I looked at Mom. “Oh, God. Ms. Shepard.”
Tommy shot toward the door. I grabbed him.
“Ms. Shepard. Could she be the one who’s been funneling information to Coyote?”
He held in the doorway, wound like a top. “She could have accessed all Dr. C’s records. Shit, if she got his password she could have used his computer system to get past the firewall at China Lake Hospital.” He looked like he wanted to smack himself in the head. “We blew it with Cantwell. It may not be him, but his wife.”
McCracken leaned forward. “Detective?”
Tommy explained. I listened, running it all over in my head. Again I looked at Tommy.
“This still doesn’t scan. Klijsters wasn’t a supersoldier; he was . . .”
“Boy George. I know.”
The springs on McCracken’s chair wailed. He stood, raising his huge hands in the air. “Hold your horses right there. What do you mean, he was Boy George?”
Tommy shrugged, working out how to phrase it. “More effeminate than the homecoming queen.”
“Hey,” I said.
He gave me a winsome look, contrite. “No, Rocky, you were a real princess. I mean that he was—”
McCracken waved a sheet of paper at him. “I’m talking about this. We got the report from the county crime lab. That dental implement we recovered near Wally Hankins’s office.” He handed the sheet to Tommy. “The scaler.”
Tommy read. “Prion contamination.”
“From Coyote?” I said.
McCracken said, “Keep reading.”
“They recovered blood evidence and DNA. It didn’t belong to Ceci Lezak. It’s an unsub.” Tommy looked up. “Then it must be Coyote’s. If we can match it to Klijsters, we have him.”
McCracken took off his scratched glasses. “You don’t have him. Klijsters isn’t a him at all.”
Tommy read further, and looked up in shock. “What the hell?” He looked at me. “The blood on that dental implement came from a woman.”
27
Breathless, Coyote swung the knife in the close confines of the kitchen. The teacher was fighting.
She clawed at him. “Bastard! Stop it!”
He pinned her left leg and slashed the Achilles tendon. She screamed. The decibel level indicated that she was experiencing hideous pain. He cut the hamstring tendons in her left leg as well, disconnecting the muscles from the bones.
Flipping her onto her back, he dove on top of her. She windmilled her arms and scratched his face. Her teeth were bared.
A tremendous thrill shot through him. She was magnificent. Why had none of her students been inculcated with her spirit? She smacked him in the face. If only he had been able to embrace the pain. He grabbed her wrist. She saw the knife, seven inches long, serrated, forged with a channel along the blade that let blood sluice from penetrative wounds in a clean, quiet run. She didn’t flinch; she didn’t freeze or withdraw mentally. She was engaged in the battle, flesh and soul.
In legend, Coyote and Woman fought, trying to outwit each other. Was this Woman, at last?
He changed tactics. Forcing her into mechanical compliance by severing tendons or nerve groups was not as challenging as forcing her into pain compliance. He lay atop her, pinned one of her hands to the floor, pried her fingers open, and sliced her palm. She screamed.
“Bastard. Fucker!”
He lowered his face, his mouth inches from hers. “New information. I need it right now.”
She spit at him. He wrestled the knife around and pushed the tip against her cheek.
“New information.”
She stared straight back at him, willing to brave his gaze. At last, a superb animal, embracing the dynamic of hunter and hunted. Unwilling to concede.
“I can blind you and peel your face off. I can flay you and leave you spread across this floor like pig slop spilled out of a bucket. And I’ll save your tongue until the end, so you can give me the information.”
Still she held his gaze. He hovered close above her like a lover.
She moved her lips. “Chang and Delaney.”
“Yes?”
Her breath hissed out and in. “They know about the others. The pregnancies. Evan was frightened.”
“Frightened. Of course.” He lowered his lips closer to hers, beginning to see. “Pregnancy?”
“I think so.”
“Think harder.” He took her lower lip between his teeth and began to bite.
Reaching up, she grabbed the handle on the oven door and slammed it down, hitting him in the back of the head with it.
