The Death Row Complex (39 page)

“Now hurry up,” the kidnapper said and thrust Alexis into the bathroom. As the door swung closed, she could see him concealing his pistol. She raced into the stall and arranged herself over the toilet. While she sat urinating, she struggled with tears. There wasn’t much time to devise a new strategy.

When she reached to flush the toilet, a jolt of pain shot through the crook of her arm. Sucking in her breath, she pulled up the sleeve of her mother’s jacket and located the small puncture wound in her vein. The spot where her kidnapper had injected her.
What did he give me?
It had bled a little bit, but was now clotting.

And then a new plan came to her.

The bathroom stall door was metal. Its edges were sharp.

She clicked open the door and slid a fingertip along its lock, a sliver of metal that slid into a bracket. She traced it delicately, feeling for the roughest corner, and then gripped the metal tightly with one hand. Then she bit into her lip to avoid crying out as she thrust her arm upon it, gouging the metal deeply into her clotting puncture wound.

The Doctor began to lose patience as he waited outside of the women’s room for Katrina Stone’s daughter.
Is she even worth all this?
His job was done. The rest would certainly take care of itself. The abduction of the girl, once she had serendipitously revealed her identity to the press right in front of him, had been spontaneous.

It
is
worth it
, the Doctor decided after all.
Imagine the publicity when they find her body. The woman’s very
daughter.
Nobody is safe. Nobody is immune. I could not have planned a more perfect end.

But where is she? She should be finished in there by now.
The Doctor reached forward and began to push the swinging restroom door inward when a force blocked its movement. He withdrew his hand and the girl swung the door outward and toward him. “It’s about time,” he said.

The girl did not answer. Through the dark maroon of her suit jacket, the Doctor could make out a circle of a different red color. The injection site was bleeding. No matter. With one hand, he reached forward to take her arm as before. The other held the pistol, jutting outward toward her through the pocket of his coat. As the Doctor reached toward her with his one free hand, her leg swung upward, and before he realized what was happening his groin was on fire.

“
Take that, fucker!
” Alexis shouted as she kneed her kidnapper between the legs. He let out an agonized yelp. She bolted past him and out of the narrow hallway of the Strip Club, racing toward the door and the daylight beyond it. Behind her, she heard a gunshot. And then a blood-curdling scream.

A vague sensation of pain came over her, and the sunlight before her faded as her vision began darkening from the edges inward. And Alexis realized that the scream she had heard might have been her own.

9:25 A.M.
PST

Inside the Strip Club, Katrina was crouching behind the bar, fervently hoping that Sean McMullan received her text message in time, when Alexis came running toward her. But then the shot rang out, and Katrina’s worst nightmare was realized for the second time in her life.

A murky waitress raised her hands to her face in slow motion, and the bar swirled around Katrina like the cabin of a ship on a choppy sea. She felt herself falling to the floor behind the bar. She heard the crash of breaking glass, and then everything faded to black.

It is the week before Katrina’s scheduled qualifying exam. She is in her bedroom, sitting on the bed she will no longer be sharing with Tom. She is
crying.

She hears the crash of breaking glass.

She runs to the living
room.

She
screams.

The front room window is shattered and Christopher is lying on the floor in front of it. Next to him, his favorite plastic cup lies on its side, and the carpet is soaked with the water he had gotten up for. The yellow racecar on the front of his cotton pajamas is now stamped with a spreading, bright red ellipse.

As Katrina races to him, she stumbles on a toy and almost falls on top of her son. She lands on her knees next to Christopher and tenderly pulls his pajama top up to look at the small wound on the upper part of his chest. Sobbing, she lifts his limp body to a sitting position, and then she sees that the bullet has gone all the way through her son’s body. Blood is spreading across Christopher’s pajamas from a ragged exit wound.

Oh God, please, no, please, no, God! Oh God!

Christopher is awake and looking at her. Large, blond curls spring out haphazardly from the left side of his head; on the right, the locks are damp and one is stuck to his rosy cheek from the peaceful slumber he was in just moments ago. The soft skin beneath the curls is creased in several places from his
pillow.

Christopher’s wide, bright blue eyes shine with fear and pain. A tear spills from the corner of each, leaving two clear, wet tracks down the sides of his nose and over his mouth. His full, pink lower lip trembles, and he blinks several times. He reaches for Katrina’s hand, still on his chest, and wraps a soft, chubby fist around her index finger. He gasps for breath and quietly mouths a single word: “Mommy.”

9:31 A.M.
PST

Sean McMullan ran through the door of the Strip Club with his pistol drawn. At first, the restaurant looked abandoned. Confused, McMullan glanced from side to side. And then he saw them.

Jutting out from behind the bar was pair of legs. He recognized the loose, blue pants that enveloped them.

Katrina was unconscious, but alive, lying on top of a pile of broken glass. Her cuts from the bar glasses she had fallen onto appeared to be superficial. McMullan lightly tapped the sides of her face. Katrina’s eyes rolled, and then slowly opened. For a moment, she only looked at him, appearing dazed. Then her eyes widened and she struggled to stand up.

“Stay still,” he said authoritatively. But when a woman’s shriek rang out from the back of the bar, Katrina jerked past him to a standing position.

Together, they followed the sound. As they reached the narrow back hallway, the door of the women’s restroom swung open, and the bar’s waitress emerged. She was crying, and a small trickle of vomit was still on her chin. “I think you need to see this,” she said and led them into the bathroom.

It was clear which stall the waitress had just lost her breakfast in. But McMullan wondered why he needed to see it, until the waitress pointed to the door of the adjacent stall. Its lock, a jutting sliver of metal, was covered in blood.

Katrina pushed past McMullan and reached for the door, looking it up and down, and then quickly opened it.

Her daughter’s message was scrawled in blood on the wall tile near the toilet: “
Yuppie Ant
Farm
.”

Alexis shoved tourists aside as she ran up Fifth Avenue, gripping the bleeding arm that had been grazed by a bullet. Occasionally, she looked over her shoulder to confirm that she was still being chased. When another shot rang out from behind her and through the crowded street, Alexis knew that the Doctor would now stop at nothing to kill her.

A police cruiser pulled away from its post at the biotechnology convention to respond to the frantic 911 call of a waitress. To clear the crowd from the streets before them, the officers inside the cruiser activated their lights and sirens. And as the black and white car pulled off Harbor Drive and onto Fifth Avenue, several news vans followed.

10:11 A.M.
PST

Roger Gilman opened a door and entered a small closet-like room at San Quentin. A brief glance around the room revealed three walls lined with video monitors, each projecting its own scene from within the prison. On the fourth wall was a built-in bookshelf containing rows upon rows of videodiscs.

Two boys who looked no older than eighteen were at a table playing checkers. They looked up, startled, when Gilman entered without knocking. One reached for a gun.