It looked like – was in fact a steel cylinder, seventeen inches in diameter, sitting on its own legs with large caster-wheels at the bottom, just where he’d left it. The steel cover on the end was not in place, hanging down on its hinge.
‘You’re going to get in that,’ Kelly told him.
‘Fuck you, man!’ Defiance again. Kelly used the butt end of the Ka-Bar to club him on the back of the neck. Billy fell to his knees.
‘One way or another, you’re getting in – bleeding or not bleeding, I really don’t care.’ Which was a lie, but an effective one. Kelly lifted him by the neck and forced his head and shoulders into the opening. ‘Don’t move.’
It was so much easier than he’d expected. Kelly pulled a key off its place on the wall and unbolted the shackles on Billy’s hands. He could feel his prisoner tense, thinking that he might have a chance, but Kelly was fast on the wrench – he only had to remove one bolt to free both hands, and a prod from the knife in the right place encouraged Billy not to back up, which was the necessary precursor to any kind of effective resistance. Billy was just too cowardly to accept pain as the price for a chance at escape. He trembled but didn’t resist at all, for all his lavish and desperate thoughts.
‘Inside!’ A push helped, and when his feet were inside the rim, Kelly lifted the hatch and bolted it into place. Then he walked out, flipping the lights off. He needed something to eat and a nap. Billy could wait. The waiting would just make things easier.
‘Hello?’ Her voice sounded very worried.
‘Hi, Sandy, it’s John.’
‘John! What’s going on?’
‘How is she?’
‘Doris, you mean? She’s sleeping now,’ Sandy told him. ‘John, who – I mean, what’s happened to her?’
Kelly squeezed the phone receiver in his hand. ‘Sandy, I want you to listen to me very carefully, okay? This is really important.’
‘Okay, go ahead.’ Sandy was in her kitchen, looking at a pot of coffee. Outside she could see neighborhood children playing a game of ball on a vacant field whose comforting normality now seemed to be very distant indeed.
‘Number one, don’t tell anybody that she’s there. Sure as hell you don’t tell the police.’
‘John, she’s badly injured, she’s hooked on pills, she probably has severe medical problems on top of that. I have to-‘
‘Sam and Sarah, then. Nobody else. Sandy, you got that? Nobody else. Sandy…’ Kelly hesitated. It was too hard a thing to say, but he had to make it clear. ‘Sandy, I have placed you in danger. The people who worked Doris over are the same ones -‘
‘I know, John. I kinda figured that one out.’ The nurse’s expression was neutral, but she too had seen the photo of Pamela Starr Madden’s body. ‘John, she told me that you – killed somebody.’
‘Yes, Sandy, I did.’
Sandra O’Toole wasn’t surprised. She’d made the right guesses a few hours before, but hearing it from him – it was the way he’d just said it. Calm, matter-of-fact. Yes. Sandy, I did. Did you take the garbage out? Yes, Sandy, I did.
‘Sandy, these are some very dangerous people. I could have left Doris behind – but I couldn’t, could I? Jesus, Sandy, did you see what they -‘
‘Yes.’ It had been a long time since she’d worked the ER, and she’d almost forgotten the dreadful things that people did to one another.
‘Sandy, I’m sorry that I -‘
‘John, it’s done. I’ll handle it, okay?’ Kelly stopped talking for a moment, taking strength from her voice. Perhaps that was the difference between them. His instinct was to lash out, to identify the people who did the evil things and to deal with them. Seek out and destroy. Her instinct was to protect in a different way, and it struck the former SEAL that her strength might well be the greater.
‘I’ll have to get her proper medical attention.’ Sandy thought about the young woman upstairs in the back bedroom. She’d helped her get cleaned off and been horrified at the marks on her body, the vicious physical abuse. But worst of all were her eyes, dead, absent of the defiant spark that she saw in patients even as they lost their fight for life. Despite years of work in the care of critically ill patients, she’d never realized that a person could be destroyed on purpose, through deliberate, sadistic malice. Now she might come to the attention of such people herself, Sandy knew, but greater than her fear for them was her loathing.
