Twice Dying (22 page)

Then came a
whump
and a stinging impact in his neck.

A man stepped into sight, moving fast. He was wearing a white lab coat. Monks tried to grapple, but the man shoved him aside with startling strength. Monks lurched against a wall, with a first wave of dizziness washing through him.

The man stepped over Larrabee, raising a heavy pipe wrench.

Monks lunged. His head butted into the man’s abdomen and his flailing arms encircled the torso. They struggled backwards, crashing into the machinery that lined the walls. The weakness surged in Monks again. His grip loosened. He went down to a knee, then both knees, weaving and gasping for breath. The man leaned down and gripped him by the collar.

Monks looked up into a face with a thick arched nose, pitted cheeks, wiry black hair.

His own face.

He clawed at it, and felt his fingers sink into softness that was not flesh: putty or wax and thick greasy makeup.

A man disguised as Monks, but with something wrong about the eyes.

His hand was gripped with savage strength and twisted until he collapsed on the floor. He
felt himself lifted easily and carried to che gurney in the hall. It was pushed with quick strides to the morgue and through the door.

Roman said, “Christ, Carroll, another one?”

The man with Monks’s face raised a pistol. The
wbump
sounded again. Roman staggered back. The man stepped forward and swung the barrel viciously across his face, knocking him sprawling. Then he pulled open a cadaver drawer, dumped Roman inside, and slammed it shut.

He paused at the autopsy cart with its gleaming array of surgical instruments.

Then he leaned over Monks, with a large scalpel held between their faces.

“‘Emergency, huh?’” he whispered in an exaggerated twang. “‘Must take good nerves.’”

The drawling voice and words touched a memory, but it was the eyes that triggered Monks’s realization of where he had seen that face.

The caretaker at the Vandenards’ Napa estate: an image that became superimposed in Monks’s mind with another, a news photo of a man being led away in handcuffs, a much younger man, but with the same old, knowing eyes.

Monks said, pronouncing the words with great effort,
“You
picked Tommy Springkell for the program. Because he fit. Used him like a suit of clothes.”

Through blurred, dimming vision, Monks watched Robby Vandenard lean over Jephson’s body with busy hands, then lift out the still beating bloody heart and place it beside the decoy in a second stainless steel bowl.

M
onks awoke with a cold gritty weight against his cheek. For a confused interval his brain tried to return to the safety of sleep, but his head was throbbing and his body ached. His left wrist felt sprained. Abruptly he remembered the blow he had taken there. Images flashed with quickening intensity through his brain: Larrabee, unconscious and bleeding; Roman in a cadaver drawer.

Both assaulted by a man disguised as himself.

He opened his eves. He was in a room with rough stone walls, wet in patches from seeping water, that curved up to form a high-ceilinged vault. A dim even light came from wall-mounted lamps. A draft brought traces of musty, earthy scent. The cold against his cheek was the floor he
lay on; the grit was sharp and unyielding, like tiny shards of glass.

Diatomaceous earth.

He struggled to sit up, fighting dizziness, and gasped at a yank around his neck. It was a leather strap, knotted to an iron rack. A horizontal row of chalk-white plaster masks was mounted along it: a fresco of men with shadowy agonized faces, held in this dark damp purgatory. A severed tether trailed beneath each. This was the place he had seen in the video of Caymas Schultz, and now he understood where he was: inside the wine cave where Katherine Vandenard had been murdered. Where Monks himself had stood outside only days before and talked to the man who had done it.

At his own place, a white mound of plaster was heaped on a board.

Monks did not need to touch it to know that it was still wet.

“You have only yourself to blame for this, Dr. Monks. If you hadn’t interfered, there’d be no need for haste.”

This voice was a man’s, natural, without any forced high pitch or intonation now. A pale oval was moving toward Monks from the darkness, a smooth androgynous face with hairless head: the undisguised face of Robby Vandenard. The body beneath was of medium height, lithe, clothed in tight-fitting black.

“I’m going to give you something not everyone
gets. A second chance. Do what I ask, and I’ll let you go. You’ll never hear from me again. Only—this time, I’ll be here to see to it that there’s no cheating.”

