The door swung closed behind us, thumping into place. Liza settled in beside the wall, arms folded, watching to prevent any shenanigans. “Fifteen minutes, Leeds. Get to it.”
I surveyed the room, which had three metal tables on wheels, a counter with various medical paraphernalia, and a wall full of large corpse drawers.
“All right,” I said to the four aspects, “I want to know how they got the body out.”
“We need proof too,” J.C. said, poking through the room. “Something to tie Exeltec to the crime.”
“That would be wonderful,” I said to him, “but honestly, we don’t want to be too leading. Maybe they don’t have it. Focus on what we know. Find me clues on how the thieves stored or moved the body, and that might lead us right to it.”
The others nodded. I turned around slowly, taking the whole room in, absorbing it into my subconscious. Then I closed my eyes.
My delusions started talking.
“No windows,” J.C. said. “Only one exit.”
“Unless those ceiling tiles are removable,” Ivy noted.
“Nah,” J.C. replied. “I’ve seen the security specs for this building. Remember the Coppervein case? No crawl space. No air ducts. Nothing funny about the architecture.”
“This equipment has been used lately,” Tobias said. “I know little of its purpose though. Stephen, you really should recruit a coroner of our own eventually.”
“We do have Ngozi,” Audrey said. “Forensic investigation. Why didn’t we bring her?”
Because of you, Audrey, I thought. My subconscious gave you an important skill and inserted you into my team. Why? I missed the days when I’d had someone to ask about things like this. When Sandra had been with me, everything had made sense for the first time in my life.
“This place is secure,” Ivy said, sounding dissatisfied. “Inside job, perhaps? One of the morgue workers?”
“Could one of the workers here have been bribed?” I asked, opening my eyes and looking toward Liza.
“I thought of that,” she said, arms still folded. “But I was the last one in the office that night. I came in, checked everything, and turned off the lights. Security says nobody came in overnight.”
“I’ll want to talk to security then,” I said. “Who else was here that day?”
Liza shrugged. “Family. A priest. Always accompanied. This room doesn’t open for anyone other than me and two of our technicians. Even the security guard can’t get in without calling one of us. But that’s all irrelevant—the body was still here when I left for the night.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I had to write down some numbers for paperwork. I checked on it specifically.”
“We’ll want to fingerprint the place,” J.C. said. “Like it or not, we might have to go through the precinct.”
I nodded. “I assume the police have already done forensics.”
“Why would you assume that?” Liza asked.
We all looked at her. “Uh … you know. Because there was a crime?”
“A corpse was stolen,” Liza said dryly. “Nobody was hurt, we have no actual signs of a break-in, and there is no money involved. The official word is that they are ‘working on’ the case, but let me tell you—finding this body is low on their list of priorities. They’re more worried about the break-in itself; they’ll want someone’s hide for that.”
She refolded her arms, then repositioned and folded them again. She was trying to play it cool, but she was obviously worried. Ivy nodded at me, clearly pleased that I could read Liza so well. Well, it wasn’t hard. I picked up things from my aspects now and then.
“Security cameras?” J.C. asked as he inspected the corners of the room. I repeated the question so Liza could hear it.
“Just out in the hallways,” she said.
“Isn’t that a little sparse?” I asked.
“The whole place is wired with alarms. If someone tries to break in, the security guard’s desk will light up like Christmas.” She grimaced. “We used to turn it on only at night, but they’ve had it on for two days straight now. Have to get permission to open a damn window these days…”
I looked at the team.
“Stephen,” Tobias said, “we’re going to need Ngozi.”
I sighed. Well, it wasn’t too long a drive to go back and pick her up.
“Here,” J.C. said, pulling out his phone. “Let me give her a call.”
“I don’t think…” I said, but he was already dialing.
“Yeah, Achmed, we need your help,” he said. “What? Of course I have your number. No, I have not been stalking you. Look, can you find Ngozi? How should I know where she is? Probably washing her hands a hundred times or something. No, I have not been stalking her either.” He lowered the phone, giving the rest of us a suffering look. He raised it back up, and a short time later, continued. “Great. Let’s videoconference.”
Tobias and I looked over J.C.’s shoulders as Kalyani’s face appeared on the screen, perky and excited. She waved, then turned the phone toward Ngozi, who sat reading on her bed.
What to say about Ngozi? She was from Nigeria, with deep brown skin, and had been educated at Oxford. She was also deathly afraid of germs—so much so that when Kalyani held the phone toward her, Ngozi shied away visibly. She shook her head, and Kalyani was obliged to stand there, holding the phone.
“What’s up?” Ngozi asked with a clipped accent.
“Crime scene investigation,” I said.
“You’re going to come get me?”
“Well, I guess we kind of thought…” I hesitated, then looked to J.C. “I don’t know if this is going to work, J.C. We’ve never done anything like this before.”
“Worth a try though, right?”
I looked toward Ivy, who seemed skeptical, but Tobias shrugged. “What harm can it do, Stephen? Getting Ngozi out of the house is difficult sometimes.”
“I heard that,” Ngozi said. “It’s not difficult. I just require proper preparation.”
