Over My Dead Body

by Dave Warner

  Georgette poked her head out. ‘We’re pretty much ready.’

  ‘He texted to say he’s on his way. So, Benson called you in?’

  They had talked briefly earlier.

  ‘Twenty-four year old female student jogging on Roosevelt Island, raped, throat cut, around six this morning.’

  Harry never heard about a homicide of a young woman without thinking of his daughters. He had trained both girls relentlessly to be careful, to be aware of human predators, but with Simone there was always that dark fear crouching in a corner that he’d turn up one day and discover his own daughter was the victim. You could only play with so many loaded weapons before one went off. And the way she dressed! Tonight was no exception, and this was a family gathering.

  He needled her: ‘Ah, there’s that postage stamp I was looking for – disguised as a skirt on your butt.’

  ‘Ha, ha. You should go into comedy work.’

  ‘No, I should go into dressmaking. That skirt works out about thirty bucks a thread.’

  ‘In contrast to that shirt. You obviously clothed yourself for zero from a dumpster.’

  ‘Not zero, there was the cost of the bleach to get out the bloodstains.’

  Harry enjoyed the banter with his daughters. If a jibe had been a jab they both could have fought welter-weight.

  Georgette said, ‘I like the shirt. It’s the one Mom bought you, right?’

  She never missed a thing.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  He loved them. They were all he cared about in the whole world. Woe betide anybody who did them wrong.

  The bell rang. His guest was here.

  Ian Watson was somewhere in his late fifties, sandy-haired, warm of nature. Whether that was his natural disposition or enhanced by the consumption of whisky from the bottle he’d brought for her father, Georgette couldn’t decide. They were around the table in the modest dining room where she had grown up. The Scotsman had described his family and life in Edinburgh with a deal of vivacity, a natural storyteller.

  ‘Your father tells me your field is cryogenics?’

  ‘She is the leading expert in the US,’ Harry said.

  ‘Cryonics,’ corrected Georgette.

  Simone tag-teamed with a Scots accent. ‘It’s troo. She revived this hamster had been did fer a month.’ She winked. ‘How’s my accent, dope hey? I played Lady Macbeth off-off-off Broadway.’

  ‘Impressive, Simone but … reviving a dead hamster?’ Ian Watson shook his head at the magnitude of that and sipped his whisky. ‘If that’s not proof of genetics, I don’t know what is.’ He appeared to realize they had no idea what he was talking about. ‘You’ve not heard of your great-great-grandfather, John Watson?’

  Georgette found Scottish people hard to understand but enjoyed the rising lilt. She shook her head.

  ‘You?’ he turned to Harry but he was equally lost.

  ‘Well, then …’ Ian Watson leaned forward. Georgette could see he was relishing having a tale up his sleeve. ‘I think your progenitor, old John Watson, was into what in those days, the eighteen nineties, was a verboten area, the dark sciences, necromancy even.’

  Simone slugged her brew. ‘Do tell. I love a skeleton in the family closet.’

  Ian Watson poured himself a nip more whisky and elaborated. Some years ago, when his father died, he had inherited trunks full of old family memorabilia. His father, an engineer, had never troubled himself to investigate these old family treasures but Ian, on long-service leave and laid up for a month after a hip operation, had slowly waded through them, and eventually came across the diary of John Watson.

  ‘Eighteen ninety-two were the earliest entries. Tragically, flooding and mould had gotten to it and much of it was destroyed but I gathered our forebear was a medico living in London. The really fascinating entries however, indicated that he was experimenting with cryogenics.’

  ‘No!’ Georgette was not one given to exclaiming and she noticed both her father and sister raised eyebrows at her outburst.

  ‘I am afraid so. There is no doubt that our relative met with James Dewar in London in eighteen ninety-two …’

  Georgette explained for Harry and Simone’s benefit. ‘Some consider him the father of cryogenics.’

  ‘He made a good whisky, didn’t he?’ Harry’s eyes twinkled as he poured himself a shot. Simone chuckled. Georgette could have slapped them: this was actually interesting.

