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Crumwald stopped walking. ‘Are you a reporter?’ His voice was flat.
‘I was the forensic biologist Eddie Loud tried to kill.’ It hung there. So I killed him.
Crumwald took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. ‘Come in. Close the door.’
Client photos covered a large bulletin board in his office: grinning McDonald’s workers, a city employee stabbing trash at Shelter Island, a singing telegram dressed as a hot dog.
‘Where’s Eddie? I want to see his face.’
Crumwald pointed him out. Eddie Loud stood stiffly in front of the sparkling taco van, hair combed, pride and anxiety blazing across his face. He was wearing a pair of blue pants and a pressed shirt. He was gripping a bag of tacos, but gently, it appeared, so they wouldn’t crush.
‘Believe it or not, he was a kind man. Not violent. His poor parents.’
Grace shot him a measured look. ‘He killed a DEA chemist, a detective sergeant, and a uniformed police officer yesterday. Good men. And he did this to me.’ She raked down her turtleneck so he could see the purple mark left when Eddie had grabbed her.
Crumwald blinked. ‘I’m sorry. Please. Have a seat.’
She took one across from the desk, and he sat heavily in his chair and placed his hands flat on the desk as if to compose himself.
‘I was hired on faith, understand? To cobble together a program assisting those the world has no interest in helping. And now –’
‘He was in a halfway house. And this program for work. Was he in rehab?’
‘I can’t answer that. That’s confidential.’
‘He’d dead, Mr. Crumwald. It’s going to come out.’
‘When you … saw him. Did it look like Eddie was on some kind of drug?’
‘He was amped like a light show. Cranked so high his brain was frying. I’d bet money.’
The air went out of him and Crumwald slumped in his chair. He had a squishball stress reliever next to a photo of a placidly smiling woman. He picked up the ball and squeezed. He looked defeated.
‘That’s so unbelievable. He knew if he tried that he’d be gone. He really wanted to stay.’
‘Did Eddie ever bring up anybody called the Spikeman?’
Crumwald shook his head. ‘But I’m not the one he talked to. When he did talk. He didn’t do too much talking when he was medded properly.’ Crumwald looked up, still back on what she’d said about drugs. ‘He could have just stopped taking his meds.’
‘I don’t know what was wrong with him, Mr. Crumwald, but if not taking meds is enough to get him to hack up three men with a butcher knife and start on me, then sure, stick with that.’
‘They feed off each other energywise. Yesterday he was agitated in group and later, another client fell apart. Not as spectacularly but … big mess we’re still cleaning up.’
Jazz Studio.
‘Did Eddie Loud say anything in group that would have alerted you?’
‘You mean, so I could have stopped it?’ Crumwald sounded defensive and aggrieved and he squished the ball harder. It made a squelching sound like a trapped mouse.
‘No, just –’
‘Just what, Ms. Descanso? I run this place on a shoestring and a prayer, and if I stopped every client from going out that door who thought sometimes he was God or the next Bill Gates – or Bill Gates himself – I’d never have confidence to send any of them out. They’re trying. Beset by demons, but trying. They haven’t given up. Where are you going with this?’
‘Is there any reason Eddie should have known who I was?’
‘None that I know of.’
‘Because he did. Right before he tried to kill me, he said my name and warned me about somebody he called the Spikeman.’ She couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice.
Crumwald looked genuinely shocked. ‘He said your name? I don’t understand.’
‘That makes two of us. If you have anything, anything at all, I need to know it now.’
Crumwald stood heavily and looked out the window. ‘Anything else needs to come from higher up the food chain, if you know what I mean. Warren Pendrell is the head of this place.’
He said the name as if that should scare her.
‘Warren Pendrell,’ he repeated.
NINE (#ulink_d5ce571e-f7b8-5a91-b241-05f24737a9fc)
Talking to Warren Pendrell was the last thing she wanted. It’s what she’d been trying to avoid by going to Crumwald first, and already she could feel the familiar constriction in her throat.
She walked out of the outpatient facility and got in her car, driving across the parking lots that connected the research and hospital sides and reparking so she could make a speedy getaway afterward. The dignity of her exit would be lost if she had to tramp across the gravel and succulent beds back the way she’d come. Not that he’d be watching.
But maybe someone was, out of the blank-faced windows in the high granite building, and that was troubling. A faint wire mesh covered a set of windows on the second floor, and Grace snatched another glance, disquieted. The wire was new, she was certain, and she wondered if that’s where she’d find Jazz. The building rose like a granite monolith under a vivid blue sky with a faint tracing of clouds. A perfect San Diego day, covering what?
He’s coming for you … He’s the Spikeman.
She locked up and entered the building under an imposing sign etched in granite: CENTER FOR BIOCHIMERA.
Next to the sliding glass doors was a smaller sign in black letters: WARNING! THIS IS A LATEX-FREE SITE. ALL LATEX PRODUCTS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN!
