Dr. O

by Robert W. Walker

  Sam Boas came to her, finding her in a Canadian parka and drinking hot cocoa laced with a local whiskey.

  Robyn Muro's distress call had also been heard by Dr. Samuel Boas and the other agents waiting this side of Ottawa. They rushed to the scene in a helicopter, which had promptly been put to work locating the airstrip used by Ovierto, to close off any chance he might have of getting to his airplane and escaping the area entirely. The plane had to be somewhere nearby, but according to the Canadian officer who joined the helicopter crew, there were twenty-one small airstrips in the region. It would take great patience and time to locate a single Beech craft that didn't "belong."

  Meanwhile, Dr. Boas had been dropped at the scene of the helicopter wreckage. He had been monitoring radio transmissions as they had approached, and, on first seeing the crash sight, he cursed their luck. Everything would be much easier if the damned machine had plunged onto the American side, or at least in the center of the river. He had seen what complications could arise between the two countries when extradition orders were put through. And with a man like Ovierto, if the Canadians attempted to hold him for up to six months or a year while they decided, he'd break free to kill again.

  Hopefully, he was dead already, a victim of the crash. But somehow Sam Boas didn't imagine that the evil doctor would go so easily. News had it that he had drowned, that the body had not been recovered from the wreckage, only that of the pilot.

  Boas's first concern on landing would be to examine the pilot's body and the wreckage closely, to see if it told him anything. Now he was on scene, and Boas saw Robyn coming straight for him—obviously distraught, unattended bruises on her cheek, forehead, and hands —but still alive. She had survived the awful drug and frigid coffin that had killed Riley; she had survived a firefight with Maurice Ovierto, the firefight that had killed Donna Thorpe.

  Instinctively, he took her in his arms, but she pulled free, shouting, "Doc, we've got to get these fucking Canadians moving. He's getting away! Ovierto is getting away, and these fuckin' idiots got their fingers up their asses and—"

  "Take it easy... easy..."

  "Easy my ass, Sam! He killed Donna! Or rather, he got me to kill her."

  "Whoa up, slow down." She was on an adrenalin high.

  "He's getting away! I know it! I can feel it. He got free of the wreckage. No one saw him. No one saw. He's disappeared."

  "He's very likely at the bottom of the river."

  "Then tell these assholes to start dredging!"

  "We may have to do such operations ourselves, Robyn."

  "I can't believe this."

  He made her sit down, ordering more of the cocoa from the man who apparently lived in the ram-shackle old place on the property. An enterprising man, he had brewed coffee, made cocoa, had broken out some whiskey, and was selling it all at inflated prices. The men and women on scene appreciated his efforts far more than they denounced them.

  With Robyn calmed a bit, Boas now went to work overseeing the inspection of both the aircraft and the pilot's body. He immediately noted the throat wound and the severed safety belt. Another victim of the maniac, the pilot had been murdered. The damage to the helicopter was slight. Broken bubble, crushed supports and detached wheel. It was a "soft" landing crash, he felt, soft enough so that both men could have survived. Ovierto had obviously feared that the pilot would be taken alive, questioned, and break under that questioning, so the man was killed.

  He returned to Robyn and the clutch of agents who had been with Thorpe since her removal to Nebraska. The other men were offering hesitant congratulations to Robyn for a job well done. "At least you know you put a bullet in him, and you brought down his helicopter," an agent named Pyles was telling her. "That's more'n anyone else, other than Sykes and Thorpe, ever got with him."

  Boas then reported to them all the bad news as he saw it, explaining his preliminary findings in the cab of the chopper. "This means that Ovierto was alive at the point of impact, when he knew they were going down. He would have cut the safety belt only if he could not get it unlatched, or if he could not reach it, given the angle of the cab, water flooding in."

  "What are you saying, then? He's still alive? I knew it," said Robyn, getting excited again.

  He waved her down. "He cut both belts and pushed himself outward in an attempt to save himself, but-"

  "Knowing Ovierto, he meant to use the pilot's body as a float, like a goddamned log, to take him down river," she said. "That's it."

