But warmth was spreading from his right arm, a soothing glow, so that by the time the first of the doctors reached him, he was able to lie still for them while they snipped the stitches from his eyes and pulled the threads out with tweezers.
Somebody, maybe a nurse, was standing behind him, her hands on his ears to hold his head steady.
“Be still, Caleb,” a voice said. “We’re almost there.”
The hands on the sides of his head didn’t let go. He could smell latex on the doctor’s fingers. The press of instruments against his lower eyelids was steady and sure. The scissors made their sharp clicks above his right eye, and the threads stung as the doctor pulled them out.
“That’s it.”
“I still can’t open them,” he whispered.
“Here.”
He felt new hands on him, felt a warm washcloth gently circling his eyes, wiping out the crusted blood that was sealing his eyelids shut. He blinked into the white light, closed his eyes again, then looked out under the shade of his hands.
“Get that light off him.”
There were six people in the room with him. Two of them were uniformed police. Hospital police. He looked at the older of the two, a woman whose hair was tied in a thick blond ponytail.
“Inspector Kennon,” Caleb said.
“On his way,” the officer said. She looked away from him.
Caleb looked down his side. There was an IV catheter inserted in the vein of his forearm, held in place with loops of white tape. The tubing led up to a saline drip on a stand next to him. He remembered crashing through his house. Upending tables and chairs, knocking over bookshelves. Crawling on his hands and knees, groping for Bridget.
“Someone has to go into my house,” he whispered to the officer. “Bridget might still be there.”
“SFPD went in. It was empty—I’m sorry.”
Caleb looked at the doctor. He knew the man, ate lunch with him sometimes in the hospital’s cafeteria. But he couldn’t think of his name. And he couldn’t lift his head. For all he could feel, he might have been floating three feet above the hospital floor, covered in a blue sheet.
“What time is it?”
“Two thirty.”
“Morning or afternoon?”
“Morning.”
Caleb closed his eyes and tried to do the math, tried to remember when he’d gotten home. He couldn’t do it.
“Where the hell is Kennon?”
“He’s coming, Dr. Maddox,” the officer said. “You wanna tell us what happened to you?”
“I’ll tell Kennon. Just get me Kennon.”
A nurse had rubbed antibiotic cream around his eyes and lips, and had turned off the overhead fluorescent tubes for him. Before leaving him, she had taken a roll of lightweight gauze and wrapped his eyes.
“Just for a little while,” she said. “Till the bleeding stops.”
“Okay.”
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No.”
If he opened his eyes behind the loose weave of the gauze wrapping, he could see a square of light from the door’s window, could see the shape of the IV stand. He lay under the sheet in the semidark, listening to the heart monitor, to the sounds outside his room. He thought about what might be in the IV drip. Diazepam, midazolam. Something to settle him down, to stop the screaming. The last thing he remembered with any real clarity was Emmeline slipping a sip of absinthe into his mouth with a kiss.
When he tried moving his hands and feet, they responded. He brought his left arm across his chest and probed at his right forearm until he found the IV catheter port. He unstrapped the tape from his arm and slid the needle out of his vein. He jabbed it into the mattress next to him, where it would be hidden. Whatever the tranquilizer was, he didn’t want it.
The door opened.
Through the gauze, he saw a silhouetted figure lean a moment against the edge of the lighted rectangle before coming into the room. He heard a chair slide across the tile floor, heard the man settle in beside him.
“That you, Kennon?”
“Yeah.”
“Bridget—she’s—she wasn’t—”
“They found her. An hour ago. I came from there.”
Kennon stopped, fiddled the notepad out of his back pocket and set it on his knee.
“Go ahead and say it.”
“She’s alive. Somebody shot her full of drugs and dumped her down the hill, off your back deck.”
“Where’s she now?”
“Safe,” Kennon said. “And that’s all you get to know.”
“Did she tell you about Emmeline?”
Kennon didn’t answer him at first. He just sat in silence, in the dark to Caleb’s right. The heart monitor beeped slowly.
“She’s safe,” Kennon finally said. “I’ve got good people with her.”
Caleb had been trying to sit, but he gave up. He let his head rest on the pillow and pulled the sheet up, making sure the needle and tubing didn’t slip into sight.
“I haven’t been telling you the truth,” Caleb said. “All those times we talked. I’ve been leaving something out.”
“There’s a surprise,” Kennon said. “Try telling me something I don’t know.”
“There was a woman in House of Shields that night,” Caleb said. “I went looking for her.”
“And you found her.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to record this, Mr. Maddox.”
“All right.”
Caleb heard Kennon shifting around. There was a click as he hit a button on his recorder. A blurry red glow appeared in the darkness to his right.
“Tell me from the start,” Kennon said.
Caleb talked to the inspector for an hour and a half. Kennon asked a few questions, but mostly he just listened. A nurse came into the room once, but backed out and shut the door when Kennon waved her off. As he spoke, he felt the drugs lose their sway on him. But he never sat up, never took off the gauze. He spoke in a low whisper and left nothing out.
Except a few things.
