He had to think fast but hadn’t a clue what to say. She had bushwhacked him good.
“And guess what? No one had seen you all day. Why are you lying to me? What the hell is going on? How could you do this to your daughters? They sat out on the front steps for over an hour waiting for you. Isabel cried her eyes out. You promised to take them to Belmont Park, remember?”
No, he didn’t remember. One day blurred into the next. “I’m really sorry, Nicole.”
“You can take your ‘sorries’ and stick them where the sun don’t shine!”
“It’s the research grant. It’s consumed me.”
“Well, then maybe it’s time for you to make a choice: your family or your precious A-Fib study.”
“Why can’t I have both?”
“Obviously, you can’t handle both.”
“I am so close, Nicole. In another two weeks I’ll have the data I need.”
“So the girls and I should just sit around waiting for you to be a husband and father again?”
“It’s a ten-million-dollar grant. I’m ninety-eight percent there.”
“Well, you’re one-hundred percent losing your family.”
The next thing Julian heard was a dial tone.
As McKenzie O’Neill soaked in the bathtub, the hot water soothing her muscles and her aching behind, it was as if a giant fog lifted from her conscious thoughts. How absurd that she would be taking a bath in the home of a madman, a madman who would likely end her life. Shouldn’t she be concentrating on a survival plan? She had already failed at her first attempt to overpower him, and now that he was on to her, how could she possibly devise a plan that might work? How could she surprise him?
She had no weapon, no way to get the advantage. Besides, even if she were to temporarily put him out of commission, without a key, there was no way she could get past the dead-bolted door. How then could she survive this ordeal?
She eased her way out of the tub, still feeling as if her internal organs were ablaze. As someone who loved TV programs like CSI, or any crime show where the police tried to outsmart the villain, McKenzie was fascinated with the idea of a serial killer, and had followed the Resuscitator and the four homicides closely. Not only had she read everything written about the crimes in the San Diego Chronicle, she also viewed national coverage on CNN and other major networks. Familiar with every detail of how he had murdered his victims, she felt chilled to the bone.
Terrified he would likely kill her in a most gruesome way, she felt overwhelmed with panic. She sat in the warm water, unable to quiet her sobs.
She heard a gentle knock on the door.
“Everything okay in there?”
“I’ll be out…in a few minutes.”
“Remember. Naked.”
If only she had a gun.
“How do you want to work this, Al?” Sami asked. After their meeting with the captain, she had the dubious task of telling Detective Osbourn that he was no longer her partner on the serial murders investigation. It took a great deal of diplomacy for her to convince him that the department’s decision had no reflection on him or his qualifications. It was merely an experience issue. To ease Osbourn’s understandable disappointment, and to make him feel more involved with the investigation, Sami asked him to follow up with the families of Robert Winters and Rachael Manning, victims three and four. They had learned that both their families lived out of state, so Osbourn was going to set up phone interviews. And if the victims’ families had video capabilities like Skype or some other Web cam system, they would conduct a video interview.
“For the sake of time,” Al suggested, “I think it might make more sense if I interviewed McKenzie O’Neill’s parents and you spoke with her girlfriend. Or the other way around. Whatever you prefer.”
She didn’t have to think about his proposal for more than a nanosecond. In fact, she imagined that she’d take advantage of every opportunity to work independent of him during the investigation. Seeing him every day at work, living under the same roof, playing a game of deception so no one would suspect they were at odds, seemed like more than she could bear. Sami wasn’t sure who would give her more grief if they uncovered their little masquerade, the captain or Sami’s mother. Of most issues whirling around in her mind right now, few were clearly defined. But on one particular issue, Sami was crystal clear: Every time she looked at Al, she wanted desperately to kick him in the balls. Not exactly the most productive attitude for a detective trying to track down a serial killer.
“I’ll take on O’Neill’s parents, and you can interview her friend,” Sami said.
Before Al could even respond, she turned her back on him and walked toward the parking ramp.
Ignoring Julian’s mandate to exit the bathroom naked, McKenzie, hoping to restore just a morsel of dignity, walked out the door with a towel wrapped around her, intentionally defying his instructions. Although the last thing she wanted was to provoke him, she just couldn’t bear the thought of exposing herself to a man who molested her with his eyes.
Sitting on the bed with his back to her, he seemed uninterested as she walked toward the bed. As she approached his back, she wished she had a baseball bat in her hands. She noticed a few additions to the area around the bed. First, she saw what appeared to be a video camera resting on a tripod. The perfect accoutrement for a pervert, she thought. What really caught her eye was a small monitor mounted on a silver stand with about a dozen long wires hanging from it. She’d worked as a candy striper, volunteering at a local hospital when she was a teenager considering a career in health care, and she’d seen monitors like this one all the time. It wasn’t merely a monitor. It was a heart monitor.
Julian looked over his shoulder and McKenzie could see his eyes locked on her.
“You don’t follow directions very well, do you?” he said.
“This loft is freezing. I’m just trying to warm up.”
“Sit on the bed,” he ordered.
