CHAPTER 31

“I hate hospitals, everything about them,” Renfrew said. “The way they look. All those beeps and bells going off. But mostly it’s the way they smell. Did I mention that?”

“A few times now,” I answered. We were sitting together in a Bellevue waiting room with stained walls and moldering chairs. We’d bought coffee down the hall but had somehow never gotten around to drinking it; our paper cups, now cold, sat on a Formica table. Bruxton was outside, smoking. Jesse was wandering up and down the hallway. Padma was in another room, listening to a doctor explain her cousin’s condition. Tariq was still in surgery.

“So we’re clear on that. Okay,” said Renfrew. We lapsed back into silence. She and Bruxton had already filled me in on their trip to Nyack. My sister had indeed been living there with Alexander Gorevale from May to August, but no one had seen her since. Gorevale’s neighbors were used to the good doctor hosting a series of female companions at his rambling old house. They’d known my sister as Cassandra, and she was notable for the fact that she spent so long at Gorevale’s. The last woman who’d spent a long time with him was Alexandra, who hadn’t been seen in five years. Then there was Serena, who appeared regularly, every couple of months. Are these real women or soap opera characters? I’d asked them. No wonder he needed all that Viagra, Bruxton had quipped. Gorevale was suspicious and secretive, keeping his neighbors at a distance with a pleasant smile and conversing only about the weather.

“For the record, I hate hospitals, too,” I added belatedly.

“If you ever feel like time is whirling by too fast, you can always come to a hospital, where time just stops.” Renfrew looked at her watch. “It’s not budging. You ever spend much time in hospitals?”

“That time Claudia overdosed. A bunch of times with my mother. What about you?”

“My pop was shot,” Renfrew said. “Six months before retirement. Trying to stop a robbery at a bodega. Off-duty, to boot.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Worst part was that they hooked him up to machines in the hospital, so his heart kept beating and he kept breathing even though he was brain-dead. I’m sure they did it because they wanted to be able to transplant from him, you know? But we couldn’t decide what to do. My mom thought it would be like murdering him, turning the machines off. Part of me felt like that, too, even though I knew he was dead.”