Nelson and Patel exchanged a glance.
“How long?” Lee demanded.
Finally Nelson spoke.
“Three days.”
“Three days? What the hell was going on for three days?”
“You collapsed in your apartment three days ago with a cero-spinal meningitis,” Patel said, his voice very clipped and brisk.
“Cero—what?”
“It is a brain fever, usually bacterial. You remained in a coma for three days, from which you have now awakened.”
Lee looked at Nelson.
“It’s true, lad,” Nelson said softly.
Lee shifted his gaze to Patel. “Bacterial…so it’s not contagious?”
“No.”
“When can I get out of here?”
“Let us not be in too much of a hurry, now,” Patel cautioned. “You have been very ill, you know. You are responding well to the antibiotics, but—”
“But I’m working on an important case—”
“Lee,” Nelson interrupted, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Chuck is concerned about you. We all are.”
That sounded like a prelude to bad news.
“What? What is it?” Lee demanded, feeling panic rising in his throat. “What’s happened? Was there another victim?”
“No, no, nothing’s happened,” Nelson reassured him. “It’s just that—” He paused and looked away.
“He’s not taking me off the case?” Lee could hear his voice tightening, becoming shrill.
“Please,” said Dr. Patel. “Please do not become agitated—”
Nelson rubbed his left eyebrow and looked away from Lee. “Chuck thought you could use some rest.”
“I just had three days of rest, for Christ’s sake!”
“I know, I know,” Nelson replied.
Dr. Patel attempted once again to intervene. “Now, I really must insist—”
“But Lee, you almost died! Did you know that?”
“Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?”
“Gentlemen, please!” Dr. Patel’s voice now held an edge of panic.
“Let me talk to Chuck,” Lee pleaded.
“You can try,” Nelson said, “but I don’t know—”
“Now you really must be leaving!” Dr. Patel practically shouted, taking Nelson by the shoulders. “If you are not leaving I will be calling security to have you removed!”
“All right, I’m going,” Nelson growled. “Chuck will be by when his shift is over. You can talk to him then,” he called over his shoulder as the doctor pushed him out of the room.
Patel returned to Lee’s bedside after Nelson was in the hall. “You must not be getting so upset,” he said, checking Lee’s pulse. “It really is not advisable.”
“Sorry.” Lee’s temples were pulsing with pain, and his body ached with exhaustion.
Dr. Patel frowned. “I am going to be blunt with you, Mr. Campbell. If you do not allow your body time to heal, you cannot hope to recover. If you attempt to hurry the process, you could very well end up in hospital again—or worse. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
Lee looked away. “Yes,” he said, trying to stifle a yawn. “I understand.” But what he was thinking was how quickly he could talk them into letting him out of this place.
Chapter Fifty-six
By that evening Lee’s head had stopped pounding. He awoke as the sun was setting, feeling ravenous. He turned his head to see Chuck sitting next to his bed, flipping through a magazine. Dr. Patel stood at the foot of the bed, studying his chart.
“I’m starving,” Lee said.
“Okay.” Chuck replied. “What do you want?”
“A cheeseburger.”
Morton smiled. “That’s got to be a good sign.”
“You’re not out of the woods yet,” Dr. Patel said glumly. He seemed to think that throwing cold water on their hopeful mood was his unpleasant but necessary duty.
“Is he allowed to eat?” Chuck asked.
“If he feels hungry,” the doctor replied gloomily, as if Lee’s appetite were a dismal sign.
“Okay,” Chuck said, rising and tossing the magazine on the chair. “I’ll be right back.”
“Hey, has anyone called my mother to say I’m okay?” Lee asked.
“She was here earlier, while you were asleep. She’ll be back tomorrow. Oh, and Dr. Azarian stopped by too,” he added. “She said she’d come by later.”
He darted out the door, followed by a gloomy-faced Dr. Patel.
