Sins of the Flesh (26 page)

“There’s something else,” Abe said, drawing Carmine away from the four uniforms on guard.

“What?”

“Up here.”

Abe led the way toward Delia’s prison, the passage lit up, gloomy rather than terrifying. The floor of packed earth, Carmine noted, was liberally dewed with debris from 150 years of enclosure: rodent skeletons, empty insect carpaces, living roots even—how did they get in there?—dead leaves.

“I hope they dressed Delia’s feet well at the hospital,” he muttered, steering around a dead rat.

“I phoned to make sure as soon as I had a look,” said Abe.

“Good man.”

In Delia’s prison he saw the relics of their incarceration—manacles and chains, a smell of urine. And the faint stench of an old decay. The passage beyond, he saw, was also lit.

“What’s up there?”

Abe grimaced. “The icing on what might be a different cake, Carmine,” he said.

A hundred yards farther, and there they were, six headless skeletons stapled to the outside wall by bands of steel nailed straight into the mortar with flat-headed spikes.

“Jesus!”

“The Shadow List Women, you think?” Abe asked

“I know,” Carmine said. “They never went anywhere, Abe.”

“Paul is aware what’s up the passage, but we’re sitting on it for the moment—Walter is enough to go on with. Unless you feel otherwise?”

“No! No, no … What difference can a day or two make now?” Tears filled his eyes; he turned his head away from Abe, and swallowed convulsively. “Even robbed of permanent rest, the poor ladies. Coming and going on the stairs, unnoticed … Of course they were zombies, how couldn’t she see that?”

“Worse than Walter,” Abe said. “They were done in ice-cold blood.

Turning, Carmine walked back to the roundel, where he could face Abe with neither the living nor the dead to eavesdrop.

“Our strategy, Carmine?” Abe asked.

“What time is it?”

“Eleven twenty-one.”

“Right. We keep the four uniforms here in case Walter makes a run for it. He’s a never-to-be-released killer, so as lives are at risk the orders are to shoot to kill. Fernando’s issued the same orders. Our authority is the commissioner himself. I’m seeing Warden Hanrahan right now, it’s arranged. You, Liam, Tony and Donny should go on up the road to Major Minor’s and grab some lunch. I’ll hope that the Warden takes pity on me. Then at one p.m. we’ll meet outside the Asylum entrance. Once inside there, we head for HI. I will see Dr. Wainfleet while everyone else waits for me still outside the entrance to HI. If Walter appears, you will arrest him—
full
manacles, hear me? Feet as well as hands, all connected at the waist. If he doesn’t appear by one-thirty, I’ll join you.”

“Let’s pray it finishes soon,” Abe said.

“I’m going back into the forest. See you at one.”

Warden James Murray Hanrahan had suffered atrociously at the whim of Dr. Jessica Wainfleet over the years, or at least as he painted it to Carmine during the first twenty choleric minutes of a long and impassioned interview. Stomach grumbling from lack of food, the captain of detectives resigned himself to a litany of complaints, on the theory that, if unopposed, Hanrahan’s tirade would cease more quickly, its deliverer somewhat purged of his ire.

“This is what happens when inexperienced public servants try to graft two disparate things together ass-to-ass!” the Warden roared. “Instead of letting me run a maximum security penitentiary properly, I’m forced to take a back seat to to an obsessive-compulsive fool with no correctional training! The power she’s accumulated in D.C., Hartford
and
Holloman mystifies me! I am just her animal care facility, her source of well-fed experimental subjects. I tell you, that woman is dangerous!”

“I know,” said Carmine, giving the warden his sweetest smile, “but, Jimmy, look on today as Deliverance Sunday, and on me as your own Archangel Gabriel. Leave things to me, and HI will be put in its proper place. Act independently, and you’ll fall flat. You’re not without friends, Jimmy, and they’re working quietly on your behalf. Dr. Wainfleet overestimates her power, whereas you underestimate yours. Just sit still, and all will be resolved.”

The Warden’s reply was perhaps inadvertent, but to Carmine it sounded wonderful. “Do you like egg salad?” he asked.

“I
love
egg salad,” Carmine said fervently.

“Then we can eat while we talk. It’s only sandwiches, but the bread is fresh. If I don’t eat, I’m afraid my stomach acids will chew another hole in my belly.”

