“Should I call him?” Izzie asked, turning in place to look first one way down the street and then the other. Then she remembered that his number was still in the contact list of her own “find friends” app. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, woke it up, and then tapped the icon to open the app. It took a moment for the GPS to calibrate, and then it swooped and panned until it was centered on the northeast corner of the Oceanview. There was the dot that indicated Izzie’s own location, and a moment later the dot labeled with Patrick’s name came sliding in from the side as the location data became gradually more granular, eventually coming to a stop only a short distance from her own. Izzie looked up from the phone and glanced around. “We should be right on top of him.”
She stepped out into the street, craning her neck to look as far down the block in either direction as possible. It was then that she saw a vintage Volkswagen Beetle come haring around the corner at what was clearly an unsafe speed, windows down and the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl” blaring from the car stereo. For a moment Izzie was sure she was about to be run over, leaping to one side just as the Volkswagen screeched to a halt directly behind Daphne’s compact hybrid.
“Hey, Izzie!” a voice from the darkened interior of the Volkswagen shouted.
Daphne gave Izzie a look, one eyebrow arched quizzically.
The door swung open, and an impressively buckled-and-strapped thick-soled boot clumped down onto the pavement, followed in short order by a cane and then another boot. Joyce unfolded herself from the diminutive car, and rested heavily on the cane in her hands. She was dressed much like she had been the previous day, only with a black leather jacket on instead of the lab coat she wore down in the morgue.
“Friend of yours?” Daphne asked Izzie.
“Special Agent Daphne Richardson,” Izzie answered, looking from her to Joyce, “this is Dr. Joyce Nguyen, Recondito’s Chief Medical Examiner.” Then, when Joyce raised a finger, about to correct her, Izzie amended, “only Medical Examiner, that is.”
Keeping one hand on the head of her cane, Joyce extended the other to Daphne. They shook and nodded curtly before Joyce knocked the Volkswagen’s door shut with her hip and then started to walk away. She pulled an ID badge on a lanyard out of her pocket and slipped it over her head.
“You two coming?” Joyce asked, calling back over her shoulder as she walked straight past the entrance to the office building with its intercom and security panel, and continued on towards the corner of the block.
“Coming where?” Izzie asked, as she and Daphne trailed after.
“Didn’t Patrick tell you?” Even using the cane, Joyce could move surprisingly fast. “I was finishing up an autopsy when he called … automotive fatality, pedestrian hit in a crosswalk, totally run-of-the-mill stuff … anyway, I was closing her up and about to hose down when Patrick called and told me to come running. Said he’d found something while doing a door-to-door that he needed me to look at right away, and that he was calling you next.”
“Right,” Izzie answered. “Which he did. But all he gave me was an address, and there’s no sign of him.”
Joyce rolled her eyes. “That goofball. He sucks at giving directions. One time he called me out to the site of a double homicide in the Hyde Park … the park itself, not the neighborhood … but didn’t bother to tell me where in the park. I was clomping up and down that damned lawn for an hour before I found him. Well, I’ve learned my lesson, so I made sure to get specific directions.” She stopped short, gesturing with her cane like a carnival barker. “And so, voilà.”
Daphne and Izzie looked around, and then to each other. There was nothing here, no door, no alleyway. Nothing.
Joyce saw the confusion on their faces and grinned, then brought the heel of her cane down hard on the sidewalk, three times in rapid succession. The impact didn’t make the thud they might have expected, but something more in line with a clang.
Joyce then raised the cane and pressed the tip against the wall of the building, where it pressed a red button on a control panel that Izzie had not noticed before that moment.
“Presto!” Joyce said with a smile, and then stepped to one side as a pair of hinged metal plates on the pavement levered open with the sound of hydraulics hissing somewhere underfoot. A kind of cage clanked up into view, open on two sides and with a curving bar overhead.
