He needed, badly, to confide in someone. More than anyone, he wanted to talk to Sol Cohen, to explain to his wise old pal why he was risking his whole career, why he was letting himself abandon the solid rock upon which the world of police work was founded, in order to be sucked down into the insane nether world of Frederick Schwartz for a battle that went against every rule and every ethic. But Joe could not and would not draw Sol into this day’s madness. God knew he’d involved too many people already.
Anyway, he wasn’t sure if he could explain it all, even to himself.
Sick as he felt, Schwartz knew that something was up. The first doubt had tickled him a few moments after he’d signed the discharge papers at Chicago Memorial, and then, during the ambulance ride to the clinic, he had begun to realize that something untoward was happening to him. For one thing, he knew that he was recovering. He still had a fever, was still in discomfort, but it was less severe than it had been, and he felt more lucid. For another, instinct warned him that they were on to him. There had been no visit from the lieutenant, nor from any other police officers, but nevertheless he knew that the next stage of the game, the face-to-face confrontation he had been anticipating for more than a week, was now imminent.
He found it interesting that he was not afraid.
They settled him comfortably in his new room. It was an attractive, elegant room, more suited to a hotel than to a hospital, with dark wood furniture, pale cream paintwork and beige fabrics. The nurses changed the IV in his arm, attached electrodes to his chest, wrists and ankles, switched on the EKG monitor and left him to rest. They were soothing and kind, and it was not unpleasant to be the object of so much attention and gentleness. It reminded him of his mother. But then, most things did, one way or another.
When Joe walked into Schwartz’s room for the first time, just after ten o’clock, the other man was sleeping and, watching him for a few moments, Joe became conscious of a new and special stillness, a kind of perfect silence, taking control of his own mind. It was a rare form of concentration, of absolute focus. He had experienced it only once before, just before he’d begun his final interview with the arsonist. His own tenacity and the killer’s ego had brought that man to his knees. Vanity, and the overpowering need to be recognized, ultimately, as a member of a select club: as one of the chosen species of mass murderers. Schwartz’s reign of terror might have been born out of revenge, but Joe would bet his last cent that ego had long since taken over.
Schwartz opened his eyes.
“How are you, Lieutenant?”
Joe thought he might have been awake all the time.
“I’m just fine, sir. How about you?”
“Wondering what I’m doing here.”
“You know what you’re doing here.”
“Yes,” Schwartz said. “I think I do.” He paused. “Tell me, Lieutenant, how did they find out about the Gila monster? I didn’t tell them.”
“No, sir. I did.”
“And how did you know?”
“A friend of mine got bitten by one of the same creatures. When your physicians at Memorial told me they were concerned by a bite on your foot, I recognized the signs.”
“That’s some coincidence,” Schwartz said, pleasantly.
“Of course,” Joe added, “it helped that you’d both gotten your bites at the same address.”
The two men watched each other. The room was hushed. The only sounds came from the machine monitoring Schwartz’s heart, and from his own breathing, slightly laboured.
“How did you get in?” Schwartz asked.
“With a search warrant,” Joe lied.
“On what grounds did you get a warrant?”
“We found you might have had a motive, sir.”
“Really?” Schwartz’s intelligent hazel eyes seemed calm.
“We learned about your mother.”
“What about my mother?”
“About her death.” Joe spoke quietly. “About what happened at the crematorium.”
“I see.”
“We searched Mr Hagen’s apartment, too.”
“Because of his mother.” Schwartz smiled.
“That’s right.” Joe paused. “We didn’t find anything there.”
The smile remained on Schwartz’s lips, not touching his eyes.
Joe opened the attaché case he’d brought into the room with him, and took out the xeroxed copies of the six documents. “We did find these, sir, in your apartment.”
“I see,” Schwartz said again.
“I wonder,” Joe said, with great courtesy, “if you would do me a favour, and tell me which of these records is the accurate one?”
Still Schwartz smiled. “I’m sure you do. Wonder, I mean.”
“Would you do that for me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s a pity.”
“Are you going to arrest me now?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Truth?”
“I’d expect nothing less of you, Lieutenant.”
“Because I need your help.”
Joe glanced behind him, drew up one of the comfortable, well-padded chairs, and sat down. The stillness inside his mind persisted, and he welcomed it, for he knew that without it there was no chance of besting this man.
“There’s a young woman here, in this clinic.”
Schwartz said nothing, just listened.
“Fifteen days ago, she received a pacemaker implant. Until last night, she believed herself over her illness, her troubles behind her. She believed that her pacemaker had healed her, was taking care of her heart. She knows different now.”
“I’m sorry for her,” Schwartz said.
“Are you?”
“Why not?”
Joe held onto the stillness, gripped it tightly like a man fighting to stop himself from lashing out, or even killing.
“Then you’ll help her.”
The smile had gone, but the hazel eyes were affable. “How could I do that, Lieutenant?”
