He sat down in the middle of the floor, his legs spread. Must think…
Bekker sighed. His tongue slipped out, tasted salt. He looked down and found himself covered with a dark crust. Crust? He touched his chest with a fingertip. Blood. Drying blood…
He got to his feet, stiff, climbed the stairs, hunched over, touching each riser with his hands as he went up, and then went down the hall to the bathroom. He turned the tap handles, started the water running, ducked his head toward the sink, splashed cold water on his face, stood, looked into the mirror.
His face was pink, his chest still liver-red with the blood crust. He looked like the devil, he thought. The thought came naturally. Bekker knew all about the devil. His parents, immersed in the severities of their Christian faith, had hammered the devil into him, hammered in the old, dead words of Jonathan Edwards…
There are in the souls of wicked men those hellish principles reigning, that would presently kindle and flame out into hell fire, were it not for God's restraints.
He'd never seen God's restraints, Bekker had told the preacher one Sunday night. For that he had gotten a beating that at the time he thought would kill him. Had, in fact, not been able to go to school for a week, and had seen not a gram of pity in his parents' eyes.
Bekker, sopping up the blood, looked into the mirror and spoke the old words, still remembered: "God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. Bullshit."
But was it? Did the consciousness go somewhere after death? Was there a pit? The children he'd seen die, that change of gaze at the last instant… was that ecstasy? Did they see something beyond?
Bekker had studied the films taken by the Nazis at the death camps, stared into the filmed faces of dying medical experiments, films considered collectible by certain influential Germans… Was there something beyond?
Bekker's rational scientist mind said no: We are no more than animated mud, a conscious piece of dirt, the consciousness no more than a chemical artifact. Remember thou that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. Isn't that what the Catholics professed? Odd candor, for a Church Political. Whatever his rational mind said, the other parts, the instinctive parts, couldn't imagine a world without Beauty. He couldn't simply vanish… could he?
He glanced at his watch. He had time. With the proper medication… He looked out of the bathroom at the brass box on the bureau.
Michael Bekker, very smooth, a little of the cocaine, just a lick of the phencyclidine, slipped through the halls of University Hospital.
"Dr. Bekker…" A nurse, passing, calling him "Doctor." The word flushed him with power; or the lick of PCP did. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
The hallway lights were dimmed, for night. Three women in white sat under the brighter lights of the nursing station, thumbing through papers, checking medication requirements. Overhead, a half-dozen monitors, flickering like the components of a rich man's stereo system, tracked the condition of the ICU patients.
Bekker checked his clipboard. Hart, Sybil. Room 565. He headed that way, taking his time, past a private room where a patient was snoring loudly. He looked around quickly: nobody watching. Stepped inside. The patient was sound asleep, her head back, her mouth hanging open. Sounded like a chainsaw, Bekker thought. He went to the bedside table, opened the drawer. Three brown vials of pills. He took them out, half turned to the dim light coming in from the hall. The first was penicillamine, used to prevent kidney stones. No need for that. He put it back. Paramethasone. More kidney stuff. The third vial said "Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride 25mg." He opened it, looked inside at the green-and-white caps. Ah. Librium. He could always use some Librium. He took half of the tablets, screwed the top back on the vial and put the vial in the drawer. The Librium caps he dropped into his pocket.
At the door, he stopped to listen. You had to be careful in this: nurses wore running shoes, and were silent as ghosts. But if you knew what to listen for, you could pick up the almost imperceptible squawk-squawk-squawk of the shoes on polished tile…
The hall was silent and he stepped out, squinting at his clipboard, ready to look confused if a nurse was in the hall. There were none, and he went on toward Sybil Hart's room.
Sybil Hart had raven hair and dark liquid eyes. She lay silently watching the screen of the television bolted into a corner of her room. An earplug was fitted in one ear, and although the inanities of late-night television sometimes made her want to scream… she didn't.
Couldn't.
