Authors: Hilary Norman
“I think your brother feels the same way.”
“I expect so.”
“All these people, wanting to protect you, loving you.” Chris still held onto her hand. “It’s because you’re so special.”
“I’m nothing special,” Lally said.
“Oh, yes. You are.”
“Thank you.”
She closed her eyes for a minute, and when she opened them again, Chris was looking at her so intently and with such naked love that she had the greatest urge to move into his arms, to hold him
and let him hold her. But Andrea was still there between them, as forcefully as if she were physically there, in the room, and so Lally just lay still and said nothing and did nothing.
“I have to let you sleep now,” Chris said, gently. “Dr Ash would shoot me if he knew I were keeping you up.”
“You should rest, too,” she said, looking at his injured hand.
“I’m fine.”
“If you were fine, Dr Morrissey wouldn’t have kept you here.”
“That was just because he knew I wanted to be near you.”
They were still again for a moment.
“Did you see him?” she asked, quietly.
“Schwartz, you mean?”
Lally nodded.
“Kind of,” Chris said.
“I met with him, you know.”
“Joe told me.”
“He was so cold,” Lally said. “I suppose I thought it would make a difference to him, seeing me – I don’t know why I thought that – I guess it was very naive
of me.” She paused, thinking, remembering. “I thought, he’s still just a man, a human being – he’s only done this because of what happened to his mother, whom he
loved.” She shook her head. “I thought that if he was capable of that kind of love, I might be able to touch him.”
“Maybe you did.”
“No.” She was clear on that. “Not a bit.”
“Your brother says he’s insane.”
“But so clever, too. Able to do all that, and to fool everyone – people who worked with him every day, who’d known him for years.”
“You always hear that, don’t you?” Chris said. “When they arrest serial killers, the neighbours always say he seemed so normal, so ordinary, a bit of a loner, but nothing
special.”
Lally took a deep breath and let it out slowly, gently. Her heart beat easily, healthily, powered by its new, safe, regular pacemaker. She knew the routine now. Another couple of days here in
the clinic, then a check-up, back in Massachusetts, with Bobby Goldstein taking care of the fine tuning. And then back to normal, the way Lucas Ash had told her the first time.
“I’m going to be okay now,” she said to Chris.
“I know,” he said, quietly. “It’s all over.”
“For me, anyway.”
“You mustn’t think about the others.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Not now, anyway. Now you have to concentrate on getting strong, on getting over it.”
“I feel pretty good, considering,” Lally said.
“You look wonderful,” he told her.
“Do I?”
He nodded slowly. “You’re very beautiful.”
“No, I’m not. I’m tall and skinny and my nose is too long.”
“Your nose is perfect,” Chris said. “Trust me, I’m an artist.”
She smiled again.
“Will you say goodbye before you go in the morning?”
“It’ll be very early.”
“I don’t mind.”
“And it won’t be goodbye,” Chris said.
“Of course it won’t,” Lally said, lightly. “We’ll see each other, whatever happens. I’ll be teaching again in a few weeks and – ”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
An image of Andrea Webber floated, unbidden, into Lally’s mind.
“I’d better get some sleep now,” she said and, very gently, she took her hand out of his. “You, too.”
Reluctantly, Chris stood up. His head still swam with fatigue and his hand still throbbed.
“I’ll be just across the corridor if you need me,” he told her.
“I won’t need anything,” she said.
“All the same, I’ll be there.”
“Stop worrying about me, Chris.”
“Easier said than done.”
At a quarter past three in the morning, Schwartz was awake. They had allowed him to rest for quite a long while, and now he was feeling better. He was able to breathe more
easily, was perspiring less. He was growing stronger.
The night staff checked on him hourly. The last nurse had come in at a quarter to three. Pulse, temperature, blood pressure. A tweak to the drip feed still attached to his left arm. The EKG
monitor had been removed during the afternoon. He did not miss it.
The room was cool and comfortable, the bed linen smooth and dry and soothing. He had slept a little, and now he was alert. Unlike the young police officer in a chair near the door. His guard.
