Bone Deep

31

Kom was awakened in the night by a distant sound and he lay still for a moment, blinking in the dark. He glanced at Tovah to see if she had heard it too, but she slumbered on beside him, mouth slightly ajar, rendered beyond the reach of casual noises by her sleeping pills. The noise came again and Kom turned toward his window where a faint glow diffused the darkness. It was not moonlight or any other kind of illumination that he could readily identify, and it seemed to shift and dance across the pane. The sound came again, a dull rasp, not close but not too distant, either.

Kom crossed to the window and peered into the night. It took him a moment to take it in and make sense of it. At the far reaches of his lawn, several yards into the woods but still on his property, he could make out the form of a man with a flashlight. The noise was the sound of his shovel scraping through dirt and stone. From this distance, it looked to Kom for all the world like a man digging a grave. For just a moment he felt a shiver as he imagined it was Kiwasee, returned somehow, but he shook the feeling off disdainfully and focused on reality. There was no time for supernatural maunderings, the situation at hand was perilous enough.

His first thought was that the police were there, searching for something, but when he reached the kitchen door and viewed the spectacle from the ground level, he realized that the police would not come without notice, without proper authority-and they wouldn't come alone.

There was only one man digging, and it could only be Becker.

Kom slipped out the front door, hidden from view of the digger in the woods by the entire house, and made his way silently to the edge of the trees that flanked his property like a horseshoe. Timing his movements to coincide with the thrusts of the shovel, he crept slowly around and behind the scene of the activity. If Becker was watching at all, he would be watching the house. Kom would come at him from the rear.

Kom stopped thirty yards away with a clear line of sight to Becker's back. He knelt behind the wide double trunk of a hickory and eased the golf club he had snatched from his garage onto the ground. It would be easy enough to slip up behind Becker and bury the golf iron in his skull. The man was working hard and making enough noise with his exertions to cover any sound Kom might make. It would be a solution to his problem, it would be easy to do, and he had proven to himself that he could act when he needed to. Kiwasee had been younger and stronger than Becker and Kom had handled him easily. He could do the same with Becker anytime. It was more important now, he thought, to discover what Becker was up to.

As Kom watched, Becker finally rested, leaning against his shovel and breathing heavily while he eyed the house. Apparently content that he was still undetected, the agent picked up a garbage bag and dropped it into the hole he had dug. The bag swung easily in his hand and Kom could tell there was nothing heavy in it. No body being buried. He grinned to himself. But then Becker wouldn't have a body at hand, would he? Becker didn't have the balls to create his own when he wanted one.

Becker may have killed some people, but only when the law said it was all right to do so, only when he was defending himself. What did a man like that know about the mania that could sweep over Kom? What did he even know about the courage it took to kill Kiwasee? That had been done without passion, without desire, without a trace of the demon riding on his soul. And Denise. There was no gutless claim of selfdefense with Denise, not even the demand of necessity. Kom had done it because he could, because it was clever, because it would thwart any further investigation of himbut not because he needed to do it in any sense.

Because he wanted to. Becker would know nothing about any of that. Kom was swept by a profound contempt for his opponent, a creation of his own press, a creature of reputation. It was hard to believe that he had ever respected Becker so, that he had ever wanted to learn what Becker knew.

There had been a time when he felt perhaps he could form a bond of the soul with the man, that they could somehow share their secret and unutterable passion. But Becker had not been worthy as a friend. He was not worthy as an adversary now, Kom had countered and foiled him every step of his clumsy way. He thought again of bashing his skull, sweeping him away and being done with it so that even the memory of his ill-fated attempt at friendship would be gone. He lifted the golf club, feeling its comforting heft. A perfect lever. Swung at the length of his arm, it could kill from five feet away, its iron head speeding at a hundred miles an hour. It would crush Becker's head like an eggshell.

