by Madyson Rush
Cambridgeshire Constabulary Headquarters
Huntingdon, England
“He’s not in the records room either,” the detective said as he slowly approached the desk.
Chief Detective Inspector Lang was away from the office for the afternoon, and the elderly detective on duty was clueless about Brenton’s case, and it seemed, even more clueless about how to use a computer. After a database search for Brenton Hyden ended without success, a paper trail of records and case files was David and Thatcher’s last hope.
“I searched the “H” cabinet twice, just in case your old man was misfiled,” the detective said. “Even got myself a paper cut.” He held up a pinky finger as if it warranted some sort of condolence.
“You people can’t be that disorganized,” David said.
“Oh, you’d be surprised.” The detective placed his finger in his mouth. “Especially if it’s a cold case. You sure it was a murder…in this area?”
“He was found in Stonehenge,” David said. “I identified the body myself.”
“And Lang moved the case up here?” The detective shook his head. “It’s not our jurisdiction. And we don’t get many murders. I’d remember something like that.”
“Yeah, you’d think.” David was annoyed.
“There’s nothing else you can do?” Thatcher said. “We came all the way from Highlands.”
“Scotland, eh?” He looked her up and down. “And DCI Lang knows you’re looking for him?”
“He rang us and told us to come in,” David lied. “He insisted we go through my father’s file.”
Thatcher took David’s lead and leaned over the counter, flashing her NATO badge as if it gave her some authority. “This is very important,” she said. “A matter of international security.”
The detective scratched his head. “Well, I guess it can’t hurt if you look yourselves. Maybe your old man was just misfiled.” He unlocked the counter door and swung it open. “But if this poor chap was murdered, he’d be listed in records at the capital. All homicides are reported to London. It’s protocol.”
Thatcher pulled out her cell phone and nodded at David. “I’m on it,” she said. “Enjoy the records.”
****
“Here’s a good one.” David sat on the laminated floor in the police station, his head buried in a drawer. He pulled out a file and read the name. “Umbrela, Anita Umbrela.” He let out a tired, neurotic laugh and then sat back against the cabinet. “Don’t you get it?”
Thatcher rolled her eyes.
It seemed everyone in the small town of Huntingdon possessed some sort of rap sheet, mostly alcohol-related disorderly conduct. Out of the hundreds of case files they’d thumbed through, none belonged to Brenton Hyden.
“Well, he’s not in the ‘U’s,” David said, shutting the drawer.
“Keep looking.” Thatcher shuffled through the V’s.
She stopped with a gasp.
“You found him?” David sat up.
She put a finger in her mouth. “Paper cut.”
“David!” a voice bellowed outside the door. “What in God’s name are you doing?”
David looked up at Lang, and then to Thatcher.
Thatcher flushed. She was very aware that they were breaking at least a dozen privacy laws.
“My father’s file was misplaced,” David said.
“It’s not misplaced.” Lang’s hands were on his hips. “Why are you looking for it?”
David dropped his head sideways and forced a look of naïveté. “Curiosity.”
Lang frowned. He wasn’t that stupid. “It’s on my desk.”
Thatcher closed her eyes and pinched her brow. David groaned in agreement. They had wasted hours.
“The detective on duty said this was a matter of national security?” Lang asked.
David shrugged. “He let us in.”
Lang pursed his lips. He looked down at the open file in David’s hands. David handed it to him with a smile.
“Anita Umbrela?” Lang read the name. He turned on his heels. “Come, you two. Now!”
David shut the cabinet drawer and raised his eyebrows at Thatcher. They followed Lang to his office, and waited at his desk as he searched through stacks of papers.
“Brenton… Brenton…” Lang reached the bottom of the pile and brushed down his mustache. “Bollocks. It must be on one of the detectives’ desks.”
“You’ve lost the inquiry?” Thatcher asked.
“It’s not lost.” Lang looked up at her, annoyed.
“You’re investigating his murder, though, right?” David questioned.
“Of course we are.”
“Just without any documentation, photographs, paperwork?”
