'Well, let's find out,' he said. 'Let's see if we can catch the doc before he goes home for dinner. God, his line of work's got to be hell on a man's appetite. Police work's bad enough. Though I seem to manage, don't I?' He clapped a hand to his gut and flashed a rueful grin. 'Let's go,' he said. 'Maybe we'll get lucky.'
The pathologist had left for the day. 'He'll be in eight o'clock tomorrow morning,' Havlicek said. 'You did say you were staying over, didn't you, Matt?'
We were Matt and Tom now. I said I was booked on a late-afternoon flight the following day.
'The Great Western's the best place to stay,' he said. 'It's east of town onLincoln Way . If you like Italian food you can't go wrong at Padula's, that's right atFirst Street , or there's a restaurant at the motel that's not bad. Or here's a better idea, let me call my wife and see if she can't set an extra place at the table.'
'That's decent of you,' I said, 'but I think I'm going to beg off. I had about two hours' sleep last night and I'm afraid I might fall asleep at the table. Suppose you let me take you to lunch tomorrow?'
'We'll have to argue about who takes who, but it's a date. You want to meet me first thing in the morning and we'll go see the doc? Is eight o'clock too early for you?'
'Eight o'clock is fine,' I said.
I got my car from the lot where I'd left it and found my way to the motel he'd recommended. I got a room on the second floor and took a shower, then watched the news on CNN. They had cable reception and pulled in thirty channels. After the newscast I worked the dial and found a prizefight on some cable channel I'd never heard of. A pair of Hispanic welterweights were spending most of their time in clinches. I watched until I realized that I wasn't paying any attention to what I was seeing. I went to the restaurant and had a veal chop and a baked potato and coffee and went back to the room.
I called Elaine. Her machine answered, and when I identified myself she picked up and turned the machine off. She was doing fine, she said, sitting behind her barricades and waiting. So far there'd been no untoward phone calls and nothing unlikely in the day's mail. I told her what I'd done, and that I'd be seeing the pathologist in the morning, that I'd ask him to look for semen traces.
'Make sure he checks in back,' she said.
We talked a little more. She sounded all right. I told her I'd call when I got back to the city, and then I rang off and worked my way around the TV dial without finding anything that grabbed me.
I got my book from my briefcase. It was The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Jim Faber, my AA sponsor, had recommended it to me, quoting a couple of lines that had sounded interesting, and one day I'd stopped at the Strand and picked up a used copy of the Modern Library edition for a couple of dollars. I'd been finding it slow going. I liked some of the things he said, but a lot of the time I would have trouble tracking his argument, and when I did hit a sentence that resonated for me I would have to put the book aside and think about it for a half hour or so.
This time I read a page or two, and then I hit this passage: Whatever happens at all happens as it should; thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch narrowly.
I closed the book and put it on the table next to me. I tried to imagine the events at the Sturdevant home a week ago. I wasn't sure what order he did them in, but for the sake of argument I decided he'd taken Sturdevant out first because he'd have presented the greatest danger.
Still, the report of the shotgun would have awakened everybody else. So maybe he'd have gone to the kids' rooms first, working his way down the hallway, moving from one room to the next, stabbing the two boys and the girl in turn.
Then Connie? No, he'd have saved her for last. He'd wash up in the bathroom off the master bedroom.
Let's say he immobilized her, got her husband into the living room at gun- or knife-point, killed him with the shotgun, then went back and did Connie. And raped her while he was at it? Well, I'd found out tomorrow, if you could still detect the presence of semen a week after the fact.
Then a phone call, and then a quick trip through the house to get rid of fingerprints. And, finally, a quick and silent exit through a window, and he was on his way. Five people dead, three of them small children.
A whole family gone because twelve years ago a woman had sworn out a statement against a man who'd forced himself on her.
I thought about Connie. Prostitution isn't necessarily a bad life, not at the level she and Elaine had practiced it, withEast Side apartments and an executive clientele. But she had taken her shot at a much better life, and she'd been living it in the house in Walnut Hills.
Then it ended. And Jesus, the way that it ended…
Whatever happens at all happens as it should. Maybe it would be nice to reach the point where I found that true, but I wasn't there yet.
Perhaps I just wasn't watching narrowly enough.
I got my wake-up call in the morning and checked out after breakfast. At eight sharp I gave my name to the desk officer. He had been told to expect me, and sent me back to Havlicek's office.
He was wearing a gray suit this morning, and another striped tie, this one red and navy. He came out from behind his desk to shake hands and asked me if I'd had coffee. I said I had.
'Then we might as well go see Doc Wohlmuth,' he said.
I suppose there are older buildings inMassillon , but in my short time there everything I saw looked to have been built within the past ten years. The hospital was new, its walls bright with fresh pastel shades, its floors antiseptically clean. The pathology department was in the basement. We rode down in a silent elevator and walked the length of a hallway. Havlicek knew the route and I tagged along.
I don't know why, but I expected Doc Wohlmuth to be a cantankerous old bastard a few years past retirement age. He turned out to be around thirty-five, with a mop of streaky blond hair and a receding chin and an open boyish face off a Norman Rockwell cover. He shook hands when Havlicek introduced me, then stood there gamely through a round of the badinage cops and pathologists visit upon one another.
When Havlicek asked him if he'd found traces of semen or any other evidence of recent sexual activity upon the corpse of Cornelia Sturdevant, he didn't mind showing that the question came as a surprise.
