Taken where?

Scarpetta didn’t know. The background had been whited out.

“Thirty-four dollar, twenty cent,” her driver said loudly as the taxi abruptly halted.

She looked through her side window at the closed black iron front gates of Bellevue’s former psychiatric hospital, a foreboding red-rock building some two centuries old that hadn’t seen a patient in decades. No lights, no cars, nobody home, the guard booth behind the fence empty.

“Not here,” she said loudly through the opening in the Plexiglas partition. “Wrong Bellevue.”

She repeated the address she’d given him when he’d picked her up at La Guardia, but the more she explained, the more insistent he got, jabbing his finger at the entrance, where Psychiatric Hospital was carved in granite. She leaned closer to him, directing his attention several blocks ahead where tall buildings were etched in gray, but he was bullish in his bad English. He wasn’t taking her anywhere else, and she must get out of the cab right now. It entered her mind that he truly didn’t know that the Bellevue Hospital Center wasn’t this creepy old horror that looked like something out of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He probably thought his passenger was a psychiatric patient, a criminally insane one suffering a relapse. Why else would she have luggage?

Scarpetta decided she’d rather walk the rest of the way in arctic blasts of wind than deal with him. Paying the fare, she got out of the cab, shouldered two bags, and began rolling her suitcase full of home cooking along the sidewalk. She pressed a button on her wireless earpiece.

“I’m almost here—” she started to tell Benton. “Dammit!” Her suitcase flopped over as if someone shot it.

“Kay? Where are you?”

“I just got thrown out of a taxi—”

“What? Thrown out of what? You’re breaking up …” he said, right before the battery went dead.

She felt like a homeless person as she struggled with her luggage, the suitcase falling over every other minute, and when she’d bend down to set it upright, her other bags would slide off her shoulders. Cold and irritable, she made her way to the modern Bellevue at First Avenue and East 27th, a full-service hospital center with a glass atrium entrance, a garden, a renowned trauma unit and ICU, and a forensic psychiatric floor for male patients whose alleged crimes ranged from jumping a turnstile to murdering John Lennon.

The phone on Benton’s desk rang just minutes after he and Scarpetta were disconnected. He was sure it was her, trying him back.

“What happened?” he said.

“I was about to ask you that.” Jaime Berger’s voice.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were Kay. She’s having some problem—”

“I’d say. Nice of you to mention it when we spoke earlier. Let’s see. That would have been six, seven hours ago? Why didn’t you say something?”

Berger must have read Gotham Gotcha.

“It’s complicated,” Benton said.

“I’m sure it is. We have a number of complications to deal with. I’m two minutes from the hospital. Meet me in the cafeteria.”