Whispers of the Dead

by Simon Beckett

  Mary's words came back to me as I walked back to my car. What was it Tom had said? Spanish. I puzzled over it, wanting it to make some sort of sense rather than be further evidence of his confusion. But try as I might I couldn't think what it could mean, or why he should have wanted her to tell me. Preoccupied with that, it was only when I was driving away that I remembered what else Mary had told me. I wondered who might have been phoning Tom at that time of night.

  The pan has boiled dry. You can see the tendrils of smoke coming from it and hear its contents hissing as they start to burn. But it's only when the smoke begins to cloud above the stove that you finally rouse yourself from the table. The chilli is blackened and hissing with heat. The stink must be intense, but you can't smell anything. You wish you were as immune to everything. You pick up the pan but let it drop again as the metal handle stings your hand. 'Sonofabitch!' Using an old towel, you lift it from the cooker and carry it to the sink. Steam hisses as you run cold water into it. You stare down at the mess, not caring one way or the other. Nothing matters any more. You're still wearing the uniform, but now it's sweat-stained and creased. Another waste of time. Another failure. And yet you'd come so close. That's what makes it so hard to stomach. You'd watched from the shadows, heart hammering as you'd made the call. You'd worried your nerves might give you away, but of course they hadn't. The trick is to shock them, to tip them off balance so they don't think clearly. And it had gone just as you'd planned. It had been almost pathetically easy. But as the minutes ticked by he still didn't appear. And then the ambulance had arrived. You could only watch helplessly as the paramedics ran into the building and returned with the unmoving figure strapped to the trolley. Then they'd bundled it inside and driven him away. Out of your reach. It isn't fair. Just when you were on the point of triumph, of parading your superiority, it's been snatched away. All that planning, all that effort, and for what? For Lieberman to cheat you. Tuck!' The pan clatters against the wall as you fling it across the kitchen, leaving a trail of water and swinging flypapers. You stand with your fists balled, panting, desperate to feed the anger because behind it is only fear. Fear of failure,fear of what to do next. Fear of the future. Because, let's face it, what do you have to show for all the years of sacrifice? Worthless photographs. Images that show only how close you came, that have captured nothing but one near miss after another. Tears sting your eyes at the injustice. Tonight should have gone some way towards countering the despair that's built up as one disappointment after another has emerged from the developing tray. Taking Lieberman would have made up for some of that. Would have shown that you're still better than the false prophets who claim to know it all. You deserve that much, at least, but now even that has been snatched away. Leaving you with what? Nothing. Only the fear. You close your eyes as you're blasted by an image from childhood. Even now you can still feel the shock of it. The chill from the big, echoing room soaking into you as you step through the doorway. And then the stink. You can still recall it, even though your sense of smell is long since defunct, an olfactory memory like the phantom tingling of an amputated limb. You stop, stunned by what you see. Rows of pale, lifeless bodies, drained of blood and life. You can feel the pressure of the old man's hand as he grips your neck, indifferent to your tears. 'You want to see somethin' dead, take a good look! Nothin' special about it, is there? Comes to us all, whether we want it or not. You as well. Take a good long look, 'cause this is what it all comes down to. We're all just dead meat in the end.' The memory of that visit gave you nightmares for years. You'd catch sight of your hand, see the bones and tendons covered by a thin layer of skin, and you'd break out in a clammy sweat. You'd look at the people around you and see those rows of pale bodies again. Sometimes you'd see your reflection in the bathroom mirror and imagine yourself as one of them.

  Dead meat. You'd grown up haunted by that knowledge. Then, when you were I I seventeen, you'd stared into a dying woman's eyes as the life -- the light -- went out of them. And you'd realized that you were more than meat after all. It had been a revelation, but over the years it had become harder to sustain your belief. You'd set out to prove it, but each disappointment had only undermined it more. And after all the work and planning, after all the risks, tonight's failure was almost too much to take. Wiping your eyes, you go to the kitchen table where the Leica is partially disassembled. You'd started to clean it, but even that pleasure has turned to ashes. You slump down on to the chair and consider the pieces. Lethargically, you pick up the lens and turn it in your hand. The idea comes from nowhere. A sense of excitement starts to grow as it takes shape. How could you have overlooked something so obvious? It was there, staring you in the face all along! You should never have let yourself forget that you have a higher purpose. You'd lost sight of what was really important, let yourself become distracted. Lieberman was a dead end, but a necessary one. Because if not for that you mightn't have realized what a rare opportunity you've been given. You feel strong and powerful again as you contemplate what has to be done. This is it, you can feel it. Everything you've worked for, all the disappointment you've endured, it was all for a reason. Fate had dropped a dying woman at your feet, and now fate's intervened again. Whistling tunelessly to yourself, you start to strip off the uniform. You've been wearing it all night. There's no time to take it to the laundry, but you can sponge it down and press it. You're going to need it looking its best. 14

