Prodigal Son (24 page)

CHAPTER 72

STANDING WITH HER BACK
to the shared wall between the living room and the kitchen, Carson fished shotgun shells out of a jacket pocket.

She had the shakes. She handled the fat shells one at a time, afraid of fumbling them. If she dropped one, if it rolled under a piece of furniture…

Outside at the open trunk of the car, when she had loaded the 12-gauge, she almost hadn’t pocketed any spare rounds. This was a finishing weapon, useful for bringing a quick end to a dangerous situation; it wasn’t a piece you used for extended firefights.

Only twice before had she needed a shotgun. On each occasion a single shot—in one instance, just a warning; in the other incident, intended to wound—had put an end to the confrontation.

Apparently Harker would be as hard to bring down as Deucalion had predicted.

She only had three spare shells. She inserted them in the tube-style magazine and hoped she had enough to do the job.

Skull bone as dense as armor plating. She might blind him with a face shot, but would that matter, could he function anyway?

Two hearts. Aim for the chest. Two rapid-fire rounds, maybe three, point-blank if possible. Take out both hearts.

Across the room, Michael was staying low, using furniture for cover, moving deeper into the living room, angling for a line of sight into the kitchen, where Harker had taken cover.

Harker was only part of their problem, Jenna the other part. The blood in the hallway suggested she was in the apartment. Hurt. Maybe mortally wounded.

Small apartment. Probably three rooms, one bath. He had come out of the bedroom. Jenna might be in there.

Or she might be in the kitchen, where he had gone. He might be slitting her throat now.

Back against the wall, holding the shotgun cross-body, Carson eased toward the archway between this room and the kitchen, aware that he might be waiting to shoot her in the face the instant she showed.

They had to whack Harker quickly, get Jenna medical help. The woman wasn’t screaming. Maybe dead. Maybe dying. In this situation, time was the essence, terror the quintessence.

A noise in the kitchen. She couldn’t identify it.

Rising recklessly from behind a sofa to get a better look, Michael said, “He’s going out a window!”

Carson cleared the archway, saw an open casement window. Harker crouched on the sill, his back to her.

She swept the room to be sure that Jenna wasn’t there to take ricochets. No. Just Harker.

Monster or no monster, shooting him in the back would earn her an OIS investigation, but she would have shot him anyway, except that he was gone before she could squeeze the trigger.

Rushing to the window, Carson expected a fire escape beyond, perhaps a balcony. She found neither.

Harker had thrown himself into the alleyway. The fall was at least thirty feet, possibly thirty-five. Far enough to acquire a mortal velocity before impact.

He lay facedown on the pavement. Unmoving.

His plunge seemed to refute Deucalion’s contention that Victor’s creations were effectively forbidden to self-destruct.

Below, Harker stirred. He sprang to his feet. He had known that he could survive such a fall.

When he looked up at the window, at Carson, reflected moonlight made lanterns of his eyes.

At this distance, a round—or all four rounds—from the shotgun wouldn’t faze him.

He ran toward the nearest end of the alley. There he halted when, with a bark of brakes in the street beyond, a white van skidded to a stop in front of him.

The driver’s door flew open, and a man got half out. From this distance, at night, Carson couldn’t see his face. He seemed to have white or pale-blond hair.

She heard the driver call something to Harker. She couldn’t make out his words.

Harker rounded the van, climbed in the passenger’s side.

Behind the wheel again, the driver slammed his door and stood on the accelerator. Tires spun, shrieked, smoked, and left rubber behind as the vehicle raced off into the night.

The van might have been a Ford. She couldn’t be certain.

Perspiration dripped from Carson’s brow. She was soaked. In spite of the heat, the sweat felt cold on her skin.

CHAPTER 73

VICTOR HAD NAMED HIM
Karloff, perhaps intending humor, but Erika found nothing funny about the hideous “life” that this creature had been given.

The bodiless head stood in a milky antibiotic bath, served by tubes that brought it nutrients and by others that drained metabolic waste. An array of machines attended and sustained Karloff, all of them mysterious and ominous to Erika.

The hand lay on the floor, in a corner, palm-up. Still.

