by Donn Cortez
Catherine nodded. “So they crossed over to the other side and kept going?”
Mark shrugged. “Beats me. You can’t really see anything with the rushes that line the bank, and it was still dark. I thought I heard splashing moving upstream for a while, so they might have stayed in, waded ashore farther up.”
Grupper sighed. “Well, the trail ends here. I can see if Carter can pick it up farther down the wash, but if they stayed in the water we’re probably out of luck.”
“Thanks for your help,” Catherine told Mark. “You do know that all the runoff from the city flows through here, right? The wetlands at the far end act like a filter, soaking up a lot of contaminants before they reach the lake, but this close to Vegas? You wouldn’t catch me swimming here.”
“Better than the desert,” said Mark. “Or the streets.”
“Unfortunately,” said Catherine, “that seems to be the direction that our subjects are headed in.”
Even an hour before dawn, the sidewalks are crowded with lost souls. Most are simply rotting corpses, shuffling along mindlessly, cameras thumping hollowly against their exposed ribs, mildewed bottles or cans clutched in their bony fists; but not all. Bannister spots a werewolf in a Gestapo uniform, a bloodstained meat cleaver in one immense, furry paw. Even hell has a police force.
“Take my hand,” he whispers to Theria. She does so, not out of any affection but because she’s learned it’s easier simply to do what he says.
They walk along, hand-in-hand, Bannister struggling to turn his stiff-legged shamble into a more acceptable limp. He knows Theria has no sense of self-preservation—for that matter, neither does he, not really—but Bannister does have something that has replaced it: a sense of purpose. Being pounced on by a member of lycanthropic law enforcement will hinder that purpose, and thus must be avoided.
He hopes that his demon hand will be enough to disguise him, that Theria won’t simply collapse into a boneless heap as she sometimes does. He wishes he could have known her in life; from what he can tell, she was quite beautiful.
The werecop lets them by, giving them no more than a suspicious snort as they pass. Bannister wonders what they smell like to such a creature.
“There,” Theria whispers, pointing at a massive building with huge white pillars out front. A bronze statue of a Roman gladiator holding a sword in one hand and a severed head in the other guards the entrance; the eyes of both swivel to watch them as they enter.
“Why here?” he asks.
“It’s a mausoleum, isn’t it?” she says, as if it were self-evident. “It’s where I belong.”
He cannot argue with her logic. They enter.
The aisles of the Roman complex are made of marble, veined with scarlet. Golden gutters line either side, filled with a sluggish mixture of gore and sewage.
Slaves seem to be the coin of the realm, dead-eyed men and women in rags chained by the neck and hauled from game to game. A line of them are attached to the brass rail of an elaborate marble bar, the bartender a monstrous demon with the head of a warthog. He glares at Bannister and Theria with tiny, red-rimmed eyes, trying to decide if they’re customers or property.
More warthog demons, most wearing togas, man the games of chance. The most popular seems to be a steep-walled, sandy pit set into the floor, ringed with seats; slaves are forced to fight armored gladiators for their lives. Each gladiator has a specific rank and crest, and they fight in teams. Bannister watches a Jack of Skulls and a Queen of Knives beat a slave with a crude “17” tattooed on his forehead to death using three-lobed clubs.
The dead slave is hauled out of the pit with meathooks and dumped on a trolley. A steady stream of trolleys departs from the pits to a huge central area with row after row of troughs; the bodies are chopped up and dumped in the troughs, where pigheaded demons in bloodstained togas devour them greedily.
“I can’t leave you here,” Bannister says. “You’ll be devoured.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, Theria. It matters. Not here.”
After a moment, she nods. “Not here . . .”
A search up and down both banks of the river for a mile in either direction produced no results, and Catherine eventually had to give up and send Grupper and Carter home. She returned to the institute, found Ray, and sank into a chair—probably the same chair that Theria Kostapolis and John Bannister had sat in themselves, many times—shaking her head at Ray’s inquiring glance. “No go, Ray. Bannister was trained to deal with surviving in a harsh desert climate, under combat conditions—it could be that he used that to throw us off. Tracking dog lost the scent at the Las Vegas wash.”
Ray nodded. He looked as if he hadn’t moved since the last time Catherine had talked to him, several open file folders in front of him on Wincroft’s desk. “That’s too bad. I’ve been delving into both patients’ histories. I can’t decide which one is more tragic.”
“That bad?”
“I’m afraid so. There’s a lot of material here, but I’ll see if I can condense it for you. John Bannister is from a small town in West Virginia, orphaned as a child. Grew up in a series of foster homes, enlisted at eighteen and worked his way up to sergeant. He was stationed at a base near Tikrit as a bomb-disposal expert, specializing in IEDs, when he was injured. An explosive device he was trying to defuse set off a second device nearby, killing four members of his unit. He was in a coma for a week. His symptoms didn’t begin to appear for another month or so—though whether or not they were triggered by the explosion is unclear.”
“And the woman?”
