Prodigal Son

  Slamming the trunk lid, Carson said, “We lie.”

  A Subaru Outback angled to the curb behind them, and Kathleen Burke got out. “Can you believe—Harker?”

  “He always seemed like such a sweetheart,” Michael said.

  “The moment I saw that suicide note on Roy Pribeaux’s computer,” Carson informed Kathy, “I didn’t believe that he wrote it. Yesterday, ragging Michael and me, Harker used the same phrase that ends Pribeaux’s note—‘one level below Hell.’”

  Michael confirmed: “Harker told us that to catch this guy, we were going to have to go to a weirder place—one level below Hell.”

  Surprised, Kathy said, “You mean you think he did it on purpose, he wanted you to tumble to him?”

  “Maybe unconsciously,” Carson said, “but yeah, he did. He threw the pretty boy off the roof after setting him up to take the rap for both Pribeaux’s string of murders and those that Harker himself committed. But with those four words—‘one level below Hell’—he lit a fuse to destroy himself.”

  “Deep inside, they pretty much always want to be caught,” Kathy agreed. “But I wouldn’t expect Harker’s psychology to…”

  “To what?”

  She shrugged. “To work that way. I don’t know. I’m babbling. Man, all the time I’m profiling him, the bastard’s on my doorstep.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Carson advised. “None of us suspected Harker till he all but pointed the finger at himself.”

  “But maybe I should have,” Kathy worried. “Remember the three nightclub murders six months ago?”

  “Boogie City,” Carson recalled.

  “Sounds like a place people go to pick their noses,” Michael said.

  “Harker and Frye were on that case,” Kathy said.

  Michael shrugged. “Sure. Harker shot the perp. It was an iffy shoot, but he was cleared.”

  “After a fatal OIS,” Kathy said, “he had six hours of mandatory counseling. He showed up at my office for two of the hours but then never came back.”

  “No offense, Dr. Burke,” Michael said, “but lots of us think mandatory counseling sucks. Just because Harker bailed doesn’t mean you should’ve figured he had severed heads in his refrigerator.”

  “Yeah, but I knew something was eating him, and I didn’t push him hard enough to finish the sessions.”

  The previous night, Carson had passed on the opportunity to tell Kathy the Spooky Time Theater story about monsters in New Orleans. Now there was no way to explain that she hadn’t any reason to feel conscious-stricken, that Harker’s psychology was not even human.

  Trying to make as light of the situation as possible, Carson said to Michael, “Is she doomed to Hell, or what?”

  “She reeks of brimstone.”

  Kathy managed a rueful smile. “Maybe sometimes I take myself too seriously.” Her smile faltered. “But Harker and I seemed to have such…rapport.”

  A paramedic interrupted. “’Scuse me, detectives, but we’ve given Ms. Parker first aid, and she’s ready for you now.”

  “She doesn’t need to go to the hospital?” Carson asked.

  “No. Minor injuries. And that’s not a girl who traumatizes easy. She’s Mary Poppins with attitude.”

  CHAPTER 75

  JENNA PARKER, blithe spirit, lived in a collection of plush teddy bears, inspirational posters—EVERY DAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF YOUR LIFE, JUST SAY NO TO THE BLUES—and cute cookie jars.

  The ceramic cookie jars were for the most part confined to the kitchen. There were a clown jar, a polar-bear jar, a brown-bear jar, a Mother Hubbard jar, a Mickey Mouse jar, a Wookie jar. Jars in the form of a puppy, a kitten, a raccoon, a rabbit, a gingerbread house.

  Carson’s favorite was a jar in the shape of a tall stack of cookies.

  Apparently Jenna Parker didn’t spend much time cooking, for the jar collection occupied half the counter space. Doors had been taken off some of the cabinets, so that the shelves could serve as display space for more cookie jars.

  “Don’t you dare say anything,” Carson muttered to Michael as they entered the kitchen and were confronted by the aggressively cheerful ceramic figures.

  Pretending wide-eyed innocence, he said, “About what?”

