4 Blood Pact (25 page)

“Maybe he just went to ground, got caught out too late and had to take what shelter he could.”

“He wouldn’t do that to me if he could help it.”

“He’d call?” Celluci couldn’t prevent the mocking tone.

Vicki’s chin went up. “Yeah. He’d call.”
He
wouldn’t leave me to think he was dead if he could help it. You don’t do that to someone you say you love.
“We find my mother. We find Henry.”
He couldn’t call if he was dead. He isn’t dead
. “Do you understand?”

Actually, he did. After nine years, he’d gotten proficient at reading her subtext. And if his understanding was all she’d take . . . Celluci spread his hands, the gesture both conciliatory and an indication that he had no wish to continue the discussion.

Some of the stiffness went out of Vicki’s stance. “You make coffee,” she told him, “while I shower.”

Celluci rolled his eyes. “What do I look like? Livein help?”

“No.” Vicki felt her lower lip tremble and sternly stilled it. “You look like someone I can count on. No matter what.” Then, before the lump in her throat did any more damage, she wheeled on one bare heel and strode out of the room.

His own throat tight, Celluci pushed the curl of hair back off his face. “Just when you’re ready to give up on her,” he muttered. Shaking his head, he went to make the coffee.

 

Running her fingers through her wet hair, Vicki wandered into the living room and dropped onto the couch. She could hear Celluci mumbling to himself in the kitchen and, remembering what had happened on other occasions, decided it might be safer not to bother him when he was cooking. Without quite knowing how it happened, she found herself lifting the box of her mother’s personal effects and setting it in front of her on the coffee table.

I suppose no day’s so bad that you can’t make it worse
.

There was surprisingly little in it: a sweater kept hanging over the back of the office chair, just in case; two lipsticks, one pale pink, the other a surprisingly brilliant red; half a bottle of aspirin; the coffee mug; the datebook with its final futile message; her academy graduation portrait; and a pile of loose papers.

Vicki picked up the photograph and stared into the face of the smiling young woman. She looked so young. So confident. “I looked like I thought I knew everything.”

“You still think you know everything.” Celluci handed her a mug of coffee and plucked the picture out of her grasp. “Good God. It’s a baby cop.”

“If I ignore you, will you go back into the kitchen?”

He thought about it for a second. “No.”

“Great.” Pulling her bathrobe securely closed, Vicki lifted out the loose paper.
Why on earth did Mrs.
Shaw think I’d want a bunch of Mother’s notes? Then
she saw how each page began.

 

Dear Vicki: You’re probably wondering why a letter instead of a phone call, but I’ve got something important to tell you and I thought I might get through it easier this way, without interruptions. I haven’t written a letter for a while so I hope you’ll forgive . . .

 

Dear Vicki: Did I tell you the results of my last checkup? Well, I probably didn’t want to bore you with details, but . . .

 

Dear Vicki: First of all, I love you very much and . . .

 

Dear Vicki: When your father left, I promised you that I’d always be there for you. I wish I . . .

 

Dear Vicki: There are some things that are easier to say on paper, so I hope you’ll forgive me this small distance I have to put between us. Dr. Friedman tells me that I’ve got a problem with my heart and I may not have long to live. Please don’t fly off the handle and start demanding I see another doctor. I have.

Yes, I’m afraid. Any sensible person would be. But mostly I was afraid that something would happen before I found the courage to tell you.

I don’t want to just disappear out of your life like your father did. I want us to have a chance to say good-bye. When you get this letter, call me. We’ll make arrangements for you to come home for a few days and we’ll sit down and really talk.

I love you.

 

The last and most complete letter was dated from the Friday before Marjory Nelson died.

Vicki fought tears and with shaking hands laid the letters back in the box.

“Vicki?”

She shook her head, unable to push her voice past an almost equal mix of grief and anger. Even if the letter had been mailed, they still wouldn’t have had time to say good-bye.
Jesus Christ, Mom, why didn’t you have Dr. Friedman call me?

Celluci leaned forward and scanned the top page. “Vicki, I . . .”

“Don’t.” Her teeth were clenched so tightly it felt as though there was an iron band wrapped around her temples. One more sympathetic word—one more word of any kind—would destroy the fingernail grip she had on her control. Moving blindly, she stood and hurried toward the bedroom. “I’ve got to get dressed. We’ve got to look for Henry.”

 

At 10:20, Catherine lifted the lid of the isolation box and smiled in at the woman who had once been Marjory Nelson. “I know; it’s pretty boring in there, isn’t it?” She pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and deftly unhooked the jack and laid it, gold prongs gleaming, to one side. “Just give me half a sec and we’ll see what we can do about getting you out of there.” Nutrient tubes were tugged gently from catheters and tucked away in specific compartments in the sides of the box. “You’ve got amazingly good skin tone, all things considered, but I think that working a little estrogen cream into the epidermis might be in order. We don’t want things to tear while you’re up and moving around.”

Catherine hummed tunelessly to herself as she worked, stopping twice to make notes on muscle resilience and joint flexibility. So far, number ten proved her theory. None of the others, not even number nine, had responded to the bacteria quite so well. She couldn’t wait to see how Donald—number eleven—turned out.

 

Had she seen the girl before? Why couldn’t she remember?

The girl was not the right girl, although she didn’t understand why not.

Hooking her fingers over the side of the box, she pulled herself up into a sitting position.

There was something she had to do.

Catherine shook her head. Initiative was all very well but at the moment a prone, immobile body would be of more use.

“Lie down,” she said sternly.

