Light in Shadow (21 page)

Shortly after midnight,
Leon stood on the closed lid of the toilet in the cramped motel bathroom. Through the small window he had a clear view of the group gathering in the alley behind the old warehouses. The drug dealing seemed to be a nightly ritual. It didn't look like a tough crowd. For the most part, the buyers appeared to be teenagers who drifted over from the fast-food restaurant. They bought booze and pills from a couple of older guys who usually showed up around one in the morning.

Tonight Leon planned to arrive before the regular salesmen.

He stepped down heavily and hurried out into the main room. Earlier this afternoon, he had selected several bottles from his emergency stash of stolen Candle Lake meds. His job as security chief at the hospital had given him a good working knowledge of the street value of the pharmaceuticals.

He picked up the sack containing his wares, a small flashlight, and his key. He paused to hang the tattered
privacy sign on the doorknob outside his room and then he made his way down the steps and around to the rear of the building.

There was enough light from the motel parking lot to enable him to find the rutted, unpaved road that ran behind the abandoned house and the warehouses. The glow from a nearly full moon helped. He wanted to avoid using the flashlight if at all possible.

The half dozen or so little dears hanging out around the last decayed loading dock did not notice him until he was almost upon them. The first one who spotted him, jumped half a foot.

“Shit, it's a cop.”

“We're not doin' anything,” another one said, voice rising in that annoying whine that was unique to the teenager of the species.

“Yeah, we gotta
right
to be here if we want.”

Kids,
Leon thought.
They might be flunking history, English, and math, but they always seemed to know their rights.

“Relax, I'm not a cop,” Leon said. “I've got some candy. Anyone interested?”

 

Ten minutes later
and seven hundred fifty dollars richer, Leon started back toward the distant lights of the motel.
Seven hundred and fifty bucks.
Where the hell did kids these days get so much discretionary income? He'd sure never had that kind of cash when he was a teenager.

He had been planning to leave in the morning because he'd paid cash through tonight and he wanted to get his money's worth. But he was wide awake and in no mood to sleep. Might as well hit the road now. The seven-fifty would see him clear of Whispering Springs, and he had a feeling it would be good to be gone before Truax came back to check up on him.

Everything had gone sour. Again.

That bastard, Cleland, had not been
available
when he had called him a second time to negotiate for the woman's
address. When Leon hung up the phone, he had faced the fact that the deal wasn't going to work. The only other angle, as far as he could see, was to try blackmailing Ian Harper. Harper was the one person left who had something to lose and who might be willing to pay for silence.

He would call his ex-boss from somewhere on the road and hope he'd get lucky. At least Harper was a businessman.

If only his original plan to blackmail the Cleland woman had worked the way it was supposed to. Shit. It was like he lived under some dark star or something.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the movement in the shadows that clung to the boarded-up house. One of the kids, he thought. Swell. He had some more candy. Maybe he could clear a neat thousand tonight.

He stopped and started to turn.

“Hey, kid. I got what you want right here.”

Too late he realized that the figure on the sagging front porch was not a young druggie.

The first bullet took him square in the chest and knocked him down. His first thought was that he could no longer feel the fire of his heartburn. Instead, everything inside him had gone cold.

He was vaguely aware of one of his customers back at the warehouse shouting a warning to his pals.

“Oh, shit, that was a gun. Come on, we gotta get out of here.”

He had come so close to the big score, he thought. But he was screwed again. Story of his life.

He was already losing consciousness when the killer walked closer and put a second bullet into his brain.

Zoe put on
the white terry cloth robe monogrammed with the name of the hotel and sat in the chair near the window. She picked up the phone and dialed the first number.

“Who is this?” Ian Harper's voice was thick with sleep and irritation.

She could hear the television low in the background. Harper had evidently fallen asleep watching an old movie. A horror film, probably, one with a plot involving a mad scientist working in a lab.

“Hello, Dr. Harper,” Zoe said. Just talking to him long distance on the telephone made her skin crawl. “I used to be Sara Cleland, but you can call me Zoe Truax now. You probably remember me as the patient in Room 232. The one Forrest Cleland paid you so well to keep locked up. I wanted to be the first to give you the happy news.”

“Sara?” He was fully alert now. “What's this all about? Where are you?”

