Night-World (17 page)

He glanced at his watch. “I should be calling in soon,” he said. “Maybe they’ve found your husband.”

“Or the murderer,” Karen said.

“You’re a very loyal woman, aren’t you, Mrs. Raymond?”

“Loyalty has nothing to do with it.” Karen recognized the defensive note in her voice. “According to the law, a man is presumed innocent until he’s proven guilty.”

Frank Gordon sighed. “Let’s lay it on the line, Mrs. Raymond. You’re trying to protect one man because you believe—or say you believe—he might be innocent. What about all the others, the victims who died? We
know
they were innocent, but who protected them?”

Karen shook her head. “I still say Bruce had no motive. Why should he kill anyone to get out of the sanatorium when they were going to release him anyway?”

“Because he didn’t know he was going to be released.” Gordon watched her face as he spoke. “That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

You bastard,
Karen thought. Lieutenant Barringer didn’t guess, that police psychiatrist didn’t find out, but
you
had to come up with it.
Yes, that’s the truth.

Gordon wasn’t waiting for an answer. Maybe he didn’t need an answer, maybe he read it in her face. “I can understand a wife’s desire to save her husband. But you’ve got to understand our position, too. It’s the job of the police to safeguard the citizens, and so far we’ve failed. Now we’ve got to think of the future. The man we suspect of those murders is still at large. And unless we can find him, quickly, we have every reason to believe others will die. Other innocent people.”

“But my husband isn’t the only one,” Karen said. “There’s another missing patient—Edmund Cromer.”

“Who?” Gordon was sitting upright now. “Why didn’t you give me that name before?”

“Because Bruce was going to tell Doyle.” Karen’s voice faltered. “Then, after what happened, I had no chance to—”

“Suppose you tell me now.”

“Yes.” And she did.

Gordon watched her, nodding from time to time as she repeated what Bruce had told her. His expression was noncommittal—the blank, official look—but he waited until she finished before he spoke.

“That’s it?” he said.

“Yes. At least, that’s all I can remember.”

“No description?”

“He intended to give that information to Doyle—”

“So he said.” Gordon’s voice was flat.

“Don’t you believe—”

“That your husband told you those things?” Gordon nodded. “The question is—why?”

“Because he wanted to identify the murderer.”

“Or because he knew it was one way to lure Doyle to the roof and dispose of him. Then he could feel perfectly safe in coming after you.”

“But he didn’t—”

“Only because there was a second man on duty in the hall below, a man he hadn’t known about. Seeing him must have scared your husband off.”

“That still doesn’t affect what he said about Cromer,” Karen said.

“Let’s think it over.” Gordon spoke slowly. “Your husband implicated another patient in the murders. But did he offer anything tangible, anything that could be checked out as proof? What assurance is there he was telling you the truth? How can you even be sure that the other patient’s name is Cromer?”

Karen didn’t reply. Because, from somewhere inside, she heard the echo of Bruce’s voice answering for her. Standing up there on the roof with that grim smile, and saying,
Maybe there is no Edmund Cromer. Maybe I made the whole thing up.

The inner echo faded. The room began to blur, and it was only the quick touch of Gordon’s hand on hers that restored reality. “Mrs. Raymond—”

Reality. This hand, this voice. It was time to stop listening to lies, time to stop lying to herself. Karen blinked, opened her eyes wide.

“Better now?” Frank Gordon released her hand.

Karen nodded.

“One thing is certain. There is another patient. We’ll have to check out the name now, try to find him. But you’ve got to prepare yourself for the possibility that he’s totally innocent. And if so, it’s highly probable that he’s no longer alive.”

Gordon spoke softly, but there was no denying the force of his logic. Denial was no longer possible.

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me earlier,” he said. “And there’s something that doesn’t seem consistent.”

“Consistent?”

“These killings are methodical, you know. Granted that the person responsible is considered clinically unbalanced, there’s evidence of a high order of intelligence at work here. These are not the usual crimes of impulse or passion. We’re faced with someone who is intent on killing anyone who can identify him. Which brings us to you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If your husband is responsible for what’s happened, why would he consider you a threat to his safety? You’ve already identified him as an inmate of the sanatorium. Eliminating you now won’t alter your testimony.”

