The Timer Game (39 page)

It was an anteroom facing a steel door. The door had no knob so it must slide open and shut, she thought. She wondered if it opened by retina scanner, the way the steel door leading to his and Lee’s labs did. If there was a door, it meant something was behind it.

She pressed her palm against the door.

“Katie.” Her voice trembled. “Honey, can you hear me? I’m right here.”

She felt the cold metal against the small of her back. “She can’t hear you, I’m afraid. Move away from the door now. This is the last time you’ll be permitted in this space.”

So Katie must be on the other side of that door. Her legs gave way and she caught herself. He prodded her with his gun and she stepped out of the anteroom, up the stairs, back into the main room, every step a brutal reminder of the distance that kept her from Katie.

Her mind raced; she needed to get him talking, find a chink.

“You’re just leaving your office, your paintings, your books?”

He made a small sound. “The Degas and the first editions? Copies. I sold the originals years ago. I’ve been leaching the bones of this company for decades, Grace. But we’re talking about you.”

He was guiding her toward an upright Plexiglas coffin. They drew closer and Grace saw that it contained a stained wrinkled lab jacket, a pack of cigarettes, and a drinking glass smudged with coral lipstick. Scattered on the floor of the exhibit were clippings of curly hair. Her color. All encased in the Plexiglas, as if it were sports memorabilia from the big game. The exhibit was lit with blue light and it made the lab jacket and lipstick glow eerily white.

“What? You don’t remember? I’ll never forget. The first day we spent discussing your future plans, Grace. How you were going to save the world, one small, damaged child at a time. You informed me of this while smoking a cigarette and cutting your hair with surgical scissors. And rushing back into the pediatric wing when necessary. Oh, how I admired your dedication!”

He was crazed, standing silhouetted against the screens, leveling his revolver at her heart.

“I see you don’t remember this at all.” His voice tightened and she was afraid.

“We did a lot of things together,” she started.

“Shut up.” He waved the revolver in the direction he wanted her to go. “Keep moving.” They were coming up on the sound now. She stopped walking. “I remember this one,” she said quietly. “I wore it the day you told me you’d recommended me at the parish for work in Guatemala.” She glanced at him. He nodded.

It was a dress, cotton with a wide skirt in a small print with buttons down the front and capped sleeves. It hung on a frame. Bellows pushed air through a nozzle positioned inside it, so the air expanded the dress and flapped the hem, as if it were inhabited by an invisible Grace, breathing and shifting, with cartoon gargantuan breasts, the whooshing punctuated by the faint cries of the Katie doll saying,
Mommy, Mommy
!

“You saved these things? All these years?”

“Mementos, Grace. Mementos. They can fuel love. Or hate. Hate is actually more difficult to keep alive than love. It has to be fed.”

Again, Warren pressed the gun into the small of her back and reached for her elbow. They moved sedately around the dress. Grace’s mouth went dry. Trapped in Plexiglas was a yellowed flyer wrapped around a tightly rolled paper bag, held together by a rubber band.

“You don’t know about this one.”

But she did. Dusty’s dad had just told her about his son throwing those flyers for his Cub Scout badge. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

“I wanted to see if it worked, yes. And it did, brilliantly.”

Grace looked away, remembering Dusty. Seeing in her mind’s eye Eric Bettles bouncing the basketball in the driveway with his dad.

“Perhaps you’re bored? Perhaps you’d like to speed things up?”

She tensed. On the multiplex screen Katie was in her T-ball uniform, running to home, safe. Balancing on a beam, jumping off. Dragging her feet through leaves after school.

Warren smiled. “I thought not. Well, don’t worry. I truly saved the best for last.”

He moved her along, past the pedestal holding the flyer. She trembled. Her legs gave way. He looped an arm around her.

They were standing in front of a new pedestal. It was a small exhibit. A terrible one.

He’d taken a photo of Katie’s face and blown it up, mounted it on springboard. The wind was blowing and it fanned her hair out in radiant concentric circles of light. Her eyes were closed, the lashes long and curly, and her mouth open, wide with laughter. He’d attached the photo with a spike to a crude rack. The spike protruded from Katie’s forehead.