The blow knocked his head down hard on hers, and the back of her skull hit the linoleum. He bit through her lip and the pain finally broke her. She fell limp in agony. He roared and lunged up, ripping her bottom lip in half.
The knife was lodged in her cheek. He pulled it free and sliced her across the face, drawing claw marks.
She raised her functioning hand, trying to protect her face. He knew he’d found her fatal flaw. She was an artist, concerned with appearance. Vanity: a woman’s weakness.
She grabbed his hair.
The wig was on securely, but she clawed her fingers into it and pulled. Perhaps she thought doing so would hurt him. Then, using her good leg, she brought her knee up under him, hoping to get him in the balls. No way was that going to happen. He held stiff and took the blow.
In her eyes shock and knowledge fought with the intense pain she must be experiencing. She was drenched in blood, and the floor was becoming slippery. It was time to finish this, but he wanted to observe how she faced the certainty of her taking. A worthy opponent deserved that.
At the front of the house came the sound of a door opening. “Antonia.”
The teacher roared an animal wail. With one last effort she swung her arm and smacked him in the face. He blinked, grabbing his face, feeling the contact lens slide off his eye.
Footsteps came running, and a man cried out, “Toni?”
Coyote drove the knife into her trachea. He bore down with both hands while the blade sank through her throat, pushing until it hit the bones of her spinal column. She became silent and still.
She had pulled the wig off. He disentangled it from her dead fingers.
The noise came from behind him: shoes scuffing on tile. He turned and saw the man fleeing for the front door. Coat lapels flapping, baldhead trailing strands of hair from a combover. The doctor.
Coyote pulled the knife from Toni Cantwell’s throat. The doctor was a coward, leaving his wife to the dogs. He would die a coward’s death.
I looked at McCracken, taken aback. “The killer is female?”
Behind his scratched eyeglasses, he appeared equally perplexed. “Yes. Are you telling me Klijsters
isn’t
female? Robin, I was presuming it was a woman’s name.”
“No, he was a man.” I glanced at Tommy. “At least, I thought he was.”
McCracken took off his glasses to reread the results from the crime lab. His beefy features were flushed.
“The crime lab definitely found two X chromosomes. Whoever got stabbed with that dental pick is female.”
I thought back to the moment at Argent Tower when Coyote passed me in the revolving door. Short blond hair and a baseball cap and men’s clothing. Jesse had seen a man go by too.
No, we’d seen the back of a head.
Jax’s and Tim’s depictions came back to me—the perplexing change in Coyote’s demeanor as the years passed; the fascination with transvestites and gays; the castration and murder of the male prostitute in Bangkok. The sexual fluidity and love of disguise. And the rest: Robin Klijsters, the simpering, theatrically camp student teacher working in Ms. Shepard’s classroom.
“Christ, Tommy. He treated our school classroom like an animal lab.” And I cleared my head. “
She
did. She’s had us in her sights ever since.”
Though the Glock was aimed at the ground, Swayze went rigid when she saw it.
“Walk around the far side of that Range Rover,” Jesse said.
She stood immobile. “Have you lost your mind?”
“I’m batshit crazy and prone to spasms. So don’t make me angry, because if I lose it, we’re going to get hurt.”
She blinked.
“Don’t expect the guards to come charging down, either. I put the security camera out of commission.”
She looked up at it. The surprise on her face said,
How the hell?
Her resolve seemed to slip.
“And if I have to go to jail for this, I will. So you’re shit out of arguments. Walk.”
She walked.
“My colleagues are going to notice that I’m gone.”
“You don’t want your colleagues to hear this. Give me your lab coat and car keys.”
She did so with a sneer. He took the keys, patted down the white coat, removed a cell phone from the pocket, and tossed the coat back.
“Sit down with your back against the wall.”
She settled herself on the concrete, squinting at him as though considering the best way to gouge his eyes out. He kept back. Phil trusted Swayze’s motives, but Jesse wondered if his warning about Coyote applied to this woman, too:
You cannot imagine how little ordinary morality affects these people, or how far they’ll go.
“What do you want?” she said.
“You’re going to help bring Coyote in.”
“Coyote? I have been helping. For heaven’s sake, I’m the one who gave a name and description to the FBI.”
