by Robin Cook
From the way Kelly had acted, he knew she knew something. The question was how much. Devlin thought there was a good possibility she’d be getting in touch with Jeffrey to warn him that Devlin had been there. Devlin wished he’d had an opportunity to put a bug on her phone. He thought about going around the back of her house and finding her telephone junction box, but he couldn’t do that in the daylight. He’d have to wait for dark for that kind of stunt.
If he was really lucky, and Devlin thought he was due for a little luck, Kelly would go visit Jeffrey, wherever the hell the guy was hiding. There was a slim chance that the doc would even show up there on Kelly’s doorstep. Devlin would wait and see. Whatever else might happen, one thing was for sure: the next time he ran into him, the good doctor wasn’t getting away.
“Didn’t you hear what he said?” Kelly asked.
“No,” Jeffrey said. “I could hear you, but not him.”
“He said that someone told him they’d seen us together. I said that I hadn’t been in touch with you since Chris’s funeral. He left his name and number in case I heard from you. I’m sure he doesn’t know you’re here. If he did, he wouldn’t have given up so easily, and he certainly wouldn’t have bothered leaving his telephone number.”
“But it’s the second time he’s come here,” Jeffrey said. “He must know something, otherwise he wouldn’t keep coming back. We’ve been lucky so far. He carries a gun, which he thinks nothing of shooting at will.”
“He’s fishing,” Kelly said confidently. “I’m telling you, he doesn’t know you’re here. Trust me!”
“It’s Devlin I don’t trust. He’s real trouble. I feel guilty about jeopardizing your safety.”
“You’re not jeopardizing my safety. I’m jeopardizing my safety. I’m an active participant in this. You’re not about to scare me out of it any more than Devlin or Harding are. Besides,” she said, softening a bit, “you need me.”
Jeffrey studied Kelly’s face. He looked deep into her dark-brown eyes, noticing flecks of gold. For the first time he almost felt everything he’d gone through in the last few days had been worth it just to reach this moment with her. He’d always thought of her as attractive; suddenly she was beautiful. Beautiful, warm, caring, and oh, so feminine.
They were sitting on the gingham couch, having come there after Kelly had pulled Jeffrey from the depths of the front closet. With the curtains of the family room still drawn, the only source of the late-afternoon light was the mullioned casement windows over the sink. It made the illumination in the room gentle and even. The sound of songbirds drifted in from the backyard.
“Despite the danger, you really want me to stay?” Jeffrey queried. He had one arm over the back of the couch.
“You can be so thickheaded,” Kelly said with a smile. “Just like a man.” She laughed her crystalline laugh. Her eyes and teeth sparkled in the soft light. “So it’s settled,” she said. Playfully she leaned her head against Jeffrey’s arm and reached out with her hand. She ever so gently touched the end of his nose, then the tip of his upper lip. “I have some idea of how alone you must have been feeling these days, these months. I know because I’ve felt the same. I could see it in your eyes the night you came here from the airport.”
“It was that obvious?” Jeffrey asked. But he didn’t expect an answer. It was a rhetorical question, as he felt a change coming over him. The universe was shrinking. Suddenly the room was all there was. Time slowed, then stopped. Gently leaning forward, Jeffrey kissed Kelly’s upturned mouth. As if in slow motion they came together in a tender, emotional, love-starved way. At first their coupling was slow, then eager, then ravenous. It was a joyous union, as mutual need was sated by mutual gratification.
Eventually the sound of the songbirds re-entered their consciousness. As overwhelming and as unexpected as their love-making had been, reality drifted back in stages. For a brief instant they’d been the only people on the earth, and space and time had stood still. With some embarrassment akin to a loss of innocence they pulled apart enough to look into each other’s eyes. They giggled. They felt like teenagers.
“So,” Kelly said, at last breaking the silence. “You’ll stay?”
Both laughed.
“I’ll stay,” Jeffrey agreed.
“How about some dinner?”
“Wow, what a transition,” Jeffrey said. “I haven’t been thinking much about food. Are you hungry?”