Becker shifted his weight, glancing to the side, and Kom pressed himself against the tree trunk. As if sensing the danger-or more likely just to give his muscles a breakBecker filled in the hole from the side of the grave so that he was partially turned toward Kom. It didn't matter, Kom thought. Becker was desperate and that would make him careless; he could be lured into his death whenever Kom desired.

When Becker had at last moved off into the night, Kom opened the grave once more. The digging was easy now that the rocks had been removed and the soil loosened. He pulled the bag from the bottom of the hole and undid the twist tie. In the light of his own flashlight Kom surveyed the contents of the bag. A scalpel with flecks of blood still on the blade and handle. A pair of surgical gloves. A surgical gown, also marked with blood. A surgical cap. He could see a few stray hairs within the cap, lying there as if carefully placed by hand. A name tag from a supermarket chain. "Denise" was printed on the black plastic background. Kom tried to remember if Denise had worn it on her last night. Of course not, ridiculous. She had awaited him in a teddy, but she would never have worn the tag into the Marriott, no matter what outfit she had on. It might have been in her purse, it might have fallen out… He scoffed at the idea. It was a plant, like the rest of it, like the bloody scalpel, like the operating gown. There was no possibility that these were the actual ones he had worn, although he imagined that Becker might have managed to get Denise's blood on them.

Nothing of Kom's though. There could be no trace of Kom on any of the items-except the hairs in the cap. Those must be his, that would be the evidence that tied everything to him. Kom remembered the day he had returned home to see Becker driving away. The damn fool Tovah had let him in the house. What had he done, asked to use the bathroom, found Kom's comb? Searched the sheets, the pillows, plumbed the drains?

It was ludicrous, he thought. Such an obvious setup. Who would believe it? That he would bury it all in his own backyard? Did they think he was suicidal? An idiot? Becker obviously thought they would believe this awkward artifice, and he was one of them, he knew how they thought.

Kom felt insulted that they would reduce his triumphant accomplishments to the blundering work of a nitwit.

The final ingredient of the bag was a hypodermic syringe with a trace of clear fluid still in the chamber. Did Becker think that he had drugged his victims? Was that how he was supposed to have killed them? He had done them willingly. They had wanted to please him. What kind of oaf did Becker imagine him, skulking around with hypos and poisons?

Whatever the fluid in the syringe was, he was certain that the needle would show traces of Denise's blood, Becker would have seen to that.

At once furious and disdainful, Kom removed the bag and went into his house to find something to replace it before filling in the hole.

The police arrived just before dawn, but Kom was awake and waiting. He had not slept that night after dealing with the aftermath of Becker's visit, and, he realized with some surprise, he had slept very little for the last week. Between phone calls and nocturnal restlessness, he had become in@kyiiniac. It didn't bother him, he told himself. He had always gotten by on less sleep than other people. His constitution was stronger, he was stronger. Normal rules did not apply to him. Not moral rules, not physical laws. There were pills to keep him going, if he needed them, and his mind did not need to rest anyway. It was too active, too full. Some machines work best when going at full capacity, and he was one of them.

His eyelids were scratchy and his eyes seemed to burn, but he smiled brightly as he opened the door to the chief of police. "Sorry to trouble you at this hour," Tee said.

"No trouble. I'm ready to help the police at any hour. Did you find some more bones for me to look at?"

Metzger stood behind Tee, a pick and shovel in hand, a tarpaulin slung over his shoulder. Metzger's dog sat upright at its master's feet, its tail thumping excitedly on the ground.

"Actually, we got an anonymous call from someone who said he had seen you digging a grave last night, Dr. Kom."

"Good heavens," said Kom. "We know each other well enough, call me Stanley."

"It's official business," Tee said. "I know it seems silly, but with all the Johnny Appleseed scare and all-would you mind if we took a look out back?"

"An anonymous call?"

"That's right."

"Now who would be around to see me digging a grave at two o'clock in the morning? That makes you feel kind of uneasy, doesn't it? Makes you feel like someone is spying on you."

