All three of them stared down.
“What the hell is it?” Perez asked.
Jordain squinted. He put his hand down and moved the white frame in just a little closer so he could focus even more clearly.
“Holy shit,” Jordain muttered.
Butler looked up.
Sixty
The dosage of Thorazine had been easy to administer. Pills crushed in water. Water taken greedily. Zombies willing to lie down and sleep. Everything about them subdued. The walking dead. The sleeping dead. The dead. Nothing woke them. That was right. Nothing could wake the dead. But the dead would strike fear in the hearts of those who knew about them. The dead would warn the living to stay away. To be better than these men had been. To behave.
Behave.
Such an easy word. Such a luscious concept.
Easy, the photographer thought, everything had been easy. Blessed. The whole plan had been blessed. The men did not see a stranger waiting for them. You do not fear someone whom you know. They came willingly. Too willingly, in fact. They were actually accommodating.
There was nothing to worry about. The monitor was on. If anything went wrong, the photographer would hear it.
But what could go wrong with the sleeping dead?
Each man had been a study in color, shape and form. To light each of them, to capture the image, to get the angles right, to develop the film carefully had taken talent.
The result had been professional, even though the photographer was only an amateur.
Arrrrg.
A sound?
Arrrg.
A moan?
Arrrrrrrg.
What was wrong?
Work tools, dropped without thought. A splatter of red spilled on the floor. It didn’t matter. Not now.
Arrrg.
Run, faster. It was so many steps from the studio, through the hall, down the steps, through the cool bricklined room, past the thick steel door built to withstand invasions and hold a family of six for days or weeks.
Arrrrrrrrrrg.
Getting closer. Closer. Closer.
The man writhed on the stretcher. Beat against the restraints. His face was pale, sweat dripped from his forehead into his eyes. He was screaming into the gag.
It had been important to memorize the side effects of Thorazine in case of emergency. Few were serious. Only one was deadly: a heart attack. And the photographer knew what a man having a heart attack looked like. He looked like the man strapped to the gurney.
Fingers fumbled to unbuckle the restraints.
It had been hours since their last cocktails. His drugs would just be wearing off. Why would the attack come now? It didn’t matter.
“Can you get up? Let me help you up.”
Arrg.
He was moving, sitting up. In pain and slow, but thank God he was standing.
“I’m going to take you to the hospital. You’ll be fine. Hold on to my arm. Let me help you.”
Prayers? Yes, prayers said silently that the man would be able to traverse the distance from here to the car. He was walking. Doubled over in pain. Slow. But putting one foot in front of the other. Lifting his legs. Step. Up. Step. Up. Prayers said silently that the man would be okay during the ride to the hospital. Because the man couldn’t die. That would be murder.
Sixty-One
My appointment with Nicky and Daphne was a welcome interruption to my week. Since the resurrection of my argument with Nina the day before, I was uncomfortable at the institute. We’d had two-no, three-fights in as many weeks, and each pushed us further apart. I found myself staying in my office. Avoiding walking in the halls. I knew sooner or later we were going to have to figure out how to work out our differences and that my avoidance of her was cowardly and childish, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to confront her. To do that, I would have to confront how I felt about Noah Jordain. And I wasn’t prepared to do that. Not yet.
At least in the car, I’d have forty-five minutes to clear my head on the way up to Connecticut.
I took the North Street exit off Merritt Parkway, drove for ten minutes, took one turn, then another, drove five minutes, and finally pulled up in front of Daphne’s house. I was fifteen minutes early, but I didn’t care.
I parked in the driveway.
There were orchards to the right of the house and I didn’t think that anyone would mind if I took a walk.
Everywhere I looked, a tapestry of leaves obliterated the grass and changed the distant landscape into a fauvist painting.
As we get close to death, we lose our color, we lose our beauty. I had seen my mother, sickly and thin, her hair stringy, her once peach-colored skin gray and ashen when she had become unconscious.
As leaves die, they alone become more beautiful. As they perish, they offer up a palette of screaming colors.
The wind blew and hundreds of lemon-yellow aspen leaves took wing, dipping and soaring on the breeze, flying around me, as colorful and as graceful as butterflies.
It had been slightly overcast when I got out of the car, but the cloud cover had blown away and the sun shone now and illuminated the landscape around me and the house beyond.
I walked toward it, getting closer and closer until, with the sun shining like that, I could see right into Daphne’s studio. There were several large canvases on display. About three feet away, I stopped. No, that’s not accurate. About three feet away, the painting I saw through the glass stopped me.
The portrait on the easel was of a man. Naked. Sitting in a chair. His head lolled to one side. His expression was slack and lifeless. His flesh fell in folds.
The painting was darker around the edges and lightened as it came closer to the center, so that there was a brightness on the man’s midsection. At the very center of that spotlight, displayed the way a diamond is exhibited in one of Tiffany’s windows, was the prize-the most detailed and lovingly painted part of the canvas: the man’s flaccid and very small penis.
Something was familiar about the composition. What? Where had I seen it before? I looked at the next easel. Another portrait of a naked man. He was standing, leaning really, against a wall. His shoulders slumped. He looked out, imploring, begging for help.
Daphne was more than accomplished. She was masterful. She captured emotions and intentions as well as any artist whose work hung in a gallery.
Like the other painting, this one employed a halo effect so that, after being assaulted by the man’s expression, I was drawn to the dead center of his body. His penis was wrinkled, red, shrunken. Impotent.
Overall, Daphne’s style was luminous and detailed, but nowhere on the canvases did she lavish more detail and time and create as much grotesque beauty as with the genitalia.
That was when I saw the third painting.
The nausea rose quickly. I didn’t expect it, so I didn’t have time to prepare myself for the violent way the image struck me. I put my hand out, reaching for a tree branch, and held on while I vomited on the newly fallen leaves.
And then I ran toward the house.
Sixty-Two
Ronny White watched the silver Mercedes SUV pull into the parking lot of the emergency wing of the Greenwich Hospital and noted the license plate.
The hospital was well staffed, well appointed, and catered to the inhabitants of the town’s population of 60,000, who were among the most wealthy in the United States. He liked his job. The hospital never got crazy busy like a big-city hospital. Great doctors worked there, imported from large cities to cater to the needs of the well heeled. Most of all, Ronny liked the visitors and patients who tipped him lavishly for watching their six-figure cars.
The driver who had just turned in to the lot was handling the car erratically, a sure signal to Ronny of an emergency. He called the front desk and told Lucie to send out some staff. “There’s a problem coming in.”