If I Should Die (27 page)

Every part of Joe that could churn was turning back-flips, including his brain. The proof he’d been praying for, blood- and shit-stained, but conclusive nonetheless, was still rolled up
inside his zipped-up jacket. Enough evidence, Joe guessed, to put Schwartz away for the duration. Except that Lieutenant Joseph Duval had broken all the rules and screwed the whole thing up. He
couldn’t even hold the documents back for a few hours, in case the blueprints and figures he’d had just a brief glimpse of in apartment 1510 might be of help to Ash and Morrissey when
they took out Lally’s pacemaker.

That’s what matters now. Saving Lally and the others.

Three forty-nine and counting.

Joe forced himself to the coffee machine, commanded himself to cut out the panic and to choose a course of action.

Under the circumstances, there was only one course left.

He dumped his polystyrene cup in the nearest trashcan, and headed, under heavily clouded skies that promised a fresh load of snow, for Chicago Memorial. He stayed at the hospital for just
fifteen minutes, keeping away from Schwartz but talking to one of his physicians and one of his nurses.

By the time he got back in the Saab, Joe knew, beyond reasonable doubt, that Schwartz’s sickness had nothing to do with the flu, and that it was almost certainly connected with a bite they
had found on his heel – probably, Joe guessed, from the same venomous lizard that had torn Webber’s hand half to shreds in apartment 1510.

By the time he’d started the motor and was pulling out into the noisy, hectic city street, the new plan was already three-quarters formulated in Joe’s mind.

As Monday afternoon dragged slowly by, his fever continuing to rise, the man named Frederick Schwartz lay under a single sheet in his private hospital room, and let himself
drift back into the past again. He preferred it there, even the darkest memories, for remembering the wickedness reinforced his strength, steeled his will against them.

The chapel. His shiny black shoes. The long white scratch on the pew. The coffin. He was eleven years old and he understood precisely what was happening. Mother’s body lay inside that
box, cold and waxy and unreal. Her golden hair neatly curled, framing her face, her bright lipstick and pale powder applied by the undertaker, almost, though not quite, the way she liked it. Mother
was dead. He would never see her or touch her or hear her again. And in just a few more minutes, her body and the coffin would be gone from his sight, for ever, to be consumed by the fire.

She had planned her own funeral. The doctors had said she would live to a ripe old age, but she hadn’t believed them. And she was right, the doctors had lied, which was why he was sitting
on the front pew next to his cousin Beatrice, who had worked in Mother’s special place, listening to the music Mother had chosen. Her beloved Wagner. He felt like crying, but his eyes
remained dry, for she had told him not to weep.

“Heroes don’t cry,” she had said, “unless they’re all alone.”

The music ended, and the small congregation knelt again to pray. A splinter dug into his left knee and he concentrated on the pain, pushed the knee harder into the wooden floor, and when he rose
again, his eyes bright but still dry, cousin Beatrice whispered: “It’s okay to cry, Freddy.” And he raised his chin high, and his expression was full of contempt.

“Heroes don’t cry,” he said.

The moment came closer. When the doors would open and the coffin would slide away to be burned. Mother said she had always wanted to be cremated, like Brünnhilde on her
husband’s funeral pyre in
Götterdämmerung
.

Wagner rose again, soaring and magnificent. He watched the doors smoothly open, was intent now on Mother, hidden from view in her box, gliding on her way to the flames and to heaven. He felt
suddenly happy for her, for it was as she had wanted it, beautiful and heroic and more mysterious in its dignity than being put into the earth. And he wondered if she had already found his father,
or if they would not find each other till after the cremation.

The doors closed again. The congregation rose, but still he sat, until Beatrice nudged him, and he stood, and slowly, silently, they began to file out of the chapel.

The explosion was massive, deafening, cutting off the music, flinging them all to the ground. He could not speak, could scarcely breathe, but he was not hurt, his arms and legs
still moved. Someone screamed, someone wept.

Slowly, painfully, he sat up. The doors to the furnace had disappeared and the cavern beyond was filled with flame and black smoke. Hot cinders floated through the air like fireflies.

