Extreme Measures (37 page)

The nervous energy generated by their break-in at the funeral home and their grisly discoveries was wearing off, and Laura was beginning to feel desperate for some sleep. Bernard Nelson was bearing up even less well, and had already taken a prolonged nap on his couch. They had decided, at least for the night, that she should steer clear of her hotel. If someone had tried to run her down, there was good reason to avoid anyplace she might be expected to be.

Their escape through a back door of the mortuary had seemed unnoticed. But still, Bernard had driven around for nearly an hour, making absolutely certain no one was following them. Finally they parked in the alley behind his building and entered through the basement. Only when they were safely in his office with the curtains drawn did they begin to examine what they had gathered from Donald Devine’s safe. Before they did, however, Bernard placed a brief, anonymous call to the Boston police, suggesting that someone stop by the Gates of Heaven.

“Where could he be?” Laura asked, concern shadowing her face as she set the receiver down.

“Where did you say his parents lived?”

“Watertown.”

“Maybe he went home and stayed over.”

“Why wouldn’t he have left the number at my hotel, or at least have called back?”

“I don’t know, Laura.” Nelson rubbed at his eyes. “Listen, I hope you don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say. I know you think a great deal of Eric. And I suspect from what you’ve told me that those feelings are not ill placed. But people are not always what they seem to be. You haven’t known him that long. There are any number of things he could be into that he hasn’t let you in on.”

“Maybe.” Laura thought for a moment and then added, “But I don’t think so. I think we should go over to his apartment.”

Bernard Nelson massaged the back of his neck and once again stretched out on the couch.

“Laura, a couple of days ago in East Boston, some heavies nearly tore the two of you apart. Yesterday afternoon someone probably tried to kill you. There’s every reason to believe that whoever they are, they’re watching his place as well as yours. If they’ve already got him, the best thing we could do is wait until they contact us. It’s you, and your brother’s tape, they’re after, not him. If they haven’t got him, well, then the
best thing we can do is wait anyhow.” He forced a smile. “Besides, one break-in a night is my limit.”

“I have a key.”

Bernard looked up at her and softened.

“Are you sure his phone’s working?”

“The operator says it is.”

“Well, I still think we’re better off getting a couple of hours sleep and at least waiting until it’s light. It’s just too dangerous, really it is. Trust me on that.”

“I’m very worried about him.”

“I know you are. Listen, the couch in my waiting room’s a fold-out. Give me just a couple of hours.”

“Oh, okay. What about all of this?” she asked, gesturing to the piles of notes, receipts, and ledgers.

“Laura, our late friend generated and squirreled away more paperwork than the Department of Defense. If we couldn’t make any sense of this stuff at two
A.M.
, our chances are even less at three. There’s something buried in there that’s going to shed some light on the man and his basement, I’m certain of that. But frankly, at this point I can barely remember my own name.”

“I understand,” Laura said.

“Good. In that case you remain the leading candidate to become my apprentice.”

“Bernard, before you sleep I want to tell you again how grateful I am for what you’ve done.”

“Cigars, woman. Talk in terms I can relate to.”

She smiled. “I haven’t forgotten. Listen, why don’t you use the fold-out. I’ll stay up for a while longer going through this stuff. Then I’ll try Eric one more time. If we haven’t connected with him by, say, six or seven, we can try his place.”

“Good enough.”

Groaning with the effort, Bernard Nelson pushed himself up, grabbed a pair of old army blankets from his closet, tossed one on the couch, and then lumbered into the waiting room with the other. In minutes, Laura heard the sonorous breathing of exhausted
sleep. Then, with a sip of cold stale coffee, she settled in behind the desk.

Bernard had estimated that in their haste to get out of Donald Devine’s bedroom he had gotten perhaps half the contents of the safe. Before they left the mortuary, he had slipped back to the upstairs apartment and verified that, as they suspected, whatever they had left behind had been taken, and the apartment ransacked. Undoubtedly the police would put robbery at the head of their list of motives. Of course there was still the intensive-care room to explain away.

Laura set aside the folder of correspondence and contracts, and concentrated on two ledgers. One of them, dating back six years and replete with names, addresses, payments, and various abbreviations, seemed to be a record of the considerable number of clients Devine had tended to. The other, held closed with a heavy rubber band, was also a list of names and abbreviations. However, between the last page and cover, this one was stuffed with receipts from various gas stations—at least a hundred of them, and possibly many more than that. Laura set the pile in front of her, made some room, and one at a time smoothed each one out, arranging them by date.

At 5:20, with the first light of day filtering through the curtains, Laura could no longer keep her eyes open. Without even trying to make sense of what she had found, she shuffled to the couch and was asleep almost as her head touched the pillow. Resting on the desk was a calculator, a pad scribbled with figures, and the Rand McNally atlas she had extracted from Bernard Nelson’s eclectic collection of novels and reference volumes. The atlas was open to a map of the mountain states. Tucked in the cleft between pages was the pencil she had used to circle a small, sparsely populated area in southeast Utah.

Barred from the spectrophotometry lab by Ivor Blunt, Eric paced about the pathology department’s waiting
room. From time to time he swore his heart had skipped beats; at other times a breath or two seemed to be heavier than normal. He flexed his fingers and rubbed his hands, wondering if the tingling in them was the first sign of progressive neurotoxicity, or merely the result of his lacerations.

The sergeant from Wayland had turned out to be something of a godsend. After driving Eric to White Memorial and getting a positive recommendation on him from the head of hospital security, Clarkson had decided to void the criminal charges against him. In exchange, Eric gladly promised to pay the Mobil station owner for repairs to his window and security system.

