Dark Sundays

by Donn Cortez

  “In a second. . . do you see that?” She pointed at the bottom of the pool.

  “Where?”

  “In the far corner. I thought it was just a shadow at first, but now . . .”

  She stopped and looked around, until she spotted the long-handled pool strainer mounted on one wall. She grabbed it and used it to scoop up the underwater object.

  Greg plucked it out of the net when she brought it to the surface; it was a small black plastic case with a single button on it. “Looks like a garage-door opener,” he said. “Seems awfully simple for something that’s supposed to control an aircraft.”

  “It does—but do you see any garage doors up here?”

  “Yeah, you’ve got a point. Maybe it does something else. Or did—I doubt if it still works after being dunked.”

  “We should keep looking, in any case.”

  There were three guest bedrooms along the south side of the building; the north side was taken up by the master suite, the door locked. “Security guard told me Dell doesn’t allow people in here during parties,” said Greg. “But the guest bedrooms are open-access.”

  They checked out the first one. “Nice digs,” said Sara. “King-size bed, fifty-two-inch flat screen, wet bar, minifridge, en-suite bathroom.”

  “And a window with a clear view of the fly-by—if the drapes weren’t closed.”

  Sara slipped on her UV glasses and shone an ALS over the rumpled bedspread. “I think I know why, too. That damp spot isn’t a spilled drink.”

  “Well, it was a party. . . funny they closed the drapes, though. Who did they think would see them?” He paused. “Okay, in this particular case they’d have reason to worry, but how often does a bedroom window get buzzed by a guy in a personal zeppelin?”

  “Who—being an inflatable dummy—wasn’t able to see anything anyway.”

  “But they had no problem having sex a few feet away from a packed room full of party guests.”

  “There’s a lock on the door.” She shrugged. “Wouldn’t bother me.”

  Greg started to say something, then thought better of it.

  They found the wheelchair in the third bedroom, collapsed and shoved under the bed. Greg snapped a photo before Sara hauled it out.

  “So Mr. Mummy didn’t roll out of here,” said Greg.

  Sara studied the wheelchair, then unfolded it. “There’s a storage compartment under the seat, made of vinyl. From the way it’s bulging, it’s not empty, either.” She tugged the zipper open. It was full of wadded-up gauze bandages. “Looks like he didn’t leave as a mummy, either,” said Sara.

  “This bedroom is the closest one to the wall dividing the roof,” said Greg. “And unlike some hotel rooms, the window opens.” He peered at the sill. “I’ve got tools marks on the sill. Looks like a match to the others we found.”

  Sara finished searching through the collapsible compartment. “Nothing but gauze—maybe we can get some DNA off it.”

  “I’ve got something else, too.” Greg pulled out a pair of tweezers and pulled a tiny fiber from the edge of the window frame.

  “More gauze?”

  He held it up and squinted. “I don’t think so. It’s too coarse.”

  Nick returned to the Panhandle, where he tracked down the doorman, Ian Stackwell, in the staff cafeteria.

  “Yes, sir, I remember them,” said Stackwell. “Really big guy, with his own nurse. They weren’t on the guest list, but another guest gave me the okay to let them up.”

  “You remember their names?”

  Stackwell frowned. “Something Russian, I think. Olegchenkov, something long like that. I wrote it down in the log.”

  Nick pulled out the notebook the man had given him earlier and flipped through it quickly. “Olegchenkov, you’re right. You’ve got a good memory.”

  Stackwell smiled. “Part of the job, right?”

  “You didn’t write down the name of the nurse, though.”

  Now Stackwell looked embarrassed. “I didn’t? I guess I—sorry. My mistake.”

  “How about the guest who vouched for them?”

  Stackwell shook his head. “All I remember is that he’d just come from the pool. He was wearing one of the guest robes, and he was toweling off his hair. Mid-thirties, average height, clean-shaven.”

  “Okay. You’ve got a security camera outside that elevator, right?”

  “Only on the main floor, plus the one inside the elevator itself. Nothing on Mr. Dell’s floor.”

