Devoted, page 23
He had no illusions that he would ever learn the identity of Lissa’s drive-by killer, or that any forensic autopsy would provide him with the full truth of any human act of violence. The truth he sought in this new life was both the truth of nature and of himself. He spent much of his leisure time hiking ever deeper into the Sierra Nevada, observing—studying—the natural world with increasing care and intimacy. A marvelous order existed in nature, a damn harsh but rational order, and no deception was involved other than, in some cases, the camouflage of fur or feathers, or chameleon scales. In the wilds, no lies were told by tongue or pen. He hoped that the better he understood the way of nature, the better he’d understand the way a man needed to live to have respect for himself and others that included no self-delusions or equally egregious errors.
He couldn’t say why he believed that the truth of the Spader-Klineman murders and the truth of Lee Shacket, alias Nathan Palmer, were inextricably linked to whatever ultimate truth he expected to find in nature. That was just what he felt, and he felt it strongly.
Earlier, in the alleyway between the morgue and the sheriff’s station, when he’d heard an ambulance arriving in Pinehaven just as another was leaving, he’d intuited that the sirens had something to do with Shacket. He’d gone next door to speak with Carl Fredette, the watch commander on the current shift, and had learned about the events at the Bookman house.
Now, through binoculars, he watched as Hayden Eckman and Rita Carrickton came out of the emergency entrance and stood talking for a minute or two under the portico. Their patrol cars were in the no-parking zone, and they departed one after the other, without sirens or lightbars.
Carson finished his current cup of coffee, screwed the cup onto the thermos bottle, and set out across the parking lot toward the hospital. According to Carl Fredette, Shacket had been captured and would be restrained at the hospital until the sheriff could speak with the district attorney in the morning.
Because Carson knew the four rooms that could be adapted as psychiatric-care units, he didn’t have to make an inquiry as to where Shacket was being held. He went straight to the third floor, the highest floor, and to the end of the east wing.
A straight-backed chair and small folding table had been placed in the hall, to the left of the door to Room 328. On the table were a sweating carafe of ice water with a glass, a can of Coca-Cola, a bag of peanuts, and magazines about hot rods.
Thad Fenton, a young and earnest deputy, put down a magazine and rose to his feet when he saw Carson approaching. He had been in service only about six months. That was good. He would be uncertain about this unprecedented situation and respectful of Carson’s authority.
“Dr. Conroy,” he said too loud, caught himself, and spoke softly in respect of the patients in that wing. “What’re you doing up and about at this hour?”
“I finished the Spader and Klineman autopsies, and I can’t sleep. Hell, I might not sleep for a week.”
“I heard about the Klineman woman. It’s straight out of The Walking Dead. I sure don’t know how you do what you do.”
“Somebody’s got to do it. Listen, I need to see this crazy sonofabitch.”
“Shacket? Well, Doc, nobody told me you’d be coming around.”
“I have a few questions for him.”
The deputy frowned. “Should he have an attorney present?”
“He hasn’t been charged with anything. He’s on a psychiatric hold. When he’s charged, he’ll need an attorney.”
Fenton remained dubious, although evidently not because of any doubt about Carson’s right to be there. “He’s dangerous, Doc. He was on enough drugs to knock him out for hours. Instead he came around while they were still restraining him, and they had to shoot him up again. They wanted to zap him a third time, but they were worried about him overdosing.”
“He is fully restrained?”
“Oh, yeah.” Fenton took a key from his pocket. “Just be careful ’cause he bit off Walter Colt’s finger. And when you go in there, I have to lock the door after you. That’s the rule.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll be watching through this little window here, but I still have to lock the door after you.”
The window in the door was about eighteen inches wide and a foot tall, multiple panes with layers of wire between them.
Deputy Fenton looked into the room as he inserted the key in the lock.
He glanced at Carson again. “What they do here is they go in two at a time, never one alone. Usually it’s a nurse and some big guy who’s an orderly or something.”
“I’ll be fine,” Carson assured him.
“Oh, and about how his eyes glow like animal eyes. They think he’s wearing some crazy contacts, like people do at Halloween. They were gonna remove them after they finished everything else with him, but then he came out of the sedative or whatever, came out of it again, tossing his head and fighting the restraints, so they just left the contacts for tomorrow.”
“He tries to spook me,” Carson said, “I’ll put in my wax fangs and give him a scare right back.”
78
Megan and Ben worked well together, cutting a double thickness of painter’s tarp and nailing it over the tall sidelight next to the front door, stretching it taut enough so the wind couldn’t billow it like a sail and thereby either strain the nails or tear the thick plastic. The molding would have to be repaired and painted after the glazier replaced the glass. Because the sidelight wasn’t an operable window, there were no security-system contacts related to it, and the alarm could be set again whenever Megan wanted. They swept up the broken glass and the in-blown debris, cleaned the mess that Shacket had left in the kitchen, and throughout these tasks, they shared their stories.