“I just got married. Say hello to my new husband.”

Ethan was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her.
He was naked except for a pair of white briefs. She shoved the phone into his hand. He touched her fingers lightly as he took the instrument from her. She realized she was trembling. Rage and old fears, she thought. She had to get control of both.

“This is Truax,” Ethan said into the phone. His voice was colder than the outer rings of hell. “Zoe and I just got married, and we've got a license to prove it. I'm now her next of kin. This call is a formality. I want to be sure you understand that if you try to snatch her I will come after her—and you—and rip apart your business operation there at Candle Lake Manor.”

He ended the call and handed the phone back to Zoe.

She took a deep breath and dialed Forrest Cleland's unlisted home number.

Kimberley answered on the fourth ring. She sounded groggy and disoriented.

“Hello?”

“Kimberley, this is Sara.”

“Sara?”

“Zoe, now. Zoe Truax.”

“I don't understand. Where are you? What's going on?” There was a slight pause. “Are you all right?”

“I'm doing great, Kimberley. Thanks for asking. I just got married, as a matter of fact. Naturally I wanted to give Forrest the wonderful news right away. Is he there?”

“You're married? But that's impossible. You're . . . you're not well, Sara.”

“Call me Zoe. And get Forrest on the phone, please.”

There was a brief pause. Zoe heard Kimberley's muffled voice in the background. Then Forrest came on the line.

“Sara? Is that you?”

“I'm no longer Sara Cleland,” Zoe said. “Zoe Truax is my name, Forrest. I wanted to let you know that I will be attending the annual meeting and that I will be accompanied by my husband. If anything happens to me before the big day, you'll be delighted to hear that Ethan will be happy to vote my shares.”

“What the hell is going on here? Where are you?”

“In a hotel. This is my wedding night.”

“Listen to me,” Forrest said in his most authoritative tone, “I need to talk to you.”

“We can talk at the board meeting. Right now I'd like you to meet my husband.”

Ethan took the phone from her a second time.

“This is Truax,” he said. “I just spoke with Ian Harper at Candle Lake Manor and gave him the same message. It's real simple. Touch a hair on my wife's head, and I will take you apart.”

He ended the call and put the phone down on the bedside table.

“That's that,” he said. “Your insurance policy is now in effect.”

She sat in her chair and looked at him. “I can't believe you did this for me.”

He gave her his slow, sexy smile. “You will when you get the bill.”

She awoke to
sunlight and the glint of gold on her finger. She could feel the heavy weight of Ethan's arm draped snugly around her waist. Mercifully, she had not dreamed last night. She wondered if that was a good omen.

She looked out through the window at the Las Vegas dawn and thought about another daybreak she had witnessed a year earlier. The memories of the escape from Candle Lake Manor rose to the surface.

“Shit,” Ernie muttered. “What the hell's the matter with her? She was supposed to get an extra dose tonight.”

“Maybe she didn't get enough of it.” Ron's voice was low but there was no mistaking the sick lust that reverberated in it. “Don't worry, the restraints will hold her. I brought a needle full of the stuff with me, just in case.”

There was another thud followed by a muffled
groan. A fist rapped twice, quick, frantic little taps against her door, but she recognized the signal.

She sat straight up in bed, her heart pounding, a cold sweat chilling her skin.

“Use the damned needle,” Ernie growled outside in the corridor. “She's too strong.”

“It's no fun when they're too doped up to know what's happening. Come on, we can handle her.”

She climbed out of bed and grabbed the light cotton robe with the words C
ANDLE
L
AKE
M
ANOR
stitched on the left breast pocket. Every patient got an identical robe and pair of slippers. There was no belt on the robe and no laces in the footwear.

She went to the door and pressed her ear to the panel. The orderlies had managed to drag their victim to the end of the hallway.

She waited until she was sure they had turned the corner before she went back to the bed and removed the stolen key card from the tiny slit in the bottom of the mattress.

She had obtained the card after weeks of careful observation and plotting. As she had explained to her friend, the plan hinged on the fact that the new orderly who worked the weekend nightshift on this ward had developed a drug habit that he fed by stealing patient meds. The stuff he didn't want to risk taking himself, he presumably sold on the street.

