Michael Palmer - Extreme Measures

Their escape through a back door of the mortuary had seemed unnoticed.

But still, Bernard had driven around for nearly an hour, making absolutely certain no one was following them. Finally they parked in the alley behind his building and entered through the basement. Only when they were in his office with the curtains drawn did they begin to examine what they had gathered from Donald Devine's safe.

Before they did, however, Bernard placed a brief, anonymous call to the Boston police, suggesting that someone stop by the Gates of Heaven.

"Where could he be?" Laura asked, concern shadowing her face as she set the receiver down.

"Where did you say his parents lived?"

"Watertown."

"Maybe he went home and stayed over."

"Why wouldn't he have left the number at my hotel, or at least have called back?"

"I don't know, Laura." Nelson rubbed at his eyes.

"Listen, I hope you don't misunderstand what I'm about to say. I know you think a great deal of Eric.

And I suspect from what you've told me that those feelings are not misplaced. -But people are not always what they seem to be. You haven't known him that long. There are any number of things he could be into that he hasn't let you in on."

"Maybe." Laura thought for a moment and then added, "But I don't think so. I think we should go over to his apartment."

Bernard Nelson massaged the back of his neck and once again stretched out on the couch.

"Laura, a couple of days ago in East Boston, some heavies nearly tore the two of you apart. Yesterday afternoon someone probably tried to kill you. There's every reason to believe that whoever they are, they're watching his place as well as yours. If they've already got him, the best thing we could do is wait until they contact us. It's you, and your brother's tape, they're after, not him. If they haven't got him, well, then the best thing we can do is wait anyhow." He forced a smile. "Besides, one break-in a night is my limit."

"I have a key."

Bernard looked up at her and softened.

"Are you sure his phone's working?"

"The operator says it is."

"Well, I still think we're better off getting a couple of hours sleep and at least waiting until it's light. It's just too dangerous, really it is. Trust me on that."

"I'm very worried about him."

"I know you are. Listen, the couch in my waiting room's a fold-out.

Give me just a couple of hours."

"Oh, okay. What about all of this?" she asked, gesturing to the piles of notes, receipts, and ledgers.

"Laura, our late friend generated and squirreled away more paperwork than the Department of Defense. If we couldn't make-any sense of this stuff at tWO A.M our chances are even less at three.

There's something buried in there that's going to shed some light on the man and his basement, I'm certain of that. But frankly, at this point I can barely remember my own name."

"I understand," Laura said.

"Good. In that case you remain the leading candidate to become my apprentice."

"Bernard, before you sleep I want to tell you again how grateful I am for what you've done."

"Cigars, woman. Talk in terms I can relate to."

She smiled. "I haven't forgotten. Listen, why don't you use the fold-out. I'll stay up for a while longer going through this stuff Then I'll try Eric one more time. If we haven't connected with him by, say, six or seven, we can try his place."

"Good enough."

Groaning with the effort, Bernard Nelson pushed himself up, grabbed a pair of old army blankets from his closet, tossed one on the couch, and then lumbered into the waiting room with the other. In minutes, Laura heard the sonorous breathing of exhausted sleep, Then, with a sip of cold stale coffee, she settled in behind the desk.

Bernard had estimated that in their haste to get out of Donald Devine's bedroom he had gotten perhaps half the contents of the safe.

Before they left the mortuary, he had slipped back to the upstairs apartment and verified that, as they suspected, whatever they had left behind had been taken, and the, apartment ransacked. undoubtedly the police would put robbery at the head of their list of motives. Of course there was still the intensive-care room to explain away.

Laura set aside the folder of correspondence and contracts, and concentrated on two ledgers. One of them, dating back six years and replete with names, addresses, payments, and various abbreviations, seemed to be a record of the considerable number of clients Devine had tended to. The other, held closed with a heavy rubber band, was also a list of names and abbreviations. However, between the last page and cover, this one was stuffed with receipts from.various gas stations-at least a hundred of them, and possibly many more than that. Laura set the pile in front of her, made some room, and one at a time smoothed each one out, arranging them by date.

At 5:2.0, with the first light of day Mtering through the curtains, Laura could no longer keep her eyes open. Without even trying to make sense of what she had found, she shuffled to the couch and was asleep almost as her head touched the pillow- Resting on the desk was a calculator, a pad scribbled with figures, and the Rand McNally adas she had extracted from Bernard Nelson's eclectic collection of novels and reference volumes. The atlas was open to a map of the mountain states.

Tucked in the cleft between pages was the pencil she had used to circle a small, sparsely populated area in southeast Utah. n Barred from the spectrophotometry lab by Ivor Blunt, Eric paced about the pathology department's waiting room. From time to time he swore his heart had skipped beats; at other times a breath or two seemed to be heavier than normal. He flexed his fingers and rubbed his hands, wondering if the tingling in them was the first sign of progressive neurotoxicity, or merely the result of his lacerations.

The sergeant from Wayland had turned out to be something of a godsend.

After driving Eric to White Memorial and getting a positive recommendation on him from the head of hospital security, Clarkson had decided to void the criminal charges against him. In exchange, Eric gladly promised to pay the Mobile station owner for repairs to his window and security system.

After Clarkson left for Wayland, Eric had stopped by the emergency room for a confidential talk with the senior resident assigned to Reed Marshall's shifts.

As he rechecked Eric's vital signs and physical exam, the bewildered resident did his best to appear to understand what had happened, but Eric knew he was being patronized. Nor was that reaction surprising.

Until Ivor Blunt confirmed the identity of the teotoxin, Eric was resigned to being very much on his own.

He sat on the arm of a chair and thumbed through a dog-eared copy of People. Like grotesque neon, the leering death's-head face glowed in his mind. Extortion, murder, narcotics, preying on the weak and superstitious-the man or woman behind that mask was a monster. He wondered where Anna Delacroix was, what horrors she was enduring-if in fact she was still alive.

His thoughts were interrupted by voices and a commotion of some sort in the hallway outside the waiting room.

"No, dammit," he heard a man say. "You all stay out here. We'll handle this. When we have something to say to you, we'll say it."

"You have no right," a woman's shrill voice cried.

"We have every right. Now just stay back here before I bust you for interfering."

The glass door to the waiting room was pulled open, and two metropolitan District policemen entered.

"Dr. Najarian?" one of them asked. He was a thin " black man with a creased forehead and kind eyes.

"That's right. Have you found out anything about Anna?"

The policeman, whose name tag identified him as Patrolman Medeiros, flipped a note pad open. Behind him, the other officer, younger and huskier than Medeiros, turned as several people pressed against the door.