Harvest (35 page)

Amity Medical Supplies Sales and Service Behind the barred front windows was a tired-looking display of company products: Crutches and canes. Oxygen tanks. Foam mattress pads to prevent bedsores. Bedside commodes. A mannequin wearing a nurse's uniform and cap straight out of the sixties.

Abby gazed across the street at the shabby display window and she said, "This can't be the right Amity."

"It's the only listing in the phone book," said Katzka.

"Why would he transfer five million dollars to this business?"

"It could be just one branch of a larger corporation. Maybe he saw an investment opportunity."

She shook her head. "The timing's all wrong. Put yourself in VictorVoss's place. His wife is dying. He's desperate to get her the operation she needs. He's not going to be thinking about his investments."

"It depends how much he cares about his wife."

"He cares a lot."

"How do you know?"

She looked at him. "I know."

He regarded her in that quiet way of his. How strange, she thought, that his gaze no longer made her feel uncomfortable.

HARVEST

He opened his door. "I'll see what I can find out."

"What are you going to do?"

"Look around. Ask a few questions."

"I'll go in with you."

"No, you stay in the car." He started to step out, but she pulled him back.

"Look," she said. "I'm the one with everything to lose. I've already lost my job. I'm losing my licence. And now people are calling me a murderer or a psychotic or both. It's my life they've fucked up. This could be my one chance to fight back."

"Then let's not screw it up, OK? Someone in there could recognize you. That would certainly tip them off. Do you want to risk that?"

She sank back. Katzka was right. Goddamn it, he was right. He hadn't wanted her to come along on this ride in the first place, but she'd insisted. She'd told him she could drive here on her own, with or without him. So here she was, and she couldn't even walk in the building. She couldn't even fight her own battles any more. They'd taken that away from her, too. She sat shaking her head, angry about her own impotence. Angry at Katzka for having pointed it out.

He said, "Lock the doors." And he stepped out of the car.

She watched him cross the street, watched him walk into the shabby entrance. She could picture what he'd find inside. Depressing displays of wheelchairs and emesis basins. Racks of nurses' uniforms under dustcovers of yellowing plastic. Boxes of orthopaedic shoes. She could imagine every detail because she had been in shops just like it when she'd purchased her first set of uniforms.

Five minutes passed. Then ten.

Katzka, Katzka. What are you doing in there?

He'd said he was going to ask questions, that he would try not to tip them off. She trusted his judgment. The average homicide cop, she decided, was probably smarter than the average surgeon. But maybe not smarter than the average internist. That was the running joke among hospital house staff: the stupidity of surgeons. Internists relied on their brains, surgeons on their precious hands. If an internist is in an elevator and the door starts to shut prematurely, he'll stick in his hand to stop it. A surgeon will stick in his head. Ha, ha.

Twenty minutes had gone by. It was after five now, and the anaemic sunshine had already faded to a gloomy dusk. Through the window crack, she could hear the continual whoosh of cars on the Martin Luther King Boulevard. Rush hour. Up the street, two men with biceps of heroic proportions came out of the gym and lumbered to their cars.

She kept watching the entrance, waiting for Katzka to emerge. It was five-twenty.

The traffic was beginning to thicken even on this street. Through the flow of cars, she caught only intermittent glimpses of the front entrance. Then, suddenly, there was a gap in the traffic and she was looking straight across the street as a man emerged from the side door of the Amity building. He paused on the sidewalk and glanced at his watch. When he looked up again, Abby felt her heart kick into a gallop. She recognized that face. The grotesquely heavy brow. The hawklike nose.

It was Dr. Mapes. The courier who'd delivered NinaVoss's donor heart to the operating room.

Mapes began walking. Halfway up the street, he stopped at a blue Trans-Am parked at the kerb. He took out a set of car keys.

Abby looked back at the Amity building, hoping, praying for Katzka to appear. Come on, come on. I'm going to lose Mapes.t She looked back at the Trans-Am. Mapes had climbed inside now, and was fastening his seat belt. He started the engine. Easing slightly away from the kerb, he waited for a break in the traffic.

