Death Sentence td-80

by Warren Murphy

  The hand started to move in again, and Naomi shut up like a constipated clam.

  "I want to see these letters," Remo said.

  "They're in the den. I can show you. If you'll let me up."

  Both hands then withdrew, and Naomi composed her nightgown before getting up. She pulled on her owlish glasses.

  "Hi!" she said, batting her eyes at his unresponsive face. He was nearly six feet tall. Probably of Mediterranean stock. His eyes were deeper than the descriptions. Like shark's eyes. They were merciless. They made Naomi shiver deliciously.

  "Lead the way," he ordered.

  Naomi started for the door, but her bare feet encountered the throw rug. It slid on the slick floor, upsetting her. She experienced an instant of flung-limbed imbalance. Her knees clicked together, her feet bending sideways at the ankles. She blinked, wondering why she wasn't falling.

  Then Naomi noticed the steel-hard pressure at the back of her neck, which raised her to her feet.

  "Oh, you caught me," she gasped as Remo released her from his one-handed grasp. "Great reflexes. You must burn your sugar really, really fast."

  "What are you talking about?" Remo demanded peevishly.

  "I'll explain later. Come on. I'll show you my files. They're much more interesting than those semiliterate letters."

  "If you say so."

  "Can I ask you some questions?" Naomi asked as they walked down the hall.

  "No."

  "Who were your parents?"

  "No idea. I'm an orphan."

  "Really?"

  "I don't remember it being all that special," he growled.

  "But you could come from anywhere. I don't detect an accent."

  "I was raised in Newark, New Jersey. By nuns." Naomi made a sympathetic face.

  "How terrible for you."

  Remo shrugged. "It wasn't so bad."

  They came to the den, where concrete-block-and-plywood bookshelves held scores of volumes. A copper filing cabinet stood beside a small desk.

  "Top drawer. Under H," Naomi said helpfully.

  "H for what?"

  "Homo crassi carpi. That's the species name for you. I devised it myself. It's Latin for 'man the thick-wristed.' Do you like it?"

  "Not really. But it beats 'Dead Man.' "

  "That was that horrid Enquirer person's idea. He was hopelessly ethnocentric."

  "Sit and be quiet."

  Naomi sat. "Where are you from?" she asked. "I mean, after Newark. My files show no clear subsistence patterns. No territorial locus,"

  Remo pulled out a thick file and began leafing through closely typed pages. There were many typos. "While you're just standing here doing nothing, can I measure your cephalic index?" Naomi asked hopefully.

  "What?" Remo asked without looking up.

  "It will take only a second. I have a tape measure on my desk." Naomi plucked a cloth measure in her fingers and stood up. She started to loop it around Remo's forehead, but one hand came up absently and snapped it without conscious effort.

  "Wow! You really do burn your sugar," she said, blinking at the two dangling lengths of calibrated cloth. "I didn't even see your hand move."

  "Sit down."

  Naomi sat. "Mind if I take notes?" she asked meekly.

  "Just do it quietly."

  Naomi began writing on a notepad. Obviously a hominid, she noted. Good posture and bipedal locomotion. Cranial development normal for a twentieth-century male. It was odd. Except for the overdeveloped wrists, there were no outwardly distinctive divergences from genus Homo sapiens. Maybe if she could get him to take off his clothes ...

  Leaning closer, she got her first close look at those wrists. They were tremendously thick. A strange quality to possess. There were no muscles in the wrists to develop like that. Maybe it was a mutation. Yet the rest of him was so lean. Little body fat. He must eat very intelligently. Lots of salads.

  "Tell me about your diet," Naomi prompted.

  "Huh?"

  "What was the last thing you ate?"

  "Oranges. I stole them off a truck."

  "A forager! I expected a hunter-gatherer because of your obviously nomadic migratory patterns. Do you eat meat?"

  "I've been losing my taste for it."

  "Just as I thought," Naomi said, scribbling on a notepad. "Excellent. Moving away from your bestial carnivore forebears. Isn't evolution grand?"

  Remo looked up suddenly. "What are you babbling about?"

  "I'm an anthropologist. I'm just trying to understand you."

