Dead as a Dinosaur (23 page)

He heard the door open, and then he turned.

“Ar—” he began and then he said, “Wait! What's the matter with you?”

There was nothing the matter with her for so long as she could keep going, get a door closed between herself and Steck.

“These damn—” she heard Steck say, as she was closing the door. She heard him move. “Women,” she heard Steck finish, as the door finally closed.

She ran across the gloom of an office much like the one she had fled and, midway, bumped hard into a table, fell half on the table. Something seemed to splinter under her outstretched hands. “I've broken somebody's something,” Pam North thought. She backed away and went around, having set back, by perhaps a generation, mankind's knowledge of a certain small amphibian which had wandered, but not beautified, the earth some millions of years before. The Broadly Institute had almost pieced him together when Pam North fell on him.

She heard—she was sure she heard—the opening behind her of the door she had just closed. She could just make out the door in the opposite wall, prayed briefly that it prove unlocked—it was fortunate that the institute scientists seemed very trusting about locks—and pulled it open. She went through and was in another office. She was more cautious this time; she avoided the skeleton of something—a gigantic bird, for heaven's sake?—which occupied the center of the room. Pam North fled on, through the remote past and the interconnecting offices of the Broadly Institute, away from the no doubt pursuing Dr. Steck, who swore in Greek—but away, also, from Jerry and whatever was happening to him in the office he had, much to her surprise, entered with the air of a policeman on patrol.

What you needed to be was three cops, maybe four, Mullins thought. When you got one of these screwy ones (with the Norths in it) it was no good to be just one sergeant of detectives. You kept an eye on two people and followed them to this god-awful barn and then the place got full up with people, all acting as if they had gone nuts. This Agee, now, sneaking into somebody else's office; the Norths, now, going into the office across the hall and not turning on the lights. Wayne Preson, up to something. Where the hell, Sergeant Mullins asked himself, is the Loot?

He had an ear to the door which connected his office with that of Dr. Steck, in which Dr. Agee now was doing something—looking for something, probably—which asked for investigation. He had withdrawn to the connecting door as soon as he had seen Agee enter the office. If he had missed something else that way, it couldn't be helped. He was, after all, only one cop, inconvenient as it was. He thought he heard a voice on the other side of the door, but he could not distinguish words. He began, very quietly, very deftly, to ease the door open.

Dr. Agee had been intent when Jerry spoke; he jumped at the sound of the voice. He said, “What the—” and then evidently thought better of finishing the sentence. Keeping the faint beam of the torch on Jerry's face, Dr. Agee began to back further into the room.

“Wait a minute,” Jerry said. “It's no good to try—”

But then the torch went out and, for a moment, Jerry was blind in the darkness. He heard movement; he heard what sounded like a door being opened. He went toward the sound. He said, “Hold it!” and then, seeing more clearly now, saw a door in the side wall on his left. The door stood just perceptibly ajar. Agee had gone that way!

It was exasperating; it was in the highest degree annoying. Jerry was annoyed with himself. He had undertaken—against his judgment, uncharacteristically—to catch Dr. Agee with red hands he was not catching him at all; he was bungling it. He was annoyed at Dr. Agee for making him bungle.

Jerry North jumped for the door, grabbed the knob, and jerked the door toward him. There was momentary resistance; then a man came in with the door. He came off balance, and Jerry grabbed him.

“I told you—” Jerry began. “What're you looking—”

The man he held seemed much larger than Dr. Agee; the man he held was no longer off balance. Something large, something heavy, hit Jerry North in the jaw. Blackness began to close in around Jerry, but now the man who was too large to be Agee—who very clearly wasn't Agee—was holding him up.

“Jeeze, Mr. North,” Sergeant Aloysius Mullins said, supporting Jerry, who sagged ominously, “How ud I know? You jumped me, Mr. North! How ud I know?”

The voice of Sergeant Mullins came dimly to Jerry North, through darkness, from a great distance. But then it came again, and now it was closer. Jerry found he could shake his head to clear it; found he was no longer, as he momentarily had seemed to be, in the process of disintegration.

“What did you hit me with, Mullins?” Mr. North enquired.

