“I wasn’t hurting them,” Belle snapped. “I was saving them from long, slow, horrible deaths. In pain. Alone. That’s how it ends, you know. Horribly.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard, and before Ripley could wonder how the volunteer had learned to use the machine, it came to life.
“Ironic, don’t you think?” Belle turned back to Ripley and smiled. “At first I was going to kill you with the stem of one of those crystal roses. I thought it would be nicely poetic and throw suspicion on either that pitiful husband of Ida Mae’s, or on Whistler. He’s an odd one, anyway. The hospital would be better off without him.”
“Belle. Don’t.” Ripley tried to press herself into the metal table as the metal arm ranged itself over her body and the inner workings hummed.
“But once I got to know Cage and his background, and saw how he felt about you, I thought this would be far more appropriate.” The computer whirred as Belle inputted a program. “It’s all quite easy if you read the handbook, you know.” She nodded and smiled, and Ripley thought the expression wasn’t quite sane. “When I heard you and Cage discussing your little hospital coup this morning, I knew I was out of time. I missed you with the motorcycle last night, but I won’t miss you with this.” She patted the huge machine fondly. “Daddy never approved of women getting an education—he said it encouraged them to think they were above the station the Lord intended for them. But in the end, he let me take the computer and medical assistant classes so I could get a job as a secretary or a nurse.”
She smiled benignly as the machine flashed through the first level of its warm-up. “Daddy understood in the end, just before he died.” She nodded. “He saw that I was doing the Lord’s work here, and he died a happy man.” Then she glanced over at Ripley, and her expression flattened into a frown. “But you don’t understand my calling. I thought you would—you’re a doctor. You should understand saving people from pain, but you don’t. That’s why you have to be removed from the equation. You were going to ruin everything.”
“Don’t do it, Belle,” Ripley warned. “If you kill me, Cage will hunt you down. He’ll rip you to shreds and give the leftovers to my father. There has to be another way. Let me up, and I’ll protect you from them, I swear. We’ll take care of everything and get you help, Belle. Just let me go!”
“I don’t think so, dear.” Belle shook her head. “I’m not worried about them. I’ve already taken care of your father, and I have something special planned for Cage. The Lord will provide for my work to continue.”
Belle tapped a final key and the vulture’s eye of the A55 linear accelerator began to blink as the little woman smiled a crazy, death’s-head grin and said, “If you have any last-minute prayers to say, now would be a good time for them.”
CAGE REACHED the Cardiac ICU at a dead run. The first thing he noticed was that the nurses’ station was deserted. The second was that the door to Howard Davis’s suite of rooms was shut.
And locked. “Damn it.” Fear rocketed through him. What if he was already too late? Was Belle inside waiting for him or was she long gone? He tried to peer through the single window, but it was blocked by a “Caution: Radioactive” sign that shouldn’t have been there.
Belle’s idea of a joke?
Cage cursed again and decided he’d have to risk a frontal assault. Without thinking, he rammed the door with his shoulder and howled in agony. Furious with pain and worry, he clutched at his right shoulder and gave the lock three hefty kicks until it finally gave way.
Where the hell were the nurses? At least two of them should have been on duty. Even if they’d left their post for an unauthorized moment in the break room, the commotion should’ve brought them running.
Unless they couldn’t run anywhere. The image of nurses bound and gagged in the Cardiac broom closet shouldn’t have been so easy to conjure.
Cage gritted his teeth and charged into Howard’s room, praying that Belle was in there at the same time he hoped she wasn’t. If she was in the room, Ripley might still be safe. If she wasn’t, then Howard might have escaped her notice.
Or else she’d beaten Cage to both of them and all was lost.
“Belle? Mr. Davis?” With no need for silence following his noisy entrance, Cage called the names and felt his gut chill when he received no answer from either of them. “Mr. Davis? Howard?” he called louder, hoping for an answering shout.
Something crashed behind a closed door.
Cage was at the door in an instant. He yanked it open and a silver trashcan rolled out of the small bathroom. Howard Davis, dressed and ready for the board meeting, was bound to the toilet with a pair of cargo straps. His mouth was covered with hospital tape and an IV bag hung from the medicine cabinet.
