Earl didn’t answer immediately. He was staring into the bottom of the boat, where the moonlight revealed the crumpled form of Phil Whalen. His head had been nearly severed from his body.
TEN
“IT’S WHALEN,” EARL SAID over his shoulder. “Run up to the house and get the others.” There was a bloody ax in the bottom of the boat, and he carefully lifted it out.
“Is he dead?”
“Dead as he’ll ever be. I wonder where this ax came from.”
“There’s a tool shed around in back of the house. We searched it the first time, when we were looking for Emily.”
He waded ashore and picked up his shoes and socks. “I’d better go up to the house with you. It may not be safe alone.”
He left the bloody ax in the kitchen and they went into the living room, where the others were. He kept forgetting how few “the others” were—only Armstrong and Hobbes and Tony remained now. Armstrong was pulling the veriprinted newsmagazine from the slot beneath the television screen while the other two bent to read it.
“What now?” Hobbes asked, seeing Earl’s face.
“Whalen’s back, around on the rear beach. Someone tried to hack his head off and then left him in the bottom of the boat.”
Armstrong let the newsmagazine flutter from his fingers, and Tony Cooper gasped. “My God!”
“Let’s get down there! This guy is serious, whoever he is!” He started for the door, the others trailing behind.
“I guess after five killings you could say he’s serious,” Earl agreed. “From now on I think we’d better all stay together.”
They returned to the beach and pulled the boat in to shore. Tony had brought along one of the freezing bags made of cotton and aluminized fabric, and they carefully slid the body into it. “We’ll carry it back and put it in a tube like the others,” Hobbes decided. “When the authorities finally get here they’ll have a picnic.”
“Who’s going to put the last body in its tube?” Vera wondered.
“That’s easy,” Armstrong said. “The murderer.”
Back at the house they settled down in the living room while Earl began to talk. “It’s time we got down to business, and that means finding out where each of us was in the time since Whalen left this island.”
Armstrong was first. “After we ate I was checking my patient downstairs.”
“He’s still there?”
“Certainly!”
“Strapped to the table?”
“No. The straps did no good before, so I didn’t bother with them. I’d stake my life he’s not responsible for all this business.”
Earl turned to Lawrence Hobbes. “What about you?”
“I was here in the living room.”
“Alone?”
“Yes. I took some of the dinner plates out to the kitchen. That’s all.”
“And you, Tony?”
“Upstairs, in my room. I was looking for Vera, actually. I didn’t see her go off with you.”
“Then Vera and I are the only ones who have what might be called alibis.”
“I was alone before our walk,” Vera admitted. “Long enough to kill him and get back up here.”
“Join the crowd,” Tony said. “Suspects all!”
“A dwindling number of suspects,” Dr. Armstrong observed.
Hobbes was perplexed. “But why should Whalen come back here in the first place? He was safely away.”
“Maybe for the film and files,” Armstrong suggested. “If they were so valuable to him, he wouldn’t want to abandon them.”
“In that case, how did the killer know he was coming back? How did the killer know where and when the boat would land?”
“He must have come upon him by chance,” Tony suggested.
But Earl shook his head. “I don’t buy coincidences. We’ve had five killings on this island since Sunday night, and nobody’s seen a thing. I can’t believe a murderer is walking around this place unseen, killing anyone he happens to come upon.”
Lawrence Hobbes sat down. “There’s one possibility we haven’t considered. One might call it the occult explanation. If you accept the possibility of undead spirits, or life after death, isn’t it possible that the spirits—or soul—of that man downstairs has been drawn back to this place by what we’ve done.”
“And the spirit’s going around hacking and strangling people?” Armstrong snorted. “Incredible!”
“I only said it was a possibility.”
“It’s not even that! If Frank down there is killing them he’s doing it with his own flesh-and-blood hands.”
“Have we examined those hands?” Earl asked. “And his feet? It’s hardly possible that he could be doing all this killing without leaving traces.”
They exchanged glances, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to them before. Then Hobbes and Armstrong headed for the basement. “We’d all better go,” Earl suggested.
Entering the operating amphitheater for one more visit, Earl found himself beginning to react to the oppressive atmosphere of the place. He was beginning to wish that he’d never have to see it again, never have to walk down those steps to the bright semicircle of healing apparatus. Though he’d posed as a medical photographer and records specialist, he couldn’t imagine anyone making his living that way. Even with the crash course he’d taken back East, the sight of blood and bone and brains had been almost more than he could stomach.
“What’s this?” Hobbes asked, crouching down next to the operating table to feel the floor. “It’s sand!”
Armstrong knelt to confirm it. “Sand, all right.”
“God!” Tony said. “He was at the beach!”
“Wait a minute!” Hobbes was having none of it. “Any one of us could have tracked this sand in here. Armstrong—you’re down here every hour or so to examine him. Were you at the beach today?”
“You know I was there this noon. We all were!”
Hobbes nodded. “There you are! The sand means nothing!”
But Tony was examining the patient’s fingernails. “Is this nothing too?”
“What?”
“Looks like traces of skin and blood to me. Have a look.”
