Raney & Levine (22 page)

2

“W
here’d the sun go?” Jill Raney looked out gloomily.

“Days are getting shorter,” muttered Tricia Donovan, Jill’s
best friend since med school. They’d survived internship together, and been
first-year residents since last July first. Were amazed it was early October
already.

Now they lay, sprawled in their scrubs and thin white
jackets, on the rug of the hospital staff’s 24/7 childcare suite, surrounded by
baby babble, bright noisy toys, and a few other parents. Tricia squirmed her
slightly plump body and scowled through her wire-rimmed glasses to the window
at the end of the room. Only six o’clock; twilight already out there.

She looked back and groaned. “I haven’t looked out this
whole stressful, crappy day. Was it nice out?”

“Yeah.” Jill was up on an elbow squeaking a yellow duck. “Great
sunset too. Saw it from the cafeteria.
Ouch. Not on Mommy’s ribs, honey.
David had to remind me to look
out.
”

She was taking a break, playing with Jesse. Times like this
were usually her happy times. David’s too. Friends of theirs often joined them,
enjoyed stretching out like this and goofing around with Jesse.

Marveling at him, too, although now he was goofing around on
his own, chortling and clambering over Jill, pulling at her long dark hair
she’d just loosened from a ponytail, tumbling down from her hip (“ooo!” he
squealed), climbing back up again like a little buckaroo. One night, in David’s
and Jill’s apartment, she had discovered that no matter how exhausted she was,
just sprawling on the rug, closing her eyes and letting Jesse climb on her was
immensely entertaining to their rambunctious almost-one-year-old.

Almost.

Jill was fretting about that, getting angst-ridden again.
After a blessed long lull, the media was starting up again. Running sensational
stories about
“the miracle baby, almost a year old and normal by all
accounts.”

There were also smaller articles about a symposium the
hospital had scheduled for researchers to hear about Jesse’s progress. Four
days from now, dammit! Six days before Jesse’s birthday. Doctors and
researchers were coming from all over the world to see him.

Put him on bleeping display, is how Jill saw it.

So she’d been fretting on two fronts: about the mounting
media harassment and the coming symposium, arguing with hospital big wigs who’d
argued and pleaded back. Jesse had made Madison Memorial Hospital more famous
than ever. David, in his more rationalizing moments, said the symposium would
at least be a chance to show that Jesse was just a sweet little kid. Smart,
yes. Advancing somewhat faster than most little ones, yes - but that happened
with kids born through regular pregnancies, too.

Jill screwed up her lovely features and smirked. “Maybe
he’ll sock Simpson in the nose.” Willard Simpson, M.D., was Chief of Madison’s
Genetic Counseling Committee, and a world expert in embryonic epidemiology and
high risk obstetrics.

“Nah,” Tricia said, her pudgy fingers squishing a squeaky
blue whale she’d been toying with. “Jesse likes Simpson. Likes to tweak his
pointy little nose and pull his fat pink jowls and smear his glasses.”

The subject of the damned symposium had become obsessive in
the last few days.

“Practice your speech?” Jill sighed.

“What’s to practice? We’re all just gonna march up to the podium
like five school kids and tell how we ‘interacted’ – love Simpson’s word – with
Jesse for the three months before his birth. We’ll blow ‘em away!
We
interacted with an unborn fetus!
Before this nobody’s ever seen the unborn
except through murky dark sonograms. We hugged his cylinder, made smiley goofy
faces, and he
responded
.”

“Made him grin.” Jill allowed herself a crooked smile,
ruffling Jesse’s wisp of light brown hair. He was tired now, cuddling against
her.

“Played music. Bogeyed like idiots for him. Kept him company
at every chance… Please stop obsessing,” Tricia said emotionally. “Try to relax
for half a minute.”

Jill fell silent, briefly. “Is half a minute up?”

Tricia barked laughter, then paused for a thoughtful moment.
“Sure doesn’t seem like a year,” she said.

“Time flies when you’re frantic.”

“C’mon, it hasn’t
all
been frantic,” Tricia
deadpanned. “Except for two killers three months apart and the hospital
swarming with cops and bomb sniffing dogs. Lately it’s been calm for
months
.”

Jill’s large, soulful green eyes grew more troubled. “I
still get nightmares.”

