The Absence of Mercy (19 page)

On the seventh ring the line was answered: “If you know the mailbox number of the party you are trying to reach, please press 1 now,” a courteous voice instructed them. Special Agent Larry Culver swore under his breath. He flipped open his cell phone and began dialing the direct line to a unit supervisor. The rapidity of Detective Hunt's pen twirling bumped up a notch, and this time Carl quietly leaned over and asked him to kindly stop before he was driven stark raving mad. The scattered photographs of the two victims lay on the table in front of the six men and waited patiently for the plodding machinery of justice to respond.

“How is she today?” Ben asked, as he and Thomas took a seat. The girl's mother, Vera, was at the windowsill arranging flowers in several of the large glass vases that stood sentinel over the motionless figure in the bed beside them. The endotracheal tube was gone, removed two days ago by the respiratory therapist, and the room seemed oddly quiet without the sound of the ventilator to which they'd become accustomed. The room itself was also different, no longer the bright lights, frequent alarms, and bustling tempo of the ICU; this was a more sedated step-down unit for less critically ill patients.

“She spiked a fever last night,” Paul Dressler advised them. “Dr. Elliot says it looks like a urinary tract infection. They started her on antibiotics and removed the bladder catheter.” He looked at his daughter. “She seems better today.”

Ben nodded. “The Foley catheter makes UTIs inevitable. It's good that it's out.”

“She wears a diaper now.” Vera spoke up from where she stood at the window. “We change her every few hours. They said we should . . .” She hesitated, glancing at Thomas for a moment. “I'm sorry,” she said. “You don't need to hear about that.”

“Has she woken up at all?” Ben asked, moving on to another subject.

“No,” Paul replied. “Nothing yet.”

“They said she'll probably wake up very soon,” Vera told them. There was a hint of desperation in her voice, her eyes taking in each of their faces in turn. “Dr. Elliot says there's no reason she shouldn't.”

The girl's father sighed. “They did an MRI of the brain three days ago,” he reported. “It was completely normal.”

“Well, that's promising,” Ben told them. He tried to sound reassuring. “These things sometimes just take some time. I'm sure the doctors—”

“ ‘Very soon,' is what they said,” Vera repeated, as if Ben had been disagreeing with her.

“Well,” Paul interposed, “we'll just have to see, Vera.” His wife gave him a contemptuous look, then turned her back on them and began sorting the flowers once again.

They were quiet for a moment before Paul turned to Thomas. “How's school?”

“Fine,” Thomas said. “But we all miss her.”

Paul smiled. “She'd be glad to hear that. You know,” he said, “I'm amazed at how many of her friends made it all the way up here to Pittsburgh to see her. Funny . . . she never thought she was that popular.”

Ben rose from his chair. “I have an appointment with Dr. Blechman in a few minutes to go over some findings from the DNA analysis. Mind if Thomas stays with you while I'm gone?”

Paul nodded. “Happy to have him.”

Ben excused himself from the room and made his way through the hallways in the direction of the forensic odontologist's office. He knew the hospital well, having rotated here during his intern year of residency, but also having spent a considerable amount of time at Children's Hospital during his younger son's own stay in the pediatric ICU in December 2010.

It had all happened so quickly, as he remembered. Joel and Thomas had been playing upstairs—goofing around, taunting one another, racing down the hallway. Even now, as he walked down the hospital's familiar corridors three years later, Ben could still almost hear their footsteps pounding on the floorboards above him.

“Quiet down, up there!” he'd yelled from the kitchen doorway. “I'm on the phone!”

Who had he been talking to? He couldn't remember. The boys hadn't quieted down, though. In fact, they'd kicked it up a notch. Ben could hear the sound of small plastic action figures striking the walls. They were
throwing
them at one another. Joel started to shriek in protest to some unseen torture his older brother was likely bestowing upon him.

