Twice Dying (13 page)

“I know it’s not a game, Rasp. I’m around violent men everyday.”

“You might see the potential. I see the results, in the ER.”

“It’s
my
ass on the line.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I don’t want to go to police yet. I think she’s asking for help.”

Monks stared at her. “Are we talking pity here, Alison? What about the kid? She could have found Caymas’s place without using him. Now he has to live with selling Caymas out. There’s a cruelty at work.”

“Maybe she doesn’t see it that way. Maybe she was giving him a chance to get even for what Caymas did to him. Means for him to be proud.”

The rain had gotten heavier in Fort Bragg. The streets were deserted. Monks pulled into the motel parking lot.

He said, “It seems to me you’re trying goddamned hard to put a pretty face on Naia.”

She picked the box up from the floor and turned to face him.

“I started doing this work because I wanted to find out what makes people turn into monsters. But if you dig too deep there, the mainstream brands you as a freak. So I’ve been a good girl, played by the rules. And you know what I am? A prison guard, with Haldol for a gun.”

She opened the door, moving away from him in a way he could feel.

“If this was a mistake,” she said, and tossed her head in a gesture that included everything but centered on the bed in her room, “it was my mistake. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Monks walked unhappily to his own room. When he called her twenty minutes later, she did not answer. The desk told him that she had checked out.

He packed and started his own long drive home.

T
he ring of her telephone brought Alison awake, fumbling to reach it. She was on her living room couch, sail dressed, covered by a quilt. The clock read 3:53
A.M.
She had gotten home from Mendocino less than an hour earlier, exhausted. The bedroom had seemed too far away.

She said, “Hello?”

For several seconds, there was no sound but faint static.

“Hello,” she said again, annoyed now that it was probably a wrong number. “If you can hear me, I can’t hear you.” Her finger moved to click off the phone.

“It was awfully late at night to go bird watching.” The voice was an eerie whisper: high-pitched, childlike.

“Bird watching?”

“You went looking for a woodbird?”

Woodbird.
Tanager.
She woke up fast, scanning the windows as if a face might be there.

“Who is this?”

“Did he sing for you?” the whisper asked.

“We—talked. Yes.”

“I’m more and more impressed. At first I was afraid you’d be just another pretty face.”

Alison tried for the same playful tone. “Where have we met?”

A hint of laughter. “Did he tell you my name?”

She said, “Naia?”

“Do you know what it means?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“It’s the genus name for cobras. Naia is the queen.”

Alison said, “Cobras?”

“You
know.” The tone was a child’s firm insistence.

She hesitated, off balance from the responses that did not seem to follow any logic.

“Do you have another name?”

“I’d like to start therapy with you,” the voice said.

“I’d like that too.”

“Don’t. You.
Ever.
Condescend to me like one of your filthy patients.”

The tone had changed instantly to cold fury. Alison swallowed, a dry, hard knotting of her throat.

“I’m sorry.”

A pause. “Did you enjoy your gift?”

Her gaze moved to the plastic box on the coffee table.

“It’s—disturbing.”

The unseen tongue clucked mockingly. “You’re shocked?”

“I can’t condone murder.”

“I think you’re lying to yourself. Don’t you sometimes tell your patients that?”

“I don’t say it that way.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you really feel, instead of what you think you should?”

Alison lifted the lid off the box and gazed down at the chalk-white death mask of Caymas Schulte. She thought about the child he had murdered and buried, with no one knowing how many others he might have damaged. The terror in his own brother’s face. The queasy sense she had felt in his presence, that some alien thing was hiding inside him, barely contained, waiting for its instant to leap out, rend, destroy, then disappear back until its next chance came.

She said, “I feel relief that he’s gone.”

“Is that all? A man you were terrified of? It thrills you. Admit it.”

“I can’t.”

“He’s yours now.”

“What do you mean?”

The laughter again. “What else did the wood-bird tell you?”

Fear for the boy touched her. “He was very-careful.”

“But you weren’t so careful. There was someone with you. A man.” The tone was dangerously edged again.

