Paul wouldn’t have blamed her if she had been just that. In the tiny restaurant kitchen, with the ceiling only a few inches above their heads, the screams were deafening. The sight of that slender hand with the fork embedded in it was horrifying, the stuff of nightmares. The air was thick with the stale odors of baked ham, roast beef, fried onions, grease-and the fresh, metallic tang of blood. It was enough to nauseate anyone. But he said, “You won’t be sick. You’re a tough lady.”
She bit her lower lip and nodded.
Quickly, as if he had been prepared and waiting for exactly this emergency, Paul took a dishcloth from the towel rack and tore it into two strips. He threw one of these aside. With the other length of cloth and a long wooden tasting spoon, he fashioned a tourniquet for the waitress’s left arm. He twisted the wooden spoon with his right hand and covered the handle of the meat fork with his left. To Jenny he said, “Come around here and take the tourniquet.”
As soon as her right hand was free, the waitress tried to get to the handle of the fork. She clawed at Paul’s fist.
Jenny took hold of the spoon.
Pressing down on the waitress’s wounded hand, Paul jerked up on the fork, which was sunk into the wood perhaps half an inch past her flesh, and pulled the tines from her in one sudden, clean movement. He dropped the fork and slipped an arm around her waist to keep her from falling. Her knees had begun to buckle; he had thought they might.
As he stretched the woman out on the floor, Jenny said, “She must be in awful pain.”
Those words seemed to shatter the waitress’s terror. She stopped screaming and began to cry.
“I don’t see how she did it,” Paul said as he tended to her. “She put that fork through her hand with incredible force. She was pinned to the board.”
Weeping, trembling, the waitress said, “Accident.” She gasped and groaned and shook her head. “Terrible . . . accident.”
6
Fourteen Months Earlier:
Thursday, June 10, 1976
NAKED, THE DEAD MAN lay on his back in the center of the slightly tilted autopsy table, framed by blood gutters on all sides.
“Who was he?” Klinger asked.
Salsbury said, “He worked for Leonard.”
The room in which the three men stood was illuminated only in the center by two hooded lamps above the autopsy table. Three walls were lined with computer housings, consoles, and monitor boards; and the tiny systems bulbs and glowing scopes made ghostly patches of green, blue, yellow, and pale red light in the surrounding shadows. Nine TV display screens-cathode-ray tubes-were set high on three walls, and four other screens were suspended from the ceiling; and all of them emitted a thin bluish-green light.
In that eerie glow the corpse looked less like a real body than like a prop in a horror film.
Somber, almost reverent, Dawson said, “His name was Brian Kingman. He was on my personal staff.”
“For very long?” Klinger asked.
“Five years.”
The dead man had been in his late twenties and in good condition. Now, circulation having ceased seven hours ago, lividity had set in; the blood had settled into his calves, the backs of his thighs, his buttocks, and his lower back, and in these places the flesh was purple and a bit distended. His face was white and deeply lined. His hands were at his sides, his palms up, the fingers curled.
“Was he married?” Klinger asked.
Dawson shook his head: no.
“Family?”
“Grandparents dead. No brother or sisters. His mother died when he was born, and his father was killed in an auto accident last year.”
“Aunts and uncles?”
“None close.”
“Girl friends?”
“None that he was serious about or that were serious about him,” Dawson said. “That’s why we chose him. If he disappears, there’s no one to waste a lot of time and energy looking for him.”
Klinger considered that for a few seconds. Then he said, “You expected the experiment to kill him?”
“We thought there was a chance of it,” Ogden said.