Act of Darkness(95)

She reached into her basket again and came up, this time, with tape. “I used pillows the last two times,” she said, “but I won’t do that now. The succinylcholine only lasts three to five minutes. I have so much to say. Because I did hear the three of you, talking. Talking about what a disaster it was that she had been born, and what a drag taking care of her was going to be on Stephen’s career, and what a fool Janet was going to be because you knew Janet would insist on not putting her in an institution. She’d want to take care of her herself and what would happen to Stephen’s perfect political wife then? And then Kevin said she should never have been born. Janet should have had amniocentesis and gotten an abortion. Then he said if it was all right to abort a child at birth minus five days, it ought to be legal to abort a child at birth plus five days. He couldn’t see any difference. And he knew they did abortions that late in that place because he’d done them himself.”

She took a strip of tape off the roll and hung it on her thumb, the way teachers kept tape in reserve when they were hanging children’s pictures on a wall. “If you’d tried to kill her then and there, I could have stopped you,” she said. “But you didn’t. Kevin just talked about succinylcholine, and then he said how you could suffocate a baby and it would look just like crib death, just like. It wouldn’t even come as a surprise. Children with Down syndrome often don’t live very long anyway. A lot of them die before they leave the hospital. It’s nothing unusual. He could use the succinylcholine to keep her still and then after she was still he could stop her breathing. And nobody would ever know.”

She now had four pieces of tape draped over her thumb. She took the longest one and put it over Dan Chester’s mouth, then took two more and reinforced it at the corners. “You said you wanted to think about it,” she said, “and you all went away, and I went back to Janet’s room. Then the next morning Janet had a crisis and I spent all day and all night waiting in hallways, waiting to hear what had happened. When I got back to the ward, Stephanie was dead. And so was Janet, Dan, that’s what you never understood. So was Janet. From that moment on, she was a walking corpse. When the three of you put together that act, you thought you were finally going to bury her. I could have forgiven you for Stephanie, Dan, but I will have my revenge for Janet. I will have it.”

She took another piece of tape off her thumb. “I’m going to put this over your nose, Dan. The succinylcholine will keep you from pulling it off. You’re going to die and when you’re dead it’s going to look just as if you died from—crib death. Do you see?”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Victoria looked at the tape in her hand and then at Gregor Demarkian. Her eyes were wild and her face was ugly. She was electrified. She picked up the heart-shaped ruby brooch and held its sharpened bar in the light.

“Get the hell out of here,” she said, “or I’ll stick you, too.”

Outside, there was a rumble that turned into a roar, and the great plate glass window that was the Mondrian study’s north wall lit up in a thousand colors.

The fireworks had started.