Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

Detectives Stabler, Tutuola, and Greene are property of NBC and Dick Wolf Productions. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

All references to magic and magical ability come courtesy of J.K Rowling and Harry Potter. The latter is the property of the former, as well as Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: This is a work of complete and utter crack and contains an OFC. If that offends thee, please exit to the rear and stay in your lane. There is no need to pee in my pool. Also contains spoilers for CSI:NY S2. Read at your own risk.

All 8 chapters of this story have been completed and will be posted as often as possible.

Don Flack sat numbly in a chair beside the bed and blinked molishly at the harsh hospital lighting. His stunned brain kept insisting that he was at the wrong bed, that his wife was in the next bed over, but then his eyes would find the empty, rumpled sheets where she should have been, and the world would slalom dangerously under his feet.

"Mrs. Gruberman," Stella was saying beside him, crisp and efficient, "What can you tell me about the young woman who was your roommate?"

Mrs. Gruberman was a frail woman of eighty-five, and according to the nurse they had interviewed earlier, she was in the last stages of renal failure. She was jaundiced and thin, and her joints were swollen with retained fluid. She was also nearly blind.

"Oh, the young pregnant girl?" Her voice was bright and clear.

"Yes, ma'am."

Mrs. Gruberman coughed delicately into her cupped hand. "Oh, well, let's see. She seemed sweet enough. Came in two weeks ago with her young husband. Didn't seem too happy, as I remember. There was a lot of crying."

Stella blinked. "Crying?" she repeated, and cast a sidelong glance at him.

"Oh, yes. She didn't want to stay here. She pleaded with him to take her home, but he insisted. She cried for a while after he was gone, but by the next morning, she must have decided it would do her no good, because she was mostly all right. Even talked a little."

"What did she say?" Stella prompted.

"That her name was Rebecca, and that she was a mathematician. My husband, Edgar, was a mathematician, you know. Spent a lifetime in the garage with his theories and algorithms. Always smelled like chalk, too. Breathing it in for forty years is probably what killed him. I told him-,"

"Mrs. Gruberman," Stella interrupted. "About Rebecca?"

"Oh. It was her first baby, you know. She was very excited. She was always rubbing her belly. Said the baby was active like his father; never gave her a minute's rest. That was why she was going to name him for him."

The casual revelation struck him like a fist, and he sat back abruptly in his chair. Suddenly, he was breathing through gauze, and the world had taken on a wavering, astigmatic sheen. He squeezed his knees until they throbbed and bit his tongue until copper flooded his mouth.

She was always talkin' about namin' the baby after you, but you never took it seriously. You figured it for a bit of sweet flattery, and that when the time came, she'd name him somethin' respectable, like John or Michael or Robert. Just as long as it wasn't exotic and unpronounceable. Aloysius or Clymenestra or Llewellyn P. Jackoff.

In truth, you wanted her to name him anything but Don Flack, III. Yeah, it was your name, but it was also your father's, and that was a hard legacy to carry. You'd shouldered it all your life, and while you'd made your own, the price was too high. You wanted better for your own son, didn't want him crushed by the weight of his past. He didn't have to be a cop. He could be a doctor or a dentist, or maybe he'd be like his Ma and show talent for numbers. He could be an astronaut and touch the moon, like you used to dream.

Maybe you shoulda listened to her more, his father grunted. It's not for lack'a her talkin'. She talked all the time, and you used to listen once upon a time, but then you got tapped for a spot on the task force chasin' that serial sicko, and you put the professional blinders on. You ate, breathed, and slept the case. Soon, you were comin' home at four in the mornin', and then you stopped comin' home at all. You slept on the hard, industrial cots of the rack room and called Rebecca to bring you changes of clothes, your toothbrush and deodorant, and a shaving kit. You barely had time for a quick, impatient peck on the lips and an absent rub of her belly before you were off playin' Sir fuckin' Galahad again. That's why you put her here.

That wasn't fair. In fact, it was fucking bullshit. He hadn't put Rebecca here for expediency; he had put her here because he'd had no choice. By her seventh month, she was so heavy and ponderous with his baby that she could no longer stand upright for even a moment without swaying dangerously on her swollen feet. More than once, he'd had to catch her before she fell while pivoting from her chair to the toilet.

You came to your decision after a particularly nasty near-fall, standin' in the bathroom at five in the mornin' in nothin' but your boxers and holdin' your tremblin' wife by the forearms. She'd nearly broken her fall with the baby, and all you could think as you stood there with the cold tile burnin' your sweaty feet and your heart lodged in your pinhole throat was, What if I hadn't come home tonight? What if I'd stayed at the station house? I never woulda known until she didn't answer the phone or show up with a change of clothes.

You couldn't get the image of her lyin' on the floor in a pool of blood and amniotic fluid outta your head. You imagined her deliverin' the baby on the bathroom floor, and him screamin' his brand-new lungs out while she bled to death. You kept envisionin' comin' home to find them in a tacky puddle. She'd be dead from blood loss, thighs smeared with blood dryin' to sticky maroon, and your Junior'd be dead from exposure and hypothermia, little face contorted and blue, miniature fist tucked beneath his stiffening chin.

