Whispers of the Dead dh-3

by Simon Beckett

  ‘No one would have believed it.’

  ‘No?’ he spat. ‘They believed the photographs I left at his house! They believed everything else I wanted them to!’

  A pulse had started to beat in my temple at the mention of Sam. ‘And if they had, what then? Murder more pregnant women?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have had to! Avery’s wife was so full of life! She was the one. I could feel it!’

  ‘Like you could feel it with all the others? Like you did with Summer?’ I yelled, forgetting myself.

  ‘She was Lieberman’s pet!’

  ‘She liked you!’

  ‘She liked Irving more!’

  That shocked me to silence. We’d all assumed that Irving had been targeted because of the TV interview. But Kyle had been present that day in the morgue when the profiler had flirted with Summer. The next day Irving had gone missing.

  And now Summer was lying in the dark as well.

  She only smiled back at him. That was all. For Kyle’s ego it had obviously been enough.

  I felt sick. But Kyle had become distracted enough to relax his grip on Gardner. I saw the TBI agent’s eyelids start to twitch open, and said the first thing that came into my mind.

  ‘What had you got against Tom? Was he such a threat?’

  ‘He was a fraud!’ Kyle’s face twisted in a spasm. ‘The big forensic anthropologist, the expert! Basking in the glory, playing jazz while he worked, like he was in some pizza bar! Hicks was just an asshole, but Lieberman thought he was something special! The greatest mystery in the universe right under his nose, and he didn’t have the imagination to look beyond the rot!’

  ‘Tom knew better than to waste time searching for answers he couldn’t find.’ I could hear Gardner wheezing again now, but I daren’t spare him a glance. ‘You don’t even know what it is you’re looking for, do you? All the people you’ve killed, these bodies you’ve… you’ve hoarded, and what for? There’s no purpose to any of it. You’re like a kid prodding something dead with a stick—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Spittle sprayed from his mouth.

  ‘Do you even know how many lives you’ve wasted?’ I shouted. ‘And why? So you can take photographs? You think that’s going to show you anything?’

  ‘Yes! The right one can!’ His mouth curled. ‘You’re as bad as Lieberman, you only see the dead meat. But there’s more than that! I’m more than that! Life’s binary, it’s on or off! I’ve stared into people’s eyes and watched it go out of them, like nicking a switch! So where’s it go? Something happens, right then, at that moment! I’ve seen it!’

  He sounded desperate. And suddenly I realized that’s exactly what he was. That was what this was all about. We’d been wrong about the killer’s identity, but Jacobsen had been right about everything else. Kyle was obsessed with his own mortality. No, not obsessed, I realized, looking at him.

  Terrified.

  ‘How’s your hand, Kyle?’ I asked. ‘I’m guessing you only pretended you’d stabbed it on the needle. Tom thought he was doing you a favour asking you to help Summer, but you were only hanging round hoping to see one of us get stuck, weren’t you? What happened, did you lose your nerve?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘The thing is, if you were just pretending, how come you went so white? It was when I asked about your shots, wasn’t it? You’d not thought about infections from any of the people you’d killed until then, had you?’

  ‘I told you to shut up!’

  ‘Noah Harper’s tested positive for Hepatitis C. Did you know that, Kyle?’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘It’s true. You should have taken up the hospital’s offer of post-exposure treatment. Even though you didn’t prick yourself on one of the needles, it was still an open wound. And there was all that gore on your glove. But then you weren’t planning on staying around, were you? Much easier to stick your head in the sand than accept you might be infected by one of your own victims.’

  His face had paled even more. He jerked his head towards the treatment room. ‘Last time! Get in there, now!’

  But I didn’t move. Each minute I kept him talking was a minute closer to help arriving. And looking at his pallor, the ragged way he was breathing, I’d started to think about something else. Why had he chosen to hide, gambling everything on being able to slip out while we were distracted with York, instead of making a run for it while he had the chance? Perhaps for the same reason he hadn’t killed Sam. The same reason he hadn’t already choked the life out of Gardner and overpowered me.

