As Good as Dead

by Holly Jackson

  Ravi considered for a moment, chewing on his bottom lip.

  “How would we manipulate those factors?” he said, eyes ahead, skimming over dead Jason and back.

  “Temperature,” Pip said. “Temperature is the main one. Colder temperatures slow the onset of rigor mortis, and lividity—that’s the blood pooling. But also, with lividity, if you turn the body before the blood has settled, it will resettle. And if you could turn the body a few times, you could buy yourself hours there, alongside cooling the body.”

  Ravi nodded, turning his head, studying their surroundings. “How could we cool his body, though? I suppose it’s too much to ask for Jason Bell to have owned a fridge-freezer company instead.”

  “The problem is body temperature, though. If we keep him cool to delay rigor and lividity, his body temperature will also drop. He will be too cold, and the plan won’t work. So we would have to cool him down, and then warm him up again.”

  “Right,” Ravi said with a disbelieving sniff. “So, we’ve just got to put him in a freezer and then stick him in a microwave. Fuck, I can’t believe we are even talking about this. This is crazy. This is crazy, Pip.”

  “Not a freezer,” Pip said, following Ravi’s lead, looking at the Green Scene complex with new eyes. “That’s too cold. More like a fridge temperature. And then, of course, after we’ve warmed him up again, we will have to make sure his body is found only a few hours later, by the police and the medical examiner. Otherwise none of this will work. We need him to be warm and stiff when they find him, and his skin still blanchable—that means the pooled blood moves when you press the skin. If that’s the early morning, then they should think he died six to eight hours before then.”

  “Will it work?”

  Pip shrugged, a near-laugh in her throat. Ravi was right: this was crazy. But she was alive, she was alive, and she was very nearly not. At least this was better than that. “I don’t know, I’ve never killed someone and gotten away with murder before.” She sniffed. “But it should work. The science works. I did a lot of research when I was looking at that Jane Doe case. If we can do all that—cool him down, turn him a couple of times, and then heat him back up—it should work. It will look like he died more like, I don’t know, nine o’clock, ten o’clock. And we will both be somewhere else by then. Ironclad.”

  “OK.” Ravi nodded. “OK, that sounds, well, it sounds crazy, but I think we can do it. I think we might actually be able to do this. It’s a good thing you’re such an expert in murder.”

  Pip pulled a face at him.

  “No, I mean, like, from studying it, not killing people. I hope this is the first and last time.” Ravi tried and failed at a smile, shifting on his feet. “One thing, though: say we’re actually going to try to pull this off, and we want them to find his body so this time-of-death manipulation works. Well, they’re going to know that someone killed him. And they will look for a killer until they find one. That’s what the police do, Pip. They’ll have to have a killer.”

  Pip tilted her head, studied Ravi’s eyes, her reflection captured inside them. This was why she needed him; he pushed her forward or reined her back when she didn’t know she needed it. He was right. This would never work. They could shift the time of death and make sure they were far away from here in that time frame, but the police would still need a killer. They would look until they found one, and if she and Ravi made even one mistake, then…

  “You’re right.” She nodded, her hand moving out to take his, before she remembered. “It won’t work. They need a killer. Someone has to have killed Jason Bell. Someone else.”

  “OK, so…” Ravi began, talking them back to square one, but Pip’s mind wandered away from him, flipped over to show her all those things at the very back. The things she hid away: the terror, the shame, the blood on her hands, the red, red, violent red thoughts, and one face hanging there, angular and pale.

  “I know,” Pip said, cutting Ravi off. “I know who the killer is. I know who’s going to have killed Jason Bell.”

  “What?” Ravi stared at her. “Who?”

  It was inevitable. Full circle. The end was the beginning and the beginning was the end. Back to the very start, to the origin, to set it all right.

  “Max Hastings,” she said.

  Twelve minutes.

  Twelve minutes was all it took. Pip knew because she’d checked the time on the burner phone as she and Ravi talked it through. She thought it would have taken much longer, it should have taken much longer, a plan to set someone up for murder. Agonizing hours and a cascade of details, tiny yet critical. That’s what you’d think, what Pip would’ve thought. But twelve minutes and they were done. Ideas back and forth, picking holes in them and plugging the gaps when they found them. Who and where and when. Pip didn’t want to involve anyone else, but Ravi made her see it couldn’t be done, not without help. The entire thing almost unraveled until Ravi came up with the cell phone tower idea, from a case he was working on at his internship, and Pip knew exactly what call to make. Twelve minutes, and there the plan was, like a physical thing between them. Precious and solid and clear and binding. They could never go back from this, go back to who they were before. It would be difficult, and it would be tight; they could make no wrong turns, no delays. No room for error.

  But the plan worked, in theory. How to get away with murder.

  Jason Bell was dead, but he wasn’t dead yet—he would be in a few hours. And Max Hastings would be the one who killed him. Finally locked away, where he belonged.

  “They deserve it,” Pip said, standing back. “They both deserve it, don’t they?” It was too late for Jason, but Max…She hated him, down to the very core of who she was, but was that blinding her, leading her?

