John Saul

by The Presence (v5) (epub)

  The screen went black, and for a moment Katharine and Rob thought the video had come to an end.

  They were wrong.

  After several seconds the computer screen filled with a jungle scene. The village was gone, and for a moment, as the image on the screen hovered in stasis, Katharine wondered if perhaps whoever had made the video was merely checking his camera. But then the lens zoomed in, and finally Katharine saw it:

  The face—the hominid face of the boy, if that was truly what he was—gazed out from a thicket of vines in a way that made Katharine shiver as a wave of déjà vu passed over her. Then she realized what it was: not déjà vu at all. The image on the screen was triggering a genuine memory, a memory of a museum exhibit she’d seen years ago, depicting a family of Homo habilis, perhaps the earliest of the hominids to make tools.

  The being on the screen, but for the color of its skin and the pattern of hair on its face, might have stepped out of that diorama and into the jungle scene she and Rob Silver were watching.

  But of course it was impossible; Homo habilis had been extinct for two million years.

  Therefore, what they were watching was a hoax.

  “Can you pause it?” Katharine asked as the camera lingered on the face.

  Rob reached out and clicked the mouse on a button on the screen. The image froze. Katharine leaned forward, examining the face. This had to be an actor expertly made up, a work of cosmetic wizardry worthy of a Hollywood special effects team. But how had they managed to slope his forehead so perfectly? It would have been a simple thing, of course, to add anything necessary to give the actor’s features the proper look, but enough prostheses to lend the boy such authentic features should have enlarged his head.

  Yet it seemed to be in perfect proportion to the body.

  Reaching out to manipulate the mouse herself, Katharine restored the picture to its former size and set it running again.

  A split second later the first spear struck.

  The lens of the camera was still in close-up, and the look of shock that came into the boy’s eyes was perfect. They widened, then moved, as if searching for the source of the stick that protruded from his chest.

  A second and third spear struck, and the boy’s expression of shock twisted into an agonized grimace of pain so genuine that Katharine was glad the video had no sound track—even in the silence of the room she could almost hear the howl that must have torn from his throat.

  His mouth gaped open, and then he pitched forward onto the ground, twitched spasmodically for a few seconds, and lay still.

  Rob reached over and took Katharine’s hand as they watched the rest of the video unfold:

  The men and boys of the tribe gathered around the body, poking at it until they were certain it was dead.

  They tied it to a pole, securing it by its hands and feet, letting it hang as they carried it back to their village.

  In the village, the men dressed the corpse, slitting open its belly and throwing the entrails to a pack of dogs who snatched them up, fought over them, then settled down to gobble their feast in an atmosphere of uneasy suspicion.

  The men roasted the body over a fire as the tribe gathered around to share in the unexpected delicacy.

  For a moment the camera settled on the face of a woman who stood apart from the rest, her eyes glistening as she watched.

  The tribe ate, but instead of throwing the bones to the dogs, they tossed them into a large kettle, where the remaining flesh would simmer into a rich broth.

  The scene changed again, and now darkness had fallen over the village.

  A form moved in the darkness, and Katharine had to strain to make out the details.

  It was the woman. As Katharine watched, the woman used a net to lift the bones from the kettle, and piled them on a cloth she had spread on the ground. She kept fishing until she was certain there was nothing left to find. The woman began folding the cloth around the bones, and for a moment the camera lingered on the grotesque pile.

  The woman seemed to have found all the bones but one.

  The skull was missing.

  The window in which the video had been playing abruptly closed. Once more, Katharine and Rob found themselves staring in silence at the image of the skull.

  The implication was clear.

  It was Rob who finally broke the silence. “What do you think? Any chance at all that the film was real?”

  Katharine shook her head. “Absolutely not. Nothing like that has lived—” But then she cut her own words off as she remembered the skeleton that even now lay by the fire pit only a few miles away.

  The skeleton that could have belonged to the very creature they’d just seen on the computer screen.

  Yet she still couldn’t believe it. The video had to be an elaborate fake. “Let’s look at the film again,” she said.

  Rob reached for the mouse to click on the link a second time. But even as he was moving the cursor across the screen, the window displaying the skull closed. “Damn,” he said softly. “Sorry about that.” Where the window had been a second ago, now only the list of files appeared. Rob once more manipulated the mouse, trying to highlight the file name again.

  The file name, like the window, had vanished.

  “Where is it?” Katharine asked.

  They hunted for the vanished file for an hour, but finally gave up. It was almost as if the file had never been there at all.

  In his private office, Takeo Yoshihara leaned back in his chair, staring at the skull that had been delivered to him by the courier from Manila. He’d photographed the skull himself, using a digital camera, and transferred the contents of the videotape that had accompanied the skull into a digitized graphics file. The videotape itself was now locked in the safe in this very office, to which only he had the combination.

  Before he left his office, the skull would join the videotape.

  The graphics files in his computer were equally secure, protected by security codes known only to himself and the few trusted lieutenants to whom he had transmitted copies of the files an hour ago.

  The money he had spent on the skull had been well worth it. It was too bad, though, that the boy had to die.

  Still, no progress came without a price, and what was the harm in spending a few lives, given what he was trying to accomplish?

