Solitude Creek (35 page)

He closed up his computer, tossed his tools into the tote bag. He left the top floor, the fifth, then headed to the basement. He didn’t have much time, he knew. The repair crews had already been summoned to fix car one and, given their location in Salinas, could be there in twenty minutes. Car two, the occupied one, would be their priority once they arrived. The hospital maintenance staff, too, would head up to the infrastructure room on the top floor and look over the system. They’d see the vandalism immediately and might rig a solution, though given the dangerous nature of a two-thousand-pound piece of machinery, they’d probably wait for the pros.

Not much time, no, but he’d choreographed this attack as skillfully as the others. After deciding, at the aborted-church-supper hall, that a hotel would make a good target he’d come up with a plan that he believed even the brilliant Kathryn Dance could not anticipate.

He had
appeared
to attack the nearby inn, setting fire to the Honda – he needed to dump it anyway. The police would concentrate on that, and assume the hotel was the target, while he hurried on foot to the hospital a half-mile away.

They wouldn’t consider the hospital a likely venue for an attack and wouldn’t have added extra guards, he speculated, because there wasn’t any one particular area of concentration: patients, visitors and doctors were spread out over several large buildings, which had numerous exits.

No, the charming and not unattractive Ms Kathryn Dance was clever but she’d surely miss that those oversize elevator cars in a hospital would be a perfect site for the panic game.

He now doubled-stepped down to the basement and peered out. He was in scrubs, yes, but had no ID pinned to the breast so he had to be careful. The corridor was empty. He stopped in the storeroom and collected a gallon container of a substance he’d found there earlier, on recon.

Diethyl ether.

Ether was a clear liquid, nowadays used as a solvent and cleanser mostly but years ago it was the anesthetic of choice. Famed dentist William T. G. Morton, of Boston, was the first to use inhaled ether to put patients under for medical procedures. The substance was soon praised as better than chloroform because there was a large gap between the recommended dosage and how much ether it would take to kill you; with chloroform that window of safety was much smaller.

However, ether did have one disadvantage: patients who were administered the drug occasionally caught fire. Sometimes they even exploded (he’d seen the remarkable pictures). Ether and oxygen or, even better, ether and nitrous oxide – laughing gas – could be as dangerous as dynamite.

Hence the chemical had been relegated to other uses, like here – a solvent. But March had been delighted to find some during his reconnaissance.

March now made his way to the elevator-room door. He opened it and dumped some of the liquid on the floor of the elevator shaft pit, holding his breath (ether may occasionally have blown up patients but it was a very efficient anesthetic).

He tossed a match into the puddle and it ignited explosively. The liquid was perfect since it burned hot but without any smoke; this would delay the fire department’s arrival, since no automatic alarm would be activated. Meanwhile, though, the passengers would feel the heat rising from beneath them and smell the smoke from the Honda burning at the inn. They would be convinced the hospital was on fire and that they were about to be roasted alive.

Now Dr March walked casually along the corridor, head down, and took the exit to the hospital’s parking garage.

He pictured the people in the elevator car and reflected that they were in absolutely no physical danger from what he’d done. The smoke was faint, the fire would burn itself out in ten minutes, the car’s emergency brakes would not give out and send it plummeting to the ground.

They would be completely fine.

As long as they didn’t panic.

Got to get out, got to get out …

Please, please, please, please, please.

The orderly was paralyzed with terror. Emergency lights had come on – the car was brightly lit – and it didn’t seem to be in danger of falling. But the sense of confinement had its slimy tentacles around him, choking, choking …

‘Help us!’ an older woman was crying.

Three or four people were pounding on the doors. Like ritual drums, sacrificial drums.

‘You smell that?’ somebody called. ‘Smoke.’

‘Christ. There’s a fire.’

The orderly gasped. We’re going to burn to death. But he considered
this
possibility in a curiously detached way. A searing, painful death was horrific but not as bad as the clutching, the confinement.

Tears filled his eyes. He hadn’t known you could cry from fear.

‘Is anybody there?’ a woman nurse, in limp green scrubs, was shouting into the intercom. There’d been no message from security through the speaker.

