They are all dressed in hospital gowns before and after their shower, and plenty are covered in bandages or have casts. They were patients, and they were unknowingly being recorded for the doctor’s viewing pleasure.
Jay’s face is tightened into a scowl, hundreds of videos on the screen. But then he pauses, hesitation permeating the air.
“What?” I ask, scanning my eyes over the screen to find what he’s seeing. It takes two seconds, and my heart stops. “Play the videos.”
Jay shakes his head and croaks, “You know what happens in them, Z. You don’t have—”
“Dammit, Jay, I do have to watch them. You know I fucking do.”
He sighs, acquiescing with a slump of his shoulders, and clicks the video. It’s just like the rituals—I wasn’t there to save them at the moment, but I’ll be damned if I turn my head away from their pain now.
On the screen, the doctor is carrying an unconscious woman to his bed, having just come from the second floor where she was probably treated for wounds.
He lays her down, removes her hospital gown, and then his own clothes. And for the next several minutes, he defiles her unconscious body. Disgust swirls in my stomach, growing stronger alongside a whirlpool of anger and the deepening desire to resurrect him so I can kill him myself.
As Jay continues to flip through videos, we realize that woman was one of probably hundreds of patients that were taken advantage of while they were unconscious.
Patients that were also children.
“I think we’ve seen enough. I don’t want to keep looking at this shit anymore,” Jay says, voice tight and uneven.
Clenching my fists, I nod, “Look up who this guy is real quick.”
He does as I ask, and I turn away, fiending for another cigarette already.
“Dr. Jim Garrison,” he announces fifteen minutes later. “Previously married to Wilma Garrison. She died of a heart attack in 2004. There are reports from her two daughters from a previous marriage citing foul play, but he had Wilma cremated before an autopsy could be done, and nothing ever came of it. In 2000, he was fired from a hospital for malpractice, and he bought this building only a few months later. There were a few lawsuits against him, but he must’ve had a good lawyer because he got away with those due to lack of evidence. Seems to have been operating here since.”
Sounds like he is a sick fuck who was doing something evil to his patients, got fired for it, and created his own business to carry out all his dark desires. Most likely killed his wife—maybe she found out about what he was doing or perhaps he simply got tired of her.
“Go back to the videos when the patients are brought in. I want to see if I recognize anyone.”
He gratefully flips back to the camera on the second floor, hundreds of different faces bringing in injured people of different ages. Most of the time, they’re women and children, but a few men are mixed in there, too. My guess is from shoot-outs gone wrong.
He comes across a clip of the doctor treating what looks like a five-year-old girl with a bullet wound in her thigh. A mammoth of a man with light brown hair tied up in a bun and tattoos crawling up his arms and neck stands at the foot of the bed, watching the doctor work with an intense look on his face.
Jay poises his finger over a key, ready to flip to the next video, but I put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “Wait, I want to watch this one.”
Swirling in my gut is an inexplicable feeling that I need to see this.
I lean closer to the screen, zoning in on the tattooed man and the little girl he brought in. He could be a trafficker in this area, and if little girls are getting shot, I can only imagine the situations the children are being put in.
The doctor is frantic as he works to stabilize the child, administers what I assume is anesthesia, and then quickly performs surgery, blood spilling from the girl’s leg as he extracts the bullet. It seems as if the doctor is shouting, but after fast-forwarding, we watch him finish up with the girl and then leave the room. The entire time, the man stood as still as a statue, hardly moving an inch.
I frown, focusing on the screen as the man rounds the bed, lifts his hand, and gently swipes the girl’s hair from her face. She’s still knocked out from the anesthesia, so it’s impossible to tell how she feels toward him.
Setting my jaw, I stare hard, trying to interpret his tenderness. Is it coming from a man who is fetishizing her or from someone who saved her? And how the fuck did the little girl end up with a bullet in her leg?
I’m not entirely sure what it is, but something about this video feels… important.
“Send all of these files to me, and then let’s get into the security cameras and see if we can get a view on the vehicle that they left in.”
I slap Jay’s back before turning back to the grimy windows, a silent thank you.
He’s been handling my attitude like a champ, and even in the throes of grief and fury, I can still recognize that I’m being an intolerable shithead.
“Shit,” Jay mutters, the sound of his fingers clacking on the keyboard growing louder and more intense. I grind my teeth, already suspecting the answer before it comes out of his mouth.
“No cameras back there. No cameras angled toward the parking lot from other buildings, either. I’m sorry, man. I got nothing.”