Near Death

by Glenn Cooper

  Alex experienced the next several seconds in a weird slow motion. He’d once been on a plane to a family holiday in Tenerife and the sensation of the car going airborne reminded him of the moment of takeoff. His father always thought seat belt laws were an insidious part of the nanny state and none of them were belted as they began their barrel roll.

  At first Alex was more fascinated than alarmed. The weightlessness and down-is-up feeling inside the spiraling cabin felt like an amusement park ride. It was only the sickening crunch of contact with the paved shoulder that jolted him into terror and then there was nothing.

  Until—

  The car was righted, wheels back on ground.

  He was aware of pain—a brutal pain—in his left leg and a fuzzy throbbing in his head. His mother’s bucket seat had collapsed onto his lap and he felt the weight of the seat and her body pinning him down. She was moaning, a low primitive vibration that scared him. He saw her right arm limply hanging down between the seats, blood streaming onto her pretty charm bracelet. There was no sound at all from his father. Dickie’s head was pitched forward resting against the steering wheel, his Liverpool cap miraculously in place.

  For some reason all Alex could think about was his brother, who incongruously wasn’t in the car anymore.

  “Joe! Joe!”

  The back window was blown out and fresh night air whistled through.

  The fire began with a pop that lifted the whole car a few inches into the air and set it bouncing back on its tires.

  Petrol from the ruptured fuel lines had ignited somewhere under the driver’s seat and had spread retrograde to the tank. After the terrible rumble of the explosion, Alex felt the heat and his lungs began to fill with stinking plumes of burning gas.

  Then the awful yellow and blue flames.

  He tried to wriggle free but his legs were pinned and his lower body seemed fixed in concrete. The plastic on the dash and kick panels started to sizzle like a load of bubble and squeak on the breakfast griddle.

  He felt the flames licking his back, heard the sickening crinkle of his polyester jumper melting away, the sulfurous smell of vaporizing hair and a moment after the searing anguish began, everything changed.

  He was no longer in the car.

  He was no longer in pain.

  He was floating above the motorway, looking down with an overwhelming sense of childhood curiosity.

  The good old family car was pretty well bashed up and flames were licking through it. Joe was on the grassy verge, crawling away from danger. “Go on Joe!” he wanted to shout. “You can make it!” Cars were stopping and men were approaching.

  The scene below blurred and went dark as if a fog had rolled in. Now he was hovering over a two-dimensional, perfectly circular disc of blackness that became three-dimensional at once. Though he could see nothing, nothing at all, he had no fear—remarkable, since he still needed a night-light to fall asleep. There was a sense of movement and narrowing, as though he were flowing through a long funnel, like motor oil during a top-up.

  Now his ten-year-old body was moving with incredible speed, or maybe he was stationary and the black tunnel was moving around him. There was a sound of whooshing wind akin to a winter gale whipping in from the Irish Sea. He blinked in wonder as the indistinct walls of the tunnel began to come alive with brilliant flashes, redolent of light glinting off embedded clusters of polished diamonds.

  A pinpoint of real light ahead grew larger and larger into another perfect circle, until finally he was spit out into a soft landing of pure whiteness—as comforting as emerging from a bubble bath into one of his mom’s oversized fluffy towels fresh from the dryer.

  Whiteness faded into translucency and he found himself on an expanse of green terrain that seemed to yield slightly to his footsteps, though he was quite sure it wasn’t grass. The sky, if that’s what it was, was the palest blue, as though an artist had mixed a thimbleful of azure into a gallon of white.

  He heard something evocative.

  With a sense of excitement reminiscent of rushing down stairs on Christmas morning he moved toward the beckoning sound of gurgling water.

  It didn’t look like any river he’d ever seen. In fact, it didn’t look like it was even made of water—more like rapidly moving streams of shimmery light broken into whirlpools and jetties by a path of shiny stepping-stones. The stones stretched from bank to bank, traversing a span of fifteen yards or so, about the distance of Liverpool’s tragically blocked penalty kick.