“Theria Kostapolis. Her history is a little more—involved. She grew up in a very religious atmosphere—both her parents were devout Roman Catholics who lived on a farm in Pennsylvania. They were convinced Theria should become a nun. She didn’t respond well to this, running away repeatedly from the time she was thirteen. Her parents tried to change her behavior with punishments that ranged from locking her in a shed to actual floggings. They withdrew her from school and taught her at home, a process that seemed to focus almost entirely on religious study. She was deprived of food, sleep, and comfort, apparently in an attempt to mimic the routines of certain monks.”
“My God.”
“Not mine. And apparently not Theria’s, either—she managed to escape again, this time when she was sixteen. She had better luck, winding up in Pittsburgh and evading her parents for almost eighteen months. They finally tracked her down, living in a shared house with several other teenagers. She was working full-time at a fast-food restaurant, had a boyfriend, and was looking into re-enrolling in school.”
“And then they dragged her back.”
“Yes. According to her case file, she’d become what young people today refer to as a goth—you’re familiar with the term?”
Catherine sighed. “I have a teenager, so yes. Lots of black clothing and eyeliner, pale skin, and a gloomy attitude. Think Dracula in studded leather with loud, depressing music.”
“It’s a subculture centered around a rather bleak worldview, one in which many traditional religious icons such as crosses or angels are subverted or used in an ironic way. I can understand why she’d be attracted to it.”
“I’m guessing her parents didn’t share her opinion.”
“No. They had her boyfriend arrested for harboring a minor, took her back home, and locked her up. Then, realizing that in less than six months she’d legally be an adult, they played their last card. If she didn’t agree to give up her lifestyle and join the church, they would send her to a missionary camp in Sierra Leone. They thought she’d be less likely to run anywhere if she was stranded in one of the most inhospitable, violent countries in the world.”
“What did she do?”
“She started a fire, hoping to escape in the confusion. She suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized.” Ray paused. “Both her parents died in the fire. She was charged with arson but found mentally incompetent to stand trial. After finding out she’d killed b
oth her parents, she had a complete breakdown in the hospital. She’s been institutionalized ever since, but it wasn’t until about a year ago that she began to demonstrate signs of Cotard’s syndrome.”
“Is that serious?”
“Yes. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never personally encountered a case—it’s an extremely rare disorder, one both fascinating and disturbing. Simply put, a person with Cotard’s syndrome believes they are dead.”
“Uh-oh.”
“This can manifest in a variety of ways. Mild cases suffer from despair and depression, while extreme examples deny that they exist at all. The delusion can extend to surroundings as well; subjects sometime believe that not only have they died, but they’ve gone to hell.”
“And this is a delusion that both of them now share?”
“I would say so, yes. Even before being exposed to BZ, Theria and John were beginning to show signs of SPD—shared psychotic disorder.”
Catherine frowned. “Wait. They were already sharing delusions? How did that happen?”
“It can occur when a dominant delusional personality encounters one that’s more pliable. Theria and John met in art therapy, an interest they both share. There’s a series of sketches in both their files; seen side-by-side, they’re very interesting.”
Ray pulled a sheaf of papers from the file and laid them down one by one on the desk before him, then picked up a second file and did the same.
“These sketches were done by Theria Kostapolis,” Ray said, indicating the ones on the left. “Her preoccupation with death is obvious. Coffins, skeletons, gravestones—the imagery remains consistent throughout.”
Ray pointed at the first sketch to the right. “And these were done by John Bannister. The obsession with death is there, too, but in the beginning his drawings were much more violent—screaming faces, explosions, even dismembered or mutilated bodies. As time goes on, though, they become calmer; less dying and more death. Some of these depictions are almost pastoral.”
“As long as you ignore the open graves. But yeah, I see what you mean.” Catherine picked up one of Theria’s sketches and studied it. “This one seems different.”
“Yes. The art therapy was being directed by this point; she was told to draw something specific. In this case, the sun.”
“So she drew a sunset.” Catherine squinted at the picture. “It is a sunset, right? Not a sunrise?”
“I would agree with that assessment, as did Dr. Wincroft. But what’s really interesting is this.” Ray picked up one of Bannister’s drawings and handed it to her.
“He drew a sunset, too,” said Catherine.
“Yes. And those aren’t the only ones; both he and Theria drew dozens of them. By the time Dr. Wincroft separated the two of them, the drawings they were doing were almost identical. It’s important to note that Theria began doing them first, though—it seems that she’s the dominant one. Even though Bannister is the one initiating action, his view of reality itself has been subsumed by Theria’s.”
“How does one come down with this—Cotard’s?”
“It can show up in conjunction with another neurological condition, as a result of brain injury, or even simply because of severe depression, as seems to be the case with Theria. According to Dr. Wincroft’s notes, she’s come to believe that she died in that fire and has been in hell ever since.”
“So we’re not just chasing two escaped psychiatric patients—we’re chasing two people who think they’re already dead.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Catherine sighed. “Let’s hope it’s still a delusion when we catch up to them.”
9
GREG STUDIED THE PULLEY in front of him on the light table morosely. “Maybe if we fold the hose in half?”
