The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (24 page)

“The patients …”

“Just like I told you on the phone. A hundred and twenty-seven bodies this time. A new record.”

The Auburn Medical Center was a four-story structure painted in rustic browns and tans in an effort to make it seem less clinical. Talley led Kimberlain through the white spill of portable floods set up on the neatly manicured front grounds that enabled investigators to work through the night.

“This is where we laid the bodies out yesterday,” Talley explained. “Rows and rows of them, arranged by hospital floor with tags attached to the tips of the bags. Made them look like luggage.”

Talley looked haggard and worn. Clearly she had gotten no sleep, and yesterday’s makeup was long gone. The lack of it made her look younger and vulnerable for the first time. Kimberlain could see the hardened exterior was all show. Beneath it now her true self showed through. He wanted to tell her to let it out all the way, but Talley spoke again before he had the chance.

“I’ve had the building cleared. I wanted you to experience the inside without distractions.”

“I don’t know what I’ll be able to tell you.”

“It’s got to be more than what the forensics team has been able to. You were the only one to pick up any clues in Daisy, and this scene’s fresher.”

“When?” Kimberlain asked, as they moved past a collection of bureau personnel clustered near the front entrance.

“Yesterday between midnight and three
A.M
. or so. Same as with the other two. Hospital doesn’t maintain a round-the-clock emergency room service, so he didn’t have to worry about unwarranted entries. Doctor coming back to pick up a lab report made the discovery. He isn’t doing well.”

“What’s the lab been able to tell you?”

“Not much besides where he entered, the order he did it, where he walked out. Grand goddamn fucking tour.”

Her use of profanity surprised him. “You’re letting it get to you, Lauren.”

“You haven’t been inside yet.”

“You let it get to you and you never find him.”

“I haven’t been doing such a great job as it is.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Talley’s eyes peered upward toward Kimberlain’s. “Try telling that to the brass at behavioral science. Once television gets ahold of this, there won’t be a person in this country who feels safe. Before, ninety-nine point nine percent of the population felt insulated by the fact that they didn’t fit the pattern. Guy’s going after small towns in Hicksville. Who gives a shit? But now he hits a hospital.
A hospital, goddamn it!
What’s next? An apartment building? A hotel, maybe? How about a school, or maybe the passengers on a goddamn 747, or the patrons of a restaurant sitting down for dinner?”

“You’re straining.”

“You’re damn right I’m straining, and what do you think the country’s going to do? Start vigilante groups. Arm themselves to the teeth probably, buy Uzis, shotguns, make homemade grenades in their basements.”

“They wouldn’t help against this guy.”

“It won’t stop folks from trying.” She stopped just before the door. “You know I got here an hour before dawn yesterday, and I couldn’t wait for the sun to come up. I knew it wouldn’t change anything except make me less scared.”

“Quite natural. Evil owns the night is the popular perception.”

“And is it true?”

“It is with Tiny Tim.”

Talley’s dark, rich eyes were empty. “Why a hospital?”

“Plenty of reasons, except none of them jibe with the profile based on his previous attacks. Tiny Tim broke his pattern, Lauren, and he broke it big time. He could have been seen, at least noticed. If someone had made it out of the hospital and sprinted down the hill, then the whole world would know what was going on in a matter of minutes.”

“You’re saying there was risk involved this time.”

“Plenty more than in Daisy and Dixon Springs, anyway. And that means something had to make the risk worth taking, something beyond the pattern itself.” Kimberlain thought briefly. “I want a list of all the victims from the hospital and the first two towns. I’ll give you a number to fax them to.”

“You think this is about individuals
within
his targets?”

“The targets have something in common, Lauren. We find out what and we find Tiny Tim. Maybe that’s what takes us where we need to go.”

“Let’s go inside.”

Garth Seckle lay in the field, gazing up at the sky. Clouds had covered the stars long before, swallowed their light just as he had swallowed the lives of his victims only a day before.

Seckle knew he wouldn’t sleep tonight; he seldom did in the days immediately following one of his visits. He could imagine the experts clustered around a table offering theories as to his methods and psyche. None of them would ever stop to consider that the roots of his work were found in reason. In his own mind it was justifiable because of what had been done to him.

