A caring, patient-centered approach
She clicked around the site. There wasn’t much else to it, just that landing page, photos of smiling young women pretending to be patients. Predictably, it had been made to look exactly like Mercy Street’s website. Anyone would have been fooled.
Claudia felt a pulsing behind her left eye, the beginnings of a headache—premenstrual, or possibly not. Her cycles were unpredictable. Thirty years after her teenage flirtation with malnutrition, she still bled grudgingly, on her own mysterious schedule—two periods in a single month, or sometimes none at all. It was a basic, incontrovertible truth of female life: everything that ever happened to you unfolded against this backdrop, the unending play of shifting hormones. Month after month, year after godblessed year, there were logistics to be managed, symptoms to be treated, effluvia to be absorbed.
Mary knocked briefly at the door frame. “How’d it go with Ladan?”
“It went,” Claudia said. “Women’s Wellness was booked solid, but Wellwoman can see her tomorrow.”
“Thank God for Wellwoman! Can she get herself down there?”
“The bus leaves at midnight. I got RCAN to spring for the ticket.”
“RCAN still exists?”
“Apparently.” Claudia felt suddenly exhausted. “Of course, it’s an eight-hour bus ride, and she has a six-year-old at home, and two jobs and no sick days and no family and no childcare. So, you know, what could go wrong?”
“Jesus,” said Mary. “Why’d she wait so long?”
“She didn’t. She’s been trying to get an appointment for months.” Claudia swiveled the monitor around to show her the screen. “She called them.”
Mary frowned. It took her exactly ten seconds.
“Oh God,” she said. “Not again.”
“This one’s on Shawmut Ave. I can’t tell how long they’ve been open.”
“How did she find them?” Mary perched on the edge of the desk. “I mean, why didn’t she come to us first?”
“How does anybody find anything?” At the keyboard Claudia typed “abortion boston.” As Ladan had surely done; as any unhappily pregnant woman in the city would naturally do.
The search took two seconds. The first result was the Mercy Street website. Second was the site Claudia had just visited—the homepage of the dummy clinic, Women’s Choice. The scammers, clearly, were tech savvy. At least, they knew enough about search engine optimization to make their site easy to find.
The other search results were just what she’d expected—links to hospitals, legit private clinics, a slew of reputable gynecology practices in Cambridge, Brookline, Arlington, and Newton. She was about to close the browser when she noticed a link at the bottom of a page:
Abortion: An Insider’s Guide.
She clicked on the link.
The page took a long time to load. When it did, it had a distinctly homemade look. At the center of the screen was an ornate picture frame—clumsy clip art from the 1990s, the awkward early days of web design. At the top of the page was a caption in curlicue script:
Hall of Shame
Click to begin slide show.
Again she clicked.
Slowly, one pixel at a time, a female face appeared in the frame. The girl was young and blond, her hair in a ponytail. She wore a pink ball cap and headphones and looked away from the camera.
“Mary,” said Claudia. “You’ve got to see this.”
They watched, fascinated, as the image fragmented and was replaced. Another photo of a woman—older, a redhead. She too looked away from the camera, seemingly unaware that she was being photographed.
“What the fuck?” said Mary.
They watched speechlessly as one image dissolved into another. Candid shots, slightly out of focus. They’d been taken outdoors, in a variety of locations: a busy urban street, a strip mall parking lot. Some were close shots, tightly focused on the woman’s face. In others, background was visible: parked cars, a palm tree, the golden arches of a distant McDonald’s.
Mary said, “What the hell am I looking at?”
“Clinics,” said Claudia. “All these women are patients.”
On the screen, another blonde dissolved into a brunette wearing sunglasses. Over her shoulder, in the distance, was a green street sign, the letters so tiny they were barely legible: MERCY.
“Mary,” said Claudia. “That’s us.”
WHEN CLAUDIA LEFT WORK IT WAS ALREADY DARK, A FINE SNOW falling. Behind her left eye, the pulsing continued. She and Mary had spent the afternoon studying the demented website, trying to determine which of the women were Mercy Street patients. It wasn’t easy to do. In an average week, Mary did hundreds of intakes—ABs, Pap smears, IUD insertions, STD tests. In the end they identified nine patients. All had been seen within the last five months.
Claudia paused in front of the clinic, noting the position of the security cameras. One was aimed at Mercy Street, the patch of sidewalk where protestors typically gathered. A second camera pointed squarely at the front door. A patient arriving for her appointment would walk past both of them. With any luck, whoever had taken the photos had been captured on video.
She crossed the street, looking over her shoulder. At the corner, two pedestrians waited for the light to change. A guy in tights sat astride his bicycle, one foot on the curb. In front of the dim sum place, a man in an apron smoked a cigarette. Each was staring at a cell phone.
At any given moment, the entire city of Boston had a camera in its pocket.
It could have been anyone.
THAT NIGHT SLEEP WAS IMPOSSIBLE. WHEN CLAUDIA CLOSED her eyes, she saw the crowd on Mercy Street, patients arriving for their appointments, protesters carrying signs. A faceless man lurking near the entrance, waiting with his cell phone. The man was everywhere, he was nowhere. It was possible—likely, even—that she’d seen him herself.
At midnight she got up and turned on the television. She clicked past reality shows, comedies, the Home Shopping Network, and settled on a rerun of Dateline.
There was literally nothing in the world she’d rather watch than a rerun of Dateline, except maybe a brand-new Dateline. Supply was the problem. The show was produced at the glacial pace of one episode per week. There was simply not enough Dateline in the world to satisfy the appetite of a fan like Claudia, if that is what she was.
She was not uncritical.
That the victim was nearly always a woman wasn’t, strictly speaking, Dateline’s fault. The Dateline producers didn’t kill these people. Statistically, men were murdered more often than women, but apparently in a less entertaining way.
Claudia was aware that the show had shaped her worldview. She would never even consider buying life insurance. She carried her driver’s license at all times—to aid police in identifying her body, should the need arise. The first forty-eight hours of an investigation were crucial. A little advance planning on the victim side could save precious days or weeks.