‘It’s hot, it’s hot!’ A woman’s voice. ‘The flames’re right under us. Help!’

‘I can’t breathe.’

‘I’ve got to get out.’

The pregnant woman was crying. ‘My baby, my baby.’

The orderly ripped his shirt open, lifted his head and tried to find some better air. But he could only fill his lungs with stinking, moist, used breath.

In the corner, a woman vomited.

‘Oh, Jesus, lady, all over me.’ The man beside her, forties, in shorts and a T-shirt, tried to leap back, getting away from the mess. But there was no place to go and the man behind him shoved back.

‘Fuck you.’

The smell overwhelmed the orderly and it was all he could do to control his own gut.

Not so lucky with the woman beside him. She, too, was sick.

Phone calls:

‘Yes, nine one one, we’re trapped in an elevator and nobody’s doing anything.’

‘We’re in a car, an elevator in the hospital. East Wing. We can’t breathe.’

Somebody shouted: ‘Don’t both call at once! Are you fucking crazy? You’ll block the circuits!’

‘What – were you born in the fifties? They can handle more than—’

Then an otherworldly scream filled the car: the biker had lost control, lost it completely. Screaming, he grabbed the shoulders of the elderly woman in front of him and boosted himself up onto the crowd.

The orderly heard a snap as the woman’s clavicle broke and she screamed and fainted. The biker didn’t even notice; he scrabbled forward atop the shoulders and necks and heads of the others and slammed into the elevator door, breaking nails as he tried to pull the panels open. He was screaming and sobbing. Tears and sweat flowed like water from a cracked pipe.

A slim African-American woman, an aide, in what used to be called candy stripers, colorful scrubs with teddy bears on them, muscled her way forward and gripped him by the collar. ‘We’ll be okay. It’ll be all right.’

Another scream from the huge man, the sound piercing.

She was unfazed. ‘Are you listening? We’ll be all right. Breathe slowly.’

The biker’s red, bearded face leaned toward hers. Close. He gripped her neck. He was looking past her and for a moment it seemed as if he’d snap bones.

‘Breathe,’ she said. ‘Slow.’

And he started to.

‘You’re all right. Everybody’s all right. Nothing’s happened to us. We’re fine. There’re sprinklers. The fire department’s on its way.’

This calmed the biker and four or five of the passengers, but among the others panic was growing.

‘Where the fuck are they?’

‘Jesus, Jesus. We’re going to die!’

‘No no no!’

‘I feel the heat, the flames. You feel that?’

‘It’s underneath us. It’s getting hotter!’

‘No, please! Somebody.’

‘Hey!’ the biker shouted, in a booming voice. ‘Just, everybody chill!’

Some people did. But others were still in the grip of panic. They began pounding on the walls, screaming, ripping the hair and clothes of their fellows to get to the door. One woman, in her forties, knocked the biker aside, jammed her nails into the seam between the sliding doors and tried to force them open, just as he had attempted. ‘Relax, relax,’ the big man said. And pulled her away.

A man screamed into the intercom, ‘Why aren’t you answering? Why aren’t they answering? Nobody’s answering.’

Sobbing, cries.

Someone defecated.

The orderly realized he’d bitten his tongue. He tasted blood.

‘The walls! They’re hot. And the smoke.’

‘We’re going burn to death!’

The orderly looked at the doctor. He was unconscious. A heart attack? Had he fainted?

‘Can’t you hear us? We’re stuck.’

‘No, no!’

More screams.

‘It’s not that hot!’ the biker called. ‘I don’t think the fire’s that close. We’re going to be okay.’

The nurse said, ‘Listen to him! We’ll be all right.’

And, slowly, the panicked passengers began to calm.

Which had no effect on the orderly. He couldn’t take the confinement for a moment longer. Suddenly he was consumed by a wholly new level of panic. He turned his back to the people in the car and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’ To his wife and son.

His last words before panic became something else. A snake winding through his mouth and into his gut.

Frenzy …

Sobbing, he tore the pocket from his scrubs, wadded it into a ball and stuffed it down his own throat. Inhaling the cloth into his windpipe.

Die, please let me die … Please let this horror be over.

The suffocation was terrible, but nothing compared to the claustrophobia.

