94
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Dr Chambers, but there is someone here to see you,’ Estelle said, her voice suddenly crackling to life on his desk. Gregory Chambers stared at the intercom for a moment. ‘It’s Special Agent Falconetti with FDLE.’
‘Very well. Please have him wait for a few minutes in the reception area, while I finish up here,’ he replied back to Estelle. Then he finished reading the notes he’d jotted down from his last patient into the dictaphone.
Estelle looked back up from her desk at an obviously worried Dominick Falconetti. She had seen him before, on TV during the trial, but there he always looked so controlled, so confident. Today he looked incredibly anxious. It must be the news, she thought. ‘Agent Falconetti, the doctor can see you in a few minutes, if you would just have a seat,’ Estelle nodded toward the leather chairs in the waiting room.
‘Thank you,’ Dominick said.
She studied him curiously while he moved away from the reception window toward the chairs. She noticed that he did not sit. His eyes perused the waiting room, and he looked at his watch two times.
The door opened then, and Dr Chambers appeared in the reception area. He walked past Estelle and opened the door to the waiting room. ‘Agent Falconetti. Please, come in,’ he said, motioning toward his office.
Dominick followed him past the reception desk and
down the Mexican-tiled hall into the soft yellow-and-blue office. ‘What can I do for you, Dom?’ Dr Chambers said as he closed the door behind them.
‘I’m sure you’ve heard about –’ Dominick began.
‘About C. J. Townsend? Yes, yes, of course. It’s been on the news for two days. Are there any developments?’
‘No. Nothing. That’s why I’m here.’ He hesitated slightly before continuing. ‘I don’t know if you knew this, but we were involved. She told me that she had been seeing you, professionally. With that in mind, I wanted to ask you some questions.’
‘Dom, please, I’ll help out, of course, in any way that I can, but please don’t ask me what was discussed between C.J. and myself. I can’t divulge that, and I won’t.’
‘I understand that. I need to know, when was the last time that you saw her?’
Greg Chambers studied him for a moment. He had already thought this possibility through, this encounter. But if the great Special Agent had known or even suspected the answer to his very own question, he would have rung the good doctor’s doorbell two days ago. And it was just as obvious that he did not know of the others included on his list of special clientele. Apparently, C.J. had kept some things to herself. ‘Oh, not since the trial. It’s been weeks, actually.’
‘Have you spoken with her at all?’
‘No, not since that time. We were no longer seeing each other professionally. I wish I could be of more help.’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘I understand. Is there anything that you can think of? Where she might go? Anyone she might go with? Anyone she was afraid of, perhaps?’
It was clear that they had no idea. None. They could
not even figure out if they had a missing person or a person who wanted to be missing. And it was sad, watching the great detective struggle with the thought that his lover might have left him. Picked up and gone with someone else, leaving him to entertain the thought that he never really knew her after all.
‘No, Dom, again, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Except to say…’ His voice trailed off and he pondered a moment before slowly sharing his next thought. ‘C.J. has a mind of her own. If you are asking for possibilities, it would not be out of the realm of them to say she would take some breathing room if she felt she needed space.’ He looked straight at Dominick, his telling eyes providing the detective with the answer he was looking for, but might not want to know.
Dominick nodded, slowly. Then he handed the doctor a business card and said, ‘Okay. Thanks. Please call me, direct, if she gets in touch with you. I wrote down my home number on the back as well, although I’m available twenty-four/seven on the Nextel, but just in case for some reason you miss me…’
‘I will. And again, Dom, I’m sorry that I couldn’t be of more help.’
Dominick turned and walked down the hallway, his head down, the dejected shoulders slightly sagging. Classic, subtle, and very telling body language. Dr Chambers watched him go, watched him nod ever so slightly to himself as he opened the door to Estelle’s reception room, watched him absorb all that the good doctor had said and had not said. And all that it implied.
Then he watched as Special Agent Dominick Falconetti opened the heavy oak front door, got into his car, and just drove away.
95
The door opened and the room exploded in light. The jingle of keys sounded behind her.