  “Yes,” he reassured her, though she knew he hated him just as much. “They’ve hurt people. Jason killed five women; he would have killed you. He started everything that led to Andie and Sal dying. So did Max. Max will carry on hurting people if we do nothing. We know that. They deserve this, both of them.” He gently tapped his finger in that safe space under her chin, pulling her face up to look at him. “It’s a choice between you or Max, and I choose you. I’m not losing you.”

  And Pip didn’t say but she couldn’t help thinking of Elliot Ward, who’d made a choice exactly like this, making Sal a killer to save himself and his daughters. And there Pip was too, in that messy, confusing gray area, dragging Ravi in with her. The end and the beginning.

  “OK.” She nodded, talking herself back into it. The plan was binding and they were in it now, and time was not on their side. “A few things still left to work out, but the most important is the—”

  “Refrigerating and heating up the dead body,” Ravi finished the sentence for her, glancing again at those abandoned feet. He still hadn’t seen the body up close, seen what Pip had done to Jason. Pip hoped Ravi wouldn’t change his mind when he did, wouldn’t look at her any differently. He pointed to the brick building behind them, separate from the corrugated-iron building with the chemical storeroom off its side. “That building there looks more like an office building, where the office staff works. There’s probably a kitchen in there, right? With a fridge and a freezer?”

  “Yeah, there probably is.” Pip nodded. “But not human-sized.”

  Ravi blew out a mouthful of air, his face tight and tense. “Again, why couldn’t Jason Bell have owned a meat-processing factory with giant refrigerators?”

  “Let’s go have a look around,” Pip said, turning back to the open metal door, and Jason’s feet lying across the threshold. “We have his keys.” She nodded at them, still in the lock where Jason had left them. “He’s the owner, he must have a key to every door here. And he told me the alarms were disabled everywhere, and the security cameras. He told me he had all weekend, if he wanted it. So we should be fine.”

  “Yeah, good idea,” Ravi said, but he
didn’t take a step forward, because stepping toward that door also meant stepping toward the dead body.

  Pip went first, holding her breath as she walked over, eyes stalling on Jason’s broken-open head. She blinked, dragging her gaze away, and pulled the heavy ring of keys out of the door. “We need to make sure we remember everything we’ve touched—I’ve touched—so we can wipe it down later,” she said, cradling the keys in her hand. “Come on, this way.”

  Pip stepped over Jason, avoiding the halo of blood around his head. Ravi followed close behind, and Pip saw his eyes lingering, blinking hard as though he might wish it all away.

  A small cough as he picked up his pace behind her.

  They didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

  It took a few attempts for Pip to find the right key for the door at the end of the storeroom, by the workbench. She pushed it open into a dark and cavernous room.

  Ravi pulled his sleeve up over his fingers and flicked on the light switch.

  The room came into view in flickers, as the overhead lights settled into their buzzy glow. This building must have once been a barn, Pip realized, staring up into its impossibly high ceiling. And laid out before them were rows and rows and rows of machines. Lawn mowers, weed trimmers, leaf blowers, machines she didn’t even understand, and tables with smaller tools, like hedge cutters. Over on the right were large machines Pip assumed must be ride-on mowers, covered with black tarps. There were shelves with more metal tools, glinting in the light, and red plastic gas cans, and bags of soil.

  Pip turned to Ravi, his eyes taking in the room, feverish and fast. “What’s that?” He pointed to a bright orange machine, tall, with a funnel-shaped top.

  “I think that’s a shredder,” she said. “Or a wood-chipper, whatever it’s called. Branches go in and it shreds them to tiny little pieces.”

  Ravi pursed his lips to one side, like he was considering something.

  “No,” Pip said firmly, knowing exactly what it was.

  “I didn’t say anything,” he countered. “But there are clearly no giant fridges in here, are there?”

  “But”—Pip’s gaze alighted on the rows and rows of mowers—“lawn mowers run on gas, don’t they?”

  Ravi eyes picked up hers, widened in recognition. “Ah, for the fire,” he said.

  “Even better,” Pip added. “Gasoline doesn’t just burn. It explodes.”

  “Good, that’s good,” Ravi nodded. “But that’s the very last step, and we have a long night ahead of us before then. All of it’s pointless if we can’t work out how to cool him down.”

  “And warm him up,” Pip said, and she felt it catching from the look in Ravi’s eyes. Despair. The plan might be over before it began. Her life in the balance, and the scales were tipping away from them. Come on, think. What could they use? There had to be something.

  “Let’s check the office building,” Ravi said, taking charge, leading Pip away from the regimented lines of mowers, back through the chemical storeroom, picking their way through the spilled weed killer and the spilled blood. Around the dead body, more dead each time, treading around him with featherlight steps, like this was just a childhood game.

  Pip glanced back at the storeroom, at the coils of duct tape with tufts of her hair and spots of her blood. “My DNA is all over this room,” she said. “I’ll take the duct tape with me, dispose of it with my clothes. But we’re going to have to clean those shelves too. Clean it all before we burn it.”