Karloff had controlled that five-fingered explorer through the power of telekenesis, which his maker had hoped to engineer into him. An object of horror, he had nonetheless proved to be a successful experiment.

Self-disconnected from its sustaining machinery, the hand is now dead. Karloff can still animate it, although not for much longer. The flesh will rapidly deteriorate. Even the power of telekenesis will not be able to manipulate frozen joints and putrefying musculature.

Surely, however, Victor had not anticipated that Karloff would be able to employ his psychic ability to gain even a limited form of freedom and to roam the mansion with the desperate hope of inciting his maker’s murder.

With that same uncanny power, Karloff had activated the electric mechanism that operated the secret door in the food pantry, providing entrance to Erika. With it, he had also controlled the television in the master suite, to speak with her and to encourage rebellion.

Being less of a complete creation than Erika, Karloff had not been programmed with a full understanding of Victor’s mission or with knowledge of the limitations placed upon the freedom of the New Race. Now he knew that she could not act against her maker, and his despair was complete.

When she suggested that he use his power to disable the machines that supported his existence, Erika discovered that he, too, had been programmed to be incapable of self-destruction.

She struggled against despondency, her hope reduced to the shaky condition of a three-legged table. The crawling hand and the other apparitions had not been the supernatural events that she had longed to believe they were.

Oh, how badly she had wanted these miracles to be evidence of another world beyond this one. What seemed to be a divine Presence, however, had been only the grotesque Karloff.

She might have blamed him for her deep disappointment, might have hated him, but she did not. Instead she pitied this pathetic creature, who was helpless in his power and condemned to a living hell.

Perhaps what she felt wasn’t pity. Strictly speaking, she should not be capable of pity. But she felt
something,
felt it poignantly.

“Kill me,” the pathetic thing pleaded.

The bloodshot eyes were haunted. The half-formed face was a mask of misery.

Erika began to tell him that her program forbade her to kill either the Old Race or the New except in self-defense or at the order of her maker. Then she realized that her program did not anticipate this situation.

Karloff did not belong to the Old Race, but he did not qualify as one of the New Race, either. He was something other, singular.

None of the rules of conduct under which Erika lived applied in this matter.

Looking over the sustaining machinery, ignorant of its function, she said, “I don’t want to cause you pain.”

“Pain is all I know,” he murmured. “Peace is all I want.”

She threw switches, pulled plugs. The purr of motors and the throb of pumps subsided into silence.

“I’m going,” Karloff said, his voice thickening into a slur. His bloodshot eyes fell shut. “Going…”

On the floor, in the corner, the hand spasmed, spasmed.

The bodiless head’s last words were so slurred and whispery as to be barely intelligible:
“You…must be…angel.”

She stood for a while, thinking about what he’d said, for the poets of the Old Race had often written that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

In time she realized that Victor must not find her here.

She studied the switches that she’d thrown, the plugs that she’d pulled. She reinserted one of the plugs. She repositioned the hand on the floor directly under the switches. She put the remaining plug in the hand, tightened the stiff fingers around it, held them until they remained in place without her sustained pressure.

In the pantry once more, she needed a minute to find the hidden switch. The shelves full of canned food slid into place, closing off the entrance to Victor’s studio.

She returned to the painting by van Huysum in the drawing room. So beautiful.

To better thrill Victor sexually, she had been permitted shame. From shame had come humility. Now it seemed that from humility had perhaps come pity, and more than pity: mercy.

As she wondered about her potential, Erika’s hope was reborn.
Her
feathered thing, perched in her heart if not her soul, was a phoenix, rising yet again from ashes.

CHAPTER 74

FROM THE SWIVELING BEACONS
on the roofs of police cruisers and ambulances, unsynchronized flares of red and white and blue light painted a patriotic phantasmagoria across the face of the apartment building.

Some in pajamas and robes, others dressed and primped for the news cameras, the neighbors gathered on the sidewalk. They gossiped, laughed, drank beer from paper cups, drank beer from cans, ate cold pizza, ate potato chips from the bag, took snapshots of the police and of one another. They seemed to regard the eruption of sudden violence and the presence of a serial killer in their midst as reason for celebration.

At the open trunk of the department sedan, as Carson stowed the shotgun, Michael said, “How can he jump up and run away after a four-story face plant?”