On the rack hung Katie’s princess costume. The sparkly crown. What she’d been wearing when she’d disappeared. He’d looped the laces of the Air Walkers together and hung them on the rack, and they twisted in the air, pink socks stuffed and rolled into the shoes.

“Why ‘Spikeman?’”

“Why not? It’s catchy. Has kind of a snap. Even the excess of the Timer Game can be justified. I did it for my own amusement. Look at any of the games on TV.
Survivor. The Amazing Race
. Enormous planning, but oh, the fun! I had the time, the resources, the energy. I enjoyed it. And the science. Bringing you along step by step until you understood. The problem with being brilliant is that there are so few who understand. But you! You would see!”

“If I’d missed a deadline?”

“Katie would have died.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “Let me clarify that. She would have died
sooner.
That’s all. Sooner. It heartened me to see the effort you expended. It made you a worthy competitor. That’s the only reason I’m even offering you a chance to go along on my great adventure. You amuse me, Grace. There are few women who do.”

“So Mac wasn’t—”

“Mac was the best source of help. So I set out to discredit and disable him.”

“They weren’t married? Mac and Lee?” Part of her lifted, part of her sang.

He laughed. “God, no. They dated a few months, until he figured out what she was.”

“And that is?”

“A monster. A beautiful, amoral, cold-blooded, lovely-to-look-at monster.” He shrugged. “She amuses me, too. She’ll be joining us in our little ménage à trois.”

“But the palm print. Mac’s palm print was found in the taco van.”

“Let’s just say Marcie wasn’t above a few well-placed lies in return for a million dollars cash.”

Marcie was in on it. Grace hadn’t expected that.

“But you called security. He’ll be rescued.”

“Oh, no, Grace. I didn’t. Mac’s going to bleed to death.”

“Why are you doing this?”

Warren Pendrell came closer until she could feel the soft whuff of his breath. He spoke quietly, almost in her ear, an intimate act that terrified and repulsed her.

“Money. Pure and simple. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake here, Grace. This place has been a money pit since day one. Do you know how hard it is to bring any drug onto the market? Thousands of biotechs go under every year, banking on the wrong horse. I’d had a couple of expensive disasters in a row. I wasn’t going to lose everything, not after what I’d poured into this place. I needed a hit. Something huge.”

Onscreen, images of Katie as a toddler eating birthday cake, two fists at a time.

“And then it turns out Lee Bentley had the answer all along. She came to me one day and explained how the heartin-a-box could be made to look real, how we could make all this money. We could use what you’d learned—about infusing patients with donor cells when they got a heart transplant—and expand on it. Infuse bone marrow cells into a fetus while it was developing. And make it one hundred percent compatible. Fake people into thinking the heartin-a-box was real. And I knew my prayers had been answered.”

On the screen, Katie was searching for clues, laughing at somebody just off camera. Playing the Timer Game, the footage grainy and uneven, shot through the windows, the game played at the party Saturday, every Monday. So many games on the screen, Katie laughing in every version, tall and shorter again, stretching and compressing like Alice.

“What was in the bioreactor if it wasn’t a heart?”

“Oh, it was a heart created on a collagen form and seeded with cells, just exactly the way it looked, and maybe in another ten years, they’ll get the damn thing to work properly, but I don’t have ten years, and for now it’s too fragile to survive any kind of pressure, let alone the pressure exerted when blood pumps through. No, that’s for show. For Belikond.”

Warren gazed out over his domain, one hand on his hip, the lord of a ruined castle.

“And I realized I could—take care of a few nagging loose ends of my own. And then little Dusty came to visit and had his—accident—and we realized we could use him, too. Take his marrow. Experiment on those three couples. See if it worked, so we’d have the advantage of working through the kinks before harvesting the one we truly were interested in. Opal was quite skilled by the time she drew Katie’s marrow to use in Hekka’s body.”

Onscreen, a blurry image came into focus and Grace saw herself again as a new mother, holding her baby in her arms, a look of light on her face.

“Why me? What did I ever do except leave medicine?”

Warren’s face tightened. The images of Katie, her small fists weaving, flicked across his face as he stepped in front of the screen.

“It was my granddaughter who came off that stretcher. My granddaughter who needed a heart. My granddaughter you killed through your own ineptness.”

