Mondale's eyes swam back into focus. 'Uh… yeah, of course, no problem. The press can be a royal pain in the ass.'
To Mondale, the cameras and publicity were as nourishing as the food of the gods, and he was delighted by the prospect of being the center of media attention. 'You let them to me.'
'Fine,' Dan said.
'And you report to me, nobody but me.'
'Sure.'
'Daily, up-to-the-minute reports.'
'Whatever you say.'
Mondale stared at him, disbelieving but unwilling to challenge him. Every man liked to dream. Even Ross Mondale.
'With this manpower shortage and everything,' Dan said, 'don't you have work to do?'
The captain walked off toward his own office, stopped after a few steps, glanced back, and said, 'So far we've got two moderately prominent psychologists dead, and prominent people tend to know other prominent people. So you might be moving in different circles from those you muck around in when a dope dealer gets wasted. Besides, if this does get to be a hot case with lots of press attention, you and I will probably have meetings with the chief, with members of the commission, maybe even with the mayor.'
'So?'
'So don't step on any toes.'
'Oh, don't worry, Ross, I wouldn't ever dance with any of those guys.'
Mondale shook his head. 'Christ.'
Dan watched the captain walk away. When he was alone again, he returned to his lists.
The sky was brightening from black to gray-black. Dawn hadn't crawled out of its hole yet, but it was creeping close, and it would crest the hilly horizon in ten or fifteen minutes.
The public parking lot of Valley Medical was nearly deserted, a patchwork of shadows and evenly spaced pools of jaundiced light from the sodium-vapor lamps.
Sitting behind the wheel of his Volvo, Ned Rink hated to see the night end. He was a night person, an owl rather than a lark. He was not able to function well or think clearly until midafternoon, and he didn't begin to hit his stride until after midnight. That preference was no doubt programmed into his genes, for his mother had been the same way; his personal biological clock was out of sync with those of most people.
Nevertheless, living at night was also a matter of choice: He felt more at home in the darkness. He was an ugly man, and he knew it. He felt conspicuous in broad daylight, but he believed that the night softened his ugliness and made it less noticeable. His forehead was too narrow and sloped, suggesting limited intelligence, although he was actually far from stupid. His small eyes were set too close, and his nose was a beak, and his other features were crudely formed. He was five-seven, with big shoulders and long arms and a barrel chest that was disproportionate to his height. As a child, he'd had to endure the cruel taunting of other kids who had nicknamed him Ape. Their ridicule and harassment had made him so tense that he'd developed an ulcer by the time he was thirteen years old. These days, Ned Rink didn't take that sort of crap from anyone. These days, if somebody gave him a hard time, he just killed his tormentor, blew his brains out with no hesitation and no remorse. That was a great way to deal with stress; his ulcers had healed long ago.
He picked up the black attachй case from the seat beside him. It contained a white lab coat, a white hospital towel, a stethoscope, and a silencer-equipped Walther.45 semi-automatic loaded with hollow-point cartridges that were coated with Teflon to ensure penetration of even bulletproof vests. He didn't have to open the attachй case to make sure that everything was there; he had packed it himself less than an hour ago.
He intended to walk into the hospital, go directly to the public rest rooms off the lobby, slip out of his raincoat, put on the white lab coat, fold the towel around the pistol, and head straight to Room 256, where they had taken the girl. Rink had been told to expect a police guard on duty. All right. He could handle that. He would pretend that he was a doctor, make up some excuse to get the cop out of the hallway and into the girl's room, where the nurses couldn't see, then shoot the jerk, shoot the girl. Then the coup de grвce: a bullet in the ear for each of them, just to make sure they were stone dead. The job done, Rink would leave immediately, return to the public rest room, pick up his raincoat and attachй case, and get the hell out of the hospital.
The plan was clean and uncomplicated. There was almost nothing about it that could go wrong.
Before opening the door and getting out of the Volvo, he looked carefully around the parking lot to be sure that he wasn't observed. Although the storm had passed and the rain had stopped falling half an hour ago, light fog marked the direction of a gentle breeze and eddied in lazy patterns off from the main current, shrouding some objects, distorting others. Every depression in the macadam was filled with a pool of rainwater, and the many wind-stirred puddles shimmered with yellow reflections of the light from the tall sodium-vapor lamps.
Except for the drifting fog, the night was perfectly still. Rink decided he was alone, unseen.
To the east, the gray-black sky had a pale, opalescent, pinkish-blue tint. The first faint flow of dawn's radiant face. In another hour, the quiet night routine of the hospital would begin to give way to the business and busyness of the day. It was time to go.
He was looking forward to the work ahead. He had never killed a child before. It ought to be interesting.
Alone, the girl woke. She sat straight up in bed, trying to scream. Her mouth was open wide, the muscles in her neck were taut, the blood vessels in her throat and temples throbbed with the effort that she was making, but she couldn't produce a sound.
She sat like that for half a minute, her small fists full of sweat-soaked sheets. Eyes wide. She wasn't looking at or reacting to anything in the room. The terror lay beyond those walls.
Briefly, her eyes cleared. She was no longer oblivious of the hospital room.
She realized for the first time that she was alone. Remembered who she was. She desperately desired company, someone to hold, human contact, comfort.
'Hello?' she whispered. 'S-s-somebody? Somebody? Somebody? Mommy?'
If people had been with her, perhaps her attention would have been altogether captured by them and drawn permanently away from the things that so frightened her. Alone, however, she could not shake the nightmare that had its talon in her, and her eyes glazed over again. Her gaze fixed once more on a scene elsewhere.
Finally, with a desperate, wordless whimper, she clambered over the safety railing and got out of bed. She tottered a few steps. Went down on her knees. Breathing hard, wheezing with panic, she crawled into the darker half of the room, past the untenanted bed, into the corner where friendly shadows offered consolation. She put her back to the wall and faced into the room, knees drawn up. The hospital gown bunched at her hips. She wrapped her arms around her thin legs and pulled herself into a tight ball.
She remained in the corner only a minute before she began to whimper and mewl like a frightened animal. She raised her hands and covered her face, striving to block out a hideous sight.
'Don't, please, please, please.'
Breathing rapidly and shallowly, with ever-increasing panic, she lowered her hands and squeezed them into fists. She pounded her own breast, hard, harder.
'Don't, don't, don't,' she said.
She was pounding hard enough to hurt herself, yet she couldn't feel the blows.
'The door,' she said softly. 'The door… the door…'
It wasn't the hospital-room door or the door to the adjoining bath that frightened her. She was looking at neither. She was dimly aware of the world around her, but she was focused instead on things no one else could have seen from any vantage point in that room.