After work, she was waiting for him outside in the van as usual. And as usual, she looked so beautiful with her white-blonde hair all soft and shiny and her blue eyes smiling at him that his knees went watery and he felt the familiar pleasant ache in his groin.
He climbed into the van beside her. She kissed him. Her lips were soft and moist. Eddie began to relax.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Slow. They’ve put a temporary hold on all testing, so there isn’t much for me to do.”
“That must mean they’re worried,” Roanne said.
“Maybe. And so am I.”
Roanne’s eyes blazed. “We’ve been all over this. Those bastards are getting what they deserve.”
Eddie’s mouth fell open. He stared at her with the hurt eyes of a little boy whose mother has struck him for the first time.
“Ah, baby, I’m sorry, but you mustn’t bother yourself about these things. What we did was right. It’s going to save lives in the end. You’ll see.”
“I hope so.”
“Trust me, baby. Trust Roanne.”
“One thing — most of the people who were out sick yesterday came back.”
“There, you see? You were worried for nothing.”
“I’ve still got to wonder what made them sick. The infirmary’s full; I know that much. They’ve closed it off and put guards outside.”
“That’s typical Establishment thinking,” Roanne said, turning down the corners of her lovely mouth. “They ignore a situation until it’s too late to make any difference; then they overreact.”
Eddie scratched at the soft flesh on the inside of his elbow. Roanne reached out and lightly touched the reddened patch of skin.
“What’s this?”
“It’s nothing. I got a scratch from a thorn when I was pruning the roses last week. It must have gotten a little infected.”
Roanne started the van’s engine and pulled out of the parking lot. “I’ll put something on it for you when we get home. Then we can take a shower together. Would you like that?”
Eddie looked over at her. She moved her hand to his thigh and squeezed gently.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that a lot.”
Chapter 17
Corey Macklin and Doc Ingersoll sat with their heads close together at Corey’s desk in the Milwaukee Herald office. Corey was trying to pay attention to what Doc was saying while watching the ash on the older man’s Camel grow longer and droop precariously over his chin.
“It’s all set up for you and me and a photographer at St. Bartholomew’s, one o’clock,” Doc said.
“Why a private hospital?” Corey asked. “Why not the county morgue?”
“Because they’ve already cut up a couple of these people at the morgue and they’re getting nervous about it, for reasons that we will see. Or so Dexter Horn tells me. What’s the matter?”
“Would you for Christ’ sake flick the ash off that cigarette?”
As Doc removed the Camel from his mouth and examined it, the three-quarter-inch ash let go and filtered down to the papers on Corey’s desk.
“Oops.”
Corey rolled his eyes as Doc blew ineffectually at the gray flecks. “Never mind. Shall we get some lunch before we go?”
“We’d better. From what Dexter tells me, we might not feel much like eating afterwards.”
“I’ll go rustle up Jimbo.”
Corey found the bearded young photographer in the lounge sitting on one cracked plastic chair with his feet up on another. His eyes were half-closed, his hands jammed into his pockets.
“Ready to go, Jimbo?”
“I’m ready, but I’m not going.”
“What do you mean?”
“The man’s got another assignment for me. Hot story.”
“What’s that?”
“They’re handing out citizenship awards at the city-council luncheon.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Would I kid about this? You think I want to be shooting up good film on one suit handing a worthless plaque to another suit when I could be getting shots of a cut-up corpse? To me this is not a kidding matter.”
Corey believed him. Next to big chests on women, Jimbo Tattinger liked best to take pictures of gore. Nobody loved a head-on collision more than Jimbo.
“Did Uhlander personally tell you this?”
“Personally and in the bulging flesh.”
Corey’s first impulse was to rush into the city editor’s office and ask what the hell he thought he was doing, but he thought better of it on the way there. Nathan Eichorn had warned him there would be obstacles if he persisted in the story. Knowing the owner’s reputation, he guessed the reassignment of Jimbo would be only the beginning. No point in escalating the battle. He settled for throwing a scowl at Uhlander’s closed door as he passed on his way back to the city room.
“There won’t be a photographer,” he told Doc Ingersoll.
“No?”
“It seems Uhlander wants to use Jimbo on the citizenship awards at the city council.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Sure it is.”
Doc stared at him for a moment, then nodded. “I see.”
Corey said, “You and I had better get out of here before one of us gets tagged to go along with him and write the captions.”
They stopped for lunch at Heinkel’s Bratwurst Gardens, then drove in Corey’s car out to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in Wauwatosa.
The pathology lab in the basement of St. Bartholomew’s was small but well equipped. It smelled sharply of disinfectant. There was only one dissection table, a stainless-steel contraption with a drain at one end for escaping body fluids. At the other end was a sink and a hanging scales.
On the table lay the nude, drained body of a white female. The gray flesh across her stomach sagged in loose folds. Her lower belly bore the navel-to-pubis scar of an old hysterectomy. High on the inside of her right thigh was an open slash four inches long. The severed end of a rubbery artery protruded from between the lips of the wound.
The hair on the woman’s head and her pubis was curly black with wiry gray strands running through it. She had a mole with a hair growing from it on one earlobe. But it was her face that commanded attention. The flesh was covered with raw, puffy lesions like boils that had burst. The woman’s dead eyes were mercifully closed.
Dexter Horn stood by silently while the reporters looked over the body. The little pathologist clutched a linen handkerchief in one hand. He used it nervously to blot his scalp where the few strands of black hair looked drawn on.
Doc Ingersoll introduced the pathologist to Corey.
“I’ve been reading your stories in the Herald,” Horn said.
“I’m glad somebody has.”
“I think a lot more people will be reading you pretty soon. You’ve maybe got a bigger story than you know.”
Corey looked down at the dead woman. “What’s the background on this one?”
Horn consulted a clipboard. “Helena Gotch, Caucasian female, age fifty-four, married. Lived in West Allis. Friday night, while cooking dinner, she came screaming out of the kitchen with a cleaver and went after her brother. He’d been staying there since her husband went crazy and scalded himself to death in their shower a week before.”
“Jesus,” Corey said softly.
“It doesn’t get any prettier. She lopped off part of the brother’s ear before he ran out of the house and jumped over a fence. She took off up the street screaming. Couple of motorists thought she was in trouble and tried to help. She left one of them with a broken jaw, the other with internal injuries. Finally died when she tried to run through a plate-glass window and sliced open her femoral artery.”
“That’s the wound on her leg?”