The Inquisitor

Chapter 20

Rain stung Earl's face.

Wet clothes clung to his skin.

But he felt only the gut-shredding, ice-water terror that he'd find Janet dead.

If he found her body at all.

Either way, the answer lay in the field ahead. If she wasn't down there, he'd no idea where else to look.

The sodden ground had already soaked his shoes up to the laces in black paste. He watched for downed wires as best he could, yet with everything so slippery, he might just as likely slide into a live one as step on it. And he'd treated enough accidental electrocutions to know that circuit breakers didn't always trip the way they were supposed to.

But his desperation to reach Janet overrode everything. Despite poor footing, he walked briskly, his flashlight providing a ghostly pale orb that wobbled over the uneven ground. Beyond this little sphere, land and sky fused into a dizzying void, and the hissing patter of rain shredded by ragged, quick strokes of his own breathing were all he could hear.

His beam caught a solitary large tree surrounded by an apron of glitter.

What the hell?

He ran toward it.

Soon his shoes crunched on fragments of broken glass. The ground was too messy to show him any tracks, but the surface of the trunk seemed abraded, and the rough bark had picked up a smear of dark green paint.

His heart leapt as he played his light in a circle. No car, but off to the left lay what looked like an elongated twist of muddy cloth.

Oh, God, he thought.

As he ran closer, he couldn't tell if its color was the beige of Janet's raincoat. A few seconds later he made out the dark hair.

Thomas!

His body lay on its side, arms above his head as if he'd been dragged there, legs akimbo. Earl knelt by the young man and felt for a pulse at his neck.

The carotid artery rose firmly, a bit fast, but strong and regular.

He leaned down and put his ear to Thomas's open mouth.

Normal breathing.

He forced one eyelid open, saw a reactive pupil, then did the same on the other side with an identical result.

A quick check of the trunk and extremities verified no external bleeding to speak of.

Just a nasty looking bruise on the side of his temple.

He must have been thrown out of the car. Whether his neck had escaped injury and the cervical spine remained intact, he couldn't tell without a proper examination. Bottom line, nobody moved him until he had a support collar.

But where was Janet?

And the car?

He desperately played the light around him.

Nothing but the flash of wet grass, leaves, and bushes glimmered back at him.

The vehicle must have continued down the slope.

"Janet!" He sprinted in the direction it would have rolled, the rain smothering his cry.

Another hundred feet, off to the right, the red wink of a brake light caught the edge of his beam. He spun toward it and saw her car on its side in the middle of the creek, the undercarriage of rods, pipes, and cylinders glinting at him like the tightly packed innards of an open abdomen.

"Janet!"

His stomach clenched down so hard that its juices surged to the back of his throat. The burning fluid made him gag. He rounded the back of the car and probed the interior with his light, clamoring up the leather roof to reach the door on the driver's side. He saw her slumped and motionless, crumpled in the passenger compartment, her legs half submerged in water red with blood.

The fear he'd contained until now exploded in his chest. He heard himself screaming her name, but his voice sounded as if from someone else far off in the darkness as he yanked at the handle.

He couldn't open it.

He scrambled up to stand astride the door and heaved on the grip with both hands.

Nothing moved.

He stomped the window.

It crisscrossed into a webbing of cracks.

He whipped off his jacket, wrapped it around his fist, and punched a small hole. Wanting to prevent pieces from falling on Janet, he reached in and slammed the pane from inside, sending showers of small, round fragments flying outward. It took several blows to clear it entirely.

But when he reached for the internal handle, he found it snapped off.

Frustration soared.

Using his flashlight, he knocked away the remnants of glass stuck around the edge of the frame and thrust himself through the opening, straining to grasp Janet.

Her head lay slumped forward on her chest so he couldn't see her eyes. But with her pallor in the light, she looked already dead.

His free hand grabbed her left arm, draped as if she were gesturing up at him, and the cold clammy surface of the skin terrified him.

"Oh, please, God, no!" He fumbled to find a pulse in her wrist.

It felt cold and lifeless.

He struggled to get closer, but wedged himself at the waist in the window frame. He propped the flashlight between the seats, and gently pulled her toward him.

"Oh, please, please, please," he whispered, sliding his fingertips into the depression where her carotid artery lay.

