Dark Sundays

by Donn Cortez

  “Carter can smell a cadaver under twenty feet of water,” said Grupper, “but a corpse tends to stay in one place. A moving subject in moving water is another story.”

  “If we’re lucky, they stuck to the banks,” said Catherine. “If they decided to go for a swim in the river, our luck might have just run out.”

  “Well, it is hot as hell out here. They might want to take a dip just to cool off.”

  “If they see it as water and not molten lava.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m told our escapees are undoubtedly hallucinating. Whether they see us as saviors or devils probably depends on what shape they’re in when we find them.”

  They continued onward. “Saviors or devils, huh?” said Grupper after a moment. “That’s kind of funny.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because of where bloodhounds come from. See, they wouldn’t even exist—not in their current form, anyway—except for a religious vision. Guy named Hubert, real party animal who also happened to be the son of the duke of Guienne. Like a lot of hunters, he liked to booze it up while he was out stalking game with his dogs; on one particular hunt, he saw a white stag with the image of the cross between its antlers. The stag told him it was time to stop carousing and get serious with the Lord, and Hubert decided to become a monk.

  “But you know, love of dogs gets in your blood. Hubert couldn’t give his up—he just switched from hunting to breeding. Wound up producing what we call bloodhounds today. They were known as Saint Hubert hounds for the longest time, and they became about as popular with European royalty of the time as the purse-size accessory dog is with today’s aspiring bimbette.”

  They could see a line of green ahead of them: cottonwood trees. At least we’ll get some shade, Catherine thought.

  But that wasn’t all they found. She saw a flash of blue through the trees, and as they got closer, she identified it as a plastic tarp.

  “Looks like we’re not alone,” said Grupper. Carter had his head up now, casting around before resuming course—straight toward the tarp.

  The tarp was part of a crude shelter, made from old cardboard boxes, metal barrels, and scrap lumber. A fire pit surrounded by stones and topped with a grille from a stove or fridge was located a few feet from the structure’s entrance, and some ragged clothes hung from a length of clothesline between two trees. A three-wheeled contraption built from old bike parts and a shopping cart was parked under a lean-to made from another tarp.

  “Complete with carport,” said Catherine. “Somebody lives here, that much is obvious. Hello? Is anybody home?”

  No answer. They could hear the river now, only a few feet away but hidden behind a thick stand of bulrushes. Carter was already skirting the edge of the rushes.

  Catherine cautiously stuck her head inside the entrance to the shelter. “Anybody here?”

  She withdrew a second later. “Empty. Which means our homesteader must have gone for a walk, because his wheels are still in the garage.”

  “Actually,” a voice said from the bulrushes, “there’s a second possibility.”

  Anarchic hand—or alien hand syndrome—showed up in sixty percent of people with CBDS. It was a neurological condition in which one of the patient’s limbs appeared to take on a life of its own, entirely beyond its owner’s control. It would perform actions that ranged from inappropriate—such as public masturbation—to dangerous, including instances where the hand actually attacked the body it was attached to.

  Bannister’s symptoms had become self-reinforcing. He frequently hallucinated that his hand was a clawed, scaly monstrosity and took to binding it to his torso to prevent it from acting.

  “Subject has formed an emotional bond with another patient, TK, in a surprisingly short period of time,” was noted at the end of the file. “While nothing was done initially to discourage this, it now appears that the relationship is contributing to a case of SPD (shared psychotic disorder) in both patients. Considering their individual case histories, I’m recommending they be separated and have no further contact with each other.”

  It was the last entry in the file. Ray put it down and picked up the one labeled “Theria Kostapolis.”

  He stopped almost immediately. “Cotard’s syndrome?” he said aloud. He looked up from the file. “My God,” he said softly.

  6

  GREG AND SARA SURVEYED all of the evidence they’d collected from the Panhandle, spread out before them on the crime lab’s layout table.

  “Where do you want to start?” asked Greg.

  “How about I take the mummy wrappings and you take the guard’s uniform?”

