The 5th Horseman (26 page)

“But this is a great verdict. O’Mara is over the moon. What’s her share of the award? Eighteen million? Oh, Yuki.”

Yuki tried to cover her swelling emotions by coughing, but her eyes swam with tears. Then her small chest was heaving, and she was having a full-scale public meltdown.

“I’m not like this,” she said as she wept. “This isn’t me.”

JAMIE SWEET WAS CRYING his little eyes out, and his undulating sobs were wrenching the hearts of his parents, Melissa and Martin Sweet. They hovered over their small child’s bed, doting on Jamie for the few remaining minutes before visiting hours were over for the night.

“I don’t want to stay here. Please, please, no,” five-year-old Jamie wailed. His chin was scraped, his front tooth was chipped, and his lower lip was split and swollen.

And then there was the fractured arm.

“Why can’t I go home? I want to go home. I have to.”

“Baby. Baby boy,” Melissa said, sweeping him up from his pillow, hugging him to her chest.

“Jamie,” his father said, “the doctors want to keep you here overnight so they can give you medicine for the pain. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be here first thing to pick you up. First thing, we promise. Look what Mommy and I got for you.”

Melissa brushed the tears from her face with the sides of her hands and held up a colorful shopping bag. She jounced it up and down. Something heavy was inside.

“Want to see?”

Jamie’s sobs receded as his mom unwrapped the gift from the creases of tissue paper, revealing a stuffed toy monkey wearing polka-dotted pants and a striped shirt.

“His name is Hooter,” said Melissa.

“Hooter?”

“He’s a hooter monkey. Just press on his tummy,” Melissa told Jamie.

The boy’s curiosity immediately took over. He stretched out his left hand, the gleaming plastic cast on his right arm looking even bigger and more monstrous by comparison.

He took the toy monkey, pressed on its belly. “Hooo-hoo-hoo,” Hooter said in a goofy voice. “Have you hugged your monkey today?”

The little boy smiled, his eyes and mouth starting to droop as the painkiller took hold. A nurse appeared in the doorway.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice honeyed with a West Indian lilt. “All the visitors must be leaving now.”

“Nooo,” Jamie cried. “They can’t leave.”

“Jamie, please. Everything’s going to be okay. Just get a good night’s sleep. There’s the big boy I know,” his father said. “You’re the best boy in the whole world.”

Martin thought his chest was going to blow apart, that’s how excruciating it was to leave his son alone. His precious, precious Jamie.

He could shoot himself now for taking the training wheels off the bike. The kid hadn’t been ready, but he’d wanted to see Jamie get the thrill of that first ride as a big boy. He could still see Jamie’s face now, looking over his shoulder to see if Dad was there, hitting the mailbox hard. Going down, breaking his arm.

It had been selfish on his part. And stupid.

“It’s just for tonight, baby,” his mom told him again, leaning over and kissing her baby’s damp cheek.

“I know twenty kinds of monkey business,” Hooter called out.

Jamie laughed through his tears, hugging his new toy tightly against his face.

His father leaned over and kissed his son. “You’re a real good boy,” he said.

“Hooo-hoo-hoo. Monkey see, monkey do,” said Hooter.

But Jamie’s smile died on his face as his parents stepped softly away, calling out, “Good night, Jamie. See you soon,” lingering in the doorway, waggling their fingers good-bye.

THE NIGHT WALKER MOVED quickly along the corridor, feeling a little queasy about the police in the halls and even some of the waiting rooms, feeling the need to do it anyway.

The need was bigger than anything.

Bigger than safety, bigger than never being caught.

The door to room 268 was closed, the child alone, sleeping deeply under the effect of his meds.

The shadowed figure pushed open the door and saw the boy in his bed. The streetlight was hitting the child, his tanned skin contrasting with the white sheets. The entire bed seemed to float in the eerie darkness.

