Dr. O

by Robert W. Walker

  He plied his way through the dangerous sections of the ancient foundry here amid a Colorado backwash, miles from the nearest town. The rental car was out-side, but would draw no attention from the road be-cause he'd pulled it around back. One thing he knew, aside from how best to practice bad medicine: how to really get around. He owned a "doctor killer", the latest in private jets made by Beechcraft—owned it outright, registered under an assumned name. So far, they had not traced this alias.

  He heard a noise and at first believed it was Bate-man in agony. He'd have to be in agony now, left alone in that craggy hole all these weeks without a scrap be-yond the raw chunks of meat tossed down to him be-fore Ovierto left. Bateman's ankle tendons had been surgically severed. He could neither stand nor walk, even if he could escape the dungeon into which he had been thrown. Bateman's suffering had been long and gratifying, and the thought that it would continue gave Dr. Ovierto a contented feeling. But the noise was not human; it was rather a scurrying sound, and Dr. O saw a rat race across a girder, onto a pillar, and up and away.

  He reached Bateman only to find a corpse. He'd come all this way for nothing.

  "Damn... damn," he cursed his luck. He'd been looking forward to watching Bateman's last breath. Maybe he could do something yet with the body, he thought. Maybe Donna'd be interested in chasing it, as she had in chasing Sykes's. Death may come, he thought, but it was never too late for fun.

  Below the glare of his flashlight, Bateman's lifeless male form was not entirely useless if he were to enjoy himself; had Bateman been a female agent... well... no use in wishing. He'd just go out and get one.

  The place was already rank from Bateman's remains. Rats were feeding on him down in the darkness. Dr. Ovierto wondered if he wanted to fight the rats off for any of the man's parts. It again occurred to him that Donna might like to have a part of Bateman sent her, something she could stew over. He chuckled quietly to himself.

  "All right, you!" came a voice disrupting the stillness, military and aggressive, yet female in timbre. "I want you to come straight out into the light, now!"

  It was a gift, a police officer by her uniform, come to him like a conch washed ashore at his feet. He could use a woman in the experiment he had in mind.

  "Right away, officer," he called back, looking about to ascertain whether she was alone or with a partner.

  "What are you doing in here?" she asked as he came closer to the light, grinning at her like a death mask.

  "My property, officer. Just purchased it."

  "March out into the light where I can have a look at you," she ordered.

  He did so with aplomb, saying, "I assure you, officer..."

  "Whatever you want to buy this old place for?" she asked.

  "Plans... big plans for it."

  She was alone except for the voices coming over the radio in her car. He reached into his breast pocket.

  "Hold it, right there!" she ordered, bringing up her weapon.

  "Please, I only want to show you the papers. I only just signed them."

  She relaxed. She was a smooth, black woman, with a fine buxom shape. He spread the papers on the hood of her squad car. She leaned in closer to see, unaware that the breath-spray container he lifted toward himself was actually pointed at her face. The spray instantly blinded her, sending her reeling while, at the same instant, Dr. O grabbed the .38 special from her hand.

  "I want you to spend a little time with Death, sweet-heart." He spoke into her ear where she lay on the ground, tossing her head from side to side before the blow from his massive fist knocked her unconscious.

  Now he had his hands full. The radio in her car was crackling with static and a dispatcher's voice. He'd have to get rid of the car, but he must first secure her.

  He took hold of her and she lashed out at him, beating with her fists, kicking, trying to bite. He pummeled her again, causing bruises and bleeding about the face, shouting, "Stop it, now! Stop it!" He only quit hitting her when she slumped unconscious again.

  He then dragged her inside.

  There he began stripping away her clothes, finding the heavy belt with night stick, the uniform and badge an additional kick as he ripped them all off. This done, he lashed her body with chains, pinning her to the darkness of the concrete wall down which dripped water and which rats curiously crawled.

  Bateman had disappointed him....

  Reading her badge plate, he rolled her name off his lips: "Roshwanda Farris. You won't disappoint me, will you, Roshwanda? You like going to the doctor's office, don't you? I got my medical in my car."

