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  Voices broke into his fevered thoughts. He stepped back, catching the blood work tray with his elbow, righted it, vials quivering. He could not see beyond the curtains, but he recognized the tenor of the voices. Police.

  Casually, he moved to a spot where he could see the stainless steel supply cabinets lining the walls, found an image in the mirrored surface, and watched it. Two men meeting, both uniforms.

  “What are you here on?”

  “A Domestic. Same old, same old.” A heavy sigh. “You waiting for Ibie Walker?”

  “Yeah. If he comes to. Once they plant him in ICU, I’ll call the sarge and let him know. If he wants me to stay, I’ll stay.” A shrug.

  “Why? Didn’t he just drop?”

  “Word is he might have surprised an intruder. We treat it lightly, overlook anything, and there’ll be racism cries from every corner. Downtown wants a statement as soon as I can get one.”

  A low whistle. Then, even lower, confidential. “Heard that drive by was in here earlier tonight.”

  “The kid? Really? What happened?”

  “He didn’t make it. He’s down in the chop shop already.”

  The image of the conferring officers blurred, as if both shuddered slightly. Then the taller one muttered, “Maybe some good’ll come out of it. Lucky you aren’t at Bayshore. Place is crawling with Feds.”

  “Shit. A congressman there, a councilman here. Did somebody call a war and we missed it?”

  “Welcome to El Lay. Come on. I know the maze. Let me show you where the coffee is. The charge nurse’ll come get you.”

  Listening to the effects of his handiwork, he felt a certain satisfaction in the chaos.

  In a moment, the stainless steel reflection cleared, footsteps leading away. The charge nurse in question had not looked up from her stool, her post, keeping an eye on her patient’s monitors. He watched her a moment longer. She wore her hair in one of those curly, curly perms. He disliked the frizzy, chemical feel of it. Whatever attraction she’d held for him quickly faded.

  He stepped back behind the curtains softly. Turned and saw the young woman watching him.

  Seeing himself in her eyes, he stepped forward, put one hand across her mouth and the other across her throat. Her eyes widened in sudden, conscious fear. She struggled, one arm free, flailing at him, too weak to bother him.

  “Bloody hands!” she got out, before he hardened his palm across the sweet plump lips, dampening all sound. She tossed her head, but she could not throw him. She quit fighting suddenly.

  He looked at her fondly, his quarry, glad she had fought off her potential harmer, glad she had saved herself for him, for his more skillful hands. Not for her the ignominy of an estranged boyfriend, a drunken husband, a misunderstood suitor. No ordinary battering and death for her. She lay there like a victim, but he knew her better. He knew her heart and soul. He would not abandon her.

  No.

  His fingertips found the pressure points in her neck. His marks would scarcely be noticeable among all her other bruises. His hand tightened.

  Her hair fell across the back of it. Soft, a silken caress.

  As her eyes dimmed and her breath stilled, he knew he didn’t want her like this. He needed more.

  Her lids shuttered. She went limp in sudden submission. He waited another few seconds, deciding, then lifted his hands from her abruptly.

  Her chest rose and fell in a sudden gust of breath and awareness. At his back, he heard one nurse call for another.

  “Stacy. Come give me a hand with this, will you?”

  Remembrance of his purpose flooded back. He turned and put an eye to the slit in the curtain. He saw the nurse leave the councilman’s quiet form and walk to the far end of triage, to where the second man still fought for stabilization.

  The window of opportunity, however small, had finally opened. He took rubber gloves from the blood work tray and pulled them on, swiftly, efficiently. Four long strides and he was across the unit, standing at the old black man’s head, looking down at the creased face, half-hidden by tubing. He reached up, found the connector to the drip bag, took a syringe and injected one, two, three bubbles of air.

  He turned and left, thoughts seething. The blood work tray he deposited on a sink in the bathroom. The gloves he stripped off and disposed of in an infectious waste container. The greens he did not shed until he was across the parking lot and in the shadows. He did not slow, but he recognized the glint of a police uniform as he went around the elbow of the parking structure and disappeared.

  McKenzie, drowning, struggled to awaken, her throat raw and sore. Dreams of Jack and drowning men trying to take her down, keep her down, filled her. She fought back, clawing and kicking, and came awake, IV tubing snaking across her chest like something alive.

  There was a man there, leaning over her. Fear of Jack exploded like shrapnel through her. The color of his white jacket didn’t register. As he reached out, she reacted to the grasping hand, determined not to be dragged under again. She balled her fist and swung. He staggered back. A tray went clattering. The triage unit chimed with noise. He grabbed at the curtain. It and the circular rod came down with a vast ripping.

  “Nurse. Nurse!”

  People came running. She had a blurred and tipping view of the triage ward, filled with white coats and greens. Monitors beeped like brassy car alarms.

  Chapter 7

  The hour was late, his story was done, and Carter figured he ought to go home, but he lingered at the hospital and finally decided to go to the lounge to get a cup of coffee. The shooting of Nelson unsettled him. That hadn’t been his assignment, the news had bled in around the emotional tragedy he’d been covering, but the notion lingered in the back of his mind that he would find a message or voice mail when he got home. Let’s meet for lunch or, How about dinner—some good Mexican, and decent margaritas—you buy. I’m a goddamn congressman, for crissakes. You might even get a story out of me.

