“Yeah, well,” he said, pretending offense, “I don’t give a shit that you don’t give a shit what I think.”
Chagrined, Carson laughed softly. “I’m sorry, man. You’re one of a handful of people I do care what they think of me.”
“You wounded me,” he said. “But I’ll heal.”
“I’ve worked hard to get where I am.” She sighed. “Except where I am is eating another meal on my feet, in the street.”
“The food’s great,” he said, “and I’m glittering company.”
“Considering the pay, why do we work so hard?”
“We’re genuine American heroes.”
“Yeah, right.”
Michael’s cell phone rang. Licking Creole tartar sauce off his lips, he answered the call: “Detective Maddison.” When he hung up moments later, he said, “We’re invited to the morgue. No music, no dancing. But it might be fun.”
CHAPTER 24
CARESSED BY CANDLELIGHT, the chased surfaces of classic silver seemed perpetually about to melt.
With five movers and shakers and their spouses gathered in his dining room, Victor looked forward to stimulating conversation that he could guide subtly into channels that would serve his interests long after the mayor, the district attorney, the university president, and the others had left his table. To Victor, every social occasion was primarily an opportunity to influence political and cultural leaders, discreetly advancing his agenda.
Initially, of course, the talk was of frivolous things, even among such accomplished guests. But Victor fancied himself to be as capable of light chatter as anyone and could enjoy this witty froth because it sharpened his anticipation for meatier discussion.
William and Christine served the soup, the butler holding the tureen while the maid ladled a creamy pink richness into the bowls.
This was Erika’s third dinner party in the five weeks since she had risen from the tank, and she exhibited some improvement in her social skills, though less than he had hoped.
He saw her frown as she noticed that the flower arrangements were different from those that she had painstakingly created. She possessed the good sense to say nothing of the change.
When his wife glanced at him, however, Victor said, “The roses are perfect,” so she would learn from her error.
District Attorney Watkins, whose once-patrician nose had begun subtly to deform as inhaled cocaine ate away supporting cartilage, used one hand to fan the rising aroma from the bowl to his nostrils. “Erika, the soup smells delicious.”
John Watkins’s opponent in the next election—Buddy Guitreau—was one of Victor’s people. With all the dirt about Watkins that Victor could provide, Buddy would romp to victory at the polls. In the months until then, however, it was necessary to flatter Watkins with dinner invitations and to work with him.
“I love lobster bisque,” said Pamela Watkins. “Is this your recipe, Erika?”
“No. I found it in a magazine, but I added some spices. I doubt I’ve improved it, probably the opposite, but I like even lobster bisque to have a little bite.”
“Oh, it’s divine,” the university president’s wife declared after her first taste.
This compliment, at once echoed by others, brought a glow of pride to Erika’s face, but when she herself raised a spoonful to her mouth, she took it with a soft, protracted slurp.
Appalled, Victor watched her dip the spoon into the bowl once more.
Soup had not been on the menu at either of their previous dinner parties, and Victor had taken a meal with Erika only twice otherwise. Her faux pas surprised and unsettled him.
She sucked in the second spoonful no less noisily than she had the first.
Although none of the guests appeared to notice this ghastly play of tongue and lips, Victor took offense that as his wife she should risk being mocked. Those who might laugh at her behind her back would also laugh at him.
He announced, “The bisque is curdled. William, Christine, please remove it at once.”
“Curdled?” the mayor’s wife asked, bewildered. “Not mine.”
“Curdled,” Victor insisted as the servants quickly retrieved the soup bowls. “And you don’t want to eat a lobster dish when it might be in any way off.”
Stricken, Erika watched as the bowls were removed from the table.
“I’m sorry, Erika,” Victor said, into an awkward silence. “This is the first time I’ve ever found fault with your cooking—or with anything about you.”
John Watkins protested, “Mine was delicious.”
