She left John Doe behind, running down the hall after Emma.
Susan Donlevy was in the room with Tyler and she looked up when they entered. Tyler was in the throes of a minor convulsion, his legs and arms jerking spasmodically.
“What’s his temp?”
“Still one oh four.”
“Let’s pack him in ice, I think it’s his temp that’s doing this. But in case he has a history we don’t know about you’d better draw up some Dilantin.”
Susan nodded and rushed from the room while Emma went after the ice.
Rachel stood at the head of the bed, ready to protect his head should he begin more severe thrashings. She put her hand against his face and thought his temperature might be higher than they knew; his skin was desperately hot. His eyes opened for a split-second she thought she saw him in there, the real Wendall Tyler.
She understood it to be a plea for help.
“Well,” Emma said, a half hour later when his condition had stabilized, “nobody’s having any iced tea tonight.” She looked at her watch. “It’s after four, I’d better get going.”
“Is it that late?” Rachel looked at her own watch.
“You should take some time to eat,” Emma said, “I know you didn’t get lunch.”
“Who could eat? But I will sit down and give Nathan a call, see how he’s doing.” She picked up the phone.
“Oh, the phones are out,” Emma said over her shoulder. “Since about two. But don’t worry; I reported it to the sheriff’s office by radio and they were going to look into it.”
“Ah, well.” Rachel replaced the phone in the cradle. “Maybe I will eat something after all.”
She unlocked the door to the small kitchen and cafeteria and went into the back. The cook, and there was only one, came at mealtimes and left right afterwards, so she was on her own.
She found some sliced cheese and an apple and took one of the small cartons of milk expressly reserved for patients only and went to sit down along the window that looked into the courtyard.
It was blessedly peaceful.
The late afternoon sun softened the sky and it was difficult to imagine dying on a day like this.
After a while she got up, mindful of the work she still had to do. The patient load was down, and Tyler was the only complicated case but she wanted to finish in the morgue and, if the phone was fixed, call Craig Johanson in Washington and see what he could tell her about serotonin.
EIGHTY-ONE
There was the problem.
Jon stood along the shoulder of the road, looking up at the dangling telephone wires. They were tangled among the tree branches and at first he thought they had just snapped, but as he moved closer he realized that he was wrong.
The insulated cable had been cut. The edge along the break was smooth and the casing showed no signs of wear or stress.
Someone had climbed up the pole and severed the wire on either side of it.
He walked back down to the telephone pole and examined the ground beneath it. The loose top soil was unmarked; no footprints or scuffmarks. How on earth? The packed dirt, where someone could reasonably stand without leaving marks, was a good three feet back. And the first metal rung up the pole was itself forty inches off the ground.
He looked back at the forest, feeling, suddenly, that he was being watched. Absolutely still, he waited. Nothing.
The sun would be down soon and he needed to report the downed wires. The only solution was to drive down the hill and make radio contact with county communications. He turned and went back to the truck.
He drove slowly along the road, noticing that the general store was closed and there was no traffic to be seen.
People were scared.
Most of the summer people had gone, now, and even the locals were shipping off the kids to family down the hill. Others were just staying in their homes, behind locked doors.
He couldn’t blame them. Murder was never pleasant but senseless, brutal slaughter was incomprehensible. If anything, people were even more upset by Amanda Frey’s death. If she, a minister’s wife, could do such a thing, then who among them could not? Neighbor looked at neighbor, wondering.
He increased his speed as the buildings receded in the rear-view mirror.
Other things. Rachel.
He needed to talk to her. He wasn’t sure that he believed Hamilton, but . . .
There was something between them, something he felt whenever he was near her. Something he had always evaded.
It was not an easy issue.
She was Tim’s little sister, and he had intended to come and take Tim’s place. That did not include carrying her off into the night. It would be a betrayal of trust.
He could not deny his attraction to her but it wasn’t as simple as that. He had convinced himself that her feelings for him were nothing more than an adolescent crush. The night of the dance she had been taken with the magic of the music and he had just been the one who was there when she wanted to be in love. He had never thought that she’d meant it—just that they both were drunk, she on romance.
But now? Years had passed and she was no longer a child. If, as Hamilton had said, she had come back for one last try . . .
He would not let her go away again.
All of a sudden there was no road ahead.
He pulled hard on the wheel and the Bronco veered to the left, going over the embankment as the rear of the vehicle swung sidewise.
It only took seconds.
Everything was still. He sat behind the wheel, waiting for the dust to clear. His right ankle had cracked into the floor gear shift and he rubbed it absently.
Then he opened the door and climbed out of the truck which was facing up toward the road.
Favoring his ankle, he moved up the embankment and walked to the edge of where the road used to be. And looked down at a precipice thirty feet across. An entire section of the road had collapsed, leaving a sheer cliff face.
There was no way to get across. They were cut off.