  “Fine with me.”

  Sara starting cutting the long swathes of gauze into more manageable strips, while Greg dug the bloody clothes out of the evidence bag. “There’s a lot of material here,” said Sara. “We got the new DNA extraction kits in, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Greg. “There’s a stack of them over there. Haven’t had a chance to try one out yet, though.”

  “No time like the present.”

  DNA could be hard to isolate, but the technology was getting better all the time. The development Sara was about to try worked on the principle of ionic charge; essentially, coated magnetic beads were added to the sample, which then had its pH lowered. This caused the ions in the beads to become positively charged and the DNA to bind to them.

  They worked in silence for a while, both concentrating on the tasks at hand. Greg took samples of the blood from the clothes, then processed them for epithelials as well.

  “Okay,” he said. “Done with the clothes.”

  Sara looked up. “I’m still working on the bandages. You want to take a look at that fiber you found?”

  “Sure.” He got the sample ready and slid it under the lens of a microscope. “It’s synthetic,” he said after a moment. “Looks like spun polyester, with some kind of coating, maybe a polymer. I’ll run it through the infrared spectrometer.”

  Greg carefully cut a short piece off the fiber, mixed it with dry salt, then shaped the mix into a disk. When the disk was exposed to infrared radiation, the rock crystals of the salt would act as a prism, breaking the rays into a spectrum that the machine would measure and analyze.

  “I think I’ve got an ID,” said Greg at last. “It’s spun polyester coated with nitrile butadiene.”

  “Synthetic rubber,” said Sara. “You get a hit in the database?”

  “I have. It’s from a fire hose.”

  “There are fire hoses on every floor of the Panhandle.”

  “Going to get exemplars now.” Greg slipped out of his lab coat.

  “I’ll go with you—we can drop off the DNA samples with Wendy on the way.”

  Greg carefully clipped a stray fiber from the fire hose on the spool, then examined it closely before popping it into an evidence bag and closing the glass door set into the wall of the hotel corridor. “Well, that’s the last one,” he said to Sara. “I’ve taken samples from every floor.”

  “You don’t look happy.”

  “I’m not. I’ll double-check at the lab, but I can already tell none of these is going to match. The fiber I found was made using a process called through-the-weave extrusion, which coats the fabric of the fire hose with the rubber. These hoses are older models—I can see just by looking that they don’t have the rubberized coating. Probably a cotton-polyester blend.”

  “So the fire hose didn’t come from here. Has there been a fire here recently?” asked Sara.

  “I’ll check with the fire department.”

  “I’ll check with the front desk.”

  They headed down to the lobby, Greg pulling out his phone in the elevator. A few quick questions ascertained that the only calls the fire department had responded to from the hotel in the last year had been medical, and no one with an industrial-strength fire hose had hauled one up to the roof.

  In the Denali on the way back to the lab, Greg said, “Why a fire hose?”

/>   Sara shrugged. “Why not a fire hose?”

  “Very zen. What I mean is, I can see someone using a fire hose out of necessity—if there’s no rope handy, you grab the nearest thing that’ll do. But not only was there no hose available on the roof, they didn’t use the nineteen closest options, either. So why go to the trouble of bringing something bulky, heavy, and specialized like a fire hose to a roof?”

  “To put out a fire?” Sara smiled.

  “Except the only fire was on the ground—the burning dirigible.”

  “Maybe the dirigible didn’t land where it was supposed to.”

  Greg frowned. “So bring a hose to the roof as fire insurance? I guess they could have used the pool for the water supply, but they’d still need a pump.”

  “And a couple of fire extinguishers would probably do the same job a lot easier.”

  “True. Which puts us right back at square one—why a fire hose?”

  After returning to the lab, Greg had verified that none of the samples he’d taken from the hotel’s fire hoses was a match to the fiber he’d found on the roof. He’d spent the next hour examining photos of the tool marks they’d discovered on the windowsill and pipe before sitting down at a workstation and inputting data. “Check this out,” he said.