Abby cast a frantic glance down at the ignition and saw that Katzka had left his keys dangling there.

This could be her one chance. Her only chance. The blue Trans-Am pulled into the street. There was no time left to think it over.

Abby scrambled into the driver's seat and started Katzka's car. She lurched into traffic, eliciting a screech of tyres and an angry honk from another car behind her.

A block ahead, Mapes glided through the intersection just as the light turned red.

Abby squealed to a stop. There were four cars between her and the intersection and no way to get around them. By the time the light turned green again, Mapes could be blocks away. She sat counting the seconds, cursing Boston traffic lights and Boston drivers and her own indecision. If only she'd pulled away from the kerb earlier! The Trans-Am was barely in view now, just a glint of blue in a river of cars. What the hell was wrong with this light?

At last it turned green, but still no one was moving. The driver in front must be asleep at the wheel. Abby leaned on her horn, releasing a deafening blast. The cars ahead of her finally began to move. She stepped on the accelerator, then let up on it. Someone was pounding at the side of her car.

Glancing right, she saw Katzka running alongside the passenger door. She braked and hit the lock-release button.

He yanked open the door. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Get in."

"No, first you pull over--'

"Get the fuck in.t'

He blinked in surprise. And got in.

At once she goosed the accelerator, and they shot through the intersection. Two blocks ahead, a flash of blue streaked rightward. The Trans-Am was turning onto Cottage Street. If she didn't stay right on his tail, she could lose him in the traffic coming up. She swerved left across a double line, raced past three cars in a row, and screeched back into her lane just in time. She heard Katzka snap on his seatbelt. Good. Because this could be one hell of a wild ride. They turned onto Cottage.

"Are you going to tell me?" he said.

"He came out the side door of the Amity building. The guy in the blue car."

"Who is he?"

"The organ courier. He said his name was Mapes." She spotted another break in traffic, made another passing swoop into the left lane, then back again.

Katzka said, "I think I should drive."

"He's heading into the traffic circle. Now which way?Which way's he going..."

The Trans-Am looped around the circle, then cut away east. "He's heading for the expressway," said Katzka.

"Then so are we." Abby entered the traffic circle and peeled off after the Trans-Am.

Katzka had guessed correctly. Mapes was heading onto the expressway ramp. She followed him, her heart ramming her chest, her hands slick on the steering wheel. Here's where she could lose him. The expressway at five-thirty was like a bumper car ride at sixty miles an hour, every driver a maniac intent on getting home. She merged into traffic and spotted Mapes way ahead, switching to the left lane.

She tried to make the same lane change, only to find a truck muscling in, refusing to yield. Abby signalled, nudged closer to his lane. The truck only tightened the gap. This had turned into a dangerous game of chicken now, Abby veering towards the truck, the truck holding fast. She was too pumped up on adrenalin to be afraid, too intent on keeping up with Mapes. Behind the wheel, she had transformed into some other woman, a desperate, foul-mouthed stranger she scarcely recognized. She was fighting back at them, and it felt good. It felt powerful. Abby DiMatteo on fucking testosterone.

She floored the accelerator and shot left, right in front of the truck.

"Jesus Christ!" yelled Katzka. "Are you trying to get us killed?" '! don't give a shit. I want this guy."

"Are you like this in the OR?"

"Oh, yeah. I'm a real fucking terror. Haven't you heard?"

"Remind me not to get sick."

"Now what's he doing?"

Up ahead the Trans-Am had switched lanes again. It peeled to the right, onto the turnoff for the Callahan Tunnel.

"Shit," said Abby, cutting right as well. She shot across two lanes and they entered the cavelike gloom of the tunnel. Graffiti whipped past. Concrete walls echoed back the grinding of tyres over tarmac, the whoosh-whoosh of cars slicing the air. Their re-emergence into the grey light of dusk was a shock to their eyes.

The Trans-Am left the expressway. Abby followed.

They were in East Boston now, the gateway to Logan International Airport. That must be where Mapes was headed, she thought. The airport.

She was surprised when, instead, he rattled across a railroad track and worked his way west, away from the airport. He headed into a maze of streets.