  "Possibly."

  "What do you mean, possible, Doc? Possible, hell! The man's an animal. Deserves to be found hiding in the hole he's lying in and shot dead the way you'd shoot a dangerous snake."

  The Mountie in charge of the Canadian investigation joined them, asking Dr. Boas if he would like to share his findings with them.

  "He's alive, you asshole! Boas says he's alive," shouted Robyn. "Ovierto is alive and he's making fools of us all, and all you do is sit on your thumbs!"

  "We have patrol cars monitoring all along the edge of the river. Highway 12 follows the course of the river, Madam Inspector."

  "Muro, Sergeant Muro!" she said.

  "Sergeant? Ahhh, I see, then you are not FBI?"

  "She is part of the FBI investigation," said Boas.

  He nodded and frowned as if he now understood. "You are American police on Canadian soil. We must cooperate, but we must do so with great care. I sympathize with your problem. Many times we must chase bad men across the border. Very often, your authorities do not cooperate with us."

  Boas told the man about the two Canadian scientists who had been poisoned in Adanta by Ovierto.

  The Mountie nodded, obviously remembering the case. "I see, then we have a vested interest, you are saying. I will do all within my limited power. Cornwall is not a large city. We do not have the great resources of Washington D.C., or even Ottawa. But I will see what can be done."

  As he walked off, Robyn said to Boas, "You see? You see the fuckin' attitude I've had to deal with?"

  "It takes tact, Robyn. More than you have in your state of mind."

  "Well pardon me... pardon me, but I've just seen four people killed at close range around me."

  "I understand."

  "Do you? Does anyone? Donna understood... but she's gone."

  Robyn slumped onto a wooden picnic bench where she had been sitting. Everyone watched her. She was exhausted and frustrated, and the anger rose off her like heat. The fact that Ovierto had slipped through, as she believed, compounded by the snail's pace at which the Canadians were moving, was driving her mad. She was now yelling at Boas to use whatever influence he had, to contact Washington and tell them to contact Ottawa.

  "There," Boas said in response, pointing. "Over the river."

  A maple leaf was splashed over the side of the Harriman aircraft that was exploring the river and the river's edge all along the possible escape route of the madman. The huge, dark aircraft hovered in place, turned like a helicopter, and then returned down the length of the river in what seemed to be slow motion for its streamlined look. It was a Canadian military plane.

  "I contacted them en route."

  In the distance a pair of Cornwall Police helicopters also combed the area from the skies. A Coast Guard boat from the American side of the river, followed by a second, was going up and down the river. This went on for several hours, but the search was turning up nothing.

  As night turned to dawn, she told Boas about how Riley had died, about how she survived, and how Donna Thorpe had been killed by one of Robyn's own bullets. "It's going to look bad, Sam," she said. "Pyles, some of the others, they heard me threaten her after Joe's death, and now she dies with a bullet from my gun."

  "You were lured into a crossfire for Christ's sake. You were almost killed yourself!"

  This didn't seem to help. He said softly, "Look, we've ordered everything be left as is, nothing touched, save for the bodies, and I'm going over to the locks now to do my investigation. Why don't you come
with me? I'll examine the scene. You can be of great help there. Here, there's nothing for you to do. What do you say?"

  "But Ovierto is out there somewhere."

  She looked down river. Sam frowned. "I really think we've done all we can here, Robyn. It's over now."

  "No, no we haven't. We've got to get divers in here, dredge for the body. We've got to find the body."

  "But in this river, with this current, it'd be like looking for the bloody Titanic." The river here was spread as wide as a glassy plain, the power of the undercurrent showing up as small ripples in the glass. Seeing the American shore in the distance was like looking at the shore of the Mississippi.

  "We've got to try, damnit."

  "It could take days, weeks."

  "Then it takes weeks, but we do it. We owe that much to Donna. We all owe Donna."