“Listen, let me call you back,” Ben said. He hung up the phone and started for the stairs. He'd ascended only three steps when he heard the rail from the second floor balcony groan in protest. A moment later, Joel's body came hurtling past him from above.

Ben was completely stunned. All he could do was to watch his son fall. Joel went headfirst, and when he reached the bottom his skull contacted the wooden floorboards with a sickening crack that echoed through the open foyer.

Ben never recalled descending the stairs and running across the room, but he must have done so because at the next moment he was kneeling beside his son, calling out his name, asking if he was hurt, telling him not to move. There was no need for those instructions. The boy's body lay splayed across the floor, quiet and motionless.

A few seconds later Thomas was also there, kneeling next to his father and gazing down at his brother in disbelief. “Holy crap,” he whispered. “He fell. I . . . I don't think he saw the rail. He ran directly into it—didn't even slow down. Just hit it and flipped right over. Joel? . . . Joel, are you okay?”

“Go get the phone,” Ben instructed him. “Call 911. Tell them we need an ambulance.
Go!
”

The ambulance had rendezvoused with a medevac helicopter, which had brought Joel here, to Children's Hospital. His son had remained unresponsive for ten days. They had begun to lose hope. And then, just like that, he had awakened.

“
Thom—as
.”

“Joel. It's Dad, Joel. Open your eyes. I'm right here.”

“Daaad?”

“Yeah. It's me, son.”

The boy's brow furrowed. He ran his tongue across dry, cracked lips. He started to speak, then stopped, reformulating the question in his mind. “Did . . . did I fall?”

Ben tried to answer and faltered, the words hanging stubbornly in his throat. “Yes, son. You fell.” He watched Joel try the idea on for size. The boy's eyes searched the room, taking it in for the first time.

“I fell a long way down. Didn't I, Dad?”

“Yes. You did.”

“But . . . but now I'm back,” Joel announced, although his inflection was uncertain, as if he were making a statement and asking a question at the same time.

“Yes,” Ben answered, needing to reassure himself as well as the boy. “Now you're back.”

“Okay,” Joel said, then closed his eyes for a moment.

Don't close your eyes, son,
Ben thought.
Don't slip away from me again
. He was on the verge of saying something when the boy's lids fluttered open.

“Dad?” The voice was barely more than a whisper.

“Yeah?”

“Were you scared?”

Ben felt his face contort as if he'd been struck. His lips tightened into thin white lines that he pressed firmly together. He looked back at his son solemnly and nodded.

Joel seemed to consider this carefully for a moment, then he looked up once more into his father's eyes and told him, “You don't have to be scared anymore.”

“—floor?”

“Hmm?”

“What floor?” a female voice asked again, pulling Ben from his reverie.

He looked around. He was standing in front of an open elevator. A young woman was perched just inside, her right hand preventing the door from sliding shut.

“Oh . . . Yes, thank you.” He stepped across the threshold. “Fourth floor, please.”

The woman reached forward and pressed the button. She appeared to hesitate for a moment, then asked, “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Ben replied. “Why do you ask?”

She smiled at him. “You were talking to yourself.”

“Oh. Sorry about that,” he apologized. “I was just . . . thinking of something that happened a few years ago.”

She nodded.

Ben glanced down at his feet, slightly embarrassed. Joel's voice (“
You don't have to be scared anymore
”) still echoed inside of his head. He looked up at the woman standing beside him. “What did I say?” he asked.

“I think you said”—she paused, frowning uncertainly—“ ‘
But I am
.' ”

It seemed that she was always in the woods, in the dark belly of the forest. She ran panic-stricken through the trees, the bramble snatching at her calves and ankles with its greedy carnivorous claws, tearing deep red fissures into her flesh. Her chest heaved with exertion, the dank air filling her lungs over and over and yet never quelling the incessant burning within. Branches grasped at her shoulders as she passed, slowing her escape, trying to pull her to the ground. The voice in her head raced around on its little track (. . .
low and quiet . . . cover myself with leaves . . . distance between us . . . run right by me . . .
) and ended up right back where it had started. She could hear him coming for her, could sense him getting closer, could almost feel the outstretched fingers brushing up against the back of her neck. Her sneakers dug for traction in the wet mud. He was
so close
now. She could hear his breath coming in quick, measured gasps. She couldn't shake him, couldn't hide from him, couldn't outdistance or outmaneuver him. Soon he would be upon her, his fingers tightening around her throat, his teeth sinking deep into her neck.