“In a few hours’ time, a surgeon is going to cut into her again, not knowing exactly what he’s going to find, and the young woman is going to have to go through all that not knowing whether she’s going to live or die.” Joe held out the documents. “If you can tell me if one of these records is accurate, it may mean her not having to go through all that.”
The hush was back in the room.
“May I see the papers, please?”
“Of course.”
Joe placed them on the bed, one set beside the other, and waited. Schwartz did not touch them.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Lieutenant.”
“Yes?”
“I’ll see the young woman.”
The stillness in Joe fractured a little. “That’s impossible,” he said.
“I thought you were trying to appeal to my better nature,” Schwartz said.
“That’s true.”
“Then let me see her.”
For a long moment, Joe looked into the hazel eyes.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Then don’t expect my help,” Schwartz said.
Joe sank into a chair in Morrissey’s office, and looked at the doctor and Ferguson. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Nor was I.” Morrissey looked at Joe. “What do you think? Might it be worth putting your sister through it?”
Joe shook his head. “Even if he did cooperate after seeing her, we couldn’t trust him not to play games with us. He knows he’s running the show right now, and we need him vulnerable. We all know the only way of being halfway sure of Schwartz is by going ahead with the plan.”
Morrissey checked his watch. It was almost ten-twenty.
“The staff are all appraised,” he said.
“And you?” Joe looked at Ferguson. “Are you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“It’s a curious thing, Lieutenant,” Morrissey said. “I hate this whole thing more th
an I can easily express to you. Simply permitting this charade to go ahead in my clinic goes against everything I believe in.”
“Just remember it’s for Marie,” Ferguson said.
“And for Miss Duval,” Morrissey said. “And for all the other victims of this man, and yet I still know how wrong it is.” He paused. “So why am I allowing it to happen?”
“Because you’re a human being,” Ferguson said, “as well as a doctor.”
“And because you’ve never met anyone like Schwartz before,” Joe added, softly.
Morrissey stood up.
“And pray never to again,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Monday, January 25th
Lally had a bad feeling. It had nothing to do with her pacemaker or with her heart. It had everything to do with Chris. It was almost ten-thirty, and she had not seen or heard from him since around lunchtime, just after they’d arrived at the clinic. She’d tried calling Joe’s house and had left messages on the answering machine, and she had asked everyone who would listen, but no one seemed to know where Chris was. For a little while, she thought he might have gone home. It would make sense for him to go to Katy, or to Andrea. But not without telling her. Not without saying goodbye. And anyway, someone else would have told her. Hugo would certainly have told her.
“You’re not leaving this room without telling me what’s happened to Chris,” she ordered Joe when he tried to dive in and out on one of his flying visits. “Is he sick or something?”
“Chris is fine,” Joe said, lying through his teeth.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Joe?”
“You know I wouldn’t.”
“But you do know where he is, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Is he doing something for you? Is that why he hasn’t called?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“No.”
“Sometimes, Joseph Duval, I almost hate you.”
“No, you don’t, you adore me.”
They shared a swift, strong hug.
“Joe, what’s going on?” Lally, not about to let him leave, drew away. “Lucas and the others are here now – why can’t we get this surgery over and done with?”
Their two matching sets of grey eyes met and held.
Joe gave in and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Because there’s a slim chance – and I mean a real slim chance – that we may get some information that could help make the surgery even safer.” He paused. “It could even mean that Ash might not have to operate at all, though we’d all have to be a million per cent sure.”
Lally still looked deep into his eyes.
“You’ve got the man.” She felt a charge of excitement.
“I can’t talk about it, Lally.”
“But you have got him, haven’t you?”
Joe held both her hands. “Don’t get your hopes up, sweetheart. We’re all working on it, but neither Morrissey nor Ash think we should hold your surgery up any longer than is safe, and I agree with them.”
“I understand that,” Lally said.
“Are you okay to be alone now?” Joe asked. “I saw Hugo taking a nap in the waiting room. I could go wake him.”
She shook her head. “Leave him. He’s exhausted, poor man.”
“He’s still crazy about you, isn’t he?” Joe said.
“I think so,” Lally answered softly.
“All these men, Lally Duval, pining away for you.”
Lally kept her hands in his. “You like Chris, don’t you, Joe?”
“He’s married, sweetheart.”
“I know. But you do like him, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Gently, Joe removed his hands. “Yes, I do.”
When Joe had left the room, Lally lay back and tried to rest, tried to focus on the slender hope he had brought her but, for the time being at least, her heart and the pacemaker were not quite uppermost in her thoughts. She had never been as big on intuition as her brother, but despite Joe’s reassurances about Chris, Lally thought she had one of his famous warning spine-prickling hunches now.
Chris was in some kind of trouble. She was sure of it.
By eleven o’clock, Schwartz was not feeling quite as good as he had. He was uncomfortably warm again, and pretty sure that his fever had risen a degree or more in the past hour, and the EKG monitor attached to his body by all those damned electrodes was beginning to make him edgy.
