CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  But this time, everything clicked. He had that swampy something that made her breath catch, and as a bonus, he could complete a sentence. Okay, he liked modern jazz, his closet looked like World War I, but he showed up for dates on the button—a metaphor with some resonance, since their dates recently both began and ended in bed.

  While she had been blithely mooning on about him, the man had been at work. His hands glided lightly over her breasts, but his face was distant. “Isn’t it a wonderful accident?” she asked.

  “Huh? What?”

  “How mine are exactly the same size as your hands?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Another snappy comeback. And here I thought I was sleeping with Oscar Wilde.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “About what?” She hoped it wasn’t Susan. He had these flashes, somber and pensive.

  Alex sighed. “I dunno, memories just come into your head sometimes. A while back, right after the divorce, I was taking a late-night flight. Plane half empty, had a couple drinks. Noticed a really striking blonde in the seat next to me.”

  “It took that long?”

  He ignored her amused jibe. “She was a stewardess, off duty, flying to meet her boyfriend. So we started talking, had some more drinks—she got them for free.”

  “Why don’t I like the direction of this story?”

  “Calm down. It was one of those moments that can happen while you’re traveling. Strangers in the night. Big plane, passengers nodding off, only us talking, as if we were alone together at thirty-five thousand feet. I start wondering can I make a pass.”

  “She had a boyfriend!”

  “But no ring. Hunting season’s still open, I figure. So we’re hitting it off, and then she asks me if I’ll do her a favor. Couple days before, she says, she had an operation. Cosmetic. Her breasts enlarged.”

  “Are you sure this isn’t the opening of a dirty joke?”

  She was instantly sorry she had spoken, because his eyes had a mournful quality. He simply shook his head, his neck muscles bulging as he tightened his throat against some suppressed emotion. “Surprise for the boyfriend, she says. Did I like them? So I look closer and tell her, sure. Then she says yeah, they’re just what she wanted for him, but she’s a little worried. She wonders if they, you know, feel right. To a man.”

  “So… would you—”

  “Right. And I did. They felt perfect.”

  “Another triumph for technology.”

  “I know it sounds funny, but it was really, well, innocent. There were tears in her eyes when I said they were okay. I realized I had no chance with that lady, ever.”

  “True love.”

  “It was. But now we know that some of the implant material can degenerate, maybe cause cancer. Silicone can get out into the rest of the body. I think about the woman sometimes. Things we do for love, they can turn out funny.”

  In some eccentric way, she saw, this story was a shadow of his divorce. But it was also about them. Falling in love was taking chances. Sometimes ones you never suspected.

  “Oh, Alex…”

  His hands moved lightly over her nipples. Then he grinned devilishly. “Hers were the same size as my hands, too.”

  She rolled against him and covered his mouth with a wet, sloppy kiss.

  Her doorbell rang.

  Alex gave her a quizzical lifted eyebrow.

  She was the sort of person who could let a telephone ring incessantly if she did not feel inclined to talk, but she always answered a doorbell. Physical presence somehow made an unavoidable demand. She pulled on an off-white terrycloth robe, automatically checking the disarray of her living room as she passed through, but nothing short of a major sweep-and-destroy would help much. She had been at I2 most of the last two days, helping with the suspension of Susan. The ruins of last night’s dinner—Gourmet Takeout of Laguna—sprawled across her broad glass coffee table.

  She cracked the door an inch, letting in sharp sunlight that rebuked her disorder, and saw Sheila. The black woman wore a denim blue sheath dress with a matching silk scarf, shiny black high heels, and flecked hose. The top flaunted orange stitching and brass wrist buttons.

  “Ready to hit the avenue?” Sheila asked brightly.

  “Uh-oh. Is that today?”

  “Sure is, gal. We were gonna do the fashion dance, strut through a few dozen stores, remember?”

  Kathryn’s mind stalled, refused to provide a solution to this small social dilemma. Well then, play it straight. “I’m running a little behind. Come in.”

