The Night Caller (29 page)

Cara almost made it. Her right foot was almost on the lobby tiles when she felt a powerful arm encircle her waist from behind. She tried inhaling to scream but couldn’t as she was yanked back into the elevator.

Immediately the arm was up around her throat, keeping her silent while she struggled. As she got a hand into her purse and felt around for her gun, she saw the man’s other hand reach forward, his finger press the
CLOSE DOOR
button. A woman had been hurrying across the lobby toward the elevators. Cara had seen her at an angle, observed her delay as the four people who’d gotten off the elevator crossed her path, momentarily blocking her from view. She would come into sight soon, see what was happening.

Then the door began to slide closed.

She thought she caught just a glimpse of the hurrying woman’s dark coat as the view into the lobby was narrowed to a thin vertical slit, then disappeared altogether.

Cara was alone with the man she was sure had murdered her sister. The man with the face Ann must have dreamed about in the recovery room. He was incredibly handsome—too much so to be real, as if he’d been created by art photographers and air-brushed. His improbably serene face was immobile and unreal, like a mask. The mask Ann must have seen while momentarily drifting up from under anesthetic in the operating room. The mask with the malevolent eyes, fixed on her with a gaze he didn’t think she’d return.

Cara saw his free hand reach out and his forefinger firmly press the bottom elevator button lettered
S.
That caused him to shift his balance and loosen his grip slightly. She knew she still had a chance! This one chance!

Her hand was deeper inside her purse, fumbling through wadded tissue, comb, ballpoint pen, pack of chewing gum. With a horror that numbed her completely, she realized the gun Coop had given her was missing from her purse. She must have somehow forgotten it at the apartment, but she couldn’t remember even having removed it.

She was jolted by a sharp stinging sensation in the side of her neck, as if she’d been bitten by an insect.

Or had the man with the marionette face leaned over and very delicately bitten her? A vampire? Was that why he appeared so artificially human? Absurd!

Then she was falling.

The elevator was descending.

Her terror remained above, drifting away from her.

The Night Caller was sure that what happened at the elevator hadn’t been noticed. The woman who’d just entered the lobby didn’t have the angle of vision to see them. And it had all been done quickly. Quickly and neatly. Arm, pocket, button, needle. Animal instinct. Flash of fang, slash of claw. The impulse to survive lent economy of thought and motion.

He could be reasonably sure no one would be near the elevator in the surgery wing subbasement. The maintenance men, if they were in the lower level at all, stayed at the other end, well away from where the cadavers were stored. And almost always they used the service elevator.

As the elevator dropped, he glanced down at Cara, slumped on the floor unconscious from the powerful soporific he’d injected in her. He’d felt the disposable needle he always carried in his jacket pocket in case a patient got violent, and with one hand removed its plastic guard and readied it even before the elevator reached the lobby. He hoped that in his necessary haste he hadn’t injected any air that might cause an embolism. But he doubted that had occurred, and it was seldom as serious as laymen assumed from watching TV and reading mystery novels.

Cara’s beautiful face was still, her expression untroubled. He was glad. He bent slightly, extended his hand, and lifted her long red braid. After running it gently through his fingers, he draped it softly over her shoulder.

His fear, his panic, had been momentary. A meteoric flash of flame across a sky where otherwise the heavens were in balance.

Pattern, darkness, light, and shadow, voices not his own.

Then fate transcended chance.

Control had been maintained.

“Julia.”

“Nighklauer,” Maureen said, when Coop called her apartment later that night. He was surprised by the vibrancy in her voice. The excitement.

“You were right,” she went on. “All the names you gave me, the murder victims, had medical procedures performed at two hospitals in the city, and two in Seattle and Miami. All different procedures, some minor, some serious. Ellen Banta, Bette, and Theresa Dravic in New York, Marlee Clark in Miami, and Georgianna Mason in Seattle.”

“So who’s Nighklauer?” Coop asked. “The doctor who performed these procedures?”

“No, they were mostly different doctors. One at Greater Dade Hospital in Miami, one at St. Bartholomew in Seattle; the others, including Bette’s diagnostic tests, were performed by two different surgeons at Mercy Hospital in Manhattan.”

“Then who’s Nighklauer? A nurse?”