Sara sighed. “We tried that.”
“But we could hold it in place by putting rubber bands or string around it at spaced intervals—”
“Greg.” Sara grabbed his arm. “Let it go. A fire hose and pulley system do not good partners make.”
He shook his head. “Okay, okay. The pulley system was pure speculation, anyway.”
Sara smiled. “We should probably—”
“But the fire hose isn’t. We know there was one up there, and it didn’t come from the hotel. And the fact that we found a fiber on the sill means it must have gone out the window.”
Sara started to speak, then stopped herself. “Okay, granted. How do you want to proceed?”
“Standard length for a hose of this type is fifty feet. Pulleys or not, that’s a measurable range. I say we go back up to the penthouse and see if we can find anything within it.”
“You’re talking about the outside of the building?”
“If that’s where the evidence is.” Greg grinned. “And hey, you did say you wanted to hang off the top of a building.”
“True, but I was thinking of something a little closer to the ground . . .”
They started with Greg taking a fifty-foot, weighted length of rope and dangling it from the penthouse window of the Panhandle. Sara stayed on the ground and snapped pictures with a telephoto lens while Greg slowly swung the rope from one side to the other. The downloaded photos, laid one on top of the other, provided a clear pattern of the arc the hose could have reached.
The next step involved a window-washing rig, a suspended platform lowered or raised by an onboard electric winch. Sara stepped from the roof to the rig without hesitation, then glanced back at Greg. “Coming?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Just double-checking my safety harness.”
“I think you’re up to quadruple-checking, actually.”
“Safety first,” he muttered, and stepped carefully onto the platform.
They had to work in sections, starting at one corner and making their way down, then moving the rig over when the section was done. They were looking for anything out of the ordinary—a tool mark, some transfer, a stray fingerprint on the glass. It was slow, painstaking work, the glass reflecting both light and heat. A gust of wind would shake the platform every now and then, and Greg would inevitably wind up glancing down as he grabbed a handrail; just as quickly, he’d look back up.
“Kind of nice up here, actually,” said Sara. “Terrific view. If I was wearing a bikini, I could even get a tan.”
“Uh, yeah,” said Greg. He focused on the few square inches of glass directly in front of his face. “It’s a terrific place to fall to your death. Leave behind a corpse with really good skin tone.”
“You don’t do well with heights?”
“Heights I’m fine with. This is to heights what trees are to fungus.”
“It’s not that bad. Twenty stories, right? A body falls at thirty-two feet per second every second. Approximately fifteen feet per story, so that’s three hundred feet. Which works out to—”
“Just under ninety-five miles an hour by the time you crater.”
She glanced at him. “That’s pretty good.”
“You have a funny definition of good.”
“I meant how quickly you worked it out.”
“I did the math beforehand. I like to be prepared when I’m obsessing about my imminent demise.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“Sure. That’s because in my head, I’m still at the lab, looking at a pane of glass I hauled in and mounted on a frame myself. Any second now, Hodges is going to walk up behind me and ask why no one ever makes a fresh pot of coffee in the break room.”
“That’s a smart technique.” She paused. “I was just trying to distract you, you know. Crunching numbers works for me when I’m trying to distance myself from a situation.”
“Not for me. You should have stuck with your first attempt.”
Sara frowned. “My first attempt?”
“You in a bikini. That stopped me from thinking about death for at least three, four seconds.”
“You do know how to flatter a girl.”
“I’ve got something,” said Greg. “L
ook.”
Sara peered at the window where Greg was pointing. “It looks like a toeprint,” she said.
“Yeah. So unless one of the window washers likes working barefoot, I think we have a winner.” Greg was already pulling out his print powder. “Now, if I can just capture this before the wind picks up again . . .”
He worked quickly, Sara shielding his body as much as she could as he dusted the print then lifted it with tape.
“Got it,” he said triumphantly.
“You think it’s the only one?”
“Let’s keep going and see.”
They found no more on the windows below, but their persistence was rewarded when they moved laterally, finding another on the window to the right. Greg was working on lifting it when the drapes abruptly opened and a woman in her underwear stared out at him.
“Uh, hi,” said Greg. He smiled weakly and waved, then pointed to his CSI vest. “I’m not a, uh, peeping Greg. Las Vegas Crime—”
The woman scowled and pulled the drapes shut.
“Lab,” he finished.
“Smooth,” said Sara. “I bet she’ll be back any minute to write her phone number on the window backward in lipstick.”
“Absolutely. Spider-Man’s got nothing on me. . . and speaking of which, I think we might be looking for a Spider-Woman. This toeprint’s pretty small.”
They kept going. The next window over held a cluster of prints, some of them overlapping. Greg lifted them all. “We’ve hit the end of the trail,” he said. “Whoever it was, I think they touched down briefly on the other windows, then stopped here.”
The drapes on the window were shut. “Well, we know where our next stop is,” said Sara.
Archie Johnson found Nick in the hall just outside the AV lab, trying to coax a granola bar out of the vending machine. “This machine is not my friend,” Nick muttered.