“In the closet, of course,” she replied. Despite his fury, she remained coldly defiant.
He walked to it and opened the door. The clothing was there. “Why don’t you help her get dressed, Mr. Ross, and we’ll get to the bottom of it all tonight?” Ryan said, turning back to Preston.
Preston’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull. Ryan grimaced with confusion.
“What?”
“Watch out!” Preston screamed.
Ryan turned just as Hattie Scranton, like some animated scarecrow, emerged from inside the closet, a pair of long surgical scissors clutched in her right hand. She lunged at him and brought the scissors down with a forcefully determined motion, but Ryan was able to sidestep a few inches, and the blade just missed his neck. He seized her around the waist and spun her around with such force she slammed into the wall and sank to the floor, stunned.
However, the moment he threw off Hattie Scranton, Mrs. Jerome stepped forward and drove her syringe into the back of Ryan’s neck, plunging the sedative into him. The pain surprised and confused him for a moment. He swiped back at her, driving her away from him, but it was too late. He saw the room start to spin.
Natalie screamed and screamed.
Preston stood up.
Ryan heard an audible groan and turned back toward Hattie Scranton, who recovered, rose to her feet, and started toward him, the scissors up. He put all of his concentration into remaining conscious just long enough to get off one round. The bullet practically lifted her off her feet, tore through her chest, driving her heart out through a twelve-inch-diameter hole between her shoulder blades. Blood was flowing so fast she hovered a few moments and then fell back into a pool of it and died seconds before Ryan collapsed to the floor, the darkness closing in around him like those clouds that drowned out the stars.
Seventeen
Hilton Sacks took Ryan Lee’s suitcase and evidence bag from the back of the rental car and closed the door. He waved to the driver, who then started away. For a moment, Sacks watched the vehicle until the rear lights disappeared, and then he walked slowly back to the front gate of the Rescue Foundation. It was opened. Preston Ross was driving out and slowed down as he approached the entrance. He came to a stop and rolled down his window.
“How’s she doing?” Sacks asked him, nodding at Natalie, who was sprawled on the rear seat, her head on a pillow, a blanket over her, and her eyes closed.
“Resting comfortably,” Preston said.
“Good. Sorry about all this, Mr. Ross. If there is anything more we can do to help…”
Preston glanced at his rear-view mirror and saw Natalie’s eyes shut tight, her lips opened just a tad. Her face still looked quite flushed.
“We’ll be fine,” Preston said. He leaned farther out of his window so he could speak sotto voce.
“You can’t put too much blame on Mrs. Jerome here. She had no idea who he was, and he didn’t exactly employ the best bedside manner. He was quite threatening, and she was frightened, I’m sure, despite the brave front she put up.”
“Don’t give any of it a second thought, Mr. Ross,” Sacks said, smiling.
“Hattie Scranton…”
“It’s all been taken care of, sir. Have a safe trip home, and good luck,” Sacks said, and patted the roof of the car.
“Thank you,” Preston said, rolled up his window, and drove out of the complex.
Hilton Sacks continued to trudge up the driveway, carrying Ryan Lee’s suitcase and bag. A CID trainee stood in the doorway. Tall, wide-shouldered, with a chiseled face, he looked like a Roman palace guard, even in his dark suit and tie. He had a small receiver in his right ear but no wires around the lobe.
“Bring the ambulance up, and then you and Hansen come up to get him,” Sacks ordered.
“Very good, sir,” the trainee said, and moved quickly down the stairs.
“Hold on,” Sacks said. “You might as well take this and put it in the vehicle now.”
“Yes, sir,” the trainee responded. He hurried back up, took the suitcase and evidence bag, and walked quickly down the stairs and around the side of the building.
Sacks moved slowly, almost as if he were very tired. As he climbed the stairs, the soft smile lay in his face like a permanently implanted mask. He shook his head, laughed softly, and stepped onto the landing, moving down to the room past what had been Natalie Ross’s room.