It fluttered like a frightened bird, the pulse weak, twice as fast as normal, but there. Definitely there.

"Janet! Janet! Janet, it's me!" He clasped her head between his hands and raised it so he could see her face. Her eyes remained closed, but she moaned, and her arms stirred, weakly shoving at his. The beam from the light cast her features in grotesque shadows, exaggerating a growing look of fear.

"It's all right, Janet. It's me, Earl," he reassured, frantic over what injuries she and the baby might have, at the same time desperate not to show it. "Everything's all right-"

Her lids shot up, her pupils flared wide, and she screamed, flailing at him with her fists.

"Janet! It's me, Earl! Earl!"

She froze. Her shimmering eyes darted in all directions, and he wondered if she could see him. "Earl?" The word floated from the depths of her chest on a long held breath.

"Yes! And now I'm going to get you out of here-"

"But the baby…"

"We'll take care of everything and he'll be fine."

"You don't understand." Her frail voice wafted between them, no stronger than a whisper.

The pool of blood where she lay assured him he understood all too well. "I'm going to get something to pry open the roof and get you out." He gently released his hold on her head, and started to wiggle back out the window.

"He's already here."

"What? Who's here."

She reached down to where her clothing appeared to have balled up over her stomach, or so he thought. One by one she removed the crimson-soaked folds, and revealed a round puddle of purple and red chunks. From its center trailed a telltale maroon cord that had been crudely tied off by strips of torn cloth. It looped deeper into her lap where he saw a flash of gleaming pink flesh.

He stared at it, unable to breathe or speak.

"Meet your son," she said, looking down at the infant swaddled in his own afterbirth. The corners of her mouth flickered upward, not in a smile, but tenderness. "He's alive, but just." Her murmuring voice remained flat and as drained of emotion as her body had been of blood. "Take him first. Get him help, then come for me." She looked up at Earl, her features drawn so tightly that a suggestion of the skull beneath emerged before his eyes. She began to gather the child in her hands, about to lift him up.

Already terrified for Janet's life, Earl hung above her, the sight of the baby momentarily paralyzing him. But her stark instructions galvanized him to action. His training, as did hers, allowed no illusions about what they faced. He immediately writhed backward, struggling to extricate himself. "Oh, Janet, Janet, Janet," he breathed, his emotions a cyclone- anguish, love, despair, grief, horror- all spinning out of control.

"He tore me up on the way out. I'm still bleeding badly, and already lost a lot of blood," Janet said, her matter-of-fact tone chilling. No embellishments were necessary. They both knew she lay near death. "The way he came out, so fast, I'm sure Thomas slipped me something to precipitate labor. The easiest would have been misoprostol."

Earl froze. Though no more than halfway out the window, he couldn't have heard right. "Pardon?"

"Thomas did this to me, Earl. Crashed the car. Knocked me out. Probably also injected me with heparin, the way I'm bleeding."

Her spent monotone made what she said all the more unreal. But he didn't need to be told twice. His own paranoid ravings fueled by anxiety an hour earlier had primed him, gotten him well past the it-can't-be stage for anything she might have told him, so that her words fell into place with an authoritative clunk. "Jesus!" he said, and immediately squirmed twice as hard to extricate himself.

"He's been gone for hours- left me here to die."

"He's outside, lying on the ground. He must be playing possum, damn it-"

"What?" Even in her depleted state, her voice suddenly found strength. "Get him! For God's sake, before-" She cut herself off, eyes bulging wide, looking behind him.

No sooner had he propelled himself the rest of the way out the window than his world exploded into white.

But he could still hear Janet as she summoned new powers to scream.

I stood over Garnet's body, squinting down at him as the rain stung my eyes, watching the rise and fall of his chest. Out cold, or pretending?

Janet's scream from the interior of the car stopped abruptly, as if she'd checked herself. In the ghostly illumination of the flashlight, I saw her huddled over, rocking, and heard her murmuring something. Strange that her fury would be strong enough to rise over the roar of the storm, then she'd shut up like that.

