The Angel Maker
Page 20
“We’re here,” said Dixie, pulling over.
The air smelled impossibly good, and the sound of the raging river, growling from below them in the darkness, brought back memories of twenty years earlier when Boldt and Liz had found time to explore the peninsula. The four-wheel drive vehicles were parked below, their headlights and search lights revealing a dug-up area that looked like the surface of the moon. The entire landscape was riddled with deep test holes, the work of a yellow backhoe that now sat off to one side. As Boldt’s eyes adjusted, he saw that they had worked their way up this bank of the river—some sixty yards worth of excavations. Those lights were now aimed onto the grave, an angry black hole that looked like a huge mouth locked open in mid-scream. There were maybe ten people—all men—crowded around the hole, some leaning on shovels, some in sheriff uniforms, most drinking coffee from plastic thermos cups. Their attention fixed on this hole in the ground and its contents, which remained out of sight for Dixon and Boldt as they slid down a small incline, the sound of the river growing even louder. It no longer sounded peaceful. The closer they drew to this hole, this grave, the more menacing that sound. Two of the four-wheel drives were running. The light was a blue sterile wash, out of keeping with the natural surroundings, like the illumination at a photo shoot or movie set.
They avoided the other holes as they approached. One of the uniforms from the sheriff’s office introduced himself. This site was well outside of the city limits, outside of Boldt’s jurisdiction, but still in King County and therefore within the professional domain of Dr. Ronald Dixon. Jurisdictional differences could create tremendous headaches for all concerned if ego and territory became issues. Boldt kept this in mind and let Dixie do all the talking. The deputy sheriff was nice enough. He asked to be brought up-to-date. Dixie managed to tell him as little as required, without reference to Sharon Shaffer’s abduction or the harvesting linkage, for which Boldt was grateful. To date, they had managed to keep this out of the press. The press could be a nightmare.
A light mist began to fall. Boldt turned up his collar. One of the Search and Rescue guys offered him rain gear but he declined. They had hand dug a series of terraced shelves descending from surface grade to the partially exposed bones below. Boldt felt impatient: This site could be the harvester’s first kill, perhaps his first harvest, and as such might hold clues to both his character and methods. Criminals made mistakes the first time around that they often eliminated as time wore on and the number of their crimes rose. As the depth of the hole increased, different strata of soils could be seen. “Remember,” one of the men warned from overhead, “this sucker is undercut something fierce! There’s not enough floor in the very bottom to support you. Stick to the shelves. That last step is as low as you dare go.” It looked as if a shovel had pierced the tender layer of soil that still supported the skeletal remains, causing a hole through which the fevered gray foam of a dark angry river could be seen threatening. Some water splashed up and into it. Over the roar of the white water another of the crew shouted, “It’s dangerous down there. That hole you’re looking at was caused by my foot!”
Dixie stepped onto the first terraced landing, standing about knee deep in the wide mouth of the excavated hole. Boldt followed, the two of them standing side by side. Dixie reached up and was handed a powerful flashlight, the size of a small briefcase. He turned it on, illuminating the haunting mask of a hollow-eyed skeleton that stared back at them. Boldt could clearly make out an arm and part of a leg. Dixie said, “She’s beautiful.”
“If you say so,” answered Boldt.
Dixie ran the light down her extremities, and as he did he recited the names of the various bones he saw: “humerus, radius, ulna, tarsus, metatarsus.” When he reached the “proximal phalanx,” he accidentally directed the bright light into Boldt’s eyes. “Skull and pelvis; most of the remaining ribs. We’re lucky.”
Boldt reached out and steered the light back to their subject. “Not her,” he was thinking. He said, “One thing about a murder: There are always two witnesses.”
Dixon said, “Now, if she’ll only tell us who the other one was.”
“The harvester,” Boldt said softly. There was no doubt now. Two of the ribs were cut sharply, their ends clearly missing. A whole section of her rib cage cut away like an empty box.
