She opened her mouth and Adam slapped her hard enough to leave a throbbing red handprint on her left arm. Pain jagged through her body, more pain than anyone could endure. This was worse than the time he’d hit her with the cane. Much worse. Rachel screamed and the heart monitor jumped up another twenty beats a minute. It pushed past the 160 mark before slowly settling back to 140.
‘Number Five will not speak. Not. A. Word.’
Rachel struggled against the restraints, desperate to escape, but they held firm, the leather digging into her arms. She wanted to crawl back into that narcotic bubble she’d been in earlier. She’d felt warm and safe in the bubble. Nothing had mattered. There had been no pain, no screams. Adam reached for a hunting knife and she shrank back into the dentist’s chair. The blade was razor-sharp and glinted beneath the bright lights, six inches of wicked steel.
She looked at the knife, then looked at Adam.
The heart monitor beeped faster.
‘This is really going to hurt,’ he said.
36
By the time I’d showered and dressed, room service had arrived. Another full breakfast, a cholesterol-heavy injection of protein and calories to recharge my batteries. Plenty of coffee to wash it all down. I’ve got a hyperactive constitution, the sort of metabolism supermodels would kill for. I never put on weight. The downside is that my blood sugar level can crash without warning, and when that happens things can get real messy real fast.
I ate quickly then took my coffee out onto the balcony. The grey skies were back and the darkness was heavy and oppressive. There was more snow on the way. Six storeys below people hurried through the cold, wrapped up warm and moving fast. It was still an hour until sunup. Tomorrow was the shortest day. In forty-eight hours the days would start to get longer again, and in five days it would be Christmas. I’d still be around in two days, I’d probably be around in five. Hopefully these unsubs would be in custody by the New Year, though, so I could get the hell out of Siberia.
I lit a cigarette and called Hatcher. Seven o’clock and the detective was already at his desk. He told me about the parking ticket and I made all the appropriate noises you made when you heard something for the first time. Aside from that, nothing much was happening. They’d found plenty of disgraced medical students, but none who fitted the profile. No sign of the unsub’s practice victim, either.
Hatcher was talking but I wasn’t really listening. Something Professor Blake said yesterday had jumped into my head and I could have kicked myself for not spotting its significance earlier. It’s the smallest of details that make or break an investigation. They can be the difference between alive and dead. It wasn’t just God who was in the details, the devil was in there, too, and he was just waiting to trip you up. Professor Blake had told me that Freeman had progressed from experimenting on grapefruits to experimenting on cadavers.
Grapefruits and cadavers. Plural rather than singular.
I’d told Hatcher to look for one murder victim, but it was possible the unsub had needed more than one person to experiment on.
‘We need to expand the search parameters for the practice victim,’ I told Hatcher. ‘First off, we could be looking for more than one victim. The exact number will depend on how quickly the dominant unsub taught himself to perform a lobotomy. Also, we’re looking for a female or a male. Any age from thirteen or fourteen upwards. The victim will be low-risk. A prostitute or a junkie, or a homeless person. They’re going to be under sixty, since the older they are the easier it would be to kill them accidentally. However, I wouldn’t be too concerned about placing an upper age limit since this will be self-regulating. Junkies don’t tend to live to be old. And forget about anyone who fits the original victim profile. He was experimenting, so he knew these ones were going to die. Part of his signature is that he doesn’t kill, so you’re looking for someone who doesn’t fit the criteria he uses to choose his usual victims. That means no brown-eyed, brunette career women.’
‘Great,’ said Hatcher. ‘Can you narrow it down any less?’
‘The victim will stand out,’ I assured him. ‘This unsub was practising his surgical skills so there will be evidence of the brain being mutilated. Get your people to call every coroner in the city. Even if it was a couple of years ago, someone’s going to remember something like this. He may well have attempted to disguise what he’d done.’
‘How?’
‘Maybe he used a hammer to smash in the front of the skull, destroying any evidence of mutilation to the prefrontal cortex. Or perhaps he removed the head and disposed of it separately. Get imaginative’.
‘Get imaginative,’ echoed Hatcher.