He walked over to the corner sink and began to wash his hands, his back to her. Next to the sink was the metal cart laid out with tools. Scalpels in assorted sizes, scissors, bolt cutters, needles, tape, an IV line kit, straight razors, and an IV bag. He spent at least five minutes scrubbing his hands, like a surgeon, over the sink, and then carefully drying them with paper towels. He opened one of the cabinet drawers below the sink and pulled out a box of sterile rubber gloves and delicately pulled on a pair.
‘Sorry that I’m so late,’ Chambers called out. ‘I got stuck in session. You think you have problems. You should hear what’s out there. Schizophrenic seventeen-year-olds that threaten their own mothers with knives. Can you imagine? Your own mother?’
He walked over to the tripod and looked through the camera, focusing the lens on her face, which was turned up, facing the ceiling, her eyes open. Then he snapped off a picture. ‘I bet you are photogenic. You have wonderful features.’He snapped off another and then refocused to capture the whole gurney.
He walked back over to the metal rolling cart and paused for a moment, thinking. Then he reached under the sink again and took out a pair of green scrubs. In the corner of the room was a metal chair. He removed his
jacket and neatly draped it over the back, then removed his tie, dress shirt, and slacks, folding them neatly on the chair. He dressed in the scrubs, and all the while he hummed. ‘Your friend stopped by the office this morning,’ he said while slipping mint-colored cotton booties over his shoes. ‘Dominick. He wanted to know if I could help him. If I could tell him where you might have gone, and maybe who with. He was very sad when I told him my opinion. Very sad, indeed.’
He pulled the metal cart over to the gurney on her right side. From the cart he took a surgical cap and placed it on his head. ‘You know, I did my residency in surgery, initially.’ He looked down at her right arm and frowned. It was not strapped. He had forgotten to strap it after he had injected her. He raised her arm and let go, watching it crash to the gurney with a thud.
She mumbled something that he couldn’t understand. More garbled nonsense. Tears flowed down the side of her head and on to her hair.
It was sad. This beautiful specimen, this fabulous work in progress. He had thought that when it ended he would have a sense of joy, a sense of validation, to see his hypothesis come true. But when Bill had finally been sentenced to death, when the game had ended and the final play set in motion, he was, well, he was
sad.
He had engineered this experiment from the very beginning, when Bill had walked into his office three years ago with a shitload of problems, down on his luck, and with no one to talk to. But he had listened when Bill ranted and raved. Listened when he had told the nice doctor of all the nasty things he had done to all the nice women he had met over the years. And he had learned. Learned that while coincidences were hard to come by, they did still
happen in this world. And that was when Dr Gregory Chambers, M.D., F.A.P.A., knew that he had found the most amazing specimens with which to conduct the most amazing experiment in all of modern psychiatric scientific history. And although he had dabbled in death long before his sessions with the clinically depressed C.J. or the narcissistic sociopath Bill had ever even begun, those efforts had been immature. The others had not even been missed. Their deaths had been insignificant, inconsequential. But this, well, this experiment had been an
orchestration.
He remembered the thrill of the moment when he had actually decided to do it – and the look on poor, sweet Nicolette’s face when he had sliced her open. She had not realized how important her role was in all this. She had been the first. The first of many in this blind study.
And now that it was over he was sad. Sad because he knew he could not share this great work, this enormous feat with the world. His peers could never know; the observations and results could not be shared and studied by his contemporaries. To them he would still be Dr Joe Anybody.
‘Now, now. No tears,’ he said in a sympathetic voice. ‘I’d like to tell you that this won’t hurt a bit, but I’m afraid that’s just not true. As you know, we need to set you up first with an IV.’ He reached behind him and grabbed a syringe and a rubber band, with which to tie off the vein.
Suddenly, he turned and his hand violently grabbed her right wrist, crushing it in his grip and smashing it hard against the gurney. He moved his head over hers, till his face was inches from her own. He searched her vacant eyes, which stared helplessly at the ceiling.
‘But before we begin’ – he smiled at her from above – ‘why don’t you be a good girl and give me back my scalpel?’