Tricia knew that; exhaled. Couldn’t think of anything else
comforting to say. They’d talked about it a lot - Tricia, Jill and her David.
The good news was that Jill’s nightmares and night sweats had eased off…mostly.
David was her rock. Still, it was incredible to think that so much, miraculous
and terrifying, had been crammed into the last fifteen months.

They grew silent, remembering...

Almost a year ago, in a delivery room during a lull,
Tricia, Jill, David Levine and two other close friends had lifted Jesse, wet
with amniotic-like fluid, from the silicone cylinder a crazed genius doctor
named Clifford Arnett had created for him to serve as a man-made uterus. The
stunned hospital didn’t announce his arrival right away. Monitored him in the
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for over two weeks while the media gnashed their
teeth, dug furiously for leaks, ran creepy blurry pictures of him floating in
his glass cylinder at just six months’ gestation when Jill – then staff running
in - first discovered him in a hidden lab. When the hospital finally announced
that Jesse was fine, normal and
here
, headlines exploded: ARTIFICIAL
WOMB, DESIGNER BABY, EMBRYO FARM and BRAVE NEW WORLD.

Now the media was at it again. Some of it beyond stupid.

“BIRTHDAY APPROACHES!... ABLE TO LEAP TALL BUILDINGS?”

There were more photos, too. Shots of Jill and David
carrying Jesse to their apartment a block away; Jesse squealing with delight at
a nurse making a goofy face; Jesse giving another baby his toy monkey. Photos
were taken or leaked. Jill and David had had to relax about it, couldn’t even
think of trying to stop it.

“…just like
any
little kid!” David had told reporters
as he carried Jesse home. That was last summer, Jesse at nine months.
Click!
Click!

Now Jesse, at almost a year, was ahead in language
development and several other things in the baby development schedule. He was
also hugely loveable.

“Mammy ‘scope!” chortled little Mr. Miracle, yanking at the
tubing of Jill’s stethoscope. His two front bottom teeth were in, and when he
grinned he looked like a happy imp.

“Honey, don’t chew on that.” Jill gently pulled her
stethoscope away, distracting him easily with a plastic toy truck.

A surgical resident – and fellow mom in the room – leaned to
them from her son and a nurse playing with her little girl.

“He said
‘scope
?” The resident watched bug-eyed as
Jesse flopped his truck over and inspected a wheel. “Amazing.”

“We talk to him a lot,” Jill said absently, frowning down
into her cell phone; and the nurse exclaimed, “He repeats
everything
. It
may sound like babble but he’s trying…”

Tricia agreed, turned back to Jill and saw her glaring into
her phone’s window. “Hey, stop reading headlines.”

Jill edged closer, and in the softest voice, a little high,
she read: “…more accessible to visitors and hospital staff since the couple
adopted him…unusually sociable for a child not yet one-”

“So people are fascinated. You gotta accept-”

Jill’s phone chirped in her hand. She gave Trish a confused
look; recognized the number of Kerri Blasco, her good friend and a cop. Leaned
closer and held the phone so Tricia could hear.

“I’m in an ambulance headed to you,” Kerri said tightly. “A
third couple’s been shot. One survivor, female, pregnant.”

“Oh no…” Jill’s heart dropped.
Third couple in a week
.
The first two attacks already held the city in terror. One couple - tourists -
making out near Times Square, a second couple in Soho. Both attacks at night in
crowds, faulty eyewitness accounts of the shooter.

“Three means a serial,” Jill breathed.

Tricia felt her body go cold:
the Couples Killer,
ohmygod.
Three couples made it six victims: four dead, one survivor in
another hospital, now a second survivor coming here
.
She and some of the
others helped Jill and David help the cops with rapes, assaults, statutory
rapes and child molestation, but...

This was a nightmare for the whole city, the country.

The other resident, dealing with her suddenly howling
daughter who wanted Jesse’s truck, leaned in to Tricia. “Thought Jill was off
tonight.”

“She is.” Tricia’s lips were dry. “Hardly slept last night.”

The howling made it hard to hear. Jill gripped the phone
tighter.

“…about three months along,” Kerri was saying. “And she’s…”
Her seasoned cop voice sounded uncharacteristically bitter.
“An Iraq war vet
.”

“Oh God…” Jill felt tears well, met Tricia’s stricken gaze.

“David available?”

“In a delivery. MacIntyre and Greenberg are free.” Sam
MacIntyre and Woody Greenberg, the two other close friends who’d helped “deliver”
Jesse.