Cage took one look at the greenish-brown tinted liquid that had traveled halfway from the IV bag to the needle in Howard Davis’s arm, and cursed. “This is going to hurt.” Ripley’s father gargled something, and Cage yanked the needle out of the older man’s arm and flung it and the IV bag into the shower stall.
“You okay?” He pulled the tape and straps away and caught Davis when he sagged. “Howard! Are you okay?”
“Hell, no, I’m not okay.” Howard’s voice was weak but it still carried the punch of authority. “Some volunteer gave me my meds, and the next thing I knew I was waking up strapped to a toilet watching something very nasty work its way toward my bloodstream. How would you feel?” He massaged his left arm.
“Stay with me, sir. We need to get you somewhere safe and I need to go after Ripley.” Cage hoisted Howard to his feet and aimed him toward the door, wondering how the tiny woman had dragged the man’s deadweight up and onto the toilet.
Adrenaline, he remembered, could help a mother lift a bus off a trapped child. He supposed it could do other, more sinister things as well.
“What do you mean ‘go after Ripley’? She’s not with you?” The old man looked around. “Where the hell is she?” He clutched at his left arm harder. “She’s out there with that woman on the loose? How the hell did you let that happen, Cage?”
“I—”
“Freeze! Security!” Though he knew for a fact they didn’t carry weapons, Cage was momentarily taken aback by the flood of blue uniforms that erupted into the room. Mike stepped forward and held out a hand. “We need you to step away from the patient, Mr. Cage, and come with us. Mr. Gabney is on his way to the hospital, and he wishes to speak with you.”
“Gabney can go to hell,” Howard spat, taking the words right out of Cage’s mouth, though not with quite the same volume. “Do you know who I am?” He was getting louder by the moment, which Cage took to be a good sign.
“Yes, sir. Dr. Davis, sir,” Mike replied. The guards did their best to stand at attention. “We’re very sorry that you’ve been disturbed, sir.”
“Do you like your jobs?”
The guards nodded quickly.
“Good,” Howard declared. “If you want to keep them, go with Cage here and get my daughter. Anything happens to her, you’re all fired, understand?”
Cage was out the door before the last, “Yes, sir,” died away. He only hoped they would be in time.
“BELLE, YOU DON’T need to do this.” Ripley struggled to keep her voice calm as Belle cursed and keyed in another command. As unobtrusively as she could, Ripley worked the broken rose stem out of her pocket with one hand. When it was free, she reversed it and scraped it back and forth across the nylon strap that bound her chest. Back and forth. Back and forth.
“Why won’t this stupid computer…ah, I have it. Don’t worry, I have it programmed for a narrow, high-intensity beam right through your heart. You won’t die nearly as slowly as the papers say Cage’s poor wife did. I like you too much for that.” The accelerator, which had grown quiet moments before, hummed back to life as the glitch was ironed out. Belle smiled serenely at Ripley. “But even though I like you, Dr. Davis, I can’t have you interfering in my good work, can I?” Cocking her head to one side, she said, “Then again, I gues
s you doctors wouldn’t necessarily see my work as good. You only see your statistics, not the patients. You don’t know how hard it is for them when they go home to their husband and child with no hair and scar tissue where one breast used to be.”
She stood and stalked to the flat table to glare down at Ripley, who quit sawing and closed her hand around the broken stem, hoping it would go unnoticed. Glass sliced into her index finger, but she hid the wince and said, “Full mastectomies are rare for breast cancer.” Keep her talking. Keep her distracted. The mantra was the only thing holding back Ripley’s screams.
“Not back then,” Belle countered. “Not when my mother had the disease.” She strode back to the keyboard but didn’t sit. “My father couldn’t stand to look at her. She’d been so beautiful before, but he told her she was hideous after the operation and the chemo. He said she never would have gotten the cancer if she’d been a better wife, a better person. The Lord had forsaken her, he said. And when she got sick again, he told her to pray.” Belle turned back. “Do you pray, Dr. Davis?”
