Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Gramercy Park
8:47 PM
The hospital foyer was sparsely populated. It was calm, quiet. Whatever violence had prompted their arrival did not seem to have either originated from or spilled over into the hospital itself. Several people sat in the hard-plastic blue seating of an L-shaped waiting room, each looking haggard and miserable in their own fashions.
They were disquieting reminders of a long, agonized summer.
Castle growled, "I hate hospitals."
Beckett advanced to the front desk with him trailing closely after. The nurse manning the reception desk was an older woman with mousy gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore blue scrub pants and a top of the same material worn beneath a white sweater dotted with small cornflowers. She glanced up at the fresh arrivals, assessing each with a critical brown-eyed gaze.
"Can I help you?"
"Good evening." Beckett eased one half of her overcoat open to reveal the badge hooked at a jean-clad hip. "I'm Detective Kate Beckett, NYPD. I'm responding to a call at this location made by a Dr. Narayan."
The receptionist frowned and adjusted her glasses. She reached for the phone on her desk while replying, "One moment, please, officer."
A page was sent out over the P.A. system.
Beckett half turned and gave another evaluating glance over the waiting room and its occupants. Her attention paused on the novelist close by. Richard stood with his shoulders lifted and tense. The hands at his sides were closed into loose fists. It was no idle selection of terms he had made previously. Detstation was written so clearly across him that she sighed and made herself look away.
A ringing of the phone on the desk arose and they waited while a low, one-sided conversation unfolded. Soon, the nurse hung up and nodded to Beckett. "The patient you're talking about is in a secure ICU on the fourth floor. If you take the elevator, the nurse at the nearby station up there will provide further directions. Dr. Narayan is with the patient now. She's expecting you."
"This isn't an ongoing situation?" Beckett clarified. "No one here has been hurt or anything? The details I was given were a bit sparse."
"Oh. No, it's nothing like that. I don't know about the patient or their condition, but I haven't heard about any trouble. The patient's arrival did cause a bit of a stir in the emergency room a while ago, but I wasn't there. Dr. Narayan will have to explain."
"Why is the patient in a secure wing if there was no trouble?" Castle asked.
The nurse hesitated a moment in consideration but could only shrug. "Sorry I can't help more. The lifts are to your left, just around the corner."
They proceeded that way and were soon standing in the elevator cab as it hummed its way up.
"You shouldn't be so critical," Beckett said as they ascended.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You're scowling. Take it easy. These nurses and doctors save a lot of lives. People like them saved mine when I needed it. I'm not exactly fond of hospitals either but that doesn't stop me from valuing the work that's done here."
Castle said nothing. His features were locked in a neutral mask. She of all people knew the signs of a well-fortified emotional wall. It felt strange to be the one standing outside the barrier, helplessly looking up.
A soft ding of arrival forestalled more discussion.
They exited into a wide-open waiting area that was more modern and comfortable than its first-floor sibling. The hall split right and continued forward along a single broad path before it turned right again at the far end. Windowless doors, many standing closed, were visible at either side every fifteen feet or so, while the central area of the hall hosted a few nursing stations where medical equipment, desks, or storage cabinets stood behind waist-high wooden counters.
The nearest station to them was about twenty feet off. A young, sandy-haired woman was sitting there and a brunette in a simple white coat was standing at the counter with her back to them. It sounded like they were discussing a medication schedule as Beckett and Castle approached. The nurse noticed them first and the other woman turned to follow her gaze. A white name tag pinned to the latter's lab coat provided in plain black script the quarry they sought.
"Dr. Leya Narayan?" Beckett asked.
The woman looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. She had striking features and a tawny beige complexion. Her eyes were deeply dark and had the amazing size and breadth commonly blessed to women of Indian heritage.
"That is me, yes. You are the detectives?"
"I'm Detective Kate Beckett and this is Richard Castle."
"Not a detective too?" she asked while studying her partner.
"I'm a civilian consultant. Pleased to meet you, doctor, circumstances notwithstanding."
Leya's focus switched solidly to Kate in mute perplexity. There was a steeliness behind them that the detective appreciated right away.
Beckett explained, "Castle's not an officer, but he's bound by the same confidentiality clauses every member of the NYPD is, if that's your concern."
"That is my concern." She studied Castle again and finally nodded. "Very well. Come with me, please."
"Your accent," Richard said as they advanced down the central corridor. "Is that a trace of Marathi I'm hearing?"
