Ridley Pearson - The Angel Maker

She trudged around to the basement door and knocked. It was colder in the fog. She was shivering by the time he answered.

He locked the door securely behind her and started giving orders before he even said hello. "Run the blood tests, will you? Then scrub up and prep him please. Right kidney and spleen." "Both?"

He stopped, turned, and looked her in the eye. "Are you questioning me?" It was just a flicker, just something passing across his eyes like a reflection on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, but it ran her blood cold. There was an implied threat behind this question of his. There was someone else someone she didn't know-behind his eyes. just a flicker, then gone, like the tics when they had first started. "Right kidney and spleen," she repeated obediently. "Good," he said, turning his back on her. He had one of those tics then. His head snapped violently toward his lifting shoulder, remained pinched there, intractable, and finally relaxed. She wanted to offer her hands to him-to rub the knots out of his back. She knew the pain of these tics because she had witnessed his face recently all the muscles twitching and distorting like some kind of Halloween mask. It just had to hurt. A short backrub was just the thing for him. But she didn't offer it. They didn't talk about the tics; they both pretended they never happened at all.

She had to think: Was that the way their moment of intimacy was to be as well? As if it had never happened at all? It had happened right here in this room, and now she was to go parading about her work as Pam the Helper. Pam the Lover was apparently lost in the shadows. Burned to a crisp along with all the other contaminated waste.

He was starting to give her the creeps, the way he was so silent over there.

The donor was a black male between twenty-five and thirty. He was naked, face up, eyes open from the Ketamine, which paralyzed him but didn't actually render him unconscious. She was used to those eyes now, but at first they had really terrified her. Elden used Ketamine on all the donors, despite the dangers, because of its effect on memory. On some, he followed this up with electroshock. She didn't approve, but she understood.

That was how she felt about much of this. Elden's strength, his power of conviction, left little room for argument. She noticed this man's upper arm then, and like so often in her life, words came babbling out before she could control them. "My God, Elden! What happened to his arm?"

"His arm! Did Donnie do this to his arm?"

"Donnie?"

"It's a mess.

Lacerated, bruised. It might even be broken by the look of it."

"Yes, I noticed that. Perhaps we can help. But not now. Hmm?

Right kidney and spleen, Pamela. Are you ready for me or not?"

The image of him, framed against the silvery plastic wall, was something surreal, something not of this world. It seemed fitting somehow, for a man of such talents.

She collected herself and asked, "Do you want me to dress it?"

"Prep him," he instructed. He never did pay much attention to what she said. He was in a mood today. More and more so in the last few days. You couldn't reach him when he was in a mood, so she gave up trying. She drew several samples of blood, labeled them, started the HIV test on one of them, the hepatitis A and B test on another, and placed the third in the waist-high fridge. There were a number of drugs missing from the door of the fridge. She was about to mention this when she caught herself. Antibiotics mostly. Some Demerol and Valium, too. The thought briefly crossed her mind that perhaps Elden was experimenting with the drugs himself; perhaps this helped to explain his recent erratic behavior. But not Demerol and Valium, she corrected herself. If anything, he seemed wound up and agitated of late, more like on an amphetamine high.

Donnie had probably stolen them; he was always sneaking drugs.

Elden knew it, just as she did. They both did their best to police their supplies, but Elden never called Donnie on it unless he caught him in the act, and then he barely slapped his hand. A strange relationship existed between those two that she would never understand; why Elden would tolerate a man like that was beyond her.

She soaped and shaved the black man's side. Elden helped her to roll him over and she continued the procedure on his back.

"I made all the necessary arrangements," he said. "That is, Maybeck did," he corrected her. "You'll be back by this evening. I've written it all down." He hurried over to the work area and returned with a note written in his own handwriting, not Donnie's. Donnie could barely write at all. Elden never made the flight arrangements. "You'll meet Juanita at the gate. The regular flight to Rio. Same as always."

"All right," she said, accepting the itinerary from him; but it felt wrong. Everything about this felt wrong. Was it just her? she wondered-expectations carried over from their encounter Saturday night? "Now then," he said from over by the sink. He doused his hands in antiseptic and then snapped on a pair of surgical gloves. He turned his back to her to have her tie his mask in place, which she did. "All set?"

"I'm worried about you," she said softly to his back. She placed her hand gently on his shoulder. It was something she could never say while facing him.

There was a long, heavy silence in which she could hear the deep breathing of the man on the table behind her. She heard the plastic ceiling crinkle as it warmed. Neither she nor Elden was breathing. What she had said had stopped them both.

Finally his head bobbed slightly. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs completely, and said in a ghostly whisper, "It's him I'd worry about." The way he said it frightened her. "Elden?" His voice returned; he reminded her, "The patient always comes first."

L L They rose above the city, climbing an on-ramp at the end of Columbia that connected to the viaduct, then headed south toward the docks and Boeing Field. You could see the next wave of rain out over the water, hanging above the stunning green of Bainbridge Island-a mare's tail stretching down, a light gray mist feathered beneath charcoal clouds. If you didn't mind rain, it was a beautiful sight. If you minded rain, you didn't live here in February and March. Boldt turned on the wipers to fend off the spray from a van ahead of them.

Daphne crossed her legs and leaned over to check the speedometer.

"I don't like driving fast," Boldt explained. "That's an understatement," she said. "At first I thought there was something wrong with this thing." She had asked to come along with him at the last second. Boldt had warned her it might be a long meeting, but she had persisted. He'd been wondering when she would tell him whatever it was that couldn't wait.

Finally, his patience ran out. "So what's up?"

"I hate being wrong," she complained. "It doesn't come easy."

"You, wrong?"

"I had that talk with Cindy Chapman. I wanted to run Agnes Rutherford's descriptions of the two men by her-the grating voice, the bad breath. There are tricks you can play with the mind. Subtle ways to make it safe for a person to remember something they would rather not remember." Boldt asked, "Where the hell is the toxicology report on Chapman?

The blood workup? "Are you interested in this or not?"

"Go ahead."

"She remembers Sharon and me tending to her at The Shelter. She's very clear on that. I worked with her on the events before the surgery. Could she remember being abducted? Could she remember faces, voices, surroundings? A week before, a day before, an hour before? As it turned out, you were right about the money." She added, "That's what I mean about my being wrong. I was convinced you were wrong about that."

His hands were sweating against the wheel. He rolled down the window for some air. "They paid her for the kidney?" he asked. "It was a business arrangement. They offered her five hundred dollars." "Five hundred?" he asked incredulously. "I thought the going rate is fifteen thousand. That's quite a mark-up." "And there's no proof she ever received it."