  She screamed and pulled away from his touch when she awoke to find his hands rushing over her nude form. But she could not see. She felt the warmth of blood in her eyes and streaming down her face where he had slit each pupil. Blind and helpless, she presented an alluring target for Dr. O.

  "As for your eyes, I've done you a kindness —a thing Dr. O is not known for. Who knows, I might even let you live to tell your friends and family about me, about us ... about this night. And if you just can't tell it to anyone else, you can tell it to yourself and the walls of your asylum, over and over." He shrieked the laugh of the mad, blotting out her scream.

  "You know, darling," he left spit in her ears where he spoke into them, "I've sent a lot of people to asylums across the country. It's either that or death. Which do you prefer?"

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lincoln, Nebraska

  Two days later H.Q. knew nothing more about Bateman's whereabouts than did Donna Thorpe in Nebraska, and the fact that they had heard nothing from Dr. Ovierto had everyone imagining the worst. Bateman was only twenty-seven years old.

  Donna Thorpe was firmly in place, in charge of the Nebraska Divison of Criminal Operations on the seventh floor of the Nebraska Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a building that wheat had built in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was still uneasy in her reassignment, still resisting it, still thinking always of Dr. Maurice Ovierto. The Ovierto operation had cost the Bureau hundreds of thousands of dollars, while it had a bottom line of zero.

  She somehow must now roll the dice with a sure hand to regain her former status, to gain reassignment to D.C., and to get even with Ovierto.

  But Thorpe was off the case. Her only hope of get-ting back to D.C., of being returned to her former status and demanding Ovierto, was to make a big score from Lincoln, Nebraska. As unlikely as that had seemed the first day of her reassignment, she was sniffing out something big; the smell was so strong it followed her home, to the shower, and into bed with Jim. She was afire with the idea.

  Donna had every right to now reopen an old case, a murder that occurred in Nebraska, one of Dr. O's ear-liest victims. Some still argued that contention, but she and Tom were sure it was the dire work of the doctor. She had every right to reassess the case that had been forgotten over time. In so doing, she had every right to the recent forensics reports on Dr. O's latest victim, to compare. She felt a twinge of guilt about the Nebraska victim, knowing that she didn't acutally care about the ancient history in which a woman had had spleen and pancreas had been removed with the skill of a surgeon.

  The woman had undergone the operation without anesthesia. A self-professed killer had taken responsibility for the slaying before taking his own life, and the case had been dropped, but Tom had stumbled on it during his research years later. At the time they'd had enough to deal with, and the information on the Nebraska case was let go —until now.

  Now, it would enable Donna to keep her foot in the Dr. O affair —to provide her a smokescreen, if not un-official sanction.

  She had a list of possible, future victims of the mad-man, and their addresses. For Thorpe's money, Ovierto had been responsible for a number of deaths abroad, and if his threats were to be taken seriously, Ovierto was racing toward several key scientists who'd done governmental research at Fermilab, just outside of Chicago, Illinois.

  The men and women killed abroad in various mysterious accidents were all scientists workin
g toward a common goal and a common good via a NASA project. Ovierto had made his first mistake, showing a pattern—victims all in a row. But no one was willing to take Donna Thorpe seriously on this, not yet. A number of some bodies of importance must die here in the Americas first, she sadly thought. In two, maybe three days, yet another scientist would be dead. Thorpe was so certain of it that she had gone on record about it.

  "Damn, damn, damn!" she cursed loud enough for her operatives to know of her frustration. She wondered how long she could afford to wait around for the next murder. Without true sanction, her hands were tied, and so far the Bureau wasn't responding to her telexes, the material she had amassed and faxed to them, nothing.

  "Who do we know outside the agency in Chicago who owes us big?" she suddenly asked the people in the debriefing room.

  "Remember that hot-headed bastard?" asked Pyles.

  "Cop there by the name of Swisher, remember him?" asked Perry Shoup.

  "Real pistol-"

  "Decoy operative, reckless as hell."

  "Wasn't he the guy that shut down that doctor that was murdering people for AIDS-free blood a year or so ago?"