Karen took a deep breath. Maybe there was a reprieve, perhaps denial was still possible after all. “That’s what I told them,” she said. “Lieutenant Barringer and the others. He has no reason to harm me.” Saying it again, she could half-believe it herself. “You’re right, there’s an inconsistency.”

“A
seeming
inconsistency, I said.” Gordon’s voice was still soft, but she heard it all too clearly. “So there has to be another reason. Eliminating you won’t alter your testimony. But it would prevent you from ever being able to alter it yourself.”

His eyes were level with hers, and there was no reprieve in them after all. “Mrs. Raymond—why did your husband commit himself to the sanatorium?”

No reprieve, no denial. Too many had died, and who could say where it would stop unless she stopped it?

“We had a quarrel.” The words came quickly now, it was like vomiting up something ugly, something which had to come out. “I told him he hadn’t been acting like himself, not since he came back, and that he needed help. I told him I wanted him to see a doctor.”

“What was his response?”

“He said he’d think it over. And then he quieted down. Did I want to go for a drive, he asked. So we did, and neither of us talked about it anymore. It was as though bringing it out in the open had somehow relieved us both, and I remembered thinking maybe I’d been making a mountain out of a molehill, he was just nervous and upset about not working. We went to Wright’s, the way we used to do before we were married. And when we came home, we made love.”

Karen lowered her glance, but the words kept coming. “I fell asleep then. And when I woke up, I was choking, I couldn’t breathe. Because he was on top of me again, his hands around my neck—squeezing and squeezing—

“Somehow I managed to fight him off. I hit him in the face and he fell back. That’s when his eyes opened. All this time they’d been closed, and later he said he’d been asleep, it was a nightmare, he didn’t know what he was doing. He seemed to be in a state of shock.

“The next day he called Dr. Griswold.”

“He tried to kill you.” Gordon’s eyes never left her face. “And you’re the only one who knows?”

“Yes. Except for Rita.”

“Rita?”

“His sister. She’d never tell—”

“Where is she now?”

Karen told him. “But she’s already talked to the police. They even searched to make sure he wasn’t hiding out there.”

“Does she have any protection now?”

“A bodyguard? I don’t think so. But even if Bruce came there, she’d be safe. She loves her brother, she wouldn’t betray him.”

“Can Bruce be sure of that?”

Karen hesitated.

Gordon rose. “We’re going out there right now,” he said. “And then I’m taking both of you downtown. You two should have been held in security from the beginning. And you would have been, if you’d told us the truth.”

“But I swear she’s not in danger—”

“Swear?” Gordon shook his head. “All you can do now is pray. And even that may be too late.”

CHAPTER 24

T
hat night the searchlights swept the sky.

Their brilliance flooded the Music Center, where the Beautiful People preened for cameras recording their presence at yet another gala charity benefit. Other people, less beautiful and entirely uncapitalized, saw the distant radiance from the windows of hospital wards where they lay dying or giving birth or whatever they do in dreary places that are never pictured in the society section.

Light lanced upward from the Grand Opening of a supermarket, danced down from aerial beacons on the far hills, hovered from police helicopters crisscrossing the city.

But there were dark places too. Cemeteries for the resting dead. Side streets for the living who could not rest because of what they’d read in the papers, heard on the news, pictured in their own minds, as they huddled behind locked doors.

Bolts and bars were no protection against the invasion of fear. The favored few were able to pretend nothing had happened. But for the many there were only shadows in which strange shapes stirred.

The airport was neither light nor dark. A gray mist crept in from the west, blurring the beacons, shrouding the shadows with silver.

Karen remembered the fog she’d driven through on that other evening. It was forty-eight hours ago, yet it seemed a lifetime away. And for some, it was literally just that. A lifetime vanished forever, swallowed up in gray oblivion.

But there were lights here, too, like the one streaming from the office window of Raymond’s Charter Service. And there were shadows off to the blind side of the frame structure where Frank Gordon pulled up and parked his car.

Karen started to open the door on the passenger side, but Gordon’s hand moved to her arm in quick restraint.

