“From who?”
“I don’t know,” Peggy said. “Check it out,” McGarvey told Yemm. “Then what?” he asked the girl. Peggy looked down, girding herself. “She made another call. It must have been Denver General, because she asked for room five-seventeen.” Peggy looked up. “She was too fast for us.”
McGarvey’s heart was ripped in two. He resisted the urge to shove Peggy aside and race up the stairs. He needed more. Peggy touched his sleeve, her face twisted in an expression of anguish and pity. “She lost it. She started throwing things around. Breaking stuff. By the time both of us got in there, she was trying to bust out one of the Lexan windows with a chair. The big chair in the bedroom. The chaise longue. She was using it like a battering ram.” Peggy shook her head in amazement. “Janis and I had a hard enough time getting it away from her and putting it down, it was so heavy. But she was swinging it around like a toy.” She glanced at Yemm, who had stepped aside and was speaking softly over his headset. “Then she started screaming at us.
Swearing. Calling us all sorts of names.” “Like what?” McGarvey asked. Peggy was embarrassed. “Motherfucking lesbian dykes. Nonsense like that.” She passed a hand across her eyes. “It stopped as fast as it started. One minute she was wigging out, and the next minute she was sitting on the floor crying her eyes out. That’s when we called your office.” “And then you called Dr. Stenzel?” Peggy shook her head. “No. He called us and said that he was on his way.” “The phone call originated here in the Washington area,” Yemrn said. “But it was a block-trace. Possibly a cell phone.” “No way of pinning it down closer than that?” Yemm shook his head. “It could have been from anyone. And anywhere, if they used a re mailer “The Russian embassy?”
“It’s possible,” Yemm said. Peggy paid close attention to the exchange. “Is there something going on here that we should know about, Mr. Director?” “I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “Maybe. But my wife will probably be hospitalized this afternoon, so your operation will move to Bethesda. And afterward probably to Cropley.” “Yes, sir.”
McGarvey went upstairs, gave Janis a pat on the shoulder, then went back to the master bedroom overlooking the fifteenth fairway.
Kathleen stood at the window, her arms clasped across her chest as if she were cold. The room was a shambles. The night lamps were broken into pieces, the lampshades battered out of shape. The bed covers and sheets had been pulled off and tossed aside. Drawers were lying amidst piles of clothing. Her closet mirror was smashed, some of her clothes and shoes pulled out and scattered. Pictures had been snatched from the walls and destroyed. The curtains had been pulled from the windows. And the heavy chaise lounge was shoved up against the bed.
McGarvey couldn’t assimilate what he was seeing. He had stepped into an alien world, a place that bore no relationship to his wife and their home. This wasn’t Kathleen’s doing. Not this. The scratching, nagging was back. The waterfall hurling itself down a million feet to crash madly on the jagged rocks drowned out rational thought. “Katy,”
he said softly. Her back was to him. She didn’t turn around, but her shoulders stiffened a little. “That’s it,” she said in a perfectly normal voice. “They’ve finally beat us.” McGarvey went to her, and she looked up into his face. “Elizabeth won’t want to have children now.
Not after this,” she said. She shrugged. “So, they win.” McGarvey felt as if he was looking into the eyes of a total stranger. “Who are they?” “I don’t know, Kirk. But you’ll have to stop them, you know.
They’ll never give up until we’re all dead. Elizabeth, Todd, Otto, you, me.” She spoke in a conversational tone of voice; very matter-of-fact, as if she were discussing the weather or what’s for supper. The effect was chilling. It wasn’t that he was looking into the eyes of a stranger, he suddenly thought. He was seeing nothing there. No one was at home. Katy’s emotions were gone, disappeared, or whatever. Burned out. “We have to stop them for good this time,” she said. “Because I don’t think that I can stand much more.” “We will,”
McGarvey said, holding her. She was shivering. There was a little blood on the side of her neck, where she had cut herself with flying glass or something. Her hair was mussed up, and her makeup was smeared. “How did you know about the accident?” “Oh, Otto called. He didn’t want me to worry.” It was another blow. McGarvey wasn’t surprised that Otto knew, only that he had called to break the news to Kathleen. It was callous. Thoughtless, even for Otto. More than that, it was cruel.
Someone came in downstairs. McGarvey heard the front door, then the murmur of conversation in the stair hall He supposed that it was Dr.
Stenzel. The future that had seemed so bright just a few weeks ago, was now dark and empty. Perhaps even meaningless. Dr. Stenzel knocked softly on the doorframe. Kathleen stiffened in McGarvey’s arms. She straightened up and stepped back. “What are you doing here?” she asked. Her left eyebrow arched. “I’m going to give you a sedative, then take you to the hospital,” Stenzel told her as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to say. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” Stenzel surveyed the damage in the room. “Who did all of this?” Kathleen refused to look. “I received some bad news,” she said. “I know. But it’s not your fault.” “It’s someone’s fault.”
“Yes, but not yours,” Stenzel said. He motioned for McGarvey to leave.
“No,” Kathleen blurted, clutching her husband’s arm. “It’ll be just a couple of days, Katy,” McGarvey assured her. “You’re overloaded.
You’re burning out. You can’t keep going like this. You have to get some rest.” “That’s stupid,” she said. “I’m not a fucking invalid, or something.” She shot Stenzel a vicious look. “Strap me in some goddamn bed, shoot me full of shit. I can’t go through that, Kirk. Not that.” She was losing it again. McGarvey gathered her in his arms and held her tight. Stenzel opened an alcohol towelette and swabbed a spot on her bare arm above the elbow. He took a hypodermic syringe from a small case in his pocket. “Jesus Christ, don’t let them do this to me, Kirk!” she shouted. She tried to struggle away from him, but Stenzel quickly gave her the shot. “Goddammit,” she said. She continued to struggle for several seconds, but then she started to sag. She looked up into her husband’s face, her anger gone. “Fuck it,” she said.
“Just fuck it.”
MONDAY
TWENTY-FOUR
WAS IT A MONSTER COMING AFTER THEM? IN THEIR MIDST? COMING TO SCRATCH AT KATY’S SANITY? COMING TO KILL THEM ALL?
McGarvey spent a tense night with Kathleen at the hospital. Even though she was sedated, she had a troubled sleep. He went home long enough to grab a quick shower and change clothes, then got back to the hospital a few minutes after eight. Katy was still asleep. Peggy Vaccaro and Janis Westlake were on station in the hall along with a couple of men Yemm had brought over from Security. Dr. Stenzel was just coming out of her room. “How is she?” McGarvey asked. “She’s still sleeping, and I want to keep her groggy all day,” Stenzel said.
He took McGarvey down the hall to the doctors’ lounge, where he got them coffee. The hospital was busy this morning. What’s wrong with her?” McGarvey asked. “Well, she’s exhausted, for one, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Stenzel said. He was careful with his words. “She could have had a nervous breakdown. Her mind simply shut down. But I rather doubt that.” “Did they tell you what she did?”