“Come on,” Stone said, “let’s start looking.”
Fifteen minutes later, they hadn’t found her. Dino was looking unwell.
“I gotta get outta here, Stone,” he said, mopping his brow. “I’m not cut out for this blood-and-guts stuff.”
“Wait a minute,” Stone said, pointing across the room at a man on a stretcher. “A white coat.”
They made their way across the room to the stretcher. The man’s eyes were closed, but he was conscious; he was holding a bloody handful of gauze to an ear.
“Are you an ambulance driver?” Stone asked. “The one the fire truck hit?”
The man nodded, then grimaced at the pain the motion brought.
“What happened to your patient?” Stone asked.
“I don’t know,” the man whimpered. “My partner’s dead; I don’t know what happened to her.”
Stone straightened up. “Then she’s got to be here,” he said.
“But she’s not,” Dino replied. “We’ve looked at every human being, alive or dead, in this place. She is definitely not here.”
They looked again, anyway, even though Dino wasn’t very happy about it. Dino was right. Sasha Nijinsky wasn’t there.
“Downstairs,” Stone said.
“Do we have to?”
“You sit this one out.”
Stone walked down to the basement and checked with the Bellevue morgue. There had been two admissions that evening, both of them from the subway fire, both men. Stone looked at them to be sure.
He trudged back up the stairs and went to the main admissions desk. “Have you admitted an emergency patient, a woman, named Nijinsky?” he asked. “Probably a private room.”
“We don’t have a private room available tonight,” the nurse said. “In fact, we don’t have a bed. If she came into the emergency room, she’s on a gurney in a hallway somewhere.”
Stone walked the halls on the way back to the ER, where he found Dino in conversation with a pretty nurse. “Say good night, Dino,” Stone said.
“Good night, Dino,” Dino replied, doing a perfect Dick Martin.
The nurse laughed.
“She’s not here,” Stone said.
“So, now what?”
“The city morgue,” Stone said.
Compared with Bellevue, the city morgue, just up the street, was an island of serenity.
“Female Caucasian, name of Nijinsky,” Dino told the night man. “You got one of those?”
The man consulted a logbook. “Nope.”
“You got a Caucasian Jane Doe?”
“I got three of them,” the man replied. He pointed. “They’re still on tables.”
Stone walked into the large autopsy room, the sound of his heels echoing off the tile walls. “Let’s look,” he said.
The first was at least seventy and very dirty.
“Bag lady,” the attendant said.
The second was no older than fifteen, wearing a black leather microskirt.
“ Times Square hooker, picked up the wrong trick.”
“Let’s see the third,” Stone said.
The third fit Sasha Nijinsky’s general description, down to the hair color, but she had taken a shotgun in the chest.
“Domestic violence,” the attendant said smugly.
Stone couldn’t tell if the man was for it or against it. “It’s not she,” he said.
“Don’t talk like that,” Dino whispered. “It’s not her.”
“It is not she,” Stone said again. He produced a card and wrote his home number on the back, then handed it to the attendant. “This is extremely important,” he said. “If you get a Nijinsky in here, or a white Jane Doe in her thirties, call me. And please pass that on to whoever relieves you. If someone overlooks her, heads will ricochet off these walls for days to come.”
“I got ya,” the man said, and he stapled Stone’s card to his logbook. “They won’t miss it here.”
In the car, Dino, who was usually the most cheerful of souls, sighed deeply. “I got a feeling,” he said.
“Oh, God, don’t get a feeling,” Stone whimpered. “Don’t get Italian on me.”
“I got a very serious feeling that this one is going to be a fucking nightmare,” Dino said.
“Thanks, Dino. I needed that.”
“And, Stone,” Dino added, “never say, ’It’s not she’ to some guy at the morgue. He’ll think you’re a jerk.”
Chapter 4
When Stone and Dino got to the precinct, the two detectives who had been at the Nijinsky apartment were sitting at their desks, cataloging evidence.
“So?” one of them asked. “Is she alive, or what?”
“Or what,” Dino said.
“So she croaked, then, or what?”
“Or what.”
Stone tugged at his partner’s sleeve. “Let’s see Leary.”
Lieutenant Leary, the squad’s commanding officer, was in his tiny, glassed-in cubicle, reading Sasha Nijinsky’s diary. He looked up and waved the two detectives in. “Well, it took a fuckin’ celebrity swan dive to get you back on the street, didn’t it, Barrington?”
“I saw it happen,” Stone said. “From the street.” He took Leary through everything that had happened at the apartment.
“So, where’s Nijinsky now?” he asked.
“It’s like this, I think,” Stone said. “The ambulance was taking her to Lenox Hill when it got broadsided by a fire truck. Another ambulance was called and took the driver and his partner to Bellevue. The driver’s alive, but doesn’t know what happened to Nijinsky. The partner’s dead.”
“So, to ask my question again, where’s Nijinsky?”
“We don’t know. She wasn’t at Bellevue. We looked at everybody there.”
“Not in the Bellevue emergency room,” Leary said.
“No. Not anywhere at Bellevue. We checked it out thoroughly. Not at the city morgue either. They’ll call me if she shows up.”
Leary looked bemused. “What the fuck is goin’ on here?”
“Probably homicide – attempted homicide, if she’s still alive.”
“Because of the guy you chased down the stairs?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he was the pizza deliveryman, got there in time to see her take the dive, then ran.”
“Maybe. It feels like a homicide.”
“And maybe a kidnapping, too. If the lady fell twelve stories and then her ambulance got whopped by a fire truck, she ain’t walking around out there somewhere, right?”
Dino piped up. “If she’s dead, is it a corpsenapping? And is that a crime?”
Leary tapped the diary with a stubby finger. “You read this?”
“Only the last page,” Stone said.
“The last page was one of her better days. This was a very unhappy lady.”
“She was about to become the only female news anchor on a major network. I would have thought she had it