  CHAPTER

  12

  Sergeant Cal Olani had just come on duty that morning when he’d gotten the call sending him out to the lonely stretch of road where Alice Santoya had found her son’s body. As he’d driven out, he assumed he’d find the victim of a hit-and-run. Five minutes after he’d arrived at the scene, though, he’d known that no hit-and-run had been involved. The absence of tread marks, in itself, didn’t mean much, since the rain last night could have washed them away. But the condition of the boy’s body revealed nothing to confirm such an accident.

  Except for a gash on his right palm, the boy exhibited none of the gross trauma that would have been apparent if he’d been hit by a car hard enough to kill him.

  Olani had worked alongside the crew of medics who attempted to revive the boy despite the fact that it was obvious from his temperature alone that he’d been dead for hours. He’d stayed at the site until the photographer had come and gone, and searched the area for any clues.

  Olani had tried to take a statement from Alice Santoya, but she’d been pretty incoherent as she sobbed over the loss of her only child.

  After an hour, he was finished at the scene, having found no evidence that any crime had been committed. But Kioki Santoya had stayed in his mind all through the day as he’d dealt with one petty disturbance after another. There’d been a domestic squabble up in Paia. He solved that one by parking out in front of the house and tooting the horn a couple of times to let Lee and Rosie Chin know that if they didn’t settle down, he’d have to come in and do it for them.

  Then there’d been a minor fender bender in which he had to convince the owner of a rusted-out 1974 Chevy Impala th
at he probably wasn’t going to get much of a settlement out of the tourist who “rear-ended me, man! I got whiplash real bad!” The problem for the Chevy’s owner was that three witnesses backed up the tourist’s story that he’d been waiting for a light to turn green when the car ahead of him suddenly slammed into his front end. If he hadn’t had his foot firmly on his own brakes, he probably would have crashed into the car behind him.

  After sorting that out, Olani cruised up and down Front Street in Lahaina for a while, just showing the colors to let the troublemakers know he was around.

  Through it all, he’d been unable to stop thinking about Kioki Santoya. Now, with only another hour before the end of his shift, when he could go home to Malia and the twins, he decided he might as well swing by Maui Memorial on his way back to the Sheriff’s Department. The hospital was barely a quarter of a mile from headquarters, and he knew he wouldn’t stop thinking about the teenage boy who had died last night until he found out exactly what had killed him.

  He pulled the car into the nearly empty parking lot next to the hospital, and went in through the emergency entrance that was almost hidden in the L-shaped building’s corner. Jo-Nell Sims, the nurse on duty, looked up. “Ten minutes,” she said as she recognized him. “That’s all I have left on my shift.” Putting on an expression of exaggerated annoyance, she shook a finger at him. “Don’t tell me you’re bringing someone in, Cal. Please, just don’t tell me that.”

  “Relax, Jo,” Olani told her. “All’s quiet out there. I just stopped by to find out what happened to the boy they brought in this morning. Kioki Santoya.”

  Jo-Nell’s eyes lost their sparkle. “Isn’t it terrible? I just feel so sorry for his mother.”

  “Have they finished the autopsy on him yet?” Olani pressed.

  Still shaking her head in sympathy for Alice Santoya’s loss, Jo-Nell scanned a schedule. “Laura Hatcher was on it,” she said. Picking up a phone, she spoke for a moment, then waved Cal through the doors leading to the examining rooms. “She’ll meet you in a couple of minutes. First door on your left.”

  Five minutes later Laura Hatcher came in. No more than five feet one inch tall, she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-three pounds, and looked to Cal Olani to be about twelve years old. Except that he’d dealt with her many times before, and knew that behind that incredibly slender and innocent-looking facade was the tough mind of a very well-trained pathologist.

  “So what about Kioki Santoya?” Cal asked. “Any idea what killed him?”

  Laura Hatcher flipped open a metal-covered clipboard she was carrying, riffled through a few sheets, then found what she was looking for. “Well, I can tell you what didn’t happen,” she said. “Nothing much in the way of external trauma at all—a few minor abrasions on his left palm, and a deep cut on his right one.”

  “I saw that. Looked more like the kind of cut you’d get from a piece of broken glass than a knife wound.”

  Laura Hatcher nodded. “No argument there. And it wasn’t nearly bad enough for him to have bled to death through it.”

  “How about alcohol?” the policeman suggested. “The way some of the kids drink these days—”

  “I thought of that right away. Nothing.”

  “So what are you saying? He just died? Kids that age don’t have heart attacks, do they?”

  “Actually, it’s not impossible, but in this case there wasn’t any evidence of it. The only thing that looked even slightly abnormal was his lungs, but until I get some results back from the lab, I won’t even know if that’s what killed him.” She spread her hands helplessly. “I wish I could be more specific, but I can’t tell you much right now. It could have been a virus—one of these new bugs that have been cropping up lately—tout he doesn’t seem to have manifested any symptoms of illness prior to death. His mother says he was fine.”

  “But you can’t be sure of that, either.” Olani sighed, knowing the caveat the doctor was certain to add.