“Not as often as I should.” Ripley sent a quick one now as her fingers slipped on her own blood and the nylon strap started to give. “I’m sorry your mother died, Belle.”
“I’m not.” The words were flat, though Belle’s face was still serene, almost eerily Madonna-like. “She wanted to die at the end. She told me it would have been better if she’d died in the hospital the first time, when she’d still been pretty. My father and I used to visit her then, and she was so happy when she was looking forward to seeing us. She was so pretty and he loved her. She always wished she had died then, when she was at peace.”
Women between fifty-five and sixty, Ripley remembered as her fingers slipped again and the glass sliced deeper into her finger. Happy women who’d been looking forward to a grandchild’s visit, or an anniversary. They had died because they were happy. God. Belle was saving her mother. Over and over again.
“Why the radioactivity, Belle?” Keep her talking, Ripley thought as a few more strands of nylon gave way. Keep her talking and keep sawing. She had to get free. Had to save her father. She had to warn Cage.
Had to tell him she loved him.
“Why not just…help them on their way?” she asked, sawing furiously. “Why contaminate the bodies when that made it more likely they’d be discovered?”
Belle’s watery blue eyes cut toward Ripley as though judging her and finding her lacking. “I marked them so they would be noticed at the Gates of Heaven. Father always said that God had forgotten about Mother. I didn’t want that to happen to my favorite patients.” Calmer now, she sat back down and touched the computer console.
The vulture’s eye blinked from red to yellow, indicating that the accelerator was almost ready. Ripley flinched at the change, and the crystal stem slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor with an incongruous tinkle.
“Who are you?” she whispered, staring at the profile of a woman she’d thought she’d known.
“I’m your savior,” Belle whispered over the building hum of the accelerator. “All men are evil, you know. Cage would have left you behind soon, just like he left his wife behind. You know that as well as I do. Now you won’t have to live through that pain. You’ll die just like his wife did, and he’ll have twice the punishment, knowing that he failed you just like he failed…whatever her name was.”
“Heather,” Ripley whispered between suddenly parched lips. “Her name was Heather.”
Above her, the vulture’s eye blinked from yellow to green.
CAGE AND THE SECURITY guards charged down the hallway, sliding to a confused halt when the chapel door eased open and a frail body tumbled out, clutching a baseball bat.
“Milo!” Cage dropped down beside the child. “What happened? Where’s your chair?”
“Belle put me in the empty space behind the altar and told me to stay there,” the child said, and his voice seemed stronger than usual. “She was acting all strange, kind of spooky. She left me my bat, but she took my chair so I couldn’t go anywhere. She kept talking about Dr. Rip. I think she’s going to hurt her, Mr. Cage! You have to go help her!”
Cage scooped Milo off the floor and handed him to the nearest security guard. “Take care of him.” To Milo, he said. “I’m going to go get Dr. Rip, okay?” He hefted the bat. “And I’m borrowing this.”
“Here.” Milo pulled a white sphere out of his pocket. “For luck.”
Cage took the ball and nodded, feeling a measure of calm return with the familiar feel of the seams beneath his fingers. “Thanks, kid. You did good, you know. Dr. Rip will be proud.”
The rush of color pushed the gray out of Milo’s face. “Just save Dr. Rip.”
“I intend to.” Cage waved the guard away and continued down the hall, carrying his bat and ball. When he reached the entrance to R-ONC, he stopped. “Stay here and wait for my signal, okay?” He waited until each of the guards nodded before he turned away and crept toward the offices, careful to stay below the level of the picture windows.
The narrow door leading to the outer office and the number of rooms radiating away from the main space made a frontal attack tricky. Worried that a startled Belle would hurt Ripley before he could intervene, Cage decided to leave the guards behind and go in alone. His only goal was to stall Belle long enough for the real law-enforcement types to arrive. With guns.
That he might already be too late was something Cage refused to consider. Ripley had to be okay. She just had to be.
The door to the outer office stood open, which was a chilling sign. Either Belle was already gone, or she was waiting for him. Cage was willing to bet on the latter. He straightened to his full height and stepped through the door, unconsciously juggling the baseball to a split-finger position.
