Mania (18 page)

It was nearly five by the time Nick pulled his old Toyota to a stop in front of the high-rise Federal Building where the Washington state EPA had its local offices. The sky had begun to darken. Except for a few homeless people guarding a couple of shopping carts covered with black plastic garbage bags, the brick plaza in front was deserted. Nick switched off the engine, then craned forward to look up at the building. One or two lights burned high inside the 1950s tower, and the lobby at the base of the building glowed slightly orange. This late on a Sunday afternoon, though, the building was otherwise dark.

Nick raised a hand to his face, rubbing his mouth and his cheeks and his temples with his fingers, trying to fight the strange dizziness overtaking him. He became aware of the smell of Sara still on his fingers. He closed his eyes, transported back to their bedroom in a confused blur, almost as if he were being pulled through a wild, twisting tunnel on the spine of a roller coaster. She had pinned him to the bed. Angrily, he thought.
Pull my hair. Damn you, Nick.
Viciously.
Choke me.
Savagely. She had held him down by his shoulders. Dug her fingers into his throat. Her thighs had cut into his hips as she had pulled herself down on top of him.
Hit me.

Nick opened his eyes.

Fifteen minutes had disappeared somehow since he had parked his car. Fifteen minutes. Where had the time gone? Van Gundy was waiting for him upstairs in his office on the thirtieth floor. Nick couldn’t afford to be late. He didn’t want to screw this up. He didn’t just want to take Hamlin down. He wanted to destroy him.

I don’t want to hurt you.

Slap me. Damn you, Nick. Hit me.

Nick squeezed his fingers into his eyes and rubbed his forehead, then at last pulled the latch on the door. After leaving Daly’s house that morning, he had stopped to print copies of the photographs, and he lifted them off the seat next to him and climbed the stepped brick plaza. A homeless man followed Nick’s progress through the dark, wet shadows. Halfway up, Nick briefly locked eyes with the man.

The guard didn’t look up when Nick entered the lobby. He headed straight for the elevator bank servicing the thirtieth floor and stepped into a waiting elevator. The doors slid closed behind him, and seconds later the cab began its quick ascent three hundred feet above the plaza.

Across town on the edge of Lake Washington, inside the men’s locker room at the Bellevue Tennis and Polo Club, Jason Hamlin and William Gutterson were lounging in heavy armchairs in front of a muted sixty-inch flat-panel plasma TV, thick towels pulled around their waists and draped over their shoulders. Having just finished a few games of squash, they were alone in the locker room. Except for the high-pitched trickle of a running faucet in the shower and the nearly inaudible hum of the central heating, the place was hushed, nearly silent.

Gutterson’s head was propped against the plush fabric of his chair, his eyes closed. Hamlin was studying the older man. The police chief’s body sickened him. The way his towel cut into his soft stomach. The pockets of fat that formed flabby breasts sagging to the sides of his torso. The long wet hair plastered to his chest. Even the pallid color of his skin.

Gutterson opened his eyes, as if he was aware of Hamlin’s scrutiny. “You’ve got to understand,” the police chief said, picking up their conversation. “I’ve been behind my desk for the last twenty years. I’m not as young as I used to be. I’m sixty-seven years old, for God’s sake. It’s time for me to step down.”

The news of the police chief’s imminent departure didn’t come as a surprise to Hamlin. Nevertheless, he was puzzled by the timing. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said.

Gutterson eyed him. He didn’t trust Hamlin any more than Hamlin trusted him. The last thing he wanted was to show weakness. What the hell, though? Hamlin would know soon enough. Her hair would begin falling out. They wouldn’t be able to hide it any longer. “Martha’s got cancer,” he said.

Hamlin turned the situation over coldly in his mind. “There are different types of cancer,” he said, speaking the words without the slightest trace of sympathy. “These days the survivability rate is pretty good.”

Gutterson looked away from the businessman. “This is pretty serious, Jason.” He was thinking about how white his wife’s skin had become. “The doctors say it started in her pancreas. Now I don’t know.” Two months ago they had been planning a trip onboard a cruise ship traveling from Los Angeles to Singapore. The disease had taken them by surprise. Their lives had been thrown upside down practically overnight.

Hamlin took the information in.

