Part 6 Aftermath
AFTERMATH
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
– From: The Mourning Bride
by William Congreve
Phelps Hospital
Sleepy Hollow, NY
Phelps Hospital was only a mile from the cemetery.
It was a garden-variety regional hospital: a neat and tidy five-storey red-brick building.
When I arrived there with Bill, we were informed that Audrey had been rushed to Emergency and was already in surgery.
(They didn’t get many gunshot victims at Phelps Hospital, let alone an FBI agent who had been shot during a major incident, so Audrey was getting the royal treatment.)
I was very worried.
Gunshot wounds can be tricky.
If the bullet strikes a major organ, the wound can be fatal. Shots to the abdomen can also cause ruptures in the stomach wall, leading to sepsis and a painful death.
But then at other times—quite often, actually—the bullet can go right through the victim’s body and not hit anything vital, and the victim survives handily.
There was, of course, nothing Bill and I could do to help Audrey now, so we took seats in the waiting room of the emergency department and waited.
An hour passed.
I didn’t move from my plastic seat.
(I can do this: simply sit in a spot and wait. I don’t fidget or pace or scroll on my phone.)
I just sat there, staring, eating the occasional sultana that I absently lifted from my backpack.
Bill did move around some. At one point, he stepped away to call his daughter in Texas and at another to get us some drinks from the vending machine.
At first, I stared at the swinging doors leading to the surgical rooms of the ER, waiting for them to open and for a doctor to come out and tell us Audrey was okay.
Eventually, my attention was drawn to a television mounted up near the ceiling of the waiting room playing CNN.
The TV was showing scenes from the cemetery—images of the open grave with the wooden coffin inside it and the covered bodies of the three killers—but mainly shots of Aristo King, draped in his thermal blanket, surrounded by cops and FBI agents, sitting on the rear fender of the ambulance, bathed in flickering police lights.
Reports of his kidnapping and rescue, culminating in a dramatic shootout at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, had hit the news.
One hour became two.
Still no word about Audrey.
At some stage during that time, Heidi arrived at the hospital.
‘I booked us a couple of rooms at a motel near here,’ she said.
‘Sorry, I could only get two rooms, so you two’ll have to be roomies.
The Feds might’ve flown us here on a private jet, but when it comes to accommodation, they told me we were on our own.
Jerks. Here, little man’—she handed me a sandwich—‘eat something other than sultanas.’
‘Thanks, Heidi.’
With nothing else to do but wait, we watched the news coverage on the wall-mounted TV.
The day’s events had become the biggest story in the world.
After lots of early speculation about what had gone on at King’s penthouse—the CNN hosts talked over looping B-roll of King and the ambulance—eventually the media scored some interviews with people who had actually been there.
And so while I sat in the waiting room of the hospital, hoping for some news, any news, of my girlfriend’s condition, I saw Special Agent Trey Hooper—and to a lesser extent, Merritt Garrett—step in front of the cameras to inform the world about what had happened that day.
They spoke of solving complex riddles and desperately saving members of King’s family.
Of course, Hooper gave most of the credit to the FBI. (‘This is what the Bureau does and we’re pretty darn good at it.’)
The only detective he praised was Garrett: the brilliant private investigator who, after hanging from the side of the building to rescue Cassandra King, had solved the riddle that led to King’s location and had then single-handedly killed King’s three captors in a shootout in a graveyard, suffering a gunshot wound in the process.
(This last solo act of bravery was bolstered by the testimony of Maria Dubrowski, the gardener who had witnessed the shootout and been interviewed by the FBI at the scene.)
Garrett himself was far more modest. With his injured left arm in a sling, he said he’d just been doing his job and thanked ‘the FBI, the NYPD and a bunch of other brave and smart people’ for contributing to a long and difficult day.
It was a nice thing to say but still, to the viewers watching at home, you’d have never known any other detectives—including me—had been there.
I didn’t care.
I only cared about Audrey.
More hours passed.
The small group of patients and families in the waiting room thinned out until it was only Heidi, Bill and me there.
At midnight, Bill and Heidi headed off to the motel to get some sleep.
And as the TV played late into the night—replaying footage of Aristo King, his penthouse, and the interviews with Hooper and Garrett—I fell asleep in my plastic seat.
I was woken by a woman’s voice.
‘This is him. He’s been here all night waiting for news.’
Two people stood over me: a doctor and a female nurse.
I sat up.
‘How is she?’ I asked quickly. ‘Is Audrey all right?’
