Open Season (18 page)

We both looked at him, Murphy obviously peeved.

“One of the reasons all this took a little longer than I planned was that I ran the semen by a couple of extra tests. One of them came up with the fact that the depositor was taking a drug called prednisone at the time he ejaculated.

“It’s a common prescription drug, a glucocorticoid, to be exact. Pharmacists sell it for its anti-inflammatory properties to treat everything from asthma to arthritis to poison ivy. Now there is a large family of glucocorticoid drugs. Prednisone is cheaper than most of the others, but it is more potent and far likelier to cause side effects. As such, I would doubt it was administered for something minor like poison ivy; I’d guess it was more like arthritis or asthma.”

“It sounds like you’re saying the depositor was an old man in a wheelchair.”

“For the arthritis, you may be right. That is mostly found among the elderly. But asthma is something else. A lot of young and otherwise healthy people suffer from it.”

He got up from his chair and stood by the window, looking out.

“I’m also inclined to think it was either one or the other of those because they’re long-term ailments, and indications are that the depositor had been taking this medicine for four weeks or more.”

“What indications?”

He hesitated a moment. “Understand that all this gets into the speculative. I mean, I have certain scientific indices to go by, but my conclusions are really my own.”

“All right.”

“During the testing, I found both a slightly lower sperm count and a lower amount of the body’s naturally produced hydrocortisone. Now the first is no real indication of anything—tight pants can knock off sperm—but the second, taken with the first and coupled to the presence of prednisone, is a red flag for Cushing’s syndrome.”

Neither Frank nor I moved or said a word. Both of us felt that in his understated way, Robert Kees was about to make us a gift.

“I almost hate to tell you this, because it’s so thin, but I do feel I’ve let you down a little with the other stuff. But take it all with a giant grain of salt.” He cleared his throat. “If you take prednisone for a month or more, chances are you’ll start to bloat—retaining fluids you normally pass to the outside. Usually, that’s where it stops, but every once in a while—and I’m talking rarely here—you develop Cushing’s. You become weak and overweight, with a rounded, pinkish moon face; you bruise easily, suffer from occasional delirium and depression, and any psychological disorders can become exaggerated. But the most telling thing about Cushing’s, at least physically, is the emergence of a kind of buffalo hump high on the back.”

“You mean the guy’s a hunchback?” Murphy asked.

I put my hand on his forearm to quiet him.

“Now, assuming that all this fell into place, which is highly unlikely though possible, there is no way to determine how long the depositor was on the medicine, why he took it in the first place, or whether he’s still on it. Furthermore, just as the syndrome appears after a month or more, it disappears a month or less after treatment is terminated.”

Kees sat back down. “What I’m giving you here is my educated guess. Because of the low hydrocortisone level in the sample, I’d say there’s an outside chance your man did develop Cushing’s—that would make him stand out in a crowd. Furthermore, for the hundreds of people who might be issued one of the prednisone family of drugs from any given urban pharmacy, only two to five will have prescriptions running for over a week to ten days.”

I glanced over to Murphy’s face. He looked back, smiled, and nodded. “Now that’s a lead.”

IT WAS MID AFTERNOON
before we picked our way through the scaffolding, the workmen, and the piles of construction material outside the doorless lobby of Kees’s building. It was snowing again, as it had been almost all week. TV reports had broadcast travel advisories for that morning, and from what I could see, or couldn’t see, things were not improving.

We found the car, the only white, furry-looking, rounded lump in the now-crowded parking lot, and put our bags and the cooler in the back seat. Glancing over my shoulder as I pulled out the ice scraper, I saw the building we’d just left as the vaguest of shadows on a whited-out television screen.

“Christ, it’s really coming down,” Murphy said as he wiped the snow from the windshield with his gloved hand.

I handed him the scraper after I’d done my side. “You want to pass on going home? We could spend the night at some motel.”

He shook his head. “I’m sick of sleeping where I don’t belong—we’ve been through worse than this.” He finished clearing the windshield and opened the door, adding, “Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to give Ski Mask a little run for his money. If he is on our trail, maybe we’ll find out if he’s a flatlander or not.”