She glanced backward—saw him barreling through the bushes a few yards behind her. In utter terror, she propelled herself onward, leaping over a thick nest of bramble. Then suddenly, she was falling, her body accelerating downward past a wall of mud and roots that jutted out at her like gnarled, severed limbs. She fell for several seconds, then landed awkwardly, feeling the snap of her left ankle as she struck the bottom of the ravine. The pain was excruciating. She rolled over onto her back, her hands clutching the deformity of her lower leg, and she opened her mouth to scream. Then she stopped, the cry dying in her throat before it was uttered.

He was looking down at her from the lip of the precipice high above, his features unrecognizable in the darkness. There was no sound except for her own ragged breathing and the soft rustle of tree limbs in the wind. The two of them stared at one another for several seconds, and she had time to think,
This is not how it happened before. This is something different.
Then she watched as he got down onto his stomach and swung his legs out over the edge, his feet searching for purchase amid the sporadic knobs of roots protruding from the wall. “
No,
” she whispered, peering up at him as he began lowering himself slowly, one foothold at a time, toward the bottom of the ravine.

There was no option of standing or running, she realized, looking down at the ruined, grotesque angulation of her ankle. She tried to pull herself up into a seated position, but the slightest movement of her leg brought the dull, throbbing pain to a sudden, unbearable crescendo that blanched her vision and caused her to teeter on the brink of unconsciousness.
Maybe that would be better,
she thought to herself. She did not want to be awake when he reached her, could not endure the horror of simply lying here sprawled in the mud, watching him close the distance between them.

“Got to wake yourself up,” a thin voice sounded somewhere off to her left. She turned her head in that direction. In the dim light, she could make out the shape of a female figure lying on the ground about fifteen feet from her current position. The face was turned away from her, but the voice had a familiarity to it that she almost recognized.

“Are you okay?” she asked the girl, for there was something not quite right in the shape of the torso, in the stillness of the chest that did not rise and fall with the usual cycle of breathing.

“
Look! He's already halfway down
.” The girl pointed with her left hand toward the figure above them. Two of her fingers were missing.

“I . . . I can't move,” Monica told her. “My ankle . . . it's broken.”

The girl turned her head to look up at the night sky. The top of her right ear, Monica could see, had been torn away, leaving behind a jagged, glistening line of cartilage.

“You're not where you think you are,” the girl said. “The worst of it is already behind you. You've already made it to the roadway.”

“
What
roadway? I don't understand.” Monica glanced upward. The figure had almost completed his descent. Soon he would be—

“
Wake up!
” The girl's voice was filled with urgency.

Monica shook her head. “No. I can't just leave you here.”

To her surprise, the girl lying beside her began to laugh. It started softly, then rose in pitch and volume until it filled the night sky above them. A moment later, the figure descending the wall reached the bottom. He turned and quickly traversed the few remaining yards between them. There was an instrument—something long and sharp—in his left hand, and he began to raise it high over his head. Monica turned to look at the girl. “I can't leave you here!” she wailed.

“
No? You sure about that?
” The girl turned her head so that she was staring directly back at her. The girl's face was a mirror image of Monica's own, only the eyes were dead and vacant. “
You sure about that?
” it said again, as the left arm of the figure looming above them began to swing downward.

“
Wake up!
” she screamed, and she wasn't certain which body she inhabited now—the living or the dead. “
Wake up! Wake up! WakeupWakeupWakeup!!
”

The instrument plummeting like a raptor from the sky . . .