Lee’s stomach took a little hop of anticipation at the mention of Kathy’s name. He longed to talk to Chuck about her, but the subject of women was a strained one between them, since things turned out the way they had with Susan. On the rebound from Lee after college, Susan Beaumont had gravitated to Chuck for many reasons, both good and bad. Lee knew this because she had told him as much after a few too many glasses of eggnog at a Christmas party a few years ago. Marrying Chuck was another way to stay close to Lee, she had said. Instead of feeling flattered, as she had perhaps expected, he reacted with guilt and dismay. He begged her never to repeat this to anyone—least of all Chuck—but he had no idea what went on between them in private. He prayed she had taken his advice. She wasn’t an unkind woman, just a chronically immature one.
Susan Beaumont was exactly the kind of woman Chuck Morton was drawn to: one who seemed to need protecting. Lee thought she was an emotional vampire, but Chuck needed to be needed, and like every man who saw Susan, he was floored by her beauty—the kind of effortless, shimmering beauty that struck other women as unfair, and left men helpless and weak-kneed before her. Susan Beaumont Morton was the kind of woman who wore her good looks so casually and yet so consciously that it was hard for anyone—man or woman—to think of anything else when talking to her. But Lee sensed Circe’s touch in Susan from the beginning, and just hoped she had been kind to Chuck, who still adored her after all these years of marriage, with an eager devotion Lee found touching. Chuck had always been in love with her, and Lee hoped that she had come to care for Chuck the way he deserved.
She needed things Lee couldn’t give her—things he suspected no one could give another person, but Chuck Morton’s mission in life regarding women was unchanging ever since Lee had known him: rescue, protect, and serve. Lee knew Chuck’s protectiveness extended to him as well, and he was touched by it. He could tease Chuck about that, but he would never tease his friend about his relationship to women. Chuck believed to this day that Susan had left Lee for him. Lee allowed him to believe this fiction because it was easier on everyone—or so he hoped.
But Kathy Azarian was different. He had dated more beautiful women, others besides Susan, but no one who touched him quite the way Kathy did. Was it the way she wrinkled her forehead when she was thinking hard, or the way she pursed her lips to one side, the single lock of curly hair that fell over her eyes? It was that and more—the sound of her low, throaty voice, the slight lisp in her speech, the way she wrapped her fingers around his arm as they walked, a hundred little things and yet no one thing in particular.
As if in answer to his thoughts, there was a soft knock on the door, and Kathy’s face appeared between the parted curtains in the hall outside.
“Come in!” Lee called, and struggled to sit up in bed. The effort caused a wave of dizziness.
Kathy entered the room and sat on the chair Chuck had vacated. She put a hand on Lee’s arm. Her fingers were cool and soft.
“How are you feeling?”
“Not bad. Hungry.”
“That’s a good sign.” He could tell she was trying to camouflage any concern she felt, so as not to frighten him.
“I’m going to be fine,” he said.
“I never doubted it for a minute,” she replied too quickly. “Oh, I brought you a proper suitcase,” she said, holding up a leather satchel. “For when you come home. It’s a girl thing,” she added with a laugh. “We love shoes and suitcases—very Freudian, right?”
“Right,” he agreed. Just hav
ing her in the room cheered him up.
“Oh, and I also brought you something even more useless,” she added, digging through a tan rattan shoulder bag on her lap.
He watched her, noting the familiar renegade curl of dark hair falling over her eyes. The mystery of desire was part of the greater mystery that Lee had come very close to during his descent into depression. In the midst of damnation, he had sensed the possibility of salvation. And maybe this was why he felt he could relate to the tortured soul of this young killer, caught as he was in the cycle of damnation. There were no maps showing the way through the dark thicket Lee had found himself in. But he had learned that salvation and damnation were very close, the line separating them thin as the band of winter twilight separating earth and sky.
“Here it is,” Kathy cried triumphantly, pulling a dog-eared piece of newspaper from her bag. “This week’s Tuesday crossword puzzle in the Times is all about forensic science. I thought maybe we could do it together.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m not that good at crossword puzzles. I don’t do them often enough. My mother’s a real whiz. Does double crostics.”