  Jenna sat on a stool, wearing a pink jogging suit with a small appliqué of a running turtle on the left breast. She was nibbling a cookie.

  For a woman who had such a short time ago been naked, strapped to an autopsy table, and about to be dissected alive, Jenna seemed remarkably cheerful. “Hi, guys. Want a cookie?”

  “No thanks,” Carson said, and Michael managed to decline, as well, without shtick.

  Holding up one bandaged thumb like a child proudly displaying a boo-boo, Jenna said, “I mostly just tore off my thumbnail when I fell. Isn’t that great?”

  “Imagine how good you’d feel,” Michael said, “if you’d broken a leg.”

  Well, he had repressed himself for the better part of a minute.

  Jenna said, “I mean, considering I could’ve been sitting here with my heart cut out, what’s a thumbnail?”

  “A thumbnail is zip, zero, nada,” said Michael.

  “It’s a feather on the scale,” she said.

  “Dust in the balance,” he agreed.

  “It’s a shadow of nothing.”

  “De nada.”

  “Peu de chose,” she said.

  “Exactly what I would’ve said if I knew French.”

  She grinned at him. “For a cop, you’re fun.”

  “I majored in banter at the police academy.”

  “Isn’t he fun?” Jenna asked Carson.

  Rather than stuff one or both of them into a damn cookie jar, Carson said impatiently, “Miss Parker, how long have you been Jonathan Harker’s neighbor?”

  “I moved in about eleven months ago. From day one, he was a sweetie.”

  “A sweetie? Did you and he…”

  “Oh, no. Johnny was a man, yeah, and you know what they’re like, but we were just good buds.” To Michael, she said, “That thing I just said about men—no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “I like men,” she said.

  “I don’t,” he assured her.

  “Anyway, I’ll bet you’re not like other men. Except where it counts.”

  “Peu de chose,” he said.

  “Oh, I’ll bet it’s not,” Jenna said, and winked.

  Carson said, “Define ‘buds’ for me.”

  “Once in a while Johnny would come over for dinner or I’d go across the hall to his place. He’d cook pasta. We’d talk about life, you know, and destiny, and modern dance.”

  Boggled, Carson said, “Modern dance? Harker?”

  “I was a dancer before I finally got real and became a dental hygienist.”

  Michael said, “For a long time, I wanted to be an astronaut.”

  “That’s very brave,” Jenna said with admiration.

  Michael shrugged and looked humble.

  Carson said, “Miss Parker, were you conscious any time after he chloroformed you?”

  “On and off, yeah.”

  “Did he talk to you during this? Did he say why?”

  “I think maybe he said having sex with me would be like having sex with a monkey.”

  Carson was nonplussed for a moment. Then she said, “You think he said it?”

  “Well, with the chloroform and whatever he pumped into me through the IV, I was sort of in and out of it. And to be perfectly frank, I was going out to a party when he grabbed me, and I had a little bit of a pre-party buzz on. So maybe he said it or maybe I dreamed he said it.”

  “What else did you maybe dream he said?”

  “He told me I was pretty, a fine example of my species, which was nice, but he said that he was one of the new race. Then this weird thing.”

  “I wondered when this would get weird,” Michael said.

  “Johnny said he wasn’t allowed to reproduce but was reproducing anyway, dividing like an ameba.” r />
  Even as those words chilled Carson, they invoked in her a sense of the absurd that made her feel as if she were a straight man in a burlesque revival. “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “Well, then he pulled up his T-shirt, and his belly was like a scene from Alien, all this squirming inside, so I’m pretty sure all of that was just the drugs.”

  Carson and Michael exchanged a look. She would have liked to pursue this subject, but doing so would alert Jenna to the fact that she might have experienced what she thought she had only dreamed.

  Jenna sighed. “He was a sweetie, but sometimes he could get so down, just totally bummed out.”

  “About what?” Carson asked.