“Okay,” Kerri said. “You’ll get us evidence? We need help.”

Jill said of course, told Kerri to meet her in the usual
place, and hung up.

“Iraq war vet,” Tricia whimpered, getting to her feet with
Jill. She saw Jill looking haunted again, a look she’d seen so many times, and
realized she felt the same.

The horror had come to them, this hospital.

“Ma,” Jesse said, raising his arms.

Jill lifted him and hugged him tight. Then Tricia reached
for him. “Hey, slugger, wanna play with Auntie Trish?” He went to her, the
truck forgotten, happy to tug at her glasses. With her free hand she struggled
them back up her nose, biting her lip.

“Need me?”

“No.” Jill’s heart thudded as she pulled her hair back into
a ponytail. “You’re on call anyway. Hope you get some sleep tonight.” Shakily,
she checked her phone’s simultaneous picture of Trish holding Jesse. She and
David had downloaded a baby monitor app.

“Working?” Trish leaned with Jesse squirming to peer at the
picture.

“Yeah. Um, David’s delivery’s having complications and I
don’t know how long I’ll be with the cops…”

“Sleep in the hospital. David and Jesse too.
I’ve got
a bad feeling.”

Jill gave a helpless shrug. She’d so looked forward to being
off tonight and bringing Jesse home, putting him to bed with his favorite toys…

“We’ll see.” She kissed Jesse again, hugged Tricia, and
hurried out. Banged frantically on the elevator button to make it come faster,
left David a voicemail and spoke briefly to Sam MacIntyre. She was a building
away, a half mile of halls to run through.

“We’re already in the ER”, Sam said. “Ambulance just
arrived.”

3

A
nurse charging
from the cubicle almost collided. “Sorry,” she huffed. “Sam ordered type and
cross match, hemoglobin and hematocrit.” She held two reddened, rubber-stopped
tubes.

“Whole blood?” Jill was breathing hard.

“Four units. She’s lost a lot of blood.”

The nurse ran, and Jill opened the thin curtain to gowned
scrubs working furiously on a bloodied woman on bloodied sheets. She was
unconscious, with an oxygen mask over her face and an IV running to the inside
of her elbow. At the rear two monitors beeped, one for the mother and one for
the fetus.

The fetal monitor was beeping too fast. The tiny heart was
struggling to live.

A wrenching sight.

Sam MacIntyre glanced up at Jill from the two electrodes
he’d placed on either side of the patient’s belly. “Not good,” he said, his
voice muffled by his mask, his athlete’s broad shoulders hunched. “Fetal
distress.”

“Fetal heart rate’s up to 180!” cried Woody Greenberg,
holding gauze pads to the bullet entry wound on the patient’s belly. A second
nurse took his place with the gauze as he checked the patient’s vital signs and
kept nervously eyeing the two monitors.

“Jill,” he said mournfully, looking up for a second. “
She’s
an Iraq War vet
.”

“I know.” Aching, Jill moved in closer. Just a couple
walking in the park. What kind of monster had done this? Gently, she touched
the patient’s leg under the top sheet. It covered from her pubic area down, and
another sheet stretched from her navel up to her chin. Her short, curling dark
hair was matted. The sheets over and under her right side only were
blood-soaked.

Jill breathed in. “No exit wound?”

“No,” Woody said, stumbling over his words, looking thinner
and more wiry than usual. “Bullet traveled superficially, entered the left
anterior abdomen and passed through the anterior-most portion of the uterus.”

Sam said in a rush, “The ultrasound found the bullet wedged
against the pelvic brim.” His eyes swept the portable ultrasound box with its
knobs, controls, and an oscilloscope for viewing. They’d glided its paddle over
the abdomen to find the bullet.

Then Sam glanced up and pulled a huge breath. “Dammit,
patient’s BP’s down to 95 over 60, pulse rate’s up to 130.
Where the hell’s
that whole blood?”

The first nurse ran in with it. “Four units! Sorry, sorry,
they’re swamped. Two stabbing victims, a gunshot and a car crash.”

She hung the first bag of blood on the IV pole and switched
the tubing from saline and dextrose to the whole blood drip. The other nurse
went to a chair near the front of the cubicle.

