Fever Dream Page 30

“That, my dear Captain, is what’s so very curious.” And he placed the papers back within his suit jacket.

  58

  THE SUN HAD ALREADY SET IN A SCRIM OF muddy clouds by the time Laura Hayward reached the small highway leading out of Itta Bena, heading east toward the interstate. According to the GPS, it was a four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Penumbra; she’d be there before midnight. Pendergast had told her he wouldn’t be home until even later; he was off to see what else he could dig up on June Brodie.

  It was a long, lonely, empty highway. She felt drowsy and opened the window, letting in a blast of humid air. The car filled with the smell of the night and damp earth. At the next town, she’d grab a coffee and sandwich. Or maybe she could find a rib joint. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  Her cell phone rang, and she fumbled it out of her pocket one-handed. “Hello?”

  “Captain Hayward? This is Dr. Foerman at the Caltrop Hospital.”

  Hayward was instantly chilled by the serious tone of his voice.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you in the evening but I’m afraid I had to call. Mr. D’Agosta has taken a sudden turn for the worse.”

  She swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  “We’re doing tests, but it appears he might be suffering from a rare kind of anaphylactic shock related to the pig valve in his heart.” He paused. “To be frank, it looks very grave. We… we felt you should be notified.”

  Hayward couldn’t speak for a moment. She slowed, pulled to the side of the highway, the car slewing into the soft shoulder.

  “Captain Hayward?”

  “I’m here.” She punched Caltrop, LA into her GPS with shaking fingers. “Just a moment.” The GPS ran a calculation displaying the time from her location to Caltrop. “I’ll be there in two hours. Maybe less.”

  “We’ll be waiting.”

  She closed the phone and dropped it on the passenger seat. She took in a long, shuddering breath. And then—quite abruptly—she gunned the Buick and swung the wheel violently into a U-turn, propelling gravel behind the car, the rear end swinging back onto the highway with a screech of rubber.

  Judson Esterhazy strolled through the double glass doors into the warm night air, hands shoved into the pockets of his doctor’s whites, and breathed deeply. From his vantage point in the covered entryway of the hospital’s main entrance, he surveyed the parking lot. Brightly lit by sodium lamps, it wrapped around the main entrance and ran down one side of the small hospital; it was three-quarters empty. A quiet, uneventful March evening at Caltrop Hospital.

  He turned his attention to the layout of the grounds. Beyond the parking lot, a smooth lawn ran down to a small lake. At the far end of the hospital stood a park with a scattering of tupelo trees, carefully planted and tended. A path wound through them, granite benches placed at strategic points.

  Esterhazy strolled across the lot to the edge of the little park and sat down on a bench, to all appearances simply a resident or internist out for a breath of fresh air. Idly, he read the names carved into the bench as some fund-raising gimmick.

  So far, everything was going to plan. True, it had been very difficult finding D’Agosta: somehow Pendergast had created a new identity for him, along with fake medical records, birth certificate, the works. If it hadn’t been for Judson’s access to private pharmaceutical records, he might never have found the lieutenant. Ultimately it had been the pig-heart valve that furnished the necessary clue. He knew D’Agosta had been moved to a cardiac care facility because of his injured heart. D’Agosta’s prelims indicated he had a severely damaged aortic valve. The bastard should have died, but when he held on despite all odds, Judson realized he’d require a pig-heart valve.

  There weren’t many orders for pig valves floating through the system. Trace the pig valve, find the man. And that’s what he’d done.

  It was then he realized there was a way to kill two birds with one stone. After all, D’Agosta wasn’t the primary target—but, comatose and dying, he could still make very effective bait.

