which The found refreshing. He stood for a moment just inside the door
from the house, taking slow deep breaths to clear his head a little.
He had no appetite for anything except perhaps more wine, but he did not
want Kari to see him drunk. Besides, though he had no surgery scheduled
for the following day, he never knew what emergency might require the
skills of the resuscitation team, and he felt a responsibility to those
potential patients.
In his darkest hours, be sometimes considered leaving the field of
resuscitation medicine to concentrate on cardiovascular surgery. When
he saw a reanimated patient return to a useful life of work and family
and service, The knew a reward sweeter than most other men could ever
know. But in the moment of crysus, when the candidate for resuscitation
lay on the table, Jonas rarely knew anything about him, which meant he
might sometimes bring evil back into the world once the world had shed
it. That was more than a moral dilemma to him; it was a crushing weight
upon his conscience. Thus far, being a religious man-though with his
share of doubts-he had trusted in God to guide him.
He had decided that God had given him his brain and his skills to use,
and it was not his place to out-guess God and withhold his services from
any patient.
Jeremy, of course, was an unsettling new factor in the equation. If he
had brought Jeremy hack, and if Jeremy had killed innocent people… It
did not bear thinking about.
The cool air no longer seemed refreshing. It seeped into the hollows of
his spine.
Okay, dinner. Two steaks. Filet mignon. Lightly grilled, with a
little Worcestershire sauce. Salads with no dressing but a squirt of
lemon and a sprinkle of black pepper. Maybe he did have an appetite.
He didn’t eat much red meat; it was a rare treat. He was a heart
surgeon, after all, and saw firsthand the gruesome effects of a high-fat
diet.
He went to the freezer in the corner. He pushed the latch-release and
put up the lid.
Within lay Morton Redlow, late of the Redlow Detective Agency, pale and
gray as if carved from marble but not yet obscured by a layer of frost.
A smear of blood had frozen into a brittle crust on his face, and there
was a terrible vacancy where his nose had been. His eyes were open.
Forever.
Jonas did not recoil. As a surgeon, he was equally familiar with the
horrors and wonders of biology, and he was not easily repulsed.
Something in him withered when he saw Redlow. Something in him died.
His heart turned as cold as that of the detective before him. In some
fundamental way, he knew that he was finished as a man. He didn’t trust
God any more. Not any more. What God? But he was not nauseated or
forced to turn away in disgust.
He saw the folded note clutched in Redlow’s stiff right hand. The dead
man let go of it easily, for his fingers had contracted during the
freezing process, shrinking away from the paper around which the killer
had pressed them.
Numbly, he unfolded the letter and immediately recognized his son’s neat
penmanship. The post-coma aphasia had been faked. His retardation was
an immensely clever ruse.
The note said, Dear D: For a proper burial, they’ll need to know where
to find his nose. Look on his back end He stuck it in my business, so I
stuck it in his. If he’d had any manners, I would have treated him
better.
I’m sorry, sir, that this behavior distresses you so.
Lindsey drove with utmost urgency, pushing the Mitsubishi to its limits,
finding every planning flaw in a highway not always designed for speed.
There was little traffic as they moved deeper into the east, which
stacked the odds in their favor when once she crossed the center line in
the middle of a too-tight turn.
Having snapped on his safety harness again, Hatch used the car phone to
get Jonas Nyebern’s office number from information, then to call the
number itself, which was answered at once by a physician’s-service