The thought of losin' your family while you were out chasin' the wolves without the walls was more than you could stand, so you made up your mind. You didn't mention it to her that night because you knew how she would react, and she was already dazed with adrenaline and weak with shock, so you helped her into bed and stroked the rounded dome of her belly until her fluttering lids succumbed to sleep.

You broached the subject the next mornin'. She was pourin' a spoonful of sugar into your coffee when you said it, and she froze. Just froze. A rabbit before the predatory eyes of a fox. Her head dipped involuntarily, as if she was duckin' an invisible blow, and her nostrils flared. She dropped the spoon onto the counter with a wet, metallic plink, and droplets of coffee stippled the wall behind the stove like cast-off blood spatter.

She shook her head. No. No way.

You launched into your argument for hospitalization, laying out all the rational reasons she should go. You told her she'd be more comfortable there, that she'd have someone to look after her all the time. You pointed out that the delivery rooms were just a few floors up if Junior decided not to wait until his due date. When the time came, there wouldn't be any mad rush to the hospital in the middle of the night; it'd be an easy transition from one room to another. It all sounded so neat there in the kitchen, so practical.

No, she repeated adamantly. No, no, no. I won't go. It was brittle, jagged with burgeoning panic.

She gave her own speech then, about virulent germs and long hours of monotony. She insisted that to put her in a hospital was de facto imprisonment. Once there, she told you, her back to you and her knuckles white and trembling on the edge of the countertop, she would no longer be Rebecca Flack, autonomous human being with rights. She would be a quarrelsome patient who did not know her own mind. The nurses would come with their injections and platitudes, and if she resisted their regimen, there would be restraints and sedatives. Her voice steadily rose in pitch as she described the horrors that awaited her, until it teetered delicately on the cusp of hysteria.

You could only stare at the back of her head in mystified disbelief. You knew she had had bad experiences in the hospital as a kid and had a strong aversion to their sterile, ugly walls-hell, you were no great fan of the men in white coats yourself, as a matter of fact-but you had never suspected that her terror ran so deep. Your wife was the smartest, sanest person you had ever known, yet there she sat, shiverin' like a child in the thrall of the boogeyman and ravin' like the paranoid schizophrenics you used to corral as a rookie beat cop.

You couldn't very well tell her that she sounded like the crazies down on Broadway, so you ambled behind her, crossed your arms over her chest, and planted a kiss on the crown of her head. You promised her that it would be all right, that you would make sure they took care of her and listened to her. She had been a child when she had been at their mercy, but she was an adult now, and it would be different. She laughed at that, a hard, mirthless caw, and shook her head.

No, it won't, she said.

And still she refused.

You wheedled and cajoled and tried fruitlessly to issue husbandly edicts, all of which were to no avail, and then you became a dirty-fightin' bastard.

All right, fine, you huffed at her rigid back. You want me to take one in the line because I'm too exhausted to think straight after takin' you to the bathroom seven fuckin' times a night, you go right ahead and stay here. I'm bettin' your precious ego'll be great consolation when my fellow officer hands you my flag.

The sound that came outta her mouth has been ringin' in your ears ever since you got the call this mornin' that she'd disappeared from her bed sometime between the six A.M. bed check and breakfast, when the candystriper in charge of bringin' the trays found her gone. It was the same sound a perp makes after takin' a baton to the ribs or a knee to the balls, breathless and agonized, a dull vibration you feel in your solar plexus as you're haulin' 'em to their feet. When she finally turned to face you, one hand was cupped over her belly as if she was soothin' away the unexpected shock of a blow, and you've never forgotten the way she looked at you, as if you'd ripped off her underwear and fucked her without askin'.

Fine, she said dully. I'll go. She rolled toward the bedroom, and you started after her, but she said. I'll do it. Just drink your coffee.

Twenty minutes later, she was waiting by the front door with a suitcase on her lap. You pushed her to the department car and settled her inside, and when she was comfortable, you asked her if she wanted to grab some breakfast first. You'd take her for orange juice and Eggs Benedict and fruit salad if she wanted, but she just shook her head and kept both hands curled around the sturdy, vinyl handle of the suitcase.

Now that you'd gotten your way, you felt guilty about how you got it, so you filled the frosty silence of the car with small talk, tried to make her smile. You talked about the gorgeous weather and the dumb rookie down the precinct who got blasted in the face with his own mace 'cause he pointed it the wrong way in a scuffle with a skel. You patted her hands and swore up and down that it wouldn't be bad. You'd bring her books and magazines and puzzles, and you'd sort things out with her department chair at NYU. She wouldn't have to worry. You'd come every day after shift, task force be damned; you'd flash the badge if you had to. She wouldn't be alone this time.

She never said a word.

She was all right until they snapped the blue plastic ID bracelet around her wrist. Then she started to hyperventilate, and a minute later she was sobbin' and clawin' at the bracelet, beggin' you to take it off.

No, she shrieked, and scrabbled at it with spasmin' fingers. No, no. Please, no. I don't want to. I've changed my mind. Don, please. Please don't make me stay here. Just take me home. Or…or take me to the precinct. I can stay in the rack room. I won't bother you, I swear. Oh, God, baby, please.

