by Simon Toyne
‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, and hung up.
He slipped on his helmet as he arrived at the bike and contemplated his next move. He figured she was safe so long as she was in the interview room — but she wouldn’t stay there forever and the Central District building was vast. Finding her inside it without drawing attention to himself would be almost impossible. He kick-started the engine and glanced across at a newsstand selling the morning edition of the local paper. A new picture of the monk filled the front page, closer this time, obviously taken on a very long lens. The headline above it read THE FALL OF MAN.
He dropped the bike in gear and eased it into the slow-moving morning traffic.
He knew exactly where she’d be going next.
Chapter 62
Arkadian pushed through the large glass door of the Central District building and held it open. Liv emerged, squinting in the bright morning sun. A small group of uniformed cops and white-collar admin workers congregated around an ashtray rising from the pavement, a shrine to their shared addiction. Liv headed over to join the service.
‘Don’t suppose I could steal one of those?’ she asked someone in a white shirt and blue tie. The admin guys were usually a softer touch than the uniforms. He looked up and recoiled slightly at her bedraggled appearance.
‘It’s OK, she’s with me,’ Arkadian said.
He produced a soft pack of Marlboro Lights.
‘Thanks,’ Liv said, plucking one and tapping it on the back of her hand. ‘’Preciate it.’
The admin guy held out a light and Liv dipped her head to meet it. She sucked in the dry smoke, hungry for the nicotine hit. It tasted just as bad as the ones she’d had in the interview room. She shot the admin guy a smile anyway and turned to follow Arkadian down the street.
‘So when was the last time you saw your brother?’ Arkadian asked as she caught up.
Liv took another drag of the cigarette, hoping the familiar bliss would descend upon her soon.
‘Eight years ago,’ she said, blowing out the acrid smoke. ‘Right before he vanished.’
‘Any idea why he took off?’
Liv screwed up her face at the aftertaste. What was it with these foreign smokes? They all tasted like burnt tyres. ‘Long story.’
‘Well then, let’s walk slowly. The morgue’s only a couple of streets away.’
Liv took one more cautious drag on the cigarette then dropped it down a storm drain as discreetly as she could manage, hoping the nice man who’d given it to her wasn’t watching. ‘I suppose it started back when Dad died. I don’t know how much you know about it. .’
Arkadian thought back to the file he’d compiled on the dead monk’s past and the article outlining the tragic car accident in the frozen ravine. ‘I know the details.’
‘Did you know my brother held himself totally responsible? “Survivor Syndrome”, that’s what the doctors called it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been the cause of everything and so didn’t deserve to be still living. He spent a long time in therapy, trying to come to terms with it. In the end he turned to religion instead. I suppose it happens a lot. You start looking for answers. If you can’t find them in the here and now, you look elsewhere.’
She replayed the events of eight years ago in her mind: her trip to West Virginia; the sound of the crickets on Nurse Kintner’s porch as she told Liv what she knew; the clarity and sense it had all made to her; then the darkness that quickly clouded it again when she shared her discoveries with Samuel. ‘I should never have told him.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ Arkadian said. ‘When Samuel blamed himself for your father’s death, did you feel the same way?’
‘No.’
‘And did you tell him it wasn’t his fault?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I’m telling you now: Samuel’s death wasn’t your fault. Whatever you said to him, whatever you think you did to drive him away, he was already on his own path. There was nothing you could have done, one way or another, to change it.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because if he’d harboured some lasting grudge against you, or held you responsible for any of it, why would he go to such great lengths to make sure we found you?’
Liv shrugged. ‘Maybe to punish me.’
Arkadian shook his head. ‘But that’s not the way it works. You must have reported on kidnapping cases, abductions, missing persons.’
‘Some.’
‘And what’s the worst thing about them? For the relatives, I mean.’
