“I’m scared, Joe.”
“I know you are.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Not any more.” He sounded very decisive. “Not now we’ve found you. You’re going to be fine.”
“What about Miami?” she’d asked, clutching at straws. “There are major hospitals there – couldn’t they take it out?”
“No, sweetheart, they couldn’t They need special equipment, and we have that here.” Joe had paused, and she’d realized that he was fighting to control his own emotions, and suddenly Lally had felt a great rush of anxiety for him.
“I love you, Joe,” she’d said.
“I love you, too, Lally.”
It was the same now, with these other two frightened, loving men, both striving so hard to seem normal as they drove, taking turns, for safety’s sake, for they were both dog tired. While Hugo drove, Chris sat in the back beside her, holding her hand, saying little but communicating a lot through his touch, and when he took over the wheel, it was much the same with Hugo, though Lally had the sense that he was closer to cracking than either Chris or herself. When Hugo looked at her now, the love in his eyes was more naked that it had ever been, and she’d always known how he felt about her, though neither of them had ever talked about it, and maybe now they never would.
She watched the nape of Chris’s neck while he was driving, saw him glancing at her every few moments in the rearview mirror. There was no more room for doubt about his feelings for her now. This man, whom she hardly knew, had dropped everything, had left his wife in a clinic, had even left his own daughter, to chase her through half of south Florida because she was in danger. If she hadn’t been so terrified, she thought that might almost have made her happy. But it was hard to daydream about happiness when she was so painfully aware that both these men who loved her were speaking in soft, cautious voices, as if they feared that a loud sound might detonate the thing inside her.
The thing. That was the way she’d thought of it when she’d first been released from the hospital, but then it had seemed a strange, yet benevolent alien, a lifesaving thing. Not a killer.
They reached Miami airport before sunrise. At the United check-in desk, Chris found a message to call Duval in Chicago without delay.
“What’s up?”
“Can Lally hear us?” Joe asked.
“No.”
“You can’t fly.”
“What?”
“They won’t let Lally fly.”
“They have to.”
“No chance.” Joe’s tone was terser than ever. “There’s been another death, in Orlando. There was a small piece in a local paper, though the full story’s been kept away from the media. But the FBI notified the FAA, and the guys down there know you want to bring Lally back to Chicago, and they’re treating her like a walking bomb.”
Chris was silent, his mind working overtime.
“I’m getting something underway from this end,” Joe said, “but it’s going to take time.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I’ll get her there,” Chris said.
“How?” Joe was sceptical.
“I’ll charter a plane.”
“You’ll never find a pilot willing to do it.”
“I’ll find one, for the right money.”
“It’ll cost a fortune.” Joe was close to tearing his hair out. “There’s no way I could even begin to – ”
“I can afford it,” Chris said. “And I won’t want paying back.”
“I can’t let you – ”
“Goddamn it, Duval, do you want your sister back in Chicago in time to save her life or not?”
“Go get a plane,” Joe said.
Chapter Thirty
Monday, January 25th
The man lay in his hospital bed in the early hours, neither asleep nor awake, his mind spiked by the fever. They had brought him there last evening. He had not told them yet about the bite on his heel. They would find it soon enough.
He closed his eyes. His foot hurt, and his head. His brain swam.
I saw a dragon once. In Mother’s special place.
In a strange room in a long corridor with a padded door. A red, glowing light spilling out through the crack, and strange, unfamiliar sounds that scared him, but not enough to make him run, until he crept up to the door and peeped inside, and the terror swelled him like a huge balloon expanding in his chest and choking him.
The dragon was great and scaly with a hideous head and a huge tail and human arms and legs, all hairy and ugly, and it lay on top of the woman, pinning her to the bed.
He wanted to scream, but he knew it might turn on him, and he wanted to run then, but he found that he couldn’t look away, and he felt a funny feeling watching them, a hot, strange sensation deep down, like the feeling he got when Mother stroked him in her bed. There was a mirror on the ceiling, and he stared up and saw the woman’s face, and her eyes were closed and her mouth was open, and she was moaning and writhing –
And he knew that the dragon was killing her – and he must have made a noise then – gasped a little, and maybe he cried out, because the dragon turned around to look at him, and its eyes were so red and fiery, and then everything went dark until Mother woke him with her cool fingers on his forehead, and they were back in her office and he was lying on the couch, and the dragon was gone.
“I saw a dragon,” he whispered.
“I told you,” she answered, still stroking him. “I warned you.”
“It was killing a lady,” he said.
“That’s what they do.” Mother’s touch was so gentle. “They kill people.”
“I thought it was going to kill me.”
“It’s all right,” the voice said. “You’re okay now.”
“It was going to kill me,” the man said. “The dragon was going to kill me. I saw it, and it saw me, and – ”
“There are no dragons here,” the voice told him.
He opened his eyes. And saw the nurse. And though his head still hurt, and his chest was tight, and his foot burned like fire, he smiled at her.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “There are.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Monday, January 25th
At seven-fifteen, Cohen called Joe at home to tell him that both Hagen and Schwartz had been admitted to Chicago Memorial Hospital.