Sybil Hart lay unmoving, propped semi-erect on her bed. She was not in the ICU proper, but was accessible, where the nurses could check her every half-hour or so. She'd be dead in three weeks, a month, killed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease.
The disease had started with a numbness in the legs, a tendency to stumble. She'd fought it, but it had taken her legs, her bowel control, her arms and, finally, her voice. Now, and most cruelly, it had taken her facial muscles, including her eyelids and eyebrows.
As the ALS had progressed and her voice had gone, she'd learned to communicate through an Apple computer equipped with special hardware and a custom word-processing program. When the disease had taken her voice, she'd still had some control of her fingers, and using two fingers and a special switch, she could write notes almost as effortlessly as if she were typing.
When her fingers had gone, the therapist had fitted her with a mouth switch, and still she could talk. When her mouth control had gone, another special switch had been fitted to her eyebrow. Now that was going, was almost gone. Sybil Hart began to sink into the final silence, waiting for the disease to take her diaphragm. When it did, she would smother… in another two or three weeks…
In the meantime, there was nothing wrong with her brain and she could still move her eyes. The CNN commentator was babbling about a DEA raid on a drug laboratory at UCLA.
Bekker stepped inside her room and Sybil's eyes shifted to him.
"Sybil," he said, his voice quiet but pleasant. "How are you?"
He had visited her three times before, interested in the disease that incapacitated the body but left the brain alive. With each visit he'd seen further deterioration. The last time she had barely been able to respond with the word processor. A nurse had told him several days before that now even that was gone.
"Can we talk?" Bekker asked in the stillness. "Can you shift to your processor?"
He looked at the television in the corner of the room, but the screen stayed with CNN.
"Can you change it?" Bekker stepped closer to her bed, saw her eyes tracking him. He moved closer, peering into them. "If you can change it, make your eyes go up and down, like you're nodding. If you can't, make them go back and forth, like you're shaking your head."
Her eyes moved slowly back and forth.
"You're telling me you can't change it?"
Her eyes moved up and down.
"Excellent. We're communicating. Now… just a moment." Bekker stepped away from Sybil's bed and looked down the corridor. He could see just the corner of the nurses' station, a hundred feet away, and the cap on the head of a nurse, bowed over the desk, busy. Nobody else. He went back to the bed, pulled a chair up and sat where Sybil could see him. "I would like to explain my studies to you," he said. "I'm studying death, and you're going to be a wonderful participant."
Sybil's eyes were fixed on him as he began to talk.
And when he left, fifteen minutes later, she looked up at the CNN commentator and began to strain. If only… if only. It took twenty minutes, exhausting her, but suddenly there was a click and the word processor was up. Now. She needed a B.
When the nurse came by a half-hour later, Sybil was staring at the word processor. On the screen was a single B.
"Oh, what happened?" the nurse asked.
They all knew Sybil Hart could no longer operate the equipment. They'd left the switch attached because her husband had insisted. F
or morale. "You must've had a little twitch, there," the nurse said, patting Sybil's unfeeling leg. "Let me get the TV back for you."
Sybil watched in despair as the B disappeared, replaced by the tanned face and stupid shining teeth of the CNN commentator.
Four floors below, Bekker wandered through the pathology lab, whistling tunelessly, lost in not-quite-thought. The lab was cool, familiar. He thought of Sybil, dying. If only he could have a patient just a little early, just five minutes. If he could take a dying patient apart, watch the mechanism…
Bekker popped two MDMAs. Beauty broke into his jig.
CHAPTER 7
Light.
Lucas moved his head and cracked an eye. Sunlight sliced between the slats in the blinds and cut across the bed. Daylight? He sat up, yawning, and looked at the clock. Two o'clock. Telephone ringing.
"Jesus…" He'd been in bed for nine hours: he hadn't slept that long for months. He'd unplugged the bedroom phone, not wanting it to ring if he did manage to sleep. Now he rolled out, yawned and stretched as he walked into the kitchen and picked up the telephone.
"Yeah. Davenport." He'd left the kitchen blinds up the night before and saw, up the block, a woman walking with an Irish setter on a leash.
