Sins of the Flesh (25 page)

When she turned its handle she discovered it wasn’t locked; Delia stepped out into a thick clump of mountain laurel, with a sun-soaked patch of grass away to her right. Heedless of her feet, she ran as fast as she could away from that terrible imprisonment.

A squad car found her on one of the ceaseless patrols that Commissioner Silvestri had ordered ever since the tragedy at the Hazelmere nursing home had been reported.

W
ithin minutes of the squad car’s reporting Delia’s escape, cops were swarming through the forest around the “out” door in the Holloman Institute’s wall, under orders to keep the noise down.

Carmine, Abe, Liam and Tony, together with Fernando and six hand-picked uniforms would be the only ones to enter the wall, but first it was imperative to get the Meloses out alive. Carmine took Abe and Tony, Abe carrying a powerful light instead of a drawn pistol, and traversed in five minutes what it had taken Delia an hour to walk. The passage was about two yards across, and widened into a roundel where a watchtower had been built; at those places it was about seven yards in diameter. The roundel containing the two doors was on the plans as a watchtower, though none had been built there, the why unrecorded.

Dr. Aristede Melos and his wife were very much as Delia had left them, except that Rose was spitting in fury at Delia’s gall in leaving them behind. Blanket-shrouded, they were taken to the hospital for observation. Once that was out of the way, the pace slackened to a rate dictated by the forensics team, enthused at the prospect of dissecting such a pristine multiple killer’s den.

Carmine himself returned to headquarters, where, sure enough, he found Delia waiting. Blinking, he assimilated the full glory of a Delia unharmed—nay,
healed
. Pink bunny slippers to cover the bandages on cut feet. Sheer yellow tights over pallid pink legs to give an impression of overripe bananas. A miniskirted dress of orange and green stripes to which were attached large, electric-blue satin bows. Oh, thank you, dear Lord Jesus!

“You ought to be resting at home,” he said, feeling he must.

“Rubbish! I’m a box of birds, and full up to pussy’s bow with tender, loving care! You can see that for yourself. Are the Meloses all right?”

“They’ll recover. The most serious injury they sustained was to their self-esteem—being found stark naked. Rose Melos couldn’t seem to stop crying.”

“Tell me about it!” Delia giggled. “I called her a silly cow. Have you any idea who our abductor is?”

“Beyond his being an inmate of the Holloman Institute, none that will hold water. Apart from a fuss out on 133 shortly before dawn, nothing’s happened to alarm anyone inside, and I don’t intend to tell Dr. Wainfleet a thing for the time being. Or the security guys and Warden Hanrahan on the straight prison side.”

“You have your suspicions,” Delia said shrewdly.

“Don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. Walter Jenkins. But you’ve never met him, Carmine—how on earth did you light on him?”

“From reading Wainfleet’s papers. He’s contained, now that we’ve found his way in and out, but I don’t want to tip our hand until after I’ve seen Dr. Wainfleet under what will look to Walter like routine circumstances. I know he’s armed and it’s a risk, but less a risk than barging in with guns drawn and a cacophony of noise. Walter’s not your usual criminal.”

Delia adjusted the bow over her bosom. “What happened last night to put so many patrols out? My good luck, but—!”

“Your abductor strangled three harmless old folks in the Hazelmere nursing home. We had no idea he’d also kidnapped you and the Meloses,” Carmine said, tight-lipped. “Finding you and learning about the doors in the HI wall was a revelation that led straight to Walter, in my mind anyway. I wish I knew why he took you and the Meloses, but it’s as big a mystery as he is.”

“I believe I can answer a bit of it, dear,” said Delia. “He has decided that we—I in one way and the Meloses in another—threaten his relationship with Jess Wainfleet. She’s the fulcrum, the basis. Assuming her as the cause, I worked backward to the inexpressibly creepy Walter.” She shivered. “Jess actually thinks him cured, whereas I thought his actions and reactions were robotic. How that upset her! But you got it from reading her papers? I confess they’re up with the astronauts as far as I’m concerned, but they’re simply scientific dissertations.”

“Oh, they’re a little more than that, Deels. In a way they read like eulogies. I inferred from them that some kind of miracle had taken place. When the physician doing the treating starts waxing lyrical the way she did about Walter, any cop worth his salt gets suspicious.” Carmine shot her a keen glance. “You know Jess Wainfleet well. Can she honestly be living in ignorance of Walter’s guilt?”

