Robin Cook - Terminal

“What’s the matter?” Sean demanded.

Janet sat up. Choking back tears, she said, “There was a man with a knife in my bathroom.” Then she pointed to the open bedroom slider. “He went that way.”

Sean flew to the sliding glass door and whipped back the curtain. Instead of one man, there were two. They came through the door in tandem, roughly shoving Sean back into the room prior to everyone recognizing each other. The newcomers were Gary Engels and another resident who’d responded to Janet’s scream just as Sean had.

Frantically explaining that an intruder had just left, Sean led the two men back out onto the balcony. As they reached the handrail they heard the screech of tires coming from the parking lot behind the building. While Gary and his companion ran for the stairs, Sean returned to Janet.

Janet had recovered to a degree. She’d slipped on a sweatshirt. When Sean entered she was sitting on the edge of the bed finishing an emergency call to the police. Replacing the receiver, she looked up at Sean who was standing above her.

“You okay?” he asked gently.

“I think so,” she said. She was visibly shaking. “God, what a day!”

“I told you you should have stayed with me.” Sean sat next to her and put his arms around her.

In spite of herself, Janet gave a short laugh. Leave it to Sean to try to smooth over any situation with humor. It did feel wonderful to be in his arms.

“I’d heard Miami was a lively city,” she said, taking his lead, “but this is too much.”

“Any idea how the guy got in here?” Sean asked.

“I left the slider in the living room open,” Janet admitted.

“This is learning the hard way,” Sean said.

“In Boston the worst thing that ever happened to me was an obscene phone call,” Janet said.

“Yeah, and I apologized,” Sean said.

Janet smiled and threw her pillow at him.

It took the police twenty minutes to arrive. They pulled up in a squad car with lights flashing but no siren. Two uniformed officers from the Miami police department came up to the apartment. One was a huge bearded black man, the other was a slim Hispanic with a mustache. Their names were Peter Jefferson and Juan Torres. They were solicitous, respectful, and professional as they spent an unhurried half hour going over Janet’s story. When she mentioned that the man was wearing latex rubber gloves, they canceled a crime scene technician who was scheduled to come over after finishing a homicide case.

“The fact that nobody got hurt puts this incident into a different category,” Juan said. “Obviously homicides get more attention.”

“But this could have been a homicide,” Sean protested.

“Hey, we do the best we can with the manpower we got,” Peter said.

While the policemen were still there gathering facts, someone else showed up: Robert Harris.

Robert Harris had carefully cultivated and nurtured a relationship with the Miami police department. Although he decried their lack of discipline and their poor physical shape, characteristics that set in approximately a year subsequent to their graduation from the police academy, Harris was enough of a pragmatist to understand that he needed to be on their good side. And this attack on a nurse at the Forbes residence was a case in point. Had he not developed the connections he had, he probably wouldn’t have heard about the incident until the following morning. As far as Robert was concerned, such a situation would be unacceptable for the head of security.

The call had come from the duty commander while Harris was using his Soloflex machine in front of his TV at home. Unfortunately, there’d been a delay of nearly half an hour following the dispatch of the patrol car, but Harris was not in a position to complain. Arriving late was better than not arriving at all. Harris just didn’t want the case to be cold by the time he got involved.

As Harris had driven to the residence, he thought back to the rape and murder of Sheila Arnold. He couldn’t shake the suspicion — improbable though it might seem — that Arnold’s death was somehow related to the deaths of the breast cancer patients. Harris wasn’t a doctor so he had to go on what Dr. Mason had told him a few months ago, namely that it was his belief that the breast cancer patients were being murdered. The tip-off was the fact that these patients’ faces were blue, a sign they were being somehow smothered.

Dr. Mason had made it clear that getting to the bottom of this situation should be Harris’s primary task. If word leaked to the press, the damage to the Forbes might be irreparable. In fact, Dr. Mason had made it sound like Harris’s tenure depended on a quick and unobtrusive resolution of this potentially embarrassing problem. The quicker that resolution came about, the better for everyone.

But Harris had not made any progress over the last few months. Dr. Mason’s suggestion that the perpetrator was probably a doctor or a nurse had not panned out. Extensive background checks on the professional staff had failed to uncover any suspicious discrepancies or irregularities. Harris’s attempts at keeping an unobtrusive eye on the Forbes breast cancer patients hadn’t turned anything up. Not that he’d been able to keep watch over all of them.

Harris’s suspicion that Miss Arnold’s death was related to the breast cancer patient deaths had hit him the day after her murder while he’d been driving to work. It was then he’d remembered that the day before she was killed a breast cancer patient on her floor had died and turned blue.

What if Sheila Arnold had seen something, Harris wondered. What if she’d witnessed or overheard something whose significance she hadn’t appreciated — something that made the perpetrator feel threatened nonetheless. The idea had seemed reasonable to Harris, although he did wonder if it were the product of a desperate mind.

In any case, Harris’s suspicion hadn’t left him with much to go on. He had learned from the police that a witness had seen a man leaving Miss Arnold’s apartment the night of the murder, but the description had been hopelessly vague: a male of medium height and medium build with brown hair. The witness had not seen the man’s face. In an institution the size of the Forbes Cancer Center, such a description had been of limited use.

So when Harris was told of yet another attack on a Forbes nurse, he again considered a possible connection to the breast cancer deaths. There had been another suspicious blue death on Tuesday.

Harris entered Janet’s apartment eager to talk with her. He was extremely chagrined to find her in the company of the wiseass medical student, Sean Murphy.

Since the police were still questioning the nurse, Harris took a quick look around. He saw the shattered mirror in the bathroom along with the broken hair dryer. He also noticed the panties amid the debris on the floor. Wandering into the living room, he noted the large hole in the screen. It was obvious the screen had been a point of entry, not escape.

“Your witness,” Peter Jefferson joked, coming into the living room. His partner followed in his shadow. Harris had met Peter on several occasions in the past.

“Anything you can tell me?” Harris asked.

“Not a whole lot,” Peter said. “Perp was wearing a nylon stocking over his face. Medium build, medium height. Apparently didn’t say a word. Girl’s lucky. The guy had a knife.”

“What are you going to do?” Harris asked.

Peter shrugged. “The usual,” he said. “We’ll file a report. We’ll see what the sarge says. One way or another it’ll get turned over to an investigative unit. Who knows what they’ll do.” Peter lowered his voice. “No injury, no robbery. It’s not likely this will become a number-one priority. If she’d gotten whacked it’d be a different story.”