by Dean Koontz
She said, “Lieutenant Verdad, surely the most logical explanation is that, in spite of Dr. Kordell’s assertions, the body has simply been misplaced.” Both the stork-thin medical examiner and Ronald Tescanet protested. She quietly but firmly cut them off. “Or maybe it was kids playing an elaborate joke. College kids. An initiation rite of some sort. They’ve been known to do worse.”
“I think I already know the answer to this question,” Benny said. “But is it possible that Eric Leben was not dead after all? Could his condition have been misjudged? Is it possible that he walked out of here in a daze?”
“No, no, no!” Tescanet said, blanching and suddenly sweating in spite of the cold air.
“Impossible,” Kordell said simultaneously. “I saw him. Massive head injuries. No vital signs whatsoever.”
But this off-the-wall theory seemed to intrigue Verdad. He said, “Didn’t Dr. Leben receive medical attention immediately after the accident?”
“Paramedics,” Kordell said.
“Highly trained, reliable men,” Tescanet said, mop-ping his doughy face with a handkerchief. He had to be doing rapid mental arithmetic right now, calculating the difference between the financial settlement that might be necessitated by a morgue screwup and the far more major judgment that might be won against the city for the incompetence of its paramedics. “They would never, regardless of circumstances, never mistakenly pronounce a man dead when he wasn’t.”
“One—there was no heartbeat whatsoever,” Kordell said, counting the proofs of death on fingers so long and supple that they would have served him equally well if he had been a concert pianist instead of a pathologist. “The paramedics had a perfectly flat line on the small EKG unit in their van. Two—no respiration. Three—steadily falling body temperature.”
“Unquestionably dead,” Tescanet murmured.
Lieutenant Verdad now regarded the attorney and the chief medical examiner with the same flat expression and hawkish eyes that he had turned on Rachael. He probably didn’t think Tescanet and Kordell—or the paramedics—were covering up malpractice or malfeasance. But his nature and experience ensured his willingness to suspect anyone of anything at any time, given even the poorest reason for suspicion.
Scowling at Tescanet’s interruption, Everett Kordell continued, “Four—there was absolutely no perceptible electrical activity in the brain. We have an EEG machine here in the morgue. We frequently use it in accident cases as a final test. That’s a safety procedure I’ve instituted since taking this position. Dr. Leben was attached to the EEG the moment he was brought in, and we could find no perceptible brain waves. I was present. I saw the graph. Brain death. If there is any single, universally accepted standard for declaring a man dead, it’s when the attending physician encounters a condition of full and irreversible cardiac arrest coupled with brain death. The pupils of Dr. Leben’s eyes wouldn’t dilate in bright light. And no respiration. With all due respect, Mrs. Leben, your husband was as dead as any man I’ve ever seen, and I will stake my reputation on that.”
Rachael had no doubt that Eric had been dead. She had seen his sightless, unblinking eyes as he lay on the blood-spattered pavement. She had seen, too well, the deep concavity running from behind his ear all the way to the curve of his brow: the crushed and splintered bone. However, she was thankful that Benny had unwittingly confused things and had given the detectives yet another false trail to pursue.
She said, “I’m sure he was dead. I’ve no doubt of it. I saw him at the scene of the accident, and I know there could have been no mistaken diagnosis.”
Kordell and Tescanet looked immeasurably relieved.
With a shrug, Verdad said, “Then we discard the hypothesis.”
But Rachael knew that, once the possibility of mis-diagnosis had been planted in the cops’ minds, they would expend time and energy in the exploration of it, which was all that mattered. Delay. That was the name of the game. Delay, stall, confuse the issue. She needed time to confirm her own worst suspicions, time to decide what must be done to protect herself from various sources of danger.
Lieutenant Verdad led Rachael past the three draped bodies and stopped with her at an empty gurney that was bedecked with rumpled shrouds. On it lay a thick paper tag trailing two strands of plastic-coated wire. The tag was crumpled.
“That’s all we’ve got to go on, I’m afraid. The cart that the corpse once occupied and the ID tag that was once tied to its foot.” Only inches from Rachael, the detective looked hard at her, his intense dark eyes as flat and unreadable as his face. “Now, why do you suppose a body snatcher, whatever his motivation, would take the time to untie the tag from the dead man’s toe?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” she said.
“The thief would be worried about getting caught. He’d be in a hurry. Untying the tag would take precious seconds.”
“It’s crazy,” she said shakily.
“Yes, crazy,” Verdad said.
“But then the whole thing’s crazy.”
“Yes.”
She stared down at the wrinkled and vaguely stained shroud, thinking of how it had wrapped her husband’s cold and naked cadaver, and she shuddered uncontrollably.
“Enough of this,” Benny said, putting his arm around her for warmth and support. “I’m getting you the hell out of this place.”
Everett Kordell and Ronald Tescanet accompanied Rachael and Benny to the elevator in the parking garage, continuing to make a case for the morgue’s and the city’s complete lack of culpability in the body’s disappearance. They were not convinced by her repeated assurances that she did not intend to sue anyone. There were so many things for her to think and worry about that she had neither the energy nor the inclination to persuade them that her intentions were benign. She just wanted to be rid of them so she could get on with the urgent tasks that awaited her.
