Peter Clement: The Inquisitor

The pool of blood where she lay assured him he understood all too well. "I'm going to get something to pry open the roof and get you out." He gently released his hold on her head, and started to wiggle back out the window.

"He's already here."

"What? Who's here."

She reached down to where her clothing appeared to have balled up over her stomach, or so he thought. One by one she removed the crimson-soaked folds, and revealed a round puddle of purple and red chunks. From its center trailed a telltale maroon cord that had been crudely tied off by strips of torn cloth. It looped deeper into her lap where he saw a flash of gleaming pink flesh.

He stared at it, unable to breathe or speak.

"Meet your son," she said, looking down at the infant swaddled in his own afterbirth. The corners of her mouth flickered upward, not in a smile, but tenderness. "He's alive, but just." Her murmuring voice remained flat and as drained of emotion as her body had been of blood. "Take him first. Get him help, then come for me." She looked up at Earl, her features drawn so tightly that a suggestion of the skull beneath emerged before his eyes. She began to gather the child in her hands, about to lift him up.

Already terrified for Janet's life, Earl hung above her, the sight of the baby momentarily paralyzing him. But her stark instructions galvanized him to action. His training, as did hers, allowed no illusions about what they faced. He immediately writhed backward, struggling to extricate himself. "Oh, Janet, Janet, Janet," he breathed, his emotions a cyclone- anguish, love, despair, grief, horror- all spinning out of control.

"He tore me up on the way out. I'm still bleeding badly, and already lost a lot of blood," Janet said, her matter-of-fact tone chilling. No embellishments were necessary. They both knew she lay near death. "The way he came out, so fast, I'm sure Thomas slipped me something to precipitate labor. The easiest would have been misoprostol."

Earl froze. Though no more than halfway out the window, he couldn't have heard right. "Pardon?"

"Thomas did this to me, Earl. Crashed the car. Knocked me out. Probably also injected me with heparin, the way I'm bleeding."

Her spent monotone made what she said all the more unreal. But he didn't need to be told twice. His own paranoid ravings fueled by anxiety an hour earlier had primed him, gotten him well past the it-can't-be stage for anything she might have told him, so that her words fell into place with an authoritative clunk. "Jesus!" he said, and immediately squirmed twice as hard to extricate himself.

"He's been gone for hours- left me here to die."

"He's outside, lying on the ground. He must be playing possum, damn it-"

"What?" Even in her depleted state, her voice suddenly found strength. "Get him! For God's sake, before-" She cut herself off, eyes bulging wide, looking behind him.

No sooner had he propelled himself the rest of the way out the window than his world exploded into white.

But he could still hear Janet as she summoned new powers to scream.

I stood over Garnet's body, squinting down at him as the rain stung my eyes, watching the rise and fall of his chest. Out cold, or pretending?

Janet's scream from the interior of the car stopped abruptly, as if she'd checked herself. In the ghostly illumination of the flashlight, I saw her huddled over, rocking, and heard her murmuring something. Strange that her fury would be strong enough to rise over the roar of the storm, then she'd shut up like that.

But no one could have heard, not with the din of all this rain, I thought, glancing back toward the deserted highway. Neither would people be likely to see us if they did come along. The glare of the van's headlights continued to hit a wall of darkness well before reaching where I stood. Still, with its motor running and being lit up like that, its presence would attract the attention of passing vehicles. Better shut it down, make it appear abandoned at the roadside, as if someone had car trouble. But first…

Tire iron at the ready, my hand shook as I leaned over, lifted Garnet's limp wrist, and felt for a pulse.

My fingertips found the strong throb of a radial artery. Nowhere near dead. And he could be faking the unconscious bit.

Still holding my weapon in the air, in case of a miraculous recovery, I grabbed him by the ankles and began to drag him around the rear of the car. I avoided looking in Janet's direction. The way she swayed back and forth while muttering soft, barely audible noises disturbed me more than the shriek she'd let out earlier.

As I struggled with him over the rocky streambed, my mind raced, obsessively going over the night's events, making sure that in my hastily ad-libbed plans I hadn't left any loose ends.

My initial plan had been rock solid and wasn't supposed to have ended like this. I'd gone to join Earl and Janet for dinner, confident that I could have no better choice of companions at the very time Deloram kicked and choked himself to death. Not that I should have required an alibi. Once someone discovered the body and the police ruled his dying a suicide, there would have been no official suspicion of foul play. But Garnet and Janet might have had niggling doubts about that verdict. So I wanted to stay off their radar by appearing as eager as they were to get at the bottom of things, plus, if Stewart managed to hold on for hours, be by their side at the determined time of death. And if it all worked out, they'd have no formal option but to accept that Stewart died by his own hand, nor would there be any concrete evidence to justify their continued pursuit of the cluster study. But just to be on the safe side, I'd come prepared to give them something else to worry about.

Then Graceton had blindsided me by turning up exactly what I'd been afraid J.S. would eventually realize: the correlation between her shifts and the unexpected deaths in palliative care. That connection could point directly at me, once someone figured out the key, and I couldn't allow it to happen.

So after dinner I'd implemented the plan that I'd originally intended to be a diversion- slipped misoprostol tablets into a steeping pot of tea with no one the wiser, the drug having no effect on me or Earl- and improvised the rest. First I insisted on driving Graceton, to keep her at my side and under my control until I could think of what else to do. Then on the way into St. Paul's the extent of the blackout and the landscape at Ellicott Creek, combined with the blind luck that she couldn't buckle up her seat belt, presented the opportunity to stage a crash that I'd survive and she wouldn't. But it was such a desperate long shot that I didn't dare attempt it without thinking everything through a bit more. Instead I tried to accompany her to J.S.'s bedside, hoping my presence would keep the woman who loved me from saying anything reckless even if she had begun to guess the truth. Then I had to back off that move in the face of Graceton's insistence that she see J.S. alone. My continued persistence on being there might in itself have aroused suspicions.

God, what a back-and-forth, seat-of-the-pants mess everything had become.

I finished tugging Garnet into position, leaving him on his back, his feet perpendicular to the undercarriage of the car, his face lined up to be crushed when I righted the vehicle. Standing over him, I began to tremble again, still frantic that having thrown everything together on the fly, I'd made a misstep that would trap me.

Finish the job, I thought, reining in my nerves, and leaned my weight against the car. The idea was to get it rocking and then pull it on top of Garnet. The Mazda looked precarious enough, sitting on its side. After it smashed his head, no one would notice he'd been knocked out first, and the cops would think he'd toppled it on himself while trying to free Janet.