“An anesthesiologist,” Maureen said. “They often bill separately, kind of the freelancers of medicine, so it took me a while to find it. Dr. Victor Nighklauer was the attending anesthesiologist in each procedure. He’s practiced for years in the New York area, but he was requested by a surgeon in Miami to perform an operation on Marlee Clark the tennis star. Her surgeon specialized in sports injuries and was on staff at Mercy the previous year before moving to Florida. After that, he moved to the West Coast, California and Washington, before returning eleven months ago to New York. Not only that, I checked by phone with someone I know at Mercy, and Nighklauer still practices there. He has a handsome but masklike face from a childhood accident he never talks about. The nurses refer to him as the Night Caller, because that’s what his name sounds like when you say it fast, and because of his insistence on visiting his patients late at night after the morning of their operations, to check on them. Most anesthesiologists don’t do that.”

A masklike face. Coop had a vision of the man in the long coat, collar turned up, muffler bunched high and tight around his throat, hat brim pulled low in front. Concealing most of his face.

Mercy Hospital.

Cara had said she was going to talk to the nurses at Mercy Hospital about Ann.

“Something else, Coop. I had some names of probable other victims Deni gave me, going back over the last five years. They were from Florida, California, and Washington state. They all had insurance claims for medical procedures during that period, and Dr. Nighklauer was the attending anesthesiologist.”

Coop knew these must be the names that were on the list Dickerson had found in Deni’s apartment. “Thanks, Maureen! Now do me another favor. Call Art Billard and tell him what you just told me. Then tell him Cara Callahan and Nighklauer might be at Mercy Hospital. Will you do that?”

“Cara Callahan?”

“Please, Maureen!”

“If you say.”

He gave her Billard’s home and department number.

“Don’t forget, Maureen.”

“Listen, be—”

But he’d already hung up the phone and had stepped off the curb, looking desperately up and down the street for a cab, ignoring the cold wind that plucked at his collar.

Folded gurneys, collapsible wheelchairs, worn mattresses, empty oxygen bottles. The Night Caller knew no one would enter the subbasement storeroom. In a corner leaned half a dozen obsolete wheelchairs. Soon, when late visiting hours were over and the night shift arrived, and the hospital upstairs was teeming with people coming and going, he would tie Cara into the wheelchair, cover her with a blanket, and wheel her from a side door. From there it was only a short distance to where his car was parked. He was wearing street clothes and had left his coat, hat, and muffler on four in an employees’ lounge closet. That was all right; he would remove his tie, turn up his shirt collar to conceal the scars on his jaw and neck, keep his head down as if concerned for the patient. Hospital employees would assume he was a volunteer wheeling someone to a waiting car or taxi. Necessary for insurance purposes.

The Night Caller smiled.

Thank God for medical insurance.

Cara lay sleeping now on her back on some crates he’d butted up against one another, limbs flung loosely to the sides. As if she were a willing offering to the gods. Like Julia.

He couldn’t complete the ritual here. He hadn’t attempted it with Deni Green, hadn’t needed it. Had been interrupted with Theresa Dravic. Cara was perfect. He’d been almost ready for her anyway. He would take her to the privacy of his apartment and perform the ritual in his time, his own sweet time, then dispose of the body on the other side of town.

He rested a hand on Cara’s still wrist, her pulse faint but steady, blood and life, and closed his eyes. His own sweet time.

Julia. When he was twelve, and Julia was ten and so perfect and beautiful. Her long red hair was worn always in a braid. She took such pleasure undoing it at night and brushing it, then rebraiding it each morning. Her ritual. When he passed her open bedroom door he would look in on her asleep, her hair no longer braided, fanned like spun red honey on her pale pillow.

And one night he couldn’t walk on, had to enter her room. He lay beside her, stroking her hair, caressing her, exploring her wonders, knowing she was pretending to sleep, as they all pretended. Women pretended everything.

He returned to her the next night and the next and the next, until finally he probed too deeply and she screamed.

Her father had burst into the room, then stopped and stood still like a statue of an ancient warrior in a museum, wielding a baseball bat he always kept beneath his bed rather than a sword.

Then the sword fell. The Night Caller clenched his eyes shut, remembering the beating, the heavy blows, then the blade, the scars, what his father had done to him so no woman would look at him twice again.