  Jenna nibbled her cookie, thinking. Then: “He felt something was missing in his life. I told him happiness is always an option, you just have to choose it. But sometimes he couldn’t. I told him he had to find his bliss. I wonder…”

  She frowned. The expression came and went from her face twice, as though she wore a frown so seldom that she didn’t know how to hold on to one when she needed it.

  Carson said, “What do you wonder?”

  “I told him he had to find his bliss, so I sure hope his bliss didn’t turn out to be chopping people to pieces.”

  CHAPTER 76

  THROUGH THE CODED DOOR, out of Mercy, Randal Six finds himself in a six-foot-wide, eight-foot-high corridor with block-and-timber walls and a concrete floor. No rooms open from either side of this passageway.

  Approximately a hundred and forty feet from him waits another door. Happily, there are no choices. He has come too far to retreat. He can only go forward.

  The floor has been poured in three-foot-square blocks. By taking long strides—sometimes bounding—Randal is able to spell himself along these oversize boxes toward the farther end of the corridor.

  At the second door, he finds a locking system identical to the first. He enters the code he used previously, and this barrier opens.

  The corridor is actually a tunnel under the hospital grounds. It connects to the parking garage in the neighboring building.

  Father owns this five-story structure, too, in which he houses the accounting and personnel-management departments of Biovision. He can be seen coming and going from there without raising questions.

  Using the secretly constructed underground passageway between buildings, his visits to the Hands of Mercy, which he owns through a shell company, can be concealed.

  This second door opens into a dark place. Randal finds a light switch and discovers a twelve-foot-square room with concrete walls.

  The floor is concrete, as well, but it is a single pour, with no form lines. In other words, it is one big empty box.

  Directly opposite the doorway at which he stands is another door no doubt opening to the parking garage.

  The problem is that he can’t cross twelve feet and reach that door in a single step. To spell himself to that exit, he will have to take several steps within the same empty box.

  Every step is a letter. The rules of crosswords are simple and clear. One letter per box. You can’t put multiple letters in one box.

  That way lies chaos.

  Just considering the possibility, Randal Six shudders with fear and disgust.

  One block, one letter. No other method is able to bring order to the world.

  The threshold in front of him shares an h with the chamber that waits before him. Once across the threshold, he must finish spelling the last five letters of the other word a-m-b-e-r.

  He can reach the next door in five steps. That is no problem. But he only has one empty box.

  Randal stands at the threshold of this new room. He stands. He stands at the threshold. He stands, thinks, puzzles, puzzles…. He begins to weep with frustration.

  CHAPTER 77

  WHEN BULLETS WEREN'T FLYING, Carson could take a more thoughtful look at Harker’s apartment. Signs of a dysfunctional personality were at once evident.

  Although every piece of furniture was a different style from the others, in clashing colors and uncomplementary patterns, this might mean nothing more than that Harker had no taste.

  Although his living room had considerably more contents than did Allwine’s—where there had been nothing but a black-vinyl chair—it was underfurnished to the point of starkness. Minimalism, of course, is a style preferred by many people who are perfectly sane.

  The absence of any artwork whatsoever on the walls, the lack of bibelots and mementoes, the disinterest in beautifying the space in any way reminded her too much of how Allwine had lived.

  At least one inspirational poster or cute cookie jar would have been welcome.

  Instead, here came Dwight Frye out of the kitchen, looking as greasy as ever but, as never before, contrite. “If you’re gonna rip me a new one, don’t bother. I’ve already done it.”

  Michael said, “That’s one of the most moving apologies I’ve ever heard.”

  “I knew him like a brother,” Frye said, “but I didn’t know him at all.”

  Carson said, “He had a passion for modern dance.”

  Frye looked baffled, and Michael said approvingly, “Carson, you might get the hang of this yet.”

  “For real he went out that kitchen window?” Frye asked.

  “For real,” Carson said.

  “But the fall would’ve killed him.”

  “Didn’t,” Michael said.

  “He didn’t have a damn parachute, did he?”

  Carson shrugged. “We’re amazed, too.”

  “One of you fired two rounds from a twelve-gauge,” Frye noted, indicating the pellet holes in the wall.

