CHAPTER 54
On the day Ruby was kidnapped, Winnie came out of her coma. I felt like my prayers had gotten mixed up somehow. I’d been back in the apartment—yes, John’s place—all of two hours when the hospital called with the news. My eyes, heart, and soul felt heavy with the absence around me. The silence filled my ears like screams. I desperately wanted to get out of here, but Ginger needed food, and I needed a bit more sleep. Soon enough, I wouldn’t get another chance.
As it turned out, sleep eluded me. I lay on the futon, plagued by inescapable thoughts. I wondered how Ruby slept. Did she stay upright in that chair? Did he feed her? Were her hands ever untied so she could feed herself? Was he giving her water? Could she take her medication? Oh, I doubted that. Did he let her use the bathroom? But the questions I wanted answered above all were, where was my wife, and how would I find her?
The answers, though grim and difficult to fathom, brought me back to Clegg.
At first, his offer seemed insane. Actually, Clegg seemed insane. I knew the guy had a few bolts loose, but maybe his whole wiring was screwed up. But the more I thought about it, the less crazy the idea became. Who were these people who had, as he put it, slipped through the knot of justice? I wondered. Murderers, rapists, drug czars, I supposed. Were they more deserving of life than Ruby? Could I do the unthinkable? Husbands and wives hire so-called professionals to kill each other all the time—just watch 48 Hours Mystery or Dateline—and they do it for anything but noble causes. He wants her money. She wants her lover and no complications. Assuming you don’t get caught, divorce is a lot more expensive than murder. Their reasons are plentiful, and the excuses probably made sense to the perpetrators at the time of the crime. Did Clegg’s offer somehow stand on different moral ground? I didn’t know. I couldn’t answer, so I did the only thing I could think to do.
I went to see Winnie.
Winnie’s hospital room smelled of strong cleaning chemicals, which only heightened the scent of sickness. Propped up in her bed, Winnie had the dazed and confused look of a car accident victim shocked by her circumstance. The equipment attached to her, IV drips and heart monitors and such, paled in comparison to the apparatuses employed during her stay in the ICU. Winnie assessed me wide-eyed, as though I could be a mirage. But recognition dawned, and tears fell from her eyes in streams.
“John,” she cried, her lips trembling. “What happened? What happened to me?”
Winnie hid her age with dyed hair and a perpetual tan, but her skin looked almost bleached. I saw bruise marks on her neck, thin wrists, and arms. The marks that looked like handprints or rope burns turned my thoughts to Ruby and the marks that would be left on her by the Fiend. I stood beside Winnie’s bed and took hold of her shaky hand.
“What happened to me?” Winnie sobbed.
With my throat going tight and dry, I wiped clear her tears and used a damp cloth to help cool her forehead.
“Hi, Winnie,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“I don’t understand any of this . . . don’t know what happened. . . . Ruby . . . where is Ruby?”
“She’s okay,” I lied. “She’ll come to see you soon.”
“Who did this to me, John?” Winnie said. “Why would somebody want to hurt me?”
“I don’t know,” I said, finding the lies came easily, knowing the truth would be like shoving smoke down her already singed lungs.
“How long have I been here?” she asked. I could feel my resolve weakening, tears pushing against my eyes until they forced their way out. And when they started to flow, they wouldn’t stop, and for the first time since this ordeal began, I thought, Dead is better. If anything happened to Ruby, if I couldn’t free her from the Fiend, how could dead not be better?
“John, what’s wrong?” Winnie asked, right before she coughed—the racking, hacking kind of cough that made people wince in sympathy.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”
“What’s happening?” Winnie asked.
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing. They said I was in a fire. I remember flying into Boston. I remember a phone call from someone, your friend, I think. What’s his name?” Winnie squinted, trying to force the memory. “I can’t remember,” she said, her disappointment evident. “Ruby’s cancer had gone into remission. I remember feeling so happy for her. That’s it. . . . That’s what I remember. Except . . . except . . .” Winnie cringed. “When can I see Ruby?” she asked.
I was gripping the side of the bed, trying to keep from crying more. That was when I noticed all the vases of flowers surrounding the empty bed in Winnie’s two-person hospital room.
“Soon,” I said, finding my composure by focusing on those flowers. “Where is your roommate?”
Change the subject. Get yourself together.
“Dead,” Winnie said. “She died last night, not long after they moved me in here. She was young, twentysomething, and went into a cardiac arrest. It was quite unexpected and horribly sad. All these doctors and nurses were in here trying to save her. They moved me into the hallway. I didn’t want to see it, anyway.” Winnie was talking quickly, more like her old self, free-form speech without too many filters. “Her family has been in and out of here grieving all day. The mother is amazing, though. She’s donating all of her daughter’s organs—eyes, liver, everything. Poor thing had Parkinson’s disease. I heard a nurse say they think that’s what caused her heart attack. Who knows? So young, so sad. I guess her mother is going to donate her brain to a medical school, so maybe they’ll find out.
“God, I want a drink. John, can you get me something to drink? Not water, I mean. Something with a bit of a kick. Maybe a glass of wine. Something to relax me. I’m dying for a drink.”
Winnie’s voice drifted to the back of my mind. I could hear her talking but wouldn’t have been able to repeat a single word she said. I could feel the cogs of my brain beginning to turn, slowly at first, but quickening as the momentum began to build. I needed to leave the hospital right away. I needed to find Clegg. I looked up at the clock on the wall and shuddered.
I had twenty-four hours to produce a victim of the SHS Killer or Ruby would die.
And now I knew how I could do it.