The outer office was deserted. He was just about to push his way into Ripley’s inner office when a familiar hum pulsed through the floor beneath his feet and Cage felt his guts turn to water.
Someone was charging the A55.
He was halfway down the hall to the linear accelera tor room when he realized he wouldn’t be in time. Belle’s back was to him as she worked the computer keyboard like a mad organist. Ripley was strapped to the metal table, and the giant laser was stretching above her as the table tilted to the programmed angle in a mechanical ballet gone horribly awry.
Once the programmed sequence was set in motion, the computer kill switches were disabled, Cage knew. Even if he charged down the hallway and pulled Belle away from the console, he wouldn’t be fast enough to stop the accelerator from shooting a beam of supercharged particles into Ripley’s body.
The machine itself was shielded and double-shielded to protect the operators and patients from stray particles. But maybe…
Cage halted at the far end of the hallway. Neither Belle nor Ripley had noticed him. Both of them were focused on the A55, one with glee, the other with horror. He stared at the machine and blocked out everything but the small, circular port next to a blinking green light. It was the linear accelerator’s weak spot, he knew from countless hours of research and courtroom testimony. A single blow to the sensitive area could disable the A55. Maybe.
Cage fingered the baseball. For good luck, Milo had said. And in a move he’d practiced a thousand times as a child and a million more as a man, Cage kicked and threw the ball as hard as he could, right at the imaginary strike zone. He felt the pain as his shoulder gave way for good.
And watched the ball curve away from the small, circular port and bounce uselessly off the A55’s shielded cowl.
RIPLEY HEARD something thunk off the accelerator and saw, of all things, a baseball roll past. Her heart leapt into her throat with a sudden surge of hope.
Cage!
Belle heard the noise as well. She grabbed something from behind the computer and spun toward the door with a feral smile on her lips. Heedless of the drama, the linear accelerator changed its tone as it prepared to fire—directly into Ripley’s heart.
“Cage! Help!” She jerked her body wildly toward the door, and felt the half-sawn strap give. She yanked again, hard. The nylon snapped and she scissored her torso to one side.
The laser bit into the metal table behind her with a hiss.
“Ripley!” Cage skidded into the room and ducked when Belle swung at him.
A filled syringe glittered in her hand. The clear liquid might have been as harmless as water, but Ripley bet it was much more. Much deadlier. “Don’t let her touch you with that,” she yelled as she fumbled with the strap around her ankles.
Belle must have inputted a repeating program. The linear accelerator fired mindlessly every ten seconds or so, though it was harmless as long as she avoided the beam.
“Hold on, Belle.” Cage dropped the baseball bat he was carrying and spread his hands wide. “I’m unarmed and I’m not going to hurt you. We don’t want to hurt you, Belle. We just want to get you some help.”
She hissed, “Don’t you see? I don’t need help. I am help. I’m helping these women stay happy. It was all going fine until Dr. Davis got suspicious.” She adjusted her thumb on the syringe and a single droplet of clear liquid glittered at the end.
It wasn’t radioactive, Ripley thought. Maybe pure adrenaline. More than enough to stop a grown man’s heart.
“Cage,” she blurted, remembering Belle’s words and worrying for him despite her own predicament. “Milo. My father…”
“Are fine,” he assured her, trying to edge around Belle. “I got to Howard in time, and Milo is a hero.”
Belle snarled at the news and darted her eyes back and forth between Cage and Ripley. Seeing that she was having trouble tracking both of them at once, Ripley slid off the table and moved opposite Cage.
“Stay right where you are!” Belle lunged, and Cage danced back. His heel came down on the fallen baseball and his feet flew out from underneath him. He went down hard, and Bell shrieked and followed him down with the syringe outstretched.
“No!” Before she could think to be afraid, Ripley leapt forward, grabbed the baseball bat, and swung it at Belle’s head. It connected with a sickening thunk. The impact sang up Ripley’s arms and Belle collapsed across Cage, who swore viciously.
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