The Killer in My Eyes (42 page)

They belonged to Maureen.

In the silence, he thought he heard voices coming from below.

He descended cautiously, keeping slightly to the side and supporting his right arm with the good one to avoid painful knocks. He came to a first landing, where there was a right turn leading to another flight of steps. The voices were louder now, although he still could not make out any words.

Never before had Jordan so regretted the lack of a gun.

He started down the second flight. With every step he took, the volume of the voices increased, and by the time he reached the bottom, he could hear that there were two of them.

One was Maureen’s, the other he had only heard once but recognized anyway.

The voices were coming through a wide-open door, accessed by a narrow gallery which Jordan reached by turning left and descending two or three more steps.

From where he was standing, he could see apparatus and instruments that suggested the basement was some kind of laboratory. He leaned against the wall and peered through the door. He didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like it at all.

On the opposite side of the huge room, beyond a workbench that occupied much of the central space, was Maureen, sitting on a chair with her arms tied behind her back, her face turned towards the door where Jordan was now hiding.

With his back to him stood the figure of a man Jordan had seen not long before in a video recording, cautiously crossing the lobby of the Stuart Building after killing Chandelle Stuart.

There was just one difference. Now he was present in flesh and blood, and was holding a big gun aimed at Maureen’s head.

Maureen had just received that hissed threat from William Roscoe when over his shoulder she saw Jordan appear beyond the door up on the gallery. She immediately looked down. When she looked up again, she forced herself to look straight into her jailer’s eyes, to avoid betraying Jordan’s presence.

But she had to find some way to show Jordan that she knew he was there to help her. She therefore said something that Roscoe could take as a response to what he had just said, but pitching her voice in such a way that Jordan could hear her.

‘Now that you know I saw you, I think I’m entitled to an explanation, don’t you?’

Jordan had understood. He leaned out, gave her a thumbs-up sign, then moved his hand in a circular gesture, indicating that she should keep Roscoe talking.

The doctor had not noticed a thing, but by chance he now moved to the side, in such a way as to keep both Maureen and the door into the lab within his field of vision. That made it completely impossible for Jordan to try to sneak in and take him from behind.

Roscoe looked condescendingly at Maureen. ‘I think that’s only fair,’ he concluded. ‘A little while ago you asked me to begin at the beginning. Well, that is where I have to start, if you’re going to understand.’

He paused for a moment, as if he had to prepare himself mentally before confronting yet again the wreckage of his life.

‘Many years ago, at a seminar I gave in a hospital in Boston, I met a nurse. She was black and her name was Thelma Ross. It was love at first sight, as if we had been put on earth solely for that purpose. It was the most beautiful, the purest thing I had ever felt in my life. Do you know what it means to meet somebody and realize that from that moment on, nobody else will ever matter as much to you as they do?’

Maureen felt her eyes grow moist.

Yes, you bastard, of course I know.

Roscoe seemed to read her mind. ‘Yes, I see you do know. You understand what I’m talking about.’

He continued in a different tone of voice, as if that knowledge had created a kind of complicity between them.

‘At the time I was at a delicate stage in my career. I was the pupil and chief assistant of Professor Joel Thornton, who was then the world’s greatest expert in my field. Everyone, including him, regarded me as his rightful heir, the rising star of ocular microsurgery and ophthalmological research. In addition to which, he was also my father-in-law, because I’d just married his elder daughter, Greta. Thelma knew all about my situation and she had no intention of doing anything that might endanger my career. She told me that if I was forced to choose her, over time I would come to resent her. The fact was, Thornton could easily have ruined me. Having someone like that against me would have meant the end of my career.’

Roscoe allowed himself a little excursion into sarcasm.

‘America isn’t quite the democratic country we try to export as a model. A white man leaving the WASP daughter of a famous surgeon for a coloured girl . . .’

He did not finish the sentence, leaving Maureen to draw her own conclusions.

