He moved to the long, marble table, sat, reviewed the notes he had written no longer than ten minutes ago and began assembling the ingredients of Formula 132.
“Leonard,” TJ called from behind the locked laboratory door. He was calmer now, his voice having lost its cutting edge. “I’m sorry about all this. I’m sorry about the fires and the drugs and the mess I put you in. I’m sorry about Rebecca, too.”
Leonard jerked towards the door, stood and screamed, “You never mention her name! I should have never told you about her. Never mention her name.”
TJ remained calm. He knew that while Leonard was a chemistry genius, he was also fragile. TJ had learned how to bring Leonard to within inches of his mental breaking point, then pull back, in order to manipulate him into agreeing with his intentions. “Leo, we’ve been friends for a long time. I know how much your research means to you and I know that what I did might be interpreted wrongly by others. But, gosh Leo, the last thing I wanted was to put your ability to keep doing your research in jeopardy.” TJ paused several beats, counting to a slow five in his head. “Leo, we need to work this out before the cops show up. They’ll never understand how much she means to you. They’ll never understand the relationship you and Rebecca share. All they’ll want to do is to end it. To take away everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish. What we both worked hard to earn.”
There was no sound coming from the lab door. TJ counted to ten in his head and was about to speak when he heard the distant sound of a doorbell echoing through Leo’s house.
“They’re here, Leo,” he said in a small voice, cut with anxiety and anger. “The cops are here right now, standing outside your front door. If I go up there and speak with them without you beside me, I won’t be able to defend what you’ve done.”
TJ waited for a response that didn’t come.
The sound of the doorbell was replaced by muffled voices and angry knocking.
“Leo, they’re going to get in here, one way or another. Either you and I walk upstairs together and let them in, or they’ll break in your door. You don’t want them to break your door down, Leo. I’m telling you, as your closest friend, you don’t want them breaking your door down any more than you want me talking to them without you.”
Silence.
Leonard La Salle hadn’t heard any of TJ’s warnings. When he had his house designed, he had the builders construct a hidden entrance which led from a secret door hidden behind a false bookcase in his lab to a ground-level hatch nestled in a grove of cedar trees near the far end of his property.
Leonard was pushing the hatch open when TJ walked upstairs. Leonard was walking across the seventeenth fairway of the Ravenswood Municipal Golf Course as TJ opened the door and invited Investigator Mark Mullins and three State Troopers inside. Leonard had reached Rebecca’s resting place when Mullins asked TJ to come to the station, where Mullins had plenty of questions for TJ.
Leonard sat, as he had so many times before, staring down where her head once was. He remembered how dirty and tangled her hair was and, in his mind, he gently removed the twigs, dirt and bugs from her locks once again, Though the sun had long since set, Leonard used the brightness of his imagination to see her sitting up, smiling and struggling to speak. As had happened countless times before, his imagination terrified him when all that came from her mouth as a result of her attempt to speak was clumps of blood-soaked dirt. This was his torture, as it certainly was hers. He needed to hear what she needed to say.
“Tell me,” he whispered, “what can I do different to hear what you are saying?”
Rebecca smiled at him. Her front teeth were still missing and while her mouth was stained from dirt, he saw the brilliance of her youth in that smile. A smile of innocence, of pure beauty and of unspoiled love.
“What do you need me to do?” he whispered again. “Tell me, please, Becca.”
Off in the distance, Leonard could hear voices and could see the erratic dance of flashlights coming from the backyard of his home. Soon, he knew, the people holding those lights would find a proper direction for the lights and would find him. “When they find me,” he thought, “they will violate this sacred ground.”
He turned away from the lights and the sounds, gathered his courage, and said, “Becca, we don’t have much time. You need to let me know what I have to do. I have to know how I recognize you. I know you want to tell me something, but I can’t understand what you’re saying. Please, we haven’t much time.”
Rebecca smiled at him again, then cast her eyes towards his front pocket. Leonard reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small bag which contained his hastily developed Formula 132. “This?” he asked in a whispered voice unable to contain his excitement. Tears grew heavy in his eyes as he held the plastic bag for Rebecca to see. “Is this finally right?”
Rebecca nodded.
She began to fade in his mind’s eye, like fog being driven away by a gentle but determined breeze.
“No, wait!” Leonard pleaded. “Tell me, is this what I need to hear you?”
He watched her dissolving smile, reached out, tried to touch her hair, but saw his hand simply pass through her misty image. She laid back down, pressing her face once more into the uncaring earth.
An outline of her body remained, but Leonard needed to squint his eyes and focus his gaze a bit above and beyond where she had laid down in order to still see her faint image. Feeling both the press of his searchers closing in on him and the pull of Rebecca’s call, Leonard opened the plastic bag, then hesitated. His last formula, number 131 was powerful but still lacked whatever mind-freeing degree he needed to hear her words. The formula he held in his hands was more powerful, that he knew. After the frustration he had felt when he completed his time in his lab and after the counteracting agent had fully removed any traces of the ingested Formula 131, he had mixed his next formula in a fit of anger and desperation. As he was pouring the extracted amino acids and what remained of the jimsonweed tropane alkaloids, he knew he was using far too much of each. But he was driven to continue. Though his use of Formula 131 did not produce an image of Rebecca in his mind, he believed he saw an echoing vision of her eyes as he floated in his chamber and mused if the muffled sounds he had heard were actually her telling him why his attempts had failed.