  He glanced at his watch. He knew that Pendergast and Hayward were still operating out of Penumbra; they couldn’t be more than a few hours away. And of course they’d have been alerted to D’Agosta’s condition by now and would be driving like maniacs to the hospital. The timing was perfect. D’Agosta was now dying from the dose of Pavulon he’d administered, the dosage being well into the fatal range but carefully calibrated so as not to kill immediately. That was the beauty of Pavulon—the dosage could be adjusted to draw out the drama of death. It mimicked many of the symptoms of anaphylactic shock and had a half-life in the body of less than three hours. Pendergast and Hayward would arrive just in time for the deathbed rattle—but then, of course, they wouldn’t get as far as the deathbed.

  Esterhazy rose and strolled along the brick path leading through the little park. The glow from the parking lot did not penetrate far, leaving most of the area in darkness. This would have made a good place to shoot from—if he’d been using the sniper rifle. But of course that would not work. When the two arrived, they would park as close to the main entrance as possible, jump out, and run into the building—a continually moving target. After his failure with Pendergast outside Penumbra, Esterhazy did not care to repeat the challenge. He would take no risks this time.

  Hence the sawed-off shotgun.

  He walked back toward the hospital entrance. It offered a far more straightforward opportunity. He would position himself on the right-hand side of the walkway, between the area lights. No matter where Pendergast and Hayward parked, they’d have to pass right by him. He would meet them there in his doctor’s uniform, clipboard in hand, head bowed over it. They would be worried, rushing, and he’d be a doctor—there would be no suspicion. What could be more natural? He’d let them approach, get out of the line of sight of anyone inside the double glass doors. Then he’d swing up the sawed-off from under his lab coat and fire from the hip at point-blank range. The double-ought buck would literally blow their guts and spinal cords out through their backs. Then all he had to do was walk the twenty feet to his own car, get in, and drive away.

  With his eyes closed he ran through the sequence, counting off the time. Fifteen seconds, more or less, beginning to end. By the time the security guard at the reception desk called for backup and screwed up the courage to get his fat ass outside, Judson would be gone.

  This was a good plan. Simple. Foolproof. His targets would be off guard, exposed. Even the legendarily cool Pendergast would be flustered. No doubt the man blamed himself for D’Agosta’s condition—and now his good friend was dying.

  The only danger, and it was a slight one, would be if someone accosted or challenged him in the hospital before he had time to act. But that didn’t seem likely. It was an expensive private hospital, big enough that no one had looked twice at him when he walked in and flashed his credentials. He had gone straight to D’Agosta’s room and found him drugged up with painkillers, sound asleep after the operation. They hadn’t posted a guard, evidently because they felt they’d disguised his identity well enough. And he had to admit they’d done a brilliant job at that, all the paperwork in order, everyone in the hospital thinking he was Tony Spada from Flushing, Queens…

  Except that he was the only patient in the entire region needing a forty-thousand-dollar porcine aortic valve xenograft.

  He’d injected the Pavulon high up in the IV drip. By the time the code came through, he was in another part of the hospital. No one questioned him or even looked askance at his presence. Being a doctor himself, he knew exactly how to look, how to behave, what to say.

  He checked his watch. Then he strolled over to his car and got in. The shotgun gleamed faintly from the floor of the passenger seat. He’d stay here, in the darkness, for a little while. Then he’d hide the shotgun under his coat, exit the vehicle, get into position between the lights… and wait for the birds to fly in.

  * * *

  Hayward could see the hospital at the end of the lon
g, straight access drive, a three-story building glowing in the night, set amid a broad rising lawn, its many windows reflecting on the waters of a nearby pond. She accelerated, the road dipping down to cross a stream, then rising up again. As she approached the entrance she braked hard, making an effort to get her excessive speed under control, came into the final curve before the parking lot, the tires squealing softly on the dew-laden asphalt.

  She came to a short, screeching halt in the closest parking space, threw open the door, and jumped out. She trotted across the lot and entered the covered walkway to the front doors. Immediately she saw a doctor standing to one side of the walkway, between the pools of light, holding a clipboard. A surgical mask was still in position on his face—he must have just come from the OR.