You were convinced that if she coulda gotten on her hands and knees to beg, she woulda. She was cryin' so hard, she was gaggin' on the snot drippin' into the back of her throat, and all the while, she was jerkin' on that ID band like it was a burnin' shackle pressed into her skin and not a loose circle of plastic and paper tellin' who she was and what she was there for.

You almost relented then because seein' her that way scared the shit outta you. Rebecca was a jealous guardian of her dignity, and if she was willin' to cast it aside in public, then somethin' must be seriously fucked-up. But each time you thought about gatherin' her up and walkin' out, you'd see her lyin' on the floor with the baby blue and cold between her bloody legs. So you hardened your heart and opted to listen to the admissions nurse, who came around the desk and assured you that sometimes pregnant women became highly irrational because of hormone fluctuations.

You got her into the room and helped her into the bed, and the whole time you were easing her legs onto the bed and underneath the flimsy covers, she was gulpin' air and cryin' it out again and clingin' to your sleeves and to the lapels of your coat. The nurse came in and offered to sedate her, and Rebecca twisted on the bed and tried to get up. You rethought your decision again, because it was eerily close to what she said would happen, but you swallowed your misgivin's and put her back in bed.

It took you twenty minutes, but you soothed her with whispers and caresses instead of sedatives. You sat on the edge of the bed and brushed her tear and sweat-dampened hair from her forehead, and you even laid the New York on as thick as you could because your New York mouth was one of the reasons she fell in love with you. You told her over and over that you loved her, really loved her, doll. All she had to do was get through the next four weeks, and then they could bring Junior home and learn about bein' a family together.

It worked like a dream until you made to leave, and then all your carefully-laid tenderness unraveled and she was crying again, pleadin' not to be left in the bed. She clung to your wrists so fiercely that she left bleedin', red weals when you extricated yourself. They stung and smarted all the way home, and as you clung to the handrail in the subway car, they throbbed beneath the skin, like she'd embedded infection there. You found droplets of blood on your cuffs from where the wounds had wept, and that broke your heart more than all the screamin' she had done in the hospital 'cause they looked so much like tears. The stains weren't bad; in fact, they were hardly noticeable, and Rebecca probably coulda gotten 'em out with soda water and some lemon juice, but they inspired a guilty nausea the longer you looked at 'em, so you wadded up the shirt and threw it into the steel gullet of the trash chute.

You were true to your word about seein' her every day for the first week. You brought her sunflowers and black-eyed Susans and arranged 'em around the room, and then you'd sit by the bed and rub her belly while she watched TV or just lost herself in the warmth of your palms. Sometimes you talked, but a lot of the time, she was content to let you feel the baby movin' and let you play by tappin' different parts of her belly to see if you could make him turn toward your hand. She still wasn't happy about bein' cooped up in the friggin' hospital bed all day, but she was makin' the best of it, and she perked up whenever you came into the room.

Then you caught a big lead on that task-force case, and all your noble intentions got shot to shit. You called her the first night you couldn't make it, but the crushed disappointment was acid against raw skin, so you found a reason not to call the second night or the third, and anyway, by then, you were three days from your last shower and stinkin' up a car on a stakeout. You sat in the passenger seat with a cup of bitter, scorched, convenience-store coffee tucked between your knees and a pair of high-powered binoculars in one hand, and you watched the abandoned warehouse in the meat-packing district. You swallowed your guilt along with your coffee, and you told yourself that as soon as you collared the perp who was rapin' women and hackin' 'em to pieces with a hacksaw, you were goin' to the captain and requestin' leave. You hadn't taken a sick day since you hit the streets, and all the unused personal time you'd accrued probably meant you could stay at home for the first six months of your son's life. You wouldn't go that far, of course, but you would go straight to the hospital and dote on your girl around the clock until she delivered and for several days after.

Three days later, you felt like the world's biggest unwashed asshole when it turned out that your big suspect was just a kosher butcher tryin' to make a little under the table by sellin' the scraps from his first job to some cheap-ass restaurateur who wasn't gonna let a little thing like botulism stand in the way of his profit margin. Those parcels you thought were body parts were hunks of veal and beef past the sell-by date. Your big bust went up in smoke, and you and the rest of the team had egg on your faces in front of a bunch'a SWAT guys called outta bed at three-thirty in the mornin'.

Six days'a work, and instead'a goin' to your girl a conquerin' hero, you had squat to show for it except a near-terminal case of ass funk and the name of a restaurant you should never, ever visit. You imagined the look on your pregnant wife's face as you explained to her that you'd blown her off for six days to nab a guy whose terrible crime against humanity netted him a $500 fine. It made you wanna laugh and cry at the same time, and flowers weren't gonna cut it this time. You vowed that you'd go to the hospital the next day armed with chocolate-covered cherries and a bottle of cocoa butter for her dry-skinned stomach. You'd feed her the cherries and give her a backrub, and when her hot, tense muscles were malleable putty beneath your fingers, you'd smear the cool lotion over her stomach and mouth your Junior's kicking feet.

And then the call came.