He finished mixing the formula together by adding six grams of the purest cocaine he had manufactured. He split his newest formula into six vials then, realizing he had made much more than what the vials could hold, grabbed a simple plastic bag that was lying atop his desk, and dumped the compounding bowl’s remaining contents into it. He had just stuffed the bag into his pocket when TJ had started pounding on the lab’s locked door.
Rebecca was fading again, her faint outlined body was being erased by some force. Though he had seen her melt away from his view a thousand times, this time felt horribly different; an air of finality was drawing her away from him.
Leonard dipped his fingers into the still opened plastic bag, pinched his fingers together and drew out a tight collection of his Formula 132. As he watched Rebecca’s image shimmer into nothingness, he snorted the formula, then, without hesitation or clarity of thought, he plunged his fingers back into the bag, and repeated his ingestion.
His plunging fingers repeated over and over until all that remained of Formula 132 was traces of powder clinging to the plastic.
When the voices grew closer and the lights were dancing around him, he felt himself slipping into a different place. Rebecca’s place, he prayed. And when the voices and the lights were upon him, she appeared. But this time, Rebecca wasn’t lying on the ground or sitting with her delicate smile in front of him. She was sitting in the backseat of a car, a look of helpless terror marring her face. Both hands, fingers splayed, pressed against the car’s windows. He saw her for only a brief moment before the car pulled away. He strained his eyes to watch her moving away, as he had done so many years ago.
In his mind, as he had done when he had first seen
her in the backseat of his father’s station wagon, he ran after her, desperate to see her again and to ask his father why he had such a sweet, innocent angel in the backseat of his car.
But his father had driven too fast all those years ago, and was moving too fast for even his mind to close the growing gap between him and her.
He stood, and charged after his father’s car which he could still see in his mind. He sprinted after the car, after Rebecca. He ran until he felt something snap inside of him. Something important that he knew shouldn’t snap. He fell to the ground in a heap, his right arm extended towards Rebecca, towards his father’s distant car. He closed his eyes as tears burned a path down his face.
When he looked up, there was no car speeding off in the distance; there was only Rebecca, sitting beside him. She was smiling at him.
“Thank you,” she mouthed. “You found me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
He saw Lucy’s face pressed hard against the plate-glass window of the bank. A deranged lunatic standing behind her, using her as a shield. His gun pressed firm against her temple. Derek had seen that final image of his wife a thousands times before; once in the real world and a thousand times in his dreams. But as he gazed into his wife’s eyes and saw the terror marring her face, he noticed that the familiar scene was different now. Morphing into something foreign. The bank’s window collapsed in on itself, becoming smaller, darker. The lunatic behind Lucy faded away, as if made of dust and smoke. And his wife’s face, the face he had loved and missed seeing, was changing, too.
Lucy’s hair darkened and stretched. Her eyes, once radiant green grew darker until they settled into a deep, rich brown. As Lucy’s eyes changed, the skin around her precious face followed suit. Derek wasn’t seeing Lucy, he was seeing someone else; her face pressed against a different window. Though this woman’s face and eyes were quite different than were Lucy’s, this face held the same terror; the same sorrowful expression of fear, of sadness of longing.
Derek jumped to his feet, confused and unable to place himself for several seconds. His energy raged against his muscles, demanding action.
“Derek.”
Someone’s voice echoed in the distance of his charged mind.
“Cole. Over here.”
There was familiarity in the tone and timbre of the voice but it could not displace the terror Derek was feeling. He had seen his wife in her final moments, then, he watched Lucy transform into Nikkie.
The window.
He needed to get into the window. He felt she was gazing through the window at him, pleading with a silenced voice for him to rescue her. He needed to get to the window.
“Goddammit, Cole. Over here!”
Derek felt a strong hand grab his shoulder and twist his body around. Derek’s eyes were wild with fear and confusion.
“Derek? You okay? Man, I didn’t mean to hit you so hard but I couldn’t think of any other way to stop you from killing yourself. Come on, Nikkie’s in the ambulance. She wants to see you.”
ˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇ
Nikkie was wide awake when the attending doctor walked into the small patient room she shared with a seventy-five year old woman, who had fallen, broken her hip and was more intent on blaming her children for leaving her alone in her house than in answering any of the medical staff’s questions regarding her list of medications.
“I’m fine,” Nikkie said before the doctor could begin his examination. “A little worse for wear, but I’m fine.”
The doctor spoke with a very heavy Indian accent. “I am certain that you are fine, Miss…Armani,” he said looking up from her chart. “But you were just pulled out of a burning house and inhaled more than a few lungfuls of toxic smoke. Let us get you hydrated and take a few chest X-rays to rule out any lung damage.”
Nikkie looked through the short-statured doctor and towards a nurse she recognized from the ICU wing. “Excuse me,” Nikkie called. “Nurse?”