Please let me … let me …

His vision went black.

‘Listen to me!’ Kathryn Dance shouted. ‘Listen!’

‘I’ve got my orders.’

She was on the east wing third floor of the hospital, speaking to one of the maintenance men.

‘We need that door open now.’

‘Lady, Officer, sorry. We gotta wait for the elevator repair people. These things are dangerous. It’s not gonna fall. There’s no fire. I mean, there was a little one but it’s out now and—’

‘You don’t understand. The people inside, they’re going to hurt themselves. They don’t know there’s no fire.’

She was in front of the doors to elevator number two. From inside she could hear screams and thuds.

‘Well, I’m not authorized.’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’ Dance stepped past him and grabbed a screwdriver from his tool kit, a long one.’

‘Hey, you can’t—’

‘Let her, Harry,’ another worker said. ‘It don’t sound too good in there.’

The screams were louder now.

‘Fuck,’ Harry muttered. ‘I’ll do it.’

He took the screwdriver and set it down, then extracted a separate tool from the bag, an elevator door key. He slipped it into the hole and a moment later was muscling aside the doors.

Dance dropped to her belly, hit by the disgusting smell wafting out of the car, vomit, sweat, feces, urine. She squinted. Security lights, mounted on the CCTV camera inside the elevator, were glaring into her face. The ceiling of the car was about eighteen inches above the hospital’s linoleum floor. To Dance’s surprise, the passengers were fairly calm, their attention on two of their fellows: a pregnant woman, the source of the screaming. And a man passed out, though standing; his face an eerie blue. He was dressed in the uniform of a hospital orderly.

‘The fire’s out! You’re safe!’ This was the best way to convince them to calm, she’d decided. Telling them it was a prank, much less an intentional attack, didn’t seem advisable.

Somebody was trying to give the orderly the Heimlich maneuver but could get no leverage.

‘He’s dying!’ somebody called, nodding at the orderly. One of the male passengers suddenly snapped and lunged forward, stepped on a fellow occupant, a petite woman, and boosted himself up. ‘I need out, I need out! Now!’ He grabbed Dance’s collar, trying to pull himself out. Still, he tugged fiercely. Dance screamed as her head was jammed into the gap, the metal ceiling of the car cutting into her cheek.

‘No, listen!’

But he wasn’t listening.

‘Stop!’

She felt the growing strains of panic grip her. She began pounding the man’s hand. Useless. Her head, sideways, was partly inside now, wedged completely still. She was feeling dizzy from the fumes and the dismal air. And that unbearable feeling of being unable to move. She tasted blood, dripping from the gash into her mouth.

Jesus …

No choice.

Sorry.

Dance reared her head back, clamped her teeth around the man’s thumb and, tasting blood and tobacco, bit down hard with her molars.

He screamed and released her.

‘That man!’ she shouted, pointing to the orderly. ‘Get him over here.’

Several of the passengers grabbed the man’s collar and waist and pulled him off the floor. Then, together, they all handed him overhead, mosh-pit style. Dance gestured for two medics from Emergency to help and together they boosted the man up to the gap and got him out.

One ER worker said, ‘We’ll get him downstairs.’ They placed him on a gurney and sprinted away.

Michael O’Neil came running up. ‘Fire’s out in the basement. You all right?’ He frowned, looking at her face.

‘Fine.’

Dance peered back into the car. Brother. She shouted over her shoulder, ‘How long till we can raise the car?’

‘Fifteen, twenty minutes, I’d guess,’ the maintenance man said.

‘Okay, then we need an ob-gyn here. Now.’

‘I’ll get one,’ a male nurse behind her called.

Dance added, ‘And make it the skinniest one you’ve got on staff.’

Dance said, ‘I should’ve thought more clearly. This unsub … he’s too fucking smart.’

A word that rarely escaped her lips.

They were in the lobby of the hospital, waiting for the Monterey County Crime Scene Unit officers to report what they’d found in the elevator motor room, the car itself and the pit in the basement.

After the Honda had started to burn in earnest and the officers had raced into the inn, Dance had checked two exit doors, found them unencumbered – and paused. She looked over the establishment.