And on the seventh day, God rested, he thought nonsensically, and dug his thumbs into his knee joints to stop the room from spinning.

He'd been at the 33rd precinct, hunkered at a table with the rest of the taskforce, poring over the case files in search of overlooked clues and trying to live down the massive waste of manpower and money his first foray had been. Elliot Stabler had been opposite him at the table, wiping a smear of jelly from the corner of his mouth and flipping through the autopsy report on the latest vic. His partner, Tutuola, had been beside him, chiding him not to get the fucking glaze shit all over the goddamned paperwork and thumbing through crime scene photos, brow creased in unconscious disgust.

Then his cell phone had rung, and the voice on the other end of the line had come from a great distance, as if he were taking a call from the twilight zone. He had dimly registered that the voice from beyond belonged to a nurse at Trinity, and he had gotten to his feet, sure that she was about to tell him Rebecca was in labor, but what she told him sent him back into the chair as decisively as if his hamstrings had been cut.

Your wife has gone missing.

She might as well have told him that his heart had been stolen from his chest. For one lunatic moment, he was convinced that he was inside Stabler's jelly doughnut, mired in the gelatinous center and flailing helplessly against the sticky filling. It flooded his lungs and blinded his eyes, and when he stood a second time, it was like wading through molasses.

He could vaguely recall Stabler mirroring his movement across the table, asking if he was all right. He had moved to intercept him, but he had brushed by him with a careless bump of shoulders. Stabler had simply ceased to exist in his world. There had been voices behind him as he had left-Stabler and Tutuola calling him back, and Greene wandering in from the vending machines to ask what the hell was going on-but they were ghosts, and he had left them to their useless wailing.

He had returned to the 14th precinct and the labs without knowing how he'd gotten there, and he'd wandered the halls of the lab with the phone still clutched in his hand until he'd found Stella. He'd known instinctively that it was Stella he wanted, needed, because she was never rattled, a fucking Rock of Gibraltar. And because-,

Because she owed you one. When Frankie Mala shattered her world and violated her dignity, you were the one to take the case. The brass had wanted some dipshit asswad from outta precinct, but you bulled your way into it because she was one'a yours. You did your job while preservin' the remains of her pride as best you could, and even when your official role was over, you went and sat with her to pass the time. You ran interference with the pissants at IAB, and when the good news came down, you told her in person because you didn't want her to swing in the wind any longer than she had to. You went lookin' for her because if your world imploded in the pitch darkness of a bodybag, she'd shield your spilled guts from the vicious Looky-Lous and keep the vultures away as long as she could.

She'd understood him somehow. He supposed that as a Vice cop, she'd become fluent in the various dialects of Drunk and Wasted. She'd gotten him into a chair before he'd fallen into it, and then she'd swung into action. She'd bypassed the old styrofoam-cup-of-water routine in favor of the vodka in the bottom drawer of Mac's desk, and she'd told Mac what had happened.

Mac hadn't wanted him to go with her, of course. He'd wanted him to stay at the labs, or better yet, go home and wait in case Rebecca tried to call. As a cop, Flack had known that was the smartest course of action, but for the first time in his life, being a cop brought him no comfort. He wasn't going to sit around like some sniveling, TV-husband pussy while his boys went looking for his wife in morgues and sewer grates. She was his responsibility, and he had a right to be a witness to his own death.

Mac had argued hard, but in the end, Stella had bowed to the inevitable. "Let him go, Mac," she'd said. "He needs to see it for himself. I'll keep an eye on him."

That was that. He'd followed in Stella's wake, and they'd driven to the hospital in silence. He had been grateful for the quiet, and he'd turned his wedding band around and around on his finger as though he were controlling the speed of the wheels on the SUV.

One ring to rule them all, he'd thought, and closed his eyes against the sudden stinging.

"She was so proud of her husband," Mrs. Gruberman was saying. "She said he was a police officer. Called him her Prince Charming."

"Oh, fuck," he managed, and pressed his knuckles to his lips. "Oh, Jesus fuck."

"Flack," Stella said sharply. "Flack, you all right?"

No, he wasn't all right. Rebecca had used that endearment once before, on their wedding day, and then, it had filled him with a beaming, giddy pride and made him blush to the roots of his hair. Now it was jagged glass and lye against his exposed heart, and it resonated inside his skull like the banging of a gavel. Prince Charming. What sort of prince left his lady fair in a sterile tower for six days with no one for company but a blind old crone poisoned by her own apple?

He took a ragged breath and passed his hand over his face. "I'm okay," he managed, but it was without conviction.

Stella eyed him speculatively for a moment. Bullshit, her eyes said, but her mouth said, "Mrs. Gruberman, did you notice anything different about Rebecca in the last few days?"

"Well, she got awfully dispirited when her young man stopped showing up," the old woman volunteered. "Still, she tried to make the best of things. Every morning, she'd make a phone call, and she'd spend the rest of the day reading or working on the puzzle he'd brought for her."

"Phone call? Do you know who she called?"