“Well, this is only Tuesday’s puzzle, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Good.”
She handed it to him, and he studied it. The title was “Criminology.” He looked at the first clue: “FBI Profiling guru.” There were seven spaces. “Ressler,” he said. “Robert Ressler. Or it could be Douglas—John Douglas.”
“You bite your left lower lip when you’re concentrating,” she said. “Did you know that?”
He looked up. “I never thought much about it. Here,” he said, handing the newspaper back to her. She took it, but let it fall in her lap.
“Oh, hell,” she said. “Damn.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Damn.”
“What? What is it?”
She tossed the newspaper on the bed in a gesture of surrender. “I’m in love with you.”
A laugh burst from his throat, taking him by surprise. She cocked her head to one side and raised her right eyebrow.
“That’s funny?”
“Well, it was the way you said it.”
She smiled only on one side—it was her rueful look, the nearest expression she had to looking apologetic.
“Maybe you just feel sorry for me,” he suggested.
“I didn’t mean anything by it, really. It’s just that—well, I wasn’t planning on it right now.” She looked irritated, but her voice was soft.
He laughed again. It felt good, like something inside him was unfreezing. “Sorry to upset your plans.”
“You don’t laugh very often, you know.”
“I know. I used to—before.”
“Oh. Right.” Her face went slack, then assumed a holding pattern, as if she wasn’t sure what the proper expression was.
“I guess it means I’m feeling better,” he said, then winced at how much the tone of forced cheer reminded him of his mother. God, get a grip, Campbell.
“Are you?” she asked. “Feeling better, I mean?”
“Yes, much.” He looked around the room. “It’s weird to be back here again. I haven’t been here since—”
“Right. Is that—uh, is that better?”
“That? Yes. I mean, it comes and goes at times, but mostly I’m better.”
She smiled. “Oh, good. I’ve never had…that”—(funny how both of them were reluctant to say the word “depression”)—“but I’ve had friends who did. I didn’t realize how bad it was until one of them committed suicide.”
Lee swallowed once, hard. “How did she—” he began, then realized he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“He, actually. Carbon monoxide. Sat in his car in the garage with the engine on. His mother found him.”
“How old were you?”
“It was a few years after college.”
“Close friend?”
“Close enough that I asked myself for years afterward what I could have done or said to change things. I didn’t even know he was depressed—we’d sort of lost touch, I guess. I found out from mutual friends.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked out the window and put her right forefinger to her forehead. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’m sorry—after what you’ve been through.”
“Well, I am a trained psychologist,” he said. “If people can’t talk to me, who can they talk to?”
She smiled at his attempt to lighten the conversation.
“What I learned from that was how…irreplaceable everyone is. Once you lose someone, that’s it. There’s really no replacing them.”
“That’s true. I just never thought of it exactly that way.”
Chuck returned with hamburgers from the coffee shop next door. Lee thought he saw a flicker of irritation on his friend’s face when he saw Kathy.
“Hi,” Chuck said, “nice to see you again.”
“Yes,” Kathy replied. “Good to see you too.”
Fortunately, Chuck had bought three hamburgers, so they each had one. Lee liked the way Kathy ate, with a hearty, unself-conscious appetite. But as soon as they had finished, Dr. Patel appeared, wagging his stethoscope at them.
“Time to rest,” he said sternly, herding Chuck and Kathy out of the room.
“Does he ever sleep?” Kathy whispered to Lee as she kissed him good-bye.
“He’s a resident,” he whispered back. “They never sleep.”
Dr. Patel did one more quick check of Lee’s blood pressure and pulse, nodded grimly, muttered something to himself, made a notation on the chart at the foot of the bed, and left the room. Lee lay back on the pillow, feeling an odd sense of contentment. Sleep dragged at his eyelids, and he sank into its dark and welcoming arms.