  When he first glanced across the opposite bank he saw nothing but a limitless plain of cool greenness merging with that pale-blue sky. Though featureless, it seemed to possess infinite promise and he was drawn to the other side with rising excitement.

  On his second glance, he saw a man.

  A big man, waving his arms wildly and happily.

  “Dad?”

  “Alex!” He could just hear his name over the sound of the rushing river.

  “What’s happening, Dad?”

  “I’m dead, son.”

  “What?” He cupped his ear to better hear the reply.

  “Dead!”

  The word didn’t strike him as scary. He made his hands into a megaphone. “What shall I do?”

  “Come over! Come to me, lad!”

  Dickie was waving his arms as he had done when the boy took his first clumsy steps on the sitting room carpet or his first wobbly pedals without training wheels.

  The stepping-stones snaked across fast-moving light beams. They looked slippery but he was certain he could make it and wanted nothing more than to be enveloped in his father’s waiting arms. He gingerly and eagerly placed his left foot onto the first stone.

  His father looked so happy at that moment, as though Liverpool had come back to pull off a 2–1 victory. And he felt happy too, overwhelmed by a feeling of pure bliss more powerful than anything he’d experienced in all his young life.

  He was about to transfer his weight and push his right foot off the bank but he couldn’t.

  He was being pulled backward, away from the river.

  “Hey!”

  Everything reversed with stunning speed. He was back in the tunnel, zooming in the opposite direction, back to the motorway, back to the crash, back to the burning car and when he got there, he was aware of being dragged out the passenger side rear door by the shoulders, feeling violent pain all over and being racked by wicked paroxysms of coughing.

  Men were shouting.

  He was looking into the face of a bearded stranger. “Can you hear me, boy?”

  The coughing stopped long enough for him to sputter, “Please let me go back.” He didn’t want to be here. He desperately wanted to be there.

  The stranger looked confused. “The only place you’re going is to hospital. The ambulance’ll be here soon enough. Lie still. Put your head on my jacket.”

  He coughed some more and rasped, “I want to go to back to my Dad.”

  The man looked at the gaggle of Samaritans standing over his father’s broken corpse, shaking their heads. Others were kneeling over his mother arguing about mouth-to-mouth technique. Nearby, at a safe enough distance, the car was fully engaged by fire. There were shouts as someone discovered his brother crawling through the woods.

  “I’m sorry, son,” the man said tremulously. “You’re safe now. You’ll be okay.”

  He defiantly tried to sit up. “I want to go back!”

  “You’re not going anywhere! Just lie still and wait for the ambulance to come.”

  At that, the boy lay back down on the ground, turned his head away and began to sob. “I want to go back.”

  Five

  Cyrus held the crime scene photo in his hand and studied it before setting it down on a growing pile. Avakian kept them coming: dozens of shots of a fully clothed Caucasian girl in a roadside ditch, attractive as corpses go, discovered by a highway crew, her flesh nicely preserved by the chilled autumn air. In some angles, she looked like she could have been woken with a
good prodding. If the family had wanted an open casket it was definitely doable.

  He sat at the little round conference table shoehorned into Avakian’s office, a meager symbol of the older man’s seniority. His own office was even more of a nutshell; his ex-wife’s walk-in closet was larger. He looked away from the photos for a moment and glanced out the window onto the moonscape of Government Center, an ugly expanse of municipal concrete made grayer by the steady rain. He sighed, unavoidably breathing in the other man’s cologne, that sickly spicy smell, day after day, month after month, year after year. Avakian was a creature of repetition: same striped ties, same bagged lunch every day, same deprecating stories about the wife and kids. He was shiny-bald and powerful, the physical embodiment of a bullet with a flat pugnacious boxer’s nose and a black Vandyck neatly trimmed and smattered with gray.

  The two shared over a decade of history. The office didn’t have a formal partner system but as the Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence Divisions had expanded post–9/11, Major Thefts and Violent Crimes had shrunk. Cyrus had always been able to avoid a transfer to another squad. The FBI had a boatload of specialists among their ranks: accountants, lawyers, computer jocks, internationalists. He was more of a glorified cop and so was Avakian. With a dwindling supply of special agents to do battle against ordinary villains, Cyrus found himself working with Avakian most of the time. Not that he minded it. Avakian was many things to him, most of them agreeable.

