Dr. O (13 page)

The solution had done its work well, not only keeping the matter preserved and clean, but pliable. He made another cut just as the audience on the TV broke into laughter at something Arsenio said to his guest star, John Candy.

John Candy told Arsenio that he had an Uncle Timmy in Cleveland that wanted to sleep with Hall. More laughter but this time a little nervous.

Ovierto made a neat, near invisible incision in the Adam's apple before him. He worked with surgical gloves on, and beside him, in a clear dish, three shimmering pearls of dubious quality had come to rest at the center.

Candy's punch line came: "But he was talking about Fawn! Fawn!" he repeated. The audience laughed more naturally, if not raucously. But Arsenio had his arms in the air. He didn't get it.

"Fawn Hall, not Arsenio!" said Ovierto, thinking Candy's so-called joke was a stupid blunder and that Arsenio was getting sick of such flak and was slow on the uptake, but that the audience was the worst for laughing at the inane remark. People were sheep, he had decided long ago. Everyone laughed and applauded when a light went on, like Pavlov's dog.

Hall was now trying to elicit some information about Candy's latest picture.

Ovierto pressed into the slit he had made in the apple one shiny pearl. The tweezer had made its deposit perfectly.

"Good," he said to himself, examining the work. Now he just needed to suture it with the finest material he had in his black bag. He went straight to this part of the job, knowing that as the tissue dried it would show more of the suture.

It was fine work, and in anticipation of this part he had secured a large magnifying glass to his head. Candy and Hall's voices continued at the back of his mind, but now he spoke to himself. "Just like the jeweler's work. There... there... yes... yes... yes."

He breathed deeply when he had finished the first one. A glance at his watch told him it was past two. Nerve-racking. He wondered if he could possibly manage all three tonight and get them out in the morning. Debating it was taking up valuable time.

He returned for the second apple in the barrel, continuing the painstaking work. The TV was flashing scenes from an old Bogart movie. He liked Bogart and wondered why he had never been cast in the role of a doctor. He had seen this particular movie when he was just a boy of eleven, he remembered. He hadn't had a bad upbringing, and he had had a great career spread before him when he had finished medical school and had gotten his position under Rosenthaler. But they—Thorpe and the others—they had changed all that... changed him, Rosenthaler among them.

But Rosenthaler had gotten his....

Now serving out his life in a mental hospital not far from here.

But maybe Rosenthaler had suffered enough. Maybe the man ought to be put out of his misery. It had been almost five years, his suffering. Why not show a little mercy, he asked himself as he made his way back to the instruments to finish his night's work.

It now remained for him to wrap the package properly, address it, and put stamps on it.

Exciting... all very exciting...

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lincoln, Nebraska

For Donna Thorpe home was fast becoming as much of a problem as her work, since it appeared that Jim was suddenly—at least it seemed sudden to her— no longer supporting her. She'd told him all that had occurred in Chicago, sparing no detail in what felt like a confession, for she did feel remorse over the deaths of those that Ovierto had killed, particularly Joe Swisher. She could only tell this to Jim, along with the rest of it, along with her obsession with this case. But he shut her out, saying he did not want to hear another word about it—about the mistakes in Chicago, the mistakes in Houston —none of it. And for the first time in their marriage he grabbed her by the wrists, and, hurling her toward the mirror, shouted, "Take a good look at what you've become, Donna! Look, look!"

She fought against his hold, knowing that if she wished she could put him on his back in an instant.

He forced her eyes round to the mirror. "You and this monster you're chasing, girl, they're becoming one! One!"

"No!" she maneuvered his arm into a gyrating twist and suddenly had him in a choke hold, forcing his right hand against the small of his back. She'd shouted to him to stop it several times, and their shouts drew the children to the door.

When the children saw them fighting, it did something to Jim. She quickly released her hold. He pretended a smile and lied to the children, bundling them off to bed, but when he returned he was icy cold, seething. In the dark where they lay side by side, unspeaking, his voice sounded like a bell tolling when he finally spoke. "I'm divorcing you, Donna. It's over."

"What're you saying? That we can't work this out?"

"I don't believe there is any way to—"

"We can try counseling," she suggested.

"It's beyond that."

"What do you mean, beyond that? We haven't even tried."

"But we have, in a sense. I've listened and you haven't, all our married life. There's no getting through to you, and the idea someday I'm going to get a call from that grim reaper, Sam Boas, that you've been—"

"That's not ever going to happen," she insisted.

"—killed! I'm tired of sitting back, waiting for that call. Maybe that doesn't make me much of a man... maybe getting an arm broken by my wife doesn't make me —”

"Oh, Jim, please, you know how much I love you! How much I need you."

"No, no I don't know anything of the kind. I know you have one overriding desire, the same desire that's been the basis of your life for six years. I'm just not able to continue this way."

"Then I'll try to change."

"Inspector Donna Thorpe will never change."

She reached out to him, but he pulled from the bed, taking a pillow and a blanket with him to the guest room.

She cried alone in her bed, worrying about the children in all this, wondering what her life would be like without Jim, and wondering if he meant to fight for custody of their kids. Exhausted, tearful, filled with regrets brought back from Chicago, she felt as if her world were coming to an abrupt end. Depression painted everything darker and darker until the blackness without her became a blackness within. At the root of all her sadness and remorse was Dr. O. Now the bastard's ugly influence was destroying her marriage.

The following morning, early before the children awoke, she found Jim in the other bed, and she curled up beside him there, feeling like a little girl, her entire being shaking. Her uncontrollable shaking woke him and he put his arms around her, pulling her into him. She nestled in the crook of his arm and began to kiss him about the chest, interspersing her kisses and caresses with promises.