  The overweight receptionist was on duty at the morgue when I arrived. 'You heard 'bout Dr Lieberman?' he asked. The sing-song voice was cruelly mismatched to his huge frame. He looked disappointed when I said I had, tutting and shaking his head so that his chins quivered like jelly. 'It's a real shame. Hope he's OK.' I just nodded as I swiped my card and went inside. I didn't bother to change into scrubs. I didn't know if I'd be staying or not. Paul was in the autopsy suite where Tom had been working. He was poring over the contents of an open folder on the workbench, but glanced up when I entered. 'How was he?' 'About the same.' He gestured at the papers in the folder. The bright fluorescent lighting showed up the dark shadows under his eyes, making his tiredness more evident. 'I was going through Tom's notes. I know some of the background, but it'd help if you could bring me up to speed.' Paul listened silently as I told him how the body discovered at the cemetery seemed almost certain to be Willis Dexter's, and how I the remains exhumed from Dexter's grave seemed likely to belong to a petty thief called Noah Harper. I described the pink teeth we'd found on both Harper's remains and those of Terry Loomis, the victim in the mountain cabin, and how they appeared to contradict the blood loss and wounds on the latter s body. When I told him that the hyoid bones of both victims were intact, and so far there were no signs of knife cuts to the bones themselves, he gave a tired grin. 'It's either or. Cause of death could be strangulation or stabbing, but not both. We'll just have to hope we find definitive evidence for one or the other.' He looked down at the folder for a moment, then seemed to rouse himself. 'So, are you OK to carry on?' It had been what I'd been hoping to hear earlier, but circumstances robbed the moment of any satisfaction.'Yes, but I don't want to cause any more friction. Wouldn't it be better if someone else took over?' Paul closed the folder. 'I'm not asking you to be polite. With Tom in hospital the faculty's going to be pretty stretched. I'll do what I can here, but the next few days are going to be hectic. Frankly, we could use the help, and it seems stupid not to use you when you've been involved from the start.' 'What about Gardner?' 'It's not his decision. This is a morgue, not a crime scene. If he wants our help I've made it clear that he can either trust our judgement or find someone else. And he isn't about to do that, not now he's lost Tom so soon after Irving was snatched on his watch.' I felt a touch of guilt at the reminder. What with Tom's heart attack, I'd almost forgotten about the profiler. 'And what about Hicks?' I asked.