Dr. Narayan gaped back at him. "Y-yes," she answered haltingly. "How—"
"I have a bit of an ear for it, that's all. Though in this case I've also had the pleasure of spending a couple weeks traveling around Maharashtra. Mostly camping in the Bramhagiri hills in the shadows of the Sahyadri."
Sheesh.
As the pair animatedly discussed Narayan's homeland, Beckett was telling herself she ought to be grateful for his worldliness and easy affability. For the thousandth time it was opening more doors than it closed.
Her grudging acceptance did not extend to the receptiveness of the doctor leading the way. Scratch that. The exotic interloper slowed to match pace with Castle on his right. The woman was nearly as thin as Kate but the former admittedly wore it with greater elegance. Her figure yielded to healthier curves around the hips, butt, and an annoyingly ample bust.
"Um, doctor?" Kate interceded.
"Huh?" Leya blinked a few times and then gasped, "Oh! Oi," she gusted with a palm lifting to her forehead. Her dusky cheeks tinted the faintest shade dimmer. "I'm sorry. That took me by surprise. It's always nice to meet an American who knows more about India than our capacity for technical support."
Castle chuckled.
Despite herself, Beckett offered a wan smile. "It's fine. I'm assuming, though, that there isn't any special urgency surrounding your patient? When we got the call it sounded like their condition wasn't going favorably."
Dr. Narayan's embarrassment evaporated. "You don't know? She passed away about ten minutes ago." Their guide gestured to a closed doorway ahead on their left. It was marked with black numerals: 407. "Please."
Beckett entered first, warily despite the assurances provided.
407 was a smallish square with a decor much the same as the rest of the hospital: off-white walls with a six-inch wide blue stripe bordering the checker patterned floor and polystyrene ceiling. Lavender curtains hung open around two windows which shone nighttime black and reflected the warm, yellowish glow of a single lamp standing in the far corner. The patient bed rested centrally in the room. What looked to be a standard array of medical equipment stood nearby, all of which were dark and silent.
The victim was a girl.
Beckett placed her in the late teens, if that. She looked fightfuly tender and frail in the large and solid medical bed. A white sheet draped the inert figure to the neck. It looked like she was nude beneath it. The poor girl hadn't even survived long enough to be cleaned up and put into a hospital gown. Her shoulder length hair was of an indeterminate color and matted with something. Blood, the investigator quickly realized. Smears of it likewise coated her cheeks, neck, and ears—inside of them no less. A large bandage was taped across the right cheek.
"So young," Castle murmured closely to her right. Kate turned to look at him, tense with awareness of the easy parallel that might be drawn between the victim and his daughter. That association was almost certainly present in the hard clench of his jaw but he appeared to be holding up okay otherwise.
Dr. Narayan advanced to the foot of the bed, withdrawing the medical chart. "We haven't identified her yet. She was brought in via HEMS at 7:55 this evening."
"Medical helicopter?" Castle confirmed.
"Yes. She went into the ER already in the early stages of hypovolemic shock. She has defensive lacerations on her hands and up along her arms. There are also multiple stab wounds on her chest, abdomen, and back—fourteen in all."
Beckett pursed her lips into a plump line.
"She was conscious when we got her," Leya continued, "but that didn't last long and she was comatose regardless. Pain response was negative, pupils were fixed, and until losing consciousness she was in a state of complete muscle tension."
"She was frozen stiff?" Castle asked with his eyebrows arched.
"Effectively, yes." Leya paused to wet her lips and glanced between the two of them. "Up until the moment she fell unconscious, the patient was staring off at something only she could see, and she looked completely terrified."
Beckett and her partner exchanged bewildered looks.
"What's the official COD?" the former asked their guide.
Dr. Narayan gave a slow shake of her head. "Officially, that will be a determination for the medical examiner to make. Most likely, exsanguination."
They were all silent for a moment as they observed the pale, silent girl.
Rick asked, "Is she in a secure ward because she was assaulted?"
"That, yes, but also because, initially, the precise cause of her distress was unknown. This ward is primarily for patient's suffering from psychological trauma."
"You thought maybe she did this to herself?"
"Ah, no. It was very quickly apparent that she was the victim of an assault. Her arrival caused some alarm. In fact, it was why I contacted the police so quickly. She came to us covered in blood. Her hair and clothing were completely saturated."
Beckett's hackles lifted. "It wasn't all hers, was it?"
The other woman's dark eyes locked on tight, surprised but also hard with confirmation. "We discovered two types. Hers and one other's. I hesitate to speak prematurely, but given the volume of blood loss implied, I do not believe the person the second type belongs to is injured. They are likely deceased as well."
"Did you tell the officers you called about a potential second victim?"
