by Lee Goldberg
The implications of Guyot's disappearance were deadly. It was one thing if he'd simply fled. But what if he'd slipped away to murder his next victim in the game, to snag the E in "Over"?
Steve didn't have a list of possible targets with a first name that began with the letter E. Whoever they were, they were totally unprotected.
They had to catch Guyot fast.
"Pull the security camera tapes for the hospital, the parking structure, and the office building next door," Steve said. "I'm on my way down."
Steve flipped his cell phone shut, put it in his pocket, and was hurrying down the hall when Amanda cut him off, the smile on her face evaporating when she saw his expression.
"I was about to congratulate you on catching Wendy Duren," Amanda said. "What's gone wrong?"
"I need you to put together a list of potential victims whose first names begin with E."
"How much time do I have?" she asked.
"We've already run out," Steve said and kept on going down the hall.
Mark awoke in bed from a dreamless sleep, his heart racing, his eyes staring into the darkness. He could hear the crashing surf, the creak of the house settling, the rustling of the leaves in the gentle ocean breeze.
But he could feel something else, a ripple in the air that brought chills to his skin.
It wasn't a cold draft.
He knew this feeling, this fear.
There was another presence in the room. He could almost smell the impending violence, like the scent of rain as storm clouds gathered in the sky.
The killer was out there, and not as an abstract concept in Mark's mind.
No, the killer was there. In the bedroom.
Mark remained very still. "I know you're here, Kristen. I'm going to turn on the lamp on my nightstand so we can see each other."
"Slowly," she whispered.
The voice raised goose bumps on his skin.
Mark reached out and turned on the lamp. He was startled to see Emily Noble standing at the foot of his bed.
She was the woman from his dreams, only in her early twenties and dressed entirely in black, including her gloves. Instead of looking at Mark with affection, as Emily had in his imagination, Kristen radiated hatred and pity.
"You look just like your mother," Mark said, sitting up against his pillows, his hands under the sheets.
If Kristen was startled by his remark, she didn't show it. "You remember her?"
"I do now," Mark said.
On some deep, subconscious level he'd remembered her at least a week ago, when he accidentally clicked "About" on the Enable software "Help" menu and saw Kristen Nash's name flicker quickly past in the scroll of software designers' credits. His mind began making the connections amidst the minutiae of his buried memories, serving them up to him as an elaborate dream while he was in a coma.
"Have you come to kill me?" Mark asked, his heart thundering in his chest.
She nodded.
"Why?"
"The same reason I killed the others," Kristen said. "You're supposed to be dead."
"Like you?"
Kristen nodded again. "You kept me alive in my mother's corpse. I should have died with her. But you didn't let that happen. For twenty-five years, I've been tortured for living a life I wasn't supposed to have, for the mistake you made."
"What makes you think you were punished?"
"After I was born, I was discarded into the child welfare system. I was given to a couple who used me as their slave. My so-called parents only wanted me and their four other foster children for the support checks from the state and the work we could do," Kristen said, speaking in a cold monotone, as if describing someone else's life instead of her own. "They used us for their pleasure, to gratify their sick physical desires, and then they rented us to others by the hour. I was nothing but a body to be used. I wasn't human anymore. I wasn't alive."
"I'm sorry," Mark said. The apology seemed ridiculously insufficient and her sneer confirmed it. "If you believed I was responsible for your suffering, why didn't you just kill me? Why kill the others?"
"I'm not a murderer, Dr. Sloan. This isn't about revenge," she said. "It's about doing what's right."
"How many people have you killed?"
"I haven't really killed anyone," she said. "I've freed them."
"How many?" Mark insisted.
"Fifteen, twenty. I don't know. But not enough," she said. "Not nearly enough. There are so many who need to be saved."
Mark shuddered to think of all the killing she'd done and the murders she had yet to commit. "How can you say you're not a murderer?"
"Because you can't kill someone who is already dead," she said. "They weren't living any more than I am. They were doomed to purgatory because of doctors like you. It took me a long time, but I finally realized that the only way I could truly free myself was to save others from my fate, from being punished the way I was. I'm only making sure that the people God has chosen to die actually do."
Mark could envision the rest of her story now as if he'd written it himself. In her mind, he probably had.
Kristen learned computer programming. She used her programming skills to get a job with a company that made database software for hospitals. While working on the program, she created a "back door" for herself so she could access the medical records of any hospital and find people who'd been saved from seemingly certain death.
She approached her victims by posing as someone from Kemper-Carlson Pharmaceuticals. Once she was alone with them, she found a way to engineer their accidental deaths, by overdose, drug interactions, or other means.
Mark didn't become one of her targets until he'd narrowly escaped death himself. If Jesse hadn't tackled him out of the path of that car and then later drilled the burr hole in his skull to relieve the fluid buildup, he would have surely died.
"How did you get Chadwick Saxelid into the hot tub?" Mark asked.
"I took off my shirt and got in first," she said. "He practically dove in to join me. Men like to see me naked. I learned that very young from my foster father."