To the Search and Rescue team whose glowing, dirty faces rimmed the enclosure, all of them looking down into the grave, Dixon said, “Let’s get to work.”
30
Inside the farmhouse, a single light burning in the other room, Elden Tegg sat in the relative darkness. He missed Pamela. She was essential to the team. Without her, this procedure was going to be much more difficult, though not impossible by any means. Even so, he remained quite angry with her for wanting no part in this, for forcing him to hide it from her.
Tegg accepted his solution to the Michael Washington problem, because he felt justified in blaming it on others. The police were a force to be reckoned with; he had no desire to be an object of an investigation. He also blamed Washington himself—a victim of his own foolishness. He prepared mentally for the task at hand, experiencing a stimulating warmth in his neocortex. He felt high. He felt ready.
He headed toward the kennel through the chill night air, drawn to the barking like a mother to a baby’s crying. As he unlocked and opened the door, Felix—left free to defend—and the others went silent. Tegg stood before Washington’s cage, his doctor’s case in one hand, the collar’s remote device in the other. Washington’s hot, terrified eyes revealed a man overcome with fear. Even though excited, Tegg didn’t feel good about this; but he accepted it just the same. Did the man know what fate awaited him? Sharon looked terrified as well. We’re all in this together, Tegg thought, each inexorably linked to the other.
He waved the “wand.”
“You don’t want me to use this, do you?”
Washington replied through the muzzle in words surprisingly clear, “What right do you have to do this? Who made you God?”
Tegg’s knee-jerk reaction was to light him up with the “wand” and watch him squirm. But he didn’t do that. He felt compelled to answer this, if for no other reason than to hear the explanation himself. “I am doing what must be done. We all are. It is not without sacrifice on all our parts. No. Not without sacrifice.”
“But you’re a fake! You aren’t even a doctor. You told me yourself: You’re a veterinarian! An animal doctor! How can you pretend like this?”
“Pretend?” Tegg’s nostrils flared. His eyes flashed hot. Auspiciously, the dogs, who had been pacing anxiously inside their cages, all stopped at once, as if on cue. The building went deathly silent.
Tegg depressed the button on Washington’s “wand.” The black man repeatedly danced around the cage like a marionette. Sharon screamed soundlessly. The dogs barked.
Tegg stopped. Enough. Washington collapsed to the cement, a magnificent erection rising from him.
Tegg said to Sharon, “What do you make of that?” He indicated Washington’s erection, but she wouldn’t look. She curled into the fetal position, trembling.
Washington was weakened to the point that he couldn’t move quickly—the perfect target.
Tegg used the dart gun next, administering a strong dose of Valium. He would hold off on the Ketamine until he had him up in the cabin. “He’s going to sleep, that’s all,” he told the woman in a blatant lie. How many times had he spoken this line to pet owners? What a strange euphemism. Washington did not attempt to remove the dart. His will was broken. Strangely, that hurt Tegg most of all.
The first few incisions went beautifully. I should be videotaping this, he thought. His patient lay before him, an eight-inch incision in his chest. Again, he longed for Pamela’s assistance and support. He had grown to depend on her, an uncomfortable feeling, a sort of attachment that he couldn’t fully accept.
He thought through the procedure carefully now, for this was exactly where he had made his mistake twenty years before. He pushed
the thought of the police from his mind. He pushed away his temporary anger at Pamela. He tried to transcend it all—to establish a quiet place in his mind from which to commence.