“No, you’ve been lying for twenty years. You lied to the parents after the explosion, and you lied to Phil and Evan the other day. That means you damn well lied to the FBI too.”
She shook her head.
“You knew from the beginning that the pain vaccine was lethal. You know that it’s killing Evan’s classmates and their children. You know that anybody South Star doesn’t kill, Coyote will, because South Star spawned Coyote.” He leaned forward. “And you like it that way.”
Her glasses shone at him. “You’re off your lithium. Let me call your shrink.”
“You want South Star and its aftermath to go away for good. By your lights, Coyote’s cleaning up your mess.”
“You did black out the other day, didn’t you? Coyote was here, casing the building.”
“Maybe you’re betting on him leaving you for last. Once he kills all the exposees and their kids, then you’ll call the police with new information you’ve suddenly remembered. Because I think you know much more about who he is and how to find him than you’ve told anybody.”
He took a breath. “But you’re going to tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“When you lied to Evan and Phil, they didn’t try to force the truth from you. They drew a line. I won’t.”
Swayze looked quizzical. “Why are you willing to go to these lengths? This is . . .” She waved at the Glock.
“Assault with a deadly weapon? Not yet.”
He lifted the gun and racked the slide. It made a solid, serious noise.
“Maybe now it is.”
Her shoulders twitched. “Capturing Coyote won’t solve your problem. Even if he’s arrested, Evan remains at risk from South Star.”
He didn’t move, but he felt it: lie number one, abandoned. For the first time she had just admitted that South Star was dangerous.
“If Evan is infected, then you’re powerless to stop it,” she said. “There’s no cure. You can kill me, but you can’t change that.”
“Then tell me how to test for it.”
“MRI.”
“You didn’t MRI your test subjects back at China Lake.”
“I don’t get this. You wouldn’t shoot me just to find out if she’s going to get sick. You’d shoot me if you found out she
is
sick.” She eyed him critically. “You’re afraid that she’ll give it to you.”
“No. How do you test for it?”
“She can’t infect you. It’s only transmissible by—”
“Blood test, genetic analysis? Tell me.”
“It’s only transmissible by inhalation or inheritance. There’s no way she could infect you.”
She was so focused on the Glock, she hadn’t been paying attention to anything else. He raised the tire iron in his hand.
“I won’t break anything; I’ll just hit you where it hurts. Tell me.”
She lifted her chin. “You don’t have the brass.”
God, he hoped he was right about her. He swung the tire iron against her shoulder. It connected with a thud.
Pain shone bright and loud in Swayze’s eyes. She grabbed her arm. “You son of a bitch.”
Jesse clenched his teeth, biting down the disgust he felt at himself. “Do you get how deeply invested in this I am? Tell me.”
“Son of a bleeding bitch. You’re safe, you imbecile. She can’t infect you.”
His pulse was pounding. He wanted to throw up. He hit her again.
She flinched this time, but the tire iron connected with her elbow. “Dammit!” She swung her head toward him, grimacing. “You cannot be infected. South Star only affects women.”
He held still, tire iron in his hand, realizing what she had just said.
“Coyote’s a woman?” he said.
Her lips parted. Lie number two, abandoned.
“You told Evan and Phil that Kai Torrance was a man,” he said.
She stared at him, her lips puckering. “Kai thinks of himself that way.”
His mouth hinged open. “And thanks to your sensitivity training, you respect the wishes of the head-fucked robo-grunt community?”
She sneered. He sneered back.
“Sorry, I mean sociopathic cross-dressers affected by Total Badass Syndrome.”
She was breathing heavily, and her graying hair was falling out of the ponytail. “Now are you satisfied? Even if Evan is infected, she could not possibly transmit it to you.”
“Can you test her?” he said.
She looked disbelieving. “What
is
it with you? She could never infect you. It’s . . .” Behind the glasses, her eyebrows rose. A clearer light shone in her gaze. “She couldn’t infect you, but she could infect any children you have together.”
If he flinched now, he would be deeply fucked. He held the tire iron ready to swing again.