 

The command traveled deeply rutted pathways and the body obeyed.

But she didn’t want to lie down.

At least she didn’t think she did.

 

“You’re trying to frown, that’s wonderful!” Catherine clapped gloved hands together. “Even partial control of the zygomaticus minor is a definite advance. I’ve got to take some measurements.”

 

Number nine watched closely as she moved about the other one like him. He remembered another word.

When she needed him, he’d be there.

Just for an instant, he thought he remembered music.

 

With number ten measured, moisturized, dressed, and sitting at the side of the room, Catherine finally turned her attention to the intruder. She’d heard no sounds at all from what had been number nine’s box since she’d returned to the lab and she rather hoped he hadn’t died. With no brain wave patterns and no bacteria tailored, it would be a waste of a perfectly good body, especially as, if he’d suffocated or had a heart attack, there wouldn’t even be any trauma to repair.

“Of course, if he
has
died, we could use Donald’s brain wave patterns and the generic bacteria,” she mused as she lifted the lid. “After all, it worked on number nine and he wasn’t exactly fresh. It’d be nice to have a little backup data for a change.”

She frowned down into the isolation box. The intruder lay, one pale hand curled against his chest, the other palm up at his side. His eyes were closed and long lashes, slightly darker than the strawberry blond hair, brushed against the curve of pale cheeks. He didn’t look dead. Exactly. But he didn’t look alive. Exactly.

Head to one side, she pushed his collar back and pressed two fingers into the pulse point at his throat. His flesh responded with more resilience than she’d expected, far more than a corpse would have but, at the same time, it seemed his body temperature had dropped too low to sustain life. She checked to make sure that the refrigeration unit had, indeed, been shut off. It had.

“How very strange,” she murmured. Then things got stranger still for just as she was about to believe his heart had stopped, for whatever reason, a single pulse throbbed under her fingertips. Frown deepening, she waited, eyes on her watch as the seconds flashed by. Just over eight seconds later, the intruder’s heart beat again. And then eight seconds after that, again.

“About seven beats a minute.” Catherine drummed the fingers of both hands on the side of the isolation box. “The alternation of systole and diastole occurs at an average rate of about seventy times per minute in a normal human being at rest. What we have here is a heart beating at one tenth the normal rate.”

Brows knit, she carefully lifted an eyelid between thumb and forefinger. The eye had not rolled back. The pupil, rather than being protected under the ridge of brow bone, remained centered, collapsed to pinprick dimensions. There was no reaction of any kind to light. Nor, for that matter, to any other kind of stimuli by any other part of the body—and Catherine tried them all.

Accompanied by low level respiration, the heart continued to beat between seven and eight times a minute, undetectable had she not been specifically searching for it. These were the only signs of life.

She’d heard of Indian fakirs putting themselves into trances so deep they appeared to be in comas or dead and she supposed this was a North American variation on that ability; that when her intruder had found himself trapped, he’d lowered his metabolism to conserve resources. Catherine had no idea what he’d been hoping to accomplish as he seemed, at the moment, totally unable to defend himself, but she had to admit that, minor point aside, it was a pretty neat trick.

Finally, she had number nine help her remove his leather trench coat and, rolling up his shirtsleeve, she pulled two vials of blood. She’d intended to take three but, with the intruder’s blood pressure so low, two used up all the time she was willing to allow. Closing the box, she headed for one of the tables at the other end of the lab. Running the blood work might give her some answers to this trance thing but, even if it didn’t, she could always use the information later should the intruder happen to die.

 

“Look, Detective Fergusson, I’m aware that my mother died of natural causes before the crime was committed and I realize that this makes her a very low priority but . . .”

“Ms. Nelson.” Detective Fergusson’s voice hovered between exasperation and annoyance. “I’m sorry you’re upset, but I’ve got a murdered teenager on my hands. I’d like to find the asshole who offed him before I’ve got another body bag to deal with.”

“And you’re the only detective on the force?” Vicki’s fingernails beat a staccato rhythm against the pay phone’s plastic casing.

“No, but I am the one assigned to the case. I’m sorry if that means I can’t give your mother the attention you think she deserves . . .”

“The cases,” she snarled, fingers curling into a fist, “are connected.”

Behind her, leaning on the open door of the phone booth, Celluci rolled his eyes. Even without hearing the other end of the conversation, he had some sympathy for Fergusson’s position. Although she could be surgically delicate with a witness, Vicki tended to practice hammer and chisel diplomacy on the rest of the world.

“Connected?” The exasperation vanished. “In what way?”

Vicki opened her mouth then closed it again with an audible snap.
My mother has been turned into a monster. Your boy was killed by a similar monster. We find my mother, I guarantee we find your perp. How do I know all this? I can’t tell you. And he’s missing anyway.

Shit
.

She shoved at her glasses. “Look, call it a hunch, okay?”

“A hunch?”

Realizing that she’d have had much the same reaction had their positions been reversed, her tone grew sharply defensive. “What’s the matter? You’ve never had a hunch?”

Anticipating disaster should the current conversation continue, Celluci used a shoulder to lever Vicki back from the phone, then dragged the receiver from her grip. Scowling, she allowed his interference with ill grace and the certain knowledge that antagonizing the Kingston Police was a bad idea.

“Detective Fergusson? Detective-Sergeant Celluci. We’ve determined that one of Dr. Burke’s grad students, a Donald Li, at least superficially fits the description of Tom Chen. We’d appreciate it if you could call the registrar’s office and have them release a copy of his student photo so we can check his identity with the funeral parlor.”