  “You look like you just woke up. I guess you weren’t just scammin’ when you called in, said you had to be at that chiller place.”

  “Coffee will repair the damage. Uh, there’s somebody else—”

  “Hi, Sheila,” Alex said, walking in as casually as possible from the bedroom, tucking his lumberjack shirt into denims. Sheila took one blink to catch on and then smiled broadly. “Glad to see you haven’t been wasting all your time, girl.”

  She had felt a spark of irritation at Alex for being so blatant, but then saw that speaking straight was the best way with Sheila. They weren’t alert enough to bring off even a minor deception. As well, she felt a spark of elation that Sheila now knew. First chance they had alone, Kathryn could now share some delicious secrets. “Let’s say the chiller job has its compensations,” Kathryn said wryly.

  Sheila grinned. “I’ll say. Wish I could get work like that.”

  Alex ambled into the kitchen and found the coffee pot. “Boyfriend trouble?”

  “Can’t have that kind of trouble anymore, ‘cause I got no boyfriend.”

  Kathryn’s mouth pursed with concern. “Really? Fred, wasn’t it? He seemed very nice.”

  Sheila’s eyebrows shot up in mock surprise. “That’s it—I knew there was somethin’ wrong with him.”

  Alex said, “Speaking as an official Nice Guy of America, I take umbrage.”

  “I thought umbrage was a color.” Sheila found the coffee grinder and started pouring beans into its snout. “Kind of dark blue.”

  They had moved into easy synchronization, waltzing around the galley kitchen as though they had all been making breakfast together for a thousand years. Yellow sunlight slanted through the warming space. Kathryn got out some raisin bran muffins and put them in the microwave. “You’ll get another right away,” she said. “No doubt about that. What’s your all-time record for going without male companionship?”

  “Ummm. Three weeks. Watched enough TV to puke.”

  “Three whole weeks,” Alex said. “Practically a nun.”

  Sheila winked. “More like a monk. Monkey business was what I had in mind.”

  The telephone rang. Kathryn took it, and Gary Flint’s clipped voice asked for Alex. Geez, she thought, maybe I should take out an ad announcing that we’re having an affair. Just in case a few people in the Western Hemisphere don’t know.

  Alex took it, and she went to change clothes. When she emerged from her bedroom, wearing a simple pastel cotton that would not get her arrested but would keep Alex suitably involved, he was still on the telephone. He listened, then said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh. I’ve got all the paperwork in the car. We’ll do it now. Right. G’bye.”

  Kathryn bit into a warm muffin and chased it with aromatic coffee. The world began to improve. Alex stood for a long moment, staring into space, and then focused on the kitchen, the women. Kathryn did not like the gray pallor that had come into his face.

  “The coroner’s office just called I2. They want to know why we haven’t come in to file the death certificate and a VS-9 form.”

  “Because we have three days to do it,” Kathryn said.

  “They want it done now.”

  “Immediately?”

  “Right now, Gary said. I’ve got the paperwork in my car. I was planning to drop by there today anyway.”

  Kathryn sipped her coffee to suppress a gathering sense of alarm. “Sounds funny.”

  Alex said, “
I’d better get over there.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Kathryn said on impulse. She would fret until she knew what was going on.

  “Girl, we’ve got a lot of shopping to do,” Sheila said amiably.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. This won’t take long.”

  “Okay. I’ll meet you at Smithson’s, on Euclid.”

  “That’s the leather place?”

  “Yeah, they got a permanent tap on my paycheck. But gal, you’re dressed a little too alive for the dead folks place.”

  “What? Oh.” Kathryn looked down at her cotton dress, for which “well-tailored” was perhaps an understatement. “Okay, I’ll change.”

  When she came out of her bedroom again Alex was coming through the front door, shaking his head. “Damned Volvo.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Won’t start. Battery’s okay, though.”

  Sheila said, “What’s the problem? You can go in Kathryn’s.”

  “Mine’s in the shop,” Kathryn said.

  Sheila made a disgusted face. “Don’t tell me we’re all members of the Clunker Club?”