EIGHTY-TWO
Even as she walked down the hall toward the morgue she knew what it was about the John Doe that had been eluding her.
The wounds on his arm.
There had been a bandage on his arm covering what looked to be puncture marks. She had thought initially that he’d probably had a series of blood tests and had allowed the wounds to become infected. But where would a man who lived on the fringe of society get blood tests?
It was painfully obvious. The man had been selling his blood. And, Amanda had received blood.
It was almost too impossible to believe.
She pushed the door open and went directly to the man’s body, turning his arm and examining the wounds.
They still had no name on him although Jon had taken fingerprints for identification, which were probably en route to the FBI. He was just a man who had died.
Except, maybe he was not.
She hurried to the lab, mind racing.
The records were kept in a file just inside the door and she opened the drawer, thumbing through the pink slips of paper.
Blood given to Amanda Frey, bought from Aid Services. The donor number was 82-563. The company would have a name for the donor, although it might be a false one. Blood was too valuable a commodity to be too particular about details. If the donor denied having hepatitis and other communicable diseases, by and large, anyone would take the blood.
The phones were still out or she would call the company and ask them to look up the name of 82-563. There was a slim chance she might be able to find some sort of medical history on him. Something to give her a clue as to what she was dealing with.
There certainly was a possibility that the man had been the donor whose blood was given to Amanda Frey.
Yet even if that proved to be true, what form of insanity was transferable through blood? She shook her head. Jumping to conclusions. She had no proof that the man was anything more than a bum. Certainly she could not presume the state
of his mental health from a rather tenuous connection with Amanda.
It was entirely possible that Amanda had just been disguising an increasing emotional problem. That, much like the copy-cat killers who emulated bizarre murderers, she had been pushed over the edge by the events of the past days.
Still . . . the odd scene at the man’s death. The absence of decomposition. The clay figures and signs of ritual. The lack of a clear cause of death.
“I’m getting nowhere fast,” she said out loud, closing the file cabinet. She looked around the lab and went over to the incubator, opening the door and pulling out a stack of culture dishes.
These were the post-mortem cultures she had done this morning, having found the other ones missing. The sensitivities were as before: resistant to Ampicillin, Carbenicillin, the Cephalosporins, Erythromycin, Gantrisin, Gentamycin, and on through the list.
She closed the dishes and dumped them into the trash. If there was nothing to which the organism was even moderately sensitive, she was wasting her time running the same tests over and over.
Nathan’s black leather notebook was on the shelf above the counter. She took it down and flipped through the pages—his tiny precise printing throughout.
The most recent entries detailed the existence of 10 cc’s of serum, and, interestingly, a carefully-worded description of the isolation of the invasive body of the organism in the blood taken from Wendall Tyler.
He hadn’t mentioned it . . .
It all seemed to come back to Tyler. Maybe the real answer was there.
She replaced the notebook and turned to leave. Maybe between the two of them, they could make some sense out of it. One thing she was sure of; she’d never heard of anything like it outside of superstition.
Superstition . . .
A tap at the door and she looked up, surprised. “Earl,” she said, “I didn’t hear you come up.”
“I wonder if you could take a look at Jon . . .”
Her heart began to pound. “Why, what’s happened?”
It was an eternity before he answered. “He had a little accident, hurt his ankle.”
“That’s all?” Relief flooded her.
“The nurse is putting ice on it now, she told me to see if I could find you.”
“But he is all right?”
“Oh yeah. He wouldn’t have come in if I hadn’t insisted.”
“Well I’m glad you did. With everything that’s happened, it won’t hurt him to take a few hours off to rest . . .”
“I don’t think he knows how to rest. He’s always working, never takes a day off . . . no, I take that back. About a year back he cut loose, got drunker than I’ve ever seen him, and could hardly walk the next day.”
“Hm?” They started down the hall toward Emergency.
“And Dr. Adams was out of town, so there was nothing to do for him but let him sleep it off.”
She stopped, something clicking in her mind. “A year ago? Do you by any chance remember the date?”
“Sure, June 12th. The first and only time since I’ve known him that he’s missed a day’s work.”
“Really?” She permitted herself a tiny smile. June 12th was the day that she was supposed to marry Kelly. “Well, we’d better not keep him waiting.”
Jon was sitting on the bed watching as Susan tried to balance an ice bag across his ankle. He looked up when Rachel entered.
“This is ridiculous,” he said and pointed at the ice bag.
Rachel came up beside Susan. “It would work better if you would immerse the ankle in cold water for a while.”
“He refused to put on a gown,” Susan smiled grimly. “This is the best I can do if he won’t cooperate.”
Rachel met his eyes. “Aren’t you cooperating?”
“Not if it means putting on a gown.”
Earl snickered from the doorway and all three of them turned in his direction.
“I’ll wait outside,” he said and disappeared.
The ice bag slipped to the floor, scattering ice across the room. Susan sighed and picked it up.