"I don't eavesdrop," Mrs. Gruberman said primly, as if Stella had accused her of farting in public. "I was brought up in a time when people had respect for one another's privacy. Nowadays, people will talk about anything to get on TV, you know. Last week, I was listening to some talk show, and a young woman was telling anyone who would listen how she'd slept with three different men in one night. It was scandalous. Why, back in my day-,"

"Back in your day," Flack interrupted before he could stop himself, "you communicated with smoke signals, and by the time guys got the message, the goods had gone cold. Now, about m-Rebecca."

Mrs. Gruberman drew up her bony shoulders in indignation. "I don't appreciate your cheek, young man," she sniffed, and he found himself wondering if she had once been a teacher.

"Yeah, well, I-," he began, but Stella cut him off.

"Mrs.-,"

"It was last night that things turned ugly," Gruberman said suddenly. "Afternoon, actually."

"How do you mean?" Stella asked, and sat forward in her chair.

"As soon as the miserable Hun in charge of this ward figured out there wasn't a police-officer husband to worry about, she stopped caring for the girl," she said bitterly. "She hasn't cared for any of us since we got here, but with a husband in law enforcement, I guess she thought it best to play it safe. With him gone…well."

"Well what?" Flack croaked. He felt faint.

Mrs. Gruberman scowled at him. "She stopped bathing her. A candy-striper came in once for a sponge bath, but her hair hadn't been washed for at least three days before she left. She was taken to the restroom twice a day. Other than that, she was left on a diaper pad."

"A diaper pad?" he repeated weakly.

"They catch piss," Mrs. Gruberman said bluntly.

He tried to imagine Rebecca, who loved wearing citrus-smelling perfumes on her wrists and throat and taking lavender baths, sitting in her own piss for hours on end. He moaned and fought the urge to punch the wall until it bled in time to his knuckles.

"I put her here because they promised they'd look after her, make her comfortable."

Mrs. Gruberman snorted. "Only if you're young and healthy to begin with. "If you're broken or old, they simply wait for you to die. Why waste time and resources on God's garbage?" she said bitterly.

"What happened yesterday afternoon?" Stella was quiet and pale, but her eyes blazed with suppressed anger.

"Rebecca got tired of lying in bed and was complaining about a pressure sore on the back of her leg. She asked if she could sit in her chair for an hour to change positions. The Hun told her no, but she kept insisting. Eventually, it got loud, and Rebecca tried to get up anyway. That was her mistake."

"What happened next?" Stella asked, but Flack thought he knew. Rebecca had told him as she stood with her back to him at their kitchen counter two weeks ago.

"The goon squad came in with a sedative," Mrs. Gruberman said simply. "Six of them held her down, they injected her with enough Haldol to stun a moose. She fought hard-I'm surprised the thrashing didn't send her into labor-but it was a losing battle from the start. She was unconscious within minutes, and even when she did come around, I doubt she knew where she was. They strapped her to the bed and left her there."

"They injected my pregnant wife with an anti-psychotic, strapped her to a bed, and left her in her own piss?" Dazed and horrified.

Mrs. Gruberman's face softened. "Yes. They did."

"What happened this morning?" Stella asked. The pen was trembling in her hand, but her mouth was set in a grim line.

"Someone came in for a moment, then left again. A few minutes later, I heard Rebecca vomiting over the side of the bed. After that, I heard her tugging on the restraints, and then I heard wheels rolling across the floor. Ten minutes after that, the door opened and shut."

"What time was this?"

"I can't say for certain, but it was before seven, because the morning news was still on. At eight-thirty, the candy-striper in charge of breakfast came in and noticed she was missing."

"They didn't call me until eleven," he told Stella.

"You're sure it was eight-thirty?"

"Absolutely. Breakfast comes the same time every morning. Whether you want it or not."

"And you're sure she vomited?"

"I was a kindergarten teacher for forty years, Detective. I know what recycled lunch sounds like."

Stella rose from her chair and went to the near side of Rebecca's bed.

That ain't her bed, his mind insisted stubbornly. Her bed is at home with me.

Stella crouched, careful not to touch the floor with her hands, and bent to sniff the floor. "No trace of vomit or cleaner on this side," she murmured. She stood and crossed to the opposite side. "Oh, yeah," she said after a sniff. "I know that smell well. The nuns were devout believers in the power of Pine-Sol." She shook her head in disgust. "They fucking cleaned up before they made that phone call." She scanned the bedrail. "If she was restrained, they took that, too."

"Of course they did," Mrs. Gruberman observed contemptuously. "You think they'd want to admit they were chaining a police officer's wife to her bed?" She settled onto her sagging pillows with a phlegmatic harrumph.

"Yeah? Well, they're gonna start talking now." Stella stormed from the room, pulling her cell phone from her pocket as she went. "Mac," he heard her say as she disappeared around the corner, "we need every available man down here. I got a feeling the medical staff are gonna try to stonewall-,"

He knew he should follow her, raise a little hell of his own, but he felt curiously light inside his skin, as though his bones had been hollowed out and stuffed with cotton batting.

I'm a straw man, he thought stupidly, and took a hesitant, unsteady step toward the empty bed.

Looking at the room now, he couldn't fathom how he had thought his Rebecca could survive here for a month. It was cramped and sterile, and the corners were crammed with machines that sprouted tentacles of plastic tubing.