"You encouraged Chadwick to drink some beers."
She shrugged. "He was thirsty."
"You knew what the combination of that hot water and the alcohol would do to him."
"Of course. I did my research."
"What about Grover Dawson? How did you get him to take the Viagra?"
"I switched his meds," she said. "He thought he was taking his prescription drugs."
"You used the same method to murder Leila Pevney, only in her case you swapped her pills with pseudoephedrine," Mark said. "Then after she died, you staged the scene with crumpled tissues and empty cold tablet packages to make it look like she'd been suffering from a cold."
"You make what I did sound evil," she said. "It wasn't. I was doing them a favor."
"Do you think that's what Sandy Sechrest thought you were doing when you tossed the hair dryer into her bathtub and electrocuted her?" Mark said. "Tell me you didn't see terror in her eyes."
"Everyone is afraid of death, Dr. Sloan. But we all have to die. There is no escaping it. That is why I am here tonight. That is the mission God has given me. I saved them."
"But they weren't suffering," Mark said. "They didn't think their second chance at life was punishment. They weren't like you. They were happy. They didn't want to die."
"You don't know that," Kristen said.
"I know that I don't want to die," Mark said.
"It's not up to you or me," she said. "It's God's will."
"Isn't it God's will that I was saved? That the others all got a second chance, too?"
She shook her head. "There is a natural balance. There is life and there is death. Both are absolutes. You want to know what true evil is? It's doctors who prevent souls from passing on, who doom them to a living death in a slow-rotting corpse."
Mark might have felt some sympathy for Kristen, for all the unspeakable horrors she'd endured, if not for the lives she'd tak
en. There was no forgiving that or the careful premeditation with which she carried out her executions.
When she described her killings, Mark detected a pride in her work, maybe even a tinge of sadistic pleasure. There was a reason she took something personal from each victim besides their lives. She wanted trophies, souvenirs so she could relive the experience of killing again and again.
Kristen was wrong about herself.
She was human. She just didn't possess any humanity. This wasn't about doing God's work. This was about lashing out at the world for her suffering, relieving her pain by inflicting pain on others.
"What's my accident going to be?" Mark asked.
"You're going to take a bad fall down the stairs and break your skull open."
"What makes you think I'll cooperate?"
"All you have to do is lie there," she said. "I'll smother you into unconsciousness, then drag you to the stairs and give you a little nudge."
"You're not worried about me putting up a fight?"
"You're a weak old man," she said. "I can take you."
"You probably could," Mark said. "But I was expecting you. That's why I went to bed tonight with a gun."
He pulled back the sheet with his free hand to show her that he wasn't bluffing. One of Steve's guns was in his hand, aimed squarely at her.
Kristen seemed no more surprised by the gun than she'd been by the fact that he'd known who she was.
"I've been watching you for years." She casually picked out one of the throw pillows on a chair, held it between both of her hands, and advanced on him. "You won't shoot me."
"Only in self-defense. So please, turn around and walk away," he said. "Don't force me to pull the trigger."
She shook her head. "You'd rather die yourself than take someone's life. Hell, you kept a dead woman alive just to birth me."
"Are you willing to bet your life on it?"
"I'm dead already."
She lunged. Mark fired. The bullet blasted through the pillow in her hands in an explosion of tiny feathers. She staggered three steps back, stood for a moment in bewilderment, and dropped the mangled pillow.
Kristen looked down and regarded the wound in her side as if she'd merely dribbled some food on herself.
"It's over, Kristen," Mark said softly, his voice shaking as much as he was. "Sit down or walk away, but don't come a step closer."
She looked up at Mark, her eyes glinting with furious intent. "I can still take you."
She lunged for him again, hands outstretched like talons, and he fired once more, the bullet catching her in the chest and spinning her around. Her body banged off the edge of the bed and she hit the floor on her back, her legs curled underneath her.
Mark got out of bed and went to her side. He saw blood seeping from her chest wound. She was wheezing, trying to speak.
"Stay still," Mark said. "I'll call for an ambulance."
She shook her head, grabbed him by the collar of his pajama top, and pulled him close.
"You delivered me twice," she whispered. "First into life and now into—"
Kristen seemed to run out of air before she could finish, her mouth agape, her eyes unseeing.
She was dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was just after daybreak. Mark sat on a sand dune, his back to his house and everything that was going on there.
The private road in front of the beach house was crammed with patrol cars, unmarked detective sedans, vans from the crime scene investigation unit, and a morgue wagon from the medical examiner's office. Reporters and satellite broadcast trucks jammed the parking lot of the Trancas Market across the Pacific Coast Highway.
This kind of activity wasn't new to Mark's wealthy, publicity-shy neighbors, who were virtually prisoners in their beachfront homes that morning and were probably simmering with anger about it.
Over the years, Mark had brought a lot of unwanted law enforcement and media attention to the street. Not so long ago, a corpse dressed as a mermaid washed up in front of Mark's house, a notorious serial killer was arrested in Mark's living room, and Mark's next-door neighbor was gunned down in bed with a naked starlet.