  “Simulation?” asked Sara, looking over Greg’s shoulder at the screen.

  “Hypothesis,” he said. “Here’s the layout of the rooftop, including the penthouse bedrooms.” The screen showed a wireframe, three-dimensional graphic. “Here’s the pipe that was bent. Here’s the tool mark at the edge of the roof. And here’s the tool mark on the window frame.”

  “If there’s a pattern, I’m not seeing it.”

  Greg hit a button, drawing a thin red line from the roof to the pipe to the window. “Try this. What if those tool marks were from clamps attached to pulleys?”

  “If they were, the force being exerted would be in this direction,” she said, tapping the screen.

  “Which is exactly the direction the pipe was bent in,” he said. “I think the fire hose was run through a pulley system and used to lower or raise something onto the roof.”

  Sara frowned. “To quote a friend of mine, why a fire hose? I mean, wouldn’t rope or cable be much more effective?”

  Greg shrugged. “Only one way to find out. You up for a re-creation?”

  “Does it involve me dangling off the edge of a roof?”

  “Only if you ask nicely.”

  Greg stood on top of a two-story-high metal scaffold set up in the CSI lab parking lot. “Okay,” he called down. “You ready?”

  Sara looked up at him, shading her eyes from the sun, and called back, “Ready!”

  “I’m not,” said Nick, strolling up. “What’s going on, guys?”

  “We’re trying to re-create the scenario that took place on the roof of the Panhandle,” said Sara. “Minus the burning dirigible and bears roaming around.”

  “Yeah? Mind taking me through it?”

  “Ask Greg—it’s his theory.”

  Nick quickly scaled the scaffold and stood beside Greg on the plywood that was standing in for the top of the hotel.

  “Hey, Nick. Just in time.”

  “Looks like. What’s the plan?” He eyed what Greg had set up.

  “Well, to start with, I found some heavy-duty vise clamps that matched the tool marks we found. Then I located the widest pulleys I could find and attached them to the clamps. The clamps are now in the same positions relative to each other that they would have been on the roof—pipe, edge of roof, windowsill.”

  “And you’ve got a fire hose running through them.”

  “We found fibers from a fire hose on the windowsill. I think it was used to haul something up or down the edge of the roof—something heavy. I did stress tests on a pipe of the same diameter, and we’re talking something in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. That’s what I’ve got attached to the other end of this hose.” Greg patted the winch beside him. “I don’t know how far—or in what direction—the weight was hauled, but I figured I’d start by trying to pull something up two stories.”

  “Let her rip,” said Nick.

  Greg signaled down to Sara once more, who gave the all-clear and stood back. The fire hose was tied in a knot around one end of a cargo net loaded with sandbags, which began to rise once Greg activated the winch.

  But not very far. After only a few feet, the load yanked to a halt.

  “Whoa! Turn it off!” said Nick.

  Greg killed the power and walked around to where Nick was examining the pulley attached to the pipe. The hose had moved sideways, off the pulley and onto the axle, where it had jammed.

  “Huh,” said Greg. “Guess I didn’t position it correctly. Give me a hand unjamming it, and we’ll try it again.”

  They did—and came up with the same result. Going up or down, the hose wouldn’t travel more than a few feet before running off the pulley and getting jammed.

  “Well, so much for that,” said Greg glumly. “The hose has no problem bearing the load, it just doesn’t like the gear.”

  Nick clapped him on the back, “Look at this the way Thomas Edison would have. ‘I have not failed—’ ”

  “—I’ve just found a thousand ways that won’t work,’” Greg finished. “Sure. One down, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go . . .”

  7

  ACCORDING TO THE SECURITY LOGS, the fire alarm that had been tripped at the Panhandle was in a recessed corner no more than fifty feet away from the elevator where the alleged bear attack took place. Nick reviewed the camera footage for that area of the casino and wasn’t surprised when it showed a security guard strolling up and yanking the lever before calmly walking away. Nick was pretty sure the man was wearing a wig, a fake mustache, and prop eyeglasses.