Robby moved closer as he talked, spiraling in, with the gliding steps of a dancer or martial artist. He was holding his right hand behind his thigh, hiding what it held. Monks turned clumsily on his knees to keep him in sight, fighting his body’s urge to run.

He said hoarsely, “What’s the price this time? Another murder?”

Robby leaped forward, the hidden hand slashing down in a blur of speed. Monks threw himself back. The hand whispered past his ear. There was a yank at his neck. Then he was free.

Robby was smiling. He held up a knife with a wooden shaft and hooked blade. A grape-picker’s knife.

“You’re probably feeling a little shaky,” he said. “I have a selection of stimulants and narcotics. Or perhaps you’d prefer a drink. I laid in some Finlandia vodka, especially for this occasion. A classic, isn’t it? The doctor who needs a stiff shot to steady his hand?”

Monks shook his head warily.

“Take your time, then. But not too much time. Katherine and I have places to go and people to see.”

Monks said, “Katherine?”

Robby’s face receded back into the cave’s darkness.
Another light came on, in a smaller chamber that opened off the main one. This was decorated like the room of a teenaged girl, with pastel walls and furnishings. The bed in the center held several stuffed animals and dolls.

Among them lay Alison Chapley, wearing a young girl’s nightgown.

Monks stood, lurching, and made his way to her. Her eyes were open, but she did not move or speak: an affect that suggested sodium pentothal or Versed. Her hair had been dyed auburn and fell straight, parted in the middle. Her eyes were lined heavily with kohl, her lipstick pale pink.

Monks’s gaze rose to a photograph on a shelf, a dated professional portrait in an ornate gilt frame. Two children stood side by side. The older was a girl already taking on a woman’s beauty. Long straight auburn hair, parted in the middle. Dark-lined eyes and pale lipstick.

Katherine Vandenard.

Not just the makeup, but the facial structure—eyes that sloed toward the exotic, strong cheekbones, wide mouth—made her resemblance to Alison startling.

The other child in the photo was a boy of perhaps ten, dressed in suit and tie, his fair hair curled to give an angelic appearance.

But even then, the eyes gave a hint of something much older.

“We need your help, Dr. Monks.” Robby’s voice came from behind him. “I was going to use
Jephson, but his hands shook like leaves. He whined that he hadn’t touched an instrument in thirty years. Pitiful. I suppose it didn’t help any, putting him in the car trunk with Garlick. Garlick was a mess by then.

“I considered doing it myself. It’s a very simple procedure. But I just don’t have that touch, the years of experience.

“Then
you
called. I thought, those steely Emergency Room nerves. Just what we need.”

Robby stepped into sight again, holding a plastic, life-sized medical model of a human head. Skin and skull were transparent, revealing the convoluted sections of the brain.

“We’ll use the trans-orbital method. Tried and true. It only takes a few minutes. They used to do them one right after the other, dozens in an afternoon. Insertion of a probe through the eyelids—”

He shifted the head to hold it with one hand, while the other introduced a surgical knife with a long, thin blade above the eyeball, piercing up into the central forebrain.

“Followed by severing the connection between the thalamus and frontal lobe. A twist of the wrist.”

The probe slashed across.

“The vessel is cleansed, and ready for its new owner.”

Robby swung the probe to point at the photograph of Katherine.

Monks stared, beginning to comprehend what Robby Vandenard intended:

A frontal lobotomy to empty the “vessel,” Alison. Eliminate her personality, in the belief that he could bring back the sister he had murdered out of jealous love, almost thirty years ago.

Robby was moving again, briskly setting out a sterile tray. It held gauze, bowls of antiseptic solution, and another surgical knife still in a packet.

He help up a pair of surgical gloves.

“Size seven and a half, I believe?”

Monks said slowly, “It won’t work, Robby. You’ll just be destroying another life. Like Katherine’s.”

“I didn’t
destroy
Katherine’s life. I kept her from going in a wrong direction.”

“What wrong direction, growing up? Becoming a normal human being?”

“She’s never stopped talking to me, Monks. She told me how to feed her the cobras, to make her stronger. She brought the vessel to me. She’s talking to me right now. Telling me she’s very angry with you.

