As he turned to leave, Ryan grabbed his arm.
“Can I see him?”
The doc shook his head. “Not now. Maybe later. After I see if I can get some blood into him.”
As he stepped out the door, Kolarcik stepped in.
“They just brought in the guy from the house.”
“Lom!” The priest leaped forward. “Let me—”
Renny put a hand on his chest and pushed him back. Gently.
“You stay put for now, Father. I’ll want you to ID him, otherwise you stay here.”
“If he looks like Teddy Roosevelt, you’ve got him. But tell me something. Am I under arrest?”
“No. But you’re up to your neck in this, so for everybody’s sake, stay put.”
“Don’t worry about that. As long as Danny’s here, I’m here.”
Renny had no trouble believing that.
6
The handcuffs spoiled the picture, but this guy Herbert Lom really did look like Teddy Roosevelt. Only the glasses were missing. And he was either completely whacked or was putting on the best damn show Renny had ever seen.
Renny seated himself opposite Lom. The guy’s eyes were focused somewhere off in space, like on Mars maybe.
“Your name is Lom? Herbert Lom?”
“Don’t waste your breath, Sarge,” said the uniform who had brought him in, a cocky brat named Havens. “No one could get a word out of him over at the station. His wallet says he’s Lom, though.”
“Were you at the house?”
“Nah. Wasn’t my shift.”
“Anybody tell you about the scene?”
Havens shrugged. “Said the upstairs bedroom was practically painted with blood.”
Just like Father Ryan had said. Renny gave Lom’s clothes a careful visual going over.
“These the clothes he was wearing when they found him?”
“Yeah. You don’t think we changed him, do you?”
Havens’s mouth was going to buy him big trouble someday, but not from Renny. Not tonight. He was too concerned with why there was no blood on Lom’s clothes or hands.
“Forensics go over him?”
“Yeah. Scraped his fingernails, vacuumed his clothes, the works.”
“He’s been Miranda’d?”
“About three times, in front of witnesses.”
“And he hasn’t asked for an attorney?”
“He hasn’t even asked to take a pee. He don’t speak and don’t do a goddamn thing you tell him to, but watch this.”
The cop pulled Lom to his feet and he stood there without moving. He pushed him back into the chair and he stayed seated. He got Lom up on his feet again and pulled him forward. After a couple of stumbling steps he began to walk in a straight line. The cop let him go and he kept on walking, right into a wall. Then he stopped walking and stood with his face against the wall.
“Guy’s a fucking robot.”
Renny didn’t argue. He had Kolarcik bring Father Ryan down from the doctor’s lounge.
“This him?”
Father Ryan’s gentle features twisted into a snarl.
“You filthy—!”
He lunged for Lom’s throat and it took everything Kolarcik and the other uniform had to hold him back. Lom didn’t even flinch.
The cop was right: Lom was like a fucking robot.
“I’ll put that down as a positive ID,” Renny said. “In the meantime, Father, would you mind returning to the lounge?”
As the priest was led away, Renny turned to the uniform.
“Take our friend down to the Emergency Room and have them give him the once-over. I don’t want anyone saying we didn’t see to his medical needs while he was in custody.”
He glanced at his watch. Two a.m. Christmas already. And he hadn’t called Joanne yet. There’d be hell to pay for that.
He hurried to a phone.
7
The ER doc caught up to Renny in the hall about half an hour later.
“Hey, Lieutenant—”
“It’s Sergeant.”
“Okay—Sergeant. Where the hell did you find that guy?”
This doc was young, in his thirties, had long dark hair, an earring on the right, and a neat beard. Looked like a rabbi. The nametag on his white coat said A. Stein, M.D.
“Lom? We’ve got him for attempted murder. Maybe murder too, if we ever find his wife. So … why are you shaking your head?”
“There’s no way your Mr. Lom is going to stand trial for anything.”
Renny’s stomach gave a lurch at the note of finality in Stein’s voice.
