by Ilsa J. Bick
Once through the door, Ramsey knew: The house was dead. And there was a smell: metal mixed with feces. He followed his nose, and Ketchum, and when he made it into the kitchen, said, “Aw, Jesus.”
* * *
The deputy had been dead for at least a day and was starting to bloat. But Doc hadn’t been dead long. Vomit as grainy and dark as coffee caked his throat and the front of his shirt and smelled like scorched iron. Doc sprawled in a slurry of excrement and urine, his legs tangled in his overturned chair. Doc’s eyes were wide, and his mouth hung open. Doc’s right hand was wrapped around the deputy’s service weapon. There was no note.
Ramsey squatted, touched the back of an index finger to Doc’s left wrist. “Still warm. Maybe dead six hours. So he died not too long after he left the rectory.”
Ketchum looked shell-shocked. “First Boaz, now Bobby and now we know Bobby couldn’t have talked Doc into anything. But Doc wouldn’t kill a man, and he loved that damn cat. He’d never kill it, never.”
“Hunh.” One constant about suicides: If a person killed a child or animal first, that was done out of love and seen as a mercy, a way to relieve future suffering. Ramsey looked at the stiff, vomit-splattered animal. No doubt about that: The animal had suffered, and it wouldn’t have if Doc had just shot it. But he didn’t, and he didn’t use the gun on himself. One thing was certain, though: Dispatch hadn’t been talking to Bobby.
He said as much to Ketchum then added, “I don’t think it’s Scott, either. Probably, the reason there’s no forced entry at Boaz’s is because Boaz either knew the guy, or saw a patrol car at the curb and figured there wasn’t any threat. Then the killer goes to Doc’s place using the deputy’s patrol car, poisons the cat, calls Father Gillis to plant stuff about Doc’s frame of mind, and then waits for Doc. This guy’s killed four people, maybe more, and he’s going to make a run at the boys. So, think, Hank. You know everybody. Who’d be able to do all this and have a chance at taking out two boys in a hospital?”
Ketchum squinted, thinking, and then Ramsey saw the light flare behind Ketchum’s eyes.
“Holy God,” Ketchum said. “It’s Craig Dickert.”
58
2130 hours
Even if that hoity-toity Hannah Schroeder wouldn’t get off her damned high horse and say a civil word or two—and oh, how the mighty have fallen, how the mighty are fallen—the nurses were kind. Still, Sandra Underhill heard the undercurrent of disdain. That’s why she kept the gauzy yellow curtain drawn around Troy’s bed: to hide from the eyes. She was done in this town. Everything said behind her back would be said to her face, and she deserved it.
I’m going to rot in hell. She hugged her arms, chafing them as if they were cold—and she was cold and so lonely and so alone—and began to rock. This is judgment, this is God’s punishment, bringing me low, and I’m going straight to hell. . . .
She heard shoes scuffing linoleum then the rasp of metal against metal as someone pulled aside the curtain around Noah’s bed. A nurse, probably, doing checks. She heard a few muted beeps, then a click, and then the metallic rattle of Noah’s curtain being pulled back into place. Straightening, she palmed tears from her face and wiped her nose on her sleeve. She’d be damned if she’d give anyone the satisfaction.
The curtain twitched aside. She looked up—and then she, literally, froze, her lips trapped in a smile halfway to being.
The man scuffled in. He wore a hospital scrub top and blue jeans. They locked eyes—his were very blue—and then his slid away. He glanced at various readouts, stabbed a noteputer as Sandra Underhill stared . . .
As she saw in her mind’s eye images that fell into place, haltingly clicking in one by one, like the rusty tumblers of an ancient lock. Then the vault of her memory swung open, and she knew.
The face of the man who’d poisoned her son.
2145
Ketchum slammed a portable flasher and siren on the unmarked’s roof as Ramsey hammered the accelerator and held it there, roaring through turns, going so fast everything was a blur. Ketchum was yelling at dispatch: “He’s got Bobby’s ID-link! Get everyone to switch over from command frequency! If we’re lucky, he’s not going to understand the code! This is an eleven-ninety-nine! I repeat, eleven-ninety-nine! All available units within spitting distance at the hospital, and I mean now!”
