Where Evil Lurks

by Robert D. Rodman

  “That’s bullshit. He doesn’t have a daughter.”

  “Ah, but he does,” said Ashley, “and you have a son. You both fathered children when you gang-raped me. Twins, of course. And your son is lying right here. Look at him. If you’re not convinced by the resemblance, here are the results of the DNA tests. One of your whores was kind enough to provide a sample of your semen. This is you; this is the child. I’m sure you’re able to understand the report, Doctor.”

  “This proves nothing. How do I know whose DNA is being compared?”

  “I think you recognize your son. His name is Benton. He can join all the other boys and girls you’ve murdered for their organs. Turn that stopcock! Now! It’s your life or his. If he doesn’t, shoot him, Owsley.”

  Sangfroid hesitated. He looked at the sleeping boy on the operating table, then at Ashley, then at the gun. Reluctantly, he raised his hand toward the valve that would release the deadly drug. Just as his fingers closed about it, Owsley shouted, “No. Don’t do this, Ashley. This isn’t part of the plan. We weren’t going to risk Benton’s life.”

  “Give me the gun, Owsley,” commanded Ashley.

  “Oh, my God,” said Owsley. “You are crazy.”

  “The gun!” she commanded.

  She put her hand out to take it. In the split second that the gun was in both their hands, Sangfroid lunged forward to seize it. In the struggle, the .38 discharged. Owsley’s head jerked back as the slug entered his left eye, and exited over his left ear, trailing bloody strings of brain and bone in its wake. The recoil threw Sangfroid off balance, and Ashley was able to wrest the gun from him.

  “Turn the stopcock or join my late cousin,” said Ashley, nodding at Owsley’s bloody corpse. “Of all the children you murdered, this, your son, will be the one you think of while you’re sitting on death row.”

  “I don’t need to,” said Sangfroid. “The valve broke and the drug is leaking through. Listen.” The heart monitor bleeps had slowed significantly and become uneven. “Give me the gun and I’ll save him.”

  Ashley hesitated, but only for a moment. “No, I won’t be cheated of my revenge. Your moments of pleasure when you tortured and raped me will be avenged through the son that you fathered. Think of that. If it wasn’t for your own child, you might’ve lived out your life in freedom and luxury. Because of him, you’ll rot in prison waiting to die.”

  Ashley’s expression had taken on a demonic cast, as of one possessed. Her eyes burned with the blue heat of madness. The change struck me so that I was for a moment unable to move. But a child lay dying, as I had foreseen days ago, and I’d come to prevent this third abomination that had sprung from Ashley’s twisted mind.

  I showed myself. While Ashley gawked in surprise, Sangfroid slipped out the back door.

  “Damn you,” she said. “I wanted him here for the end.” She pointed the gun at me. “Why are you working against me? Wasn’t I good to you? Owsley said you were out of the picture.”

  “Ashley, listen. I understand. I saw you crucify Fatboy, and I saw how you used Jeanne-Renée to entrap Strong. I knew you’d use Benton to get at Little.”

  “That goddamn Owsley told you. How else would you know what that little bastard was doing?”

  “Ashley, I give you my word. I figured it out on my own. The children were disappearing after Harry used them. Sangfroid was in a position to launder organs for huge amounts of money. It was logical.”

  “The ever fucking logical Dagny Taggart Jamison. Atlas will not be shrugging tonight. Let’s see you deduce your way out of this: Dr. Sangfroid will be caught red-handed with a child’s corpse on his operating table.”

  At that moment, someone came barreling down the stairs. Charles burst into the room. Ashley calmly trained the gun on him. “Don’t come a step further. Put your little black bag down, doctor. You won’t be needing it.”

  The heart monitor bleeps ceased. I had one last desperate card to play.

  “Ashley, your father gave me something for you. It’s in my bag. I swear this isn’t a trick. You once said we were of an age. You once trusted me. For the sake of that, I beg you to look. It’s in the envelope.”

  As I spoke, I approached her, hands outstretched in front of me holding open the bag.

  Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. She kept the gun on me as she reached for the envelope. She waved me back, opened it with her free hand and withdrew the photograph. I held my breath. Charles’s eyes were fixed on the nearly dead boy.

  Ashley stared at her namesake, at her ancestor double, for what seemed an eternity. Finally, her expression softened. She lowered the gun and big tears formed in the corner of each eye. She sank to her knees, hugging herself, head lowered. Then she looked up, tears streaming.

  “Save him. Oh God, please save him,” she implored.

  Charles leaped into action. He had preloaded syringes for just such an emergency, and inside of ten seconds had emptied the contents of one into Benton’s jugular vein. He began to massage the boy’s heart externally, counting under his breath as he pushed and released.

  My eyes were on the flat line of the monitor’s screen. The line broke into a tiny wavelet, then went flat again. Then several wavelets, but still no sound. After endless time, a jagged wave attended by a single bleep made its way across the screen. It was followed shortly by another, and finally an irregular, but steady, musical stream of them. Charles stopped pumping and pulled a stethoscope out of his black bag. He pressed the bell to Benton’s chest and listened intently. Finally, he looked at me and gave me a thumbs-up. I nearly melted with relief.

  “Loads better,” said Charles. “The boy is severely sedated. That alone could’ve stopped his heart. We’ll use the EMS van to take him to hospital. Where’s Sangfroid?”

  “I’m afraid he bolted out the door when I made my grand entrance.”

  There was a commotion above, then a voice called, “Dr. Clarke, are you down there?”

  “That’ll be Sergeant McClaugherty,” said Charles. “Yes, we’re here.”

  Two plainclothesmen leading Richard Sangfroid in handcuffs came down the stairs into the operating room. “We found this one in a Porsche inside the front gate, honking like a madman. Too bad for him, after we entered the house the security guard lammed and left the joint locked up.