But no one could have heard, not with the din of all this rain, I thought, glancing back toward the deserted highway. Neither would people be likely to see us if they did come along. The glare of the van's headlights continued to hit a wall of darkness well before reaching where I stood. Still, with its motor running and being lit up like that, its presence would attract the attention of passing vehicles. Better shut it down, make it appear abandoned at the roadside, as if someone had car trouble. But first…

Tire iron at the ready, my hand shook as I leaned over, lifted Garnet's limp wrist, and felt for a pulse.

My fingertips found the strong throb of a radial artery. Nowhere near dead. And he could be faking the unconscious bit.

Still holding my weapon in the air, in case of a miraculous recovery, I grabbed him by the ankles and began to drag him around the rear of the car. I avoided looking in Janet's direction. The way she swayed back and forth while muttering soft, barely audible noises disturbed me more than the shriek she'd let out earlier.

As I struggled with him over the rocky streambed, my mind raced, obsessively going over the night's events, making sure that in my hastily ad-libbed plans I hadn't left any loose ends.

My initial plan had been rock solid and wasn't supposed to have ended like this. I'd gone to join Earl and Janet for dinner, confident that I could have no better choice of companions at the very time Deloram kicked and choked himself to death. Not that I should have required an alibi. Once someone discovered the body and the police ruled his dying a suicide, there would have been no official suspicion of foul play. But Garnet and Janet might have had niggling doubts about that verdict. So I wanted to stay off their radar by appearing as eager as they were to get at the bottom of things, plus, if Stewart managed to hold on for hours, be by their side at the determined time of death. And if it all worked out, they'd have no formal option but to accept that Stewart died by his own hand, nor would there be any concrete evidence to justify their continued pursuit of the cluster study. But just to be on the safe side, I'd come prepared to give them something else to worry about.

Then Graceton had blindsided me by turning up exactly what I'd been afraid J.S. would eventually realize: the correlation between her shifts and the unexpected deaths in palliative care. That connection could point directly at me, once someone figured out the key, and I couldn't allow it to happen.

So after dinner I'd implemented the plan that I'd originally intended to be a diversion- slipped misoprostol tablets into a steeping pot of tea with no one the wiser, the drug having no effect on me or Earl- and improvised the rest. First I insisted on driving Graceton, to keep her at my side and under my control until I could think of what else to do. Then on the way into St. Paul's the extent of the blackout and the landscape at Ellicott Creek, combined with the blind luck that she couldn't buckle up her seat belt, presented the opportunity to stage a crash that I'd survive and she wouldn't. But it was such a desperate long shot that I didn't dare attempt it without thinking everything through a bit more. Instead I tried to accompany her to J.S.'s bedside, hoping my presence would keep the woman who loved me from saying anything reckless even if she had begun to guess the truth. Then I had to back off that move in the face of Graceton's insistence that she see J.S. alone. My continued persistence on being there might in itself have aroused suspicions.

God, what a back-and-forth, seat-of-the-pants mess everything had become.

I finished tugging Garnet into position, leaving him on his back, his feet perpendicular to the undercarriage of the car, his face lined up to be crushed when I righted the vehicle. Standing over him, I began to tremble again, still frantic that having thrown everything together on the fly, I'd made a misstep that would trap me.

Finish the job, I thought, reining in my nerves, and leaned my weight against the car. The idea was to get it rocking and then pull it on top of Garnet. The Mazda looked precarious enough, sitting on its side. After it smashed his head, no one would notice he'd been knocked out first, and the cops would think he'd toppled it on himself while trying to free Janet.

I couldn't budge it.

Shit!

It must be wedged against some rocks in the streambed.

Unable to see much, I reached down into the flowing water and felt around near the submerged front tire. Several small boulders the size of soccer balls were wedged against it. I worked at one near the periphery with my fingers and felt it loosen. But this would take time.

I'd also have to erase any tracks I'd left from dragging Garnet into position. Then I'd resume my act of being knocked unconscious but thrown clear.

I checked Garnet again- nothing too clinical, just a particularly savage kick to see if he responded to pain- and got not so much as a grunt.

Setting to work with the tire iron, I pried the first rock loose. About a dozen more remained.

While trying to dislodge the rest, I obsessed on the details of what I'd done, certain that something had gone wrong.

