The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  They were also officially in charge of what came and what went, laboriously logging the writing-up and removal of physical evidence. It wasn’t glamorous policing – very little that fell within Gayle’s purview could be called that – but it did keep the crash in the forefront of his mind and brought him into daily contact with the people actually investigating it.

  He took the opportunity of raising the walking dead sightings with anyone who’d stand still long enough to listen. Mostly people seemed to find the topic either funny or morbid, and either way they thought it was bullshit. One of the FAA people, though, was more receptive to the idea. She was a tall, nervous woman named Sandra Lestrier, and she was a member of the spiritualist church. That didn’t make her credulous, she was at pains to point out: spiritualist wasn’t another word for sucker, it meant someone who believed in and was in touch with another dimension of the endless plurality that was life. But she did have a theory about ghosts, and although reluctant at first, she eventually consented to share it. With his impressive height and his rough and ready good looks, Gayle had always had a certain charm with the ladies, which he had never abused: in his fifties now, with his hair turned to silver but still as full as ever, the charm had metamorphosed – to his sorrow – into something avuncular and safe. Women were happy to talk to him. Only Moggs seemed willing to take that further step to pillow talk.

  ‘Ghosts are the wounds of the world,’ Sandra Lestrier told Gayle. ‘We see the world as a big, physical thing, but that’s only a tiny part of what it is. The world is alive – that’s how come it can give birth to life. And something that big, if it’s alive, you’d expect it to have a big soul, too, right? When the world bleeds, it bleeds spirit. And that’s what ghosts are.’

  Gayle was rocked. Religion had never been a big thing in his family, but he was aware of it, and he knew that it came in three flavours: regular, which was okay; Jewish, which was sort of okay too, because the Lord appeared to the Jews and gave them what amounted to an all-clear; and Muslim, which was the bad apple. He’d never realised up until then that there could be progress in religion just like in anything else, fashions that came and went.

  He asked Ms Lestrier to tell him more about the wounds of the world, but the specifics turned out to be a little confusing and uninteresting. It was something to do with the persistence of life in the valley of death, and several different kinds of human soul that all had their own names and places in a hierarchy. The more technical it got, the more Gayle tuned out. In the end, he was left with the metaphor and very little else. But he did like the metaphor.

  Things were getting a little crazy by this time: the black box from Flight 124 still hadn’t been found and that was becoming kind of an embarrassment to the federal guys. The signal had started to break up, apparently, and now it was hard for them to get a fix on it, even though they’d brought in a spy satellite of some kind to coordinate the search. The FAA guys on the ground were keen to pass some of the blame along to inadequate support from the Sheriff’s Department, and Gayle had harsh words with one of their bigwigs who came into the station to throw his weight around.

  It was getting a little ugly and a little political. Gayle hated politics and wanted the box found before anyone from the governor’s office got involved. He started running the search recons himself, which had the incidental benefit that he sometimes got to ride shotgun for Ms Lestrier and hear a little more about her newfangled religion.

  He was riding solo when he met the pale people, though. He was following the line of a broad arroyo with a whole lot of tributaries – badly broken ground that the feds had already hit and bounced off of. It was late afternoon but still hot, the kind of cloudless day where the shadows are as black as spilled ink and the sun hangs dead centre in the sky like a piece of fruit you could almost reach up and touch. Gayle stayed in the air-conditioned car as much as he could, but had to get out to walk down to the stream whenever the banks were high enough to hide it. Not that there was much of a stream at this time of year: just little puddles here and there on the creek bed, each with a few skinks around it like an honour guard.

  There was nobody else in sight. Nobody much would have a reason to come out here in the heat of the day. Gayle had got out of the car a half-dozen times to trek down to the bottom of the arroyo, kick a few rocks around to prove he’d been there, and trek back up again.

  Then one time he came scuffling and sliding down the steep bank to find himself abruptly face to face with two complete strangers. They weren’t hiding or anything: they didn’t jump out on him from cover. It was more like he’d been lost in his own thoughts and the first time he registered their presence they were right there in front of his damn nose, staring him down.

  A man and a woman. Both young – maybe in their mid-twenties or so – tall, and lean in a way that suggested a whole lot of effort spent in a gym or on a track. They had incredibly pale skin, almost like albinos, but the man had dark red flashes high up on his cheekbones where he’d obviously caught a little too much sun. They both had jet black hair, the guy’s long and loose, the woman’s fastened up at the back of her head into a no-nonsense bun the size of a fist. Their eyes showed black, too, although they were probably just dark brown.

  But the thing that Gayle noticed first of all, and most of all, was the symmetry: identical sand-coloured shirts, tan slacks, tan shoes, as though they were aiming to blend in with the surrounding desert; identical stares on identical faces, like he was looking at the same person twice, even though they were of different sexes and weren’t even physically alike at all. He thought of the Viewfinder toy he’d had as a kid, and how each picture was really two pictures, on opposite sides of the reel. It was like that – and for a second he was almost afraid to speak to them in case they answered in creepy unison.

