Extreme Measures (33 page)

“No tricks?”

She shook her head. “No tricks,” she said. “At least not the kind you mean.”

“Photos?”

“He wouldn’t allow it. And frankly, I had no desire to take them. It was neither his wish nor mine that I go out and convince the world of what he could do. He knew, his people knew, and I knew, and that was quite enough.”

“Well, now
I
know,” Eric said.

“Yes, but you don’t believe it. It’s written all over your face.”

“Not that long ago, you would have been right. I wouldn’t—
couldn’t
—have believed your account. But what you see in me now is astonishment, mixed perhaps with skepticism, not disbelief. I’m a good doctor, Anna, and yet, I’m here plowing through these volumes because of a growing belief that both I and a friend of mine, who is also a fine physician, have each recently pronounced patients dead in our hospital who were, in fact, very much alive.”

The woman glanced at the volumes. Then she nodded and smiled knowingly, as if the pieces of a puzzle had fallen in place.

“Tetrodotoxin,” she said, almost reverently.

“Exactly. Do you know much about it?”

“I do. For one thing, it will most likely be a full chapter in my thesis, if not more. And for another, some of my roots are Haitian—my father, I have been told, though I never knew him, was born there.”

“Do you believe the drug has the power to slow metabolism without stopping it? To take a body to the line of death without crossing over?”

“Do you?”

“I … I don’t know what to believe.”

Once again Anna Delacroix’s eyes held fire.

“The drug can do what you ask … and more,” she said.

Eric felt her energy, her heat. He ran the edge of his hand across the sweat on his forehead.

“How do you know?” he asked hoarsely. “Is there proof? Proof a scientist could not refute?”

For more than a minute she said nothing. Eric studied her exquisite face, her perfect mouth, and silently prayed that she would at least share with him what she knew.

Finally she took one of her file cards, carefully printed an address on it, and passed it to him.

“This place is in Allston,” she said. “Can you find it?”

He glanced at the card. “I can find it.”

“Ten o’clock tonight, then. Come alone and meet me there, Dr. Eric, and you shall have your proof.” She stood. “Perhaps when this night is over, you will know in your heart that there are those who can fly … and those who can die without dying.”

She turned quickly, picked up her notes and her jacket, and moments later was gone.

S
hielded by a new-moon darkness, Laura and Bernard Nelson made their way from the alley where he had parked, down several more alleys, and finally across the street to the entrance of the Gates of Heaven Funeral Home. For two hours they had placed periodic calls to the mortuary, each time reaching only Donald Devine’s answering machine. Finally, Nelson had shrugged and said simply, “I guess we go.”

The detective carried with him a small black medical bag, containing what he called his “tools of truth”—two powerful penlights, various Exacto knives, screwdrivers, tape, a crowbar, pliers, a voltage meter and battery-powered soldering iron, wire, suction cups, a ring of keys and other oddly cut pieces of metal … and one Littman Cardiosonic stethoscope.

“If we’re stopped by the police,” he said as they set off, “you had better do a damn good job of convincing them that I’m your family doctor making a house call on your ailing aunt. If they ever open this little kit of mine, we’re cooked.”

The wooden shutters on the upstairs windows were pulled closed. Nelson checked the windows on the alley side of the structure and reported that they, too, were shuttered. They rang the doorbell several times, listening each time to the melodic chimes echoing from within.

“What tune are those playing?” Laura whispered.

The detective smiled.

“It would appear our Mr. Devine has a sense of humor,” he said. “They’re playing Tchaikovsky. A snippet of the death of Odette from
Swan Lake.”

“You could tell that from seven or eight notes?”

“Maggie’s a ballet nut. After six or seven years of being dragged, I finally gave up and got interested.”

“You’re amazing.”

“Tell me that after we’re inside,” Nelson said, tossing his cigar stub aside as he scanned first the edge of the door jamb, and then the windows.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked.

“That’s still up to you. How committed are you to finding out what this mysterious mortician is up to?”

“Very committed.”

“In that case, stay in close to the building, in the shadows, and keep your eyes on the street. I’m going back into the alley and around to the rear. Listen for a tap from the inside of the door. If it’s clear for me to open it, tap back twice. If not, tap once and then head back to the car. I’ll meet you there.”

Nelson reached in his medical bag and withdrew a nip of Jack Daniel’s.

“To the truth,” he said.

“To the truth,” Laura echoed.

She took a small sip, and in a single quick gulp, Bernard Nelson disposed of the remainder. He then slid along the side of the Gates of Heaven and disappeared down the alley.

Over the long minutes that followed, only one car drove past the darkened mortuary. Laura zipped up the thin black leather jacket Bernard had given her,
and pressed herself tightly against the building. She had tried calling Eric any number of times since the nightmare on Harrison Avenue, but without success. In a way, she was grateful. He almost certainly would have insisted on coming along, and if for any reason they were caught in their illegal entry, the negative publicity would doubtless kill whatever chance he still had for the White Memorial promotion.

A couple, holding hands, crossed the narrow street just two doors away. Laura froze, easily holding her breath for more than a minute until they had let themselves into their building. She glanced down at the doorknob.
What is taking so long?
She thought about the man who had called himself Roger Ansell. He had probably once stood somewhere right on this street, watching as she and Eric paid their visit to Donald Devine.
Did he have a wife? Children?
First Scott, now him. Regardless of the reasons, it seemed stupid and senseless and sad.

The taps—two of them from inside the mortuary—were barely audible. Laura responded with two of her own. Bernard Nelson opened the door, and she stepped into a darkness that was so complete, so palpably dense, that she instantly relived the moment when her flash failed during a night dive in a massive undersea grotto called the Sultan’s Cave.

