The Blood Artists
- Автор: Хоган Чак
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-688-15622-0
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Blood Artists». Краткое содержание книги:
Reilly was calming down now and the eagerness was returning to his moon-shaped face. “We breezed by his shop at the Underground Mail around eleven and everything was fine. Followed him back home here like any other night and watched him go in. All routine. He put on the lamp and the light in the bedroom window as always.”
“That’s it?”
“There’s nothing missing as far as we can see. He draws his salary every other Thursday and of that takes just twenty in paper, so there’s never any hard currency lying around. Everything that isn’t tied up in his store he spends on more of the same collectible junk, and obviously, all of that is still here.”
“How did you find him?”
“He didn’t open the store this morning. We tried a phone call to wake him up. We tried a lot of things before we came in. He was always punctual. Made our part easy. None of it makes any sense.”
“Where’s the bedroom?”
Reilly led him through the connecting hallway. The bed was queen-sized and neatly made. A rattan shade drawn down over the room’s only window lifted and fell against the sill as the bedroom sighed. The breeze stirred the coppery smell of blood.
Lancet was a trim thirty-three-year-old white male with sandy brown hair. He lay facedown across the peach comforter with his head and shoulders falling off the side and the knuckles and backs of his hands curled on the thin white mat covering the floor. He was nude except for athletic socks. Discarded clothes lay in a pile against one wall.
Both wrists had been slit lengthwise. Dry brown blood soaked the white mat and also a wood-handled steak knife lying between Lancet’s curled hands.
Maryk stepped back. The shock of the suicide momentarily eclipsed his anger at seeing four years of work thrown away. The instrument choice seemed particularly crude.
“A steak knife,” he said.
Reilly nodded. “I know.”
The weight of the body upon the mattress had shrugged down the comforter so that the sweat-stained tops of the pillows showed. Maryk went to the heap of clothing across the room and sorted through the pile with his right foot. A vintage pair of black Levi’s jeans lay below a white pair of briefs. Both were turned inside out.
“No sign of a struggle, forced entry?” Maryk said.
Reilly said, “None that we can see.”
“And no one was following him. You’re certain of that.”
“Lancet had no enemies,” Reilly said. “Not that he had any friends either. He didn’t have anybody. Except us, and that he never knew.”
Boone rose before the dresser. He was wire-haired and older than Reilly. “This is too much,” he said. “We’ve moved out of the gray area now. Observation, surveillance: fine, okay.” He pointed to the bed. “That’s a corpse there.”
The loss frustrated Maryk as much as it troubled him. “You were to watch him,” Maryk said. “You were to monitor him and to make certain that he remained in Atlanta, and that he lived comfortably. But above all you were to make certain, absolutely certain, that no harm came to him. That he remained viable and healthy.”
Reilly and Boone looked at each other as men who have worked long hours together will. “What did you expect?” Boone said. “This guy was haunted. He was a ghost, and, he knew it. He lived for the past. Look at this.”
There were display shelves next to the closet doors and Boone began pulling items off them. A sky blue box reading WINDOWS ’95. A Frasier mug. An unopened foil pack of Beavis and Butt-head playing cards. A Lost World lunch box. An Entertainment Weekly guide to The X-Files. Stacks of old VHS video cassettes. A red ribbon pin.
“Pull all the phone taps,” Maryk said. “Unwire his tablet. Then declare a Biohazard 3 and go through all the motions. Bring him out in a covered pod and get BioCon going on the hallway and the rest of the building. We want the neighbors inconvenienced as much as possible; it will lend legitimacy. Write up a death certificate, nothing too exotic, then contact his sister in Louisiana. Make certain she gets anything of value you find here.”
Boone folded open the closet doors and pulled out a vinyl storage bag from among Lancet’s personal effects. He drew the zipper down on a green canvas jacket with white sleeves and white snaps and a twilled green-and white collar. The face of a bulldog was sewn over the right breast and a white capital letter P over the left. Script stitching beneath the dog face read: Plainville Class of ’00.
“How’s this for nostalgia,” said Boone.
Maryk only frowned. “You may dispose of that.”
Quarantine Services had sealed off the auditorium and old cafeteria inside Building One for the sequestration of anyone who may have shared breathing space with Stephen Pearse following his return from Orangeburg. It was a “friendly” quarantine of international health care professionals requiring no ankle monitors and minimal security at each exit.
The shock of the director’s illness was still setting in. A moroseness more eloquent than the usual moroseness of enforced quarantine pervaded the old building. Even the QS administrators in their contact suits sat tiredly on folding chairs or leaned dazed against walls. The administrative staff from Building Sixteen sat solemnly in groups and speculated about the future of the BDC.
Maryk strode through quarantine. No one approached or addressed him and no one spoke. of him until after he was gone.
Bobby Chiles entered the makeshift examining room and sat down before realizing that Maryk was seated across from him. “Peter,” Bobby said anxiously. “How is he?”
Maryk was rearranging the blood-taking supplies on the standing tray between them. “Alive. Blood samples seem to indicate a slowdown.”
Bobby’s eyes brightened in amazement as he rolled up his shirtsleeve. “Why, that’s — that’s remarkable, Peter. That’s truly remarkable. So there’s a chance, then.”
Maryk pulled out a Betadine swab and smeared Bobby’s exposed brown forearm orange-red. “I can slow the process enough to keep him alive for a few more days. A week, maybe more. Depends on how far gone he is, and how much we can learn about the virus in that time.”
“But there’s a chance he’ll make it beyond that. I mean, there’s always that chance.”
Maryk broke the skin of Bobby’s forearm and entered a vein. “No,” he said. “Stephen’s not going to make it.”
Bobby looked at him blankly as the small plastic barrel began to fill.
“When can I see about moving him out of there?” Bobby said. “B4 is a laboratory, Peter. People will want to visit.”
Maryk was firm. “No visitors. Stephen stays where he is. Full rein, Bobby, remember? No distractions.”
Bobby nodded distantly. “How could this happen?” he said.
Maryk raised his left hand. He opened it and pointed to the center of his latex palm.
Bobby said, “But he didn’t report anything. What was he doing up in New York?”
“Running away. The guilt of infection.”
“I knew that, of everyone we had out there, you’d be the one to find him. You two had a history.”
“His parents’ summer house was a long shot, but it paid off. We’re picking apart his tablet now. His bank account shows only one service stop the entire trip.”
“He had one of the government fleet. Eight cylinders of compressed natural gas. He could make it there with just one fill-up.”
Maryk nodded. “It was a full-service CNG station. A bank account debit through his tablet. Never had to roll down the window.”
“No spread, then.”
“None yet.” Maryk switched to a third barrel. “Except for the publicity woman.”