Earl picked up a magnifying cap from the instrument table and slipped it over his forehead. He snapped on the viewing light and bent close for a look. “I think you’re right. Vera, could you run some lab tests on these fingernail scrapings?”
She’d remained seated in the front row of the amphitheater, quite near the place where Emily Watson had sat that first night. It was as if she didn’t want to come any closer to the thing on the table. “Sure,” she agreed. “That would be simple enough. If there’s blood I can even tell you if it’s the same type as Whalen’s.”
“That would be a big help.”
But Lawrence Hobbes wasn’t so sure. “What happens if it is the same?”
“That’s easy,” Tony said. “Then we destroy this thing we’ve created.”
Hobbes’s laboratory was a well-stocked room as large as those Earl remembered from his high school chemistry classes. It was in the basement, beyond the operating room, and it seemed odd that Earl hadn’t seen it before. Vera went at once to one of the half-dozen black-topped counters (each with its own running water and sink, and started mixing chemicals from a selection on the shelf before her. She might have been a housewife whipping up a late-night snack for her husband, or a cosmetologist checking the latest brand of face powder.
“This won’t take long,” she assured him. The others were in the operating room, awaiting the verdict. “Some of this new equipment has cut in half the time needed for lab tests.”
“Good.”
“Do you have the sample of Whalen’s blood?”
“Right here.” He handed over the bloodied shirt the man had been wearing.
Seeing her like this, in what must be her natural setting,. Earl was aware of a new person in Vera. She was no longer the harlot of the bedroom or the quietly efficient nurse of the operating roo
m. Instead there emerged a firm, determined woman who went about her task with a knowledge and skill that were aggressively right.
“Well equipped,” she muttered approvingly, switching on an electronic spectrograph. “This lab alone must have cost him a fortune.”
“I guess Miss Watson was really generous.”
“I guess.”
“You still think Hobbes is behind the killings? You think he’d kill a goose that laid golden eggs like this?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.” The slide carrying her chemically treated samples went into the slot in the spectrograph. “This is an advanced design,” she told him as she worked. “We had one like it in Boston. We can produce a spectrum, study it, compare it, and then photograph it.”
“For blood samples?”
“No, I’m working on the bits of skin first. There—see that!” Earl stared blankly at the dancing colors as she brought them into focus. “They’re skin particles, probably from Whalen!”
“You’re sure?”
“The blood should confirm it.”
She ran through the standard blood tests while he watched and waited. “You’re quite efficient at this sort of thing,” he remarked at one point.
“I should be—I’ve been doing it long enough!”
“Is this the sort of work you were doing with Freddy?”
“More or less.” She pressed a red button on the lab table’s built-in computer terminal. The familiar chattering of the automatic printout began. “The blood samples match,” she said simply. “As do the skin scrapings. Of course that doesn’t prove positive identification in the case of the blood. It only means that Whalen was type B and the blood under Frank’s fingernails is type B.”
“How common is type B?”
“About twenty percent of people have it. Other types are more common, but I wouldn’t call this rare.”
“That’s good enough for me, especially along with the skin scrapings. Let’s go tell them.”
They found Hobbes and Tony and Armstrong seated in the amphitheater, talking softly among themselves. “Well?” Hobbes asked, rising quickly to his feet. “What’s the verdict?”
“The scrapings and blood traces match.”
Tony Cooper nodded, as if he’d known it all along. “Then Frank killed them. Frank killed them all.”
“No!” Lawrence Hobbes cried out.
Cooper ran forward. “Don’t you see—we’ve got to destroy him!”
Hobbes grabbed him and they struggled, overturning a portable lamp that landed on its side and splashed the wall with their tussling shadows. Earl sprang between them, pulling them apart. “Come on, you two! Where’s this getting us?”
“I’m going to hook up the electrodes and fry him!” Tony insisted. “I didn’t sign on to create a monster! I didn’t come here to work in a Frankenstein factory!”
“Tony!” Vera shouted. “Stop it!”
Freddy’s phrase about the Frankenstein factory somehow seemed shrilly terrifying coming from Tony’s lips. Freddy, with his vulgar jokes, had not been one to take seriously; Tony, speaking the same words, sent a shiver of terror through them all.
“That … thing has to be destroyed!” Tony insisted. “I couldn’t believe it till now, but the evidence doesn’t lie!”
“Let’s examine that evidence,” Earl said, trying to calm both men. “Evidence can be faked, you know. The sand, the blood, the skin scrapings—it all could have been brought here by the real murderer, and that could be any one of us. Dr. Armstrong is down here every hour; Hobbes and Tony and Vera have all been here; I’ve been here myself a half-dozen times.”
“Is it worth taking a chance?” Tony asked. His voice was soft but intense.
“Yes!” Hobbes shouted the word. “Man, we’re making medical history! To MacKenzie this operation was more important than his walk on the moon. It was the single event in his life that would enshrine his name forever with the great surgeons. Don’t you see that?”
“MacKenzie is dead!” Tony reminded him. “Are we going to enshrine his name or avenge his murder?”