The Night Walker picked up the stuffed monkey that had fallen onto the floor, put the toy into the hospital bed, and leaned over the side rails, thinking how nice the child smelled. Vanilla pudding and sleep.

Jamie Sweet.

The name suited him. With his long lashes and swollen cupid’s-bow mouth, his arm set in a cast, the five-year-old looked every bit an angel with a broken wing.

Too bad.

There would be no more baseball games for this little boy. He wouldn’t be falling off his bike again, either.

Nothing could change that now.

Jamie Sweet was going to die. It was the boy’s destiny, his fate on this earth.

The Night Walker loaded the syringe, pocketed the empty bottle, and moved closer to the bed, quickly injected morphine into the tube leading from the IV bag into Jamie Sweet’s left arm. The prescription was meant for the 250-pound fireman in room 286 — a man with second-degree burns and a broken hand who wasn’t going to get much pain relief tonight.

Minutes passed, the only sounds being the whizzing of traffic in the street below and Jamie Sweet’s soft breathing.

The Night Walker used two fingers to press open the child’s eyelids. His pupils were already reduced to pinpoints, the boy’s breath shallow and erratic, night sweats flushing his cheeks, making his damp curls into tight ringlets against his scalp.

As if he’d heard the intruder’s thoughts, the boy thrashed, arching his back, crying out wordlessly. Then his head tipped back and he exhaled, a little sputter coming from his throat.

He didn’t inhale again.

The killer touched Jamie’s carotid artery, felt for a pulse, then reached into a pocket for the metal buttons. Placed one on each of the child’s eyes, whispering, “Good night, sweet prince. Good night.”

BRENDA PAGED ME on the intercom.

“Lieutenant, pick up line three. The caller says it’s urgent and you know her, but she won’t identify herself.”

I stabbed the button on the phone and said my name. I recognized Noddie’s voice even though it was cracking and she was snuffling through her tears.

“Lieutenant, he was such a young boy,” Noddie Wilkins said. “He only had a broken bone and he died. He really shouldn’t have died. I heard about it in the coffee room. There were caduceus buttons on his eyes.”

I called Tracchio, got him on the line, told him what I needed and what I was going to do.

Then I swallowed the load of obligatory cover-your-ass crap he dished out: was I sure I knew what I was doing? Did I understand the dire consequences if I got this wrong?

I said, “Yessir, yessir, I understand.”

And I did.

A blind sweep could churn up nothing more than panic: no evidence of wrongdoing, no suspects, no leads of any kind. The outraged calls would come in after that, complaints about my lack of judgment, my bad leadership instincts, and, most of all, the SFPD’s inability to protect the people we serve.

But there wasn’t time enough to come up with a better plan.

Another person had died.

This time it was a five-year-old kid.

Tracchio finally gave me a green light, and I called the squad together.

They gathered like a flock of large birds around the squad room: Jacobi and Conklin, Chi and Rodriguez, Lemke, Samuels, McNeil, all the other good cops I’d worked with for years, and depended on now.

I willed the anxiety out of my voice, but I felt it deep in my gut. I told them that a child had died at Municipal Hospital under suspicious circumstances. That we had to preserve the evidence while there was still time, and find the cruelest kind of killer without much to go on.

I could see the concern in their faces, and still they had faith in me.

I asked, “Any questions?”

“No, ma’am.”

“We’re on it, Lieutenant.”

The squad gave me the courage of my desperate convictions.

WITHIN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of my call to Tracchio, I had warrants in hand and a caravan of inspectors and cops, some on loan from Robbery, Anticrime, and Narcotics, behind me with lights flashing and sirens screaming. We were all heading north in a broken line to Municipal Hospital.

We left the cars on Pine, and once inside the hospital, we dispersed according to plan.

Jacobi and I took an elevator to the executive floor. I badged Carl Whiteley’s secretary; then we pushed past her, Jacobi in the lead, throwing open the doors to a wood-paneled conference room where a board meeting was in progress.