  Archie walked in while Nick was studying a screen shot of the phony guard’s face. “Hey, I know that guy,” Archie said.

  Nick swiveled on his chair. “You do?”

  “Sure. I just spent the last few hours staring at a very blurry, red-tinted version of his face. Maybe I don’t know his name, but I feel like we’ve become close. I call him Gorylocks.”

  “Cute. Does that mean you’ve managed to clean up that footage?”

  “Some. Take a look at this.” Archie slipped a disk into a workstation and sat down next to Nick. “Okay, the first thing you notice is that the bear drops down. Previously, it was on its feet, giving old Gorylocks a big ursine hug and pretending to chew on his neck.”

  “Pretending?”

  “Yeah. See over there? That’s where one of the gore hoses was planted; you can see it sticking out of his collar and flopping around later.”

  Archie tapped a key. “Okay, now that the camera has been gooped, he gets down to business. It’s still really blurred, but it looks to me like he just hit a button on the control panel.”

  “Yeah, going down. He wanted to get to the basement level before security could lock down the elevator again.”

  “Then he does a face plant—playing corpse for when the doors open. As soon as they do, the bear lumbers out. But then—” Archie hit another key, freezing the image. “See? He put his hand out, to the base of the open elevator door.”

  Nick nodded. “He’s holding the safety guard in, so the door stays open.”

  “Right. And he just stays like that, while the bear herds everyone out to the fire stairs. Once everybody’s gone—”

  “He gets up,” said Nick. “And—aw, you’re kidding.”

  “Yeah, he pulls out what I can only assume is a more concentrated version of what’s already all over the lens and sprays some more on. The only thing you see after that is more red. Sorry.”

  “It’s more than I had a minute ago. Thanks, Archie.”

  “Hey, Hodges,” said Nick, walking into the trace lab. “You finished looking at the blood sample I sent you?”

  Hodges crossed his arms and smiled but said nothing.

  “What?” said Nick.<
br />
  Hodges’s eyebrows went up. His smile stayed put.

  “Hodges, I don’t have time for this—”

  “Ah, but my time is infinite, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Noooo—”

  “Then why, oh why, would you send me a sample to analyze that clearly should have been sent to DNA?”

  “Because I didn’t want DNA, Hodges. I wanted to see if there was something in it that shouldn’t have been.”

  “Then you could have asked for a tox screen.”

  “I’m not looking for a drug.”

  Hodges’s smile was replaced by a suspicious frown. “And you’re not trying to pull a gag? Do a little hazing on the newbie?”

  “Hodges, you’ve been here longer than I have.”

  “True . . .” He stroked his chin.

  “Look, Hodges, did you find something unusual or not?”

  “All right, I’ll take this at face value. But if I hear even a hint of a punch line involving a fairy tale, I will have my revenge.” Hodges strode over to a table and grabbed a piece of paper. “Here. I refuse to be your straight man.”

  Nick took the paper cautiously, then scanned it quickly. “This is from the bear attack?” he said.

  “Yes. Three bears, right? I’m not thick—though this certainly was.”

  “Hodges, this says it wasn’t human blood at all. It came from a pig.”

  “That’s correct. Three bears and three little pigs, right?” He looked triumphant. “I’m sorry, did I ruin the joke by figuring out the structure? Sorry, but that’s what I do.”

  Nick sighed. “For the last time, Hodges, there’s no punch line. The interior of that elevator was sprayed in pig’s blood, because our missing guard was never wounded in the first place. The attack was a fake—if the joke’s on anyone, it’s on me.”

  “Oh. I was wondering why there was corn starch in the blood instead of porridge. Seemed like a real missed opportunity, theme-wise.”

  “It was there as a thickening agent. The intent was to coat the lens of the security camera, preventing anyone in the security office from seeing what was happening. I guess unadulterated blood didn’t do a good enough job.”