“What are you insinuating, David?” Lang took a seat. He set one hand on the top of the pile. “I hate to disappoint you, but things can temporarily go missing within a bureaucracy. You have my word Brenton’s file is here and active.” He stood and placed one hand on David’s back, guiding David and Thatcher through the office and back out to the lobby.
“How about I try to forget about this abuse of privacy incident and ring you as soon as Brenton’s file turns up, eh?” he offered.
David was tight-lipped.
“Homicides don’t disappear, David. You have my word.” Lang headed back toward his office. “I will phone you!”
They watched as Lang disappeared into his office.
David flexed his jaw. He threw open the exit door and bolted out of the police station.
Thatcher was right behind him, following him into the parking lot. “David, wait. Stop for one second, will you?” She grabbed his shoulder.
His cheeks were flushed. “I told you I couldn’t help you.”
“We need to go to Maeshowe,” she said. “I humored you. I can’t waste any more time.”
David stared at the ground.
“We’ve got to get a grip on the situation. You haven’t even explained how these things could be related.”
“What I want to show you…what this whole wild goose chase is about...” he stumbled over his words, too frustrated to talk. “The eternal stone. The symbol you found in Maeshowe. That same mark was glowing on my father’s palm the night I identified his body.”
“Glowing?” Thatcher’s eyebrows skewed.
Her cell phone rang before he could respond. “This is Thatch—”
“Brynne, I looked up your dead man.” Brimley, her American contact at the Embassy, spoke quickly. “Well, I tried to look him up,” she said. “He’s not in the database.”
Thatcher bit her lower lip. “What does that mean?”
“If this guy was murdered, like you said, there’s no record of it anywhere.”
Brimley paused.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t much help.”
“No, you’re brilliant, Brimley. Thanks.”
Thatcher ended the call and met David’s eyes. Maybe he was onto something. “That was my contact at the consul,” she explained. “She has access to all U.K. records belonging to American citizens. There’s no record in London pertaining to your father’s murder.”
David crossed his arms over his chest. “Then there’s been no investigation?”
“No.”
“We’d better find his body, then.”
Chapter 30
TUESDAY 6:24 p.m.
Grantchester Meadows
Southwest Cambridge, England
Thatcher studied the headstones along a lushly forested row of graves. They were within an overgrown corner of the cemetery, and losing daylight quickly. Most of the markers were cracked and broken, difficult to read in the dusk. Some were centuries old, others prematurely aged by the extreme environmental conditions. Perpetual rainfall kept the ground sopping with mud. Her boots sunk deep into the earth. She stumbled over a shallow, overgrown root and toppled to the ground.
“Bloody hell.” She sat there for a moment, annoyed. Mud covered the front of her Gianfranco Ferré suit. The outfit was ruined. Not that it
mattered. Nothing mattered in a world where passage graves came alive with noise and slaughtered entire populations.
“Dr. Thatcher!” David called from across the field.
She forced herself to her feet, wiped the brown sludge from her pants, and headed towards him, careful to not trip again. He waved excitedly through thick underbrush at the bottom of the gully and pointed to a small obscure clearing under an immense oak.
“Over here,” he shouted.
Thatcher pushed through the scrub, trying to step over the in-ground grave markers covered with moss and leaves. It was bad luck to step on them. Footsteps came down the hill behind her. The sound sent a tingle through her spine. She looked back. No one was there. She could hear someone following them, but there was only wind blowing through the low tree boughs.
“What is it?” David asked.
She stopped beside him. “Can you hear that?”
“What?”
“Footsteps?”
He glanced up at the trees. “I think it’s the wind.”
A continuous breeze blew wet leaves across the mud. It was the wind, trudging like heels.
Thatcher shivered. “Creepy.”
David squatted beside a modest ground stone. The grave marker was barely the size of a dinner plate. He pointed at fresh dirt packed in a long rectangle shape that protruded slightly from the earth around the grave. “Does this look recent to you?”
The ground hadn’t yet settled around the coffin.
