The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Even though Simone had wanted — begged — to accompany Lucas to the hospital, he had persuaded her to stay with her father, who looked, quite understandably, very troubled and shocked by the incident at the stadium.

The emergency room was in commotion, too, and Lucas wondered if this was common on a Saturday evening. Doctors and nurses were bustling about, speaking in low tones and appearing distracted. It was several minutes before a harried intern was found who could attend to Lucas’s knife wound. After swabbing it with antiseptic and taking a cursory look, he declared it a superficial wound, but put in a half-dozen stitches for good measure.

As the intern gathered up his supplies, he happened to ask Lucas how he’d been cut, and when Lucas told him he’d been attacked by a guy with a knife—“a guy named Wally Gregg, who’s been a patient in this hospital”—the intern abruptly stopped and said, “Can you wait here for a minute?”

Lucas had barely finished buttoning his bloodstained shirt when a portly man in a blue uniform barged in. A brass badge pinned to his lapel identified him as T.J. Farrell, Borough Police Chief.

“Is what that intern just told me true?”

“I couldn’t have made it up. What’s going on?”

“A doctor was injured downstairs a couple of hours ago. He was working in the morgue.”

“Was his name Crowley, by any chance?”

“Jesus Christ,” Farrell said. “How’d you know that, too?”

“I know he was attending to Wally Gregg.”

“Grab your stuff,” he said, gesturing at Lucas’s torn jacket draped on the examining table, “and come with me. Now.”

Leading him down a corridor, Farrell threw open the door to a private room where Lucas found Dr. Crowley propped up in a bed, with a bandage around his head, an IV drip hooked up to his arm, and a dreamy sedated look in his eye.

“I gather you two don’t need any introductions,” Farrell said.

Crowley didn’t reply, but lifted a hand limply off the bed to indicate that it was true.

“Mr. Lucas here says that he was attacked, too — and by the same guy that attacked you.”

A dim but fearful light went on in Crowley’s eyes.

“Tell him what happened in the morgue, Doc.”

Crowley looked uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure he could or even should tell this particular story.

“Tell him already. I haven’t got all day.”

“He died,” the doctor croaked from the bed.

“You mean the patient, right?” Farrell said, in a tone indicating that he was merely prompting the doctor for Lucas’s benefit.

“Yes. Gregg. Wally Gregg died.”

“From the infection,” Farrell prompted him again. “The bat bites, right?”

Crowley nodded, but just barely. “I pronounced him dead myself,” he said, his words slurred by the drugs. “He had no heartbeat. No pulse. No brain activity. He was dead.”

“And then what?” Farrell said. “Go on — tell him.”

“We took him downstairs for the autopsy. I was filling out the certificate. The death certificate.” Crowley closed his eyes for a few seconds before continuing. “That’s when I heard a noise, and I turned around.” He stopped again, as if unable to believe what he was recounting. “He was sitting up. His eyes were open.”

“And then what?” the chief said.

“He picked up the metal block — the one we wedge under the knees during an autopsy — and he hit me with it.” His hand went up toward his bandaged head. “He hit me with it, over and over again. He knocked me out.”

Lucas could hardly fathom what he was hearing. The last time he’d seen Wally in the hospital, the poor man looked like he was only inches from death’s door. How could he have recovered enough to knock someone out, much less leave the hospital, arm himself, and travel all the way to the stadium?

“When Doc Crowley here came to,” Farrell said to Lucas, “he was missing most of his clothes — his pants, his shoes, his coat and hat — and we have since learned that one of the surgical knives is gone. You think that’s what he used to wound you?”

“I didn’t get a good look at it.”

“We’ll get it later. Anything you can add to this?”

Lucas wondered how much he should share. “He looked like he was in a trance of some kind,” he said, “and he seemed to be heading straight for Professor Einstein.”

“Dr. Einstein was at the game?” Plainly, this part of the story was news to the police chief, and very unwelcome news at that.

“Yes. Even when I knocked Wally down and started fighting with him, he was still so focused on getting to his target that I don’t think he actually saw me.”

Farrell waited for more.

“I had to bang his head against the concrete to get him to stop.”

“And you think you killed him?”

“Yes,” Lucas said, “I killed him,” uttering words that he had never had to say out loud, even on the front lines in Europe. It was as if he were speaking some foreign, and abhorrent, tongue.

“Don’t worry about it,” Crowley said. “He was already dead.”

“Did he do anything else?” Farrell asked Lucas. “Did he say anything?”

The question gave Lucas pause. Should he bring up Wally’s bizarre Arabic curse? Could such information be of any possible use to the police? Or would it simply complicate things and cast doubt on his own credibility?

“Nothing that I could make out.”

Farrell mulled this over. “But Dr. Einstein’s okay, right?”

“Yes. He wasn’t injured. When I left, the ushers were escorting him out of the stadium.”

Farrell digested the additional information before pulling a card from his wallet and giving it to Lucas. “You think of anything else, you call me.”

Lucas slipped the card into his pants pocket.

“And only me. Don’t talk to anybody else. It’ll be my problem from now on. The hospital’s not going to need any more bad press than it’s already likely to get, and personally, I’d rather not have a bunch of state troopers looking over my shoulder. Are we all agreed on that?”

“Got it,” Lucas said.

“And that goes for you, too, Doc,” the chief barked. “Radio silence, from here on in.” Farrell ran a pudgy hand over the few stray hairs on his head. “What a mess,” he muttered.

“Dead,” Crowley reiterated, to no one in particular, his voice barely audible now. “I’m telling you, the man was clinically deceased.”

Impossible as that was, Lucas believed him.