  “Nice work, Sergeant,” said Charles.

  “We also found the original crew of the ambulance, bound and gagged in the back. They complained they were hijacked by a couple of hoods and wanted us to let them go. But there was something shady about those guys, so we had a patrolman take them downtown for questioning.”

  “Excellent,” said Charles. “Hang on to them. They’re part of this diabolical organ-reaping scheme.”

  Ashley had regained her composure and, for the moment, her sanity. “He’s been murdering children and selling their organs. I have the evidence. He gathered it.” She looked at Owsley, from whose death-wound blood and gore still oozed. “And I believe that Ms. Jamison also has knowledge of Sangfroid’s evil little business.”

  I went to Ashley and helped her to her feet. I said to her softly, “You need to get help.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m ready at last.

  ‘Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge,

  To cure this deadly grief.’”

  EPILOGUE

  Nine-year-old Benton Bloodworth survived his ordeal, and, mercifully, had little memory of it. His twin sister, Jeanne-Renée, remembered her painful experience as a nightmare, her memory befogged by the large doses of the phenothiazine with which she’d been drugged. What might linger in their subconscious minds is another story.

  Ashley escaped all but self-inflicted punishment. The murders in Turkey could not be traced to her. Owsley was the front man and he was no longer answerable. Likewise, Owsley had arranged for Jeanne-Renée to be “kidnapped” in setting up Harry. Only a very imaginative prosecutor would have bothered Ashley with that crime.

  Insofar as events surroun
ding the entrapment of Richard Sangfroid were concerned, the law had every reason to thank Ashley’s vigilantism. Sangfroid had become untouchable since his public exoneration. Now, the District Attorney could try an odious criminal caught red-handed and would probably get a promotion out of it. There was little reason to question Ashley’s motives or methods.

  Sangfroid offered no defense at his trial. Instead, he agreed to cooperate fully with the authorities in exchange for a no-death-penalty sentence. He pleaded guilty to 52 counts of murder, including Owsley Bloodworth’s, and received 52 life sentences to run consecutively. I’m sure the D.A. hated to give up the death penalty, but its popularity is waning in California anyway.

  The organ-laundering scheme was under the aegis of the same organized crime syndicate that had threatened Sangfroid. The threats were bogus. They were designed to raise Sangfroid above suspicion, and give him cause for the heavy security one needs when one is murdering children and selling their body parts on the black market.

  Sangfroid was the perfect man for the job. In his administrative capacity, he controlled the records to allow both organs and recipients to enter the system in balance. As a surgeon, he could remove the organs from “donors” invented in the electronic “paperwork.” The implanting of the reaped parts was done legitimately, or so it appeared, after Sangfroid had doctored the records. The disposal of the plundered bodies was taken care of by the syndicate—it was one of their several areas of expertise. Had it not been for Ashley’s obsessive desire for her version of justice, there was no telling how long the children’s Underground Railroad to Hell might have lasted.

  A week after I got home I received a handwritten letter from Taylor Bloodworth on Hatfield Hall stationery:

  My Dear Miss Jamison,

  I am very much beholden to you for going beyond the bounds of duty and saving my daughter and grandchildren. I also apologize for the way I treated you when you were in my employ. My judgment failed me then, but I hope to be forgiven notwithstanding.

  That you had the presence of mind to show Ashley the photograph of her great-grandmother fills me with admiration. I had hoped, when I gave it to you to show her, that it would remind her of her roots, and of who she truly was, and bring her back to her family.

  You may be interested to know that Dr. Ashley Stuart Bloodworth, the lady in the photograph—after whom my daughter was named—was a Professor of English Literature, and the author of books on Shakespeare, Milton, and the Brontës. She also managed to rear a family, including my father.

  After Ashley’s “mishap” in her first year at Marquis, she became attached to her great-grandmamma. She kept the photo by her bedside. More than once, I heard her talking to it. Somehow, it helped her. Though my grandmother died 20 years before Ashley was born, Ashley drew strength and inspiration from her. She read all her books and all the works of the authors that my grandmother wrote about. As I had prayed might happen, my grandmother became a beacon in the darkness that swept over my daughter.

  I hope that you will not find it crass that I have enclosed a check for $5,000. I left the payee unspecified. You are welcome to the money, or you may redirect it as it pleases you. Your service to my family has been invaluable, and you have my undying gratitude.

  Very truly yours,

  Taylor Bloodworth

  P.S. Benton and Jeanne-Renée have gone to live with Olivia while Ashley undergoes treatment. Perhaps this will take her mind off the loss of Owsley.

  TB

  I did not accept this extra money from the Bloodworths for myself. I arranged with Uncle Husnu to have the $5,000 donated anonymously to the orphanage in Turkey once run by J. Thompson Beck. It was a minuscule token when weighed against the enormity of Beck’s crimes, but better something than nothing.

  Charles came to Raleigh to stay with me for the winter holidays, three weeks to the day after the drama in Sangfroid’s operating room. I showed him Mr. Bloodworth’s letter.

  “Huh, very interesting,” he said after reading it. “Maybe that explains those poetical words she spoke about vengeance being medicine. Probably Shakespeare or someone. It wasn’t quite what you’d expect under the circumstances.” He paused a moment in thought. “But you know, she may find her medicine to be poisonous in the end. What she did, it can’t be all that great for a healthy psyche. Poor, poor woman.”

  I took the letter from his hands and put my arms around his neck. “You’re a sweet man to find it in yourself to feel sorry for Ashley. I know in my mind she’s pathetic, but in my heart she will always be evil.”

  He enclosed me in his arms and said, “Speaking of evil, think of what you’ve done—of the children you’ve saved.” He pulled me close and kissed me. “And of the evil that you’ve helped to end…”