  He took a deep breath, placed a firm hand on her shoulders, and said, "All right. All right."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Maurice Ovierto had found a mud hole with a pipe into which he had slithered. He'd tied off the leg to staunch the flow of blood. The wound in his arm had been a mere crease, but the leg wound had developed into a hammering pain and the loss of blood threatened to send him into unconsciousness. Muro's bullet had caused an increase in anxiety which translated to a proportionate increase in the stomach cramps caused by his disease. And he had lain out in the tall prairie grass in the sun too long, having collapsed from exhaustion. The sunlight had baked away at his flesh, and the porphyria was doing its work to scar and pockmark him, not to mention the amount of nerve damage caused by the trauma that she had inflicted on him.

  He was suffering, and he didn't like that. He was a wounded animal, unable to think clearly.

  But now he had found a hole in which he could regain his strength and control of his mind, in which to think. The first thing he thought about was his medicine. He had lost the small supply he had been carrying, and the rest was aboard the plane with his other things. They would stumble onto the plane even if they were blind, and to go directly to Long Sault Airport was suicide, and yet he needed the drugs.

  Where else... where else could he get the drugs? A pharmacy? He didn't have steady enough hands to disable an alarm, much less the strength to run from pursuing police. Where else? Where else could he get the drugs?

  He must increase his intake of carbohydrates to help combat the attacks of acute intermittent porphyria. If he could get hold of some straight Portagen, the food additive. Then he realized that most any medicine cabinet would have enough drugs for him to create his own homemade variety of the drug he needed, a kind of specialized vitamin supplement.

  But he'd have to travel by night, like an animal, and sleep by day in places like this pipe, praying no local cop would think of it as a place where he might create a den.

  The water had frightened him. He had always had a morbid fear of drowning, and when the water had gushed in at him where he was semi drenched, caught in the cab of the helicopter, he'd found it difficult to think clearly. He swam out from the machine, instantly taken along by the current, fighting to remain close enough to shore to find footing. Each time he had put his feet down in an attempt to meet the ground, there was no floor, and he was swept inexorably along, snatching at branches that hung out over the river and ripped from these as if he were a toothpick in the rush. He hated the feeling of fear and utter helplessness that had overcome him. To die was one thing, but to become fish fodder in the cold river that'd soon be frozen over disturbed him to his core. He had almost drowned as a child, and the horror of that moment had never left him.

  All around him in the darkened pipe he heard noises, the loudest being the drip and movement of the water in the drain pipe, one of thousands that skirted the highways here. The constant sound of the water kept bringing back the terror he'd felt in the river. He couldn't sleep for the sound and its accompanying nightmare, coming as it did in rhythmic waves as he dozed, froze, came awake, dozed, froze, came awake, dozed again, froze again, came awake again, hour after hour in the hole to which Robyn Muro had sent him.

  He thought of the revenge he would wreak on her; this thought was sweeter than the memories of the near-drowning, and so he clung to it. He decided he would live to see her suffer as he was now suffering. His face was peeling, burning, and scarred; terrible things were happening to his in- sides, his stomach, his nerves. His leg throbbed with a fiery pain, as if a jagged knife were lodged there. She'd used some kind of exploding bullet and it had ripped through his leg, severing arteries. He'd be left with a perpetual limp. He'd been maimed by a woman, and he meant to live to see her pay for her cruelty toward him. He dreamed of having her at his mercy, having her in chains on a cold slab below his scalpel. He dreamed and smiled and rested, and in the dreams of revenge he quickly forgot the sound of trickling water and the fear of drowning.

  And in the back of his mind, he thought out each step necessary to his survival.

  Robyn finally agreed to go with Boas back to the locks to view the scene of Donna Thorpe's death. Donna's body was in the morgue of a hospital in Massena, New York, awaiting transportation back to D.C., where she would join her parents in an unmarked grave, as was her request. Even in death, she felt she must hide from Ovierto's perverted interest in her, and rightly so. Robyn had conveyed her wishes to Boas, who had balked at them, saying, "But if we find Ovierto's body, that will not be necessary."

