The Inquisitor

by Peter Clement

  And every step of the crash had gone perfectly. Having cinched my seat belt extra tight, I emerged from the impact of hitting the tree with little more than a few bruises and a sore chest from the shoulder belt. Graceton, though still conscious, ended up severely dazed and was easy to knock out. A further push of the car sent it hurtling the rest of the way to the creek.

  My plan with J.S. hadn't gone as well. She could still finger me. But with her sedated for the night, I'd have time to think of a way to dispose of the problem. Maybe I wouldn't have to. Maybe I could still have her. No- it would be so risky. Before long she would figure it out. And every day I would be waiting for it to happen. Oh, God. I'd grown so fond of her, and the release she provided in bed was fantastic. I didn't want to hurt her. But the danger of keeping her around would drive me crazy.

  I pried what felt like the last rock free, the lurch of the tire iron snapping my thoughts back to the present. With Earl and Janet, maybe I hadn't made any mistakes after all. Could it be? If I could just finish this, I'd have fooled everybody about everything so far. The prospect gave me a surge of strength as I leaned my back against the underframe and pushed with my legs.

  I still couldn't budge it.

  A quick probe around the rear tire this time revealed more rocks. I went to work on them but couldn't find the right spot with the tire iron to dislodge the first one. I went to get the flashlight.

  After checking Garnet again- still unresponsive to pain- I made my way back around the other side of the car, hoisted myself up to the broken side window, and froze.

  Janet looked up at me, eyes black with hatred.

  But that's not what had my attention.

  At her breast she held a baby soaked in the bloody remains of its afterbirth, sucking at her nipple.

  I shrank back from the sight.

  "Save the boy," she ordered in a flat, cold voice. "I'm as good as dead. And I know you'll kill Earl if he isn't already gone. What would it cost you to spare the child?" Her stare penetrated mine with the icy stealth of needles.

  I looked away, but the image of that infant had emblazoned itself on my brain, and she continued to speak with no more expression than a corpse.

  "No matter what story you cook up, someone will doubt it, and you're doomed. But if you rescue my baby, you'd be a hero, and less likely to draw suspicion."

  I tried to shut the words out, but they grated through me, permeating my head and scraping the inside of my skull.

  "Please!" she persisted. "I'm begging. Save his life. Who'd question a hero?"

  She continued to implore me to have mercy on her son.

  Definitely not what I intended.

  Even if I succeeded, got away now, a new nightmare would replace the old. Visions of a blood-covered newborn and Janet's accusing stare might await me every time I closed my eyes for the rest of my days. What the hell had I accomplished?

  I recoiled from the thought, fought to deny it, but broke into a sweat. I'd already experienced how the power of a dead man could possess my mind, putrefy my subconscious, and roam my dreams. Against a haunting by a dying mother and child, I would have no defenses whatsoever, because this ghost would be fueled by my own guilt, not rage against the guilt of another. I may have been able to harden myself against relatively bloodless killings, but to have actually seen the baby, heard Janet plead for its life- that wouldn't succumb so readily.

  Grabbing the flashlight, I retreated from the interior of the car, turning my back on that malignant scene, and attacked the stones with a frenzy.

  As I worked, I shut out her pleas and desperately tried to force my wild emotions to order.

  Feelings never flowed easily through me or came freely. They either surged out of control, having to be wrangled and herded like errant beasts, or died completely until I exhumed and reanimated them, as if forcing spiritless things to life. Clinical objectivity, on the other hand, was something I naturally excelled at. In addition to serving me well in my medical career, it concealed a terrible coldness. And I'd taken that objectivity to new heights recently. Several times over the past weeks I'd argued myself in or out of killing as if the matter were merely a question of logic. So why not now? It would just be a matter of hiking objectivity to yet another level.

  And I had another talent: making everybody laugh or feel good about themselves. It deterred them from being too critical of me and protected my secret self. So I'd perfected the graces of charm and wit the way some people polished their golf game. I would only have to work the skill on a higher plane, and no one would ever begin to think I could do anything appalling to a baby.

  But charm couldn't stop dreams. Even sparing the infant might not do that.

