The Inquisitor (32 page)

He took a breath, then let it escape slowly from his pursed lips. It sounded as if he were deflating. "The latter."

She felt a glimmer of relief. There would be time. She'd hear the details of what he'd done, then they could decide on a plan.

Never once did she think to be afraid of him.

Rain pelted on metal.

Her head hurt.

She also heard the rush of running water.

Cold seeped through her, insinuating itself deep into her bones, and icy liquid crept up her chest.

Her eyes flew open.

But everything remained black.

She couldn't remember what had happened.

Then a contraction seized her belly and cut her in two.

Oh, my God, I'm in labor.

Janet doubled over with a cry, vaguely aware she lay on her side in a cramped space with a hard irregular surface. Where am I? How did I get here? Why can't I see? But the brutal agony in her belly cut off all her questions.

She couldn't breathe, not even scream. The pain smothered her, shrank her world until all she sensed were the impossible forces at work in her womb.

My baby, she thought, forcing herself to count off the seconds, to think rationally, to mentally catalog the primitive thrust of the uterine muscles into their physiological stages, as if her ability to name what racked her could exert mastery over its hold, deaden its grip, and break its power. After a full minute, the contraction released, dropping her back into the darkness and cold, as flickers of memory tried to tell what had happened.

A crash?

And Thomas!

Where was he?

They'd been in her car together, coming back from St. Paul's.

He'd offered to drive again, promised to go much slower this time, and apologized for speeding on the trip in. "Finding J.S.'s name in the cluster search really shook me," she remembered him saying.

But the recollection remained shrouded in a haze, and her thinking came in slow, disjointed fragments. She couldn't see the time on her watch or even tell if it still worked. How long had she been in labor, let alone unconscious?

She tried to feel around her. Her hands found knobs and dials that felt like parts in the dashboard of her car, but twisted, and arranged vertically, as if tipped sideways. Everywhere were fragments of broken glass spread thick as confetti.

And water. She lay in half a foot of it.

Her brain continued to work at half speed.

Obviously they'd crashed.

But where?

She recalled pulling out from the parking lot. The rain had seemed less, but a few blocks away they found parts of the downtown core to be in complete darkness, including the expressway. The beam of their headlights barely penetrated the murk.

The storm must have come back at full force, she thought, judging by the constant din on whatever remained of her car. But water also seemed to be gushing around her. If only she could see.

"Thomas!"

No answer.

What had happened to him?

She felt above her to where the driver's seat should be. Free ends of a seat belt trailed toward her, and her fingers found the gearshift, the leather upholstery, but no Thomas.

Had he been thrown clear?

"Thomas!" She screamed louder then before.

Even if he was conscious and able to hear, the roar from the storm and whatever that rushing water might be would drown her out.

She tried to move her legs. Sore yet functional, though cramped in the crumpled shell of her car. By now she'd realized it had rolled on its side, but not all the way over. Otherwise she would have been crushed or had her neck broken, the windshield and flimsy convertible top offering no protection to a car flipped upside down. And she hadn't been able to buckle up. God, she could easily have died.

And the baby. God, what had happened to her baby? If her stomach had hit the dashboard or been compressed by the rollover, he might be injured. Reflexively she palpated her own abdomen. It hurt only slightly, not nearly as much as her head, and had no focal areas of tenderness that might mean contusions or damage to the fetus. But she had to find help, make it to a hospital where they could monitor him, check him with ultrasound, get him safely out and treat any injuries to him. A month premature, he'd need special care anyway.

She tried to extricate herself from where she'd been lying, gripping the steering wheel and the back of the driver's seat, then hoisting herself up while pushing with her feet. It felt like climbing out of a pit.

"Thomas! Help!"

Lightning split the sky, and in a flash she saw above her the driver's-side door, its glass starred with cracks but intact, the windshield on her right equally fragmented yet also in place, and she remembered something that shouldn't have been.

The right side of her head throbbed, not the front.