“It’s good that you know. We’ve been friends for years now, Jason. You should know this before everyone else. I’m not sure. I think I may take her down to Mexico.” The night before, he had held Martha’s hand while she had vomited her guts into the toilet. She had been so violently sick that she had soiled her pants, and Gutterson had had to clean her up before putting her into bed. “They say there are some practitioners down there who’ve had success with experimental treatments. I thought maybe I’d try. We thought maybe—” Gutterson didn’t finish his thought.

Hamlin scrutinized the older man. Until this moment he had never understood how much the police chief loved his wife. He considered whether there might be any value in the knowledge.

“So that kind of begs the issue between us, doesn’t it, Jason?”

Hamlin pursed his lips, ignoring his question. “Who’s going to replace you, Bill? Any idea yet?”

“My guess is it’s going to be Dombrowski,” the old man answered. “You might want to give him a call.”

“Dombrowski,” Hamlin repeated. “Over in Homicide, isn’t he?”

“He’s not a bad guy.”

“So I hear,” Hamlin said. “A straight shooter, by all accounts.”

“I’ll sit him down before I’m gone. Have a little talk with him.”

“When’s this going down?”

“Hmmm? I don’t know. Soon. A week? Two on the outside. I’ll let the mayor know first and assess the situation with him. I’m sorry to leave him in the lurch. But I’m halfway out the door already. This won’t wait. I can hear the clock ticking.”

Hamlin narrowed his eyes, sucking his lips against his teeth.

Gutterson felt uncomfortable, caught in the man’s predatory stare. “So what about it, Jason?” He glanced down the length of the locker room. “The time has come for our reckoning, you know what I mean?”

Hamlin understood the demand. “Relax, Bill. All I do is give you a few numbers to memorize, and the matter will be taken care of. You can stop in the Caymans on your way back from Mexico. I don’t know why you think you even have to ask. You know I’m a man of my word.”

Gutterson settled into his chair, once again leaning his head back and closing his eyes. “I’m glad,” he said. “It would be pretty bad for both of us if you weren’t.”

The elevator cab was getting smaller. The fluorescent light was getting brighter. The walls were closing in. The squeal of the elevator running along its vertical tracks at high speed had crescendoed from a whisper into a loud scream, and Nick wasn’t certain anymore whether he was climbing or dropping in a free fall. He raised a hand to his forehead. When he brought it away, his fingers were drenched with liquid. He stared at his hand, certain that his fingers were streaked red with blood rather than sweat.

When the elevator came shuddering to a stop on the thirtieth floor, Nick staggered from it drunkenly, trying on uncertain feet to make a straight line down the hallway. The walls were flying toward him from either side. Not more than ten steps down the corridor he reeled, fell to his knees, then hit the floor facedown. He realized he was bleeding. A small red pool was spreading underneath him. He closed his eyes, trying to remember what he was doing there, trying to figure out how he had banged his head. Confused, his mind was filled with an image of a man he didn’t know. A stout man with a bushy mustache whom he didn’t recognize. A scared and angry man who didn’t mean anything to him. Nick’s face was pressed against the floor. He wanted to scream. Then he descended into blackness.

Sometime after eight
P.M.
Nick regained consciousness. Three hours had passed. He raised his head, expecting to find himself in the corridor on the thirtieth floor where he had fallen. The light was too bright, though, and he wasn’t able to make immediate sense of his surroundings. The walls glistened with a cheap fluorescent glow. The floor was slick beneath his hands, painted white. His clothes rustled as he pushed himself up, echoing as though he were inside a concrete chamber. Stairs rose next to him. His gaze traveled up the wall until he found a stenciled black sign. He had no idea how he had gotten there, but he had collapsed inside the Federal Building’s fire stairwell, between the twenty-sixth and the twenty-seventh floors.

Nick was dizzy, but the floor wasn’t reeling anymore, and he was able to stand. He took hold of the steel railing, and, clasping the manila folder containing copies of his photographs in his free hand, he pulled himself onto his feet. Breathing hard after climbing the stairs back to the thirtieth floor, he paused in the air lock on the landing to catch his breath, then pulled open the door. The corridor was empty. He stopped, listening. Except for the hum of an elevator accelerating up its shaft, the building was silent. He found his cell phone in his back pocket and looked at the time. 8:13. Van Gundy would be long gone by now, he figured. Strangely, though, Nick’s phone hadn’t registered any calls from him. Why hadn’t Van Gundy tried to reach him when he didn’t show for their appointment? Nick had given him his number when they spoke on the phone. Van Gundy had demanded it. Making his way down the corridor, Nick raised his eyes, looking for Suite 3015.