Liv thought of the people she’d interviewed: the haunted looks; the constant speculation on all the things that may have happened; the never-ending worry and uncertainty. She thought of the demons that she’d lived with ever since Samuel had vanished. ‘The worst thing is not knowing.’
‘Exactly. But you know what happened to Samuel because he made sure of it. He wasn’t punishing you by doing that. He was setting you free.’
The whoop of a siren startled them both as a large fire truck barged through the traffic and turned into the next street. Arkadian watched it disappear then broke into a sprint. Liv watched in surprise for a moment then hurried after him. She caught up as he rounded the corner.
Chapter 63
Groups of people in lab coats and shirtsleeves filled the street, their hands shoved into trouser pockets, their shoulders hunched against the cold. The truck that had driven past them pulled up next to another already parked in front of what looked like a huge mausoleum. Fire marshals in high-visibility jackets checked names on a piece of paper.
Arkadian strode towards the nearest of them, scanning the faces in the crowd and punching a number into his phone. ‘Have you seen Dr Reis?’
The marshal checked his list. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’
In his ear, Reis’s recorded voice asked him to leave a message. Arkadian snapped the phone shut and walked over to two firefighters emerging from the entrance. ‘What’s up?’ He flashed his badge. He could smell smoke coming off them.
‘Nothing,’ the larger man said, pulling off his helmet and wiping sweat from his eyebrows. ‘Alarm tripped in a hallway; a fire in a bin in one of the toilets.’
‘Deliberate?’
‘Oh yeah.’
Arkadian frowned. ‘Can I go in?’
The fire-fighter turned his head and spoke into a microphone on his lapel. ‘Charlie Four, you found anything else?’
A burst of static was followed by a metallic voice. ‘Negative. We’re on our way out.’
‘Be my guest,’ he said.
Arkadian moved across the pavement and up the steps. Liv followed, sticking close behind, looking resolutely ahead and frowning slightly in the hope that it would lend her a sense of professional seriousness and make the fireman think she was Arkadian’s partner. The fireman watched her pass, looking instead at her grimy clothes and hair. He opened his mouth to say something but a squawk on his radio distracted him long enough for Liv to bound up the steps and disappear into the building.
She found herself in a large atrium with several doors leading off it, a deserted reception area in front of her and a pair of lift doors to the left. Arkadian punched the buttons and stood waiting for a moment, then turned abruptly through a set of double doors. Liv followed him into a stairwell which echoed with the sound of his footsteps. She matched hers with his, all the way to the sub-basement, so he wouldn’t hear her and tell her to go back outside.
Arkadian emerged from the stairwell and into the corridor. He was immediately struck by how quiet it was. A lab coat lay discarded on the floor, knocked from its hook by someone in the rush to get out. Further down the hallway he could see the door to Reis’s office. It was open. He punched the redial button on his phone and stalked down the hallway towards it.
He glanced inside and saw Reis’s mobile skittering across the abandoned desk. It clinked against a black mug, half-full of milky coffee, steam still rising from its pale surfa
ce. Arkadian snapped his phone shut. Heard the silence flooding back. Heard a noise in the corridor behind him. Spun round, his hand reaching for the gun in his shoulder holster.
Liv saw Arkadian’s hand dart into his jacket then annoyance flash across his face as he realized it was her. She glanced past his shoulder into the empty office, desperately wanting to know what was going on, but also knowing this was not the time to ask questions.
Arkadian used the sleeve of his jacket to pull the door closed and the sound of her heartbeat quickened in her ears. She’d been around enough investigations to recognize the significance of this move. He was treating the place as a crime scene.
The door clicked shut and Arkadian turned to look at her again.
‘Stay here,’ he said, heading towards another set of doors at the far end of the corridor. ‘Don’t touch anything.’
He shoulder-barged his way through. Liv scampered after him, slipping through the gap before they had time to swing shut, and found herself in a narrow, featureless room.