“Complications from the flu,” Cohen said.
“Easier to keep tabs on them,” Joe said, without sympathy.
Fifty minutes later, just after Joe had arrived at the station, John Morrissey telephoned.
“Sean Ferguson needs to see you urgently, Lieutenant.”
“What’s up?” Joe was grateful as hell to Morrissey for his offer of the clinic for Lally, but he needed another encounter with Marie Ferguson’s grieving husband like a hole in the head.
“He said to tell you it might be a breakthrough in the investigation.”
“What kind of a breakthrough?” Joe asked wearily.
“He wouldn’t tell me, but Ferguson’s not a time-waster, Lieutenant. If he says he has something, I think you should listen.”
“Is he at home?” Joe felt the first tingle of interest.
“No, he’s here at the clinic, in Marie’s office.”
Ferguson was pacing, his boots making indentations in the soft, pale green rug. His late wife’s office had been cleared of surface paperwork, but otherwise Joe guessed it was pretty much as Marie Ferguson had left it. It was a workmanlike but unmistakably feminine room, and Joe realized now that the whole clinic was stamped with her personal style.
“Lieutenant, thank God.” Ferguson wore denims, a black turtle neck sweater and leather jacket. His dark hair was tousled, he looked a little wild, but there was a touch of triumph in his almost black eyes.
“What do you have?” Joe got straight to the point.
“A motive.”
Joe felt the old, familiar prickling in his spine. “Go on.”<
br />
Ferguson bent down and pulled a folded piece of paper out of a battered pigskin attaché case. “Research is what I do best, Lieutenant. Journalists get used to digging, and fiction writers are even better at it when they’re determined to find exactly what they need to make a story fit.” He laid the paper on Marie’s desk.
“You want me to read?” Joe was impatient.
“In a moment.” Ferguson gave a small wry grin. “Forgive the theatricality, Lieutenant. I’ve felt so helpless since I lost Marie, and knowing that you guys weren’t getting anywhere hasn’t helped. This thing I’ve found may not pan out, but I have a hunch – I get hunches, you know – and this one says it’s the real McCoy.”
“I know all about hunches,” Joe said.
“Okay.” Ferguson sat down behind the desk and motioned Joe to sit down facing him. “I found an old newspaper cutting. Four columns, with a picture. There was never a follow-up story, but I did a little more digging of my own.”
Joe waited.
“Seems a crematorium on North Lincoln Avenue got blown up – that is, the chamber and furnace exploded – at the end of a service.” Ferguson paused. “Seems it happened because the body being burned had a pacemaker with an old-style battery made of mercury zinc cells. Seems that happened a few times in different places, which is why there’s a law now decreeing that pacemakers must be explanted prior to cremation.”
Joe sat on the edge of his chair. He watched the other man’s dark, excited eyes, and thought that he might have been more suited to life as an actor than a writer.
“Does the deceased have a name?” he asked, softly.
“Yes, it does.”
“Do you think you could tell me the name?”
Ferguson glanced sideways at a photograph on Marie’s desk of his wife and himself, arms around each other. Slowly, and with satisfaction, he picked up the paper off the desk, unfolded it and passed it across to Joe.
“Mean anything to you, Lieutenant?”
Joe was already on his feet.
“Oh, yes,” he said.
“And there’s more,” Ferguson told him.
“It’s not enough for a search warrant,” Jackson said when Joe called him at the station.
“Sure it is, Commander.”
“We have no more hard evidence than we had before.”
“His whole personnel file is full of lies.”
“Could just be full of errors.”
“You don’t believe that, sir.”
“Maybe not, but we need a lot more and you know it.”
“His mother was a madam. His file says she was a housewife.”
“I can’t see a judge blaming him for lying about that”
“His file says his father died in Chicago in 1950, but there’s no record to say he ever really existed.”
“So he lied about being illegitimate – or maybe he didn’t even know.”
Joe fought to hold down his rising anger. “His childhood was probably warped as hell, Commander. His mother – his only parent – wasn’t just some small time hooker, she ran her own whorehouse. Lord knows what the boy might have gone through, and that was before his mother got blown sky high in the middle of her cremation when he was just a boy.”
“It’s all hypothesis, Duval, not hard proof.”
“It’s motive. He fits the killer’s profile almost perfectly now. He’s been harbouring this obsession for decades – we’re talking revenge, for God’s sake.”
Jackson was immovable. “You’re probably one hundred per cent right, and Christ knows I’m just as anxious to get a result on this as you are – ”
“I seriously doubt that,” Joe snapped into the phone. “Your sister’s not going half crazy wondering if her heart’s going to explode any second.”
Jackson’s tone grew crisper. “With respect, Lieutenant, there may be hundreds of people out there in the same condition, only they don’t have a crack team of surgeons and bomb squad officers and half a private clinic on stand-by.”
Joe tried to hold on to his self-control, knowing that losing it wasn’t going to help Lally. “I have to get into that apartment, Commander. He’s in the hospital – it’s the perfect opportunity.”
