Bob shook his head. “I can’t. Not legally qualified to.”
“Then if we suspend him,” Kathryn said shakily, “it’s—it’s…”
“Technically, maybe they could call it murder,” Ray said.
“The medical examiner,” Kathryn said desperately. “Would he be satisfied with a set of samples Bob could take?”
Bob thought, inhaling deeply. “I could draw blood through a femoral stick, so the ME could run a toxicology screen.”
“That would be enough?” Kathryn asked.
“Sometimes it is, to rule out foul play by poisoning. But this is clear trauma. I could document that with photographs, which might help, sure, but—”
“We can all testify that Alex was dead.”
“That won’t stand up,” Bob said.
Ray nodded grudgingly. “Prob’ly not.”
“But if we wait for an ambulance, for the cops, it’ll be way too late,” Bob said. “The ME will do a complete autopsy.”
“We can’t let them!” Kathryn exploded.
Bob’s face was ashen, jaw muscles clenching. “Right. Alex, he dedicated his life to this. To let him slip away…”
“We got to choose,” Ray said quietly.
Kathryn held her breath. She could try to persuade them, but she sensed that words would do little good now. These were the kind of men who could not be herded with more talk.
Ray scowled at Bob. “I know it’s a big risk for you.”
Bob’s mouth drew into a tight line. “For all of us.”
Kathryn studied Alex’s face. It was calm, unworried, with only a single curved scar under one eye that had crusted over with brown blood. She had to struggle to get the words out. “Yes—yes, but he would like that—want that—”
For a long moment they studied each other’s faces. Somehow a sad but determined confirmation passed among them.
“Let’s go,” Ray said.
Bob began working, assembling materials. Ray swung a basin around Alex’s head and started filling it with water and ice. Kathryn noted with numb incomprehension that the ice was all ready, prepared by Ray sometime when she had not noticed. Had he done that while they were out there, finding Alex? It would be like Ray, covering all the possibilities. But not calling an ambulance, she thought. Not endangering Susan’s precious frozen self. She felt a spurt of anger, a cutting red rage that shot through her and forced open her mouth, but all that came out was a sharp wail, a forlorn note of hopeless grief. Ray embraced her, the room whirled, and she sagged against a counter. She sobbed as convulsive gasps wracked her. It seemed to go on a long time, a boundless time of utter despair.
And then, seemingly without transition, she was packing more ice into the tank that had somehow come to envelop Alex. There was no memory of anything in between, and she could breathe again without the sobs breaking through anymore. She realized that they were well into the suspension process. Time had passed, and she had no memory of it. Bob had opened arteries to gain access to Alex’s circulation. Alex was now the focus of IVs, lines carrying dark red blood, paraphernalia that seemed to bristle from him. She could no longer see enough of his face to read his expression. I didn’t get to kiss him good-bye, she thought. He’s really gone.
Kathryn found herself with a clipboard, noting down medications, dosages, flow rates as Bob and Ray called them out. Everything focused to a narrow sphere in which she followed orders, wrote, held tubes, fetched. And it was all under glass for her now, hollow sounds and sights and smells from far, far away.
2
GEORGE
The great Marble Cathedral towered against a pale sky just beginning to ease open with the glow of dawn. George hurried under the twisted trunks of the oak grove. The gnarled trees were peaceful in day’s bland light, but now in the diffuse hour when shadows began to melt, they seemed like hunched-over, malevolent spirits, casting a waxy gloom. He shivered. Cutting pain laced through his belly. He had tied a crude compress over the places where the screwdriver had stabbed, but they kept oozing something. He would tend to that later. Now he had to still his mind, regain the analytical side of himself. Only it could deal with the host of torments that dogged him.
