by Jon Land
“Care to speculate?”
“Not at the moment, Lauren. Right now I want to see the second floor.
“No,” Talley told him. “You don’t.”
Chapter 25
TINY TIM REACHED THE door leading from the stairwell onto the second floor kicking on all cylinders. Not only had his work with his primary target gone brilliantly, but the emergence of some of the patients into the corridor had confronted him with a challenge. Imagine if one of them had cried out or somehow else alerted the floors below what was coming their way… . Expediency was demanded, precision achieved against the possibility of discovery and disaster. His heart was still hammering away inside him when he took the stairs downward.
He felt cleansed, refreshed. He had completed his mission. Now he could take his time and enjoy the remainder of this visit, make them live up to the towns. The towns had been so fulfilling, enriching even. Each house had brought a new challenge. Each home had been filled with its own smells, its own vitality. The act of killing kept renewing itself, as he moved from one to the next. The variety was striking, the challenge constant. The third floor of the hospital had provided him with at least a semblance of that, albeit one that promised to fade quickly. His victims here seemed no more than cardboard copies of one another. The rooms were the same, as were the very clothes of those whose lives he was snuffing out. The result was the feeling that he was repeating the same act over and over again instead of expanding and building upon the experience from one kill to the next. But the feeling that had reached him behind the door leading onto the second level indicated things were about to change for much the better.
Garth Seckle quivered in the night air, the brush rumbling around him. The sky was bloodred in his mind in that moment, his memory of the next acts as real as those acts themselves.
There were children on the second floor! Children!
Something stirred in him in a rush so powerful that he felt his heartbeat quicken and breath grow rapid. He stilled himself just behind the door and leaned against it to prolong the moment. In his present state, a single jolt of his shoulders would send it crashing inward, but Tiny Tim held his ground. Nothing could go wrong on this floor, no distractions that might detract from his pleasure. He grabbed the knob, turned it loudly without giving the door any pressure. Then he rapped loudly against the steel.
“Hello … Hello! Is anyone there?” he called.
Alone so much, he spoke almost not at all, and when he did the sound of his own voice was foreign to him.
“Coming,” a nurse’s voice returned.
Tiny Tim worked the knob again. “Door’s stuck,” he said to her through the door.
“Just give me a moment,” he heard her say trustingly. And then the door was coming inward, and Tiny Tim lashed out for where he knew her face would be.
The massive shape of his right hand swallowed it from chin to brow. She tried to scream, tried to flail out, tried to kick, but he jerked her upward and held her there with her feet swiping at the air. Tiny Tim drew the nurse further into the stairwell and slammed her against the wall. It gave on impact, plaster shredding inward as the nurse’s head was embedded into it. Her limbs spasmed horribly with the rupturing of her brain. She was still twitching when he left her stuck there and emerged onto the second floor.
At this point his memories became jumbled. He remembered rooms and faces in no particular order. Most of the children were asleep when he entered. He took the first of them quickly and quietly, but the next he made sure were awake as he stole their lives from them. That way he could see the look in their eyes as the daring hope of youth that had withstood whatever had brought them to this place of sickness was extinguished. Children did not show fear in any way like adults, holding perhaps to that same youthful resilient surety that it could not end for them this way. Only in the last seconds did they finally realize with pleading sadness what was happening to them.
It had been over much too fast. Emerging into the corridor from the last occupied room, though, Tiny Tim had heard a sound. A muffled wheezing reaching out to him from somewhere ahead.
Crying.
Smiling tightly, Tiny Tim moved off toward the nursery and maternity wards.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Kimberlain had told Lauren Talley before moving ahead of her onto the stairwell.
“Pediatrics and obstetrics,” she said from behind him.
The Ferryman stopped, suspended between floors and worlds.
“Go on,” she urged him. “You have to see it, don’t you?”
Kimberlain turned toward her but didn’t speak.
“I studied you, Jared. I studied each and every one of your cases and each and every one of the monsters you brought in. But I never really understood you or them until tonight, until now. And I’m scared of you almost as much as I am of the monster that did this.”
“Regretting that you came up to see me in Vermont, Lauren?”
“I just feel a lot older now than I did then.”
“And you want to blame me for that, as well as this. You hate and you fear and you need something to focus all that on.” He took two steps closer to her. “Well, wake up, Lauren, wake up and smell the blood. This is the real thing, away from the books, the classrooms, the reports, and the promotion ladder. This is reality, and this is where I live. You came up to Vermont full of ambition. I help you catch Tiny Tim, and you end up making points at behavioral science. Section head maybe. First woman ever in that department, correct me if I’m wrong.”
She didn’t bother to.
“Well, Lauren, take the call letters of your grand department together and you get BS. Fitting, don’t you think? Because all those attempts to assemble portfolios and profiles are bullshit. When I walk through that second-floor door, I’m looking for traces of the person. I find them because I can climb into their heads and think just as perversely as they can. You said you didn’t understand that before. Congratulations. You just grew up. Might even be able to do it yourself someday.”
“Please,” she shot back, showing disgust.