  A charter member, bucking for lifetime, Kathryn thought ruefully. She was going to have to go deep into the plastic just to get hers back out of the shop.

  Alex shrugged, his eyes a thousand miles away. “Poverty sharpens the mind.” He blinked when both women laughed.

  Sheila dropped them off outside the gray concrete coroner’s office, near the Orange County jail. A receptionist let them wait the required five minutes, then ushered them down an antiseptically lit corridor. Kathryn could glimpse along side hallways the steel gurneys bearing white-sheeted burdens.

  There was a curiously neutral smell to this place, as if its business must at all costs be kept matter-of-fact. People used to say they knew death both as an enemy and as a friend, she remembered, because it sometimes at least brought an end to suffering. It came right into the house and sat with you for a while, stayed for supper, and left its calling card, an empty space where once somebody you loved had been.

  Those days were gone. Loved ones and friends went off to scrupulously clean emporiums to die, as politely as being ushered out of a play. And if your case caught the eye of the coroner, you made one last stop here, to contribute another digit to the world’s all-consuming curiosity.

  The receptionist left them in a crowded office. One wall was covered with framed citations, medical degrees in pathology, and photos of the coroner, Miles Wellington, shaking hands with the Board of Supervisors, with Donald Bren of the Irvine Company, and with similar local luminaries. Their smiles had a rigid cast. Quite fitting, Kathryn mused; they were all involved in the dying away of the best in Orange County.

  Dr. Wellington nodded to them but did not shake hands. Kathryn had noticed that none of the police did either, apparently to keep some psychological space between them and the public. On Wellington’s big oak desk was an outsize coffee mug, with bloodred lettering stenciled in: DEAD CERTAIN.

  Dr. Wellington’s sense of humor did not reach as far as his stiff, downturned mouth, however. “I have some questions about this body, and your treatment of it,” he said.

  “We have a copy of the death certificate, a VS-9, and other forms here,” Alex offered.

  “I’m sure you do, and all filled out. You people have always had your paperwork in order.” Wellington’s clipped voice had an edge, as though he were savoring this. “But I have other issues in mind.”

  Wellington pressed a button and into the office, led by the receptionist, came Dr. Blevin and Detective Stern. The shock of both appearing left Kathryn speechless. A tart dread soured her mouth.

  Blevin and Stern sat on a long couch. Each nodded to them but said nothing.

  Wellington sat back in his leather lounger, plainly pleased with his theatrics. Coroners were basically politicians in Orange County. “Dr. Blevin called me to express his own suspicions that Dr. Susan Hagerty’s death was in fact a suicide. Studying the photographs and other evidence, I find the circumstances do warrant such a preliminary hypothesis. As a physician, Dr. Hagerty would have realized that such a fall of approximately fifty feet would probably be fatal, but people have survived such heights before. Physicians more often use drugs. Therefore I was interested to find that under further study her urine sample showed traces of fluoxetine.”

  “What’s that?” Alex asked. Somehow he seemed calmer under pressure than he had on the drive over.

  “An antidepressant.”

  “At what concentration?” Kathryn asked. Wellington looked like the kind who would grant you some respect if you got into the technical details a bit. She was winging it, actually; she had no idea what was an important amount. She tried to remember the drunk-driver level for blood alcohol. A tenth of a percent?

  “A tenth of a microgram per milliliter. Also triatolam at 0.1 microgram per milliliter. The hurried lab analysis at UCI failed to turn these up.”

  “No wonder,” Alex said, giving Kathryn a grateful look. “Those sound like trace amounts with no pharmacologic effect.”

  Wellington was unbothered. “True, but they are indicative.”

  “So she was taking an antidepressant and a sleeping pill. So what?”

  “This is a physician prescribing for herself, perhaps indicative of a problem. If Dr. Hagerty was experiencing depression, there is a chance that it suddenly got the better of her.”

  “While she was out jogging?” Kathryn asked, incredulous.

