“New York/Cornell Hospital, please,” I said to the cabdriver. “I’d like to go to the entrance on East Sixty-Eighth Street, just off York Avenue.”
He pressed the meter and headed north on Third Avenue without saying a word.
It was only a ten-minute ride to the enormous medical center. At nine forty-five in the evening, there was very little traffic on the streets.
I texted Mike that I was going to stop by and check on Francie, hoping for the chance to squeeze her hand or stroke her forehead if the nurses would let me in.
The security guard at the front desk, probably near the end of his eight-hour shift, seemed tired and uninterested.
I showed him my DA’s office ID and gold badge—just like a detective’s badge but without any corresponding juice—and asked for the Neuro ICU.
“Take the F elevator bank to the third floor and follow the signs.”
I thanked him and walked down the corridor. Most visitors were gone at this late hour, but several walked by me as the elevator doors opened and discharged some glum-looking folks.
When I reached the third floor, I pushed through several sets of double doors until I reached the nursing station for Neuro ICU.
I could see in the glass-walled sides of the first three cubicles. Patients in them were attached to an array of monitors that beeped and blipped. One nurse was bedside and another was standing at the station, noting something on a chart.
“Good evening,” I said. “I’m sorry to interrupt you.”
“No problem. How can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Francie Fain,” I said. “I’m not family, and I know it’s late, but she’s a dear friend and I was just thinking you might let me in for a minute to whisper some encouragement in her ear.”
“Just a minute,” the woman said. “Let me talk to the other nurse. I just came on to cover while one of them went to have her dinner.”
She walked to the door of the cubicle and I heard her say Francie’s name. The second nurse shook her head as they both walked back to the station.
“Is she the one who flatlined earlier?” the first nurse I talked to said. “Before I got here?”
Dead? She couldn’t possibly be dead.
“No,” the second nurse said, running her finger down the list of patient names, then looking up at me, still talking to the other woman. “The flatliner was a man. Delivery guy without a helmet thrown off his bicycle and crushed his skull.”
She flipped the top page of papers on the clipboard.
“What’s this Francie Fain to you?” she asked.
“I’m a friend. A close friend,” I said. “We worked together.”
“Ms. Fain was transferred out of here at two P.M. today,” the in-charge nurse said, reading from the sheet of paper.
“To another floor?” I asked. “Does that mean she regained consciousness?”
She put the clipboard down and brought Francie’s name up on the computer.
“No. There’s no change in her condition.”
“Can you please tell me what room she’s in?” I said.
The monitors in the second cubicle began to beep rapidly and both women looked up at the overhead screen. The in-charge nurse pointed and told the temp kid to check on the patient. Then she kept tapping on the keyboard, but looked puzzled each time an answer came up.
“Ms. Fain isn’t here.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was signed out of the hospital,” the nurse said.
“But she’s in a coma, or she was this morning,” I said, a nausea growing in my stomach. “She didn’t walk out on her own steam, I don’t think.”
“You’ll have to check with hospital administration when they open tomorrow,” the nurse said. “We’ve got our hands full up here tonight, as you can see.”
“But she was a patient in this unit, right?” I asked.
“Yes, it looks like she was a transfer from Bellevue.”
“What else does it say about her?”
“Look, ma’am, Francie Fain is gone, okay? I can’t tell you anything else.”
“I’m not asking to see her medical records,” I said, trying not to let myself get shrill. “Nothing privileged. But surely there must be the name of the person who signed her out or authorized her discharge?”
I reached back in my tote for my badge and ID.
The nurse scowled at me and told me to come around to look at the computer screen. “Maybe this will mean more to you than it means to me.”
A piece of letter-size paper had been scanned into the system, separate from the medical records:
“I hereby accept responsibility for the treatment of Francie Fain, upon her discharge from Cornell Hospital.”
It was dated at one P.M. today.
The signature line read “Keith Scully,” and below it, “Police Commissioner of the City of New York.”