"I didn't say it was two in the morning," Tee said.

"No, but that's when I was doing it. You may have to restrain your dog, I'm afraid," Kom said, stepping off the porch. "Come on, Tee, I'll show you."

Kom escorted them to the grave and stood to one side, smiling, as Metzger excavated a gray trash bag.

"What's inside?" Tee asked.

"Didn't the informant tell you?"

"No, he didn't."

"We had a little accident in the house last night," Kom said. He knelt and untied the metal twist that sealed the bag. "Just be sure not to let Tovah see. She's going to be upset enough as it is."

Tee peered into the bag and saw the form of a snowywhite, long-haired cat, its body stiff as a board, its mouth still open as it was caught in a final howl.

"It leapt into the car just as I was slamming the door," Kom said. "Died instantly, I like to think. I was going to let Tovah think it ran away.

That's less cruel, isn't it, somehow? Let her hope it's still alive and being cared for somewhere?"

Tee squatted on his heels next to the hole, looking at the corpse of the cat. He resealed the bag, lowered it back, and with a nod indicated to Metzger to fill in the grave yet again. As the dirt hit the plastic and Kom jabbered on about his wife's pet, Tee stayed on his heels, staring up at Kom.

At his office, Kom's nurse asked if he was feeling all right. He had spent the day performing minor blunders, a series of small lapses that were noticeable only because he normally made so few. His memory failed him several times, he prescribed the wrong medication to a patient, and at one point in midafternoon the nurse found him staring blankly into space as if he were asleep standing up. His eyes were rimmed in red and deeply bloodshot. If she had not known him better, she would have thought he was coming off a three-day drunk. "Have you been sleeping all right?" she asked. He looked at her and laughed, startling her.

"I don't need to sleep," he said. "You miss too much that way."

The nurse was over fifty and overweight and had been partly medical assistant and partly mother hen to Kom for years. Her position had afforded her a familiarity-and a right to concern-that remained tightly enfolded within the stiff confines of hierarchical respect. No matter how possessive she felt within her heart, she always referred to him as "Doctor," as in, "Doctor will see you now,"

"Doctor is in good humor today"-as if Doctor were his name. If anyone had suggested to her that the constant, insistent use of a title placed him at a one step remove from the rest of humanity; or that it isolated him, made others unable to relate to him with spontaneity or naturalness, distorted his own view of his position and importance so that he was comfortable only when dealing with other physicians, reinforced his belief that special treatment was his due; or that the incessant parade of assorted ailments, all much alike, had caused him to view the possessors of those allments, and by extension most other people as well, from a cynical and uncaring distance-she would have scoffed at the notion. If Kom had confessed to her that he saw knees and elbows and broken bones and X rays clearly but had only a dim notion of the person who actually owned the troubled limbs, she would have not believed it. She would not have allowed herself to believe it.

Just as she did not now allow herself to believe that Doctor was on the verge of a breakdown.

"You need a nap," she said. "Why don't I cancel your appointments for an hour? You can lie down right in the examining room."

Kom laughed at her again. "I can't sleep alone," he said He winked at her, a grotesque, slow-motion movement that looked as if it pained him.

Later, the nurse would swear that she could almost hear the eyelid rasping against the eyeball, like sand on sand.

Later in the day, when conferring with his receptionist on a matter of billing, Kom glanced into the waiting room and thought he saw Becker seated in a chair, hiding behind a newspaper. The receptionist saw Kom turn away from the waiting room and grin. "Who is he pretending to be?"

Kom asked, tossing his head in the direction of the man in the chair.

The receptionist looked at him curiously. "Mr. Helquist?" she asked.

"Oh, right," Kom said, as if willing to go along with the joke.

Helquist, hearing his name, lowered the newspaper, revealing a large neck brace. He raised his brows inquisitively toward the receptionist.

"Not yet, sir," she said to Helquist. She puzzled over the twinkle in Kom's fiery eyes, wondering what conspiracy they were sharing.