  Paul's expression hardened. 'Hicks can go to hell.' It was obvious he was in no mood to make concessions. The pathologist and Gardner would find him very different to work with
from Tom, I thought. 'OK,' I said. 'Shall I carry on reassembling the exhumed remains?' 'Leave them for now. Gardner wants to confirm whether or not the bones from the woods are Willis Dexter's. Summer's made a start on unpacking them, so that's our priority for the moment.' I turned to go, but then remembered what I wanted to ask. 'Mary said Tom tried to tell her something earlier. She said it sounded like "Spanish". Does that mean anything to you?' 'Spanish?' Paul looked blank. 'Doesn't ring any bells.' I went to get changed after that. Paul had to go to an emergency faculty meeting, but said he'd be back as soon as he could. Summer was already in the autopsy suite where the remains from Steeple Hill had been taken, unpacking the last of the evidence bags from their boxes. Somehow I wasn't surprised to find Kyle helping her. Engrossed in their conversation, neither of them heard me enter. 'Hi,' I said. Summer gave a cry and spun round, almost dropping the bag she'd just picked up. 'Omigod!' she gasped, sagging with relief when she saw it was me. 'Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you.' She managed a shaky smile. Her face looked tear-stained and blotchy under the bleached hair. 'That's OK. I didn't hear you. Kyle was just lending a hand.' The morgue assistant looked embarrassed but pleased with himself. 'How's it going, Kyle?' 'Oh, pretty good.' He waggled his gloved hand, the one he'd spiked on the needle. 'Healed up nicely.' If the needle had been infected it wouldn't matter whether the wound was healed or not. But he'd be well enough aware of that himself. If he wanted to put on a brave face then I'd no intention of spoiling it. 'Summer was telling me about Dr Lieberman,' he said. 'How is he?' 'He's stable.' It sounded better than saying there was no change. Summer looked as though she might cry.'I wish I could have done more.' 'You did great,' Kyle assured her, his round face earnest. 'I'm sure he's going to be OK.' Summer gave him a tremulous smile. He returned it, then remembered I was still there. 'Well, uh, I suppose I ought to get on. See you later, Summer.' Her smile grew more dimpled. 'Bye, Kyle.' Well, well. Perhaps something good might come out of this after all. After he'd gone Summer seemed listless, without her usual exuberance as we finished unpacking the remains. 'Kyle's right. It's lucky you were here last night,' I told her. The overhead lights glinted on her piercings as she shook her head. 'I didn't do anything. I feel like I should have done something more. CPR, or something.' 'You got him to hospital in time. That's the main thing.' 'I hope so. He seemed fine, you know? A little tired, perhaps, but that's all. He joked about buying me pizza to make up for keeping me late.' The ghost of a smile flickered across her face. 'When it got to ten o'clock he told me to go home. He said he wanted to check something before he left himself.' I felt my curiosity stir. 'Did he say what?' 'No, but I guessed it was something to do with the remains from the cabin. I went to change and was on my way out when I heard his cell phone ring. You know that corny old ringtone he has?' Tom would have had a few choice words to say at hearing Dave Brubeck's 'Take Five' described as 'corny'. But I just nodded. 'I didn't take much notice, but then there was this sudden crash from the autopsy suite. I ran in and found him on the floor.' She gave a sniff and quickly wiped her eyes. 'I dialled 911 and then held his hand and talked to him until the paramedics arrived. Telling him he was going to be all right, you know? I'm not sure he could hear me, but that's what you're supposed to do, isn't it?' 'You did well,' I reassured her. 'Was he conscious?' 'Not really, but he wasn't completely out. He kept saying his wife's name, like he was worried about her. I thought perhaps he didn't want her to be upset when she found out, so I told him I'd call her. I thought it might be better coming from me than the hospital.' 'I'm sure Mary appreciated it,' I said, although I knew that sort of news was never welcome, no matter who it came from.

  Summer gave another sniff and wiped her nose. A little of her bleached hair had come loose from its Alice band, making her look younger than she was. 'I put his glasses and cell phone in a cupboard above the workbench in your autopsy suite. I hope that's OK; they were on the floor and I didn't know what else to do with them.' I was about to say that I'd make sure Mary got them, but then her words registered. 'You mean they were on the floor in my autopsy suite?' 'That's right. Didn't I say? That's where Dr Lieberman collapsed.' 'What was he doing in there?' I'd assumed Tom had been in his own autopsy suite when he'd had the heart attack. 'I don't know. Is it important?' she asked, looking worried. I assured her that it wasn't. Even so, I was puzzled. Tom had been reassembling Terry Loomis's skeleton. Why would he have broken off to check on the exhumed remains? The question continued to nag me as we took the skull and other bones from the cemetery to be X-rayed, but it was another hour before I had a chance to do anything about it. Leaving Summer to make a start on cleaning the remains, I went to see where Tom had collapsed. The suite looked exactly as I'd left it. Only the skull and larger bones were set out on the examination table; the rest were still waiting their turn in plastic boxes nearby. I stood there for a while, trying to tell if anything had been moved or changed. But if it had I couldn't see it. I "went over to the cupboard where Summer had left Tom's glasses and phone. The glasses looked both familiar and forlorn without their owner. Or perhaps I was just colouring them with my own emotions. I slipped them into my top pocket and was about to do the same with the phone when something occurred to me. I paused, feeling its weight in my hand as I tried to decide if what I had in mind was too much of an invasion of privacy. That all depends what you find. The phone had been left on overnight, but it still had plenty of power. It didn't take long to find where incoming numbers were stored.The most recent had been logged at 22.03 the previous night, just as Summer had said. The same time as Tom's heart attack. I told myself that it could be a coincidence, that the two events might not be connected. Still, there was only one way to find out. The number was from a landline with a local Knoxville code. I keyed it into my own phone. I had enough doubts about what I was doing as it was without using Tom's. Even then I still hesitated. You might as well try it. You've come this far. I rang the number. There was a pause, then the engaged tone sounded in my ear. With a sense of anticlimax I rang off and left it a minute before trying again. This time I was connected. My pulse quickened as I waited for someone to answer. But no one did. The phone rang on and on, repeating itself with monotonous regularity. Finally accepting that no one was going to pick up, I broke the connection. There were any number of reasons why the line should have been busy one minute and unanswered the next. The person at the other

  end might have gone out, or decided to ignore an unknown caller. It was useless speculating. Still, as I left the autopsy suite, I knew I wasn't going to rest until I found out.

