Eden's Eyes (28 page)

She sat there in the padded booth, unable to look at her friend, the very bedrock of her mind shifting unstably, images of violent death haunting her memory.

Startling them both, a wino stumbled to a weaving halt in front of the restaurant window. Dried vomit stained the front of his jacket, an ancient seersucker, and his fly gaped open obscenely. He grinned a toothless grin, green eyes twinkling, then began mouthing something unintelligible, his gestures apologetic. Abruptly his features hardened, became furious, and he raised a fist as if to punch through the glass. Just as suddenly he was grinning again, shrugging and ambling away.

Karen rose to her feet. "Take me home," she said to Cass. "Please. . . "

Chapter 34

Jim hall had almost given up searching through Tommy Kelly's hospital chart when at cast the link revealed itself. There was a flimsy near the back, a third- or fourth-generation carbon copy which he'd already scanned twice. On it, just legible, was the donor's name.

Eden Crowell.

Thinking it familiar, he leafed balk to his notes on the Bleeker case, where, for the sake of completeness, he had jotted the donor's name. The connection struck him like a dropkick.

Both victims had received organs from the same donor.

Now he was on hold, waiting for the director of medical records at the hospital in Sudbury to come back on the line. While he waited, drumming his fingers impatiently, a theory took shape in his mind.

The killer was someone previously involved with the donor; it had to be. Some bizarre love thing, maybe. Someone who couldn't bear the thought of the guy being dead, or worse, his body divvied up and his parts farmed out to strangers. Psychotic fury trained full force on innocent victims, who, in the crazy's mind, were responsible for the donor's mutilation. . . and maybe even his death.

But ahead of a theory, what Jim needed now was an answer to a question, a reply upon which other lives might depend—and a means of bagging this sick sonofabitch might neatly present itself.

Over the phone, an effeminate male voice said: "Sergeant Hall?

"Yes!"

"The donor you named had four organs retrieved in this hospital: a heart, a kidney, and a pair of eyes."

"Were the eyes used?"

"Indeed they were," the director said proudly. "Those were the eyes used in the nation's first whole-eye transplant. You've probably seen her on TV. Her name is Karen Lockhart."

"Do you know which hospital her surgery was done in?"

Paper being shuffled. "The Civic, Sergeant. Where you're calling from."

He thanked the man and hung up, then hailed the woman who had brought him Kelly's chart. "I need another chart," he told her. "The name is Lockhart. Karen Lockhart."

Five minutes later he was calling Karen's home.

There was no answer.

Chapter 35

Cass, normally an aggressive driver, took the Queensway exit ramp at a crawl, giving way to an eighteen-wheeler before edging out onto the rural highway herself. Beside her Karen sat rigidly, eyes aimed out over the windswept fields. Reflected in the window glass, her face looked haggard and gray.

Against her will, the morning's events whirled in Cass's mind, defying her efforts to sort them into some definable order. How were you supposed to get your mind around something like this? It was fine in the movies. There you could munch popcorn in big nervous handfuls and clutch your date, maybe even let out a yelp or two over the especially grisly bits. But in the theater you knew the lights were going to come back up in an hour or two and erase the darkness. Then you would mosey back outside on sticky feet, and it would still be pissing rain or snowing or whatever it'd been doing when you paid your five bucks to enter that imaginary world in the first place. The concrete would support your weight, your car would carry you safely back home, and if your mood allowed it, your date might even jump your bones for a while. Outside of that theater, the world behaved as you expected it to. You were aware of its cruelties, understood its caprices, sought its rewards.

But now. . . what now? Watching Karen in the throes of whatever kind of dream or vision she'd been having had been like watching a victim of demonic possession, writhing a death dance at the whim of the beast. And then to actually find them loading that corpse into a body bag. . .

Overcome with sudden compassion, Cass reached over and touched Karen's hand. Karen seemed not to notice. . . and her hand was cold as marble.

Cass withdrew her hand and continued driving, trying and failing to slow the spin of her thoughts.

There were fields out there, farms and homesteads, trees and lakes and acres of flawless blue sky. . . and something had just brushed her hand.

