A Fountain Filled With Blood (3 page)

He had a bizarre urge to take her hand in both of his and kiss it. He squelched the notion, nodding instead. “Yeah. Absolutely. You get your car and I’ll follow you.” She flashed him another smile and jogged off toward the parking lot, her long black skirt flapping around her ankles. How the hell did she manage to be so damn pleasant and open and normal, when he felt like a seventeen-year-old around her? Ever since he had crossed that line last December, he had pretty much avoided her, on the theory that his feelings must be middle-aged idiocy and absence would make the heart grow indifferent. It hadn’t worked that he could tell. Spotting her in the park, running into her at the IGA, or even driving past the rectory made his chest squeeze and the back of his throat ache. Maybe this would be better, to go on as friends, ignoring that other thing. Hell, maybe if he acted normal, he’d come to feel normal, too.

A blast of noise and movement swung his attention back to the entrance to the ER. Two EMTs, a doctor, and a nurse were moving a gurney in a carefully controlled frenzy through the bay, heading toward the open doors of the waiting ambulance. Between the bodies surrounding him, Russ could catch glimpses of Emil’s face. He winced. Christ. “Careful! Keep those lines clear!” the doctor said, levering himself into the ambulance as the EMTs maneuvered Emil, strapped to a spine board, from the gurney to the ambulance bed. The nurse passed over the IV bag she was holding above her head and scrambled up into her seat.

The doors into the ER hissed open again and Paul emerged, accompanied by another nurse. On his face was the look Russ knew from Vietnam—the face of someone who has just seen his buddy blown away beside him. A mix of shock, fear, and terrible comprehension. “Paul!” he called out. The oversized man looked up. “Clare’s gone to get her car. I’ll follow you to the airport.” Paul nodded, as if speech was too much of an effort right then.

One EMT had finished strapping Emil in and was jumping out of the back of the ambulance when Clare screeched in behind the wheel of her little white-and-red Shelby Cobra. She waved to Paul, who lumbered over and squeezed himself into the tiny passenger seat. The EMT slammed and sealed the door and dashed to the cab of the ambulance. It began moving before the cab door had swung shut.

Russ and the ambulance both kept their lights flashing all the way to the fire station. He couldn’t shake the image of Emil’s ground-meat face. They had never been more than professional friends—he had precious few real friends for someone who had come back to his hometown, Russ realized—but in the five years he had headed up the department, he had spent a lot of time with Emil Dvorak—in the ME’s office, at the hospital, in courthouse hallways. He thought about the pathologist’s razor-sharp wit, his orderly office, full of thick books and opera CDs, his addiction to Sunday-morning political debates. The damage to that fragile brain when Emil’s skull had been pounded again and again—bile rose in Russ’s throat, threatening to choke him. He followed the ambulance across the intersection and into the fire station’s parking lot. Lights blazed from the station bays, burnishing the garaged fire trucks and emergency vehicles, glittering off the blaze-reflective strips on the life-flight helicopter, which was hunkered down in the middle of the asphalt. Several firefighters stood inside their bays, watching. He followed Clare’s car to the farthest corner of the lot, where the firefighters’ cars were parked.

The life-flight team—a paramedic, a nurse, and a pilot—jogged over to the ambulance to help the EMTs off-load Emil on his spine board. Clare leaped from her driver’s seat and paused while Paul wriggled his way out of the passenger side. Russ joined them, a little apart from the medical team, which was carefully transferring Emil into the helicopter.

“Paul,” he said, “I wanted to ask you—what was Emil doing tonight?” One of the nurses hoisted the IV high as they smoothly lifted the board into the belly of the chopper. “Do you know where he was? Who he was with?”

Paul kept his gaze fixed on the figure disappearing into the helicopter. He rubbed his hands up and down, up and down along the seam of his shorts. “He had dinner with some friends of ours. Stephen Obrowski and Ron Handler. At their bed-and-breakfast, the Stuyvesant Inn. He was going to come straight home….” his voice trailed off.

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll be talking with them tomorrow. We’re going to get whoever did this.” Russ knew that was cold comfort when measured against Emil’s broken body in the helicopter. Paul looked at him, his eyes wide and red-rimmed.

“Paul,” Clare said, “it’s time. The pilot’s going to warm up the engines now.”

