Death Rounds (49 page)

I pressed myself back against the wall where it was darkest and huddled into a ball with my face cradled in my arms. I allowed myself a wide enough slit for one eye to peek through. The door flew open the rest of the way, banging noisily against the inside wall as Rossit bolted from the room. In the fraction of an instant he passed under the overhead light I glimpsed vomit streaming from under his mask and down the front of his gown. His eyes were as wide as saucers with black bull’s-eyes in them. Then he was tearing away in the semidarkness, his labored breathing loud and full of whimpering sounds, his shoes slapping against the floor.

The echo in the place amplified the noises of his retreat as he got farther away in that long corridor. I got up from my hiding place and watched him go. Silhouetted against the distant light where the hallway joined the rest of the hospital, he gave the illusion of running in place.

It wasn’t the behavior I expected from a murderer. Come to think of it, if this was his lab, why had he spent so much time poking his head into all the other rooms on the way to it? Leave the questions to the cops, I readily decided, pulling out my cellular and dialing the security desk. “This is Dr. Garnet,” I announced as soon as I heard the receiver pick up. “You know I’m working with Detective Riley.”

“Yes, sir!” came the reply. “I’ve accompanied you myself to the basement.”

“Listen up. By no means let a Dr. Gary Rossit out of this hospital, you hear! He’s on his way toward you. Stop him, no matter how much he protests. Alert all the guards at the other entrances. Now!”

“Right away, sir!”

“And notify Riley—”

The buzz in my ear told me he’d hung up. Obviously, for him, an order was something to be jumped to. “If only we could get the residents to obey like that,” I said out loud, wanting to break the leaden quiet that pressed in on me.

Rossit had passed out of sight and sound, leaving me listening only to the occasional “thunk” of an overhead pipe. I continued to take in air by mouth, but nothing I did could keep away all traces of the telltale smell and nothing would lessen the terrible dread I felt about entering that room. Nevertheless, I walked up to the fully open doorway and stepped in.

At first I saw only more storm windows and boxes. Then, looking over the top of a particularly large pile of cartons stacked in the middle of the floor, I could see a three-quarter-size metal door set in the far wall. It was open, but the area it led to was in darkness. I recoiled from looking in. The smell where I stood was already much more powerful than it had been outside, and mouth breathing left me actually
tasting
the odor of rot. I needed a few minutes to let my olfactory senses accommodate to the aroma; pathologists always taught us never to run from a stink but rather stay in the room a few minutes and let it become bearable. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. The trick was to get through the few minutes. I walked over to the table and tried to focus on the items laid out on its surface while fighting the urge to throw up.

It was almost as Williams and I had predicted. The large cube-shaped object was an incubator with a thermostat and a heat lamp. It was probably intended for hatching chicks and was open on top, but he’d laid a big cookie sheet over it as a cover. Inside was a rack of half a dozen shelves—again some kind of kitchen accessory. On each of these shelves were a dozen petri dishes, every one of them teaming with bacterial colonies. His equipment looked more like the stuff of a cooking class than the tools of murder.

I lifted the bed sheet off the other end of the table and discovered four closed preserving jars full of water. I presumed these were his supply of
Legionella.
Bundles of culture sticks and collection tubes were lying on trays, and boxes of gloves and masks were within easy reach. But when I removed the sheet entirely I found myself looking at something I didn’t understand. Half a dozen surgical masks were spread out side by side. Near them was a box of thirty-cc syringes fitted with very small number 25 needles. I picked up one of the masks, yet couldn’t see anything special about it. When I put it down, however, I realized I had a little moisture on my gloves at the tips of my fingers. When I examined the other five, I discovered they were all damp as well. Had he spread them out to dry? But why were they wet in the first place?

I’d have to figure it out later. At the moment I had as good a hold on my stomach as I was ever going to have, and it was time to get on with what I’d come in here to do. I walked over to the entrance of that small chamber. Pathologists must simply have lousy noses, I concluded as I resorted to holding mine and trying to swallow at what seemed like once every second.