  ‘Anyway, it seemed their meetings were somewhat secretive but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it until, right at the bottom of the trunk, I found a few surviving part-pages from the diary that had obviously fallen out.’

  These were dated 1891 and, according to Ian Watson, shed new light on the mystery.

  ‘I’m not saying everything became clear but what I gathered was that at some point, around early ninety-one, one of John Watson’s great friends had perished in a lake in Europe … Switzerland, I later worked out. John had evidently retrieved the body from the freezing lake and was keeping it frozen somewhere in the hope that one day there would be a technology capable of reviving his friend. It was all very hush hush of course because in those days it would have been considered akin to witchcraft.’

  Georgette was flabbergasted.

  ‘Well before Walt Disney,’ cracked Simone.

  ‘It sounds like one of his stories,’ said Harry, reaching for a refill.

  ‘I assure you, this is genuine. I’ve seen plenty of old documents and these were the real deal.’

  ‘I gather he didn’t succeed?’ Georgette forked an olive.

  ‘Not from what I read. It was quite touching actually. There is a section written much later, after World War One. John Watson laments not achieving his goal, says he’s too old now. I’ll send you the diary when I get back. I would have brought it if I realized.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘No trouble. A toast to our erstwhile relative, John Watson.’

  They all drank, Georgette only with water. What a terrible thing, she reflected, your whole life dedicated to a project you never achieved. Then she shuddered and thought, I hope that’s not a curse that runs in the family.

  Even from the distance behind the crime-tape he had recognized the Watson girl. He’d zoomed in with his camera too, got a good look at her face. Strong resemblance to her father. Ironic she was trying to raise the dead while he himself was intent on increasing their number. They were like Greek gods lined up on opposite sides. He wasn’t quite sure yet what he wanted to do with her. Oh, he knew how she was going to end up, but for full satisfaction you wanted the sequence of things just so. Still, it was tempting. Groundwork had been laid. And it would be ultimately so satisfying. People had to be punished for the wrongs they had done, and the punishment needed to be exquisite, not just pain but the worst kind of pain – ‘If only I had done this and not this, if only I had seen what was staring me in the face …’

  Too few people read the Bible these days. They talked of Yin and Yang and all that trendy shit but they mocked those truths that anybody with any experience in life came to realize were inescapable. Life is pain. Escape from pain was possible, but not without correct planning, and adherence to that plan.

  He dropped his car into gear and cruised away from the modest Queens house.

  Soon, he told himself.

  For now there were other matters that needed his attention.

  4

  There was nothing she didn’t love about this life: investment banker, Manhattan, Upper East Side apartment, Jaguar. It was like a list. In fact, it was a list, one that she had doodled on her notepad way back in the prehistoric days of her Midwest high school. With her grades, she could have gone into whatever profession she wanted: medicine, law, media, you name it. But if you wanted the really big money and the playtime after work, there really was only one game in town, the one she was in, finance, Manhattan.

  She zipped up her skirt, leather, you just couldn’t beat it, especially not an Armani, still
the sexiest beast and hopefully it might allow her to tame one tonight, although that would just be a bonus. She was really looking forward to trying the Brazilian place in Chelsea, celebrating Didi’s birthday, and then maybe later to Valhalla. See if he was there again tonight. She had a feeling he would be but if he wasn’t, no problems, she wasn’t going to chase him, no way, that was a lesson she’d learned in elementary school. She examined herself in the entrance hall mirror. You look hot, Carmen. And she wasn’t sure if she had thought it or said it but whatever, it was true. She did, especially with the natural red of her hair highlighted. She grabbed her jacket and slipped it on. The bag fitted neatly in her hand, smooth and sleek as a small bird. It had enough room for a credit card, lipstick, phone and condom. She scooped up her keys with the chunky silver keyring Brad had said was a genuine antique.

  She could have taken a cab but what was the point of having a super-sexy car if you didn’t use it? She took the elevator down to the resident’s garage. One of her only gripes about her building was that her car space was at the back but hey, at least she had a car space in the building and didn’t have to use a public parking garage.

