The Frankenstein Factory (21 page)

He came to the end of the first aisle and moved on to the next. There was no sign of him down here, nothing but those damn cylinders. Frank might be still upstairs, finishing the job on Armstrong and Vera.

He might even be—

The blow was so unexpected that it knocked him against the wall of cylinders like a hammer to the head. Then, before he knew it, Frank was upon him, dropping from atop the line of tubes. The machete was at his throat, and Earl saw death only inches away.

He pressed against the blade with all his failing strength, feeling it cutting through the flesh of his palms, feeling all of Frank’s superhuman strength straining to end his life.

Here, inches away from his eyes, were the eyes of someone who wanted him dead. He had two good arms against Frank’s one, but it was still a losing battle. The blade of the machete came gently, unstoppably, against the soft flesh of his throat.

He tried to bring his knee up into Frank’s groin, but their bodies were too close together. He tried to kick him in the shins, but to little effect. He could only gasp for breath and try to keep the cutting edge away from his throat a few seconds longer.

He heard Armstrong shouting, from a great distance away, and knew that rescue would be too late, knew that he was dying.

And then he saw Frank’s eyes roll up high in his head, and a vomit of blood erupted from his mouth.

The pressure on his throat was gone, and he wiped away the blood from his face and eyes, staring down at Frank as he toppled over, gasping and choking on his own blood.

Armstrong came running up, took one look, and turned away.

“What happened to him?” Earl asked.

“The strain on his heart must have been too much. The pressure of the pumping blood tore out the fresh sutures. He just came apart inside, all at once.”

Earl wiped the blood from his palms and wrapped a handkerchief around them. He tried not to think about the last few minutes. “How’s Vera?”

“She’s coming around. And I heard the rocketcopter again.”

He stared down at Frank’s bloody face and gaping mouth. “Can’t anything be done for him?”

“Not this time.”

“All right. Let’s go upstairs.”

Vera was sitting up when they reached her, and the sound of the rocketcopter was much closer. “I think they’re landing,” she said.

“Let’s go see.”

“What about Frank?”

“He’s dead. For good, this time.”

For a moment she didn’t say anything. Then, as they walked up the steps of the amphitheater, she whispered, “I’m glad.”

“I think we all are,” Earl agreed.

The rocketcopter had landed on the beach, not far from the smoldering remains of the bonfire. A Mexican in the uniform of the International Air Rescue Service was walking toward them. “There was a sighting of emergency flares, and you didn’t answer the radiotelephone call. Is there trouble?”

“There was,” Earl confirmed. “Come up to the house and we’ll tell you all about it.”

Through the rest of the morning there were arrivals. The hovercraft from Baja brought the local police officials, and a medical team—accompanied by a regional police captain in full uniform—had arrived by boat to attend to the bodies. “The place looks like a war zone!” one doctor remarked. “What happened here?”

Earl had already told the story at least a half-dozen times, with growing dissatisfaction. He wanted to be away from Horseshoe Island, away from the bodies of Hobbes and the others, and the memory of Frank dying. He wanted to be back in New York City, feeding his report into the computerized records bank, talking to Carl Crader, and maybe flirting with the secretaries again.

But it was not yet time to go.

While the medical team worked downstairs, removing bodies and attempting to determine how many others were stored in the vault, Earl gathered up the files and ledgers, going over the records of ICI one more time. He reached into his pocket for a marking pen and instead came up with the coil of fine wire he’d found outside.

Wire?

It looked like the sort that had once been used to hang pictures, before the days of suction brackets.

Wire.

He put it back in his pocket and went outside to join Armstrong and Vera.

“How are your hands?” she asked.

He held up his bandaged palms. “Nothing serious. It won’t impede my progress any.”

Armstrong’s shoulder had been treated too, and he carried his arm in a makeshift sling. “Well,” he observed, “it looks as if we three are the survivors.”

Earl nodded. “The police captain said there’d be room on the rocketcopter to ferry us back to Baja. But I think we’d be better off arranging transportation in the other direction, to Guaymas. The airport is larger there, and we’ll have a better chance of making flight connections.”