He reviewed each detail: He would split the sternum with the sternal saw; place and lock the sternal retractor, opening the chest cavity; open the pericardial sac; identify and immobilize all the vessels leading in and out of the heart; flush the heart with cold solution; place ice around the heart; collect and centralize all the vessels; cut the heart out and place it immediately in ice. He congratulated himself on how effortlessly he recited the various steps. Not so terribly difficult. One step at a time. He checked, insuring that any and all instruments he might possibly need were within easy reach. They were. Ready now …
He switched on the sternal saw. The Ketamine, Valium, and Versed paralyzed and relaxed the man, but left his eyes open in a vacant stare. Tegg was distracted by those eyes. Without Pamela by his side, whom he normally used as a sounding board, describing each detail of the procedure like a pilot running down a checklist, Tegg found himself looking at those eyes, engaging his patient in a monologue. The electric saw hummed noisily. A sternal saw requires an upward pressure in order to cut the bone and still remain at a safe distance from the tissue beneath it—the heart. With the sternum exposed, Tegg fed the saw under the lower edge of the sternum into the chest cavity, slipping the edge into the slot made to accept it.
This was the very same procedure Tegg had failed to execute properly twenty years before. Seemed like yesterday, now that he had this saw in hand. Seemed so much like yesterday, that yesterday came right out of his subconscious. His mind played tricks on him: It wasn’t Washington on the operating table, it was Thomas Kent. His eyes were open. He looked dead already. One second Washington; the next Thomas Kent. Back and forth: black skin, white skin, positive, negative. “You’re a fake!” He recalled this man’s words clearly. But I’m not, he thought. I’ll show you. Sternum goes in the mouth of the saw—he could remember performing this procedure on cadavers, never a hitch. He could remember assisting Millingsford a dozen times. Never a hitch.
“Stop staring,” he told his patient. He hadn’t bothered with conventional anesthesia because Washington wouldn’t be around after this, and it was usually Pamela’s job anyway. The harvest would be over in thirty minutes or so—what was the worry?
It was those eyes. Was he awake?
“Stop staring,” Tegg beseeched the man for a second time.
He flipped on the switch. Sternum goes in the mouth of the saw … Only for a fraction of a second did he glance at those eyes.
“A fake!”
Too long. He neglected to maintain the constant upward pressure required of the saw. Suddenly, the donor’s warm blood, like water from a burst pipe, sprayed into Tegg’s eyes and blinded him. At the same time, he was flooded by his memories again. Was this nothing but the same nightmare he had lived with for twenty years? For a moment he stepped back, believing it was, but his surroundings—the plastic walls and ceiling—alerted him that this was for real. He jumped back to work, literally throwing the saw to the cement floor with a crash.
He attempted to contain his mistake, which was like expecting the Dutch boy to hold back the flood, like trying to piece a blowout back together from the scraps of a tire found in the breakdown lane. He enlarged the chest incision, gaining access to the heart by reaching beneath the sternum. He quickly packed the wound with cloth, applying pressure with his hand. He plugged the hole in the man’s heart with the cloth and pinched the tough muscle shut. But he was all out of hands. The hemostats—the clamps—were just off to his left, lying there waiting for him, staring at him, glinting in the light, but his hands were fully occupied. Pamela! If only … Frantically, he released the heart and made for the clamps. Blood erupted like a geyser. He began furiously clamping anything he touched. The bleeding slowed and stopped. For a moment he thought he had contained it, but then he looked up at the monitor and realized the patient was dead. In abject horror, in fear of total failure, Tegg worked at a frantic pace. There was far too much blood on the chest for him to see what he was doing. His movements, usually smooth and controlled, came out of him as small explosions. He retrieved the saw, opened the chest and let his fingers be his eyes. The organ was ruined. The saw had inflicted a two-inch incision in the left ventricle. Had it only been the pulmonary artery …
Tegg ignored the error—not his, but the saw’s, he tried to convince himself—and removed the heart properly. He cradled it in his hands and sank slowly to the floor, exhausted. Could he never get it right? he wondered. Only one more try, and if he failed at that what would Wong Kei do to him? He’d have his heart, that’s what! The police, Wong Kei, the heart he held in his hands, Pamela’s refusal to help him. It felt like some kind of conspiracy! He had to rise above this, to overcome. “Practice makes perfect,” he mumbled, looking down at the heart still cradled in his hands. “Practice makes perfect.”