  “Mood swings are difficult to explain,” Wellington said. “We are some years away from procedures that could yield psychological profiles of the deceased through neurochemical analysis. Such measurements could perhaps tell us whether she was depressed, suicidal, even angry or homicidal. But even without such certainty, there are grounds here for suspicion.”

  “Given her behavior the last few weeks,” Dr. Blevin said in a flat, professional voice, “there were more than mere suspicions.”

  Kathryn could not stop herself from snapping, “What’s that mean?”

  Blevin gave her a cold glance. “She was plainly self-destructive. If she had confessed right away to her doings, perhaps even thrown herself on the mercy of the dean, then—”

  “She intended to fight you all the way,” Kathryn shot back. “That’s not depressed or suicidal. It took guts.”

  “I hope you don’t think you are qualified to pass judgment on a clinical matter,” Dr. Blevin said sarcastically.

  Kathryn reminded herself that the real power here lay with the coroner, not Blevin, and said nothing. She had to bite her tongue to do it.

  Dr. Wellington glanced at Blevin and said, “I am not certain whether an autopsy would give us any further evidence of suicide, in any case. But of course, that is what an autopsy is for—to reveal the unsuspected.”

  Alex said earnestly, “Look, I don’t for a moment think Susan threw herself off that bluff. That’s not her.”

  “Your concern is of course understandable,” Wellington began, clearly launching into a set speech. “Still, you surely must see—”

  “But even if it was, so what? A determination of suicide would just move her from one column of statistics to another. I know your job is looking after those statistics, but this is a person.”

  “California Code, Section 27491, makes this office responsible for investigating the circumstances, manner, and cause of all deaths other than natural,” Wellington recited.

  Alex leaned forward. “You’re not listening. The bodies that come in here, they’re really gone, dead. Susan isn’t. The structure of her body—and her mind, her self—is preserved in liquid nitrogen, at minus three hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “I’m not responsible for that,” Wellington said. “You are.”

  Blevin said with professional smoothness, “This hope of regenerating tissues after they have suffered that much freezing damage—well, it’s a fantasy. An absurd scheme used to separate suckers from their cash.”


  “We can’t revive them now, sure,” Alex said. “But fifty years from now? Who knows? Not you, Dr. Blevin. Meanwhile, thanks, we’ll hold on to what we can save—and that means not letting Susan get cut up. That’s what you plan, isn’t it?”

  “A complete autopsy, yes. The law requires it.” Dr. Wellington had kept a mild composure, Kathryn noticed. His eyes said that he knew a deep secret: that they would all be the same, once they stopped breathing.

  “Doing that would destroy all of Susan that remains,” Alex said. “All to find out if she committed suicide? You know, sir, how hard it is to tell if somebody jumped rather than slipped. Hell, it’s impossible. The body isn’t going to show you anything.”

  Dr. Wellington nodded, still quite calm and resolute. “There are further grounds. Detective Stern?”

  Kathryn had wondered why the detective was here at all. Now his angular features lost their reflective cast, and he said sardonically, “You two didn’t mention the fact that Susan Hagerty was assaulted a few weeks ago. Right on your own company property, too. I had to turn it up from the county sheriff’s blotter.”

  The silence that followed was just long enough to be embarrassing. Kathryn’s memory rang with what Alex had said when she had brought up that uncomfortable fact: That was a random incident. No connection to this.

  “We forgot it in the excitement, that’s all,” Alex said. “It was just some transient. He knocked her down and ran away.”

  “The sheriff’s office listed it as ‘assailant unknown,’ though,” Stern said.

  “Because they didn’t try any harder,” Alex countered.

  Kathryn said, “It was a minor injury.”

  Stern said tightly, “But now, along with this fatality—”

  “They’re unrelated, I tell you!” Alex was at last breaking open.

  “We don’t know that,” Stern said flatly.

  “You can’t mean that you’ll destroy her, just to—”

  “She is dead,” Blevin said sternly. “Your silly dreams about reviving her do not carry any weight here.”