They flashed by the cutoff for Amanda’s farm, and then Ketchum shouted at Ramsey, “Hold it, hold it, take the right, the right!”
“Hang on!” Ramsey cut the car hard, felt the rear fishtail, heard the high squeal of tires.
“Watch it!” Ketchum, bracing himself on the dash. “Watch it, watch it!”
“I got it, I got it!” Ramsey wrestled the car straight and punched the gas. The car leapt forward, like a fighter kicking on afterburners. “How far?”
“Three minutes!” Ketchum shouted over the siren’s wail. “We’ll probably get there first! But the deputies on duty, they’ll know when dispatch tells them to switch channels! They’ll know!”
And Ramsey thought: And if he’s listening in, so might Dickert.
* * *
Time was his enemy now. Time was running out, and Craig Dickert—Gabriel—hurt like a son of a bitch. The bullet from Scott’s gun had zipped a deep trough in the space between his fifth and sixth rib and banged bone along the way. He cleaned the wound then used coags and a pressure bandage, gritting his teeth the whole time.
Scott’s blood smeared across his mouth in a grotesque circus clown’s too-red grin, and there was more blood in crescents beneath his nails. He washed his face, scrubbed his fingers, brushed his teeth twice. He’d have liked a shower; he could smell the adrenalin stink saturating his pores. But no time. He had to get to the hospital, and it had to be tonight. They’d find his father, and a dead man with half a skull in his kitchen.
Before he left, he tucked his cannon into his waistband at the small of his back and stashed Scott’s gun in a leather fanny sack. The fanny sack held money, too, as well as the two crystals he already had—and a little vac-pac for one more: because there was something he’d just figured out and hadn’t told the Handler.
Threes. The agents had always done things in threes. He’d read back over Amanda’s autopsy and he now knew where the third crystal was.
Then I’ll have it all, every piece of the puzzle. The DNA isn’t the key. The DNA’s something, but not the key.
An hour late but rounding, now. Doing his work, not hurrying. Moving hurt, and he was sweating again. But no one noticed—because everyone knew that Craig Dickert was quiet, had a lisp and was a bit of a geek.
When he turned the corner and spotted the two deputies at the ICU, he almost lost it. One read something on a noteputer: a magazine, probably. The other held up the wall and looked bored. They glanced up as he approached. He plastered a smile on his face, said, “Hey,” as he came up . . .
Keep going, move!
. . . And passed them into the ICU. He tensed, waiting for the shout, the clap of hands on his shoulders. But nothing came.
He glanced at the nurses’ station, gave the charge nurse his usual half-wave. She flashed an automatic smile and forgot about him in less than a second.
It took him twenty seconds to silence the alarms and reset the pumps to deliver the maximum lethal dose into Noah’s body in the shortest period of time. Then he jabbed garbage into a chartputer—beep, bop, boop—counted to ten, and backed out. Just another busy nurse anesthetist, making his rounds.
He fingered open the curtain around Troy’s bed, stepped through, looked left—and that’s when his stomach bottomed out. But he didn’t lose it. Sweat beaded along his upper lip. Every nerve ending sang an alarm, and his brain was screaming: Get out, get out now before she screams, before she says something, before she realizes! Run!
Instead, he jabbed nonsense into a chartputer, his pulse banging away like something living in his throat. The Underhill woman was standing now, her eyes wild.
Time to go, time to move,
go, go.
He fingered open the curtain and walked out, eyes facing front. Not too fast, not too slow, steady, steady, and now left, go left, there are the stairs, there are . . .
Suddenly, the air split with the shrill of the deputies’ links at the same moment that Sandra Underhill screamed.
Go!
He banged through the doors like a rocket. He heard a shout: “Hey, hey . . . !” But he was through the doors and pelting down stairs, taking them at a near-run. There was a ripping sensation in his side, and the pain made him gasp. But he kept going, past the first floor, wheeling around, nearly losing his footing, slipping. The damn scrub booties. He paused to rip them off, and then he ran full-out, his side hitching.
