The Vault

by Karen Long

  “Impetigo. You need some antibiotics.”

  “What are you, a fucking doctor?” she spat.

  “Yes, I am… I was,” he replied cautiously.

  “Detective Whitefoot was a doctor and is now a police officer,” said Eleanor, by way of an explanation..

  Lula-Bell leaned towards Eleanor, confusion squeezing her features. “So, you’re a doctor too?”

  “No, just Detective Whitefoot. He’s special,” she added.

  “So you’re gonna write a prescription for me then?” she asked Laurence..

  “Urm no, I can’t do that as I don’t practise anymore,” he replied, uncomfortably.

  “Huh? I don’t get that. You’re a doctor but you don’t do prescriptions? What the fuck!” with that she flung herself back into the chair, her arms raised in disbelief.

  “Detective Whitefoot will get you a prescription when we’ve finished the interview.” Eleanor ignored the look on Laurence’s face. “Now tell me about the comb and the hair stuff.”

  “It was big and white. I didn’t like it much and there were some hair clips but they were crap. Never stayed in your hair. I think she binned them.”

  “Were they heavy?”

  “Listen can I go now?” said Lula-Bell, her urgent need to locate Tara considerably diminished now that Justin had been scooped up by child services.

  “Could you describe the comb and the hair clips to an artist so she can draw them?”

  “You’re shitting me!”

  Eleanor raised an eyebrow to convey the unlikeliness of that.

  “How long is this gonna take?” she groaned.

  “Do you know who this is?” Eleanor pushed the mug shot of Giselle across the table. Lula-Bell snorted. “Yeah it’s…” She stared at the photograph. “ Jeez, they could be twins!”

  “How the hell am I supposed to get Lula a prescription,” bleated Laurence, as he followed Eleanor along the corridor and past the interview rooms.

  “You’re a detective and a medical practitioner now, so it shouldn’t be a problem,” she said, stopping and staring at several metres of biohazard tape zigzagged across the entrance to Interview One. “What happened here?” she asked.

  “Timms was interrogating Muntjack and saw some small louse-like creature run across his forehead. So he dragged him off for a shower and a dose of DDT,” said Laurence smiling.

  “Who’s in Two?”

  “Mo is talking to Tyler Baxton about his whereabouts last night.”

  Eleanor nodded.

  “Wanna watch?” he asked.

  She glanced at her watch and nodded.

  Tyler Baxton’s strangely elongated head lolled despondently in his hands, as he listened to Mo’s questions. There were a couple of empty paper coffee cups littering the table, the one in front of Tyler had been systematically shredded and spread open in front of him like a flower. But all attempts at therapeutic artistry were long gone and he was now sinking into silence.

  “How long have they been in there?” asked Eleanor, as she looked through the two-way mirror that allowed observations to take place without disturbing the process.

  Laurence glanced at his watch. “About an hour. Any chance he did it?”

  She shook her head. “Tyler isn’t a killer, he’s a sex offender. We’re looking for someone organised.”

  “Keeping a body in cold storage for a couple of months and filling a coffin with sand bags requires organisation, surely?”

  “No, it requires opportunity. I imagine Tyler has a fairly low IQ. He wouldn’t be able to deal with or understand the intricacies of avoidance, planning, and execution. He watched the women’s bodies being prepared and handled them with his father. A corpse would be non-judgmental of his appearance and therefore a source of comfort. He wouldn’t want to be parted from them. As to his father, I imagine that he knew or at least suspected what his son was doing.”

  Suddenly Mo stood up and left the room. Eleanor went round to meet him.

  “He’s confessed,” said Mo irritably. “The second he sat down, out it all came but none of it’s matching what we’ve got. I pleaded with him to have legal rep but he wouldn’t. I was hoping we could exonerate him quickly and get him back home but now I’ve got to get a psych evaluation set up and do the paperwork.” He sighed heavily. “What do you want me to do with him?”

