Kathy's condominium complex-Hollings Hollow-was only a few blocks from police headquarters but insulated from noise and neon by beige baffling on three sides. The fourth side was an elongated cluster of shade trees. One time, David jested that if he had been awarded the contract for the baffles, he could have opened a plush Medical and Detective Bureau somewhere and never drawn a salary for life. "Baffle money" would suffice.
Her corner unit comprised one of the smallest there: kitchen, living/dining room combination, single bedroom with bath. It opened directly on an interior roadway and, to the side and rear, a one-car garage, wooden deck and intervening slice of yard occupied more space than the rooms inside. She and David liked to barbecue year-round on the deck which, attached to the kitchen, bedroom and garage, formed a secluded horseshoe. A rock ledge, half as high as the unit, ran along the driveway and garage, defining her property line on the right. More than once, he had said, "This deck right here is the Hollow, not the whole damned place." They would position chairs and a small table not an arm's length from the gas-fired grill and edge even closer in freezing weather.
That evening, he sipped on a second drink and flipped steaks while she shuttled dishes, silverware and seasonings between kitchen and table. A pie plate thermometer on the garage's cedarwood registered thirty-six degrees, and the air smelled fresh as if everything could start over. They chose not to turn on the mushroom lamps, preferring the glow of the fire and slender threads of moonlight.
David wore a burgundy flannel shirt, tan sleeveless sweater, corduroys and his black stocking cap. He forgot the scarf. Kathy was in stirrup pants and a ginger duffle coat whose fleece lining showed at the collar. They flexed and unflexed their fingers as if trying to unfuse them.
He was about to begin discussions of the Bernie/ Marsha alliance and the excursions of Victor Spritz and both Bugles when Kathy sat down and, gripping her hands together, said, "Nick wants you off the case."
He put down a spatula and said calmly, "He what?" David believed she was joshing for she, too, had consumed a generous drink, yet he looked at her as if sizing up an abstract painting and added, "Now run that by me again."
"He wants you to withdraw from the investigation." David now felt his pulse pounding in his ears but stood there, mute, waiting to hear more.
"I asked him why and he said, `What's he getting done? Nothing.'"
"`That's not fair,' I said. `Neither are we when you come right down to it. He's working full-time on the murders.'" Kathy's face turned placatory.
"Then he seemed to lose it. I was at my desk and he stomped around the office, mumbling to himself. So I just expressed what I believe: `Well, we can't stop him.' And David, he gave me such a keep-your-mouth-shut stare that I was frightened for a second."
"Oh, he did, did he? Then what happened?" David kept his lips pursed with suppressed but building fury.
"He said … said? … he almost shouted … `We can't? Well, let me tell you something: for starters, we can sure stop helping him.' Then he leaned over my desk and said, `And I can sure charge him with interfering with a criminal investigation. Do you know what that means? It means obstruction of justice. Plus, he's making us look bad.' That's when I lost it a little myself. I said something like, `And how will that make us look?' Then, he stormed out."
David pulled a chair next to hers, resisting the urge to drive his knuckles into the table. "That son-of-a-bitching carpetbagger! It wouldn't surprise me if he had something to do with the killings."
Kathy dipped her head as if peering over reading glasses. "You're kidding, of course."
David stiffened. "Kathleen, what do you definitely know about him?" He had a million questions about Nick on his mind but waited for an answer.
"Only what came through official channels. He applied for the job. They said he had good recommendations. We checked with San Diego-that I know."
"Ever see him at one of your conventions?"
"No."
"He ever talk about any of his cases?"
The questioning seemed to settle David down. He rose and checked the steaks with a knife and fork, returned to his seat and covered both Kathy's hands with one of his. "Level with me, Kath, don't you think he acts … well … weird at times? Like now?"
"I can't disagree, but I think you're jumping to conclusions."
"Then, you know, he's friggin' stupid. What's he gain by alienating me? There could be times where he might need me more than I need him."
"There's no doubt about it. And no matter what he says, don't ever think of taking yourself off the case. He'll never file a complaint because it wouldn't stand up. You're too well-liked by the rest of the department and he knows it. The only reason I mentioned his ranting and raving is because you should know where you stand with him."
David pulled his hand back. "Another thing," he said. "How come you and he get along so well?"
"That's hardly the case, believe me."
"Well, you're always defending him … "
"Oh, we've had our battles."
"Like over what?"
"You name it." Kathy got up, circled around David and put her hands on his shoulders. "It seems they always end the same way, too. I say, `Whose side are you on, anyway'?"
"What's he say?"
" `And whose side are you on'?"
"What a jerk." David twisted in his chair and, facing Kathy, said, "And, come to think about it, I can do without Sparky, if that's the help he's talking about."