  I adjusted the flashlight and reattacked the rocks with the desperation of a man digging for air.

  "Thomas, I beg you, don't murder my son," Janet persisted, her voice nearly lost in the sounds of rain and the stream. Yet her words rang as clear and hard as if she'd whispered them in my ear.

  At first Earl heard the rain.

  Then felt it across his face like icy streamers.

  He managed not to flinch when Thomas kicked him.

  Let the bastard think the crack on the head still had him out cold. He needed time to subdue the twenty migraines that had set up residence in his brain.

  But when he heard Janet's voice, he surfaced fast.

  He cracked an eyelid just enough to catch a glimpse of Thomas off to his left hefting rocks like he was harvesting watermelons.

  What was he doing?

  No matter. He had to take him. Whatever his favorite resident had in mind for him and Janet, it would be terminal. He felt around with his right hand for a rock, found one the size of a five-pin bowling ball, and, with memories of Bible stories, got ready to heave it at the man's head.

  But Thomas suddenly threw down the tire iron, walked around to the other side of the car, and leaned hard against the trunk, causing the whole vehicle to teeter over Earl's head.

  "Holy shit!" he cried. He sat bolt upright and rolled forward just as the front and back tires hit the ground, bracketing where he'd been lying in a half foot of water.

  "Earl!" Janet screamed.

  "I'm okay!" he hollered, and threw his rock.

  It glanced off Thomas's shoulder as the big man rounded the car and flew at him.

  Earl saw the abandoned tire iron glinting in the pale light and leapt for it.

  They both reached it at the same time and wrestled with it between them, like a steel taffy pull. Earl managed to hang on for the first few twists, but the younger man had much more strength and soon wrenched it out of his hands. Earl stumbled backward, ducking swipes at his head, the bar whistling past his ear.

  Three times. Four times. Sooner or later it would hit.

  Then, over Thomas's shoulder, he saw a row of trucks with orange flashers pull up behind his van, and a bunch of men in tangerine jumpsuits pile out.

  "Help!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "Help me!"

  He ducked for the fifth and sixth time, high-stepping it backward, slipping on rocks, trying to keep his footing.

  "You don't think I'm going to fall for that stupid trick, do you, Dr. G.?" Thomas asked, winding up for strike seven.

  Searchlights befitting a Hollywood opening sliced through the gloom and spotlighted them both.

  Thomas shielded his eyes, and his white features twisted into a look of horror that would have done Marcel Marceau proud. He began to run in the opposite direction, giving Earl a wide berth, across the stream and up the far bank, still clutching the tire iron.

  Earl immediately ran to the passenger side of the car and got the door open. "Go with the baby," Janet ordered, handing him the tiny figure.

  "We go together," he said, clasping the infant inside the folds of his coat. He turned to the group of figures running down from the highway. "We need help here," he yelled at them. "My wife's just had a baby. And someone get that man." He pointed to where Biggs was disappearing up
the far slope. "He tried to kill us."

  A half dozen of the hydro workers reached the edge of the stream and stopped.

  "I said, get him! He's going to escape," Earl yelled at them, still clutching his tiny, newborn son and kneeling beside Janet. Together they watched through the shattered front windshield as Biggs struggled up the far bank and disappeared beyond the reach of the spotlights.

  "That bugger's not going anywhere," the man with the ravaged cheeks said as he ran up beside them.

  Seconds after he spoke, an arc of electricity bright as the sun exploded out of the darkness where they'd last seen Biggs. At its center stood his rigid silhouette, limbs extended and quivering, hair and clothing ignited in flames. For an instant it turned him into a human lightbulb, the strands of his tissues serving as filaments of carbon, their glow strong enough to illuminate an area as big as a baseball diamond. Then the current snapped off, the effect of a circuit breaker somewhere, and as darkness returned, his blackened form collapsed to earth.

  Chapter 21

  Janet's next few hours came to her in snatches.

  She heard Earl yelling into a two-way radio that a hydro worker must have given him, demanding an ambulance, an incubator, and vials of protamine zinc, the antidote to heparin.

  Seconds later the attendants seemed to be putting her on a stretcher.

