by Allan Folsom
“That only gets us back to McVey’s question,” Noble said. “Why? Why freeze decapitated bodies and a head to that degree, assuming you could get them to absolute zero?”
“To join them,” Richman said, wholly without emotion.
“Join them?” Noble was incredulous.
“It’s the only reason I could begin to give.”
Tugging at an ear, McVey turned away and looked out the window. Outside, the morning was bright and sunny. By contrast, Richman’s office felt like the inside of a musty box. Swiveling back, McVey found himself nose to nose with the labeled brain of a Maltese cat suspended in some kind of liquid preservative inside a bell jar. He looked at Richman. “You’re talking about atomic surgery, correct?”
Richman smiled. “Of sorts. Simply put, at absolute zero, under the application of a strong magnetic field all the atomic particles would be perfectly lined up, and under total control. If we could do that, we could perform atomic cryosurgery. Microsurgery beyond conception.”
“Elaborate a little, if you would, please,” Noble said.
Richman’s eyes brightened and McVey could almost feel his pulse quicken. The whole idea of what he was discussing excited him tremendously. “What it means, Commander, assuming we could freeze people to that degree, operate on them and then thaw them out with no damage to the tissues, is that atoms could be connected. A chemical bond would be formed between them so that a given electron is shared between two different atoms. It would make a seamless connection. The perfect seam, if you will. It would be as if it had been created by nature. Like a tree that grew that way.”
“Is somebody trying to do that?” McVey asked quietly.
“It’s not possible,” Michaels interjected.
McVey looked at him. “Why?”
“Because of the Heisenberg Principle. If I may, Doctor Richman.” Richman nodded at the young pathologist, and Michaels turned to McVey. For some reason he needed the American to know that he knew his business, that he knew what he was talking about. It was important for what they were doing. And beyond that, it was his way of showing and, at the same time, demanding respect.
“It’s a principle of quantum mechanics that says it’s impossible to measure two properties of a quantum object—say an atom or a molecule—at the same time with infinite precision. You can do one or the other but not both. You might tell an atom’s speed and direction but you could not, at the same time, say precisely where it was.”
“Could you do it at absolute zero?” McVey was giving him his due.
“Of course. Because at absolute zero everything would be stopped.”
“Detective McVey,” Richman interjected. “It is possible to get temperatures to less than one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero. It has been done. The concept of absolute zero is just that, a concept. It cannot be reached. It’s impossible.”
“My question, Doctor, was not if it can or it can’t. I asked if someone was trying to do it.” There was a decided edge to McVey’s voice. He’d had enough of theory and now wanted fact. And he was staring at Richman, waiting for an answer.
This was a side of the L.A. detective Noble had never seen and made him realize why McVey had the reputation he did.
“Detective McVey, so far we’ve shown that the freezing was done to one body and one head. X rays have shown metal in only two of the remaining six cadavers. When we have that metal analyzed, we might be able to arrive at a more conclusive judgment.”
“What’s your gut tell you, Doctor?”
“My gut is strictly off the record. Accepting such, I’d venture that what you have are failed attempts at a very sophisticated type of cryosurgery.”
“The head of one person fused to the body of another.”
Richman nodded.
Noble looked at McVey. “Someone is trying to make a modern-day Frankenstein?”
“Frankenstein was created from the bodies of the dead,” Michaels said.
“Good Lord!” Noble said, standing and nearly knocking over a vessel containing the enlarged heart of a professional soccer player. Steadying the jar, he looked from Michaels to Richman. “These people were frozen alive?”
“It would appear so.”
“Then why the evidence of cyanide poisoning in all the victims?” McVey asked.
Richman shrugged. “Partial poisoning? A part of the procedure? Who knows?”
Noble looked at McVey, then stood. “Thank you very much, Doctor Richman. We won’t take more of your time.”