By the time I'd retreated to the doctor's lounge, hoping J.S. would say nothing that might give me away, I began to think and act more logically. Preparing a pot of tea, I added sufficient pills to top off Graceton's dose of misoprostol, knowing that what I had in mind would work best with an unusually violent and quick labor. I also sneaked into one of the nearby utility cupboards where I stole the syringes and vials of heparin. Its fast-acting anticoagulation effect would do the job immediately, unlike the slow-acting warfarin tablets that I'd slipped into J.S.'s lemonade over a period of three days.

No choice but to use the pills with her, not just to avoid the need for an injection, but because the antidote to warfarin took hours to work, time enough for the hemorrhage to do its worse. Heparin, on the other hand, could be neutralized in minutes. But in Graceton's case, that wouldn't matter. There'd be no heading to ER and receiving an antidote for her.

And every step of the crash had gone perfectly. Having cinched my seat belt extra tight, I emerged from the impact of hitting the tree with little more than a few bruises and a sore chest from the shoulder belt. Graceton, though still conscious, ended up severely dazed and was easy to knock out. A further push of the car sent it hurtling the rest of the way to the creek.

My plan with J.S. hadn't gone as well. She could still finger me. But with her sedated for the night, I'd have time to think of a way to dispose of the problem. Maybe I wouldn't have to. Maybe I could still have her. No- it would be so risky. Before long she would figure it out. And every day I would be waiting for it to happen. Oh, God. I'd grown so fond of her, and the release she provided in bed was fantastic. I didn't want to hurt her. But the danger of keeping her around would drive me crazy.

I pried what felt like the last rock free, the lurch of the tire iron snapping my thoughts back to the present. With Earl and Janet, maybe I hadn't made any mistakes after all. Could it be? If I could just finish this, I'd have fooled everybody about everything so far. The prospect gave me a surge of strength as I leaned my back against the underframe and pushed with my legs.

I still couldn't budge it.

A quick probe around the rear tire this time revealed more rocks. I went to work on them but couldn't find the right spot with the tire iron to dislodge the first one. I went to get the flashlight.

After checking Garnet again- still unresponsive to pain- I made my way back around the other side of the car, hoisted myself up to the broken side window, and froze.

Janet looked up at me, eyes black with hatred.

But that's not what had my attention.

At her breast she held a baby soaked in the bloody remains of its afterbirth, sucking at her nipple.

I shrank back from the sight.

"Save the boy," she ordered in a flat, cold voice. "I'm as good as dead. And I know you'll kill Earl if he isn't already gone. What would it cost you to spare the child?" Her stare penetrated mine with the icy stealth of needles.

I looked away, but the image of that infant had emblazoned itself on my brain, and she continued to speak with no more expression than a corpse.

"No matter what story you cook up, someone will doubt it, and you're doomed. But if you rescue my baby, you'd be a hero, and less likely to draw suspicion."

I tried to shut the words out, but they grated through me, permeating my head and scraping the inside of my skull.

"Please!" she persisted. "I'm begging. Save his life. Who'd question a hero?"

She continued to implore me to have mercy on her son.

Definitely not what I intended.

Even if I succeeded, got away now, a new nightmare would replace the old. Visions of a blood-covered newborn and Janet's accusing stare might await me every time I closed my eyes for the rest of my days. What the hell had I accomplished?

I recoiled from the thought, fought to deny it, but broke into a sweat. I'd already experienced how the power of a dead man could possess my mind, putrefy my subconscious, and roam my dreams. Against a haunting by a dying mother and child, I would have no defenses whatsoever, because this ghost would be fueled by my own guilt, not rage against the guilt of another. I may have been able to harden myself against relatively bloodless killings, but to have actually seen the baby, heard Janet plead for its life- that wouldn't succumb so readily.

Grabbing the flashlight, I retreated from the interior of the car, turning my back on that malignant scene, and attacked the stones with a frenzy.

As I worked, I shut out her pleas and desperately tried to force my wild emotions to order.

Feelings never flowed easily through me or came freely. They either surged out of control, having to be wrangled and herded like errant beasts, or died completely until I exhumed and reanimated them, as if forcing spiritless things to life. Clinical objectivity, on the other hand, was something I naturally excelled at. In addition to serving me well in my medical career, it concealed a terrible coldness. And I'd taken that objectivity to new heights recently. Several times over the past weeks I'd argued myself in or out of killing as if the matter were merely a question of logic. So why not now? It would just be a matter of hiking objectivity to yet another level.