  She stepped out of the elevator. The basement seemed darker than usual. Some of the lights weren’t working. Something she’d never got out of her small-city system was the threat you always felt in these underground garages. It was ridiculous, she knew. A building like this was very secure, and the crime stats on New York were way down. Even so, she was not comfortable in the dark. She started on the route to her space, the light from the elevator area fading like a dying patient’s heartbeat. She thought about getting her phone from her purse, using it for light, but she was almost there. If she remembered, she’d drop an email to the super about lights being out.

  What was that?

  She stopped. It had seemed like a footfall, somewhere close by. Or was it just the echo of her Jimmy Choo heels? She cocked an ear. Nope, imagination. She turned around the concrete hump that sectioned her area. There was her car, its silver gleam dulled to the color of the concrete by the closest globe a good twenty feet away.

  ‘You look hot, Carmen.’

  This time the voice was not in her head. She swung around. A face appeared in front of her, a white blur. Before she could scream, something smashed into her forehead. She was dazed, felt herself dragged down, a hand reach up under the leather skirt, seize her underwear and rip it down. She prepared to loose a scream, then was struck again and her last conscious thought rushed out and impaled itself on the sharp spike of imminent death.

  5

  ‘They thought your research was extremely promising but at this stage not sufficiently advanced to justify them supporting a human subject.’

  Anita Mirabella twirled the stem of her wine glass. It was clear she was hoping the chardonnay in this uber-trendy, chocolate-brick wine-bar two blocks from campus would dull any sense of defeat or rejection in her companion.

  It didn’t. Georgette felt both of those no less keenly than if she were drinking vinegar.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ added Mirabella, as if she knew that sentiment was absolutely useless to her. Which of course it was. It had always been a long shot but Georgette had refused to be a glass half-empty gal. Now the whole bottle was suddenly looking bone dry.

  ‘What do they expect me to do, use a chimpanzee?’

  Mirabella shrugged. There was never an answer that solved your problem, just more questions.

  ‘I mean, it’s just … stupid.’ Georgette was acutely aware that her vocabulary was pathetic and blunt. She should have left it there but the burn was spreading and the wine had loosened her tongue. ‘If I revive a hamster after six months, or six years, what does it matter? In the real world who revives a hamster? It’s meaningless. And I don’t imagine too many chimpanzees fall through the ice or get buried by an avalanche, so rule out primates.’ She sighed, rested her forehead on her palm. She hadn’t expected a different outcome but she had hoped.

  Mirabella, who probably delivered this type of bad tidings five times a week wasn’t fussed. Her elegant nails smoothed the tablecloth.

  ‘You could look at private funding.’

  ‘Without the university’s rubber stamp?’

  ‘I didn’t say it would be easy. Okay, your research isn’t applicable to mass-marketing like a cure for acne but there’s always a company looking for a prestige project, like a studio making an art movie to win an Oscar. Your research is news. That’s a positive.’

  Georgette was worried about losing control of her research. The university was nurturing but a commercial company would put their interests first. Mirabella read her.

  ‘Sometimes we have to give up something to move forward and get what we dream of.’

  ‘They’d what, get me subjects by paying families for the bodies of their loved ones?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘A bit like Burke and Hare isn’t it?’

  ‘Except if you manage to revive their loved one it’s win-win: they get them back, you get the Nobel prize.’

  Georgette swallowed her wine. There is that, she admitted.

  By the time she got back to her apartment building, she was warming to the idea of working with the devil. It was that or move back in with Harry. She did not want to lose this place. No doorman but it was roomy, two-bedroom, in a nice neighborhood, with an elevator.

  It sucked.

  On the one hand, they stymied you from the research you had to do, on the other they cut off your money because your research wasn’t going to some bold new level. More consulting with the NYPD would supplement her income but that wasn’t her preferred option.

  She entered the small lobby of her apartment building. It was gloomy now and cold. As if tendrils of ice had pushed through crevices in the walls. Funny that you could be in the heart of one of the world’s biggest cities and still find a minute where you were as lonely as if you’d been laid in a grave. In her mailbox she found a brown-paper package which mystified her until she turned it over. Despite the fading light she could see it was from Ian Watson, Edinburgh. The diary.