‘Thelma and I continued meeting in secret. Then she fell pregnant. We agreed to keep the child, and that’s how Lewis came into the world. I’d found Thelma a job as Chief Surgical Nurse at Samaritan Hospital in Troy, a town not far from Albany. It was the perfect place. Close enough to allow me to see her and the child when I could, and far enough not to be too exposed. In any case, we were very discreet, so much so that none of her friends ever saw me or even knew of my existence. To everyone, Thelma was a young divorcée, survivor of an unpleasant marriage she didn’t like to talk about. To Lewis, I was a kind of uncle who loved both of them and always showed up with lots of toys. I’d found an isolated house for them and when I went to see them we stayed there. There was no risk of Thelma and me being seen together. Five years passed. Thornton died and things between Greta and myself deteriorated to the point that she asked for a divorce. I agreed to it with violins playing in my head, and that same day, that cursed day, I went up to Troy to tell Thelma that I’d be free soon and we’d be able to live together.’

From his rapt expression, Maureen could see that Roscoe was reliving in his mind the images evoked by his story.

‘Lewis was playing in the garden and Thelma and I were in the house. As I was telling her what was going to happen, I heard Lewis scream and then he came running into the house, crying and holding his arm out to me. I could see he had been stung several times, and from the size of the punctures I guessed they were hornet stings. I knew that simultaneous stings from a number of insects of that kind can cause serious anaphylactic shock. I told Thelma to get out the car and take him straight to the Emergency Room at Samaritan. She’d just gone back inside, when we heard the doorbell ring. Thelma opened the door and there they were.’

Maureen saw Roscoe’s jaws contract and hate – pure hate – distort his features.

‘Four people in sweatshirts and dark pants – three men and a woman, wearing masks of various characters from
Peanuts
. Linus, Lucy, Snoopy and Pig Pen, to be precise. One of them, I don’t know who, pushed Thelma violently back inside. She fell to the floor and they came in with guns aimed at us. They gathered all three of us in the same room and ordered us not to move. We guessed what was going to happen, because not long after that, a police car stopped in front of the house and two officers came and rang the doorbell. The one who seemed to be the leader – the one with the Pig Pen mask – aimed a gun at Lewis’s head and ordered Thelma to go to the door and get rid of the police.’

Roscoe looked up at the white ceiling and took a deep breath, as if that was the only way he could continue.

‘I don’t know how Thelma managed to be convincing in that situation, but somehow the officers were persuaded that nothing unusual was going on. They went back to their car and drove away. In the meantime Lewis was getting worse. He was finding it hard to breathe. I knew what was happening. The hornets’ stings had provoked a laryngeal spasm that was gradually blocking his respiratory tract. I begged them to let us go, saying I was a doctor. I explained what was happening to Lewis, and that he needed help. I swore with tears in my eyes that I wouldn’t go to the police – I even kneeled in front of the one with the Pig Pen mask. It was no use. I still remember the indifference in his voice as he said, “You’re a doctor, you deal with it.” He left me free in my movements, but to avoid my doing anything to try and escape or fight back he ordered Lucy and Snoopy to take Thelma into another room while I took care of my son. By this point, Lewis had fainted and couldn’t breathe. To avoid asphyxia, with two guns pointing at me, I took a scalpel from my bag and there, without anaesthetic, without instruments, like a butcher, I was forced to perform an emergency tracheotomy on my son and try to give him air by inserting the holder of a ballpoint pen in his throat.’

Tears of rage and grief fell from Roscoe’s eyes. Maureen knew from personal experience how difficult it was to tell which burned the more.

‘It was pointless. I couldn’t save him. When I heard that his heart had stopped beating, I raised my arms and started screaming. I could feel my son’s blood running down from my hands.’

Maureen suddenly connected those grainy images in her visions.

It was him I saw with his back to me, not Julius. What I took for a knife was actually a scalpel.