  I was too busy for the rest of that day to think about trying the number again.The remains from Steeple Hill still had to be cleaned, but that was a relatively straightforward job. Scavengers and insects had already stripped any traces of soft tissue from them, so it was largely a matter of degreasing them in a detergent solution. But we'd no sooner got them in the vats when the medical records of Noah Harper and Willis Dexter were delivered to the morgue. Knowing Gardner would want their IDs verified as soon as possible, I left Summer to finish cleaning and drying the bones while I turned my attention to that task. Of the two, Dexter s identity proved the easier to confirm. The X-rays we'd taken that morning of the skull recovered from the woods showed identical fractures to those in X-rays taken at the mechanic's post mortem. It was what we'd expected, but now it was official: Willis Dexter wasn't the killer. He'd died in a car crash six months earlier. That still left the question of whose body had been left in his grave. There seemed little doubt that it was Noah Harper's, but we needed more than superficial similarities of age and race to be sure. Unfortunately, there were no post mortem or dental records to provide convenient identification. And while the eroded hip and ankle joints I'd found on the body from the casket would explain Harper's characteristic limp, there were no X-rays of them in his medical records. Medical insurance and dental care were obviously luxuries the petty thief couldn't afford. In the end it was the childhood breaks in Harper's humerus and femur t
hat identified him. They at least had been X-rayed,

  184 I and although the grown man's skeleton was aged and worn, the long-healed fault lines in his bones remained constant. By the time I'd satisfied myself as to the identities of both sets of remains, it was growing late. Summer had left a couple of hours earlier, and Paul had called to say that his meeting had overrun, so he wouldn't be able to make it back to the morgue after all. He'd got his priorities right, going home to his pregnant wife rather than working all hours. Smart man. I would have liked to carry on working, but it had been a tiring day, emotionally as well as physically. Not only that, but I hadn't eaten since breakfast. Much as I might want to make up for lost time, starving myself was no way to go about it. As I changed I called Mary to see how Tom was. But her phone was switched off, which I guessed meant she was still with him. When I called the ICU itself, a polite nurse told me he was stable, which I knew meant there was no change. I was about to put away my phone when I remembered the number I'd taken earlier from Tom's. I'd forgotten all about it till then. I tried it again as I left the morgue, nodding goodnight to the elderly black man who now sat at reception. The number was engaged. Still, at least it showed that someone was home. I pushed open the heavy glass doors and stepped outside. Dusk was settling on the nearly empty hospital grounds, giving the evening a dying golden glow as I called the number once more. This time it rang. I slowed as I waited for someone to answer. Come on, pick up. No one did. Frustrated, I ended the call. But as I lowered my mobile I heard what sounded like a distant after-echo. A phone was ringing nearby. It stopped before I could tell where it was coming from. I waited, but the only sounds were birdsong and the distant wash of traffic. Knowing I was probably over-reacting to what was in all likelihood just a coincidence, I called the number again. A lonely ringing broke the evening's silence. Perhaps thirty yards away, partially screened by a border of overgrown shrubs, was a public payphone. No one was using it. Still not quite believing this wasn't some fluke, I ended the call. The ringing stopped. I redialled as I walked over. The payphone started ringing again. It grew louder as I approached, half a beat behind the tinnier version coming from my mobile. This time I waited until I was only a few feet away before I disconnected. Silence fell. The payphone was in a half-shell booth, open to the elements. Branches from the shrubs had grown round it, so that it seemed to be sinking into the greenery. I knew now why the line had either been busy or gone unanswered when I'd called. Hospitals were one of the few places where payphones were still in demand, visitors calling relatives or for taxis. Yet no one would bother to pick up if one rang. I stepped into the booth without touching the phone. There was no doubt that someone had called Tom from here the night before, but I was at a loss as to why. Not until I looked back down the path I'd just walked along. Through the straggly branches of the shrubs I had a perfect view of the morgue entrance. And of anyone who came out. I