  “Captain Hayward?” the doctor asked.

  She veered toward him, alarmed at the thought he was waiting for her. “Yes, how is he?”

  “He’s going to be just fine,” came the slightly muffled response. The doctor let the clipboard drop casually in one hand while he reached under his white coat with the other.

  “Thank God—” she began, and then she saw the shotgun.

  59

  New York City

  DR. JOHN FELDER MOUNTED THE BROAD STONE steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library. Behind him, the evening traffic on Fifth Avenue was a staccato chorus of horns and grinding diesels. He paused a moment between the large stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, to check his watch and rearrange the thin manila folder that was tucked beneath one arm. Then he made his way to the brass doors at the top of the stairs.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the guard standing before them. “The library is closed for the day.”

  Felder took out his city credentials and showed them to the man.

  “Very good, sir,” said the guard, stepping deferentially away from the doors.

  “I put in a request for some research materials,” Felder said. “I was told they were ready for examination.”

  “You can inquire in the General Research Division,” the guard replied. “Room Three Fifteen.”

  “Thank you.”

  His shoes rang out against the floor as he walked through the vast and echoing entrance hall. It was almost eight in the evening and the cavernous space was deserted save for a second guard at a receiving station, who again examined his credentials and pointed the way up the sweeping staircase. Felder mounted the marble stairs slowly and thoughtfully. Arriving at the third floor, he walked down the corridor to the entrance of Room 315.

  Room 315 did not do the space justice. Nearly two city blocks long, the Main Reading Room rose fifty feet to a rococo coffered ceiling busy with murals. Elegant chandeliers hung over seemingly endless rows of long oaken reading tables, still appointed with their original bronze lamps. Here and there, other researchers with after-hours access sat at the tables, poring over books or tapping quietly on laptops. While many books lined the walls, they were merely a drop in the library’s bucket: in the subterranean levels beneath his feet, and the others below the green surface of adjoining Bryant Park, six million more volumes were stored.

  But Felder had not come here to look at books. He had come for the library’s equally vast collection of genealogical research materials.

  He walked to the research assistance station that bisected the room, itself made of ornately carved wood, as large as a suburban house. After a brief whispered exchange, a library cart full of ledgers and folders was presented to him. He wheeled it to the nearest table, then took a seat and began placing the materials on the polished wooden surface. They were darkened and foxed with age but nevertheless impeccably clean. The various documents and sets of records had one thing in common: they dated from 1870 to 1880, and they documented the area of Manhattan in which Constance Greene claimed to have grown up.

  Ever since the commitment proceedings, Felder had been thinking about the young woman’s story. It was nonsense, of course—the ravings of someone who had completely lost touch with reality. A classic case of circumscribed delusion: psychotic disorder, unspecified.

  And yet Constance Greene did not present like the typical person totally out of touch with reality. There was something about her that puzzled—no, intrigued—him.

  I was indeed born on Water Street in the ’70s—the 1870s. You will find all you need to know in the city archives on Centre Street, and more in the New York Public Library… I know, because I have seen the records myself.

  Was this some clue she was offering them: some morsel of information that might clear up the mystery? Was it perhaps a cry for help? Only a careful examination of the records could provide an answer. He briefly wondered why he was doing this: his involvement in the case was over, and he was a very busy man with a successful private practice. And yet… he found himself damnably curious.

  An hour later, Felder sat back in his chair and took a deep breath. Among the reams of yellowing documents was a Manhattan subcensus entry that indeed listed the family in question as dwelling at 16 Water Street.

  Leaving the papers on the table, he rose and made his way down the stairs to the Genealogical Research Division on the first floor. His search of the Land Records and Military Service Records came up empty, and the 1880 US census showed nothing, but the 1870 census listed a Horace Greene as living in Putnam County, New York. An examination of Putnam County tax records from the years prior provided a few additional crumbs.