“He died?”
“Might as well have. He’s as good as brain dead.”
“Bullshit! He’s faking it, acting like he’s got that disease, cata—cata-something.”
“Catatonia. But he’s not catatonic. And he’s not faking. You can’t fake what he’s got.”
“So what’s he got?”
Stein scratched his beard. “I’m not sure yet. But I’ll tell you one thing: His neurological exam puts him on a level somewhere between an earthworm and a turnip.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Renny said acidly. “You’ve been a big help. Now find me a specialist, one who knows that a guy who walks around ain’t brain dead. Maybe then I can get a real exam done.”
Stein’s reddening face told Renny he’d scored with that one. Stein grabbed him by the arm.
“Okay, Sergeant Wise-ass. You come with me. I want to show you a few things.”
Renny accompanied him to a curtained-off cubicle in a rear corner of the ER where Herbert Lom lay on a gurney. Alone.
“Where’s Havens?”
“The cop? I sent him for coffee.”
That pissed Renny off. “You left a suspect here alone?”
“Mr. Lom’s not going anywhere.” Stein pulled a penlight from his coat pocket and stepped around to the far side of the gurney. “Come on over here and take a look at this.”
Renny stepped closer and stared down at Lom’s impassive face.
“Look at his pupils. Look how wide they are?” Stein flashed the beam of his penlight into each eye, back and forth, one then the other. “See any change in them?”
The pupils didn’t move a hair.
“Fixed and dilated,” Stein said. “Now watch this.”
He touched his finger to Lom’s left eyeball. Renny flinched but Lom didn’t. He didn’t even blink.
“You don’t need a medical degree to know that’s not normal,” Stein said. “Now check this out. Watch his eyes.”
He grabbed Lom’s head with both hands, one at the chin and one at the crown, and rotated it back and forth a few times, then moved it up and down like a nodding marionette. Lom’s eyes never moved in his head; his gaze remained fixed straight ahead, staring whichever way he was turned.
“We call that ‘doll’s eyes.’ It means his brain’s in deep shit. He’s got no higher brain function—nothing above the brainstem, if that much. He’s a turnip.”
Renny already knew the answer, but had to ask: “And he couldn’t be faking it?”
“No way.”
“How about drugs? What’d the blood tests show?”
Stein looked away. “We didn’t do any.”
“You mean to tell me you’ve got a guy you’re calling brain dead and you haven’t checked to see if he’s full of H or blow or ice?”
“We couldn’t get any blood out of him,” Stein said, still looking away.
An icy-fingered hand began a slow walk down Renny’s spine.
“Oh, shit. Not another one!”
“You know about the kid too?” Stein was looking at him now. “I guess everybody in the hospital’s heard. What the hell’s going on, Sergeant? Somebody brings in a bloodless mutilated kid who can’t be anesthetized, and you cops bring in this … this zombie with no pulse, no blood pressure, no heartbeat, yet he sits, stands, and walks. I couldn’t find any blood anywhere in him—I even stuck his femoral artery, or at least where I thought his femoral ar
tery should be. We cathed his bladder for urine but wound up with a dry tap. This is getting scary!”
“Maybe he’s brain damaged,” Renny said, shaking off the chill. He’d heard enough Twilight Zone bullshit for one night. “Can’t you x-ray his head or something?”
Stein brightened.
“We can do better than that. We can get an MR—and we can get it stat.”
Renny stayed with the inanimate, staring Lom while Stein rushed off to set up the study.
“You’re not fooling me, pal,” he whispered as he leaned over him. “I’m going to break up your little game and see you pay for what you did to that kid.”
Renny almost jumped back when Lom’s mouth twisted into a toothy grin.
8
Renny was still shaky as he sat outside the Magnetic Resonance Imaging room. Lom’s grin had lasted only an instant before collapsing back into the slack expression he’d worn all night, but that had been long enough to convince Renny that he had a supreme con artist on his hands here.