Crawling higher, she strained to look around, saw only darkness, and the steady sound of water streaming around her smashed vehicle became louder. But the effort left her dizzy, so much so she sank back into the passenger compartment.

Where the hell had they crashed?

She wished for yet another lightning burst to give her a chance to get a bearing.

None obliged.

My cellular, she thought, hands diving into her coat pockets. I can call for help.

Empty.

It must have fallen out as the car rolled.

She felt around for it in the darkness.

Still nothing.

Struggling again to reach the door, her fingers gripped the far edge of the driver's seat, and she pulled herself to her knees. This time her head spun so severely she thought she'd pass out. She nevertheless persisted and felt around for the handle.

Her fingers scraped over the jagged metal edges where it had been snapped off. Nothing else budged. The door was jammed shut.

Had Thomas crawled out the roof? Gone for help?

She flapped her hands behind her, touched the taut surface of the leather and explored it with her fingers. It was intact.

He must have been thrown out the door after all, but the rollover had swung it shut again. And she'd definitely landed in water. Her side of the car rested in a shallow pool.

Her brain spun through a few high-speed revolutions, and she sank back to her knees.

God, she must have really hit her head.

She couldn't recall past Thomas starting up the access road to the darkened expressway. Retrograde amnesia, they called it. Meant she'd given her noggin a good enough whump to knock off her memory for events leading up to the accident. Neurologists considered it a sign of significant head trauma.

No kidding. The throbbing that ran from her temple to her ear could have told her that. Again something concerned her about where she hurt.

She once more mustered her strength, pulled herself up, and tried to force the driver's-side door open.

It remained stuck. She couldn't even release the locks.

Nor could she unclip the front of the retractable roof from the windshield frame. The mechanism must have been twisted or jammed with the crash.

She'd nothing sharp enough to cut the leather, so she tried to rip it with her hands and punch through it with her fists, but the material proved to be too tough. She even lay back and thrust at it a few times with her legs, hoping to poke a tear.

No luck. She didn't have the strength, and the effort left her increasingly lightheaded.

She twisted to try to smash out the driver's-side window, though her swollen belly would probably be an impossible squeeze through it.

She'd struck it with her shoe just as the inside of her brain revved all the way up to a death spiral. Oh, God, what's happening? she thought, feeling her heart start to race as she collapsed back into the passenger compartment.

And something clicked.

Dizzy, a fast pulse, and in labor.

Pain could cause it, but at the moment she'd no contractions.

Not a hemorrhage, she prayed, reaching inside her skirt to check.

From the waist down she'd been soaking wet in cold water. But between her legs the fluid felt warm to her fingers.

Oh, God, no!

She fought back a surge of panic, trying to tell herself it might not be blood.

Yet she now dreaded the next lightning flash for fear of what it would show.

Once more a sickening spin filled her skull, and she clutched blindly at wherever she could for support.

The dark sky detonated into a searing light, making it possible to see.

Swirls of crimson curled away from her through black water like fronds of seaweed, and small currents where the stream flowed through the car swept them away.

In an instant darkness returned, more impenetrable than ever, her eyes no longer adjusted to it.

Seconds later another contraction hit.

Wednesday, July 18, 11:31 p.m.

There'd still been no word from Janet.

And her cellular remained off.

He'd repeatedly phoned the hospital and asked them to page her.

No response.

He'd asked them to page Thomas.

The same result.

When he'd tried to call the man at home, in case Janet had dropped him off, he reached a recording inviting the caller to try St. Paul's. The man's cell phone number produced a full minute of intermittent buzzing, until the same answering machine clicked in.

"Shit!" Earl yelled, tossing the phone into the passenger seat and gliding his van through yet another small lake that had formed across the road. Everyone else he knew justified owning a four-wheel-drive beast for family trips, luggage, kids, a nanny, or the family dog. His reason? On a bad night, he could power through anything.

Thomas's car remained parked in front of their house. Nevertheless, he dared to hope the familiar sight of Janet's green Mazda would greet him when he opened the automatic garage door.