“Wait.”

He peered through the windshield, scanning the airstrip, the runways, the dark cluster of hangars bordering the field behind and beyond the office. Nothing moved in the mist.

“Now.”

Karen slid out of her seat and crossed behind the car as Gordon emerged. He was holding a service revolver.

“Keep behind me,” he said. “Behind, and to one side.”

He started towards the office, moving close to the wall, away from the fan of light coming from the window. The window was on the far side of the door, so they approached in shadow: shadow, and clammy mist.

The door was slightly ajar. As Gordon reached it, he gestured for Karen to halt.

“Back,” he murmured. The revolver rose in readiness.

He kicked the door open.

Then he stood there. Stood there for a moment, or an eternity. Time stopped for Karen; everything stopped until he turned, and spoke.

“Nothing. Nobody here.”

She joined him then, moved with him into the lighted office. The floor fan droned, its turbulence fluttering the papers pinned to the wall.

Gordon glanced at the desk top. Rita’s purse rested there, next to the telephone. Beside it, in the big ashtray, a crushed cigarette butt still smoldered. Karen noted it and nodded.

“She must have just stepped out.”

Gordon frowned. “What makes you so sure? I didn’t see any car when we drove up.”

“Rita drives a VW. She generally parks it inside the hangar.”

“The one in back?”

“Yes—in back and to the right.”

He nodded and turned. Karen followed him through the doorway. At the right of the clapboard shack was a tied-down plane, a single-engine Cessna. Gordon halted in its shadow, staring at the dark opening of the hangar beyond. Somewhere off inside, a faint light flickered.

Karen started to step forward, but Frank Gordon shook his head.

“Not yet.”

Peering into the hangar, Karen could make out the squat bulk of the VW. Behind it was a plane, and beyond that, the light. Its source was apparently an electric lantern, placed on the floor beside a tool rack. And now Rita’s silhouette moved across it.

“That her?” Gordon’s voice was pitched to a whisper.

“Yes, thank God. And she’s alone.”

“Good. Here’s what I want you to do. Go in and talk to her.”

“You’re not coming with me?”

Gordon gestured with the revolver. “Don’t worry—if you need me, I’ll be ready. My hunch is you’ll get further with her if she doesn’t see me at first. Tell her what happened—about Bruce, and Tom Doyle. I think she’s ready to crack. Maybe Bruce has been in touch with her, maybe she knows where he is.”

“What if she won’t say anything?”

“Then I’ll take over. But it’s worth a chance.” Gordon put his hand on her arm. “Remember, she’s in danger, too, whether she knows it or not. You’ve got to convince her of that.”

“I’ll try.”

Karen moved through the mist, moved forward to the deeper darkness beyond the hangar entrance.

And now there was no turning back.

No turning back as she walked past the plane, no turning back as she emerged into the fitful flicker of the light, no turning back as Rita looked up and saw her, recognized her.

“What are you doing here?”

There was shrill surprise in the voice, and something else, something more than mere surprise, in the shadowed face.

“I have to talk to you. Now.”

Rita had a heavy wrench in her hand. She didn’t put it down; instead, her fingers tightened around the handle.

“You picked a fine time. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“I didn’t pick the time. Please, Rita, listen to me—”

“I’m listening.”

She listened while Karen told her about Bruce’s call, the meeting on the roof and what followed. From time to time Karen hesitated, but she didn’t stop completely until she came to the moment when she’d stared out of the window at the body sprawled far below.

Rita didn’t move, her face was still in shadow, and she said absolutely nothing.

I’m not reaching her,
Karen told herself.
I have no way of reaching her, only words.

She found them.

“You didn’t see what I saw, Rita. Tom Doyle, lying in the street with his head smashed open like a rotten melon. Griswold dead in a room filled with the smell of his own burning flesh. That poor nurse—”

“What do you want from me?”

“The truth.” Karen felt her fingers curl back against the palms, felt the nails, digging into flesh. “It’s not a matter of faith or loyalty—it can’t be, not anymore. We’ve got to stop what’s happening. If you’ve kept anything back, if you know where Bruce has been hiding—”