  Because he couldn’t.

  ‘You took quite a knock in the crash, didn’t you?’ I said, trying to keep my tone conversational. He regarded me with a hunted expression, his chest rising and falling unevenly. ‘I saw the steering wheel in the ambulance. Must have given your ribs a hell of a crack. Did you know that’s one of the most common causes of death in car crashes? The ribs splinter and pierce the lungs. Or the heart. How many times have you seen injuries like that in the morgue?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘That sharp, stabbing pain you feel every time you draw a breath? That’s the bone splinters lacerating your lung tissue. It’s hard to breathe, isn’t it? And it’s going to get a lot harder, because your lungs are filling up with blood. You’re dying, Kyle.’

  ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ he screamed.

  ‘If you don’t believe me, take a look at yourself.’ I gestured to the broken mirror on the wall. ‘See how pale you are? That’s because you’re haemorrhaging. If you don’t get medical help soon you’re going to either bleed to death or drown in your own blood.’

  His mouth worked as he stared at his shattered reflection. I’d no idea how badly hurt he really was, but I’d just fed his imagination. To someone as self-obsessed as Kyle that would be enough.

  He’d all but forgotten about Gardner. The TBI agent was blinking now as consciousness returned. I thought I saw him shift slightly, as though he were testing the chokehold. No, not now. Please, just stay still.

  ‘Give yourself up,’ I went on quickly.

  ‘I’m warning you…’

  ‘Save yourself, Kyle. If you give yourself up now you can get medical attention.’

  He didn’t speak for a moment. I realized with a shock he was crying.

  ‘They’ll kill me anyway.’

  ‘No, they won’t. That’s what lawyers are for. And trials take years.’

  ‘I can’t go to jail!’

  ‘Would you rather die?’

  He was snuffling back tears. I tried to keep the sudden hope from my face as I saw the tension begin to go out of him.

  Then Gardner’s hand began inching towards his gun.

  Kyle saw what he was doing. ‘Shit!’ He wrenched hard on Gardner’s throat. The agent gave a choked gasp and pawed feebly at his belt as Kyle grabbed with his free hand for the weapon. I lunged towards them, knowing I wasn’t going to reach them in time.

  There was a sound from the doorway.

  Jacobsen stood framed in it, her face blank with shock. Then her hand swept aside her jacket as she went for her own gun.

  ‘Leave it!’ Kyle yelled, twisting so Gardner was between them.

  She stopped, hand resting on the pistol grip. Kyle had Gardner’s gun partway out of its clip, but he had to reach at an awkward angle round the agent’s body. The silence was broken only by his ragged breathing. Gardner was no longer moving at all. He hung from the chokehold like a sack, his face darker than ever.

  Kyle licked his lips, his eyes going to Jacobsen’s belt clip.

  ‘Hand away from the gun and let him go!’ she said, but for all her authority there was still a quiver to her voice.

  Kyle heard it. Adrenaline had given him a new strength. The moon face moved from side to side as he shook his head and smiled. He was back in control. Enjoying himself.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I think you need to put your gun down.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen. Last chance—’

  ‘Shh.’
He cocked his head towards Gardner, as though he were listening. ‘I can hardly feel your partner’s heartbeat. It’s getting weaker. Slowing… slowing…’

  ‘If you kill him there’s nothing to stop me shooting you.’

  Kyle’s smugness vanished. The pink tongue darted out to moisten his lips again, and at that moment there was the thump of footsteps from the floor above. Kyle’s eyes widened, and as Jacobsen’s attention wavered he snatched the gun from Gardner’s belt and fired.

  I saw Jacobsen stagger, but she’d already drawn and fired herself. As Kyle let Gardner fall there were two more cracks and a section of mirror by my head exploded, spraying me with splinters. Then Kyle’s gun clattered to the floor and he dropped as though his strings had been cut.

  My ears rang for the second time that afternoon as I rushed to Jacobsen. She was slumped against the doorway, her gun still rigidly levelled at where Kyle lay. Her face was chalk white, in stark contrast to the spreading dark stain on her jacket. It was on her left side, a glistening wet patch between her neck and her shoulder that grew bigger as I looked.