Or had it? Was any of it real?

Karen felt her mind on the verge of a total disconnect, as if some mischievous child had got ahold of the main power cable and had coaxed out the prongs to within a fraction of letting go. But the horror of the dreams, multiplied a thousandfold by the fact of their truth, remained punishingly close to the surface, each blink of her eyes buffing away the dust of one world to reveal the hideous luster of another.

Biting back tears, Karen dug the fingers of her right hand into the flesh of her opposite wrist. The power to make sense of the world seemed to have fully abandoned her. In its place a kind of free-floating dread had been moored, a sense that with the gaining of sight, some irrevocable step had been taken. A step into a new realm of darkness.

She closed her eyes and saw that meaty red lump in her hand, the thing she had torn from the dead man's chest.

Chapter 36

A half hour ahead of Karen and Cass, Jim Hall swung off the main highway onto the Twelfth Line. Behind him, a dust plume boiled into the dry summer air.

Failing to raise Karen by telephone; Jim had leafed again through her chart and found her father's number, recorded under Number to Call in Case of Emergency. To Jim's annoyance there had been no answer there either, and, he had left the hospital to return to the station. There he had filled in his partner on the latest developments, while at the same time outlining his theory on the killer's probable link with the donor.

Then, in response to an urgent summons, they had gone together to the office of the chief, who came down on them with both feet.

"We need an arrest on this one, Jim. And fast."

Shifting like a caged bear in the space behind his desk, Chief of Detectives Lyle Cumberland puffed on his well-chewed cigar. Stout and deceptively dull looking, Cumberland was widely known for his almost maudlin civic pride. Ottawa, with its oak-shaded avenues and winding canals, was the chief's first love. And anything which jeopardized the safe as-your-living-room-status of its streets, Cumberland made his foremost concern.

"This city is not accustomed to violent crime," he lectured. "There's no room for it here." He looked from Jim to Don with eyes made large by bottle-thick glasses. "We've had two mutilations in two nights, gentlemen. Not just murders but mutilations! And it's just a matter of time until the press links the two of them. . . if they haven't already.

"And when that happens we've got a panic on our hands." Crimson rose in the big man's cheeks like mercury held over fire. "The flack is already coming down. I just got off the phone with the mayor. The mayor, gentlemen.

"So do whatever you have to. But nail this bastard's ass."

Jim hadn't needed the lecture, but neither had he allowed it to irk him. He understood Cumberland's point of view, not to mention his outrage and shock; copies of the forensic photos had laid strewn across his desk. In a city where the homicide statistics were among the lowest in the nation, two slayings in as many nights constituted an epidemic. The pressure to make an arrest narrowed Jim's options—and it shifted his priorities, too. His initial plan had been to take the Lockhart girl into protective custody, then try to eel up on his man from behind, learning as much as he could by investigating the donor. That, he felt certain, was where the answer lay, somewhere in the folds of a dead man's past. But now, with the girl's safety no longer uppermost on his list of concerns, Jim's only course was to use her as bait. Leave her at her home with twenty-four-hour police protection, hoping to nab the bastard when he made his move. As a procedural scheme it was infinitely more risky but was much more likely to end in results. They'd have their killer. Whether or not the bait would survive was another matter entirely.

Back in his office, Jim tried both numbers again. Again there was no reply. Handing the numbers to his secretary, he settled in with Don to discuss the detective's duties in the hours to come. Before they could finish, the intercom buzzed and Jim's secretary informed him that she had Mr. Lockhart on the line.

That had been just under an hour ago.

Now, glancing again at the directions Albert had given him, Jim swung left toward Karen's place. He barely glanced at the Dolans’ dirty-white clapboard as he roared by.

A half hour later, Cass's Camaro pulled to a stop behind Jim's dust-filmed sedan. Ahead of the sedan, baking in the sun, stood Albert's truck. Curious, Cass urged Karen out of the car, then cradled her shoulders as they crossed the yard and mounted the porch steps together.

Looking old and unsteady, Albert met them at the door.