Sometimes, reflected the captain of detectives, the most ordinary of queries can provoke the most delight.

“Make sure you have reserved your best padded cell in complete isolation, as well as maintain maximum security from the moment I leave,” Carmine said somewhat later. “Walter Jenkins must be taken dead or alive, I hope at the hands of the police, but otherwise, by yours. Most importantly, after he’s caught, you must ensure his isolation is preserved—no visitors, including Jess Wainfleet.”

“It will be done, Captain, you have my word on it.”

Jess and Walter lingered all morning in the cafeteria, then decided to eat lunch there before moving. The long silences between them were quite usual, though over this particular meal the paucity of their conversation was not due to any of the normal reasons.

Jess was still shaking off the last vestige of her shock at discovering exactly how far Walter had come—and how well he had concealed his progress. Nor had he told her all of it yet, she was positive; there was a lot more to make public, and she was dying to know what. In one aspect her ego was so enormous that she saw herself as a mighty sun alongside Walter’s dying ember, yet in another way her ego was so small that she saw Walter as a supernova alongside her own wan moon. She had no genuine concept of God, especially a God imaging her own species; she tended to think God was the Universe, and so she was a part of God. In which case, she reasoned, how then to classify Walter, who saw with diamantine clarity that he had created himself? Did that mean that Walter was the Universe, that
Walter
was God? A God who had created himself, but had needed the vital spark she gave him?

Walter sat wrestling with the knowledge that something inside him was slipping the way a snake swallowed its tail, the insatiable jaws and the coils of muscle behind them already beginning to digest the engulfed tissues of his disappearing tail into nothing. But that made no sense! He didn’t know what, or why, or where, or how. What he
felt
was a sensation akin to pain yet was not pain. Somewhere inside himself everything was going around and around, swirling and churning, but he had no idea of a name, or a function, or a reaction to pin on it. And ever and always came memories of the ecstasy he was driven to seek, to repeat. Though he had a name for the idea of ecstasy: the I-Walter. He, Walter, served the I-Walter.

He gave a grunt of exasperation and ran his hand over his aching forehead, screwing up his eyes, grinding his teeth.

“Walter! Walter! What’s the matter?” Jess was asking.

He stared at her, eyes clouded and distrait. “A headache,” he said. “I looked up the word ‘ecstasy’.”

“That’s an interesting word to look up! Why?”

“I feel it when I become the I-Walter.”

“Tell me first what you think ecstasy means.”

“Lifted out of myself in a pleasure so great I yearn for it to happen over and over and over again.”

“Is it a reaction inside your body? A part of your body?”

“No, it belongs to the spirit.”

“When does the ecstasy happen?”

“When I become the I-Walter.”

Is he regressing or progressing? Jess asked herself, at a loss. “Tell me what the ecstasy consists of, who the I-Walter is.”

“It happens when I watch the life-spark die in a pair of eyes,” Walter said, the only emotion in his voice a faint pleasure. “But it took a while to find the right way.”

“What is the right way?”

“I put my hands around its throat and squeeze while I’m either sitting or lying on top of it. Then its eyes are very close, I can see right into them and watch the life-spark die.” He rushed on with his explanation, it seemed forgetting that she sat there. “I can get in and get out of here, I stole a motorcycle. Oh, I have a
headache!
I find it asleep and I put my hand around its neck and I squeeze all the life out. Ecstasy!”

Her howl brought all talk in the cafeteria to a paralyzed halt; every face turned to look at Dr. Wainfleet, on her feet and howling like a dog, and Walter Jenkins, scrabbling backward in his chair.

“No! Jess! Jess!” he cried.

The howling rose to shrill yammers; Walter finally leaped to his feet, both hands to his head, then, without looking toward Jess Wainfleet again, he ran out of the cafeteria into the hall, and headed for the fire stairs.

At the bottom he forgot the back fire door, erupted into the front hall and sprinted for the glass doors. The shrieks had alerted the small group of detectives outside; they went for their guns.

No shots were fired. Five paces from the doors Walter’s back arched and he emitted a solitary scream of agony that ripped through brick and plaster as if it were made of tissue paper. Still in mid-stride, he pitched forward to the floor and lay on it, motionless.