Hobbes turned back to the operating table, gesturing now in something close to frenzy. “Look at him. Look at him! We haven’t seen him off that table since Sunday night’s operation! Are you going to tell me he could have gotten up and roamed around this island five times in three days without anyone seeing him?”
“Five people saw him,” Tony replied. “They’re all dead.”
“Bullshit! You’re not going to ruin all my work here just for your wild theories.”
“We just got a bad brain,” Tony said, trying to calm him with some sort of compromise. “It was an experiment and it failed. We’ll try again with another body, another brain.”
“Try again? With MacKenzie and O’Connor both dead? Who’d perform the operation? You, Doctor?” His tone was deliberately sarcastic.
“You could assemble another team.”
“There’s no money for another team! There’s no money for anything unless this succeeds!”
“What about Miss Watson’s money?”
Hobbes waved that away. “Miss Watson is gone.”
“Is it just the money?” Tony asked. “Or is it some twisted sense of pride?”
But the fight had gone out of Lawrence Hobbes as quickly as it had come. He bowed his head and suddenly he was just an old, somewhat overweight man whose white hair hung down over his eyes. “Go on,” he said quietly. “Get out of here—all of you.”
Tony Cooper stood firm. “Not until I’ve destroyed that thing.”
Hobbes reached inside his loose-fitting shirt and pulled out something which Earl at once recognized as a small laser pistol. “I said get out,” Hobbes repeated. “Out!”
Cooper retreated a few steps. “All right,” he agreed. “We’ll go, for now.”
As they filed out of the amphitheater Earl glanced back to see Hobbes leaning against the operating table, one arm resting protectively across the body of his patient.
“Is he safe there alone with that thing?” Vera asked when they were together in the corridor.
“By thing do you mean Frank or the laser gun?” Tony asked her. “I’d think the laser could protect him from Frank. And if it doesn’t, there’ll be no one to keep us from destroying him next time.”
Dr. Armstrong made a low, rumbling in his throat. “The man is still my patient. I hope you don’t think I’d be a party to any act of violence against him.”
“You just stand aside, Doc, or look the other way,” Tony assured him. “I’ll do the violence!”
“You seem to forget that you’re a doctor too, sworn to prolong life, not end it.”
“I’ll be prolonging the lives of the four of us,” Tony insisted. “And I won’t be ending a life. I simply won’t be helping in a rebirth.”
“Leave him there,” Earl advised. “And let’s stop fighting among ourselves.”
“What are we going to do?” Vera asked.
“I don’t know about you,” Earl answered, “but I’m going to have a good stiff drink and then go to bed. Tomorrow, bright and early, we start gathering wood for that bonfire on the beach.”
He lay awake for some time, simply staring at the ceiling, and he wondered if the others were having the same frustration seeking the release of merciful slumber. Finally he got up and walked to the window, staring out at the shoreline in the moonlight. Across the water, the low mountains of Baja California seemed not so far away at all. He remembered one peak, the Volcano of the Three Virgins, that had been pointed out to. Him earlier in the week. He could see it now, dominating the far horizon.
He went back to the bedside table and pressed the viewer on his digital watch. It was not yet two o’clock. The night was going to be a long one. He got out the little pistol Whalen had abandoned during his flight and reloaded it with the cartridges removed earlier. Then he slipped it into his robe and carefully opened the hall door. If he couldn’t sleep he might as well go downstair
s and check on his host.
The upstairs hallway was silent as he moved along it, and he assumed that the others were sleeping. But he found himself keeping a hand on the gun in his robe pocket, just in case. He’d wanted to bring a pistol along with his photographic gear, but Crader, back in New York, had advised against it. They’d expected no violence, and a pistol might only blow his cover if it was discovered. Now he was glad he had this one, at least.
In the darkness, with only the filtered moonlight to see by, he moved through the vaguely moorish living room toward the back stairs that led to the basement operating room. It would probably have been wiser to check Hobbes’s bedroom first, to make certain that he hadn’t come back upstairs, but Earl had the feeling that the stocky man was still at his post, guarding the patient against destruction by Tony or anyone else.
The very silence of the big house was reassuring to Earl. There could be nothing sinister here in the nighttime, nothing threatening to them. The five who had died were merely random mistakes of some sort. Misunderstandings.
He passed one of the alarm sensors, and for the first time he wished that they were still working. Then at least they’d be safe in the night.
But Emily Watson hadn’t been safe.
The alarms had still been working Sunday night, yet something had gotten to her in her bedroom. Gotten to her and carried her away.
And that part didn’t fit. It didn’t fit with the strangled and hacked corpses they’d been finding ever since.
Was it possible that there were two killers on the prowl? He considered that but then rejected it. After all, an attempt had been made to hide MacKenzie’s body too. It was due only to luck that they’d discovered it in the freezing tube.
He went quickly down the steps to the long basement corridor that led to the operating room. Here the lights still burned—more proof that Hobbes hadn’t yet retired.
He entered the rear door of the amphitheater, careful to be as quiet as possible, and then stopped dead.
Lawrence Hobbes was crumpled on the floor near the operating table. Tony was standing over him, holding the laser pistol.
ELEVEN
The Frankenstein Factory Page 10