"There's a policeman inside," he started to explain. Then he saw the look of his daughter.

"My Lord," he said touching her cheek. "What in heaven's name happened ya?"

Chapter 37

Upon seeing Karen, shuffling like a much wilder woman into the room where Jim Hall stood waiting, an errant detail slotted into place with an almost audible clunk in the detective's mind.

He had seen this woman before. . . but not just on TV and magazine covers. She had been at the murder scene this morning, gaping in from the street.

The question was: why?

"Karen," Albert said to his daughter, whose expression was eerily trancelike. "This is Sergeant Hall. He's a detective, honey, and he's come here to. . . talk to you." Jim had already explained the situation to Albert, and the farmer was still in shock.

If Karen comprehended her father's words, she gave no sign. She sat like one of her mother's dolls between Cass and Albert on the couch, staring with filmed-over eyes at the detective. Regarding her, Jim was reminded of Mary Bleeker; propped like a zombie in her hospital bed, her mind ripped out and discarded in the doorway of her little girl's bedroom.
      

Then Karen's face cleared, the light of awareness a dim flicker in the pits of her eyes. "What is it you want to tell me?" she said in a voice like a child's.

How much do you already know? was Jim's unspoken reply.

But he said: "What I have to tell you is not going to be easy, Miss Lockhart. . . We have reason to believe that your life is in danger."

Karen's expression grew taut with anticipation—and something else, Jim thought. Was it foreknowledge? The shock of worst fears confirmed? Whatever it was, her friend shared the same look.

"In the past two nights there have been two murders in Ottawa—"

Unable to help herself, Cass groaned as if kicked. "How does that involve Karen?" she blurted trying to cover her reaction. . . and wishing she could clap her hands over her ears to block out the answer.

"Both victims were organ recipients, Miss Fields," Jim replied, glad for an excuse to shift his gaze from Karen's haunted eyes. "In both cases, the cause of death was the removal of the transplanted organ."

Cass turned green.

"And both victims had the same donor." He looked back at Karen. "The same donor as you. That's why we think—"

But that was all he managed to say.

Across from him Karen's body grew stiff. Her eyes flipped back and her breathing rate trebled, becoming a hiss between her savagely clenched teeth.

And in the deepest reaches of her mind something reared up from a bed of back mud, an awareness so terrible that to acknowledge it in the light of her conscious mind would surely mean her destruction. It rose and rose from the wired depths, still shapeless, yet no less lethal for its lack of a face. The sheer impact of the detective's words had torn a hole through the floor of her mind, and now the offspring of that rancid sub-basement lunged deliberately up toward it. Fearful of witnessing its face, Karen fought to repair that rent, stuffing it with fragments of thought themselves barely sane.

And as that last black inch was finally filled, she glimpsed the thing that killed in her dreams. . .

Then it was gone from sight.

But it remained there beneath the floorboards, pounding crazily, the sound of its blows like cannon fire.

Jim got to his feet, feeling like he'd just been tossed from the ring by a seasoned pro. Confusion ran loose in his mind, making a shambles of its methodical workings. He'd expected the girl's reaction to be bad. . . but a grand mal seizure? A doctor he wasn't, but the brief fit the girl had taken had struck him as decidedly pathological.

It was time to talk to the friend. Whatever Karen knew, the friend knew it too.

"Miss Fields."

Cass looked up from Karen's limp body, cradled now across Albert's lap. Under her father's gentle touch, she had twitched her way off into an exhausted sleep.

"Yes?" Cass said.

"I'd like to speak with you, please. Outside."

Afraid and uncertain, Cass looked to Albert.

"Go ahead," he told her. "She'll be fine here with me."

Hefting a yoke of reluctance, Cass followed the detective out to the porch. The sun, nearing its zenith, beat down in fiery earnest, baking the yard and its small fleet of vehicles. Jim gazed at Cass's orange Camaro a full minute before angling around to face her. She looked wan in the shade of the porch.

"What were you, two doing at the murder scene this morning?" he said, his voice laced with just enough accusation to catch Cass off guard.

His abruptness worked.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Cass said before she could, stop herself.