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:
This couldn’t be true. Not someone like Dr. Pearse. She sat stunned as Maryk returned to the lectern. He was gathering his things. She realized that the lesson was over.
“You can’t keep me here,” she said.
He stopped on his way out. “It is no longer a question of personal freedom. The reason I have told you all this is because Plainville lives on, and you alone have the blood I need to combat it, to save human lives. You will be safe here. Finals are almost over, and the students will be leaving to begin their Christmas break. You will remain here under my care at least until I know what is happening. Dr. Pasco now will take you to the school cafeteria, and there you will eat.” Maryk had started past her for the stairs. “Above all else,” he said, “we need you to remain healthy.”
Thunderstruck and voiceless, Melanie watched as Maryk climbed the blue steps to the exit.
Exsanguination
Freeley pointed with a capped surgical marker. “See the blunt force injury here, the parietal lobe, right side of the cranium? The intruder rose up from the backseat and brought an object across like this” — she made a right-handed whipping motion across the front of her body — “incapacitating Blossom. Then she was pulled over the seat back and the incisions were made in both wrists.”
Blossom’s bluish corpse lay facedown atop the stainless steel autopsy table. A rubber block beneath her shoulders arched her neck and shaved head. Cellulite pinches pitted her sagging buttocks and thighs. Her fingers were tipped black.
Freeley wore a scrub gown, mask, sleeve protectors, skullcap, and blue rubber gloves. “The keys were in the ignition of the car,” she continued. “All four doors were locked, with both rear windows rolled down. We got no prints off the door handles or inside panels except glove smudges, which we may have left ourselves. Blossom kept plants in the car, two small spider plants — did you know that? For company. In any case, the plastic pots were still glued to either end of the dash but the plants themselves were gone. Most of the soil was still there, some spilled onto the floorboards.”
“Stolen plants?” Maryk said.
“Could be.”
“You say the rear windows were rolled down. The window in Lancet’s bedroom was open too.”
Freeley nodded and positioned the overhead magnifying lens to illuminate the back of Blossom’s neck. Within the bluish ridges of flaking skin below the hairline was a single red dot breach. Maryk examined it.
“Toxicology again clean,” Freeley added.
Maryk straightened. “It’s not an injection,” he said.
Freeley said, “What do you mean?”
He walked around the end of the table to the other side. He was remembering his meeting with the girl. She had thought they were injecting her with something when in reality they had been pulling her blood.
“I mean they were purposefully bled,” he said. He pointed to the deep incisions on Blossom’s upturned wrists. “We assumed these murders were made to resemble suicides. Each, in fact, was an exsanguination.” Maryk pointed to the needle stick magnified on Blossom’s neck. “This is a blood pull. Lancet and Blossom were sampled before their deaths. The bleeding was meant to cover up the crime of the stolen blood: two homicides to mask two petty thefts.”
“But who would want their blood? And why? No one knew about the project.”
“Someone knew.”
“We were watching them all the time.”
“Not all the time. Nor were we watching for other people watching them. We were more worried about being seen ourselves.”
“The only problem with that is: Their blood was good. It was beneficial, life-saving.”
Maryk nodded. “Exactly. And to go to these lengths, to steal these lives from us, implies desperation — not in the act, but the impetus. The motivation. Who would so desperately want a look at their blood? And why?”
“Someone close, you’re thinking. Someone in Special Path.”
“No. I can account for all of my people’s whereabouts at any given time. It’s someone outside the project. Maybe it ties in to Orangeburg somehow, I don’t know.”
Freeley said, “What about the girl?”
“We keep her close, see who comes looking for her.” He was thinking back to the lecture hall again. “I think we may have underestimated her. She may not be as malleable as her psych profile led us to believe.”
He went back around the table near Freeley and set his tablet on top of her cutting board. He opened the screen and brought up the image of the unfinished painting they had recovered from Melanie Weir’s apartment.
“What do you see?” Maryk said.
Freeley looked at it disparagingly over the top hem of her mask. “One of her crazed paintings.”
Maryk was patient. “Look again.”
She crossed her arms within her surgical gown and stood in judgment. “I see a big mess,” she said. “I see garish colors: stormy red, smoky black. A dead, sick yellow.”
Maryk pointed. “What is this?”
“That’s a man. He’s sick. He’s kneeling.”
“He’s praying. And that?”
“A crevasse, or a gorge. But the colors and the shadows are all wrong — the light doesn’t match. It’s either a mistake or an optical illusion. Then that black valley below. A mangy wolf lapping at a lake of blood.”
“And that?”
“That’s the reflection of a man,” she said. “His face is hidden. Except for his white hair.” She stood quietly a moment. She was beginning to see. “It’s you,” she said.
“And here?”
“You’re squeezing a royal purple fist. Dripping blood into the lake of blood.”
“And here?”
“Thin people, naked. Walking with crutches and splints on a dirt road that becomes an oak tree. Those clouds in the sky are like milky eyes.” She nodded grudgingly. “It’s almost like she knew we were running her.”
“She never knew,” Maryk said. “She felt, because she has that extra sensibility. Maybe she remembered a little.”
Freeley picked up a trephine from among the scalpel, forceps, scissors, butcher’s knife, and Stryker saw set out on her cutting board. “She was your favorite,” Freeley said. “Wasn’t she. The artist.”
“She was the most interesting case.”
Freeley steadied Blossom’s bared scalp with a gloved hand. The circular blade of the trephine started with a whine. “She’s just a guinea pig,” Freeley said.
Her derision surprised him. Maryk collapsed his tablet and returned it to his bag as she began to cut. Freeley was a good doctor and a good investigator but she was not an artist. It limited her.
The nurse looked up startled from the counter as Maryk entered the B4 lab.
Stephen was sitting up with a cushion of pillows propped behind his back. His nylon restraints hung loose to the cement floor.
“He asked to sit up,” she said quickly through her hood.
“Peter?” The pillows rustled. Stephen could not see him yet.
Maryk went around the raised head of the gurney. Stephen’s thin hands were folded on the sheet in his lap. The nurse had dressed him in a hospital gown. “Peter,” he said. He seemed relieved. He had apparently undergone a change of personality since earlier that morning.
Stephen’s withered face exaggerated expression. He would be Happy or Sad or Content or Angry without degree. Here it seemed he was Embarrassed.
His jaw worked clumsily. “Better now,” he said. “To be sitting up. More balanced, in my thinking. About before—”
“Forget it.”
“She told me everything you did.” Stephen turned his eyes to the tablet open on the counter next to him. The data screen was toplined Pearse, Stephen D. “My charts,” he said. “More T cells even than you now.”