He stood for a moment staring at the remains of the Wilson house, now visible through the thinning smoke, and remembered the small scared boy sitting in his office, nervously clenching and unclenching his hands, flipping his too-long hair off his dirty forehead. He had not really known the boy, but he had liked him. He'd seemed like a good kid.
He thought unreasonably of his own son Justin. He saw him the victim of a deliberately set fire or some other form of murder made to look like an accident and he shivered. Maybe he should send Annette and the kids down to Phoenix to stay with his brother for a few days. Or a few weeks. Or however long it took for this thing to blow over.
He got into the car and backed slowly out, lights and siren off.
Glancing in the rearview mirror at the chaotic street, at the incendiary destruction, he felt as though something had been taken out of him, as though he were empty. He had not realized until now how much he had been depending on that boy to see him through this crisis, to provide him with more dream-inspired clues, to help him, somehow, solve all of these interrelated cases. He had been expecting the boy to be with him every step of the way, to lead him. Now he was alone.
He was on his own and he would have to use his own deductive powers and abilities to put an end to all this.
And he had nothing whatsoever to go on.
He drove slowly back toward the sheriff's office.
The trip to Phoenix was uneventful. Neither Gordon nor Marina felt like speaking, and they drove down Black Canyon Highway without talking, listening only to the sound of the tires on the washboard road and to the cheerily artificial conversation of the morning deejays on the radio. They left early, so there was no traffic, and they stared silently out at the craggy cliffs, massive gorges, and thick forests of the Coconino as they traveled, both lost in their own thoughts.
They reached the Valley well before noon and spent the morning looking through the myriad expensive Fifth Avenue shops in Scottsdale, talking obviously and self-consciously about third-party events entirely unrelated to the upcoming ordeal.
After a quick and quiet lunch at a fake French outdoor cafe, they drove into Phoenix. To the hospital.
Gordon stared up at the peeling white paint and run-down exterior of the hospital's administration building. He couldn't see the top floor of the structure through his car windshield, but he did notice that several of the third-story windows were broken.
Obscene graffiti was spray-painted on the lower portion of the street wall, and the first floor windows were barred with chain link fence. He had never been to St. Luke's before, and the hospital did not look as he had expected. He looked over at Marina, suddenly apprehensive. "I didn't know the place was this old," he said.
She smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry about it. It's a good hospital." She pointed past the administration building to where a giant complex of new concrete buildings arose. "Besides, that's where we're going. This is just the original hospital. I don't think they even use it anymore."
She was right. Gordon pulled into the parking lot and followed the white arrows painted on the asphalt to the new wing, where he found a spot near the entrance, adjacent to a handicapped space. They got out of the Jeep and walked through the sliding glass doors into the air-conditioned hospital lobby. Marina sat down on a cushiony chair and picked up a magazine while Gordon strode purposefully across the carpeted floor to the front desk. A woman wearing a telephone headset was staring intently down at a series of file cards. Gordon cleared his throat to let her know of his presence. "Excuse me," he said.
The woman looked up. "May I help you?"
"Yes, my wife is here to see Dr. Kaplan."
The woman opened a large notebook. "Does she have an appointment?"
"For one o'clock."
"Name?"
"Lewis. Marina Lewis."
The woman's finger ran down the notebook page to a line halfway down and then stopped. "Just a minute." She punched a key on the switchboard in front of her and spoke into the mouthpiece of her headset. "Dr. Kaplan? Mrs. Lewis is here to see you." She paused.
"Yes." Another pause. "Okay. Thank you, doctor." She looked up at Gordon. "Dr. Kaplan is ready for her. A nurse will be coming out with a wheelchair to take her into the exam room."
Gordon walked back across the lobby to where Marina sat reading her magazine. Her overstuffed straight-backed chair was pushed flush against a wall of crisscrossing unfinished wood. Above her head hung a framed ClanNamingha print. She was staring down at the pages of the magazine and did not notice when he walked up. He cleared his throat loudly, pompously.
She looked up at him, smiling. "So?"
"So a nurse is coming to bring you back to Dr. Kaplan." He grinned.
"You're going in style."
She sighed disgustedly. "Wheelchair?"
Gordon laughed. "You got it." He sat down in the chair next to her and gently lifted the magazine from her lap, putting it back on the small table on the other side of her. He took her hands in his, looking into her large brown eyes. "Are you going to be all right?"
She nodded. "Do you want to come back there with me?"
"I don't think they'll let me. Besides, I have to fill out the insurance forms and everything. I'll just wait here for you."
Marina smiled lightly, mischievously. "You're just afraid to go back there."
He smiled back. "You're right."
"What a wuss ."
A thin old nurse, wearing a traditional white hat and uniform, came through the set of swinging double doors next to the front desk, pushing an empty wheelchair. She looked down at the clipboard she was carrying. "Mrs. Lewis?" she called, scanning the lobby.
"That's you," Gordon said. He stood up and walked with her to the wheelchair. They stared silently at each other for a moment, each painfully aware of what the other was thinking, feeling, and she hugged him tightly before sitting down. "Don't worry," he said. "Everything's going to be okay."