  The Feds would be all over Nelson’s death, as a congressman and lately one of their own. If John had called, they’d be tracking him down soon enough. Carter didn’t mind it, hell, he welcomed it. But he had nothing he could tell them. He didn’t know why John was in town. Who he’d planned to meet. Or how he’d met his death.

  But he was a reporter. He ought to care enough to find out. As Carter walked along, he scratched the underside of his jaw, where the razor blade had nicked him two or three days before and a small but decidedly itchy scab now rested. He knew before the matter even started that the Feds would freeze him out. He’d have to wait for the news conferences and media releases like anyone else.

  So, with nothing else he could do to help change anyone’s status in life, coffee sounded good. He could smell it long before he got there, the aroma drifting through the corridor of the back way of Mount Mercy. The hospital was in a state of flux, halfway through renovation and additions, and the corridors were raw, open to their underpinnings. In some areas big sheets of opaque plastic hung down and fluttered in the perpetual drafts. The beams and insulation were laid open, elevator shafts bared and inoperative and cordoned off, and Carter reflected that the hospital resembled one of its own patients, sliced open in surgery for probing and healing.

  The reflection suited his shitty mood. John Nelson had come to town and had gotten himself drilled. The day had not improved from there, until sunset when it had really hit the pits, with another innocent victim—and he’d been called in to milk the story.

  Back here, beyond Emergency and Triage, away from Billing and Admitting, downstairs from the wards and upstairs from the operating theaters and the morgue, there were only x-ray and lab techs wandering, their fatigues wrinkled and open at the neck, their faces gray under the unflattering light. Their eyes did not meet Carter’s. Back here in the bowels, if he knew where he was going, then he probably belonged. Renovation had wiped out all the little courtesy arrows pointing to this region or department or that and only a participant in hospital business could wend h
is or her way through the labyrinth of hallways without getting lost. Carter wondered if they knew him for himself, or if they thought he was a surgeon, or maybe from the coroner’s office.

  He turned the corner. A sheet of plastic moved with him, wearily, shifting as though a gray tide followed him. He felt like a piece of driftwood, old, weathered, twisted and beaten, half-skinned by the harshness of the sea which had carried him along and beached him here. He’d been beached a number of times since letting himself be swept out of Chicago. He’d left when he’d been fired— no, that was wrong. He’d left before he’d been fired—the certified fax had followed him—in search of Bauer, he’d told himself, but he had not found the killer.

  The tide had taken him all over until he’d been cast up in California. He’d worked at the Sacramento Union until it had gone belly-up in early ’94. Now he was here in L.A., where reality ground at him until he sometimes thought nothing would be left except a tiny pile of fine dust. Which, he supposed, was one way of achieving what he had not been able to do earlier.

  He had already let go of life. He no longer clung to it. He ate when he wanted, which was seldom, and smoked if he thought about it, and slept only when he absolutely had to, and did not care what others thought of him. At first, there had been that vague possibility that finding Bauer might save him, might give him the grip he needed to hold on, but he had been unsuccessful. His paper had tolerated his misuse of the information pipeline far longer than he would have guessed. The VICAP hookups, the taps he had put into various systems, ears to the ground, listening for the mortal footfall of Bauer.

  It was as if the killer knew that Carter would come after him. The last time Carter had talked to an FBI suit, the unofficial word was that Bauer was considered probably dead, his mind having disintegrated to the point that he could no longer exist. Like Jack the Ripper, the reporter had been told.

  Carter didn’t buy it. Bauer was not a disorganized killer like Dahmer, so mentally ill that eventually he would be unable to cover his crimes, so disturbed that his fantasies and murders would hang on him like crimson flags. No. Georg Bauer was a student of torture and sexual violence, and he carried his tools with him so that he might always be prepared if an opportunity arose, but he was not careless. Having been caught once, and liberated by chance, he would not be caught again. Unlike Bundy who’d thought himself above catching, Bauer did not have arrogance. He had confidence. He was still out there, had found a quiet way to satisfy his blood lust, and he would not surface if he could help it. He would know Carter just as well as Carter knew him, and he would know Carter was waiting.

  If Carter’s current existence could be so optimistically described. He shrugged his shoulders which felt as though something incredibly heavy bowed them down, stiffening his neck, and turned the corner, that much nearer to a good cup of coffee.

  He should go home, his story had been filed, and there was nothing left for him to do, but he did not want to be alone. The story hadn’t been nice, he knew it when he’d been sent out. That didn’t matter, but there were times when he wanted it to be nice. He knew his readers needed that pat ending, that Disney flare, that hope for a rainbow-colored fade-out.