“Sidewalk elevator,” Joyce explained. “From when this was a working warehouse. They’d use it to load things in and out of the lower levels while the big bays on the ground floor were occupied.”
The elevator car clanked to a halt, the metal plates that formed its base now level with the sidewalk’s pavement.
“Come on,” Joyce went on, pulling the gate open and stepping inside. “We don’t want to keep Patrick waiting.”
The trip to the bottom of the service elevator’s shaft took longer than Izzie had thought possible, and the cage that carried them down had shaken and rattled so noisily along the way that it felt to her as if they had undertaken a long, laborious descent into the underworld, and had not simply gone down two floors to a warehouse subbasement.
The elevator opened onto a dimly lit hallway, with just a sparse few flickering fluorescents up ahead to light their way. The air down here felt cool and damp, but with a strange tinge to it that Izzie found familiar but could not quite place.
“Why ask us to come down this way?” Izzie said, looking around.
“Patrick said he was trying to avoid a panic in the office building upstairs,” Joyce replied as she stepped out of the elevator cage and onto the concrete floor. “He’s hoping to keep this low key until we get a handle on it.”
“I didn’t realize that buildings in this part of Recondito had basements, much less subbasements,” Daphne said, glancing around. “Especially this close to the water. Isn’t this below sea level?”
Joyce shook her head. “No, just above it, actually. With the cliffs on the ocean side and the big hill leading up from the docks, this part of the Oceanview is actually higher above sea level than you’d expect.”
The hallway led to the left and right away from the elevator, with closed doors every ten feet or so on either side. There was one open door to their left, though, and as Izzie glanced in that direction she saw a uniformed police officer step out into the hallway, hands over his face.
“Excuse me?” Joyce said, starting to walk in his direction.
The officer lowered his hands and looked towards them, and Izzie recognized him as Officer Carlson, the one who had worked the door ram during the raid on Malcolm Price’s home earlier in the week. His expression looked haunted, mouth hanging open, eyes wide and staring.
“What’s going on?” Izzie asked. “Is Lieutenant Tevake … ?”
Officer Carlson just pointed back through the doorway out of which he’d just stepped. “In there,” he said before language seemed to fail him, and he turned away, covering his mouth with his hand as if trying not to gag.
Daphne and Izzie exchanged a glance as Joyce looked back over her shoulder at them. “This looks promising, doesn’t it?” the medical examiner said, humorlessly. “Come on, let’s go see.”
Izzie tasted a familiar foulness on her tongue as she stepped through the door, and nausea roiled in her gut. When she took her first breath after entering the room, her nostrils stung with the same bouquet of ozone and body odor, floral scent and rotten meat that she had first smelled in Malcolm Price’s kitchen, only here the smell was much stronger, much more pervasive.
As she looked around the room her eyes began to water, too, as though she were staring into a bright light, though the few bare bulbs burning in the wall sockets were scarcely bright enough to illuminate the cavernous low-ceilinged space they were entering. The room was about the size of Joyce’s morgue, and in some ways seemed like a dark mirror version of the sterile order of the medical examiner’s domain. There were bodies here too, for example….
Patrick was standing to one side, arms at his
sides, staring blankly at the gruesome tableau spread out before them.
“Oh …” Joyce said, taking a tentative step towards the nearest of the bodies. “Oh, my …”
Izzie approached Patrick, leaving Daphne standing in the open doorway, taking it all in.
“Patrick?” she said, as she drew nearer to where he stood. “What happened here?”
Patrick looked up, a confused expression flitting briefly across his face, as though he didn’t recognize her at first, and then recognized her but couldn’t remember why she might be there. Only after his features settled back into a more neutral expression of professionalism and comprehension did he answer. “Oh, good. You made it.”