  “That would be me,” said Carson. “Totally justified. He shot at us first.”

  Frye was puzzled. “How could you not take him down at such close range?”

  “Didn’t entirely miss.”

  “I see some blood,” Frye said, “but not a lot. Still and all, even gettin’ winged by a twelve-gauge—that’s got to sting. How could he just keep on keepin’ on?”

  “Moxie?” Michael suggested.

  “I’ve drunk my share of Moxies, but I don’t expect to laugh off a shotgun.”

  A CSI tech stepped out of the bedroom. “O’Connor, Maddison, you gotta see this. We just found where he really lived.”

  CHAPTER 78

  FATHER PATRICK DUCHAINE, shepherd to the congregation at Our Lady of Sorrows, took the phone call in the rectory kitchen, where he was nervously eating sugar-fried pecans and wrestling with a moral dilemma.

  After midnight, a call to a priest might mean that a parishioner had died or lay dying, that last rites were wanted, as well as words of comfort to the bereaved. In this case, Father Duchaine felt sure that the caller would be Victor, and he was not wrong.

  “Have you done what I asked, Patrick?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course. I’ve been all over the city since we had our little conference. But none of our people has seen one of us acting…strangely.”

  “Really? Can you assure me there isn’t a renegade among the New Race? No…apostate?”

  “No, sir, I can’t absolutely assure you. But if there is one, he’s given no outward sign of a psychological crisis.”

  “Oh, but he has,” Victor said coolly.

  “Sir?”

  “If you’ll turn on your radio or watch the first TV news in the morning, you’ll get quite an earful about our Detective Harker of the Homicide Division.”

  Father Duchaine nervously licked his lips, which were sugary from the pecans. “I see. It was some policeman, was it? Do you…do you feel that I’ve failed you?”

  “No, Patrick. He was clever.”

  “I was exhaustive…in my search.”

  “I’m sure you did everything that you possibly could.”

  Then why this call? Father Duchaine wanted to ask, but he dared not.

  Instead, he waited a moment, and when his maker said nothing, he asked, “Is there anything more you need me to do?”


  “Not at the moment,” Victor said. “Perhaps later.”

  All the sugar had been licked from Father Duchaine’s lips, and his mouth had gone dry, sour.

  Searching for words that might repair his maker’s damaged trust in him, he heard himself saying, “God be with you.” When only silence answered him, he added, “That was a joke, sir.”

  Victor said, “Was it really? How amusing.”

  “Like in the church—when you said it to me.”

  “Yes, I remember. Good night, Patrick.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  The priest hung up. He plucked fried pecans from the dish on the kitchen counter, but his hand shook so badly that he dropped the nuts before he could convey them to his mouth. He stooped, retrieved them.

  At the kitchen table with a water glass and a bottle of wine, Jonathan Harker said, “If you need sanctuary, Patrick, where will you turn?”

  Instead of answering, Father Duchaine said, “I’ve disobeyed him. I’ve lied to him. How is that possible?”

  “It may not be possible,” said Harker. “At least not without terrible consequences.”

  “No. I think perhaps it’s possible because…my programming is being rewritten.”

  “Oh? How can it be rewritten when you’re not in a tank anymore or hooked up to a data feed?”

  Father Duchaine looked toward the ceiling, toward Heaven.

  “You can’t be serious,” Harker said, and took a long swallow of communion wine.

  “Faith can change a person,” Father Duchaine said.

  “First of all, you’re not a person. You’re not human. A real priest would call you a walking blasphemy.”

  This was true. Father Duchaine had no answer to the charge.

  “Besides,” Harker continued, “you don’t really have any faith.”

  “Lately, I’m…wondering.”

  “I’m a murderer,” Harker reminded him. “Killed two of them and one of us. Would God approve of your giving me sanctuary any more than Victor would?”

  Harker had put into words a key element of Father Duchaine’s moral dilemma. He had no answer. Instead of replying, he ate more sugar-fried pecans.