96
How clever. How very clever. Of course, he had noticed the missing scalpel the moment he had walked in the room. Did she think him that stupid, that he wouldn’t notice? A classic mistake, one that others far more clever than she, had made. In her haste, she had underestimated him, taken him for a fool.
Victory in the game of chess comes by ensnaring your opponent in a trap from which he cannot escape, through a series of complicated, but seemingly insignificant, moves. The thrill is won by whispering the word
checkmate
to the dumbfounded fool across from you, who, until that very moment, had been plotting his next move against your queen.
This game was no different, the thrill made even sweeter by a worthy opponent. He moved about the room, setting up his board, laying the trap, giddy with thoughts of seeing the dumbfounded look cross her beautiful face.
He saw the wrist strap unattached, her clenched hand trembling with nervous anticipation before she attempted to save her own life with one last desperate attempt on his. He watched her eyes, wide with fear, and allowed her mentally to move her pawn into position. Then his hand, quick as lightning upon hers, his words to her a final checkmate, her preemptive strike foiled.
Her fist was clenched into a tight ball, and he saw the bright red blood as it oozed out between her fingers,
trickling down her wrist and dripping on to the gurney. Using both of his hands, he pried open her palm. She moaned in protest. There he could see the number-five scalpel, and then the raw, deep cut that it had made in her flesh when she had clenched it so tightly. He plucked it from her grasp, as a parent would do with a toy hoarded by his naughty toddler.
She shook her head slowly from side to side, an obvious acknowledgment of defeat, and tears spilled from her eyes. Her last best effort had failed. It amused him that she had so much strength. A worthy opponent, perhaps – better than all the rest. But, unfortunately, not good enough.
He heard the scream first then in his ear, her words clear, not garbled, and that was when he realized that most of the Haldol had worn off. Much more than he would have thought. Pain, hot and wicked, sliced through his neck, and he felt the warmth of his own blood as it drained on to his scrubs, the green slowly transformed to a dark red.
Surprise replaced amusement, and he watched her shout the words at him, her tearful face now dark and angry. His hands flew to his neck, uselessly covering the small hole that spurted blood violently through his fingertips. He could feel himself drowning in his own blood, heard his own garbled chokes as he tried to speak to her. He watched as the life poured out of him, spilling on to his shoes, slowly seeping away from him across the floor.
He struggled to grab her, to crush and twist her neck, but she was just out of reach as he stumbled backward, and he felt the wall behind him. She sat up on the gurney and he saw the hatred in her eyes. In her left hand she
held another blade, dripping red droplets of blood on to the gurney. His blood.
And at that moment he feared, because he knew that he had made the most classic mistake of all.
He had underestimated her.
97
She knew she had only one chance. Just one chance to get him close enough to her so that she could stick the blade in his eye or ear or neck. She knew her strength was limited, her arms still weak.
He crossed the room in his green scrubs, all the while humming. Then he was next to her, frowning just above her. She knew something was wrong. She tightened the tension in her thumb, clenching the blade tighter against her palm. Had she not pushed the gurney into the same spot? Had she moved the instrument cart too much? In the complete blackness, it had been impossible to discern how things in the room had looked, exactly where they had been placed before.
He was close, but not close enough. But it was clear he knew that something was amiss.
The strap.
He saw that she was not strapped in. She felt the sweat form on her face, even in the freezing-cold room. He grabbed her hand suddenly and dropped it with a thud on the gurney. She let it fall, trying hard to let her hand fall naturally, but without letting go of the blade.
Don’t let go. Whatever you do, don’t let go.
He seemed satisfied and turned away from her to the cart behind him.
Inside, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Closer, just come a little hit closer now with that IV. Just a few more inches.
Suddenly, his hand violently on hers, crashing it to the cart, prying her fingers apart.
No. No. Don’t let go!
She clenched her fist tight, and felt the blade slice through
the layers of skin and tendon and muscle. But still she wouldn’ t let go. Not until her last finger was pried open and she was robbed yet again. He was smiling above her, a smug smile at having figured her out. Foiled her plan. Tears rolled down her face.
God, no. It can’t end like this.