  “I’m going to need copies of all the security footage from tonight, for both of them—and for the camera on the other side of that dividing wall, too.”

  Nick took the security logs back to the lab and went through them minute by minute, starting with the feed from the main-floor camera that showed the party guests arriving. He captured a screen shot of every guest and stacked them up in a separate file labeled “Guests.”

  Nick studied the screen closely when the large man in the wheelchair arrived. He wore a loose-fitting robe draped over his frame, but beneath it, every inch of skin seemed to be wrapped in gauze.

  Archie Johnson, the lab’s resident AV expert, walked up and peered over his shoulder. “Wow,” he said. “Who’s the king-size Tut?”

  “The name he gave is Olegchenkov,” said Nick. “And he’s more like a ghost than a mummy. People saw him arrive at a party, but no one saw him leave.”

  “So he’s still there?”

  “No. Sara and Greg searched the place, and I had the owner let me into his private quarters to look around—nobody there. They did find the wheelchair and bandages, though, so I figure he must have just slipped out with the other guests.”

  “How about the nurse?”

  “Don’t have a name for her. She probably left with him, but there are no cameras in the fire stairwells, so I don’t know for sure. All I can really say at this point is they definitely didn’t use the elevator, because no one did.”

  “Fire-alarm lockdown?”

  “Not so much fire as Smokey. Bears loose in the Panhandle.”

  “That’ll make their insurance rates go up. You have footage?”

  “I do. There was only one actual attack, a guard who got trapped in an elevator—but there’s something weird going on. We haven’t been able to find his body. And don’t even get me started on the inflatable flying clown.”

  “I won’t. Frankly, it sounds like a dangerous path to go down.”

  “Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. Something I need your help with.” He switched tapes, then hit play. “This is the bear attack itself, from outside the elevator.”

  Archie watched intently. “Guy looks terrified—can’t blame him.”

  “It gets worse. The doors open, the guy dives inside, and the bear charges after him before the doors can shut.” He stopped and switched tapes again. “This is the footage from inside the elevator.”

  Archie’s head jerked back. “Oh, man. That’s—messy.”

  “And therein lies my problem. The blood got all over the lens of the camera, and from that point on, pretty much all you can see is red. I was wondering if you could clean it up for me, maybe pull a few images out.”

  Archie shrugged. “Blood work isn’t usually my thing, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, Arch.”

  Ian Stackwell studied the face on the laptop open on the interview table. “No, that’s not him, either.”

  Nick sighed. The picture Stackwell was looking at was the last of the series of shots he’d pulled from the elevator footage; it looked as if the man who’d vouched for the nurse and her patient hadn’t arrived in the elevator.

  He tried something else. “How about this guy?” he asked, tapping a key and calling up a shot of the guard who’d been mauled.

  Stackwell peered at him. “No, definitely not. Not even close.”

  Nick thanked him and said he could go. After he’d left, he sat and thought.

  Footage from the camera aimed at the dividing wall had shown
nothing—nobody had climbed over or even come within the camera’s range, including the mysterious missing guard. Bodies were disappearing left and right, whether alive, dead, or artificial—and so far, the only crime he had was arson. No murder, no robbery, no suspects.

  Time to take a closer look at the physical evidence.

  5

  “THE SECOND PATIENT’S NAME is Theria Kostapolis,” Catherine told Ray. “That’s about all I’ve been able to learn from the staff. Wincroft’s really out of it. Think you can find both patients’ files if you look around?”

  “Yes, of course,” Ray said.

  “Good. You do that, and I’ll process the rest of the scene. Between the two of us, maybe we can figure out which way they headed.”

  Catherine returned to where the sliding glass door had been smashed. She’d already noted the absence of blood; now she looked for other indicators.

  “They would have headed for an exit,” she muttered to herself. “Fork in the corridor—right or left?”

  She went left, shining her flashlight at the floor, sweeping it from side to side in slow arcs. When she’d traveled twenty feet, she stopped, returned to the fork, and went the other way.

