River of The Dead Read Free

certainty. Do you have any possible names for the cleaners or the nurses?’
    The administrator switched on his computer terminal. Hospitals were such public places! In one sense that worked against criminal activity, because of the large numbers of people around. But in another, provided the timing was right, hospitals were wide open in that regard. Yusuf Kaya had been rescued very early in the morning, when the hospital was probably at its quietest. The only problems the rescuers had experienced had to have revolved around the timing of the attempt. It had been the prison governor who had made the decision to have Kaya sent to the Cerrahpaşa in the early hours of the morning. True, he had been encouraged to make some sort of decision by members of his staff, including Ramazan Eren, who had apparently been alarmed by Kaya’s condition. But unless the governor himself was involved, the placing of the cleaners and nurses at the scene had to have been a speculative act. The hospital administrator had admitted that tracking down a couple of casual cleaners was probably well-nigh impossible, but the nurses could have been, indeed in İkmen’s mind had to have been, ‘embedded’ within the hospital for some time. Even so, on the morning in question, they had to have been activated by someone, told that Kaya was coming. And that someone had almost certainly been a person or persons inside the prison. If that person or persons was either Ramazan Eren or Cengiz Bayar or both, they had paid a very high price for their treachery. But then Yusuf Kaya, as İkmen knew from his friend Mehmet Süleyman, was a ruthless, unfeeling psychopath. The death of two ‘bent’ prison guards, if that was indeed what they had been, would simply serve to save him anxiety and money, because if cash hadn’t been involved somewhere along the line İkmen would be very surprised. In addition, there were the two dead police officers . . .
    ‘There are three male nurses who have not reported for duty since that morning,’ the administrator said as he peered at his screen. ‘İsak Mardin from Zeyrek, Murat Lole from Karaköy, and Faruk Öz, who lives in Gaziosmanpaşa.’
    İkmen frowned. Yusuf Kaya, it was well known, came originally from Mardin. What were the chances of one of these nurses having that name?
    ‘I’ll need their contact details,’ he said. ‘All of them.’
    The administrator frowned. ‘You’ll contact these men?’ He looked over at his computer screen once again. ‘Lole and Öz work in the same department, orthopaedics. I believe their supervisor has already tried or maybe even succeeded in speaking to them. Would you like to speak to someone in the department?’
    ‘Yes.’
    İkmen, or rather some of his officers, would almost certainly be paying all the missing nurses a visit in the very near future, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to speak to their colleagues and superiors too.
    Several hours later, when he emerged from the Cerrahpaşa, İkmen had a slightly clearer picture about İsak Mardin, Murat Lole and Faruk Öz. Both Öz and Lole worked on the orthopaedics ward, as the administrator had said. Mardin’s speciality was cardiac care, which made sense in relation to his possible appearance on a corridor leading to the cardiology clinic. Lole had been contacted by his superiors since the Kaya incident and was apparently at home with a bad cold. İkmen himself had spoken to the man on the telephone and Lole had readily agreed to be interviewed by the police. Mardin and Öz were seemingly uncontactable. After lighting up a cigarette in the lee of the ambulance station, İkmen called his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, and told her to assemble a squad of officers to meet him at İsak Mardin’s address in Zeyrek.
    When he’d finished the call, İkmen dropped his mobile telephone into his pocket with a sigh. In spite of the seriousness of having a murderer like Yusuf Kaya on the run in the city that was both his home and