"Yes, of course."
"They neglected to pass that along," Beckett muttered to herself. "Uh. Were you able to deduce anything about what happened to her before she arrived here?"
"Not beyond the obvious. I'm afraid that's not our area of expertise, detective."
"You must have some thoughts," Castle tried.
Dr. Narayan was not having it. "With respect, my work is about trying to save lives, not delve into the specifics of how or why they were ended. I don't want to know why someone would brutally stab a young girl like this. What difference could that possibly make?"
Beckett could feel a twin to her affront in the way her partner stood, the way his chin lifted and the rock of his jaw into a defiant set. To her relief, he said nothing. Rick turned and drifted away, standing before one of the casements with his arms crossed and his back ramrod straight.
"You'll be wanting to speak with the HMES pilot who brought her in," Leya continued. Her tone remained professional but it had definitely cooled. She perceived their disapproval even without the benefit of any commentary. "I told him he'd need to wait and make a statement to the police. I'll go have Terri page him. This isn't the place for a conversation like that, though. I can arrange for him to meet you downstairs somewhere. Would the cafeteria suit your needs, detective?"
"Uh, yeah. Yes. Thank you, doctor."
Dr. Narayan nodded. With a tight smile that didn't reach her eyes she eased out into the main hallway, but almost immediately ducked back in by head and shoulders. "Her belongings are in that bag on the shelf. It's everything she had with her."
Beckett spared a glance at Rick but he was facing away, angrily and perhaps unwittingly echoing the doctor's refusal to look at the crime and be part of its solution.
She sighed and turned forward, advanced to the rolling stand on which the mute and dark monitoring equipment was stationed near the sadly occupied hospital bed. A paper bag sat to one side on the shelf, folded once at the top. It crackled as she opened it and peered inside. Tennis shoes, socks, bra, a pair of jeans and a floral patterned purple and white blouse; all of it was bagged individually. All of it was slathered in gore as had been described previously. It was…a lot.
Beckett felt her partner's cold hand close tightly over her wrist, so firmly it hurt. She turned to look back at him with a soft sound of protest already welling up.
Except it wasn't his hand.
And the noise of pained protest stuck fast in her throat.
No. N-not possible.
Smaller fingers gripped her. Delicate. Youthful. The pale wrist and forearm attached to them had been bandaged again and again up its length where someone else had slashed, slashed, and slashed. The shoulder was a bare, rounded joint and the neck hollowed with reluctantly shifting tendons as the dead girl turned to fix a vacant, blue-gray stare on the inert officer. There was no dilation in the pupils, no tangible sense of being seen by human lenses and processed in human terms.
Not possible. Oh god. Oh god, I'm—I'm hallucinating!
The calamitous wave of fear which rocked her was very real. It shot through Kate as immediate and merciless as a sniper's bullet, rooting her where she stood.
With a clear, hard ringing sound the dead girl snapped her other hand around the railing on the side closest to Kate. She—it—started pulling herself upright in the bed and as the corpse came up the sheet slid down towards her waist. The girl's chest was similarly swathed with gauze and medical tape over gaping wounds. It did not rise. No gasping breath was sought. The only thing that tumbled out of the darkness between the girl's thin lips was a cavernous, overwhelming silence—the same nothingness that shone so plainly from the voids of dead gray eyes.
Castle, she's got me! Castle!
The grip around the railing released and rose with the fingers still partially curled as if they were already stiffening with rigor mortis, a featherless, skeletal bird in flight. There was overabundant power in the grip that seized Kate's coat and pulled. Almost tauntingly it pulled, slowly, inexorably, and the detective didn't have the strength or sense to resist properly as she was dragged closer to the girl's looming dead eyes and her bloodless lips. The grip on her wrist felt like bone was being crushed.
Beckett tried to scream. In the face of strange and sudden horror, her thinking degraded to almost nothing. She was a little girl again, painfully unknowing of the world's monsters or what to do in the face of them.
Daddy, help me! Daddy, Daddy!
The corpse's face loomed closer. Closer. It was a pale moon filling the sky and the eye sockets were boring absences, ravenous singularities that the detective could feel drawing her in, deeply in. The lips moved. There was no breath but it seemed to Kate that her right cheek went numb from a killing wash of coldness. The dry, rubbery texture of the girl's mouth tickled at the shell of her right ear as it moved.
Bring. Me. Home.
Beckett found her breath. She rediscovered her capacity to scream and with a chilling mindlessness, with every ounce of childlike fear rocketing through her veins to fuel the effort, that is precisely what she did.