"Why do without Sparky? Who says you have to deal directly with him? I'm eventually privy to anything he comes up with. And sooner if you need it. "
Kathy's revelation had reinforced David's distrust, if not suspicion, of Chief Detective Nick Medicore. For the rest of the cookout, he tried to put a tolerable spin on a stressful development, but deep down he felt like one possessed because Nick had dared to act up at a time when his own head was still churning over other problems. Once again, he ran the words CARCAN and CANCAN slowly through his mind, trying to pin down a meaning for all four syllables. The last three letters in each word are short for something, right? Maybe not. Maybe they're complete words that start a phrase. Like, for example, "Can do."
Eventually, he brought Kathy current on discoveries that had continued to baffle him.
David had eaten his steak, but never tasted it. He had watched a TV movie with Kathy, but never saw it. Later, sleep came in spells.
At six in the morning, he sprung up in bed. "That's it!" he cried.
He felt Kathy's hand on his forearm. "What's the matter?" she said. "David, what's wrong?"
"The dictionary! Of course. Where the hell have I been? Where is it, Kath?"
"In the bookcase, but can't it wait till later? What's in the dictionary, for heaven's sake?"
He stumbled into the living room, turned on a desk lamp and leafed through a Webster's New Collegiate Edition until he got to "C." A few pages along, he ran his fingers down eight columns of words starting with "can." Nothing caught his attention so he began the process again, this time more slowly. At the midway point, he passed a word, then returned to it as if he had overshot the mark: the finger equivalent of a double take. He slammed the dictionary shut and pumped his fist. The word was "canister." The silver canisters. "Yes!" he exclaimed aloud.
His mind's eye focused on Victor Spritz's equipment room, his "Ambulance Without Wheels," with its spare parts and shelf of silver canisters. Six in all, and identical to the ones that had held gauze and cotton in a Navy treatment room years ago. He mouthed words and word fragments and suddenly realized he had forgotten the names of the two "Can" cities in Turkey. He returned to the bedroom, smiled at Kathy's deep breathing and, in the dark, groped for his pants.
Back in the living room, he removed the index card from his wallet and now had all the pieces of the mosaic, he thought. He took one word at a time. "CAR" is "Cartagena," so we have "Cartagena Canister." "CAN" is either-he looked at the card-"Canakkale" or "Cankin. " So it's either "Canakkale Canister," or "Cankin Canister." And who care's, it's over there in Turkey. David rubbed his decision scar before editorializing. Where they grow the old opium poppy, and process it into heroin, and smuggle it all over the place, like in the old U.S. of A., to fry human brains. And the same for Cartagena, only we're not talking Colombian coffee here, we're talking cocaine, Big C, lady, nose candy. Candy to fry the same human brains.
He wanted to leave immediately for Spritz's office but, at the same time, wanted to digest the events of the past day. And of the days before that. It was Saturday so he let Kathy sleep. Over coffee, he sat at her desk, took his notepad out from Friday and began to make notes which he would later polish to enter into his computer. He wrote about shipment dates, coded containers, drugs, murder suspects, loss of forensic support, excursions to known drug producing countries-estimating relevance, drawing lame conclusions, offering actions to consider. And he didn't know what to make of the Bernie/Marsha alliance, but since he had cast everyone he had come across lately as a killer, he characterized them temporarily as Bonnie and Clyde desperadoes.
At eight-fifteen, he left for the hospital, charged with questions and few answers, determined to enter Spritz's office even if it meant breaking down the door. He had forgotten the Red Cross blood drive next door in Pathology. While working there two years ago, David was instrumental in expanding the drive to three mornings at a stretch and in having the doors open at eight.
He walked into the Pathology wing and at the entrance to its large conference room, stopped to view donors lying on tables-two rows of four each-like live bodies in a morgue, their arms restrained and guarded by nurses in grey uniforms. The room's fluorescence was more than it could handle. David leaned against the archway, picking up the smell of alcohol sponges and smarting from the sting of needle insertions, while pink smocked ladies tended to plastic pouches bearing the Red Cross logo or to intravenous tubing and refrigerated white boxes. Men and women sat beside desks for screening interviews and blood pressure recordings; others waited in line.
He winked at Marsha who looked up while interviewing the psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Corliss, but David didn't bother to address Nora Foster as she scurried from table to table and desk to desk, straightening tubing, whispering to volunteers. Nora had been the director of Hollings' blood drives for as long as David could remember.
He watched the cool precision of bloodletting for only a minute because he had other matters on his mind. Deciding to take a shortcut to Spritz's office, he bypassed the labyrinth of laboratories and zigzagged through empty suites off a parallel corridor. The Saturday morning silence of the department's administrative rooms bothered him.