Thatcher bent over the headstone as David brushed the leaves away.
“‘Arise my beloved; my beautiful one, and come…” she read the engraving. “There’s no name.”
“It’s him.”
For never having visited his father’s grave before, David seemed certain. She frowned. What now? They couldn’t just dig up a body. What if David was wrong and this was some stranger?
David tried to explain. “I’m telling you, this scripture is significant. This is him.”
The setting sun punched a narrow hole through the drab clouds and penetrated the overgrowth where they stood. A kaleidoscope of shadow and light spread over the grave. For the first time, Thatcher noticed a dozen marble archangel statues circled them in the thicket nearby. The effigies abided the hallowed cove, posing with stoic gestures. The crumbling fragments of broken faces, wings, and arms were strewn about the weeds. The entire southwestern corner of the cemetery suffered from neglect. It was like these were the grave markers of the ashamed and forgotten. She stepped to the side of Brenton’s marker.
“Wait, David. Look,” she said.
A line of identical ground stones spread across the ground at their feet. There were at least thirty markers, side-by-side, in five columns forming a square underneath a massive oak tree. She brushed debris off a nearby stone, and then off another. “They all say the same thing.”
David uncovered another line of gravestones a few feet away, unearthing a sixth column. “‘Arise my beloved, my beautiful one, and come,’” he read.
“There’s more.” Thatcher found another row. The entire grove was filled with identical markers. “There are hundreds of them. Do you still think that one is your father’s?”
He looked at the first headstone. It was definitely the most recent addition. He nodded. “I’d bet my life on it.”
****
The noise of a backhoe echoed through the cemetery. Its grumble was loud enough to wake the dead. After a few hours of pleading with the groundskeeper and five hundred pound sterling, they were in luck.
In spite of her anxiety, Thatcher forced herself to recline in the heated car seat. David bounced from foot to foot beside the grave. Lit by the backhoe headlights, he was strangely giddy to uncover the corpse he had identified at Stonehenge nine days earlier.
Her cell phone rang. “This is Thatcher.”
“You’re not going to believe this,” Marek’s voice was rapid but hushed. “I isolated the noise that Golke and Bailey recorded in Maeshowe.”
She heard him click his mouse. A roar blared through the phone.
“Sorry about that,” he apologized, turning down the volume.
Thatcher returned the phone to her ear.
“The volume and frequency of Maeshowe’s soundwaves are way beyond our capacity to analyze effectively,” he said. “Inside the grave, we’re talking thousands of decibels at subsonic levels. But, I got brilliant. I divided the recording in half. And then I did it again, and again, and again, and ag—”
“Get to the point.”
“You’re not going to believe this.” He breathed heavily in the phone. “I kept dividing into the thousandths, the millionths, the billionths…and then I found something.” He paused. “There’s way more than just noise here.”
He clicked his mouse again.
Voices intermixed in playback. Their guttural words repeated in a harsh scream. “Lachsa’arhhh pahrash htsssa!”
“I don’t know what it means, but if my calculations are correct, we’ve recorded about 32.8 million voices saying lacksar—whatever.” He paused for her response.
Thatcher’s mind was suspended in disbelief.
“Brynne,” his voice trembled. “What the hell is going on?”
Chapter 31
TUESDAY 11:54 p.m.
Cambridge University, England
“No autopsy has been done,” Thatcher said, rolling the gurney under the lights within the basement of one of Cambridge’s zoological laboratories. She turned on the overhead lamp, pulled rubber gloves over her hands, and looked down at Brenton Hyden’s body.
Although dead for nearly two weeks, the corpse was unexplainably un-decayed. “I don’t even feel any bloating, marbling, or slippage within the epidermis,” she said running her hands over the skin. “There’s slight rigor mortis in the joints, but even so, he looks like a subject whose ETD is only six to ten hours.”
Thatcher hovered over the star-shaped bullet wound in Brenton’s chest. The slug had penetrated his heart and stopped somewhere in his mid-back. She twisted the body onto its side. “It’s still there!”