Grace scanned the lobby. A young woman sat reading at the information kiosk in the middle of the room. A small coffee and pastry area lay to the left, most of the tables occupied by interns and nurses, none she recognized. On the walls hung pictures of the groundbreaking, Nobel laureates who did research at the Center, and an unseemly number of photos featuring Warren as the beaming centerpiece, his shock of white hair glowing along with his teeth.
The V of the building opened into floor-to-ceiling windows, revealing the view. Here the ocean was a churning presence, a gray and blue highway carrying Navy traffic and fishing trawlers out to sea. The skyline of La Jolla glinted in the bright sun, and far to the south, Mexico’s Coronado Islands rose like the purple humps of a prehistoric sea monster.
On scattered sofas people waited. They waited in the halls, milling around. On chairs by the entrance. They waited in pairs and family groupings and alone. It seemed to Grace as if that waiting defined the essence of the Center. It was saturated with a pain born of that waiting, and a longing so intense it seemed distilled, the longer she was away from it.
She headed past the information kiosk to the elevators. A family marshaled a boy of about ten out into the hall, his wheelchair sticking as it bumped over the elevator groove. His younger sister hopped next to him in excitement. The mother had a trembly half-smile on her face, as if smiling even that much was too costly.
Grace rode the elevator alone to three. The joke was, the Center was built on a bluff and run on one, and Grace had heard it repeated more times than she could count by jealous colleagues of Warren’s who didn’t realize they knew each other personally. She never repeated it; it was petty, but it spoke clearly to the empire he had built and the enemies he’d made.
Damaged adults and children wounded by disorders and limping from attacks leveled against them by their own immune systems flocked to the Center for specialized treatment, hoping for the miracle cure that would stop their bodies from viciously destroying themselves. Warren Pendrell promised nothing, but something in his manner must have communicated hope. People lined up for clinical trials.
She’d spent part of her residency on loan from Johns Hopkins working in the Center’s sophisticated pediatric heart transplant unit, and Warren had taken her immediately under his wing. Those were the giddy days when she was a rising star and everything was working, but that was a long time ago and when she’d left medicine, part of what she’d jettisoned was the safety of his mentor-ship, the easy way doors opened and the belief that anything professionally was still possible. Now she approached his offices with the caution and respect they deserved.
The elevator opened and she faced smoked-glass doors with Warren’s name engraved in brass: DR. WARREN PENDRELL, DIRECTOR.
Another name was inscribed in smaller script underneath: LABS OF DR. LEE ANN BENTLEY.
Grace felt the beginning of a headache, seeing the name. Lee had been a coldly amoral researcher hungry for grants and recognition when Grace had known her five years before. Now she’d moved up to the major leagues, sharing lab space with Warren himself. Grace had managed to avoid seeing Lee in earlier visits. But today she didn’t feel lucky.
Grace opened the heavy door leading to the reception area. This smaller lobby glowed in a soft shade of gold, the center of the room dominated by a carved marble statue of an angel and child. A drug salesman looked up incuriously from a trade magazine and went back to reading, his briefcase of samples bulging at his feet.
Grace went to the counter and waited as the receptionist finished a call. The receptionist was middle-aged, efficient, with a helmet of dyed black hair and a chest that jutted forward like the prow of an immense ship. She put down the telephone and turned to Grace.
‘Yes?’ Her face was neutral. She’d missed a spot with her eyebrow pencil, and one of her brows had a small, disconcerting patch of white in the middle of what otherwise was a perfect walnut brown arched wing.
‘Cynthia. Could you please alert Warren I’m here.’
‘And you are?’
Cynthia knew exactly who she was. This was a petty humiliation she put Grace through every time. ‘Grace. Descanso.’
‘Identification?’
Grace pulled out her crime lab ID instead of her driver’s license and was heartened to see a quiver of surprise in Cynthia’s eyes before she recovered. Good. Let her think I’m here on official business. Serves her right.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ She touched her pearls. The necklace was so long she could hang herself.
‘No.’ Grace stared her down and felt a sharp surge of victory when Cynthia turned away first. She really needed to play more board games.
‘He’s very busy.’
‘He wants to see me.’
‘I’ll let him be the judge of that. Sit and wait.’ It was an order.
Grace smiled thinly and went to the window, looking out. Far away, hang gliders floated over a blue expanse of sea, and clouds threaded the soft sky. Behind her, she heard Cynthia whispering into a phone. The steel door behind the counter slid open.
‘Grace!’
Warren had a forceful way of dominating a room, his energy thrusting itself into the place moments before he spoke, which gave her the unsettled feeling of being constantly in the presence of a sonic boom. He was in his late sixties but tall and fit-looking. His silver-white hair was precision cut, and he wore dark linen trousers and a blue cashmere sweater that matched his eyes.
He bared his teeth in a smile. The door wickered shut behind him. He stepped into the lobby. ‘Cynthia taking good care of you?’
Grace shot a smug smile at Cynthia but it was wasted. Cynthia shuffled papers, pretending to be busy.
