glanced over at him and said, “Well, don’t just stand there, Sergeant, take a chunk of this.” She passed him two inches of paperwork. As if they had been discussing the case together, she said, “Shifts changed at six o’clock, so no one here now saw him come in today. But one of the girls recognized the description. Garman uses the clinic, though she says the name doesn’t sound right. She says the plastic surgery was a lousy job-it’s always infecting along his ears. They’re not so pretty, evidently; he wears the sweatshirt hood up to hide them. And they’re real painful. If he was in today, he’s in these piles. And if he’s in these piles they have some paperwork on him. Everyone has to register here. It’s kind of like an uninsured HMO.”
A female nurse called another patient’s name into the crowded room. A male nurse answered the phone and sat down at a computer terminal.
“You didn’t call in,” Boldt said. Leafing through the doctors’ reports, he asked, “What do I look for?”
“An injection of this.” She passed him a Post-It that bore the handwritten name of an antibiotic. “That word will be in this space here,” she said, indicating a box on one of the forms. “But doctors can’t write, so it’s hard to know what you’re looking at. How can guys who spend ten years in graduate school write like they never made it through sixth grade?”
“How could you go an hour without checking in?”
She indicated the pay phone. There was someone on it, and a line waiting. “This place has been jumping. I figured, Do the job at hand. I know it’s a long shot but-”
“No, Bobbie, it’s a stroke of genius.” He didn’t often hand out that kind of compliment, and it stopped her for a moment.
“When that gal said she knew the disfigured guy with the sweatshirt-well, it kind of felt like Christmas. I wanted to unwrap the present for you. That’s all.” Suddenly she barked, “Got it!” and tugged one of the forms from the pile. She shouted to the male nurse at the computer terminal. “Jonny
Boldt announced them: “Police!”
The resulting commotion behind them sounded like a stampede. Boldt turned around in time to see four youths already out the door and sprinting down the sidewalk.
Typing the name into the terminal, the male nurse observed, “Well, that’s certainly an effective way to thin the waiting room. Thank you. I’ll have to remember that.” Looking back at his screen he said, “Babcock, Jonathan. No phone. Apartment Two-C, 1704 Washington Street South. You want me to print it for you?”
Not hearing an answer, the man turned around. The two police officers were already out the door.
60
Daphne parked a block short of the Santori house on Jackson, where she and Boldt had arrested Nicholas Hall.
She reached for her cellular phone to call for backup, an involuntary action born of the scar on her neck, but reconsidered, both for Ben’s sake and, more honestly, because she wanted to avoid making a fool of herself for the second time in the same day. Prudence dictated that she investigate further before calling it in.
Taking her weapon into her hand inside the purse, she hung the purse casually off her right shoulder. She would not go into the driveway because she had the wrong car; Martinelli had driven an Explorer. Instead, she would park where she was and walk, head down. It seemed to her entirely plausible that Garman had gleaned the address off Ben’s backpack. If so, the Scholar might be watching the house from a tree or preparing his accelerants in a makeshift lab somewhere. He might be carving a biblical reference into a tree trunk. But she would not look up into the overhead branches, would not risk giving herself away. She would go inside and hope to find Ben. After that, she wasn’t sure.
With her sweaty fingers gripping the handgun inside her purse and her heart racing painfully in her chest, she took one final deep breath and left her vehicle. She had things under control, she convinced herself. No reason to panic.
Daphne barely took notice of the light drizzle, of the damp chill in the air. Falling mist was more common than sunshine as winter approached: one day Indian summer, the next a cold drool. Up the hill was a small park. Tall trees, she thought, believing Garman would be found there. She regretted not calling Boldt, not calling for backup, but was again reminded of the fiasco of the failed surveillance.
She walked to the back of the house and climbed the stairs to the landing. A sheet of plastic covered the hole of broken glass where Nicholas Hall had forced his way inside. If she were being watched, she couldn’t stand at her own backdoor all day debating whether to enter or not. She tried the door. It was locked. She raised her hand as if using a key and punched through the plastic and let herself in. The door fell open and she stepped inside. It banged shut as she closed it.
Daphne’s finger hesitated at the light switch, wondering if it was possibly a trigger. She glanced around the worn kitchen, suddenly thinking of everything as a trigger-the furniture, the faucets, the toilets, the thermostat, the phone-as if any step she took might initiate an explosion or a fire. The place gave her the creeps. She wanted out of there.
She decided to place her faith in Bernie Lofgrin: The trigger was always in the plumbing, not the wiring. She counted to five and threw the light switch. Nothing happened.
She moved through the kitchen and into the living room, slowly and cautiously, step by precious step.
Would he have had time to set his charge? She doubted it. Watch the house for action tonight, wash the windows once Daphne left in the morning.
She switched on several lights and called out Ben’s name, moving room to room. A cold shiver passed through her. She could picture herself as Dorothy Enwright or Melissa Heifitz. Another victim.
Garman was watching the house-she could
61
Ben heard the back door of his own house slam shut and immediately lifted his head to the open window of the crude tree house. Jack Santori was still under arrest, as far as he knew, so who the hell …? The kitchen light came on and, a few seconds later, the living room light.
To avoid any chance of being seen, Ben had been crashed out in his sleeping bag on the tree house floor, basically waiting for tomorrow to come. He would return to Emily and present his plan: They should run away together. No more police. No more Jack Santori. A new beginning. He was too excited by the idea to sleep, so instead he just lay in the dark, listening to the neighborhood, biding his time. And then the back door. Ben recognized that his own curiosity was what had gotten him into all this trouble. It kind of took control of him. Possessed him. He fought the urge to find out who was in his house, reminding himself over and over again that when the sun rose the following morning he was free. All he had to do was cool his jets until then. Sit tight.
A light went on in his bedroom.
He needed a better look. He just had to know what was going on.
He slipped out of the bag but waited before leaving the tree house, because headlights from 31st and 32nd caught the tops of the trees that grew on the western edge of Frink Park, and Ben didn’t want to take any chance of his being seen. He still had control of that burning curiosity that boiled away inside him. He didn’t want to be too impetuous.
The whitewash of the headlights receded, and Ben crept out onto the main limb, determined to climb higher where he might see down into his own bedroom.
The noise of the city hummed around him, the droning whine of tires, the distant rolling thunder of jets landing and taking off, the moan of ferry horns out on the water. He started up the tree.
Some car doors shut not far away, but he couldn’t make out the direction. When a beam of white light spread
