WIDOW (23 page)

He shrugged. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it wasn't serial killings. Just a coincidence of two murders washing up the channel.

It would take three victims to make this worth his investigation.

Son prayed for that one more victim. That he be dispatched soon. And that his remains be found in the waters off the coast of the Seabrook area.

He had been idle too long. His skills unused. His taste for violent action too long postponed.

There must be one more death. He knew it would happen because he wanted it so.

 

Nineteen

 

Mitchell found himself in an emotional bottleneck—his head stuck up above the rim, arms pressed tight to his sides, feet dangling.

Big Mac might die with pneumonia and, for worried moments, while she tried in a dry raspy voice to answer the questions put to her about the murder in Montrose, Mitchell mentally reasoned with himself over that fact.

Face it, he told himself. She's old, she's undernourished, she's depleted. And did that mean she should die in the county hospital? No. No one deserved an end in a charitable ward without a soul to care.

She's just an old homeless hag, what's wrong with you? What was wrong with him had nothing to do with Big Mac's economic status. It had to do with how much he'd invested in the gaunt, liver-spotted woman, an investment he didn't know, until now, had been so significant.

She had looked through the yearbooks from Woodlands High School and picked out, without hesitation, the five boys responsible for the bashing and murder of the gay banker killed in the alleyway. While doing so, Mitchell caught his lieutenant's eye watching him with a sad she's-not-gonna-make-it-to-testify look.

Anyone looking at Mac could see she was on her last legs. Her color was high, the blush in her cheeks not the charm of roses, but the searing scald of scarlet banners. Mitchell thought she must have a high fever that was burning her up. While checking the yearbook, she had slowly removed two outer layers of jackets as sweat beaded and slipped from her brow into gray-ringed sunken eyes.

Only one other time in his life had Mitchell seen someone as deathly ill as Mac. His own mother on her deathbed, dying of the cancer rampaging through her body, had looked this way. Death stamped a footprint on fatally ill people nearing the chasm, and it was apparently crushing the life force from Mac even as she sat, scarecrow thin and trembly, in Epstein's office.

She's not your mother.

Hell no, she wasn't his mother, she probably wasn't anyone's mother, but she was his friend. And he cared about her. She was a goddamn decent human being. She had to survive.

“You want a glass of water, Mac?” He moved toward the door thinking he had to leave the room before he did something really stupid like call 911, swoop her up into his arms, and rush her through the bullpen, the outer offices, and down to a waiting ambulance.

She looked up at him, eyes faded and rheumy. Why was it when people got old the color of their eyes washed out, he wondered? Did age drain the color, leaving watery husks behind? Noticing how the elderly's eyes faded was sadder to him than any number of wrinkles or the whitest of hair.

She gazed at him a full ten seconds, as if she were having trouble placing his name, and then a spark lit within the depths of her eyes, and she smiled a little, licked dry lips, nodded. “That would be nice, Samson.”

He hurried away, breathing easy again. At the water cooler he drank two paper cups of water before getting a fresh cup and filling it for her. He shook his head, worrying, worrying.

All right. As soon as she had identified the teenage killers, he'd whisk her to the emergency room. He'd make them save her, by God. They had fucking miracle drugs, didn't they? Not for cancer sometimes. They could save anybody from anything. Except your mother. Let them work some magic on this one old woman and he'd forgive the medical community anything from now on.

Back in Epstein's office, he handed over the water cup. Again Mac smiled at him, but it was a slow, sad, sick thing playing on her lips, threatening to disappear into a painful grimace at any second. She'd been coughing—hacking, belly-shaking, body-rending coughs that turned her blushing cheeks blue, the pain of the ordeal crinkling her eyes shut. She had the cough under control now, but it could come back; it would come back, he knew that.

“Thanks.” She took the water gratefully and sipped the way a connoisseur might sip expensive cognac.

“Well . . .” The lieutenant cleared his throat and shifted in his chair behind the desk. “I think that'll do it, Mac. We'll have you sign a few forms and a statement against these particular boys, then you're free to . . . uh . . . go.”