The nurse acknowledged Nikkie’s call, walked into the exam room, gave a quick glance at the doctor, then said, “Can I help you?”
“I saw you in the ICU,” Nikkie started, “when my friend, Victoria Crown’s heart stopped.”
“Ma’am,” the nurse said, “I’m sorry, but I see a lot of patients every day.”
“Victoria Crown? The middle-aged woman with the head injury? It was just yesterday when you were in her room.”
The nurse paused a beat, glanced at the doctor again, rested one hand on the side of her expansive hip, then said, “Okay, sure, I remember her.”
“Can you tell me how she’s doing?”
“I can’t really give out patient information,” the nurse said, “but I’ll make a call and see how she’s doing today. Okay?”
“Fine,” Nikkie said. “And, thank you.”
The short doctor with the strong Indian accent was standing beside Nikkie’s uncomfortable hospital bed, arms crossed over his chest, glaring down at her. “Miss Armani?” he said. “May I begin my examination now? The sooner I can examine you, the sooner you can leave.”
It was nearly three hours before Nikkie’s hospital bed was wheeled out of the Emergency Room wing of the hospital, and into a room on the hospital’s third floor.
“Doctor wants you under observation for one night,” a nurse told Nikkie.
“Can I at least go visit my friend in ICU?” Nikkie asked.
“If you’re asking about Victoria Crown,” the nurse said with a smile, “you won’t find her in ICU. She’s been moved to critical care. And, yes, I can take you to visit her. But right now, you need to let us get all your monitors connected and an IV started.”
Nikkie fell asleep ten minutes after being rolled into her new, private room.
It wasn’t until nine the next morning when Nikkie was escorted to the critical care wing of the hospital. Crown was in room 522. A doctor, who had been standing near the nurse’s station drinking coffee while reviewing patient notes, saw Nikkie approaching Crown’s room and waved her over.
“I’m Dr. Matthews,” he said. “Before you visit with your friend, there are a few things you should know.”
Nikkie sighed then tentatively nodded her head. “Okay,” she said. “What do I need to know?”
“Victoria sustained a skull fracture, a severe concussion and the brain swelling she experienced has caused some brain damage. I’m not sure if the damage will be permanent or temporary; that’s why we are recommending a long-term facility that specializes in traumatic brain injury rehabilitation for her. She won’t get the treatment she needs in a hospital and she certainly won’t be able to return to her home for quite a while.”
“How…” Nikkie struggled to find the right combination of words to ask the questions burning in her mind. “How much brain damage is there? I mean, can she talk? Does she know what’s happening?”
The doctor clasped his hands and held them low across his body. He moved his head in short, quick nods. “Her speech is heavily affected by the brain injury and she has some paralysis that, with proper treatment, should resolve over time. But, yes, she is aware of her surroundings but it’s very difficult to tell whether or not she is aware of her condition. I do have to qualify her awareness, however. She’s only been conscious for less than twenty-four hours, so our window of observation is still quite limited. If she follows the recovery path that most TBI cases take, her awareness will slowly improve. She is aware of her surroundings, like I said, but she seems unable to respond appropriately. I think the hardest thing she is struggling with is knowing what she wants to communicate but not knowing, or not remembering, how to express it. She has a very long road of recovery ahead of her.”
When Nikkie tentatively entered the room—fearing what Crown would look like—she was both surprised and relieved to see Crown, propped up against several pillows, staring directly into her eyes. Crown’s head was still heavily bandaged and a plethora of tubes and monitoring devices stretched across her body.
“My God, Crown,
” Nikkie said, “I’m so glad that you’re awake. You look wonderful.”
Crown’s lips twitched and then her mouth opened, but only a faint grunt was formed.
“It’s okay,” Nikkie said as she held Crown’s hand in hers. “You don’t need to say anything right now.”
Crown began to cry.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Bo Randall stood, head held low, shoulders slumped, breathing in shallow patterns, before the Judge. The plea his father had arranged with the district attorney was now, thankfully, taken off the table. Instead, in light of the recent discoveries surrounding the circumstances behind the arson, his newly appointed attorney reached an amended agreement with the DA that would find Bo not going to prison, but to a year’s worth of drug and alcohol rehabilitation. That was, of course, if the Judge, who sat glaring down at him between his glances at the stack of papers he held in his hands, agreed with the district attorney’s recommendation.
“You understand the agreement your attorney has arranged with this court, Mr. Randall?” the judge asked in a voice so raspy that Bo wondered if the judge’s throat was part flesh and part sandpaper.
Bo stood silently, his eyes sending his gaze to his shoes. The attorney standing beside him, nudged Bo with a quick elbow. “Yes, your Honor. I understand.”
“From what I understand, Mr. Randall, you now admit to starting the fire that killed Brian Mack and his mother, Claire Mack?”
“Yes, your Honor. I started the fire,” Bo said.
“And, furthermore, you’ve stated that you were under the influence of a type of cocaine during the time you set the fire? A type of cocaine, I am told was developed right here in our little old town of Ravenswood?”
The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) Page 25