Lovecraft had it wrong. Cthulu wasn't a cunt; it was a piece of medical equipment.

He thought then of her tiny arms, pocked and bruised with needle marks from the constant blood draws needed to monitor hormone and glucose levels. She was afraid of needles, of their greedy, merciless sting. Whenever he had taken her to Dr. Fiorello for pre-natal visits, she'd whimpered and resisted, and he'd had to cup her face in his hands and distract her with jokes and limericks and bad singing, and even with his antics to occupy her, she would cry out at the moment her skin was breached, a sharp squeak of dismayed betrayal. She would thrum with nervous energy for hours afterward, and he would watch the bruise bloom on her lily skin and be overwhelmed with a nebulous guilt that settled in the pit of his stomach like indigestion.

Except you weren't there for the blood tests since you brought her here. She was on her own. You'd come in and find fresh marks in the crook of her elbow or the back of her hand, dark and sore and crusted with blood. By the end of the first week, her right arm was a bruise from elbow to fingertip, and when you sat on the bed, she buried her head in the crook of your neck and breathed like you were the first fresh air she'd had in days. She gripped your hand with panicky tightness, and she cried when you left. She hadn't done that since the first day, and it bothered you.

You chalked it up to loneliness and hormones and stir-craziness, but now that it's too late, you wonder if it wasn't somethin' else entirely, if maybe not all of those marks came from the tip of a syringe. Maybe one of those plastic hoses snaked from its corner and battened onto her like an obscene umbilical cord, siphoning out her energy in a parody of the baby inside her. Maybe she knew what was happenin' and couldn't tell anyone 'cause she was afraid that no one would believe her, just like no one believed her about what it was gonna be like in here.

She tried to tell you, his father said. She told you it would come down to needles and restraints. She begged and pleaded, exposed her belly like a terrified dog, and you shoulda known then that she was serious, but you brushed her off 'cause you wanted to get back on the hunt, and it'd be easier if you didn't have to worry about her. So you put your foot down and broke her back. 'S always been that way with you. Your mother and I told you not to go to that house, but you went anyway and took your sister, and your sister wound up dead. No one can tell you nothin' if you don't wanna hear it, and most of the time, it blows up in your face, and you're left to wonder what the fuck happened.

He turned in a slow circle between the beds. Maybe she had fled this room because everything in it was dead or dying. The sunflowers he had brought her seven days ago were on the dresser. They had been buoyant and bright when he'd presented them to her, heads nodding in happy agreement with their place in the world. Rebecca had commented that their black centers reminded her of wide, curious eyes, aliens touring Earth for the first time, and she'd idly toyed with the soft, vibrant petals. Now, the curious aliens were dead, their avid eyes grey and closed, and their sunshine had dimmed and fallen to the floor in a sad, brown drift. Welcome to Earth, and won't you enjoy your stay?

Mrs. Gruberman was dying, too, withering in her white soil as the flowers had done. The stink of her gradual decomposition hung in the air-piss and stale breath and rotten oranges. That she would die was beyond dispute, and yet she clung to the fraying threads of her life with brittle, dirty-nailed fingers because it was hers. She kept breathing and pissing and rotting, and every time she exhaled, the stink got worse.

The stink ain't just from her. It's from every body that's ever died in here. Hundreds, maybe thousands. It's bled into the walls and floors and soaked into the sheets. If you turned out the harsh, fluorescent lights, the walls would be yellow, and so would the pillows and sheets. This place has dyin' in the walls, and it touches everything. It'll take you seven washes before the rotten-pork reek comes outta your clothes.

Nausea coated his guts like grease, and the voice of common sense told him to bolt before he puked all over a potential crime scene, but his feet moved of their oven volition to the bed where Rebecca had spent the past two weeks. He thought he saw her outline in the rumpled linens, and he wanted to touch her.

Not her bed, his mind reminded him mulishly. Her bed is with you, and it smells like orange blossoms and shampoo and woman. It's got not enough pillows and too many goddamn blankets, and there's nowhere else you'd rather be when it's fourteen below and snow drifts against the windows like tapping fingers. She lies on your chest and belly and tucks her hands and feet against your body for warmth, and you can pass the night away listenin' to her heartbeat and smoothin' your palm over the bony curve of her spine. The best Christmas Day you ever had was spent in that bed, drowsin' and talkin' and playin' slap-and-tickle all day while the snow built mountains on your front stoop and your mother left waspish messages on your answerin' machine, demandin' to know why you hadn't turned up to watch your father open his socks. You made minestrone soup and sipped it from ceramic mugs that made your hands prickle and turn pink with the heat.

He picked up the pillow and pressed it to his nose. Old starch and industrial detergent and the sour smell of unwashed scalp. But she was not there. He turned the pillow in his hands, squeezed the lumps of cotton between his restless fingers. The fabric was rough, not worn smooth by her cheek and sagging beneath the comfortable weight of habit. He tossed it onto the bed and picked up the sheet.

It was sticky and gritty, and he grimaced in a reflexive moue of distaste. It was like touching shed skin. He pressed his nose to the folds, and a moment later, he was bolting from the room, gorge lodged in his throat and eyes blurred with tears. He stumbled into a row of chairs in the hallway, struck the wall, and slumped there, hands clamped around the arm of a chair to steady himself.