‘Then someone, I don’t know who, hit me on the head and knocked me unconscious. When I came to, they’d gone. They’d taken our car and escaped, leaving behind them the body of my son lying like an animal on the table and Thelma tied to a chair in the other room. When I untied her and she saw what had happened, she rushed to the table and hugged the body of Lewis so hard, it seemed as if she wanted to absorb him into her own body and give him back his life. It’s a sight I’ve never forgotten, one that’s sustained me like a drug all these years: the tears of my woman mixed with the blood of our son.’

‘Why did you never go to the police?’

‘That was Thelma’s decision. She was the one who persuaded me to leave. She didn’t want me to be found there. After the grief, she’d suddenly become as cold as ice. She told me what she wanted me to do. Even if those four were caught, she said, they’d do a bit of time in prison, and then they’d be free to do more harm. She made me swear I would find them and kill them with my own hands. If that meant never seeing each other again, that was a price she would gladly pay. That was why we decided she’d say she had performed the tracheotomy herself.’

Out of nervousness, Roscoe continued rhythmically opening and closing the hand that was not holding the gun, as if trying to rid himself of a cramp.

‘I lived with revenge as my one purpose in life, while I watched Thelma gradually lose her mind and sink into the limbo where her mind had taken refuge from suffering. She’s in a psychiatric hospital now. I haven’t seen her in years . . .’

His voice had dropped in volume. For a moment, Maureen felt compassion for this man who had sacrificed his present and future to a revenge that could never wipe out the past.

‘After almost ten years of effort, time and money, I’d still not managed to track them down. The bastards seemed to have vanished into thin air, as if they’d never existed. Then, one day, chance smiled on me. Chandelle Stuart, on the advice of her family doctor, came to me asking for a laser operation to cure myopia. It’s an almost routine operation but, being the kind of person she was, she said it had to be done by the best there was. During the check-up, she made a mistake . . .’

He paused, staring into space.

‘What mistake?’ Maureen asked.

Roscoe turned his head abruptly towards her, as if Maureen’s voice had woken him from a trance.

‘She asked me if I knew a good plastic surgeon who could remove a tattoo on her groin. She told me it was a memento of a person who had meant a lot to her but who she now wanted to wipe out of her life. She unzipped her pants and when I saw the tattoo I was struck dumb. The day Lewis died, in a moment of nervousness, Pig Pen had rolled up the sleeve of the black sweatshirt he was wearing. It had only been for a moment, but long enough for me to see that he had a big tattoo on his forearm – a demon with butterfly wings. What Chandelle Stuart was showing me was exactly the same tattoo. She couldn’t know I had seen it, because at that moment she was in the other room with Snoopy and Thelma. And without noticing what was going through my head, thinking because of the expression on my face that I was turned on by her, that whore Chandelle Stuart, standing in front of me with her pants down, had the nerve to take my hand and rub her crotch with it.’

Roscoe’s jaws were tight, his face ashen with scorn. His hand was a clenched fist, the knuckles white with the tension.

‘From that day on, my life changed. I lived in a frenzied state, as if hundreds of voices were talking in my ears simultaneously. I had a lead, so small as to be almost nonexistent, but still it was something. All my free time was devoted to my investigations, all the money I made was spent on it. I hired private detectives, paying them exorbitant sums. I went back to the time of the events and discovered that at that time Chandelle was studying at Vassar. One by one I identified Gerald Marsalis and Alex Campbell. Julius Wong, who was the worst of them all, was more difficult, because he hadn’t attended the college, but I somehow managed to give him a face and a name too.’

Roscoe was smiling now. Perhaps he was reliving the thrilling moment that every researcher lives for – when he finally makes his breakthrough.

‘When I found out that Julius Wong was Pig Pen, I wanted to go straight to him, ring his doorbell and put a bullet in that depraved face. But then I calmed down and forced myself to think. Eventually I made my mind up. I was going to kill them, one by one, but in such a way that blame fell on Julius Wong. Chandelle Stuart, Gerald Marsalis and Alex Campbell would be allowed to die, but not him. He had to pay more than all the others, he had to spend the rest of his days on Death Row, knowing that every day that passed was bringing him closer to the moment when someone would administer the fatal injection.’