  She heard snippets of conversation about CPR and possible organ retrievals.

  "Don't bring the bastard to St. Paul's!" she heard Earl snap.

  The next moment she found herself in the back of a swaying vehicle, a siren rising and falling above the hiss of tires on the road and the battering of rain against the roof. Earl hovered over her, setting up portable oxygen tanks, inserting several IVs to infuse her with normal saline, and administering the first injection to counteract the hemorrhage.

  "Let me hold him," she said, her voice sounding hollow to her own ears.

  The rest of the way she comforted their son in a blanket, clutching him to her, refusing to surrender his tiny form back to the isolation of a plastic chamber just yet. This may be the only time he feels me hold him, she thought, and warned Earl off with a sharp glance when he suggested putting a line in one of the child's veins. Time enough for tubes and needles later.

  They pulled up to the unloading dock and the rear doors of the vehicle flew open.

  A pair of nurses she recognized from the preemie unit leapt inside, their uniforms a cliche of powder blue and baby pink. "We've got him, Dr. Graceton," the older of the two said, carefully lifting him, so little and so light, from Janet's hands to the isolette.

  They transferred it onto a cart and ran off, wheeling the Plexiglas chamber between them.

  Like a miniature coffin, Janet thought, and her insides gave a wrenching twist. "Stay with him," she ordered Earl, interrupting the string of orders he issued as his ER team rushed her into a resus room.

  "I've got Janet," a familiar voice said. Michael Popovitch stepped to her side, the concern in his eyes at odds with the wrinkles of an attempted smile.

  The ridges of anxiety on Earl's face rose up in surprise. "But you're not on-"

  "They called me in. Now go."

  "Thank you-"

  "Get!"

  Earl nodded, squeezed Janet's hand, and whispered to her, "I love you," then ran out the door.

  "My thanks too, Michael," she said quietly. All the ER doctors were competent, but some, like Michael, held the distinction of being a physician's physician, that rare breed not afraid to take care of his own.

  By the time he added red cells and fresh frozen blood to Janet's IVs, then got her to ICU, her vitals had steadied and her bleeding had started to subside.

  She drifted in and out of nightmares that had her trapped back in her car, screaming at Thomas Biggs, demanding, "Why?"

  Awake, she anguished about the baby. Had the violent labor injured him? Had the heparin thinned his blood? Had the combination of drug and trauma led to internal bleeding, in particular the dreaded complication of a brain hemorrhage?

  Sometime before dawn she started half awake. Through barely open eyes, she saw Earl leaning over her and felt his hand, free of its glove, stroking her hair. Even in the dim glow of her night-light she could tell that his eyes were washed clear of the worry and dread from before.

  He must know from the initial tests and examinations that the baby should be all right.

  Her own fear released its grip, and she sank into a dreamless, exhausted sleep.

  Two days later, Saturday, July 19, 11:10 a.m.

  Preemie Unit, Obstetrical Department, St. Paul's Hospital

  "Thomas Biggs was Jerome Wilcher's son," Earl began, settling into the chair by Janet's bed.

  "His son?" She'd only just been wheeled upstairs to the obstetrical floor, where the baby could room with her. Though still wan from her ordeal, her color had improved at the prospect of holding the recently named Ryan Graceton Garnet in her arms. She kept glancing toward the door, expecting the nurses to bring him to her any second. Yet she'd also insisted that Earl tell her everything he'd learned about why Thomas Biggs had done what he did. She seemed to need an explanation, as if that would somehow make it easier to recover from the horror of her ordeal. "I thought Jerome and his wife had no children."

  "Thomas's mother had been one of his mistresses."

  "Really?" The revelation grabbed her full attention for a few seconds, then she resumed her watch of the door.

  "Are you sure you want to hear this now?" He'd spent the last two days on the phone tracking fragments of information, then pieced it together sitting by her side in ICU while she slept. Whenever the nurses allowed, he also visited the nursery to hold the tiny, scrawny-limbed little boy with a wrinkled red face under a straight-up brush of black hair. He would watch in wonder as the miniature fingers of a doll-sized hand tentatively closed on his own gloved finger, barely able to reach halfway around it, yet exerting a titan's pull on his heart. To let the sordid, twisted story of Thomas Biggs intrude on such sacred moments seemed a sacrilege, yet it insinuated itself, each time leaving Earl weak-kneed at how closely that legacy of buried pain and obsession had touched Ryan and Janet.

