“Then,” Benny said, “someone either had to pick the lock—“
“It's virtually unpickable.”
“Or someone slipped into the morgue while the outer door was open for legitimate visitors, hid out, waited until he was the only living person inside, then spirited Dr. Leben's body away.”
“Evidently yes. But it's so unlikely that—”
Rachael said, “Could we go back inside, please?”
“Certainly,” Kordell said at once, eager to please. He stepped out of her way.
She returned to the morgue corridor, where the cold air carried a faint foul smell beneath the heavy scent of pine disinfectant.
5
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
In the holding room where the cadavers awaited autopsy, the air was even colder than in the morgue's corridor. Glimmering strangely in all metal surfaces, the stark fluorescent light imparted a wintry sheen to the stainless-steel gurneys and to the bright stainless-steel handles and hinges on the cabinets along the walls. The glossy white enamel finish of the chests and cabinets, though surely no thicker than an eighth of an inch, had a curiously deep — even bottomless — appearance similar to the mysterious, lustrous depth of a landscape of moon-washed snow.
She tried not to look at the shrouded bodies and refused to think about what might lie in some of the enormous cabinet drawers.
The fat man in the madras jacket was Ronald Tescanet, an attorney representing the city's interests. He had been called away from dinner to be on hand when Rachael spoke with the police and, afterward, to discuss the disappearance of her husband's body. His voice was too mellifluous, almost greasy, and he was so effusively sympathetic that his condolences poured forth like warm oil from a bottle. While the police questioned
Rachael, Tescanet paced in silence behind them, frequently smoothing his thick black hair with his plump white hands, each of which was brightened by two gold and diamond rings.
As she had suspected, the two men in dark suits were plainclothes police. They showed Rachael their ID cards and badges. Refreshingly, they did not burden her with unctuous sympathy.
The younger of the two, beetle-browed and burly, was Detective Hagerstrom. He said nothing at all, leaving the questioning entirely to his partner. He stood unmoving, like a rooted oak, in contrast to the attorney's ceaseless roaming. He watched with small brown eyes that gave Rachael the impression of stupidity at first; but after a while, on reconsideration, she realized that he possessed a higher than average intelligence which he kept carefully veiled.
She worried that somehow Hagerstrom, by virtue of a cop's almost magical sixth sense, would pierce her deception and see the knowledge that she was concealing. As inconspicuously as possible, she avoided meeting his gaze.
The older cop, Detective Julio Verdad, was a small man whose complexion was the shade of cinnamon and whose black eyes had a vague trace of purple like the skins of ripe plums. He was a sharp dresser: a well-tailored blue suit, dark but summerweight; a white shirt that might have been silk, with French cuffs held together by gold and pearl cuff links; a burgundy necktie with a gold tie chain instead of a clip or tack; dark burgundy Bally loafers.
Although Verdad spoke in clipped sentences and was almost curt, his voice was unfailingly quiet and gentle. The contrast between his lulling tone and his brisk manner was disconcerting. “You've seen their security, Mrs. Leben.”
“Yes.”
“And are satisfied?”
“I suppose.”
To Benny, Verdad said, “You are?”
“Ben Shadway. An old friend of Mrs. Leben's.”
“Old school friend?”
“No.”
“A friend from work?”
“No. Just a friend.”
The plum-dark eyes gleamed. “I see.” To Rachael, Verdad said, “I have a few questions.”
“About what?”
Instead of answering at once, Verdad said, “Like to sit down, Mrs. Leben?”
Everett Kordell said, “Yes, of course, a chair,” and both he and the fat attorney, Ronald Tescanet, hurried to draw one away from a corner desk.
Seeing that no one else intended to sit, concerned about being placed in a position of inferiority with the others peering down at her, Rachael said, “No, thank you. I'll stand. I can't see why this should take very long. I'm certainly in no mood to linger here. What is it you want to ask me, anyway?”
Verdad said, “An unusual crime.”
“Body snatching,” she said, pretending to be both baffled and sickened by what had happened. The first emotion had to be feigned; the second was more or less genuine.
“Who might have done it?” Verdad asked.
“I've no idea.”
“You know no one with a reason?”
“Someone with a motive for stealing Eric's body? No, of course not,” she said.
“He had enemies?”
“In addition to being a genius in his field, he was a successful businessman. Geniuses often unwittingly arouse jealousy on the part of colleagues. And, inevitably, some people envied his wealth. And some felt he'd… wronged them on his climb up the ladder.”
“Had he wronged people?”
“Yes. A few. He was a driven man. But I strongly doubt that any of his enemies are the type to take satisfaction from a revenge as pointless and macabre as this.”
“He was not just driven,” Verdad said.
“Oh?”
“He was ruthless.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I've read about him,” Verdad said. “Ruthless.”
“All right, yes, perhaps. And difficult. I won't deny it.”
“Ruthlessness makes passionate enemies.”
“You mean so passionate that body snatching would make sense?”
“Perhaps. I'll need the names of his enemies, people who might have reason to hold a grudge.”
“You can get that information from the people he worked with at Geneplan,” she said.
“His company? But you're his wife.”