  Hatcher nodded her agreement. “Sorry. I wish I could be more help.” She glanced down at her notes. “Do the names Rick Pieper, Josh Malani, and Jeff Kina mean anything to you?”

  “There’ve been a couple problems with the Kina kid. He’s big, and has a chip on his shoulder when it comes to haoles. And Josh Malani tries to act tough, but it’s mostly for show. Why?”

  “According to Alice Santoya, her son was out with those three boys last night. He left a message saying he was going to a movie with them. Depending on what comes back from the lab, someone might want to talk to them.”

  Cal Olani wrote the three names in his notebook. Maybe he’d just drop by the school and have a talk with those boys.

  Ten minutes after Cal Olani finished his conversation with Laura Hatcher, a man stepped into the small room that served as the hospital’s morgue. Making certain no one had seen him come in, he locked the door, then opened the drawer containing the remains of Kioki Santoya. Having to deal with dead people was the worst part of being an orderly. Elvis Dinkins had never really minded the rest of the job—emptying bedpans and changing linen didn’t bother him.

  Even sick people didn’t bother him.

  But dead people …

  Despite his revulsion at having to deal with the corpse—or maybe because of it—Elvis Dinkins’s eyes fixed on Kioki Santoya’s face. The boy’s eyes were open, and his face looked bloated. His mouth was open, too, and it looked to Elvis like the kid’s tongue was all swollen up. His stomach churned as he saw the place where Dr. Hatcher had cut away a slice of it to send to the lab.

  As he pulled on the surgical gloves he’d swiped from the scrub room, Elvis wondered if maybe he should take a slice of the tongue, too. But that would mean actually reaching into the dead boy’s mouth, and Elvis wasn’t sure he could do that.

  It was going to be bad enough just taking pieces of tissue from the wound that Dr. Hatcher had cut when she’d opened the kid up to do the autopsy. Elvis shuddered. The sight of blood did tend to make him feel sick.

  In fact, it made him feel sick enough that he was thinking about looking around for another job.

  Maybe one working for Takeo Yoshihara, who he’d heard paid a lot better than anyone else on Maui.

  And that, at least indirectly, was why he was in the morgue today.

  A few days after he started working at the hospital, he’d been cleaning up one of the rooms when a doctor came in. Although Elvis Dinkins had been at the hospital less than a week, he’d already known who this doctor was.

  Stephen Jameson. Personal physician to Takeo Yoshihara.

  Someone to pay attention to.

  Therefore, Elvis Dinkins had listened carefully when Dr. Jameson suggested that if he ever came across anything in the hospital that seemed unusual, he would appreciate it if Elvis would let him know.

  At the time, of course, Elvis hadn’t really known what might be considered unusual in a hospital. He’d waited, keeping a sharp lookout, but nothing “unusual” had come his way. Until now.

  A teenage kid who’d died for some reason that even Dr. Hatcher hadn’t been able to figure out—now that was something else again! It was just lucky for him he’d been in the emergency room a few minutes ago when Sergeant Olani came in.

  He’d hung around in the hall while the cop talked to Hatcher, and then clocked out at the end of the shift, right after Jo-Nell Sims. Except instead of leaving, he’d waited until Dr. Hatcher left, then printed out a copy of the autopsy report she’d done. For a minute he’d thought maybe that was all he would give Dr. Jameson, but then he remembered the doctor talking about how the lungs looked funny. That was when he’d decided to collect a sample of the kid’s lungs, too.

  Now, though, as he stared at the loose stitches Dr. Hatcher had used to close the huge Y-shaped cut she’d made to gain access to the interior of Kioki Santoya’s body, he wondered if he could actually do it. His hands were starting to shake, and he hadn’t even cut the thread.

  Gripping the handle of the scalpel he’d
picked up in the operating room, Elvis Dinkins steeled himself and bent closer.

  One by one he sliced through the stitches, until the corpse’s torso was gaping open.

  Elvis Dinkins gazed down at the jumbled organs that had been packed back into the body after the autopsy was completed. His stomach churned again, and he had to struggle to keep from throwing up right there. But as he sank the scalpel deep into the tissue of the left lung, he told himself it wasn’t much different from cutting up the liver his mother used to fry with onions.

  His nausea eased a little.

  A few seconds later he had hacked a piece of the lung out and dropped it into one of the plastic specimen jars he’d found in the same cabinet as the scalpel. Of course, he had no idea what Jameson might find in the sample, but he thought it might be important.

  Really important.

  And if it was …

  As he slipped out of the hospital, Elvis Dinkins was already dreaming about the future. Maybe after he got a job working for Takeo Yoshihara, he’d find a new apartment.

  Hell, if he was lucky, the contents of the plastic bag might change his whole life!

  The thought that they might also end his life never entered Elvis Dinkins’s mind.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Jack Peters wished he knew what to say to the dozen teenage boys clustered around him. There was none of the laughter and playful jostling that ordinarily preceded track practice; this afternoon they all seemed lost in their own thoughts, and as the coach’s eyes moved from one face to another, he saw one common element.

  Fear.

  None of them knew why Kioki Santoya had died last night, and because they didn’t know, they were frightened.

  He could almost hear what they were thinking: