“Huh?” Lomax stopped his pacing and glanced at George irritably. “Oh, I forget. Kathryn Sheffield was frozen, too.”
Cold, seeping revulsion. “Her? How?”
“Constantine. He hid her, too. Then managed the whole thing just right. You didn’t hear about it?”
George had lain low for years, wanting to forget the chillers. His work there had been done, well and true. “I was out of touch.”
Lomax flicked a sour glance at Montana, who was somberly staring into space. “The mystery angle tickled the media’s nose just right. Swamped our Reverend here.”
Montana’s eyes narrowed. “I did as I promised.”
“You lost the media battle. A sharp, businesslike campaign could have—”
“I do not hire my followers.” Montana’s eyes flashed with the energies George remembered. “I build them, from troubled souls.”
“I should never have relied on you to harass the I2 operation,” Lomax said bitterly.
“You had to,” the Reverend countered swiftly. “Who else could? Your lawyers?”
“You let him”—Lomax jabbed a finger at George, voice going scratchy and strained—“get out of hand. That girl, Karen—I told you not to use her to calm him down. That kind of therapy—”
“She worked for you, remember? I thought she knew what she was doing.”
“I trusted you to work with him, keep tabs. Instead, he got on my trail, broke into the estate, damned near found—”
“Oh yes,” Montana said sarcastically, “that heavily protected fortress. George went right through it.”
George realized they were oblivious to him, two aging men bickering over ancient aggravations. Lomax spat back at Montana, “And I took care of it!”
“I’ve brought in some of the best clients, don’t forget—”
“Shut up!” George shouted.
Both men blinked, startled.
“You two are here to do what I say now. Got it?”
Montana nodded, his face becoming sober and reflective again. George had liked the momentary glimpse of the fire-eating Reverend he remembered. Now the weathered man of the present returned. “My older brother here can be exasperating at times. For all our differences, we have always helped each other.”
“Admirable,” George said, meaning it. He had never thought about Montana’s family, somehow. The Marble Cathedral had been family to them all. “But you couldn’t stop the chillers? After all I did?”
Lomax said, “We worked together to clean up the messes you left, George. The police were already working on the girl’s murder, that Karen. They were after you. If they made any connection between that and the Immortality Incorporated cases—”
“They couldn’t,” George said vehemently.
“They tried to find you for years, picked over my congregation something terrible.” There was a sad, worn note in Montana’s deeply modulated voice. It would still hold an audience in thrall, George judged, but there was a slackening of once prodigious energies. “Hurt attendance.”
Lomax nodded. “But we got by. And with Sheffield gone, we were safe. I figured Immortality couldn’t hush up anything, so all the bodies would be warmed up for autopsy. I never figured that Ray Constantine guy would go public, make it into this big ‘mystery.’” Lomax stopped and threw up his hands in disgust, sarcasm lacing his gravel voice. “So the media got it and that stimulated the whole field—I2 and Vitality and a half-dozen other firms.”
“A circus,” Montana chuckled bitterly. “And after all, George just gave the chiller people what they wanted—freezing.”
“And your method, covering the Hagerty woman’s death so it looked like an accident, that was smart.” Lomax eyed George. “Odd how that fit in with her aim—to get frozen without an autopsy.” He stopped pacing and studied George pointedly. “Funny, huh?”
What was Lomax hinting? George felt welling confusions warring within him, could not find words to give them voice. “Funny? I figured out how to be a serious killer, and then those chiller people, they messed everything up. Now we got to fix them for good.”
He slammed a fist onto Montana’s desk. Both men jumped, and George saw that they feared him. They tried to keep a calm face, but these were two weak, time-worn men.
The Reverend said softly, “If these chillers remember you, you think this WOrldNet will find you.”
Lomax nodded sourly. “No place to hide in the world anymore. And the chillers have erased all that about the statute of limitations. The Supreme Court already ruled on that last year. Resurrected witnesses can testify. Crimes don’t have a time limit.”
“A God-sent moment,” George said forcefully. “I’m going to do it right this time. God abhors these walking dead.”
Their cowed faces told George that he could get the help he needed. To unravel the loom of chance and circumstance. To again be of steely resolve, forged in the flames of rectitude.
“You got me that job?” he asked Lomax.
“It cost me plenty, but—yes.”
“Then let’s get going.”
Lomax slapped at his armchair, an old man’s gesture of irritation. The leather was ruddy with wear, the arms gone thin and ripped. “I’ve done enough. You—”
“You’re going to train me,” George said.
He studied the two men. Obviously they had bought for themselves all the antiaging medical advances George had read about. Still, they seemed a lot older than he was. They should carry a weight of years and authority, but it was all hollow now. They would do nothing—had done nothing—about the chillers.
Lomax nodded bitterly. “We can begin tomorrow.”
George shook his head. “The chillers are coming out. We start now.”
7
SUSAN
When she awoke the walls were treating her to a light summer rain, seen across shimmering rice paddies. Farmers stooped over their patient work in the foggy distance. Amid them sat a man talking to Dr. Fernandez. The walls were so good, it took Susan a while to realize that the men were not in the landscape.
“I want to introduce Captain Stern,” Fernandez said cordially when he was quite sure that Susan was awake. “He has remained on your case, even though he retired from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.”
Stern matched his name. His angular features seemed to stretch his parchment skin over sharp bones. Bright eyes moved with birdlike quickness. He seemed excited, a man who had not let the years get the best of him. “I’m honored to meet you.”
Susan listened to Stern begin reciting the history of her “case” and felt the tilt of unreality. She still had trouble getting her mind around a vast shift in perspectives. Despite this man’s intent gaze, she could not help but laugh. “Let me get this straight. You’re talking with me, the victim, about a murder case you’ve spent thirty-eight years on? Without solving it?”
Stern looked sheepish.
Susan said, “How is it murder, if I’m now alive?”
Stern shrugged. “Well, some definitions are going to have to change. I leave that to the lawyers.”
Dr. Fernandez said, “This is too hard for attorneys. You’ll need a licensed semanticist.”
Susan had spent long hours approaching up to this moment in her mind, but she still did not wish to face it. “I suppose I should be grateful for your efforts,” she said.
“I got interested, and then, well, after all that happened…” He looked down at his hands, then back up, his mouth twisted into a thin, beseeching curve. “I still don’t know what happened back there.”
“It has been a long time. Isn’t there a statute of limitations?”
“Not on murder. Although maybe this isn’t murder anymore.”
Fernandez said jovially, “In this case, it is a pleasure as a physician to hand your profession a new problem.”
Stern had to smile. “Thanks. But what I really want is, well, to know who, uh—assaulted you.”
She found the truth oddly embarrassing. �
�I don’t know.”
Stern blinked. “Why? Did he hit you from behind?”
“I don’t know that, either. The last memory I have is of going down to the beach for a run with my dog.”
Stern’s mouth worked soundlessly. Susan could see the shock sink into him. Fernandez had explained how Stern had dogged the case, kept it in the back of his mind for decades. It had eaten at him, and now she had dashed his last hopes.
“Nothing? Nothing… at all?”
“Sorry, no. I’ve tried.”
“I’m afraid this is not really so surprising,” Dr. Fernandez said precisely. “And not only among cryonics revivals, of which we have done quite a few. Even ordinary trauma often obliterates memory. The mind does not have time to process an event into long-term memory storage before, uh—it is unable to do so.”
“Before the victim dies,” Stern said absently.
“It could perhaps have been recalled when she was first revived,” Fernandez went on pedantically. “But then the reviving mind was bombarded with so many fresh things, the layers of perception and thought restarting and sorting themselves out. It must have been like strangers trying to find each other in a fog. We have no research about this phase, but I am not surprised—”
“The dog,” Stern cut in. “You had your dog with you.”
“Yes, definitely.”
“We traced it later. The Animal Services people pulled it out of a dumpster. They IDed it from a chip implanted in the skin.”
“A subdermal, yes. I had that put into Travis. It carried his full medical records, vaccinations, American Kennel registry, my name—”
“Animal Control ran a data reader over the body. The same procedure we use today on people, now that everybody has a chip embedded. So eventually Animal Control got around to sending a postcard to your address. That’s how we linked it with a serial killer operating up in Santa Ana. He killed two women and disposed of them. Same dumpster.”
Susan felt a strange, stabbing mix of anger, fear, oblique hope. To her Travis was a bundle of romping enthusiasm she had seen only a few days ago. Then she had awakened in this distant place, and here was a detective describing a serial killer nearly forty years before. And Travis was dust. She shook her head, as if that would clear the blur. But the yawning gray vacancy, the simple disbelief that her familiar era had been utterly blown away by the winds of change—that would stay with her a long time. “Look, I’m having trouble following this.”
“I was the investigator on your case. At first I thought you had simply fallen off the cliff near Crystal Cove. Your cryonics friends were leaning on me all the way. I went along with them, they froze you down. But then other evidence turned up. I—I changed my mind.”
Susan gave him a piercing glance. “You wanted to autopsy me.”
“Well, yes.” Stern chewed at his lower lip.
And whoever thought he would have to sit here and explain to me? She waited in silence, not trusting herself to speak.
“But we couldn’t. Your friends hid your body.”
So that was it. Fernandez had not told her this part. She felt her surprise show in her face, though she struggled to suppress it. “Ray, Alex… I owe them a lot.”
“You knew they had a facility for that?”
“I helped build it.” She gazed off over the rice paddies veiled in silvery rain. The plip-plop of droplets sounded real, immediate, and she tasted fresh-turned earth on the mild breeze. “I never thought… I would use it.”
Stern related what had happened, and she tried to see the bizarre events in her mind’s eye. It was like being in a play, scenes moving on while you were offstage. Alex’s death, the same way she had gone. Then Kathryn. Each brought a stab of pain, of loss, of building catastrophe.
“Why didn’t they see a pattern?” Susan burst out.
“Why didn’t you?” Stern asked quietly.
“What? I told you, I can’t remember—”
“The man who attacked you outside Immortality Incorporated?”