“I’m always hungry,” Kelly admitted, detaching herself.
They made dinner together, Kelly doing the lion’s share of the work but giving Jeffrey odd jobs like cleaning and spindrying the lettuce.
Jeffrey was amazed at how calm he felt. The fear of Devlin was still there, but it was now under control. With Kelly by his side he didn’t feel as if he was alone. Plus he decided she was right. Devlin couldn’t have known he was there. If he had, he would have come through the door whether Kelly had opened it or not.
Noticing the hour, Jeffrey took time out from his chores to call the Medical Examiner’s office. He hoped Dr. Warren Seibert would be still there. Jeffrey wanted to ask if he’d been able to identify any toxins.
“No luck so far,” Seibert told him once he got on the line. “I ran samples from Karen Hodges, Gail Shaffer, and even Patty Owen through the gas chromatograph.”
“I appreciate your trying,” Jeffrey said. “But from what you said this morning, I suppose it’s not surprising. And just because you haven’t found a toxin, doesn’t mean that one’s not there. Right?”
“Right,” Seibert said. “Even though I didn’t find it, it could be hiding in one of the peaks. But I put in a call to a pathologist from California who’s been doing some research on batrachotoxin and its family of toxins. Hopefully, he’ll be getting back to me to let me know where the stuff would come out of the column. Who knows, maybe he might know where we could get a tagged antitoxin. I did some more reading, and with all the stipulations you’ve given me, I think batrachotoxin is the prime candidate.”
“Thanks for all your help in this,” Jeffrey said.
“Hey, no problem,” Seibert said. “This is the kind of case that made me go into the field. It’s got me all excited. I mean, if your suspicions are right, this is big-time stuff. We’ll get a couple of great papers out of it.”
After Jeffrey hung up the phone, Kelly asked, “Any luck?”
Jeffrey shook his head. “He’s excited, but he hasn’t found anything. It’s so frustrating to be this close but still have no proof of either the crime or the guilt of the main suspect.”
Kelly stepped over and gave Jeffrey a hug. “Don’t worry, we’ll get to the bottom of it one way or another.”
“I sincerely hope so,” Jeffrey said. “And I hope we do it before Devlin or the police catch up with me. I think we better go ahead and make this call to Trent Harding.”
“After dinner,” Kelly said. “First things first. Meanwhile, how about opening some wine? I think we could use a little.”
Jeffrey got out a bottle of chardonnay from the refrigerator and took off the foil seal. “If this Trent turns out to be the person responsible, I’d love to find out about his childhood. There has to be some kind of explanation, even if it’s irrational.”
“The problem is he looks so normal,” Kelly said. “I mean, his eyes are pretty intense, but maybe we’re reading that into them. Otherwise he looks like the fellow who was the captain of the football team in my high school class.”
“What bothers me most is the indiscriminate nature of the killings,” Jeffrey said as he got out the corkscrew. “Killing another person is bad enough, but tampering with drugs and killing randomly is so sick it’s hard for me to conceive of it.”
“If he’s the culprit, I’m going to wonder how he can function so well in the rest of his life,” Kelly said.
With a grunt, Jeffrey popped the cork on the wine bottle. “Especially becoming a nurse,” he said. “He has to have had some altruistic motivations. Nurses more than doctors
have to be motivated by a desire to help people in a true, hands-on manner. And he’s got to be intelligent. If the contaminant turns out to be something like this batrachotoxin, its choice is diabolically ingenious. I wouldn’t have ever thought of a contaminant if it hadn’t been for Chris’s suspicions.”
“That’s kind of you to say,” Kelly said.
“Well, it happens to be the truth,” Jeffrey said. “But if Trent is the guilty one, I’m certainly not going to admit that I’ll ever understand his motivations. Psychiatry was never one of my strong points.”
“If you’re finished opening the wine, how about setting the table?” Kelly asked. She bent over and turned on the oven.
The meal was delicious, and though Jeffrey hadn’t realized he was hungry, he ate more than his share of the breaded Dover sole and steamed broccoli.