There was frustration in his voice, a stress that comes from chasing shadows and ghosts and feeling like you’re getting nowhere. I could imagine him hunched over his desk, shaking his head wearily and rubbing those basset hound eyes and wishing he’d been an engineer or an accountant or a grocery store bagger, anything but a cop.
‘We’re going to catch them,’ I said.
‘Well it had better happen sooner rather than later.’
Hatcher let go of a sigh that was loaded with a ton of hidden implications.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
Another sigh, this one longer and even more loaded.
‘This stays between you and me,’ he said. ‘Okay?’
‘You could be talking to your priest,’ I replied.
‘There’s a rumour going around that I’m going to be taken off the investigation.’
‘Ignore it. There are always rumours, and there always will be. And do you know the thing about rumours? Nine times out of ten there’s no substance behind them. They’re just smoke. Usually what you’re dealing with is some asshole with a grudge, or someone playing politics. Bottom line: you’re the best person for the job, Hatcher.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, but this is the one time in ten where the rumour has substance. The media is putting pressure on the people upstairs, and that pressure is being passed down the line to me. It’s scapegoat time, and I’m right up there at the top of the hit list. Everyone wants to know why we haven’t caught this bastard yet. And by
we
they mean
me
. And rightly so. I’ve had over a year to catch him and he’s still out there. Rachel Morris’s kidnapping has sent the press into a feeding frenzy. You want to see this morning’s papers, it’s not good. The media has cranked up the fear level. People are scared.’
‘Then let’s throw the media a bone.’
‘What have you got in mind, Winter?’
‘Give me a couple of hours to sort some things out.’
‘You’re not going to tell me. Fine.’ Another sigh. ‘But be quick. I need you here.’
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
I killed the call, took a last drag on my cigarette, pitched the butt over the railing and headed inside, back into the warm. Downstairs at reception, the concierge ordered a cab. The car arrived five minutes later. I climbed inside, gave an address to the driver, then settled back in my seat.
I realised we were being tailed the second we turned out of the Cosmopolitan’s driveway.
37
The X-Type Jag was right behind us, close enough for me to make out the two guys up front. The guy behind the wheel was in his late forties, skinny and tense-looking. His buddy was younger, and much bigger, tall and wide and bulky. A linebacker rather than a quarterback. The driver did nothing to hide the fact he was following. He matched us move for move, turn for turn. Whenever my driver indicated, he indicated. I rapped my knuckle on the partition and the cabby slid it open.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
The cabby was a white guy in his late fifties. He had a beer belly and a jolly demeanour and had probably driven cabs his whole life. I nodded to the rear-view mirror.
‘See that Jag behind us? I’ll give you an extra twenty if you can lose it.’
‘No problem.’
The cabby put his foot down and I held on tight. He turned down side streets without indicating, bullied his way through jams, cut across traffic to a discordant chorus of blaring horns. I lost count of the number of near misses we had. My adrenalin was pumping and my knuckles were shining white from gripping the seatbelt. I kept catching glimpses of the cabby’s reflection in the rear-view mirror. He was grinning a wide dopey grin and clearly having a ball. He looked like a little boy who’d fallen through the big screen and ended up in a Hollywood action movie.
My guy was good.
Really
good. Unfortunately the skinny guy driving the Jag was better. He rode the rollercoaster the whole way, never falling more than two vehicles behind. We turned into Dunscombe House and made our way up the potholed drive, swerving from side to side to avoid the worst of the craters. The cab rolled to a stop at the front door, and the Jag rolled to a stop in a parking lot about fifty yards away.
‘Sorry, I gave it my best shot,’ the cabby said.
‘No problem,’ I told him, and gave him the extra twenty anyway.
The cab did an about-turn and disappeared down the drive. The Jag stayed put. I gave the driver a small salute then made my way to the front door and rang the bell.
The same receptionist as yesterday was behind the counter. She called me Detective Winter and I didn’t bother to correct her since it saved on long explanations and made my life a whole lot easier. She got me to sign in and I headed past the tall Christmas tree into the day room.