Mitchell said, “I'll be unavailable for a couple of hours. I'll call in.”

Epstein lifted his eyebrows in question and Mitchell shifted his gaze toward Mac to indicate he had to take care of this. Right now. Before it was too late.

“Uh . . . sure. That's fine. You want me to send out a car to pick these kids up or wait for you?”

“Wait on it. They're not going anywhere. I want to bring ‘em in.”

Mac rose, gathering her frayed and weathered garments into her arms. “Put the boys away, gents,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “They're stone killers if I ever saw one.”

Mitchell took her arm and led her into the squad room where the stenographer's notes had been typed up. Mac signed everything she was supposed to, then turned to go.

“Wait,” Mitchell said. “I'm taking you some place.”

“What place?” Her voice was a croak. Cocking her head in a way that made her look like a crane on long skinny legs watching the skies for a sign to fly away.

Mitchell hustled her from the room with as much gentleness as he could muster. He had her down the hall before he answered. “To a hospital.”

“Look, that ain't necessary . . .”

“It sure as hell is necessary! You won't make it through the night without some penicillin in you.”

“Crock of shit.”

“I'm not arguing about this, Mac. We're going to find you a doctor and that's that.”

She relented, mostly he figured because she couldn't fight him over this or anything else. She could hardly walk, how was she going to stop him? And it was then the wracking cough came back and he had to support her, standing there on the steps of the station, until she could draw a breath again.

“Okay,” she sounded exhausted. “Okay, if you say so. If you'll stay with me.”

“I wouldn't think of leaving you alone, don't worry.” He got her to his car and drove like some kind of Hollywood-stuntman maniac through the clogged city streets to Ben Taub's emergency entrance. They thought they'd make him wait, have the old woman sit in the waiting room for her turn, but he took out his shield, brandishing it like a sword, and his voice dropped a register and grew hard. They took Mac straight through the back to an examining room. Mitchell trailed behind, hands in his pockets so he could keep them still.

A nurse came in, made a moue of disgust upon seeing Mac in her old layers of cheap, torn clothes sitting upon the examining table. Ben Taub had to take the indigent and those without insurance, but most of the poor who came in through the waiting room wore clean clothes. And not so many of them layered thick as a quilt.

“You'll have to get out of those things. Sir, would you mind stepping out?”

Mitchell stood just outside the closed door, chewing the inside of his cheek. The hallway was strangely empty. He could hear a child whimpering somewhere, a hydraulic door hissing shut, a telephone ringing, and the intercom voice calling for a “Dr Hajune,” but there wasn't a soul in sight. Where was the doctor?

Where were all the goddamn doctors when you needed them?

Then he laughed to himself. It was what they said about cops. And for both professions it was true. You needed help, you couldn't find it to save your life. The more you needed it, the longer it took to reach you.

He saw a man in a lab coat swinging down the hall, head lowered, scanning a medical record.

Maybe that was the doctor. It better be the doctor.

The man came right up to Mitchell before taking his eyes from the clipboard. Then he looked him in the eye. “What have we got here?”

Mitchell jerked his head at the closed door. “My friend's got the flu or pneumonia, I think. Something with her lungs. It's pretty bad.”

The doctor nodded and pushed through the door. Mitchell followed. The nurse glanced over her shoulder at them. She took a thermometer from Mac's mouth, read the digital numbers, and jotted them on a pink sheet attached to a clipboard before handing it to the doctor. He set it atop the other he carried, reading over Mac's vital signs.

“So! Feeling sickly, are we?”

Mac rolled her eyes at Mitchell. “You may not feel sick, but I feel like hell came to visit and decided to stay.” Saying this much threw her into a paroxysm of coughing. The doctor waited patiently for it to end before pressing his stethoscope to her scrawny chest.

“How long you had this cough?”

Mac shrugged her shoulders.

“Week? Two weeks?” He prodded her diaphragm, tapping at it with two fingers.

“Three, maybe four,” she said. “It's been getting worse.”

The doctor moved behind her and listened again with the stethoscope; lifting it, settling it in a new spot, lifting again, listening.

