Under the Knife

by Tess Gerritsen

  * * *

  THE TRAFFIC HEADING into Waikiki was bumper-to-bumper.

  As usual, the streets were crowded with a bizarre mix of tourists and off-duty soldiers and street people, all of them moving in the surreal glow of city lights. Palm trees cast their spindly shadows against the buildings. An otherwise distinguished-looking gentleman was flaunting his white legs and Bermuda shorts. Waikiki was where one came to see the ridiculous, the outrageous. But tonight, Kate found the view through her car window frightening—all those faces, drained of color under the glow of streetlamps, and the soldiers, lounging drunkenly in nightclub doorways. A wild-eyed evangelist stood on the corner, waving a Bible as he shouted “The end of the world is near!”

  As she pulled up at a red light, he turned and stared at her and for an instant she thought she saw, in his burning eyes, a message meant only for her. The light turned green. She sent the car lurching through the intersection. His shout faded away.

  She was still jittery ten minutes later when she climbed the steps to Ann’s apartment building. As she reached the door, a young couple exited, allowing Kate to slip into the lobby.

  It took a moment for the elevator to arrive. Leaning back against the wall, she forced herself to breathe deeply and let the silence of the building calm her nerves. By the time she finally stepped into the elevator, her heart had stopped its wild hammering. The doors slid closed. The elevator whined upward. She felt a strange sense of unreality as she watched the lights flash in succession: three, four, five. Except for a faint hydraulic hum, the ride was silent.

  On the seventh floor, the doors slid open.

  The corridor was deserted. A dull green carpet stretched out before her. As she walked toward number 710, she had the strange sensation that she was moving in a dream, that none of this was real—not the flocked wallpaper or the door looming at the end of the corridor. Only as she reached it did she see it was slightly ajar. “Ann?” she called out.

  There was no answer.

  She gave the door a little shove. Slowly it swung open and she froze, taking in, but not immediately comprehending, the scene before her: the toppled chair, the scattered magazines, the bright red splatters on the wall. Then her gaze followed the trail of crimson as it zigzagged across the beige carpet, leading inexorably toward its source: Ann’s body, lying facedown in a lake of blood.

  Beeps issued faintly from a telephone receiver dangling off an end table. The cold, electronic tone was like an alarm, screaming at her to move, to take action. But she remained paralyzed; her whole body seemed stricken by some merciful numbness.

  The first wave of dizziness swept over her. She crouched down, clutching the doorframe for support. All her medical training, all those years of working around blood, couldn’t prevent this totally visceral response. Through the drumbeat of her own heart she became aware of another sound, harsh and irregular. Breathing. But it wasn’t hers.

  Someone else was in the room.

  A flicker of movement drew her gaze across to the living room mirror. Only then did she see the man’s reflection. He was cowering behind a cabinet, not ten feet away.

  They spotted each other in the mirror at the same instant. In that split second, as the reflection of his eyes met hers, she imagined she saw, in those hollows, the darkness beckoning to her. An abyss from which there was no escape.

  He opened his mouth as if to speak but no words came out, only an unearthly hiss, like a viper’s warning just before it strikes.

  She lurched wildly to her feet. The room spun past her eyes with excruciating slowness as she turned to flee. The corridor stretched out endlessly before her. She heard her own scream echo off the walls; the sound was as unreal as the image of the hallway flying past.

  The stairwell door lay at the other end. It was her only feasible escape route. There was no time to wait for elevators.

  She hit the opening bar at a run and shoved the door into the concrete stairwell. One flight into her descent, she heard the door above spring open again and slam against the wall. Again she heard the hiss, as terrifying as a demon’s whisper in her ear.

  She stumbled to the sixth-floor landing and grappled at the door. It was locked tight. She screamed and pounded. Surely someone would hear her! Someone would answer her cry for help!

  Footsteps thudded relentlessly down the stairs. She couldn’t wait; she had to keep running.

  She dashed down the next flight and hit the fifth floor landing too hard. Pain shot through her ankle. In tears, she wrenched and pounded at the door. It was locked.