  She blinked. ‘I’m… I think…’

  ‘Sit down. Don’t try to talk.’

  I spared a quick glance at Gardner’s unmoving form as I tore open her jacket. I couldn’t see if he was breathing, but Jacobsen’s situation was more urgent: if the bullet had hit an artery she could bleed out in seconds. Feet were clattering down the stairs and along the corridor but I barely heard. I’d pulled her jacket from her injured shoulder, my breath catching at how her white shirt was soaked with blood, when figures burst through the doorway. Suddenly the chamber was filled with shouting.

  ‘Quick, we need—’ I began, and then I was dragged away and thrust face down on to the floor. Oh, for God’s sake! I started to get up but something struck me roughly between the shoulder blades.

  ‘Stay down!’ a voice yelled.

  I yelled that there was no time, but no one was listening. All I could see from my vantage point was a confusion of feet.

  It seemed an age before I was recognized and let up. Angrily, I shrugged free of the helping hands. People were crouching by Gardner, who had been moved into the recovery position. He was still unconscious, but I could see that at least he was breathing. I turned to where Jacobsen was being attended by two agents. They’d pulled her shirt away from her neck and shoulder on the side where she’d been shot. Her white sports bra was stained crimson. There was so much blood I couldn’t see the wound.

  ‘I’m a doctor, let me take a look,’ I said, kneeling beside her.

  Jacobsen’s pupils were dilated with shock. The grey eyes looked young and scared.

  ‘I thought you were talking to Dan…’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘The… the ambulance was only half a mile away, so I came back. Knew something wasn’t right…’ Her voice was slurred with pain. ‘York hadn’t taken any of the photographs from the house. His parents, all his past. He wouldn’t have just left them…’

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  I felt a surge of relief as I saw the blood-filled furrow in her trapezius, the big muscle that runs between neck and shoulder. The bullet had torn a groove across its top, but despite the bleeding there was no serious damage. Another inch or two lower or to her right and it would have been a different story.

  But she was still losing blood. I wadded up her shirt and started to apply pressure to the wound when another agent rushed in with a first-aid kit.

  ‘Move,’ he told me.

  I stood back to give him room. He tore open a sterile gauze pad and pressed it on to the wound hard enough to make Jacobsen gasp, then began expertly taping it into place. He obviously knew what he was doing, so I went over to Gardner. He was still unconscious, which was a bad sign.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked the agent kneeling by him.

  ‘Hard to say,’ she said. ‘Paramedics are on their way, but we weren’t expecting to need them. The hell happened here?’

  I didn’t have the energy to answer. I turned to where Kyle lay sprawled on his back. His chest and stomach were coated with blood, and his eyes gazed sightlessly at the ceiling.

  ‘Don’t bother, he’s dead,’ the agent told me as I reached down to feel his throat.

  He wasn’t, not quite. There was the faintest whisper of a pulse under the skin. I kept my fingers there, looking down into the open eyes as his heart gave its final stutters. They grew weaker, the gaps between them longer and longer until eventually they stopped altogether.

  I stared into his eyes. But if there was anything there I couldn’t see it.

  ‘You’re hurt.’

  The agent kneeling by Gardner was looking at my hand. I saw that it was dripping blood. I must have gashed it on the piece of broken mirror, although I’d no memory of it happening. The cut sliced across the existing knife scar on my palm like a thin mouth, blood welling between its lips.

  I’d felt nothing until then, but now it started to burn with a cold, clean pain.

  I clenched my hand on it. ‘I’ll live.’

  EPILOGUE

  IT WAS RAINING in London. After the vivid sunshine and lush mountains of Tennessee, England seemed grey and dull. The tube was busy with the tail end of the evening rush hour, the usual day-worn commuters crammed into each other’s personal space. I flicked through the newspaper I’d bought at the airport, feeling the usual sense of dislocation as I read about events that had happened while I’d been away. Coming home after a long trip is always like finding yourself transplanted a few weeks in the future, a mundane form of time-travel.