Whiteley was at the head of the table, looking as though he were trapped inside a very bad dream. His skin was sallow and gray. He was roughly shaven and glassy-eyed.

The other suits at the table had the same stark look of post-traumatic shock on their faces.

“There’s been a report of a suspicious death on the orthopedic floor. These warrants authorize us to search the hospital,” I said, slapping the paperwork down on the large blond table.

“For God’s sake,” said Whiteley, half-standing, knocking over his china coffee cup. He sponged up the spill with his pocket square. “Whatever you want, all right, Lieutenant? It’s not my problem anymore.”

“If that’s the case, who’s in charge here?” I asked.

Whiteley looked up. “Apparently, it’s you.”

JACOBI AND I TOOK a noisy, very rickety service elevator down to the basement, which turned out to be a labyrinth of unadorned concrete walls filling the city block under the hospital.

We followed the signs to the morgue, drifting behind an orderly who was wheeling a gurney in that direction, the wheels rattling and grinding ahead of us.

We stood back as the orderly and gurney preceded us into the chilly room.

A stringy, middle-aged man with a basketball-size pot belly under his scrubs looked up when we entered the room. He put his clipboard down on a nearby corpse and walked toward us.

We exchanged introductions.

Dr. Raymond Paul was the chief pathologist, and he’d been expecting us.

“James Sweet’s room had already been cleaned out and we had him down here by the time we got your call,” he told me.

My sigh bloomed out in front of me, a frosty plume of disappointment. I had hoped against hope that the crime scene, if that’s what it was, hadn’t been destroyed.

We trailed Dr. Paul to the cooler, where he checked a list, then opened a stainless-steel drawer. The slab slid out with a smooth, rolling whirr. I drew back the sheet and saw for myself what Noddie Wilkins had described on the phone.

The boy’s naked body was so small and vulnerable. The cast on his arm made him seem even more pitiful in death.

What had killed the boy?

How could a broken arm turn into this?

Jacobi asked the pathologist, “What the hell happened here?”

“According to his chart, he had a simple fracture of his right humerus and a hairline fracture of the ulna, same arm,” said Dr. Paul. “Apparently, he fell from his bike.”

“And what else, Doctor?” said Jacobi. “Last I heard, a broken arm isn’t fatal. Or maybe it is at this hospital.”

“I was told to keep my hands off this kid,” the doctor told us. “So, you know, I can’t even guess.”

“That’s fine, Dr. Paul,” I said. “The ME is on the way. This little boy is going to the medical examiner’s office.”

IT WAS ONLY 9:00 in the morning, roughly nine hours after Jamie Sweet had died with the side rails up on his hospital bed, presumably surrounded by people who were supposed to take excellent care of him and make him well.

I left a thoroughly exasperated Jacobi on the second floor with Charlie Clapper and his team. They were processing what was left of the scene: recovering the bed linens and the child’s gown from the laundry, dusting for prints, bagging the trash and the pair of caduceus buttons that had been left inside an empty water glass when the boy’s body was removed from the room.

I passed my detectives as I walked the corridors, saw that they were interviewing the doctors and nurses in the orthopedic wing, getting a timeline. Who saw the boy alive and when? What medication had he received?

Who had been on duty last night?

Who had found him dead?

I met with Jamie Sweet’s parents in the cramped second-floor waiting room. They were a young couple in their early thirties, huddled together in the corner of the room, caught between anger and shock, wanting to believe anything but what I was telling them.

“This is fucked-up,” Martin Sweet shouted at me, his face bloated with grief. “Jamie had a broken arm. A broken arm! I want to kill someone, Lieutenant.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you? I’m holding you responsible for finding out who did this to my son.”

Beside him, the child’s mother rocked and moaned. Bright red streaks ran from her cheeks to her throat, where she seemed to have raked her skin with her fingernails.

“I want to die,” she cried into her husband’s chest. “Please, God, let me die.”