He angled along the long brick flank of meeting rooms, past the cafeteria and a warren used for Bible classes. He had spent many a fine hour here, keeping fellowship with others of the cathedral flock. It had been a quiet honor to sit among them, to share their singsong prayers and fried chicken dinners, all the while knowing that no one suspected that he was a special warrior of the Lord. A fighter who would look after the little ones while busy mothers fussed in the kitchen, who would help out with some quiet generosity when a church member was down on his luck.
The Reverend’s private residence was dark. He felt the huge steel cross soaring above the complex as a rebuke, a frown. But he had to get help, some balm to soothe his turmoil, and the Reverend himself had said that George was to come to him in time of affliction.
Guilt clung to him as he slipped alongside the Reverend’s quarters. The door he usually came in was Douglas fir, deeply stained. He had always admired its solidity and without even thinking about it had remembered the standard lock and safety chain. Now in the ebbing shadows he did not need to see it clearly to know how it worked. His gray guilt ebbed as he got out his equipment. Doing a job got his mind away from the raucous clash of feelings.
The lock was easy. His pick popped it open within moments. He had learned that as a boy, but the next part he had worked out on his own, practicing on his own apartment door. He had learned a lot of things a man needed to move silently and shrewdly through this world, and most of it from books that the libraries were only too happy to lend him.
He fished rubber bands and thumb tacks from his jacket pocket. All his tools were innocuous, easy to carry and arousing no suspicion, even if he were stopped here by police. The door swung open without a squeak and thunked against its chain. He had just a narrow crack to work in. In the gloom he had to do it by feel. A thick rubber band, looped around the thumb tack, right. He used tacks with broad heads because the usual ones slipped through his thick fingers.
It was a little tricky reaching as far around the back of the door as he could, and then mashing the tack into the Douglas fir. He tugged at the rubber band, getting it snagged right. When it was firmly trapped, he stretched it back and looped it around the knob on the chain. Good—the distance was right, the rubber band stretched nice and tight.
He eased the door nearly shut. In the morning stillness he heard the faint clack as the rubber band shortened and the knob slid along its track. He stopped, the door nearly closed. The knob was sitting at the end point of the channel. He jiggled the door a little. The chain clattered as it fell out of the track.
This was better, yes, much better than banging on a door, calling attention to himself. Swift, sure, a shadow. The pain in him had cleared his head some now. He was ready to report.
The soft carpets made him soundless as he slipped along the corridors he knew so well. From outside he had figured out where the Reverend slept, and sure enough, the door he had guessed swung open upon a king-size bed.
“Reverend?” He advanced into the shadowy recesses.
“Uh?”
“Reverend?”
“Wha’? Who…”
“I had to come, to tell. The hurt’s bad, but I held it.”
“Who’s that?” This voice was different. A woman’s voice.
“The hurt—” George stopped, open-mouthed. Two forms sat up from the bed. A lamp snapped on. Light flooded across the Reverend and a woman, a woman in a white silk nightgown, a woman he knew.
“Sister Angel.” He stepped back.
She always looked so regal and pure and remote in the choir, sweet songnotes spilling forth from her lovely mouth. Here she was frowsy, heavy-lidded, hair a tangle, lipstick smeared.
“What the hell are you doing here?” the Reverend demanded.
“I—I came, you said—”
“Haven’t you the decency to knock?” Sister Angel crossed her arms over her full breasts, though they were covered by a filmy nightgown.
“I thought the Reverend, he would be…”
The Reverend said sternly, “Outside, George. Out.”
The minutes standing in the hallway were miserable. George brushed away tears and tried to regain the calm he had attained only moments before, but sobs came welling up from his chest and had to get out. The pain got worse, too. When he looked at the bandage it was sticky, bloody, a foul matted mess that made him ashamed again.
He heard the Reverend’s deep tones from behind the bedroom door, but no answer from Sister Angel. He thought of how he had worked with the sister at church gatherings, admiring her without being able to say much of anything to her, tongue-tied and awed. Was she listening now to the Reverend apologize for George? The Reverend spoke again, short murmuring phrases, and George realized that he was probably talking on the telephone, probably alerting the guards, if there were any.