She smiled, but her smile was less genuine than before and there seemed to be a hint of sadness in it. She held up her crossed fingers.
"Let's hope so."
The nurse wheeled her through the double doors and into the depths of the hospital.
The smile fled Gordon's face immediately after the doors swung shut, and he walked slowly back to the front desk feeling tired and emotionally fatigued. God, he hoped everything was going to be all right. A gut-level feeling told him that Marina's test results were going to be bad and his brain told him logically that he should prepare for the worst, but part of him wanted to believe the best and was hoping for the best.
He received a sheaf of duplicate forms and a pen from the woman at the desk and sat wearily down in the nearest chair. He twisted his neck in a slow semicircle to relieve some of the stress and closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then he glanced over the papers and began filling out the top form.
"And the Lord said unto woman, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.""
At the sound of the deep oratorical voice, Gordon jerked his gaze up from the forms in his lap. Standing before him, he saw a tall, business-suited man carrying what looked like a small black-bound Bible in his right hand, next to his chest. A bundle of thin pamphlets was clutched in his free-dangling left hand. The man's graying hair was short and neatly combed, parted on the side, and his face was almost pleasant. His eyes were two piercingly black orbs that burned with the fiery intensity of fanaticism. His tie clip, Gordon noticed, was in the shape of a cross.
"Genesis 3:16," the man said.
"I'm not interested," Gordon said shortly. He looked down, turning again to his paperwork, hoping the man would go away. But instead the stranger sat down in the chair next to him. Gordon continued writing, trying to ignore the man. He was acutely aware of the man's presence, and he knew without looking that those burning black eyes were boring into him. After a minute or so, he glanced up. Sure enough, the man was staring. "What do you want?" Gordon
asked.
"My name is Brother Elias," the man said. "I want to help you."
"I don't need any help," Gordon said. He turned back to his insurance forms.
"Yes you do. Your wife is going to have a baby. And there will be troubles."
Gordon jerked his head up, shocked and, against his more rational impulses, a little frightened. "What do you mean?" he said. "Who the hell are you?"
Brother Elias smiled distractedly. He fingered his tie clip. "Do you realize," he said, "that if Christ had been killed with a knife instead of on the cross we would today be worshiping a knife? This tie clasp would be a knife." He made an expansive motion in the air.
"Sculpted knives would hang on the fronts of our churches."
The man was crazy, Gordon realized. He did not know whether Brother Elias was an ex-hippie who had turned to Christ, bringing his fried brain along with him, or whether he was a fallen fundamentalist, but he knew that the man was not one of your ordinary everyday Bible-thumpers.
Gordon picked up the pen from his lap, grabbed his forms and stood up, preparing to move to another seat.
Brother Elias stood up as well.
"I know what has befallen you and your loved ones, and I want to help you," Brother Elias said. "You are suffering the consequences of the wicked." He knelt on the lobby carpet and reached up to grab Gordon's hand. "Sit here and pray with me and we will put it right."
Gordon pulled away, shaking his head, staring in disbelief at the kneeling man. "No."
""The field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one. And the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the close of the age."
Matthew 13:39."
Gordon looked around the lobby to see if anyone else had caught this, to see if anyone else was watching. But the few people sitting in the overstuffed chairs were either staring out the smoked glass of the window onto the parking lot or looking at the carpet, contemplating their own miseries and misfortunes. No one was paying any attention to Brother Elias.
Brother Elias bowed his head. "Praise Jesus!" he said. "Praise the Lord!"
Gordon stared. Why the hell had this guy decided to pick on him?
Brother Elias looked up. "If Christ had been hung instead of crucified, we would today be worshiping a noose."
Gordon walked over to the front desk. He tapped his hand on the white countertop to get the headsetted woman's attention. "Excuse me, miss," he said. "But is this man supposed to be here?" He pointed toward Brother Elias, still kneeling on the floor of the lobby praying.
The woman took one look at the business-suited preacher, at the Bible and the stack of pamphlets on the carpet next to him, and pressed a red key on her switchboard. "Security?" she said. "The reverend is back again. Would you please escort him out of the hospital? .. . Thank you." She looked up at Gordon and nodded.
Gordon returned to his seat, but this time Brother Elias did not follow him. "Pray," the preacher said, walking voluntarily toward the glass doors of the front entrance. He looked back at Gordon. "Pray for your wife. Pray for your daughter. "For I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother."" His black orbs bored into Gordon's for a moment, then he was gone, walking out of the building just as two uniformed security guards entered the lobby from another door.
Gordon picked up his pen and the sheaf of insurance forms.
On top of the stack of papers was a small cheaply printed pamphlet.
The large bold letters on the cover of the pamphlet said: "SATAN is using YOU! HE is here NOW!"
He did not even bother to read the leaflet. He crumpled the paper up and deposited it in the ashtray of the table next to him.
He got to work on the insurance forms.
It was nearly four o'clock when Marina finally emerged from behind the swinging double doors, a different nurse wheeling her out. Gordon, who had been situated in a chair by the front window, staring at the doors and waiting for Marina's return, stood up immediately and went over to her. She looked tired, but she was smiling, and she stood up from the chair as soon as she saw him. "Good news," she said.
