Scent of Evil (53 page)

“Climb up.”

“How? That’s a four-foot threshold.”

He kicked over a chair, as I’d hoped he might. I positioned it against the lower cabinet, let a surreptitious drop of blood hit the seat, and immediately put my shoe on it as I stepped up. I put my knee on the edge of the square opening, smeared a tiny bit of blood where it could be seen once the secret door was shut again, and crawled halfway in.

He had climbed up behind me to keep me going, not taking time to look around at the trail I’d left behind. “Keep moving.”

“It’s hard to see.” That part was true. Beyond the hole at the end of the three-foot tunnel, it was just a dim void with an odd, empty resonance to it.

“Put your leg over and reach down. You’ll find the bottom; it’s even with the floor.”

I did as instructed. As soon as I gained solid footing, I turned to see if I could catch him off guard, but he was already next to me, having closed the cabinet behind us and leapt down in one easy, practiced movement. Again, I felt the gun’s hard nose nuzzle my spine.

“Straight ahead, there’s a ladder.”

The air was suffocating, as bad as the heat wave of the past week—worse in the total blackness surrounding us. There was a rancid odor of decay, and of something akin to old, moldy wool. My bloody hand located the rungs of a ladder.

“Start climbing, and don’t try to hit me with your heels. I’ll be out of the way.”

The thought had crossed my mind, along with dozens of others. I had seen situations like this in the movies, and I, along with everyone else, had been critical of the hero for not being more aggressive. After all, I’d always reasoned, you’re dead anyway, why not fight for your life?

The problem with all that, I now knew, was that you didn’t really believe you were dead anyway. Despite what he’d told me, I knew there had to be a way out of this; it became too irrational otherwise. I started climbing.

“Where’s this lead?” I asked.

“Up.”

We’d been trained about hostage situations, about creating a bond with the kidnapper, making it harder for him to kill someone who was hell-bent on becoming a friend. But I knew it wouldn’t work on Buddy.

“How far up?”

“You’ll know.”

I had no feeling of my surroundings. I might as well have been climbing into the night sky above a boiling cauldron, swathed in its cloying, invisible steam. I tried focusing on something more tangible. I knew I was climbing one of the four air shafts; there were no other available empty spaces in the building. During the remodeling, there’d been some discussion about taking over the hundred-year-old shafts to create more floor space, since their original purpose had been replaced by modern, less cumbersome technology. But the engineers had vetoed the idea—something about structural integrity. The shafts had stayed.

“You do this during the remodeling? Cover your noise with the carpenters ?”

There was no answer. Despite his warning, I tried kicking back with my heels a couple of times, but all I hit was air. I was sweating profusely, not only from the heat, but from the exercise. I felt I’d been climbing a half-mile straight up.

Suddenly, I ran out of rungs. My hand reached up in what was becoming an automatic grasp, closed on nothing, and threw me completely off balance. My foot, in midair, hesitated, missed its placement, and rattled by several rungs as I almost fell backwards into the darkness, arrested only by my throbbing left hand. I heard Buddy grunt below as he ducked to avoid my swinging, kicking feet.

I latched back on and rested, panting hard.

“Reach the top?” Buddy’s voice was· sarcastic.

“What the hell was that? You gonna drop me into a goddamn black pit?”

“I have something better in mind for you. Know where we are?”

I looked around, feeling aimlessly for something solid with one outstretched arm. “The attic?”

“Yeah, the bat cave. That’s what we call it in maintenance. Climb to the top, take one step forward, and freeze. It’s not all floor, so don’t get fancy.”

I stepped off the ladder, but then immediately turned and waited, all my energy directed at sensing when Buddy would come even with the floor so I could kick back at his head.

Instead, I heard his voice slightly off to one side and level with me. “Waiting to send me back down the hard way?”

I had no idea how he’d done it. He seemed totally oblivious to the pitch black of our surroundings. Indeed, everything about him had metamorphosed, including his slightly hesitant, boyish speech. A tingling spread across the nape of my neck—a small reminder of panic awaiting.