Abby slowed down, gave him some space. That surge of adrenalin she'd felt during the frantic chase on the expressway was fading. The Trans-Am wasn't going to get away from her in this neighbourhood. Now her challenge was to avoid being noticed.

They were heading along the wharves of Boston's inner harbour. Behind a chain-link fence, rows and rows of unused ship's containers were stacked three-deep like giant Legos. And beyond the container yard was the industrial waterfront. Against the setting sun loomed the silhouettes of loading cranes and ships in port. The Trans-Am turned left, drove through an open gate and into the container yard.

Abby pulled up beside the fence and parked. Peering through a gap between a forklift and a container, she saw the Trans-Am drive to the foot of the pier and stop. Mapes got out of his car. He strode onto the dock, where a ship was moored. It looked like a small freighter - a two-hundred footer, she estimated.

Mapes gave a shout. After a moment, a man appeared on deck and waved him aboard. Mapes climbed the gangplank and disappeared into the vessel.

"Why did he come here?" she said. "Why a boat?"

"Are you sure it's the same man?"

"If it isn't, then Mapes has a double working at Amity." She paused, suddenly remembering where Katzka had just spent the last half-hour. "What did you pounds d out about the place, anyway?"

"You mean before I noticed someone stealing my car?" He shrugged. "It looked like what it's supposed to be. A medical supply business. I told them I needed a hospital bed for my wife, and they demonstrated some of the latest models."

"How many people in the building?"

"I saw three. One guy in the showroom. Two on the second floor handling phone orders. None of them looked very happy to be working there."

"What about the upper two floors?"

"Warehouse space, I assume. There's really nothing about that building worth pursuing."

She looked past the fence, at the blue Pontiac. "You could subpoena their financial records. Find out where Voss's five million dollars went to."

"We have no basis on which to subpoena any records."

"How much evidence do you need? I know that was the courier! I know what these people are doing."

"Your testimony isn't going to sway any judge. Certainly not under the circumstances." His answer was honest - brutally so. "I'm sorry, Abby. But you know as well as I do that you have a whopping credibility problem."

She felt herself closing off against him, withdrawing in anger. "You're absolutely right," she shot back. "Who'd believe me? It's just the psychotic Dr. DiMatteo, babbling nonsense again."

He didn't respond to that self-pitying statement. In the silence that followed, she regretted having said it. The sound of her own voice, wounded and sarcastic, seemed to hang between them.

They said nothing for a while. Overhead a jet screamed, the shadow of its wings swooping past like a raptor's. It climbed, glittering in the last light of the setting sun. Only as the jet's roar faded away did Katzka speak again.

"It's not that I don't believe you," he said.

She looked at him. "No one else does. Why would you?"

"Because of Dr. Levi. And the way he died." He gazed straight ahead at the darkening road. "It wasn't the way people usually kill themselves. In a room where no one will find you for days. We don't like to think of our bodies decomposing. We want to be found before the maggots get to us. Before we're black and bloated. While we can still be recognized as human. Then there were all the plans he'd made. The trip to the Caribbean. Thanksgiving with his son. He was looking ahead, expecting a future." Katzka glanced sideways, at a streetlamp that had just flickered on in the gathering dusk. "Finally there's his wife, Elaine. I often have to talk to surviving spouses. Some of them are shocked, some of them grieving. Some of them are just plain relieved. I'm a widower myself. I remember, after my wife died, that it was all I could manage just to crawl out of bed every morning. But what does Elaine Levi do? She calls a moving company, packs up her furniture, and leaves town. It's not the act of a grieving spouse. It's what someone does when they're guilty. Or they're scared."

Abby nodded. It's what she'd thought as well. That Elaine was afraid.

"Then you told me about Kunstler and Hennessy," he said. "And suddenly I'm not looking at a single death. I'm dealing with a series of them. And Aaron Levi's is beginning to look less and less like a suicide."

Another jet took off, the scream of its engines making conversation impossible. It banked left, skimming the evening mist now gathering over the harbour. Even after the jet had vanished into the western sky, Abby could still hear the roar in her ears. "Dr. Levi didn't hang himself," said Katzka.