Although she might not have understood the cause of Victor’s action, Erika recovered quickly. “No, John. You’ve always got my vote for district attorney. But in culinary matters, I trust Victor. His palate is as refined as any chef’s.”
Victor felt his clenched jaw relaxing into a genuine smile. In part, Erika had redeemed herself.
CHAPTER 25
THE GRAY VINYL-TILE FLOOR squeaked under Carson’s and Michael’s shoes. Although subtle, the sounds seemed loud in the otherwise silent hallway.
The forensic pathology unit appeared to be deserted. At this hour, staffing should have been reduced but not this drastically.
They found Jack Rogers where he said he’d be—in Autopsy Room Number 2. With him were the professionally fileted corpse of Bobby Allwine, supine upon a guttered steel table, and a lanky young assistant whom Jack introduced as Luke.
“Trumped up an excuse to send the rest of the night staff home,” Jack said. “Didn’t want to take a chance of some chatterbox getting a glimpse of what we’ve got here.”
“And what do we have?” Carson asked.
“A miracle,” Jack said. “Except I get a squamous feeling, like it’s too dark a miracle to have anything to do with God. That’s why only Luke and I are here. Luke isn’t a gossiping jackass, are you, Luke?”
“No, sir.”
Luke’s slightly protuberant eyes, long nose, and longer chin gave him a scholarly look, as if books exerted such an attraction on him that they had pulled his features toward the contents of their pages.
Potbellied, with a hound-dog face full of sags and swags that added years to his true age, Jack Rogers looked older now than he usually did. Although his excitement was palpable, his face had a gray tinge.
“Luke’s got a good eye for physiological anomalies,” Jack said. “He knows his guts.”
Luke nodded, taking pride in his boss’s praise. “I’ve just always been interested in viscera since I was a kid.”
“With me,” Michael said, “it was baseball.”
Jack said, “Luke and I completed every phase of the internal examination. Head, body cavities, neck, respiratory tract—”
“Cardiovascular system,” Luke continued, “gastrointestinal tract, biliary tract, pancreas, spleen, adrenals—”
“Urinary tract, reproductive tract, and musculoskeletal system,” Jack concluded.
The cadaver on the table certainly appeared to have been well explored.
If the body had not been so fresh, Carson would have wanted to grease her nostrils with Vicks. She could tolerate this lesser stench of violated stomach and intestines.
“Every phase revealed such bizarre anatomy,” Jack said, “we’re going back through again to see what we might’ve missed.”
“Bizarre? Such as?”
“He had two hearts.”
“What do you mean two hearts?”
“Two. The number after one, before three. Uno, dos.”
“In other words,” Luke said earnestly, “twice as many as he should have had.”
“We got that part,” Michael assured him. “But at the library, we saw Allwine’s chest open. You could have parked a Volkswagen in there. If everything’s missing, how do you know he had two hearts?”
“For one thing, the associated plumbing,” Jack said. “He had the arteries and veins to serve a double pump. The indicators are numerous. They’ll all be in my final report. But that’s not the only thing we
ird about Allwine.”
“What else?”
“Skull bone’s as dense as armor. I burnt out two electric trepanning saws trying to cut through it.”
“He had a pair of livers, too,” said Luke, “and a twelve-ounce spleen. The average spleen is seven ounces.”
“A more extensive lymphatic system than you’ll ever see in a textbook,” Jack continued. “Plus two organs—I don’t even know what they are.”
“So he was some kind of freak,” Michael said. “He looked normal on the outside. Maybe not a male model, but not the Elephant Man, either. Inside, he’s all screwed up.”
“Nature is full of freaks,” Luke said. “Snakes with two heads. Frogs with five legs. Siamese twins. You’d be surprised how many people are born with six fingers on one hand or the other. But that’s not like”—he patted Allwine’s bare foot—“our buddy here.”
Having trouble getting her mind around the meaning of all this, Carson said, “So what are the odds of this? Ten million to one?”