Empty.

At least they still had power. The rest of the suburbs he'd passed through were riddled with blackouts where wires had gone down.

He stepped over Muffy as she lay inside the front entranceway, stooping to give her ears a perfunctory rub. She must have been out for a walk, because her coat, softened by the rain, had the sweet aroma of wet wool and felt young again. She raised her head and slipped her tongue out for a quick comfort lick of his hand.

The dog probably sensed his fear.

He strode through the living room and headed straight for his study, where he found Annie still busy at the computer.

"Hi, Doc," she said, not looking up from a screen filled with swat soldiers and a scoreboard displaying an impressive number of kills.

"Sorry, Annie, but can you hang around? I may have to go out again."

This announcement won him a glance, and her face fell. "What's happened? You look spooked."

"I'll explain later. Right now I need my computer." He wouldn't frighten her about Janet just yet.

She vacated the chair and bustled out of the room. "I'll put on a pot of tea."

She'd a great talent for knowing when to make herself scarce.

He clicked up the cluster program and, as the machine erratically hummed to retrieve it, thought about Sadie Locke's calendar marked with crosses.

The tiny memorials, when he first saw them, had occupied about a quarter of the squares demarcating days. Not systematically one in four- he would have picked up something so recognizable on the spot- but in a distribution close enough to it that those crosses popped to mind after Susanne mentioned residents being on one in four nights. In other words, could the murders correspond to a resident's schedule? And if J.S. had been on duty in ER for 80 percent of the kills, plus seemed to be protecting someone, the obvious question became, How often had the man she most liked to work with been there?

He typed in DR. T. BIGGS.

The computer digested the command and proceeded to download the R-3 duty roster, a lengthy process that let Earl stand there and battle nausea as Janet's being overdue grew more ominous by the minute.

God help him, he'd no reason to suspect Thomas of anything sinister. The man had been his best resident in a decade. But a knack to see all possible answers to a problem, no matter how far they lay outside the box or how unsavory their implications, meant he jumped on perverse ideas the same way he might seize on an isolated clinical sign to track down a mystery illness. In fact, the unlikelihood of a piece of information attracted him, because pursuing a rogue notion made him approach the puzzle from a different angle, forcing a new perspective on it. And now, cold certain that something bad had happened to Janet, he wasn't about to spare anybody.

The screen flashed up the verdict.

Fifty percent.

Jesus Christ, what the hell did that mean? he wondered, not in any mood to be toyed with, especially by a machine.

The number seemed high. Not 80 percent like J.S., but more than what it should have been if the nights on which killings occurred were part of a completely random and unrelated pattern.

A sensation that his lungs were being sucked inside out filled his chest.

Slow down, and don't jump to conclusions here, he told himself. Cluster studies only focus on opportunity.

They totally ignored things such as motive or the personality of the perpetrator, he reminded himself, and he slowed his breathing.

Besides, there might be other explanations unrelated to Thomas. Perhaps the killer had a schedule that overlapped all the resident's on-call rosters at least half the time.

He quickly plugged as many third-year residents' names into the cluster program as he could think of. About a quarter of them got the same 50 percent Thomas had, half got 25 percent, and another quarter got 0. He'd no idea what it meant, but at least the man who had Janet with him didn't stand out alone. While that didn't totally exonerate the guy, Earl's runaway imaginings that his protege might be some secret fiend began to abate.

But he'd no sooner reined in his paranoia than it leapt out with another possibility.

Any one of those residents in the 50 percent group would have the opportunity to move around the hospital without raising suspicions, given the way they were called here and there to help out their juniors all the time.

Shit! Stop it! This is over-the-top crazy.

He brought his breathing under control again. In his mind he could even hear Janet spout her usual refrain whenever his instincts to think the worst ran amok. There you go again, she would say, dreaming up nasty inklings. I swear, they pop up as insubstantial as the kernels of corn that Brendan loves to watch puff open in the microwave.