Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

Then the surgeon said, “Ryan, the best man on that list of therapists is Sidney -”

“No therapist, Dr. Hobb. A photo.”

“But really-”

“A photo and a name, Dr. Hobb. Please. This is so important.”

“Ryan, some families prefer the recipients of their loved one’s organs to know who gave them the gift of life.”

“That’s all I want.”

“But many other families prefer that they-and the donor-remain anonymous. They want no thanks, and their grief is private.”

“I understand, Doctor. And in most cases I would respect that position. But this is an extraordinary situation.”

“With all due respect, it’s unreasonable to-”

“I’m in a position where I can’t take no for an answer. I really can’t. I just can’t.”

“Ryan, I’m the surgeon who removed her heart and transplanted it to you, and even I’m not privy to her name. The family wants its privacy.”

“Somebody in the medical system knows her name and can find her next of kin. I just want a chance to ask the family to change their minds.”

“Perhaps it was the donor’s explicit condition that her name not be revealed. The family may feel morally powerless to override the wishes of the deceased.”

Ryan took a deep breath. “Not to be indelicate, Doctor, but with the jet fees and medical expenses, I’ve spent a million six hundred thousand, and I’ll need expensive follow-up care all my life.”

“Ryan, this is awkward. And not like you.”

“No, wait. Please understand. Every penny this cost me was well spent, no charge was excessive. I’m alive, after all. I’m just trying to put this in perspective. With all the costs, no insurance, I’d still like to offer five hundred thousand to her family if they’ll provide her photo and her name.”

“My God,” Hobb said.

“They may be offended,” Ryan said. “I think you are. They may tell me to go to hell. Or you will. But it’s not that I think I can buy anything I want. It’s just…I’m in a corner. I’ll be grateful to anyone who can help me, who has the decency and mercy to help me.”

Dougal Hobb, the storm-tossed sailing ship, and Ryan shared a long silence, as if the surgeon were mentally cutting open the situation to explore it further.

Then Hobb said, “I could try to help you, Ryan. But I can’t fly blind. If I knew at least something about your problem…”

Ryan reached for an explanation with which the physician might not be able to sympathize but to which he might accord a higher value than the absolute privacy of the donor’s family.

“Call it a spiritual crisis, Doctor. That she died and I lived, though she was certainly a better person than I am. I know myself well enough to be sure of that. And so it haunts me. I’m not able to sleep. I’m exhausted. I need to…to be able to properly honor her.”

After another incisive silence, the surgeon said, “You don’t mean to honor her in a public way.”

“No, sir. I don’t. The media never got wind of my illness, the transplant. I don’t want my health problems to be public knowledge.”

“You mean honor her…say, as a Catholic might honor someone by having a Mass said for her.”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.”

“Are you a Catholic, Ryan?”

“No, Doctor. But that’s the kind of thing I mean.”

“There’s someone I could talk to,” Hobb acknowledged. “He has the full file on the donor. He could put the question before them. Before the family.”

“I would be grateful. You can’t know how grateful.”

“They might be willing to provide a photograph. Even a first name. But if the family doesn’t want you to have her last name or contact information for them, would you be satisfied?”

“The photo would be enormously…comforting. Anything they can do for me. I’d be grateful for anything.”

“This is highly unusual,” Hobb said. “But I must admit it’s happened before. And we resolved it that time. It all depends on the family.”

The woman with the lilies wanted to torment Ryan, to carve his nerves to ribbons before she put a sharp blade through his heart. Before further violence, she would most likely give him at least a day to consider the shallow incision in his side, to anticipate his next wound.

Night and rain were her allies. Twenty-four hours from now, she would have the collaboration of both.

“One more thing, Doctor. The photo and whatever else the family will share-I need it as soon as possible. Twelve hours or sooner would be ideal.”

If Dougal Hobb whetted his scalpel on those words, he decided not to cut with it. After a silence, he said only, “Spiritual crises often last years, even a lifetime. There’s usually not an urgency about them.”

“This one is different,” Ryan said. “Thank you for your help and your thoughtfulness, Doctor.”

The filet mignon cut like butter.

As he ate, Ryan wondered about the woman’s expertise with the switchblade. She maneuvered him with the lilies, inflicting precisely the wound she intended.

Had she cut deeper, he would have needed medical assistance. She sliced shallow enough to leave him with the option of treating the wound himself-and evidently expected that he would.

Although she might prove herself a killer when the time came, she remained for now a death tease. She wanted this game to last, inflicting the maximum psychological torture before gutting him-if gutting was the only thing she had in mind.

The confidence and delicacy with which she wielded the knife might have been learned on the street, but Ryan suspected she was not anything as common as a gang girl. The bloody business in the shopping-mall parking lot had been not butchery but switchblade ballet.

Unsettling as the encounter had been, he was glad for it.

As recently as the previous evening, he had required himself to consider the possibility that these new incidents-the hooded watcher in the rain of whom no security-camera proof existed, the tiny candy hearts and the inscribed gold heart pendant, which were no longer in his possession-were delusional, as the strange events more than a year earlier had evidently been delusional, and were related to his current battery of twenty-eight medications.

He had rejected that possibility, which of course had been his subjective and perhaps unreliable opinion. The wound in his left side counted as objective proof sufficient to settle the issue.

After dinner, he returned the food-service cart, with the dirty dishes, to the landing, and buzzed Mrs. Amory to retrieve it.

For an hour, he nursed a second glass of Opus One and paged through Samantha’s novel, spot-reading passages, as other men in a crisis might open the Bible at random and read verses in the hope of receiving divine guidance.

At nine o’clock, he went to the Crestron panel embedded in the wall of the master-suite foyer and accessed the security cameras. He toured all the interior hallways, and when he found every one of them dark, he assumed the Amorys had retired to their private quarters for the night.

On the lowest floor of the house, in the service hall that led to the laundry, he unlocked the storage room that he had visited the previous evening, and quietly closed the door behind him. He unlocked the tall metal cabinet that contained the security-camera recorders, and he switched on the monitor.

Back then, when he had first reviewed the recording that should have captured the hooded figure in the rain, the phantom’s absence rattled him. At that time, of course, he had not yet been confronted by a switchblade diva, and still had reason to wonder if his outré experiences owed anything to pharmaceuticals.