"Flack?" Stella, concerned and faraway.

He swallowed . "Aw, shit, Stel," he said. "The old biddy was right. They left my girl in her own piss. It's all over the fuckin' sheets."

A hand on his shoulder. "Hey, Don? Listen to me. It's gonna be okay. We're gonna find her. The team's on the way, and we're gonna dust, bag, and tag every inch of this place until she turns up. I've got a court order for her phone to find out who she was calling, and I can guarantee you that Mac will shake people until teeth rattle to get to the truth."

He shook off her hand. "This is my fuckin' fault. I never shoulda put her here."

"You-,"

"She begged me, and I made her come anyway. She begged me, Stel."

"You were doing what you that was best," Stella countered. "You had to keep food on the table."

"I coulda told the brass to fuck off, refused the nod for the task force. I coulda taken paid leave. I shoulda. Now she's gone God knows where, pumped full of drugs. Christ, in her condition, anybody could grab her. Fuckin' hurt her."

Images crowded his head of Rebecca at the mercy of a dopesick gang, lying in the trash with her maternity dress over her head and her underwear around one ankle. Maybe they were finished with her by now, and she was lying in the trash with a crushed skull, feeling her brain pulse with every breath and wondering when the stink would attract attention. Or maybe they weren't, and they were fucking her by turns and with beer bottles while she was too weak and stoned to cry out.

"Don," Stella was saying sharply, and then she was turning him to face her. "Don, go home. There's nothing you can do here, and you're driving yourself crazy."

"And do what?" he snapped. "Huh? Stare at my weddin' picture on the wall or the fuckin' crib where my baby's s'posed to sleep?"

In truth, the crib was only half-finished. He'd bought it a few weeks after his Junior was declared viable, a sturdy, wooden model with a drop-down, fold-out side so Rebecca could reach the baby without standing. He'd brought it home and proudly shown it to Rebecca, and he'd promised her that it would be finished before the baby came.

But Bob Villa he wasn't, and as the months passed and her belly rounded, progress was incremental. He would sit cross-legged on the floor with the elaborate plans spread in front of him, intent on getting to business, and then his cell phone would hum with news of a body in an industrial dryer, and the project would be delayed again. When he did apply himself to the task, the complex diagrams and geometric shapes confounded him. Rebecca had offered to have a mathematician friend set it up, but he insisted on doing it himself. What kind of father would he be if he couldn't assemble his son's crib? So it took shape a screw at a time.

You remember the last time you worked on it? Just before you brought her in? For once, the task force was dead as shit, and so you went out for beers and a game of pool with Messer, and when you got home, you decided to work on the crib. So you got out the plans and the tools, and you turned on ESPN. Rebecca was on the couch with a bowl of blackberries, but when she saw you setting up shop, she got into her chair and rolled up behind you to watch.

You'd had a few beers, and the world was soft around the edges. Your hands floated too much, and the screws resisted proper placement. You squinted peevishly at the holes and swore at them not to behave like the fuckin' Knicks, but it didn't help. The pieces were stubbornly unjoined. You swore and cursed and derided the manufacturers as anal-retentive German engineer cocksuckers with no sense of fucking decency or common sense, and you threw the plans at the TV. Or tried. They hovered dreamily in the air and settled over your legs like a contented and proprietary cat. You stared at them for a minute, and then you cussed so loud and long that Mrs. Petrinski threatened you with Michael by-God Bloomberg.

And Rebecca? She laughed her ass off, laughed until she cried. She threw her head back and howled, clutching her jiggling belly, and she reminded you of Snoopy, laughing until he cried on top of his doghouse. You were amused and pissed at the same time, and you were about to demand what was so goddamned funny when she grabbed your hand and placed it on her belly.

Look, she said between watery giggles, he's laughing, too.

And sure enough, her belly rippled, and little feet kicked enthusiastically against the heel of your palm. He spun and kicked again, and you put your cheek on her belly and laughed until it hurt, because you, a dumbass cop son of a cop, were getting a Norman Rockwell moment. You were gonna have a family soon. It was a Waterford crystal moment in a lifetime of shattered glass, and it was sublime.

She snorted and wheezed and coughed laughter like phlegm, and she ran her fingers through your hair. She told you your accent was at its thickest and most beautiful when you forgot yourself, sharp as sour cream on her tongue. You had no idea what she meant by that, but it made her happy, so you spent the rest of the night callin' her Snoopy and thickenin' your accent as much as you could. The next day, the task force kicked into high gear, and a few weeks later, she was packin' her suitcase to go to the hospital, but that moment was perfect in its sweetness.

"Fuck!" he shouted, and kicked the nearest chair. It skidded across the linoleum floor, struck the opposite wall with a heavy thud, and rebounded to the center, where it settled with a graceless, elephantine flop.

"Flack-,"

"For God's sake, Stella, don't tell me everything is fine, 'cause it ain't." He threaded his fingers behind his head and began to pace. Stella wisely said nothing.