Which was just great. As if this case weren’t already twisted enough, he had to have some Houdini-type trance artist as a prime suspect.
Stein came down the hall and dropped into the seat next to him. He was carrying a pair of x-ray films. He didn’t look so good but he managed a smile.
“Standing guard?”
“Actually, I’m sitting.”
Renny had stationed himself here when Lom was wheeled in and he’d sit here until he was wheeled out again. Only one way in or out of Magnetic Imaging and this was it. He was here to see to it personally that Lom didn’t pull anything cute—like a disappearing act. Renny would have been inside, right next to the MR machine, except that they’d wanted him to remove anything that contained any iron and leave it outside. Something about a magnetic field or something. That meant stripping off his pistol and his badge; they’d even told him he’d have to leave his wallet outside because the field around the MR machine would scramble the magnetic strips on his credit cards.
Sounded like Star Trek stuff to Renny, but he wasn’t going anywhere around Lom unless he was fully armed. So he’d camped outside.
“I’m telling you, Sergeant, Mr. Lom is not going to take a walk. Anywhere.”
“And I’m telling you he grinned at me. He’s playing you for a sucker, Doc.”
“Uh-uh. That was a random muscle twitch.”
Renny was about to suggest another muscle Stein could twitch when the MR technician stuck his head out the door.
“Yo! Doctor Stein. We got ourselves a little problem in here.”
Renny was on his feet, reaching for his Glock. Knew it!
“Where is he? What’s he doing?”
The tech was a skinny black guy sporting short dreadlocks. He looked at Renny as if he was nuts.
“Who? The patient? He ain’t doing nothin’, man. Be cool. It’s the computer. It’s puttin’ out some weird shit.”
As Stein followed the tech into the control room he glanced back over his shoulder at Renny.
“Coming?”
Renny was about to tell him that he’d already seen enough weird shit for one night, then decided that a little more wouldn’t make much difference.
“Yeah, sure. Why not?”
He followed them to the control console with its rows of monitors. He watched Stein lean forward and stare at one of the screens, saw his face go slack and fade to the color of the eggshell wallpaper behind him.
“You’re kidding, right?” Stein said. “This is bullshit, Jordan. If you think this is funny—”
“What’s wrong?” Renny said.
“Hey, man,” the tech told Stein. “If I could make it show that kinda shit just for fun, you think I’d be workin’ this shift?”
“What the hell’s wrong?” Renny demanded.
Stein sagged into the chair before the console.
“That’s Mr. Lom’s head,” he said, pointing to the screen before him. “A side view. A sagittal cut through the center of his head and neck, top to bottom, right between his nostrils.”
Renny could see that. The nose was toward the right side of the screen, the back of the head toward the left.
“Looks like one of those sinus medicine commercials.”
Stein laughed. The sound had a slightly hysterical edge to it. “Yeah. And his sinuses look fine. But something’s missing.”
“What?”
Stein tapped the screen with the eraser end of a pencil, indicating the big empty space behind the nose and sinuses.
“There’s supposed to be a brain here.”
That cold hand did an encore down Renny’s spine; this time it was dancing.
“And there’s not?”
“Not according to this. No sign of a spinal cord either.”
“Then your machine’s fucked up! He’d—he’d be dead!”
“Tell me about it.” Stein turned to the technician. “Slide him farther in and get the chest cavity.”
The tech nodded and threw some switches. Before too long, an empty circle lit on the screen.
Jordan the technician said, “Shit, man! Where’s his lungs? Where’s his fucking heart?”
“That’s what I said when I saw these.” Stein handed Jordan the x-rays he’d been carrying. “I was trying to tell myself they’d pushed the tube too high but I didn’t really believe it.”
“Shit!” Jordan said as he held the x-rays up to the recessed fluorescents overhead.
“What’s wrong?”
Renny knew he sounded like a broken record but found himself unable to say anything else. He was completely in the dark here.
Jordan held the films up for him. Renny had no idea what he was supposed to see.
