The Crime Writer (27 page)

L
loyd signaled me with one hand to roll down the window. His other arm was out of view, since he was standing half on the curb, bent beneath a wayward bough of the pepper tree. As I hit the switch, I kept my eyes on that hidden hand. From the flex of his arm, he was holding something. The cell phone was sleek and hard in my fist.

“Hey, Lloyd.”

A dated weave belt pinched his tan Dockers at the waist. His brickred Polo shirt he wore tucked in, though it had tugged free at one side from recent exertion. His wavy blond hair sparkled with sweat where it met his forehead and temples. “Hello. What do you need?”

I gestured at the manuscript pages in my lap, giving myself an extra beat so my voice wouldn’t reveal the adrenaline pounding through my veins. “I came by to give it one more shot, see if you’d take a look at some pages for me. I was just reviewing—”

He shifted, his arm moving, and I came within an instant of smashing his face with a Motorola-fortified fist. What swung into view, though, was not a weapon but a roll of silver electrical tape, which he spun absentmindedly around a finger.

“Drew, I’m just too overwhelmed right now. I can’t help you. Or see you. This is a really bad time. An impossible time.”

For all the heinousness of his actions, he was speaking the truth. He certainly looked overwhelmed, worn down by grief and dismay. As if his panic bell had been rung so often so he no longer registered the clangor inside his head. Like me he’d arrived here by desperation, choosing the less awful of two scenarios. From his face I’d say he’d had his share of second thoughts.

“Right. Okay. Sorry to bug you.” I tugged the gearshift into drive. “See you later.”

“See you, Drew,” he said softly.

I pulled away, watching him in the rearview. He stood on the curb, staring after me, then started for the house, his shoulders stooped as though his thoughts were pulling him downward.

I turned the corner, pulled over, and dialed. “Detective Unger, please.”

A few moments later, Cal picked up.

“It’s Drew. I’m around the corner from Lloyd Wagner’s house. I need you to get here now and bring the guns. Lloyd’s got a Volvo with the right dent, repainted in brown. His wife has leukemia. There are only two matches for her marrow type in Los Angeles. One of them was Kasey Broach.”

I heard wood creak as Cal sat down. “Was the other match Genevieve?”

“No,” I said. “Some girl named Sissy Ballantine.”

“Did you say
Sissy Ballantine
?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Cal’s voice got tight. “An Amber Alert just hit my desk. Ballantine was snatched outside her house in Culver City a few hours ago. Neighbor saw a guy wrestle her into a white van.”

I threw the Highlander into park, turned off the engine.

Cal said, “Stay put. Do not approach that house. We’re on our way.”

“Get over here.”

“Stay out of the house. Promise me, Drew.”

I snapped the phone shut, grabbed the tire iron from the trunk, and headed back down the street.

A
s silently as possible, I approached through the neighboring hedges. The garage door had been lowered, and I could hear from behind it the screech of tape being stripped from a roll. Slowing my breathing, I eased up on the window at the side of the garage, wading through a scented hedge of juniper. A dusty set of venetians guarded the glass, but where the stiff blinds had been tweaked down, I could see into the dim interior.

Lloyd’s waist and legs protruded from the back of the van. At his feet a heap of plastic drop cloth. He emerged, roll of tape in his mouth, X-acto knife in his hand. Judging from the unused material, he was on the tail end of the job.

I withdrew, peering over my shoulder at intervals. He’d left the kitchen door unlocked, and I slipped inside. Dirty dishes, crumbs, and empty jars had overtaken the counters I’d cleaned just days before, a half-eaten burrito resting atop the rubber guard of the garbage disposal—Lloyd doing his best to keep doing.

Tire iron swinging at my side, I squared off with the dark hall and the seam of light under the bedroom door at the end. Beneath the nervous ticking of the kitchen clock and the grandfather’s stately tocking from the living room, I could make out the wheeze of medical equipment. I started back, the photos of Lloyd and Janice hung at intervals providing a journey through their married lives. The wedding picture, the two of them beaming and clutching like prom dates. The bumper of their Gremlin, trailing toilet paper and tin cans,
Best of Luck!
frosted in cursive on the rear window. Poolside in Hawaii, paperbacks splayed on lounge chairs, fruit-bedecked cocktails raised. I was aware of my footfall on the slightly warped floorboards, my breath firing in my chest, that strip of light growing ever closer. Threads of gray had crept into Janice’s hair by the time they were snapped before El Capitan in Yosemite. Jovial smile lines textured their faces as they held hands across a wrought-iron patio table in a Venetian piazza. Most of the pictures had caught them looking at each other rather than at the lens, as if they couldn’t help themselves, as if they had a secret from the rest of the lonely world.

I reached the bedroom door and set my hand on the bulbous antique knob, the white-noise hum of the medical equipment beyond drowning out the clocks, my thoughts. In hackneyed narrative tradition, I couldn’t help but recall standing outside another door, fearful of entering.

Before I lost my nerve, I pushed through into the room.