  But they didn’t. In answer to his belated ‘Howdy’, the woman nodded while the young guy gave him back a strangely formal ‘Good day to you’. Then they both went back to staring at him: neither of the two had moved an inch so far.

  ‘I’m looking for the black box from the airplane that went down,’ Gayle explained, unnecessarily. ‘About so big by yay long.’ He gestured with his hands, which of course took them away from his belt where his department-issue FN five-seven rested in its worn leather holster. He realised this a moment later, dropped his hands again awkwardly, and still neither of the strangers had moved. Gayle was at a loss to understand why he felt so ill at ease.

  ‘We haven’t seen anything like that here,’ the man answered. His voice was deep and it had a weird something to it that Gayle couldn’t quite get his head around. It wasn’t that he sounded foreign, although he did, just a little. It was the tempo, which was sort of sing-song, like someone reading from a book: slightly slower than normal speech, with a weight behind it that a casual remark like that just didn’t need. The man also put a slight but noticeable emphasis on the word here, which Gayle picked up on and thought was odd.

  ‘Well, I’ll take any clue I can get,’ he said. ‘You see any sign of it some place else?’

  The man frowned, seeming momentarily troubled or irritated, then countered with a question. ‘Why are you looking for it? Is it important?’

  ‘Might could be, yeah. It’s got all the intel on it about how that plane come down. There’s a whole lot of people looking all over for this thing.’

  The woman nodded. The guy didn’t react at all.

  ‘Well, keep your eyes open anyway,’ Gayle said, just to make a hole in the silence.

  ‘We’ll strive to do so,’ the woman promised. Again, as with her partner, there was that measuredness and that weight, like the words had been written down for her to say. And again, the accent was unplaceable but definitely not local. Gayle, for whom local was the measure of all things benign, experienced that strangeness as mild discomfort.

  The young man reached up a hand to wipe his eye, as though there was a dust speck in it. When he lowered his hand again, there was a smear of red a
cross his face, right under the eye. It gave Gayle a little bit of a shock. Forgetting his manners, he pointed.

  ‘You’ve got something,’ he said, inanely, ‘on your cheek there.’

  ‘I weep for witness,’ the man said. Or at least that was what it sounded like.

  ‘For what?’ Gayle echoed. ‘It looks like you … did you cut yourself or something? It looks like you’re bleeding.’

  ‘You could perhaps search over there,’ the woman broke in, ignoring Gayle’s solicitude. ‘Where the scree is. If the box had fallen there, it would have slid down into the weeds at the bottom of the bank. It would be out of sight unless you came very close to it.’

  Now the measured pace sounded like a lawyer in court, picking his words to skirmish his way around something he wasn’t going to admit to. Gayle wondered whether these two knew something they weren’t saying. He didn’t have a damn thing to hold them on, though, and something about them was still giving him a crawly feeling at the nape of his neck. He just wanted this encounter to be over, and he was about to give them a nod and a thank you kindly, then move on.

  The strangers moved first, both at the same time, and without there seeming to be any signal between them. As slow as they talked, when they moved it was like drops of water running on a greasy griddle. They were past Gayle in a split-second, parting to go around him. Wrong-footed, embarrassingly slow, he turned to watch them go. Saw them walking by his car and on up the road, fast and smooth, falling into step with one another like soldiers.

  The nearest building – a gas station – had to be five miles up that road, and it wasn’t a walk that anyone would make by choice in the middle of the day. All the same, that seemed to be what the strangers were proposing to do. Was that how they’d gotten here? They just walked from somewhere? How could they do that without having their faces and hands burned all to hell and gone?

  Gayle opened his mouth to call after them. A man could die of heatstroke just walking around out here like that, without a hat. But the words sort of died in-between his brain and his mouth. He watched the two figures top a slight rise and walk on out of sight.

  With an effort, Gayle pulled his mind back to the task in hand.

  This little stretch of the arroyo was empty, too, but he saw plenty of sign that those oddballs had walked around here some: footprints and scuff marks in the sand and the darker dirt of the creek bed, a bit of sage that had been torn up as they walked through it. It looked like they’d done pretty much what he was doing: come down from the road, walked as far as they could along the near bank, then stopped and turned around when they hit a gully they couldn’t cross.

  Could just be an afternoon stroll. Drug transaction. Pay-off for some political backscratching. Sexual assignation. No, not the last. The two had something about them that made Gayle believe they were related – very closely related – and his imagination rebelled against the vision of stereo onanism that rose in his mind. He tidied it out of sight and tried to forget about the creepy duo. They hadn’t done anything out of place; had been extremely polite and helpful, in fact, and didn’t have to explain to the law any more than anyone else did what they were doing walking along a dry arroyo on a hot day.

  He climbed the bank, abruptly aware that he was sweating like a pig. As he walked back to the car, he could hear Connie’s voice chattering on the radio-phone, asking him to pick up if he was there.

  He hooked the handset out through the open window and pressed the talk button.