His crime was never mentioned, something that had happened in another, darker world. But he was sent away to a strict boarding school, St. Augustine. The saint who had been a carnal sinner. He would never be alone with Julia again. He’d been filled with shame, spent nights contemplating suicide, eventually run away and supported himself on the streets by learning the art of the pickpocket and petty thief. But he’d been caught, escaped the machinery of the courts because of his youth, and had to be institutionalized.

He was held in the place of the roaches, huge ones peculiar to the region that actually hissed quite audibly. At night he would hear them, and sometimes feel them dart across his bare flesh with astounding speed. Though they were the size of a man’s thumb, they were like the brief touch of quill feathers on his soft cheek.

Eventually he’d gotten used to them, learned to endure their touch. Like him, they were part of the dark.

The shame and the scars bored in. The stains spread. It was a time he kept locked away in a deep, distant part of his mind.

Four years later a nun came into his room and told him the news. His father had beaten Julia to death and then committed suicide. Hanged himself from a rafter in the garage of the family’s suburban tract house.

Afterward the Night Caller had learned the details of the incestuous relationship his father and Julia had kept secret from him. The nuns and the doctors didn’t know he felt relieved—he wasn’t so sick and repulsive after all. His father hadn’t been punishing him, but eliminating him as a rival.

Though he still mourned and missed Julia terribly, he began to feel better about himself, smarter. Eventually he was released from the institution and continued his education, this time at St. Alexius Academy. St. Alexius, defender, helper, patron saint to nurses and pilgrims. It was after his time at St. Alexius, during medical school, that he’d had the so ineffectual cosmetic surgery performed. The operations had been like a series of dreams that had only a temporary impact on the real world. The past had been cut away but had grown back.

He’d never known sweeter moments than when Julia had lain still and allowed him to touch her. He’d never known such trust and acceptance since. Those moments in that long ago quiet bedroom determined his choice of career. He still was compelled at intervals to relive those moments. But only after making sure the woman would never cry out as Julia had, that she would never belong to another man or be harmed by him.

Georgianna Mason had been a precaution, Theresa Dravic an interruption, Deni Green a practical necessity.

Not again, he thought. Not this time. Not with this Julia. Destiny had touched destiny. Choice had become fate.

The Night Caller had denied himself the complete and unhurried ritual long enough. The careful, detailed recreation of his nights with Julia.

To deny himself longer would be unbearable.

There had been an accident on Roosevelt Drive, and traffic was backed up for blocks.

Coop sat stiffly in the back of the cab, eyeing the long line of vehicles before him, listening to the cacophony of blasting horns that accompanied every New York traffic jam. A cluster of three miniature Christmas ornaments tied together with a red bow hung from the rearview mirror. The cab smelled as if someone had recently smoked a cigar in it. Probably the driver.

“Try the side streets,” he instructed the driver. “They’ll be faster.”

The man simply ignored him.

“The side streets!” Coop repeated. “Cut over to First Avenue!”

“This is shorter,” the cabbie said, not turning his head. “Much faster.”

“This is important, damn it!”

“Everything is important, my friend. Put your trust in me. I know my job.” The cabbie turned up the volume on his radio, which was playing some sort of music Coop didn’t recognize. Like jazz blown through crude reed instruments.

The cab braked again and was totally motionless.

Coop dug a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and stuffed it into the swivel tray in the Plexiglas panel separating the passenger compartment from the driver. He opened the door and climbed out.

“C’mon back, my friend. This is fastest. Put your trust in me.”

Coop couldn’t. He was going to jog to First Avenue and try to catch another cab uptown.

“You forgot your change!” the cabbie yelled behind him. “Here’s your change, my friend!”

Ignoring him, rushing away, Coop wondered, should he have put his trust in the man?

Cara could hardly move her arms and legs. Someone was helping her across a dim room. Her feet were dragging. One shoe came loose, was left behind. Then the other.

She tried but couldn’t wake up all the way. Something was odd here, very—

She remembered. Her heart leaped in her breast.

Still she couldn’t clear her head. She felt herself forced down, into a sitting position in a chair, felt cool metal against her wrists. Something was wound around her midsection, pulling her tight to the chair back. She tried to struggle but remained detached from everything that was happening. It felt as if her arms and legs were moving, but she couldn’t be sure.