We need to do some blood work, but I think I can tell you right now this is a serious case of pneumonia. Double pneumonia, actually. Both your lungs are involved. Your temperature is elevated . . .”

“How high?” Mitchell interrupted, stepping forward, his heart a regular trip hammer. He knew she was sick, knew she was in really bad shape, but it was one thing to think it and another to hear a doctor say it.

“Hundred and three.”

Jesus, Mitchell thought. It goes much higher her brain will boil.

“We'll have to keep you . . .”

“I don't want to stay.” Mac looked made of sterner stuff than she had when they first entered the room. “I don't like hospitals.”

“Well, ma'am, if you don't stay, this thing might kill you. Just giving you a shot of antibiotics isn't going to make this go away, you know.”

“She's staying.” Mitchell took her elbow and looked into her old watercolor-washed eyes. “Aren't you?”

“Samson, I don't like . . .”

“I don't care if you don't like it here, you're staying. Aren't you?”

She tried, with her steady, fierce gaze, to fight him, but finally she glanced down at her hands lying in her lap on the hospital-issue gown and she said, “I guess I will.”

Mitchell hung around the hospital until they'd done the preliminary blood workup, taken a chest x-ray, and assigned Mac to a bed in a ward. He saw her tucked in, given a shot in the butt, an intravenous situated in her left arm, and then he knew he had to go.

“I have to leave for a little while, Mac, but I'll be back later tonight to check on you.”

“You don't gotta do that. I was just kidding about you staying with me. I ain't no kid.”

“I don't gotta do nothing, but I'll be here. I said I would and I will. Now you do what they tell you and when they're not around jabbing or poking, try to rest. Okay?”

“Mitchell?” She wrapped long bony fingers around his wrist. “I don't get well, you shouldn't worry about it.”

“What the hell you talking about, not getting well? Goddamnit, you're in a hospital getting shot full of miracle drugs, of course you'll get well.”

“If I don't,” she insisted. “If I don't, then you ought to know I've had a good run. Not a great one, but a good one. Even on the street, life ain't so bad sometimes. And . .” She paused, out of breath, swallowing hard and frowning as if it hurt to swallow, “. . . And at least I did a good thing telling you about those boys. I want you to do something about them, Samson. Make them hurt a little for that killing. It was a cold-blooded thing they done.”

“Don't worry on that score. They'll be put away.” He knew the chances of putting kids under eighteen years of age in jail for any length of time, any hard time, was a possible, but not a probable, outcome.

Yet he wouldn't tell Mac that.

Outside in the sunshine, Mitchell ground his teeth. Even the light summer breeze blowing gently across his face as he retraced his steps to where he'd parked his car didn't relieve the pent-up tension he had been holding in his gut ever since Mac had walked into the station that day.

He should have found a place for Mac to stay and she wouldn't have gotten pneumonia from living out in the elements. He should have forced a shelter or halfway house to take her in. He should have taken her in himself if he couldn't find a place.

He should have done something.

“Hell,” he mumbled, screeching tires leaving the parking lot. “Hell and damnation and cat shit on a stick.”

~*~

It was Mrs. Darnell who answered the door, inviting him into her spacious, country-decor den. Mr. Darnell wasn't home from work yet—one of the many ultra-chic laboratories huddled in the woods of the Woodlands. Ricky Darnell, a boy Mac had identified, was in his room “doing his homework,” Mrs. Darnell said. “What's this about, Officer Samson?”

“Could you have Ricky come in here?”

The woman, heavy from the hips down, but slim from the waist up, rather like a badly put together stuffed doll, stood her ground. “First,” she said, opening her eyes a little wider with the first tinges of alarm, “why don't you tell me what this is about, please?”

Mitchell sighed and took a breath. “Mrs. Darnell, I have a warrant for Ricky's arrest. He's a suspect for murder. We want to question him about the night of May 28th. Five boys were seen beating to death a man named George Calloway in an alley in Montrose, and your son was identified by our eye witness as one of those boys. If you'll call Ricky in here, I'll read him his rights.”