She inhaled deeply and stared out the French doors as the implication hit. The lights of the San Francisco coastline shimmered through the rain, distant as stars.

She said, “I was afraid to go alone. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Is he someone special?”

Her mind moved swiftly, searching for the right course.

“He’s not in this. He was just company.”

“Tell me then,” the voice said archly. “Did you fuck your company?”

Alison hesitated. “No.”

“No?
I can
smell
your lie, you slut.” The voice ripped into her. Her teeth came together in a quick clattering.

“Yes,” Alison said. “I did.”

“What a generous girl.” The voice was calm again, gently inquisitive. “Suck him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he make you come?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“He knows what I like.”

“I want to know, too.”

“He went down on me. Then I was on top.”

“Go on.”

“I think—he hadn’t had a woman in a while.”

“Was he too quick?”

“Very hard.”

“That pleases you?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” the voice repeated musingly. “What will we do about him?”

“There’s no need to do anything. I’ll just tell him nothing more has happened. He’ll go away.”

“This is just between us, now. Yes?”

Alison said, “Yes.”

Silence. Thirty seconds. Forty. Rain splattered the windows in a sudden hard gust.

“I’m not interested in birds,” the voice said. “Let’s talk about noble prey. Serpents. Considered by the ancients to be immortal, because they regenerate their skins. Symbols of wisdom and healing. The caduceus. And hermaphroditic, when depicted as circular, with the phallic tail penetrating the mouth. Have you ever seen a cobra? A live one?”

“I’m—not sure. Maybe when I was little, in a zoo.”

“They’re particularly splendid. Intelligent. But the deadliest species of cobra walks on two legs.”

“Like Caymas?”

“Like him. Let’s go for a stroll, shall we?”

“All right. Where?”

“A dark place. A lair, a den. Close your eyes.”

Alison did.

“There’s a dangerous creature loose,” the voice said. “A cobra. Very vicious, very cunning. You have to be
more
dangerous. Faster, smarter. See in the night.”

“I’m not strong like you are.”

“No,” the harsh voice said. “You’re a little quail, mincing around the entrance. You peek in at the cobras to get your dreary, timid thrills. You tease them with a stick you hold in your little beak. But you’ve been oh, so careful.”

Eyes still closed, Alison said, “What happens then? When you walk into that den?”

A high skittering laugh. “Oh, darling. Everything changes. You become a cobra
hunter.”

For an instant, she glimpsed again that dark inner landscape, with its searching presence that promised to reveal the longed-for mystery. Her senses returned slowly, as if she were reawakening. The room was warm, fragrant with the greenery of plants.

She said, “How can a quail hunt a cobra?”

“You already know. You just have to realize it. Hold your gift. Turn it over.”

Alison gazed down into the mirror, into her own blood-ringed eyes at the someone she was supposed to be.

“Tell me who I’m looking at,” she said.

“She got lost.” The voice was smaller now,
subdued. “In a dark place, a cellar. A cobra found her.”

“Were you there?”

“That’s how Naia was born.”

Alison stood and walked to the French doors, watching her reflection approach in the rain-streaked glass.

She said, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You can use your gift.”

“How?”

“The mask traps the escaping life force, dear. That’s its purpose. The purest form of power.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. Do you know what happens if you throw a piglet into a cage with two hungry cobras?”

“No.”

“They start eating it from either end. Then one will swallow the other. That’s what Naia does. She turns them on each other and harvests the victors.”

Alison opened the French doors and stepped onto the deck. A hundred yards away, down the rocky slope, dark surf boomed and ebbed with a cold sucking sound.

“You’re going to get
strong,
“the voice said.

Alison said, “You haven’t told me what I can give you. In return.”

“The lost girl isn’t really lost,” the voice said softly. “She’s coming home. Soon.”

The phone clicked.

“Hello?” Alison said. “Can you still hear me?”

She stood clasping the mask of Caymas Schulte, her fingers moving over the cold pain-wracked features. Approving of him at last, for being dead.

