CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
St. Bartholomew’s had once been a landmark of municipal pride, a place where surgeons wore starched coats and the sick went to be mended. Now it sagged inward on itself, a hulking thing of boarded windows, peeling paint and the slow, inexorable rot of abandonment.
The Bronx had changed around it; developers had moved on, and so had most of the people who remembered why this building mattered.
What remained were the echoes of gurney-wheels long silenced, young interns joking in the wards as the sun came up, solemn old nurses who had cleaned bodies and smoothed brows until there were no years left in their hands.
She didn’t like hospitals, closed or otherwise.
You wait until you need one – her Dad used to say.
He’d done some of his earliest work in a lab right here, back when embryonic stem cells were still a promise on the horizon, when grant applications were prayers and the edge of science looked dangerously like salvation.
Kate hadn’t been born, or even conceived back then—but, as she’d recently discovered, there’d been another child, not quite a baby, who’d lived a pitifully short while. Jeanette.
And that had to be why Cox had brought her here.
The main corridor swallowed her footsteps.
Fluorescent fixtures had burned out years ago, leaving narrow shafts of light to collect on the linoleum in pale, exhausted pools.
Kate’s torch played across rooms: a ward of beds with no mattresses; a nurses’ station with drawers pulled half-open, their contents cached and mummified; a surgical theatre whose theatre-hood had been stripped of steel and left to rust. In one of the side rooms somebody had set up a makeshift camp—an old dining chair, a blanket thrown over it like a fort.
She moved closer, careful, the way you move around a sleeping dog.
The handwriting hit her before she could see the words.
It was the same handwriting she had seen on the back of a yellowing family photograph, the spidery, arrogant script that adorned all of Elijah Cox’s manifestos and notes.
He wrote scripture like other men wrote blueprints—selective, obsessively annotated, a mixture of heat and chill: gospel and geometry in one hand.
The scrawl surveyed the peeling plaster like a claim.
Her throat tightened. She forced her breath into normal rhythms and walked on.
There were signs—soft, domestic markers that told her someone had been living here recently.
A strip of clothesline was strung between two bedframes, socks and a wash cloth draped like little flags.
It felt odd to see them, these traces of the man beneath the myth and the menace, like seeing your teachers outside of school.
Cans of beans sat in a tidy stack on top of a beer crate; a kettle sat, long-cold, on a camping stove.
A paperback lay open on the floor, the spine had been split a hundred times.
Cox was reading Die Physiker: a Swiss play from the Fifties, about the moral dilemmas of science.
Was he actually reading it, Kate wondered.
Or was it another prop? Put there like a footnote, referencing her dad’s research, his neglect of family in favor of work.
It was impossible to know, with Cox, where the man ended and the show began.
A Polaroid, edges yellowed, was held to the plaster with a rusted nail. She squatted, the flashlight turning the photograph into an island. It showed her father in a lab coat—young, hair dark and unruly at the temples, grin sharp as a new nickel.
Flanking him, a younger group: a man too boyish for the cigar in his lips, a woman with short hair and a serious frown. Arranged around a cluttered lab bench like a family portrait.
“Hello?” she said aloud. The sound hit the low ceiling and came back softer, almost apologetic.
She moved from room to room, registering small items as if cataloguing evidence.
A scrap of newspaper with a headline about a clinical breakthrough; a box of sterile spatulas; a Bible, spine cracked, its margins filled with marginalia—verses underlined, cross-references scribbled in the margins with the same spidery script she had come to expect.
She picked up the Bible, fingertips running across pencilled notes.
Time was, her skin would have prickled to stumble on a sight like this.
To be this close to the beast’s lair, to walk where he’d stood, breathe the same air.
For some reason, though, she wasn’t experiencing that animal response.
Something had shifted, but Kate couldn’t put it into clear thoughts, let alone words.
She was tired; that was the answer and yet not the answer.
She found the phone in a dentist’s office—an old cell the size of a small book, resting on a cracked vinyl patient chair.
The screen was shattered; a small, pale icon of a crown appeared behind the maze of tiny fractures.
When it rang, it hit like a bell in a silent church.
The tone that filled the corridor was Handel—Zadok the Priest—bloated, ceremonial, absurdly triumphant.
It sounded like a herald, ridiculous among the leaking pipes and mouldy curtains, and for a heartbeat Kate laughed despite herself.
Her thumb answered before she could talk herself out of it.
“Hello?” she said.
There was a small, amused silence at the other end, as if the man had been enjoying her reaction and had decided to wait.
When he did speak his voice was the one she knew well: cultured, a hint of the South; the baritone of old-time radio plays.
But a rasp at the edges, as if illness had finally taken a small, private toll on his lungs.
“Kate Valentine,” he said. He said her surname like a benediction and a threat. “You are a creature of habit. You came alone.”
She pictured him as he had been: the man in the photographs on the walls of a dozen investigations, the man whose portraits were more mythology than memory. There were crackles on the line like distant rain. “You’re… you’re not here, are you?”
“No.” He laughed, low and small. “No, I am not inside the hospital. But I am near.” He spoke in measured phrases. “Have you seen the photographs, Kate?”
She swallowed. “You left them.”
“Left them? No, I placed them. There is a difference. Placement implies intention. Left implies negligence.” He made the distinction as if they were reading from the same page. “Do not be afraid.”
“What do the photographs mean? What are you trying to tell me?”
