Deficiency (6 page)

"I was hoping she had said something to you. No matter how insignificant it might seem, it could be important," he emphasized.

"No, as I said, she was too far gone to speak. She didn't know where she was anymore."

Terri looked up at him.

"How was she discovered? In the state she was in when I saw her, I can't imagine her even calling out for help."

"The manager was walking by her room and noticed the door was wide open. When he looked in, she was sprawled on the floor. What about the nurse at the ER or the paramedics… did any of them hear her say anything?"

"Not that I know," she replied and wondered why he didn't just go directly to them.

He anticipated the question.

"I'm just getting into this. I haven't even had an opportunity to speak with her parents yet."

She nodded, imagining how hard that was going to be now.

"It's never easy to understand the death of a child, but something like this especially so. This sort of acute scurvy would have revealed itself through symptoms far earlier. Her parents were here this morning," Terri continued. "Understandably, they don't believe the cause of death was scurvy. I can't believe it myself, or can Dr. Templeman, but the medical evidence is quite convincing.

"I can't believe that whoever brought her to the motel would not have noticed something," Terri continued. "To begin with her teeth… she would have had bleeding in her mouth, black and blue marks… been tired…. Who would do such a thing, bring a woman that sick to a motel or keep her there once he saw that? Why not get her to a hospital? The therapy was simple and would have saved her life."

"I know. That's what I'd like to know."

"If someone kept a person from getting life-saving medical attention, he would as much as murdered her," Terri concluded.

"Exactly."

"Oh. I see why you would be investigating," she said nodding. "As I understand it, she looked well the day before. At least, that's what her parents say." Terri shook her head. "Everything I know about the disease would make that impossible. The whole thing seems impossible. I can't think of any medical explanation for a practically instantaneous case of acute scurvy. People don't develop something like that overnight, even if they neglect vitamin C for days."

"Maybe drugs caused it," he suggested.

"Haven't you seen a copy of the autopsy report?" she asked.

"Oh yes, but I just wondered. Maybe they missed something," he said quickly.

"There are many drugs that deplete vitamins, but nothing would work this fast and everything I know would show up in an analysis. I'm not going to pass myself off as any world-renowned expert on the subject, however. I'm just a family physician, you understand."

"Of course," he said smiling, "but I can appreciate your frustration."

"I mean her parents told me that she was an exercise fanatic. What can I say? It's a real medical mystery. You don't have any other situations like this, do you?" she asked.

"I don't know yet. I'll have to contact the FBI. I hope not," he said.

"Oh, I would have thought you would have done that already," she said.

"Not enough time. This is my first case on a new position and I get this," he said smirking.

"Oh?"

"I moved out of New York City because my wife wanted a quieter, safer environment for our children."

"How old are they?"

"We don't have any yet," he replied, "but my wife's pregnant."

"Do you live here?"

"No. We moved to the Albany area, a small community just outside the city. It's actually more rural than I had expected, but we like the stressless life, a world without all this urban turmoil."

"Normally this is a safe place to live," Terri said. "I grew up here."

"Really? And you returned to practice medicine here. I guess you do like it."

She smiled.

"My fianc� lives here. He has a successful law practice."

"Oh." He looked impressed.

She thought a moment.

"You're absolutely sure no one noticed anything unusual about her at the club?" Terri asked, still struggling with the effort to understand and free herself of this terrible frustration.

"The bartender claims she was dancing up a storm."

Terri shook her head.

"That would just seem to be impossible. I wish I could tell you something that would clear it all up, but I'm more confused than anyone right now."

"I understand. Well, Doctor, thank you," Kent said rising. "I'm certain we'll reach some satisfactory conclusion."

"Well," she said, "nothing is for certain in this world, but people don't die like this."

"No," he said, "they don't."

He said it as if he knew just as much about medicine as she did. He nodded, thanked her again, and left.

She turned slowly and saw Elaine Wolf seated behind the counter. Of course, she had been listening in. Only now she looked sorry about her curiosity. Her eyes were filled with terror.

It gave Terri a chill that she knew she wouldn't shake off until she had made herself a cocktail at home.

He hadn't slept late this morning because he was fully energized and his every sense was heightened, sharp and clear. Maybe he imagined it, but he thought he had been able to hear the movement of the birds on the branches, their tiny steps on the thin twigs of the birch trees just outside the motel window. All he had to do was concentrate and he homed in so quickly and completely, it was as if he were right beside the birds, his ear against the twig.

When he had opened his eyes and focused on the opening in the window curtains, he had caught sight of a small cloud in the distance, and like a telephoto lens, his eyes had brought the cloud closer, so much closer in fact, that he had felt himself drifting into it the way an airplane drifted through clouds.

Then he had thrown back his covers, inhaled deeply, and recognized that he still carried the scent of the woman he had fed upon the night before. Everything about her stuck to him, was in his very skin: the perfume she wore and the scent in her shampoo, especially, and when he had combined that with the memory of how she had tasted, how delicious had been the inside of her mouth, her juices, he sighed and stretched like a newborn baby.

How wonderful it had been to be able to feed on one so healthy, with blood so rich. The memory had stimulated him and had filled him with every kind of natural hunger. Today, he had eaten normally and he now recalled how the thought of bacon and eggs, soft rolls and butter, and steaming hot coffee had made his stomach churn in such anticipation that he had been unable to linger a moment longer in that bed.

He had also wanted to jog, to feel his muscles expand and his heart pound. And he had wished he had another woman beside him to make love to normally. He would take no more from her than he would give to her.

"I promise," he had said aloud, as if there had been a skeptical woman beside him.