Can’t use the turbo. I need a car, and I need something to buy me enough time so I can get away, and I need that crystal!
Down the last flight of stairs now, basement coming up fast, and as he cut left, straight-arming the door, he reached around for his gun, dragging it free of his waistband.
* * *
Amanda was talking to her computer when she heard the thwap-bang of a door connecting with cinderblock. She looked up, dumbfounded, as someone smashed her door open so hard, the impact sent a picture crashing to the floor.
“Craig?” She was half-out of her seat now, a quizzical smile playing over her lips. “Craig, what’s wrong?”
Then she spotted the gun and, well, she was pretty much up to speed.
59
2200 hours
Dickert beat them by ten minutes. They’d slewed into the ER breezeway, nearly colliding with deputies and hospital personnel. As they jumped out, Ramsey heard sirens converging on the hospital and then, very distinctly, the thumping whop-whop-whop of a VTOL, and knew the press was onto the story. Then they told him about Amanda.
Now five minutes later, the page operator said, “I’ve located her pager. It’s receiving. She’s just not answering.”
“She probably can’t. But the pager has a SatNav, right?” Ramsey said, impatiently. He and Ketchum stood behind the operator. “Something so you can always find her, that’s what she said.”
“It’s not that sophisticated. It’s more of a general locator.” The page operator’s fingers clattered over her keyboard. “I can’t tell you what street she’s on but I can pinpoint . . . hang on, just hang on. . . . Got it. Heading west toward the mountains.”
“Hank, how much time to get on the straightaway west of here?” Ramsey asked.
“Fifteen minutes, and that’d be taking it fast. He’s got a good jump, but I’ll bet he sure as heck wouldn’t want to get Amanda so rattled she cracks up. So probably closer to twenty minutes.”
“So he’s got at least a half hour lead. The landtrain trestle’s forty-five minutes away. But he has to expect we’d think of that first. Besides, the crime scene people have been crawling all over that place, so he’s got to be headed further out. Where can he go from there?”
“To the mountains, or down the river,” Ketchum said. “River’s more dangerous, but Emerald River branches into three before the trestle. Once he’s on the water, he could go anywhere. But trying those rocks at night . . . he’d have to be crazy.”
“Hank.” Ramsey was already moving for the door. “Does he strike you as a guy who’s operating on all thrusters?”
* * *
The hospital parking lot looked like a circus ring minus the tents and the clowns. Behind a police barricade, the press gabbled like eager spectators waiting to see if the trapeze artist was going to break his neck, or not. The VTOL hovered overhead, its rotors slapping air, the harsh ball of its spotlight turning Ramsey’s skin light blue.
He dodged deputies, running for the car, digging for the keys. Time was working against them. Dickert had a head start, he was crazy and he had Amanda either as insurance, or maybe just for her car. The pager was alive, but Amanda might already be dead. Or maybe Dickert would remember the pager, ditch it, and continue on. If Dickert was part of a group, he must have confederates, and they might be waiting for him.
He fumbled the keys, dropped them. Whoa, whoa, going too fast, hold on, hold on. He felt his mind tilting off its axis, veering into panic. He was so keyed with anxiety and adrenalin, his head felt like a geyser, ready to blow. The last time he’d felt like this was McFaine and, God, no, that had ended in . . .
Stop this shit. You know how to do this. Just do the job.
He reached the unmarked, aimed the remote and vaulted around the open door—and paused as the pool of the VTOL’s glare white light washed past like a wave.
The VTOL.
Whirling round, Ramsey sprinted back. “Hank, Hank!”
* * *
Well, she hadn’t stabbed him with a scalpel, screamed her head off, or kicked his nuts so hard he had to blow them out of his nose. So this all pretty much sucked the big one.
Pitch black. Foamy clouds had moved in during the afternoon, so there weren’t any stars, either. She’d mashed the accelerator and now they were going so fast, she felt as if they were skating over frictionless black ice.
Craig Dickert: in the backseat, the muzzle of a gun pressed just below her right ear. When her gaze flicked to her rear view, she saw his eyes. Glittery, intent. Insane.
