by Steven James
“He’s supposed to fly in sometime around noon. I guess he’ll probably want to be briefed this afternoon at HQ. I’ll let you know when I find out more.”
Cheyenne rolled down the window and slipped her key into the ignition. “What’s up?” she called.
“I’ll tell you on the way.” I opened the car door. “Let’s go visit the morgue.”
23
Room 404, Investigative Journalism Suite
The Denver News Building
Downtown Denver
9:22 a.m.
Amy Lynn Greer sighed.
Her husband Reggie was working a crime scene, so she was the one who’d had to drop their three-year-old son off at day care half an hour ago, even though she had two articles that were both due to her editor by noon.
She would have loved to be covering the murders that Reggie was investigating, rather than writing her column on local politics or the follow-up piece on the amount of drug use in children of professional baseball players who use steroids, but her boss refused to assign her any articles that related to Reggie’s cases.
When Reggie had first gotten the job, she’d thought that in her line of work, being married to one of Denver’s crime scene unit forensics specialists might have its advantages, but Reggie was under the scrutinizing eye of Lieutenant Kurt Mason, who’d informed him when he got the job that if he ever released any details about any investigation to his wife, he would be without a job and in court facing criminal charges before her story ever ran. Period. She’d met Lieutenant Mason and could tell he was a man of his word.
She took a small break from outlining the steroids story, checked her email, and found five rejection letters, one from each of the literary agents she’d sent her book proposal to.
Five in one day.
That actually might beat her old record.
A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts.
“Yes?”
The door opened, and a vaguely familiar female voice said, “I’ve got something for you.”
Amy Lynn glanced over and saw one of the secretaries, a sandy-haired, thick-wristed woman she could never remember the name of, standing in the doorway, holding an oversized ceramic flowerpot filled with a shiny-leafed plant sprouting a cluster of half-inch-long, purplish-white flowers. The pot was so large she needed to use both hands.
“What’s that?”
“Flowers.” The woman explained as if Amy Lynn couldn’t tell. Her voice was strained with the effort of holding the oversized pot. “Can I set ’em down?”
“Sure.” Amy Lynn slid some papers out of the way. She tried to remember the woman’s name but couldn’t. She thought it was maybe Britt or Brenda or Brett or something preppy and girlish like that.
The secretary eased the pot onto her desk. “So, what’s the special occasion?”
Amy Lynn gazed at the flowers.
“There is no special occasion.”
Flowers?
Who would send you flowers? Reggie would never do that.
Small clusters of stamen stuck out of the center of each of the feathery-white flowers. The leaves overlapped and grew in layers, each set of two leaves at a perpendicular angle to the ones beside them. The strong minty scent was somewhat familiar, but also unfamiliar at the same time.
She knew how to identify a few kinds of flowers, but mostly just the ones everyone knew—lilies and daisies and roses. She didn’t have a clue what kind of flowers these were.
But she was more curious about who might have sent them than what kind they were. “Was there a note?”
The secretary with the all-too-forgettable name fished out a small envelope from where it had fallen behind some leaves.
The envelope was eggshell white and had only four words handwritten on the front: “To Amy Lynn Greer.”
She immediately realized that it wasn’t her husband’s handwriting and that if he’d sent her the flowers he wouldn’t have included her last name.
But if not Reggie, who? She had a few sources who were male, and a few friends who were a little more than friends—but none of them would have been brash enough to send her flowers. At least she didn’t think so.
The secretary lurked. “I didn’t open it.” She pointed to the envelope.
“Thank you . . . um, wait, I’m sorry. What’s your name again?”
The woman looked hurt by the question. “Brett Neilson. I’ve been working here for—”
“Thank you, Brett, yes. I’m sorry. I’m not so good with names.”
“It’s OK,” Brett said, but she didn’t leave, just stared longingly at the flowers. “My husband never sends me flowers.”
Amy Lynn didn’t know what to say to that. Finally, she just mumbled, “Well, men. You know.” It sounded pathetic when she said it, but it somehow seemed to satisfy Brett Neilson, who gave her a parting half-smile and backed out of the room, pulling the door closed behind her.
After Brett was gone, Amy Lynn studied the flowers again. They had a formal, functional quality about them rather than a flirty, romantic one. And that scent. Was it a spice?
And who sent them?
She had no idea.
The note.
Ripping open the envelope, she found a small slip of card stock paper with a short, cryptic, handwritten message:
Must needs we tell of others’ tears?
Please, Mrs. Greer, have a heart.
—John
John?
John who?
She didn’t recognize the handwriting.
Amy Lynn considered all the Johns she knew and almost immediately eliminated all of them from her list of people who might possibly send her flowers, especially ones with an enigmatic note like this.
Maybe a reference to a story she’d done? Something about grief? Tragedy? Someone’s death?
Amy Lynn turned to her computer and felt excitement stir inside of her for the first time that morning.
Figuring out who sent the flowers was much more interesting than analyzing local politics or writing about the families of drug-abusing baseball players. Her editor would just have to wait.