The projectile bulged from the skin between the right shoulder blade and the spine, a gleaming sharp metal nugget lodged sideways in the tissue. She removed it from Brenton’s back and held it up into the light for David to see. “Semi-jacket hollow point. An older design, .357 Magnum caliber—”
“Desert Eagle?” he asked. He watched from the doorway, looking more and more pale.
“Could be. Why?” She sealed the bullet inside a plastic bag and tucked the bag into her pocket. “My lab can tell us exactly.”
David swallowed and looked away.
She found a faint white spiral scar on Brenton’s palm. “Is this what you were talking about?”
David wouldn’t look at the body. “The night I identified him it was glowing.”
The faded mark was almost invisible. She could barely see the outline of the circles. She bit her lip, wondering if David could have been mistaken. Identifying the body of his father must have been a rough go, even if their relationship was crap. Maybe he’d just been in shock?
As if reading her mind, David continued. “Lang saw it, too. He asked me if I knew what it meant—the spiral.” He shook his head. “I told him I didn’t know.”
“The wound could’ve been infected with bacteria that radiate light.” She had to reach deep into her imagination to come up with a plausible scenario for glowing skin. She tried not to sound too skeptical. “P. luminescens glows blue as it oxidizes.”
“It was white.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.” David looked faint. For an archeologist, he was sure weak-stomached around cadavers.
Thatcher tapped her temples, thinking aloud. “During the Civil War, soldiers in the States were documented as having glowing wounds. But they were found under extreme conditions, hypothermic and in muddy swamp lands, basically human Petri dishes swarming with bacterial and fungal infections.”
&nb
sp; “It was 2 a.m. at Stonehenge in pouring icy rain.” David nodded. “Everyone was hypothermic.”
She brushed a strand of hair from her face. It still didn’t add up. “You said the body was discovered a few days after death? P. luminescens can’t survive within a dead host.”
“Lang estimated the time of death. Brenton’s clothes were almost completely disintegrated. It made sense.” He frowned. “Is it too late to isolate whatever was in his skin? Couldn’t some remnant of dead bacteria still be inside him?”
Thatcher rubbed her eyes, tired. “If the organism was symbiotic and not isolated to the wound.”
He leaned back into the doorway and closed his eyes. “Cut him open, then.”
Thatcher studied his face with uncertainty. “Your remorse is touching.”
He kept his eyes clenched shut. How could he be so detached and disconnected? David was as tight-lipped and bereft of sympathy as Hummer. Hummer wore a mask of stoicism, however. He had built a wall layer by layer around his heart. David, on the other hand, had no mask. It almost seemed as if he had no soul.
“What are we waiting for?” he asked, staring at the floor.
With a sigh, she reached for the scalpel and began the Y-incision. “In the rare instances that P. luminescens attaches itself to mammals, the bacteria harvest their larvae within the trachea, gut wall, and intestines.” She finished the incision and opened the ribcage. “Theoretically, if the same scenario happened to your father, the pathogen would’ve entered by mouth, passed through the lungs, and cultivated within the bowels.”
David took a seat in a chair at the far corner of the room facing away from the autopsy.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He looked over at her. The blood had drained from his face. “I’m fine.” He swallowed hard.
“You’re an archeologist. Aren’t corpses second nature to you?”
“There’s a reason I only study rock formations.”
She bit her lip and nodded. “I’ll stop narrating, then.”
David tipped his head in appreciation.
Thatcher removed a tiny portion of the intestines. Placing the tissue sample on a glass slide, she flipped on one of the university’s microscopes. The instrument’s bulb burned dull yellow. It would take the outdated equipment a minute to warm up. She moved back over the body and examined the chest cavity. The tissue was a hemorrhagic clutter of scrambled cells and burst vessels loosely stabilizing tortured organs. It was an oddly familiar pattern. The peripheral wall was covered with Microlesions—a damning indicator of subsonic noise. She cut through the length of the left lung and opened the sponge-like organ.