Ralph Van Gundy’s name was spelled on the thick oak door in polished brass letters that seemed to glitter in the light. Nick was reaching toward the heavy doorknob before he realized that the door was already ajar. He opened his mouth to speak Van Gundy’s name, then instinctively realized it would be a waste of breath. He pushed the door open with his knuckles.

The wooden floor creaked underneath him as he entered the office. He stepped onto the thick wool rug to muffle his footsteps, then crossed the swankily furnished reception room to Van Gundy’s private office. Once again the door was ajar.

Nick’s jaw clenched. Van Gundy’s corpse, facedown in a pool of coagulating blood, lay on the other side of the doorway, a stiff leg blocking the full swing of the door.

Nick examined the body long enough to confirm that Van Gundy, like the other victims, had been stabbed to death. Then he turned and began retracing his steps. His heart nearly stopped when, halfway across the suite, the phone on the secretary’s desk rang. He knew without reflection that the person on the other end was Van Gundy’s wife, wondering where her husband was. And he knew that she would already have called the police and it wouldn’t be long before someone sent the security guard from the lobby up to investigate.

It was only when Nick was taking hold of his shirttail to grab the handle on the door leading back into the fire stairs that he remembered having come this way before. He reached up to his forehead, shuddering at the touch of the crusty dried blood he found there, then pushed the door open and hurried down the stairs, taking them as quickly as he could.

Nick was alone in his apartment at ten-thirty when the first report of the homicide was broadcast on the news. Sara was out with friends. She would be home, she had said, by eleven.

A pall has fallen over the city of Seattle tonight in the wake of yet another senseless, unprovoked attack by a homeless man this evening.

Nick recognized the Channel 11 reporter’s voice before he saw an image of her face on the TV screen. A few seconds later, Sheila’s heavily made-up face hovered above his bed, relating the details of another homicide with deceptive authority.

This is the first such attack since the police announced the arrest of the so-called Street Butcher, Jackson Ferry. Ferry is believed to be responsible for the brutal slaying of Samuel Wilder, a successful bioengineer working for Matrix Zarcon. The police also believe that Ferry may have been responsible for the murder of another homeless man known simply as Dickenson, as well as the homicides of Claire and Daniel Scott. Until Ferry’s arrest last week, Seattle was gripped by fear that yet another serial killer was walking our streets. Police thought Jackson Ferry’s arrest put an end to that. But no more.

The body of Ralph Van Gundy was found tonight in his office in the Federal Building downtown after he failed to return home. As in the case of the other homicide victims, he had been stabbed in the chest multiple times. There is some good news tonight, though. Police credit the work of Detective Adam Stolie, who cordoned off Federal Plaza immediately upon discovery of the murder, for the capture of the alleged perpetrator of the crime. The Seattle PD found the murder weapon on the person of a homeless man camped in the plaza, as well as blood on his clothing. The Federal Building is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, manned by a private security company. Police are investigating how it could be possible to enter the building without the notice of the security guard stationed in the lobby.

Nick switched off the TV to answer his cell phone.

“Did you see the news?” Daly didn’t stop to identify herself. “Van Gundy’s been stabbed.”

“I know,” Nick said. “I was there.”

Daly registered the information. “You went to see him as we planned, Nick?”

“This afternoon,” Nick confirmed. “This evening,” he said, correcting himself, remembering the time. “He was dead when I got there.”

“Jesus.” Daly connected the dots. “I’m not sure I understand, Nick. If he was dead, why didn’t you call the police?”

“I don’t know.” Nick clenched the phone. He didn’t want to tell the editor about his blackout. “I got scared. I ran.”

“Jesus,” Daly said again. The editor understood the severity of the situation. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Sam. Daniel Scott. The other murders.” She didn’t remark that they were all somehow connected to Nick. She didn’t have to.