  The banter went about the room. There were a few people who hadn't a clue about Lieutenant Joe Swisher, but as these men were filled in by others, Donna Thorpe leaned back in her chair and recalled the tough, cynical Chicago undercover cop with a mixture of admiration and dislike. Admiration because he did his job so very well, as when he cornered the infamous Widow-maker a few months back, a whacko who had killed eighteen men by firing a high- powered rifle into windows from great distances for reasons the killing mind alone understood. She detested Swisher for the methods he reputedly used, for instance, torturing a man for information leading to someone that Swisher had been chasing for years in some ongoing vendetta. It had been to this vendetta that she and Tom had once played Swisher.

  At that time, Lieutenant Joe Swisher had been chasing down a small-time creep named Camera, beating heads together for any information he might gain concerning the drug lord who dared work Swisher's territory. She and Tom had stepped in with a deal, seeing to it that the game plan went another way, intercepting Swisher, snatching up Camera as well. Camera was wired and returned to the streets to do a bigger job for the Feds. Camera walked as part of the deal. They had had to squeeze Joe Swisher pretty hard, using some old files from a police shrink against him. After it was over, Swisher torched the files and the Feds told him that he owed them.

  Camera was relocated, given a new identity, the whole package, but someone managed to get to him anyway —a large .44 through the skull at close range. Detective Joe Swisher was at the top of the list of suspects.

  Time was just right to pick some fruit from that tree again. Since Sykes's brutal death, Thorpe had come to believe that she understood Joe Swisher's unquenchable thirst for violent revenge.

  Another of Joe Swisher's supposed victims had been a child-porn filmmaker and child-brutalizer by the name of Julio Zaragoza. Zaragoza had died of drowning, found head-down in a toilet bowl, his feet in the air. His head and face had been battered and he'd been knocked unconscious before he drowned.

  Dr. Maurice Ovierto would have approved, no doubt. Ovierto had made brutality a way of life; it seemed that Swisher had also. Ovierto was a raging psychotic who coolly masked his psychosis; so was Swisher. It takes a thief...

  At the moment they were swamped with missing persons believed to be kidnapped, some taken across state lines. These kinds of cases seemed on the rise and typically turned into murder.

  Thorpe got on her phone, called Chicago, Precinct Thirty-one, and asked for Lieutenant Joe Swisher. Told the lieutenant was indisposed at the moment, she persisted.

  "Indisposed?"

  "Out on duty."

  Thorpe wondered what mayhem the lieutenant was into.

  "This is urgent. Could you patch me through to his vehicle?"

  "Who is calling, ma'am?" asked the female dispatcher. "FBI."

  "I see," she said with a mind full of doubt. "I'll need a name, ma'am."

  "Hoover, godamnit! J. Edgar."

  "Thank you Ms. Hoover, and please hold."

  "No, thank you, dear," she said with mock politeness.

  "I’ll try to hail his frequency, ma'am, but he's on a ten eighteen."

  "Ten eighteen, that's suspect injured, isn't it?"

  But she was off the line, trying to get through to Swisher. It took more time than she had patience for. She was about to slam down the receiver, when static struck and was replaced by the sound of another female voice.

  "This is Sergeant Muro."

  "Who?"

  "Joe's partner... in the field... can this wait?"

  "No, it can't"

  "You're not going to come back at him with all that phony crap about knockin' off your witness, again, are you?"

  "I have Swisher's best interest at heart, ahh... Muro"

  She laughed. "Sure you do, you FBI bitches are all alike."

  "Hey, Muro, I'm just trying to alert him to a danger in your sector."

  "What danger?"

  "Serial killer who seems to like high-powered scientists as targets. You read about the three in England? Everybody's read about that. Now it's starting here, and if our information is correct, Chicago and Dr. Ibi Oliguerre is next, along with a possible second physicist working out at your Fermilab. Is that reason enough to alert Swisher? I'd like him in but it's completely unofficial."

  Muro hesitated a moment before saying, "Why should Joe want anything to do with you? You break into his shrink's office, lift his file, use it against him-"

  "Muro! This is bigger than us, or old sores!"