“I’ll have to get another one,” she said.
After she left Rachel stood, hands on hips, facing Jon.
“What is a gown between friends?” She tried to restrain her smile but found it impossible.
“Just look at my ankle.”
“Yes sir.” She ran her fingers along the ankle, making him flex it, feeling the play within the joint. It was somewhat swollen but not obviously deformed. “I don’t think it’s fractured, but I’d better take an x-ray.”
“Is that necessary?”
“Yes.” She paused. “What happened?”
“I ran the truck off the road.”
“On purpose?”
“It was that or else.”
She opened her mouth to ask what he meant when Susan returned with a second ice bag.
“Bring him down to x-ray,” she said to Susan, “I’ll go warm up the machine.”
She positioned the machine over his ankle and put a fresh plate in the slot in the table.
“I’m going to take a series just to be on the safe side. It won’t take long.” She went behind the radiation shield and snapped the first exposure.
In fifteen minutes she was done and she had him wait in the small anteroom while she developed the x-rays.
“Well?” he said when she came out.
“Nothing broken, but you’re probably going to have some tenderness until the soft tissue swelling goes down.” She sat opposite him and regarded him in the half-light.
“Thank you,” he said. He made no move to leave.
“Don’t mention it.” She didn’t want him to leave. There was nothing more than the look in his eyes.
“Rachel,” he said.
“What?”
He stood up, putting out his hand to her and helping her to her feet.
“We need to talk.”
She could not speak because, incredibly, he was kissing her, his arms around her tightly, possessively. When he released her she stepped back and looked up at him, trying to read his eyes.
“Can you leave?”
“Yes, but I’ll need to tell Susan.”
“I’ll be outside,” he said and walked away.
She felt as if she couldn’t breathe until she went outside and saw that he was waiting for her.
“Where are we going?” she asked a minute later as he pulled the Bronco onto the main road.
“My house.” He picked up the microphone and began talking to the dispatcher.
Rachel leaned back in the seat and tried to stop smiling.
She was still smiling when he held the door open for her and helped her out of the truck. She stood waiting for him to lock up and stared up at the night sky. Black velvet with millions of stars.
He began to pace the moment they were in the house, casting glances at her, limping only slightly. She was tempted to tell him to sit down, not to stress the leg but she could sense that whatever it was he was thinking needed an outlet.
She sat primly on the couch and watched him.
Finally he stopped and turned toward her. “How do you feel about me?” He shook his head and held up a hand to keep her from answering.
“I love you,” she said anyway.
He looked at her hard, nothing in his expression to reveal how he felt.
“You were gone for eleven years,” he said then.
She nodded and waited for him to continue.
“And you were very young when . . . that night.”
“I’ve always loved you.”
Again she could not judge the impact that her words had on him and again she waited for him to continue.
“There are things . . .” his voice faded.
“Nothing that matters,” she said.
“But it does. We’re so different . . .”
“Don’t try to be logical, the only thing that’s important is how we feel.” She stood up. “You haven’t said how you feel.”
/> He didn’t speak and they stood, six feet apart, time passing slowly as she waited.
“It isn’t that simple.” His voice was so quiet she could barely hear him.
“It is.”
“No. It’s not right . . .”
“Damn what’s right; it’s you and me, how we feel. You’re always walking that thin line of what’s right or wrong. It only matters in theory. In practice . . . how do you feel?”
“I love you.”
“Then it is right.” She smiled. “What are we going to do about it?”
He crossed the room and stood before her and she reached up to touch his face before moving to unbuckle his gunbelt.
She looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“Hussy,” she said but she couldn’t stop smiling. She ran a comb through her hair and then took a deep breath, turning to the door.
Opening the door, she arranged herself in the doorway, dressed only in Jon’s windbreaker and waited.
He was pacing again but he stopped when he saw her.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“You look beautiful,” he said, still standing halfway across the room.
“I’m supposed to slink over to you but I’m afraid if I try to walk that far my legs will give out.” She pulled the windbreaker zipper down an inch. “You’ll have to come get me.”
Then he was there, lifting her effortlessly up into his arms and carrying her toward the bedroom.
Her body was pliant, moving with his, straining to be ever closer, luxuriating in the feel of his skin against hers. She ran her hands over the lean muscles of his back wanting to memorize every line but he was distracting her and she turned her attention to the insistence of his body.
“Jon,” she said once, just to hear his voice and then she raised her hips to meet him, wrapping one leg over his and there was nothing else.
Friday
EIGHTY-THREE
She watched him sleep, her eyes caressing his face. A remarkable face, strong-featured but capable of expressing such depth of emotion and sensitivity. Kept, most of the time, in check, but there nonetheless.
His hair was tousled, making him look younger and more vulnerable and she smoothed it back from his forehead. Soft, as she remembered it, from all those years ago.
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