  "Until we find Ovierto's body and it's identified beyond any doubt, doctor, we do as Donna requested."

  "Very well," he had conceded.

  Now they walked through the firefight with Ovierto, and Robyn explained how everything had happened; how the young Indian man was knifed down by Ovierto, how Riley had been catapulted from the cold container box and into the locks, his body lost forever, she thought. How she had clung to life at the edge of the locks, and how Donna had come on like a maniac herself in close pursuit of Ovierto, just behind her. She explained how they took different directions, Donna to the rear and she to the front of the power plant.

  All of the paraphernalia that Ovierto had rigged earlier at the rear of the plant was clearly visible now by daylight. He had set up a three-way imaging mirror using advanced transponders to create an image of himself at the center of the triangle. The ruse had gotten Thorpe killed.

  The lock master who had come on in the A.M. had been trying desperately to get Boas and Robyn to listen to him. He said he thought he could possibly get the dead agent's body from the locks.

  "Riley?" asked Boas.

  "There's maybe a way."

  "How?" asked Robyn.

  "We throw all our power into filling up the lock to capacity, all at once. It'd work as well as cannons firing off, reversing those turbines so quickly. Everything was shut down after what happened here. I was called in to do the work. There's a chance that-"

  "Then do it," ordered Boas.

  Robyn exchanged a glance with Boas and they mentally crossed their fingers together. For the next half hour they watched and waited as the lock where the British freighter, Carpathia, had sat the night before, as the waters were churned into a cauldron. The level of the water rose and rose and suddenly Robyn saw a man's hand rise to the surface.

  A team of men in a boat who had been riding out the manmade storm in the lock cut loose from their safe hold onto the anchoring lines and went out toward Riley, pulling his pale form onto the boat with them, the water lapping up over the side with the body.

  Robyn had watched the entire episode wishing to God that it was Maurice Ovierto's body that they were dredging up instead of Riley's, when an idea hit her. She shouted it to Boas. "The water level around the dam could be increased like this, couldn't it! Couldn't it?"

  "Well, yeah, I suppose so, but—“

  “For Ovierto's body. If it's settled to the bottom a good churning up from the dam might have the same effect as this—"

  "And it could send the body just further down river. The search area's al
ready mapped out, and divers are at work out there—at our request—along with dredging vessels."

  "But the body could be made to rise, if the damned body is out there at all!"

  "It'll take all kinds of authorization to—“

  “Come on! We'll get it from the American side of the fuckin' damn. We don't wait for Canadian bullshit."

  Ovierto awoke with a start, with the drowning dream again, and for good reason. The water in the pipe had risen and was at his chest! Had there been a goddamned downpour outside? The sun was shining. It was three-forty-two by his watch. He was drenched and all manner of debris floated about him. Field mice were scurrying about the upper portions of the pipe. He looked out toward the river side and realized that the grass was gone! Under water! Suddenly there was a surge of water covering his vision, filling the pipe, sending him tumbling, coughing, choking. He clawed his way toward the other end of the pipe, pulling hard for the edge, unable to see in the fetid, mud-colored water, holding his breath until he thought his lungs would burst. Further suffering. Terrorizing him with his water fear. She was behind it. She and Thorpe. Thorpe was dead but somehow guiding her hand, telling her he was here, alive in this hole, and so she had filled it with water as if she were wielding a gigantic garden hose! But how? How could she know?

  His hands felt the edge of the pipe, and he pulled his drowning, prone body up and up and out, finding his feet and standing in waist-deep water that filled the ditch along the highway. Cars speeding by paid him no mind, not seeing him throwing up and clinging to the roadbed. Thank God, no police cars. But now a beat-up old Dodge pickup came to a screeching halt, sending up rocks all around him.

  The driver, a pair of coveralls over his plaid shirt, marched back to him with boots that stank of pig shit and cows. "Mister? Mister? You look like hell caught you by the ass. Mister? You best get in the truck and we'll get you into Cornwall to the hospital."