"Lucas? Daniel…"
"Yeah."
"I've been talking to people. We're going with television."
"Terrific. What time's the press conference?" The woman was closer now, and Lucas was suddenly aware that he was standing naked in front of a window that was barely knee-high.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?" Lucas frowned at the phone. "You gotta do it today."
"Can't. No time. We didn't decide until a half-hour ago-Homicide still doesn't like it."
"They think it makes them look bad…" The woman was one lot away, and Lucas squatted, getting down out of sight.
"Whatever. Anyway, it'll take the rest of the day to get a package together. I've got to meet with the county attorney about the legal angles, figure out if we're gonna try to pull full-time surveillance on Bekker, and all that. We're sorting it out now. I left some messages at your office, but when you didn't get back, I figured you were on the street."
"Uh, yeah," Lucas said. He looked around the kitchen. Unwashed dishes were stacked in the sink and microwave-dinner boxes were crushed into a plastic wastebasket. Bills were piled on the kitchen table with books, magazines, catalogues-two weeks' worth of mail, unopened. He was living like a pig. "Just walked in the door."
"Well, we're gonna do the conference early tomorrow afternoon. Probably two o'clock. We'll want you around. You know, for the PR. Wear the usual undercover rig, you know they like that, the TVs…"
"All right. I'll be down a little early tomorrow, talk it over. But today would be better."
"Can't do it," Daniel said. "Too many details to smooth out. You coming in?"
"Maybe later. I'm trying to get an interview over at University Hospital with a guy who knows Bekker."
When Daniel got off the phone, Lucas peeked over the windowsill and found a redheaded woman staring vacantly at the front of his house while pretending not to see her dog relieve itself in Lucas' bushes.
"God damn it." He crawled back to the bedroom, found his notebook, sat on his bed and called Webster Prentice at the University of Minnesota. He got a secretary and was switched to Prentice's office.
"You think Bekker killed her?" Prentice asked, after Lucas introduced himself.
"Who mentioned Bekker?"
"Why else would a cop be calling me?" the psychologist said in a jovial fat-man's voice. "Listen, I'd like to help, but you're talking to the wrong guy. Let me suggest that you call Dr. Larry Merriam."
Merriam's office was in a building that from the outside looked like a machine, with awkward angles, unlikely joints. Inside, it was a maze, with tunnels and skyways linking it to adjoining buildings, ground-level exits on different floors. Entire floors were missing in some parts of the structure. Lucas wandered for ten minutes, and asked twice for directions, before he found a bank of elevators that would take him to the sixth floor of the right wing.
Merriam's secretary was short, overweight and worried, scurrying like a Disney churchmouse to locate her boss. Larry Merriam, when she brought him back from the lab, was a balding, soft-faced man in a white smock, with large dark eyes and tiny worried hands. He took Lucas into his office, pressed his fingertips to his lips and said, "Oh, dear," when Lucas told him what he wanted. "This is totally off the record?"
"Sure. And nothing'll come back to you. Not unless you confess that you killed Mrs. Bekker," Lucas said, smiling, trying to loosen him up.
Merriam's office overlooked a parking garage. The cinderblock walls had been painted a cream color; a small bulletin board was covered with medical cartoons. From behind the desk Merriam mouthed silently, Shut the door.
Lucas reached back and eased the door shut. Merriam relaxed, folding his hands over his chest.
"Clarisse is a wonderful secretary, but she does have trouble keeping a secret," Merriam said. He stood, hands in his pockets, and turned to look out the window behind his desk. A man in a red jacket, carrying what looked like a doctor's bag, was walking across the roof of the parking garage. "And Bekker is a troubling subject."
"A lot of people seem to be troubled by Mr. Bekker," Lucas said. "We're trying to find an angle, a…" He groped for the right words.
"An entry wedge," Merriam said, glancing back over his shoulder at Lucas. "You always need one, in any kind of research."