Sleeping peacefully, his fair head slumped down over his chest, snoring gently, his throat constricted by the tightness of his uniform collar.
Schwartz knew that there was not much time left. He was not going to die from the Gila’s bite. By morning he would be strong enough for them to transfer him to a prison hospital, perhaps
even to a regular jail cell. And then it would be too late.
Mother had come to him in a dream while he had slept.
There is a dragon here, in this house
, she had told him.
He was awake now, very clear in his mind, very lucid. No fever to delude him, no doctor or policeman to terrorize him. He knew that Mother was watching over him, and that she was right. There
was a dragon, on the next floor, almost directly above his head, and Schwartz knew that it was his destiny to kill it.
You must be silent and swift, Siegfried,
Mother had whispered in his ear.
You must make yourself invisible. And you’ll need your sword.
They had all relaxed their vigil now. In their presence, he had been quiet and unresponsive and obedient ever since the tape recorder had been switched off and the lieutenant and the pudgy-faced
older detective had left. They thought he was still sick and exhausted, and they had what they wanted from him for the moment, and he knew they had all been working, all through the day, probably
all through this night, piecing together information he had given them, contacting the patients in need of explantation. They were finished with him, for now.
And his guard was sleeping soundly.
Lally, too, was asleep. Dr Ash had offered her a sleeping pill, but she had told him she didn’t need it, though the truth was that she didn’t want that kind of
drugged oblivion. She had escaped death, and now, more than anything, she wanted to re-establish control over her life. She wanted to allow time to idle by, to feel everything, be it pleasure or
pain or sheer normality. But her talk with Chris had drained her, and in the end, fatigue had overtaken all other thoughts, all other emotions, and sleep had won.
He stood at the foot of the bed, gazing down at her. There was a night light fitted behind the top of the curtains, just enough to illuminate the patient for the staff, but not
bright enough to disturb her.
She looked more peaceful in sleep than she had during their meeting the previous night, but otherwise much the same. Female, with a sweetly shaped face and softly rounded arms, long brown hair
spread out fanlike over the white pillow. She looked human. But he knew better.
A dragon takes on many forms.
Mother had told him.
Man and metal.
She had the metal inside her, in her heart.
He had his sword. He had found it in the deserted galley kitchen on his floor, together with an orderly’s green coat. His magic cloak. Invisible and armed. Siegfried, the dragon
slayer.
She stirred a little, and he stood motionless, hardly breathing, but then she grew still again, lips slightly parted. She looked so innocent, almost child-like. A lesser man might be fooled.
He moved silently around the bed until he stood directly over her. He felt a new, great strength flow through him.
And he raised his sword.
Lally opened her eyes, saw the knife, saw his face, and screamed, but it came too late, and the long blade flashed down and sliced into her arm as she tried to thrust herself
away.
“Help me!” She screamed again, shrilly, piercingly.
The door crashed open, flooding the room with light.
“Lally, get
clear
!”
Schwartz raised the blood-soaked knife a second time, and Lally rolled away off the bed and crashed down onto the floor, searing the wound in her chest, knocking the air out of her lungs.
“Son of a
bitch
!”
Chris hurled himself at Schwartz, eyes wild, bellowing with rage, grasping at the madman’s arm, grabbing for the knife. The blade cut through the bandages on his bitten hand, drew fresh
blood as they grappled for control, and Chris almost fell, but still they wrestled, and Chris was hitting Schwartz, great, maddened punches into his belly, and Lally, trying to crawl away, could
hear the killer’s groans, could almost hear the breath being squeezed out of him, yet still the knife was in his right hand, and she saw the light from the corridor flashing on the bloody
blade as Schwartz thrust up again towards Chris’s stomach –
She heard the shot before she saw Joe in the doorway. The sound was deafening, final.