Before. Long before.

His unblinking eyes held on the sky and imagined the clouds as blood scarlet. Just thinking of the color made him quiver. And there would be more blood soon, much sooner than anyone expected. The pieces were all falling into place, the symmetry so pleasing to his innermost thoughts.

It was time to close his eyes so he could go back to the hospital in his mind. Renew the pleasure by rerunning the actions while they were still fresh. That way they would stay with him until a new set replaced them.

He had parked his van in the building’s rear not far from the service entrance. But that would not serve as his route in. No. In order to maximize the use of his time he must use the entry where his presence stood the greatest chance of being noticed. He hugged the building to avoid the spray of the hospital’s outdoor lights as he slid round to the front and approached the one entrance open at such a late hour… .

“It’s the only door they keep open after midnight,” Lauren Talley explained, holding it open for Kimberlain to pass through.

“Not very accessible for a hospital.”

“Just the way they want it. Without an emergency facility, the last thing they want is drive-in business.”

The Ferryman entered and had the feeling he was stepping into hell. Inside the small reception area and lobby, fingerprint dust was evident on the counters and desk, as well as the walls. Kimberlain could see sprinkles of it on the floor, too, the shape of a massive foot filled out.

Talley pulled out her memo pad and flipped it open. From behind her, Kimberlain could see many of the pages were full of chicken-scratch scribble.

“He entered here,” Talley started, consulting the fourth page of her notes, “and shot the nurse once in the head. Two security guards slain as well, both with shots to the chest and midsection. Silenced automatic. Shell casings not found. He then proceeded to the—” Talley flipped a page. “—fourth floor.”

“Work his way down,” Kimberlain said. “Makes sense. More likely to be hurt by someone coming down than up.”

Talley reached the stairwell. “He used the stairs. The fourth-floor nurses’ station was not manned at the time,” she continued as they began to climb. “Duty nurse was checking a loose heart monitor. Floor nurse was dispensing meds.”

“Good assumptions,” Kimberlain said.

Talley looked at him gravely. “Not assumptions. We found their bodies in the respective rooms.”

Kimberlain pulled open the door leading onto the fourth floor.

“This floor had twenty-two patients, eleven pairs of two,” Lauren Talley said as she stepped out behind him. “Eight rooms vacant. No evidence he ever stepped into any of the empty ones.”

“Door labels,” Kimberlain pointed out, noticing one just down from the elevator. “Only the occupied ones had them. Acted like invitations for our boy.”

“All elderly on this floor, many invalid or infirm. Not much ability to fight back, even if he’d given them the chance.”

Kimberlain nodded ever so slightly. “Tiny Tim is no sportsman. The kill is both end and means. He doesn’t need buildup, because each kill serves as build-up for the next. He visualizes the next act while still in the midst of the current one. In other words, the person he’s killing doesn’t mean anything compared to the one he’s going to kill next. And so on, so on, and so on.” The Ferryman hesitated. “Makes perfect sense in explaining him.”

“Explaining him how?”

“He can’t be satisfied. No matter how many he kills, he’s always thinking of the next victim until there are no more victims left. He can’t help it any more than you or I can help breathing.”

“Don’t pull this psycho crap with me,” Lauren Talley flared.

“You can’t catch him if you don’t understand him, Lauren. You’ve got to see the way he thinks if you ever want to see him captured.”

Talley nodded, trying to understand as Kimberlain spoke again. “Now show me where he started on this floor.”

The hospital was a microcosm of the shitty world that had scorned him. Garth Seckle found it more orderly than the towns he had visited previously. The old people were on the top floor, as if it had taken all their lives to climb up there and now they’d never be coming back down. He hated them, hated the lingering smell of slow death that struck him when he stepped out of the stairwell. He could hear the hum of a few televisions, moans and sobs from those who were beyond entertainment. The true object of his visit here lay on the floor below, but Seckle needed to leave his mark, and that would begin up here.