  "And I'm trying to understand these dippy reports. They have me-or someone who looks like me-running from hell and gone like a maniac. Destroying this. Breaking that."

  "I've been trying to fathom your behavioral patterns. I came to the conclusion that you're trying to dismantle our stupid twentieth-century technolopolis. To pave the way for the reign of your own kind, am I right?"

  "My kind?"

  "Homo crassi carpi."

  "Lady, I don't swing that way. Not even after twenty years on the row."

  "I said 'thick-wristed,' not 'limp-wristed.' And what do you mean by 'the row'? Is that the name of your kinship group? Do you belong to some kind of ceremonial clan?"

  "That's what I can't figure," Remo muttered grimly. "If this is me in these reports, how could I have been in two places at once?"

  Naomi blinked. "Now I don't understand you." Remo shook the files under Naomi's narrow nose.

  "I've been on death row for the last twenty years," he snapped. "I haven't been outside prison walls since I broke jail last night."

  "Jail? Those fascists!"

  "What fascists?" Remo said, dumbfounded.

  "The government. This is obviously a government plot. They learned of your existence-you, the next stage in human evolution-and they imprisoned you unjustly. Oh, you poor Homo crassi carpi."

  "Government plot?"

  "Yes, this fascist regime is committed to destroying anything it doesn't understand."

  "Lady, I've been doing time for killing a pusher. I didn't do it, but that's why I was doing time."

  "You were framed. It all fits."

  "Read my lips. I said twenty years. I've been on death row for twenty years, not running around the country with a crazy old Mongol."

  "Mongoloid. And who is he? I couldn't figure him out either."

  "Damned if I know. But he's dead."

  "Dead?"

  "At least I think so. I saw him die in a dream. It seemed as real as those other dreams, the ones where I was doing stuff like you have in these files. But I don't remember being in any of these places or doing these things. Hell, before I was sent away, I'd barely ever been out of New Jersey. Unless you count a tour in Vietnam."

  Naomi Vanderkloot touched Remo's arm tenderly. "Don't try to sort it all out at once," she said. "You've been through a tremendous ordeal."

  Remo slapped the files in her solicitous hands. "There's nothing in these to help me. Thanks for your time."

  Naomi shot to her feet. Her eyes were pleading. "Wait! I can help you."

  "Yeah, how? I'm in pretty deep."

  "By offering you a place to stay for a start. Here. Then we'll help you find yourself. That's what this is all about, isn't it? Finding yourself."

  "I know who I am. Remo Williams."

  "And Remo Durock. And Remo DeFalco. And Remo Weeks. Don't you see? These reports can't all be coincidence. You may think you've been in jail, but someone with your face and first name has been doing all these bizarre destructive things."

  "Maybe I have a twin brother," Remo suggested.

  "Maybe. If so, then you and he are the same species. I want to study you. Please allow me." Naomi Vanderkloot watched the changing expressions flicker across Remo Williams' troubled face. The doubt, the confusion, oh, he was everything she'd ever wanted in a man. Or a study specimen. He was perfect.

  Seeing him waver, she reached up and removed her glasses. In movies, this was always the moment when the handsome hero fell for the
brainy woman who, under the glasses and schoolmarm bun, was secretly gorgeous. And passionate. She wet her lips to communicate the passionate part. And waited for his reaction.

  "Can you cook?" Remo asked at last.

  Naomi's face fell. She struggled to get it aloft again.

  "Yes," she said bravely.

  "Good. I'm starving. Got any rice?"

  "As much as you want. Plain white or wild?"

  "Either of 'em."

  "Let's continue this in the kitchen," Naomi suggested, smiling.

  In the kitchen, Naomi asked, "Care for a Dove Bar while you wait?"

  "I'll shower after we eat," Remo said seriously, watching in horrified fascination as Naomi Vanderkloot took a package from the freezer marked "Dove Bar" and began nibbling.

  Later, over two heaping bowls of rice, she listened to Remo Williams' life story. It was not exactly a biography. More of a hard-luck story.

  "And you say you simply woke up in Florida State Prison?" she asked when he was through. "And they said you'd killed a guard?"

