Colour of Death, The

by Cordy, Michael

  The kerosene cans.

  Time paused for a second, followed by an explosion that sent a kaleidoscope of colors flashing before her eyes. A ball of intense heat knocked her to the ground. Then the colors disappeared. Replaced by black.

  Chapter 2

  A few miles across town, Dr. Nathan Fox woke with a start and found himself in a dimly lit room, slumped in a chair, back aching. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. It sure as hell wasn’t his apartment. Then he saw the bed and remembered he was in one of the private rooms at Oregon University Research Hospital. This had to be the first time he had spent the whole night in a hospital since his years as a medical student.

  Tonight wasn’t work, though. This was personal.

  He stood and studied the patient lying in the bed. In repose, with his eyes closed, the man’s gaunt face looked relaxed and at peace. In the low light Fox could almost imagine he was well, except for the sound of his ragged breathing, which told Fox that the pneumonia was now in its final stages. Since the antibiotics had been stopped the disease had advanced rapidly. Pneumonia hadn’t been the real killer though: just the merciful coup de grâce. Fox stroked the patient’s clammy forehead and the man’s eyes flickered open, stared blankly for a moment then closed again. At least the morphine was minimizing his discomfort.

  A sigh made Fox turn to the woman lying on the couch beside the bed. Like Fox, she too had been keeping vigil all night and as he straightened her blanket he was glad she was now sleeping. The glow through the shutters told him it was almost dawn. Yawning, he flexed his legs and checked his watch. His first outpatient would be here in a few hours and he welcomed the distraction of work. First, though, he needed to go for a run in the hospital grounds and wake himself up. He met the senior nurse in the corridor.

  “You OK, Dr. Fox?” She instinctively reached out a comforting hand but, equally instinctively, he shifted his body, subtly evading her touch. “Can I get you anything?”

  He smiled. “Thanks, Kate. Just look after Samantha when she wakes. I’ll be back to check on both of them but page me if anything changes.”

  A little over two hours later — after a run around the grounds, a shower and a hot milky coffee with two sugars in the hospital canteen — Fox was sitting behind his desk in his small office in the psychiatric and neurology department with his first patient of the morning. Fox enjoyed the variety of his work. Although he treated outpatients here at the main hospital he spent much of his week at Tranquil Waters, the hospital’s specialist residential psychiatric clinic, and still managed to squeeze in time for police forensic work. This morning’s patient had been on Fox’s latest experimental program and the man’s first words buoyed Fox’s spirits:

  “I can’t tell you how much the treatment’s helped me, Doc. You’ve given me my life back.”

  “I’m pleased, John. Really pleased.” Fox contrasted the beaming young man sitting across from him with the desperate, haunted patient he had met six months ago. Then, John Fontana had been tyrannized by obsessive-compulsive disorder triggered by spending several years in a religious cult. Fox prided himself on his professional objectivity but detested cults and the damage they caused. John’s form of OCD didn’t involve manifest behavioral compulsions but obsessive repugnant thoughts (he was convinced he was possessed by the devil), which made it notoriously difficult to treat with behavioral therapy. The condition had stopped John working, sleeping or having a social life — or any kind of life — for almost five years. Finally, after every other treatment had failed, he had joined Fox’s experimental program. Fox scanned John’s notes and went through a checklist of questions. “How would you rate your anxiety levels now?”

  “Overall, I’d say they’d halved, down from a ten to a five. I even have moments when I actually forget about my OCD. I got my old job back, too.”

  “You’re working again. That’s great. How’s your sleep? Still need Valium or chlorpromazine?”

  “Nope. My sleep’s fine. Just taking the Prozac and risperidone you prescribed.”

  “Any side effects?”

  “Just the dry mouth I told you about last time and I’ve put on a bit of weight. But I can live with fat and happy.”

  Fox smiled as he noted the improvement from earlier consultations. “You’re still attending the ACT sessions?”

  ‘I haven’t missed one. They’re really helping me get some distance from my thoughts.”

  “Excellent.” Fox checked the file one last time, then closed it. Of the thirty subjects on his study, twenty-eight had enjoyed significant improvements. “In that case, John, I’d like to see you in a year’s time to check on progress but for now just keep taking the medication and attending the sessions.” He stood. “All the very best, John.”

  “You’ve saved my life, Dr. Fox.” John moved to embrace him but Fox reached out and shook his hand. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Trust me, seeing you do so well is more than enough.” Fox smiled. “Thank you for taking part in this program. Your courage in volunteering will allow us to help others.” Seeing John leave, Fox’s thoughts returned to the man he had watched over last night, and his smile faded. He wished he could have done as much to help him. As the door closed behind John, there was a gentle knock and it opened again. The expression on the nurse’s face, and the fact that she hadn’t sent one of her staff, told him all he needed to know. “It’s time?”

  “I’m afraid so, Dr. Fox.”

  Ever since the murder of his parents and sister, Nathan Fox had learned to distance himself from pain and loss but as he returned to the room of last night’s vigil he knew it wasn’t always possible. Fox was often asked how someone with his natural empathy could inhabit the minds of the mentally disturbed without becoming somehow infected or affected, and he always gave the same answer: detachment. If you became involved, or got too close, you became vulnerable and lost perspective. Applying this philosophy to his personal life didn’t please girlfriends who mistook him for the marrying kind, but usually it served him well and kept him safe. Usually.