“Yeah,” J.C. said, “like a hazmat suit.”
“Please,” Ngozi said, rolling her eyes. “Just because I like things clean.”
“Clean?” I asked her.
“Very clean. Do you know the kinds of poisons that are pumped into the air every day by all those cars and factories? Where do you think that all goes? Do you ever wonder what that crusty blackness is on your skin after you hold a handrail on your way down the steps into the subway? And think of the people. Coughing into their hands, wiping their snotty nostrils, touching everything and everyone, and—”
“We get it, Ngozi,” I said. I looked at Tobias, who nodded encouragingly. J.C. was right; phones among my aspects could be a valuable resource. I took the phone from J.C. Nearby, Liza watched me with what seemed like the first genuine emotion she’d displayed all morning: fascination. She might not be a psychologist, but physicians of all varieties tend to find my … quirks captivating.
Good for her. As long as it kept her from thinking about how much—or little—time I had remaining of her original “fifteen minute” restriction.
“We’re going to try this over the phone,” I said to Ngozi. “We’re at the icebox. By all accounts, the body was here at night, but gone the next morning. Nothing suspicious on the hallway security cameras.” Liza nodded when I checked with her on this one. “There isn’t a camera in this room specifically, but the building does have an intense security system. So how did they get the body out?”
Ngozi leaned forward, still not taking the camera from Kalyani, but inspecting me with curiosity. “Show me the room.”
I walked around it, scanning the place, fully aware that to Liza’s perspective, I was holding nothing. Ngozi hummed to herself as I walked. Some show tune; I wasn’t certain which one.
“So,” she said after I’d spent a few minutes scanning the place, “you’re sure the body is gone?”
“Of course it’s gone,” I said, pointing the camera toward the still-open
corpse drawer.
“Well,” Ngozi said, “it’s going to be hard to do any traditional forensics here. But the question we should ask first is, ‘Do we need to?’ You’d be surprised at how often something is reported stolen, only to be found lost—or stashed—someplace very close to where the theft happened. If getting the body out of the room would be so hard, maybe it never did leave the room.”
I looked at the other drawers. Then, with a sigh, I put the phone aside and began pulling them open one at a time. After a few minutes, Liza walked over and helped me. “We did this,” she mentioned, but didn’t stop me from double-checking. Only three of the other drawers had corpses, and we checked each one carefully. None were Panos.
From there, I looked in the room’s cabinets, closets, and even drawers that were too small for a corpse. It was a long process, and one that I was actually pleased to find unfruitful. Discovering several bags full of elbows or whatnot wouldn’t have been particularly appealing.
I dusted off my hands and looked toward the phone and Ngozi’s image. Kalyani had joined her on the bed, and the two had been chatting about how I really did need to stop working so much and settle down with someone nice. And preferably someone sane.
“What next?” I said to the phone.
“Locard’s principle,” Ngozi said.
“Which is?”
“Basically,” she said, “the principle states that whenever there is contact, or an exchange, evidence is left behind. We have very little to go on, as the victim was already dead when abducted, and presumably still zipped up tight. But the perpetrator will have left behind signs they were here. I don’t suppose we can get a DNA sweep of the room.…”
I looked hopefully at Liza and asked, to which I got a sniff of amusement. The case wasn’t nearly important enough for that. “We can try for fingerprints on our own,” I said to Ngozi. “But the police aren’t going to help.”
“Let’s do obvious contact points first,” Ngozi said. “Close up on the drawer handle please.”
I brought the phone over and put it very close to the handle of the corpse drawer. “Great,” Ngozi said after a minute. “Now the door into the room.”
I did so, passing Liza, who was checking her watch.
“Time might be running out, Ngozi,” I said softly.
“My art isn’t exactly something that can be rushed,” she noted back at me. “Particularly long-distance.”
I showed her the door handle, not really certain what she was looking for. Ngozi had me pull the door open to look at the other side. The door was heavy, made to swing shut after anyone who left. Once I was outside, I couldn’t open it again. Liza had to unlock it with a key card.
“All right, Leeds,” Liza said as I turned the camera to show the strike plate on the inside of the door frame. “You—”
“Bingo,” Ngozi said.
I froze in place, then looked back at the door frame. Ignoring the rest of what Liza said, I knelt down, trying to see what Ngozi had.
“See those dust marks?” Ngozi asked.
“Um … no?”
“Look closely. Someone put tape here, then pulled it off, leaving behind enough gum to attract dust.”
Liza stooped down beside me. “Did you hear me?”
“Tape,” I asked. “Do you have some tape?”
“Why—”
“Yo,” J.C. said from inside the room, holding up a roll of the translucent industrial tape that lay on the counter.
I brushed past Liza and fetched the tape—J.C. had to set down his imaginary copy before I could see the real one—then rushed back. I placed a strip of it over the strike plate, stepped out of the room, and let the door slide closed.
It thumped into place. That thump covered the lack of a click. When I pushed on the door, it opened without needing help from the inside.
“We know how they got into the room,” I said.
“So?” Liza asked. “We knew they’d gotten in somehow. How does this help?”