  "I did kill a guard," Remo said. "It took a while for it to come back to me, but I remember it distinctly. He pushed me to the breaking point. I guess I was treated like a criminal for so long, I became one."

  Naomi placed a reassuring hand on Remo's massive wrist.

  "Prison turns men into killers, even evolved men like you," she said simply. She squeezed and felt hard wrist bones.

  "Why do you keep saying that? Men like me?"

  "Because you're different. I've analyzed these reports. You're not like other men. You're a step ahead. I theorize that you're the leap ahead in human evolution. A mutant."

  "Bulldookey. I was a beat cop who got jammed up in the justice system. End of story." He yanked free from her hands. He didn't like the creepy way she was feeling up his wrist.

  "That doesn't explain how you escaped death row. How you manipulated electronic locks with your fingers. "

  Remo had no response to that. He chewed his food slowly, carefully, before swallowing. Naomi wrote that down on the pad beside her plate and began to chew her food slowly for just as long as Remo. She waited until he swallowed before she did. By then, her rice had the consistency of liquid.

  She wrote that down too.

  "The way I figure it," she said at last, "we simply backtrack all the things you remember until we find a link."

  "The name Folcroft Sanitarium seems to mean something. And a guy named Harry Smith. I thought he was the judge who sentenced me, but he seems connected to Folcroft somehow. If it exists."

  "I think your dreams are tapping on the door of your subconscious. They're trying to tell you something. Yes, Folcroft would be an excellent place to start."

  "But how would we find it? It could be anywhere."

  "Just a moment," Naomi said, going to her telephone stand. She pulled out the white pages and brought the book to the table.

  "What we'll do is call information for every area code in the country and ask if they have a listing for Folcroft. If it's out there, eventually we'll hit it."

  Remo's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Smart," he said.

  "Thank you," Naomi said, pleased. "We'll start with New Jersey, because that's where you think you lived."

  "That's where I did live," Remo said firmly.

  "You think."

  Remo frowned as Naomi went to the telephone. There was no Folcroft Sanitarium in New Jersey, according to the information operator. Naomi then dialed New York State.

  "I got it!" she cried, clapping her hand over the receiver. "It's in Rye, New York. Write this number down. "

  Remo wrote the numbers Naomi called out, wondering what this stuff on the pad about chewing food to a liquid was all about.

  Naomi accepted the pad from Remo and dialed Folcroft Sanitarium. "Yes, hello. Could you connect me with Harry Smith?" Pause. "Oh, I see. No, I'm not a relative. The new director? What is his name, please? ... I see.... No, that won't be necessary. Thank you."

  Naomi hung up and turned to Remo with a triumphant smile, making her face resemble a hungry clown mask.

  "What'd you learn?" Remo asked anxiously.

  "We're onto something. There is a Harold Smith there. But he's a patient. They asked if I was a relative."

  Remo's hopeful expression deflated. "Coincidence."

  "Could be," Naomi said thoughtfully. "But you know, after I told them I wasn't a relative, they asked if I wanted to talk to the new director. That might mean Smith is the old director."

  "Strange. Harold Smith was the judge who put me away. I remember it as plain as day."

  "Maybe he switched careers?" Naomi suggested.

  "Maybe. What was the new director's name?"

  "Norvell Ransome. Does it ring a bell?"

  "No. Never heard of the guy. I guess we're at a dead end."

  "Let's leave that line of investigation for the moment. It'll keep." Naomi began dialing again.

  "Who're you calling now?" Remo wanted to know. "New Jersey information. Hello? ... Yes, could I have the number of Trenton State Prison?" Naomi looked over at Remo. What could it hurt? her expression said.

  Chapter 19

  Dr. Alan Dooley was nervously hovering around his patient when Norvell Ransome waddled into the green hospital room on the third floor of Folcroft Sanitarium. He did not look up as Ransome's prodigious shadow fell over the patient's corpse-gray face. Smith lay under an oxygen tent, intravenous tubes taped to one dead-looking arm.

  "He's taken a turn for the worse, but I have him stabilized," Dooley said flatly.

  "That is most unfortunate," Ransome said unctuously.