After some further conversations with the officials, it was decided. The rocketcopter would carry the chief and some others back to Baja while the hovercraft helped transport bodies. Then the copter would come back for them and fly them across the gulf to Guaymas. The regional police captain would accompany them.

While Armstrong and Vera were recording their statements for the police Earl used his camera equipment to copy Hobbes’s ledgers. The police here would want the originals, but Crader would want copies back in New York.

“You were right about one thing,” Armstrong said, pausing at the door of the office. “When they examined Hilda’s body they found that that dark complexion of hers was theatrical makeup. She was wearing a black wig too. They think she was a much younger woman than she appeared—probably in her mid-thirties. And yes, she was menstruating.”

Earl smiled. “It was a good guess. Have they left yet?”

“Just about. They’re finishing taking Vera’s statement now.” Armstrong came in and took the other chair in Hobbes’s little office. The dust from blowing the safe was still thick in the room, coating everything with a thin layer of white.

“I’ve been wondering,” Earl said, “about Vera. And especially about the duel I fought with Tony before he was killed. You know, she could have set up that whole thing.”

Armstrong grunted. “She told me how it came about.”

“She could have killed Tony after I failed to do it for her. She could even have slipped out the back door and around the house and thrown that knife into Hobbes’s chest last night.”

“I thought we were convinced that Frank killed them all.”

“I wasn’t convinced. In fact, from the very beginning Frank was the single person on this island who
couldn’t
have killed them.”

“Would you mind explaining that?” Armstrong asked.

“First, there’s the evidence of the alarm system. It was tampered with the night MacKenzie was killed, so that his killer could move about the house freely. As was pointed out earlier, I think, such an act on the killer’s part tends to exonerate Frank. Would he have known of the alarm system, waking up after a sleep of nearly thirty years? And if by some fluke he did know about it, would it have been necessary for him to tamper with it? Once we remove Miss Emily from the list of victims, the first two become MacKenzie and Freddy. Both were killed in the operating room itself, as we discussed earlier. If Frank killed them, he didn’t have to leave that room until the murder of Hilda, some time later. So
why
did he need to disconnect the alarm system? Answer: he didn’t! Of all the people in this house, only Frank could have committed the first two murders without disconnection of the system. Carrying it a step further, he could have killed just about everyone else too without fouling up the alarms. Hilda was killed in her kitchen during the daytime; Whalen and Tony and Hobbes were all killed outside the house.”

“Maybe Hobbes tampered with the alarms for his own reasons, like putting up the signal flag. Maybe the murderer and the tamperer weren’t the same person.”

“Granted, that’s a possibility. But Frank is still ruled out by the
nature
of the killings.”

“What do you mean?” Armstrong asked.

“Well, consider how MacKenzie was murdered, for a beginning. He was strangled by a cord around his throat. And then the body was hidden in one of Hobbes’s freezing capsules. As we’ve seen time and again during these past few days, those screw tops on the capsules are difficult enough to get on and off with two good arms. And yet we know that Frank’s damaged brain made one arm next to useless. Even when he was fighting us, fighting for his life, he was mainly using only his right arm and hand. It would have been impossible for him to strangle MacKenzie with that cord, lift the body into the capsule, and then screw the top shut. Likewise, it would have been very difficult for him to have brained Freddy with a capsule top, using only one arm to lift it.”

“But you can’t seriously believe that Vera could have murdered six people in cold blood! For one thing, we were all accounted for during the period of Tony Cooper’s murder out at the wood pile. She was with Hobbes all the time, helping to search the island. Just as I was with you!”

“Yes,” Earl agreed. “That search was what threw us all off, wasn’t it? That search, more than anything else, seemed to clear the four of us and implicate either Frank or the missing Emily Watson. Of course, I’ve shown that Emily really died when Hilda died, so that seemed to only leave Frank.”

Outside, they could hear the sound of the rocketcopter taking off. Their rescuers were leaving, for the moment. They were alone on the island with Vera.

“Of course it left only Frank! Who else was there?” Armstrong asked.