“Oh, yes. Of that, I’m positive. He’s her child.”

Delia really was, Carmine reflected, a superb detective in the true sense of that word: she could take a bunch of unrelated facts and deduce from them. It was for that reason he had given her the Shadow List, and if the last piece of evidence had come from him, that was only because of their contrasting educations; he had seen the neurosurgeon in Jess, whereas she had seen the psychiatrist. But the case wasn’t closed yet, it had simply hit another brick wall that one or the other of them would find a way around. That both of them were necessary was yet one more argument in favor of his kind of detective force—men and women with varied skills and educations. Chance and luck played roles too. If he hadn’t been lonely and domestically rudderless, he wouldn’t have had the time to read all those scientific books and magazines that had alerted him to stereotaxic neurosurgery and research. Though his reading wouldn’t have taken the slant it did had Delia not sought enlightenment from a police artist about similar skulls. One hand washes the other ….

Walter had emerged from his migraine shortly before dawn on Sunday, to find Jess wakeful and pacing her office.

“What’s up?” he asked, bringing her freshly brewed coffee.

Her face lit up, the profundity of her relief written on it, and showing too in trembling fingers as she took the mug.

“Oh, I am so glad to see you! Something about your headache frightened me, Walter. When you went to bed last night, you seemed—oh, I don’t know—
changed.
”

“It was a very bad headache. Left-sided. Like you said, I lost my speech for a while. Couldn’t calculate either.”

Sagging into her chair, she waved at the other one. “Sit down, please. I want to talk to you.”

He sat, the obedient soldier, chin up, eyes fixed on hers.

“Do you know what I did when I performed all those operations on you, Walter?” she asked.

“Yes. You mended me.”

“Well, okay, I did do that, but it’s not what I mean. You’ve progressed so much since the day thirty-two months ago when I did the last operation! Now I can explain on a more complex level than I have to date. Do you know what a short-circuit is?”

“Yes, it’s basic. The electrical current that should flow along a preordained pathway of wires finds a way to jump from ‘in’ to ‘out’ that bypasses the path, cuts it short. So all the current is lost, the circuit is burned up in a fiery flash of energy, and the work is ruined.”

“I like your choice of words. Preordained—wonderful!” Jess drank her coffee deeply, still recovering from the worry of wondering if Walter’s headache had been a warning of—? “So imagine that vast numbers of these pathways have suddenly short-circuited at the same moment, and that together they are your whole brain. Because of the massive short-circuit, the flash of energy has utterly destroyed all of your brain’s pathways. What becomes of your brain, can you tell me?”

“It becomes a no-brain.”

“That’s correct. I took you, Walter no-brain, and I put many hundreds of tiny terminals throughout the shell of your no-brain. Each terminal was inside a cluster of cells I’ll call a battery. And each battery was wired through pathways to many other points all over your no-brain. Remember, nothing worked anymore!”

“I hear you,” he said steadily.

“The new terminals I put in, I then turned on by giving each of them the tiniest imaginable zap of electrical current. The current cut through the burned-out wreckage and reconnected each battery to its pathway. As I did this over and over, I built a new brain on top of the wreckage of the no-brain. The new brain is the new Walter—the Walter
I
created!” Jess cried shrilly.

“You did it,” he said woodenly.

“Darned right I did it, Walter! Why? Why is that? Because I am the only one who knows all the brain’s secrets! I just needed a framework, and I found it in the burned-out husk of your no-brain—a perfect frame! I gave Walter No-brain the brain of a sane, kind, decent human being! I might call you Walter Jess-brain.”

His upper lip lifted in naked contempt. “Horseshit! Utter horseshit! You speak as if to a dim, dull-witted child. But I am not a child, and I am far from dull in my wits,” he said.

She let out a bellow of laughter, one of those involuntary, amazed, I-can’t-believe-my-ears laughs that mask a total paralysis of thought, driven out of the mind by a colossal blow, the rudest of shocks. Jaw dropped, mouth agape, eyes staring wide and stunned, she sat looking at him emptied of any comeback.