Beretta out and safetly off, Abe Goldberg approached the body slowly, cautiously, searching for the eyes. Only one was visible, staring at Abe’s right foot, its pupil fixed and dilated. Abe relaxed a little, came close to Walter, then knelt and groped for a carotid pulse.

“He’s dead, but we don’t disregard instructions,” Abe said to Liam and the rest. “Manacle him properly. He’s a brain case, and I’m not taking any chances that this might be some kind of trance or catatonic state. Once he’s manacled, he’s safe.”

Carmine arrived, breathless, a minute later, Warden Hanrahan in tow, to find the lifeless Walter Jenkins as per instructions, in full manacles.

The Castigliones were at the top of the main stairs, forbidden to descend; Carmine joined them.

“What happened?” he asked.

“You tell us!” Moira Castiglione snapped. “Jess was having one of her eternal chats with her precious Walter, when she suddenly—I don’t know!—came apart, disintegrated, went into hysterics—God knows what, because I sure don’t! She started making weird noises like an animal yowling. She was standing, Walter was still sitting, but apparently he was the cause of her state because he began backing his chair away from the table looking as guilty as sin. I
think
he appealed to her, but if he did, she took no notice. Then he jumped up and ran away in the direction of the fire stairs. Jess collapsed. We put her in the room she uses here for resting if she works late, and when doesn’t she?”

“Did you sedate her?”

“No. We figured she might be needed to answer questions.”

And you hate her guts into the bargain, Carmine thought to himself. Lots of would-be directors of HI around here.

Carmine leaned over the landing railing. “Abe? Could you join me up here, please?” He thought of something else. “Warden Hanrahan? Many thanks, but your cooperation won’t be needed now. I’ll call you tomorrow with the full story.”

Jess Wainfleet had recovered from whatever Walter had said or done to trigger her hysteria, though both Carmine and Abe had a fair idea what the trigger had been: the monster had informed his Dr. Frankenstein that he was out and about the countryside murdering for the thrill of it rather than from ignorance.

“Which doesn’t alter our original dilemma,” Carmine said to Abe outside Jess’s makeshift bedroom. “Is this the right moment to hit her with the rest of it, or do we concentrate on Walter?”

“Let’s play it by ear,” was Abe’s advice.

“Okay by me.” Carmine knocked, was bidden enter. She had changed her blouse to a fresh one in a color he had never seen her wear—a dismal mid-grey—and primped at her hair and face to some effect. But the eyes she turned upon the two men were lackluster, devoid of warmth or any other feeling. Yet they were not defeated eyes: they were wary eyes.

“I take it, Doctor, that you were not aware what Walter Jenkins was up to?” Carmine asked gently.

“That is correct,” she said mechanically. “I had no idea.”

“Did finding out dismay you?” Abe asked.

“The word I would use is devastated, Lieutenant.”

“He rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, we presume stolen from someone nearby who hasn’t missed it, and killed a number of people in cold blood. Most of his murders seem to have been as the result of a homicidal psychopathia and undertaken for the fun of it, if I may be pardoned for what sounds a facetious phrase? His victims would have cooperated gladly, but the pity of it is that he discovered he enjoyed the act. Once he learned that, there could be no turning back, he actually sought to kill,” Carmine said. “You presumed that he was cured of his psychopathia, whereas the truth is that no cure had taken place.”

“The evidence supports my hypothesis,” she said stiffly.

“Except that all your so-called evidence was negative, Doctor. You were not, and never have been, in a position to infer a cure on positive evidence. The first positive opportunity resulted in the first murder. There can be no getting away from that.”

“I have no reason to get away from anything, Captain. It is not my fault that Walter Jenkins, cured or uncured, was permitted to roam the streets of Holloman County murdering innocent people! That is the fault of a system which does not take its duty anything like seriously enough. I mean that the security precautions supposed to keep Walter Jenkins imprisoned within a facility for the criminally insane were totally, utterly, inadequate. Anyone reading my papers on Walter knew that his I.Q. was extremely high and his ability to reason much better than that of most free men.” Her chin went up, her eyes kindled. “I was shocked literally out of my wits today when I learned that my patient—a lifetime felon from seven states—has been allowed to run amok thanks to the slipshod methods of the man responsible for the security of the Holloman Institute for the Criminally Insane—Warden James Hanrahan!”