He had just thought about this when the bedroom door jerked open. He caught a glimpse of Sister Angel standing beside the bed, face dark with anger, her breasts heaving against the white silk. The door slammed shut. The Reverend stood fuming, scowling at George. He wore a red satin robe, arms folded across his chest. He gestured curtly toward his study and strode ahead. George followed. In the heavy silence George heard the snick-snick of the Reverend’s legs rubbing the silk, a soft sound of wealth. When they reached the solemn, shrouded room, George felt some comfort from the aromas of wood and leather.
“You should never violate a sanctified dwelling,” the Reverend said, standing tall beside the desk. Dawn streamers lit the stained-glass windows behind him.
“I never thought, sir, I mean, you and Sister Angel—”
“You do not need to think of that. Your mission lies elsewhere.”
“I don’t mean to criticize, honest, I—”
“You will have to apologize to the lady.”
“Yes God yes I will.”
“You were very unwise to come here this way.”
“I had to. There’s something, I don’t know what it means.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
George looked down at himself. The stain had spread on his sweatsuit, and his hand came away bloody. “Nothing, I’ll get it fixed up.”
“You got into trouble.”
“I was doing good work. I went there, I found the Hagerty woman.”
“The… corpse? Where? Have you got it?”
“No, but I found their place, back on the ridge behind their building.”
“Very fine, very fine. But they injured you?”
“Nothing to it. I got one of them, though. That fellow who rebuked you on the television.”
“Cowell? What do you mean, ‘got’ him?”
“I killed him. Same as before.”
“Killed?” The Reverend gasped.
“You said I was to smite them.”
“But—before?”
“Hagerty. I did him same as to her, smote him, threw him down.”
“Threw?” The Reverend’s mouth worked, but no sounds came out.
“You knew about the white bones, how they are God’s necessary.”
“Bones…? I did not—tell you to…”
“Reverend, I didn’t plan it out right this time.” His voice was high and plaintive, a boy’s plea. “Something’s happened, something that made me kill Cowell before I meant to. There’s this Lomax—you didn’t tell me about him—and I, Karen, she was in with him somehow, so after I felt so funny from her, you know, I saw Lomax, and then this other thing, with Cowell, it happened fast, so fast I couldn’t think. That’s what I want the help with.”
The Reverend sagged against his desk, pale and vacant-eyed. “Help?”
“I don’t understand. Dr. Lomax, something from him, I can’t remember it. Made me do this thing. I can’t keep straight and true now, my hard half, it needs to come out, I can’t go like this, sir.”
“Lomax—you didn’t hurt him?”
“Oh no. No.”
“Thank God. But… Cowell.”
“Well, yessir. I saw it was right when you spoke to me, the chillers and all.”
“As… before?”
“Well, yeah. But that was before I found you and my Calling.”
“And Karen, too?”
“Now that was where things started to go wrong. I honestly do not know why that happened, sir. I don’t even recall most of it.”
“But you did it. I gave you her, and you slew her.”
“I knew you didn’t want to know the worst of me.”
The Reverend’s face collapsed into a haggard mask. “I—I never let you tell me outright. My way of… keeping a distance, I suppose.”
“I kind of guessed what you wanted.”
“I was able to tell myself that you were just making trouble for them. I had it on good authority that you were all right.”
“What authority?”
The Reverend’s eyes became veiled, wary. “The Church fathers in Arizona.”
“I am all right. I had to, the white bones and all, only Karen—”
Reverend Montana pressed his face into his hands, swaying, and for a moment George thought the man was going to topple over. “My God, yes… Karen.”
“That’s what bothers me so, sir. I did that, and then I couldn’t stop, I had to find Dr. Lomax because of things that kept coming into my head, things I couldn’t shut out. I prayed, I did, powerfully hard. I played the tapes of your services over and over, I did, I have every one, nearly. Made me furious mad just thinking about the chiller assholes, pardon the expression. But your sermons, beautiful sermons, still they didn’t do for me, it didn’t stop me wanting.”