Then he had risen from his bed feeling a foot taller as usual and had put on his exercise clothes. When he had first driven into this town, he had noticed the nice park with the jogging track circling it. Faces and names drifted in and out of his memory like leaves carried in the wind. For a moment they were there, and then they were gone and he couldn't recall them no matter how hard he tried or how much he wanted to remember. Yet incidental things, like the park, lingered long enough for him to recall them precisely. Why this would be so, he did not know, but he rarely questioned it. He rarely questioned anything about his life even though he understood he was different from every other human being around him.

He had stepped out of his new motel room and looked about with interest. Because he had come here so late, he had really seen it for the first time this morning — the scenery, the parking lot, the office, and the pool. He had arrived here in the dark, tired, but fulfilled and eager to pass into a restful sleep. But when he had stepped out and inhaled the clear, cool air, all of his systems went into full gear and he quickly became the wonderful and efficient machine he always knew he was capable of being.

In the park he had appeared to be just another one of them: rosy cheeks, heart pumping, legs moving in stride, his lungs expanding, his blood moving efficiently through his veins bringing oxygen, taking away waste. Of course, he wasn't really just another one of them. They didn't have his capacities and they couldn't reach his sensual heights.

Yet, they would never notice any difference simply by looking at him. If they could, they would be frightened away and he would die of starvation, age instantly.

He didn't know why all this was so and at the moment, he didn't care to think about it. What was important was he knew what things he was supposed to say when he went out on a hunt, and he knew where to go for whatever he wanted; but unlike everyone he met, he had no photographs of family, no relatives to talk to. If they pressed him, he made it up — invented parents and brothers and sisters. Actually, he drew from his victims.

Lately, much of it was getting jumbled and that worried him a bit. Was he really remembering his own past, or was he dipping into the well of identities he had absorbed in one way or another? One day it occurred to him that he might not exist at all, not in the sense anything else existed. He really had no personal identity. He was a conglomeration, a union of a myriad of DNAs. His body was so infused with the essence of his victims, their corpuscles, their genetics, that maybe he was merely the sum total of his prey. In an ironic sense, they had absorbed him; they had seized and possessed him and not vice versa. He was nothing without them.

Because of this he resented them in the same way an addict might resent the substance of his addiction. He couldn't deny the need, nor could he stop himself from seeking it, but he despised it at the same time.

What would he do if he didn't have the need? In what direction would he go? As it was, his periodic hunger controlled and governed his every move. It provided all his ambition for him and created the subjects and natures of his dreams. In his mind there was an overall design, a road map only he could see and follow. It had brought him here, to this place, these mountains in upstate New York.

If anything amazed him about himself, it was that instinctive knowledge of direction, that power, that force that literally took hold of his hands and arms and made him turn the steering wheel to the right or to the left. Sometimes, he thought he saw a red line before him leading the way, even in broad daylight. It disappeared as he drove over it. At night, it glowed with neon brightness, the light thumping, thumping, thumping behind his eyes. He was hypnotized by his destiny, mesmerized by the predetermined design set forth by some magical power. He reacted and acted on stimuli in a precise, given way each and every time.

Now, as hard as he tried, he couldn't even remember when he had first come here or how he had gotten here. Things just seemed to happen. Something had triggered him to leave where he was. He was being chased, and he had packed up and come here. It was the closest thing to fear he felt, this sense of being pursued. Something was out there that would do him harm and he had to make distance between it and himself whenever he could. It bothered him that he couldn't identify it specifically, but he blamed that on his difficulty to tap into his own history. He was truly an amnesiac.

Vaguely he understood that he had done many different things during his short but rich life. However, as soon as he had done them, he had put them into some dark closet in his mind. Whatever was necessary to do was done. It was as simple and as worry-free as that. In fact, he never once thought himself unlucky or freakish. He mourned no one, loved no one, suffered no anxiety except the anxiety that accompanied his hunger, for there was always the fear that he would not find suitable prey. However, he had come to recognize this as a natural thing, something to help drive him forward and be successful. If he were too nonchalant about his need, he would fail, and he could fail only once.

Again, that was something he knew instinctively. No one taught him. There was no mother, no father, no sister or brother beside him to advise him. When he bothered to think of all this, he wondered why not, but after a short while, he would forget why it mattered and stop wondering. There was too much to do, too much to enjoy. Just like it had been this morning.

How sweet the air had been, how bright the day. He had gone through his stretching exercises quickly in the parking lot at the park. Who could deny that he wasn't the paragon of all creatures, a higher form of life? Look at his face, as young and handsome as it was from the day he was created. And aside from the agony he experienced when his hunger came, he had never had a sick day or a bodily pain, at least none that he could recall. Why, he had never even experienced the common cold. There were no medicines in his bags, not even aspirin. That was significant in and of itself, wasn't it?

When he looked at himself in a mirror, he could see that he had never had a
cavity in his teeth. Of course, he couldn't recall ever having seen a doctor or
a dentist, so he assumed he was just as he was created, perfect, complete, the epitome of life itself. And it made him proud. He showed it whenever he ran, his head high, his chest out, his arms perpendicular to the ground, pumping the air as he took his stride, his feet gliding over the turf, a veritable Mercury sailing through the parks wherever he was, his eyes bright and fixed on the way before him. He always sensed that other joggers were looking at him enviously as he passed them so swiftly and with such ease.

He wanted them to look at him. He understood that vanity had always been a part of whom and what he was, for what was more a proof of his love of life than his love of himself? It was the nature of an organism to be self-centered, to spend its life searching for ways to satisfy its needs and keep itself healthy and alive. Animals that worked for other animals had shorter life spans.

This realization came to him one day when he stopped in a meadow and watched bees working around a hive. The individual sacrificed itself for the good of the whole. But what was its reward? It didn't live to see or to enjoy the fruits of its labor.