  “Give the duty solicitors a quick call and see if they’ve got someone sympathetic who’ll have a talk with him,” suggested Eleanor. “And I’m sure psych owe us a couple of favours.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” said Mo.

  “In the meantime we’ve no choice but to keep him downstairs.”

  Chapter Nine

  Toby had made an exception to the rules today and drove to and from work in his father’s ancient but beautifully maintained Oldsmobile Super 88 Deluxe. It drew considerable attention from both colleagues and pedestrians. Attention was not something Toby wanted but just sitting behind the wheel and listening to the engine’s heavy cardiac beat, made him feel like a man of considered taste. As he pulled the garage doors to and secured them with the double lock, he took a deep inhalation of breath. It was time.

  The basement had been ready for weeks. Toby was extremely cautious when it came to purchasing chemicals and equipment. Never buy in bulk, as that drew suspicion. Never buy from the same outlet, and always stockpile. You never knew when an opportunity would arise to further the collection; neither could you anticipate when artefacts would need emergency conservation. He gritted his teeth at that thought and shook his head. He still couldn’t account for the persistent mould that had covered Giselle’s face and torso. There was nothing wrong or lax about his technique, which had been perfected over the past fifteen years. Admittedly, he had only just started experimenting with plastination as a preserving medium but it had produced some exceptional results. Whereas before he’d been content with the ‘sleepers’, now he had the means to create his family in life-like poses. Giselle had been a touch of genius. She had been given a room in the east end of the building, far away from his wife’s. It would have been intolerable to have housed his mistress so close to his beloved Olivia. Never let it be said that Toby Adams was tactless.

  Giselle’s room had been a homage to fifties bordello chic. He had painted the room a deep purple-red and covered the bed with silk sheets and a thick burgundy bedspread. The lighting had been dimmed almost to nothing and the dressing table was littered with authentic cosmetics and some extremely titillating night attire. His original idea had been to arrange her in a provocative pose across the bed but this new technique had allowed him to have her seated on the edge, in an attitude he described as ‘come hither’, mixed with ‘not tonight!’.

  As a youngster, Toby had stayed with a distant aunt on her farm in Vancouver. Nothing about the place had particularly caught his eye, apart from the cattle crush. A cow requiring either medication or artificial insemination was driven into the steel cage and then a lever was thrown and the box immediately concertinaed, clamping the cow into a vice-like grip. What had astonished Toby was that the animal, once clamped, didn’t fight the process, rather it became strangely subdued and still. When he’d asked one of the farm hands why this should be the case, they’d replied that it calmed them, just like being swaddled calmed a baby. It was with this in mind that he had designed and constructed his own cattle crush out of domestic scaffolding and pipe insulation.

  Tara had been placed inside it several days ago. Persuading her to get in hadn’t been as easy as it was with Giselle. He thought he’d have to resort to aggression but after explaining that it was just a ‘little game’ that would excite both of them, she had ventured in nervously. After chatting to her for several minutes, he had turned off the lights and left her there. She could, of course, move around because he hadn’t applied the crush mechanism. Twice a day he’d cleaned up her mess, provided her with water and engaged in non-confrontational conversation. After the first few embalmings, Toby had decided th
at a couple of days’ fasting would purge the subject’s system and make his work easier and less unpleasant. However, experience had taught him that by denying water, the skin became less hydrated and more vulnerable to post mortem damage. Neither did he want any premature deaths. The art of preservation depended on precisely calculated chemical procedures and any short cuts or aberrations could lead to disaster.