Izzie glanced from him to the bodies lying facedown on the benches. She looked closer, and realized that they were massage tables, with headrests on one end for the people being massaged to rest their foreheads, and holes for their faces to fit. Their arms were arranged neatly at their sides, knuckles down and palms facing behind them, their legs close together. There were towels or sheets draped across their midsections covering their buttocks, and if Izzie had slightly worse vision (and no sense of smell) or the lights had been a little more dim, she might have thought they were massage clients waiting patiently for the masseuse to return. But Izzie could see just fine, and the lights were bright enough to see not only the bodies lying peacefully on the massage tables, but the needles and shunts and such that bristled along the backs of their skulls and down their spines, and the large lesion-like dark “blots” that covered their exposed skin. Black plastic tubing snaked from the shunts to either side of the massage tables, draping over the edges and trailing on the ground until they reached a black plastic pump of some kind that sat atop a glass jar. Aside from the massage tables, the tubes, the pump, and the jar, the only other item of note looked like a rolling metal tool chest along the far wall, where the corners of the room were draped in shadows.
Izzie could not shake the sensation that she had been here before, or somewhere very much like this. Then she remembered the dream that she’d had about taking an elevator down from the middle of the street, all the way down into the inky darkness where a silver-skulled grim reaper waited. The reaper had wanted to show her something in the shadows. Was this what she was supposed to have seen?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“What the hell is all this, Patrick?” Izzie asked. “And If If how did you find it?”
It took Patrick a moment before he was able to collect himself sufficiently to answer. “I, um …” He licked his lips, blinking a few times. “Carlson and I were going door to door upstairs, checking each of the office spaces, seeing if anyone had seen anything unusual. Spent a few hours at it, and by the time we hit the last office we’d come up with nothing. Figured it was time to call it a day and went back outside, and it was then that I noticed the sidewalk elevator. I didn’t realize there was a basement in the place before then, but I couldn’t get the elevator to work. Turns out it was locked down on this end, but I didn’t know that at the time. I figured, we’ve checked all the offices upstairs, though, so we should probably check out whatever’s in the basements before I sign off on the building altogether. So we went back inside and poked around until we found the basement entrance. Somebody had dummied up the original door to the stairway down so that it looked like an electrical closet. They were trying to keep people out. So we went down.”
Patrick took a deep breath, looking up at the ceiling for a moment before continuing.
“We checked the basement, and there was nothing there. Just a bunch of junk. Old office equipment. Pallets. Nothing of interest. But when we found the sidewalk elevator shaft, the elevator wasn’t there. It was one floor down. There was a subbasement.” He gestured around them, indicating the level where they stood. “We found a way down, and …” He nodded a few times. “Well … we found this.”
There were half a dozen bodies on an equal number of massage tables. Joyce was pulling on a pair of blue nitrile gloves while looking down at the one nearest the door, eyes narrowed, deep in concentration.
“Are they all dead?” Izzie said, looking around.
“Yeah,” Patrick answered. “Maybe. I think. I’m not sure.” He seemed shaken. “I … I don’t feel so great.”
He seemed really shaken up. More so than Izzie would have expected, even considering how gruesome the scene was. He was acting more like someone who was suffering from a severe fever, or who’d had too many cocktails, too quickly. Disoriented. Out of it.
“Izzie?” Daphne was stepping away from the doorway, coming deeper into the room, eyes on the bodies. “What is this? I thought you were working some kind of drug investigation?”
Patrick seemed to notice Daphne for the first time, eyes widening fractionally with surprise, or perhaps alarm. “You brought someone with you, Izzie?” he asked, his jaw tightening.
“Agent Daphne Richardson,” Izzie explained. “She gave me a ride from the Resident Agency offices.”
Patrick nodded slowly, as if considering what he thought about having Daphne present for this.
“I haven’t called this in yet,” he finally said, still looking at Daphne but addressing his remarks to Izzie. “Not officially.”
Now it was Izzie’s turn to look surprised. “What?! Why not?”
Patrick pointed at Daphne with his chin. “How much does she know, Izzie?”
“About what?”
