Читать книгу Dean Koontz 2-Book Thriller Collection: Innocence, The City - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 49

IN THE LAND ROVER, SURROUNDED BY THE CITY, I thought the falling snow began to seem ominous, as though it might be the same storm in which Father had died, the wind having circled the world uncounted times in those six years, returning now for me.

As we headed for the haven to which Gwyneth had fled from her apartment near the Commons, she said, “When Walter lost Claire, it changed him. The brutality of her murder followed by the travesty of the not-guilty verdicts radicalized him.”

Of the three rapists—Orcott, Sabbateau, and Clerkman—the last was the son of the longtime president of the union representing the city’s police and firemen. The press and all responsible authorities agreed that Clerkman’s family connections would in no way affect how the district attorney’s office would build a case and prosecute it.

In court, the police chain-of-custody records for evidence in the case showed that the nurse’s cap and panties were found with her other garments near the pond. The officer who tagged and bagged those items had since retired and moved out of state; he was too ill to be subpoenaed. For reasons not explained, the prosecution was confident that the evidence records hadn’t been altered, that the cap and panties found in the van were not those of the nurse. Therefore, the defense attorney proposed that the aunt of Orcott, Verbina Orcott, who claimed to have found the garments, had foolishly planted them in the flower-shop van to incriminate her nephew, whom she detested and believed to be a heavy drug user. Wasn’t it true that she thought her husband was naive and far too financially generous with their nephew? Wasn’t it true that they often argued about his generosity? Wasn’t it true that subsequent to her giving this trumped-up so-called evidence to the police, her husband filed for divorce? In sworn testimony, Verbina declared that the cap and panties shown to her in court were not the ones she found under the seat in the van, but when subjected to relentless cross-examination, she at times became befuddled.

Although initial statements by the police-department spokesman had mentioned mattress-related DNA evidence matching that of the three defendants and the victim, by the time the trial was under way, the prosecution had no match to the victim or to Orcott, and the DNA evidence regarding Clerkman and Sabbateau was inconclusive. Because the nurse had floated for hours in the pond, water had invaded her every orifice. The deputy coroner testified that he could not obtain perpetrator DNA from the cadaver. For some reason unspecified, the chief coroner was not called to testify.

With such supposedly flimsy evidence, the case might never have been brought to trial, if not for Sabbateau’s confession. In court, the defendant claimed he had made a false confession because the two interrogating detectives threatened and psychologically tortured him, so that he feared for his life. And they had not allowed him to call an attorney. Two psychologists testified that Sabbateau had a below-average IQ and suffered from an inferiority complex; as a consequence he was timid and inclined to be fearful even in ordinary situations. They didn’t go as far as to claim that Orcott and Clerkman hung out with the pathetic Sabbateau solely because of their kind hearts, but such noble intentions were implied.

The two accused detectives, Hines and Corzo, each other’s best friend, didn’t acquit themselves well on the witness stand. After the jury returned the not-guilty verdicts, the detectives were eventually suspended for a year without pay. In spite of having no income, Hines and Corzo endured no obvious decline in their living standards, and in fact they rented a bachelor’s pad in Las Vegas and spent most of the year enjoying everything that city had to offer, whereafter they returned to their duties, chastened and contrite.

Now, piloting the Land Rover through the steadily thickening snowfall, Gwyneth said, “When the girl found in the Dumpster wasn’t protected by the court, when Judge Gallagher started the process of having the feeding tube removed, Walter felt the system was failing her as it failed Claire. Without my name ever being used, Gallagher was persuaded to allow an irrevocable trust to be set up to care for the girl. Custody of her was quietly granted to Walter and to his sister, Janet, so that they could care for her in the house I provided through the trust.”

Considering the burden of her social phobia and the restrictions that it placed upon her, I marveled that Gwyneth could accomplish so much. I supposed that she had been taught competence and courage by the father of whom she spoke so highly, as I had been by my father.

“But how could the judge be persuaded to do all that without knowing who funded the trust?”

“Judge Gallagher’s mother, Rose, has big influence, because he’ll receive a huge inheritance when she dies. The person Rose trusts most in this world isn’t her son, who often defies her, but Teague Hanlon.”

“Your guardian.”

“He told her what could be done for the child if the judge allowed it. Rose was sick that the girl might be starved to death. Never mentioning who had advised her, she told her son that if Walter and Janet weren’t given guardianship, a new will would be drawn, granting him a quarter of her estate rather than all of it. The court saw the wisdom of compassion. The wheels of justice turned with express-train speed.”

I said, “So much money and effort for a girl you didn’t know.”

“What else is money for if not for things like this? Besides, you saw her. She’s special.”

I remembered the face that inspired in me thoughts of peace and charity and hope. “Special, I think. But how?”

“Time will show us. Maybe soon.”

The wind brought the fine dry snow fast along the street, and the heavily trafficked street brought us at a more sedate pace to a long block of theaters and restaurants. Through the streaming flakes, I read the titles of the plays and the names of the actors on the marquees.

I wondered what it would be like to sit in such a theater, with the auditorium in quiet shadows and the whole wide world for a while shrunken to a stage evocatively lighted, to sit without fear among hundreds of people and to see a story told, to laugh with them, to share their suspense, and in the most human moment of the play, to cry with them.

Again, I thought of the comatose child, reclining in the bed, like a princess in a play, a princess bewitched, with many years to wait and grow before she would be old enough to be awakened and betrothed by a prince’s kiss. And as in a fairy tale, the kiss would also heal the bone of battered temple, so that when the flaxen hair was drawn back, there would no longer be a grievous indentation in her skull.

Perhaps it was inevitable that such a thought would bring to mind Father’s battered face and the spray of blood like a nimbus on the snow around his sainted head.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“No. I’m all right.”

I suspected she still believed that my face was only scarred from burns. I was reluctant to tell her there had been others like me—Father and his father—and that there might be more in the world, we of the hidden. She no doubt thought my father had been like her own, a man of normal appearance who had walked in daylight as well as night, who had gone wherever he wished, whenever he chose. I hoped that she would continue believing just that for a while yet. These tender hours of friendship might come to an end when at last she understood that the thing about us that terrified people wasn’t anything as mundane as fire-chewed flesh or any of the ordinary deformities of the human face that have medical definitions, that we were so horrific, even she, with all her tolerance and sympathy, might recoil in fear and disgust.

“I’m all right,” I repeated, keeping my head turned away from her. “I’m just hungry.”

“We’re almost there. We’ll have dinner soon.”

“Good. That will be nice.”

I knew that I had done a fateful thing when I had sought her out in her hiding place in the library. If I were to die in this snow as Father had died in the white night six years earlier, my actions would have summoned this storm and my rebellion against loneliness would have been the death of me.