"Really?" He could not believe it. He had been preparing himself for the worst, and her announcement took him by surprise.
"I think so. The preliminary tests look good. But it'll be tomorrow before we know for sure." She smiled at him, her eyes twinkling.
"Better start thinking up girls' names."
"Are you sure?"
"No, I lied."
"I mean, it really looks promising?"
She laughed. "It looks that way."
He hugged her, squeezing her close. They kissed. "Let's celebrate," he said, pulling back. "Let's go out somewhere to eat. Somewhere expensive."
Marina shook her head. "I'd rather not. I don't really feel all that well. Some of those tests, you know ..." She shook her head and rolled her eyes in an expression of un believability leaving the sentence unfinished. "Let's just get home."
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather stay overnight in the Valley and drive back up tomorrow?"
"You have to work tomorrow."
"I'll call in sick. Brad won't care."
She looked at him as if he'd just said something outrageous. "You're joking, right?"
He smiled. "All right."
"Besides, we need to save all the money we can. We're going to be proud parents."
He thought of her earlier ideas about an abortion and wanted to ask her what her thoughts were now, but he decided against it. "I get the hint," he said, smiling. He offered her his arm and she took it. "We'd better get started if we want to get back before dark."
They walked out of the lobby into the parking lot. Although it was late afternoon, the temperature was still well over a hundred and the sun was high in the clear blue, cloudless sky. There were no monsoons to relieve the heat in Phoenix. They got into the Jeep, leaning back into their seats slowly. The vinyl upholstery of the car felt hot even through their clothing. Gordon rolled down his window and turned the air conditioner on full blast, trying to drive out the hellishly heated air. He was already sweating.
"Thank God we don't live here," Marina said.
"That's a fact."
They pulled onto Washington Avenue, heading west toward Black Canyon Highway.
A few minutes later, they passed Brother Elias, calmly standing by the side of the road in his business suit, hitchhiking. The preacher smiled directly at Gordon and waved as they drove by THE REVELATION /
How did be know my car? Gordon wondered--but Gordon continued driving and stared straight ahead, ignoring him. He thought he could feel those intense black eyes cutting through the glare of the windshield and boring into him. Marina did not notice a thing.
On the way out of Phoenix, they stopped at a Dairy Queen where they each got a sundae for the long trip home.
Old Mrs. Perry was going to have a baby.
Phil Johnson, director of the Randall Rest Home, shook his head and tossed a twisted paper clip into the wastebasket as he reread the doctor's report. It was inconceivable. The woman was well over eighty and just this side of senile. On her best days she was barely coherent. On her worst days she was little more than a blubbering overgrown infant.
Sighing, he stood up and folded the report, placing it in the top drawer along with several file folders. He flipped off the desk lamp and walked down the sterile white-lighted hallway to Mrs. Perry's darkened room. Slowly, quietly, he pushed open the door and looked in, staring down at her sleeping form. Her cadaverous chest rose and fell visibly with each rasping breath. Her back, propped up by a series of pillows, only accentuated her rising belly. His eyes shifted to her face. A thin line of mucus stretched from her small nose across the wrinkled mustached skin to her dried cracked lips. Even in sleep, he noted, her expression was not peaceful. Her brows were furrowed; her mouth curved down in a painful grimace.
He shook his head again. How could she be pregnant?
The question was never very far from his thoughts. Who would sleep with her? What kind ofsicko would want to have sex with an eighty-year-old woman?
And how in God's name had she gotten pregnant? She was long past menopause. It should have been physically impossible for her to conceive.
But Dr. Waterston had checked her over thoroughly. Several times.
That rising midsection was not caused by overeating, malnutrition, some disease, or any of the other countless possibilities he had first considered. It was caused by the growth of the living fetus inside of her.
Phil quietly left the room, closing the door behind him, and started down the hall to the coffee machine in the kitchen. It was his fault things had gone this far. He should have noticed earlier, he should have kept a closer watch on her, he should have.. ..
But there were other patients in the rest home who also required constant supervision. Too many of them. And he was so hopelessly understaffed that it was a miracle there were not more problems.
Now it was too late for an abortion. In his report, Dr. Waterston said that such a procedure would almost certainly be fatal for the mother as well as the fetus at this stage of the pregnancy. Mrs. Perry's age and precarious physical health made it not only more dangerous but genuinely lethal.
Phil walked into the kitchen, got a Styrofoam cup from the half unwrapped bag on the counter and poured himself some coffee. The room was dark, and he did not bother to turn on a light. A diffused refracted light entered the kitchen through the open hallway door, and the edges of the room were bathed in shadow. He shuddered as he looked into the darkness and thought of what the poor baby would probably look like.
Years ago, as a medic in the army, he had assisted with the birth of an infant to a similarlyove raged woman in a small town in Italy. It had not been a pretty sight. The baby had emerged horribly disfigured, almost indistinguishable from the bloody afterbirth, and had died almost instantly. He had had nightmares about it for years afterward.
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