during the trip to the hospital in Bexford. Although her breathing was regular, it was labored; and she moaned softly as she exhaled.
Behind the ambulance, at the open bay doors, Sam stood with Anson Crowell, Thorp’s night deputy. “All right. Let’s go through it one more time. What happened to her?”
“She was attacked by a rapist,” the deputy said, as Sam had programmed him to say.
“Where did it happen?”
“In her apartment.”
“Who found her?”
“I did.”
“Who called the police?”
“Her neighbors.”
“Why?”
“They heard screaming.”
“Did you catch her assailant?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“No. But we’re working on it.”
“Have any leads?”
“A couple.”
“What are they?”
“I’d prefer not to say at this time.”
“Why not?”
“I might prejudice the case.”
“By talking to other policemen?”
“We’re real careful in Black River.”
“That’s being too careful, isn’t it?”
“No offense. That’s just how we operate.”
“Do you have a description of the man?”
The deputy recited a list of physical characteristics that Sam had made up off the top of his head. The fictitious assailant did not remotely resemble the real one, Ogden Salsbury.
“What if the state police or the Bexford police offer assistance in the case?”
“I tell them thanks but no thanks,” the deputy said. “We’ll handle it ourselves. We prefer it that way. Besides, I don’t have the authority to allow them to come in on it. That would be up to the chief.”
“Good enough,” Sam said. “Get in.”
The deputy clambered into the passenger bay of the ambulance and sat on the padded bench beside Lolah Tayback’s cot.
“You’ll be stopping at the end of Main Street to pick up her boyfriend,” Sam said. He had already talked to Phil Karkov on the telephone, had primed him to play the role of the anxiety-stricken lover at the hospital — just as he had primed Lolah to play a bewildered rape victim who had been attacked in her apartment. “Phil will be staying at the hospital with her, but you’ll come back as soon as you’ve learned she’s going to be okay. ”
“I understand,” Crowell said.
Sam closed the doors. He went around to the driver’s window to reinforce the story that he had planted in the mind of the night duty volunteer fireman who was behind the wheel.
At first it seemed that there was no way to break through Salsbury’s iron resolve, no way to open him up and make him talk. He was in great pain — shaking, sweating, dizzy — but he refused to make things easier for himself. He sat in Thorp’s office chair with an air of authority that simply did not make sense under the circumstances. He leaned back and gripped his shoulder wound and kept his eyes shut. Most of the time he ignored Paul’s questions. Occasionally he responded with a string of profanities and sex words that sounded as if they had been arranged to convey the minimum of meaning.
Furthermore, Paul wasn’t a born inquisitor. He supposed that if he knew the proper way to torture Salsbury, if he knew how he could cause the man mind-shattering pain without actually destroying him — and if he had the stomach for it — he could get the truth in short order. When Salsbury’s stubbornness became particularly infuriating, Paul used the butt of his revolver to jar the man’s shoulder wound. That left Salsbury gasping. But it wasn’t enough to make him talk. And Paul was incapable of any more effective cruelties.
“Who were the men in the helicopter?”
Salsbury didn’t answer.
“Were they government people?”
Silence.
“Is this a government project?”
“Go to hell.”
If he knew what most terrified Salsbury, he could use that to crack him. Every man had one or two deeply ingrained fears — some of them quite rational and some utterly irrational — that shaped him. And with a man like this, a man so apparently in the borderlands of sanity, there should be more than the usual number of terrors to play upon. If Salsbury were afraid of heights, he could take the bastard up to the church bell tower and threaten to throw him off if he didn’t talk. If Salsbury were severely afflicted with agoraphobia, he could take him to the flattest and biggest open space in town — perhaps to the baseball field — and stake him down in the very center of it. If, like the protagonist in 1984, he were brought near to madness merely by the thought of being placed in a cage with rats—
Suddenly Paul remembered how Salsbury had reacted to him when he had first come into the room. The man had been shocked, damned scared, devastated. But not just because Paul had surprised him. He had been terrified because, for some reason known only to himself, he had thought that Paul was a man named Parker.
What did this Parker do to him? Paul wondered. What could he possibly have done to leave such a deep and indelible scar?
“Salsbury?”
Silence.
“Who were the men in the helicopter?”
“You’re a fucking bore.”
“Were they government people?”
“A regular broken record.”
“You know what I’m going to do to you, Salsbury?”
He didn’t deign to answer.
“You know what I’m going to do?” Paul asked again.
“Doesn’t matter. Nothing will work.”
“I’ll do — what Parker did.”
Salsbury didn’t respond. He didn’t open his eyes. However, he grew stiff in the chair, tense, every muscle knotted tight.
“Exactly what Parker did,” Paul said.
When Salsbury finally opened his eyes there was a monstrous horror in them, a trapped and haunted look that Paul had never seen anywhere but in the eyes of cornered, panic-stricken wild animals.
This is it, Paul thought. This is the key, the pressure point, the knife with which I’ll open him. But how should I react if he calls my bluff?
He was close to getting the truth, so close — but he hadn’t the vaguest idea what Parker had done.
“How do you… How do you know Parker?” Salsbury asked. His voice was a thin, pathetic whine.
Paul’s spirits lifted even further. If Salsbury didn’t recall that it was he who had first mentioned this Parker, then the use of the name carried a great deal of weight.
“Never mind how I know him,” Paul said shortly. “But I do. I know him well. And I know what he did to you.”
“I… was only… eleven. You wouldn’t.”
“I would. And enjoy it.”