  Toby had already filled the 50 ml syringe with a saturated solution of potassium chloride and had placed it in a small kidney shaped bowl, covered with a hand towel. When he first applied the crush she fought like a cat and, somewhat surprised by this, he hurried the mechanism, only to find that she’d snapped her wrist as the arm-lock swept into position. He could hardly bring himself to look at her hand, which was twisted unpleasantly to the left, a little shard of bone having poked through the skin. There was a moment’s silence before Tara began to howl. Big, lung-splitting animal howls. In a panic he lost his grip on the bowl and let the syringe skitter across the floor to within inches of her feet. She had instantly understood that a momentary hope was to prevent him from getting this and thrust her foot through the bars, stamping it onto the syringe and, allowing the needle to dig in, she scraped it back towards her. Fascinated, Toby stared at her face, which displayed nothing of the serenity to come. Her blood-shot enraged eyes were made more feral by the streaks of dirt and make-up. “You fucking bastard!” she screamed. He felt flecks of saliva spatter his face. “Let me out!” He waited; this was usually the preliminary stance to complete subservience. The rest of his collection had all begged and bartered for the release that would never come. Perhaps she was different to them, feisty, more unpredictable?

  “I’ve got a baby! Please let me go! I ain’t gonna tell anyone…” her voice trailed off as she saw Toby’s expression harden. He was tiring of this stage of the proceedings now. The noise was intolerable and the longer he dithered around in here, the later he would have to work this evening. He lowered himself to the level of her feet. She was whimpering miserably, shaking her head at the injustice or the finality, he wasn’t sure which. He squeezed her foot, lifted it and extracted the syringe tip from the soft pad of skin at the top of her arch. Her howls began to thrum his eardrums once more. He could have reassured her that he had calculated the necessary dose of potassium chloride by gauging her weight, calculating the LD50 dose and adding twenty per cent for good measure. He had dissolved the dose in 50 grams of warm water, ensuring that even if the solution cooled there was still sufficient water to stop any premature re-crystallisation of the compound. He knew that injecting such a large amount of salt solution wouldn’t be distressing; that her heart would stop within minutes and that she would drift away peacefully like all of the others but he suspected she wouldn’t listen, so he didn’t bother.

  Her pulse rate had fallen within ten seconds to a sluggish irregular throb. He held her undamaged hand as she struggled to maintain consciousness but one pupil was already beginning to dilate and her skin had taken on the all too familiar clammy sensation. Toby understood that the last sense to depart would be her hearing, so as he loosened the mechanism and gently extricated her from the apparatus, he spoke slowly and reassuringly to her of how loved and valued she would be as part of his collection. He placed his hand on her chest and waited as her breathing became low and sporadic. In several specimens there had been some spasm, so wary of this he lowered her onto the mattress in the corner of the room and waited, as patiently as he could, for the end.

  There was always the temptation to hurry matters by multi-tasking but Toby had really clamped down on that aspect of his personality recently. He had noticed that, whereas previously, the technique had been the most exciting part, he was now becoming more enthusiastic about the post preparation period, where the new artefact could be arranged, displayed and enjoyed. Perhaps, he mused, it was indicative of his growing maturity and sense of responsibility. So, he focused his energies on the embalming process, not allowing the lure of cosmetic enhancement to detract him.

  Tara lay naked on the dissecting table. The two studio lights positioned at the head and foot of the table made her appear more delicate than he’d expected. It had taken her heart nearly twenty minutes before it finally gave out, her brain, he supposed, had ceased to function within the first ten or so. Toby always shaved and sterilised first, as the stiffening caused by formaldehyde could result in unseemly razor burn. He used an electric shaver to take off the bulk of Tara’s shoulder length, chemically overloaded hair, switching to his father’s ‘cut throat’ ivory handled blade, which had to be handled with extreme care and a great deal of foam lubrication, if he was to avoid cutting the skin. Her face was a little too small and misshapen to accommodate the four-inch blade and, if he was honest, he only used the ‘cut throat’ for its historic value, so he switched to a disposable razor on her face, legs and underarms. The cut hair, foam and sloughed skin were rinsed away with a large bucket of warm water and not wanting to wade through organic mess as he tackled the embalming stage, he methodically sluiced it into the drainage grid positioned below the table. The house had originally been serviced by a large septic tank buried in the garden and although the plumbing in the upper floors was now all connected to the main water and sewage supply, the basement still filtered into it.