  He was right behind her.

  She flew down the next flight and the next. Her purse flew off her shoulder but she couldn’t stop to retrieve it. Her ankle was screaming with pain as she hurtled toward the third-floor landing. Was it locked, as well? Were they all locked? Her mind flew ahead to the ground floor, to what lay outside. A parking lot? An alley? Is that where they’d find her body in the morning?

  Sheer panic made her wrench with superhuman strength at the next door. To her disbelief, it was unlocked. Stumbling through, she found herself in the parking garage. There was no time to think about her next move; she tore off blindly into the shadows. Just as the stairwell door flew open again, she ducked behind a van.

  Crouching by the front wheel, she listened for footsteps but heard nothing except the torrent of her own blood racing in her ears. Seconds passed, then minutes. Where was he? Had he abandoned the chase? Her body was pressed so tightly against the van, the steel bit into her thigh. She felt no pain; every ounce of concentration was focused on survival.

  A pebble clattered across the ground, echoing like a pistol shot in the concrete garage.

  She tried in vain to locate the source but the explosions seemed to come from a dozen different directions at once. Go away! she wanted to scream. Dear God, make him go away….

  The echoes faded, leaving total silence. But she sensed his presence, closing in. She could almost hear his voice whispering to her, I’m coming for you. I’m coming….

  She had to know where he was, if he was drawing close.

  Clinging to the tire, she slowly inched her head around and peered beneath the van. What she saw made her reel back in horror.

  He was on the other side of the van and moving toward the rear. Toward her.

  She sprang to her feet and took off like a rabbit. Parked cars melted into one continuous blur. She plunged toward the exit ramp. Her legs, stiff from crouching, refused to move fast enough. She could hear the man right behind her. The ramp seemed endless, spiraling around and around, every curve threatening to send her sprawling to the pavement. His footsteps were gaining. Air rushed in and out of her lungs, burning her throat.

  In a last, desperate burst of speed, she tore around the final curve. Too late, she saw the headlights of a car coming up the ramp toward her.

  She caught a glimpse of two faces behind the windshield, a man and a woman, their mouths open wide. As she slammed into the hood, there was a brilliant flash of light, like stars exploding in her eyes. Then the light vanished and she saw nothing at all. Not even darkness.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “MANGO SEASON,” SERGEANT BROPHY said as he sneezed into a soggy handkerchief. “Worst time of year for my allergies.” He blew his nose, then sniffed experimentally, as if checking for some new, as yet undetected obstruction to his nasal passages. He seemed completely unaware of his gruesome surroundings, as though dead bodies and blood-spattered walls and an army of crime-lab techs were always hanging about. When Brophy got into one of his sneezing jags, he was oblivious of everything but the sad state of his sinuses.

  Lieutenant Francis “Pokie” Ah Ching had grown used to hearing the sniffles of his junior partner. At times, the habit was useful. He could always tell which room Brophy was in; all he had to do was follow the man’s nose.

  That nose, still bundled in a handkerchief, vanished into the dead woman’s bedroom. Pokie refocused his attention on his spiral notebook, in which he
was recording the data. He wrote quickly, in the peculiar shorthand he’d evolved over his twenty-six years as a cop, seventeen of them with homicide. Eight pages were filled with sketches of the various rooms in the apartment, four pages of the living room alone. His art was crude but to the point. Body there. Toppled furniture here. Blood all over.

  The medical examiner, a boyish, freckle-faced woman known to everyone simply as M.J., was making her walkaround before she examined the body. She was wearing her usual blue jeans and tennis shoes—sloppy dress for a doctor, but in her specialty, the patients never complained. As she circled the room, she dictated into a cassette recorder.

  “Arterial spray on three walls, pattern height about four to five feet…. Heavy pooling at east end of living room where body is located…. Victim is female, blond, age thirty to forty, found in prone position, right arm flexed under head, left arm extended…. No hand or arm lacerations noted.” M.J. crouched down. “Marked dependent mottling. Hmm.” Frowning, she touched the victim’s bare arm. “Significant body cooling. Time is now 12:15 a.m.” She flicked off the cassette and was silent for a moment.