“Just a second, Ian.” McVey turned to Richman. “One other question, Doctor. The head of our John Doe was thawing from the deep freeze when it was discovered. Would it make any difference when it was frozen as to its appearance and pathological makeup when it thawed?”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Richman said.
McVey leaned forward. “We’ve had trouble learning John Doe’s identity. Can’t find out who he is. Suppose we’ve been looking in the wrong place, trying to find a man who’s been missing for the last few days or weeks. What if it had been months, or even years? Would that be possible?”
“It’s a hypothetical question—but I would have to say that if someone had found a means of freezing to absolute zero, then nothing molecular would have been disturbed. So when it thawed there would be no way to tell if the freezing had been done a week ago or hundred years ago or thousand, for that matter.”
McVey looked to Noble. “I think maybe your missing-persons detectives better go back to work.”
“I think you’re right.”
The telephone ringing at McVey’s elbow brought him back and he snatched it up.
“Oy, McVey!”
“Hello, Benny, and cut that out will you? It’s getting repetitive.”
“Got it.”
“Got what?”
“What you asked for. The Interpol, Washington, request for the Albert Merriman file was time-stamped by the sergeant who took it at eleven thirty-seven A.M., Thursday, six October.”
“Benny, eleven thirty-seven A.M. Thursday in New York is four thirty-seven Thursday afternoon in Paris.”
“So?”
“The request was for that file, nothing else—”
“Yeah—”
“It wasn’t until about eight A.M., Paris time, Friday, that the inspector in charge of the case for the Paris P.D. got a photocopy of the print. Just a print. Nothing else. But fifteen hours before that, somebody at Interpol not only had the print, they had a name and a file to go with it.”
“Sounds like you got interior trouble. A cover-up. Or private agenda. Or who knows—But if something goes wrong it’s the investigating cop who’s on the line because you can bet four ways from Sunday there won’t be any record of who got the first transmission.”
“Benny—”
“What, boobalah?”
“Thanks.”
Interior trouble, cover-up, private agenda. McVey hated those words. Something was going on somewhere inside Interpol, and Lebrun was holding the bag without knowing it. He wouldn’t like it, but he had to be told. The trouble was when McVey finally got through to him in Paris twenty minutes later, he didn’t get that far.
“McVey, mon ami” Lebrun said, excitedly. “I was just about to call you. Things are suddenly very complex around here. Three hours ago Albert Merriman was found floating in the Seine. He looked like a big cheese chewed over with an automatic weapon. The car he’d been driving was discovered about ninety kilometers upstream, close to Paris. Your Doctor Osborn’s prints were all over it.”
43
* * *
WITHIN THE hour McVey was in a taxi, heading for Gatwick Airport. He’d left Noble and Scotland Yard scouring missing-person files for anyone who bore the description of their John Doe and who’d had head surgery requiring the implant of a steel plate and, at the same time, quietly checking every hospital and medical school in southern England for people or programs experimenting in radical surgery techniques. For a time he’d
entertained the thought of requesting Interpol, Lyon, to have police departments do the same throughout Continental Europe. But because of the Lebrun/Albert Merriman file situation he decided to hold off. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, was going on inside Interpol, but if something was, he didn’t want something similar happening with his investigation. If McVey hated anything, it was having things going on behind his back. In his experience most of them were petty and backbiting, aggravating and time consuming but essentially harmless, but this one he wasn’t so sure about. Better to hold off and see what Noble could turn up first, on the quiet.
It was now 5:30 P.M., Paris time. Air France Flight 003 had left Charles de Gaulle Airport for L.A. at five o’clock as scheduled. Doctor Paul Osborn should have been on it but he wasn’t. He’d never shown up for the flight, which meant his passport was still in the hands of the Paris police.
Increasingly, McVey was distrusting his own judgment of the man. Osborn had lied about the mud on his shoes. What else had he lied about?
Outwardly and under questioning, he’d appeared to be, and admitted being, exactly what McVey thought he was a well-educated man approaching middle age head over heels in love with a younger woman. Scarcely anything significant in that. The difference now was that two men were violently dead and McVey’s “well-educated man in love” was connected to both.