The coffin was gone. Mother was gone.

He’d thought that the last crime against her, but then they wrote about it in the
Tribune
, and on the bus on the way to school, he saw two women reading that
page of the newspaper, and he watched their faces, waiting for their horror.

They laughed.

They covered their open mouths with their hands and rolled their eyes and shook with mirth. He stared at their ugliness, at their wickedness, and then, slowly and clearly, he saw, for the first
time, how right Mother had been to warn him about the dragons that lived in the world outside their home.

“They take on many forms,” she had said.

She was right.

Al Hagen professed to be well enough to go over the documents with Joe and Howard Leary. His hospital room at Memorial, eight floors above Schwartz’s own room, was
brightly lit and cheery with flowering plants, and Hagen himself looked a whole lot better than he had when Joe had last seen him at home just over a week before.

“I’ll be out of here by tomorrow morning,” he told them. “The doc only had me admitted because I passed out in the street, but it was nothing much, just the after-effects
of that damned flu.”

“This whole fiasco can’t have helped,” Leary said.

“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Joe asked, pulling up one of the chairs to the bedside.

“Your sister and the others need all the help they can get,” Hagen said, still heavily burdened by responsibility.

“I appreciate that, sir.”

Leary sat down on the other side of Hagen’s bed. He was natty in a well-cut sports jacket, his red hair crisply combed as always, his eyes avid with curiosity. “What do you have for
us, Lieutenant?”

The documents were in an attaché case, leaning up against Joe’s right leg.

“Before I show them to you,” he began, “I need to ask if you’re willing to keep this off the record.” He paused. “I also have to request that you don’t
ask me where or how I obtained the papers you’re going to see. I have no right to make these demands, but if you do ask me any question on that score, I won’t answer them, except to
tell you that even the smallest comment from me could ultimately jeopardize this whole case.”

Hagen and Leary exchanged glances.

“I have no problem with that,” Leary said.

“Nor I,” Hagen confirmed.

Joe opened the attaché case and laid the documents out on the bed. Each individual sheet of paper had been separated and encased in a plastic folder.

“First objective,” he said, taking a smaller slip of paper from an inside pocket, “is to crosscheck this serial number with those on the documents.” He paused.
“There are a lot of numbers – I wish I could offer you more people to assist you, but under the circumstances that’s not possible.”

Hagen read the serial number. “Your sister’s?”

“Yes.” Joe looked right at him. “I have no right to ask this of you either. If it’s too much for you, you should tell me.”

“Nothing is too much.”

They worked together. The serial number of Lally’s pacemaker came up on two out of the six documents.

“I wish it weren’t so,” Hagen said, “but there isn’t any doubt.”

Joe felt sick to his stomach.

“We should get to work on the rest,” Leary said. “Why not take a break, Lieutenant? You can’t help any more.”

Joe stood up. “I’ll be outside.” He paused. “We don’t have too long.”

“We know that,” Leary said and, glancing up briefly, he smiled at Joe. It was the first genuine, warm smile that Joe had seen on his face, and it filled him with a new brand of
despair. He had always functioned on instincts as much as hard facts, and faced with Leary, Hagen, Ashcroft and Schwartz in those early days, he had picked Leary – as had the others –
for his first choice as bad guy. Over the years, Joe had gone through frequent bouts of self-doubt, had always been his own worst critic, but never in his whole career to date, had he felt as
ineffectual, as guilty of poor judgment, as
impotent
, as he did right now.

He gave them twenty minutes, then went back inside.

“What do we have?”

“Everything,” Hagen said, “and nothing.”

Joe waited, his throat so tight and dry it was painful.

“Tell me.” Joe sat down.

“They’re remarkable,” Leary said. “Minutely, perfectly detailed records of everything that was done. Ingredients, method, projected results.”

“What’s the bad news?” Joe asked.

“It’s a game,” Hagen answered. “He – whoever this is – ”

“We all know who it is,” Leary said, grimly.

“No.” Joe’s tone was firm, almost harsh. “We don’t. You mustn’t.”