The pilot had been tying down straps by the door and didn’t look as if he was headed for the cockpit, but Clare was the one who had flown these monsters in the army, not Russ, so he walked with them to the open door. Sure enough, the pilot disappeared, and a second later, he heard the unpleasant whine of turbines kicking in.

Paul stepped forward. Stopped. “The dogs,” he said to Clare. “Did I ask you about taking care of the dogs?”

“You did.” She rubbed his arm. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll collect them and take them to the kennel. Don’t worry about them.”

“C’mon sir,” the paramedic said, jumping from the chopper. “Time to go.” He held out a helmet to Paul and helped the big man strap it on correctly, then pointed out the stepping bar and straps where Paul could climb up into an empty jump seat. The IV bag trembled where it hung from a hook in the ceiling and the flight suit–clad nurse bent over Emil to adjust something.

Paul turned toward Clare, his brown hair and beard sticking out improbably from beneath the helmet. “Clare,” he said too loudly, “I’ve never been one for religion, but Emil is Catholic…he was…”

Clare stepped close and spoke directly to his face, enabling Paul to see her lips moving, an aid to hearing inside the bulky helmet. “I’ll pray for him,” she said in a normal tone of voice. “I’ll pray for both of you.” She squeezed his hand. “Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to reach out to God the Comforter if you feel the urge. You can always go back to being an agnostic after Emil is well. I won’t tell on you.”

“Sir, we have to go!” The EMT beckoned Paul urgently. Paul hoisted himself into the belly of the chopper as Clare and Russ backed away. Above them, the rotors began to circle slowly, then faster and faster, until the hard-edged chop of the blades challenged the turbines’ whine. Clare stopped in front of the nose of the ambulance. The hair fallen from her knot danced in the updraft, strands the color of honey, caramel, and maple syrup. Russ was caught by the look on her face.

“You miss this, don’t you?” he yelled over the noise. She shrugged, never taking her eyes from the helicopter. He could feel the vibrations through the soles of his shoes. Looking inside the cockpit, he saw the outline of the pilot, dimmed and warped behind the reflective smoke-colored Plexiglas. The beat of the rotors increased to a sound he still heard sometimes in nightmares. And then the skids left the ground, bumped, rose, hovering half a foot off the parking lot, and the chopper was away, its fat insect body rising smoothly and improbably into the darkness over Glens Falls.

They both looked up into the sky. A freshening wind sprang up, and from the mountains Russ could hear a distant rumble. “Is it safe for them to fly with a storm coming on?” he asked her.

“Mmm. They’re headed south, in front of the leading edge. They’ll stay ahead of it with no problem.” Another gust sent a scrap of paper skittering across the asphalt. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“I hate helicopters,” he said.

She looked at him with surprise. Over her shoulder, there was a tapping from the ambulance windshield and the driver leaned out of his window. “Would you folks mind stepping out of the way? I’ve got to get back to the hospital. My shift’s just starting.”

Russ and Clare retreated to the parked cars. Russ waved as the ambulance pulled away.

“You hate helicopters, the machines, or you hate riding in them?” Clare asked, crossing her arms over her wilted black blouse.

“I don’t know. Both, I guess. I had a bad experience in one.” His brain caught up with his eyeballs. “Shit! I wanted to talk to the doctor! Scuse my french.”

“I was listening while he spoke with Paul. I think I got the gist of things. Dr. Dvorak has a lot of fractured ribs, a fractured skull, internal bleeding…. It sounds like someone kicked the crap out of him.” She glanced up at him. “Excuse my french. What happened to him? Why on earth would anyone try to murder the county’s pathologist?”

He shook his head. “That may be it right there. He’s been our medical examiner for ten years now. I don’t think he was ever involved in a capital case, but I’m sure he’s had a hand in sending lots of men to Comstock. Maybe he gave evidence against someone’s brother or buddy. Maybe someone he put away has been released without managing to rehabilitate himself into a model citizen.”

Clare glowered at him. “Don’t start in with that. If we made more services available to support prisoners—” She huffed and waved her hands. “Never mind. That scenario seems a little far-fetched. I mean, suppose you were this guy, just released and slavering for vengeance?”

“‘Slavering’?”

She ignored him. “Would you go after the medical examiner who gave some of the evidence first? Or would you go after the prosecuting attorney, or the arresting officers, or even your own attorney first?”