  “Somethin’ wrong, M.J.?” Pokie asked.

  “What?” She looked up. “Oh, just thinking.”

  “What’s your prelim?”

  “Let’s see. Looks like a single deep slash to the left carotid, very sharp blade. And very fast work. The victim never got a chance to raise her arms in defense. I’ll get a better look when we wash her down at the morgue.” She stood up and Pokie saw her tennis shoes were smeared with blood. How many crime scenes had those shoes tramped through?

  Not as many as mine, he thought.

  “Slashed carotid,” he said thoughtfully. “Does that remind you of somethin’?”

  “First thing I thought of. What was that guy’s name a few weeks back?”

  “Tanaka. He had a slash to the left carotid.”

  “That’s him. Just as bloody a mess as this one, too.”

  Pokie thought a moment. “Tanaka was a doctor,” he remarked. “And this one…” He glanced down at the body. “This one’s a nurse.”

  “Was a nurse.”

  “Makes you wonder.”

  M.J. snapped her lab kit closed. “There’s lots of doctors and nurses in this town. Just because these two end up on my slab doesn’t mean they knew each other.”

  A loud sneeze announced Brophy’s emergence from the bedroom. “Found a plane ticket to San Francisco on her dresser. Midnight flight.” He glanced at his watch. “Which she just missed.”

  A plane ticket. A packed suitcase. So Ann Richter was about to skip town. Why?

  Mulling over that question, Pokie made another circuit of the apartment, going through the rooms one by one. In the bathroom, he found a lab tech microscopically peering down at the sink.

  “Traces of blood in here, sir. Looks like your killer washed his hands.”

  “Yeah? Cool cat. Any prints?”

  “A few here and there. Most of ’em old, probably the victim’s. Plus one fresh set off the front doorknob. Could belong to your witness.”

  Pokie nodded and went back to the living room. That was their ace in the hole. The witness. Though dazed and in pain, she’d managed to alert the ambulance crew to the horrifying scene in apartment 710.

  Thereby ruining a good night’s sleep for Pokie.

  He glanced at Brophy. “Have you found Dr. Chesne’s purse yet?”

  “It’s not in the stairwell where she dropped it. Someone must’ve picked it up.”

  Pokie was silent a moment. He thought of all the things women carried in their purses: wallets, driver’s licenses, house keys.

  He slapped his notebook closed. “Sergeant?”

  “Sir?”

  “I want a twenty-four-hour guard placed on Dr. Chesne’s hospital room. Effective immediately. I want a man in the lobby. And I want you to trace every call that comes in asking about her.”

  Brophy looked dubious. “All that? For how long?”

  “Just as long as she’s in the hospital. Right now she’s a sitting duck.”

  “You really think this guy’d go after her in the hospital?”

  “I don’t know.” Pokie sighed. “I don’t know what we’re dealing with. But I’ve got two identical murders.” Grimly he slid the notebook into his pocket. “And she’s our only witness.”

  * * *

  PHIL GLICKMAN WAS making a pest of himself as usual.

  It was Saturday morning, the one day of the week David could work undisturbed, the one day he could catch up on all the paperwork that perpetually threatened to bury his desk. But today, instead of solitude, he’d found Glickman. While his young associate was smart, aggressive and witty, he was also utterly incapable of silence. David suspected the man talked in his sleep.

  “So I said, ‘Doctor, do you mean to tell me the posterior auricular artery comes off before the superficial temporal?’ And the guy gets all flustered and says, ‘Oh, did I say that? No, of course it’s the other way around.’ Which blew it right there for him.” Glickman slammed his fist triumphantly into his palm. “Wham! He’s dead meat and he knows it. We just got the offer to settle. Not bad, huh?” At David’s lackluster nod, Glickman looked profoundly disappointed. Then he brightened and asked, “How’s it going with the O’Brien case? They ready to yell uncle?”

  David shook his head. “Not if I know Kate Chesne.”

  “What, is she dumb?”

  “Stubborn. Self-righteous.”

