“I’m gonna tell you. But first you gotta promise you’ll forgive me for not going to see you sooner. It’s just that things were getting crazy rough, and I couldn’t get hold of you. So I went to the detective. I’m so sorry. I’m—”

“Jesus Christ, Troy! Just tell me what happened. Tell me the goddamn story!”

And he does.

“Last week Tracy Anne comes in to see me all teary and shaky and nervous. She sits me down and closes the doors, and she makes me promise not to tell anyone anything about what she’s going to tell me. So I swear on a stack of make-believe Bibles, and she tells me that she’s been…that she’s been freelancing.”

Freelancing, when you’re a midwife, means that you’re helping with deliveries but not in connection with a hospital. It’s, well, a totally unconnected freelance job. It’s usually dangerous. It means you have no real support system—no other midwives, no prenatal care, no postnatal care. It’s pretty much like the frontier days when a midwife showed up when the pain began and did her best to help the delivery. Freelancing is usually used by illegal immigrants and drug addicts and very often by women who don’t want anyone else to know they’re giving birth—that would be women like teenage prostitutes and homeless women. Most of the freelance midwives aren’t trained with the depth and knowledge professionals are. At least Tracy Anne has impeccable training and an excellent education. But it’s still a bad thing to do, and because of Tracy Anne’s association with GUH, it’s also totally forbidden by the hospital for her to do it.

Back to Troy. He’s calmed down a little, but he’s still doing some serious shaking.

“So Tracy Anne tells me that she’s done six freelance births in the last two weeks, and she did a few more before that. Well, more than ‘a few.’ So many other births that she’s even lost track. It seems the last six were all teenagers and they were all drug addicts. One of them surely had AIDS, Tracy Anne said, and another one was bleeding out so much they had to bring her to a really sketchy off-the-street clinic in Bed-Stuy.”

Bobby Cilia shakes his head in wonder at the horror of this tale. Blumenthal stands in stony silence.

“Anyway, Tracy Anne tells me that she’s getting all her freelance jobs from this Russian couple. I know, I know. Just like the ones you’re closing in on—that’s when I knew I couldn’t let the story rest without telling someone. And poor Tracy Anne was ready to kill herself. I mean truly, literally, she was talking about how she was in such deep shit already that there was no way out but to kill herself.”