I knelt down and peered into the darkness. The tiny space was barely five feet high at the zenith of a low arched stone ceiling. Braced for the worst, what startled me was that I
didn’t
see the corpse I’d been smelling. Instead I was looking at another bunch of large boxes randomly placed about the floor, if floor was the right word. It was nothing but dirt. There was enough light streaming into the cramped space from behind me that I could see where many of these boxes were shredded near the bottom, some of them with holes in their sides the size of a cat. Their contents were probably documents, because chewed strands of paper trailed out from those holes onto the ground like streamers. Were these containers what I had heard Rossit dragging around?

It took my eyes a few seconds more to see the scrape marks where he’d hauled them off an area of darker, coarser earth compared to the gray powdery soil surrounding it. This patch was a few feet wide, and at the far end I could make out a small spot where the dirt was especially roughed up and scattered. Without giving myself time to think about it, I took a breath, went in on all fours, and crawled toward the freshly disturbed ground until I was looking down at what seemed like a shallow depression of mud. There was absolutely no sound in here, and the weight of the whole hospital seemed to press in on me. I gritted my teeth, and tried to push aside the wet dirt with my gloved hand. After letting my eyes adjust again to the lack of light, I could make out that the mud had earth-caked features. The rats hadn’t had to dig down more than a few inches to chew on Cam Mackie’s face.

I broke into a sweat despite the cold clamminess of that closed space, and when I had to breathe, the air was so putrid that my throat involuntarily seized. Desperate for a breath, I backed out as fast as I could.

He was waiting for me. I had started to get up when I caught a glimpse of his crepe-soled shoes behind me on my left. I tried to wheel around and get my arm up to protect myself. But I was still partially bent over, and the ceiling light was behind him, so all I could make out was a silhouette and the shape of the shovel he was holding in the air like a bat. The instant before he brought it down on my head I realized he was too tall to be Gary Rossit.

Chapter 24

When I next opened my eyes, I was staring at my crotch. My head was lolling on my chest; the slightest effort to raise it sent spears of pain up my back and into my skull. I was leaning forward against some kind of restraints—duct tape, it looked like—around my chest and arms. My hands were bound behind my back, and I was strapped into a chair with my legs lashed together, also with duct tape.

Three strikes and you’re out, they say. On this occasion I figured I was out for a long time. The numbness I felt in my hands, arms, and legs and the stiffness I could feel in the parts of me that weren’t yet numb were the result, I knew, of being cramped in this position for quite a while.

I tried to take inventory of how badly I was hurt. Definitely some things were wrong. When I tried to look sideways, I could detect a lump that I judged to be the size of a walnut. It seemed to be growing out of my forehead and bulging down over my left eye. That didn’t worry me much. A hematoma, or goose egg, always looked worse than it was. More disturbing was a complete lack of sensation on that side of my face, which might mean nerve damage, and that could be permanent. I made a few more painful attempts to lift my head enough that I could see my surroundings. More spasms seared through the upper half of my back from the bottom of my skull, making me wonder if he hadn’t also injured my neck. After crying out with the pain a few times, I realized that I was hearing with only my right ear.

The large door to this room was now closed, and my attacker had placed me not too far from the table where he’d cooked up his particular brand of death. As I looked around, I could feel that my surgical mask was much tighter across my face than I was used to, the added pressure against my nose making it hard to breathe. Whoever hit me must have retied it, I thought, but I remained baffled about why he would have. It certainly wasn’t out of any concern for my health. I was bothered by the top of the mask biting into my cheeks just below my eyes, so several seconds passed before I realized my glasses were gone. I looked around; they were lying by my feet, smashed.

I noticed something else was gone as well, or at least was barely noticeable—the smell. No mask, however tight, could have protected against that reeking odor. I tried to look behind me, and by peering under my goose egg, I was able to see that the metal door leading into where Cam was buried was closed and sealed with duct tape. Leaning against the wall beside it was a shovel coated with traces of fresh earth. I shuddered. Cam’s face, I presumed, had been reinterred. I also saw that some of the boxes that had been piled in the center of the room were gone. Maybe the killer had used additional containers to better cover the grave this time, though I doubted anything would keep the rats away from it for very long.

