Dark Screams, Volume 9

by Dark Screams- Volume 9 (retail) (epub)

  I still see Emma in my dreams. Her perfect face is, of course, indelibly burned into my psyche. I think she believed that her beauty was somehow responsible for what her father did to her. And I find some solace in that—at least for a short time—she may have known some peace. She found a way to excise the beauty that tormented her and experienced what life was like without her looks defining her.

  That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

  I’m writing all of this down because what I’m about to do carries great risk. There is a strong possibility of me getting caught this time around. If that happens, I won’t go alive. And I want the world to know why I’ve done the things I’ve done.

  Two weeks ago as I left a coffee shop, I noticed a city bus as it pulled up to a stoplight. There was an advertisement plastered across its side for a new cable TV drama.

  It starred Emma Grace.

  Of course, it wasn’t my Emma Grace. The actress’s name was different, as were her hair and eye color. After a quick Internet search, I learned that she’d had a few guest-starring roles in the past, but this new show was her first starring role. Apparently, she was a real up-and-comer.

  Dr. Holland neglected to mention that he had obviously taken DNA or stem cells from those first-generation donors and most likely frozen them for later use. Now, with today’s more sophisticated technology, the institute was able to grow the materials in a lab and print faces on demand, like production molds on an assembly line.

  I’ll deal with every one of those fucks at the Fresh Start Institute soon enough. But my first priority is the actress who stole Emma’s face. Getting to a celebrity will be a challenge, but not insurmountable. After all, I’ve done it before.

  I can’t help but wonder how many more Emmas are out there. It’s a disturbing thought that often keeps me up at night.

  The Blackout

  Jonathan Moore

  The storm’s eye was still a hundred miles to the southeast, but by five o’clock the wind along the coast was gale force, kicking up waves that broke across the lowest-lying roads, so that traffic patrol was keeping itself busy. They were out there in rain slickers and clear plastic ponchos, setting up cones and roadblocks from Hilo to Puna, turning cars around. There’d been radio calls all afternoon as the calm fell apart and the weather moved in, but that had just been background noise for Detective Nakahara. Interesting, but not his problem. He’d been in the station writing burglary reports. But he’d wanted to see it for himself, wanted to know what the island was in for, so on his way home, he detoured out to Banyan Drive, drove past the condos and hotels, and turned into the park that fronted the bay. A lone officer was at the edge of the soaked lawn, using yellow tape to cordon off the pedestrian bridge to Coconut Island.

  The wind pulled at the tape, curving it into an arc between the bridge’s handrails. Nakahara’s headlights picked out geysers of white spray when the waves broke against the rocks under the bridge. Every time it happened, the officer ducked.

  Before Nakahara could get out to help the officer, his phone rang. He checked the incoming number—Lieutenant Silva, calling from his cell.

  “Sir,” Nakahara said. “You caught me going home.”

  “I need you here.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The Medical Center,” Lieutenant Silva said. “The basement.”

  That meant the morgue.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Come around back—it’s how she got out.”

  “She?” Nakahara asked.

  But his lieutenant had already hung up.

  —

  There’d been lines of traffic outside the big-box stores—on the radio, dispatch was sending units to gridlocked intersections, and to a shoving match inside the Walmart—and it was even worse around the gas stations near the airport. But going up the hill toward the hospital, that all died away. Here it wasn’t just quiet. It was dark. The streetlights were out, and there were no fixed lights in any of the houses. Candle flames glittered in his peripheral vision. Until the storm blew out, the only people busier than the police would be the linemen from the electric company.

  —

  When he drove behind the hospital, he saw the lieutenant’s truck first, and then the man himself. The truck was parked in a space near the building, but Lieutenant Silva was at the back edge of the parking lot, where the banyans growing along the riverbank made it even darker. A woman in blue scrubs was next to Silva, and both of them were searching the grass with their flashlight beams. Nakahara parked and got out of his car, taking his own light from the loop on his belt.

