Death Rounds (50 page)

My gaze flicked over the contents of the table for some hint of what that something could be. I stopped at the syringes, then the bottles. This time I knew with the suddenness of a chill. The water! Oh my God! That’s how he was giving people
Legionella.
The contaminated water—it was in the mask! The steps raced through my head with terrible clarity. He’d injected it into the inner layers, then let the outsides dry enough so no one would feel or notice the wetness. Once the mask was on his victim, the humidity of exhaled breath—trapped in the nearly closed space behind the mask— would mingle with the contaminated moisture in those inner layers. The result would be moist humid air teeming with
Legionella,
and every time the victim breathed in, he or she would draw the deadly mix directly into the lungs.

With rocketing terror I realized that was why he’d tied my mask so tight—to maximize my exposure!

I’d no idea how long I’d been breathing in
Legionella.
Inhaling the organism in such a concentrated form within such a closed space for an extended period of time would be how he’d achieved the massive exposures needed to infect otherwise healthy adults. I had to get that infested thing off my face!

I bent my head sideways again and despite the searing jolts of pain tried frantically once more to catch the bottom edge of the mask with my shoulder and get it up off my chin. Nothing budged. I looked around for something else I might use to snag it on if I could only rock the chair near it but saw nothing handy at the same height as my head. Then I spotted the shovel. The blade. If I tipped the chair over and somehow wiggled to where it was leaning against the wall, I might be able to hook a corner of that blade onto one of the ties on my mask and rip it off.

Every breath I took felt hot and moist. Thinking of what I was inhaling only made me breathe faster. By sheer force of will I concentrated on what had to be done despite my fear. I initially verified that I could at least rotate my hands and feet enough to manage a few inches of up-and-down motion with both my arms and lower legs. As I prepared to tip myself over, I figured if I got to the shovel, I could possibly get rid of my ties as well as my mask.

I calculated that the best strategy was to land on my side. Flat on my back I’d be like a turned-up turtle unable to right myself; if I went forward, I might land on my face and be knocked out again. I started lurching my upper body from side to side against the tape restraints. At first I got no movement at all, but then I won some leverage by throwing in a little hip action, and in no time the chair was rocking. I kept increasing the size of the arc I was tipping through, wanting to go over toward the left, to be as near as possible to the shovel. But I misjudged, and ended up teetering for a few seconds toward the right, trying to reverse my momentum before toppling in that direction anyway. Crashing to the floor I felt pain explode through my shoulder as I landed on it, and I let out a roar. For a few seconds I lay there with my eyes closed, sure that I’d broken it, but the telltale nausea that accompanies a fracture never came. When the throbbing finally began to subside a bit, I opened my eyes.

And blinked. And blinked again. I couldn’t accept what I saw. Refused to. But it wouldn’t vanish. He had been lying behind a row of boxes near the table, not so much hidden as simply out of sight from where I’d been placed in the chair. I was looking into me face of Gary Rossit.

That he was dead I had no doubt. There was that unmistakable stillness about him—no breath, no sound, no twitch or flicker of movement in the smallest strand of muscle that always betrays life. His head was toward me, his mask half off, and I could see the purplish color of his skin, suffused with blood that no longer flowed. His eyes, fixed and staring, bulged more than they had in life, and his mouth hung slack in death. His hair was matted with blood at the back, but not a lot. If the bleeding had been the result of an encounter with the shovel, the blow may have knocked him out, but I doubted it had killed him. I couldn’t see his neck from where I lay, but his face had all the features of someone who’d been strangled.

He must have been ambushed after he’d run from here, I thought, my mind slowly working its way back up to normal speed.

I’d spoken so harshly of him so often over the years, especially in the last ten days and as recently as a few minutes ago. Yet I felt outraged that he too had been murdered. Whatever I thought of him as a man, he’d had a skill that could save lives, and he’d used it, however it had been twisted up with vicious politics and the perpetual chip he’d carried on his shoulder. In a world where there were those who protected life and those who took it, he’d still been enough of a doctor to put himself mostly on the side of the angels.