After Clarkson left for Wayland, Eric had stopped by the emergency room for a confidential talk with the senior resident assigned to Reed Marshall’s shifts. As he rechecked Eric’s vital signs and physical exam, the bewildered resident did his best to appear to understand what had happened, but Eric knew he was being patronized. Nor was that reaction surprising. Until Ivor Blunt confirmed the identity of the tetrodotoxin, Eric was resigned to being very much on his own.

He sat on the arm of a chair and thumbed through a dog-eared copy of
People
. Like grotesque neon, the leering death’s-head face glowed in his mind. Extortion, murder, narcotics, preying on the weak and superstitious—the man or woman behind that mask was a monster. He wondered where Anna Delacroix was, what horrors she was enduring—if in fact she was still alive.

His thoughts were interrupted by voices and a commotion of some sort in the hallway outside the waiting room.

“No, dammit,” he heard a man say. “You all stay out here. We’ll handle this. When we have something to say to you, we’ll say it.”

“You have no right,” a woman’s shrill voice cried.

“We have every right. Now just stay back here before I bust you for interfering.”

The glass door to the waiting room was pulled open, and two Metropolitan District policemen entered.

“Dr. Najarian?” one of them asked. He was a thin, aging black man with a heavily creased forehead and kind eyes.

“That’s right. Have you found out anything about Anna?”

The policeman, whose name tag identified him as Patrolman Medeiros, flipped a note pad open. Behind him, the other officer, younger and huskier than Medeiros, turned as several people pressed against the door.

“The natives are restless, Tony,” he said.

“Goddam cannibals,” Medeiros muttered. “Brian, just don’t let ’em in here.”

“Who are they?” Eric asked.

Medeiros looked up at him.

“Reporters,” he said. “A couple of them were at the station when the call came in about this Delacroix woman and your voodoo ceremony. One of them recognized your name.”

“Mine?”

“That’s right. Apparently the
Herald
is about to hit the streets with an article about you and a missing body of some sort.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Eric said, remembering the stern faces of the selection committee as they discussed the hospital’s campaign against negative publicity. “What about Anna?”

“Twelve Sproul Court in Allston. That the address of the store you went to?”

“That’s right. Benet’s. It’s like a hardware store.”

“You sure this man—this Titus Memmilard—was the owner?”

“Of course I’m sure. He said it, and his niece said it.”

Eric felt confusion and a terrifying emptiness beginning to set in.

“Well, Doctor, number Twelve Sproul Court is a hardware store named Benet’s all right. But the Benêts, who live upstairs, and who we woke up and scared half to death, have owned that store for more than five years. And they’ve never even heard of anyone named Titus Memmilard—or, for that matter, Anna Delacroix either.”

“That’s … that’s impossible.”

But even as he said the words, Eric knew he was hearing the truth.

“And that other place,” Medeiros went on wearily, glancing at his notes, “the place three doors down where you claim you and this Delacroix woman were taken at knife point and allegedly poisoned.”

“Yes?” Eric felt ill.

“You said it was a boarded-up empty store that had been turned into some sort of voodoo temple.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, Doctor, I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’re no boarded-up stores on that whole street. On the first floor of the building three doors down is a candle shop.”

“Are you sure you were on Sproul Court?”

Eric could tell now by the way the two officers were looking at him that they felt certain he was quite mad.

“Oh, we were on Sproul all right,” Medeiros said. “Were you?”

“Of course I was. Officer, contrary to what you’re thinking, I’m not crazy. Everything happened exactly the way I said it did. Did you go inside the candle shop?”

“No. After what we encountered down the street, we weren’t too excited about trying to get someone to let us in. But there’s a whole window filled with candles and a bunch of other little knickknacks, and
we could see inside perfectly well. Not a headless chicken in sight, Doc. Not one.”

Eric sank back in his chair, desperately trying to sort out what he was hearing.

“This is insane,” he said.

“Now there we’re in agreement.”

“What about the woman?”

“What about her?”

“Officer Medeiros, you’ve got to believe me. I met Anna Delacroix in the Countway Medical Library. She’s a grad student at B.U. She asked me to meet her on Sproul Court, and we were abducted by two men at knife point and poisoned in a very frightening ritual.”

“You know what we think, Doc? We think you were pledging some sort of fraternity or club and the whole thing got carried away.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You take any drugs tonight?”

“Only the one that was put on my skin. There’s a toxicologist in there right now. After you hear what he has to say, maybe you’ll believe me.”

As if on cue, the door to the laboratory slammed open, and Ivor Blunt stalked into the room, his expression a strange mix of anger and bemusement.

“Talcum powder,” he said.

The two officers exchanged smiles. Eric could not even speak.

“Plus a little dirt, a little lint, and a smidgen of oil of some sort,” Blunt went on. “Maybe olive oil. Dr. Najarian, you are one crazy son of a bitch, and at this moment I wish you nothing but ill.”

“Don’t you see,” Eric pleaded, looking from one of the men to the next, “the whole thing was a setup to discredit me—to make you all think exactly what you’re thinking. I’m telling you, it all happened just like I said it did.”

“I’m going home,” Blunt said. “If you get poisoned again, please don’t call.”

He stormed back into his lab.

“I don’t think he believes you,” Officer Medeiros said in pointed understatement. “Dr. Najarian, you’ve caused a lot of people a lot of trouble tonight.”

Eric couldn’t remember the last time he had broken down and cried, but he knew that if he tried to speak, that was precisely what would happen. He had been
had
—maneuvered step by step by Anna Delacroix into an abyss of humiliation and discreditation from which he would never recover. He bit at his swollen lower lip and slowed his breathing until it seemed safe to stand and confront the policemen.