  ‘Checking in, Connie,’ he said. ‘I’m on Highwash three miles out from 66. Just working my way up the road, here. You need me?’

  ‘Hey, Web,’ Connie replied, her voice half broken up with the crackle from the tall rocks up here. ‘You can come back in. We’re all done on that black box thing.’

  Gayle swallowed this information with a certain dour resignation. He’d put a lot of hours into this business. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Where’d they find it?’

  ‘They didn’t.’

  ‘What?’ Gayle stuck his head in through the car window to shut out the sound of the wind, which had sprung up at just the wrong moment. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘They didn’t find it. It just stopped transmitting, and they gave up on it. But that FAA woman you’re always talking to said they got everything they needed out of the wreck. The whole damn circus just up and rolled out. She said to tell you bye. Over and out.’

  Gayle shoved the phone back on to its rest, feeling more perplexed than aggrieved – although he had to admit that he was pretty sore, when it came down to it. Just gave up? One second it’s crucial, the next it doesn’t matter a damn?

  Gayle was a stubborn man and that didn’t sit right with him.

  It wasn’t over until he said it was.

  9

  An incidental benefit of being a cop was that you got to ignore the congestion charge, central London parking restrictions and the speed limit. Kennedy drove back into London along the A23 with the windows open – not quite like a bat out of hell, but fast enough to air-cool her overclocked imagination.

  Three dead historians at the same conference. In the words of Oscar Wilde, that seemed to be considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance. It could still be nothing, probably was nothing. Even now, an outrageous coincidence seemed more likely than a ruthlessly efficient killer, stalking and striking down people who had strong opinions about the Rotgut Codex and superannuated Christian sects.

  But Stuart Barlow’s death hadn’t been an accident. That was obvious, both from the autopsy and from the physical evidence. Kennedy had mixed opinions about autopsies: sometimes they were more about politics than facts, and politics is the art of the possible. With the physical evidence, she trusted her instincts – and mourned all over again the fact that nobody had bothered to call in a forensics team on the night when Barlow had yoyoed up and down that stairwell. She could be sitting on DNA, fibres, fingerprints, any amount of serviceable stuff, instead of flailing around in the dark looking for a direction.

  Maybe on some level, too, she wished this hadn’t come up right now. She’d been living in a kind of suspended animation since the night when Marcus Dell got shot. Or rather, since the night when she’d fired the bullet that put Dell down. It was important to get the grammar right. Heather, active subject, as in Heather pulled the trigger. Dell, passive object, as in the bullet hit Dell in the heart, and tore right on through.

  When you came up for an ARU licence, they tested you for a whole lot of things and mental stability was most of them. They just called it by a lot of different names, like ability to handle stress, emotional intelligence, panic index rating, psychological integration rating and so on. It all came down to the one question: would you lose it if you had to shoot someone or if someone was shooting at you?

  And the answer, to put it baldly, was that nobody knew. Kennedy had scored top end on all of those scales. She’d also drawn her weapon on three occasions, and fired it twice, in one case exchanging shots with an armed suspect – a bank robber named Ed Styler who she’d brought down with a bullet in the shoulder. She’d survived all that well enough and never lost a single night’s sleep over it.

  Dell was different. She knew why, too, but didn’t want to go there just yet. It was a can of worms that, once opened, could prove to be impossible to square away again. So she soldiered on without a weapon; relieved, really, to be without it for the time being, until the whole mess got sorted out. The problem, though – the wider problem, which made the pending prosecution shrink into a wrong-end-of-the-telescope perspective – was that she might have lost something else along with the gun and the right to carry it: the iron faith in her own judgement that had made carrying it possible in the first place.

  She found Harper in the canteen and hooked him right out of it into one of the interview rooms. There was no way she was having this conversation with anyone else from the division listening in. She closed the door and leaned against it. Ha
rper sat on the desk, still with half a chicken sandwich in his right hand and a can of Fanta in his left. It was four in the afternoon and he was finally getting round to lunch. From his face, she could tell how happy he was with the way the case was going. The sweat-room smelled of piss and mildew, but Harper didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Take it from the top,’ Kennedy said.

  Harper, with his jaws working, gave her an ironic salaam but said nothing. Kennedy had to wait, with as much patience as she could manage, until he’d swallowed the mouthful and washed it down. ‘I got the list and started working through it,’ he said, finally. ‘Got nowhere on the stalker. Nobody else saw him. Nobody else even remembered Barlow talking about him.’

  ‘Tell me about the deaths,’ Kennedy said, bluntly.

  ‘Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Catherine Hurt and Samir Devani. They both attended that history conference and they’ve both died since. Amazing, yeah? And you know what’s even better? Hurt pegged it on the same night as Barlow, Devani the day after.’

  Kennedy said nothing as she pondered on that timing. It was a very tight spread, by anybody’s reckoning. Out of nowhere, she remembered a garbled line or two from Hamlet: someone asking Death what the big occasion was in the underworld that caused him to take so many princes all on the same night.