“I knew very little about his business. He didn't want me to know. He had very strong opinions about… my proper place. Besides, for the past year I've been separated from him.”
Verdad looked surprised, but somehow Rachael sensed that he had already done some background work and knew what she was telling him.
“Divorcing?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Bitter?”
“On his part, yes.”
“So this explains it.”
“Explains what?” she asked.
“Your utter lack of grief.”
She had begun to suspect that Verdad was twice as dangerous as the silent, motionless, watchful Hagerstrom. Now she was sure of it.
“Dr. Leben treated her abominably,” Benny said in her defense.
“I see,” Verdad said.
“She had no reason to grieve for him,” Benny said.
“I see.”
Benny said, “You're acting as if this is a murder case, for God's sake.”
“Am I?” Verdad said.
“You're treating her as if she's a suspect.”
“Do you think so?” Verdad asked quietly.
“Dr. Leben was killed in a freak accident,” Benny said, “and if anyone was at fault, it was Leben himself.”
“So we understand.”
“There were at least a dozen witnesses.”
“Are you Mrs. Leben's attorney?” Verdad inquired.
“No, I told you—”
“Yes, the old friend,” Verdad said, making his point subtly.
“If you were an attorney, Mr. Shadway,” Ronald Tescanet said, stepping forward so quickly that his jowls trembled, “you'd understand why the police have no choice but to pursue this unpleasant line of questioning. They must, of course, consider the possibility that Dr. Leben's body was stolen to prevent an autopsy. To hide something.”
“How melodramatic,” Benny said scornfully.
> “But conceivable. Which would mean that his death was not as cut-and-dried as it appeared to be,” Tescanet said.
“Exactly,” Verdad said.
“Nonsense,” Benny said.
Rachael appreciated Benny's determination to protect her honor. He was unfailingly sweet and supportive. But she was willing to let Verdad and Hagerstrom regard her as a possible murderess or at least an accomplice to murder. She was incapable of killing anyone, and Eric's death was entirely accidental, and in time that would be clear to the most suspicious homicide detective. But while Hagerstrom and Verdad were busy satisfying themselves on those points, they would not be free to pursue other avenues of inquiry closer to the terrible truth. They were in the process of dragging their own red herring across the trail, and she would not take offense at their misdirected suspicion as long as it kept them baying after the wrong scent.
She said, “Lieutenant Verdad, surely the most logical explanation is that, in spite of Dr. Kordell's assertions, the body has simply been misplaced.” Both the stork-thin medical examiner and Ronald Tescanet protested. She quietly but firmly cut them off. “Or maybe it was kids playing an elaborate joke. College kids. An initiation rite of some sort. They've been known to do worse.”
“I think I already know the answer to this question,” Benny said. “But is it possible that Eric Leben was not dead after all? Could his condition have been misjudged? Is it possible that he walked out of here in a daze?”
“No, no, no!” Tescanet said, blanching and suddenly sweating in spite of the cold air.
“Impossible,” Kordell said simultaneously. “I saw him. Massive head injuries. No vital signs whatsoever.”
But this off-the-wall theory seemed to intrigue Verdad. He said, “Didn't Dr. Leben receive medical attention immediately after the accident?”
“Paramedics,” Kordell said.
“Highly trained, reliable men,” Tescanet said, mopping his doughy face with a handkerchief. He had to be doing rapid mental arithmetic right now, calculating the difference between the financial settlement that might be necessitated by a morgue screwup and the far more major judgment that might be won against the city for the incompetence of its paramedics. “They would never, regardless of circumstances, never mistakenly pronounce a man dead when he wasn't.”
“One — there was no heartbeat whatsoever,” Kordell said, counting the proofs of death on fingers so long and supple that they would have served him equally well if he had been a concert pianist instead of a pathologist. “The paramedics had a perfectly flat line on the small EKG unit in their van. Two — no respiration. Three — steadily falling body temperature.”
“Unquestionably dead,” Tescanet murmured.
Lieutenant Verdad now regarded the attorney and the chief medical examiner with the same flat expression and hawkish eyes that he had turned on Rachael. He probably didn't think Tescanet and Kordell — or the paramedics — were covering up malpractice or malfeasance. But his nature and experience ensured his willingness to suspect anyone of anything at any time, given even the poorest reason for suspicion.
Scowling at Tescanet's interruption, Everett Kordell continued, “Four — there was absolutely no perceptible electrical activity in the brain. We have an EEG machine here in the morgue. We frequently use it in accident cases as a final test. That's a safety procedure I've instituted since taking this position. Dr. Leben was attached to the EEG the moment he was brought in, and we could find no perceptible brain waves. I was present. I saw the graph. Brain death. If there is any single, universally accepted standard for declaring a man dead, it's when the attending physician encounters a condition of full and irreversible cardiac arrest coupled with brain death. The pupils of Dr. Leben's eyes wouldn't dilate in bright light. And no respiration. With all due respect, Mrs. Leben, your husband was as dead as any man I've ever seen, and I will stake my reputation on that.”