  “Yes,” Ravi said, taking the ring of keys from her. “And these,” he jangled them. “There should be cleaning supplies in the office, I’d guess.”

  Pip caught sight of herself again, reflected in the window of Jason’s car as they passed. Her eyes too dark, the pupils overgrown, eating away at the thinning border of hazel. She shouldn’t stare too long, in case her reflection stayed in Jason’s window, forever leaving a mark of her there. That’s when she remembered.

  “Fuck,” she said, and Ravi’s footsteps crunched to a halt.

  “What?” he said, joining her reflection in the window, his eyes too big and too dark too.

  “My DNA. It’s all over the trunk of his car too.”

  “That’s OK, we can deal with that as well,” Ravi’s reflection said, and Pip saw the mirror version of him reach for her hand too, before he remembered and pulled back.

  “No, I mean it’s all over the trunk,” she said, panic rising again. “Hair, skin. My fingerprints, which the police already have on file. I left as much as I could. I thought I was going to die and I was trying to help. Leave a trail of evidence so you could find him, catch him.”

  A new look in Ravi’s eyes, desolate and quiet, and a quiver in his lip like he was trying not to cry. “You must have been so scared,” he said quietly.

  “I was,” she said. And as scary as this was, the plan, and what would happen if they failed, nothing came close to the terror she’d felt in that trunk or in that storeroom, taped up in her death mask. Its traces still there, all over her skin, in the craters of her eyes.

  “We will fix it, OK?” he said loudly, speaking over the tremor in his voice. “We will deal with the car later, when we’re back. First we need to find something to—”

  “Cool him down.” Pip sounded out the words, staring beyond herself, into the inside of Jason’s car. “Cool him down and then heat him up,” she said, her eyes circling the control panel beside the steering wheel. The idea started small, as a simple what if, then kept growing and growing, gorging itself on Pip’s attention until it was all she could think of. “Oh my god,” she hissed, and again, louder: “Oh my god!”

  “What?” Ravi asked, instinctively checking over his shoulders.

  “The car!” Pip turned to him. “The car is our fridge. This is a new-ish car, expensive SUV, how cold do you think the AC gets?”

  The idea pulled in Ravi too, she could see it in his eyes, something close to excitement. “Pretty cold,” he said. “On the coldest setting, full blast from all the vents, enclosed space. Yeah, pretty fucking cold,” he said with a near-smile.

  “A standard fridge is about forty degrees; you think we can get it to that?”

  “How do you know what a standard fridge temperature is?” he asked.

  “Ravi, I know things. How do you not know by now that I know things?”

  “Well,” Ravi glanced up at the sky, at the setting sun. “It’s kinda chilly out tonight. Can’t be more than sixty degrees outside, sixty-five at most. So, if we just need the car to cool by twenty degrees or so…yeah, yeah, I’d say that’s feasible.”

  A shift in Pip’s rib cage, a feeling like relief that opened out her chest, gave her a little more space to breathe. They could do this. They might actually do this. Play god. Bring a man back to life for a few hours, so another could kill him.

  “And,” she said, “when we get back here later—”

  “—turn on the heaters to the hottest setting, full blast.” Ravi took over the sentence for her, speaking fast.

  “Bring his body temperature back up,” Pip finished it.

  Ravi nodded, eyes darting left to right as he ran it through his head again. “Yes. This is going to work, Pip. You’re going to be OK.”

  She might, she just might. But they hadn’t even started yet, and time was ticking away from them.

  * * *

  —

  “Remember the last time we did this?” Ravi asked her, pulling on the pair of work gloves he’d found in the office building, in a closet full of spare uniform parts bearing the company logo.

  “Moved a dead body?” Pip asked, clapping her gloves together, small clumps of mud disintegrating into dust before her eyes.

  “No, we haven’t actually done that before,” Ravi sniffed. “I meant, the last time we wore gardening gloves to commit a crime. Breaking and entering into the
Bells’ house, his house.” He nodded back in the direction of the chemical storeroom. “That, er…” He drew off.

  “Don’t,” Pip told him, giving him a stern look.

  “What?”

  “You were going to make a ‘that escalated quickly’ joke, Ravi. I can always tell.”

  “Ah, I forgot,” he said. “You know things.”

  She did. And she knew that humor was Ravi’s tic, his way of coping.

  “OK, let’s do this,” she said.

  She crouched and pulled up one edge of the tarp covering the oversized mower. The black plastic crinkled as she threw it up and over the machine, Ravi dragging it off from the other side. It came free, and Ravi folded it up roughly in his arms.

  Pip guided him out of the large room, back into the chemical storeroom, the weed killer fumes still strong, a headache starting to make itself known.

  Ravi laid the tarp out over the concrete, beside Jason’s body, avoiding the blood.

  Pip could read the tension in the way he held his mouth, that faraway look she was sure she had too.

  “Don’t look at him, Ravi,” she said. “You don’t have to look at him.”

  Ravi stepped toward her, as though to help her with the next part.

  “No,” she said, sending him away. “You don’t touch him. You don’t touch anything unless you have to. I don’t want any traces of you here.”