Sharon Shaffer trembled in the center of her cage, wrought with fear. There was nothing to measure this fear against, nothing to compare it to. At first, the pain had distracted her. Pain was a matter of tolerance, tolerance a matter of attitude, attitude a matter of choice. She chose to be strong, calling on her higher power to see her through. Thus far it had. Her wounds were both terrifying and painful. She could only see out of her left eye now, but maybe that was a blessing, for all she saw were the vicious, angry eyes of the restless pit bulls boring down onto her. She concentrated not on her losses but her strengths. In order to regain the confidence required to escape, she would need every available faculty.
Her central focus had been, and continued to be, gaining her freedom. People made mistakes, even people like him, and she was ready to seize the moment.
Fifteen minutes after The Keeper had left the building, she went to work with a determination she had not allowed him to see. She hoped that his impression of her was that she was weakened to the point of total exhaustion—a necessary ruse if she was to have any hope of taking him by surprise. In fact, quite the opposite was true: She was much stronger than she looked.
That morning she had spotted a hypodermic needle covered in dust, pushed into the corner of the adjacent cage where the building’s corrugated metal met the chain link of the kennel wall. She saw it not as a needle but as a potential weapon.
Given the right moment, she could take an eye out with it. Blind him. Jump him. When he returned with Michael, he would be distracted. If she could only get that needle, it might be the perfect time for an attack. Lure him into the cage by moaning and gripping her side …
The problem was how to reach clear across the adjacent cage, snag the needle, and drag it all the way back. She had decided to craft a fishing line out of the only two materials available: the plastic I.V. tube hooked up to her arm and string from the burlap sack. Having spent the last twenty minutes unweaving a portion of the burlap sack and knotting pieces of it together, she now had an eight-foot length to use as a fishing line.
As she disconnected the I.V. tube from both the needle in her forearm and the overhead I.V. bag, she considered using the needle in her own arm as a weapon—a needle was a needle, after all—but she feared he was too observant for that. He always stood there examining her prior to opening her cage. If he noticed the needle missing, if he sensed her intentions, all hope was lost. He would shock her into semiconsciousness, and her “weapon” would be lost. She would have only one chance to use the needle. She couldn’t risk his catching on.
She prevented the I.V. from leaking by inverting it and re-clamping it to the top of the chain-link cage. She fashioned a “fishing pole” from the tubing by doubling it on itself. She knotted her burlap line to the end of it.
Her blind eye gave her unexpected problems. She felt time slipping away. How much longer until he returned Michael to his cage? The more she tried to hurry, the more awkward her motions. She quickly realized that above all she had to remain calm. Steady.
The door banged again, but the dogs remained complacent, dozing for the most part. The sweat now trickled down her jaw. She fed the tubing and line through the chain link, careful not to touch it. Any contact with the cage would trigger the shock collar. She jerked the tubing back and forth, driving her weighted line toward the far corner and the needle. She couldn’t judge distance well. She kept casting toward the needle but the end of her line didn’t even come close. It took some practice. The tubing sagged if she extended it too far. The line hit the cement floor if she didn’t keep it high enough. With each new attempt, her lasso inched toward the target.
The door, the wind, her imagination, all worked against her concentration. The harder her heart pounded, the more pain she felt in her wounds.
The loop hooked the needle! Slowly, she pulled it toward her.
Suddenly, the dogs sat up in unison, their ears perked, eyes alert. Him!
Him!! Her bad eye screamed with pain as she squinted. Her good eye blurred with tears from overuse. The needle was only halfway toward her. Come on! She pulled the line more quickly. The dogs paced anxiously—he was close.
Her hands shook. Panic overtook her. She tugged on the tubing and lost the needle, stranding it in the middle of the adjacent cage. To her, it looked as big as a Coke bottle, lying there. It called out: “Here I am! Look, she’s trying to escape!”