“It’s more than gumption.”

“And how are we gonna write up this report without landing in a psych ward?”

Slamming the trunk lid, Carson said, “We lie.”

A Subaru Outback angled to the curb behind them, and Kathleen Burke got out. “Can you believe—
Harker
?”

“He always seemed like such a sweetheart,” Michael said.

“The moment I saw that suicide note on Roy Pribeaux’s computer,” Carson informed Kathy, “I didn’t believe that he wrote it. Yesterday, ragging Michael and me, Harker used the same phrase that ends Pribeaux’s note—‘one level below Hell.’”

Michael confirmed: “Harker told us that to catch this guy, we were going to have to go to a weirder place—one level below Hell.”

Surprised, Kathy said, “You mean you think he did it on purpose, he
wanted
you to tumble to him?”

“Maybe unconsciously,” Carson said, “but yeah, he did. He threw the pretty boy off the roof after setting him up to take the rap for both Pribeaux’s string of murders and those that Harker himself committed. But with those four words—‘one level below Hell’—he lit a fuse to destroy himself.”

“Deep inside, they pretty much always want to be caught,” Kathy agreed. “But I wouldn’t expect Harker’s psychology to…”

“To what?”

She shrugged. “To work that way. I don’t know. I’m babbling. Man, all the time I’m profiling him, the bastard’s on my doorstep.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Carson advised. “None of us suspected Harker till he all but pointed the finger at himself.”

“But maybe I
should
have,” Kathy worried. “Remember the three nightclub murders six months ago?”

“Boogie City,” Carson recalled.

“Sounds like a place people go to pick their noses,” Michael said.

“Harker and Frye were on that case,” Kathy said.

Michael shrugged. “Sure. Harker shot the perp. It was an iffy shoot, but he was cleared.”

“After a fatal OIS,” Kathy said, “he had six hours of mandatory counseling. He showed up at my office for two of the hours but then never came back.”

“No offense, Dr. Burke,” Michael said, “but lots of us think mandatory counseling sucks. Just because Harker bailed doesn’t mean you should’ve figured he had severed heads in his refrigerator.”

“Yeah, but I knew something was eating him, and I didn’t push him hard enough to finish the sessions.”

The previous night, Carson had passed on the opportunity to tell Kathy the Spooky Time Theater story about monsters in New Orleans. Now there was no way to explain that she hadn’t any reason to feel conscious-stricken, that Harker’s psychology was
not even human.

Trying to make as light of the situation as possible, Carson said to Michael, “Is she doomed to Hell, or what?”

“She reeks of brimstone.”

Kathy managed a rueful smile. “Maybe sometimes I take myself too seriously.” Her smile faltered. “But Harker and I seemed to have such…rapport.”

A paramedic interrupted. “’Scuse me, detectives, but we’ve given Ms. Parker first aid, and she’s ready for you now.”

“She doesn’t need to go to the hospital?” Carson asked.

“No. Minor injuries. And that’s not a girl who traumatizes easy. She’s Mary Poppins with attitude.”

CHAPTER 75

JENNA PARKER
, blithe spirit, lived in a collection of plush teddy bears, inspirational posters—
EVERY DAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF YOUR LIFE
,
JUST SAY NO TO THE BLUES
—and cute cookie jars.

The ceramic cookie jars were for the most part confined to the kitchen. There were a clown jar, a polar-bear jar, a brown-bear jar, a Mother Hubbard jar, a Mickey Mouse jar, a Wookie jar. Jars in the form of a puppy, a kitten, a raccoon, a rabbit, a gingerbread house.

Carson’s favorite was a jar in the shape of a tall stack of cookies.

Apparently Jenna Parker didn’t spend much time cooking, for the jar collection occupied half the counter space. Doors had been taken off some of the cabinets, so that the shelves could serve as display space for more cookie jars.

“Don’t you dare say anything,” Carson muttered to Michael as they entered the kitchen and were confronted by the aggressively cheerful ceramic figures.

Pretending wide-eyed innocence, he said, “About what?”

Jenna sat on a stool, wearing a pink jogging suit with a small appliqué of a running turtle on the left breast. She was nibbling a cookie.

