Vengeance

Manhattan General Hospital

It was a miracle that Laura Taylor was alive at all. Police officers had found her, bound and gagged in Central Park. She had been badly beaten but was very much alive.

"Was she raped?" Detective Lennie Briscoe asked the Chief Resident on call.

"No," Dr. Kennedy said. "In fact, there's no evidence of any sexual activity; consensual or otherwise."

"Can we talk to her?"

"Yeah…" Kennedy nodded. "She's awake and aware."

…..

Laura Taylor was in a private room, not a curtained-off space.

She has money, Detective Rey Curtis thought to himself as he and Lennie Briscoe walked in.

The victim was over forty, blonde, with carefully styled hair. Even with her face turning all the colors of the rainbow, she looked alert.

Frightened too.

A cane, one of the modern metal ones, lay by the side of the hospital bed.

"Dr. Kennedy didn't say anything about a leg injury."

"There wasn't a leg injury," Taylor responded. "This is what the doctors call a pre-existing condition. And you are?"

"Oh! Sorry…" Curtis recollected himself, started over. "I'm Detective Rey Curtis, and my partner is Detective Lennie Briscoe. We're here to take your statement about what happened to you. Do you know why this happened?"

"Yes," Taylor nodded. "They told me. Before you ask, they work face masks, bulky disguises, and spoke through voice synthesizers. I can't tell you if they were white or black, or anything else for that matter. I couldn't even tell you if they were men, or women. All I know is what they told me."

"What did they say?" Curtis asked.

"They told me I murdered someone."

…..

27th Precinct

"This gang kidnaps Laura Taylor, tells her they're going to execute her for the murder of Elaine Farrow in Nineteen Eighty-seven, in Newark, New Jersey?"

Lieutenant Anita Van Buren listed off the facts of the case, then continued.

"Was Ms. Taylor residing in Newark at the time?"

"No," Lennie Briscoe looked up from his notes of the interview with Laura Taylor. "She had been living in Newark up to Nineteen Eighty-five. But she left when her marriage to Johnny Nash broke up. After the Divorce, she went to live with her parents in Manhattan."

"Was there a murder?" Van Buren asked.

"Rey's checking with Newark right now." Briscoe looked up. "And, speak of the devil, and here he is, and it looks like he hit the motherlode."

Curtis was walking up to his desk, a thick file's worth of faxed reports in hand.

"It was a home invasion," he began without preamble. "Miss Elaine Farrow was brutally murdered in her Newark apartment on April 19th, Nineteen Eighty-Seven. No suspects were ever identified."

"Is it possible Ms. Taylor was involved?" Van Buren asked.

"We cleared her, LT." Curtis replied. "First, she had left Newark two years before."

"She might have returned for a visit, Rey." Van Buren pointed out.

"Not that year," Lennie spoke up. "She had been hit by a hit and run driver, almost lost her right leg. As it turns out, this happened April 17th of that year. Just two days before the home invasion that killed Elaine Farrow. She was in no condition to go anywhere."

"We have proof of this, Lennie?"

"Yeah…" Briscoe looked down at his notes again. "It happened before Dr. Kennedy's time, but he was able to access hospital records. Laura Taylor, admitted to Manhattan General, on 4/17/87. She didn't leave the hospital until 6/12/87, where she was admitted to a private facility for physical therapy. She literally couldn't have been involved in the home invasion. She said she told them about that. Apparently, they checked her information out, then let her go."

"How would the kidnappers be able to verify that?" Van Buren asked.

"Same way we would," Curtis replied. "They probably called Manhattan General, and verified her story that way."

"Which means they pretended to be cops, so they could get the hospital staff to cooperate," Briscoe paused now, said the thing Curtis was really hoping he wouldn't say.

"Think we're looking at vigilantes here."

"Lovely…" Van Buren snorted. "And it seems they almost took an innocent person."

"We'll talk to her again tomorrow," Briscoe promised. "She was pretty shaken today. Maybe she'll have a better grasp of what went down."

"Hope so…" Curtis sighed. "We do not need vigilantes running around and taking the Law into their own hands."

"Also, check with the hospital staff at Manhattan General," Van Buren advised. "I know this happened years ago, but there might be a few hospital employees who were there when this happened. I want those kidnappers found. They could have killed an innocent woman."

Now, it was Lennie Briscoe's turn to heave a sigh.

Vigilantism is a blight on society…