Chapter 4 - The Anatomy of a Fracture
The emergency entrance of Loyola University Medical Center was a blinding, chaotic canyon of fluorescent light, diesel exhaust from idling ambulances, and the sharp, high-pitched shrieks of electronic cardiac monitors.
It was seven o'clock on a Friday evening. The shift change had just dumped forty exhausted nurses onto the floor while forty more stepped into the triage bays with fresh coffee and cold hands.
I didn't take Emily inside.
She was three miles away, sleeping in the guest bedroom of a convent run by the Sisters of St. Joseph on 47th Street—a sanctuary where the Mother Superior had known me since I investigated the theft of their parish relief fund in 1988. No computer network reached those limestone bedrooms; no private investigator with an iPad could search a registry that existed only in the handwritten Latin ledgers of an eighty-year-old Irish nun.
I walked into the trauma pavilion alone.
I wore my regular wool trousers, my worn sheepskin coat, and a blue baseball cap bearing the crossed anchors of the Navy Seabees—the uniform of an invisible man in the city of Chicago.
In the fourth observation bay, behind a curtain of yellow plastic slats that had been cleaned with too little bleach, Mark Sterling was lying on a gurney.
He was not wearing his pressed shirt.
He wore a pale blue paper hospital gown that was open at the back, tied with two flimsy cotton strings. His right eye was swollen shut, the lid the color of an overripe plum, and a five-inch strip of white medical tape held an ice pack against the right side of his jaw. His left wrist was handcuffed to the stainless-steel side rail of the bed.
Beside him stood two uniformed patrol officers from the Maywood Police Department, their arms crossed over their Kevlar vests, their faces set in the bored, sullen expressions of men who had been assigned to baby-sit a rich man’s son on their overtime shift.
Mark was screaming.
It wasn't an articulate sound. The trauma to his temporal bone had affected his motor speech area; his words were thick, slurred, sliding around his tongue like wet stones.
"Vance!" he howled, his good left eye wild and bloodshot as he pulled against the chrome handcuff, rattling the gurney frame against the tiled wall. "He... he broke my jaw! He was in the house! Officer, write this down! Arthur Vance! He has an illegal firearm! He threatened to burn the building down!"
The younger patrolman looked at his watch, clicked his ballpoint pen twice, and spat a shred of tobacco into a paper cup. "Yeah, yeah. We got the name, buddy. Your dad’s lawyer is down in administrative records trying to get the magistrate on the phone. You want another cup of crushed ice or not?"
"I want him in a cell!" Mark shrieked, his voice cracking into a high, hysterical register that drew the attention of an emergency room resident two bays over. "He's sixty-two years old! He has a gray Crown Vic! Plate number... plate number..."
"Plate number 414-B-99," I said, stepping through the yellow plastic slats.
The two patrolmen turned instantly, their hands moving with institutional speed toward the leather retention snaps on their Glock holsters.
"Hold up, officers," I said, keeping both hands flat and visible at the height of my sternum.
I reached into the breast pocket of my coat with two fingers and produced my retired credential folder—the worn black leather case bearing the gold-and-blue star of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, with the red diagonal bar that indicated thirty-plus years of active felony service.
The older cop, a sergeant named Kowalczyk whose face bore the distinctive pockmarks of the steel-mill districts, leaned forward and squinted at the laminate.
He looked at the badge. He looked at my eyes.
His shoulders dropped three inches.
"Arthur Vance," Kowalczyk said, his voice dropping into the quiet, respectful cadence that younger cops use when they meet a man whose name is printed on the standardized training manuals at the academy. "The Glenwood storage locker case. Nineteen ninety-four."
"That was me, Sergeant," I said.
"They told us you were living down in Florida, fishing for grouper."
"I don't like the sun," I replied.
Mark let out a strangled, bubbling sound from the bed. He tried to point with his free right hand, but the IV line in his median vein pulled taut, the needle dragging against the vein wall until a dark blossom of blood appeared beneath the transparent dressing.