Still holding the bath towel in place, hoping he wouldn’t force her to remove it, she sat on the bed as far away from him as possible.
“Are you going to rape me again?”
He stood and walked toward the cart holding all the surgical instruments. Julian opened the drawer and removed a syringe. “I want you to remove the towel, lie on your back, and close your eyes.”
McKenzie’s body shivered. Looking at the syringe, imagining what awful drug he would inject in her veins, she now understood that rape was the least of her worries. She felt an odd pressure in the center of her chest, as if a heavy weight lay on it, a sensation she had never felt before. She could hardly breathe. Panic set in. Was she having a heart attack? Now she could feel a rapid heartbeat. “Something is wrong.”
“What is it?”
“It feels…like an elephant is sitting…on my chest. I can’t…breathe.”
He pawed through the drawer in the cart, grabbed a stethoscope, and pressed it to her chest.
“It’s just a stress-induced rapid heartbeat.” He took a syringe off the cart.
“What are you…going to do?”
“Give you something to calm you down.”
“You’re going to…kill me, aren’t you?”
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
“How are you feeling, Mom?” Sami asked. They had just finished dinner and Emily was cleaning up in the kitchen. Sami and Josephine sat on the sofa.
“So-so. My back still aches and I get out of breath easily. But I don’t have any chest pain.”
“That’s great.”
Sami was still struggling with how to tell her mom that Al would be sleeping on the sofa bed, trying to come up with a logical explanation. No doubt, no matter what the reason, this change in living arrangements would evoke much speculation. Emily, Sami could deal with. Her mother would be a handful.
“Oh, by the way,” Sami said matter-of-factly, “I just wanted to tell you that Al will be sleeping on the sofa bed for a while. I didn’t
want you to wander into the living room in the middle of the night and be startled.”
It took Josephine less than a second for her red flag to go up. “Trouble in paradise?”
“Nothing like that. It’s just that I haven’t been sleeping very well—lots of things on my mind. And Al snores at night, which makes falling asleep even more difficult for me.”
“I see. And how long is this going to go on?”
“Just for a few weeks.”
“And in a few weeks Alberto will be miraculously cured of his snoring?”
The old woman was sharp as ever, Sami thought. She felt dangerously close to checkmate. The door opened and Al walked in. He stood in the foyer and looked confused, as if he’d walked into the wrong home.
“Did I miss dinner?” he asked.
“There are plenty of leftovers,” Josephine said. “Emily made linguine with clam sauce.”
Al hung his jacket on the coat tree. “Sounds great.” He walked past the two of them as if they were barely acquainted with him, and headed for the kitchen.
“He must really be hungry,” Josephine said. “Not even a peck on the cheek for the love of his life.”
Checkmate.
Julian was amazed at McKenzie’s resilience. During his two procedures, both complicated and performed with her ribcage spread wide open, her heart maintained a normal sinus rhythm and wouldn’t go into atrial fibrillation even when he introduced powerful drugs. He found this quite puzzling—and medically remarkable. Obviously, her heart was strong and resistant to electrical disturbances caused by medications. This fact in itself compelled Julian to follow a completely different path. McKenzie O’Neill just might be the subject he’d been searching for. For the next experiment, he carefully stapled her ribcage closed.
When finished, he stood over her, admiring the textbook precision of his work. Feeling parched and ready for a short break, he went into the kitchen and grabbed a sparkling water from the refrigerator. Just about to take a sip, he heard the heart monitor going berserk. He dropped the water bottle on the floor and it exploded on impact, the carbonated water gushing out of the plastic bottle like a mini-geyser.
Julian rushed to the bed, looked at the heart monitor, and nearly gasped when he saw that the young woman was in cardiac arrest. With medical skill and a meticulous technique, he began CPR, hoping to restore normal rhythm. As he performed compressions, blood squirted from the fresh incision, and some of the staples broke free. After several minutes, he stopped to catch his breath. He then resumed CPR, his eyes locked on the monitor. He continued with the compressions but could not restore a heartbeat. He guessed that for whatever reason, McKenzie suffered from a delayed and adverse reaction to the drugs he’d given her. Now her heart felt the full impact of the potent medications. He had made an irreversible error in judgment and his hopes to uncover critical new data through never-before-performed experiments were lost.
McKenzie O’Neill was dead.
His disgust escalated to rage. He dashed to the monitor, grasped the power cord, and yanked it out of the electrical socket. He never wanted to hear that annoying sound again. He had risked everything to secure the research grant: his wife, children, career, and reputation. Not to mention the very real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison. Or worse. He really believed that his experiments on McKenzie would have produced the data he required to satisfy the Global Atrial Fibrillation Foundation and ultimately fulfill their requirements to approve the research grant.
So close. So painfully close.
Suddenly, Julian realized he didn’t want to spend another minute in the same room with McKenzie’s corpse. She symbolized failure. No self-recrimination—there’d be plenty of time for that later. No shopping for designer clothes. No critical thinking about where to dump her body. For the sake of his prior subjects’ families, he’d been careful to leave the bodies where they could be easily found. But he didn’t have the time or the patience to pay McKenzie the same courtesy. He wanted her out of his life immediately. He wrapped a sheet around her, lifted her off the bed, and headed for his car.
