Glen moved quickly around to put himself between her and the attacker. The poker rose and fell, rose and fell. With each blow the sound of impact became mushier.
Joana had a hand pressed against her mouth. She tasted blood and realized she had bitten through the skin on her knuckle. A few feet away, the big man still tried to get at her as Glen hit him over and over again with the poker. The man's head was a shapeless mass with yellow shards of skull bone sticking out and the ooze of brains splattering everything. Joana wondered at the fact that there was so little blood.
The sound of running feet.
Voices shouting.
People from the apartment were climbing over the fence and running around from the street side toward the grisly tableau. When he heard them coming, Glen stood back. His breath came in labored gasps. His face was a mask of revulsion. The thing that stood swaying before him now wore a shapeless blob for a head. It stood there, turning from side to side, as though it could still see with the ruined eyes.
The first of the arriving people reached the scene and pulled up abruptly at the sight of the man. Others ran up and stopped just as suddenly. The mutilated creature stood turning, turning, surrounded. For eerie seconds no one spoke, no one moved. Then without warning the intruder collapsed on the ground and was still.
Glen stood for a moment looking at the fallen man. Then he dropped the poker into the grass and rushed to the fence, where Joana still crouched, her fingers laced through the wire. He gently freed her hands and pulled them away from the fence. He knelt beside her and held her close against his chest.
"Are you hurt?" he asked in a whisper.
"No, he didn't get to me. You, darling?"
"A bump on the head. I'm all right."
And then the tears came.
The people who had run onto the scene moved in and edged cautiously closer to the man lying in the weeds. Others came over to join Glen and Joana.
"What happened?" somebody said.
"I saw it all from my bedroom window," somebody else answered. "That big guy there was like a maniac. He kept going after the girl. The other guy tried to stop him, but he just kept coming. He kept taking those shots to the head like they were nothing."
"Jesus, look at his head."
"There's nothing left on top."
"How did he stand up as long as he did?"
"He was a maniac. Really freaked out."
A man knelt on the grass where Glen was holding Joana. "Are you two all right?"
"Yeah," Glen managed. "We're okay." He nodded his head toward the crumpled body of the big man. "What about that one?"
"He's finished."
Glen groaned softly.
"Hey, don't worry, you couldn't help it. Enough of us saw what happened. There was nothing else you could have done."
A police siren wailed in the distance and grew steadily louder.
Chapter 15
Dr. Hovde sat on a metal stool in his examination room facing his patient, Mrs. Helen Ingalls. She perched on the edge of the table, holding her right arm gingerly out in front of her.
"It hurts from about here," she pointed to a spot on her lower triceps, "all the way through the elbow and down to my forearm."
The doctor passed his fingers lightly along the woman's arm. There was no swelling, no discoloration. He applied a little pressure.
"Ouch," she said.
Dr. Hovde nodded, satisfied.
"It hurts especially when I serve," she said, "and when I have to reach for a backhand."
"It looks like you have a classic case of tennis elbow," Hovde said. "How long have you been playing the game?"
"Twenty years, for Christ's sake."
"Have you made any changes in your game lately?"
Mrs. Ingalls gave an embarassed shrug. "Well, I have been trying to improve my serve. I mean, with the little pitty-pat delivery I've been using, I'm a sitting duck for a winner off the return. Don has been making excuses to get out of being my partner in doubles."
Dr. Hovde shook his head at the folly of a man and wife teaming up to play tennis. He said, "What kind of a change did you make in your serve?"
"The thing is, I've been watching Martina Navratilova, and she really powders the ball. I'm trying to serve more the way she does it, and I've only just started getting results."
"I'll bet," Hovde said. "And one of the results you're getting is the tennis elbow. Remember, Helen, Martina Navratilova is a professional. She is also six inches taller than you, at least forty pounds heavier, and she's left-handed. I suggest you pick somebody else to model your new serve after. In the meantime, go back to pitty-pat."
Helen Ingalls frowned. She was an attractive fortyish woman with tied-back blonde hair and crinkly blue eyes. "Don isn't going to like it."
"Let him play with Martina. If you take a couple of aspirins before you play and wear an elastic brace, it will cut down on the pain, but that's all I can do for you except to tell you to forget the cannonball serve."
Mrs. Ingalls sighed and pulled on her jacket. "I'll think it over."
Dr. Hovde left the examination room and walked back to his office in the renovated old house. He went into the washroom and scrubbed his hands at the sink. Out on his desk the telephone buzzed. He dried his hands and walked back to pick it up.
"Yes, Carol?"
"There's a Dr. Breedlove calling."
Dr. Hovde was instantly alert when he heard the pathologist's name. "I'll talk to him."
The line clicked and Hovde said, "Hello, Kermit?"
"Hi, Warren. You busy?"
"No more so than usual. What's up?"
"A customer came in downstairs last night that you might be interested in."
A knot clenched in Hovde's stomach. "Who is it?"
"Name's Edward Frankovich."
Hovde ran the name through his mental file.
Nothing clicked. "I don't know the name," he said.
"It's not him, it's the place where he died. A house up on Beachwood Drive. The girl who lives there is Joana Raitt."
"Joana? Is she all right?"
"As far as I know. Just the same, there are some peculiar things about Frankovich's death that I thought you'd be interested in."
"For instance?"
"For instance, the guy seems to have died twice."
There was a moment of silence on the wire before Hovde replied. "Are you going to be around there for a while?"
"Where else would I be?"
"I'll be down as soon as I can. I want to talk to you about this."
Dr. Hovde hung up the phone and sat for a moment pulling on his lower lip. He badly wanted a cigarette. He picked up the receiver again and buzzed the receptionist. "What do we have going for the rest of the afternoon, Carol?" he asked.
The receptionist ran down the list of patients scheduled for afternoon appointments, and their respective complaints. The more urgent cases Hovde arranged to send to a colleague who had a clinic just a block away. The others he told Carol to reschedule wherever possible for later dates.
Dr. Hovde changed from the white jacket into his old tweed and slipped out the back door, leaving Carol to deal with the patients in the waiting room.
It was most unprofessional behavior, he told himself sternly, but the circumstances were extraordinary. The message from Dr. Breedlove had triggered all sorts of unpleasant thoughts, but Hovde forced himself to draw no conclusions until he had all the facts.
It was two o'clock when he pulled into the doctors' parking lot at the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital. He jogged to the Emergency entrance, nodded to the doctors he knew on the ward there, and rode the elevator down to the sub-basement.