Taking a second helping of salad, he said, “If Seibert is not able to isolate a toxin from any of the current bodies, we talked about exhuming Henry Noble.”
“He’s been dead and buried for almost two years,” Kelly said.
Jeffrey shrugged his shoulders. “I know it sounds a bit ghoulish, but the fact that he lived for a week after his adverse reaction might be helpful. A toxin like this batrachotoxin gets concentrated in the liver and is excreted in the bile. If it’s what Harding used, the best place to find the stuff may be in Henry Noble’s bile.”
“But two years after the fact?”
“Seibert said that if the body had been reasonably embalmed and perhaps buried in a shady spot, it would still be traceable.”
“Yuck,” Kelly said. “Can’t we talk about something else, at least until we’ve finished dinner? Let’s get back to what we’re going to say to Trent Harding.”
“I think we have to be direct. Let him know what we suspect. And I can’t help but think we can use those Polaroids to our advantage. He can’t want pictures like that to get into circulation.”
“What if it just makes him mad?” Kelly said, recalling Harding’s angry hammer throw. The roof of her car had a dent in it the size of a baseball.
“I hope it does. If he gets angry, maybe he’ll say something to give himself away.”
“Like threaten you?” Kelly said doubtfully. “ ‘I’ve killed before, I’ll kill again.’ That sort of thing?”
“I know it’s a long shot,” Jeffrey said, “but do you have any better suggestions?”
Kelly shook her head. Jeffrey’s idea was worth a try. There certainly wasn’t anything to lose at this point.
“I’ll bring an extension in here,” she said. “There’s a phone jack over by the TV set.” She went to get it.
Jeffrey tried to prepare himself for the call. He tried to put himself in Trent’s position. If he was innocent, he’d probably hang up immediately. If he was guilty, then he’d be nervous and want to try to find out what the caller knew. But it was all pure guesswork. If Trent stayed on the phone, it certainly wouldn’t qualify as proof of guilt.
Carrying a dusty red telephone, Kelly returned to the kitchen. “Somehow I thought it would be fitting if we used the phone from Chris’s office,” she said. She pulled out the TV stand, bent over, and plugged in the jack. Picking up the phone, she made sure there was a dial tone.
“You want to use this one or the one in the kitchen?” she asked Jeffrey.
“The one in the kitchen,” Jeffrey said, not that it made much difference. This was going to be one tough call, no matter where he made it.
Jeffrey pulled out the slip of paper Polly Arnsdorf had given him, with Trent’s phone number and address. He dialed Harding’s number, then motioned to Kelly to pick up as soon as it started to ring.
The phone rang three times before Trent answered. His voice was a lot softer than Jeffrey had anticipated. He said, “Hello . . . Matt?” before Jeffrey had a chance to say anything.
“This isn’t Matt,” Jeffrey said.
“Who is it?” Harding demanded. His voice turned cold, even angry.
“An admirer of your work.”
“Who?”
“Jeffrey Rhodes.”
“Do I know you?”
“I’m sure you do,” Jeffrey said. “I was an anesthesiologist at Boston Memorial, but I was put on leave after a problem occurred. A problem in the OR. Does that ring any bells?”
There was a pause. Then Harding raged. “What the hell you calling me for? I don’t work at Boston Memorial anymore. I quit there almost a year ago.”
“I know,” Jeffrey said. “Then you went to St. Joseph’s and you’ve just recently quit there. I know a bit about you, Trent. And what you’ve been up to.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Patty Owen, Henry Noble, Karen Hodges,” Jeffrey said. “Those names ring any bells?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”
“Oh, sure you do, Trent,” Jeffrey said. “You’re being modest, that’s all. Plus I can imagine you don’t want many people to know. After all, you went to all that trouble to choose just the right toxin. You know what I mean?”
“Hey, man, I don’t know what you mean. And I haven’t the faintest idea why you’re calling me.”
“You do know who I am, don’t you, Trent?” Jeffrey asked.
