She whispered something in his ear.
And fell asleep.
That seemed very strange. Emily never used drugs, rarely drank more than a beer or two, and here she was passing out?
The man sat back against the wall and watched her. It was maddening — Hallie could see the top of his head and shoulders and thighs, but nothing else. After several minutes, he climbed down from the bunk and out of the picture. When he reappeared, he had on tight-fitting latex gloves. Working carefully and without haste, he unzipped Emily’s leotard and pulled it off, leaving her in bra and panties.
The son of a bitch. He’d drugged her. With that flask? He’d been drinking from it, too. Or maybe just pretending. Something else, before they got to the room?
Hallie’s breath came faster. She felt angry and afraid for Emily. Said, out loud, “You better not touch her.”
He disappeared from the frame and reappeared with two hypodermic syringes. The barrels were the same size, but the needle on one was much longer. Using the smaller syringe, the man injected something into the vein, in Emily’s right arm, from which blood was typically drawn. Hallie watched with growing horror.
“Leave her alone!” She said that aloud, too.
Oddly, he was dressed. A date rapist would have been naked by now. He stood beside the bunk, watching. Emily was still asleep, her chest rising and falling slowly. After several minutes, her eyes floated open. She didn’t move or try to speak. Hallie strained, but she still could not see the man’s face.
He climbed up onto the bed and knelt between Emily’s parted legs, holding the syringe with the long needle up for her to see. Her blink rate and respiration increased. He took a deep breath, shoulders rising and falling, leaned closer, and began using the needle. Emily’s eyes stretched wide and her whole body tensed, but she didn’t move.
He had given her some kind of short-acting paralytic. Oh God.
Hallie thought she might vomit. Shaking with rage, she had to pause the video. It was some time before she could turn it on again. Now there was no question about watching. It was a thing she had to do.
The man went back to work.
God. Please make him stop.
He did not stop. Horror washed Hallie’s mind clear of words. Her jaw was clenched so tightly it ached. Her stomach churned, and she pulled the wastebasket close.
There was no blood. Only agony. He kept at it until Emily’s body went limp.
Tears of grief and rage were running down Hallie’s cheeks, blurring her vision. She brushed them away, blinked her eyes clear.
I will find you, she vowed. If it takes the rest of my life, I will find you. Wil Bowman will help me. And you will pay.
The man climbed down off the bunk. She still could not see his face, but the bulge of an erection was unmistakable.
Emily was unconscious but still breathing. He tapped his gloved fingers against the inside of her right elbow to bring up the vein and, with the smaller syringe, pierced it in several places without injecting anything. Then he took her right hand and pressed her fingertips to the syringe, her thumb to the top of the plunger, and moved to the vein inside her left elbow. He performed a smooth venipuncture and pushed the plunger all the way in, emptying the syringe. He left it attached to her arm.
He put the spent vial on her bunk and laid several more, still full, beside her body. He moved out of frame for a few moments, and when he came back into view he had the flask. He moistened a paper towel and used it to swab Emily’s lips, neck, other places where his mouth had touched her.
DNA wipe. He wants people to think she overdosed. Why in God’s name would anybody do this?
The man disappeared from the frame one last time. Seconds passed, and the wavering light went out.
He’d snuffed the candle.
The video played for three more minutes, then stopped.
She could not remember anything more horrible than what she had just watched. She grabbed the wastebasket and vomited. She tried to look out the window, but it was solid black. She could almost touch both walls with her arms outstretched. It felt as though the room were shrinking.
Something was trying to claw out of her. She felt sick, disgusted, enraged. If the man had been there, she might have attempted to kill him with anything in the room that would tear flesh and break bone. Including her bare hands.
A sound, part sob and part howl, erupted from her throat. She buried her face in the pillow, sat on the floor, and wept until her belly hurt. Exhausted, she stood, one hand on the bunk’s edge for support, trying to think rationally. The images of the man and the things he had done to Emily stayed where they were. Might as well try to push black clouds out of the sky, she told herself.
Keening wind suddenly hit the station, which jumped and shook like a plane flying through turbulence. The ceiling light blinked several times, and somewhere in the room a fly began to buzz. A final gust, strongest of all, and the room went dark. Dizzy, she lost her balance, flailed at empty air for some firm hold, finally grabbed the bunk.
The light came back on, flickered, then died and stayed out.
She thought: What if that man is still here?
8
“Dhaka may be the only place I know where February is like July in Washington,” David Gerrin observed cheerily. He was in his late fifties. Dark-haired and with a thin, efficient body, he had been a marathoner until knee injuries had ended the running, a decade earlier. An epidemiologist, not truly famous but with a university laboratory named after him and several books to his credit.
“Could do with a bit less jollity,” said Ian Kendall. “I mean, it’s a bloody steam bath, isn’t it?”
Jean-Claude Belleveau said nothing. Out of respect for the conference, he had worn a suit. White linen, but still sweltering. He wiped his face with an already soaked handkerchief.
It was late afternoon. The three men, walking back to their hotel after the last day of a U.N. global conference on sustainability, were trapped in a mass of bodies on a sidewalk that radiated heat like a giant griddle. Leaving the Bangabandhu International Conference Center, Kendall had suggested a taxi, but Gerrin had pointed out that in the capital of Bangladesh, traffic in the streets moved even more slowly than people afoot. Day and night, masses of bodies clogged sidewalks and alleys and roads and overflowed into main highways, so that solid lanes of exhaust-spewing buses and trucks and cars measured their progress in mere yards per hour.
And it was also true, Gerrin had said, that a walk would keep their Triage focus sharp.
With only the backs of necks and heads to look at in front of him, Gerrin glanced over at a woman sitting by the curb under a sign prohibiting public defecation. The woman was not terribly old, but her mouth showed more gums than teeth and her skin was the color of ashes. She tilted over and slowly fell onto her side, her left arm flung across her body, her right arm trapped under it. Her fingers curled around a few coins in her right hand. Her head hung at an awkward angle, just touching the filthy sidewalk beside her shoulder. Flies lit on her eyes. Others crawled into her nostrils, and her tongue tried to push them out of her mouth.
Arrayed in front of her on a square of green cloth were things she was selling: yellow pencils, a blue pack of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes, cards with images of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, packs of chewing gum. She wore a torn yellow dress, and her swollen feet looked like black melons. One eye was opaque with a cataract. She was still alive, Gerrin figured, because the other blinked when flies tried to crawl into it.