Mrs. Jerome stood just inside the doorway, her arms folded under her bosom, glaring at Ryan Lee on the bed.
“How are you doing?” Sacks asked her.
“After the day I’ve had, I’ll be happy to go to sleep,” she replied dryly.
He laughed. “That makes two of us. The director wants me to issue you a formal apology and to assure you that this sort of behavior is unprecedented for a member of the CID.”
Mrs. Jerome raised her eyebrows. “I’m not the one who should be receiving any assurances or apologies,” she said. “I’m just an employee here.”
“Understood,” Sacks replied.
They both turned as the two CID trainees came up the stairway carrying a stretcher. They unfolded it and rolled it toward the room.
“Is there anything further I can do?” Mrs. Jerome asked as they approached.
“No, ma’am. Thank you,” Sacks said.
“That poor woman,” Mrs. Jerome said.
“Which one are you referring to?” he asked with a smile.
“Figure it out,” Mrs. Jerome snapped at him, and walked away and down the stairs.
He shook his head after her and nodded at the two trainees, who moved quickly into the room. They lifted Ryan Lee off the bed and placed him on the stretcher.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Sacks told them. He walked ahead of them, bouncing down the stairs. Outside, he stood on the steps and looked over the beautifully manicured grounds. He nodded appreciatively.
The two trainees carried Ryan Lee past him and brought him to the rear of the ambulance. One opened the doors, and they loaded him in and started to close the doors.
“Hold up,” Sacks said. He approached them. “He’s having too easy a time of it for what he did,” he said, and climbed into the ambulance.
They watched from the rear as he sifted through a medical bag and produced a syringe. He took a bottle out of his pocket, inserted the syringe, and drew out the medicine. Then he held it up and squirted it in the air, smiling at the trainees.
“Six months as a paramedic. You guys should not look down your noses at that training. It is sure to come in handy sometime, if not a few times, during your careers.”
“Yes, sir,” Hansen said.
Sacks injected Ryan Lee in the neck.
“I gave a guy electro-cardiac treatment with a taser gun once. Saved his life. I ever tell you that story, Hansen?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s a good story. Happened after we arrived at a hostage situation in Yonkers. Ever been to Yonkers, Hansen?” he asked, keeping his eyes on Ryan’s face.
“No, sir. I mean, I’ve driven through it, I think.”
“Yeah. That’s what happens with a lot of communities these days…people drive through them.”
Ryan’s eyelids fluttered.
“And the princess kissed the frog, and behold,” Sacks cried, his hands extended toward Ryan Lee.
Ryan’s eyes opened wide and remained open for a moment. He flickered his eyelids and then turned slowly and looked up at Sacks.
“Hello, Detective Lee. Have a good nap, did you? Glad it wasn’t on company time.”
The confusion on Lee’s face brought a wide smile to Hilton Sacks. He looked at the trainees.
“Doesn’t know where the hell he is. I bet you thought you landed in hell, huh, Lee?”
“What…the fuck…is going on, Sacks?”
“Well, let’s see. For one, Lieutenant Childs has taken a rather big hit from the director, thanks to you. His position, his rank, is actually in grave danger for assigning you to this case i
n the first place.
“Two, you disobeyed a direct order to remove yourself from the present case and return to headquarters and, on your own, a loose cannon, proceeded to create a rather embarrassing situation for the agency. Fortunately, I was able to get onto the scene in time to clean up the mess before our good friends from the media got wind of any of it.”
“Stocker Robinson was murdered,” Ryan said, “and I’m pretty sure I know who murdered her.”
“Uh-huh. Well, good. You can put it into your memoirs. Of course, no one will publish them, but you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you served your country well.”
Ryan started to sit up.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Sacks said, forcing him back. “You don’t have any idea how weak you are. That was a good dose of sedative she gave you. I had the antidote to bring you out of it faster, but you’ll have a very severe headache if you don’t keep your head down. The fluid in your spinal cord is raging. You remember the stuff…Qx2.”