She shoved her other notes aside, tapped at her keyboard, and began to search through the articles she’d written, looking for references to anyone named John.
24
Cheyenne and I arrived at Baptist Memorial Hospital, one of the oldest and most respected hospitals in the state of Colorado, at 9:46 a.m.
The hospital administration had been renovating the eastern wing for the last six months, and I could see that they still had a long way to go. Local press coverage had emphasized how “patient care had not been compromised in the least” during the current renovations, but over the years I’ve seen how much spin finds its way into press releases, so I hadn’t been completely convinced by the hospital administrator’s carefully worded PR statements.
I was stepping out of the car when my cell rang.
“What did we do before cell phones?” Cheyenne said good-naturedly.
“Got into fewer car accidents.” I looked at the caller ID picture on the screen.
Lien-hua Jiang.
OK, this was inconvenient. Cheyenne glanced at me. “Excuse me for a minute,” I said.
“Sure.” She started across the parking lot, and I waited until she was out of earshot.
“Hey,” I said to Lien-hua.
“Hello, Pat. How are you?”
“Good. Things are good, pretty good.” A stiff and meaningless response. I began to follow Cheyenne but made sure I stayed far enough back so she wouldn’t hear my conversation. “How are you?”
“I’m OK. Thanks for asking.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah.” A pause that spoke volumes. “Pat, you know why I’m calling, I think.”
Wow. Well, she’s not wasting any time, is she?
“I’m thinking maybe I can guess.” The words had a bite to them, and I knew it, but I let them stand.
“Please, it’s hard
enough doing this over the phone. You don’t have to make it worse.”
“I’m not trying to—” I really did not want to be doing this. Not here, not now. Twenty meters in front of me Cheyenne was entering the hospital. “Look, can we talk about this later, maybe later today?”
“I’m going on assignment to Boston and I don’t want to have this hanging over my head. It’s nothing against you, Pat. You know that.” I could hear pain in her voice but no condemnation. She still cared about me, wasn’t blaming me. And that just made this harder.
“It’s just . . .” she said. “Things haven’t been . . . It’s not working.”
For more than a month now things had been deteriorating, and we’d both been dancing around the issue, avoiding saying what we both knew we needed to. “Really, Lien-hua, this isn’t a good—”
“It’s over, Pat.”
I felt a sting, a deep sense of finality and regret. “No, we’ll talk about it later. Maybe when I get to DC later this week we can—”
“No. Please. It would be too hard for me.” Her voice wasn’t harsh, but it was firm.
A long pause followed her words. I had no idea what to say.
I tried to formulate the right words, but they escaped me, “So then . . .”
“Yes.”
I arrived at the hospital’s automatic sliding doors, and they whisked open. I was barely aware of myself stepping inside.
On a better day, either Lien-hua or I might have found something helpful or healing to say before we ended the call, but on this day, neither of us did. A few thick moments of silence fell between us until at last she said good-bye and I said good-bye, and then the conversation was over. Long before I was ready for it to be.
The sliding doors closed behind me, and I stood staring blankly at the phone until I felt Cheyenne’s presence beside me.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes,” I lied.
I slipped the phone into my pocket, and it felt unusually awkward and uncomfortable. I pulled it out and jammed it back in, harder.
She looked at me with understanding and concern. “No, it’s not.”
“I’m all right,” I said, but I didn’t look her in the eye. “Let’s go.”
A few minutes later we were being escorted down the hall by Lance Rietlin, a fidgety man in his late twenties who spent the walk telling Cheyenne how much he appreciated being able to work under someone as experienced and respected as Dr. Bender, but I wasn’t really listening. Instead, I was trying to convince myself that Lien-hua and I could still be friends, that we would be able to put aside the deep feelings we’d had for each other and move back to the way things were before we started going out—because that’s what you tell yourself at times like this.
You tell yourself those things, you hide inside naivety, because the truth is too painful to admit.
And the truth was: from now on it would be difficult to work with Lien-hua; I would be jealous of the attention she gave to other men and I would always wonder if we—I—could have done more to salvage our relationship.
Lance led us down a set of stairs and into the hospital’s lower level past a series of custodial supply closets and the physical therapy room. “They’re doing some kind of maintenance on the elevators,” he explained as we passed the “out of order” signs taped across the doors. “They’re supposed to have ’em up and running in an hour or so. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
As my thoughts wandered back to Lien-hua, I realized that getting things out in the open was somewhat of a relief—even though going our separate ways was something I’d never wanted.
We arrived at the morgue and Lance unlocked the door. “Pretty full in there this week. Dr. Bender and I have been . . . Well.”
He didn’t need to say more.
“Have at it.” He swung the door open. The overly sharp smell of hospital disinfectants filled the air. “Eric should be by in about ten minutes.”
I noticed Cheyenne glance at her watch.
“I’ll be upstairs,” Lance said. “Unless you want me to stay?”
“No,” I replied. “We’ll be fine.”
He gave me a small nod. “If you need anything, just call the admitting department. They’ll page me.” He told me the number, I thanked him, and after he’d stepped away Cheyenne and I entered the sterile white chamber where death is dissected and studied.
