The father studied his daughter, and obviously knew her well enough to realize this was the best he was going to get right now.
He stood. Smoothed his expensive suit. Moved his neck around as if his collar were suddenly too tight. “You’ll be hearing from my attorneys,” he told Roy.
“Who knows?” Roy said, not getting up. “Maybe they’ll do better for you this time around. But I don’t think so.”
Parsons was fuming as he headed for the door.
“Grandpa!”
Richie ran to him and took his hand. His grandfather looked down at him quizzically, as if the abstract problem of the boy had somehow inexplicably manifested itself.
“I have a new friend,” the boy said. He gestured toward the ceiling. “Would you like to meet him?”
Roy looked at Helen and Helen looked at Roy, both white as a sheet. As a ghost.
“No thank you, Richard,” Parsons said. “Your grandfather has to get back to work. That’s what responsible grown-ups do.”
The boy gave his grandfather another hug, which seemed to make the man uncomfortable, though he did again tousle the child’s hair before slipping back into the sunshine, putting on his Ray-Bans to banish it from view.
Night had fallen by the time a ’67 Chevy sedan got to the front of the line of cars at the roadblock that was swinging cars away from the stretch of pavement from which the Ryan compound could be accessed.
A broad-shouldered individual — with long dark hair combed back neatly, in a Georgia Tech sweatshirt that spoke of a powerful upper build — smiled pleasantly at the young-looking officer who peered in the driver’s side window.
“Any trouble, officer?” The voice of the man behind the wheel was soft and rather high-pitched.
“Sorry, sir,” the young cop said. He wore the uniform of the Sugar Hill PD. “You’re going to have to detour around this area.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Just routine police work.”
The driver nodded. “Will the detour take me around to the highway?”
“It will. Just turn right at the second intersection and follow the signs.”
The driver smiled, nodded again. “Thank you, officer. Good night.”
“Night, sir.”
The next vehicle, a station wagon filled with a family, pulled up as the Chevy pulled away, its driver smugly smiling, knowing the angle and the dark would prevent the uniformed cop from seeing the specially installed push-pull hand controls affixed to the steering wheel.
Chapter 8
Chief Blake Cutter pulled his Dodge Challenger up in front of an old five-story brick building in the middle of a wire-fenced-off block marked for demolition. With him was Detective Janet Hodges, on loan from the Buford PD. Janet had been working the phones, running down leads and gathering information.
The once proud building had a ragged hole in its face on the second floor. The structure to its left had several greater holes in its facade, but the work had apparently been stalled, and the two buildings to the right hadn’t been touched yet. All of them bore the ghosts of a once vibrant retail block — store windows long-ago boarded up, signs faded and splintered, neon letters gone with their painted outlines on metal backing remaining... skeletons of commerce. In a lettering painted on the bricking between the second and third floors, the building with a hole in its face said, in very faded white, LEE & SON FURNITURE.
Cutter was off his beat, but not very far off — Timber Lake, Georgia, population 17,000, just north of Peachtree Heights and perched along the Chattahoochee River. A shopping mall, stables and golf courses kept the town alive.
Earlier that day, Buford PD Detective Janet Hodges — a pretty, bouncy brunette in her forties with a boy and a girl in high school and a husband who managed a convenience store — had corralled Cutter at the Peachtree Heights PD, in the chief’s glassed-in office in back of the modest bullpen of desks and the counter where citizens could bring a beef or request or even report a crime.
With Cutter behind his desk, Janet took the chair opposite him and her bright eyes and cocky expression said she had something, really had something. She wore big-framed wire-rim glasses and a red pants suit with a yellow frilly blouse — a woman whose brains were matched only by her enthusiasm and girl-next-door attractiveness.
“Two of the three doctors our menace apparently murdered,” she said, her voice a chirpy second soprano, “were somewhat controversial.”
“How so?”
She leaned back in her chair, chin up, proud of herself and rightly so. “Samuel Carter was a pediatric surgeon who got himself in trouble a few times with the AMA — he used devices to straighten limbs, a painful and questionable procedure at best.”
Cutter sat forward. “And we have a crazed killer who is apparently burdened with physical deformities.”
Janet nodded. “We do indeed. And it’s a similar situation with Lee Meyer, also a specialist in pediatrics, who isn’t on the AMA’s Outstanding Physicians of the Year list either — he invented his own version of something called a hexapod ring fixator, intended to try to lengthen legs.”
Cutter’s eyes widened. “A pattern emerges.”
“Doesn’t it, though? Now, our dead obstetrician, Vernon Petersen, doesn’t seem to have anything particularly negative or controversial in his past. But he did deliver a child named Dennis Chandler Lee.”
“A deformed child?”
“The records don’t indicate that, but Dennis and his grandparents, Efram and Rosemary Lee, turn up in the files of both Doctors Carter and Meyer, and always the same Timber Lake home address. Carter worked with the patient starting about two years after the boy’s birth, and Meyer seems to have taken over perhaps ten years after that. Both physicians billed considerable hours ‘helping’ little Dennis Lee.”
Cutter was nodding. “So if Dennis Lee was seeing a couple of quack doctors, thanks to his loving grandparents, he may well have been put through pain and misery and...”
“A living hell,” Janet finished. “And as for the obstetrician, Petersen may not have been part of this torture team, but there is one other possibly significant fact — Lula Lee, the mother of Dennis Lee, died in childbirth.”
Neither officer said anything for several moments.
Then Cutter said, “So... our killer’s grudge appears to involve specific doctors, as we speculated. Does Dennis Lee turn up in Dr. Roy Ryan’s records?”
She shook her head. “No. But we’ll want to ask him if the name Dennis Lee means anything to him — don’t you agree?”
“Oh, I agree, all right. Let me ask you something, Janet. Did you refer to our murderer as ‘the menace’ because his name is Dennis?”
She grinned. “I’ll never tell. What now?”
“See if the Efram Lee family still has a Timber Lake address.”
She was on her feet already. “You got it, Chief.”
When finding a Lee family address in Timber Lake proved a dead end, Detective Hodges had called Chief Wynn Sturgis, who had been evasive at first but eventually told her to round up Chief Cutter and come on down to his friendly little town. The demolition-targeted block Cutter’s Challenger pulled up to was the address where Sturgis had requested they meet.
Cutter had been to Timber Lake a few times, as a citizen enjoying the boating and fishing, but not as a public servant from a nearby community, so he didn’t know much about the place and had never met the local PD’s chief. This block, off the town square, had obviously once been a retail center before devolving into an eyesore.