“I’ve been to every hospital in Manhattan over the years, and most in the outer boroughs,” I said to Mike as we settled in at home in the den. “I should be able to figure out who’s got the best resources to care for Francie.”
Rape victims were treated in most emergency rooms, and we worked closely with forensic nurse examiners and docs who prepared evidence collection kits during those exams—now a critical feature in most trials.
My colleagues and I had stood beside gurneys in ERs to interview witnesses when an arrest time was critical, we had visited patients in ICUs just to make a silent bond when a case was assigned, and we often sat with survivors who were hospitalized with other injuries as we worked on their cases.
“You want to start on the southern tip of the island?” Mike asked. “Or top down?”
“Bottom up,” I said. “I’ve never seen Vickee snap like that.”
“She’s sitting on a powder keg,” Mike said, “and we weren’t much help.”
“How about a drink?” I said, reclining on the sofa in a pair of leggings and one of Mike’s shirts. I started to name the hospitals, drawing an imaginary map in the air. “Presbyterian Downtown, Beth Israel, Bellevue, NYU Langone.”
“Not so much research at those,” Mike said. “No Nobelists, I don’t think.”
“Cornell, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, Lenox Hill, Mount Sinai,” I said, and by the time I had ticked off Metropolitan, Harlem, and Presbyterian Columbia in Washington Heights, Mike was cooling me down with a healthy dose of Dewar’s on the rocks.
He fixed a drink for himself and sat down in an armchair across the room.
“You skipped a few.”
“Specialty hospitals,” I said, dismissing them in one breath. “Places she isn’t likely to be. Ear, Nose, and Throat is mostly plastic surgery, which Francie doesn’t need; Memorial Sloan Kettering is a great cancer facility, which is fortunately not her issue; Hospital for Special Surgery is orthopedic, and nothing was broken. Did I ever tell you when HSS was founded, it was called the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled?”
“You got that story from your old man, right?” Mike asked.
“Yes, like everything else I know about this subject,” I said. “Then there’s Joint Diseases on East Seventeenth,” I said.
“Never been there,” Mike said. “No homicides, I guess.”
“That one was originally called the Jewish Hospital for Deformities.”
“Dr. Benjamin Cooper knows way too much about medicine.”
I sat up straight. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“What?” Mike asked.
I grabbed my iPhone from the side table and dialed the international number for my parents, who were at their home in the Caribbean for the fall and winter.
“I’ll ask my father,” I said. “He’ll figure this out.”
It was an hour later on the tiny island of St. Barth’s than our ten thirty P.M., but my father was a night owl, just like me.
“Dad?” I said when he answered the phone.
“Alexandra,” he boomed back, enthusiastically. “Is everything okay?”
I had just spoken with him and my mother at length on Monday, assuring them that everything had gone well on my first day back at work.
“All good with Mike and with me, but we’re puzzling out a problem in a case, and I thought maybe you could help.”
“Just what a man wants to hear,” he said, “that I might know as much as Siri.”
“I like the sound of your voice much better,” I said, “and I know how much you love me, so I expect you’ll try harder than she would.”
“I’ll give it a whirl,” my father said. “What’s the question?”
“Let me put you on speaker so Mike can hear, too. We need help identifying a major medical research center in Manhattan,” I said. “At least, Mike and I think it’s in Manhattan.”
“Oh, darling,” he said. “I think you’ve given me an impossible task. Almost every major medical center in the city has a serious research arm attached.”
“Some must be more outstanding than others,” I said. “C’mon, Dad. What do you know about Nobel laureates?”
He laughed at me. “Do I need to remind you, Alexandra? I wasn’t exactly a sore loser, but I never won one.”
“I know you don’t have a Nobel Prize, Dad, but you were given a Lasker Award, and that’s pretty swell company.”
The Alfred and Mary Lasker Award was given annually to living persons who made major contributions to medical science. My father and his partner had received the award for their work on heart disease more than twenty-five years earlier.
He ignored my compliment and asked me a question in return. “What does this have to do with sexual assault?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all. But someone I care about with a very rare diagnosis has been moved from New York/Cornell Hospital—shrouded in secrecy—to some kind of research facility, where there are something like five or six Nobel Prize laureates working on her.”
“You should have started with that fact, Alexandra. It’s a rather unique identifier,” my father said. “A facility with twenty-two Lasker Award winners and twenty-five Nobel Prize winners, six of them current faculty.”
“And it’s medical, Dr. Cooper?” Mike asked.
“Entirely,” he said. “It’s the first institute for research in America, founded in 1901, exclusively dedicated to the scientific study of medicine.”
“Where is it, Dad?”
“Right under your nose, Alexandra. Behind wrought iron gates, guarded by a security team to keep it private, on York Avenue, between Sixty-Third Street and Sixty-Eighth Street. The best-kept secret in the city.”
I looked at Mike and shook my head. A five-block stretch of the Upper East Side that was a total mystery to me.
“The Rockefeller Institute,” my father said, “complete with a sequestered twenty-bed hospital held in reserve for some of the most extreme medical cases in modern history. You’ll find your six Nobelists in there—and probably your patient, too.”