Cox said nothing. She felt, rather than knew, that wherever he was, he was still smiling.
“What do you want?” Kate asked.
A pause; then his voice, soft as a blessing and hard as a calculation.
“You will leave the hospital now. Walk out of the doors you came through. Take the first right. Walk to the third lamppost. Take a left at the florist. Then take the third right. Walk to the bus-stop and take route 414 towards Manhattan. Do not try to deviate. Keep your phone on this line. Follow my voice and you will eventually arrive at a place where you will find what you need to know.”
He spoke with the unruffled composure of a man setting out chess pieces.
The list of directions came like those long lists in Genesis—and Mahaleel begat Jared— precise, unemotional, judicial.
The ridiculousness of sticking to them in the warren of an abandoned hospital was part of the design: it compelled obedience.
“No,” she said, bitter and quick. “Why would I follow your directions?”
“Because you will do anything to know,” he said. “You are the sort of person who will step into a trap if she believes the trap holds an answer. That is why I have called you. The choice I give you is the one you always make.”
The corridor blurred at the edges as her muscles remembered other fights—other times when he’d been the architect of her fear. She steadied herself. “My colleagues are going to be looking for me.”
“And my colleagues will be looking at them.”
“You’re bluffing.” Kate’s jaw clenched. “What guarantee do I have that this isn’t a setup?”
His laugh this time was small and approving. “You always ask for guarantees. I do not offer them. Guarantees are for the faithless. I deal in options.”
“You’re not giving me an option,” she said. “You’re giving me a command.”
“Language matters,” he said. “I will speak it plainly: do as I ask and forfeit nothing but the illusion of control. Disobey me and I will end the illusion entirely.”
There was a long, white silence. Somewhere in the hospital, a window rattled. A pigeon startled, its wings like a small, black flag.
“You’re blustering,” she said finally. “You’re trying to frighten me.”
“Am I?” He coughed; it sounded painful. "Listen carefully, Kate.
This is the part you must know." His voice narrowed; he removed the rhetorical flourish and left only the essential.
"There is a watcher at your mother's home in Portland. He is my disciple. He understands what must be done and what must not be done. He is patient. He is calm. He is not you. If you are followed at any point on this walk, if you make any attempt to elude him, or if you signal for help, I will give him the instruction to act. I will give the instruction to end the life of the person who loves you the most.”
Kate felt her stomach turn over as if a punch had landed beneath her ribs.
She’d thought this had something to do with her father: the hospital, the photos, the reference to Jephtha.
And she’d thought the danger to her mother was over.
Because, of course, Cox had wanted her to think that.
He’d steered in one direction, in order to haul her suddenly in another.
The Master rears the spotted calf. She had a sudden image of herself being led by the nose and she flushed hot and cold at once, anger and shame slugging it out.
She thought she saw through him. But the bastard was still playing her.
She wanted to curse, to tell him to shove his worship somewhere it could not spit on the living. Instead, she asked hoarsely, “If I do what you want, what then?”
“You will come,” he said. “You will be alone. You will be on this line. You will follow the route precisely. You will not look at windows, you will not approach vehicles, you will not talk to anyone but me.”
“You sound like God in the Old Testament,” she said. “But you’re not God.”
“I am not,” he conceded smoothly. “But I ask the same relentless questions.” His voice softened, a thread of something like pity in it. “Do not think I relish this. I would rather not have to instruct pain. But the world will not be instructed without demonstration.”
The practical part of her mind filed the constraints as a separate truth: no backup, no witnesses, the risk to her mother.
The rest of her, the part that had learned to obey for the sake of keeping a thing alive, made the calculation that had been practiced behind a thousand desks in a thousand cases: you trade one certainty for the chance of a greater one.
“All right,” she said at last. Her voice was a dead thing.
“I knew you would make the right choice.”
She took a breath, and a memory flashed: a little girl under a treehouse, a father who had promised a sign.
Green Gables. The image of the treehouse slid through her like a shard.
She remembered the way his hands had been on the saw, the way he had taught her to nail a board straight.
The things a man teaches are sometimes the last things he leaves you.
“First right, third lamppost, left and third right. I’ll stay on the phone.”
“Good.” A beat. “Walk now, Kate.”
She turned, the telephone tight in her grip.
In the corridor the shafts of light were like prison bars.
She moved as if underwater—slow, deliberate, counting steps more by a rhythm in her head than by the hard evidence of ground underfoot.
She obeyed his directions to the letter, not because she trusted him but because she did not trust what might happen otherwise.
Outside, the world smelled of wet tar and something metallic—the city’s blood, sweeping back into its pipes.
The first right took her onto a street of mostly shuttered shops, though a little Korean store was just opening up.
She pondered, briefly, rushing up to the man as he laid out fruit and vegetables on the fake grass shelving of his storefront, telling him everything, getting him to call Marcus on her phone.
The man looked kind; a Good Samaritan type, the sort who’d help…
Hope rose and died as she walked right past him; it was futile, too great a risk. Sure, Cox could be bluffing about the disciple watching her mother, but her experience reminded her that he’d followed through on his promises, just as often as he’d bluffed and pretended.
She passed a florist whose window held a single dead rose.
Lampposts counted themselves off in the wet dark, and she kept her phone to her ear, hearing him like a metronome.
She passed a parked van with a dented bumper and a familiar graffiti tag; her breath came shallow.
At the third lamppost, she turned left, and she kept walking until she reached the bus stop, where she waited for the next move.