I was going to stop the monster who did this, before
he
took any more lives.

The way I was lying put my back to the shovel, which was about twenty feet away. It was going to the longest twenty feet I ever traveled. Using my shoulders and the few inches of up-and-down movement I had in my legs, I managed to make enough pushing motion against the floor that I rotated myself until my head was pointed in the direction I had to go. Then, using my shoulder as a kind of flipper and digging in with the bit of a knee hold I got on the floor, I humped on my side toward that blade, propelling myself, chair included, barely an inch at a time. I hurt everywhere. I was sweating with the strain of each move and breathing hard, always breathing hard and inhaling
Legionella.

At first I wasn’t certain I was even making any progress, but gradually I halved the distance, then quartered it. Each time I heard one of the overhead pipes clank, I was sure it was
him
returning. If by some miracle I got myself untied before he got back, I needed a plan to deal with him. Continually listening for sounds at the door, I kept humping and pushing toward that shovel, all the while figuring what I could do to nail him. Finally I was a few feet away, then inches, then had my head right up against the blade. I couldn’t help thinking that it had been in the earth alongside Cam’s decomposing body but forced myself to maneuver my right cheek to the top of the steel edge by straining my head away from the floor. I pressed hard into the shovel, hoping some part of the mask would catch or rip, and moved my head down. The steel hurt my skin, but nothing on the mask gave way. Suddenly the shovel shifted, and the handle clattered to the floor.

“Shit!” I exclaimed aloud, to ease my frustration.

I eyed the curved blade now lying on the floor, the handle away from me. I rotated around until my back was to the shovel, and my feet could pin its handle to the baseboard. Then I wiggled and humped some more until I got my bound wrists alongside the blade, got a hand on either side of it, and managed to push the tape binding my wrists up against its edge. Wedging the shovel against the wall, I kept pressing as hard as I could with my wrists, drawing the tape up and down on the semisharp steel. The metal kept scraping my skin, but soon I felt a little separation between my wrists, driving me to work harder and faster until, with a lurch, I felt them spring apart. My upper arms were still bound to the chair, but I could bend my elbows, stiff as they were, and slowly brought my forearms around from behind. By flexing my neck, I managed to bring my hands enough toward my face to curl my forefingers under the bottom straps of the mask. When I had my grip, I wrenched and tore the straps off. The mask now napped in front of my mouth like a banner hanging off my nose, still attached by the upper ties. A few more flexes and twists of the neck brought me near enough that my fingers could rip the rest of it away, and the hideous covering wafted to the floor.

I took gulps of air like a man who’d been underwater, so much so that I made my head woozy. I had to force myself to once more slow my breathing and started clawing furiously at the tapes around my arms and trunk. Within minutes I had them off, then freed my legs as well.

Of course my cellular phone was gone. Even the erythromycin I’d been taking for two days had been confiscated. I’d no idea what time it was because my watch had been smashed, probably when I’d raised my arm to protect myself. I stumbled over to the door, barely able to move. Knowing full well I was probably locked in, I turned the handle and pulled. As expected, I wasn’t leaving that easily. Nor was this door one of the feeble wooden ones I’d hidden behind in the corridor. It was large and metal, and I knew I wouldn’t be kicking my way out of here either. Instead I resigned myself to carrying out the plan that I’d come up with while I’d been slithering across the floor. I started to get ready.

Five minutes later I was back in the chair, hopefully close enough to the same place he’d left me in. I’d taken a clean mask from the box on the table and had stuffed the remains of the one I’d ripped off my face into my pocket. I’d returned the shovel to its original position against the wall but had rejected using it as a weapon. I’d first thought of hiding and braining him with it when he came in but had realized he might first open the door a crack, see I wasn’t in the chair, then slam it closed, locking me in again for who knows how long. I had to lure him into the room, then get him. Yet if I was in the chair, twenty feet was too great a distance to reach the shovel and take him by surprise. So I’d looked around for an alternative weapon, something closer to the chair and abundant enough in the room that he wouldn’t notice one of them was in a little different position than when he’d left. I’d made my choice, had placed it so I could grab it readily, and then had reapplied the duct tape around the front of my legs, trunk, and upper arms.