  After taking the elevator to the third floor, he barely suppressed the urge to run the length of the corridor to the private room. As he approached the bed and the woman tending to the patient, Fox could feel his defenses falling away. His uncle Howard and aunt Samantha, who despite planning on never having children had brought him up as their own, were the only people in the entire world to whom Fox’s strategy of detachment and distance didn’t apply. Howard had never tried to replace his father but in so many ways he had. He had stepped into he blackest part of his life, when Fox was drowning in almost intolerable grief, and like a beacon in the dark had provided unswerving guidance with unconditional love. When Samantha saw Fox, she reached for him. “They say it’s close now, Nathan,” she said.

  Fox put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek. “His suffering will be over soon.” He checked his uncle’s pulse, listened to his ragged breathing and accelerated the morphine drip. Fox’s parents and sister had been ripped away from him in an instant, when he was too young to understand fully what had happened. Alzheimer’s had stolen his uncle away over a period of years, day by day, brain cell by brain cell, when the medically trained Fox had understood exactly what was happening.

  Suddenly, Howard let out a rattling wheeze and opened his eyes. He reached out his hand and gripped Fox’s arm. Samantha leapt forward. “Howard, Howard. It’s me, Samantha.” She stroked his face. “Nathan and I are both here.” Howard looked at her and then at Fox and his fevered eyes closed. In that instant, for the first time in a long while, Fox felt sure his uncle recognized them. Then Howard’s grip slackened and his hand fell back on the bed. Samantha looked at Fox with red-rimmed eyes and smiled.

  Fox nodded. “He knows we’re here. He knows he’s not alone.”

  Moments later Howard took a shallow breath, released a final, rattling sigh and was still. Samantha, who had always been so strong for Fox, suddenly collapsed in his arms
and began to cry. “He saw us,” she said, shock and wonder tempering her grief. “I think he was trying to say goodbye.”

  Fox said nothing, just enveloped her small frame in his arms, supporting her, making sure she didn’t fall.

  Chapter 3

  The flames reached high into the dawn sky, lending the silhouetted neighborhood of nondescript brick houses an unfamiliar air of drama and menace. Red trucks from the Portland Fire Department were already on the scene while uniformed cops were holding back the small crowd that had gathered despite the early hour. More cops and paramedics were helping a group of blanket-wrapped girls into a bus.

  Getting out of his car, Chief of Detectives Karl Jordache took a sip of black Arabica from the flask his wife had prepared for him. He was medium height and broad — too broad according to his doctor, who had him on a low cholesterol, low fat, zero-taste diet — but his charcoal-gray suit fitted well, and he was light on his feet.

  “What have we got, Danny?” he called to the nearest policeman.

  The cop checked his notes and indicated the girls getting on the bus. “There were at least eleven in there, Chief. They claim they were abducted and caged in the basement. According to the fire chief, the wooden cages are why the brick house went up like a torch. Helped by the kerosene, of course. The basement reeks of it.”

  “Who are the girls?”

  “A couple of American runaways but mostly illegals from the old Soviet republics who paid a syndicate — part of the Russian mob — to ship them to the U.S. and hook them up with jobs. See those Douglas firs at the back end of the yard? A couple of girls who tried to escape were killed and buried under there.”

  “Who says the slave trade’s been abolished?’ Jordache muttered wearily. “The sleazeballs promise the girls money and a better life, then lock ’em up, take their passports, get them addicted to drugs and force them into the sex industry.” He sighed. “Christ, the girls are little older than my two daughters. They all got out OK?”

  “Yep.”

  “The Russians?”

  “They’re being taken down to the station for processing. Two are badly burned but they’ll live.”

  “That’s too bad.” Jordache watched an unconscious, blackened figure being moved to the ambulance on a gurney. “Is that her? Is that their mystery savior?”

  A nod. “The girls are calling her their guardian angel.”

  “Avenging angel more like. I heard she appeared out of nowhere with an axe and busted them out.”

  “That’s what they say. The Russians confirm their story and claim she was alone. They assumed she was police.”

  “Police? She’s not one of ours.”

  “She doesn’t belong to anybody so far as we can gather. No agency knows anything about her: who she is, where she comes from, what she was doing here, or how she even knew the girls were down there. She’s got no ID on her, just a silver locket round her neck.”

  “A real mystery, huh?” Jordache watched the medics load her onto the ambulance and slam the doors shut. As it pulled out and the siren wailed into life he climbed back in his car. “Finish up here, Danny, I’m going to learn a bit more about our friend.”

  Twenty minutes later Jordache found himself in the emergency room of Portland General Hospital, standing in front of a fiercely protective intern who was refusing to let him get beyond the green curtain screening the mystery woman.

  “I need to ask her some questions, Doc.”

  “She’s not speaking to anyone,” the woman replied. “Not till we’ve checked her out.”