“When she gets angry—” the voice rose into the eerie high pitch, echoing through the vault with venomous intensity—“she becomes Naia.”

Robby stepped to an alcove in the stone wall. He stood with his back turned for half a minute, leaning slightly forward, hands moving like those of a woman putting on makeup. When he turned back to Monks, his eyes were ringed in red and
dark hair streamed down his shoulders. He advanced with the silent gliding steps. He was holding the grape-picker’s knife again.

“Everything alive consumes other life, Monks,” the high voice crooned. “Look at
her,
and admit the truth.” The knife made a hooking gesture at Alison. “You were feeding off her all along, lapping at her soul: her flame, her fearlessness, the way she put herself on the edge. When you had your hands around her throat that night, didn’t you feel her life spilling into you? Wasn’t that what
really
scared you, the power that was so delicious?”

Monks’s hand touched his back pocket. The razor was still there. He slid it loose, keeping it hidden, and turned with the circling figure.

“Alison, get up!” he yelled. “Get out of here!”

Monks shuffled backwards along the iron rack. Robby glided after him.

Then sidestepped and disappeared from sight.

Crouched, skin prickling, Monks stayed motionless, straining to hear.

“I lived with people who understand these things, Monks.”

The voice came from above. Monks’s head jerked up so sharply a burn shot through his neck. Robby was standing on top of the rack.

“In Africa,” Robby said. “Not much fancy modern medicine out in the bush. But cobras. Masks. The knowledge of how death feeds life, and how it can be used. It’s as old as time.”

He stepped into the air and dropped, landing silently: feet spread, poised, knife ready.

“Get up!” Monks screamed. He stumbled away, skirting around the rack’s far end. His hand hooked on one of the masks. He wrenched it loose and hurled it like a discus to shatter against the wall above the bed where Alison lay.

“That,” the high voice said with controlled rage, “was a mistake.”

Robby lunged, driving under Monks’s clumsy out-thrust arm. A hot streak of pain burned across his belly. He clasped it with his left hand, backing away, feeling the seep of slippery blood through his fingers.

Another lunge. Monks flailed out, but the quick body spun and kicked a knee out from under him. He went down heavily.

“Come on, Dr. Monks. The offer stands. A couple of bandages and a shot of Demerol and you’ll be fine,
I
don’t hold grudges.”

Monks got to his feet and ran blindly, staggering, colliding with the walls, deafened by his own shrieking breath. Another hot slice flared across his back. He hit the stone floor on hands and knees, the razor flying from his hand and skittering across the floor.

He screamed,
“You can’t empty out a human being like a jar and fill it up with somebody who’s dead.”

Monks dragged himself a little further and lay still, his cheek again on the stone, cool and comforting
now. He was aware of his blood slipping away.

The pain seeped away with it, and an image appeared in his mind, of a day almost two decades earlier, at the beach at Point Reyes. Crystal blue sky, hot sun and fresh breeze, miles of pristine sand. His young wife with their son and daughter, playing in the surf; the perfect family, in a life and world that seemed as fresh as they themselves.

“All right, Monks, I’ll have to do it myself after all,” the voice said. It sounded very far away. “But I’ll need some practice first. Let’s see, where shall I start?
I
know.”

Monks felt a hand on his neck, then the pressure of a knee across the small of his back, the full weight of a man coming to rest. Something sharp hooked into the flesh at the inside tendon behind his right knee.

In that instant of pause, there came a sound that he could feel: a
tchhh,
like a knife slicing into a slab of meat.

A splash of wann liquid hit his neck and face. The weight on his body lessened, then lifted.

Monks forced his eyes to open. Robby Vandenard was on his knees, swaying, both hands clasping the left side of his throat. Blood was pumping between his fingers with the quick rhythm of pulse.

Behind him, Alison stood, with the razor in her hand.

It fell from her fingers. As if it had held invisible puppet strings that supported him, Robby dropped back to his haunches, then sagged again.

He settled beside Monks like a shy lover, his face only a few inches away. Blood pulsed from the gaping slash across his carotid artery. Monks’s hand moved of itself to compress the wound, but then stopped, his mind knowing it was hopeless. He felt a sensation he knew all too well, of a life leaving, with coldness where it had been.