She hadn’t believed that anything Ben Hawkins needed to tell her could distract her from the terror Lee Shacket had brought into her life and the stain of horror that his assault had left in her memory. However, the incredible story of the golden retriever’s seeming intelligence and his insistence on guiding Ben all the way from Olympic Village to this house outside Pinehaven filled her with wonder and raised countless questions beyond answering. For the moment at least, Lee Shacket faded from immediate consideration.
She made coffee, and they took two mugs upstairs to Woody’s room, where they settled at the small round table at which Megan and the boy sometimes worked a jigsaw puzzle together.
The blustering night pressed its featureless face against the windows, its voice groaning in the glass, seeking admission, and the attic creaked as though some intruding weighty presence coiled among the rafters in that high realm. The night was no less strange than it had been since the hard wind had risen in the latter hours of the previous evening. However, now the rainless storm seemed to be blowing not just a fusillade of threats but also a promise of something amazing and agreeably transformative.
The boy and the dog lay as before. Neither seemed to have moved as much as an inch. This was not necessarily curious behavior for Woody, but it seemed highly unusual for a dog that wasn’t sleeping.
“Woody has some kind of connection with animals,” Megan said. “He feeds deer that come on the property. They almost take apples from his hands. Rabbits, squirrels—small things don’t run from him.”
“I had dogs as a kid. I had Clover until recently. They were wonderful, but they were nothing like this one.”
“What’s happening between them?” Megan wondered.
Ben shook his head. He got up and stepped to the foot of the bed and said softly, “Scooby?”
The dog thumped his tail once, emphatically, but didn’t move otherwise.
Megan went to the bed as well. When she spoke her son’s name and received no response, she said, “Scooby?”
Again the dog responded with one hard slap of his tail against the mattress.
Without breaking eye contact with the retriever, speaking in a whisper, Woody said, “No. His name is Kipp.”
79
Carson Conroy stepped across the threshold. The door fell shut behind him. Deputy Fenton locked it.
The prisoner was on his back, arms at his sides, restricted by wide straps, the upper half of the bed raised at about a thirty-degree angle.
Currently, the only light in the room issued from a sleep-hours luminary on the wall behind the bed, directly above Shacket’s head. Even the low wattage of this lamp streamed down on him in an eerie, mocking approximation of the mystical light that some painters of Christendom had portrayed as descending on the crucifixion, though this was not a portrait of self-sacrifice and redemption bathed in the light of love. This grotesque, demonic figure brought to mind the poet Yeats, who had written of some “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.
As Carson approached the foot of the bed, he saw what seemed to be animal eyeshine in Shacket’s hateful glare, fluxing continuously between yellow and red. He suspected that, in the morning, when the staff calmed the prisoner with another injection and attempted to remove the contact lenses, they would discover only eyes that in some hideous fashion and with terrifying rapidity had become other than human eyes.
“I’m Dr. Carson, the county medical examiner. I performed autopsies on the man who was shot yesterday and on a woman who was bitten to death.”
If there had not been wicked cunning in this creature’s stare, Carson would have imagined it; so he knew that he couldn’t trust himself to discern with full confidence what Shacket might be thinking or the true condition of his mind.
“I don’t have any intention of testifying against you in a court, only as to the condition of the bodies of Justine Klineman and her companion.”
Shacket made no attempt at a reply.
The air carried a subtle but peculiar smell. The scent was neither foul nor pleasant. Just different. Carson had never smelled anything quite like it, and he couldn’t give it a name.
“No one here is operating on a worst-case scenario. They think you’re just psychotic, had a total mental breakdown. I’m afraid it’s not that, not in the way they mean. I think something extraordinary is happening to you.”
Shacket’s arms lay above the blanket, under the straps. The pale light was just bright enough to reveal the muscles tighten and the hands claw into fists.
“Do you know the word transhumanism, Mr. Shacket?”
The prisoner’s nostrils flared, possibly a sign of excitement.
Carson said, “It’s too puerile to be a philosophy, too barren of foundational facts to be called a theory. It’s just a high-tech religion.”
“What would you know?” the prisoner said. “You’re not a doctor in any meaningful sense. You’re a butcher of the dead.”
“An article of the transhumanism faith,” Carson continued, “is that human beings will soon have the ability to transform themselves physically and intellectually, acquire much stronger bodies, vastly increase our intelligence, gain powers once dreamed of only by the folks at Marvel Comics. This is expected to happen through a melding of man and machine or by breakthroughs in genetic engineering.”
“You have eyes to see, and you see not,” Shacket said.
“Was it truly cancer research that was being conducted in Springville?”
“Nothing so inconsequential as that. Why are you here? To thank me for bringing business your way? Without murder, you would have no work. Have you ever given thought to how complicit you are in crime, Doctor?”