I’d been so wrong about Cam, and Janet had had him pegged right all along. Like father, like son—Stephen Mackie wasn’t just remarkable for the way he’ d conducted himself through the hideous ordeal chronicled in his chart. He also deserved credit for getting Cam through it intact—free enough from bitterness that he could make his father proud and become the man and doctor Janet knew him to be. Now Cam lay in the earth, slaughtered. Had I inadvertently set him up to be the Phantom’s scapegoat? The question seared into me.

I began coming to grips with the fact that Rossit wasn’t the one who’d knocked me out. There was no mistaking that the silhouette I’d seen was the wrong height to have been him. It made sense now, too, his looking into rooms the way he had. He’d no more known where this secret workplace was than I had. What he
was
doing here, I’d no idea, though I wouldn’t put it past him to have blustered his way past the guards for no better reason than to grab some publicity for himself.
LOCAL
E
XPER
T IN
INFECTIOUS
DISEASES
STEPS
FORWARD
TO
HELP
OUT
DURING
CRISIS
was exactly the kind of headline I could imagine him going after. Maybe he’d even figured out as much as Williams and I had and knew what kind of equipment to look for. Damn! If I hadn’t kept everybody focused on the asylum, probably Riley’s men would have found this place as well.

But they had searched the entire hospital at least once, I recalled, after Cam disappeared. Maybe there’d been no odor then; the rats hadn’t yet done their hideous work. Even if the police had looked into that little crypt, they wouldn’t have seen the fresh earth with the boxes over it. Another possibility was that they never saw the entrance to the crypt at all. There were sufficient containers nearby to have made a big enough pile that it would have hidden the door altogether. Likewise the table. The police probably had glanced in, seen only boxes stacked to the ceiling, and gone on with their search.

The slightest movement of my head sent new pains coursing through my skull, and I was having increasing difficulty breathing through the tight mask. Had my attacker retied it like this to make it hard to breathe? Or yell?

“Hey! Help me!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. My cry was a bit muffled, but the mask wouldn’t keep me from shouting if that’s what he was worried about. I doubted he would be, though, when I thought about the chances of anyone hearing me. No one was in the subbasement these days, let alone nights, except those of us going through records. Even then, except for me and my trips to the repository, everyone else was usually in the archives at the other end of the hospital.

But someone who came specifically looking for me might hear. Rossit should have told the police about this place by now. Surely they’d gotten him after I’d called them to pick him up. But where were they? I’d certainly been here longer than the ten minutes or so it should have taken for him to have reached the front door and for them to have gotten back down to this room.

“I’m in here,” I screamed, thinking maybe the would-be rescuers had taken a wrong turn, but my little burst of hope that someone was on the way quickly faded in the answering silence. What had happened when Rossit got upstairs? Was it possible he would have not told the police about this place?

I started to feel twinges of panic over what this killer would have in store for me when he returned. I strained my wrists, arms, and legs against the tape, but the more I forced, the more I felt bound by them. My breathing quickened and I began feeling suffocated by the mask. I tried to bend my head far enough to one side that I could rub the bottom tie loose from my jaw with my shoulder, but I only managed to send my neck muscles into their worst spasms yet. I screamed once and then had to hold my upper body completely still to avoid more of the same. I ended up staring directly at the table so laden with death. The sight of it added to my anxiety, and an unbidden thought slithered into my mind. Could he already have infected me while I was unconscious?

Now it was all I could do to keep my panic from going right out of control. I desperately screened the tabletop. Had anything been moved or used? It took me the better part of a minute to realize one of the six surgical masks was missing. The other five remained spread out, presumably left that way to dry. But dry of what? I tried to steady my breathing, but it shot up again as another question raced into my head. Where was the missing mask? My entire body broke out in a sweat as the realization came. He hadn’t retied mine. He’d replaced it with the one missing from the table—one that he’d wet with something!