Then the nausea was back with a vengeance and he retched against the bite bar. Vincent quickly removed it and grabbed Tolan’s head, turning it to the side. Tolan retched again, spewing thick threads of saliva onto the table.
He was going to die.
Felt it coming.
Another jolt and he’d be gone.
He spit again, trying to evacuate the fluid from his mouth. Normally, atropine would have been administered to reduce the secretions, but there was nothing normal about this situation at all. He felt like a fugitive from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“No more,” he croaked.
“Then I take it you’re ready to confess?”
Tolan said nothing. If he denied killing Abby, it would only be more of the same.
“Don’t try my patience, Doctor.”
Tolan remained silent. Maybe Vincent knew something about him that he couldn’t or didn’t want to see. Maybe Vincent had some killer radar that let him know when he’d met one of his own kind.
Tolan couldn’t, with any certainty, say whether or not he had killed Abby. He simply couldn’t remember. But what difference did that make to Vincent? Vincent only wanted to hear one thing.
And anything was better than this. Anything.
Vincent grabbed the bite bar again and was about to reinsert it when Tolan shook his head, warning him away.
“All right,” he said. “All right. I confess. If that’s what you want to hear, I confess.”
The penlight shone directly in his eyes. “Not very convincing, Doctor. Say it.”
“I just di—”
“Say it, or I swear to God I’ll fry your fucking brain.”
Tolan closed his eyes against the light, tried to catch his breath. Then, after a long moment, he said, “I killed my wife. I killed Abby. We fought that night and, God have mercy on me, I killed her.”
Vincent leaned in close to his ear. “Thank you, Doctor.”
Then, without warning, a needle stabbed Tolan’s neck and he once again disappeared down the rabbit hole.
33
Solomon sat cuffed to a chair just inside the security cage. The chair, in turn, was bolted to the floor.
He’d been waiting here awhile now, watching the nurses and security guards go about their business, listening too, hoping he might hear something about Myra.
When the cops dropped him off, the angry one, the one who’d beat on him, had said to the guard, “Watch your pecker with this one.”
“Don’t you worry,” the guard had said. “He tries anything, he’ll be pulling back a bloody stump.”
“It isn’t his hands you gotta worry about.”
They’d both gotten a good chuckle over that, the guard saying, “Yeah, well, I’d threaten to knock his teeth out, but he probably doesn’t have any.”
They laughed again, and after that touching moment of male bonding, the cops were gone, leaving Solomon to wonder what kind of men wanted to treat people like that. He had his share of problems, sure, but he’d always tried to treat others with respect. Even the cops.
Even after one of them had killed Henry.
He could see the lobby doors from here, and on out past them to the walkway leading to the parking lot. Saw that pretty nurse go out there a couple more times, scanning the lot, looking for someone.
He’d noticed her name tag when the cops had pushed him past her. Could only remember the first name: Lisa. Saw she was a director of some kind. A woman in charge.
She didn’t seem all that in charge right now. Kinda worried-looking. And he’d sensed a storm inside her. The Rhythm off balance. Struggling.
Solomon couldn’t really tell you why, but he knew she was the one he needed to talk to. To tell about Myra.
So he sat there, quiet, waiting. Didn’t have much choice in the matter.
After a while she came back through the lobby doors and the guard buzzed her into the security cage. She looked distracted, but he tried to get her attention anyway.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
The guard was talking to her now and she hadn’t heard him.
“Ma’am? Excuse me.”
She turned, looking over at Solomon. “Yes, sir?”
“I need to talk to you.”
She smiled then, but it was a polite smile, not a happy one. “Let me guess. You found my lost soul?”
He thought for a moment she might be mocking him, but she didn’t seem the type.
“Still workin’ on it,” he said. “Can’t do much chained to this chair.”
“You shouldn’t have to wait much longer. The intake clerk will process you, then we’ll get you into the showers and find you a bunk.”
“I got somethin’ I need to tell you. Somethin’ important.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “As soon as you’re processed you’ll be assigned a doctor.”
Solomon shook his head. “No, no doctors. You. It’s about the woman the police brought in here early this morning. My friend Myra. Little bitty thing.”
This caught her off guard. She came over to him then. “You know her?”
“That’s just it,” Solomon said. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. But it’s hard to explain, sittin’ out here in the open like this.”
She looked at him for a long moment as if trying to decide what to make of him. But Solomon could see that her curiosity was piqued.
“Let the intake clerk process you,” she said. “Then I’ll come find you.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I appreciate that.”
She nodded to him, then started down the hall, stopping to talk to a nurse, pointing in his direction as she spoke, throwing another smile his way.
Watching her, Solomon knew he’d made the right choice. Despite the smile, he still sensed that storm inside her. Something bothering her. Weighing on her mind.
She glanced out toward the parking lot and Solomon wondered what she was looking for out there.
Wondered if she’d ever find it.
34
They put out an alert on Tolan, had the patrol units out looking for his black Lexus. A unit was dispatched to his home, but came up empty.
The other members of the task force had been apprised of his deception and sudden disappearance, and after an impromptu telephone conference, Rossbach made a command decision. They would now take a two-pronged approach to this investigation. The task force would continue working the previous victims and the Janovic case on the assumption that Vincent was indeed back in action, while Blackburn took a closer look at Tolan.
“I think it’s a dead end,” Rossbach said. “There’s no way we sprung a leak, I can tell you that. But Tolan’s behavior is just fucked-up enough to raise a lot of questions. So find him, sit him down, and get him talking.”
“Will do,” Blackburn said.
“Oh, and Frank? Just so you know, since you’re the bonehead who took our only witness to Dr. Dementia, you’re the goat on this. Understand? We get any blowback, you’re the goddamn goat.”
Blackburn wouldn’t expect anything less.
They considered finally transferring Jane Doe to County, but were told that County had had an unusually busy morning and didn’t have a bed to spare. At this point, nobody was expecting much out of her anyway, so they left her where she was, posting a uniformed officer right outside her room with specific instructions that, should Tolan return, he be immediately detained and not allowed inside.
Carmody agreed to stay behind to question staff and wait for Clayton Simm, still a no-show. Blackburn had gotten his number from admin and called him at home, only to wake him from a sound sleep.
“What the hell, Doc? You should’ve been here an hour ago.”