An orderly was watching him from the shadows of a stairwell, and as he caught his gaze, the man beckoned with a spidery finger.

He nudged Stella. "Stel." He nodded in the direction of the orderly.

The orderly looked dismayed at Stella's presence, but he stood his ground as they approached, one skinny, leathery hand curled around the handle of a push broom. He nodded noncommittally and stretched in a long, reaching stroke. "Sir," he said. "Ma'am."

"You got something you want to tell us?" Stella prompted.

A slow stroke of the broom. "Mmm. I might. I just might."

"Listen, pal," Flack snarled. Why don't you do us all a favor and cut the bul-,"

"She was under her own power when she left," the man said, unfazed.

"How do you know?"

"'Cause I'm the one that let her out," came the mild reply. The broom reached out, probing the white linoleum like an anteater's tongue.

Flack seized the orderly by the collar of his shirt and slammed him against the wall. His heartbeat was vibrating in his throat, and adrenaline was bitter on his tongue. He was dimly aware of Stella's hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off with an irritated grimace.

"You let my pregnant, doped-up wife leave the hospital? Do you have any fuckin' clue the danger you put her in? Let me tell you somethin', you fuckin' scumbag. If anythin' happens to her or my baby, you ain't gonna make it to-,"

"Flack, enough!" Stella was tugging at his shoulder with both hands.

The orderly studied him. There was no fear in his expression, no inveterate wariness of the police officer's wrath. It was sly and strangely compassionate, as though he were watching an animal snapping ineffectually at a lethal snare.

"Do you know where your girl was before New York?" he said quietly.

The question struck him like a slap, unexpected and stinging, and he tightened his grip on the man's collar, visions of sociopathic stalkers dancing in his head. He racked his brain for images of skels he had put away, and who had cried vengeance as they were dragged through the indifferent jaws of the cellblock. But there had been too many over the years, and time had worn them all to a depressing sameness.

"What the fuck do you know about my wife?" He shook the orderly, and was perversely satisfied at the thump of his back against the stone.

"I knew her when she was a slip of a girl, eleven years old and more eyes than skin. Even back then, she was stubborn as a government mule and twice as tough in here as any lifer convict I ever saw." He tapped his temple. "She was gonna buck the system as hard as she could. Damned if she didn't." The orderly thought for a moment. "She never told you about that place, did she?" he asked shrewdly.

"Yeah, yeah she did." It was soft, dazed, and Flack let go of the orderly's collar. "She said the school was all right, but the infirmary… She didn't like to talk about that."

"She didn't tell you the half of it," the orderly declared, and straightened his shirt. "If she did, you never woulda brought her here. No sane man condemns what he loves to hell if he knows what he's doin'. I worked there for twenty-three years, and I promise you, it was hell." The orderly picked up his broom.

"Somethin' happens to doctors when they realize that weakness is permanent. Sometimes, they try to protect it, but most of them decide to exploit it. They're never goin' to get better, so who cares if they get a little worse? Maybe their sufferin'll help somebody who matters."

"That's a pretty bleak assessment," Stella observed skeptically.

The orderly stayed his broom and rested his chin on the rounded nub of the mop handle. "Have you ever been at the mercy of a doctor for more than a couple hours?" Stella didn't answer, but he continued as though she had. "No, I didn't think so. To you, doctors area convenience, but your wife knew better, Detective. She knew what was behind the mask, and she was afraid. You would be, too, if you had any damn sense, but you can't see. You haven't learned yet. She came by those lessons hard, and she ain't goin' to forget."

Flack stared it him in helpless incredulity. His cop-voice was insisting that the orderly was either a scam artist or a crazy son of a bitch, but the words resonated behind his sternum like the vibrato thrum of a bass chord, and his mind conjured images of Rebecca dissolving into absolute hysteria the instant the blue band closed around her bony wrist.

Baby, please don't make me stay here.

"The longer you're with 'em, the less human you become," the orderly was saying now. "They're so busy dissecting your parts that they go blind to the sum, and when that happens, no amount of begging will save you. She was luckier than a lot of students there. She didn't go to the infirmary often, but when she did, by God, she fought tooth and claw and screamed to beat the band. I was in there when she came in one time, and it took ten of the bastards to hold her down. I ain't never heard screaming like that since. Until yesterday afternoon, an' I knew what I had to do."

When Flack continued to gape at him in numb stupefaction, he sighed and said, "An animal in a trap will chew its paw off to escape, even if it means bleeding to death a few yards away. She was in a trap, Detective, and she was chewing, and I was afraid that if I didn't give her a chance to run, she'd end up like Judith Pruitt."

"Judith Pruitt," he heard himself say.

"She was another girl at that damned school. Soft as tallow inside and out. It ate her up, and one day, she climbed into bed and slit her throat with a piece of broken handmirror."

"Rebecca wouldn't do that."

"Maybe she would, and maybe she wouldn't." The orderly shrugged. "All I know is, I gave her another way out, and she took it. Look for the magic. They're drawn to it even if they don't know it. That's where you'll find her."

It was Stella who broke the stunned, soporific silence after that. "Come on, Flack," she said gently.

"She went that way," the orderly said, and pointed to the fire door behind him.