Wiping the back of his shirt sleeve across his damp brow, Jack Rogers said, “Get real, O’Connor. Nothing like this is possible, period. This isn’t mutation. This is design.”
For a moment she didn’t know what to say, and perhaps for the first time ever, even Michael was at a loss for words.
Anticipating them, Jack said, “And don’t ask me what I mean by design. Damn if I know.”
“It’s just,” Luke elaborated, “that all these things look like they’re meant to be…improvements.”
Carson said, “The Surgeon’s other victims…you didn’t find anything weird in them?”
“Zip, zero, nada. You read the reports.”
Such an aura of unreality had descended upon the room that Carson wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if the eviscerated cadaver had sat up on the autopsy table and tried to explain itself.
Michael said, “Jack, we’d sure like to embargo your autopsy report on Allwine. File it here but don’t send a copy to us. Our doc box is being raided lately, and we don’t want anyone else to know about this for…say forty-eight hours.”
“And don’t file it under Allwine’s name or the case number where it can be found,” Carson suggested. “Blind file it under…”
“Munster, Herman,” Michael suggested.
Jack Rogers was smart about a lot more things than viscera. The bags under his eyes seemed to darken as he said, “This isn’t the only weird thing you’ve got, is it?”
“Well, you know the crime scene was strange,” Carson said.
“That’s not all you’ve got, either.”
“His apartment was a freak’s crib,” Michael revealed. “The guy was as psychologically weird as anything you found inside him.”
“What about chloroform?” Carson asked. “Was it used on Allwine?”
“Won’t have blood results until tomorrow,” Jack said. “But I’m not going out on a limb when I say we won’t find chloroform. This guy couldn’t have been overcome by it.”
“Why not?”
“Given his physiology, it wouldn’t have worked as fast on him as on you or me.”
“How fast?”
“Hard to say. Five seconds. Ten.”
“Besides,” Luke offered, “if you tried to clamp a chloroform-soaked cloth over his face, Allwine’s reflexes would have been faster than yours…or mine.”
Jack nodded agreement. “And he would have been strong. Far too strong to have been restrained by an ordinary man for a moment, let alone long enough for the chloroform to work.”
Remembering the peaceful expression on Bobby Allwine’s face when his body lay on the library floor, Carson considered her initial perception that he had welcomed his own murder. She could make no more sense of that hypothesis, however, than she had done earlier.
Moments later, outside in the parking lot, as she and Michael approached the sedan, the light of the moon seemed to ripple through the thick humid air as it might across the surface of a breeze-stirred pond.
Carson remembered Elizabeth Lavenza, handless, floating facedown in the lagoon.
Suddenly she seemed half-drowned in the murky fathoms of this case, and felt an almost panicky need to thrash to the surface and leave the investigation to others.
CHAPTER 26
TO ALL OUTWARD APPEARANCES, Randal Six, Mercy-born and Mercy-raised, has been in various degrees of autistic trance all day, but inwardly he has passed those hours in turmoil.
The previous night, he dreamed of Arnie O’Connor, the boy in the newspaper clipping, the smiling autistic. In the dream, he requested the formula for happiness, but the O’Connor boy mocked him and would not share his secret.
Now Randal Six sits at his desk, at the computer on which he occasionally plays competitive crossword puzzles with gamers in far cities. Word games are not his purpose this evening.
He has found a site on which he can study maps of the city of New Orleans. Because this site also offers a city directory of all property owners, he has been able to learn the address of Detective Carson O’Connor, with whom the selfish Arnie resides.
The number of blocks separating Randal from their house is daunting. So much distance, so many people, untold obstacles, so much disorder.
Furthermore, this web site offers three-dimensional maps of the French Quarter, the Garden District, and several other historic areas of the city. Every time he makes use of these more elaborate guides, he is quickly overcome by attacks of agoraphobia.
If he responds with such terror to the virtual reality of the cartoonlike dimensional maps, he will be paralyzed by the vastness and chaos of the world itself if ever he steps beyond these walls.
