Shock

by Robin Cook

  “You know,” Joanna suddenly suggested, “he might have passed out.”

  “That’s a happy thought, and I suppose it’s a distinct possibility. He’s now had two martinis and three and a half bottles of wine over a three-hour period.”

  “Let’s go up and look, but you first!”

  “Thanks, buddy.”

  The women went to the bottom of the stairs. With the music thudding away even at its reduced volume there was no possibility of hearing any noise from above. Sticking close together, they mounted the stairs and then hesitated at the top. There were a number of closed doors, although at the end of a corridor one was ajar. A bit of weak light spilled out onto the hall carpet. Other than the music from below there was no sound.

  Deborah motioned for Joanna to follow, and feeling like trespassers the women headed toward the open door. When they reached the threshold they had a full view of an undisturbed king-sized bed. The only light was coming through an open door to a bathroom beyond. Spencer was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where the hell is he?” Deborah whispered angrily. “Could he be playing some kind of game with us?” Joanna’s earlier suggestion sprang into her mind.

  “Should we look in the other rooms?” Joanna asked.

  “Let’s check the bathroom,” Deborah said.

  They’d taken no more than three steps into the room when Joanna’s grip on Deborah’s arm tightened suddenly.

  “Don’t scare me like that!” Deborah complained.

  Joanna pointed toward the bed. On the opposite side just visible were Spencer’s feet snagged in his trousers. With some trepidation the women went around the bed and looked down. Spencer was lying prone with his shirt half off and his pants in a bundle around his ankles. He was obviously sound asleep and breathing heavily.

  “It looks like he fell,” Joanna said.

  Deborah nodded. “I’d guess in his haste he tripped on his pants. Once horizontal he was out cold.”

  “Do you think he hurt himself?”

  “I doubt it,” Deborah said. “He wasn’t close enough to anything to hit his head, and this broadloom is two inches thick.”

  “Do we dare?”

  “Are you kidding?” Deborah said. “Of course we dare. He’s not going to wake up.” She bent down, and after a brief search and a tug, she extracted Spencer’s wallet. Spencer did not move.

  The wallet was inordinately thick. Deborah opened it and began rifling through it. The blue access card was not immediately apparent, but she found it in one of the compartments behind the credit cards. “I like the fact that it was hidden away,” she said. She handed it to Joanna, bent back down, and slid the wallet back into the pocket she’d found it in.

  “Why do you care where he had it in his wallet?” Joanna asked.

  “Because it means he doesn’t use it often,” Deborah said. “We don’t want him to miss it until after we’ve had a chance to use it. Come on! Let’s find those car keys, hide them, and get the hell out of here.”

  “Getting out of here is the best suggestion you’ve made all day,” Joanna said. “As far as the car keys are concerned, why bother? He’s not going to wake up for at least twelve hours, and when he does, he’s not going to feel much like driving.”

  KURT HERMANN STARED AT THE POLAROID PHOTO OF THE new employee, Georgina Marks. He was holding it in his rocksteady hand beneath the green-glass-shaded desk lamp. As he studied her face he recalled the appearance of her full body, with her breasts ready to spill out over the front of her dress, and her skirt barely able to cover her behind. To him she was an abomination, a direct affront to his fundamentalist mentality.

  In his slow, deliberate style, Kurt laid the photo down on the desktop next to the photo of the other new employee, Prudence Heatherly. She was different—obviously a Bible-fearing female.

  Kurt was sitting in his office in the deserted gatehouse where he frequently spent his evenings. Adjoining the office was a makeshift gym where he could hone his muscular, finely tuned frame. As a determined loner he avoided socialization. And living on the Wingate premises made it easy, especially since the institution was sited in a small town which had nothing to offer as far as he was concerned.

  Kurt had been working for the Wingate Clinic for a little more than three years. The job was perfect for him, with just enough intrigue and challenge to make it interesting and yet not so busy that he had to work too hard. His military experience made him uniquely qualified for security. He’d joined the army directly after high school and had made it into the Special Forces, where he’d been trained for covert operations. He’d learned to kill with his bare hands as well as with any number of weapons, and he’d never been troubled by it.

  Joining the army had not been the beginning of his association with the military. Having grown up as an army brat, Kurt had never known a different lifestyle. His father had been in the Special Forces and had been a strict disciplinarian who’d demanded utter obedience and perfection from his wife and child. There’d been a few ugly scenes in Kurt’s early adolescence, but he’d fallen into line quickly enough. Then his father had been killed in the waning days of Vietnam in a Cambodian operation which to this day was still classified. To his horror, after his father’s death his mother embarked on a series of love affairs before she wound up marrying a prissy insurance salesman.

  The army had been good to Kurt. Appreciating his abilities and attitude, it had always been there to smooth over the minor brushes with the law that Kurt’s aggressive behavior sometimes brought on. There were a number of things Kurt could not tolerate, but prostitution and homosexuality in any form were at the top of the list, and Kurt was not one to shy away from acting on his principles.

  Things had gone well in Kurt’s life until he’d been posted to Okinawa. On that rugged island, he admitted, things had gotten out of hand.