Boasts like that aside, drivers in New England handle heavy snow the same way everyone else does—they cling to the right lane and crawl. By the time I got to the interstate heading north, I knew we were in for a very long trip. Occasionally, in the straightaways, when the wind would briefly shift and open up visibility, I’d venture onto the white-crusted, slippery passing lane to overtake a couple of my more timid fellow travelers, but for the most part we were stuck in line. My eyes strained to see through the flurries to the blurry outline of the car just ahead.

“I wonder how many people go off the road because they follow the guy in front of them?”

Frank grunted. “You thinking of doing that?”

“I’ve heard of it happening.”

He didn’t respond. He was wearing a shapeless black coat and a fake-fur trooper hat with the flaps pulled down over his ears. His chin was buried in a brown scarf. He looked like a tired Russian commuter sitting on a bus.

“Why don’t you turn up the heat?”

He shook his head. “Makes me sleepy.”

“So sleep. You can take over at Hartford.”

“Naw. So what are we going to do now?”

“I say we dig into Kimberly Harris. We know damned well she wasn’t the innocent victim of a drug-crazed loner.”

“Got any guesses?”

“A couple. Floyd Rubin, for instance.”

“The pharmacist?”

“He could be the father.”

“Are you kidding? I thought she just worked there.”

“He said they were friends, but it may have been more. It’s pure hunch right now, but she was five-and-a-half months pregnant when she died—and that was five months after she quit Charlie’s.”

“Does that make him Ski Mask too?”

“You’ve never seen the man. I think he’s clear there, but he could easily be her four-thousand-dollar-a-month sugar daddy. Those payments also started near the time she quit and went up to the end. I’d love to be able to look at his bank records, but I doubt we could get a warrant.”

“We could get around that, maybe.”

“Wouldn’t risk it. If it does give us something, we’d never be able to use it in court. We might wear him down—imply we’ve already got the records or something.”

“What about Ski Mask? Why not bring in some outside help?”

“I doubt we have the choice anymore. We had one body when we left four days ago; that’s more than we’ve had in the last three years. I’d be surprised if the selectmen haven’t forced Brandt to bring in everybody but the Mounties by now. Gail said they’d soon be looking for someone to hang.”

For once, Frank didn’t even groan. Slim as it was, Kees’s conjecture about Harris’s killer had given him something to chew on besides his endangered reputation.

He muttered, “I bet he’s a government man.”

“A spook?”

“That, or a vet. Special Forces or something. He’s got to be on his own, though. Sure as hell that bug was stolen.”

“He might be the fetus’s father.”

“Sure, or even the real killer. It’s not impossible that since we missed him the first time, he’s renewing the invitation—the man’s obviously bonkers.”

I nodded. “I like that one.”

“The only problem with it is he doesn’t fit my image of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and according to Kees that’s who did her in. You ever notice Ski Mask having trouble breathing?”

“You mean asthma? No, from the little I’ve seen, he’s in good shape. Of course, Kees didn’t say it had to be asthma.”

“I know, and I’ve heard of crippled kids becoming gymnasts. But I can’t believe a guy who was so sick three years ago would be a jock today.”

The car in front suddenly swerved out of control and started slowly spinning around and around, working its way toward the opposite guard rail like a gyroscope losing power. I downshifted and pumped the brakes a couple of times, feeling the road slide out from under the wheels. I hit the accelerator gently and crabbed by the other car, which had come to a stop a few inches from the edge of the road. My tires finally caught and brought us back into line.

“Everyone okay?”

Murphy was looking back over his shoulder. “Yeah. No damage.” He settled back and we both watched an abandoned eighteen-wheeler lying in a ditch loom up and disappear like a half-remembered thought. “Interesting trip.”

I waited a couple of minutes for my heart to start beating normally. Maybe it was time to get some snow tires. “Of course, no one says he even had a humpback. Kees did mention he might have just had poison ivy or something.”

