Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

here, which Randal has overheard, are as numerous as they are disturbing.

      A battle seems to have been fought on this level. A section of the corridor wall has been broken down, as if something smashed its way out of one of the rooms.

      To the right of the elevator, half the width of the passageway is occupied by organized piles of rubble: broken concrete blocks, twisted rebar in mare’s nests of rust, mounds of plaster, steel door frames wrenched into peculiar shapes, the formidable steel doors themselves bent in half …

      According to Hands of Mercy legend, something had gone so wrong down here that Father wished always to keep the memory of it clear in his mind and, therefore, made no repairs and left the rubble instead of having it hauled away. Dozens of the New Race had perished here in an attempt to contain … something.

      Because Father enters and exits Mercy every day on this level, he is regularly confronted with the evidence of the terrible crisis that apparently almost led to the destruction of his life’s work. Some even dare to speculate that Father nearly died here, though to repeat this claim seems like blasphemy.

      Turning away from the rubble, Randal Six uses the last letter of toward to spell determination in a new direction.

      By a series of side steps that spell small words, alternating with forward steps that spell long words, he comes to a door at the end of the hallway. This is not locked.

      Beyond is a storage room with rows of cabinets in which are kept hard-copy backup files of the project’s computerized records.

      Directly opposite the first door stands another. That one will be locked. Through it, Father comes and goes from Mercy.

      Randal Six navigates the tile floor in this room by means of crosswords, at last settling in a hiding place between rows of file cabinets, near the second door but not within sight of it.

      Now he must wait.

       CHAPTER 57

      FROM THE LUXE, Carson went to Homicide, settled at the computer on her desk, and launched her web browser.

      There was no graveyard shift in Homicide. Detectives worked when the investigation required, night or day, but they tended to be in-office less as the day waned, on call but not sitting desks in the wee hours. At the moment, though the night was not yet that late, she sat alone in the corpse-chasers’ corner.

      Reeling from what Deucalion had told her, Carson wasn’t sure what to believe. She found it surprisingly difficult to disbelieve any of his story regardless of the fact that it was fantastic to the point of insanity.

      She needed to get background on Victor Helios. With the World Wide Web, she was able to unwrap a fictitious biography more easily than in the days when a data chase had to be done on foot or through cooperating officers in other jurisdictions.

      She typed in her search string. In seconds, she had scores of hits. Helios, the visionary founder of Biovision. Helios, the local mover and shaker in New Orleans politics and society. Helios, the philanthropist.

      At first she seemed to have a lot of material. Quickly, however, she found that for all his wealth and connections, Helios didn’t so much swim the waters of New Orleans society as skim across the surface.

      In the city for almost twenty years, he made a difference in his community, but with a minimum of exposure. Scores of people in local society got more press time; they were omnipresent by comparison to Helios.

      Furthermore, when Carson attempted to track the few facts about Helios’s past, prior to New Orleans, they trailed away like wisps of evaporating mist.

      He had gone to university “in Europe,” but nothing more specific was said about his alma mater.

      Though he inherited his fortune, the names of his parents were never mentioned.

      He was said to have greatly enlarged that fortune with several financial coups during the dot-com boom. No details were provided.

      References to “a New England childhood” never included the state where he had been born and raised.

      One thing about the available photos intrigued Carson. In his first year in New Orleans, Victor had been handsome, almost dashing, and appeared to be in his late thirties. In his most recent photos, he looked hardly any older.

      He had adopted a more flattering hairstyle – but he had no less hair than before. If he’d had plastic surgery, the surgeon had been particularly skilled.

      Eight years ago, he had returned from an unspecified place in New England with a bride who appeared to be no older than twenty-five. Her name was Erika, but Carson could find no mention of her maiden name.

      Erika would be perhaps thirty-three now. In her most recent photos, she looked not a day older than in those taken eight years previously.

      Some women were fortunate enough to keep their twenty-something looks until they were forty. Erika might be one of those.

      Nevertheless, the ability of both her and her husband to defy the withering hand of time seemed remarkable. If not uncanny.

      “They got him, O’Connor.”

      Startled, she looked up from the computer and saw Tom Bowmaine, the watch commander, at the open door to the hallway, on the farther side of the Homicide bullpen.

      “They got the Surgeon,” Tom elaborated. “Dead. He took a header off a roof.”

       CHAPTER 58

      ONE BLOCK OF THE ALLEYWAY had been cordoned off to preserve as much evidence as possible for the CSI crew. Likewise the roof of the building and the freight elevator.

      Carson climbed the stairs to Roy Pribeaux’s apartment. The jake outside the door knew her; he let her into the loft.

      She half expected to find Harker or Frye, or both. Neither was present. Another detective, Emery Framboise, had been in the area and had caught the call.

      Carson liked Emery. The sight of him didn’t raise a single hair on the back of her neck.

      He was a young guy – thirty-four – who dressed the way certain older detectives had once dressed before they decided they looked like throwbacks to the lost South of the 1950s. Seersucker suits, white rayon shirts, string ties, a straw boater parked dead-flat on his head.

      Somehow he made this retro look seem modern, perhaps because he himself was otherwise entirely of a modern sensibility.

      Carson was surprised to see Kathy Burke, friend and shrink, with Emery in the kitchen. Primarily Kathy conducted mandatory counseling sessions with officers involved in shootings and in other traumatic situations, though she also wrote psychological profiles of elusive perpetrators like the Surgeon. She seldom visited crime scenes, at least not this early in the game.

      Kathy and Emery were watching two CSI techs unload the contents of one of two freezers. Tupperware containers.

      As Carson joined Kathy and Emery, one of the techs read a label on the lid of a container. “Left hand.”

      She would have understood the essence of the situation without hearing those two words, because the raised lid of the second freezer revealed the eyeless corpse of a young woman.

      “Why aren’t you home reading about swashbuckling heroines and flying dragons?” Carson needled.

      “There’s a different kind of dragon dead in the alleyway,” Kathy said. “I wanted to see his lair, see if my profile of him holds any water.”

      “Right hand,” a tech said, taking a container from the freezer.

      Emery Framboise said, “Carson, looks