"Exactly right. With Bekker-"
"What's this man doing?" Merriam interrupted, staring down at the roof of the parking garage. The man in the red jacket stopped next to a midnight-blue BMW, glanced around, took a long silver strip of metal from his coat sleeve and slipped it between the window and the weather stripping, down into the door. "I think, uh… Is this man stealing that car?"
"What?" Lucas stepped over to the window and looked out. The man below stopped for a moment and looked up at the hospital building, as though he sensed Merriam and Lucas watching. He wouldn't be able to see them through the tinted glass. Lucas felt a pulse of amusement.
"Yeah, he is. Gotta make a call, just take a minute," Lucas mumbled, reaching for Merriam's desk phone.
"Sure," Merriam said, looking at him oddly, then back down at the thief. "Dial nine…"
Lucas dialed straight through to the dispatcher. "Shirl', this is Lucas. I'm looking out a window at a guy named E. Thomas Little. He's breaking into a BMW." He gave her the details and hung up.
"Oh, dear," Merriam said, looking out the window, his fingertips pressed to his lips again. E. Thomas Little finally got the door open and climbed into the front seat of the BMW.
"E. Thomas is an old client of mine," Lucas said. The amusement pulsed through him again, felt good, like a spring wind.
"And he is stealing the car?"
"Yeah. He's not much good at it, though. Right now he's jerking the lock cylinder out of the steering column."
"How long will it take a police car to get here?"
"Another minute or so," Lucas said. "Or about a thousand bucks in damage." They watched, silently, together, as Little continued to work in the front seat of the car. Sixty seconds after he got inside, he backed the car out of the parking space and started toward the exit. As he was about to enter the circular down ramp, a squad car, driving up the wrong way, jerked to a stop in front of him. Little put the BMW in reverse and backed away, but the squad stayed with him. A minute later he was talking to the cops.
"Very strange," Merriam said, as the cops handcuffed Little and put him in the backseat of the squad. One of the patrolmen looked up at the hospital windows, as Little had, and waved. Merriam lifted a hand, realized that he couldn't be seen, and turned back to Lucas. "You wanted to know about Michael Bekker."
"Yeah." Lucas went back to his chair. "About Dr. Bekker…"
"He's… Do you know what I do?"
"You're a pediatric o
ncologist," Lucas said. "You treat kids with cancer."
"Yes. Bekker asked if he could observe our work. He has excellent credentials in his own field, which is pathology, and he's also developing something of a reputation among sociologists and anthropologists for work on what he calls the social organization of death. That's what brought him up here. He wanted to do a detailed examination of the chemistry we use, and how we use it, but he also wanted to know how we handle death itself… what conventions and structures had grown up around it."
"You agreed?"
Merriam nodded. "Sure. There are dozens of studies going on here all the time-this is a teaching and research hospital. Bekker had the credentials and both the studies had potential value. In fact, his work did result in procedural changes."
"Like what?"
Merriam took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, Lucas thought. Not like he'd missed a night's sleep, but like he'd missed five years' sleep. "Some of it's stuff you just don't notice if you work with it all the time. When you know somebody's about to die-well, there are things that have to be done with the body and the room. You have to clean up the room, you have to prepare to move the body down to Path. Some patients are quite clearheaded when they're dying. So how must it feel when a maid shows up and peeks into the room with a bunch of cleaning stuff, checking to see if you're gone yet? The patient knows we must've told her, 'Well, this guy'll be gone today.' "
"Ouch," Lucas said, wincing.
"Yeah. And Bekker was looking at more subtle problems, too. One of the things about this job is that some medical people can't handle it. We treat kids with advanced and rare types of cancer, and almost all of them eventually die. And if you watch enough kids die, and their parents going through it with them… well, the burnout rate with nurses and technicians and even doctors is terrific. And they sometimes develop problems with chronic incapacitating depression. That can go on for years, even after the victim has stopped working with the kids. Anyway, having Bekker look at us, we thought, might give us some ideas about how we might help ourselves."
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