If they hadn’t found Bridget already, he would have told Kennon about the Golden Gate Bridge. But they had Bridget, and she was safe. So he left that out. He thought of the cool last kiss Emmeline gave him, before she sewed his mouth shut. She was crying as she did that. He’d felt her tears fall onto his cheeks.
And he didn’t tell Kennon what Bridget had said about the John Singer Sargent painting, the one that had spent decades in the Haas-Lilienthal House before moving to the Legion of Honor. He didn’t know what to think about that.
At the end, Kennon finally spoke.
“Mr. Maddox—Dr. Maddox—did this Emmeline person know anything about computers?”
“What?”
“You think she was raised by a man who kidnapped her. Some kind of hypnotist—basically, a guy doing parlor tricks. You think this guy, this hypnotist, could’ve taught her anything about software?”
“I don’t know.”
“Seems like a stretch, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“And you never went upstairs in the Haas-Lilienthal House?”
“No.”
“Not even for a minute, to use the restroom?”
“I never used the restroom there. I don’t even know if there is one upstairs.”
“So we wouldn’t find any of your DNA upstairs, then, right? Any of your hairs?”
Now Caleb was all the way awake. He felt the electric current ride the nerves down his spine, charge into his fingers and toes. He lay perfectly still and spoke in the same low whisper.
“If there is any—any of my hair—it came off Emmeline. We were kissing. She ran her hands through my hair.”
Kennon didn’t answer him. The long silence was broken only by the beeping heart monitor. Its rate was faster than it had been a few seconds earlier.
“How you feeling, Dr. Maddox?”
“How do you think I’m feeling?”
“You don’t
look so great. But your mind seems pretty clear. You’re lucid? You’ll remember this conversation?”
“I think so.”
“When you and Bridget had the fight last week, what started it?”
“Come on, Kennon. That had nothing to do with this.”
Kennon yawned and stretched his arms out. Caleb had lost track of the time. Other than the small square of glass on his room’s door, there were no windows.
“I asked Henry,” Kennon said. “Since you guys are old friends, I figured he might know.”
“Then he probably told you the truth.”
“When you got it done, were you planning to keep it a secret from her forever? I mean, what were you thinking?”
“I don’t know.”
“She wanted kids,” Kennon said. “You didn’t. But you didn’t want to have that conversation. So you just went and got it done while she was out of town. That it?”
“Pretty much,” Caleb said. He didn’t want to explain it, didn’t want to make Kennon see that it hadn’t been a selfish act. He’d done it for both of them. He’d done it for the children who would never be born and would thus never have to blame him for their inheritance.
“Then you told her, later on. And she didn’t take it so well.”
Caleb didn’t answer. After a while, he heard Kennon flick a switch on the recorder. He’d turned it off.
“And what about your father, and the months you and your mom spent in Langley Porter? Or the time you disappeared. You tell her any of that?”
Caleb held still and listened to the heart monitor, willing it to slow down. Waiting for the dragging pace of his pulse to tell Kennon that he’d passed out. Kennon sat with him, perfectly still and silent. A patient man.
“Did Bridget understand what it was like for you?” Kennon asked. “I was in there, right after your dad did it. I found you chained to the floor. Did you know that?”
The legs of his chair scraped against the linoleum as Kennon dragged it closer to the bed. He leaned to Caleb’s ear and spoke in a low whisper.
“I don’t know what your life was like before that day. But I’ve got a good idea. I saw the basement, saw everything he had for the two of you. The dog collars, the tie-downs—everything,” Kennon said. “He didn’t snap all at once, did he? I mean, you don’t just wake up one morning and put eyebolts in a concrete floor without having thought it through.”
Kennon leaned back and was silent. Shadows fluttered past the door’s small window as a group of nurses rushed up the hallway, their soft-soled shoes squeaking on the clean floor.
Then he was bending close again.
“It was years in the making, wasn’t it?” Kennon whispered. “Thinking about it was probably like picking at a scab. He might not have wanted to, but he couldn’t help it. He never stopped painting, never took a break from the galleries and the shows. But that whole time, he was following a secret staircase down to hell. And you and your mom were going with him, whether you wanted to or not.”
Caleb closed his eyes behind the gauze and let himself drift into the shadows. He knew his way through them, had been navigating the darker end of the spectrum most of his life.
“You’re done talking now, I guess,” Kennon finally said. “After I found you the first time, they said you didn’t talk until you’d been at Langley Porter a week. So that’s okay—we’re used to it, I guess. Par for the course, for Caleb Ellis—excuse me, Caleb Maddox. But if you think of something you want to tell me, just let the police officers know. There’ll be two of them sitting right here.”
Kennon stood. Through one eye, Caleb watched him put his recorder in his pocket, take his coat off the back of the chair, and leave. As he was walking out the door, a man was walking in. Kennon took the man’s arm.
“Step outside a minute, Doctor,” Kennon said. “Wanna ask you something.”
