"Go," Ann said, reassuring him in the least amount of words that she was okay.
"Keep up." Losing sight of Morty was his first mistake—an error that could prove fatal. He didn't want to put Ann at risk, too.
As she hustled along behind him, Luther heard her talking into her radio. In the center of the dense woods, the cells couldn't get reception.
Crashing through the underbrush, shoving aside spindly tree limbs, he moved as fast as he dared. It no longer mattered if Mort knew he'd been followed. It no longer mattered if Gaby might be guilty.
Guilty or innocent, he wanted her alive.
In the distance, he heard the sirens of approaching cars. Almost at the same time, an awful stench, one he'd smelled before, choked him.
It was the smell of blood—and rotted flesh.
Something awful had happened here.
And somehow, Gaby was involved.
Expecting a monster of hideous proportions, Gaby instead witnessed the fearful limping of a wounded human, slumped against the wall, barely staying upright. Not a large, powerful man, but a woman.
A small woman.
Confusion kept Gaby immobile.
It didn't work like this. God showed her the heart of the demon, not the mortal body. The only time she'd ever seen beyond the haze of duty was… with Luther near her.
Oh God, oh God... Gaby looked behind her, but saw no one. If Luther did lurk nearby, she still had time.
Thank you, God.
Not yet daring to look into that room of torture, Gaby said to her victim, "You can't escape."
The woman turned her face, and all thought gelled.
Dr. Chiles.
The soft-spoken doctor. The defender of the indigent patients. The trusted one.
It suddenly made sense: The duplicity. The conniving. The ability to get close to Rose.
Only a slender woman would fit through the basement window of Morty's apartment building.
Dr. Chiles was both skilled enough to do deranged, sick, perverse experimentation on ailing cancer victims and inconspicuous enough with her gentle appearance to escape a brutal crime scene without drawing suspicion.
Furious with herself. Gaby cursed low. More than anyone else, she knew the unpredictability of evil. It didn't follow a pattern, didn't fit a profile.
She'd been sloppy. Unforgivable.
Ungluing her feet, Gaby tightened her hand on her knife and stepped away from the wall. "You deserve everything you get today."
"Freak!" the doctor railed at her, her voice barely audible above the commotion from the adjoining room. She pressed a hand hard to her side. "Look at what you've done, at all you've ruined! How will I continue my work? How will I find the cure?"
Her work. Teeth locked, Gaby glanced into the yawning space ahead. What she saw repulsed her.
Frankenstein's laboratory would look like a posh hotel in comparison to the makeshift lab the doctor had erected. Kerosene lanterns illuminated filthy glass jars overflowing with rotted flesh stacked on shelves, boxes, and crates.
Pilfered equipment, including instruments that could cut, saw, and clip, littered a section of sheet-covered floor.
Crawling with cockroaches, discarded food containers, blood-soaked rags, and soiled clothing cluttered each corner.
A half-dozen crude beds, made from cots, gurneys, and splintered boards, showed signs of unbelievable cruelty. Gaby made note of the thick straps, the raw rope and wires meant to restrain the bodies, and her skin crawled.
Only two of the beds were empty.
"You sick bitch."
Blood pulsed and gurgled from below the doctor's left breast, drenching the clichéd white coat, the pale blue scrubs, in sticky crimson. "How dare you insult me? Some day soon my work will produce a cure, and then the world will hail me."
Gaby shook her head. "You will never work again." Numb from her heart to her brain, she trailed after the doctor, metering her pace the same, stalking her. It wasn't easy, not with her perception of the desolated people around her, but she kept her focus on the doctor. "Tonight you die."
Doctor Chiles stumbled forward into the room and dragged herself between two rickety beds occupied by patients of indiscriminate age, in various stages of cancerous decay. At the intrusion, the wretched souls roused enough to lament their fates.
Their movements emphasized the doctor's debauched experiments. Exposed, bloody tumors riddled with pulsing veins, rough scabs, and blackened lesions, adhered loosely to sagging, puckered flesh. Faces, bodies, limbs—the cancer grew over all parts of the bodies.
Clutching her side in awful pain, Dr. Chiles demanded, "Look at them." As she spoke, she continued to inch away, keeping a distance between herself and Gaby. "They're the scourge of our earth, a waste of humanity. For years, they defiled their lives and the lives of those around them."
"I know." Gaby saw it all, the contaminated pasts and iniquitous souls. "Right here, right now, it doesn't matter."
"They're all alone," Dr. Chiles insisted. "No one cares what happens to them."
"I care."
Pain turned the doctor's lips white. "Damn you, I've given them purpose. Through me, their lives will have meaning."
Beside Gaby, a man with sunken eyes mostly hidden by great globules of cultivated growths gave a pitiful moan.
Gray, paper-thin skin lay over protruding bones. Without words, he pleaded.
He wouldn't live much longer, but every second brought him immeasurable agony.
At Gaby's other side, a hairless woman jerked and flailed in futile rage. With each movement, a monstrous sac on her midsection recoiled with a life of its own.
Turning a slow circle. Gaby saw more of the same—until her gaze landed on the pile in the corner.
Decomposing bodies, overrun with maggots.
Failed experiments.
Patients whose usefulness had run out.
Knowing she'd allowed this to happen, angry tears burned Gaby's eyes. She wanted to kill the doctor now, this instant.
But as she breathed in the stench of decay and desperation, absorbed the misery in the frantic auras, their anguish became her own. The insurmountable burden bowed her shoulders and wrenched her heart.
She needed to kill them. All of them.
But for the first time, God made sure she saw things clearly… even through her blurring tears. They were all evil, and all human—capable of great suffering.
Gaby sensed the doctor moving toward her, along with other bodies. She recognized the danger, felt the encompassing evil.
Ready to fulfill her duty, she poised herself—and a gunshot rang out. The misfired bullet hit the wall, sending out a spray of splintered wood and plaster dust.
Shaken from her discipline, Gaby spun around and there stood Morty, shoulders back, chin up, arms straight out with the gun gripped tightly.
He took aim again and Gaby glanced behind her to see the doctor advancing, her lip curled in rage, her eyes hot with hatred. In her blood-soaked hand, she hefted a long surgical blade as lethal as Gaby's own knife.
The room echoed with the blast of another resounding shot. The doctor's body jerked at the bullet's impact, then crumpled to the ground, felled by a gunshot wound to the side of the face. No longer recognizable, Dr. Chiles now resembled the monster Gaby had anticipated.
Morty crept up beside her. "Oh God, Gaby. She's dead, isn't she?"
"Looks like." In the gray ugliness of the room, a blue glow floated around Mort. On the outermost reaches of the aura, the blue was quiet and calm, but closest to Morty, nearest to his heart, it shone rich and deep, indicative of a man who'd found his work in life.
Gaby couldn't quite credit Mort's transformation.