“Got your evidence.” She handed Jill bulging paper bags. “Clothes,
shoes, everything collected. The cops are waiting, they were here for a sec.
Jeez, why had we only been doing this for rapes?
Any
kind of assault…”

“Tell that to the other hospitals.” It was hard, turning
away from the patient to gather up the bags.

“They’re still resisting?”

“Yeah. Hollering that it diverts from care, which is
ridiculous. Something like this takes just seconds, isn’t expensive like rape
kits.”

Jill looked back to Sam and Woody. “Save the bullet.”

“We
know
,” Sam said; and Woody said, “Gotta stabilize
her first, we’ll call you when we get it in surgery.”

Then he cried, “Oh Christ. The fetal heartbeat’s dropping,
it’s down to 60 - no, now 55…”

The fetus had struggled frantically to live, and now was
giving up. Jill took her evidence bags and left, tears stinging.

Well lookee there…

He saw her, running through the wide ER waiting area. Jill
Raney! Twitter on fire said they were bringing the survivor here. He had rushed
over hoping to see some of the show he’d created. Reporters maybe, not
expecting this luck.

Tall and thin and beautiful she was, dark ponytail flying.
He’d seen them both on TV, Jill crying and struggling not to fall off that
steep old roof, David Levine trying to save her, shooting that bad guy
right
between the eyes
. Just too damn impressive. News chopper footage was now on
YouTube, zillions of hits.

Seeing her was such a thrill. It made him grin, but just
slightly. Mustn’t stand out from the ER bedlam, the milling outpatients and
their relatives, the line of ugly plastic chairs. He’d been lucky to get a seat
on one of them, just another shabby guy with a fake, messy goatee. His hoody
pulled low shadowed his face from the fluorescents, from security cameras too.
And his seat gave a good view of the TV over the harried nurses’ desk.

Anderson Cooper droning about hundreds lost in a plane
crash, but crawling beneath him the streamer with the
real
news, the
wonderful report of
his work
. This third attack had the city, the whole
country, out of their minds with fear. Huge coverage online, and he was
controlling all of it. He felt so important!

The streamer passed, and while he waited for it to snake under
Anderson again, he glanced in boredom at the ER arch Raney had run under,
disappearing down that wide, busy corridor. Doctors, nurses, EMTs…they all
rushed and whisked back and forth. Such heroes they thought they were. So
goddamned self-important.

Fools.

He licked his lip, tasting blood. He hated the taste of
blood. A branch had smacked his face as he approached this third pair. He tried
to stop chewing his lip, but he couldn’t. Admit it, he thought. I’m worried.

The kid saw me.

It made him nervous, but was that rational? What kid that
small could describe anyone when adult eyewitness accounts were so flawed?
Besides, in the park he’d been just another jogger, the usual self-important
clone clean-shaven and wearing sunglasses under a baseball cap.

Ah! Breaking news interrupting Anderson! A round-eyed gal
holding a mike, with yellow police tape and cops and floodlit brush behind her.

“The fearful news is that the Couples Killer has struck
again,” she said tremulously. “Another man and woman have been shot, for the
first time not at night but just minutes past sunset in this well lit part of
Central Park. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, and the female victim
has been taken to famed Madison Memorial Hospital. Their names have been
withheld pending notification of kin, but this third attack has thrown the city
into further panic.”

She held up a paper and read from it, her hand shaking. “The
police have issued a statement that they will hold a briefing at nine o’clock,
in the meantime urging extreme caution, especially at night, as they step up
their manhunt.” She let the paper drop and blinked wide-eyed back at the
camera. “Meanwhile our thoughts and prayers go out to these latest victims and
their families. Back to you, Anderson.”

Anderson Live
was taped, ha, and the break caught him
droning mid-sentence about ocean depth. It was all so phony, thought the man in
the fake goatee. He wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t.

He was fretting about that damn kid. It suddenly hit that
he
must be here too
, getting checked out. Maybe he really could describe…

Would the cop briefing say they had a witness?

The man rose, shuffled with a fake limp out of the ER to the
street. He limped two blocks and peered back at the hospital. A glowing star
ship, it looked like, immense white cubes and rectangles with every window lit.
Cop cars down in front of it, TV trucks unwinding their cables and upturning
their floodlights.

No cab would stop for him. Hell, he wanted to see the cop
briefing at home on his big screen. He lost his limp, started a fast jog, and
then suddenly stopped.

He had a better idea.