I held my hands behind the chair, took a final glance around the room, and settled down to wait.

Chapter 25

Someone once said the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrated the mind. Waiting in that chair, watching the door, and feeling the stillness of Rossit’s unseen remains and Cam’s nearby tomb, it wasn’t hard to think like a condemned man expecting the executioner. Except I doubted I had until morning. Occasionally the pipes clanged, as time passed my arms and legs once more stiffened up, and bit by bit I began to piece together the events of the last ten days in a way that finally made sense.

The initial step was to realize that I hadn’t pursued the Phantom, that in reality I’d been subtly led to him and to the connections that had pointed at Cam. Once I accepted that starting point, the rest of what I’d seen and learned since Phyllis Sanders first came into my ER simply flowed into perspective.

Scapegoating Cam, I now figured, had probably been part of the killer’s plan from the beginning. I also began to grasp the sweep of that plan—how this killer had set up the execution of punishers and the collapse of University Hospital. But the scheme had started with the business of the Phantom; that whole episode of two years ago had been carefully created for the sole purpose of making Cam a suspect for what was to come.

I once more crawled inside the killer’s skin and figured how he’d set it up.

The initial tit-for-tat attacks against punishers who had gotten away with their cruelty were the kind of benign retributions that allowed hospital gossipers to say, “I know it’s wrong, but they deserved it.” When whispers inevitably turned to who might be responsible, it wouldn’t be too shocking a leap to include Cam’s name on the list. Probably the killer had waited until those whispers had begun and then had escalated the attacks to potentially lethal events with the use of insecticides. That move would lead gossipers to realize that whoever the Phantom was, he was capable of far more dangerous acts than anyone had initially thought. Afterward came his most ingenious maneuver of all—the
too convenient
double alibi. It would focus speculation on Cam but still leave him off the hook enough that nobody would accuse him openly. Once that seed of doubt about the man was sown, the Phantom’s activities were suspended and the suspicion was allowed to lie dormant for two years, until the killer was ready to start his now deadly game of infecting punishers.

As part of his plan the killer had probably meant all along for someone to recognize the pattern of the Phantom at work when the infections began to occur, and all along he’d counted on someone resurrecting the old rumors that would make Cam a scapegoat for murder—mass murder. Except Janet, after recognizing that someone was once again punishing the punishers, had resisted going down the false trail that had been laid out to incriminate her friend. I’d been more obliging.

I’d even offered up other suspects besides Cam on my own— Rossit, Hurst, the entire board of St. Paul’s—hell, I’d become a fund of false leads, a voice directing the police to everyone but the killer, leaving the true Phantom free from suspicion, safe from detection.

In that dreary room I anguished that if I’d been more attentive to Janet’s instincts, two of the “suspects” I’d fingered might still be alive.

I knew who was going to come through that door. He’d always been close at hand, ostensibly helping, feeding me just enough bits of information to keep me diverted toward Cam. I’d just begun to guess his motive—why he would kill punishers, including one in particular, and then seek to destroy this hospital—when I heard the key in the lock. At the sound I tried to drop my head, slouch forward, and feign being unconscious still, hoping that when he came near enough to check me, I’d take him. But I had to move carefully not to dislodge the duct tape, and he had the door open too quickly.

“Well, well,” declared Harold Miller. “Finally awake, are you?” He sounded like a host greeting a guest who’d overslept. He was carrying a tray of culture sticks which he took over to the table. “It’s about time. Garnet. After all, I didn’t hit you that hard.” I didn’t answer him, didn’t even react. I wanted to size up the best way to make him come near.

“You’ll be interested to know I’ve been busy finishing my ‘work,’ so to speak.”

I felt a rush of alarm. Son of a bitch, I thought, he’s been infecting more people. I had to get back and warn anybody he’d been near. “Trying to kill them makes you a worse creep than they ever were,” I snapped, hoping to goad him into coming closer.