“What?”
“Empty, man,” he said. “The guy’s whole chest is fucking empty!”
Renny was starting to feel a little sick.
“Aw, come on!”
“He’s not kidding,” Stein said. “Just for the hell of it, Jordan, let’s get a look at the abdomen.”
Jordan did some more fiddling at the console and soon another image filled the screen. Stein stared at it, then rotated his chair to face Renny. He wore a crazy smile and his eyes looked as if they were receding toward the back of his head.
“He’s hollow! No brain, no heart, no lungs, no liver, no intestines! He’s completely hollow! A walking shell!” He got this thousand-mile stare. “‘We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men…’”
He started to laugh and Renny found that almost as frightening as what he was saying.
“Hey, easy, Doc.”
“Easy my ass! We’re talking about some sort of zombie here! It can’t be! It’s crazy! It can’t fucking be!”
The monitoring room was silent as the three of them sat and stared at each other.
“What we gonna do with this guy?” Jordan said.
“He’s a murder-one suspect,” Renny said.
Jordan smiled. “Try him and fry him.”
“Not in this state anymore. Besides, with all the bullshit that’s going down here tonight, he might walk.”
The thought of that twisted Renny’s insides. Nobody should get off on a head-case plea after what he did to that kid.
“He’s not walking anywhere tonight,” Stein said. He turned to Jordan. “Wheel him out of there. I’m taking him back to the ER and no one—” He glared at Renny. “No one is moving him anywhere else until I’ve got plenty of witnesses to what’s going down here.”
As long as Lom remained in custody, Renny didn’t care where he was kept. And when all this was over, maybe a few questions would get answered.
Like where was Mrs. Lom?
9
The waiting was killing Bill. The waiting and the incredible story Danny’s surgeon had told. No blood? No anesthesia? Awake during the surgery? Feeling everything? How could that be?
He shuddered. What was happening here? This kind of brutal crime wasn’t supposed to make sense, but what had been done to Dan
ny—what was still being done to him, apparently—went beyond madness into—what? The supernatural?
Poor Danny! God, he wanted to see him, be with him, find some way to comfort him. Only one thing restrained him from making a scene and demanding, as his legal guardian—some guardian!—to be taken to him. The last words Danny had spoken to him in that almost-gone voice still echoed in his mind. Each syllable drove a nail into a different corner of his skull.
Why didn’t you come, Father Bill? You said you’d come if I called. Why didn’t you come?
“I did come, Danny!” he said aloud around the sob crammed into his throat. “I did! I just came too late!”
And then the phone rang. One ring that wouldn’t stop. He’d never heard a phone ring like that. Was that the way hospital phones worked? On and on it went. Bill looked around, wishing someone would answer it. But he was alone in the doctors’ lounge, as he had been all night.
And then it occurred to him that maybe it was for him. Maybe Danny was out of Recovery and they wanted him upstairs. But wouldn’t they tell the cop outside first?
No matter. He had to stop that ringing. He crossed the room and lifted the receiver.
“Doctors’ lounge.”
He heard a child on the line, a small boy, his voice pitched somewhere between a scream and a sob. Bill recognized it immediately.
Danny’s voice.
“Father, please come and get me! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don’t want to die. Please come and get me. Don’t let him kill me. I don’t want to die!”
“Danny?” Bill’s voice rose to a shout. “Danny, where are you?”
The voice started again.
“Father, please come and get me! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don’t want to die. Please come and get me…”
Bill tore the receiver away from his ear. The horror of the call was submerged in an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. And then he remembered that this wasn’t the first time for this call. Danny had cried and screamed those same words last night when he’d called from the Loms’ house. His last words just before the phone went dead. His last words …
… just before Herb had—
Bill couldn’t finish the thought. He slammed down the phone and headed for the door to the hall. Some sick bastard had recorded the call and was playing it back. Someone in the hospital. That could only be one person.
Reprisal Page 20