The killings of Albert Merriman and Jean Packard aside, something else was gnawing at McVey, and had been even before he’d spoken to Lebrun: Dr. Stephen Richman’s off-the-record remark that the deep frozen, headless bodies might well be the result of failed attempts at a very advanced kind of cryosurgery attempting to join a severed head to a body not its own. And Dr. Paul Osborn was not only a surgeon, but an orthopedic surgeon, and expert in the human skeletal structure, someone who might very well know how these things could be done.
From the first McVey had believed he was looking for one man. Maybe he’d had him and let him go.
Osborn woke out of a dream and, for a moment, had no idea where he was. Then, with sudden clarity, Vera’s face came into view. She was sitting on the bed next to him, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth. She wore black, wide-legged slacks and a loose sweater of the same color. The black of the cloth and soft light made her features seem almost fragile, like delicate porcelain.
“You were running a high fever; I think it’s broken,” she said gently. Her dark eyes held the same sparkle they had the first time they’d met, which Osborn, for some reason, calculated had been only nine days earlier.
“How long was I out?” he said, weakly.
“Not long. Maybe four hours.”
He started to sit up, but sharp pain shot through the back of his thigh. Wincing, he lay back down.
“If you’d have let me take you to the hospital, you might be a little more comfortable.”
Osborn stared at the ceiling. He didn’t remember telling her not to go to a hospital, but he must have. Then he remembered he’d told her about Kanarack and his father and the detective, Jean Packard.
Getting up from the bed, Vera lay the wash cloth; in the pan she’d been using to keep the cloth damp, and moved to a table under a small, clam-shaped window that had a dark curtain pulled across it.
Puzzled, Osborn looked around. To his right was the door to the room. To his left, another door was open to a small bathroom. Above him, the ceiling pitched sharply so that the side walls were much shorter, than the end walls. This wasn’t the room he’d been in before. He was somewhere else, in a room like an attic.
“You’re at the top of the building in a chamber under the eaves. It was built by the Resistance in 1940. Almost no one knows it’s here.”
Lifting the cover from a tray on the table where she’d set the washbasin, Vera came back and set it down on the bed beside him. On it was a bowl with hot soup, a spoon and napkin.
“You need to eat,” she said. Osborn only stared at her.
“The police came looking for you. So I had you moved up here.”
“Had me?”
“Philippe, the doorman, is an old and trusted friend.”
“They found Kanarack’s body, didn’t they?”
Vera nodded. “The car, too. I told you they’d come when that happened. They wanted to come up to the apartment but I said I was on my way out. I met them in the lobby.”
Osborn let out a weak sigh and stared off.
Vera sat down on the bed beside him and picked up the spoon. “You want me to feed you?”
“That much I can manage.” Osborn grinned weakly.
Taking the spoon, he dipped it into the soup and began to eat. It was a bouillon of some kind. The salt in it tasted good and he ate for several minutes without stopping. Finally, he laid the spoon aside, wiped his mouth with the napkin and rested.
“I’m in no shape to run from anybody.”
“No, you’re not.” ‘
“You’re going to get in trouble helping me.”
“Did you kill Henri Kanarack?”
“No.”
“Then how can I get in trouble?” Vera got up and a picked the tray from the bed. “I want you to rest. I’ll come up later and change the bandages.”
“It’s not just the police.”
“What do you mean?”
“How are you going to explain me to—him. Frenchy?”
Slinging the tray over one hip like a café waitress, Vera looked down at him. “Frenchy,” she said, “is no longer in the picture.”
“No?” Osborn was stunned.
“No—” A slight smile crept over her.
“When did that happen?”
“The day I met you.” Vera’s eyes never left him. “Now, go to sleep. In two hours I’ll be back.”
Vera closed the door and Osborn lay back. He was tired. As tired as he’d ever been in his life. He glanced at his watch. It was 7:35, Saturday night, October 8.