  "What?" Dooley asked querulously. "That Smith's condition has worsened or that he's stabilized?"

  "I resent that uncalled-for remark, sir," Ransome said, bending over the death mask of a face that belonged to Dr. Harold W. Smith. "You are forgetting your place."

  "Sorry," Dr. Dooley said quietly.

  "Perhaps your heart is no longer in your work. Hmmm?"

  "You have my loyalty, and you know it."

  "I have your genitals in my vise grips, Doctor. That is not loyalty. That is servitude, but it suits me and it befits you."

  "You cold bastard," Dooley snapped. "I'd love to know where you learned about my ... indiscretion."

  "A fondness for prepubescent girls is not an indiscretion, sir. It is a disease. As for my sources, let us say that I have access to a great many secrets. Your slimy little foibles being among the least of them. Now, update me on Dr. Smith's condition."

  Dr. Dooley wiped his perspiring forehead. "He's still in a coma. His heart began fibrillating, but it stabilized by itself."

  "He appears even more corpselike of visage than before, eh?"

  "Illusion. When you haven't been here for a few days, it just seems that way because he's nearly the color of lead. We call the condition cynanosis. In Smith's case, the gray coloration is due to a congenital heart defect. There's a flaw in the wall of his left ventricle. I examined his medical records. Smith was a blue baby. The condition-which was the result of insufficient oxygenation of the blood-cleared up when he was still an infant, although the root cause obviously did not. Over the years, his heart has become enlarged. His wife tells me that his skin color had gradually darkened over the years. The shock that stopped his heart simply made the leadenness that much more pronounced."

  "I see. And what, if anything, can you do for him?"

  "It's touch and go. I'll continue to monitor him around the clock. If he relapses further, naturally I'll resuscitate."

  "Hmmm," Norvell Ransome said softly. "I would prefer that you do not do that."

  Dr. Dooley shot the fat man a glaring glance.

  "I can't do that," he said heatedly. "You know that. No matter what you threaten me with." Sizing up the fire in the physician's eyes, Norvell Ransome nodded. His pursy lower lip protruded like a hemorrhoid.

  "I can see that, Doctor. Very well. Let me relieve you for a few days. You've obvious
ly been under great strain."

  "Not until you bring in another doctor," Dr. Dooley said firmly.

  "I assure you that the Folcroft medical staff will be equal to the task. No, please. You have my word. Or would you prefer that I report your 'indiscretions' to the AMA?"

  "You've made your point," Dr. Dooley said grudgingly.

  His shoulders drooping, Dr. Dooley trudged from the hospital room. After he had departed, Norvell Ransome rummaged through a cabinet and found an ordinary box of Band-Aids. He selected a broad one and carefully peeled the backing as he walked over to Dr. Smith's still form. Smith's bluish lips were parted slightly, revealing dull dry teeth. His folded hands showed blued fingernails.

  Reaching under the oxygen tent, Ransome affixed the Band-Aid across the patient's slate-gray forehead. The contrast with the flesh-colored Band-Aid was ghoulish. Then, extracting a fountain pen with a solid gold nub, he began to write on the Band-aid in a looping florid script, holding Smith's head still as he did so.

  When he was done, he stepped back and read the result: DO NOT RESUSCITATE.

  Noticing that he had forgotten to dot the I in "resuscitate," Ransome placed a precise dot in the proper place and, capping the pen, left the room.

  To the floor nurse, he said, "Dr. Dooley will be taking a few days off. Please see that Dr. Smith is attended to by our top physician, won't you?"

  "Yes, Mr. Ransome." She hurried off to do her duty.

  Norvell Ransome allowed himself to admire the play of the nurse's womanly buttocks under the starched white uniform before waddling toward the elevator. He liked the way she had hurried to do his bidding. Like the governor of Florida. And unlike Dr. Dooley.

  Soon, many would do his bidding. Not tomorrow, or next month, perhaps. Great plans took time to germinate. Ransome stabbed the down button, and happily, the elevator responded instantly.

  He stepped aboard and pressed two. The cage sank and Norvell Ransome felt the thrill of momentary weightlessness in his 334-pound being.