  The world had gone on without me.

  The taxi driver was a polite Sikh who was content to drive in silence. I stared out at the early evening streets, feeling grubby and jet-lagged after the long flight. My own street looked somehow different when we turned on to it. It took me a moment to realize why. The branches of the lime trees had been barely shading green when I’d left; now they were shaggy with new leaves.

  The rain had slowed to a drizzle, varnishing the pavement with a dark gloss as I climbed out and paid the driver. I picked up my flight bag and case and carried them to the front door, flexing my hand slightly when I set them down. I’d taken the dressing off several days before, but my palm was still a little tender.

  The sound of the key turning in the lock echoed in the small hallway. I’d put a stop on my post before I’d gone away, but there was still a forlorn pile of fliers and leaflets on the black and white floor tiles. I pushed them aside with my foot as I carried the cases inside and shut the door behind me.

  The flat looked exactly the same as when I’d left it, except dulled by several weeks’ accumulation of dust. I paused in the doorway for a moment, feeling the familiar pang of its emptiness. But not so sharply as I’d expected.

  I dumped the case on the floor and set my flight bag on the table, cursing as a heavy clunk reminded me what was inside. I unzipped the bag, expecting to be greeted by the reek of spilt alcohol, but nothing was broken. I set the odd-shaped bottle on the table, the tiny horse and jockey perched on the cork still frozen in mid-gallop. I was tempted to open it now, but it was still early. Something to look forward to later.

  I went into the kitchen. There was a slight chill in the flat, reminding me that, spring or not, I was back in England. I switched the central heating back on, then as an afterthought filled the kettle.

  It had been weeks since I’d had a cup of tea.

  The message icon on my phone was flashing. There were over two dozen messages. I automatically reached out to play them, then changed my mind. Anyone who needed to contact me urgently would have called my mobile.

  Besides, none of them would be from Jenny.

  I made myself a mug of tea and took it to the dining table. There was an empty fruit bowl in its centre, a slip of paper lying in it. I picked it up and saw it was a note I’d made before I’d left: Confirm arrival time w. Tom.

  I balled it up and dropped it back in the bowl.


  Already, I could feel my old life starting to reclaim me.

  Tennessee seemed like an age ago, the memory of the sunlit garden of dragonflies and corpses, and the nightmare scenes in the sanitarium, starting to assume the unreal quality of a dream. But it had been real enough.

  Forty-one bodies had been recovered at Cedar Heights; twenty-seven from the grounds, the rest from the spa and treatment rooms. Kyle hadn’t discriminated. His victims were a random mix of age, sex and ethnicity. Some of them had been dead for almost ten years, and the task of identifying them was still going on. The wallets and credit cards he’d saved speeded the process to an extent, but it soon became apparent that there were more bodies than there were IDs. Many of his victims had been vagrants and prostitutes whose disappearances weren’t always noticed, let alone reported.

  If Kyle hadn’t felt the need to prove himself, he could have carried on indefinitely.

  But not all the victims were anonymous. Irving’s body had been recovered from the same chamber as Summer’s, and amongst the others who had been identified three names stood out. One was Dwight Chambers. His wallet and driver’s licence were in the pile in the sanitarium’s kitchen, and his body was found in the spa, confirming York’s story about the casual worker he’d hired at Steeple Hill.

  The second name to ring alarm bells was that of Carl Philips, a forty-six-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who had gone missing from a state psychiatric hospital more than a decade before. Not only were his remains the oldest that had been found at the sanitarium, but his grandfather had been the founder of Cedar Heights. Philips had inherited the derelict property but never bothered to develop it. It had lain fallow and forgotten, inhabited only by the termites and dragonflies.

  Until Kyle had put it to use.

  But it was the discovery of the third ID that caused most consternation. It belonged to a twenty-nine-year-old morgue assistant from Memphis, whose faded driver’s licence was lying on the cabinet under the victims’ photographs. His remains had been recovered from undergrowth by the pond and positively identified from dental records.