Sarah Flight was in the exact same spot she’d occupied yesterday, her chair pushed into the bay window, the unseen grounds stretching out on the other side of the glass. I carried a chair over and sat down beside her.
Today’s crowd was the same as yesterday’s, a dozen or so patients floating twenty miles high. Like yesterday, some were playing cards and some were talking to themselves, while others were staring off into space. The same two orderlies were on duty. They had a table to themselves and looked as bored as they had the previous day. The TV high up in the corner had the volume down too low to hear anything anyone was saying.
If I came here tomorrow, or a year from now, or ten years, the scene would be pretty much the same. The faces would change, but that TV would still be playing to itself. Someone screamed upstairs and my head automatically snapped towards the sound. I was the only person in the room who reacted. Even the orderlies didn’t really react. They paused in mid-conversation for a moment, then started up again like nothing had happened. The screamer let rip with another high-pitched, tortured shriek. It was impossible to say with any degree of certainty if they were male or female.
‘So how’s it going, Sarah?’
Sarah stared through the glass, seeing but not seeing. Her chest rose and fell in line with the instructions being sent out from her medulla oblongata. Her hair was sleep-tangled and a stringy line of drool had escaped from the corner of her mouth. I’d brought a packet of tissues with me this time and used one to wipe the drool away.
Outside, a groundskeeper tidied up leaves. The footprints in the virgin snow showed where he’d been, and there were tyre tracks from his small tractor, neat parallel lines like rail tracks. A monkey puzzle tree stretched strong and tall into a slate-grey sky. The world on the other side of the glass was sheened with the dull matt of winter.
Sarah didn’t see any of this. She probably had this same spot every day, the same view. The seasons would come and the seasons would go and she would be oblivious to it. That was depressing enough, but what made it worse was the fact that Sarah would never complain about her unchanging view.
I sat back and crossed my legs and waited.
It didn’t take long.
Amanda Curtis came into the room. Light, defined footsteps on the wooden floor. She picked up a chair on her way across the room and placed it next to her daughter’s. There were stress lines etched into her face, crow’s feet around her sad brown eyes. The grey in her hair had been hidden with dye. She looked a lot like Sarah Flight, only older.
Like her daughter, Amanda also had an empty space on her ring finger. This was the ripple effect in action. Something I was all too familiar with. You got the victim, then you got the victims of the victim, that poison rippling outwards from the unsub like radiation from a nuclear blast, completely invisible and just as destructive.
‘Morning, sweetheart.’
Amanda Curtis brushed Sarah’s hair back from her forehead, uncovering a patch of skin where she could plant a kiss, then sat down and stared out at the grounds. For a while she just sat and stared and said nothing. I wondered what she was seeing, what memory she’d lost herself in.
‘The first day Sarah was here, they left her in a chair facing the wall.’ Amanda was talking to her reflection in the glass. ‘I know it’s silly but I was so angry. Almost as angry as I had been when I first heard what happened to her.’
‘It’s not silly,’ I said.
‘I like to think there might be a piece of the Sarah I knew and loved still in there. I know that’s not the case, but even still.’ Her voice trailed off and she took a moment to catch her thoughts. ‘Sarah would have liked this view. She always loved the outdoors. As a child she was happiest when she was outside. She used to love riding horses. Watching her fly around on the back of a horse, going over all those jumps, used to worry me half to death. She was absolutely fearless. I would never have stopped her, though, because that would have been like taking away one of the things that made her who she was.’
Amanda reached out and placed a hand on her daughter’s. The gesture brought her out of her memories and back into the room. She turned her sad brown eyes in my direction.
‘So what can I do for you, detective?’
‘I’ve come to ask permission to kill your daughter,’ I said.
38
There were four scars in total. One on her stomach, one on each arm, and the fourth on her thigh. They burned into Rachel’s skin, branding her. The longest and deepest was four inches long and ran down her left biceps. She’d passed out by the time Adam started cutting into her thigh and didn’t remember that one. That final scar was the shortest, only an inch in length. When she’d stopped screaming, he’d stopped cutting.