As soon as the door closed, Caleb sat up and let the sheet fall to his waist. He pulled the gauze off his face, felt the scabs rip off and the bleeding start again around his eyes. He didn’t care about that. A tangle of wires led to adhesive electrodes stuck to his chest. He reached across to the heart monitor and switched it off. He didn’t want it to sound an alarm when he tore off the leads.
When he stood, his legs were trembling. But he could walk.
He wrapped the sheet around himself and went to the door, standing to the side of the window. Kennon’s back was to the door. He was writing on a notepad.
“Ten milligrams,” he was saying. “Diazepam—that’s p-a-m, m as in Mike?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s that do? Diazepam.”
“It’s a tranquilizer. Valium. Came in here, he was screaming. Had to calm him down, stop the thrashing.”
“A dose like that—he’s not hallucinating or anything, is he? He can understand questions, answer them?”
“Sure,” the doctor said. It was the man whose name Caleb couldn’t remember. “He might be a bit confused. Like talking to a guy coming off a long night of drinking. He might not remember what he said to you.”
Kennon nodded, put the notebook away.
“Good,” he said. “I got one more question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Could he have done that to himself?”
The doctor looked up from his clipboard and took a step back. Caleb leaned against the doorjamb and listened. It was cold in the room. As cold as it had been in his kitchen when Emmeline came up from behind him. He remembered the scent of her perfume, the way it slipped over his shoulder and wrapped him, like a fast-growing tangle of vines.
“The sutures?”
“Yeah. The eyes and the mouth. Could a guy do that to himself? Sew his own eyes shut?”
The doctor looked at his feet as he thought about it. He ran his thumb over his lips, closed his left eye and pulled out the eyelid. When he looked up at Kennon, Caleb flinched back from the window.
“The mouth, that’d be easy,” the doctor said. “If you were standing in front of a mirror. One of the eyes, maybe. But—Jesus, Inspector—you’d have to be fucking nuts.”
Caleb leaned back to the window in time to see Kennon coughing into his fist.
“I’m not worried if he’s fucking nuts. That’s not my problem. I just want to know—could he have done it?”
“Maybe.”
“And he wouldn’t need to be a doctor?”
“You can learn anything online. Or if you spent a lot of time in hospitals, you could watch. It’s an easy knot.”
“Were the stitches in both eyes the same?”
“Come again?”
“The stitches,” Kennon said. “Were they the same in both eyes?”
“The right eye, it was a little uneven,” the doctor said. “Not quite as perfect as the mouth, the left eye.”
“You got pictures?”
“Paramedics took them. In the ambulance.”
Kennon pulled out his wallet. Caleb pressed himself against the edge of the door, looking out the square window with one eye.
“This is my card. See my email address there? Those pictures get emailed to me before sunrise.”
“Okay,” the doctor said. “And, look—the uneven stitches? That could’ve been anything. He was running into stuff, falling down. He could’ve pulled the knots loose, could’ve ripped something.”
Kennon looked at the doctor.
“I asked you if he could’ve done it himself,” Kennon said. “You didn’t say no.”
The doctor stared back, then nodded.
“I didn’t.”
Kennon put his wallet away.
“Where’d those two officers go? Those hospital police?”
“They’re waiting in the lobby.”
“You go get them,” Kennon said. “Put them outside this door. He wakes up, they call me.”
“Got it.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
Twenty-Four
CALEB KNEW HE had about a minute, maybe less. His opti
ons were narrowing with every second, and when the hospital police got to his room, there would be none left. He opened the door and looked out. Kennon and the doctor had walked away in the same direction, going down a wide corridor that led to the emergency room’s triage desk, which was near the front entrance. A red plastic sign on the wall opposite his room gave directions to the different departments on this floor. The arrow underneath RADIOLOGY pointed deeper into the building. He pulled the blue sheet around himself, looked one more time to be sure the hallway was empty, and went as quickly as he could.
He rounded the corner and limped through the double-leafed, lead-lined doors that opened to the CT scanning suite. It was dark in here. The scanning machine was an empty hulk in the center of the room, its sliding bed poised to send a patient into the machine’s oculus.
He went through the service door into the control room. There was a white lab coat on a wooden hook. He dropped the bed sheet and put on the coat, which almost reached his knees.
Another lead-lined door exited from the control room to the power supply closet. As he opened the door, he heard the intercom system crackle once, and then a woman’s voice spoke out of the ceiling.
“Uh . . . we got a code gray in the ER,” she said. “That’s a code gray in the ER.”
The intercom cut out.
They were looking for him now. They’d fan out from the triage desk, cover the exits first, then move inward. It might be a while before anyone thought to check in here. But he didn’t plan to stay any longer than he had to. He stepped into the power supply closet, switched on the light, and closed the door.
The access hatch to the utility tunnel was at the back of the closet, where heavy-duty conduit pipes rose out of the floor and into the distributor box. He knelt and lifted the trapdoor on its hinges, straining to get it all the way up. A steel ladder led down the shaft to the base of the utility tunnel. There was some light down there, a soft glow. He stood and turned off the closet light, then descended, shutting the trapdoor as he went.
The Poison Artist Page 23