The bed was across the wide space, raised unreasonably on a box spring and penned in by metal guardrails. It had been angled toward the window so Janice could take in the downward-sloping stretch of trees. The room smelled of sitting food, sweat-laced linen, and residual human waste, not quite scoured from bedpans and fabric. The overlay of antiseptic cleaner and the various monitors and IV poles sprouting up like electronic growth brought me back to the room in which I’d awakened four months earlier to discover Genevieve’s blood beneath my nails.

Janice looked soft and fleshy, her baldness making her head appear unusually round. She had no eyelashes or eyebrows, her blue eyes pronounced and burning from the depths to which they’d sunk. A terry gown had fallen open at the chest, revealing bone ridges above her breasts. Her lips were moist, slack cheeks folded in on them like an infant’s. A bag of crimson, frothed lightly at the top, dangled from a metal pole, transfusing what I imagined was fresh bone marrow into her veins. Syringes, pill bottles, and vials overloaded one of the metal trays pushed to the wall. From the labels, potent names jumped out at me in officious pharmaceutical print.
CYTOXIN. BUSULFAN. CYCLOSPORIN.
To the right, a draft sucked at a closed door.

She raised a wasted arm, dripping a sheet of loose skin, as if to fend me off, her mouth opening slowly, repetitively, shaping a word. Her voice was depleted and her lips stiff with the great effort, hiding her teeth, turning her mouth into a wavering black hole, a parody of yelling. Passing her by ignored was unthinkable. I approached, owing some respect to the deathbed. To my great horror, I realized she was trying to call her husband’s name. I became suddenly, horrifically aware of the tire iron hanging by my knee.

“No,” I whispered, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

A rasp, so dry as to be nearly inaudible.
“Make…him…stop.”

I left her there straining on the bed. The far door opened to a brief hall, which led to another door, left partially ajar. Listening for creaks in the old house that would broadcast Lloyd’s return, I moved forward on tingling legs, the dim room drawing into view. It was, I saw by degrees, an in-law suite, a narrow bedroom complete with kitchenette and bathroom. Like some condemned construction site, it had been veiled in plastic and fabric. Hunter green bedsheets were tacked over the windows and over a sliding glass door that led to the backyard. His wife, I guessed, knew nothing of the comings and goings through that rear entrance, though clearly she knew that something was not as it should be. A plastic painter’s drop cloth, meticulously laid down, slipped beneath my shoes and made it feel like I was moving across ice. It had caught drops of blood, many long dried. I stepped over coils of clear medical tubing, a gas canister lying on its side. A sleek box of a machine, the size of an old heater, purred. A processor of sorts, I assumed from its labels and dials. It was at work. Jumbled on the Formica counter, cartons of medical gloves, a collection of fat syringes, coils of white cotton rope, crusty transfusion bags. There, on a floating metal tray, a curved Shun boning knife, the Japanese character standing out starkly, black against stainless steel. And just behind it on a cot, almost disguised as another inanimate object, lay a young woman on her side.

Her eyes were closed peacefully, and Lloyd, sensitive soul, had propped her head on a pillow. I watched her raised shoulder sway gently with her breaths. The skin at her left hip was peppered where a big-bore needle had been thrust through to extract marrow from her pelvic bone. The marks were fewer and more tightly clustered than I’d have thought; Lloyd must have gone in repeatedly through the same perforations, sliding the skin to reach new bone.

She lay, depleted and unconscious, awaiting the boning knife. I imagined that Lloyd, feeder of Xanax, didn’t like that part and so had left it for after he’d prepped his van for her body’s transport. He couldn’t let her live any more than he could’ve released Kasey Broach after taking from her what his wife required. The soreness and resultant medical treatment would have revealed that bone marrow had been extracted, and from there it would’ve been a short hop to matching wait-listed patients, and to Janice. Leaving a corpse also made it significantly less likely that the marrow theft would be uncovered. I’d learned from Lloyd himself that during an autopsy medical examiners generally extract and weigh organs, examine visible wounds, and take fluid and tissue samples. They’d have little call to look for perforations in the bone beneath a divot of carefully scraped flesh. And of course there’d be no patient around to complain of deeper soreness.

Behind the processor, restored to a Pyrex jar and left on the floor like a kicked-off shoe, was my ganglioglioma. My tumor had found the killer before I had. It took me an instant to tear my eyes from the familiar cluster of cells that Lloyd, during his
Gaslight
campaign, had kidnapped and led me to believe I’d destroyed. He was probably planning to leave it at a crime scene, adding to my confusion or culpability.

I moved toward the girl. Sissy Ballantine? I set the tire iron down on the thin mattress at her side and reached for her. The girl’s eyelids rose lazily.

She said calmly, “Behind you.”

I spun around, nearly tripping on the flared end of a medical tube.

Lloyd filled the doorway. “Damn it,” he said sadly. “Damn it, Drew.”