  She glared at him. "How the hell did you find out?"

  "Through Cheryl Branagh. After my conversation with her Wednesday, she began to think that my idea of someone caring enough about Jerome Wilcher to avenge his death might not be so crazy. I made a call to the cemetery where she remembered attending the funeral, giving the caretaker a story that former colleagues wanted to include the late doctor in a hall of honor but were unable to track down any family members. The caretaker, demonstrating most people's willingness to give doctors confidential information, looked up who had been paying the maintenance for the grave. He found a Mrs. Kathleen B. Otterman, her address on a rural route somewhere in Tennessee."

  "The B stood for Biggs?"

  "Right. It was her maiden name- she's a divorcee. But I'd no idea of that when I first phoned. The woman herself wouldn't come on the line to talk with me, but her sister gabbed readily enough. Said Katie, as she called her, had been an invalid for years. I asked outright if they knew Thomas Biggs. 'Thomas?' she said. 'Oh, my God, what's happened?' I told her just about the electrocution, not the rest of what he'd done, letting it sound like an accident. Then I told her what hospital they'd sent him to. From the way she went to pieces, he undoubtedly meant a lot to her, and she kept saying, 'This will finally kill Katie.'"

  "Is he still alive?"

  "More a heart-lung preparation from what I hear. He's got spurts of brain activity that no one can really account for, enough that they won't pull the plug to chop him for parts just yet, though his kidneys and liver are spoken for."

  She shuddered. "But what's the rest of the story? I mean, he'd have been what, thirteen when Jerome killed himself? And the man probably wasn't much of a dad, no? Why the hell would he go after Stewart now?"

  "I've spent forty-eight hours trying to figure that out. I'm
afraid all I could get were secondhand scraps of information, so it's been more filling in the gaps than anything else."

  "But what about the police? Won't they-"

  "The woman investigating Stewart's death, Detective Lazar, spoke with the county sheriff where Biggs's mother and aunt lived. He knew all the dirt about the family, and gave the impression most of the locals did too. According to him, Thomas's mother had still been married when she started having an affair with Jerome Wilcher. She'd worked as a technician at one of the labs he visited where they were doing research trials for one of his projects. After getting pregnant, she divorced her husband but kept her married name and raised Thomas on her own. Jerome Wilcher visited a lot but must have kept his little family a secret from his New York colleagues- probably because of that ex-wife who kept trying to clean him out financially. Thomas and his mother apparently never got much support, but at Jerome's death, they found out he'd set up a trust for Thomas's university education. Except Katie went off the deep end."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Once Jerome hung himself, she no longer saw any reason to be discreet, though most of the locals knew what was going on anyway. But she didn't just begin to speak openly about their long relationship. She obsessed about Jerome's death and belabored anyone who would listen with all the details about how he had been sabotaged by colleagues at NYCH. One tidbit that became common knowledge as a result of her going on all the time is that apparently Thomas discovered Jerome's body. The night he killed himself Katie and the boy were due to arrive on one of their rare trips to visit him in New York. Jerome must have been in such deep despair over the collapse of his career that by then he could no longer face them.

  "And if that weren't trauma enough for Thomas, the mother went nuts afterward, first trying to hang herself in her basement at the farmhouse. Local rumor had it that she staged the event so Thomas would find her in time to cut her down. But the real damage she did him, according to the neighbors, was done over the long term. When she ran out of sympathetic people willing to listen to her ranting about how Jerome had been so heinously wronged, she unleashed it all on Thomas, feeding him a steady diatribe of hatred against those whom she held responsible for his father's death. To his credit, he moved out as soon as he could, but that wasn't until four years later, when he accessed the trust fund and got himself into a community college as far away as possible. But his mother had unquestionably done her work on him, marked him indelibly- much the way, I suppose, a terrorist might indoctrinate a son to be a suicide bomber- spooning him a daily diet of malice against the intended target."