  Slowly Kurt leaned over and stared again into Georgina’s eyes. On Okinawa he’d met a number of women just like her. So many, in fact, he’d felt a religious calling to reduce their numbers. It was as if God had spoken to him directly. Getting rid of them was easy. He’d have sex with them in an isolated environment, and then, when they had the moral depravity to demand money, he’d kill them.

  He was never caught or charged, but eventually he was implicated by circumstantial evidence. The army solved the problem by discharging him under President Clinton’s government employee reduction plan, which turned out to be mostly from the military and not from the bureaucracy. A few months later Kurt answered an ad placed by the Wingate Clinic and was hired on the spot.

  Kurt heard the gate creak open followed by the sound of a car accelerating through the tunnel. Pushing back from his desk, he went to the window and opened the shutters. He could make out the taillights of a late-model Chevrolet as it disappeared down the gravel road. He looked at his watch.

  After closing the shutters, Kurt returned to the desk. He looked down at the woman’s now-familiar face. He’d seen that car come in soon after Wingate’s and he’d followed it up to Wingate’s house. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what was going on behind closed doors. The appropriate Biblical passages immediately sprang to mind, and as he recited them his hands balled into tight fists. God was talking to him again.

  MAY 10, 2001

  7:10 A.M.

  IT WAS ANOTHER GORGEOUS,

  bright spring morning as the women sped northwest, heading back toward Bookford, which they’d left only nine hours previously. Both were exhausted. Contrary to the morning before, they’d not awakened spontaneously and had had to be dragged out of their beds by their respective alarms.

  When they’d gotten home the night before, neither went to bed, much as they’d longed to. Deborah had felt impelled to clean her shoes, which had gotten muddy in Spencer’s basement. She also spent some time accessorizing her outfit for the next day; she’d realized belatedly that she’d have to wear the same dress since all her other clothes were a completely different style, a fact whic
h she felt would have suggested she wasn’t whom she said she was.

  Joanna had gotten on the phone with David Washburn to rehash exactly what she would do once she got into the Wingate’s server room. At his insistence she even had to go over to his apartment to get some of his brute-force cracking software. He’d told her that the more he’d thought about it, the more he believed that even the server room console would require a password to get the keyboard to function. He showed her how to use the software and had her try it several times until he was confident she was familiar with it. By the time she got home it was well past midnight, and Deborah was already fast asleep.

  As fatigued as they were, they drove in silence while listening mindlessly to morning talk radio. When they got to the Wingate entrance, Deborah, whose turn it was to drive, used her swipe card. The gate opened without a hitch, and in they drove. Since they were some of the first employees to arrive that morning, there were any number of parking spaces available. Deborah took one close to the front door.

  “Are you worried about running into Spencer?” Joanna asked.

  “Not really. With the hangover he’s undoubtedly going to have, I don’t think anybody is going to be seeing much of him today.”

  “You’re probably right. Besides, he’s probably not going to remember much about last night anyway.”

  “Well, good luck, partner,” Deborah said.

  “Same to you,” Joanna said.

  “I forgot to ask if you remembered your cell phone.”

  “I certainly did. And you?”

  “Yup! And I even remembered to charge the battery. So let’s do it!”

  With a sense of purpose and not a small amount of anxiety, the two women alighted from the car and entered the building. According to instructions they’d gotten the previous day they went first to Helen Masterson’s cubicle, where they completed a bit more paperwork. They were relieved that no problems with their fake Social Security numbers had emerged overnight.

  From Helen’s office space they split up, with Joanna heading to Christine Parham’s cubicle only three down from Helen’s and Deborah crossing the main hall to find Megan Finnigan’s office.

  Joanna wasn’t sure how to get Christine’s attention. The woman was at her desk, facing away from the cubicle’s doorless entrance. First Joanna rapped on the partition wall, but since it was composed of a sound-absorbent material, the meager noise was not enough to rouse the office manager. Joanna resorted to calling the woman’s name.

  Christine had remembered Joanna from the introduction the previous day in the dining room. She also had a copy of Joanna’s employment questionnaire sitting on the corner of her desk.

  “Come right it and sit down, Prudence!” Christine said. She removed some folders from the chair pressed up against the side of her desk. “Welcome to the Wingate.”

  Joanna sat as requested and eyed the office manager. She was a woman cast from a similar mold as Helen Masterson, with the same solid build and broad, spadelike hands suggesting her immediate forebears could have been farmers. She had a kind face with natural florid patches that appeared like dabs of rouge on her broad cheekbones.

  In a no-nonsense manner Christine informed Joanna what would be expected of her and what her initial duties would be. As Joanna had anticipated, she would be doing data entry for billing purposes for the clinic side of the Wingate operation. She was told that her duties and responsibilities would be expanded in the near future if working at the Wingate continued to be mutually satisfactory.

  “Any questions?” Christine asked.

  “What is the office policy on coffee breaks?” Joanna asked. She smiled. “I suppose that sounds like asking about vacation on the first day, but I should know.”

  “It’s a very reasonable question,” Christine said. “We’re not strict about coffee breaks, and we encourage people to do what’s best for them. The important thing is to get your work done. Generally speaking, most people take a half hour in the morning and another half hour in the afternoon, either at one time or broken into several shorter periods. Lunch is also a half hour, but again, we’re not sticklers for that.”