Mullins continued to support him.

“You all right?” Mullins enquired, anxiety in his voice. “You O.K.?”

“Wonderful,” Jerry said. “A blackjack?”

“Jeeze,” Mullins said, “I just sort of nudged you, Mr. North. With my shoulder, sorta. You come in wide open, Mr. North. You jumped me.”

“Not—” Jerry began, and stopped and shook himself free from Mullins's supporting arms. “Agee. He was in here. Snooping around. I thought you were Agee. He's still here!
You! Agee!
”

But nobody answered. When Jerry turned the lights on, it was evident why. He and Mullins, having captured one another, were alone in the office. A door in the right-hand wall of the office showed, clearly enough, why they were alone.

“All these offices are strung together like that,” Mullins said. “You can come in from the hall. You can go from one office into the next. I guess he must of.” Mullins listened. He heard the voice of the absent, the sadly absent, Loot. “Must have,” Mullins said.

Jerry was looking at the cards Agee had left on Dr. Steck's desk. Mullins joined him.

The cards were, quite evidently, medical records. It appeared they were the records of various—of perhaps half a dozen—members of the staff of the Institute.

“Yeah,” Mullins said, “he's a regular doctor, Steck. Along with being a Ph.D. He treats some of the people here. When they don't feel good. It's convenient, I guess.”

Jerry nodded, looking at the cards, uneasy that he was invading privacy; relieved that, except for the names of the patients, he was invading it imperceptibly, since nothing he read on the cards had meaning for him. It was medical shorthand. None of the names on the cards was of anyone so far connected with the case. He showed them to Mullins, who agreed.

“The way I'd figure it,” Mullins said, “if it was one of the cards he was after, it was his. Wouldn't you, Mr. North? And that he got it?”

Jerry would.

“I guess,” Mullins said, “maybe we'd better talk to this Dr. Agee. You wanta come, Mr. North?”

Jerry did. They would get Pam from the office across the hall. They would find Dr. Agee.

But it did not work that way. Pam was not in the office across the hall. Nobody was in the office across the hall—not even, so far as they could determine, the ghost of Dr. Preson.

13

S
ATURDAY
, 9:15
P
.
M
.
TO
9:40
P
.
M
.

Pamela North entered, at what amounted to a brisk trot, the third office beyond the one with the prehistoric bird in it. She had traversed one with a large rock on a table in the center—she had avoided that—and another which, in the dim light, seemed to be occupied by someone with a penchant for snakes, prehistoric, of course. Going through that office, Pam's trot had become indistinguishable from a lope. The third office was largely filled with glass cases, contents better not guessed at, and Pam—who now could see almost clearly where she was going—made her brisk way between them. It had been some little time, now, since she had actually heard the pursuing Dr. Steck. It appeared that she was distancing him. Perhaps he had become entangled with the prehistoric bird.

Pam's mood was, therefore, one of increasing confidence when she reached the far wall of the third office beyond the bird. Another door, another office. Dr. Steck, who swore in Greek, farther and farther behind. Another door—There was no other door. There was only bare wall. Even the longest series of interconnecting offices must wind somewhere to a blank wall, a fact which Pam North had not until that moment considered.

“Oh,” Pam said. She considered. “Oh—
damn!
” said Pamela North.

And now she was sure she heard someone in the office she had quitted a moment before. Someone was in there making a kind of scuffling sound.

She could not go back, into the arms of the scuffler. She could not go forward. It remained only to go sideways, which Pam did, toward the entrance door of the office—the door leading to the central corridor; to the harsh exposure of the central corridor, which now, through the glass of the door, looked intolerably bright and without hiding place. Pam went toward the door, no longer trotting.

She started to open it and checked the movement. She had come toward the front of the building; now she was near the point at which the central corridor joined the foyer at the head of the main staircase. Dr. Paul Agee was standing there, looking down the stairs. Emily Preson was coming up the stairs.

“I've been trying to find you,” Emily Preson said, her tone intense with the necessity of finding Dr. Agee, with the violence of her need to find him. “We've been trying to find you.”

It was remarkable, Pam North thought, her own fears diminishing a little (after all, she could hardly be assailed with help so near)—it was remarkable what intensity Emily could put into the simplest sentence. If she said, “Here's a cat,” you'd expect at least a tiger, Pam North thought. Hearing her now, one thought of somebody's search for somebody—Stanley for Livingstone, perhaps—in trackless wilderness.

“I,” said Dr. Agee, in an equable tone, “have been out to dinner. In any case, the Institute is closed, Miss Preson.”

“
Don't!
” the girl said. “Don't
pretend!
You won't get away with it. Not now.”

“Away with it?” Dr. Agee enquired. Emily had reached the top of the staircase now. She stood facing Dr. Agee. They were, Pam thought, almost of a height.

“I haven't any idea what you're talking about, Miss Preson,” Agee said. “No idea at all. I have no idea why you are here at all—or, for that matter, how you got in.”

“She came with me,” a heavy, rumbling voice said, and then Dr. Albert James Steck walked past the door at which Pam North stood. He walked unhurriedly along the corridor, from the direction of his office and Dr. Preson's, from—

Why, Pam thought, then he wasn't chasing me at all! But then—

“I let her in, Agee,” Dr. Steck said, and joined the two at the head of the stairs, towered over them. “She wanted to ask you some questions. She's disturbed about several things.”

Agee merely looked at him.

“It seems,” Steck said, his heavy voice conversational, unexcited, “that poor Preson didn't kill himself after all. It seems that somebody killed him—and then had to kill old Landcraft. Things like that worry people, you know. Miss Preson's quite worried.” He looked down at her. It seemed to Pam, listening with the door barely open, that his voice changed with the next sentence. “Very understandable that she should be,” Steck said. “Entirely understandable.”

“Even so,” Agee said, “I'm afraid I don't understand this—er—violent desire to talk to me, Steck. I'd like to help, of course, but—” He let the sentence hang.

“Of course,” Steck agreed. “Well, I think she wants to talk about money, for one thing. I think perhaps the police will too, doctor. As a matter of fact, they seem already to have collected Preson's check book. In his desk drawer the other day, you know. It isn't now. Unless?” He regarded Agee. “Unless you picked it up for—safe keeping?”

“Certainly not,” Agee said. “What are you getting at?”

“Money,” Steck said. “Contributions to the Institute. Oh yes—arrhythmia too, doctor.”

The word did not, this time, sound like profanity. It sounded like the name of something.

The word had meaning for Agee; that was clear from his face. He looked up at Dr. Steck, and seemed intently to consider him.

“You're a physician, aren't you?” he said, then. “Things you can't talk about, aren't there?”

“Well,” Steck said, “that's a nice point, isn't it? Quite a nice point. We might go somewhere and take it up, don't you think? Medical ethics? And medical records, of course?”

It seemed to Pam, listening, making little of it, that Steck's voice was now anything but soft, but gentle. It seemed to her now that the heavy, rumbling voice had a threat in it.

Perhaps it seemed so to Dr. Paul Agee. At any rate, he hesitated a moment, seemed for a moment at a loss. Then, without speaking, he turned and went toward the corridor leading to his office. Emily and Dr. Steck followed him. Dr. Steck had a hand, gently, on Emily's arm. He was, Pam thought, a great one for putting a hand on people's arms.

What in the world is arrhythmia? Pam wondered, and tried to decide from the sound how it would be spelled. She came, in her thoughts, not too far from it. It might, she decided, have something to do with rhythm. But that did not help much. That—

But then all speculation vanished before the realization, now sharp in her mind, not a mere flicker to be superseded by something else, that Steck had not been following her. Nobody had been following her; she had hurried, panicked, through strange offices. She had broken things, possibly of great importance. And—she had fled without pursuit. It was embarrassing. She—

And then, in the office where she had heard the scuffling, she heard another sound. It was unmistakable, this time—in the other office, someone was opening a door! It was not the door which led into the office in which Pam stood. It was the door which, from the office still beyond it, gave access to the office in which there had been a scuffling sound. But then—but then, she
was
being followed! Slowly, with stealth, but relentlessly, she was being—