I took a half step to my right, hoping to block the tire iron from view. If I didn’t set him off, this wouldn’t have to get violent. Would it? The floating metal tray pressed into the small of my back. Sissy murmured something behind me, and then her voice trailed off.

Lloyd said, “I couldn’t just let her die, Drew. I couldn’t. Not when I was in a position to do something about it.”

My voice was hoarse. “But why…why did you pick
me
?”

He looked at the floor, my shoes, but not at me. “For the past two years, I’ve tapped in to that transplant registry every day. Every single day. And stared at those two women whose marrow matched Janice. One who’d removed herself from reach, the other whose marrow was already spoken for. Nothing I could do. By day I processed bodies, by night I watched my wife die.” He rested a hand on the half-open door, swinging it slightly on its hinges. “But one night I got called out of bed. And there was Genevieve lying in her bedroom. I was stunned. The paramedics told me that you’d been taken away. That you’d been seizing. Dazed. That you were now in surgery. I went back and looked at Genevieve, that run of unblemished flesh at her hip. And it struck me how I could do this.”

“So you didn’t kill her?”

“I didn’t kill her.” His lips pressed together in a sad grin. “She was no good to me. To Janice. But there she was. An inspiration. And there you were. Scared. Paranoid. Tangling with detectives who already thought you were the killer. All I had to do was add an abrasion to the next one’s hip. And then keep paying you out rope. You brought me the next twist and the next. A felon who worked at Home Depot. A hundred and fifty-three owners of brown Volvo wagons to choose a candidate from. You were so imaginative, you see.” Lost in thought, he toed the tubing that snaked from behind him into the room. Finally he lifted his gaze to my face. “For this to work, I needed a Drew. And you were the perfect Drew.”

Made strangely drowsy by the weight of the discovery and the soporific hum of the filter, I focused on his words. It was oddly difficult.

“I helped you write all those books,” Lloyd said. “I figured you could help me with this one.”

“I know I owed you,” I said. “Did I owe you this much?”

He stared at me, and I stared at him. He’d set his weight forward so the door squeezed him against the jamb. I couldn’t see his hands, which made me nervous, so I clasped my own behind my back, gripping the metal tray. The tire iron was out of reach, back on the bed.

“So,” I said.

“So.” He frowned, and his mouth twitched a little, as if on the verge of a sob, but then calm reasserted itself over his features. “What are we gonna do now?”

“Call an ambulance for Sissy. And for Janice. Some cops we probably know will come get you. We’ll go in. And we’ll straighten this out.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No. Here’s how it’s gonna go. I’m going to kill you. And I’m going to kill Sissy. And then I’m going to get her marrow into Janice.”

A sudden heat rose to the line of my surgical scar, making it tingle and seethe. The tips of my fingers brushed the handle of the stainless boning knife behind my back.

“How are you gonna do that?” I asked.

Lloyd leaned over, reaching for something behind the door.

A wave of light-headedness washed through me. I sensed not an odor but a change in the consistency of the air. I staggered a half step, then firmed my legs beneath me. When I looked up, a gas mask stared back at me from the doorway, cylindrical filters shoved out from the jaw like insect mandibles. The door was wide open now, and I could see the canister he’d hidden behind it. His fingers rested on the metal valve atop the canister. In his other hand, he held a plastic face mask, shaped for the nose and mouth, its tube trailing back to the nozzle. I glanced dumbly at the end of the tubing at my feet, only now noticing the slight hiss it had been giving off all this time, virtually hidden beneath the hum of the filter.

Lloyd wrenched the valve, rerouting the escaping gas through the mask, and lunged. Reaching blindly for the knife, I blocked with one arm, but he managed to shove the mask over my face, and I jerked in a pure inhale, feeling my knees buckle. I flailed, striking the tray, and went down amid the metallic rattle.

My hand grasped for the knife among the folds of plastic drop cloth, finding the cold handle. As Lloyd stumbled down over me, jamming the mask again to my face, I brought the knife up and felt it press against his belly as he fell, then break surface tension with a pop. He collapsed on top of me, his gas mask knocked askew so it rode up in his thick curls. My bucking legs struck the Pyrex jar—the tinkle of breaking glass and then the schoolroom reek of formaldehyde. Lloyd was weeping with horror, his face twisted. Both of my hands, gripping the shaft of the knife, were trapped beneath his dying weight. His white fingertips, straining around the plastic, dug into my cheeks, keeping the face mask rammed unevenly against my nose and mouth.

He sputtered and collapsed, drooling blood onto my chest.

Burning rubber.

The acrid odor washes through my head, lining my nasal cavities, enveloping my brain. I cannot breathe it away.

I am driving. My dashboard clock reads 1:21
A.M.

Genevieve’s house comes into view, and I jerk the steering wheel, banging over the curb, snapping the sprinkler at the fringe of the decorative lawn.

The dinging of the open car door behind me, I am running up the walk to the house, my thigh muscles burning. My flesh is clammy, pulsing with some unknown terror. I stumble onto the porch. Music swells from within.