Then she heard a ripping sound. When unyielding strips of material were wrapped around her arms, fixing them to the chair arms, she knew the ripping sound had been tape being torn. Duct tape? Surgical tape? Again her heart pounded with fear.

She was aware of who was doing this to her, but he was shadow that came and went, bending over her, not touching her himself, using tape, other materials to bind her tightly to the chair. Her feet were forced against each other, her detached feet, and her lower legs were bound together. Then her thighs. She could move nothing now but her toes and fingers.
Riiiiip!
Tape was wound around her fingers. Cara tried to cry out but there was a numbness in her throat, at the base of her tongue. She wasn’t even sure if she was shaping her mouth to form a scream. She heard no sound.

She did feel in the back of her right hand a sharp pain. She knew what it was this time. A needle going in. A burning sensation as whatever was in the hypodermic syringe surged into her bloodstream.

She heard a voice like hers say, “No.” Off in the distance. “Please, no…”

Everything was fading, going away. She tried to fight it, struggled to remain aware. Was she falling asleep again? Dying? Was there a difference?

Soon she didn’t care.

The Night Caller withdrew the needle from Cara’s vein and checked the transparent syringe, making sure. He didn’t want to inject her with too much secobarbital. Not yet.

Cara was already back in her state of semiconsciousness, drifting in and out of sleep, not caring, faintly aware. The Night Caller knew her twilight condition precisely. She would be somewhat cognizant but helpless and manageable.

After dropping the syringe back in his pocket, he untaped Cara’s now limp right hand and placed a cotton wad on the needle mark, securing it with a thin strip of adhesive. He would leave that hand exposed, marking her as a patient who’d recently received intravenous medication. That would explain her semiconscious state to anyone who might be curious. He felt the slackness of her neck and jaw muscles, massaged her throat for a moment. She wouldn’t be able to speak, he was sure, even if she somehow thought of something to say.

He took a long, last look around. It might be apparent that someone had been in the storage room, but there was nothing to indicate the trespasser’s identity.

He had only to remove Cara from the hospital without detection. And he was sure he could accomplish that. She would soon be where they wouldn’t be disturbed.

Soon now.

He did wish he could have gotten to know this one more thoroughly before the final recognition. But he knew her sister Ann. He’d administered the relaxant and amnesiate in the pre-op room and asked Ann the usual questions about her medical background, family, medications she might have taken. As she lost control he asked her more personal questions, about her private life, her computer service, password to get on-line, finances, love life. He would remove her house key from her purse in the wire basket that would be placed in a locker, make a wax impression of the key, then return it.

He wouldn’t touch the patient after that. Not then.

When the OR nurse arrived he would accompany the patient as she was wheeled into the operating room. It was all a routine with him, with certain female patients. Always he would have recommended general anesthesia and MAC—monitored anesthetic care—so he could minister to them in the operating room, so he could make sure they wouldn’t say anything revealing. After the operation he’d visit them that evening, talk with them, make sure the amnesiate had done its job. Invariably they remembered nothing of the operation. Nothing of any conversation beforehand.

Then he would enter their lives like a shadow. Become intimately acquainted with them though they’d virtually forgotten him. He would become a part of them they didn’t know, like the dreams and memories they couldn’t touch.

And when he knew them well enough, as if they were a sister, there would come the recognition and the final bonding.

He was thinking clearly through his anticipation. He could do that.

Because he knew, because he understood, there wasn’t much he couldn’t do.

He’d already removed his tie, using it along with surgical tape and strips of worn sheets to secure Cara. He turned up his collar, ducking his head so his grotesqueness wouldn’t show.

This would work, he assured himself. People would only glance at his face, then look quickly away. It would be as if they hadn’t looked at him at all. And why should someone entering or leaving a hospital—visitor or employee—pay particular attention to a patient being transferred to a car? Checking out. Only if the Night Caller encountered someone he knew might there be a problem. But his route would be a short one, and Mercy Hospital was immense, so there was little chance of that.

Little chance, but some. A chance he would have to take. A lie he would have to tell. A circumstance he could deal with later if questions arose, if anyone guessed that Cara Callahan had disappeared from Mercy, if anyone even connected her to him. And even if someone—the Distraught Dad?—did make a connection, he could only suspect. All any of them could do was suspect. Shadows left no trace, not even a scent. They were here, they were gone, had they been here?

Confidently, he pushed the wheelchair toward the door.