“Please,” Kimberlain echoed. “You didn’t use that word in Vermont, but you might as well have. ‘Please come and help me catch Tiny Tim. Please help me get the bureau off the hook from a country living in fear. Please help me become a department head.’ Now I’m helping, and you don’t fancy what that looks like.”
“I’m … sorry.
“No, you’re not. And if you’re sorry about anything, it’s about getting involved at Quantico in the first place. That’s to be expected. When this is over, ask for a transfer. I’ll write you a nice recommendation.”
“You’re angry.”
“Damn right.”
“Not just with me, though.”
“It’s him, Lauren, Tiny Tim. He’s in my head now, and that makes him a part of me I don’t want. But I can’t get rid of him until I find him.”
Lauren Talley slid down the stairs until Kimberlain’s features, lost in the stairwell’s dimness, were clear again. “The years in your file that are blank, before the paybacks …”
“Should be accessible somewhere on the bureau’s data bank.”
She shrugged. “Not to me.”
“I did what the monsters do,” he told her. “On orders.”
“Oh,” she muttered.
“And every time I walk into a scene like this, it comes back. I can’t be rid of it until all the monsters are gone. But they’ll never be gone. That’s reality, and that’s why you’re scared of me all of a sudden. I’m sorry, Lauren. Really I am. I tried to tell you as much in Vermont, but you kept at it, and now you know the truth.”
“We’d better get moving,” she said, advancing ahead of him with a stabilizing breath.
Kimberlain followed her down the remainder of the steps. A patch of blood outlined a deep oval-shaped crack in the wall on the right eight feet off the ground.
“It was the nurse, wasn’t it?”
“He lured her in h
ere somehow,” Lauren Talley confirmed. “She was the only one on duty. Night maternity nurse was on break downstairs in the snack bar. That left him with free reign of the hall.”
The door creaked open, and they advanced onto the pediatrics and obstetrics wing. Kimberlain moved slowly down the corridor, passed the rooms without entering a single one or even seeming to look inside. Talley hung back, afraid to draw any closer. There was no need for explanation; the signs left in the pediatric rooms were very clear.
“He heard crying,” the Ferryman said suddenly. “He stepped out of this last room after he was finished, and he heard crying.”
“Thirty-eight bodies on this floor up to this point,” the woman from the FBI reported. “Thirty-nine including the nurse back on the stairwell.”
“How old?”
“Does it really mat—”
“How old!”
Lauren Talley flipped open her notebook again. “Four to fifteen. Twenty-two girls, sixteen boys. We’ve got their medical files if you want—”
“I want to see the nursery, Lauren.”
It was almost too much for Garth Seckle. Standing there at the window, it seemed as if the babies belonged to him. After all, they were his to do with as he pleased. More than any of the others that night, they were at his mercy because they lacked the capacity to grasp what he was. When he stepped through the door, the ones who were crying continued to cry. The ones who were sleeping continued to sleep. His presence, though perhaps detected, was not affecting.
He found their helplessness to be a metaphor for the other victims he had taken. None had stood a chance against him, but it was much worse because they could grasp what was happening to them. Tiny Tim moved up and down the rows of cribs, certain that death could hold no meaning for these since life had yet to form into any coherent shape.
A few more seemed to be crying now. He wondered if somehow the smell of blood had awakened them. Had some primal, instinctive sense alerted them to the scent of their mothers’ blood on his clothes? Avoiding the blood had been impossible considering the way circumstances had demanded he dispatch the women.
Until that moment, Tiny Tim had considered leaving the infants as they were, since their utter indifference provided him no satisfaction. Now he saw them as no more than extensions of those he had just visited in the adjacent rooms. His work could not be considered complete if they were left alive.
“We aren’t sure whether he came here first or to the mothers,” Lauren Talley said as the nursery came into view.
“The mothers. He would have liked to maintain the order of things. You haven’t gone in there, have you? To where the mothers were, I mean.”
“No. I … couldn’t.”
“He would have used a knife on them. Opened them up in the same area where the baby had come from to attack the canal of life itself.”
“Yes,” Lauren Talley muttered, and swallowed hard.
“How powerful it would have made him feel,” Kimberlain continued. “As if the power of life was his to dispense.”
“Death, you mean.”
“Indistinguishable for Tiny Tim. Death is life, you see; at least that’s the only way he can accept it. Order and precision. Everything balanced.”
“Does he think that way consciously?”
“No more than the rest of us do. We are what we are. Tiny Tim kills because it makes him feel stronger, invincible. He has no reason to believe anyone can stop him, so his own order is the only one he has to acknowledge.”
The nursery began as a windowed wall on the corridor’s left-hand side. The lights were still on. As Kimberlain approached he could feel his blood run still and his breath form into a big lump in the center of his throat.
The nursery was … empty. That was all he could say. The cribs lay unoccupied, blankets barely ruffled. It looked undisturbed, almost pristine. Even the name tags taped to the appropriate slots on each crib were untouched.
“The infants,” Kimberlain muttered.
“They were all found alive. We know he was in here, but he didn’t kill them. A show of humanity possibly. Maybe there’s a limit to what even this monster can bring off.”