“What about him? He—”
A ricochet of cold fear cut through layers of memory. The shadowy bulk. A stiff, rapt face, eerily impersonal. Blank eyes. Had she seen it more than once? On the beach? “I remember that. Was it connected? Was that him?”
Stern shook his head with frustration. “I don’t know. That attack on you—it was just a couple of sentences in a sheriff’s report.”
“It’s been so long,” Susan said distantly. But it didn’t feel that way. Time was a telescope, collapsing perspectives.
“Right. Plenty of deltas since then.”
“Deltas?”
“Big changes. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
“And why are you? The deaths—I mean, suspensions—happened so long ago. The killer must be dead.”
“Not necessarily.”
“You couldn’t even prevent him from killing Kathryn?” She had been appalled when she heard of that.
Stern scowled. “I couldn’t see the pattern because I didn’t know Alex was dead. There was no obvious link to the Santa Ana cases.”
“What a horrible death she faced! How was she suspended?”
“Raymond Constantine was asleep in the facility. He heard something, found her. He called Skinner, the intern, and they suspended her.”
“Skinner, of course.” So many people, crowding into this strange world and time. “But with a sudden freezing, no perfusate, the damage would be worse.”
Stern shrugged. “So Constantine told me. But they had no choice—just like with Cowell. Suspend her or lose her completely.”
“They did the right thing,” Susan said so emphatically that both Stern and Fernandez looked a bit startled. Of course; they lived in this time, where the ideas of cryonics were commonplace. She was like a zealot arguing that airplanes could too fly, in 1950.
“After a while Mr. Constantine and Mr. Skinner came to me and laid it all out. Immortality Incorporated couldn’t keep three people hidden back in that little canyon forever. So they negotiated with the district attorney’s office. We agreed not to thaw out the bodies for autopsy, even though we knew there was a serial murderer at work.”
“In return for what?” Susan said cautiously.
“For testifying, giving us every lead they could.”
“Why couldn’t you catch him?”
Stern looked down at his hands again. “Nothing added up. He never hit again. No subsequent murder fit his pattern.”
“Could he have changed it?”
“We don’t think so. Serial killers don’t, usually. But Kathryn Sheffield’s—well, that was funny. Not like the others. Risky—but it worked.”
“Perhaps he was desperate.”
“Maybe so. She was alone, maybe she surprised him when he was snooping around.”
“You do not seem to have turned up very much in thirty-eight years,” Susan said gently. The fact made its own point.
“He disappeared. Very atypical for serial killers.”
“This interview, before I see anyone else—that was part of your deal with I2, wasn’t it?”
Stern looked surprised. “You’re a quick lady. Yeah, I got that written in, all right. Just on the wild chance we might be able to use it someday.”
Susan smiled wanly. She knew a thing or two about obsession. “That you might.”
“Well, yes.” Stern seemed respectful, shy, almost reverential, despite the fact that he was considerably older than she was now. Or rather, older in true age. While her birth certificate said she was eighty-two, the mirror in the bathroom showed her a face in its forties.
“I’m not the only one who wants a solution to this case. It’s famous.”
“Now, that can’t be true. I saw nothing in the newspaper about it.”
A quick glance between Fernandez and Stern told her much. “Ah,” she said. “That’s why I couldn’t find an index in the Times.”
“I felt it would be traumatic,” Fernandez said with a tou
ch of professional stiffness she recognized. Physicians automatically hid personal decisions behind a facade of specialist authority. “You have no idea how this entire matter has been blown up by the media and distorted. I hoped to shield you from that for a while.”
“I understand. But I have to know everything if I am to help you.”
Stern nodded vigorously. “I’m hoping that as you recover, you may remember more. I can go over all the evidence with you, see if anything booms down.”
“Booms…?”
“Becomes clear. We can do that over the next few days, while we’re waiting for the others.”
“Others?”
Stern covered his surprise, but still shot a glance at Fernandez. “Cowell. Then Sheffield, if Dr. Fernandez thinks it’s okay to go ahead. This new set of techniques he’s worked out really is a miracle.”
Susan was not prepared for this. She pursed her lips, feeling circumstances accelerating with wrenching thrust. So much to learn—
“I believe this is enough for now,” Dr. Fernandez said kindly. “Susan, you should rest.”
“Wait—they’ll come back? Soon?”
Stern spread his hands. “This is the most famous unsolved case in the world. The public has been waiting decades to see if we can nail this guy. Here’s our first chance. Do you have any idea what kind of pressure that creates?”
“I see.”
Stern smiled mirthlessly. She saw how all this had chipped away at him, hounding a conscientious man through his entire career. Two women in Santa Ana. Three victims at Immortality Incorporated. A distant sympathy swelled in her. “And all your leads have been cold for a long time,” she said.
Stern’s eyebrows registered ironic pleasure. “Yes, doctor.”
“I don’t really feel tired at all, Dr. Fernandez,” she said, getting more strength in her voice than she felt. “Not at all.”
“Still, I do think that—”
“What comes after Captain Stern? I’ve satisfied my obligation, haven’t I? Don’t I get to direct my own affairs now?”
Fernandez said reluctantly, “Well, there is…”
“What?”
“Another visitor.”
“Who?”
CHILLER Page 53