The room looked like most of the morgues I’ve visited over the past fifteen years: stainless steel counters, bright fluorescent lights, microscopes, scales, sanitary disposal units, trays of instruments. An empty gurney.
And, of course, the vibrating electric Stryker saws for cutting through skulls without destroying the tender brain matter inside, Hagedorn needles for sewing up body cavities, skull chisels, bone saws, rib cutters.
Tools of the trade.
The gurneys that bore the dead would be in the freezer.
As I crossed the room, I thought about how we design morgues to be as impersonal and institutional as possible. Despite how messy and nauseating dead bodies are, the place where we probe them is sparkling and clean and carefully sanitized to cover up the smell of decay.
Maybe it’s our way of dealing with death, of helping us forget the laughter and tears and smiles of the people we’re dissecting.
Maybe that’s a good thing—being able to forget.
We reached the freezer, and I stared at the door for a moment.
“OK,” I said softly. “Let’s have a look at the governor.”
25
I unlatched the door to the morgue’s freezer. Swung it open.
A swirl of cold air nudged out and encircled me. I could see five gurneys inside.
Dead lips whispering to me, “Why? Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you come sooner?”
On each gurney, a cadaver. I recognized the faces of three of them as the victims from earlier this week. Strangely, none of the bodies were covered, and two of the corpses were headless—two, not one. Not just Sebastian Taylor’s.
What’s going—?
And then as I took my first step into the freezer, I saw her. A woman, seated against the far wall, with the missing sheets from the bodies draped across her shoulders and arms. Her eyes were open.
I rushed toward her, Cheyenne beside me.
As I bent over the woman and felt for a pulse, I realized I’d seen her before at one of the coffeehouses I visit regularly. I didn’t know her name, just her face, but somehow, recognizing her made things all the more urgent. Her skin was cold to the touch. Her lips, bluish, cyanotic, but she was still breathing. I found a faint heartbeat. “She’s alive,” I said to Cheyenne.
“Thank God. Let’s get her out of here.”
“Ma’am,” I said. “We’re going to help you.” She moved her lips but made no sound. I noticed that she wasn’t shivering, which meant she was in the advanced stages of hypothermia.
Cheyenne reached for one of her armpits to lift her.
“Careful.” From my rock climbing trips I knew that moving people with severe hypothermia can jar them, cause them to go into shock or cardiac arrhythmia, but I didn’t want to say that within earshot of the woman. “I’ll get her.”
As gently as I could, I lifted the woman. She had a slight frame, but still I felt a twitch of pain in my side where Grant had driven the axe handle into my ribs the day before.
I carried her to the empty gurney in the exam room, and Cheyenne ran ahead of me, pressed the intercom button, and called for a doctor to report to the morgue, stat!
I eased the woman onto the gurney. “We’re going to get you warmed up.”
As long as she remains conscious, she should be all right.
“It’s going to be OK,” Cheyenne said, but she must have realized how serious the woman’s condition was because she whispered, only for my ears, “I’m not sure we can wait for a doctor.”
“She’ll be all right.”
But as I was evaluating whether or not we sho
uld wait for a doctor or go looking for one, I saw the woman’s eyes roll back. Cheyenne slapped her cheek firmly to keep her awake. “Stay with me,” she said. “Stay with me!” But the woman’s breathing was becoming choppier. Cheyenne called, “Pat—”
“I know.”
The woman shuddered. Cheyenne slapped her cheek again, but this time she didn’t respond.
I grabbed the end of the gurney to push it into the hall. “We have to warm her. Now.”
26
As I passed through the door I remembered that the elevator on this level was out of service.
No!
In the wilderness you’d remove someone’s clothes and lay beside her to share your body heat, but I figured we could do better than that here at the hospital.
I glanced down the hallway, reviewing the rooms we’d passed on the way to the morgue.
“The PT room,” I mumbled and began to wheel the woman down the hallway as fast as I could.
“What is it?” Cheyenne caught up with me.
“Physical therapy, we passed it on the way here. They’ll have a whirlpool.”
Cheyenne hurried ahead of me and held open the door. I eased the gurney inside. “We’re going to help you,” I told the woman. “It’s all right.”
Gently, I took her in my arms.
He locked her in the morgue.
The killer tried to freeze her to death.
The sadistic, merciless nature of his crimes stunned me, nauseated me.
No one else was present, but I saw Cheyenne motion toward me from the far side of the room. “The whirlpool’s over here.”
The pool had been built into the floor, and as I descended the steps and entered the warm water, I saw Cheyenne reach for the control panel. “Leave the jets off,” I said. “It might be too much of a shock to her system.”
“Right.”
Supporting her weight, I carefully lowered the woman into the water, but she began to shake, weak quivers running through her body. I lifted her a little, then lowered her again, more slowly, while Cheyenne spoke to her, comforting her, reassuring her from beside the pool.
A few moments later the woman coughed and blinked her eyes rapidly. The color was returning to her face.