"That's him!" Mark yelled, his face turning an alarming shade of eggplant. "Arrest him! He’s the one! Kowalczyk, shoot him! He’s resisting! He’s—"
"Shut up, kid," Kowalczyk said without looking back at the gurney. He turned his body slightly, positioning his broad frame so that he completely blocked Mark’s line of sight to the hallway. "Arthur, what do we have here?"
"A Class B aggravated domestic," I said, pulling Ray Morales’s handwritten chain-of-custody slip from my pocket and handing it to the sergeant. "Victim is Emily Vance Sterling. Eight months pregnant. Severe patterned contusions to the bilateral upper extremities, blunt force trauma to the lower ribs, and intentional destruction of emergency telecommunications equipment under 720 ILCS 5/12-3.5."
Kowalczyk read the slip. His eyes hardened as he saw the name Morales, Raymond — Chief Medical Examiner (Ret.).
"Ray did the intake?"
"One hour ago," I said. "Twelve exposures on Tri-X. The negatives are in the nitrogen locker on Harrison Street. The state’s attorney’s on-call felony review officer—young Miller from the fourth district—has already signed the preliminary complaint."
"You lying bastard!" Mark screamed, thrashing against the side rail. "My father is on the telephone with the Chief Judge right now! You won't even see the inside of a courtroom! They’ll have you in the psych ward by morning!"
I took two steps toward the edge of the bed.
I didn't lean over him. I didn't raise my fist. I simply looked down at him the way an agricultural inspector looks at a crate of bruised apples before condemning the shipment to the rendering vat.
"The fracture of your right zygomatic arch is comminuted, Mark," I said softly.
His thrashing stopped. His good eye flickered, the pain finally cutting through his adrenaline.
"The surgeon—Dr. Thorne—is going to have to make an incision through the hairline above your ear," I continued, my voice steady, clinical, and devoid of heat. "He’ll have to insert a small titanium plate with four three-millimeter screws to prevent the eye socket from collapsing into the maxillary sinus. It’s a very delicate procedure. Takes about three hours."
"What... what are you talking about?" Mark stammered.
"I’m talking about your bail hearing on Monday, Mark," I said. "Under the new Pretrial Fairness Act, domestic battery against a pregnant victim requires an immediate, individualized risk assessment before any conditions of release can be established. Because of the severity of your facial trauma, the county jail cannot accommodate your medical needs in the general population at 26th and California."
I leaned in two inches closer, until he could smell the winter wind and the carbolic soap on my wool lapels.
"You’re going to the hospital wing at Cermak Health Services, Mark," I whispered. "The third floor. Where they keep the multiple-offender parole violators who have active tuberculosis and drug-resistant staph infections. You’ll be in a steel-framed bed with two leather restraints, forty feet from the men who used to work for the Latin Kings in Little Village."
Mark’s jaw dropped. The paper ice pack slipped from his cheek, falling into the puddle of brown tea on his rolling tray.
"No..." he breathed. "My father... my father will post cash."
"There is no cash bail in this state anymore, Mark," I said. "Didn't your father tell you? The statute changed last year. You don't get to buy your way out of a holding cell with an equity loan on your summer house in Lake Geneva. The judge will look at the photos Ray Morales took. He will look at the digital recording of Emily’s statement. And he will find that you are a specific, articulable threat to the physical safety of your unborn child."
I turned toward Sergeant Kowalczyk.
"Sergeant," I said. "The transport wagon from the sheriff's office is at the ambulance bay. You might want to make sure his discharge paperwork is signed before his father’s attorney arrives with the useless habeas petition."
Kowalczyk smiled—a slow, terrible grimace that showed two gold crowns on his upper bicuspids.
"We’re on it, Arthur," the sergeant said.
May you like
He reached down, took Mark by the upper arm with a grip that made the younger man shriek, and clicked the key into the chrome handcuff.
"Up on your feet, VP," Kowalczyk said. "The county bus doesn't have heated leather seats, but the driver likes to keep the radio on the polka station."