When the elevator doors closed, finally separating her and Benny from the lean pathologist and the corpulent attorney, Benny said, “If it was me, I think I would sue them.”
“Lawsuits, countersuits, depositions, legal strategy meetings, courtrooms—boring, boring, boring,” Rachael said. She opened her purse as the elevator rose.
“Verdad is a cool son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Benny said.
“Just doing his job, I guess.” Rachael took the thirty-two pistol out of her purse.
Benny, watching the light move on the board of numbers above the lift’s doors, did not immediately see the gun. “Yeah, well, he could do his job with a little more compassion and a little less machinelike efficiency.”
They had risen one and a half floors from the basement. On the indicator panel, the 2 was about to light. Her Mercedes was one level farther up.
Benny had wanted to bring his car, but Rachael had insisted on driving her own. As long as she was behind the wheel, her hands were occupied and her attention was partly on the road, so she couldn’t become morbidly preoccupied with the frightening situation in which she found herself. If she had nothing to do but brood about recent developments, she would very likely lose the tenuous self-control she now possessed. She had to remain busy in order to hold terror at arm’s length and stave off panic.
They reached the second floor and kept going up.
She said, “Benny, step away from the door.”
“Huh?” He looked down from the lightboard, blinked in surprise when he saw the pistol. “Hey, where the hell did you get that?”
“Brought it from home.”
“Why?”
“Please step back. Quickly now, Benny,” she said shakily, aiming at the doors.
Still blinking, confused, he got out of the way. “What’s going on? You’re not going to shoot anybody.”
Her thunderous heartbeat was so loud that it muffled his voice and made it sound as if he were speaking to her from a distance.
They arrived at the third floor.
The indicator board went ping! The 3 lighted. The elevator stopped with a slight bo
unce.
“Rachael, answer me. What is this?”
She did not respond. She had gotten the gun after leaving Eric. A woman alone ought to have a gun … especially after walking out on a man like him. As the doors rolled open, she tried to remember what her pistol instructor had said: Don’t jerk the trigger; squeeze it slowly, or you’ll pull the muzzle off target and miss.
But no one was waiting for them, at least not in front of the elevator. The gray concrete floor, walls, pillars, and ceiling looked like those in the basement from which they’d begun their ascent. The silence was the same, too: sepulchral and somehow threatening. The air was less dank and far warmer than it had been three levels below, though it was every bit as still. A few of the ceiling lights were burned out or broken, so a greater number of shadows populated the huge room than had darkened the basement, and they seemed deeper as well, better suited for the complete concealment of an attacker, though perhaps her imagination painted them blacker than they really were.
Following her out of the elevator, Benny said, “Rachael, who are you afraid of?”
“Later. Right now let’s just get the hell out of here.”
“But—”
“Later.”
Their footsteps echoed and reechoed hollowly off the concrete, and she felt as if they were walking not through an ordinary parking garage in Santa Ana but through the chambers of an alien temple, under the eye of an unimaginably strange deity.
At that late hour, her red 560 SL was one of only three cars parked on the entire floor. It stood alone, gleaming, a hundred feet from the elevator. She walked directly toward it, circled it warily. No one crouched on the far side. Through the windows, she could see that no one was inside, either. She opened the door, got in quickly. As soon as Benny climbed in and closed his door, she hit the master lock switch, started the engine, threw the car in gear, popped the emergency brake, and drove too fast toward the exit ramp.
As she drove, she engaged the safeties on her pistol and, with one hand, returned it to her purse.
When they reached the street, Benny said, “Okay, now tell me what this cloak-and-dagger stuff is all about.”
She hesitated, wishing she had not brought him this far into it. She should have come to the morgue alone. She’d been weak, needed to lean on him, but now if she didn’t break her dependency on him, if she drew him further into it, she would without doubt be putting his life in jeopardy. She had no right to endanger him.
“Rachael?”
She stopped at a red traffic light at the intersection of Main Street and Fourth, where a hot summer wind blew a few scraps of litter into the center of the crossroads and spun them around for a moment before sweeping them away.
“Rachael?” Benny persisted.
A shabbily dressed derelict stood at the corner, only a few feet away. He was filthy, unshaven, and drunk. His nose was gnarled and hideous, half eaten away by melanoma. In his left hand he held a wine bottle imperfectly concealed in a paper bag. In his grubby right paw he gripped a broken alarm clock—no glass covering the face of it, the minute hand missing—as if he thought he possessed a great treasure. He stooped down, peered in at her. His eyes were fevered, blasted.
Ignoring the derelict, Benny said, “Don’t withdraw from me, Rachael. What’s wrong? Tell me. I can help.”
“I don’t want to get you involved,” she said.
“I’m already involved.”
“No. Right now you don’t know anything. And I really think that’s best.”
“You promised—”
The traffic light changed, and she tramped the accelerator so suddenly that Benny was thrown against his seat belt and cut off in midsentence.
