“Is he expecting you?” the guard in the security booth at the Sixty-Sixth Street gate said to Mike, who had flashed his gold shield to the uniformed man.
“He’ll be happy to see me. Let’s just leave it at that.”
We had walked through the two tall stone pillars that were topped with an elegant wrought iron archway, a typical design at the time it was built, more than a century ago.
Mike’s answer didn’t seem to raise any concern in the guard. “Well, you’re early, but you might as well go on in,” he said. “Just turn right at the Founder’s Hall, at the top of the drive, and it’ll be your next building on the left.”
“Thanks,” Mike said.
We walked uphill toward the five-story gray-brick building with limestone trim that had the name FOUNDER’S HALL carved above the entrance. It seemed to anchor the campus of the institute-turned-university, and was undoubtedly the first structure built there.
We turned right to reach the next building, almost as old as the main one, bearing its original designation: NURSES’ RESIDENCE.
“This means we must be getting close to the hospital,” Mike said, climbing the steps and opening the front door, shortly before seven A.M.
Instead of a residential hall, the first floor had clearly been turned into suites of offices. The first ones, to the left and to the right, were both marked SECURITY.
Murf’s name was on a sign over the door to the left. Mike knocked but there was no response. He opened it and we entered, sitting down in the reception area, where Mike picked up a map of the grounds from a pile on the secretary’s desk.
We began to study it but hadn’t gotten very far when Roger Murfee came through the door.
“Well, well, well,” he said, smiling at Mike and extending his hand. “It’s sort of like a bad penny turning up. It had to happen sooner or later.”
“I’m Alexandra—”
“Cooper,” Murf said. “Special Victims. My guys had a ton of cases with you.”
He was taller than Mike and lean, with a handsome face framed by short, slightly wavy blond hair and frameless glasses.
“Good to meet you,” I said.
“Somebody asleep at the front gate when you got here?” Murf asked.
“Tinning the old-timers still works,” Mike said. “The shiny badge opens a lot of doors.”
Murf unlocked his door and led us into his office. “I’ve been here five years, without a scintilla of a violent crime. So don’t change the odds for me, okay?”
“Just sniffing around,” Mike said. “Looking for a body.”
“Fresh out of luck. I don’t do bodies anymore.”
“Even before you hear my story?” Mike asked.
“I’ll give you fifteen minutes,” Murf said. “What do you want to know?”
“What is this place, and why is there a private hospital here?”
“Let me answer your question with a question. What do you know about John D. Rockefeller? I mean Senior, the original?”
“That he was probably the richest person in modern history,” Mike said. “Founded the Standard Oil Company in the 1870s.”
“And known for his philanthropy, too,” I added.
Murf filled in all the gaps with a brief bio of John D.’s business and philanthropic successes in his very long life.
He went on. “In 1900, Rockefeller’s first grandchild—his daughter’s baby, Jack—died of scarlet fever. There was no treatment for the disease back then. The billionaire was devastated by the boy’s death. He told friends that he had enough money to try to find a cure for both scarlet fever and infectious diseases like it.”
“Sad story,” I said.
“But it launched this incredible place,” Murf said. “Within months, Rockefeller agreed to fund the creation of this new research facility dedicated exclusively to the scientific study of medicine—the nature and causes of disease, and the methods of treatment.”
“Okay,” Mike said. “I get the research part of it. But why a hospital?”
“His science advisers insisted on a small private hospital on the same campus,” Murf said. “The research would be done in the laboratories, but the patients would be carefully selected from the general population of the city to receive the new treatments. There was no institute like this in the entire country.”
“So the hospital is essentially a lab, too,” I said.
“Yes,” Murf said. “It opened in 1910, just before the height of the polio epidemic. So polio was one of the first diseases studied for treatment, along with typhoid and syphilis and pneumonia—which used to kill twenty-five percent of the people who contracted it.”
“Can we see the hospital?” Mike asked.
“Sure. Sure you can,” Murf said. “It’s still in its original building.”
“Still small, then,” I said. “Still exclusive.”
Murf got up from his desk. “Exclusive? Let’s just say it’s a club you don’t want to join, although you’ll have the most brilliant docs in the world working on you.”
“You like your job?” Mike asked as we headed for the door.