“If Tony was stabbed earlier, as I believe, if he merely managed with his dying breath to stagger as far as the wood pile, then any of us could have done it.”

“Any of us?”

“Even you, Dr. Armstrong.”

“So it’s gotten down to a contest between Vera and myself now, has it? You picture one of us as an insane mass murderer, but you’re not sure which one.”

“
Insane
is your word, not mine.”

At that moment Vera appeared in the doorway, carrying a pot of coffee and three cups. “We’ve just got time for some coffee before the rocketcopter returns for us. How about it?”

Earl and Armstrong eyed each other. Then the tension eased as the doctor reached for a cup. “I’d be happy to join you.”

“Me too,” Earl agreed.

“Looks like I interrupted something,” Vera said, pouring the coffee. “What were you two chatting about?”

“Jazine was trying to convince me that you killed six people.”

Vera’s hand on the coffee pot was steady. “Oh? That would really make me some sort of fiend, wouldn’t it?”

Earl accepted the coffee and added some liquid sweetener. “I was only exploring possibilities.”

Dr. Armstrong chuckled. “If you really believed that business about Vera killing them, we shouldn’t be sitting here drinking coffee with her. If she could whip up a batch of nitro and a couple of magnesium flares, she could certainly find something in that laboratory to poison our coffee.”

“You know,” Earl said, “I was just thinking that same thing.”

His eyes went to Vera’s for just an instant. He stirred the coffee a bit with his spoon, gazing into it as if trying to read the future.

Then he drank it down.

“You’re a brave man, Jazine,” the doctor said.

Earl studied him for a moment before replying. “Only a wise one, Doctor. Vera didn’t kill those people—you did.”

Armstrong smiled indulgently. Then, almost faster than Earl’s eyes could follow, his right hand came out of the makeshift sling and snaked beneath his shirt. He had a short hunting knife hidden there, and he lunged across the table at Earl, his eyes glazed with a kind of madness.

That was when Vera swung the coffee pot against the side of his head.’

“G
ET SOMETHING TO TIE
him up,” Earl told her. “He’s not going to be too pleasant when he comes to!”

“Were you serious about him killing them all?”

“I was never more serious! If you didn’t believe me what did you hit him for?”

“He was going at you with a knife! My God, I already lost Freddy and Tony! I wasn’t going to let you get killed too!” She poured some more coffee from what remained in the dented pot, and now he noticed that her hand was trembling just a bit. “You must have had some reason for knowing that it was him.”

“Lots of reasons. With all the searches of the island and the house, it was impossible to believe that an outsider could have been responsible for the killings. There were only three possibilities—either the killer was Frank, or it was someone we assumed to be dead, like Emily Watson, or it was one of the dwindling survivors. I just explained to Armstrong how I knew it wasn’t Frank. And I explained earlier about Miss Emily being Hilda, the cook.”

“I wonder who she
really
was!”

“We’ll probably never know, unless there’s some identification among her papers. I imagine she was an actress or hologramer who fell in with Hobbes and helped him play his game. But, as I’ve said, there was no record of Emily Watson before a few years ago. Anyway, now that we know the truth a lot of things make sense—Hobbes’s virtual indifference when Miss Emily disappeared contrasted with his utter collapse when Hilda’s body was found. And the look of alarm he gave Hilda at the breakfast table when you insisted on going up to Emily’s room to look for her. And the fact that he resisted calling the police after Emily’s disappearance, when the communications with the mainland were still functioning. But she’s dead and she couldn’t have been our killer. Likewise, there could be no fakery with the other bodies. So that left the survivors—Armstrong and you and me.”

“Did you really suspect me?” she asked.

“Not as much as Armstrong thought. There were things all along the line that pointed to him. You and Tony arrived just the day before me. It’s doubtful you’d know enough about the alarm system to disconnect it. But Armstrong had been here for months. He knew exactly what to do. He was adept at slipping around at night, because he entered my room to tell me of Freddy’s murder and I never heard him till he shook me awake. The first three killings could have been done by anyone, but number four—Phil Whalen—bears a closer look.”