Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

Paying for Laura's care had been not a burden, but the purpose of his existence. Even if these men believed him, however, he would till see the keen edge of suspicion sheathed in their sympathy.

One of the cops stepped forward as Noah followed Vasquez to the front door. "Mr. Farrel, I've got to ask you if you're carrying."

He had pulled on chinos and a Hawaiian shirt. The holster was in the small of his back. "Yeah, but I've got a permit for it."

"Yes, sir, I know. If you'll trust me with it, I'll return it to you when you leave."

Noah hesitated.

"You were in my shoes once, Mr. Farrel. If you think about it, you'll realize you'd do the same."

Noah wasn't sure why he had strapped on the pistol. He didn't always carry it. He didn't usually carry it. When he'd left home, after Martin Vasquez's call, he hadn't been thinking clearly.

He surrendered the handgun to the young officer.

Although the lobby was deserted, Vasquez said, "We'll have privacy in my office," and indicated a short hallway off to the left.

Noah didn't follow him.

Directly ahead, the door stood open between the lobby and the long main corridor of the ground-floor residential wing. At the far end, more men gathered outside of Laura's room. None wore a uniform. Detectives. Specialists with the scientific-investigation division.

Returning to Noah's side, Vasquez said, "They'll let us know when you can see your sister."

A morgue gurney waited near her room.

"Wendy Quail," Noah guessed, referring to the perky raven-haired nurse who had been serving ice cream sundaes a few hours ago.

On the phone, he had been given only the essence of the tragedy. Laura dead. Gone quickly. No suffering.

Now, Martin Vasquez expressed surprise. "Who told you?"

So his instinct had been right. And he hadn't trusted it. Ice cream wasn't the answer, after all. Love was the answer. Tough love, in this case. One of the Circle of Friends had indulged in a little tough love, teaching Noah what happens to the sisters of men who think they're too good to accept airsickness bags full of cash.

In his mind's eye, Noah imagined himself squeezing the trigger and the congressman contorting in agony around a gut wound.

He could do it, too. He was without a purpose now. A man needed worthwhile work to occupy his time. In the absence of anything more meaningful, maybe revenge would suffice.

Receiving no answer to his question, Vasquez said, "Her resume was impressive. And her commitment to nursing. Several excellent letters of recommendation. She said she wanted to work in a less stressful atmosphere than a hospital."

For seventeen years, since Laura was beaten out of this world but not all the way into the next, Noah had pretended that he wasn't a Farrel, that he was an outsider in his criminal family, just as Laura had been an outsider, that he was cleaner of heart than those who had conceived him, capable of being redeemed. But with his sister twice lost and beyond recovery, he could see no reason to resist embracing his true dark nature.

"But caught," said Vasquez, "she admitted everything. She's been a nurse in neonatal-care units at three hospitals. Each time, just when someone might begin to wonder if all the infant deaths pointed to something worse than just nature's work, she changed jobs."

Killing the congressman wouldn't give Noah a new cup from which to drink, but the pleasure of that murder might be sweet enough to mask, for a while, the bitterness here at the bottom of his life.

"She admits to sixteen babies. She doesn't think what she's done is wrong. She calls those murders her 'little mercies.' "

He had been listening to Vasquez but hardly hearing what was said. At last a measure of the man's meaning penetrated. "Mercies?"

"She chose infants with health problems. Or sometimes just those who looked weak. Or whose parents seemed dirt poor and ignorant. She says she was sparing them from lives of suffering."

Noah's instinct had been half right. The nurse was bent, but not by the Circle of Friends. Yet their roots grew from the same swamp of self-importance and excess self-esteem. He knew their kind too well.

"Between the third neonatal unit and here," Vasquez said, "she worked at a nursing home. Euthanized five elderly patients without arousing suspicion. She's. proud of those, too. Not only no remorse, but also no shame at all. She seems to expect us to admire her for. for her compassion, she would call it."

The congressman's evil was born of greed, envy, and a lust for power, which was a logical wickedness that Noah understood. That was the evil of his old man, of Uncle Crank.

The nurse's irrational idealism, on the other hand, incited only cold contempt and disgust, not a raging desire for revenge. Without a banquet of vengeance to sustain him, Noah felt starved of purpose once more.

"Another member of the staff walked in on Nurse Quail when she was.. finishing with your sister. Otherwise, we wouldn't have known."

At the far end of the long corridor, a guy wheeled the gurney into Laura's room.

Rolling through Noah's head came a sound like distant thunder or the faraway roar of a great cataract, soft though charged with power.

He passed through the door between the lobby and the residential hallway. Martin Vasquez called to him, reminding him that the police had restricted access to this area.

Approaching the nurses' station, Noah was met by a uniformed officer who attempted to turn him back.

"I'm family."

"I know that, sir. Won't be much longer."

"Yeah. It'll be now."

When Noah tried to move past him, the cop put a hand on his shoulder. Noah wrenched loose, didn't take a swing, but kept going.

The young officer followed, grabbed him again, and they would have gotten physical then, because the cop had no choice, but mainly because Noah wanted to hit someone. Or maybe he wanted to be hit, hard and repeatedly, because physical pain might distract him from an anguish for which there was neither numbing medication nor any prospect of healing.

Before any punches were thrown, one of the detectives farther along the hall said, "Let him through."

The roar of live Niagaras still echoed from a distance in Noah's mind, and though this internal sound was no louder than before, the voices of the men around him were muffled by it.

"I can't let you alone with her," the detective said. "There's an autopsy gotta be done, and you know I'll have to show we've had continuous possession of the evidence."

The corpse was evidence. Like a spent bullet or a bloody hammer. Laura had ceased to be a person. She was an object now, a thing.

The detective said, "Don't want to give that crazy bitch's attorney any chance to say someone tampered with the remains before we got toxicology back."

Crazy bitch instead of defendant, instead of the accused. No need to be politically correct here, as later in court.

If the attorney could sell the crazy without the bitch, however, then the nurse might do light time in a progressive mental facility with a swimming pool, TVs in every room, classes in arts and crafts, and sessions with a therapist not to analyze her homicidal compulsion but to ensure that she maintained high self-esteem.

Juries were stupid. Maybe they hadn't always been, but they were stupid these days. Kids killed their parents, resorted to the orphan defense, and a reliable percentage of jurors grew teary-eyed.

Noah couldn't rekindle his fury either with the prospect of the nurse remanded to a country-club sanitarium or with the possibility that she would be entirely acquitted.

The distant roar in his head wasn't the sound of building rage. He didn't know what it was, but he couldn't shut it off, and it scared him. Laura on the bed. In yellow pajamas. Either she had come out of her cataleptic trance sufficiently to dress for sleep or perhaps the nurse had changed her, brushed her hair, and arranged her artfully as a courtesy before the killing.