“Guatemala?” She was confused. “You’re talking about Guatemala? I didn’t kill—”

“Silence.” In the flickering images, his face looked demented. “I depended on you, Grace. When you told me the nun from your parish was going to Guatemala, I went to the parish myself, on your behalf, remember? Told them what an asset you’d be to Sister Mary Clare. I set up everything. Got word to my daughter. Her husband.”

“The general.”

“The general. They were looking for him everywhere. He couldn’t bring her in for treatment to a regular hospital but I’d been working with you for months. I’d seen what you could do, the miracles you wrought. I arranged everything. And you failed.”

His voice rose in a staccato lash of fury. “You dropped the ball. You didn’t come through.
You killed her! You!
After I’d guaranteed my granddaughter’s safety! You made a mockery of me, Grace. And you canceled any chance I had of bringing my daughter home. He disappeared, afterward, and took my daughter with him. And then to find out you were expecting. You were going to get the gift that had been taken from me. No, I was delighted to use Katie. It was fitting.” He took a shaky breath.

“We knew before you did, Grace. Who the daddy was. We’ve known all along. Do you know what it’s like, losing all you hold dear? You do now, don’t you? You have a taste of what that’s like. That endless loss of hope.”

Grace licked her lip. “I want to see her. Katie. Where is she?”

Warren raised the clicker and aimed it at the screen. The screen melted away. And in its place, lights blazed. Grace found herself staring down into a cement operating room.

Katie lay strapped to a gurney.

Chapter 45

Mac came to with a start in the pitch black of the locker and fought nausea, and then remembered where he was and fought panic. He was crouched in a fetal position, legs locked under him, wounded, the space so small he had to squeeze his shoulders to fit. His feet stung and he furiously moved the balls of his feet, flexed his ankles, trying to get back circulation.

The air was close and hot. His lungs burned and he wondered how much longer before he ran out of air. Pricks of light came through the sliver of vents. He forced his breathing to slow. Searing pain shot up his left arm. He slid his good hand over and pressed the wound. Renewed pain raked his arm and he dug his forehead into the metal door to keep from passing out. His arm was slippery with blood. Bad news. He was still bleeding.

If he didn’t suffocate, he’d bleed to death.

He remembered his key ring, and he squeezed his good hand around his chest and slid the ring out of his pocket. He breathed shallowly and he could feel his back slick with sweat.

He found the Swiss Army knife and detached the tiny penlight and trained it on his arm. A gash slippery with blood. He opened the knife. It was dull and flimsy, and he hacked at his shirt, ripping a piece he fashioned into a clumsy tourniquet.

He aimed his penlight at the crack between the door and locker. Keys were stronger than a knife blade and he tried them all: cars, trunks, house key in Atlanta, all the keys to all the newsrooms in his life. Too thick. None slid into the crack.

Credit cards were useless against whatever Grace had wedged into the locker to hold it. He slid the blade into the crack and leaned hard against the door, the top of his head banging against a hook. The blade snapped off in his hand. He wiped his mouth, beamed the light on the blade. It had snapped neatly across, leaving a straight edge protruding a half inch from the handle. Just right to slit his wrists and be done.

He flashed the penlight up. Three flat prongs flared off a hook from a metal base screwed into the top of the locker. He held the penlight in his teeth, keeping the hook in view, and inched up his good hand, using the sheared-off blade like a screwdriver. The screws dropped like metal hail onto his face, and he yanked the hook free and shoved it into the crack, leaning all his weight into the door. Blood rushed to his face and he strained, cramming the hook into the wedge and using it as a lever to pry the door.

A sliver of light appeared. He gasped, relaxed, panted against the door, and tried again, pressing the hook deeper into the crack and leaning his shoulder into it like it as if it were a brand he was gouging into his flesh. The top of the door bent and he leveraged that into a bigger opening, still not big enough to climb out of, and then suddenly the door burst open and he fell out, blinded by the sudden light.

What had they done to his daughter? How could he find her?
Katie, Katie.

He patted for his keys. Nausea surged up his throat and he took vast gulps of air. He rolled to his knees and gripped the buckled door, steadying himself before he tried standing. Pain shot down his arm and he fought the urge to pass out.