  “Do your best not to step on anything,” Silva said.

  “Yes, sir—what are we looking for?”

  “This.”

  Nakahara crouched next to his lieutenant and looked at the illuminated spot on the ground. The grass was bent where someone had stepped on it. The wet soil held a small heel print, the press of bare toes. In the middle, a spot of blood glistened.

  “What’s going on?” Nakahara asked.

  “Dr. Redstone can tell you.”

  They stepped back to the parking lot.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Dr. Redstone said.

  The county didn’t have a full-time medical examiner, but she was in the rotation of doctors the chief would hire whenever the law required a postmortem. Like most doctors he’d met, Dr. Redstone’s usual demeanor was that of unflappable professionalism. But tonight, standing in the dark parking lot and listening to the whine from the hospital’s backup generator shed, she’d lost something. Her eyes were still searching the ground, and her salt-and-pepper hair was pulling free of the elastic tie she’d used to put it back in a ponytail.

  “Back up and tell me from the start,” Nakahara said. “Why you called me.”

  “The power went off at sunset, and the generators didn’t come on right away. It took fifteen minutes, and we were in the dark. In a hospital, that’s total chaos—I was in the morgue, but when the lights went out, I got a headlamp and a lantern, and I ran to the ER to pitch in.”

  “Okay.”

  “And that’s when it must have happened. I pulled the door shut behind me, and I heard it lock. Before the lights went out, everything in there was fine.”

  “You’re saying someone broke into the morgue. During the blackout, while you were gone, someone broke in.”

  “Or broke out,” Lieutenant Silva said.

  “Give me a break, Lieutenant,” Dr. Redstone snapped. “We’ve been over that.”

  “I’m saying something else,” Lieutenant Silva said. “Maybe someone was in there with you. Hiding. And after you left, he took what he wanted and broke out. That would explain the glass.”

  “What glass?” Nakahara asked.

  “God—this is giving me the creeps,” Dr. Redstone said. “Let’s go back inside. And before he sees the glass, he’ll want to see the freezer door.”

  She started walking toward the back of the hospital, her light still scanning the pavement around her.

  —

  They used the stairs, because Dr. Redstone wasn’t entirely sure the elevators and the backup generators got along. One flight of bare concrete steps, the landings lit red by battery-powered emergency lamps over the fire doors. When they came through two sets of swinging doors and into the morgue, Nakahara would have known where they were even if the lights had been out. There was an untamed smell down here. It was heavier than the air. An invisible fog that spilled off the guttered autopsy tables and ran along the gently slanted floor until it settled in the drains and waited.

  “I was over there when it happened,” Dr. Redstone said. She gestured to a small workstation with a desktop computer. A digital camera lay next to the keyboard. “When the lights went out, I mean.”

  “And you went out the way we just came in?”

  “That’s right.”

  Nakahara looked back the way they had come. There was a clear plastic box bolted to the wall near the
door. A yellow, handheld lantern standing there. Dr. Redstone was holding her headlamp in her right hand.

  “You said he took something?”

  “In here,” Dr. Redstone said. She led them across the main autopsy floor until they were standing in front of the walk-in freezer’s sliding steel door. Overhead, the hanging fluorescent lights were shivering in a current of air. “This was locked.”

  It should have been secured with a brass combination lock that fit through a stainless-steel hasp welded to the door. The lock was broken and on the floor. Nakahara crouched, taking a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. He used it to turn the lock over. It hadn’t been cut with bolt cutters. Someone simply pulled on the door until the tempered steel latch shattered.

  Nakahara stood up.

  “Strong guy,” he said. “What’d he take?”

  Dr. Redstone slid the door open, and a wave of frigid air crashed around their feet. She leaned inside and flicked on the light, which blinked awhile before it finally held steady. Then they were looking at two rows of steel shelves. A plastic-shrouded cadaver lay on each shelf.