D
r. Roman Kasmarek was a youthful forty-five, slender, dark, with wire-rimmed glasses and dabs of Vick’s glistening under his nostrils. Monks found him preparing for his first autopsy of the day in Mercy Hospital’s morgue, a windowless concrete room with drains set into the floors. One wall had a bank of what looked like giant filing cabinets, one of which might still contain Ismael Esposito.

Roman said, “Let me run this through once more. You want me to check surrounding counties for coroners’ reports that may or may not exist, using hospital facilities, even though this is in no way related to hospital business, and not disclosing the true reason for the inquiries. All of which violates professional ethics in several ways
that could have serious repercussions for, say, me.”

“I didn’t put it quite like that.”

“Is this related to your investigation work, Carroll? Or just a new hobby?”

“I don’t know what it is,” Monks said, which, in the light of day, was becoming truer. “A friend, a psychologist, approached me.”

Monks laid the printout of the four missing NGIs on a stainless steel dissecting table: Wayne Prokuta, Kenneth Foote, Brad Kurlin, and Caymas Schulte. Roman scanned the litanies of violence, drumming his fingers. The drumming slowed, then stopped.

They had first worked together more than a decade earlier at Bayview, when Monks was head of the ER and Roman, assistant pathologist. When the missing tape incident occurred, and Monks had been forced to divide the world between friends and others, Roman stood firm. A year later, he became chief pathologist at Mercy and Monks was unemployed. Among the first things Roman had done was to use his influence to bring Monks to Mercy’s ER.

“All these men have disappeared after release,” Monks said. “The follow-up’s piss poor and there’s reason to think at least one has been killed. I’m wondering if any have turned up in the morgues.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that I have any moral objections to lying. I’m just not good at it.”

“The fewer people who know about this, the better, Roman. My friend was contacted by somebody who may be the killer.”

Roman looked up owlishly.

“I assume that means you’d like these ASAP?”

“Sorry to be pushy.”

“I have a backlog of patients, but none of them are urgent appointments. I can get anything in San Francisco and Marin. Maybe San Jose. Sacramento and Mendocino are long shots. I don’t know the MEs in those areas.”

Monks said, “There’s one more. Robert Vandenard IV.”

“Vandenard?”

“He was the heir. Committed suicide in ’87 or ’88. The body was found near Napa.”

“Carroll. Asking about these other guys is one thing. With a name like Vandenard, people might want to know why.”

“It could be the most important one.”

“I’ll think of something,” Roman said. “Why don’t you check hack about noon.”

The medical records building at Clevinger Hospital was gray and uninviting. Alison had only been inside a few times. Files for current patients were kept on-ward, with aides transferring them as needed.

Posters in English and Spanish—NOTICE!
AVISO!
—papered the lobby walls, proclaiming information everyone either already knew or cared
nothing about. The chipped Formica counter was an uncomfortable orange color that reminded her of Dreamsicles she had eaten as a kid.

The clerk, a sinewy black woman with a long slender neck, ignored her for the requisite minute or so. Finally she looked up from her computer monitor, busy fingers pausing. Her name tag read Ms. Willis.

“I need access to Dr. Jephson’s audit,” Alison said. “I work for him.” She held up her ID card.

“You new here, miss?”

“No.”

“Uh-huh. Cause unless you’re authorized, there’s a procedure. You fill out a form—” a brilliant red-tipped fingernail jabbed at a stack of papers in a plastic stand “—and leave it there.” The finger sliced through the air to another untidy pile of perhaps twenty, waiting to be collected. “You come pick up the files when they’re ready. We’ll call you.” She swiveled back to her computer, as if to avenge the waste of her time.

“I’m sorry, but it has to be now.”

“You and everybody else.” The red-tipped fingers danced across the keyboard.

“I’m trying to save you trouble. I can work here, I don’t need to take them out.”

Ms. Willis exhaled. “How many files?”

“Sixty-eight.”

She sank back in her chair. “Honey, you have got to be kidding.”