“Best place in the world to be,” Murf said. “It’s like a mini precinct. We’ve got close to forty men and women, on duty 24/7. Two thousand people work here and about two hundred of them are grad students—PhD candidates. I’ve never been treated so well in my life.”
“I get it,” Mike said. “No perps on campus. No mopes to mess with you. They’re all brainiacs, doing good for the world.”
We turned left again and Murf pointed up over our heads. Three stories above us was an elevated bridge—once copper coated, now with a light green patina that made it stand out against the brick buildings on either end. It connected the third floor of the old Nurses’ Residence with the hospital.
“Remind you of anything?” Murf asked.
I looked up and laughed. “You’ve got your own Bridge of Sighs,” I said.
“You bet we do,” Murf said. “The patients used to be wheeled over to the solarium in the Nurses’ Residence, and their wistful glances out over the East River were often their last looks at the cityscape.”
“Condemned men and women making that final crossing on the bridge,” Mike said. “Just like the Tombs. Just like the Doge’s Palace.”
I wanted to get that image out of my head. “Such prime real estate to build a medical institute on back then,” I said. “Bordering on the river, I mean.”
“By 1900, this thirteen-acre plot of land was left intact on Manhattan Island,” Murf said. “It had been a family farm—the Schermerhorn Farm—since the eighteenth century, until John D. bought it. You should see the old photographs, with great views over the river and all the way out to Long Island.”
Mike stopped to walk closer to the edge of the building, which hung out over the FDR Drive and the river. He turned back to join us and we continued on to the entrance of the hospital.
“You’ve got new construction going on,” he said to Murf.
“Yeah, we’re adding some new labs and offices. State of the art,” Murf said. “These scientists have it good. They’re sitting right on the river, above the Drive.”
“They probably don’t even know what they’re sitting on,” Mike said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The FDR Drive was built after World War II,” he said. “From landfill.”
“Okay,” I said.
“That landfill came from England, you know.”
Murf looked at me and shrugged.
“This part of Manhattan is built with the rubble from the blitz of the city of Bristol,” Mike said, putting his knowledge of military history to good use.
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“Not so crazy as you think. Our ships had been delivering supplies to England, in all the time leading up to the Normandy invasion. Specifically to the port city of Bristol,” Mike said. “The ships couldn’t come back empty. They needed to be filled with ballast. Something heavy had to go in the bilge to stabilize them, so they used the material from all the buildings—homes, factories, aircraft manufacturing plants, and even churches—that were destroyed by the Nazis.”
“That will make my ride home feel a little different from now on,” I said.
Murf had pulled open the door of the old Rockefeller Hospital to let us in. “Interesting factoid, Mike. But you never made your point. Exactly what are we looking for?”
“Coop and I are thinking you might have a patient here who might need our help—well, her help specifically when she wakes up out of a coma.”
I let Mike put the weight on me. Every cop wanted to help when they thought a woman had been the victim of a rape.
Murf just stared. “But you want to see her now, even though she’s not conscious?”
I phumphered for an answer. “We—uh, I just missed seeing her at Cornell, and now I understand she’s been transferred here. It’s the way I usually do things, just to get connected to my victim—and perhaps there’s family around I could introduce myself to.”
I got the feeling that Murf was too smart to buy into us completely.
“I don’t get to make decisions about patients and who gets to see them,” he said.
“Well, can you ask one of the nurses or docs about her? About her condition, and whether we’d be allowed in?” I said. “Her name is Francie Fain.”
“They’re not even going to tell me about her condition,” he said. “HIPAA regulations and all that.”
We had gotten off the elevator on the third floor. Although the bones of the building were old, the interiors had been completely modernized. I watched as Murf approached the nurses’ station.
He leaned in and spoke with the only nurse at the desk, looking back at us to explain who we were.
Her stern expression didn’t waver for a second. I could see that the corridor to our right had an open door, and that a physician in a lab coat was heading back to the desk.
But something the nurse said—without moving her head to either side—made Murf look in the opposite direction, toward the corridor entrance to our left.
“Look, Mike,” I said. “There’ll be no getting in that wing.”
There was a sign posted over the closed door, with a single word printed in a large, bold font. It had to be where Francie Fain had been taken. All the sign said was QUARANTINE.