Most of the residents on the street were still bitter about the time Mark's house was quarantined because he took in a sick man who'd been infected with genetically altered smallpox. The entire block had to be evacuated and people prevented at gunpoint from returning to their homes.
That isn't the sort of thing that happens in most communities, he thought ruefully, unless Dr. Mark Sloan happens to be your neighbor.
Mark wouldn't have been surprised if soon his neighbors gathered with torches outside his door to bum his house to the ground and drive him away.
That was assuming, of course, that some mad arsonist or bomber didn't beat them to it. There were already a few people matching those descriptions rotting in prison cells, nursing their grudges against Mark, the man who put them there.
He'd be hell on real estate values wherever he went.
But the way Mark was feeling now, he might just move on his own anyway, saving his neighbors, the mad arsonists, and the bombers the trouble of forcing him out.
He wasn't sure he could live in the same house, and sleep in the same room, where he'd killed a woman.
His hands stung. He didn't know whether it was a physical consequence of firing the gun or an emotional reaction to what he'd done.
It didn't really matter, though.
He would be feeling what happened last night, in one form or another, for the rest of his life.
One thing he wouldn't be feeling was guilt. He knew he'd had no choice except to shoot Kristen. If he hadn't, he would have been killed. It was unquestionably an act of self-defense. Yet he still felt an overall queasiness that went beyond shock or revulsion. It was deeper than that. It was an uneasiness in his soul.
Kristen had been right when she said he'd rather die than take a life. But what he had discovered last night was that his will to survive was much stronger than any of his ethical and moral reservations about killing.
It made him wonder what else he didn't really know about himself.
Mark was so lost in thought that he wasn't aware of Steve approaching until his son sat down beside him on the sand.
"How are you holding up?" Steve asked.
Mark shrugged. "I don't regret what I did, but I'm not feeling very good about myself right now." That was an understatement and he figured his son probably knew it. "Any word on Paul Guyot?"
"He was arrested trying to hot-wire a car last night about a mile from John Muir Hospital," Steve said. "A civilian saw him and called the police. We were already patrolling the area, so we got there within a minute or two of the call."
"What made Guyot run?"
"A bad feeling," Steve said. "He tried to call Wendy on her cell. When she didn't answer, he called Appleby Nursing Services and they told him they hadn't heard from her and she hadn't shown up to see her assigned patient. That spooked him."
"Is he talking?"
Steve laughed. "We can't shut him up. The instant he sat down in the interrogation room he offered to testify against Wendy in return for a lesser sentence."
"The two of them were certainly made for each other," Mark said. "Where do I stand?"
"What do you mean?"
"On the shooting," Mark said. "Despite the obvious signs of forced entry, the crime scene doesn't necessarily support my claim that I shot Kristen Nash in self-defense. For one thing, she wasn't carrying a weapon."
"You have nothing to worry about. I just got a call from Tanis. She tossed Kristen Nash's place and found the trophies she took from her victims. That pretty much confirms your theory about the killings. We'll get a computer crime forensics expert to check her computer and see if she left a trail when she accessed the medical records."
Mark was relieved. He wasn't relishing the prospect of having to defend himself in either a court of law or the court of public opinion.
"How d
id you figure out there was another killer at work?" Steve asked.
"I knew Grover Dawson and the others were murdered," Mark said. "It wasn't until I dropped those files that I finally realized there was a reason I couldn't link their deaths to Guyot and Duren. It was because there was another killer, someone else with an entirely different motive."
"But like Guyot and Duren, she got away with it unnoticed for so long because she picked people who were expected to die."
"Kristen Nash killed them because they'd nearly died before. That was her motive," Mark said. "Guyot and Duren picked them because their deaths were less likely to be investigated."
"Why didn't you tell me about Kristen?"
"It was still a series of guesses on my part. I didn't have any real evidence," Mark said. "I thought it could wait until morning and we could argue about it then."
Mark regretted the dig at his son the moment he said it. Steve looked his father in the eye, acknowledging that his comment had hit home. "But you went downstairs and got yourself one of my guns anyway."
The accusation in the remark was clear to Mark. Steve didn't think his father was being honest with him, that Mark had other motivations for not informing his son about what he knew.
"If you think I wanted the glory of capturing Kristen all by myself, you're wrong," Mark said. "I'd cheated death and I was alone. I realized that I fit the victim profile perfectly and, given what I knew, I had to assume she wouldn't be able to resist killing me. I was afraid, that's all."
"Not enough to call me. Not enough to call someone, anyone, to stay with you so you wouldn't be alone," Steve said. "You set yourself up as bait."
"I didn't have to set myself up. I was a target no matter what I did," Mark said. If that sounded familiar to Steve, it was meant to.
"How did you know she was going to come for you last night?"
"I didn't," Mark said. "I thought I'd have some time to prepare the trap, so that you and a squad of police officers would be there when it was sprung. I never intended to be alone when it happened."
"So you took a gun to bed just in case."