There was a scraping sound, and abruptly a dim shaft of murky light sliced into the void, outlining the large square hole before me, the top of not one, but two ladders, and the dim perception of a room the size of a closet. Buddy’s shadow stood by the side of the narrow door he’d opened, the gun in his hand shining dully.

“Step right this way.” The gun waved in invitation.

I edged around the shaft hole and stepped through the door. I was on a narrow catwalk, suspended from cables that disappeared into the gloom overhead. Beneath me was a grid work of floor joists and support beams, the square gaps between them filled with musty, dark snowdrifts of rock-wool insulation. I looked to the sides. Nearby I could make out the forty-five-degree slope of a couple of immense rafter beams, along with another catwalk angling off into the dark. The air was almost literally suffocating, rich with the stench of bat dung, rotten wood, and damp insulation, fragments of which I’d smelled at the bottom of the shaft.

“Go down to the end, turn left, and keep going to the platform.”

I reached out tentatively to steady myself. Each catwalk had but one handrail, also made of cable. The other side was left free, presumably to make it easier for workmen to lower ladders to the joists ten feet below. It was a practical idea, but not great for one’s sense of balance. At best, the catwalks were two feet wide. In my present state of mind, a tightrope was no wider.

I followed Buddy’s directions, my earlier thoughts of leaving a trail long gone. The length of the climb, the darkness, the near-unbearable heat had all combined to make the attic as alien to me as the far side of the moon. Only a few dozen feet below, the night-shift policemen were loitering around the coffee machine, or chatting with the dispatcher. Ron Klesczewski was probably hard at work, awkwardly poised over his paperwork, having totally missed my feeble message. Up here, suspended between a pitched roof I couldn’t perceive and a floor that looked like a wood-strewn, blackened sea, I felt utterly abandoned.

The platform he’d mentioned was two steps up from the catwalk and about six feet square. There were no handrails at all here, the area serving as a junction for four catwalks, one branching off from each side. A single chair stood before me, placed near one edge, overlooking the entire attic’s only source of light: a dim, dirt-covered skylight that hung over the building’s top-floor corridor. In the days before electricity, this skylight had matched a similar window cut into the roof above, allowing Mother Nature to illuminate at least a portion of the building’s interior. The outer skylight had long ago been sealed over, leaving its quaint and functionless mate to gather dust. I stepped up onto the platform and looked down onto the grimy glass rectangle, noticing, outlined against the dim glimmer coming from the corridor’s fire-safety lighting, the stiff and tiny body of a sparrow.

The first possibility of escape occurred to me then, justifying in my own mind my docility so far. If I were to merely step off the platform, I could crash through the skylight to the floor below it and maybe get away. From this elevation, it was probably twelve feet to the glass, which in turn was some ten feet above the floor. A long way to go, but survivable, which was more than I thought my chances were with Buddy. Besides, I continued thinking hopefully, even if I broke both legs, I might still be able to crawl to a fire alarm and summon help. I took a small step toward the edge to get into position.

“Cute,” was all I heard from behind me before the back of my head exploded into a painful flash of light and I felt my entire body go weak. My hand flew to the point of impact and was grabbed by Buddy, who pulled me backward off balance into the chair. I landed heavily, my head still swimming, and was only half aware of him quickly handcuffing my wrists behind my back, to the outside rails of the chair back. He ran off two long strips of duct tape and fastened my legs to the front legs of the chair.

If there was one image that had dogged me throughout this case, and had served as a continual reminder that the man we were after was both determined and crazed, it was the picture of Charlie Jardine, bound and helpless, having to watch his own death like a spectator. Superimposing that image on my own situation, I suddenly came face to face with the true meaning of the word “horror.”

I worked my mouth several times, trying to get the words to come out, fighting the fearful nausea and the pain from the back of my head. “Buddy, for Christ’s sake. Why do this?”

He laughed, putting the finishing touches on his handiwork. “This has been my home away from home. No one knows where we are. I’m going to end this the way it began and then I’m history.”

He pulled a small bottle and a packaged syringe from his pants pocket and began preparing an injection.

“Buddy, we went through your house; we found the silencer and the curare. We know you killed Jardine. Killing me isn’t going to help you.”