Whatever Carson had been expecting, this was not it. Where was the out-of-control subhuman beast who had grossly assaulted Justine Klineman and bitten off Walter Colt’s finger?
Declining to take the bait, Carson continued. “Dorian Purcell has said that, considering the medical advances being made, there are people alive today who’ll live two hundred years, three hundred, maybe longer. Did the research in Springville involve the issue of longevity?”
“It involved the human genome, horizontal genetic transfer, the destiny of humanity, the fate of the earth—much more elevated work than carving up corpses to see what made them stop ticking.”
Carson persisted. “Something went wrong?”
The skirling wind protested loudly. Shacket turned his head to the left, regarding the window with what might have been longing for the tumult of the night.
“Something went wrong?” Carson repeated.
Smug satisfaction pulled Shacket’s features into a sardonic grin. “Something went wrong and something went right.”
“You were contaminated?”
In Shacket’s eyes of light, blue irises floated like gentian petals in moonlit pools.
Carson Conroy believed he was in the presence of something profoundly alien. He could not prove it, but he knew it.
In a voice astringent with contempt, Shacket said, “You say contaminated, I say coronated.”
“Coronated? Crowned? Made king of what?”
“Of all that will come to be.”
Those seven words were spoken with quiet confidence that either confirmed Shacket’s insanity or belied it. Carson was disturbed to find that he could not be sure which.
“Whatever happened to you,” Carson said, “whatever you’ve been coronated with—are you communicable?”
“So this is why you’re here. Ready to inflame the population with fear of a plague.” Shacket shook his head and looked again at the window. “You’re getting tiresome, Doctor.”
“No bacteria, no viruses?”
“When a king coughs, does he then infect those around him with royalty?”
“The ninety-two killed in the fire—they were contaminated?”
“Coronated. Try not to be dense, Doctor. No bacteria, no virus. Just . . . an agent of change programmed to invade every cell.”
“What agent?”
“Archaea. If you don’t know what that is, look it up. It won’t do you any good to know. In my becoming, archaea isn’t kryptonite to me. I have no fear of it.”
“Your ‘becoming’?”
“Before your eyes, I am changing. But you haven’t the capacity to see.”
“They were burned to death—why? Because they were liable to undergo . . . changes, genetic changes?”
“Precisely.”
Carson thought about that. “Uncontrolled changes. So they were a publicity disaster. And the source of potentially hundreds of millions in lawsuits.”
“Ah.” Shacket smiled at him. “Associating with the deceased has not left you entirely brain dead.”
“Did those people know when they signed employment contracts that they were essentially working atop a bomb, that they were all expendable in a crisis if this altered archaea somehow escaped whatever isolation lab it was confined to?”
“If they didn’t know, they suspected. They all signed off on the risk. Scientists can be true believers, too. In fact, perhaps more easily than others if they haven’t yet found something they can call true and worth believing. Dorian pursued and signed up only those with a passion for the transhuman future, who wanted to be there when the ultimate breakthrough occurred—who wanted to be among the first to be guaranteed centuries of vigorous life free of disease, with new capabilities. We all live for the fulfillment of one promise or another—love, wealth, fame. But what could be a promise more worth pursuing than the promise of physical immortality?”
Of all that Shacket had said, this speech was the first that, to Carson, had the unmistakable flavor of insanity.
To Carson’s best knowledge, archaea could horizontally transfer genes between species but were not known to be carriers of disease.
He assumed that altered archaea programmed to deliver a genetic package into the cells of a test animal would die after fulfilling that function or would resort to a preprogrammed natural condition and would become agents of only natural processes.
His concern about a plague receded to the back of his mind.
“Becoming what?” he asked.
Again the wind drew Shacket’s attention to the casement window, where the glass vibrated and the metal frames of the two tall panes rattled against each other.
When the wind subsided slightly, Shacket brought his radiant gaze back to his visitor. “I am becoming the king of beasts.”
Here was the more obvious evidence of insanity that Carson had expected when he’d first entered the room. “King of what beasts?”
“This is a world of beasts, Doctor. Human beings are just one of the many in the zoo. I’m becoming king of them all.”
Delusions of grandeur. Megalomania. The eerily articulate and considered Lee Shacket, with whom he’d been speaking, now seemed to be revealing a more recognizable madness heretofore concealed.
The scent that Carson had never smelled until entering this room was less subtle than previously. For a moment he was reminded of raw onion, but then wasn’t, and for an instant he thought of the vapors from rubbing alcohol, but only for an instant, nor was this the astringency of the urine in the collection bottle.
It was evidence of his dread that he wondered what the smell would be like in a warren of raw earth where a snake curled among the wriggling lengths of its recent offspring. Maybe like this?
“Considering your circumstances,” Carson told Shacket, “you were deposed from the throne before you could occupy it.”
