"Beats me. I think they're gone."
She worked her way up several steps.
"Do you want to risk opening the door?"
"I think so. First see if you can find a light down there. Maybe there's a way we can get out of here without going through the house."
Laura backed down the stairs and felt along the wall until she found a switch. After an hour of near total darkness, the bright overhead fluorescent lights were blinding. Bernard Nelson made his way down to her as Laura blinked and rubbed her eyes into focus.
Then the two of them stood side by side, staring incredulously at the space in which they had been hiding. The room was perhaps fifteen feet square, painted gleaming white, and equipped with a stretcher, a cardiac monitor, and other sophisticated-looking medical equipment. One wall was filled with shelves of linens, bandages, medications, and solutions.
Against the wall opposite the stretcher were a small desk and chair, and hanging just over the desk, a set of metal and leather limb restraints.
"Well, I'll be damned," Nelson muttered.
"It's like an intensive care unit."
"Not like one, child. It is one."
They walked about the room, looking over the equipment and checking in the wastebasket and desk drawer.
"I'm no doctor," Nelson said, "but this stuff looks like state.-of-the-art to me."
"I agree. Look at this medication. There must be fifty different drugs here. This place frightens me."
"I'd be worried if it didn't." Nelson held up the folders and ledger he had taken from Devine's safe.
"Maybe these will give us a clue. From what I could tell, our friendly visitors found the safe, so there's no sense going back up there.
Whether they're upstairs or outside watching the house, I don't know, but I vote we try to get these out of here. Are you game?"
"The sooner we get out of here, the better."
They turned out the lights, tiptoed back up the stairs, and then, ever so slowly, opened the door. you sure there're no messages for me? Najarian, Eric Najarian… No, yOu don't understand. I'm not registered at the hotel; Laura Enders is.
But she might have left a- Look, forget it. When she does get in, just leave her a message that Eric called, and that I'll call back later. … What's Eric Na-"
The desk clerk had hung up.
Ird eive-r back in place and wan Eric sn P the recap dered across the virtually deserted street. He was in one of the seedier areas of Aflston, ' just half a block from the Sproul Court address that'Anna Delacroix had written down for him.
For nearly two hours he had been calling Laura, both at her hotel and at his apartment. From what he could determine, she had phoned him at the hospital at least twice during the day, but had left no message other than that she had called. He was beginning to worry, but not unduly so.
It was only a quarter of ten.
He would finish his business with Anna elacroix and then go straight to the Carlisle.
A city within the city, Allston's crowded tenements and triplexes were home to many college students, as well as to ethnic pockets of Vietnamese, Thais ifispapics, Haitians, Pakistanis, and first-generation migrants from various Eastern European countries.
Sproul Court itself was a dingy, poorly lit, deadend side street, filled with wooden three-story.structures, most of which had porches off the second- and third-story flats. All of the buildings, it seemed, had a shop or store of some sort on the street level. The posters in the windows of the businesses suggested that the main clientele in the area was black.
With some time to spare, Eric wandered the length of the street, past the "grocerette" and the package store, Craissou's Tailor Shop, and the Treasure Island Used Clothing Boutique. There was little that was quaint about the decaying buildings, sooty windows, and trash-cluttered alleyways, and he found it difficult to connect the street in any way with the enigmatic, exquisitely beautiful woman he was to meet there.
Still, he felt tense and excited. If she was true to her word, Anna Delacroix would provide the proof he could use" along with the fruits of his library investigation, to convince some of the powers at the hospital-and even more importantly, to convince Reed Marshallf the validity of his tetrodotoxin theory. He would then gain some allies, and his efforts could shift from determining whether such poisoning was possible to why it had happened… and how.
Although he had not yet found a specific description of the cardiographic pattern in tetrodotoxin oxin poisoning, he had catalogued a number of accounts of the clinical presentation, all of which included the classic signs of rapidly progressive heart failure: shortness of breath; intractable coughing; cyanosis, first of the lips and fingertips, then later of the face, hands, and feet; frothy fluid building in the chest and weg into ' the throat; air hunger leading to panic, leading to even worse air hunger; and finally somnolence, loss of consciousness, and death.
"Dr. Eric, over here."
Anna Delacroix was standing in the shadow of a storefront, not far from one of the few lampposts on the street. She was wearing a wide floppy-brimmed hat, and had a bandanna of some sort tied loosely about her neck.
"Did you believe I'd come?" he asked.
"Of course I did. You have doubts, and you are desperate to have those doubts assuaged."
"Can you assuage them?"
"Not I, but there is a man inside this store who has some things to say that you will find most interesting." She gestured at the window behind her, which was filled with the trappings of a hardware or dry goods store. The uneven hand-painted letters on the glass said simply:
BENET'S. Beyond the display, a dark shade was drawn. "I had to convince him that you would never divulge his name to anyone," she went on. "You will honor that pledge?"
"Of course."
"Good. Because as you will see, any indiscretion could cost either him or me our lives." She looked at Eric gravely.
Anna led him into the alley, knocked once on a side door to the shop, and entered. Inside, seated on a stool, was a gaunt, willowy man with silvering hair and a face that spoke of illness or perhaps merely of a life of too much pain. He shook Eric's hand with no firmness.
Anna introduced him as Titus Mennilard, her mother's brother and once the proprietor of Benet's, which was now run by his family.
Titus mumbled a greeting. His speech was slow and thick, and his accent, which Eric assumed was Haitian, was so dense that Eric had to concentrate to understand the man's words.
Benet's was a cluttered melange of tools, fabric, electrical supplies, canned goods, and grain. it was illuminated by a single low-wattage bulb, suspended beneath a metal reflector.
Whether intended or not, the effect of the subdued lighting, the drawn shade, and the hushed tones was dramatic and mysterious.
"You wanted proof of your suspicions," Anna said.
"Well, my uncle here is that proof Look into his eyes as you listen to us, and you wig know that what we share with you is the truth. Once, he was the most vigorous and vibrant of men-a musician and a poet, a leader in our community. Now he is a shell. Our troubles began several years ago when word began spreading around our community of the arrival here from Haiti of a most powerful houngan-a priest with the power and knowledge of vodoun. The houngan, we were told, was to be known only as Mr. Dunn."
At the mention of the name, Titus Memmilard seemed to stiffen.
"Evil and pain," he said. "The houngan brought evil and pain."
Anna patted the man's hand.
"What he brought," she said, "was the coup poudre."
"The magical powder," Eric said.
"Exactly." Anna looked impressed with his knowledge- "Death powder, mystical powder; take your Pick. In Haiti, the coup poudre is the sword of the houngans. There are government courts and officials, but the houngans are the real judges, and a living death is their only punishment."