And outside, beyond the window curtain of his tiny cell, Paris was beginning to dance.
44
* * *
AT PRECISELY the same time, and some twenty-three miles out on the Autoroute Al, McVey’s Air Europe Fokker 100 touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Fifteen minutes later he was being driven back toward Paris by one of Lebrun’s uniformed officers.
By this time he seemed to know every nook and turn in Charles de Gaulle Airport. He ought to; he’d barely been out of it twenty-four hours when he was back.
Nearing Paris, Lebrun’s driver crossed the Seine and headed toward the Porte d’Orleans. In his broken English, he told McVey Lebrun was at a crime scene and wished McVey to meet him there.
The rain had started again by the time they pushed through a half block of fire equipment and rows of onlookers held back by uniformed gendarmes. Pulling up in front of a still-smoldering, burned-out shell of an apartment building, the driver got out and led McVey over a crisscross of high-pressure hoses and sweat-caked firemen still playing water on smoking hot spots.
The building was a total loss. The roof and the entire top floor were gone. Twisted steel fire escapes, arched and bowed by extreme heat into opposing courses, like unfinished elevated highway sections, dangled precariously from the upper floors, held there by brickwork that threatened to collapse at any moment. Between the floors, discernible through burned-out window casings, were the scorched and charred timbers that were once the walls and ceilings of individual apartments. And hanging over everything, despite the steadily falling rain, was the un-mistakable stench of burned flesh.
Skirting a pile of debris, the driver took McVey to the back of the building where Lebrun stood with Inspectors Barras and Maitrot in the glare of portable work lights, talking with a heavyset man in a fireman’s jacket.
“Ah, McVey!” Lebrun said out loud as McVey stepped into the light. “You know Inspectors Barras and Maitrot. This is Captain Chevallier, assistant chief of the Port d’Orleans arson battalion.”
“Captain Chevallier.” McVey and the arson chief shook han
ds.
“This thing was set?” McVey said, glancing up again at the destruction.
“Oui” Chevallier said, finishing with a brief explanation in French.
“It burned very hot, and very quickly, set off by some kind of extremely sophisticated device, probably using a military-type incendiary,” Lebrun translated. “No one had a chance. Twenty-two people. All dead.”
For a long moment McVey said nothing. Finally he asked, “Any idea why?”
“Yes,” Lebrun said definitively, not trying to hide his anger. “One of them owned the car Albert Merriman was driving when your friend Osborn found him.”
“Lebrun,” McVey said,, quietly but directly. “First of all, Osborn’s not my friend. Second, let me guess that the Merriman car was owned by a woman.”
“That’s a good guess,” Barras said in English.
“Her name was Agnes Demblon.”
Lebrun’s eyebrows raised. “McVey. You truly amaze me.”
“What do you have on Osborn?” McVey avoided the compliment.
“We found his rented Peùgeot, parked on a Paris street more than a mile from his hotel. It had three parking tickets, so it hadn’t been driven since early afternoon, yesterday.”
“No sign of him since?”
“We have a citywide out for him, and provincial police are checking the countryside between where Merriman’s body washed ashore and where his car was found.”
Nearby, two burly firemen dragged the scorched remains of a child’s crib through an open door and dropped it on the ground beside the burned-out shell of a box spring. McVey watched them, then turned back to Lebrun.
“The place you found Merriman’s car, let’s go there.”
The yellow lights of Lebrun’s white Ford cut through the darkness as the Parisian detective turned onto the road along the Seine leading toward the park where the police had found Agnes Demblon’s Citroën.
“He called himself Henri Kanarack. He worked at a bakery near the Gare du Nord and had for about ten years. Agnes Demblon was the bookkeeper there,” Lebrun said, lighting a cigarette from the lighter in die console. “Obviously they had a history together. What it was exactly we will have to imagine because he was married to a Frenchwoman named Michele Chalfour.”