  A toddler had gone down in a gang shoot-out. Pronounced brain-dead here at Mount Mercy, the family had been talked into donating the youngster’s organs so that not all had been lost, but Carter got no satisfaction out of the gesture. He couldn’t escape the image of the mother, her dusky skin darkened further around her eyes and mouth from crying. This was one gun the toy exchange hadn’t swept up, one life the Rebuild L.A. committee couldn’t save, one more death to be mourned as unnecessary. His story would not be exceptional. Ibie Walker would be up on his feet in council and exhort the neighborhoods to come together, to stop children killing children, but even that gentle black giant, that elderly African-American statesman would not be able to stem the tide.

  He could hear low voices drifting from the lounge, and slowed his step to listen, a newspaperman, a reporter always, an eavesdropper by profession.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “Moreno wants a statement if I can get it out of her.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “The old man? In a coma now, ICU’s got him. He was muttering when the EMTs got there, but I dunno.” A pause. “Looks like they just beat the shit out of each other, but then there’s the hair—”

  “Oh, yeah? Think it’s the Blue killer?”

  Carter stopped in the corridor, turning his head slightly to focus better. He recognized instantly what the cops referred to, for it was cops talking in the lounge, the pitch and tone of their voices unmistakable even in Southern California. No civilian spoke like a cop spoke.

  There was another stalker out there, someone as deadly as the Hillside Strangler or the Nightstalker, and this was someone they’d dubbed Mr. Blue. It wasn’t Bauer, Carter had determined that early on, unless Bauer had changed his tastes a great deal, but he hadn’t been able to determine much else about the killer, and he had yet to be able to access VICAP successfully. L.A.’s finest were sitting on this one, and so was he, until he found out more.

  But he did know, as the police did, although none of them were sure the killer himself realized it, that he had a predilection toward slate or blue-gray houses. Just as Ramirez, the Nightstalker, had subconsciously chosen victims who lived in light yellow or beige houses, Mr. Blue was drawn by wedgewood. Wedgewood and women left home alone, for one reason or another.

  The speaker made a slight noise, shifting his weight in the lounge chair no doubt, for it squeaked with a protesting echo a second after. “Could be,” he said. “She had some hair cut, sawed off her scalp, just behind her ear, real recently.”

  “Thought he didn’t like to take souvenirs until after they were dead. And I thought the profile had the perp figured as a young man.”

  There was a pause, a shrug on the conversation, and Carter knew he couldn’t stand there in the corridor much longer. Someone was bound to discover him. He backed up a couple of strides, coughed, and then went on in.

  The two officers had subsided to idle chitchat when he entered the lounge. He went straight to the coffeepot, and watched the lines of their bodies ease slightly as he passed them. “Gentlemen,” he said, as he picked up the pot and poured himself a large styro cup full. “Long day.”

  He did not know their names, for the L.A. Basin beat was a massive one, but they knew him; hence the silence. He would not get around that tonight or, at least, not easily.

  “What brings you here, Windy?” the younger cop asked, conversationally. He had put his feet up on a second chair.

  The older cop had been hunched over his coffee. He looked up with eyes that reminded Carter of fried eggs. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “How much did you hear?”

  His partner did a barely perceptible double take, then flushed all the way to the collar of his uniform. He dropped his feet to the floor and hunched up to the table in an unconscious echo of his elder.

  Carter stirred the brew around to cool it, because he drank it black, for the aroma and the bitter jolt of it. He shrugged. “Enough.” He pulled up a chair and straddled it, not too close to the patrolmen, but not too far away, either. “You can relax. I’m here for the drive by.”

  “We heard he was in the chop shop.”

  He controlled his reaction to the term. “Yeah. The family decided to donate everything.” He swallowed, felt hot liquid surge down his throat. “Good copy. But it never should have happened.” He looked at the morose senior cop. “So what was it—a domestic or Mr. Blue?”

  “Can’t tell you anything.” The cop hid his face behind the two big, callused hands curled around his cup.

  “I know you don’t know, but what’s your best guess?”

  “My best guess,” the man said heavily, as he pulled himself to his feet and signaled his partner to get up as well, “is that we wouldn’t have serial killers if the media didn’t give them so much publ
icity. Just like shooters and carjackers. News is a billion dollar business, and, God knows, you wouldn’t want to miss any. Why don’t you go chase the Feds? I heard Nelson and you go back a ways.”

  Carter felt the corners of his mouth pull back in a humorless smile. “We haven’t written word one about this guy yet, but you’ve still got a string of bodies laid out at the county morgue. And I don’t think you have a chance in hell of blaming us for what happened to John Nelson.”

  The younger cop grunted in agreement, but his fellow officer took a deep breath.

  “Maybe you want to bring the copycats out of the woodwork, too. Maybe you’d like to sign up broadcast rights before someone else sells out. Maybe you’d like to get in my way while I try to do my job.” The cop’s chin jutted out belligerently.

  Carter tilted his head back. “Don’t worry, boys, I don’t intend to muddy the waters. I’m not asking for anything you won’t be making public later. But I’ll wait a while longer. When the department’s ready to let go, just make sure I’m first in line, okay? And if there’s any line at all on Nelson, anything, I’d like to know. But right now, I’m letting both you and the Feds do their jobs.”