Rachael had no doubt that Eric had been dead. She had seen his sightless, unblinking eyes as he lay on the blood-spattered pavement. She had seen, too well, the deep concavity running from behind his ear all the way to the curve of his brow: the crushed and splintered bone. However, she was thankful that Benny had unwittingly confused things and had given the detectives yet another false trail to pursue.
She said, “I'm sure he was dead. I've no doubt of it. I saw him at the scene of the accident, and I know there could have been no mistaken diagnosis.”
Kordell and Tescanet looked immeasurably relieved.
With a shrug, Verdad said, “Then we discard the hypothesis.”
But Rachael knew that, once the possibility of mis-diagnosis had been planted in the cops' minds, they would expend time and energy in the exploration of it, which was all that mattered. Delay. That was the name of the game. Delay, stall, confuse the issue. She needed time to confirm her own worst suspicions, time to decide what must be done to protect herself from various sources of danger.
Lieutenant Verdad led Rachael past the three draped bodies and stopped with her at an empty gurney that was bedecked with rumpled shrouds. On it lay a thick paper tag trailing two strands of plastic-coated wire. The tag was crumpled.
“That's all we've got to go on, I'm afraid. The cart that the corpse once occupied and the ID tag that was once tied to its foot.” Only inches from Rachael, the detective looked hard at her, his intense dark eyes as flat and unreadable as his face. “Now, why do you suppose a body snatcher, whatever his motivation, would take the time to untie the tag from the dead man's toe?”
“I don't have the slightest idea,” she said.
“The thief would be worried about getting caught. He'd be in a hurry. Untying the tag would take precious seconds.”
“It's crazy,” she said shakily.
“Yes, crazy,” Verdad said.
“But then the whole thing's crazy.”
“Yes.”
She stared down at the wrinkled and vaguely stained shroud, thinking of how it had wrapped her husband's cold and naked cadaver, and she shuddered uncontrollably.
“Enough of this,” Benny said, putting his arm around her for warmth and support. “I'm getting you the hell out of this place.”
* * *
Everett Kordell and Ronald Tescanet accompanied Rachael and Benny to the elevator in the parking garage, continuing to make a case for the morgue's and the city's complete lack of culpability in the body's disappearance. They were not convinced by her repeated assurances that she did not intend to sue anyone. There were so many things for her to think and worry about that she had neither the energy nor the inclination to persuade them that her intentions were benign. She just wanted to be rid of them so she could get on with the urgent tasks that awaited her.
When the elevator doors closed, finally separating her and Benny from the lean pathologist and the corpulent attorney, Benny said, “If it was me, I think I would sue them.”
“Lawsuits, countersuits, depositions, legal strategy meetings, courtrooms — boring, boring, boring,” Rachael said. She opened her purse as the elevator rose.
“Verdad is a cool son of a bitch, isn't he?” Benny said.
“Just doing his job, I guess.” Rachael took the thirty-two pistol out of her purse.
Benny, watching the light move on the board of numbers above the lift's doors, did not immediately see the gun. “Yeah, well, he could do his job with a little more compassion and a little less machinelike efficiency.”
They had risen one and a half floors from the basement. On the indicator panel, the 2 was about to light. Her Mercedes was one level farther up.
Benny had wanted to bring his car, but Rachael had insisted on driving her own. As long as she was behind the wheel, her hands were occupied and her attention was partly on the road, so she couldn't become morbidly preoccupied with the frightening situation in which she found herself. If she had nothing to do but brood about recent developments, she would very likely lose the tenuous self-control she now possessed. She had to remain busy in ord
er to hold terror at arm's length and stave off panic.
They reached the second floor and kept going up.
She said, “Benny, step away from the door.”
“Huh?” He looked down from the lightboard, blinked in surprise when he saw the pistol. “Hey, where the hell did you get that?”
“Brought it from home.”
“Why?”
“Please step back. Quickly now, Benny,” she said shakily, aiming at the doors.
Still blinking, confused, he got out of the way. “What's going on? You're not going to shoot anybody.”
Her thunderous heartbeat was so loud that it muffled his voice and made it sound as if he were speaking to her from a distance.
They arrived at the third floor.
The indicator board went ping! The 3 lighted. The elevator stopped with a slight bounce.
“Rachael, answer me. What is this?”
She did not respond. She had gotten the gun after leaving Eric. A woman alone ought to have a gun… especially after walking out on a man like him. As the doors rolled open, she tried to remember what her pistol instructor had said: Don't jerk the trigger; squeeze it slowly, or you'll pull the muzzle off target and miss.
But no one was waiting for them, at least not in front of the elevator. The gray concrete floor, walls, pillars, and ceiling looked like those in the basement from which they'd begun their ascent. The silence was the same, too: sepulchral and somehow threatening. The air was less dank and far warmer than it had been three levels below, though it was every bit as still. A few of the ceiling lights were burned out or broken, so a greater number of shadows populated the huge room than had darkened the basement, and they seemed deeper as well, better suited for the complete concealment of an attacker, though perhaps her imagination painted them blacker than they really were.
Following her out of the elevator, Benny said, “Rachael, who are you afraid of?”
Shadowfires Page 5