  The only aspect of preparation that Toby disliked was the removal of the specimen’s eyes. Not because he was particularly squeamish but because it required such a dexterous touch. He would have loved to have left them in but experience had taught him that they didn’t respond well to the chemical processes and tended to dehydrate, sink and cloud over. So, having withdrawn most of the vitreous humour, to reduce the dimensions of the eye, he inserted a small metal evisceration scoop and carefully removed both, dropping them into a small glass jar filled with alcohol. Everything else was easy. Her eye sockets were plugged with appropriate plastic cups, to ensure that the glass ones would fit when the time came. Toby checked his watch, it had been three hours since her time of death and he knew that post mortem changes had already begun, despite the coolness of the basement there was already a slight stiffening of her jaw. With a practiced hand Toby carefully incised the carotid artery and inserted a threaded arterial tube, which he attached to his rather dated fluid pump. He then placed the drainage tube into the vein and capped it. Having performed at least twenty-five embalmings, he’d learned that a careful build up of the arterial pressure lead to better saturation. He’d give the pump a few minutes and then open the valve to let the blood drain. He’d recently adopted a formaldehyde product with a deep pink dye; this had the advantage of making the skin seem more vibrant and alive later on. Some of his earlier efforts had a rather cadaverous look and these less favoured specimens tended to receive less interest from him. He sighed and straightened his back, admitting that he was feeling rather tired now. As he stood vigil over the transformation he allowed himself a small glass of single malt, appreciating its warmth as it flowed through his veins.

  It was well past eleven pm when Mo knocked quietly on her office door and stuck his head round.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” Eleanor replied, getting up from her chair and limping stiffly towards the door. Mo stood in the corridor; a large envelope tucked under one arm and two mugs of coffee balanced on top of a Tupperware lunch box in his hands.

  “Yeah, says who?” he smiled and walked past her, placing the food on the desk and drawing up his chair.

  “Minnie for one!” Eleanor closed the door and turned on the main light.

  “I’ve been home, got yelled at and then sent out with supper for you,” he said, carefully peeling open the plastic cover from the lunchbox. “From Minnie and she says she’ll know if you ate it or me,” he said shaking his head. “Though I’m fucked if I know how.”

  Eleanor smiled and looked at the chicken salad. “It’s kind of her.”

  Mo shrugged and handed her a fork. “Eat!” She began to pick at the chicken. “Here!” Mo selecte
d a sheet of paper from his file, placed it next to her and tapped it with his index finger. “While you fanny around with your food, read it.”

  Eleanor glanced at the heading, her eyes immediately picking out her handwritten name next to the typed heading, ‘Patient’. It was a photocopied sheet and dated from the previous November.

  “Sue Cheung says you’re having difficulty swallowing…” ventured Mo cautiously.

  “So much for ‘just between her and me’,” she snipped.

  “I am ‘just between her and you!” he said in an outraged tone. “You don’t get to be treated as an individual when you have a partner. We are one. As soon as you agree to take a bullet for one another, you’re closer than a marriage.

  “But you’re not my partner any more are you?” she said quietly.

  “I will always be that. Always. We didn’t get divorced, I just got old and fat.”

  Eleanor felt her throat tightening again; a thick band of leather cutting into her skin and rationing her air supply. Mo stabbed his finger on the paper again. “Read it.” She skimmed through the mundane observations on urine output, ECG readings and temperature charts to the ‘observations’ at the bottom of the page. She read it through twice, struggling with the slanting script as much as the information it revealed. “Do you understand what it’s saying?” Mo said quietly pushing the untouched supper closer to her.

  “Where did you get this? I don’t understand how you got this?”

  Mo sighed, “Dr Blackmore gave it to me.”

  “And you read it?” she asked in disbelief.

  “He asked me to read it and then make sure that you understood the implications,” he said slowly. “Do you understand?”

  Eleanor shook her head silently.

  “Then read it again,” he said firmly. “It says that…”

  “I know what it says!” she could hear her voice bang against the walls of the small office. “It just doesn’t make any sense. They didn’t understand…”