Patrick turned and met Izzie’s gaze. “I’m trying to get a handle on this before I bring in … well, before I have to explain it to Chavez and the others. I think this is …” He glanced over at the bodies that Joyce was already busy inspecting, and started walking in that direction. “I think that this is some weirdness right here.”
Izzie followed him across the floor.
“I put a call into Chavez when I found this,” Patrick explained. “But I kept it vague. Told him we’d found something, and that I wanted to check it out more before I made a full report, and that he should have our unmarked cars continue to patrol the area in the meantime. I mentioned that there might be something here for the Medical Examiner to check out, but that the scene was sensitive and I didn’t want too many people traipsing around in it until we had it fully secure.” He glanced back at Izzie, and added, “Which is true, as far as it goes. But the real reason is … well, take a look.”
They had reached the nearest of the bodies. The smell that she’d noticed when coming into the room—a confusing blend of pleasant and foul, organic and inorganic—was even stronger here, intermingling with the peppery scent of bodies gone long unwashed.
“There.” Patrick pointed at a black plastic tube leading from a shunt drilled into the base of the man’s skull.
Izzie could hear faint squelching sounds, and there was a low hum from the black plastic pump a short distance across the floor.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?” Izzie said.
Patrick turned to Joyce, who had moved to the next table over. “Do you have a spare glove?”
Joyce pulled a pair of blue nitrile gloves out of her pocket and tossed them to Patrick. He pulled one onto his right hand, and then reached out for the black plastic tube, a few inches from where it connected to the shunt in the man’s skull. “Watch,” he said, then pinched the plastic tube off between his thumb and forefinger.
As Izzie watched, the black color leeched out of the plastic tube slowly, like molasses being sucked through a straw, starting at the point where Patrick was squeezing it shut with his fingers, and becoming increasingly clear as it traveled towards the black pump.
“And …” Patrick said, and released his hold on the tube.
Blackness surged into the tube from the shunt with a loud squelch, gradually filling it with oozing black all the way to the pump again.
“This stuff is being sucked out of their heads,” Patrick said. “And that’s not all. Take a closer look at the ‘blots’ on their skin.”
Izzie looked down at the m
an’s back. The black marks that marked his skin seemed to be the standard variety lesions associated with prolonged Ink use to her, just like the pair of shamblers that she had passed in Hyde Park a few nights before.
“And if I do this …” Patrick said, and poked the middle of the man’s back with the index finger of his gloved hand.
Izzie jumped back as if a snake had suddenly appeared before her, preparing to strike.
“They moved!” She wheeled on Patrick. “The blots moved!”
Izzie turned and looked at the man on the massage table again, narrowing her eyes. Sure enough, the blots were sliding around underneath the man’s skin like cockroaches moving around under a sheet, fleeing from the spot that Patrick had just poked with his finger.
“How is that possible?” she said.
“I’m working on it,” Joyce called over from the next table. “And to answer your earlier question, these people are dead.” She paused, leaning in to look more closely at the body in front of her, and added, “Well, mostly …”
“Mostly dead?” Daphne said, coming to stand beside Izzie. “As in The Princess Bride, ‘mostly dead is slightly alive’?”
Joyce looked up, pursed her lips, and nodded. “Basically, yeah. I don’t have all of the diagnostic equipment to make a definitive prognosis, but things just aren’t lining up here. None of the bodies that I’ve checked so far shows any evidence of a pulse, so their hearts don’t seem to be beating, but I’m not seeing any evidence of pallor mortis in the Caucasian subjects. And they seem to have been down here a while, and their body temperatures should have been dropping until they reached the ambient temperature of the room, but they’re all still right at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.” She crouched down until she could lean under one of the headrests and look up at the exposed face of one of the bodies. She pulled a penlight out of her pocket, pried open the lids on one eye with one hand, and shined a light into it with the other. “No sign of primary flaccidity, and the pupils are nonresponsive, but the pupils aren’t dilated, they’re completely constricted.”
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