  Felder walked slowly back upstairs and sat down at the table. Now he carefully opened the manila folder he had brought and arranged its meager contents—obtained from the Public Records Office—on its surface.

  What, exactly, had he learned so far?

  In 1870, Horace Greene had been a farmer in Carmel, New York. Wife, Chastity Greene; one daughter, Mary, aged eight.

  In 1874, Horace Greene was living at 16 Water Street in Lower Manhattan, occupation stevedore. He now had three children: Mary, twelve; Joseph, three; Constance, one.

  In 1878, New York City Department of Health death certificates had been issued for both Horace and Chastity Greene. Death in each case was listed as tuberculosis. This would have left the three children—now aged sixteen, seven, and five—orphans.

  An 1878 police ledger listed Mary Greene as being charged with “streetwalking”—prostitution. Court records indicated she had testified that she had tried to find work as a laundress and seamstress, but that the pay had been insufficient to provide for herself and her siblings. Social welfare records from the same year listed Mary Greene as being confined to the Five Points Mission for an indefinite period. There were no other records; she seemed to have disappeared.

  Another police ledger, from 1880, recorded one Castor McGillicutty as having beaten Joseph Greene, ten, to death upon catching the boy picking his pocket. Sentence: ten dollars and sixty days of hard labor in The Tombs, later commuted.

  And that was it. The last—and indeed only—mention of a Constance Greene was the 1874 census.

  Felder returned the documents to the folder and closed it with a sigh. It was a depressing enough story. It seemed clear that the woman calling herself Constance Greene had seized upon this particular family—and this lone bit of information—and made it the subject of her own delusional fantasies. But why? Of all the countless thousands, millions, of families in New York City—many with more extensive and colorful histories—why had she chosen this one? Could they have been her ancestors? But the records for the family seemed to end with this generation: there was nothing he could find to foster any belief that even a single member of the Greene family had survived beyond 1880.

  Rising from his seat with another sigh, he went to the research desk and requested a few dozen local Manhattan newspapers from the late 1870s. He paged through them at random, glancing listlessly at the articles, notices, and advertisements. It was of course hopeless: he didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly—in fact he didn’t know why he was looking in the first place. What was it abo
ut Constance Greene and her condition that puzzled him so? It wasn’t as if…

  Suddenly—while leafing through an 1879 issue of the Five Points tabloid New-York Daily Inquirer—he paused. On an inside page was a copperplate engraving titled Guttersnipes at Play. The illustration depicted a row of tenements, squalid, rough-and-tumble. Dirty-faced urchins were playing stickball in the street. But off to one side stood a single thin girl, looking on, broom in one hand. She was thin to the point of emaciation, and in contrast with the other children her expression was downcast, almost frightened. But what had stopped Felder dead was her face. In every line and detail, it was the spitting image of Constance Greene.

  Felder stared at the engraving for a long moment. Then, very slowly, he closed the newspaper, a thoughtful, sober expression on his face.

  60

  Caltrop, Louisiana

  A RAPID SERIES OF SHOTS RANG OUT AS HAYWARD threw herself sideways, instantly followed by the roar of the shotgun. She landed hard on the ground, feeling the backwash from the cloud of buckshot that blasted by her. She rolled, yanking out her piece. But the phony doctor had already wheeled about and was flying toward the parking lot, white coat flapping behind him. She heard more shots and a screeching of wheels as a vintage Rolls-Royce came careering across the parking lot, tires smoking. She saw Pendergast was leaning out the driver’s window, firing his pistol like a cowboy firing from a galloping horse.

  With a scream of rubber the Rolls went into a power slide. Even before it came to a stop, Pendergast flung the door open and ran up to her.

  “I’m fine!” she said, struggling to rise. “I’m fine, damn it! Look—he’s getting away!”

  Even as she spoke she heard an unseen engine roar to life in the lot. A car went screeching away, a flash of red taillights disappearing out the access drive.

  He hauled her to her feet. “No time. Follow me.”