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Skeleton Key(115)

By:Jane Haddam


She just couldn’t think of what it was she was supposed to do.





3


When Bennis Hannaford got to Gerald Harrison’s office, the light was on in the two front windows, and there was a note for her on the door.

Ring twice so I’ll know it’s you. G.

Bennis rang twice, and then the coughing started again. She wrapped her arms around her chest and doubled over. By now, she had been coughing so often and so violently for so long, her lungs hurt whenever she started in again. Out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike coming into Philadelphia, she had once again thrown up blood. She was going to do it again, right here. She hacked and hacked, hacked and hacked. Just as she brought up a big splatter of red, Gerald opened his door.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, looking at the mess on the floor. “How long has this been going on?”

“The cough or the blood?”

“The blood.”

“Since yesterday.”

“What about the cough?”

“For a couple of weeks.”

“Come on in,” Gerald said. “In about two minutes, I’m going to make you go to the hospital, but for the moment I want to check you out.”

Bennis straightened up and stretched. It hurt to stretch. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to have the hall light glowing over her head.

“He’s going to say he told me so, you know that,” she said. “They’re all going to say they told me so.”

“They ought to. You should have given up cigarettes ten years ago. You should never have started.”

“You think this is caused by cigarettes?”

“Yes, Bennis,” Gerald said patiently. “Whatever this is, it was probably caused by cigarettes.”

Bennis walked past him into the office. The reception room was carpeted in deep pile and decorated with huge plants—trees, really—in equally huge planters. The walls were covered with photographs of patients successfully treated. Nobody ever kept photographs of the ones who died. She wondered if Gerald would take her own photograph down off the wall if she died, and then she told herself to stop it. She was being morbid. She was being nuts.

In the back hall, Sheryl Lynne, one of the nurses, was fussing around in an examining room. She smiled politely at Bennis—Bennis was sure she just loved having to stay late, just so some Main Line postdebutante could have an examination after hours—and pointed the way into the room they were going to use. Bennis felt the cough welling up in her chest and tried to hold it back, if only to avoid the pain. It didn’t work. She began to hack and hack again. She brought up more blood.

“Oh, my God,” Sheryl Lynne said.

“Go sit down,” Gerald said, coming up behind them both.

Bennis put a hand against the wall. She was so cold, she couldn’t stop herself from shaking. The whole world seemed to be made of ice. The coughing had stopped but she didn’t feel any better. She felt worse. She felt worse and worse all the time.

“Go sit down,” Gerald commanded her, giving a little push to her back.

Bennis scurried into the examining room. The examining table was too high up. She sat down on the little wooden chair instead.

“What is it?” she heard Sheryl Lynne ask.

Gerald Harrison sighed. “Pneumonia, for one thing. What else is the matter in there, I can’t tell at the moment. You’d better call me an ambulance.”

“No,” Bennis said. “I’ve got—I’ve got my car.”

“Tell the hospital I’m going to want an immediate admission. I’m going to need an IV and I’m going to need a ton of antibiotics. There’s no way she came down with this yesterday. She must have been walking around with it for days. Get the ambulance, Sheryl Lynne. Do it now.”

“My car,” Bennis said.

“Shut up,” Gerald said. “What it is you have against consulting a doctor when you get sick, I’ll never know. It’s like you’ve got a vested interest in creating emergencies.”

Not quite, Bennis thought, as she drifted into oblivion—but then she did drift into oblivion. The world was dark and endless, and the only person in it besides herself was Gregor Demarkian.

By the time the ambulance showed up, Bennis was thinking of nothing at all.





Five



1


What Gregor Demarkian really wanted to do was to find some form of public transportation and go right back to Philadelphia, and to Bennis, as soon as possible. What he had to do was to find some way to give the Connecticut State Police hope that they might be able to arrest a person who had already committed three murders in four days, and who seemed to have no interest whatsoever in stopping. That, Gregor knew, was a misperception. This murderer was not a lunatic—a “homicidal maniac” as some people liked to call them. Gregor had known a few homicidal maniacs in his time, and taken an interest in a few he had not been professionally involved with. The truth was, none of them had seemed very much like maniacs to him. Some of them had been the kind of person one expected to find accused of serial murder—drifters, loners, badly dressed, badly smelling, with a history of lost jobs and erratic behavior. Some of them had been far more ordinary men. There was Ted Bundy, who could have had a life if he’d managed to keep his sexual impulses on track, or if he’d even wanted to. There was Frederick West, in England, just a few years ago, who had had a life, and a wife and a job and a house, and used all of them to murder young girls who happened to be waiting for a bus at the stop on the street just outside his front door.