  “The last set is from her autopsy.”

  In the best of times, Cyrus wasn’t wild about seeing snaps of a young woman cut open on a slab and these weren’t the best of times. He hardened his jaw and reluctantly stuck out his hand. The first photo showed her head on its side. She had a nice profile, a pleasing upturn to her nose, a good chin. A neat rectangle of bleached hair had been shaved from her right temple by the coroner’s assistant and a steel metric rule was laid out on her scalp. In the pale-flesh center of the shaved patch was a small, perfectly round, perfectly black hole. The next photo was an extreme close-up that made the black hole look unanatomical, infinitely deep, and unspeakably evil.

  He tried to detach himself from the image by asking a pedestrian question. “What is that, three-sixteenths? Eighth of an inch?”

  Avakian had the report. “It’s the same as the others. Eighth-of-an-inch drill bit. Nothing distinctive about it. Same as you can get in any hardware store.”

  Minot slipped in behind them and watched them work for a moment. The fabric of his clothes was permeated with aromatic pipe tobacco and both men turned at the sensory cue. He asked them how it was going.

  Avakian deadpanned they’d have it wrapped up by lunch.

  There was an air of academia about Minot; it was difficult to imagine he’d ever qualified on the pistol range or the obstacle course at Quantico. He was borderline emaciated, blessed or cursed by a rapid metabolism that gave him the lipid profile of a youngster but left him so perpetually cold that he always wore a sweater vest under his suit jacket, even in summer. His thinning but carefully combed hair drained of color and his pink-tinged plastic bifocals that framed lachrymal eyes suggested an aging Boston banker, not someone with a holster in his desk and a badge in his pocket.

  He touched Cyrus’s arm the same way the priest had done earlier and asked, “How’s your daughter?”

  “She’s home. Everything’s status quo.”

  Minot gestured at the files. “I wish I didn’t have to give this to you.”

  Cyrus shrugged to signal he understood.

  “It’s a weird case, isn’t it?” Minot mused.

  Avakian handed him the photo of the punctured skull, then followed suit with other autopsy photos of two young black women with the same wound.

  “This is a sick guy,” he clucked. “Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer drill his victims?”

  Cyrus knew the details; he remembered these kinds of things. “He injected their frontal lobes with acid. He wanted to turn them into sex zombies but he wasn’t a great scientist. All of them died.”

  “Anything similar going on here?”

  “No one thinks foreign substances were introduced,” Avakian said.

  “What then?”

  He rubbed his bald head, fingers splayed like a man who still had tousled hair. “To be determined, Stanley.”

  After lunch they took a drive. They had to start somewhere so they decided to begin with the latest victim, Carla Louise Goslinga, a twenty-one-year-old prostitute from Boston whose body was found the previous Friday up in Hooksett, New Hampshire. Her probable interstate transport put the crime on the federal map. The case was shaping up to be a jurisdictional hash anyway: the first victim was found on state-owned land on the banks of the Charles in Newton, so the Massachusetts State Police had it; the second victim was discovered in a vacant lot in Columbia Point not far from the JFK Library, so that case was owned by Boston Homicide. Now that the third case triggered the FBI’s involvement, everyone was rushing to dump off their databases and let the feds have the headache and expense of a serial killing investigation.

  It was a straight shot out of Boston, north on I-93. Avakian drove one of the pool cars, his attention moronically glued to a sports radio station while Cyrus wearily rested his hands on his knees and stared through the beating wiper blades at the dull highway scenery. Despite that peak foliage was only a week or so past, the wet afternoon and gloomy light muted the palette of the woodlands. Avakian was babbling to the radio, calling one of the talk-show guys an idiot, but Cyrus was able to tune out, only distantly aware of a stream of logorrhea.

  When they crossed the state line, Cyrus pulled out the report from the New Hampshire State Police with the precise location of Goslinga’s body. They had to drive right past the spot, so a quick tramp through the crime scene was on the agenda even if it meant soaking trousers.