The Ferryman was sliding about the room between the empty cribs. “No,” he said distantly. “Tiny Tim was prepared to kill them, but then he heard something.” He swung toward Talley. “Something that startled him from downstairs.”
She flipped feverishly through her notes. “Yes, here it is. There was a code blue in the intensive care ward downstairs. A crash cart tipped over and took a few trays of bottles with it. Lots of noise.”
“Distracted Tiny Tim. Made him head in that direction.”
“Downstairs,” she acknowledged. “The first floor.”
The noise from below had shaken Tiny Tim just as he was about to begin his work in the nursery. Had someone discovered what he had left on the floors above and brought that panicked message down? He could not risk that eventuality. A change of strategy was essential.
Peering out from the first floor stairwell, he realized the noise had come from something else entirely. No one was rushing about. People were simply going about their business. This level would prove the most challenging for him. Not only did it contain the intensive care unit, but also the snack bar along with the doctors’ lounge where those on call waited for a page. Lots of individual places where victims would be waiting for him. Four doctors garbed in white coats were on duty this evening, all presently on this floor. Add these to the four nurses on around-the-clock duty, and things promised to be complicated.
Tiny Tim checked both his silenced Uzi submachine guns and emerged from the stairwell. There was no longer a need to act quietly. The first person he spotted was a bespectacled doctor walking with his eyes fixed on a chart. He never saw Tiny Tim. A burst blew him backward and splattered blood upon a receptionist working the phones. Tiny Tim shot her next and watched her body disappear under the desk. Then, almost mechanically, he moved on toward the wing marked NO ADMITTANCE and under that DOCTORS ONLY.
The double doors came open as he approached them, allowing a pair of nurses to rush out in the wake of some emergency. Tiny Tim used a burst from each Uzi on them, and the women’s white uniforms leaked red. He burst through the doors to find the remaining pool of on-duty nurses and doctors clustered around a bed on the right. The rest of the ICU cubicles had their curtains drawn. This one alone had been yanked open.
“Clear!” one of the doctors ordered, pressing the wands of a defibrillating machine against the patient’s chest.
There was a thump, and the chest heaved.
“No pulse,” one of the nurses reported.
“We’re losing him,” someone else said.
“Clear!” the doctor handling the defibrillator instructed again.
Tiny Tim liked the sound of that. He waited until the shocked chest jumped one more time before speaking.
“Clear,” he said loud enough for all of them to hear and swing his way. “Lost,” he followed before he opened fire.
The bodies crashed into the monitoring machines, spilling them over. Several IV hookups tumbled as well, and the sound of glass shattering echoed through the unit, along with the clamor of metal striking tile. The ICU patients were stirring now; the ones who could were screaming, and Tiny Tim moved for them with his submachine guns. Incapacitated as they were, it was over very fast. Most died with tubes still pushed up their noses or needles stuck in their arms. The doctors who had been in the on-call room rushed through the double doors just as Tiny Tim was finishing up, and he used the rest of one of his clips on them. Nice stroke of luck. Saved him a trip into their lounge.
His research indicated the hospital’s two sublevels contained a number of labs, pathology, and the morgue. At this hour there might be a few strays left down there, and Tiny Tim headed down to finish his sweep.
Lauren Talley had shown Kimberlain the intensive care unit last, keeping with the theorized chronological progression Tiny Tim had taken
. On the floors above, walls had separated the killings, cushioning the shock and disguising the scope of the truth. But ICU was little more than a ward, beds separated only by curtains and rollaway partitions. Some of these had been toppled, a number of the curtains shredded.
And the blood was everywhere, dried and dark; on the floor, on the walls, on the bed sheets waiting to be removed. Kimberlain didn’t want to know the number of victims down here. The exact number was a useless piece of information. The only reality was the river of red.
“This is as far as we traced him,” Talley was saying, “probably as … far … as—”
Her broken speech had Kimberlain moving toward her an instant before she started to drop. He caught her in midswoon and felt her press against him.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“No need.”
“It’s just that I haven’t been able to sleep.” She eased herself away. “Even when there’s time, I can’t sleep.”
“He’s inside you, Lauren.”
She looked up into Kimberlain’s ice-blue eyes. “And how do I get him out?”
“We catch him.”
Chapter 26
“DR. VOGELHUT, THIS IS Rembart down in the LW. You’d better get down here, sir.”
“Something wrong?”
“You have to … see it.”
The intercom page reached the chief administrator of The Locks in the midst of his usual morning rounds, which ordinarily would not have included what Rembart referred to as the “LW.” The basement wing of The Locks was known in the vernacular as the lost ward, but Vogelhut preferred to think of it as hell. The lost ward contained those incarcerates who had lost all touch with reality. Most had come there in that condition. A few had evolved into it after spending time in one of the facility’s other levels. Either way, those who came to the lost ward were truly the forgotten. No appeals were pending. No lawyers made contact. No psychiatric students sought audience for research.
Dr. Vogelhut heard the inmates’ sounds as soon as he emerged from the elevator. Cries and screams combined with desperate howls and wails. There were animal sounds and loud, angry sobs. A regular pounding as one of the inhabitants repeatedly threw himself at the door.