  “Help.” The cry from behind the curtain was so raw it didn’t sound human. The doctor swiveled and pulled back the screen. The woman on the bed was sitting up, a blackened arm propped against the wall, the other pointing at an empty gurney to her right. “Help him,” she rasped from her smoke-ravaged throat. The whites of her terrified eyes looked huge and unnaturally bright against her blackened face.

  “What’s wrong?” the doctor said, rushing to her side. “Help who?”

  The young woman collapsed back on the bed, arms falling by her side. “The man with the knife in his chest. Can’t you see the blood? Do something. He’s dying.”

  Jordache looked at the empty gurney. “There’s no one there,” said the doctor.

  The young woman shook her head, dazed. Despite the soot and grime, she had an ethereal, otherworldly beauty. “What’s happening to me?” she whispered to no one in particular.

  The doctor shone a light into her eyes and examined her head. “You’re hallucinating. You experienced a trauma above the left temple. The bullet only grazed your skull but you were unconscious and are still in shock. The detective tells me you’ve been to hell and back.”

  Jordache moved closer and noticed how luminous her eyes were. Her clothes were plain and simple, possibly homemade: cotton top, loose jacket and dark denim trousers. The only distinctive thing she wore was the silver locket round her neck. He could see a catch on the side and wondered what it contained. Who was this girl? How had she known about the girls in the basement? And where had she found the courage to go down there alone, armed only with an axe? When she saw him looking at her locket she clutched it to her chest like her life depended on it. He smiled. “My name’s Detective Karl Jordache. I’m here to help you. Can I ask you some questions?”

  “Not now—” the doctor started to say.

  The young woman rested a blackened hand on the doctor’s white sleeve. “Please,” she pleaded in a dry rasp, “may I ask something?” Her speed was old-school polite, out of town.

  “Sure,” said Jordache, leaning in before the doctor could object. “Shoot.”

  The young woman frowned, marshaling her thoughts, then posed the exact same question Jordache was going to ask her: “What’s my name, Detective? Who am I?” At that moment, he saw in her eyes a fear as raw as any he’d witnessed in all his years of policing: a realization that she had become lost from herself, unable to find the way back to the person she had once been. “Help me,” she pleaded. “Someone, help me.”

  Chapter 4

  Ten days later

  Almost a week had passed since his uncle Howard’s funeral and Fox had already phoned his aunt twice that morning. Once from his apartment in north-west Portland and once in the car driving over. Samantha was always out of bed by six and it was almost eight thirty. As he parked his battered second-hand Porsche outside the house he spotted her small Ford. She must be in, he thought, as he rang the bell on the door of the imposing Victorian house and banged the brass doorknocker. The funeral and the wake that followed had been surprisingly joyous, with his aunt taking center stage and appearing to revel in the celebration of her beloved husband’s life. Nevertheless, Fox had called or visited on every day since, concerned that anticlimax and depression would descend once the well-wishers had left her to get on with the rest of her life. He usually called when he guessed she might be at her lowest ebb without Howard: just after she got up and before she went to bed. Though she was invariably in good spirits and dismissive of his concerns, he was determined to be there for her, as she and Howard had been there for him.

  He used his spare set of keys to enter the house that had been his childhood home since he was eleven. He heard voices. “Samantha?”

  The television was on in the lounge, tuned to one of the rolling twenty-four-hour news channels. Who is the mysterious avenging angel? read a banner across the bottom of the screen. The mystery woman staring out at him looked lost and otherwordly. Her pale skin, cropped fair hair and beautiful eyes momentarily diverted his attention. A reporter’s voice explained: “the authorities are still no closer to identifying the mystery Jane Doe who broke eleven girls out of a sex traffickers’ dungeon in Portland. Although recovering well from her burns and physical injuries, she’s been moved to a specialist psychiatric clinic for further treatment. To date, all attempts to match her fingerprints, dental records or DNA in major databases here and abroad have failed, and no one h
as yet come forward to identify her. If you recognize her, then please call this number.”

  He turned off the television and called again, louder. “Samantha. Samantha.” Nothing.

  He searched the rooms, passing photographs of his parents and sister and bookcases crammed with books. The house had always been filled with books. The kettle in the kitchen was warm and the glazed doors leading out to the garden were still locked but there was no sign of Samantha.

  He ascended the stairs. At the top he turned and glanced down the landing to the two bedrooms at the end. The one on the right was his aunt’s. The one on the left had once been his. As he walked toward them he passed two more rooms: twin studies. He looked in the first and his relief made him smile. His aunt was sitting at her desk, small and birdlike, early covered by huge headphones connected to a black iPod, peering through thick reading glasses at a loosely bound typescript. As she sipped coffee from an oversized cup, her pale brown bob, streaked with silver, nodded gently to the beat of whatever she was listening to, which, knowing Samantha Quail, could be anything from Tchaikovsky to U2. After all these years she still closely resembled the memory he had of his petite mother. Fox had inherited his height from his father, along with two other legacies he had stubbornly retained from his childhood: his surname and his English accent. With her penchant for kaftans and bright colors, Professor Samantha Quail betrayed her roots as a fully paid-up member of the hippy, flower-power generation. Not for her the cashmere cardigans and tweed skirts of conventional academia.