“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“Not even my date, Mr. McCall. I took her home and came right here.”
“Then you haven’t notified the police?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
It seemed to McCall that Dean Gunther looked annoyed through his worry, as if McCall had asked an irrelevant question.
“Why not?” Graham Starret repeated, and he smiled. “You want a straight answer, Mr. McCall?”
“Always.”
“Okay. I don’t have any use for policemen.”
“That puts me in my place,” McCall said with an answering smile. “Well, you’d better show me where the place is, Mr. Starret. Do you want to come with us, Floyd?”
“Well, perhaps not,” the Dean said. He was very pale. “I can’t stand unpleasantness, Mike. I mean this sort of thing — and I shouldn’t leave Rose alone—”
“Let’s go, Starret. By the way,” McCall said, “was she dead?”
Graham Starret looked startled. “I really don’t know. I just assumed she was. I didn’t touch her.”
McCall sprang for the door.
7
McCall knelt on the riverbank.
“Turn on the flash.”
“I’m afraid it’s not much,” Graham Starret said. “Batteries are low.” He flicked the light on. A pale yellow beam, more shadows than light, struggled on the black water.
McCall took the flash from the student and played it on the girl’s face. She was lying half out of the water. The eyes were closed. The hair looked like seaweed. Her mouth hung open. Bruises and darkened swellings distorted her face.
He put his ear to her heart, felt for the carotid artery with his right hand.
“Is she dead?” Starret whispered.
“No, she’s alive. Barely, I’d say. Give me a hand.”
Between them they dragged the girl up on the bank. Her dress, which had once been white, was soaked with mud to her hips. She wore a thin black cardigan over the dress, which was ripped across her breasts.
“She’s taken a bad beating.” McCall stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around her. “Starret, go find a phone and call the police. Ask for Lieutenant Long. And have them rush an ambulance.”
The student had come in his own car; McCall had followed in his rented Ford. Graham Starret left on the run. McCall watched him peel off, headlights slicing through trees and shrubbery, and vanish down the dirt road.
He returned his attention to the girl. There was nothing he could do for her now but wait for the ambulance.
McCall touched her hand. It was icy and damp. No wonder: lying in river water all this time. Mercifully she had lost consciousness.
What had happened?
Someone had beaten her savagely. One eye was frightfully swollen. Her mouth was puffed grotesquely over her teeth. Her cheeks were lumpy and contused, her arms striped with cuts and bruises. He gently inspected her head. Blood clots had formed on the scalp. She had been repeatedly struck over the head. It was a wonder she was still breathing.
He reached for a cigarette, remembered, and flashed Graham Starret’s failing light across the river. It was narrow here; the water ran as if it were deep. The stream made small secretive sounds between its banks.
Spring.
Would Laura Thornton ever see another?
In the moon-deserted night, with black water rushing by as if to a conspiratorial rendezvous and a battered human being at his feet awaiting dissolution, McCall could not repress a shiver. Death he had seen in plenty in his youth; it was not death that bothered him. It was the dying. When it was all over, what was left? You threw it out like so much garbage. But to stand by and witness the struggle, the failing, the going out... like the batteries in young Starret’s flashlight... this he had never been able to bear. He had had one interminable night in Korea holding the hand of a Marine buddy who was dying of a stomach wound inflicted by a mortar round, and he could still feel the loosening clutch and hear the fading moans in his dreams. The company was pinned down in the barrage, the medic had been killed, and there was nothing to do for the Marine but watch him die.
McCall looked up at the star-salted sky, felt the chill spring breeze on his cheek, and shivered again.
Faced with the body of the girl, he felt an urgency. He wished he had been able to talk with Damon Wilde. Now it would have to wait. And there was Perry Eastman, in Dean Gunther’s office: cocky, contemptuous. And Dennis Sullivan, the other student mentioned in connection with Laura Thornton. McCall ached to get at them. There was something to go on now.
He would have to contact Governor Holland, too, hand the governor the dirty job of reporting this to Laura’s father...
Two police cars, preceded by Graham Starret’s yellow Mustang, shot in under the trees. A patrolman got out and stood by his car, looking back. And there were Lieutenant Long, the sneerer, and Sergeant Oliver. They hurried toward him. Another officer focused a spotlight on the girl’s body at his feet.
Long covered ground in a peculiar long-striding, knee-bending way. McCall almost laughed; the lieutenant’s stride made him think of Groucho Marx. When he came up to McCall he threw his head back and stared accusingly.
“Who found her?” he demanded.
“Starret did. Didn’t he tell you? Didn’t you bring a doctor? And where’s the ambulance?” With a character like Long you threw five questions to every one of his.
“Sure I told him,” young Starret said. “Is she still alive?”
Long stooped over the girl, sneering. Sergeant Oliver said, “She’s still breathing. This is a break, a real break.”
“Doc!” Lieutenant Long called.
An old skin-and-bones got out of one of the police cars and trudged toward them. He was carrying a medical bag. He paid no attention to McCall or the police officers.
“This is our M.E.,” Oliver said, “Doc Littleton. Mr. McCall.”
Dr. Littleton grunted. “Don’t involve me in your lousy politics. Stand back, will you?” He squatted beside the girl’s body.
“Where’s that ambulance?” McCall said.
The medical examiner flicked an eyelid, dug sharp fingers into the girl’s neck, nodded, snapped his bag open, snatched a stethoscope, placed it under her left breast. His bony fingers went here and there.
“How is she, doc?” Oliver asked.
“Call that ambulance again and tell them to make time. This girl’s barely vital.” He began to massage her wrists. Then he plunged into his bag, came up with a disposable hypodermic and a vial. He filled the syringe, squirted some liquid into the air, and stroked the needle into the girl’s arm. “No telling,” he said abruptly. “Miracles have been known to happen, though not by me.”
“Will she live?” Long asked.
“You tell me, lieutenant. You’re the wonder boy of the ’Squanto police department.”
“What’s eating you?” Long asked angrily.
“First get that goddam ambulance here,” Dr. Littleton growled. “I’ll be glad to fill you in on my personal feelings afterwards.”
Long loped away, glaring. McCall said to Littleton, “No prognosis yet, doctor?”
“Not without a thorough examination. At that she must have the constitution of a racehorse.” The M.E.’s eyes in the spotlight glittered like ice at Sergeant Oliver. “And you wonder boys still haven’t come up with any lead to this thing?”
“No,” the sergeant said stiffly. “How about you, Mr. McCall?”
McCall resisted the temptation to point out that he had been on the case less than nine hours. He said, “Nothing, sergeant,” and turned to Littleton. “Has she been lying out here since Friday, doctor? That seems a hell of a long time.”