Central Park by Guillaume Musso (ebook reader macos .TXT) 📕

on her photograph, on her eyes in particular. Pale irises, with an expression that was both intense and fragile. There was something mysterious, indecipherable about her. He sighed. This damn disease had always wrecked lives, but now it was hitting people younger than ever before.

Gabriel scrolled down in the file. There were dozens of pages of test results and medical images—MRI, PET scan, spinal tap—culminating in a definitive diagnosis by Professor Evariste Clouseau. Though he had never met him, Gabriel knew all about this French neurologist’s reputation. He was one of the best in his field.

The second part of the file began with Alice Schafer’s admission form for Sebago Hospital, the clinic specializing in memory problems that he had founded with Thomas and two other partners. It was a cutting-edge research facility for Alzheimer’s. The young woman had been admitted six days earlier, on October 9, to undergo treatment through deep-brain stimulation, the clinic’s specialty. On the eleventh, a tiny neurostimulator—known to the patients as a “brain pacemaker”—had been implanted under her skin to provide constant electrical impulses to her brain. After that, there were no more notes.

Strange.

Under normal circumstances, the implantation of the three electrodes in her brain would have taken place the next day. Without them, the pacemaker was useless. Gabriel was swallowing his last mouthful of coffee when his cell phone vibrated on the desk.

“Have you read the file?” Thomas asked.

“Reading it now. What do you expect from me, exactly?”

“Any help you can give me. I’m in deep shit, Gabriel. That girl, Alice Schafer, she escaped from the clinic last night.”

“Escaped?”

“She’s a cop. She knows what she’s doing. She left her room without telling anyone. She fooled the nurses and even injured Caleb Dunn, who was trying to stop her.”

“Dunn? The security guard?”

“Yeah. The idiot pulled a gun on her. He got into a fight with the girl while he was trying to handcuff her, and she came out on top. Apparently, the gun went off by accident, but she ran away, taking the gun and the handcuffs with her.”

“Is he seriously hurt?”

“No, the bullet went into the flesh of his thigh. He’s being cared for here, and he says he won’t involve the cops on the condition that we pay him a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Are you telling me one of your patients has wounded a security guard and is now on the run, carrying a weapon, and you haven’t informed the police? That’s just irresponsible, Thomas. You could go to jail for this!”

“If we tell the cops, we’ll have the law and the press all over us. We could lose our accreditation for something like this. It could put us out of business. I’m not going to give up my life’s work just because of that stupid security guard. That’s why I need your help, Gabriel. I want you to bring her back to me.”

“Why me? And how am I supposed to do it?”

“I’ve carried out my own investigation. Alice Schafer is in New York, and so are you. She went to Portland by taxi at nine last night. From there, she took a bus to Boston, then a train to Manhattan. She arrived there this morning at five twenty.”

“If you know where she is, why don’t you come here and get her yourself?”

“I can’t leave the hospital in the middle of a crisis. Agatha, my assistant, is on a plane now. She’ll be in Manhattan in two hours, but I really want you to take care of this. You have a gift for reasoning with people. You have something special, an empathy, like one of those actors who—”

“Okay, okay, don’t start on the flattery again. How can you be sure she’s still in New York?”

“Because of the GPS tracker we implant in our patients’ shoes. She’s in the middle of Central Park, in a wooded area called the Ramble. According to the tracker, she hasn’t moved in the past half hour, so she’s either dead or asleep, or maybe she dumped her shoes. Please, Gabriel, just go over there and look for her—I’m asking you as a friend. We have to find her before the police do.”

Keyne took a few seconds to think about this.

“Gabriel? Are you still there?”

“Tell me more about her. I saw that you implanted the stimulator four days ago.”

“Yes,” Krieg confirmed. “The latest model, completely miniaturized, hardly any bigger than a SIM card. You should see it, it’s impressive.”

“So why didn’t you move on to the next stage and install the electrodes?”

“Because overnight, she went completely crazy! She was in total denial. Add that to the amnesia and—”

“Amnesia?”

“Schafer is suffering from a sort of anterograde amnesia based on her denial of her condition. Her brain has been blocking everything that’s happened to her since her Alzheimer’s was diagnosed.”

“She’s not storing any new memories?”

“Not since a drunken night a week ago, just after Clouseau gave her the diagnosis. Every morning when she wakes up, her memory resets. She doesn’t know she has Alzheimer’s and she thinks that she was partying on the Champs-Élysées just the night before. She has also forgotten that she’s been on medical leave from the police department for the past three months.”

Gabriel tried to put things in perspective. “Well, we know that denial and the disappearance of past memories are symptoms of the disease…”

“Yes, but this girl doesn’t appear sick at all. She’s intellectually agile and quite a character.”

Gabriel gave a long sigh of resignation. Krieg knew better than anyone how to pique his curiosity. And this girl’s case was clearly very mysterious.

“All right, I’ll go see if I can find her.”

“Thanks, Gabe! You’re a lifesaver!”

“I’m not making any promises, though,” Keyne said.

“You’ll manage, I’m sure you will. I’ll text you her exact location. Call me as soon as you have any news.”

Gabriel hung up with the disagreeable sensation of having been duped. Since his return to New York, he had created his own medical business in Astoria, specializing in emergency psychiatric house calls. He sent his secretary