"My little sweetheart," he whispered. "What have they done to you?"
23
Contents - Prev/Next
Kate collapsed for several hours in an adjoining room, and woke to find that the painting of the agonized woman, the intricate patchwork quilt from Vaun's bed, and a length of burnt-orange velvet had been delivered during the morning to the hallway outside Vaun's door. The guard sat next to them and rose when she saw Kate. Low music came from inside the room.
"Morning, Lucy. It is still morning, isn't it?"
"Barely. You want some coffee?"
"I'll get some in a minute. Anything happening?"
"Just this stuff arrived. Inspector Hawkin said nobody but you could go in, and the shrink hasn't been out, so I just left them here."
"Have you heard from him? Hawkin, I mean? Or Trujillo?"
"No, I've just been sitting here listening to golden oldies coming through the door and wishing I hadn't drunk so much coffee this morning."
"You haven't had a break? You go ahead, I'll stay here until you get back."
When the woman returned, Kate went for coffee and a stale roll, retrieved some clothes from her car, had a shower, and returned just as Lucy was going off duty. Her replacement was a massive Hispanic man whose movements were slow, except for those of his eyes. Kate introduced himself and made sure he knew that he was not to enter the room if he could possibly avoid it, and then very quietly. She then let herself in with only a faint click.
The first thing she noticed was the bright drawing taped to the wall above the light. Teddy's effort, no doubt. Paul McCartney was singing about blackbirds. The bed's inhabitant lay as before, limp and remote. Her hair had been heavily brushed. The perfume from the roses on the bedside table rose above the pervasive medicinal smell of a hospital room, two dozen incongruously perfect scarlet blooms hacked off and stuck into an institutional mayonnaise jar with patches of the label still clinging. Next to the jar were several items that Bruckner must have brought with him: a flat box of jumbo-sized crayons, the kind designed for pudgy little hands, a package of Conte crayons, and one of charcoal sticks. Kate wondered if he was planning on some kind of sleep-drawing with the unconscious woman and wished she could be witness to it.
Bruckner was sitting on the edge of the bed, bent forward in close scrutiny of Vaun's right hand, which lay curled up on her chest. He looked around when Kate came in, winced, stood up slowly, and eased his back. He was wearing a drooping bud in the lapel of his corduroy jacket. His hair stood on end, his five o'clock shadow was verging on an early beard, and when he came over to Kate he brought the mustiness of stale sweat. They both kept their voices very low.
"How is it going?" she asked him.
"Too early yet to know. Hawkin said you'd be able to help me today?"
"I haven't heard any different. What do you want me to do?"
"Relieve me for a couple of hours. I've got to shave, and I should talk to Tanaka and go through her records so I look professional."
"There's a shower in number seventeen," she suggested.
"I am looking forward to using it." He dug a crumpled shirt and a zip bag from his briefcase, and handed Kate two cassettes. "Put these on next, and brush her hair. Don't talk to her, and try to keep out of her line of sight. And watch her."
So for two hours Kate listened to half-remembered songs by Judy Collins and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel, and brushed firmly until the black curls lay flat against the head and pillow, and held her breath at several imagined movements and once at a faint noise that she decided must have come from the tape player. At the end of the hypnotic time, she was startled at the careless shock of the door being thrown open and Bruckner carrying in the canvas. He propped it on a chair against the wall facing the bed, and as she looked at it Kate realized that it had no signature. Bruckner came back with the glowing velvet and the quilt, and closed the door. She got up from the bed and went to whisper that there was no change, but his eyes swept over Vaun and the monitor that he had reattached to her, and grinned.
"Oh, yes there is. Look at her color, and her pulse rate."
Kate looked more closely, but could see no variation in the skin. The luminous numbers on the monitor had read between 55 and 58 before, and now read 59, hardly a noteworthy increase, she thought. It blinked to 60, then back to 59, and stayed there.
"No movement, though?"
"I thought a couple of times, but it's kind of like staring at a spot on a blank walclass="underline" It starts to jump after a while."
He nodded, tossed the velvet on the chair, and shook out the quilt to spread over the bed. He picked up Vaun's loose right hand and something fell out onto the folds of the bed, a small black something that brought an intake of breath and a look of slow, intense satisfaction to his face. He turned the flaccid hand over, plucked something from the furled fingers, and laid the hand down again on the bed, patting it affectionately. He walked around the bed to Kate and held out his hand. On his palm lay two short lengths of a charcoal stick. Kate picked them up and looked curiously at him.
"She broke it," he explained. "She felt it, knew what it was, and tightened up on it enough to snap it."
"And that makes you happy."
"That makes me very happy indeed. I'll need you again in two or three hours. Will you be here?"
"All day and tonight, so far as I know. Shall I come back in two hours?"
"Make it three. If I want you before that I'll ask Cesar or whoever's on duty to find you."
So Kate waited. She ate an overcooked lunch in the hospital cafeteria, ducked a reporter by diving into the kitchen and emerging from the back door in a white coat, talked to Hawkin when he called from San Jose, found someone to remove the stitches from the healed cuts in her back, and felt generally useless. In two hours and fifty minutes she went back to the room, and Bruckner told her what to do. She thought he was crazy, but she did it: she stood next to the unconscious woman (did her face seem less waxen?) telling her in slow, emphatic tones the outline of their investigation. She dwelt on Angie's concern for Vaun but not on her need for comfort; she told of Tony Dodson/Andy Lewis and his assumed guilt, though she did not say that he was missing; and finally she stressed that the police were aware and satisfied that Vaun was a victim, not a suspect, as much a victim as Tina Merrill, Amanda Bloom, and Samantha Donaldson. Then she went away, and fidgeted, and talked on the telephone to Lee and to Hawkin, and slept fitfully in a hospital bed on the other side of the wall from Vaun's.
The next morning Vaun's pulse rate was 62, and she had broken another charcoal stick and a Conte crayon.
It was a dreadful day, that Thursday. Bruckner called her in twice to repeat her story to the senseless figure on the bed and then sent her away. She couldn't go home, because he wanted her close and Hawkin had turned her over to him. She couldn't leave the hospital without trailing a conglomeration of loud people with flashbulbs and microphones. Tanaka and his assistants began to stop by and stare at the door with pointed questions, which they all knew she couldn't answer. Hawkin and Trujillo disappeared to direct the hunt for Andy Lewis. She felt closed in, forgotten, pushed to one side, bloated from the cafeteria food and the lack of exercise, and altogether gloomy about the future of the case and about her future as a detective.
At ten o'clock that night Vaun's pulse rate was 63. She had not moved. There was now a thick orange crayon in her hand. Her picture rose up at the foot of her bed, arrogant, demanding, unfinished. Bruckner subsisted on coffee and looked drawn, nearly as pale as his patient. His voice was hoarse. Kate went to bed to the whisper of music through the wall, and woke to silence. It was dark outside.