THE PARK Avenue Clinic was a renovated brownstone sandwiched in between a law firm and a glass building that housed an art gallery. It had passed the status of clinic and entered into the realm of corporation more than two decades back and it wore its muscle proudly. There was valet parking and three limousines sat at the curb.
Phelps rammed the truck across two lanes, plugging a hole a Rolls had staked out with its massive gauche ass. The driver looked up, acknowledged the flashing bubble with a shake of his head, and pulled out into the cars heading downtown. Hemingway was on the curb before the Suburban came to a halt, her shield out, feet pounding the concrete. By the time she was at the front door to the building, Phelps was patiently bringing Dennet up to speed with that no-nonsense diction he was famous for. The next call would be to the District Attorney.
Hemingway yanked the big metal handle and the ten-foot polycarbonate door bowed out, then flew open.
The welcome desk was sculpted from a single chunk of volcanic rock, cut to show the negative space of a mother and child swallowed by the ash of Pompeii. The handsome woman behind the counter backed up when Hemingway came at her with the badge. Outside, the screech of a police siren stopped at the curb and the sound of car doors slamming punctuated her footsteps.
“Detectives Alex Hemingway and Jon Phelps, NYPD. I need to speak to your CEO right now.”
The receptionist was mixed race but her dialogue was heavy Brooklynese. There was a tiny black microphone peeking out of the hair beside her ear. “May I ask what this is about?”
“You have ten seconds to get the CEO or director or whatever you call the head cheese down here. At the end of ten seconds, I am going get annoyed. You don’t want me to get annoyed,” Hemingway said.
The receptionist’s eyes shifted from Hemingway’s badge to the restructured line of her jaw, then back to the badge. She took a step back. “That would be Marjorie Fenton.”
“Then phone her, sweetheart. You get Fenton down here right now.” She leveled her finger at the microphone. “Ten seconds,” she repeated.
It was then that a woman appeared beside them. Her face was a perfect blend of poised calm and subtextual annoyance. Five hundred pounds of security squeezed into two suits stood behind her. Whatever her title, there was little room for doubt that she was a major player in the clinic’s ecosystem. “I’m Director Fenton, how may we help you—detectives, is it?” She was small, maybe five foot one. Close to sixty but could pass for fifty if the light and makeup were right. She put her hand firmly on Hemingway’s elbow. “I am happy to make an appointment. We are terribly busy and can’t operate with the police barging in and—”
Hemingway saw how this was going to go—or at least how Fenton imagined it would go—and she had no intention of letting the woman railroad her. “I am going to shut you up right now.” At that, the wall of suit behind the woman flexed and Hemingway heard Phelps’s shoes scrape the travertine behind her. She knew he had taken a step forward and that his hand was probably on the big automatic under his arm. For a man of his size, Phelps was able to move with surprising speed.
Hemingway continued in an even cadence. “You have heard about the two boys who were found in the East River? The other who was abducted this morning? Very shortly he is going to have parts of his body sawn off while he lies in the dirt somewhere, wondering why bad things are happening to him. If I don’t get your help—and I mean right fucking now—I will go outside and call a press conference on the sidewalk. I will tell Wolf Blitzer and the rest of the cackling idiots that patients of this clinic are being murdered and yet you refuse to cooperate with us and I am going to emphatically state that the commonality between these victims is that they were all conceived here. You, Mrs. Fenton, can piss your retirement right down the toilet.” Hemingway knew that this would all come out eventually anyway, but she was going for a knee-jerk reaction, not a rational response.
Fenton opened her mouth and Hemingway cut her off. Again.
“You may consider threatening me personally, but you’d be wasting your breath. I have a family attorney on retainer: Dwight Hemingway of Hemingway, McCrae and Pearson. They’re a few blocks up, in nicer digs than this. I won’t have to make meetings for three years, by which time the story of our little conversation here will be at the film stage and you will be on record as the director of Jeffrey Dahmer, Inc.” Hemingway, almost a solid foot taller than the woman, pulled her elbow out of Fenton’s grip and leaned over, her hands on her thighs as if reprimanding a child. “Now do you still want to play Queen Bitch with me?”
The door opened and the clink of cops in gear had everyone but Hemingway turn their heads. She kept her eyes locked on Fenton’s, but this was a woman who gave nothing away. She just stared back, her expression frozen in the indifference that seemed to be her prime emotion.
Fenton turned to the receptionist. “Maya, we’ll be in the big consultation room.” Then she led the two detectives away.
Hemingway beckoned the two uniformed policemen to follow. Fenton moved fast in her heels and Hemingway recognized the rhythm of a runner in the way she timed her shoulders. The two security men and the two street cops closed up the rear. They rounded two ground-level corners and just before they came to an elevator, Phelps—still on the phone—said, “Yeah, we’re there now,” loud enough that Fenton shifted in her designer one-off.
They dropped into the building’s guts in a backlit car, three of the walls decorated with Keith Haring acrylics—happy linear representations of parents and children with rays of goodness shooting out of their bodies. Hemingway’s parents had a moderate collection of American modern, the brunt of their focus on Georgia O’Keeffe and Jacob Coleridge, but they owned a Haring or two; it didn’t take a dealer’s acumen to see that there had to be a million dollars’ worth of canvas hanging on the walls. Money was evidently not an issue here.
That would change when the lawsuits started.
Hemingway was neither spiteful nor petty, and she wasn’t holding Fenton at fault for her Sarah Palin imitation downstairs. She wondered if Fenton had an inkling of what was about to happen. Probably not—too much confidence in the way the world was supposed to treat her—which meant that Hemingway would have to bully her.