“Yeah, I know you,” Trent said. “I remember you from Boston Memorial and I read about you in the papers.”
“I thought so,” Jeffrey said. “You read all about me. Only maybe it won’t be too long before people are reading about you, one way or another.”
“What do you mean?”
Jeffrey knew he was upsetting him, and the fact that Trent was still on the phone was encouraging. “These things have a way of getting found out,” Jeffrey continued. “But I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Trent said. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Oh, no,” Jeffrey said. “I’ve got the right guy. Like I said, one way or the other you’re going to make the news. I’ve got some pictures that would look great in print. Let’s say copies of them spread all over Boston City. Your colleagues there could be treated to a whole new side of you.”
“What pictures are you talking about?” Trent demanded.
“They were a treat for me,” Jeffrey said, ignoring him, “and quite a surprise.”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Trent said.
“Polaroids,” Jeffrey said. “Color glossies of you and not much else. Check your bureau drawer, right by your sack of pot. I think you’ll find you’re missing a few photos.”
Trent muttered a few curses. Jeffrey thought he heard him put down the phone. In a minute Trent was back, shouting into the receiver. “So it was you in here, huh, Rhodes. Well, I’m warning you—I want those pictures back.”
“I’m sure you do,” Jeffrey said. “They are fairly . . . revealing. Great lingerie. I liked the pink teddy the best.”
Kelly gave Jeffrey a disgusted look.
“What is it you want?” Trent asked.
“I’d like to get together,” Jeffrey said. “Meet you in person.” It was clear to Jeffrey he wouldn’t be able to draw anything out of Trent over the phone.
“And what if I don’t want to meet you?”
“That’s your prerogative,” Jeffrey said. “But if we aren’t able to get together, I’m afraid I just can’t vouch for where all the copies of these photos might end up.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“Very good,” Jeffrey said. “I’m glad we understand one another. Now, do we have an appointment or not?”
“Sure,” Trent said, suddenly changing his tone. “Why don’t you come over. I know I don’t need to tell you where I live.”
Kelly waved her arms and mouthed the word No.
“Much as I like the idea of something up close and personal,” Jeffrey said, “I don’t think I’d feel all that welcome in your apartment. I’d feel more comfortab
le with people around.”
“Name the place,” Trent said.
Jeffrey could tell he really had Harding now. He thought for a moment. Where was a safe, public place they could meet? He remembered his wandering down by the Charles River. There were always plenty of people and lots of open space. “How about the Esplanade, down by the Charles River?” Jeffrey suggested.
“How will I recognize you?” Trent asked.
“Don’t worry,” Jeffrey said. “I’ll recognize you. Even with your clothes on. But I tell you what. Look for me on the stage of the Hatch Shell. How does that sound?”
“Name a time,” Trent said. He could barely contain his rage.
“How about nine-thirty?”
“I assume you’ll be alone.”
“I don’t have too many friends these days,” Jeffrey said. “And my mother’s busy.”
Harding didn’t laugh. “I just hope you haven’t been spreading your cockamamy stories to anyone else. I won’t tolerate any slander.”
I’m sure you won’t, thought Jeffrey. “See you on the Esplanade.” He hung up before Trent could say another word.
“Are you crazy?” Kelly fumed once they’d hung up. “You can’t go meet that lunatic. That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“I had to improvise,” Jeffrey said. “The guy’s smart. I wasn’t making any headway. If I talk to him in person I’ll be able to see his face, judge his reactions. There’ll be a much better chance he’ll implicate himself.”
“The guy is a maniac. He was just chasing you with a hammer.”
“That was a different circumstance,” Jeffrey said. “He caught me in his apartment. He had a right to be angry.”
Kelly looked to the ceiling in astonishment. “And now he’s defending this serial killer?”
“He wants his pictures,” Jeffrey said. “He won’t do anything to me until he has them. And I won’t even take them. I’ll leave them here.”
“I think we should go back to the idea of digging up Henry Noble. That sounds like a Sunday picnic compared with a face-to-face meeting with this madman.”