“Whoever this is,” Leary went on, “is playing with us.” He took a breath. “There are six documents, all of them variations on a theme. We know how he did it. We
know how he turned our pacemakers into bombs. But the crucial details – quantities, timer settings and serial numbers – are different enough in each set to make them useless.”

“But that’s not the worst of it,” Hagen said. “All the documents give details of homemade pacemaker batteries created on the outside to look identical to the real thing,
but each containing a smaller battery, some circuitry, a detonator and a timing device to count down.” He swallowed. “Four of the documents detail batteries with a half-ounce of
plastique explosive added, though not all.”

“And the other two?” Joe wasn’t breathing.

Leary took over, his voice stronger than Hagen’s. “If either of these two documents is the real thing, we’re looking at two alternative forms of detonation. One solely operated
by timer, as in the others. One by a kind of hair trigger, using conductive glue.”

“In other words – ” Hagen was looking sicker again.

“They could blow any time,” Leary said.

Joe felt as if everything inside him had stopped again.

“Especially during explantation,” Leary added.

“And correct me if I’m wrong,” Hagen said, softly, “but I believe I’ve read that like plastique, conductive glue doesn’t show up on X-rays.”

No one spoke for several seconds.

“Quite a game,” Leary said.

“Unless we can establish which – if any – is the authentic document,” Hagen said, “we still won’t know precisely which, or how many, devices have been
sabotaged – ”

“Or which of the detonation methods have been used,” Leary added.

Hagen’s tone and face were still gentle but grim. “And since your sister’s number tallies with one document detailing plastique only, and one detailing the conductive glue, we
have no way of knowing just how volatile her pacemaker is.”

“If either of those documents is the authentic one,” Leary clarified, “it’s very bad news. If it’s one of the others, it’s possible that the only real danger
to her could be that the smaller battery would have a shorter life.”

Joe was back on his feet. There was only one person who could tell them what they needed to know, and so far as Joe was concerned, it was a rock solid bet that a man capable of playing these
kinds of games with people’s lives would not volunteer the information unless he felt compelled to do so.

Everything they needed now was locked inside Schwartz’s head.

He drove to the Howe Clinic, found Valdez and Morrissey and looked at Lally’s X-rays. They looked past the stainless steel casing of the pacemaker’s battery case,
and there was a smaller dummy battery and the circuitry that told them, without a grain of doubt, that Lally’s device was certainly one of Schwartz’s, though they couldn’t tell if
it was benign or deadly. Joe felt like going back to Memorial Hospital and killing the son of a bitch with his bare hands, but instead he took Valdez and Morrissey into his confidence – the
more people who knew about the mess, the more trouble his career was in, potentially, but that was another story for another day – and Valdez confirmed pretty much what Hagen had said about
conductive glue.

“Bombers use it instead of running wires – it conducts electricity and we can’t see a goddamned thing on X-rays.”

“What about magnetic resonance scanning?” Joe wanted to know.

“Magnetic resonance imaging,” Morrissey corrected. “Unfortunately, MRI isn’t suitable for pacemaker wearers.”

They all looked back at the lit X-ray pictures on the wall.

“So we could be looking at plastique and this glue stuff right now,” Joe said, “and just not be able to see it.”

“You got it,” Valdez said, grimly.

“What now?” Morrissey asked.

“We need the right document,” Valdez said.

Joe said nothing, fought to hold himself together, to use his anger and his fear, to pump it all into strength and clarity.

“What are you going to do, Lieutenant?” Morrissey asked softly.

“I’m going to get what we need,” Joe said.

The Howe Clinic felt more like a large, sumptuous and tranquil private house than a hospital. There were flowers everywhere, not grand displays, but lovely, simple splashes of
colour charmingly arranged to cheer and calm. The paintings were mostly landscapes, and framed photographs of grateful patients hung on almost every wall.

When Joe came in to see her, Lally, ordered by Morrissey to rest, was compromising by sitting up, still fully dressed, on top of the bed in her pretty pastel-coloured bedroom on the third floor.
Hugo, gaunt from worry and lack of sleep, was sitting in an armchair on the window side of the bed.