It was just a few degrees above freezing, and the smell of disinfectant and something sweet and faintly nauseating hung in the air. One wall was filled with a grid of large filing drawers — about thirty in all. Liv shuddered in the sudden chill and the knowledge of what they contained.
A trolley had been abandoned in the centre of the room. A plastic sheet was draped across the lower half of it, bunched up like bedclothes. It looked as though the occupant had got up when the fire alarm sounded and left the building along with everyone else. Arkadian swerved round it and came to a halt by a drawer at the far end of the room, three rows in and two up, which had a number eight stencilled above a window containing a handwritten note trapped behind a sheet of clear plastic. Liv couldn’t quite read it from where she stood, but she knew what it said.
Arkadian grabbed the handle with the sleeve of his jacket. As it slid open Liv heard a sound behind her. She spun round. A pale, skinny man hovered on the threshold. He held a half-eaten bagel in one hand and pushed a curtain of black hair from his face with the other.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Arkadian yelled.
Reis leaned to one side and looked past Liv. ‘Missed breakfast,’ he said, indicating the bagel. Then his eyes dropped and registered confusion.
Liv followed his gaze, bracing herself. But the body of her dead brother was nowhere to be seen. The drawer was empty.
Chapter 64
Liv, Arkadian and Reis stood motionless.
Then Arkadian broke the spell. He glanced up into the corner of the room. ‘Out!’ he said, shepherding them into the relative warmth of the hallway before heading back towards the stairs. ‘Don’t let anyone go in there,’ he called back at Reis. ‘Check your office to see if anything’s missing — and don’t touch anything.’
Reis and Liv exchanged glances. A flicker of recognition showed in his eyes, then a look of uneasiness as he realized who she must be. Liv looked back up the corridor before it turned into pity. She saw Arkadian disappear through the doors leading to the stairwell and started after him, partly to find out what was going on and partly so she wouldn’t have to hear the pathologist telling her how sorry he was for her loss.
Arkadian took the stairs two at a time and burst back through the doors leading to reception. It was already full of people making their way back into the building. He pushed his way towards the security office.
‘Call central dispatch,’ he said to the forbidding-looking matriarch behind the desk. ‘Tell them there’s been a break-in at the morgue. Tell them to send a forensics team and stand by for a description of the suspects.’
The woman glared at him sternly over a pair of half-moon glasses, her face a picture of indignation.
‘Now!’ he bellowed, snapping everyone to attention. ‘And no one’s to go down to the sub-basement.’
The nerve centre of the morgue’s security operation was just about big enough to house a chair, a desk and several towers of computer memory recording the feeds from eighteen CCTVs. A couple of flat-screen monitors sat on the desktop, each split into three grids with an image from a different camera in every square. A uniformed man in his fifties looked up as Arkadian entered, the glow of the twin screens glinting on the Reactolite lenses of glasses still dark from the outside daylight.
Arkadian flashed his badge. ‘Can you punch up the feed covering the cold-storage chamber in the lower basement?’
Light flooded into the darkened room as the door beside him opened again. Arkadian turned and saw Liv squeeze in behind him. She stared resolutely at the monitors to avoid making eye contact. He thought about asking her to leave, but decided he’d prefer to keep her close.
He dug out his phone and scrolled through the caller log until he found the call Reis had made when the fire alarm had gone off. Nine-fourteen. One of the screens was now filled with the feed from the camera he’d spotted in the corner of the cold store. ‘Can you wind it back to o-nine-fourteen, and play it from there?’
The guard pulled down the menu and tapped in the time. The picture jumped and a man appeared in the middle of the previously empty room, manoeuvring an empty trolley towards one of the lockers.
‘Who’s that?’ Arkadian asked.
The security guard peered at the screen. The man stopped and looked around, registering the shrill sound of the alarm.
‘Don’t know his name, but he works here,’ the security guard said. ‘I think he’s one of the lab techs.’
The recording continued in three-second jerks until the man vanished, moving like a badly animated marionette.