“You can’t. Not yet. Get me more.”
Joe opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“Go talk to him first chance you get, Duval. You have to wait till the doctors okay it – if he’s real sick the hospital won’t let you near him yet. Take Cohen with you – better yet, take Lipman – get her to offer to bring him stuff from home. Talk to him about his mom, make nicey-nice, goad him a little if you have to. Take it as far as you can, but for Christ’s sake be careful.”
“We’re running out of time, Commander.”
“Do us all a favour, Duval. Go have some breakfast, then occupy yourself – catch up on all that paperwork sitting on your desk.”
The phone in Joe’s hand went dead.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Monday, January 25th
Lally, Chris and Hugo took off from Miami at eleven minutes past nine. Lally panicked a little as they climbed on board the Cessna, terrified suddenly that her pacemaker might explode in mid-air, killing them all and God-alone-knew who else on the ground, and Hugo, too, had wavered, but Chris had taken over, and the pilot, a near-silent, square-jawed, grey-haired man in his late fifties seemed laid-back and unconcerned, and so Lally just let it happen.
The skies were clear over Florida and for much of the flight, but over Georgia they hit a little turbulence, and later, starting their descent towards O’Hare, the little plane bucked and rocked repeatedly as their pilot battled his way through snow and high winds, and by the time touchdown came, Hugo was pea green, and Lally’s face was white as her knuckles, and only Chris seemed cool and unshaken.
“Everyone okay?” the pilot asked, emerging from the cockpit.
“Fine,” Chris said.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes, thank you,” Lally said, a little shakily.
“I’m sorry it got a little rough for a while,” the pilot said.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Lally said.
The pilot attended to opening the door.
“All right?” Chris asked Lally, very gently.
She swallowed. “In one piece.” She managed a smile. “Thanks to you.”
“It did get a little hairy up there.”
“At least it was real,” Lally said.
“Real?”
She tried to explain. “The turbulence, all that buffeting. I felt I was part of it – I could feel it happening to me.” She shook her head. “All the rest of this has felt so unreal – do you understand?”
Chris looked down at her. “I think so.”
Hugo stood up, hating the closeness between the other two, despising himself for hating it. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take a scheduled flight when it’s time to go home.” His long legs were shaky. “But thanks for getting us here.”
“My pleasure,” Chris said.
Joe, pale with tension, was waiting for them with another man, silver-haired and in great shape for his sixty or so years. Joe and Lally hugged each other tightly for several seconds, both holding back their tears, and then Joe pumped Chris’s hand vigorously and shook his head at Hugo.
“Do me a favour, Barzinsky. Next time you take my sister island-hopping, remember to stay in touch with someone.”
Lally saw Hugo’s flush, and came to his defence. “Don’t you dare blame Hugo for any of this – if it had been up to him, we’d have been sitting in the shade at some hotel in Miami Beach.”
The silver-haired stranger spoke. “Perhaps we should get out of here?”
“Lally,” Joe said, “this is Dr John Morrissey, head of the Howe Clinic, which is where we’re taking you right now.”
The clenched, sick feeling in Lally’s stomach that had vanished for a few minutes at the sight of her brother, came back. She looked at the man. He had a trim grey beard and a kind
face.
“How are you doing, Miss Duval?” he asked her.
“I’m doing okay, thank you.”
“You must be very confused.”
“Yes, I am.”
They all started walking. Joe had his left arm around her, and Chris strode along on her other side, with Hugo beside the doctor. Lally had little sense of where they were. All that seemed important now was to get to wherever they were going as quickly as possible. She’d had plenty of time to think on the flight, before the bad weather had started shaking them up. When Joe had told her on the telephone that they couldn’t take out her pacemaker in Florida because they needed special equipment, she’d felt anger and bitterness as well as fear, but once she’d begun really thinking about it, she’d understood. They were talking about some kind of bomb. That meant a risk factor for everyone who came near her. A surgeon most of all.
They emerged from the terminal building into the icy air. Joe’s old green Saab waited at the kerb. Joe opened the back door.
Lally looked at the doctor again.
“Are you sure about this, Dr Morrissey?”
“About what?”
“About having me in your clinic.”
“Absolutely.”
“I don’t want to endanger anyone.”
His smile was warm. “We’ll take every precaution, Miss Duval. Though you do realize there’s only a very small chance that your pacemaker is one of the affected ones.”
“Why doesn’t that comfort me as much as it should?”
“Get in the car, Lally,” Joe said.
She stayed where she was.
“What’s up?” Chris asked.
“I think I should travel alone.”
“Why?” Hugo asked.
“Why do you think? In case.”
“Lally, get in the car,” Joe repeated.
“I think the others should get a cab,” she said, stubbornly.
“It didn’t worry you in the plane,” Hugo said.
“Of course it did, but I didn’t have much choice.”
“Lally, for the last time – ”
“May I say something?” Morrissey intervened.
“I wish you would,” Joe said.
If I Should Die Page 19