  Joanna nodded. She liked the idea of being able to take a half hour, especially if she were able to coordinate it with Deborah. That was when she’d try to get into the server room. If that didn’t work, then she’d have to use the lunch period.

  “I should remind you there is no smoking,” Christine said. “If you do smoke, you have to go out to your car.”

  “I don’t smoke,” Joanna said. “No problem there.”

  “In your application it says you have a lot of computer experience,” Christine said. “So I suppose we don’t have to go over anything about our system. It is rather straightforward, and I know you have spoken with Randy Porter.”

  “I think I’ll be fine in that regard,” Joanna said.

  “Well, let’s get you started,” Christine said. “I’ve got a clear cubicle for you and a full in-basket.”

  Christine led Joanna to a work space pressed up against the common wall with the main hall. The cubicle was as far from the windows as possible. It had a standard metal desk, a file cabinet, a desk chair, a side chair, and a wastebasket. On the desk was an in-basket which was brimming, an out-basket, a keyboard with a monitor and a mouse, and a telephone. The partition walls were completely bare.

  “I’m afraid it’s not very cozy, Prudence,” Christine admitted.

  “But you are welcome to bring in any decorative items you wish to personalize the space.”

  “It’s fine,” Joanna said. She put her purse on the desk and smiled back at the office manager.

  Christine then introduced Joanna to the other workers who occupied the immediately adjacent cubicles. They seemed a pleasant and hospitable group who readily reached over the chest-height dividers to shake Joanna’s hand.

  “Well, then,” Christine said. “I think that covers the basics. Remember! I’m here to help, so just give a yell.”

  Joanna said she would and waved as Christine took her leave. Turning to the desk, Joanna took her cell phone out of her purse and immediately dialed Deborah’s number. She got Deborah’s voice mail and assumed Deborah was still going through her introduction. She left a message for Deborah to call her back whenever she had a free moment.

  Next, Joanna sat down at the keyboard. After swiping her blue card through the slot, she got a window on the monitor requesting her to set up a new password. Joanna used the word Anago; it was her favorite Boston restaurant. Once on the network, Joanna spent a quarter hour checking what kind of access she had. As she had expected, it was very limited, and the donor files in which she was interested were unavailable.

  At that point Joanna turned her attention to the in-basket. It was her intent to get as much of the required busywork out of the way as possible so that when she had the opportunity to get into the server room, no one would be looking for her for mundane, work-related reasons.

  Joanna hadn’t been working very long before she was concretely aware of how much money the clinic was able to generate, and she was looking at only a small portion of a single morning’s receipts. Even without knowledge of costs, she gathered the infertility business was an enormously appealing investment.

  DEBORAH NODDED EVERY SO OFTEN TO MAKE IT SEEM LIKE she was listening. She was sitting in Megan Finnigan’s postage-stamp-sized office just off the main laboratory room. Shelves lined all four walls and were filled with manuals, laboratory source books, and loose stacks of papers. The laboratory supervisor was a rail of a woman with gray-streaked, mousy-colored hair that continually fell into her line of sight. Every minute and a half, with metronomic regularity, she tossed her head to whip the errant strands away from her face. The tic made it hard for Deborah to keep her eyes on the woman without reaching out, grabbing her by the shoulders, and telling her to stop.

  Deborah’s mind couldn’t help but wander as the woman gave her a canned lecture about laboratory techniques. Deborah w
ondered how Joanna was making out.

  “Do you have any questions?” Megan asked suddenly.

  As if having been caught napping, Deborah sat up straighter. “I don’t think so,” she said quickly.

  “Good,” Megan said. “If any occur to you, you know where I am. Now I’ll turn you over to one of our more experienced technicians. Her name is Maureen Jefferson. She’ll be training you in nuclear transfer.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Deborah said.

  “As a final point,” Megan said, “I’d like to suggest you wear more sensible shoes.”

  “Oh?” Deborah asked innocently. She glanced down at her high heels, which looked good despite the previous day’s rigors. “You have a problem with these?”

  “Let’s just say they are inappropriate,” Megan said. “I don’t want you slipping on the tile and breaking a leg.”

  “I wouldn’t want that either,” Deborah said.

  “As long as we understand each other,” Megan said. She glanced briefly at Deborah’s skirt, which was revealing a lot of leg, but didn’t say anything. Instead she stood up, and Deborah did the same.

  Maureen Jefferson was a twenty-two-year-old African American woman whose color was like coffee with a lot of cream. There was a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose. She wore her hair bobbed, which showed off to maximum advantage an impressive collection of pierced earrings. Her eyebrows were quite arched, giving her an expression of continual amazement.

  With the introductions complete, Megan took her leave. At first Maureen didn’t say anything but merely shook her head as Megan walked back down the central aisle. It wasn’t until Megan disappeared into her office that Maureen turned to Deborah: “She’s a piece of work, wouldn’t you say?”

  “She is a bit rote,” Deborah said.

  “My guess is she gave you her stock lecture on laboratory cleanliness.”