In the last room before the hall to the EMS office, he came upon John Bartholomew, the hospital's chief microbiologist and a confidant during David's four years of Pathology there. Although Bartholomew was not an M.D., he was considered an expert in the clinical findings of infectious diseases as well as one of the area's top bacteriologists. He sat at a desk, pressing the telephone receiver down against his shoulder. David had often asked the veteran, skin-creased researcher how it felt to witness the laying of Hollings General's cornerstone in the century before.
"Hey there, John, you're not whistling, what's up?" Startled, Bartholomew dropped the phone on the desk before replacing it in its cradle. His hands shook. "Oh, David, it's you. Sorry, I'm a bit jumpy." David narrowed his eyes. "Can I help?"
The microbiologist appeared to welcome the question and said, "Can you keep a secret? I've been bottling it up too goddamned long."
"Of course. You know better than to ask that." Bartholomew relaxed his shoulders. "Alton Foster just hung up on me. I called him at home. He still refuses to notify the County Health Department about something I think is an emergency-and I don't want to be a part of it any longer."
David sat on the corner of the desk. "What emergency?"
"You remember the botulism study we started just before you left here?"
David nodded.
"Well, it was expanded. We got a grant from CDC to see if we could find a way to improve the trivalent botulinum antitoxin."
"And?"
"As you know, you need clostridium bacilli to generate the toxin."
"You're beating around the bush, John. What happened, you ran out of clostridium?"
"Worse," Bartholomew said, swallowing audibly. "We kept it in a tube of thioglycolate broth, and it's gone."
What do you mean, gone?"
"Disappeared. I can't find it."
"Since when?"
"Thursday."
David pulled at his ear until it hurt. Jesus Christ, now what, germ terrorism? He pushed himself away from the desk and paced. "Anybody else know about this?"
"Just Foster. I called him immediately."
"No one in the department knows?"
"No. Remember, it was my baby, so nobody else paid much attention to it."
"Hmm," David said, "and what's with Foster?" "He says I probably spilled it down the sink-which is ludicrous-and that the Health Department would only create panic if they heard about it. That they'd go to the press, ask a lot of questions around here. And he went on and on about the census of the hospital. He said the murders were more than enough to overcome-if we ever did-and we shouldn't scare people about something that probably didn't happen. David, it did happen. Someone stole the tube. I would have remembered spilling it. And there'd be an empty tube lying around."
"The whole tube couldn't have been discarded accidentally somewhere, like in the trash can?"
"I doubt it. " After a burst of eye blinks, the microbiologist repeated the phrase.
David was well aware that botulism food poisoning was on the list of biological weapons reportedly stockpiled by international terrorist groups, along with anthrax, brucellosis and plague.
"Look," he said, "don't do anything on your own quite yet. Let me speak to Foster-he sounds completely off base on this."
"Tell him if he doesn't, I'm reporting the theft myself."
"Hold off, John, I'll call him. You working today? "I'll be here till noon."
"Good, I'll try to get back to you. If not, later. Now, don't do anything rash."
David took his leave, walking more slowly now, as if uphill. A vial of poison had been added to a consciousness already scrambled with people, places and other things, including the silver canisters he hoped to examine momentarily.
He had anticipated calling Security for a key to Victor Spritz's office, but he found the door unlocked, the overhead lights on. The status of the outer room was the same as when he looked in from the corridor ten days before: mostly empty and in general disarray. In the center was a table burdened by days of unopened mail. He danced around the litter on the floor.
In the past, he had entered the back room on only a few occasions but now, approaching it, he clearly pictured the six canisters that had caught his attention each time. It was a large room, perhaps twenty-five feet square, and after he walked in and looked toward the shelf on the right wall, he arched back as if he had been shot. The canisters were not there.
David put his hands on his hips and retreated in order to improve his view of the entire room. Like stalking prey, his eyes darted to all four corners, across and under tables, from cabinet tops to carton tops, and up along the ceiling, for good measure. Where are they?
He tossed splints aside, looked behind aspirators, and moved stretchers stacked like furniture in storage. The more supplies and equipment he encountered, the more careless he became; oxygen tanks clanked against each other like bowling pins, metal drawers thwacked pulley weights, I.V. poles toppled over and bounced off his toes. He felt no pain, an obsessed hunter looking for round silver containers.
