Dark Rivers of the Heart (30 page)

The unthinkable suddenly seemed inevitable. Large portions of the desert were all shale and volcanic rock and quartzite, but he had the misfortune to be caught in a cloudburst while traveling over a fathomless sea of sand. Unless a hidden spine of rock was buried between the two arroyos, the intervening land might indeed be washed away and the entire plain recontoured, depending on how long the storm raged at its current intensity.

The impossibly heavy downfall abruptly grew heavier still.

He sprinted for the Explorer, clambered inside, and pulled his door shut. Shivering, streaming water, he backed the truck farther from the northern arroyo, afraid that the wheels would be undermined.

With head still downcast, from under his lowered brow, Rocky looked up worriedly at his master.

“Have to drive between arroyos, east or west,” Spencer thought aloud, “while there’s still something to drive
on.
”

The windshield wipers weren’t coping well with the cascades that poured across the glass, and the rain-blurred landscape settled into deeper degrees of false twilight. He tried turning the wiper control to a higher setting. It was already as high as it would go.

“Shouldn’t head toward lower land. Water’s gaining velocity as it goes. More likely to wash out down there.”

He switched the headlamps to high beams. The extra light didn’t clarify anything: It bounced off the skeins of rain, so the way ahead seemed to be obscured by curtain after curtain of mirrored beads. He selected the low beams again.

“Safer ground uphill. Ought to be more rock.”

The dog only trembled.

“The space between arroyos will probably widen out.”

Spencer shifted gears again. The plain sloped gradually up to the west, into obscure terrain.

As giant needles of lightning stitched the heavens to the earth, he drove into the resultant narrow pocket of gloom.

At Roy Miro’s direction, agents in San Francisco were seeking Ethel and George Porth, the maternal grandparents who had raised Spencer Grant following the death of his mother. Meanwhile, Roy drove to the offices of Dr. Nero Mondello in Beverly Hills.

Mondello was the most prominent plastic surgeon in a community where God’s work was revised more frequently than anywhere except Palm Springs and Palm Beach. On a misshapen nose, he could perform miracles equivalent to those that Michelangelo had performed on giant cubes of Carrara marble—though Mondello’s fees were substantially higher than those of the Italian master.

He had agreed to make changes in a busy schedule to meet with Roy, because he believed that he was assisting the FBI in a desperate search for a particularly savage serial killer.

They met in the doctor’s spacious inner office: white marble floor, white walls and ceiling, white shell sconces. Two abstract paintings hung in white frames: The only color was white, and the artist achieved his effects solely with the textures of the heavily layered pigment. Two whitewashed lacewood chairs with white leather cushions flanked a glass-and-steel table and stood before a whitewashed burled-wood desk, against a backdrop of white silk draperies.

Roy sat in one of the lacewood chairs, like a blot of soil in all that whiteness, and wondered what view would be revealed if the draperies were opened. He had the crazy notion that beyond the window, in downtown Beverly Hills, lay a landscape swaddled in snow.

Other than the photographs of Spencer Grant that Roy had brought with him, the only object on the polished surface of the desk was a single blood-red rose in a Waterford cut-crystal vase. The flower was a testament to the possibility of perfection—and drew the visitor’s attention to the man who sat beyond it, behind the desk.

Tall, slender, handsome, fortyish, Dr. Nero Mondello was the focal point of his bleached domain. With his thick jet-black hair combed back from his forehead, warm-toned olive complexion, and eyes the precise purple-black of ripe plums, the surgeon had an impact almost as powerful as that of a spirit manifestation. He wore a white lab coat over a white shirt and red silk necktie. Around the face of his gold Rolex, matched diamonds sparkled as though charged with supernatural energy.

The room and the man were no less impressive for being blatantly theatrical. Mondello was in the business of replacing nature’s truth with convincing illusions, and all good magicians were theatrical.

Studying the DMV photograph of Grant and the computer-generated portrait, Mondello said, “Yes, this would have been a dreadful wound, quite terrible.”

“What might’ve caused it?” Roy asked.

Mondello opened a desk drawer and removed a magnifying glass with a silver handle. He studied the photographs more closely.

At last he said, “It was more a cut than a tear, so it must have been a relatively sharp instrument.”

“A knife?”

“Or glass. But it wasn’t an entirely even cutting edge. Very sharp but slightly irregular like glass—or a serrated blade. An even blade would produce a cleaner wound and a narrower scar.”

Watching Mondello pore over the photographs, Roy realized that the surgeon’s facial features were so refined and so uncannily well proportioned that a talented colleague had been at work on them.

“It’s a cicatricial scar.”

“Excuse me?” Roy said.

“Connective tissue that’s contracted—pinched or wrinkled,” Mondello said, without looking up from the photographs. “Though this one is relatively smooth, considering its width.” He returned the magnifying glass to the drawer. “I can’t tell you much more—except that it’s not a recent scar.”

“Could surgery eliminate it, skin grafts?”

“Not entirely, but it could be made far less visible, just a thin line, a thread of discoloration.”

“Painful?” Roy asked.

“Yes, but this”—he tapped the photo—“wouldn’t require a long series of surgeries over a number of years, as burns might.”