Warren didn’t wait for an answer. He gripped Grace’s elbow gently and moved her out of harm’s way as he stood for a moment under the retina scanner. The red light beamed into his eyes. He blinked and the door reopened.
‘Quickly, quickly.’
He led her back into a hallway as the steel door closed behind them. They were in a corridor with laboratories. Grace could hear a synthesizer whirring softly in a lab down the hall, and the muted sound of voices coming from a conference room.
Warren turned and studied her, and the heartiness in his face fell away and was replaced with anger. ‘He could have killed you, damn it. I’ve left three messages since yesterday. You couldn’t pick up the phone and let me know you were all right?’
‘I wanted to come in person.’ She wondered if he could tell she was lying. ‘I have questions about Eddie Loud.’
Warren glanced quickly at the conference room and Grace realized Warren didn’t want whoever was in there overhearing them.
‘Follow me. I’ve got a meeting going on so I don’t have much time.’
In all the years she’d known him, he’d always had a meeting going on. Something big.
Warren had started the Center as a shoestring biotech company thirty years earlier, and hit the jackpot with a drug that became widely used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, inhibiting the immune system from attacking the body’s own cartilage. He’d taken that money and bought land, eventually building the Center for BioChimera. Now the company had grown to over three thousand employees worldwide, with manufacturing plants scattered across the globe.
But it was the hospital side that had attracted her. The chance to work with pediatric heart transplant patients and pursue new methods of controlling transplant rejection. When she’d been offered a residency, she’d jumped at it.
Warren had immediately singled her out, something that stunned her and made her uneasy at the same time. She had no interest in following Warren Pendrell into hospital administration, but she soon learned his interest was more complicated.
He’d lost a daughter about her age, he confided finally. Warren’s pain at losing his daughter Sara, and Grace’s need to have a dad, melded during her work at the Center. That and a mutual passion for research and healing. He’d personally recommended her for a position at Cedars-Sinai after her residency, and had helped set up the two months she’d spent in Guatemala working in a remote mountain clinic.
And then she’d come back from Guatemala and dropped out of medicine and taken a job at the crime lab.
She’d never told him why and Warren never let it drop, how her place was back at the Center leading the assault on transplant rejection and doing heart surgery on kids, instead of wasting her talent in some two-bit job with the police, barely scraping by.
She’d delivered Katie at the Center when the time came, and later Katie had ear surgery as a baby there, but the relationship between Warren and Grace had grown increasingly strained until it had erupted in a frightening outburst of pyrotechnics, Warren insisting she tell him why she’d given up medicine, Grace holding to silence. He’d apologized but she sensed lurking beneath the surface a fierce need to control, a need he was barely able to keep in check. Now their contact was relegated to stray lunches and occasional phone calls.
‘Do you know how many people I’ve mentored here in all these years? Exactly two.’
‘Warren.’ It was the opening volley of a familiar war and she didn’t have the taste for it.
‘Fine, fine, I’ll stop.’
She followed him into his private library and waited as he scooped up an open reference book from a leather sofa. The room was large, airy, painted Italian custard.
A plaster fireplace vaulted in sweeping simplicity, surrounded by chairs in a rich palette of gold and red, accenting his favorite painting, a Degas that hung near his Italian rosewood writing desk. Two walls held floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It was here he kept his collection of science journals, books on philosophy and religion and first-edition nineteenth-century European novels.
‘Sit anyplace.’ He turned his back on her and went to the window. ‘I’m relieved you’re all right, by the way,’ he said gruffly. ‘More relieved than you’ll know.’
She sank into the leather sofa. Soft sunlight floated through raw silk panels, spilling wide bands of light across the tiled floor.
He turned and she saw how tired he looked under the tan. ‘I don’t mean to be short. I’m under more pressure than usual this week, that’s all, and then when I heard how close you’d come to dying – well, it seems to have unhinged me. What do you need?’
‘Answers. You knew him personally, didn’t you? Eddie Loud.’
He gave her a long, measured look. ‘I think I’ll have a drink. May I get you something? Perhaps fresh papaya juice?’
‘Sounds wonderful.’
He went to the sideboard, glancing at the photograph of his daughter he kept in a small gilt frame. Taken years ago, it revealed a young woman with a strong jaw and merry eyes. She was lost in a corn maze, laughing, not sure which way led to the exit. It had been shot from above looking down, and the exit was within reach. She just couldn’t find it.
Losing her way seemed to have been a chronic problem. Sara had been a sophomore at Brandeis when she’d fallen in love with a foreign exchange student who police discovered was traveling with false papers and had a criminal record. He was deported and six weeks later, she’d dropped out of school and followed him to Central America. Warren sent a former Green Beret to capture her and drag her home, but she’d run away again, and this time he’d left her alone.
Warren’s gaze left the photo and settled on Grace. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘What do you need to know?’
She told him what Eddie Loud had said right before she killed him.