After lying awake for nearly two hours, checking the time on her clock radio every few minutes, Sami decided to raid the fridge for a light snack, in spite of the fact that once again she felt nauseous. Although her body needed additional calories about as much as a centipede needed another leg, she’d always found comfort in food, particularly fattening food. She’d always believed that if God was truly all-knowing and all-merciful, He would have made broccoli taste as good as chocolate cake, and never would have invented the word calorie.
It had been a fruitless day. Sami’s interview with McKenzie O’Neill’s parents yielded nothing she could run with. And according to Al, McKenzie’s friend could only offer a description of the mysterious man at the yoga class, which pretty much matched the composite sketch.
She’d spoken to Osbourn about his interviews with the families of Robert Winters and Rachael Manning, but they offered very little information that would help the investigation. Not living in San Diego, neither family knew much about the victims’ daily activities, whom they hung around with, or where they went for entertainment. Robert Winters’s parents didn’t even know that Rachael and he were engaged. Not exactly a close-knit family.
What puzzled her most was the scarcity of leads coming in since they’d distributed the new sketch. Typically, when the police department circulated a sketch of a suspect in a murder investigation, the toll-free hotline lit up like the Fourth of July at Disneyland. And what made this even more baffling was the fact that Judge Foster, the father of the first victim, Genevieve Foster, was offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the serial killer. Where was this guy hiding?
With the refrigerator door open and her head poking inside, Sami shuffled the contents around looking for something appealing. She spotted a small slice of carrot cake tucked away in the corner, the remains of a get-well gift a neighbor had baked for her mother.
About to rearrange the contents of the fridge so she could reach the carrot cake, Sami heard someone’s feet padding along the floor. She let go of the cake and looked over her shoulder.
“Got the munchies?” Al asked.
“I’ve always had a passionate relationship with midnight snacks.”
“Don’t let me stop you.” He pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table.
Sami had no idea why he wasn’t sound asleep. “Is the sofa bed uncomfortable?”
She closed the refrigerator and leaned against the counter, suddenly aware that all she wore was a long T-shirt and panties. He had seen a lot more. Many times. But things were different now.
“The sofa bed is fine. I heard someone in the kitchen and hoped it was you.”
Looking like a mad professor, Al combed his fingers through his hair. “Can we talk?”
She could deal with talking business at one in the morning, but if he wanted to discuss their relationship, she just couldn’t handle it right now.
He didn’t wait for her to answer. “I really screwed up. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and the thought of losing you—”
Her cell phone rang.
Saved by the bell, she thought.
“This is Captain Davidson.”
She looked at Al and silently mouthed the captain’s name. “I don’t suppose that this is a social call at one a.m.,” Sami said.
“When my phone rings in the middle of the night, your phone rings. That’s the deal. Where’s Diaz?”
“Sitting right next to me.”
“You two have insomnia?” the captain asked.
“Something like that,” Sami said.
“Put me on speaker,” the captain said. “I need to talk to both of you and don’t want to repeat myself.”
Sami didn’t think that the captain would call in the wee hours of the night to chew their asses. He much preferred doing that face to face. She guessed that s
omething significant was brewing with the investigation.
“Remember McKenzie O’Neill, the missing young woman?” the captain said.
Sami feared what was coming next. “We do, Captain.”
“She’s not missing anymore. Our guy dumped her at Torrey Pines Park, right near the public parking lot.”
“Same condition as the other victims?” Al asked.
“Except for one minor detail.”
They could hear the captain sucking on a cigarette.
“What’s that, Captain?” Al asked.
“She’s alive.”
Sami and Al gave each other a long, penetrating stare.
“Is she conscious?” Sami asked.
“She’s barely breathing. Real faint heartbeat. Fortunately, the guy who found her—a late-night jogger—was an EMT and had the presence of mind to check her pulse and call nine-one-one. From what I understand, by looking at her, you’d think she was dead.”
“Where is she right now?” Sami asked.
“Fighting for her life in the ICU at Saint Michael’s. Not looking good.”
“Where are you, Captain?” Al said.
“Drinking rotgut hospital coffee in the waiting room.”
“What do you want us to do, Captain?” Sami said.
“Get your little asses to the hospital ASAP, so I can go home and get some sleep. If she regains consciousness even for a minute, I want you two here.”
Barely awake, occasionally dozing off for brief periods, Sami and Al sat in the hospital ICU waiting room with two vacant chairs between them. Silent as two heavyweight fighters mentally preparing themselves for a title fight, they seemed totally disconnected. Sami knew why she wasn’t talking, but she wasn’t sure if Al’s tight lips were voluntary or a matter of exhaustion. Whatever the reason, she was glad he hadn’t continued his speech about how sorry he was. With her wounds still raw, she didn’t want to hear it. She looked at her watch just as the hour hand hit four.
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