"I'll just stop," she said.

"Stop what?"

"Pursuing that bastard."

Jim was silent a long while but his body began to respond to her touch. "Is that possible with you?" he asked.

"Damnit, I'm not bound hand and foot to Ovierto!"

"You had the case stripped from you, and yet you pursued him to Chicago."

"On a tip," she half-lied. "There wasn't time, and no one in D.C. was buying it, and—"

"So, you took up the standard once more, and once more me and the kids have to wonder if you're coming back alive. Isn't there enough crime in Nebraska to fulfill you, Don?"

"Yes... you're right..." she sniffed back tears. "It was wrong to go."

"Things like that... you're the chief. You could have coordinated the whole thing from here. Why place your-self in such danger?"

"I won't do it again."

"You put me through hell, you know?"

"Yeah, yeah, I know."

"And while it was going on, this manhunt of yours... you never gave me a thought."

"Not true," she said, sitting up. "I called and—"

"You called to touch home, to recharge your batteries. Don't try to fool yourself. When you're working no one's on the planet other than you and the creep you're after."

She shook her head. 'You're being... you're—"

"Concerned? Worried sick? You bet. And while we're at it, I'd like my children to have a mother."

"That's not fair!"

"We're going to wake them to this, if you don't hold your voice down."

She breathed deeply, nodding. "I didn't come in here to fight."

"No?"

"I came in to say I was sorry, and maybe find something under these covers." She lifted the sheet.

He smiled in spite of himself. "Do you mean it, about quitting this obsession with Ovierto?"

"If he'll quit-"

"No, if you'll quit!"

She hesitated a moment. "I'll... I'll... I can't promise anything other than I'll do my best to stay in Nebraska."

He reached down, brought her lips up to his and kissed her tenderly. " 'Bout all I should expect to hear from you," he said.

"It's a start."

"No, this is a start," he said, kissing her ferociously, sending his tongue deeply into her mouth. His sexual maneuvers were rough and he ended their lovemaking with a pounding of himself deeper and harder and deeper into her, all as if to make up for the arm-lock she had placed him into the night before. Neither experience had given her any gratification, except that now, perhaps Jim would reconsider the rash words of the evening before.

Later, breakfast with the children was relaxed and pleasant. Just before she left, Jim made her promise once more to end her obsession with Ovierto.

She told him to consider it done.

She was met downtown with news that sent her reeling back to those moments in bed with Jim, the promise at the door. Her superiors at Quantico had faxed new orders for her. She was to go full-steam ahead on the Maurice Ovierto case. The information was sketchy, something to do with her being the only field agent who had had contact with Ovierto, and secondly that no one else had placed him in Chicago as she had. Apparently, her report had made an impression on someone high up. She'd been careful to give her report a proper framework, saying that her Nebraska office was in pursuit of information on a Nebraska homicide that could have been Ovierto's first abduction-murder, and that the trail had led them to Chicago. The rest of the report was fairly accurate, detailing how agents such as Jack Harris had died, and how a Chicago cop named Joe Swisher had also met his end. According to the report, Swisher had been involved in a mutilation case that might be the work of Ovierto. He had contacted her in Nebraska, offering the tip only if he could be in on the bust.

So far as she knew, no one questioned the particulars of the deal she and Swisher had arrived at, which had been exactly what she had counted on. With the possible exception of Robyn Muro, no one in the CPD was squawking either. And now this—a coup of sorts! Quantico admitting to a mistake, reinstating her, with obvious limitations. She would remain in Nebraska, but every shred of information on Ovierto would filter through her offices.

Obsession, or hard-won right to see a case closed? No matter what terms she might use, no matter how she put it to Jim, it was going to be a blow to him. She had no choice now in the matter. It was a direct order. She only wished that she hadn't promised....

She was still responsible for the safety of Elena Hogarth and her family. She had worked tirelessly to see they were intercepted by agents at another corner of the continent, where they were being safely detained now. It was all her ballgame once more, and she didn't need to couch her terms in the muffled wrapper of an ancient case, nor employ the services of another Joe Swisher. It was too bad about what happened to Swisher, and she felt remorse for Muro, who loved the man, but at the time the CPD connection had been necessary to keep her hand in the game.

She hoped that no one would ever know how strongly she felt Swisher's death.

Jim was wrong about her resembling Ovierto, dead wrong. Ovierto felt no remorse for any of his actions, and for a time she had believed that she could work that way if need be... but she couldn't. Not as tough as I thought I was, she told herself now.

In the squad room the atmosphere was mixed. Some men were missing. Victims of the Chicago debacle. But now they had been given the full green light to seek out and wreak revenge on this bastard, Ovierto. The orders to her were read aloud, and they ended with a chilling line:

The Company is now involved in the search for Ovierto, and if the CIA gets him before we do, we'll never live it down, so it's shoot to kill, Inspector Thorpe, shoot to kill.

Boxes upon boxes of records were shipped to Nebraska; all the paraphrenalia of a six-year-long man-hunt. It almost seemed as if Quantico believed that by shipping everything to Nebraska along with Thorpe their problems with Ovierto were over; that it was now a Nebraska field office problem, like a simple tax evasion rap, or a whiskey runner, or an ordinary kidnapping. It seemed as if Washington wanted to wash its hands of the ugly matter. And it also seemed as if she now had been cast in the same role as she had cast Joe Swisher.

She'd heard nothing from Robyn Muro, and in talking with Brian Noone she learned only that Muro had been promoted and was still working on the Stavros case.