at least until two-thirty and probably until three o’clock.
Less than an hour at the outside.
Harry was so intently focused on the blinking red light of his watch that he lost track of what Connie said to the nurse. Either she charmed the lady or came up with an incredibly effective threat, because the security chain was removed, the door was opened, their ID wallets were returned to them with smiles, and they were welcomed into Pacific View.
When the night supervisor saw Janet and Danny, who had been out of sight on the lower front steps, she had second thoughts. When she saw the dog, she had third thoughts, even though he was wagging his tail and grinning and, quite clearly, being intentionally cute. When she saw — and smelled — Sammy, she almost became intractable again.
For policemen, as well as for house-to-house salesmen, the supreme difficulty was always getting through the door. Once inside, Harry and Connie were no easier to dislodge than the average vacuum-cleaner salesman intent on scattering all manner of sample filth on the carpet to demonstrate the superior suction of his product.
When it became clear to the Filipino nurse that resistance to them was going to disturb the home’s patients more than would cooperation, she spoke a few musical words in Tagalog, which Harry assumed was a curse on their ancestors and progeny, and led them through the facility to the room of the patient they sought.
Not surprisingly, in all of Pacific View’s accommodations, there was only one eyeless woman with lids sewn shut over empty sockets. Her name was Jennifer Drackman.
Mrs. Drackman’s handsome but “distant” son — they were told in whispered confidence while in transit — paid for three shifts of the finest private nurses, seven days a week, to care for his “mentally disoriented” mother. She was the only patient in Pacific View provided with such “suffocating” ministrations on top of the already “extravagant” care that the facility offered in its minimum package. With those and a number of other loaded words, the night supervisor made it clear, ever so politely, that she didn’t care for the son, felt the private nurses were unnecessary and an insult to the staff, and thought the patient was creepy.
The private nurse on the graveyard shift was an exotically beautiful black woman named Tanya Delaney. She was not sure of the propriety and wisdom of letting them disturb her patient at such an ungodly hour, even if some of them were police officers, and briefly she threatened to be even more of a barrier to their survival than the night supervisor had been.
The gaunt, mealy, bony woman in the bed was a ghastly sight, but Harry could not look away from her. She compelled attention because within the horror of her current condition there was a tragically faint but undeniable ghost of the beauty that had once been, a specter that haunted the ravaged face and body and, by refusing to relinquish entire possession of her, allowed a chilling comparison between what she most likely had been in her youth and what she had become.
“She’s been sleeping.” Tanya Delaney spoke in a whisper, as they all did. She stood between them and the bed, making it clear that she took nursing seriously. “She doesn’t sleep peacefully very often, so I wouldn’t like to wake her.”
Beyond the piled pillows and the patient’s face, on a nightstand that also held a cork-bottom tray with a chrome carafe of ice-water, stood a simple black-lacquered picture frame with a photograph of a good-looking young man of about twenty. An aquiline nose. Thick dark hair. His pale eyes were gray in the black-and-white photo and were surely gray in reality, the precise shade of slightly tarnished silver. It was the boy in blue jeans and a Tecate T-shirt, the boy licking his lips with a pink tongue at the sight of James Ordegard’s blood-soaked victims. Harry remembered the hateful glare in the boy’s eyes after he’d been forced back behind the yellow crime-scene tape and humiliated in front of the crowd.
“It’s him,” Harry said softly, wonderingly.
Tanya Delaney followed his gaze. “Bryan. Mrs. Drackman’s son.”
Turning to meet Connie’s eyes, Harry said, “It’s him.”
“Doesn’t look like the ratman,” Sammy said. He had moved to the corner of the room farthest from the patient, perhaps remembering that the blind supposedly compensated for their loss of sight by developing better hearing and a sharper sense of smell.
The dog mewled once, briefly, quietly.
Janet Marco pulled her sleepy boy tighter against her side and stared worriedly at the photograph. “Looks a little like Vince… the hair… the eyes. No wonder I thought Vince was coming back.”
Harry wondered who Vince was, decided it wasn’t a priority, and said to Connie, “If her son really does pay all of her bills—”
“Oh, yes, it’s the son,” said Nurse Delaney. “He takes such good care of his mother.”
“—then the business office here will have an address for him.” Connie finished.
Harry shook his head. “That night supervisor won’t let us look at the records, no way. She’ll guard them with her life until we come back with a warrant.”
Nurse Delaney said, “I really think you should go before you wake her.”
“I’m not asleep,” said the white scarecrow in the bed. Her permanently shut eyelids didn’t even twitch, lay slack, as if the muscles in them had atrophied over the years. “And I don’t want his photo here. He forces me to keep it.”
Harry said, “Mrs. Drackman—”
“Miss. They call me Mrs. but I’m not. Never was.” Her voice was thin but not frail. Brittle. Cold. “What do you want with him?”
“Miss Drackman,” Harry continued, “we’re police officers. We need to ask you some questions about your son.”
If they had the opportunity to learn more than Ticktock’s address, Harry believed they should seize it. The mother might tell them something that would reveal some vulnerability in her exceptional offspring, even if she had no idea of his true nature.
She was silent a moment, chewing on her lip. Her mouth was pinched, her lips so bloodless they were almost gray.
Harry looked at his watch.
2:08.
The wasted woman raised one arm and hooked her hand, as lean and fierce-looking as a talon, around the bed rail. “Tanya, would you leave us alone?”
When the nurse began to voice a mild objection, the patient repeated the request more sharply, as a command.
As soon as the nurse had gone, closing the door behind her, Jennifer Drackman said, “How many of you are there?”
“Five,” Connie said, failing to mention the dog.
“You aren’t all police officers, and you aren’t here just on police business,” Jennifer Drackman said with perspicacity that might have been a gift she’d been given to compensate for the long years of blindness.
Something in her tone of voice, a curious hopefulness, induced Harry to answer her truthfully. “No. We’re not all cops, and we’re not here just as cops.”
“What has he done to you?” the woman asked.
He had done so much that no one could think how to put it into words succinctly.
Interpreting the silence correctly, the woman said, “Do you know what he is?” It was an extraordinary question, and revealed that the mother was aware, at least to some degree, of the son’s difference.
“Yes,” Harry said. “We know.”
“Everyone thinks he’s such a nice boy,” the mother said, her voice tremulous. “They won’t listen. The stupid fools. They won’t listen. All these years… they won’t believe.”
“We’ll listen,” Harry said. “And we already believe.”
A look of hope flickered across the ravaged face, but hope was an expression so unfamiliar to those features that it could not be sustained. She raised her head off the pillows, a simple act that made the cords go taut with strain under the sagging skin of her neck. “Do you hate him?”
After a moment of silence, Connie said, “Yes. I hate him.”
“Yes,” Janet Marco said.
