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colleagues, or maybe they even forgot we were there with them. Either way, we’re tagging along with the crew through Adult Neurosurgery and ICU. I don’t exactly know what Blumenthal and company are doing that’s so different from what Tracy Anne and I were doing fifteen minutes ago. They pull open drawers and look under beds. They go into bathrooms and knock on stall doors. Could it be that their flashlights make them seem professional?
    There aren’t many good places to hide in a hospital—no matter what you’ve seen on television. Sure, a supply closet, a visitors’ bathroom, an occasional doctor’s vacant office. But for the most part, the spaces are all very wide corridors and lots of rooms for patients.
    “That’s a janitor’s closet,” I say as NYPD officer CindyHazard opens a janitor’s closet, the same one I’d opened fifteen minutes ago. Hazard and Blumenthal step into the closet.
    Okay, moving right along.
    We finish searching Adult Neurosurgery and ICU. We head for the Darlow Pavilion, a fancy area of the hospital with marble floors and dark wood-paneled private rooms. I explain to Blumenthal that the Darlow Pavilion was designed for super-rich patients willing to pay a lot of money for being sick in absolute privacy and luxury. Darlow is a cash cow for Gramatan, and most patients in Darlow are not used to being disturbed by anyone except their masseurs and stockbrokers. Blumenthal and his gang don’t seem to care. We look in. We move on. Now we’re running out of places to look.
    We are walking toward the huge physiotherapy rehab room when Blumenthal gets a message on his cell phone. He reports that another police search group think they may have located the “possible MP Kovac.” He says, “The victim is in a basement storage room.”
    Why did he use the word
victim
?
    Now I’m nervous as shit. This isn’t a game. This is real.
    We run for the elevator. Blumenthal tells us we’re headed for Mechanical Storage and Lab. It’s an area of the hospital I know nothing about. As we run, Blumenthal gets another text. They report that MP Kovac is seriously injured.
    During the brief elevator ride, Blumenthal speaks directly to me. “My team says that this storage room is pretty grim. Have you ever been down there?”
    “No,” I tell him. “I think it’s probably just where they keep old equipment like out-of-date x-ray machines, filing cabinets, that sort of stuff.”
    The elevator arrives in the basement. We exit and quickly survey the area. The basement is vast. Its ceiling is low, and thevery tall Detective Blumenthal has to tip his head forward to avoid lighting fixtures. Long corridors crisscross one another. Two NYPD officers quickly escort us to an open door.
    Grim? They said the room was grim?
    The harsh lighting, the putrid odors. The room sure is
grim
. But that’s only the beginning.

CHAPTER 13
    OUR EYES BURN. OUR throats gag. The storage room is filled with three or four more cops and two men I recognize from GUH Security. We enter a miserable scene: small puddles of filthy, stinky liquid on the floor, dripping, oozing pipes running along the ceiling. The smell is an overpowering mixture of bathroom antiseptic and human or animal feces. Handkerchiefs go to faces, and a tough-looking NYPD officer vomits almost immediately. It is totally out of keeping with the high standards of you-can-eat-off-the-floor cleanliness practiced by GUH.
    Two huge MRI machines are pushed up against big old-fashioned x-ray units, twenty-foot-long chunks of steel with worn leather and dirty plastic. Someone more creative than me might see this mash-up as a fascinating art installation, the absurd landscape of a foul medical junkyard, or props from a horror movie.
    The sickening odor in the air is accompanied by a nerve-racking soundtrack: squeaking, squawking, screeching sounds. A million birds gone crazy? Then suddenly an answer from many feet away … a woman’s voice …
    “Rats! They’ve got cages