And I had another talent: making everybody laugh or feel good about themselves. It deterred them from being too critical of me and protected my secret self. So I'd perfected the graces of charm and wit the way some people polished their golf game. I would only have to work the skill on a higher plane, and no one would ever begin to think I could do anything appalling to a baby.

But charm couldn't stop dreams. Even sparing the infant might not do that.

I adjusted the flashlight and reattacked the rocks with the desperation of a man digging for air.

"Thomas, I beg you, don't murder my son," Janet persisted, her voice nearly lost in the sounds of rain and the stream. Yet her words rang as clear and hard as if she'd whispered them in my ear.

At first Earl heard the rain.

Then felt it across his face like icy streamers.

He managed not to flinch when Thomas kicked him.

Let the bastard think the crack on the head still had him out cold. He needed time to subdue the twenty migraines that had set up residence in his brain.

But when he heard Janet's voice, he surfaced fast.

He cracked an eyelid just enough to catch a glimpse of Thomas off to his left hefting rocks like he was harvesting watermelons.

What was he doing?

No matter. He had to take him. Whatever his favorite resident had in mind for him and Janet, it would be terminal. He felt around with his right hand for a rock, found one the size of a five-pin bowling ball, and, with memories of Bible stories, got ready to heave it at the man's head.

But Thomas suddenly threw down the tire iron, walked around to the other side of the car, and leaned hard against the trunk, causing the whole vehicle to teeter over Earl's head.

"Holy shit!" he cried. He sat bolt upright and rolled forward just as the front and back tires hit the ground, bracketing where he'd been lying in a half foot of water.

"Earl!" Janet screamed.

"I'm okay!" he hollered, and threw his rock.

It glanced off Thomas's shoulder as the big man rounded the car and flew at him.

Earl saw the abandoned tire iron glinting in the pale light and leapt for it.

They both reached it at the same time and wrestled with it between them, like a steel taffy pull. Earl managed to hang on for the first few twists, but the younger man had much more strength and soon wrenched it out of his hands. Earl stumbled backward, ducking swipes at his head, the bar whistling past his ear.

Three times. Four times. Sooner or later it would hit.

Then, over Thomas's shoulder, he saw a row of trucks with orange flashers pull up behind his van, and a bunch of men in tangerine jumpsuits pile out.

"Help!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "Help me!"

He ducked for the fifth and sixth time, high-stepping it backward, slipping on rocks, trying to keep his footing.

"You don't think I'm going to fall for that stupid trick, do you, Dr. G.?" Thomas asked, winding up for strike seven.

Searchlights befitting a Hollywood opening sliced through the gloom and spotlighted them both.

Thomas shielded his eyes, and his white features twisted into a look of horror that would have done Marcel Marceau proud. He began to run in the opposite direction, giving Earl a wide berth, across the stream and up the far bank, still clutching the tire iron.

Earl immediately ran to the passenger side of the car and got the door open. "Go with the baby," Janet ordered, handing him the tiny figure.

"We go together," he said, clasping the infant inside the folds of his coat. He turned to the group of figures running down from the highway. "We need help here," he yelled at them. "My wife's just had a baby. And someone get that man." He pointed to where Biggs was disappearing up the far slope. "He tried to kill us."

A half dozen of the hydro workers reached the edge of the stream and stopped.

"I said, get him! He's going to escape," Earl yelled at them, still clutching his tiny, newborn son and kneeling beside Janet. Together they watched through the shattered front windshield as Biggs struggled up the far bank and disappeared beyond the reach of the spotlights.

"That bugger's not going anywhere," the man with the ravaged cheeks said as he ran up beside them.

Seconds after he spoke, an arc of electricity bright as the sun exploded out of the darkness where they'd last seen Biggs. At its center stood his rigid silhouette, limbs extended and quivering, hair and clothing ignited in flames. For an instant it turned him into a human lightbulb, the strands of his tissues serving as filaments of carbon, their glow strong enough to illuminate an area as big as a baseball diamond. Then the current snapped off, the effect of a circuit breaker somewhere, and as darkness returned, his blackened form collapsed to earth.