She had done such a good job of looking sedated whenever he showed up with her midnight pills that the orderly had been encouraged to steal some of the new pills that Dr. McAlistair had prescribed. The drugs were intended to induce a cheerful, trusting, euphoric state that McAlistair had hoped would overcome her patient's stubborn refusal to discuss screaming walls and crying rooms.

She had faked swallowing the first few doses and had been only too happy to watch through her
lashes when the orderly began to pocket the pills.

She had bided her time. Finally, after five weekends of successful theft, the orderly had grown careless. One Saturday night, after helping himself to the contents of the little paper cup on her tray, he had hurried out of the room in response to a ringing call button and had forgotten to lock her door.

She had given him forty minutes and then she had crept out of the room and made her way down the hall. She had found the orderly smiling blissfully in front of a small television set inside the glass-walled nursing station.

She had pulled the fire alarm just outside the restroom. The orderly, enveloped in a drug-induced haze, had responded to the clanging bells like a confused bull confronted with a striped cape. In the ensuing chaos, it had been no trick at all to grab the spare master key kept in a desk drawer.

The next day she had told her new friend about the acquisition of the key, and they had begun to make detailed plans.

They had decided to make the break on a Sunday night because the weekend orderlies were inevitably more lax than the regular weekday staff.

But this was Thursday night. Ron and Ernie were on duty together. And they had her new friend, the woman with the silvery blue eyes.

She knew where they would take her: the examination room with the medical table fitted with metal stirrups, the room with the screaming walls.

So much for their plan to leave Sunday night, she thought. It would have to be tonight.

She took one last look around the space that had been her prison cell for the past few months. There was nothing worth taking. The personal effects and identification that had been with her when she had been brought to the Manor were locked up in a small room on the first floor.

She used the stolen card key to open her door very carefully. She stood listening for a few seconds. Silence echoed. The hall was empty.

She stepped out into the corridor. The lights were turned down at night but not off. She made her way quickly toward the corner, turned, and went down another intersecting hallway.

At the next junction, she paused again to listen. This section of the hospital did not house any patients, just offices and examination rooms that were supposed to be empty at night.

Muffled noises came from the screaming room. Ron and Ernie were already inside with her friend.

For an instant the fear was so thick that she thought she might succumb to nausea.

Then she moved, hitting the bank of switches at the end of the hall with both hands. The passage went dark but light still glowed beneath the door of the screaming room.

She hurried forward, moving carefully so as to make no sound. The slippers helped. When she reached the fire extinguisher locker, she opened it and grasped the canister in both hands.

She went to the door of the screaming room and banged the extinguisher against it.

“What the hell?” Ernie sounded alarmed.

“Must be one of the loonies,” Ron said. “I'll take care of it.”

The door of the screaming room opened. Ron took one step out into the hall.

It was at that moment that it occurred to her that her long run of abysmally lousy luck might have finally changed course.

Ron looked first to the left, not the right. He did not see her standing there with the heavy canister raised on high.

“Shit,” Ron muttered. “Some crazy turned off the damned lights.”

Ron was much taller than she was. She had to swing the extinguisher at an awkward angle, not straight down as she would have much preferred to do. Nevertheless, the heavy canister struck the back of Ron's skull with a satisfying thunk.

He dropped to the floor without a sound.

“What's going on?”

Ernie appeared in the doorway, mouth agape. “What the fuck?”

She pulled the trigger on the fire extinguisher, releasing a gusher of white foam. The stuff caught Ernie full in the face.

He yelped and staggered backward, clawing at his eyes. The fact that he had already unfastened his pants in preparation for rape created a real problem for him.

His feet got tangled in his sagging trousers, and he went down hard. He opened his mouth to yell, and she filled it with foam. Choking, Ernie struggled to breathe.

Sensations stormed through her when she moved into the examination room. She struggled to ignore the psychic noise and raised the canister a second time, preparing to bring it down on Ernie's head.

Her friend was struggling frantically with the restraints. She had managed to rip off her gag. “Help me.”

She rushed to the table and unbuckled the leather ties that bound her feet into the stirrups.

Ernie reached out, trying to grab a chair. She turned back, hoisting the extinguisher.

“Wait.”

Her friend grabbed a syringe off the desk and plunged the needle into Ernie's arm. The orderly moaned, gasped, and sagged.