Schwartz stumbled back, stretched out both his hands. The knife tumbled, soundlessly, to the carpet and bounced, twice, sprinkling blood into the air, and Schwartz, too, fell, heavily onto his
back against the wall. And Lally heard the sound in his throat, half gasp, half cry, saw the shock on his face and the bloodied mess on his side where the bullet had exploded into him.
Joe reached him first, his gun still raised, and kicked the knife away, and Lally, on the floor a few feet away, knew there were other people in the room, running, calling out directions, but
she hardly noticed them, hardly felt the pain in her own arm where he had stabbed her, or in her chest where she had struck herself when she’d fallen. She was watching Schwartz, seeing the
staring of his eyes and the trickle of blood at the side of his mouth.
The last two things Siegfried saw were the dragon’s blood on his sword hand, and Joe Duval’s face, peering down into his own.
Slowly, painfully, he lifted his hand to his lips and licked it, tasting salt, tasting triumph, and for a moment he closed his eyes. And then, opening them again, he stared up at Joe, and his
expression grew perplexed.
“But you’re not Hagen,” he murmured, dying. “I thought it would be Hagen.”
Lally tried to stand but, dizzy and trembling, she sank back down onto her knees, and Chris, tearing his eyes from Schwartz, rushed to help her, put his arms around her and held her tight.
And Morrissey bent and checked the dead man’s pulse.
Life went on with the strange, flat normality of anticlimax. Chris returned to Stockbridge a day late, while Lally stayed on at the clinic for another few days. With Schwartz
dead and the case against him proven beyond doubt, Joe’s career seemed salvageable, after all. Isaiah Jackson’s anger hung between the two men like a constant, silent reproach, but Jess
and Sal were back home with Joe again, and Lally was safe, and if Joe had claimed to have any real regrets about his handling of the case, he knew he’d have been a damned liar.
Of the thirty-two lethal pacemakers, Schwartz’s Midnight Specials, seventeen had been implanted in patients. For Jack Long, Marie Ferguson, Sam McKinley and Alice Douglas, help had come
too late. And for one more victim, a fifty-five-year-old bus driver in Philadelphia, dead at the wheel of his vehicle just a few hours after the killer’s confession, taking with him one young
passenger and injuring three more. The remaining twelve devices had been explanted without incident.
Lally’s pacemaker, when taken apart by the bomb techs, proved to have been one of Schwartz’s dummies, its battery small and inadequate, but minus plastique. Deadly enough,
potentially, in its way.
It would be a while before Lally felt truly normal again. Lucas Ash and John Morrissey had both suggested a short course of counselling to prevent her from bottling up her
fears and memories of the nightmare, and Joe, from long experience of dealing with victims, agreed with them. But Lally knew that just going home, getting back to teaching ballet and baking cakes
and croissants for
Hugo’s
would be the best therapy for her. And spending time with Chris and Katy.
Especially Chris.
Lally knew now, without question, how she felt about him, but she knew, too, that their closeness had been brought about by their respective traumas, and that as long as he remained married,
there could be no certainty about a future with him. Andrea Webber was a very sick woman, and they were all going to have to be very careful and gentle with Katy if she was not to be torn
apart.
In Stockbridge, waiting for Lally to come home, Chris Webber couldn’t see too far into the future either, but he knew that he loved Lally Duval more than he’d ever loved any woman,
and that Katy cared for her, too. He knew, also, that it was only a matter of time before he and Andrea divorced, and he was a little consoled by the knowledge that this had been an inevitability
long before he got to know Lally.
He was painting another picture of her. His hand was still bandaged and painful, but he had the mobility he required in his fingers, and he wanted – he needed – to get the image onto
canvas while it was still so vivid, so
entrancing
, in his mind. Lally, with her hair blowing in the breeze, her shoulders and arms bare, her long slender legs showing through the thin
fabric of her skirt. Lally, with the joy of seeing him so transparent in her face. The way she’d looked in the moonlight in the harbour at Key West.
He was working more slowly than he liked, but it was coming, it was taking shape. If it was ready in time, he would take it to Logan Airport when Joe brought her home from Chicago.
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