“Wait a minute,” she whispered. “I’ve got to let my eyes adjust.”

“There’s no light for them to adjust to,” Nelson said. “Here.” He passed her a pair of surgical gloves and then a slim penlight, which cast a narrow but surprisingly potent beam. “Just keep it low, away from our faces.”

“Hey, I dive for a living, remember? There’s no verbalizing eighty feet down, so we live and die by using our lights the right way.”

“Sorry. Sorry I took so long too. The security system in this place turned out to be rather sophisticated.”

“Are you sure it’s deactivated?”

“That’s the weird thing. The system wasn’t on in the first place. W
e
could have used one of the keys on my Ring of Truth and been safely inside in two seconds. God, there’s enough formalin in the air here to grant eternal pickling.”

“It really does smell like death.”

They moved carefully from the foyer to Devine’s parlor, Laura keeping her flash fixed on the floor while Nelson swept his beam along the walls.

“What are we looking for?” Laura asked.

“Oh, shelves, bookcases, drawers, a wall safe—that sort of thing. If this Devine is the meticulous little mouse you describe, I’d be amazed if he doesn’t have records of whatever he’s into. I wish I felt comfortable turning on a light, but frankly, that’s a risk I’m not willing to take except as a last resort. If our divine friend happens to return, even a sliver of light through those shutters could warn him and cost us escape time.”

Bernard pulled a tool from his kit, popped open the drawer of Devine’s imitation Chippendale desk, and rifled quickly through its contents, scanning sheets, then carefully replacing them.

“Pull every book off those shelves, Laura—carefully,” he said, motioning to one wall. “Check to be sure each is what the binding says it is, and then set it right back where it was.”

It took twenty minutes to finish with the room, and another ten to search the small chapel adjacent to it.

“This is tougher than I thought it was going to be,” Laura said as they picked their way through the rear door of the chapel into the casket room.

“It gets even more difficult if the proprietor of the establishment walks in on us.”

Laura squinted, trying to adjust her vision to the new room, which was smaller and if possible even darker than the others. There seemed to be four or
five caskets displayed on stands of various heights. The walls were overhung with maroon velvet drapes, which emitted a mustiness competitive in intensity with the formalin.

Laura attempted to ignore the odors by breathing through her mouth. As she scanned the floor, trying to get some sense of the space, she stepped forward, bumping against one of the caskets. She put her hand out to steady herself, and set it down on the waxen face of a man. Laura gasped, recoiling against another casket as her penlight clattered to the floor. Immediately, Nelson’s flash sought her out.

“That casket.” She struggled to clear the sudden hoarseness from her throat. “There’s a body in there.”

Bernard played his light down her arm, past her pointing finger, into an ornate, velvet-lined coffin, and finally onto the face of a man.

Laura gasped. “That’s Donald Devine!”

The mortician, his hands resting peacefully on his vest, stared sightlessly upward. In the center of his forehead, just above his wire-rimmed spectacles and just below his pomaded hairline, was a single small bullet hole, surrounded by a halo of dried blood.

“Less than a day, I’d guess,” Bernard murmured, touching the back of his hand to Devine’s pallid cheek and then hefting the corpse’s arm, which seemed stiff and plastic. “But I’m really not very good at that sort of stuff. I
can
tell you for certain that he didn’t do this to himself.”

“This is horrible.”

“Maybe. But it tells me that you were right. Your friend here was into something shady. And whatever it was, he was obviously in over his head.”

“Should we keep searching?”

“I doubt we’ll find anything that whoever made this little hole didn’t find, but you never can tell. Besides, with the danger of Mr. Devine walking in on us lessened considerably, I think we might even risk turning lights on as we go.”

“If you think it’s all right. Do you mind if we skip this room though?”

“Not at all.”

“You know, I think he lived upstairs. Maybe it would be worth looking there.”

“Maybe it would at that,” Bernard Nelson said.

The staircase to Devine’s apartment was off the back hallway. The apartment itself consisted of an eat-in kitchen, a TV room, and two bedrooms, one of which was a small museum, overfilled with a startling collection of medieval weapons and armor, including mace-and-chains, broadswords, crossbows, lances, daggers, and several helmets.

“The mouse that roared,” Nelson mused.

“This place is truly creepy,” Laura said. “How about I do the bedroom and you do Camelot?”

“Just be sure there are no unshuttered windows before you turn oh any lights,” Nelson cautioned. “Check behind the drapes and pictures, and under any throw rugs. Mark my words. This guy kept detailed records of whatever he was into, and he kept them in a safe. Say, you wouldn’t have an extra cigar on you by any chance?”

“Sorry. But listen, if we find the safe you predict, I’ll buy you one—whatever kind you want.”

“What a sport.”

“Only one, though, and only if we find that safe.”

Just ten minutes later, they did. Laura was trying to move a large oil painting—some sort of rural scene—when she backed against a black spoke-backed chair, set on a small Oriental rug. The chair did not budge. Laura dropped to her knees and lifted the edge of the rug. The legs of the chair were bolted through it to the floor. Between the bolts she felt a small recessed latch. Releasing the latch, she tipped the chair backward. The rug and a hinged portion of the oak flooring tilted upward with it. The strongbox, a foot or so square with a dial lock and heavy metal handle, was concealed in the space below.

“Bingo!” she cried. “Mr. Nelson, you are truly a prince of your profession.”

“I hope you’re still considering that apprenticeship offer of mine,” he said, first examining the lock, then rummaging through his medical bag for his stethoscope.

He spent the next fifteen minutes pressed against the floor, listening to the tumblers of Donald Devine’s safe.

“There’s a gizmo that does this electronically,” he muttered, “but I’m just too damn cheap to invest in it. Besides, half this business is the challenge, right?”