  The elevator rattled and swayed but it was clean and didn’t smell. Most of the dives in her student days were walk-up, and the couple that did have an elevator made you feel you should climb into your biohazard suit before entering. She really didn’t want to move from here. And Harry, well … she enjoyed her dad’s company but moving back was an admission of defeat. Her mind flicked back a few months, Vance next to her, the smell of his cologne and the take-out they’d share on the sofa. But naturally he turned out to be an asshole. She unlocked her door and entered the apartment, dropped the package on the reception table. Time she vacuumed again. Sure she had a cleaner in once a week but that was more a safety net. Georgette had vacuumed yesterday because she’d been anxious and it took her mind off things. Today she would do it because, okay, Simone was right, she was a neat freak. Everything in its place, everything dusted, washed and ready, that was how she liked her place to be, like a lab except with a sofa and bookcase.

  Her phone buzzed. The Harry Potter theme. She wished she could go to Hogwarts right now and have toasted marshmallows with Hermione, Ron and Harry. Juvenile? Yes, but sometimes you needed that when your world was, as Mirabella had pointed out in their interview, beholden to death. A thought flashed through her brain: had Gina Scaroldi read Harry Potter too? And there it was again: death.

  From the display she could see it was her father.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘They’re not going to allow me to test on human subjects.’

  ‘How the hell can you prove that it works then?’

  ‘Yeah, welcome to my world.’

  ‘Chin up. We’ll have pizza tomorrow.’

  Tonight was his poker night so that was out.

  ‘Go get ’em tonight, old man.’

  ‘I plan to. Mirsch has been on a streak like you wouldn’t believe.’

  No soo
ner had she ended that call than her phone rang again. Garry Benson. Maybe Simone was right? Perhaps he’d be inviting her to coffee or … something.

  ‘Hi Garry.’

  ‘Looks like we have a serial killer. Woman strangled, throat cut in her apartment garage sometime last night. Carmen Cavanagh, mid-twenties, investment banker, Upper East Side. The precinct cops were switched on, recognized the same mark on her arm as we found on Gina Scaroldi’s thigh. I called but you didn’t pick up and I didn’t have time to leave a message so Verstigian did it.’

  Tom Verstigian was one of the coroner’s people. He wasn’t a time of death specialist like she was but he was thorough and experienced.

  ‘Tom’s good. Anything on the DNA from the semen on the first girl?’

  ‘The semen matched Gina Scaroldi’s boyfriend. They had sex before she went jogging. When she was being strangled, he was in a cab on the way to work. We’re sure she was raped by the killer but we got no other DNA at all. He’s careful, maybe suited up.’

  Thanks to crime shows on TV every psycho had learned how to avoid leaving DNA. Somebody called to Benson and he yelled, ‘Coming,’ then returned to her. ‘I gotta go. I’ll call you when I’m free. Thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Appreciate it.’

  After Benson rang off, she sat slumped on her sofa, inert as a stain. Time crawled. She didn’t even have the energy for TV. It was getting colder but even that couldn’t get her up to turn on the heat. She churned over the idea of private financing, continued to balk at being beholden to a corporation.

  Summoning all her willpower, she forced herself up, was about to get the vacuum cleaner when she caught sight of the parcel from Ian Watson and, venting her frustration, ripped it open without any of the caution she would normally have employed. Revealed was a very old diary, bigger than the current sort people use, if people use one at all. This was more like an old ledger, heavy. The binding was falling apart. Ian Watson, she presumed, had placed loose pages back in the diary at appropriate points. A long, ancient, iron key hung on a piece of rotting string looped around the back cover. As he had warned, some of the pages had rotted away or were stained so as to be unreadable but remarkably much of it was quite legible, written in a stately hand. She turned on the heat and, flopping back on the sofa, started reading. She imagined the scratch of the quill under a low gas globe in a cosy sitting room, velvet chairs, a wind-up clock on the mantlepiece, antimacassars, perhaps a tabby cat curled by an open fire and outside the window the lonely clip-clop of hansom cabs, drunken voices, policeman belting iron lamps to warn of their presence in thick fog.