For a woman who had such a short time ago been naked, strapped to an autopsy table, and about to be dissected alive, Jenna seemed remarkably cheerful. “Hi, guys. Want a cookie?”

“No thanks,” Carson said, and Michael managed to decline, as well, without shtick.

Holding up one bandaged thumb like a child proudly displaying a boo-boo, Jenna said, “I mostly just tore off my thumbnail when I fell. Isn’t that great?”

“Imagine how good you’d feel,” Michael said, “if you’d broken a leg.”

Well, he had repressed himself for the better part of a minute.

Jenna said, “I mean, considering I could’ve been sitting here with my heart cut out, what’s a thumbnail?”

“A thumbnail is zip, zero, nada,” said Michael.

“It’s a feather on the scale,” she said.

“Dust in the balance,” he agreed.

“It’s a shadow of nothing.”

“De nada.”

“Peu de chose,”
she said.

“Exactly what I would’ve said if I knew French.”

She grinned at him. “For a cop, you’re fun.”

“I majored in banter at the police academy.”

“Isn’t he fun?” Jenna asked Carson.

Rather than stuff one or both of them into a damn cookie jar, Carson said impatiently, “Miss Parker, how long have you been Jonathan Harker’s neighbor?”

“I moved in about eleven months ago. From day one, he was a sweetie.”

“A sweetie? Did you and he…”

“Oh, no. Johnny was a man, yeah, and you know what
they’re
like, but we were just good buds.” To Michael, she said, “That thing I just said about men—no offense.”

“None taken.”

“I like men,” she said.

“I don’t,” he assured her.

“Anyway, I’ll bet you’re not like other men. Except where it counts.”

“Peu de chose,”
he said.

“Oh, I’ll bet it’s not,” Jenna said, and winked.

Carson said, “Define ‘buds’ for me.”

“Once in a while Johnny would come over for dinner or I’d go across the hall to his place. He’d cook pasta. We’d talk about life, you know, and destiny, and modern dance.”

Boggled, Carson said, “Modern dance?
Harker?
”

“I was a dancer before I finally got real and became a dental hygienist.”

Michael said, “For a long time, I wanted to be an astronaut.”

“That’s very brave,” Jenna said with admiration.

Michael shrugged and looked humble.

Carson said, “Miss Parker, were you conscious any time after he chloroformed you?”

“On and off, yeah.”

“Did he talk to you during this? Did he say
why
?”

“I think maybe he said having sex with me would be like having sex with a monkey.”

Carson was nonplussed for a moment. Then she said, “You
think
he said it?”

“Well, with the chloroform and whatever he pumped into me through the IV, I was sort of in and out of it. And to be perfectly frank, I was going out to a party when he grabbed me, and I had a little bit of a pre-party buzz on. So maybe he said it or maybe I dreamed he said it.”

“What else did you maybe dream he said?”

“He told me I was pretty, a fine example of my species, which was nice, but he said that he was one of the new race. Then this weird thing.”

“I
wondered
when this would get weird,” Michael said.

“Johnny said he wasn’t allowed to reproduce but was reproducing anyway, dividing like an ameba.”

Even as those words chilled Carson, they invoked in her a sense of the absurd that made her feel as if she were a straight man in a burlesque revival. “What do you think he meant by that?”

“Well, then he pulled up his T-shirt, and his belly was like a scene from
Alien,
all this squirming inside, so I’m pretty sure all of that was just the drugs.”

Carson and Michael exchanged a look. She would have liked to pursue this subject, but doing so would alert Jenna to the fact that she might have experienced what she thought she had only dreamed.

Jenna sighed. “He was a sweetie, but sometimes he could get so down, just totally bummed out.”

“About what?” Carson asked.

Jenna nibbled her cookie, thinking. Then: “He felt something was missing in his life. I told him happiness is always an option, you just have to choose it. But sometimes he couldn’t. I told him he had to find his bliss. I wonder…”

She frowned. The expression came and went from her face twice, as though she wore a frown so seldom that she didn’t know how to hold on to one when she needed it.

Carson said, “What do you wonder?”

“I told him he had to find his bliss, so I sure hope his bliss didn’t turn out to be chopping people to pieces.”