  Ten feet down it, a tiny piece of broken glass glinted on the floor.

  She followed the corridor all the way to the nearest fire exit, then pushed it open. The ground outside was soft and held the impression of two sets of running shoes, one large, one small.

  They headed into the desert and quickly disappeared on rocky, sun-hardened soil.

  Dawn’s not far off, she thought. Hyperthermia will work for them for a while, keep them from noticing how cold it is. Once that sun is up, though . . .

  She wondered how quickly she could get a tracking dog out there. If Theria Kostapolis and John Bannister collapsed out in the desert, the heat would kill both of them even quicker than it normally would.

  Ray located the medical files of both John Bannister and Theria Kostapolis in Dr. Wincroft’s office, in an unlocked file cabinet. He hesitated before looking at them, unsure of the legality of what he was about to do—but this was a crime scene, and the information could prove vital to saving two lives.

  Besides, he was also a doctor. This could simply be viewed as consulting on another physician’s case—he didn’t think Dr. Wincroft would object.

  He sat down at Wincroft’s desk, opened Bannister’s folder, and began reading.

  Bannister’s corticobasal degeneration had initially presented with symptoms of depression, irritability, and difficulties in walking. An MRI had showed posterior parietal and frontal cortical atrophy, as well as atrophy in his corpus callosum. Shortly afterward, he had begun to display indications of dementia: confusion, reduced alertness, and visual disturbances. The disturbances included double vision, hallucinations, and misinterpretation of what he was viewing; in one instance, Bannister had insisted that the coat rack in the doctor’s office was in fact a skeleton.

  The initial diagnosis was DLB, dementia with Lewy bodies. Hallucinations were common in DLB, presenting in three-quarters of all cases. While many patients with DLB saw people or animals, Bannister frequently demonstrated a condition known as reduplicative paramnesia, the conviction that a location has been duplicated or moved from one place to another. During an interview with a doctor at the VA hospital, he was convinced that the entire building was located on the slope of Mount Everest, even going so far as to request a bottle of oxygen because he was worried about the thinness of the air.

  But that wasn’t the only odd manifestation of Bannister’s CBDS. He was also suffering from anarchic hand.

  “I’m Hieronymus Grupper,” the dog handler said, shaking Catherine’s hand. “And this is Nicky Carter the Second—the best damn tracker since the original.”

  Catherine eyed the panting dog where it had flopped down on the clinic’s tiled floor. “The original?”

  Hieronymus was a short man with a big head and froggy eyes, dressed in baggy tan shorts, a plaid shirt, hiking boots, and a beat-up straw hat. “Sure. Nick Carter was a Kentucky bloodhound around the turn of the nineteenth century—tracked down six hundred and fifty men in his career. Named after a famous dime-store novel detective, though nobody today seems to remember him. Once tracked a man over a hundred miles.”

  “The detective or the dog?”

  Grupper chuckled. “The dog. Speaking of which, I guess we should get going. I understand we’re after a couple escaped mental cases?”

  “Psychiatric patients, yes. Does Carter need a personal item to get the scent?”

  “He doesn’t need it—especially since I understand we’re going to be tracking through desert—but it won’t hurt. You have an idea where the trail starts?”

  “Follow me.” Catherine gave Grupper the torn sheet she’d found and a T-shirt that Theria had worn, then led him and Carter down the hall and out the fire exit.

  Once outside, Grupper knelt and let the dog sniff both items. Carter took his time, snuffling deep into the folds of the cloth.

  “Human beings have somewhere around five million olfactory cells,” said Grupper. “A bloodhound has forty times that crammed in their nose.”

  Carter began casting about on the ground. “Our chances are good,” said Grupper. “Good time of day for tracking, not that big a lead, not a lot of other scents to interfere. We’ll find them.”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Catherine.

  Carter lunged forward, straining at his leash, and they set off. The sun was just rising, and Catherine slipped on her sunglasses. Grupper did the same.