  "Why does it sound like a set-up to me? Unofficial?"

  "I can't explain it over the phone. Will Swisher meet with me if I fly there? Tonight?"

  "You nuts? He wouldn't give you the time of day."

  "Put him on! This is too damned important, Muro."

  There was more static and some commotion on Muro's end. Joe Swisher came on. "Thorpe, sweety, how's D.C. this time of year?"

  Donna knew now that Swisher knew about her de-motion. She chose to ignore the barb. 'Your partner fill you in on the situation? Will you meet with me tonight?"

  "Why're you asking, Thorpe? Why didn't you just bust in and cuff me? Drag me in before your holier- than-thou presence and just explain things to me? Like you did when you got Camera and those three women killed so you could get your man. Oh, by the way, tough luck about your partner... ahh, Sykes? But what's a few bodies along the way to a gal like Donna Thorpe, huh?"

  Donna recalled having said the exact same words to Swisher once. She almost told him to fuck off. In-stead, she swallowed it and calmly replied, "Hey, mister, I'm the one saw that your unsavory file and your unsavory ass came out of that one intact and alive, or did you forget that? As for your file, you got it back, remember?"

  Swisher hesitated on the other end. "My problem is you, Thorpe. I just don't like you or your methods."

  "Then we agree to disagree, because I don't like your methods either."

  "You call me out of the blue, sic me onto some poor slob like you've got me on a leash. Then maybe I blow your problem away, and then I'm carted off for it, shut away tight; end of Donna Thorpe's backside itch. Great."

  "No, no... Lieutenant, it's not like that."

  "Then why aren't you going through my captain?"

  "It's not officially my case. I can't go through channels, and I can't order anyone on or off it, you under-stand?"

  "Until it becomes your case, I'll say no thanks and hasta luego."

  "Suppose I told you I know who did Stavros?"

  "Bullshit," he replied and promptly hung up on her. In Nebraska, she said, "Damn that man." She then called for the helicopter to be readied, and she made a few preparatory calls for her visit. She'd go to the Windy City with what she had on Ovierto, lay it all out for Swisher, and take her chances. She knew just where to locate Swisher. He'd be at a wate
ring hole, a bar and grill called Transfusions, on Kedzie near Damon Avenue.

  Swisher had his own agenda: people he wanted to put away forever. There wasn't a murder in the country reported that Donna Thorpe didn't know about; she'd read with great interest the news of a man named Stavros who'd ostensibly bled to death from a wound in a nasty place, a wound a man needn't die from, unless the killer had also grotesquely arranged for the victim not to get medical attention. The case smacked of Dr. Ovierto's handiwork, and she believed it could be a decoy killing —one of Dr. O's endless red herrings, to lead police in one direction while he sought out another.

  One phone call and the Stavros thing would be turned over to Lieutenant Joseph Swisher. The ties that bind, thought Thorpe.

  She got Swisher's captain on the line, a man that she had made use of before many times. Brian Noone was physically one of the biggest men she had ever en-countered, but his bull shoulders and huge middle be-lied his intellect. He was shrewd. Even more than shrewd, he was ambitious. He was what was fast be-coming a rare breed: an inner city police captain who welcomed FBI involvement on a case. Not that he actually believed that the FBI knew what they were doing.

  After the initial amenities, including a few remarks about how sorry Noone was to hear about Tom Sykes, Thorpe told him, "I'd like you to put Joe Swisher on the Stavros case."

  "Is that a request?"

  "It is."

  Noone was assessing her tone. "Brian, it's important. Can't give you all the details, but—"

  "That's all right. I love being in the dark," he replied with what amounted to a lot of sarcasm for Noone.

  She cleared her throat. Brian. I've got reason to believe Stavros may be connected to one of our most wanted."

  "Ovierto, huh?"

  "This stays between us. Okay, Brian?"

  "Swisher's got a full docket."

  "You can loosen that up, a little juggling."

  "Just snatch it from the dicks that're on it now and dump it in Joe's lap, just like that. Tell me, Inspector, what does my department get for our trouble?"

  "Things work out, you and your man will get plenty of press, I can guarantee that."