“It tells us it was likely someone who visited the day before the body went missing,” I said. “The last visitor, perhaps? They would be in a position to tape the door with the least chance of discovery during the day.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d have noticed if the door were taped,” Liza said.
“Would you have? With the key card unlocking, you never have to turn or twist anything. It’s natural for you to push the door and have it just swing open.”
She thought about it for a moment. “Plausible,” she admitted. “But who did it?”
“Who was last into this room that day?”
“The priest. I had to let him in. The others had gone home for the evening, but I stayed late.”
“Had a FreeCell game that you just had to finish?” I asked.
“Shut up.”
I smiled. “Did you recognize the priest?”
She shook her head. “But he was on the list and his ID was valid.”
“Creating a fake ID wouldn’t be much,” Ivy said to me, “considering what was at stake.”
“That’s probably our man,” I said to Liza. “Come on, I want to talk to your security officer.”
As Liza pulled the tape off the door, I thanked Ngozi for her help, turned off the camera, and tossed the phone back to J.C.
“Nice work,” Ivy noted to him, smiling.
“Thanks,” he said, slipping the phone into a pocket of his cargo pants. “Of course, it’s not actually a phone. It’s a hyperdimensional time—”
“J.C.,” Ivy interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ruin this moment.”
“Oh. Yeah, okay.”
THIRTEEN
I hit the restroom in the hallway before going to the security station. I didn’t really need to go to the bathroom, but Tobias did.
The room was clean, which I appreciated. The soap dispensers were full, the mirror spotless, and it even had a little chart on the door listing the last cleaning, where the staff had to sign to prove they’d done their job. I washed my hands, looking at myself in the mirror while Tobias finished his pit stop.
My own mundane face looked back at me. I’m never what people expect. Some picture me as some sort of eccentric scientist, others imagine an action star. Instead, they get a rather bland man in his thirties, perfectly normal.
In some ways, I often feel like my White Room. A blank slate. The aspects have all the character. I try very hard to not stand out. Because I am not crazy.
I dried my hands and waited for Tobias to wash up, then we rejoined the others outside and walked toward the security station. It consisted of a circular desk with an open center, the type you’d find at a mall beneath a sign proclaiming INFORMATION. I walked up and the security guard looked me over—like I was a piece of pizza and he was trying to decide how long I’d been sitting in the fridge. He didn’t ask what I wanted. Liza had called to tell him to prepare camera footage for me.
The desk really was too small for this hulk of a man. When he leaned forward, the inside front of the desk pressed into his gut; I was left with the impression of a grape being squeezed from the bottom.
“You,” the guard said with a deep baritone voice, “are the crazy one, aren’t you?”
“Well, that’s not actually true,” I said. “You see, the standard definition of insanity is—”
He leaned forward farther, and I pitied the poor desk. “You’re armed.”
“Uh…”
“So am I,” the guard said softly. “Don’t try anything.”
“Okaaay,” Ivy said from beside me. “Creepy guy manning the security station.”
“I like him,” J.C. said.
“Of course you do.”
The guard slowly lifted a flash drive. “Footage is on here.”
I took it. “You’re certain the security system was on that night?”
The man nodded. His hand made a fist, as if me even asking something so stupid was an offense worthy of a pounding.
“I’m going to catch him,” the guard said. “Nobody breaks into my building.”
“Twice,” I said.
The guard eyed me.
“Nobody breaks into your building twice,” I said. “Since they did it once already. Actually … they might have done it twice already, since the first time they placed the tape on the door—but you might call that more of an infiltration than a break-in.”
“Don’t give me lip,” the man said, pointing at me, “and don’t make trouble. Otherwise I’ll thump you so hard, it’ll knock some of your personalities into the next state.”
“Ouch,” Audrey said, flipping through a magazine she’d found on his desk. “Ask him why, if he’s so amazingly observant, he hasn’t noticed that his fly is down.”
I smiled, then made a quick exit. Liza watched me go from the doorway of her office.
Outside, I held up the flash drive, then began moving along the side of the building. I waved to Wilson, who was still in the car. Panos’s brother sat sullenly in the front passenger seat, drinking a glass of lemonade.
I rounded the building, aspects trailing, so we could get a good look at the exterior. It had small windows, maybe large enough to fit through. No fire escape. I approached a back door; it was locked tight. I gave it a good shake anyway.
“Someone impersonated a priest,” I said to the aspects, “and slipped in to inspect the body and place the tape. Then they came back at night to extract the corpse. So why didn’t they just take a sample of the body’s cells when they were first there, in the room with it?”
I looked toward the others, who all seemed baffled.
“I guess they didn’t know where on the body the modified cells were to be found,” Tobias finally said. “There are many, many cells in the body. How were they to know which place held the information they wanted?”
“Perhaps.” I folded my arms, dissatisfied. We’re missing something, I thought. A very important piece of all this. It—
The back door burst open. The security guard stood there, puffing, hand on his sidearm. He glared at me.
“I just wanted to check,” I said, inspecting the now-open doorway. Tape wouldn’t work here; the door had a deadbolt. “Nice response time, by the way.”
Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds Page 13