Mondello’s face was exceptional because the proportions were so studied, as though the guiding aesthetic behind his surgery had been not merely the intuition of an artist but the logical rigor of a mathematician. The doctor had remade himself with the same iron control that great politicians applied to society to transform its imperfect citizens into better people. Roy had long understood that human beings were so deeply flawed that no society could have perfect justice without imposing mathematically rigorous planning and stern guidance from the top. Yet he’d never perceived, until now, that his passion for ideal beauty and his desire for justice were both aspects of the same longing for Utopia.

Sometimes Roy was amazed by his intellectual complexity.

“Why,” he asked Mondello, “would a man live with that scar if it could be made all but invisible? Aside, that is, from being unable to pay for the surgery.”

“Oh, cost wouldn’t be a deterrent. If the patient had no money and the government wouldn’t pay, he’d still receive treatment. Most surgeons have always dedicated a portion of their professional time to charity work like this.”

“Then why?”

Mondello shrugged and pushed the photographs across the desk. “Perhaps he’s afraid of pain.”

“I don’t think so. Not this man.”

“Or afraid of doctors, hospitals, sharp instruments, anesthesia. There are countless phobias that prevent people from having surgery.”

“This man’s not a phobic personality,” Roy said, returning the photos to the manila envelope.

“Could be guilt. If he lived through an accident in which others were killed, he could have survivor’s guilt. Especially if loved ones died. He feels he’s no better than they were, and he wonders why he was spared when they were taken. He feels guilty just for living. Suffering with the scar is a way of atoning.”

Frowning, Roy got to his feet. “Maybe.”

“I’ve had patients with that problem. They didn’t want surgery because survivor’s guilt led them to feel they deserved their scars.”

“That doesn’t sound right, either. Not for this guy.”

“If he’s not either phobic or suffering from survivor’s guilt,” said Mondello, coming around the desk and walking Roy to the door, “then you can bet it’s guilt over
something.
He’s punishing himself with the scar. Reminding himself of something he would like to forget but feels obligated to remember. I’ve seen that before as well.”

As the surgeon talked, Roy studied his face, fascinated by the finely honed bone structure. He wondered how much of the effect had been achieved with real bone and how much with plastic implants, but he knew that it would be gauche to ask.

At the door, he said, “Doctor, do you believe in perfection?”

Pausing with his hand on the doorknob, Mondello appeared mildly puzzled. “Perfection?”

“Personal and societal perfection. A better world.”

“Well…I believe in always striving for it.”

“Good.” Roy smiled. “I knew you did.”

“But I don’t believe it can be achieved.”

Roy’s smile froze. “Oh, but I’ve seen perfection now and then. Not perfection in the whole of anything, perhaps, but in part.”

Mondello smiled indulgently and shook his head. “One man’s idea of perfect order is another man’s chaos. One man’s vision of perfect beauty is another man’s notion of deformity.”

Roy did not appreciate such talk. The implication was that any Utopia was also Hell. Eager to convince Mondello of an alternate view, he said, “Perfect beauty exists in nature.”

“There’s always a flaw. Nature abhors symmetry, smoothness, straight lines, order—all the things we associate with beauty.”

“I recently saw a woman with perfect hands. Flawless hands, without a blemish, exquisitely shaped.”

“A cosmetic surgeon looks at the human form with a more critical eye than other people do. I’d have seen a lot of flaws, I’m sure.”

The doctor’s smugness irritated Roy, and he said, “I wish I’d brought those hands to you—the one, anyway. If I’d brought it, if you’d seen it, you would have agreed.”

Suddenly Roy realized that he had come close to revealing things that would have necessitated the surgeon’s immediate execution.

Concerned that his agitated state of mind would lead him to make another and more egregious error, Roy dawdled no longer. He thanked Mondello for his cooperation, and he got out of the white room.

In the medical building parking lot, the February sunshine was more white than golden, with a harsh edge, and a border of palm trees cast eastward-leaning shadows. The afternoon was turning cool.

As he twisted the key in the ignition and started the car, his pager beeped. He checked the small display window, saw a number with the prefix of the regional offices in downtown Los Angeles, and made the call on his cellular phone.

They had big news for him. Spencer Grant had almost been chased down in Las Vegas; he was now on the run, overland, across the Mojave Desert. A Learjet was standing by at LAX to take Roy to Nevada.

Driving up the barely perceptible slope between two rushing rivers, on a steadily narrowing peninsula of sodden sand, searching for an intruding formation of rock on which to batten down and wait out the storm, Spencer was hampered by decreasing visibility. The clouds were so thick, so black, that daylight on the desert was as murky as that a few fathoms under any sea. Rain fell in Biblical quantities, overwhelming the windshield wipers, and although the headlights were on, clear glimpses of the ground ahead were brief.

Great fiery lashes tortured the sky. The blinding pyrotechnics escalated into nearly continuous chain lightning, and brilliant links rattled down the heavens as though an evil angel, imprisoned in the storm, were angrily testing his bonds. Even then, the inconstant light illuminated nothing while swarms of stroboscopic shadows flickered across the landscape, adding to the gloom and confusion.

Suddenly, ahead and a quarter mile to the west, at ground level, a blue light appeared as if from out of another dimension. At once, it moved off to the south at high speed.

Spencer squinted through rain and shadow, trying to discern the nature and size of the light source. The details remained obscure.

The blue traveler turned east, proceeded a few hundred yards, then swung north toward the Explorer. Spherical. Incandescent.