Yet he persists in studying the three-dimensional maps, for he is motivated by intense desire. His desire is to find happiness of the kind that he believes he has seen in the smile of Arnie O’Connor.
In the virtual reality of New Orleans on his computer screen, one street leads to another. Every intersection offers choices. Every block is lined with businesses, residences. Each of them is a choice.
In the real world, a maze of streets might lead him a hundred or a thousand miles. In that journey, he would be confronted with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of choices.
The enormity of this challenge overwhelms him once more, and he retreats in a panic to a corner, his back to his room. He cannot move forward. Nothing confronts him except the junction of two walls.
His only choices are to stay facing the corner or turn to the larger room. As long as he doesn’t turn, his fear subsides. Here he is safe. Here is order: the simple geometry of two walls meeting.
In time he is somewhat calmed by this pinched vista, but to be fully calmed, he needs his crosswords. In an armchair, Randal Six sits with another collection of puzzles.
He likes crosswords because there are not multiple right choices for each square; only one choice will result in the correct solution. All is predestined.
Cross YULETIDE with CHRISTMAS, cross CHRISTMAS with MYRRH…. Eventually every square will be filled; all words will be complete and will intersect correctly. The predestined solution will have been achieved. Order. Stasis. Peace.
As he fills the squares with letters, a startling thought occurs to Randal. Perhaps he and the selfish Arnie O’Connor are predestined to meet.
If he, Randal Six, is predestined to come face to face with the other boy and to take the precious secret of happiness from him, what seems now like a long harrowing journey to the O’Connor house will prove to be as simple as crossing this small room.
He cannot stop working the crossword, for he desperately needs the temporary peace that its completion will bring him. Nevertheless, as he reads the clues and inks the letters in the empty squares, he considers the possibility that finding happiness by relieving Arnie O’Connor of it might prove to be not a dream but a destiny.
CHAPTER 27
DRIVING AWAY FROM the medical examiner’s office, into a world transformed by what t
hey had just learned, Carson said, “Two hearts? Strange new organs? Designer freaks?”
“I’m wondering,” Michael said, “if I missed a class at the police academy.”
“Did Jack smell sober to you?”
“Unfortunately, yeah. Maybe he’s nuts.”
“He’s not nuts.”
“People who were perfectly sane on Tuesday sometimes go nuts on Wednesday.”
“What people?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Stalin.”
“Stalin was not perfectly sane on Tuesday. Besides, he wasn’t insane, he was evil.”
“Jack Rogers isn’t evil,” Michael said. “If he’s not drunk, insane, or evil, I guess we’re going to have to believe him.”
“You think somehow Luke might be hoaxing old Jack?”
“Luke ‘been-interested-in-viscera-since-I-was-a-kid’? First of all, it would be a way elaborate hoax. Second, Jack is smarter than Luke. Third, Luke—he’s got about as much sense of humor as a graveyard rat.”
A disguise of clouds transformed the full moon into a crescent. The pale flush of streetlamps on glossy magnolia leaves produced an illusion of ice, of a northern climate in balmy New Orleans.
“Nothing is what it seems,” Carson said.
“Is that just an observation,” Michael asked, “or should I worry about being washed away by a flood of philosophy?”
“My father wasn’t a corrupt cop.”
“Whatever you say. You knew him best.”
“He never stole confiscated drugs out of the evidence lockup.”
“The past is past,” Michael advised.
Braking to a stop at a red traffic light, she said, “A man’s reputation shouldn’t have to be destroyed forever by lies. There ought to be a hope of justice, redemption.”
Michael chose respectful silence.
“Dad and Mom weren’t shot to death by some drug dealer who felt Dad was poaching on his territory. That’s all bullshit.”
She hadn’t spoken aloud of these things in a long time. To do so was painful.
“Dad had discovered something that powerful people preferred to keep secret. He shared it with Mom, which is why she was shot, too. I know he was troubled about something he had seen. I just don’t know what it was.”