to the Sheffields’. I don’t think they should be alone right now.” He glanced at Phillips. “If there’s anything that needs to be done, you let me know. Craig’s been a good friend for a long time, and I don’t aim to let him down now.”
Phillips nodded agreement, and a moment later the waiting room emptied out. When they were alone, with only Judd Duval still there, Phillips spoke to Jolene. “Call Orrin Hatfield, and tell him we need him,” he said. “I can sign the death certificate, but given the circumstances, we’ll need a coroner’s report.”
“I already called him,” Jolene replied. “He’s on his way.”
Phillips nodded, turning immediately to Judd Duval. “There’s no need for you to stay,” he told the deputy. “Orrin can pick up your report after he’s finished his own examination.”
Judd, looking relieved, hurried out of the hospital. Phillips turned back to Jolene. “Call Fred Childress,” he said. “Have him send a hearse.”
He was just starting back toward the room in which Jenny Sheffield lay when Orrin Hatfield arrived, his eyes still puffy from sleep. “What’s going on, Warren?” the coroner demanded. “Jolene says you got a six-year-old girl who drowned in the canal?”
Phillips beckoned the other doctor to follow him, and led Hatfield into the examining room. “I want this done quickly, Orrin,” he said. “Jolene’s calling Fred Childress, and by the time his hearse gets here, I want your report to be ready.”
The coroner frowned uncertainly. “I don’t know, Warren. Given what Jolene said, there’ll have to be an autopsy, and that takes some time.”
Phillips’s eyes hardened. “There will be no autopsy, Orrin. Look her over if you want to, but don’t touch her with a scalpel. We need her, Orrin. All of us.”
Orrin Hatfield, who had already bent over Jenny, beginning his examination, straightened up. As he saw the expression in Warren Phillips’s eyes, he slowly began to understand.
“I see,” he said softly. “How much time do we have?”
Phillips glanced at his watch. “None. If we don’t start now, she might really be dead.”
Going to the cabinet against the wall, he found the syringe he’d brought with him to the hospital less than an hour ago, carefully putting it away even before he started forcing water from Jenny’s lungs.
Now, slipping the needle into Jenny’s arm, he administered the shot of naloxone, which would counteract the morphine he’d used to put Jenny into a coma even before he’d immersed her in the tub of ice water.
The morphine had slowed her metabolism nearly to the point of death, and that, combined with the hypothermia induced by the ice water, had kept her barely alive through the last hours.
With luck, there wouldn’t even be any brain damage.
Not that it mattered, really, for Warren Phillips wasn’t the slightest bit interested in Jenny Sheffield’s mind.
It was her thymus he was after.
Her thymus, the large mysterious gland above the lungs, whose use he’d finally discovered so many years ago.
There would be enough of the precious secretion from Jenny Sheffield’s thymus to stave off the aging processes of at least three of his patients. And she was young enough that he could milk her for at least another year.
As long as she didn’t die before he got her to Fred Childress’s funeral home.
21
There were no lights on in the house, but she knew there was someone inside, waiting for her. Though the house was barely visible in the darkness of the night, still she could see it clearly; the worn, splintered boards of its siding glowing unnaturally, as if they had somehow come alive. Vines crept up the walls, but though the air was still, the vines moved like serpents, rippling around the windows, creeping toward the roof.
She wanted to run from the house, but something drew her toward it, and though she struggled to turn away, her legs refused to obey her, carrying her steadily closer.
At last she was on the porch, and now she could feel the vines reaching out for her, their tendrils twisting, searching. One of them brushed against her skin, and she wanted to shrink away, but again her body seemed paralyzed. As the vines began to enfold her, binding her arms to her body, the terror inside her threatened to overwhelm her.
She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
The door opened, and in the darkness a figure appeared.
A man, so old he seemed barely alive at all. His hair, only a few thin wisps, hung limply from his scalp, which was