“Now you’re talking my language. Of course he’ll let me keep a case like that. What do you need from me?”

“I think you’ll want to get down here as soon as you can. Have your video guys meet us, too. The Crime Scene Unit has already processed the room and taken photos, but they had to move really fast. I’m just worried we all may have overlooked something that might turn out to be important, so I’d like your crew to go over the whole area and record it. Once the story breaks, the place’ll be crawling with press and we won’t be able to preserve it.”

“Back up, Mike, and start at the top. Where are you?”

“ Mid-Manhattan Medical Center. Sixth floor of the Minuit Building.” East Forty-eighth Street, right off the FDR Drive. The oldest and largest medical compound in the city. The victim must have been transported there for an attempt at treatment after she was found.

“Well, where shall I meet you? Where’s the scene?”

“I just told you. The sixth floor at Mid-Manhattan.”

“You mean the victim was killed in the hospital?”

“Raped and killed in the hospital. Big wheel. Head of the neurosurgery department at the medical college, brain surgeon, professor. Name’s Gemma Dogen.”

After ten years at my job, there were very few things that surprised me, but this news was shocking.

I had always thought of hospitals as sanctuaries, places for healing the sick and wounded, comforting and easing the days of the terminally ill. I had been in and out of Mid-Manhattan countless times, visiting witnesses as well as training medical personnel in the treatment of sexual assault survivors. Its original red-brick buildings, almost a century old, had been restored to recapture the look of the antiquated sanitarium, and generous patrons of more recent times had lent their family names to a handful of granite skyscrapers that housed the latest in medical technology and a superb teaching facility-the Minuit Medical College.