Prodigal Son

them, Jack said, “And don't ask me what I mean by design. Damn if I know."
        "It's just," Luke elaborated, "that all these things look like they're meant to be… improvements."
        Carson said, "The Surgeon's other victims… you didn't find anything weird in them?"
        "Zip, zero, nada. You read the reports."
        Such an aura of unreality had descended upon the room that Carson wouldn't have been entirely surprised if the eviscerated cadaver had sat up on the autopsy table and tried to explain itself.
        Michael said, "Jack, we'd sure like to embargo your autopsy report on Allwine. File it here but don't send a copy to us. Our doc box is being raided lately, and we don't want anyone else to know about this for… say forty-eight hours."
        "And don't file it under Allwine's name or the case number where it can be found," Carson suggested. "Blind file it under…"
        "Munster, Herman," Michael suggested.
        Jack Rogers was smart about a lot more things than viscera. The bags under his eyes seemed to darken as he said, "This isn't the only weird thing you've got, is it?"
        "Well, you know the crime scene was strange," Carson said.
        "That's not all you've got, either."
        "His apartment was a freak's crib," Michael revealed. "The guy was as psychologically weird as anything you found inside him."
        "What about chloroform?" Carson asked. "Was it used on Allwine?"
        "Won't have blood results until tomorrow," Jack said. "But I'm not going out on a limb when I say we won't find chloroform. This guy couldn't have been overcome by it."
        "Why not?"
        "Given his physiology, it wouldn't have worked as fast on him as on you or me."
        "How fast?"
        "Hard to say. Five seconds. Ten."
        "Besides," Luke offered, "if you tried to clamp a chloroform-soaked cloth over his face, Allwine's reflexes would have been faster than yours… or mine."
        Jack nodded agreement. "And he would have been strong. Far too strong to have been restrained by an ordinary man for a moment, let alone long enough for the chloroform to work."
        Remembering the peaceful expression on Bobby Allwine's face when his body lay on the library floor, Carson considered her initial perception that he had welcomed his own murder. She could make no more sense of that hypothesis, however, than she had done earlier.
        Moments later, outside in the parking lot, as she and Michael approached the sedan, the light of the moon seemed to ripple through the thick humid air as it might across the surface of a breeze-stirred pond.
        Carson remembered Elizabeth Lavenza, hand-less, floating facedown in the lagoon.
        Suddenly she seemed half-drowned in the murky fathoms of this case, and felt an almost panicky need to thrash to the surface and leave the investigation to others.

CHAPTER 26
        
        TO ALL OUTWARD APPEARANCES, Randal Six, Mercy-born and Mercy-raised, has been in various degrees of autistic trance all day, but inwardly he has passed those hours in turmoil.
        The previous night, he dreamed of Arnie O'Connor, the boy in the newspaper clipping, the smiling autistic. In the dream, he requested the formula for happiness, but the O'Connor boy mocked him and would not share his secret.
        Now Randal Six sits at his desk, at the computer on which he occasionally plays competitive crossword puzzles with gamers in far cities. Word games are not his purpose this evening.
        He has found a site on which he can study maps of the city of New Orleans. Because this site also offers a city directory of all property owners, he has been able to learn the address of Detective Carson O'Connor, with whom the selfish Arnie resides.
        The number of blocks separating Randal from their house is daunting. So much distance, so many people, untold obstacles, so much disorder.
        Furthermore, this web site offers three-dimensional maps of the French Quarter, the Garden District, and several other historic areas of the city. Every time he makes use of these more elaborate guides, he is quickly overcome by attacks of agoraphobia.
        If he responds with such terror to the virtual reality of the cartoonlike dimensional maps, he will be paralyzed by the vastness and chaos of the world itself if ever he steps beyond these walls.
        Yet he persists in studying the three-dimensional maps, for he is motivated