I shook my head. “Kees was just covering his tracks. I don’t say the guy had the hump necessarily, but he was seriously into this prednisone stuff or Kees wouldn’t have brought it up. I have the suspicion he thinks we have, or at least we had, a full-fledged Cushing’s victim on our hands. In any case, hump or no hump, a run through the local prescriptions ought to give us something.”

“Assuming he was local.”

And so it went, hour after hour, traveling through white space with only the occasional slipping of the tires to let us know we were attached to the road. The conversation lapsed now and then, but only long enough for us to come up with a few more weird ideas.

It was a morale booster if nothing else. By the time Frank took over the wheel in Hartford, I knew for certain my old friend was back where he belonged. We had never worked together on a case as convoluted as this, but we had shared lots of long, winding conversations that had eventually set us on the right course. After all the uncertainty and frustration of the past few days, that simple process, even without final answers, was a big comfort.

Night had fallen halfway into the trip, narrowing our already limited view to a hypnotizing funnel of onrushing snow. Coming from the space-like void, it blazed briefly in the headlights before careening off the windshield, without sound or trace. It was like flying through densely packed stars while standing perfectly still. I was no longer sure if we were moving, or if the earth was slipping rapidly beneath us. And we were utterly alone. North of Springfield the traffic had ceased to exist and we hurtled along in total isolation.

The illusion was shaken first by the dark, deep rumbling of a diesel engine coming up from behind—an oddly menacing sound that enveloped the car. Murphy muttered, “Christ, the son of a bitch must be flying.”

I looked around. The ice-caked rear window glowed with two shaking headlights from an eighteen-wheeler. The noise grew and became a vibration, tickling the soles of my feet and making my hands sweat.

“How fast are we going?”

Both of Frank’s hands were tight on the steering wheel. “Forty-something.”

The light was getting stronger, along with the noise.

“He’s got to be going fifty or better.”

The truck was abreast of us now, a mechanical monster looming like a nightmare.

“What the fuck’s he doing? He’s going to kill us.” Frank tugged at the window crank, fighting against the ice outside. The window suddenly came free. Blazing snow, wind, and the screaming of a diesel engine swept into the car, making us both shout in alarm. Across Murphy’s chest I could see the trailer’s side marker lights gleaming inches from his door; had he reached out his hand, he could have touched them. The wind blew the hat from his head, and in the demonic red glow his face was tight with fear.

“Let up on the gas,” I shouted.

He was ahead of me. The truck’s speed picked up as ours lessened, but too late. The riveted steel wall of the box veered closer and connected. There was a thump and a screech of metal. The car was lifted as by the wind. The smoothness beneath our wheels rippled loudly and then sent a punch that lifted us from our seats. Briefly, as in the flash from a camera, I saw the guard rail dead ahead, heard a sudden smashing and then all was quiet and darkness.

For a moment we were airborne, the headlights gone, the windshield a spidery web of cracked glass, the car filled with wind. The nose made contact first, throwing me against my seatbelt. The windshield blew out and we began to roll, slowly at first, then faster and faster. I felt my body float in harness amid an orchestra of noise. The end I don’t remember. There was a flash of light from deep behind my eyes, and there was water. The lovely sound of rushing water.

I WOKE UP
in a hospital room, staring at a ceiling of pockmarked little tiles, complete with a brown water stain directly overhead. I can’t remember ever seeing such a ceiling without a stain like that.

I was flat on my back and my head hurt. I knew it was a hospital because of the smell, the whiteness, the drip bag suspended from a coat-hanger contraption to my right, and the fact that I’d been woken up by a voice paging Dr. Winters.

I turned my head slightly to better examine the drip bag and instantly closed my eyes against the burst of pain. A scraping noise made me open them again. Gail’s face came into view.

“Joe?”

“Guilty.” My voice had a canned sound to it, as if it came from the outside.

“How are you?”

“Not good, I guess.” My head pounded regularly now, in perfect time with my heart.

Her face came very close, and I felt her lips touch my own. They were soft and trembling. I had never felt so totally in love. I wanted the kiss to continue.

She touched my cheek with her hand. “You’ve been asleep a long time.” Her eyes were brimming.