Tiny Tim went from room to room, never using the same method twice. Got to be quite challenging near the end, especially when he killed one old geezer without waking the roommate. He broke a neck, crushed a larynx layered with liver-spotted flesh, smothered one with a pillow.

In contrast to earlier kills, these deaths didn’t refresh him. He felt drained, unfulfilled. Tiny Tim wanted to be done with it, wanted to move on and finish with the true reason for his being there so he might enjoy the rest of his visit. He completed his work on the second half of the fourth floor quickly and made for the stairwell that would take him to the next level down.

“Standard rooms on this floor,” Lauren Talley told Kimberlain as they descended the stairs. She had turned her memo pad open to a fresh page. “Adult patients in for tests, evaluations, minor surgery, orthopedic work. Physical therapy wing’s up here, too. Thirty-five rooms in all, twenty-six doubles and nine singles. Two of the singles had a second bed wedged in.”

He opened the door just ahead of her, and the blood-splattered nurses’ station greeted him.

“There were three on duty,” he heard Lauren Talley reciting. “One was on rounds, the other two were here. We’re almost certain one of those managed to push the security button when she saw him. Just a quick press before he got her, barely enough to stir the guard downstairs from his nap.”

Her eyes aimed further down the corridor, and Kimberlain adjusted his angle in order to see the elevator. The floor before it was stained by a dark red pool. The elevator doors themselves had a series of scarlet splotches embossed upon them.

“Automatic weapon,” Talley said. “Upward of ten silenced rounds. After he killed the nurses, he must have heard the elevator coming and waited for whoever was going to come out.”

“He waited for more than that.”

“Excuse me?”

“That blood on the outside of the doors. He must have given the guard time to get out, probably even draw his gun.”

Talley’s eyes widened. “It was still in his hand when we found him. We thought …”

“Thought what?”

“That maybe he came close to getting a shot off.”

“Not a chance. Tiny Tim just wanted to have some fun.”

“Sound of a gunshot would have risked everything. Patients wake up, reach for their phones.”

“He never risks anything. The nurses?”

“The two behind the station were shot and one was mutilated postmortem, we believe after he was finished with the rest of the floor.”

That struck a chord in Kimberlain’s memory. “There was a mutilation in Daisy, too. You were supposed to check the burned bodies from Dixon Springs.”

“We did. We are. Nothing conclusive yet.”

“Assume it is. Who did he torch in Dixon Springs?”

“You want names?”

“Specs will do just fine. Whatever your memory has handy.”

“A couple, the occupants of a rooming house, a—”

“Stick with the couple. It was a family in Daisy, wasn’t it?”

Lauren Talley nodded. “Children included.”

Kimberlain drew closer to the formerly white counter. Much of the blood had sprayed atop the trays holding the patients’ charts, as if Tiny Tim was wiping out what had brought them here in addition to the people themselves.

“Just the one nurse?” he raised.

“Yes.”

“Anyone else on the lower floors?”

“No.”

“Strange.”

“Why?”

“Say he set the fires in Dixon Springs to hide the mutilation of that couple. Then he goes after an entire family in Daisy, and finally a single nurse here. It doesn’t jibe with the rest of his thinking.” Kimberlain’s mind returned to the setting and the matter at hand. “Run it through for me on this floor.”

“It got messy for him. He wasn’t expecting a third nurse, and she appeared at the wrong time. From the contortions of her mouth in death, we believe she managed to scream. That drew some patients from their beds. Tiny Tim dispatched her, and them, with the same rifle he used on the other nurses and the security guard. Then he made rapid work of the rest.”

“Poison gas?”

“How did you know?”

“The smell. It’s almost tolerable. Somebody had the windows open for a time.”

“We had to. The toxicity levels were still too high when we got here.”

“Any idea how he released it?”

“Canisters. He was kind enough to leave them behind.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“Of the homemade variety, though. Forget tracking him down through army surplus.”

“Not so sure you’re looking for a soldier anymore, Lauren?”

“Like you said originally, he’s something else, something …”

“More?”

“To use your phrase, yes.”

“And what would your phrase be? You’ve seen his work firsthand now. Still think you’re dealing with a man?”