  “When the lights went out, she was right there,” Dr. Redstone said. She was pointing at a sheet of clear plastic on the concrete floor. “And when I came back, she was gone.”

  “Now show him the glass,” Lieutenant Silva said.

  —

  Dr. Redstone slid the door shut as Nakahara came out of the freezer. They stepped over the pieces of the lock and went back through the morgue. There was a little office against the back wall.

  “Who was she?” Nakahara asked.

  “Rachel Ako,” Lieutenant Silva said. “You heard the reports?”

  “No.”

  “A fifteen-year-old. Hilo girl. Her grandfather reported her missing three days ago—you didn’t get that?”

  “I’ve been working burglary. How’d she end up here?”

  “This afternoon, she bolted out of the woods to cross Mamalahoa Highway and got hit by a car,” Silva said. “This is up near the national park. The car that hit her, it was a rental. A German couple driving. They called an ambulance, but it was too late for that.”

  “These tourists—”

  “They got to Hawaii this morning. When Rachel went missing, they were in Munich.”

  “An ambulance brought her here, and then what?” Nakahara asked. “She died in the ER?”

  “No,” Dr. Redstone said. “She was DOA.”

  “Any witnesses besides the Germans?”

  “No,” Lieutenant Silva said. “But there were officers on the scene and it was consistent. And you’ll be able to talk to the Germans. They’re still in town.”

  Dr. Redstone opened the office door and turned on the light.

  —

  Maybe office was the wrong word, Nakahara thought. This was a storage area. There were cardboard boxes and broken wheelchairs. Plastic flowers in dusty vases. A desk was pushed against the cinder-block wall. Above that, a tiny window. On the outside of the building, the window would have been at ground level. Now Nakahara understood why he’d been feeling a breeze since entering the morgue. The window was shattered.

  “Look at this,” Dr. Redstone said. She was pointing to a bloody footprint on the desktop. Small feet, Nakahara thought. You could almost fit them in your hand.

  “And look outside,” Silva said. “Stand on the chair and look. All the glass is in the bushes. There’s none on the desk.”

  “The window was broken from the inside,” Nakahara said. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  “What do you think?” Dr. Redstone asked.

  He looked at the footprint on the desk. There was another blood mark on the wall. Not a footprint, exactly. Just a scuff of blood, halfway between the desk and the windowsill. He pictured a fifteen-year old girl standing on the desk and smashing out the window with her palm. Climbing through, she would have put her foot on the wall for one last bit of purchase.

  “This girl, Rachel—you’re sure she was dead?” Nakahara asked. “She couldn’t have been stunned?”

  “Stunned, Detective?” Dr. Redstone asked.

  “You hear stories,” Nakahara said, but now he was embarrassed. “People who get hit in the head, who get an electric shock—”

  “Those are stories. Anecdotal. This is real. Let me show you what she looked like when she got to the ER.”

  —

  They were gathered around the computer, looking at Dr. Redstone’s morgue photos. Rachel Ako was a slight girl. Thin as a whisper, Nakahara’s grandmother might have said.

  She was also a very dead girl. Nakahara could see that for himself, looking at the photographs as Dr. Redstone scrolled through the first five.

  “First,” she was saying, “you need to look at this. This is her hip. It’s where the front bumper hit. You don’t need an X-ray to know it’s shattered. Hips aren’t caved in. You got a shattered hip, you’re not going to stand up. You’re not going to climb out a window, either.”

  “But you hadn’t done the postmortem,” Nakahara said. “This is just what you can tell from the pictures.”

  “That’s true. I never got the chance. But, look at this one—her head, where it hit the pavement.” She traced her finger on the monitor. “This, coming out here? You know what that is, right?”

  “Her frontal lobe,” Nakahara said.

  “When half your frontal lobe comes out into your hair, you’re not stunned. You’re dead.”