“Do I have to have that thing switched on all the time?” he asked one of the nurses when she came in to check the new bag on his IV and to straighten his pillows.
“It’s nothing to worry about, Mr Schwartz,” she answered, soothingly.
“I’m not worried,” he said, tartly. “The noise is irritating me.”
“I’ll have a word with Dr Kaminsky, shall I?”
“Dr Kaminsky, I gather, is my physician?”
“He is, sir, yes.” She finished his pillows.
“What exactly is his specialty, nurse?”
“Poisons, sir. And envenomations.”
Schwartz lay back and restlessly batted at the bedclothes with his right fist. “It would be nice if Dr Kaminsky would take the time to come and see me. I’ve been here for over an hour and a half.”
“I’m sure he’ll be in to see you very soon now, sir.”
The nurse left the room quietly, and Schwartz stared up at the ceiling. Until the last half-hour or so, ever since the visit from the lieutenant, he’d been pretty certain that this transfer had been some kind of ploy to put him under the same roof as the young woman with the pacemaker – if, of course, she existed at all. They want to play with me, I’ll play with them, he’d thought, confidently. But he was feeling sicker again, and he knew that the damned lizard, the shitty little captive dragon that he’d boiled into infinity, had done its work too well, and it was starting to mess with his mind again, and he needed to be clear, he needed to be sharp with the lieutenant, with all of them.
The monitor bleeped erratically.
He didn’t like the way he felt.
As few employees of the Howe Clinic as possible had been drawn into Joe’s plot. Two night nurses, two orderlies, no one else. And all they knew was that the heating in Schwartz’s room was to be turned gradually higher, that ventilation was to be kept to a minimum, that they were to appear not to notice any discomfort themselves and that, for reasons they did not need to know, Marie Ferguson’s husband was, so far as Schwartz was concerned, to be known as Dr Kaminsky, a specialist in the treatment of poisoning and envenomation.
Lally Duval’s room was on the third floor of the clinic. Schwartz’s was on the second. Every other, regular patient had been moved to the far side of the building before Lally’s arrival, and John Morrissey had spent more than two hours visiting each one in turn, explaining that a localized electrical problem had necessitated the transfer from their preferred rooms, and that they would be compensated for any inconvenience caused.
Like Lally and Schwartz, Hugo was growing restless. Seeing Joe walking past the waiting room where he’d been napping, he jumped to his feet and called to him.
“What’s going on, Joe?”
“Things are moving.”
“What things?”
“You could use a shave, Hugo.”
Irritably, Hugo rubbed his beard. “Joe, I’m not asking you to disclose police business, but Lally’s going nuts in there.”
“I’ve spoken to Lally, she’s doing okay.”
“She wants to know where Webber is.” Hugo wasn’t giving up easily. “I know he left with you at lunchtime when you said you were taking him to your place – I bought that, and so did Lally. But now she hasn’t heard from him all day, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t give a damn if she never heard from him again, but circumstances aren’t normal, and she’s really upset.”
Joe was itching to move on, but he knew that Hugo was Lally’s dearest fri
end and distraught from waiting, and so he let him finish.
“I know she’s upset, Hugo, but I think I’ve put her mind at rest.”
“You know where Webber is?”
“I do.”
“Did you tell Lally?”
“I told her there was nothing to worry about.”
Hugo’s soft brown eyes were suspicious. “Is that the truth?”
“Absolutely.” It wasn’t that Joe didn’t trust Hugo, but he was a soft man, and he doubted if he was capable of successfully lying to Lally for more than five minutes.
“Lieutenant.”
Joe turned around and saw Morrissey at the top of the staircase.
“Kaminsky’s about ready,” Morrissey said.
“Good.” Joe turned back to Hugo. “I have to go.”
“You’ve had a breakthrough, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s Kaminsky?”
“No one you need to know about.”
“Is this breakthrough going to help Lally?” Hugo persisted.
“Maybe,” Joe said.
Joe and Morrissey walked down the staircase to the second floor.
“How ready is Ferguson?” Joe asked.
“As ready as he can be.”
“Do you think he’s going to be able to handle it?”
“I thought I was the one with all the doubts,” Morrissey said, drily.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Joe said. “Schwartz killed Ferguson’s wife. I’m having nightmares about Kaminsky throttling his patient.”
“Sean Ferguson’s smarter than that, Lieutenant,” Morrissey said. “He knows what we’re trying to achieve, and he knows he has to treat Schwartz with kid gloves. We’ve gone through the basics – he knows how to take a pulse and read a thermometer, and he can bluff his way through an EKG recording – ”
“What if Schwartz suspects something?”
“Then Sean’ll fly by the seat of his pants.”
They reached Schwartz’s floor. Ferguson, white-coated, a stethoscope around his neck, was pacing the corridor near Schwartz’s room.
“He looks nervous,” Joe said.
If I Should Die Page 24