Chapter Fifty-seven
The church was vast and empty, its dark marbled interior cold as the grave. A chill wind swept over Lee as he walked down the long corridor toward the altar. The pews were empty, but he could hear whispering, tongues slithering over consonants like so many snakes. The click of his heels on the hard stone floors was like a rhythm track underneath the wall of whispering. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but felt that they were talking about him in the dimly lit chapel, illuminated only by flickering votive candles lining the walls. He strained to see them, but saw only rows of empty pews stretching out before him, silent wooden sentinels.
He walked on. The corridor stretched out before him, and the altar seemed to recede as he approached it. The whispering was behind him now, and he strained to make out the words, but the voices blended into a hissing like the sound of raindrops on a tin roof. A single white light shone down upon the altar as he ascended the steps. The whispering got louder, thickening the air like the buzzing of cicadas.
There, on the altar, Laura was waiting for him. She lay on her back, her hands folded over her spotless white communion dress. Her eyes were closed, her face peaceful in death—and there was no doubt in his mind she was as dead as the dried flowers lining the steps of the altar. Lee studied her face, waiting for the roses to bloom in her cheeks once again, to replace the gray pallor of death. Her hair surrounded her pale face like a dark halo, falling in crisp ringlets on her shoulders. Laura had always been proud of her hair—thick, black and shiny as polished river stones.
He felt sadness, but no horror. To his surprise, he also felt relief. He had always known she was dead, but now here was proof, and she was at peace. Instead of a rotting, mangled corpse cast off in a ditch somewhere, exposed to the elements, and eaten by wild creatures, she was perfectly preserved, pristine as a bride, her beauty intact forever. He was glad—glad for her and for his mother, who could now accept the reality of her death.
He bent to kiss her dead cheek, but as he did, her face morphed and changed before his eyes—into Kathy Azarian’s face. A fist of fear grabbed his heart, squeezing the breath from his body. He sank to his knees, blind terror wrapping itself around his brain, p
ressing down on him so that all of his senses began to fade. He struggled to see, to hear, to feel, but a cloud of unknowing draped itself over him, dimming his senses. He tried to cry out, but his vocal cords had turned to dust, dry as the dead flowers surrounding the altar.
He awoke to middle-of-the-night stillness. It took him a few moments to realize where he was. The phones at the nurses’ station had stopped ringing, and he heard the soft whirr of machinery from the ICU unit down the hall. He was flooded with an overwhelming sense of relief that his dream was just that: a dream.
The room was dark; the only source of illumination was the light seeping through the smoked glass door panel. The venetian blinds on the window next to his bed were closed, blocking out even the light from the street lamps. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, Lee had a strong sense of a presence in the room with him. He peered into the far corner of the room, where a straight-backed chair sat against the wall. At first glance Lee thought maybe someone had thrown an overcoat across the chair, but then he realized the dark figure on the chair was a person. He thought could just make out a man seated in the shadows—unmoving, as still as if he were made of stone.
He knew who it was.
Lee’s hand twitched, and he almost reached for the call button to summon the nurse, but something stopped him. Curiosity, maybe—or perhaps an instinct to submit to whatever fate held in store for him. The figure in the corner sat very still. Lee reached over and pulled the string on the Venetian blinds, letting in light from the street outside. As he did so, a gleam of moonlight reflected off the high, pale forehead. The room was still too dark to get a good look at his face, but he could tell that the man was thin and pale.
Lee ran his tongue over his parched lips. “How did you get in here?” he croaked.
His visitor laughed nervously. “I’m very good at getting into places—but you should know that by now.” The voice was young, high pitched, and raspy, and there was a soft wheezing sound when he breathed, as if his lungs were worn and tattered bellows, stiff and dried with age. Lee couldn’t resist feeling a sense of triumph. So I was right about the asthma. He also had the feeling he had heard the voice before, but where? In their brief encounter in Hastings, no words had been exchanged between them.
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