Francis didn't know what to say, because he didn't want to tell Big Black the truth, which was that one was going to be quite a bit different. He looked across the room.
There were three patients still waiting. Each was easy to pick out in the remaining crowd of people. They simply weren't as well groomed. Their hair was either slicked down, or frizzy and uncontrolled. Their clothes weren't as clean. They wore striped pants and checked shirts, or sandals with mismatched socks. Nothing about them seemed to quite fit, not what they wore, or how they looked out at the proceedings. It was a little as if they were all slightly lop sided. Their hands shook and their faces twitched at the corners of their mouths those were the different medications and their side effects. All three were men, and Francis would have guessed their ages to be between thirty and forty-five. None was particularly distinctive; they weren't fat or tall or white-haired or scarred or tattooed or anything that made them stand out. They wore their emotions inwardly. Outwardly, they seemed blank, as if the drugs had worn away not only their madness, but much of their names and pasts, as well.
None had turned aside and looked at him, at least that he could tell. They had remained stoic, almost impassive, staring ahead as each case had been heard throughout the long day. He could not quite see their faces; at best they were profiles.
One man was surrounded by perhaps four visitors. Francis guessed an elderly set of parents and a sister and her husband, who squirmed in his seat, clearly unhappy to be there. Another patient sat between two women, both far older than he, and Francis supposed a mother and an aunt. The third sat beside a stiff older man in a blue suit with a stern, unrelenting look on his face, and a much younger woman, a sister or a niece, Francis thought, who seemed unafraid and listened intently to all that was being said, occasionally taking down some notes on a yellow pad of legal paper.
The overweight judge banged his gavel down. "What have we got left?" he asked briskly. "It's getting late."
The woman psychiatrist looked up. "Three cases, Your Honor," she said with a slight stutter. "They shouldn't be difficult. Two of the men are here with diagnoses of retardation and the third has emerged from a catatonic state, and shown great progress with the help of antipsychotic medication. None have any current charges pending…"
"Come on, C-Bird," Big Black whispered, a little more insistently. "We've got to get back. Ain't nothing different gonna happen in here now. These cases are going to be rubber-stamped and out-of-here quick. Time for us to leave."
Francis stole a glance toward the young woman psychiatrist, who was continuing to speak to the retired judge."… All these gentlemen have been committed and released on several prior occasions, your honor…"
"Let's go, C-Bird," Big Black said in a tone that didn't leave room for debate. Francis didn't know how to say that what was about to take place was what he had spent the day waiting for.
He stood up and Francis realized that he wasn't being given a choice. Big Black gave him a little push in the direction of the door, and Francis stepped that way. He did not turn around, although he had the impression that at least one of the three remaining men had slightly turned in his chair and aimed a glance in his direction, his eyes burning into Francis's back. He could feel a presence that was both cold and hot all at the same time, and he understood that was what the killer felt, when he held sway with knife and terror over his victim.
For a second, he thought he heard a voice shouting after him: We are the same, you and II but then he realized that there was no real noise in the hearing room, except the routine voices of the participants in the daylong exercise. What he heard was hallucination.
But it was real, and not real, all at once.
Run Francis, run! His own voices clamored.
But he did not. He simply walked forward slowly, imagining that the man they had hunted was directly behind him, but that no one, not Lucy, Peter, or the Moses brothers, Mister Evil, or Doctor Gulp-a-pill would believe him if he blurted this out. There were three remaining patients in that room. Two were what they were. One was not. And Francis thought behind that one false mask of madness he could hear the Angel laughing at him.
He understood another thing: The Angel seemed to like risks, but Francis might have slipped past the acceptable category. He would not leave Francis alive much longer.
Big Black held the door to the administration building open and the two of them stepped out into a haphazard drizzle. Francis turned his face skyward, and felt the mist flow over him, almost as if he could get the sky to clean away all his fears and doubts. The day was rapidly closing down, the gray skies fading to a washed-out black that heralded night. In the distance, Francis could make out the sound of some heavy machinery laboring hard and fast, and he turned in that direction. Big Black, as well, had pivoted about and was staring across the hospital grounds. Over by the garden, in the makeshift cemetery in the most distant corner of Western State, a bright yellow backhoe was dumping a final load or two of moist dirt onto the ground.
"Hold on, C-Bird," Big Black said abruptly. "We need to take a minute here." The huge attendant lowered his head down, and then Francis heard him whisper, "Our Father, who art in heaven…" and the rest of the brief prayer.
Francis listened quietly. When Big Black lifted his head, the attendant said, "I'm thinking that'll be just about the only words spoken over poor Cleo." He sighed. "Maybe she'll have more peace now. Lord knows, she had little enough while she was alive. That's a sad thing, C-Bird. A real sad thing. Don't make me have to speak a prayer over you. You hang in there. Things will get better, sure enough. You trust me."
Francis nodded. He did not truly believe this although he wanted to. And, when he looked up once again into the darkening skies, hearing the distant noise of Cleo's grave being filled in, he thought right at that moment that he was listening to the overture of a symphony, notes and measures and rhythms that promised that there were surely still deaths to come.
It was, Lucy considered in reflection, the simplest, least adorned plan they could come up with, and probably the only one that held out any hope for success. She would simply take the late night nursing shift that had proven to be fatal for Short Blond. After taking up her position in the nursing station alone, she would wait for the Angel to show up.
Lucy was the tethered goat. The Angel was the man-eating tiger. It was the oldest of ruses. She would leave the hospital intercom open to the second-floor station, one flight above her, where the Moses brothers would wait for her signal. In the hospital, cries for help were pretty familiar and often ignored, so it was decided that if they heard Lucy say Apollo, they would race to her side. Lucy had chosen the word with a twinge of irony. They might as well have been astronauts heading for a distant moon. The Moses brothers did not think it would take more than a few seconds for them to descend the stairwell, which would have the added advantage of blocking one of the routes of escape. All Lucy had to do was keep the Angel occupied for a few moments and not die doing it. The front entrance to Amherst was double-locked, as was the side entry. They all imagined that they could corner the killer before he was either able to slice Lucy or to fumble his way through keys and out into the hospital grounds. But even if he dill flee, by then Security would be alerted, and the Angel's options would be rapidly narrowing. And, more important, they would see his face.
Peter had been particularly insistent on this point and one other detail. It was critical, he'd argued, that the Angel's identity be learned, regardless of what happened. It would be the only way to back build the cases against him.
He had also demanded that the door to the first-floor men's dormitory be left unlocked, so that he, too, could monitor the situation even if it meant a sleepless night. He argued that he would be a little closer to Lucy, and that the Angel was least likely to expect an attack from a door customarily locked. The Moses brothers had said that was true but that they could not leave the door unlocked themselves. "Against the rules," Little Black had said. "Big doc would have our jobs if he caught wind of that…"