  When they passed the Route 3A exit, Cyrus reached over and turned off the radio, prompting Avakian to swear at him. “Three miles,” he said in response. “There’s a large pond. Let’s not overshoot it.”

  “I can drive and listen to the radio, it’s not that advanced,” Avakian grumbled.

  “This crap makes you crazy,” he replied, referring to football.

  “Our running game sucks. We need more balance.”

  “No, you need more balance.”

  “Yeah, right,” Avakian countered. “My egghead partner’s telling me I need balance. I like red-blooded American sports, you like libraries. Tell me which one of us is normal and which one needs professional help.”

  He guided Avakian off the road onto the shoulder as soon as he glimpsed the edge of Pinnacle Pond through the misty trees.

  Finding the location where her body had been discovered was a piece of cake because a knot of yellow police tape remained on a nearby tree. Cyrus had a wide-angle photo showing the body in a roadside depression: he and Avakian thus were able to stand over the precise spot, close to the grassy verge, down a natural slope in a shallow piece of ground puddled with runoff.

  Cyrus pointed to the highway. “All he had to do was pull off the shoulder, park there, pull her body out of the car, drag it three feet and push it down the slope. He’s in and out in under a minute.”

  “They couldn’t get any tire tracks,” Avakian said. “The grass is too thick and it was dry last week.”

  “No witnesses either,” Cyrus added. “He was probably here late at night when the traffic’s thin.” They were getting drenched.

  “Okay, we’ve seen it,” Avakian said, making a move back to the car. Cyrus wasn’t following. He was trying to decide whether to jump down into the wet ditch. “They went over the place,” Avakian implored. “You think you’re going to find the perp’s wallet down there? Let’s go, for Christ’s sake.”

  Back in the car while Avakian dried his scalp with his pocket handkerchief, Cyrus offered up his assessment. “He picked her up in Boston off her usual beat, probably didn’t have sex with her, strangled her, drilled her head for whatev
er reason, drove her up here, pulled off the highway at a random place when there weren’t any headlights in his rearview mirror, dumped her just far enough off the road so she wouldn’t be spotted immediately, took the next exit and turned tail back to Massachusetts.”

  “Why no sex?”

  “Because he made no attempt to conceal the body by burying it, covering it up, dragging it another twenty yards and throwing it into the pond. That tells me he’s confident we wouldn’t find his DNA on her body. Just like the other two.” He seemed to second-guess himself for being so opinionated and he abruptly adopted a less certain tone. “I could be wrong. He could’ve used a condom.”

  Avakian grunted and turned the radio back on. “You keep thinking, I’ll keep driving.” He turned the volume up. “No ego problems here.”

  The rain was coming down too hard for Avakian to deign to use the parking lot. He pulled up to the covered entrance of the Holiday Inn in Concord, got out and showed his badge to the attendant. The young man didn’t give him any lip and ran off excitedly to tell his buddies that a couple of FBI agents were on the premises.

  The assistant deputy medical examiner who’d conducted the girl’s autopsy over the weekend was attending a conference, and he agreed to meet with the FBI agents on short notice only if he could see them at the hotel. All the medical examiners in southern New Hampshire, along with their support staffs, were holed up for the day at an off-site meeting to get in-serviced on new database software that was supposed to make their lives easier. Dr. Ivan Himmel nevertheless had grumbled over the phone in a stream-of-consciousness way that there was nothing wrong with the software they already had and that the state of New Hampshire never got anything right.

  The doctor seemed beyond grateful when someone from the conference staff pulled him out of the hotel ballroom. He approached Cyrus and Avakian like a puppy then happily led them over to a table near the afternoon coffee setup. “First dibs on the baked goods,” he exulted. “Load up. On me.”

  Himmel was one of those older men who never seemed to grow out of adolescence, and even though he was a portly sixty-five decked out like a period piece in a red bow tie and suspenders and short-sleeved white shirt, he had juvenile mannerisms, dunking his chocolate chip cookies into his coffee and wiping the crumbs off his puffy lips with the back of liver-spotted hands.