“What about Mrs. Ross?”
“She’ll be fine. She’s on her way home. After a while, this will all seem like a nightmare to her, I’m sure. It’s not our concern, anyway, Ryan. We weren’t sent here for any of that, and you shouldn’t have tracked her down. There was no point.”
“I was right about her. She was pregnant. She was the one with the pills. Stocker Robinson got the pills from her house, stealing them when she accompanied her mother one day. She traded them to Lois Marlowe, and Lois Marlowe wanted her to confess. Stocker killed her in a rage and then decided to make it seem as if the Rosses were involved. I suspect she was either planning to or had already begun blackmailing them.”
“You’re exhausting yourself, Ryan. None of that matters anymore. She killed someone and killed herself.”
“But she didn’t…”
“Goodbye, Ryan. You’re going home and then, probably, to traffic direction school. Where,” he added at the door of the ambulance, “a Natural belongs, anyway. Hansen, take him home.”
Hansen got into the ambulance.
The other trainee went around to the driver’s side and got in.
Sacks closed the doors and stepped back. The ambulance was started up and a moment later was off. Following in the direction of the other vehicles, it disappeared under the cloak of a continually deepening darkness.
William Scranton stared at the miniature grandfather’s clock on the fireplace mantel. He wasn’t staying up and waiting for Hattie out of some deep emotional concern for her welfare so much as he was tired of the way she treated him when it came to her activities as head of the community’s baby squad. She never let him even have the illusion that he was more important than her work, much less at least as important. If her work kept her from making their dinner, he had to fend for himself. If there was an event, an invitation they had accepted, and she was busy, the event was sacrificed, even if it was something that had to do with his work or one of his more prestigious patients.
Lately, she had become even more fanatical. It used to be that she would call to tell him she wasn’t coming home or that he should cancel whatever arrangements they had made. He appreciated that, even though when she called, she let him know through her tone of voice that it was an inconvenience to bother with him. He should have no doubts that her work was more significant than anything he did. Listening to her, he imagined she was speaking to him in front of her followers, showing them how she treated him, how far down the totem pole he was, and how he would accept and be grateful for the bone she had thrown his way.
Now he didn’t even have that bone. He had silence. When she returned, he could ask her where she had been, and she would reply, “Doing work for the community.” If he complained, she would chastise him for thinking more of himself than he did of the community’s needs.
“How would that look?” she challenged. “My own husband, self-centered? Just think what it would do to your practice here.”
She was actually threatening him the way she would threaten other poor slobs in the community, he thought. As the evening wore on, he became more irate. It all festered in him, growing like a cancerous tumor, spreading through his thoughts to the point where he couldn’t read, couldn’t watch any television, couldn’t sleep.
He knew that calling around in search of her would enrage her. She was not incapable of phoning from wherever she was and in front of whoever was with her, chastising him as a parent would chastise a child.
His anger made him frenetic. He paced through the house, straightened up whatever looked messy, went into the garage, and actually began reorganizing things to make more space. While he did so, he focused on the spade he had seen her using the other day to fill in a so-called gopher hole.
He stared at it a moment. How unlike her it was to care, despite what she had said about the potential for some lawsuit if someone stepped into the hole. He couldn’t help thinking there was some other reason. Hattie was so secretive about the things she did in the name of the baby squad, making it seem as if she were performing some highly sensitive government spy missions. He was always the last to know what the baby squad did, even though people in the community thought otherwise. Sometimes he pretended he knew just so he wouldn’t look foolish or let them know just how little she thought of him.
He lifted the spade and turned it around, thinking about it, and then he charged out the side door of the garage and around to the backyard. He flipped on the floodlights that illuminated the pool, their few trees and bushes, and slowly perused the grounds until he found where she had filled in the hole. It had created a small bald spot in the lawn. He hesitated, looked back at the house, and then, impulsively, angrily, shoved the spoon of the spade into the ground and began to dig up the earth she had so carefully packed.