“You make me sound like an exercise in Meccano parts,” Walter said, “as if inside my pathetic cranium lies the nuclear wasteland after detonation. You built
nothing,
Jess! What you did was to implant dual tungsten microelectrodes in my brain using the specific stereotaxic co-ordinates your atlas told you were correct. Then you zapped the neurones in between the two tips of a pair of microelectrodes: It was a work of genius because you knew whereabouts to put your ultrafine electrodes and how much current to apply, but it could only succeed if you had an experimental animal—Walter Jenkins the homicidal maniac. But who says where the accolades should go? To you, who did the hack work, or to me, whose brain belongs only to me? Your part ended thirty-two months ago when you performed the last neurosurgical intervention. It’s I whose pathways have kept opening up, more and more and more. The man sitting here this morning has nothing to do with you. The man sitting here this morning is the I-Walter.”

It never occurred to her to be frightened. As the power to think returned she had listened enthralled, staggered by the ease and familiarity of his delivery—never in a million years would she have dared to hope for anything approaching what he was airily showing her, a peacock spreading his gorgeous cerebral tail—!

“Your vocabulary is amazing,” she said.

“I feel things these days, Jess. I’ve found things to enjoy and things to dislike,” he said in dreamy tones. “If intensity of feeling turns like into love or dislike into hate, then I’m not there yet, though there’s one thing I do that lifts me high into pleasure. All my feelings belong to the I-Walter.”

“And
you
have built the I-Walter,” she said.

“Yes. The I-Walter worships you.”

Now where was he going? Was this area still in regression? Certainly he gave off no emanations of sexual desire, which led her to presume that the pathways to his erotic nuclei and cortex were either still closed or at most unimportant. The I-Walter!

Third person, or first person? First …. “Can you describe how you feel when you worship me, Walter?”

“I feel that were it not for you, I would not exist.”

“You feel for me as your maker, your creator?”

The magnificently blue eyes flashed in scorn. “No! I made myself, I created myself. You gave me the framework on which to build, Jess. Haven’t I made that clear?”

“It needed the elucidation of words, that’s all. Words are vital, never forget that! Without words, we go back to the animal, we can’t make our wants, needs, desires and wishes crystal clear. Don’t forget how many kinds of ‘clear’ there are, from a pane of glass smeared with the filth of a hundred years to a pane of glass polished five minutes ago. Both clear, but what a difference!”

“I worship you too because you teach.”

“What do you mean by worship?”

“I mean that I would protect you from all harm, make you as happy as happy can be.”

Her knees felt weak, her head was spinning; knowing the signs, Jess got up. “My blood sugar’s right down, I need to eat breakfast, or lunch, or whatever the cafeteria is serving. May I lean on your arm?” Jess asked.

He was at her side immediately. “Still breakfast. Come on.”

Protesting bitterly, Delia was refused permission to continue at work, and Carmine knew exactly how to ensure obedience. He made a call to Rufus Ingham, gave him the barest bones of Delia’s ordeal, and half an hour later handed her into Rufus’s Maserati at the Cedar Street entrance to the police station. Whether she liked it or not, she was firmly anchored for at least a day.

That done, he went back to the door in the HI wall, where the forensics team had made many discoveries. The interior was lit up like day, displaying Walter’s circular base of operations and the narrow passages going in opposite directions away from it. Already processed for prints and other evidence, the motorcycle had gone back to Forensics for further examination, its gas tanks drained. Abe was in command.

He and the others had found Marty Fanes’s .45 Colt semiautomatic and a spare clip as well as a box of .45 projectiles.

“Just as well he didn’t dare keep the pistol with him,” Abe said, proffering a magnifying glass. “He’s put quicksilver in the tips—beautiful job too.”

A hunting knife had also been found, washed but still bearing traces of blood around the junction of hilt and tang.

A shelf held warm black clothes, a set of black motorcycle leathers hung neatly from hooks driven into the mortar between the stones of the wall, and, in pride of place, a black helmet. A case of bottled Italian water, assorted imperishable foods, a first-aid kit that included suturing needles and silk thread, various tools and a home-made workman’s bench indicated that Walter had perhaps planned for a last-ditch stand inside his citadel.

Aerie duty, involving a lookout on top of the wall in the watchtower under which Delia and the Meloses had been kept; if Walter was seen crossing toward his bolt-hole, the lookout was to ring an alarm bell; radio signals didn’t penetrate inside the wall. That meant four uniforms on guard just inside the “in” door, all armed with semiautomatic pistols as well as their .38 police special Smith & Wesson revolvers. Carmine himself packed a Beretta 9mm semiautomatic firearm these days, and Abe had followed suit; the flatter depth of the gun was more comfortable than a round-barreled revolver, and the magazine held more bullets.