For Kelly those feelings were precisely inverted. ‘Okay, Sandy, but please be careful. Promise me.’
‘I will. I’m going to call Doctor Rosen.’ She paused for a moment. ‘John?’
‘Yes, Sandy?’
‘What you’re doing … it’s wrong, John.’ She hated herself for saying that.
‘I know,’ Kelly told her.
Sandy closed her eyes, still seeing the kids chasing a baseball outside, then seeing John, wherever he was, knowing the expression that had to be on his face. She knew she had to say the next part, too, and she took a deep breath: ‘But I don’t care about that, not anymore. I understand, John.’
‘Thank you,’ Kelly whispered. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’ll do fine.’
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. I don’t know what we can do with her – ‘
‘Let me worry about that. We’ll take care of her. We’ll come up with something.’
‘Okay, Sandy… Sandy?’
‘What, John?’
‘Thanks. ‘ The line clicked off.
You’re welcome, she thought, hanging up. What a strange man. He was killing people, ending the lives of fellow human beings, doing it with an utter ruthlessness that she hadn’t seen – had no desire to see – but which his voice proclaimed in its emotionless speech. But he’d taken the time and endangered himself to rescue Doris. She still didn’t understand, Sandy told herself, dialing the phone again.
Dr Sidney Farber looked exactly as Emmet Ryan expected: forty or so, small, bearded, Jewish, pipe-smoker. He didn’t rise as the detective came in, merely motioning his guest to a chair with a wave of the hand. Ryan had messengered extracts from the case files to the psychiatrist before lunch, and clearly the doctor had read them. All of them were laid open on the desk, arrayed in two rows.
‘I know your partner, Tom Douglas,’ Farber said, puffing on his pipe.
‘Yes, sir. He said your work on the Gooding case was very helpful.’
‘A very sick man, Mr Gooding. I hope he’ll get the treatment he needs.’
‘How sick is this one?’ Lieutenant Ryan asked.
Farber looked up. ‘He’s as healthy as we are – rather healthier, physically speaking. But that’s not the important part. What you just said. “This one.” You’re assuming one murderer for all these incidents. Tell me why.’ The psychiatrist leaned back in his chair.
‘I didn’t think so at first. Tom saw it before I did. It’s the craftsmanship.’
‘Correct.’
‘Are we dealing with a psychopath?’
Farber shook his head. ‘No. The true psychopath is a person unable to deal with life. He sees reality in a very individual and eccentric way, generally a way that is very different from the rest of us. In nearly all cases the disorder is manifested in very open and easily recognized ways.’
‘But Gooding -‘
‘Mr Gooding is what we – there’s a new term, “organized psychopath.”‘
‘Okay, fine, but he wasn’t obvious to his neighbors.’
‘That’s true, but Mr Gooding’s disorder manifested itself in the gruesome way he killed his victims. But with these killings, there’s no ritual aspect to them. No mutilation. No sexual drive to them – that’s usually indicated by cuts on the neck, as you know. No.’ Farber shook his head again. ‘This fellow is all business. He’s not getting any emotional release at all. He’s just killing people and he’s doing it for a reason that is probably rational, at least to him.’
‘Why, then?’
‘Obviously it’s not robbery. It’s something else. He’s a very angry man, but I’ve met people like this before.’
‘Where?’ Ryan asked. Farber pointed to the opposite wall. In an oaken frame was a piece of red velvet on which were pinned a combat infantryman’s badge, jump wings, and a RANGER flash. The detective was surprised enough to let it show.
“Pretty stupid, really,’ Farber explained with a deprecating gesture. ‘Little Jewish boy wants to show how tough he is. Well’ – Farber smiled – ‘I guess I did.’
‘I didn’t like Europe all that much myself, but I didn’t see the nice parts.’
‘What outfit?’
‘East Company, Second of the Five-Oh-Sixth.’
‘Airborne. One-Oh-One, right?’
‘All the way, doc,’ the detective said, confirming that he too had once been young and foolish, and remembering how skinny he’d been, leaping out the cargo doors of C-47s. ‘I jumped into Normandy and Eindhoven.’