He wasn’t at it two minutes when he heard and felt the spade hit something hard. He dropped the shovel and got down on his knees to claw away the rest of the soil until he saw what looked like something in a plastic bag. Carefully, he dug around it until he could extract it easily and hold it up against the light.
It was a long black flashlight. Why the hell would she bury such a thing? He turned it around for a closer inspection. He couldn’t make any sense of it. He started to unzip the bag to take it out and stopped. Maybe he shouldn’t touch it, he thought. It was obviously placed in the bag to protect it for a reason. It was evidence of some sort. Why was she burying evidence?
He was torn between putting it back and not, and in the end he decided he would not. He replaced the earth, trying to make it look as close as he could to the way it had looked before, and then he carried the flashlight in the plastic bag back into the garage.
He placed it on his work table and turned on more direct and intense light. Cleaning off the bag, he was able to look more closely at the flashlight. He thought the lens of it looked stained, but he could see no other clue to why his wife would have hidden such a thing. Still, he felt as if he had something over her. When she returned tonight and he questioned her about her whereabouts and complained about how she had left him stranded again, in the dark about where she was and when she would be home, and she started to attack him for having the audacity to question her like some common criminal, he would mention this and see just what sort of reaction he got. He felt certain she would come down from her high horse, and maybe, maybe, she would show him some respect.
He hid the plastic bag and flashlight in the bottom of his tool cabinet and put the shovel back. Then he went inside, cleaned up, and poured himself a stiff scotch and water. He took it to his easy chair and sat waiting, his eyes back on the clock and then shifting toward the front door.
“Come on home, Hattie. Come on home,” he muttered. He felt really good and couldn’t remember when he had enjoyed a drink as much. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he went and poured himself another, just as stiff, and returned to his chair. The clock ticked on. He anticipated the sound of her vehicle pulling into their driveway, but it didn’t come.
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Silence stole away his moments of satisfaction and his great anticipation. An hour later, he was sullen again, sullen and tired. He dozed off and woke and dozed off. When he woke again and saw how late it was and realized she was still not home, he dug his fingers into the arms of the leather chair like a convicted murderer being electrocuted. His mouth stretched, his nostrils widened, and his eyes were wide and protruding like those of someone with a terrible thyroid condition.
“Hattie!” he screamed. “Where the hell are you?”
She would drive him mad.
She would drive him into an early grave, he thought.
If he let her…if he let her.
But he wasn’t going to let her. There was someone he had made promises to sometime ago, promises he was always afraid to fulfill. Tonight he would, he thought, and went to the video phone. He held the flashlight in the bag in front of the camera.
“Hattie buried this in our backyard,” he said. “I thought you should know.”
The screen went blank almost immediately, and less than ten minutes later, he heard a vehicle in his driveway. He rose and went to the door. Almost as soon as he opened it, the bullet lifted the top of his skull off in a shattering of skin and bone. It was a gruesome death, the sort of assassination carried out by someone driven by hate more than idealism.
From the expression on his face, one would assume his last thought was, why didn’t I just leave well enough alone?
Close to a half hour after they had left the foundation grounds, CID trainee Hansen closed his eyes and sat back on the seat in the ambulance. The vehicle was practically hovering over the road like a small helicopter, its engine droning along. Ryan could feel the speed. He was being vacuumed out of here, scooped away and deposited in some heap of inconsequence in which he would spend the rest of his professional life. Hilton Sack’s smile lingered on his retina like a flash of light that would not dissipate. It was a smile full of ridicule and contempt as well as arrogance. It made Ryan close his eyes and try to swallow down the ugly taste it all left in his mouth. He felt his body harden. He was recuperating a great deal faster than Hilton had assumed he would.
The Baby Squad Page 24