She was shivering now, uncontrollably, and fear coated her mouth with a metallic, sharp taste. Her abdomen cramped, and the bubble of a scream pushed the back of her throat. But she was also getting a little pissed off, and that was probably good.
She’d acted like a numb nut: getting Limyanovich’s personal effects, then picking out the evidence bag with that red diamond ring—and how did Dickert even know about the ring? The newspeople? No, they’d held back the ring, necklace and bang stick from the press. But Dickert knew. From whom? Kodza?
“You scared?”
Amanda blinked back to attention. “What?”
“I asked if you were scared,” Dickert said. “You think you’re gonna die?”
“Well, duh,” she said, and decided, yeah, honesty was best. This was Dickert, after all. She had worked with him for a couple of years, and that had to count for something. She wasn’t sure that calculus panned out but, right now, she didn’t much care.
And if I can get him talking, maybe I can distract him long enough to throttle back, give whoever’s after us—because Hank’s got to know by now, Jack’s got to know—time to catch up.
She said, “Of course, I’m scared, and I’d rather not die. How about we talk? It’s better than me pissing my pants.”
Dickert’s voice turned suspicious. “What’s there to talk about?”
“Well, gee, let me think,” Amanda said. “How about what the hell is this all about? Why’d you kill Limyanovich? Was he a Blakist? Kittery Resistance? What?”
A pause. Then: “Where’d you get all that?”
“Around. I found something in Limyanovich’s DNA.”
Another silence. “You people, you think you’re so smart. But you’ve got no idea. You’re clueless.”
“Okay. So clue me in.”
“It’s all right there, hiding in plain sight. I mean, what happens after the HPGs go down? The Republic falls apart; the Houses make land grabs; the exarch seals off Prefecture X; there are probably dozens of civil wars.”
“So?”
“You don’t think this was engineered? That whoever did this didn’t know that nothing had really changed?”
“I’m not sure I see it,” Amanda said, easing off her speed a little. Not too much, keep him talking, buy time. “Who do you think engineered it?”
“Blakists, of course: just biding their time. You really believe all that crap about getting rid of them?”
“Actually, no, not entirely. The Inner Sphere’s big.”
“So what do you think the Blakists have been doing all this time? I’ll tell you what they’ve been doing.” He was talking faster now, the words tumbling out like the jackpot from a one-armed bandit. “They’ve been planning, they’ve been buildi
ng alliances, and now they’re spreading like a cancer all through the Inner Sphere. What about those Kittery Resistance cells, like the one that showed up on Terra? And who wouldn’t mind seeing all the Houses fall, and The Republic, too?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Just because all those dots exist doesn’t mean they connect.”
“Oh, they connect. We’ve got their data crystals. It’s the Clans, that’s what.”
“Clans?” There it is again. Clans, and Kodza, at the periphery. “Which ones?”
His tone was petulant now, a little sulky. “If we knew that, then we could come forward. Tell people. All we know is it’s Clanners, probably way the hell out on the periphery, and you can bet your bottom century they’ve got HPGs and they’re in league with the Blakists. You religious?”
The shift threw her. “Uh,” she said, not certain what the right answer was, then risked it. “No. Why?”
“Because these guys, they always do things in threes. They’ve got this whole new trinity: Clanners, Blakists and God. Only God ain’t Jesus. It’s Devlin . . . Stone.”
She almost laughed. The idea was insane. “How do you guys figure?” Bleeding a bit more speed. “What’s the logic?”
“Stone appears the first time, saves the Inner Sphere with The Republic, then disappears with the promise that he’ll come if we need him,” Dickert said. He made quotation marks with the fingers of his left hand. “When the time is right.” More quotes. “That remind you of anything in particular?”
She was silent. Because he was right. She was a good Jewish girl, but she knew Dickert was right.
Trinity? Or . . . Triumvirate?
But Stone would have to be, well, pretty old. Pushing a hundred and maybe more, and no one could live much longer than a hundred ten—not and have any marbles left. No one.
And then she remembered what she’d said: Boys, we got ourselves a dinosaur.
