Gregg Hurwitz - The Crime Writer

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.