  The ground was rocky and bare, with only the occasional sage bush to break it up. Carter seemed intent, sometimes keeping his nose to the ground, sometimes lifting his head to sniff the air.

  “Scent hounds track in two different ways,” Grupper said as they walked along. “When they’ve got their nose down, they’re following the actual trail of footprints—more specifically, the little bits of dead skin that every person sheds, no matter how bundled up they are. When the dogs lift their heads, they’re picking up those bits of skin in the air—and the warmer the air gets, the more the dead bits rise up. The floppy ears and wrinkly jowls help; they work kind of like a big scoop, collecting those bits as they drift past.”

  “I see. And the slobber?”

  The dog handler grinned. “Some people say that the drool gives off steam, which helps lift the skin particles into the air. Me, I think it’s their secret weapon. You haven’t seen the havoc dog drool can wreak until you’ve seen a hound shake his head on a hot day.”

  The sun was low, but the temperature was already beginning to rise. Catherine wondered if John Bannister and Theria Kostapolis had any water with them; she doubted it.

  Carter stopped, his head up, his tail quivering. After a second, he resumed moving forward with his nose to the ground.

  “What was that about?” asked Catherine.

  Grupper shrugged. “Hard to say. It’s not just their nose that’s sensitive; dogs can hear things people can’t, at both the upper and lower ends of the spectrum. Humans can’t hear much above twenty thousand cycles per second, but canine ears can go all the way up to forty-five. Lower, too—Saint Bernards can hear down in the subsonic, which tells them when a snow pack is shifting and about to avalanche. Some say that’s the reason dogs get uneasy before an earthquake, too—they can hear the rocks grinding away at each other as the pressure builds up.”

  “You know, you talk about your dog the way a car buff talks about engines.”

  Grupper laughed. “I guess I do. Well, they’re damn amazing animals. I figure if I’m going to work alongside one, I should know what makes it tick. Suppose that makes me a canine geek.”

  Catherine smiled. “There are worse things to be.”

  “All right, you want to hear something really amazing? It sounds pretty out there, but I swear to God it’s been documented.”

  “As long as you’re not about to tell me about a golden retriever
who’s the Second Coming, go ahead.”

  “Dogs can also detect certain medical conditions. Seizures, blood-glucose levels, even cancer.”

  “I’ve heard of that, actually. Makes sense to me—I mean, any kind of serious disease is going to cause biological changes, right? A dog is probably just picking up on the difference in the way someone smells.”

  “Sure,” said Grupper. “That’s exactly what it is for diabetic patients or people with a tumor. But a seizure is a brain event, and dogs seem to be able to detect it before it happens. How do you explain that?”

  Catherine shrugged. “I can’t. But then again, my ex used to have a dog that would always know when he was on his way home from the bar, regardless of day or time. She’d get up and stare at the door, and about ten minutes later he’d roll in. I used to call her my drunk detector—too bad she couldn’t tell me how wasted he’d be when he showed up.”

  “Dogs are great, but they’re no substitute for a good divorce lawyer.”

  “Amen,” said Catherine.

  The Nevada Neurological Studies Institute was southeast of Las Vegas, and the rocky, sage-brush-dotted terrain gradually gave way to a more lush landscape of deciduous trees and marshy grass.

  “They’re headed for the wash,” said Catherine, stopping and uncapping her canteen. She took a long drink; the sun was up and blazing now.

  Grupper did the same, pouring a small amount of water into a collapsible pan for Carter first. The hound sniffed at it, then ignored it, straining at his leash; he had no time for petty details like hydration. “Mixed blessing, I guess. Good for them, bad for us.”

  Catherine nodded and took another drink. The Las Vegas wash was a twelve-mile-long urban river that funneled runoff from several creeks and the city proper. The wash was mainly a slow, meandering body of water that supported a lot of marshy wetlands at its banks and where it eventually drained into Lake Mead. While it could prove a godsend for two dehydrated, hyperthermic patients staggering out of the desert, it could be difficult tracking them through it.