The elevator opened to a subterranean conference room that could have been under the White House if the president was into Ralph Lauren. The walls were paneled in bamboo and fitted with an array of multimedia presentation equipment, tools to help talk prospective parents out of their money. The table was a block of polished concrete and the chairs were high-backed leather deals that looked like they were lifted from a fleet of Bentleys. A heavy silver coffee service sat in the center of the table, along with sandwiches, muffins, and cookies.
They stepped out as a procession, Fenton doing her best to look authoritative. Hemingway was annoyed at the time they were losing and she could feel Phelps vibrating behind her like an angry infection. No doubt, this was one of those times when he would be silently lamenting the loss of the old days he always talked about, a time when the letter of the law hadn’t been obscured by red tape and bureaucracy.
Fenton gestured to one side of the table and reached for the chair at the head but Hemingway grabbed it. Phelps dropped into the seat to her right. The two uniformed officers took up position at the door and Fenton was forced into one of the cheap seats with her security men behind her.
Fenton opened her mouth and Hemingway nailed her again. “Mrs. Fenton, there is no discussion here. My patience and time is running out.” She checked her watch. “You are almost at the end of my rope.”
“Do I need counsel present?” Fenton didn’t ask politely, courteously, or even as if it were any kind of a real possibility. She wanted to show she couldn’t be pushed.
Hemingway turned on her predator face. “You know about Tyler Rochester and Bobby Grant?”
Fenton stared at her. “I read about it in the paper, yes.”
“A third boy, Nigel Matheson, was abducted a few hours ago.”
Fenton just stared, waiting.
“Bobby Grant and Nigel Matheson were conceived at this clinic and I expect to have the same news from the Rochester family in a few minutes. Dr. Brayton handled the pregnancies. Your clinic—or Dr. Brayton—are what links the victims. Very soon, the media will descend on this place and you can forget the right to a due process. You can forget the right to a fair trial. They will paint this institution black. And for just a second, I want you to imagine what the parents of the next child who turns up dead with his leg or his arm or his foot chopped off is going to do when they find out that we came to you.” And she stopped cold to let that sink into Fenton’s core reactor. “And you told us to go fuck ourselves.” She looked into the points of anger that had replaced Fenton’s eyes.
After a protracted pause, Fenton said, “First off, I do not know the name of every child we helped to conceive—the number now totals in the thousands.”
“Would a doctor remember his patients ten years later?”
“I expect so, yes.”
“So where is Dr. Sylvester Brayton?”
“Brayton left us a year ago and I am not in the habit of staying in touch with former employees. I heard he took a position somewhere in Europe.”
“How long had Brayton been with the clinic?” Hemingway wanted to see if Fenton would be up front with information.
“I can’t be certain, but an easy twenty years. Since before we opened this facility at least.”
“Why did he leave?”
Fenton paused for a second. “We had mutually exclusive visions for the future of this clinic.”
“So you won’t tell me?”
Fenton shook her head. “I cannot discuss internal politics unless it has bearing on your case.”
“Who picked up Brayton’s patients?”
At that Fenton reached for the phone and punched in a four-digit extension number. “Yes, Maya, is Dr. Selmer back from Paris? Good. Could you please get him on the phone? Yes. Yes. Immediately. Then put him through.”
Fenton hung up and looked at Hemingway. “Dr. Michael Selmer picked up Dr. Brayton’s files. You have to understand that we are a fertility clinic, not a pediatrics ward. I doubt even Dr. Selmer will know that these boys were conceived here.” She reached over and poured herself a cup of coffee. “What do you want from me, Detective?”
“That phone call to Selmer is a good start. Anything you can give me in the way of due diligence. I understand the doctor–patient privilege; I understand that we need a court order to access Dr. Brayton’s files; I understand that we have to be very specific in our requests and that you can only release information that pertains to this case—we can’t go fishing and we can’t guess. But I am making the not-too-far-reaching assumption that these two—and soon to be three—children are not the only children at risk. There are more of Dr. Brayton’s patients out there. Which means other children may be in danger. Until we have a court order in our hands, which will take—” She turned to Phelps and raised an eyebrow.
“Two hours,” he said flatly.
“Since you cannot give me the names of Dr. Brayton’s patients without breaking your fiduciary responsibility to this clinic and its patients, I expect you to get on the phone and contact each and every one of them. You will give them my coordinates and you will ask them to call me. You will be persuasive. They need to know that their children are in danger.”
Fenton shook her head. “I don’t have the legal authority to do that. They are Dr. Selmer’s patients, not mine. Maya should have him on the phone any second.” She pointed at the phone in the middle of the table beside the coffee and food.
The elevator opened and the receptionist came in. She was out of breath and held her pumps in her hand. “I can’t find Dr. Selmer. I’ve called his apartment and he’s not answering. I—”
Fenton pushed her chair back and stood up. “Did you call the doorman?”
Maya nodded, and with her mouth frozen in a perfect circle, she looked like an umlaut O come to life. “The doorman says there’s no answer. He’s not allowed to go in.”
“Are you sure he’s home?”
Maya nodded again. “He landed at nine thirty-five this morning. British Airways flight . . .” She pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from inside one of the shoes still dangling in her hand. “. . . flight two-two-nine-two. JFK. George, our driver, picked him up and dropped him off. Gate to apartment door. I called him. George left him at eleven oh five a.m. and the doorman says he hasn’t left and no one answers his door. His car’s in the garage.”
Hemingway stood up. “We need an address.”