‘Agent Mills is going to be okay,’ the doctor said. ‘The bullet went right through, but it nicked her spleen which made things pretty hairy for a while. We’ve put her in an induced coma while she recovers.’
‘Can I see her?’
‘You’re her husband? Her partner?’ the doctor asked.
‘Boyfriend.’
He and the nurse exchanged looks.
(I’d actually witnessed this kind of thing before. Modern relationships involving unmarried partners didn’t fit well with traditional hospital visiting rules about ‘family members only’. It was particularly difficult for gay couples.)
‘It’s five a.m., Brian. He’s been here all night,’ the nurse said. ‘Hasn’t moved.’
The doctor pursed his lips.
Then he said, ‘Come on. This way.’
I was led down a back corridor to a recovery room.
Two armed cops stood guard by the door.
A young FBI agent in a (cheap) suit, with his badge flipped over the breast pocket, sat in a chair across from them, scrolling on his phone.
Through the door, I could see Audrey lying in a bed, hooked up to all manner of hoses, IVs and a breathing tube.
Her eyes were closed.
A heart monitor beeped softly.
Guided by the nice nurse, I was making to step into the room when the FBI guy sprang up and the two cops blocked the door.
‘Whoa, whoa, no-one goes in there,’ the FBI guy said. ‘Especially you.’
‘What do you mean, especially me?’ I said.
‘I got strict orders. No-one goes in till Special Agent Mills is debriefed. Only exception is direct family, and Hoop made it very clear that that ain’t you. He told me to make sure you definitely didn’t go in. So, let me put this as delicately as I can, four-eyes.’ (126.) ‘Fuck off.’
I wasn’t even looking at the young agent as he said this.
I was just staring past him at Audrey in her bed.
That she was alive and recovering was the only thing I needed to know.
There was no point engaging in an argument I couldn’t win.
I left the hospital and went to the motel to sleep.
22 December
By the following morning, the story of Aristo King’s kidnapping was absolutely everywhere.
It was all over the TV, press, radio and social media.
Sometime overnight, someone in an adjoining building had uploaded to X a long-range photo of Merritt Garrett hanging from the window washer’s harness with Cassandra King in his arms.
That shot turned him into an out-and-out hero.
And so, over the next day, Garrett went on Good Morning America, MS NOW, CNN and SiriusXM. He even did a special recording of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
I saw a couple of these interviews on the waiting-room TV. Garrett looked uncomfortable in the spotlight, unused to receiving so much raw praise and adulation—it reminded me a little of my own awkward experience with the media—but I thought he did really well, all things considered.
The trending topics online were:
billionaire kidnap foiled
tower of terror and
merritt garrett detective hero.
‘Jesus,’ Heidi said, ‘you’d think Garrett solved the whole damn thing by himself.’
I said, ‘He did figure out the Sleepy Hollow connection from the Ambien in the hollowed-out book. That was clever.’
It was around midday, the day after our wild day, and Bill and Heidi had joined me at the hospital.
‘Sam, you leapt across an elevator shaft and jumped out of a building onto a helicopter,’ Heidi said. ‘You deserve some recognition.’
‘You also figured out the first riddle pointing to the elevator,’ Bill said.
I shrugged. ‘Thanks, guys, but it’s not about credit. It’s about solving the case and we did that. We played our part—’
I cut myself off, seeing another figure from our long day appear on the TV, being interviewed by Fox News.
Special Agent Trey Hooper.
Having figured out—all by himself, he claimed—where Katya King had been hidden, unlike Merritt Garrett, Hooper was absolutely delighting in his fifteen minutes of fame.
And it seemed the FBI’s press office was helping him in any way it could.
He appeared on three times as many shows as Merritt Garrett, something that only happened when you had a team of publicists working for you.
‘Such an asshole,’ Heidi said.
Later that day, the media got wind of Aristo King’s offer to pay $30 million to whoever saved him.
The New York Post’s webpage blared with a photo of Garrett standing protectively beside the blanketed King by the ambulance at the cemetery, under the massive headline:
WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE
SAVES WORLD’S RICHEST MAN!
KING TO PAY $30M REWARD
The story went viral instantly and soon it was leading every news program and trending on social media.
The next day, December 23rd, Aristo King made good on his promise.
At a photo-op at his drone facility in New Jersey, cameras flashed as Aristo King handed Merritt Garrett a cheque for thirty million dollars.
Garrett nodded humbly as he took the cheque, seemingly unsure what to do next.