He was meticulously measuring how much curare to pull into the syringe barrel, holding it against the skylight’s dim glow. He sounded almost bored. “It doesn’t matter. If I am caught, I’ll be able to get off on an insanity plea, especially after killing you.”

He tapped the syringe with his fingernail and shot a little of the fluid out the end of the needle, to eliminate any air bubbles.

I made a single, convulsive leap against my bonds, hoping for a flaw in the duct tape or a weakness in the chair. I barely moved, though the pain and nausea from my head wound doubled in intensity.

Buddy looked at me and shook his head. “That reminds me: I better tape you down a little better before I stick this in. Wouldn’t want you bouncing around, messing my aim up.”

His words had the proper undermining effect. Had I waited until he was just poised with his needle, I might have been able to knock it out of his hand with my shoulder.

I closed my eyes as he set about taping my elbows painfully together, pinning my upper arm against the back of the chair so tightly I could barely move.

“There we go,” he said happily. “Trussed up like a hog.”

He picked up the syringe from the floor and held it ready. “Any last words? Words become a little difficult after this stuff goes in; that’s what Charlie found anyway.”

“Yeah, Buddy, I’d like to know why? Jardine didn’t steal Rose from you, and losing a scholarship couldn’t have been the end of the world.”

He paused for a long time, giving me a faint touch of hope. “Let’s say I thought it was poetic justice, and leave it at that.”

He did it then with astounding quickness. One moment he was smirking down at me, the syringe held delicately in his hand, and the next it was over, the needle had been withdrawn, and he was carefully putting the small plastic sleeve back over it before slipping the whole thing into his pocket. “Gotcha,” was all he said.

I felt for a moment that my heart had stopped. I turned my head away from him and looked down at the shape of the small, dead sparrow, all my focus turned inward. After a half minute I realized I needed to start breathing, and I took some of the hot, stale air into my lungs, no longer resentful of its poor quality.

“I envy you a bit, you know. I’m curious about how it feels. With Charlie, it was almost like he was going into a trance, until I grabbed his attention, that is. Did you guys figure out exactly how I did it?”

I was beginning to feel very odd. I tried to answer, mostly to see if I could do it, but the effort seemed too much. I wasn’t numb, which was how I’d imagined Charlie had felt. Instead, it was just the opposite. I could sense everything that was going on inside me: the air moving in and out, the blood rushing through the vessels in my neck, the regular thumping of my heart, the sweat pouring down my face. But I could not will myself to do anything, wiggle a toe, or move my tongue, or even swallow. It was as if all the body’s automatic systems had taken over, and all the voluntary ones short-circuited.

Buddy was still chatting, fooling with something beyond my scope of vision, but I no longer listened. All I had left was my ability to concentrate, and to spend what time I had left paying attention to Buddy seemed a waste. At first, though, I didn’t actually know what to think about. The case came to mind, the irony of it ending this way, questions about how they would deal with my death. I wondered if Ron would be made lieutenant, and if Willy Kunkle would bother trying to get back on the force without me goading him.

Gail eventually pushed all that aside, as she often did in real life. I found myself regretting how little time I’d given her this past week, and how I’d allowed the tensions of the investigation to come between us, if only temporarily. I remembered holding her close just recently, having patched up those differences, and the warmth of her voice on the phone a mere twenty minutes ago.

Buddy thrust his face before my own, cutting off my view of the skylight. “Hi, Joe. You haven’t been paying attention. I invented a new toy, something to help me in my work.” He dangled a thin nylon strap in front of me, on which two empty wooden sewing spools had been taped, about an inch and a half apart.

“See, when I killed Charlie, it was hard work; it took a long time and ended up being painful—for me, that is. My thumbs hurt for a couple of days. So this is my new experiment.” He disappeared and I could hear him moving behind me. The strap, held horizontally, reappeared before my eyes, the spools side by side, in the middle.

“It goes around the neck, each spool over an artery, so that when I pull it tight, you can still breathe, but the blood gets shut off. It’s no wear and tear on me, ’cause I just work a tourniquet stick from the back. Whatcha think? Neat, huh?”