‘Look at the sheet.’ Liv pointed at the screen. ‘Neatly folded on top of the trolley. When we got there it was all bunched up.’
‘Can you speed it up a little?’ Arkadian asked.
The guard hit a key a couple of times and the numbers jumped forward in five second units, then ten. When the clock flipped to o-nine-seventeen another figure stepped into the frame.
‘Hold it,’ Arkadian said.
The guard resumed its three-second default.
The newcomer was tall, black hair, black clothes. They couldn’t see his face. He kept his back to the camera the whole time. He moved past the trolley and stopped in front of the drawer Arkadian had opened. He reached for the handle with a gloved hand and pulled. Liv felt her heart pound against her ribcage. She saw the outline of a body-bag.
The man unzipped it. Despite the poor quality of the image, Liv recognized the bearded face immediately and felt tears pricking her eyes. A moment later the interloper shifted his position and obscured Samuel’s face with his body. He seemed to be searching for something in his jacket pocket. He struggled against the material for a few moments then removed the glove from his right hand and recommenced his search, quickly finding whatever it was he was looking for. He leaned across the open drawer with whatever he had retrieved from the pocket, then whipped his head round towards the door, clearly disturbed by something. He had kept his face tilted down, wary of the camera, but Liv still saw enough to recognize him.
‘Gabriel. .’ she breathed. ‘He picked me up at the airport last night.’
Arkadian grabbed the desk phone, his eyes never leaving the screen as the man zipped up the body-bag, slid the drawer back into place, climbed on to the trolley and pulled up the plastic sheet.
‘This is Inspector Davud Arkadian. We’ve just had a break-in at the morgue; I want all units on the lookout for a suspect. A white male. Slender build. Maybe six-one, six-two. Black clothes — ’
Two new figures dressed as paramedics appeared, pushing a trolley between them. The taller one glanced up at the camera but it was impossible to see his face. Both wore surgical masks, caps, lab coats and Nitrile gloves. Arkadian watched them move straight to Sam’s locker. They checked inside the body-bag, hoisted it on to the trolley, closed the drawer and wheeled the earthly remains of Samuel Newton out of frame. The whole operation had taken less than fifteen seconds.
Gabri
el rose like something out of a horror film and followed them, leaving the plastic sheet how they had discovered it.
Arkadian covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘Is there a camera in the delivery bay?’
The cold-storage chamber was replaced by a raised concrete platform with an ambulance on one side and a set of overlapping plastic doors on the other. Liv thought it looked like the entrance to a meat-processing factory.
After a few seconds the doors buckled and a trolley crashed through them. The two paramedics practically threw it into the back of the ambulance.
Arkadian removed his hand from the mouthpiece. ‘We have a new priority. I want an urgent BOLO for an ambulance outbound from the city morgue, heading towards Hallelujah Crescent. Licence plate unknown. Suspects are two Caucasian males, medium-heavy build, one maybe six-three, the other around five-ten, both dressed as paramedics. Be advised the suspects are wanted for break-in and unlawful seizure and are fleeing the crime scene. A photo of the secondary suspect will be circulated immediately.’
He slammed down the phone. ‘Can you lift images of the suspects from the footage and email it to central dispatch?’ It wasn’t a request.
Arkadian didn’t wait for the guard’s reply. He needed to talk to Reis.
Chapter 65
Gabriel slipped into the deserted dispatch room and ducked under the central counter, still covered with the morning’s post and packages, abandoned as soon as the alarm had sounded. He retrieved his bag and bike helmet from where he’d stashed them and grabbed a medium-sized padded envelope as he heard voices in the hallway.
‘You OK there?’ A middle-aged woman had appeared at the door, regarding him with flinty suspicion from behind thick designer frames.
‘Yeah. . got a package here for. .’ Gabriel glanced at the label. ‘A Dr. . Makin?’ He treated her to a 500-watt smile.