“Well, you know how I feel about lawyers. I’d definitely go for them first.” She whacked his arm. “No, I know. Point well taken. There’s another possibility. His car was in an accident, not bad enough to cause his injuries, but enough to give everyone involved a good smack. Maybe the other driver went ballistic. Cut loose on him.”

“Road rage run amok?”

“It happens.”

She worried her lower lip. “Could it have been personal? Someone he knew?”

He nodded. “In most assaults and homicides, the victim and the perpetrator know each other. That’s why I asked Paul about where Emil had been.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. There are too many possibilities right now. I don’t like that. The only thing we know for sure is that the vehicle he hit was red. We got some paint scraping on his left-front fender.”

“We know he wasn’t robbed.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“One of the nurses gave Paul Dr. Dvorak’s belongings—clothes and stuff. He had a very expensive watch and a wallet full of credit cards. Untouched.”

“I almost wish he had been robbed. We’re going to have some good prints off Emil’s car, but they’re not going to do us any good if whoever did this hasn’t been arrested before.” Thunder rumbled, closer and louder than before. He glanced up. Heavy clouds had moved in, their underbellies reflecting a faint sodium glow from the lights of Glens Falls. “Time to go. You can follow me back to Millers Kill if you need to.”

She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out her keys. “I need to.” He watched her get into that ridiculous mosquito of a car. Another impractical sports car, and a convertible to boot. He shook his head. She had slipped, slid, and stuck in her old MG last winter, finally wrecking the thing trying to drive through a snowstorm on Tenant’s Mountain. He had assumed that would have taught her to buy a sensible four-wheel-drive vehicle. He had assumed wrong.

As he climbed into his cruiser, it struck him that he didn’t feel like a hormonal teenager anymore. He felt…pleasant. Friendly. He had enjoyed Clare’s company without making an idiot of himself. He reached for the mike to let dispatch know his destination. He was going to work out this friendship thing after all.

Thursday morning, Clare woke early with the sound of helicopter rotors in her mind. She ran through the tree-lined streets of her neighborhood as the sun was rising, looping east to return along Route 117, parallel to Riverside Park and the abandoned nineteenth-century mills. A short run on Thursdays, so she could shower and be ready for the 7:00 A.M. weekday service of Morning Prayer. It was one of her favorites: cheerful and intimate, with the same five or six faces showing up regularly. Since the Memorial Day weekend a month back, the size of her Sunday-morning congregation had dropped like a stone through water. She was lucky if she saw thirty faces at the ten o’clock Eucharist. But she could rely on her Morning Prayer people, and no matter how much turmoil she brought with her, she always found her center in the orderly succession of prayers, psalms, and canticles.

Today, though, she was seized by the thought of Paul and Dr. Dvorak as she and her tiny congregation read the Second Song of Isaiah, the Quaerite Dominum. “Let the wicked forsake their ways and the evil ones their thoughts; And let them turn to the Lord, and He will have compassion….” Paul’s broken, lost expression. Dvorak’s still form at the eye of a whirlwind of activity. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.” She tried to imagine what would lead someone to stomp an unoffending man half to death. It seemed infinitely more vicious, more personally hateful than that American classic, murder by cheap gun. “So is my word that goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty….” Sometime during her once-a-week visits to the MillersKill infirmary, Paul had become her friend, one of the very few people in Millers Kill who didn’t look at her and stop when they got to her collar. A man who spent his days caring for the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. His world had collapsed in the space of a few minutes because of—what? Careless malice? Cool calculation? An explosion of anger? “But it will accomplish that which I have purposed, and prosper in that for which I sent it.” She wanted to know. She wanted to know why. And who. Was it a monster? She didn’t believe in monsters. She believed in redemption. But some days, it was awfully hard.

After the service, she checked the calendar. Two premarital counseling sessions today and another three next week. Whoever said Generation X was not interested in marriage hadn’t been looking in the Adirondack region. And the MacPherson-Engals wedding rehearsal Friday evening. She underlined that. She left a note for Lois, the church secretary, asking her to contact the organist, and another for the sexton, reminding him to unlock the door by eight o’clock Saturday morning to give the florist time to arrange the wedding flowers. Then she dashed back to the rectory next door and changed into an outfit that compromised between the weather and her customary clerical uniform: a long, loose-fitting shift in black linen, with a collar attached by hand.