Do No Harm

A parking permit hanging from the car's rearview mirror caught his eye: UCLA MEDICAL CENTER. Expired in May, three months ago. The month Clyde was fired.

David froze, peering at the car. A chipped brown Crown Victoria. On the dash sat an empty box of Nobleman's Zinc Lozenges and a loose twenty-gauge needle, still in its plastic sheath. Wrappers and soda cans covered the backseat.

Carefully sidestepping the homeless man, David headed for the run-down apartment building closest to the car. He ran his finger down the list of names on the mailboxes, searching for Clyde's to no avail. He did the same at the apartment building next door. And the one next door to that. He was just about to give up when a name caught his eye. Slade Douglas. Apartment 203.

The lobby featured a circular couch with the stuffing showing and a large dead fern. The carpet covering the stairs was worn through in the middle. A shattered lightbulb littered the landing between the floors.

A bare flickering bulb was all that lit the second floor. Maroon carpets and brown peeling wallpaper made the hall seem darker than it was.

David paused outside the door to Apartment 203, then slowly drew his eye close to the peephole. A large form, coming directly at him.

He sprang back, nearly tripping over his feet, and darted for the alcoved doorway to Apartment 202. As Clyde's door swung open, David pressed himself flat against the neighboring door. He heard three dead bolts lock, one after another, then Clyde swept past him, banging into a wall. Clyde stumbled down the hall toward the stairs, pulling on a torn jacket and muttering under his breath.

Loud footsteps on the stairs, then all was still. David realized he'd been holding his breath, and he let it out in a rush. He felt light-headed.

Walking back outside, he headed out of view along the side of the building, in case Clyde returned. He paged Yale again, this time to his cell number, then switched his phone over to vibrate mode. Peering up the street, he wondered where Clyde had gone. Probably to spy on David again, to make sure he'd left the area.

Pacing impatiently beneath a fire escape, David waited for Yale's return call. None came. He'd just decided to page Yale again when the muffled cries of a woman caught his attention. Looking up the side of the building, he saw he was standing beneath Clyde's window. The muffled cries were in all likelihood coming from Clyde's apartment.

David's face went slick with sweat. The breeze kicked up, and he lost the sound of the cries momentarily, before it died down. Ed had pointed out that police response time to this area was slow. Clyde could return and resume torturing, or even kill, whoever was up in his apartment before a 911 call could be responded to. And Yale hadn't even called back.

David walked back and forth beneath the fire escape, the cries overhead driving him to a near-panic. His mind stumbled through terms-suppressed evidence, search warrants, unlawful entry-searching for something to guide him, but he was forced to acknowledge that his legal expertise was derived almost entirely from bad movies. A pained, stomach-deep grunt overhead drove him to action.

David pulled on a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket, then jumped up, grabbing the fire escape ladder and yanking it down. He climbed to the first landing, then the second, the structure creaking beneath him.

Peering through Clyde's filthy, cracked window, he saw little more than an unmade bed. The reflection of the glowing Healton's Drugstore sign shined in the glass, and David turned to look at the store, visible beyond the empty lot. In front of the store, bathed in a cone of light, sat his Mercedes, in clear view from Clyde's window. David grimaced at the distinctive tilt of the headlights-his car stuck out glaringly from the surroundings. Clyde must have recognized it pulling up, and realized David had come looking for him. The Pearson Home was also distinctly observable from Clyde's apartment. It struck David as noteworthy that Clyde had never left the vicinity of the Happy Horizons home in which he'd spent part of his childhood. Clearly, he derived some comfort from being nearby.

The woman's cries brought David's attention back to the dark apartment. He carefully removed a long shard of glass from the cracked window and reached through, lifting the catch. He pushed the window up and slid inside, resting the shard on the sill.

The first thing to catch his attention was the odor of decay-nearly unbearable. Thousands of motes swirled in the artificial light filtering through the window.