  “So it goes with the white coat.”

  David tiredly dragged his fingers through his hair. “I hope this doesn’t go to trial.”

  “It’ll be like shooting rabbits in a cage. Easy.”

  “Too easy.”

  Glickman laughed as he turned to leave. “Never seemed to bother you before.”

  Why the hell does it bother me now? David wondered.

  The O’Brien case was like an apple falling into his lap. All he had to do was file a few papers, issue a few threatening statements, and hold his hand out for the check. He should be breaking out the champagne. Instead, he was moping around on a gorgeous Saturday morning, feeling sleazy about the whole affair.

  Yawning, he leaned back and rubbed his eyes. It’d been a lousy night, spent tossing and turning in bed. He’d been plagued by dreams—disturbing dreams; the kind he hadn’t had in years.

  There had been a woman. She’d stood very still, very quiet in the shadows, her face silhouetted against a window of hazy light. At first he’d thought she was his ex-wife, Linda. But there were things about her that weren’t right, things that confused him. She’d stood motionless, like a deer pausing in the forest. Eagerly he’d reached out to undress her, but his hands had been impossibly clumsy and in his haste, he’d torn off one of her buttons. She had laughed, a deliciously throaty sound that reminded him of brandy.

  That’s when he knew she wasn’t Linda. Looking up, he’d stared into the green eyes of Kate Chesne.

  There were no words between them, only a look. And a touch: her fingers, sliding gently down his face.

  He’d awakened, sweating with desire. He’d tried to fall back to sleep. Again and again the dream had returned. Even now, as he sank back in his chair and closed his eyes, he saw her face again and he felt that familiar ache.

  Brutally wrenching his thoughts back to reality, he dragged himself over to the window. He was too old for this nonsense. Too old and too smart to even fantasize about an affair with the opposition.

  Hell, attractive women walked into his office all the time. And every so often, one of them would give off the sort of signals any red-blooded man could recognize. It took only a certain tilt of the head, a provocative flash of thigh. He’d always been amused but never tempted; bedding down clients wasn’t included in his list of services.

  Kate Chesne had sent out no such signals. In fact she plainly despised lawyers as much as he despised doctors. So why, of all the women who’d walked through his door, was she the one
he couldn’t stop thinking about?

  He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the silver pen. It suddenly occurred to him that this wasn’t the sort of item a woman would buy for herself. Was it a gift from a boyfriend? he wondered, and was startled by his instant twinge of jealousy.

  He should return it.

  The thought set his mind off and racing. Mid Pac Hospital was only a few blocks away. He could drop off the pen on his way home. Most doctors made Saturday-morning rounds, so there was a good chance she’d be there. At the prospect of seeing her again, he felt a strange mixture of anticipation and dread, the same churning in his stomach he used to feel as a teenager scrounging up the courage to ask a girl for a date. It was a very bad sign.

  But he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind.

  The pen felt like a live wire. He shoved it back in his pocket and quickly began to stuff his papers into the briefcase.

  Fifteen minutes later he walked into the hospital lobby and went to a house telephone. The operator answered.

  “I’m trying to reach Dr. Kate Chesne,” David said. “Is she in the building?”

  “Dr. Chesne?” There was a pause. “Yes, I believe she’s in the hospital. Who’s calling?”

  He started to give his name, then thought better of it. If Kate knew it was his page, she’d never answer it. “I’m a friend,” he replied lamely.

  “Please hold.”

  A recording of some insipid melody came on, the sort of music they probably played on elevators in hell. He caught himself drumming the booth impatiently. That’s when it struck him just how eager he was to see her again.

  I must be nuts, he thought, abruptly hanging up the phone. Or desperate for female companionship. Maybe both.

  Disgusted with himself, he turned to leave, only to find that his exit was blocked by two very impressive-looking cops.

  “Mind coming with us?” one of them asked.

  “Actually,” responded David, “I would.”

  “Then lemme put it a different way,” said the cop, his meaning absolutely clear.

  David couldn’t help an incredulous laugh. “What did I do, guys? Double-park? Insult your mothers?”