Do No Harm

Dalton turned on the light and a mouse scurried under a cabinet. He removed two Old Milwaukees from the refrigerator and sat at the table. "Don't knock the robe," he said. "It was Kathy's. I like sl- " He slid one can across the table at Jenkins and opened the other. "It was Kathy's."

Jenkins had pulled his chair out from the table so he faced the wall. He slouched in the chair, his posture unusually lax. Dalton waited patiently. After a while, he finished his beer and reached across the table for Jenkins's, which sat full. He was halfway through that one before Jenkins spoke. "I can't see her," he said.

"Nance?"

He nodded. "I can't go in there anymore. I tried yesterday, but I got to the curtain and couldn't pull it aside. She called out, asked who was there, and I turned and left."

Dalton sipped his beer. He cleared his throat but didn't speak.

"My little sister," Jenkins said. "She meant more to me than anything in the world."

The only noise was the quiet ticking of the cracked plastic clock above the sink.

"I wish she was dead," Jenkins said. After a moment, Dalton realized he was crying. He was an inexperienced crier, all gasps and jerks. Dalton walked slowly to the light switch and flicked it back off, then returned to his seat.

"Thanks," Jenkins said.

They sat quietly in the darkness, Dalton occasionally sipping his beer.

David awakened at three in the morning, and it was as though he'd never fallen asleep. The same images had followed him from exhaustion into sleep, and then back out again. Diane dabbing ceaselessly at the weeping wounds on her face. Their kiss at the park. Tame as it had been, his kiss with Diane had been wonderful. It had also been unsettling, and he suddenly realized why. He had grown accustomed to feeling other people's flesh only when examining them. He asked himself whether some part of him was as fearful of human contact as Clyde was.

After forty minutes of lying in darkness, David rose from his bed. He sat in the living room and tried to read a medical journal but could not concentrate. Changing into workout clothes, he went into the garage and ran on the treadmill for a half hour. After his shower, he lay in bed again, studying the ceiling, the plants scraping softly at the dark window overhead.

At five, he fell into a fitful sleep, full of jerks and tremors. He awoke several times, bathed in sweat, the sheets wrapped around his legs. At six o'clock, he rose and showered again, went to the study dripping wet, and raised the drape from the cockatoo's cage.

He watched the bird slowly awaken, like a mechanical toy coming to life. "Where's Elisabeth?" it asked. "Where's Elisabeth?"

At six-thirty, a sudden and irresistible urge to do laundry seized him. He grabbed the hamper from his bedroom and sorted his laundry carefully by color, washing the dark blues with the blacks and browns, and leaving the light blue scrubs for the next load. As he awaited the washer's chime, he sat in the laundry room and watched the appliance vibrate and hum.

When he finished, he stood over the warm mound of clothes on his bed and began to separate the items. With the slow automatic movements of a robot, he lined the socks in pairs, stacked his boxers, folded his shirts in tight military rectangles.

His scrub bottoms were all folded identically, and he laid one pair on top of another until they rose like a smooth blue tower. One of the pant legs was a half inch out of line with the others and he pulled it out and refolded it, refolded it, refolded it, his hands working in short concise movements until they began to tremble and then the stack blurred before him and he turned to sit on the bed, using one hand to lower himself slowly, and the sobs seized him from the chest up, his breath coming in short choking gasps, and he covered his eyes with a cupped hand though there was no one there to see and wept for the first time in two years.

Chapter 47

DAVID double-checked the address he'd jotted on a slip of paper as he pulled the car to the curb near the intersection of Butler and Iowa. It was 1663 Butler Ave. The West LA Division police station would have been another dull city building if the curved entranceway hadn't been tiled a fantastic reddish-orange.

David parked in the lot across the street beneath the red-and-white metal tower he'd sighted from Santa Monica Boulevard. He'd heard similar structures referred to on TV shows as repeaters; they were presumably used for radio contact between police vehicles. The sky, gray and heavy from last night's storm, looked as though it might not return to its summer blue without another downpour.