Pillows and blankets were piled in a corner while, nearby, one blanket lay crumpled on a folding cot. Under a bench, he uncovered a leather trunk covered by a blue tarpaulin. The canisters are in there? Why? He yanked out the trunk, threw off its covering and opened it. Stuck into a clutter of books and manuals were a pair of bloody latex gloves, a roll of yellow tape and a woman's black
Hollings
Cardiac Defibrillator
Vehicle
It was a combination of curiosity, basic detection procedure and that sixth sense that drew him out into the crisp morning. He steadied his Minx against his chest and Friday against his thigh as he advanced toward the van.
It was unlocked. He lifted one foot up to the floor before stopping short, barely able to maintain his balance. He felt his heart hammer on his chest wall and, swaying forward, caught the stench of gunpowder, blood and death. He tried breathing through his mouth but that only distilled the smell on his tongue. He settled on short expiratory grunts until adaptation kicked in.
To the left, a male body lay doubled over, wedged between a folded stretcher and the floor, while lining an adjacent glass cabinet were the objects of his hunt minutes before, the objects he momentarily felt were anticlimactic. Except David knew better. Six silver canisters shone in the light that beamed over his shoulder.
The body's face was obscured. David stooped and climbed into the van, tossing Friday toward the driver's seat to the right and sliding his Minx behind it. He didn't bother checking for a pulse because the exposed surfaces of the body felt cold, clammy and stiff. He righted the head with difficulty and flinched at the agonal face of Victor Spritz.
David eased upright and for a split second-until his head tapped the ceiling of the van-he felt lifeless, detached, as if he were disembodied, suspended in some other location, but certainly not there, cramped in quarters too small for even average size men. In his day, he had treated many patients who had had acute anxiety attacks but he had never had one himself, and in a moment of self-diagnosis, reckoned that if he were disposed to having one, this discovery would have triggered it by now. He bent forward, probing the full extent of the body. Spritz was completely clothed and wore a blue windbreaker which David unzipped. Underneath, a tight sweater in bright yellow contrasted with streaks of desiccated blood. He palpated the chest, abdomen and all four extremities, and then pulled up the sweater and a shirt to inspect Spritz's exposed flanks and to press on his skin.
There was a circular bullet entrance wound on the left side of his forehead with no surrounding gunpowder traces. A single bead of caked blood ran from the wound to the angle of his jaw like a crimson termite tunnel. David counted five other round entrance wounds through the sweater, two in the vicinity of the heart, two at the level of the navel and one at the right clavicular area. The one nearest the left heart border appeared to have sucked in threads of yellow fabric. He detected no soot smudges and estimated the shots came from a distance greater than fifteen to eighteen inches. Several pools of dark blood lay clotted on the floor and on the lap of the body.
David braced himself against a side wall and calculated: full rigor mortis, fixed lividity, van temperature about thirty-five to forty degrees. Dead twelve to fourteen hours.
He massaged his knee and, feeling the strain on both legs from maneuvering in a crouch, backed up to allow one leg to extend out the door, his foot to be planted on the snow-filmed macadam. His body spanned the length of steps in the van as he supported his weight on his hands and searched for other details before he would return inside for a closer look. He noted five spent shells to the right of the body and, tilting his head sharply to the side, identified a sixth one partially hidden by the wheel of a red metal crash cart. David reminded himself to refer to the shells as "empty brass" in talking with the police later. He combed the van like a robin looking for worms but found no gun.
An electronic defibrillator which he knew was ordinarily stationed on the cart lay askew on the floor. The cart itself was tipped on its side, all five drawers exposed and emptied of drug bottles, vials and ampules; of scalpels, tape, airways and catheters; of syringes, suture materials and tourniquets. They were scattered about, some items intact but most crushed or bent out of shape.
David returned his attention to Spritz's body. When he had forcibly lifted the head minutes earlier, it remained frozen in that position and now he had a better view of its neck. At Zone I, between the collarbone and the Adam's Apple, there was a straight-line bruise around the circumference. The bruise was broad and irregular in spots, wider in others. He noted several satellite markings above the line and some egg-shaped discolorations over the face and forehead. There were blotches on the backs of Spritz's hands which David interpreted as defense wounds.
Strangled and shot. Shot? Riddled! He had heard about the difference between "stranger" murders with their trim format, and crimes of passion with their telltale evidence of anger and rage, of the repeated stabbings or shootings, of the usual conclusion that such a killer had a strong relationship with his or her victim. He wondered why the multiple shots hadn't been heard. No doubt a suppressor. Another baby nipple?
In a matter of minutes, David had observed and acted swiftly, not peimi.tting himself time to react emotionally to his discovery. Quite aside from the violence of the murder, he grappled with the question of its relationship to the others in and about Hollings General. And his expectation of soon nabbing a killer had been dashed, as in the case of an athlete with a supposed insurmountable lead who then sees certain victory evaporate.