Behind them, the drunk with the clock shouted: “I’m Father Time!”
Rachael said, “Listen, Benny, I’ll take you back to my place so you can get your car.”
“Like hell.”
“Please let me handle this myself.”
“Handle what? What’s going on?”
“Benny, don’t interrogate me. Just please don’t do that. I’ve got a lot to think about, a lot to do …”
“Sounds like you’re going somewhere else tonight.”
“It doesn’t concern you,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“There’re things I’ve got to … check out. Never mind.”
Getting angry now, he said, “You going to shoot someone?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why’re you packing a gun?”
She didn’t answer.
He said, “You got a permit for a concealed weapon?”
She shook her head. “A permit, but just for home use.”
He glanced behind to see if anyone was near them, then leaned over from his seat, grabbed the steering wheel, and jerked it hard to the right.
The car whipped around with a screech of tires, and she hit the brakes, and they slid sideways six or eight yards, and when she tried to straighten the wheel he grabbed it again, and she shouted at him to stop it, and he let go of the wheel, which spun through her hands for a moment, but then she was firmly in control once more, pulled to the curb, stopped, looked at him, said, “What are you—crazy?”
“Just angry.”
“Let it be,” she said, staring out at the street.
“I want to help you.”
“You can’t.”
“Try me. Where do you have to go?”
She sighed. “Just to Eric’s place.”
“His house? In Villa Park? Why?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“After his house, where?”
“Geneplan. His office.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you that, either.”
“Why not?”
“Benny, it’s dangerous. It could get violent.”
“So what the fuck am I—porcelain? Crystal? Shit, woman, do you think I’m going to fly into a million goddamn pieces at the tap of a goddamn finger?”
She looked at him. The amber glow of the streetlamp came through only her half of the windshield, leaving him in darkness, but his eyes shone in the shadows. She said, “My God, you’re furious. I’ve never heard you use that kind of language before.”
He said, “Rachael, do we have something or not? I think we have something. Special, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“You really think so?”
“You know I do.”
“Then you can’t freeze me out of this. You can’t keep me from helping you when you need help. Not if we’re to go on from here.”
She looked at him, feeling very tender toward him, wanting more than anything to bring him into her confidence, to have him as her ally, but involving him would be a rotten thing to do. He was right now thinking what kind of trouble she might be in, his mind churning furiously, listing possibilities, but nothing he could imagine would be half as dangerous as the truth. If he knew the truth, he might not be so eager to help, but she dared not tell him.
He said, “I mean, you know I’m a pretty old-fashioned guy. Not very with it by most standards. Staid in some ways. Hell, half the guys in California real estate wear white cords and pastel blazers when they go to work on a summer day like this, but I don’t feel comfortable in less than a three-piece suit and wing tips. I may be the last guy in a real-estate office who even knows what a goddamn vest is. So when someone like me sees the woman he cares about in trouble, he has to help, it’s the only thing he can do, the plain old-fashioned thing, the right thing, and if she won’t let him help, then that’s pretty much a slap in the face, an affront to all his values, a rejection of what he is, and no matter how much he likes her, he’s got to walk, it’s as simple as that.”
She said, “I never heard you make a speech before.”
“I never had to before.”
Both touched and frustrated by his ultimatum, Rachael closed her eyes and leaned back in the seat, unable to decide what to do. She kept her hands o
n the steering wheel, gripping it tightly, for if she let go, Benny would be sure to see how badly her hands were shaking.
He said, “Who are you afraid of, Rachael?”
She didn’t answer.
He said, “You know what happened to his body, don’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“You know who took it.”
“Maybe.”
“And you’re afraid of them. Who are they, Rachael? For God’s sake, who would do something like that—and why?”
She opened her eyes, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb. “Okay, you can come along with me.”
“To Eric’s house, the office? What’re we looking for?”
“That,” she said, “I’m not prepared to tell you.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Okay. All right. One step at a time. I can live with that.”
She drove north on Main Street to Katella Avenue, east on Katella to the expensive community of Villa Park, into the hills toward her dead husband’s estate. In the upper reaches of Villa Park, the big houses, many priced well over a million dollars, were less than half visible beyond screens of shrubbery and the gathered cloaks of night. Eric’s house, looming beyond a row of enormous Indian laurels, seemed darker than any other, a cold place even on a June night, the many windows like sheets of some strange obsidian that would not permit the passage of light in either direction.
6
THE TRUNK
The long driveway, made of rust-red Mexican paving tiles, curved past Eric Leben’s enormous Spanish-modern house before finally turning out of sight to the garages in back. Rachael parked in front.
Although Ben Shadway delighted in authentic Spanish buildings with their multiplicity of arches and angles and deep-set leaded windows, he was no fan of Spanish modern. The stark lines, smooth surfaces, big plate-glass windows, and total lack of ornamentation might seem stylish and satisfyingly clean to some, but he found such architecture boring, without character, and perilously close to the cheap-looking stucco boxes of so many southern California neighborhoods.