“I gave him the full dose. He won't wake up for a while. Let's get out of here.”

They took the time to drag Ron back into the
screaming room and locate his car keys. Then they closed and locked the door. They fled to the first floor using the key card to access the emergency stairwells.

The lockers containing the patients' personal effects were located in Leon Grady's office. The magic card key did not work on that lock but it opened the door labeled
HOUSEKEEPING AND JANITORIAL SERVICES
across the hall. The key to Grady's office was hanging on a hook in the janitorial supply cabinet.

Once inside Security, they found the lockers. The little padlocks that secured them were so flimsy they could have been broken with one of the tools in the janitorial closet, but in the end there was no need to go to the trouble. The keys to the lockers were in one of Grady's desk drawers.

The locker with her name on it opened easily enough. Inside was the handbag she had been carrying the night she had been brought into Candle Lake Manor. To her enormous relief, her wallet, containing her driver's license and some other miscellaneous pieces of identification were still inside. The cash and credit cards had been removed. Those, she knew, had been turned over to Forrest the day she had been admitted. It was standard procedure. But occasionally there was need for a patient's ID, so such documents were retained.

“The credit cards wouldn't do you any good, anyway,” her friend reminded her. “You couldn't use them. Too easy to trace.”

Outside in the chill of a moonless night, they had climbed into Ron's car. They had driven it to a small house on the outskirts of a tiny mountain town.

“Who owns this place?” she asked her friend.

“I do. Under another name. By the way, from now on you can call me Arcadia.”

“Nice name.”

“Thanks. I found it in a name-the-baby book.”

Arcadia pried up a loose board on the porch and removed a key. She used it to open the door of the house.

Inside the postage-stamp-sized living room, she removed a wall panel to reveal a safe. After working the combination, she took out a packet of documents.

“What's that?”

“A new ID,” Arcadia said.

“I'm impressed. You had this all planned before you were sent to Xanadu, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“It's a long story.” Arcadia started toward the front door. “I'll tell it to you after we change cars.”

“You've got another car hidden somewhere?”

“In the garage.”

The following morning, Arcadia had accessed an offshore account.

“We need a little time to set up a new background for you,” she said. “What do you say we take a little vacation?”

“I've heard that travel is broadening. . . .”

Ethan raised himself up off the pillows and bent his head to kiss her bare shoulder. “You okay?”

“Yes.” She turned onto her back and looked up at him.

Her husband.

He smiled. She felt the tingle all the way to her toes. His face was shadowed with his morning beard, and his hair was rumpled. He was just as compelling in the light of day as he was at midnight. And he was all hers. For a while.

“What were you thinking about?” he asked.

“The escape from Xanadu.”

“Tell me about it,” he said.

He already knew most of it. He had a right to the rest.

She told him the whole story.

His eyes went cold. “Did those two orderlies ever drag you into that examination room?”

“No. I think they decided that I was too unpredictable in my craziness. They never knew how I would react to the meds.”

His smile was coldly approving. “You fostered that impression of unpredictability, I take it?”

“Oh, sure, every chance I got.” She stroked her fingers through his hair. “I got rather good at playing the madwoman of Room 232. The orderlies avoided me.”

He brushed his mouth across her lips. “I am very happy to hear that. Otherwise, I would have had to add two more items to my to-do list.”

She shivered at the expression that came and went in his eyes.

“I can't take all of the credit for scaring off Ron and Ernie,” she said. “They also knew that Dr. McAlistair was particularly interested in my case. They couldn't be sure what I might tell her in a therapy session or what she would choose to believe. She could have easily gotten them both fired.”

“McAlistair. That name rings a bell.”

“She was the doctor who supervised my so-called treatment plan.”

“Right.” He looked thoughtful. “According to Singleton, McAlistair is the only real doctor at Candle Lake. She must have her hands full. Why did she take a special interest in you?”

“Officially, I landed in Xanadu because Forrest told everyone that I heard voices in the walls at the cabin telling me that he was the person who had murdered Preston.”

“Any of that true?” Ethan asked neutrally.

“Of course not. I don't hear voices.”
Just feelings and emotions.
But he wouldn't like that explanation any better, she figured. “I think Dr. McAlistair wanted to believe that I could somehow walk into a room and sense things, though.”