  Nakahara hardly registered Dr. Redstone’s words. He was looking at the screen, which had moved on to the next picture. To take it, someone had rolled Rachel Ako onto her stomach. She was thin enough that he could see every bump in her spine. But what stood out like spilled ink was the rippling mass of scar tissue. This wasn’t a single wound, or a dozen of them, but hundreds of separate injuries. It would have taken years to do that, to build scars on top of scars. Most of this girl’s life, maybe, had been dedicated to making this.

  “What about these?” he asked. “They didn’t happen today.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Those are whip marks, aren’t they?”

  “I think so.”

  He turned to Silva.

  “Three days ago, who was it that reported her missing?”

  “Her grandfather.”

  “That’s who she lived with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The file’s in your truck, or back at the station?”

  “The station,” Silva said. “I didn’t know it was Rachel Ako until I got here.”

  —

  Silva followed him back up the stairs, and then they were standing behind the hospital again. It wasn’t raining yet. From the southeast, the county’s emergency sirens rose and fell as if the storm were an incoming air raid.

  “How’d you find that footprint in the grass?”

  “There’s a blood trail starting at the window.”

  “Show me.”

  They went to the broken window, and Nakahara photographed the shattered glass. The first blood spot was on the curb, and the next was fifty feet away. Then they were at the back edge of the parking lot, and Nakahara was photographing the footprint.

  “If that’s her footprint on the desk, what do you think?” Silva said.

  “Say you’re the guy, what would you do?” Nakahara answered. He put his camera away and got out his pocketknife. “You’re stealing a corpse out of a morgue. You need to get her out a basement window. If she’s stiff, you stand her on the desk, then lift her through. So there’d be a footprint.”

  “What about this, and the ones in the lot?”

  “Maybe he had to set her down,” Nakahara said. “If he was losing his grip, he’d set her down, then pick her up again.”

  He opened his knife’s blade, and cut away the bloodstained grass. He put it into an evidence bag and stood up.

  “This is the last one you found?”

  “We went back as far as the river,” Silva said. “We didn’t see an
ything.”

  Nakahara looked into the forest. The trees grew thicker as they approached the river, where the banks were choked with banyan trees and climbing devil’s ivy. The forest pulsed with a chorus of tree frogs. There was no use checking again, if Silva had already searched. It was too dark to find anything. Besides that, he couldn’t imagine someone carrying the dead girl back there. The river ran between low cliffs, and the current was swift as the water approached the falls.

  “He must’ve parked right here,” Nakahara said. “At edge of the lot. He threw her in his trunk, in the backseat.”

  “By now, she could be anywhere.”

  Nakahara agreed with that. If she’d been missing since sundown, by now the guy could have driven as far as Kona. He looked back at the footprint in the grass, and then into the woods. It was too dark to see past the stab of his light.

  “Do you think—”

  Silva stopped talking and looked up. The tree frogs had gone silent, and the wind had dropped off. For a second, there was nothing. Just the hum from the generator shed, the rumble as the Wailuku River poured over the falls a quarter of a mile away.

  “Shit,” Silva said. “Let’s get inside.”

  Before they could move, the silence was blown to pieces. The rain was here now. Huge, wind-driven drops. The rain machine-gunned off the parked cars and the tin-roofed administration building. Nakahara followed Silva at a run, holding his evidence bags and camera close to his chest. By the time they reached the hospital’s back door, some of the puddles were already ankle deep.

  —

  At their highest setting, his windshield wipers were wholly unable to keep up with the rain. He was soaked, and he’d turned on the heater. At every stop sign, he could feel the car shuddering in the force of the wind. He followed Silva’s taillights, because they were all he could see.

  He reached to the evidence bag on the passenger seat and felt the pieces of the shattered lock. The steel was thicker than his forefinger. Some men might have struggled to break it with heavy bolt cutters. So the man who’d thrown open the freezer door and taken Rachel Ako was strong. Uncannily so. Yet he’d climbed out of the morgue through a basement window that wasn’t quite twelve inches high. A strong man, then, but thin. Whisper thin, his grandmother might have said.