“Probably.” I lowered my voice. “Plus, it’s right beside the evidence room. Melice stole the device, or at least he thinks he did.
But I’ve got the real one. Listen, he knew it’d be in there. And I think he knew the shift change was at 5:30.”
“Someone told him,” growled Ralph.
I thought of Dunn speaking with the officers who were leading Melice to the infirmary, and then of Margaret’s sudden interest in the device. “Yes. Someone did.”
While Ralph and I were talking, a number of the officers stepped past us, leaving the room to join the search for Melice, so I was finally able to approach the dead officer and study the wound on his neck. “Does anyone know what he was stabbed with?”
“Piece of metal,” someone said. “A shiv of some kind. Parkers told us that much before he passed out.” I assumed Parkers was the man with the battered face.
“All right,” hollered Dunn. “He was cuffed. Where did he get the shiv?”
I examined the dead officer’s neck more closely. A thin tip of metal protruded from the wound, but it hadn’t passed all the way through the man’s neck. Using my hand, I measured the diameter of his neck… about fifteen centimeters. Then, I compared that to the size of my hand… about ten centimeters.
“I think,” I said, “Melice might have had it with him, hidden in his hand, probably embedded at the metacarpophalangeal joint. That’s what he was picking at. He wasn’t itching, he was digging at the skin, pulling it away. We missed it. And now this man is dead.”
“Who inspected this guy?” Ralph’s fists tightened. “Who processed him?”
Detective Dunn took a flat breath. “I did. I processed Melice.”
Then he stared at the two officers, one dead, one seriously wounded.
“And I’m gonna be the one to kill him.” Then Detective Dunn thundered out of the room.
Could Dunn be Shade after all? What about Margaret? Graysmith?
More evidence, less conjecture.
Eliminate your theories, don’t try to prove them, try to disprove them one by one.
I didn’t know who to trust, but I figured as long as I had the device, Shade would come looking for me. “Ralph, meet me in five minutes at the work space I was in earlier.”
He agreed, and I went to get set up.
I’d recorded over three hours of video, but thankfully, my laptop’s media player allowed me to slide the cursor along the control module to quickly scan the footage until I came to the image of a person dressed in civilian clothes. At that point, I played the video at normal speed and saw the lights in the room blink off and then a person stepping cautiously into the darkness.
Since the person was starkly backlit and walking through the dark, I couldn’t make out a face. Unbelievable. Shade was smart.
Very smart. I had to give him that.
He took only three steps into the room, then eased backward and left, keeping his face in the shadows the whole time. Whoever it was, he was probably just verifying the presence of the device.
I checked the time on the video marker-2:58 p.m., the time we were all off by ourselves researching Melice. Anyone might have slipped in here.
Wait. Not anyone. I highlighted the footage, opened CIFER, and analyzed it.
Weight distribution, pace, posture.
Male.
That eliminates Margaret. Someone else must have signed her name onto the log.
I placed a call to the evidence room to see if Officer Kernigan could identify the person, but whoever picked up the phone told me Riley Kernigan had slipped back into unconsciousness and had been taken to the hospital.
All right then, I knew what I had to check on. It was time to decipher Project Rukh. I made a call, and then, before I could close up my computer, Ralph arrived.
“Do they need you here at the station right now?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Margaret can run the FBI teams, Graysmith’ll coordinate the police. What do you need?”
“I want to find out what this device really does. And there’s one person who I think might be able to help us.”
“Who’s that? Drake?”
“No. Dr. Rigel Osbourne.”
“Wasn’t he at some kind of conference?” “He’s back,” I said. “A telemarketer just called his house. He picked up.”
Ralph grinned. “What were you selling?”
“Luggage.”
“That’s not even funny.”
“Let’s go pay the doctor a little visit.”
89
Twenty minutes after escaping from police custody, Creighton Melice rounded the corner in the car he’d jacked off some lowlife crack dealer two blocks from police headquarters, and cruised down India Street. Shade had given him the time and place to meet after his escape, and it looked like things were right on schedule.
The escape had gone just as planned.
Inserting the six-inch shiv into his hand last night at the warehouse had been easy. He’d just positioned it against the base of his left middle finger and pressed. It went right in. Just like sliding an oven thermometer into a turkey.
Of course, digging it out meant peeling back a layer of meat from his palm during the interview. For anyone else it would have been painful, but of course he didn’t feel it. He didn’t feel anything. Then, on the way to the exam room, he used the shiv to pick the lock on his handcuffs, and when they arrived and the pockmarked cop was on the phone calling for the doctor, Creighton simply grabbed the guy’s hair with one hand and shoved the shiv all the way into his neck with the other.
It went in clean and smooth. Just like sliding a thermometer into a turkey.
Then he smashed the handcuffs into the other cop’s face. The guy howled in pain and, based on his reaction, Creighton guessed that having your eyeball flattened into paste was a painful experience.
He took note of that as he swung the cuffs at him again and again, sending him reeling into the wall. At that point, though, he realized he needed to hurry, so he’d decided not to take the time to kill the guy, but instead grabbed the keys to his ankle chains, unlocked the shackles, helped himself to a new gun, and walked casually and confidently to the evidence room.
Creighton let the car roll to a stop inside the auto body shop. A moment later he’d pulled down the garage door and locked it. He swept his hand across a nearby workbench, scattering the tools, discarded car parts, and a pile of greasy rags to the floor. Then he retrieved the black duffel bag from the backseat of the car and carefully set it in the center of the area he’d just cleared.
His fingers were trembling.
This was it. The moment he’d been waiting for.
Tonight, after they’d finished with the woman, Shade would use the device on him and he would finally feel pain. Finally realize what it’s like to suffer. What it’s really like to be a human being.
Creighton closed his eyes and let his mind wander into his elaborate fantasies of pain. The spiders were just the beginning.
He thought of blades and screams, of tender flesh so easily torn, and of splintered bones piercing meat. He dreamt of finally feeling that elusive ghost called pain.
Before Creighton could unzip the bag, he heard a swift whish of air and saw the wood of the bench explode less than an inch from his hand.
“Don’t turn around,” said the electronically altered voice from behind him. “Unzip the bag.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Creighton barked. A tense moment passed where neither of them spoke, and then finally, Creighton unzipped the bag, unwrapped the foam, then stared down at a tripod of three broken mop handles with a radio, a can of solvent, and a broken coffeemaker all duct-taped together onto the end. He felt his teeth clench. “No.” Grit. Grind. “No. No!” “Pick it up,” said the voice.
Creighton didn’t just pick it up, he grabbed the fabricated device and smashed it, smashed it, smashed it against the workbench until only a shattered array of broken pieces remained.