The Reverend was sweating, but his mouth became a thin hard line and he now had a cool expression, as if he were looking down from a high place. “I thought you could be relied upon to do holy work, warrior work. But following instructions. Instead you have run amok on me, George.”
George made a strangled cry. “I didn’t mean to!”
“Nonetheless, you did. And you may have embroiled me and this Church, this spiritual rock, in your madness.”
“Don’t—don’t say that.”
“A minister must speak the truth, the one truth.”
The words came heavy and mournful, and George felt his head swim with the hot currents he had felt before, down through the cascading hours of this night. The pain in his belly punished him again with hellfire, and he fell to his knees. “No, please.”
“You have blemished this Church.”
“I was doing the Lord’s work, please, don’t—”
The Reverend’s voice was once again smooth, sad, glorious. “You were to do the Lord’s work, not to mesh me in your madness.”
“I was doing fine, I was a serious killer like the Lord wanted. But then you sent Karen to me, and something she did, something, it made me hot in my mind again, a way I haven’t been in so long. I couldn’t help it.”
“Do not blame your transgressions upon others. Accept the sin. That is the only way to be free of it.”
George opened his mouth but could not speak for his sobbing. The study that was so comforting swirled about him, and he felt himself let go, his belly pain cutting him again. His head struck the floor.
He was trying to lift it when another voice, a stern voice he recognized from somewhere long ago, said, “I agree, George. Accept what you are.”
Then he knew who had been on the other end of the conversation in the Reverend’s bedroom. In the shadowed reaches of the room he saw Dr. Lomax, standing with the silver cylinder in his hand.
3
KATHRYN
She watched the man who had brought warmth into her life as he descended through a terrible, keeping cold.
Kathryn sat on a hard bench beside the cooling vessel and monitored Alex’s temperature. He was drifting down,
one lonesome degree at a time. Beneath the icy fluids she could barely see his outlines. He lingered with her, a shadow presence.
Once, while she dozed, she had heard his voice. It was definitely, defiantly him. The strong notes were freighted with a softness in the vowels, so that even when being firm, his sentences carried a certain rounding. The voice had murmured, and she had thought for a moment, drifting up from fitful dreams, that he was there. She had reached out to shape herself to his contours, and then felt the cool, deserted sheets all around her.
After that she could not drop back into sleep’s oblivion. She had gotten up, joints aching. The sheets were on a narrow I2 bunk bed. Sips of coffee now brought a faint spark of interest back into the world. Alex’s digital temperature readout winked down one more notch in his slow approach to freezing, with the cryoprotectants developed by Susan now safely diffused through his tissues. She knew she should feel something. Instead there was numbness, a dry nothing, just sights and sounds and passing moments, each like the last, unending. Valueless, flat. She made another entry and looked up as Bob Skinner approached.
“Kathryn, you need more sleep.”
“Had some.”
“A few hours, and that was around noon. It’s five o’clock. You can go home.”
“Don’t want to.”
“Look, you’re no good if you’re completely shot.”
“We’re short-handed.”
Bob sat down and let out an exasperated sigh. “I know. But it’s a long process now, running him down. Takes a half day before transfer to liquid nitrogen, first vapor and then liquid, so—”
“I know. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Then get some sleep, for chrissake.”
“Don’t feel like it.”
“Kathryn, we did our best. There was nothing anyone could have done to—”
“I know. I just want to be here with him.”
“Understandable.” Bob lowered his face into his hands and rubbed. “We’re all pretty flattened.”
She forced herself up, out of the gray lethargy that had been stealing over her. There was a job to be done here, and if she fell asleep, it might be too late by the time she awakened. Ray Constantine was already asleep, but Bob was the crucial one. She had been waiting to talk to him alone.
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