Vanish

by Tess Gerritsen

  “You’d think there’d be at least a spare dime or two,” said Yoshima.

  “These pockets are clean.” Abe looked up. “Brand-new uniform?”

  They turned their attention to the shirt. The fabric was now stiff with dried blood, and they had to peel it away from the chest, revealing muscular pectorals and a thick mat of dark hair. And scars. Thick as twisted rope, one scar slanted up beneath the right nipple; the other slashed diagonally from abdomen to left hip bone.

  “Those aren’t surgical scars,” said Maura, frowning from her position at the foot of the table.

  “I’d say this guy’s been in a pretty nasty fight,” said Abe. “These look like old knife wounds.”

  “You want to cut off these sleeves?” said Yoshima.

  “No, we can work them off. Let’s just roll him.”

  They tipped the corpse onto its left side to pull the sleeve free. Yoshima, facing the corpse’s back, suddenly said: “Whoa. You should see this.”

  The tattoo covered the entire left shoulder blade. Maura leaned over to take a look and seemed to recoil from the image, as though it were alive, its venomous stinger poised to strike. The carapace was a brilliant blue. Twin pincers stretched toward the man’s neck. Encircled by the coiled tail was the number 13.

  “A scorpion,” said Maura softly.

  “That’s a pretty impressive meat tag,” Yoshima said.

  Maura frowned at him. “What?”

  “It’s what we called them in the army. I saw some real works of art when I was working in the morgue unit. Cobras, tarantulas. One guy had his girlfriend’s name tattooed on . . .” Yoshima paused. “You wouldn’t get a needle anywhere near mine.”

  They pulled off the other sleeve and returned the now-nude corpse to its back. Though still a young man, his flesh had already amassed a record of trauma. The scars, the tattoo. And now the final insult: the bullet wound in the left cheek.

  Abe moved the magnifier over the wound. “I see a sear zone here.” He glanced at Maura. “They were in close contact?”

  “He was leaning over her bed, trying to restrain her when she fired.”

  “Can we see those skull X-rays?”

  Yoshima pulled films out of an envelope and clipped them onto the light box. There were two views, an anteroposteral and a lateral. Abe maneuvered his heavy girth around the table to get a closer view of the spectral shadows cast by cranium and facial bones. For a moment he said nothing. Then he looked at Maura. “How many shots did you say she fired?” he asked.

  “One.”

  “You want to take a look at this?”

  Maura crossed to the light box. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “I was there when it happened.”

  “There are definitely two bullets here.”

  “I know that gun fired only once.”

  Abe crossed back to the table and stared down at the corpse’s head. At the bullet hole, with its oval halo of blackened sear zone. “There’s only one entrance wound. If the gun fired twice in rapid succession, that would explain a single wound.”

  “That’s not what I heard, Abe.”

  “In all the confusion, you might have missed the fact there were two shots.”

  Her gaze was still on the X-rays. Gabriel had never seen Maura look so unsure of herself. At that moment, she was clearly struggling to reconcile what she remembered with the undeniable evidence now glowing on the light box.

  “Describe what happened in that room, Maura,” Gabriel said.

  “There were three of us, trying to restrain her,” she said. “I didn’t see her grab the guard’s gun. I was focused on the wrist restraint, trying to get it tied. I had just reached for the strap when the gun went off.”

  “And the other witness?”

  “He was a doctor.”

  “What does he remember? One gunshot or two?”

  She turned, her gaze meeting Gabriel’s. “The police never spoke to him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because no one knows who he was.” For the first time, he heard the note of apprehension in her voice. “I’m the only one who seems to remember him.”

  Yoshima turned toward the phone. “I’ll call Ballistics,” he said. “They’ll know how many cartridges were left at the scene.”

  “Let’s get started,” said Abe, and he picked up a knife from the instrument tray. There was so little they knew about this victim. Not his real name or his history or how he came to arrive at the time and place of his death. But when this postmortem was over, they would know him more intimately than anyone had before.

  With the first cut, Abe made his acquaintance.

  His blade sliced through skin and muscle, scraping across ribs as he made the Y incision, his cuts angling from the shoulders to join at the xiphoid notch, followed by a single slice down the abdomen, with only a blip of a detour around the umbilicus. Unlike Maura’s deft and elegant dissections, Abe worked with brutal efficiency, his huge hands moving like a butcher’s, the fingers too fat to be graceful. He peeled back flesh from bone, then reached for the heavy-duty garden pruners. With each squeeze, he snapped through a rib. A man could spend years developing his physique, as this victim surely had, straining against pulleys and barbells. But all bodies, muscular or not, yield to a knife and a pruner.

  Abe cut through the last rib and lifted off the triangle containing the sternum. Deprived of its bony shield, the heart and lungs now lay exposed to his blade, and he reached in to resect them, his arm sinking deep into the chest cavity.

  “Dr. Bristol?” said Yoshima, hanging up the phone. “I just spoke to Ballistics. They said that CSU only turned in one cartridge.”

  Abe straightened, his gloves streaked with blood. “They didn’t find the second one?”

  “That’s all they received in the lab. Just one.”

  “That’s what I heard, Abe,” said Maura. “One gunshot.”

  Gabriel crossed to the light box. He stared at the films with a growing sense of dismay. One shot, two bullets, he thought. This may change everything. He turned and looked at Abe. “I need to look at those bullets.”

  “Anything in particular you’re expecting to find?”

  “I think I know why there are two of them.”

  Abe nodded. “Let me finish here first.” Swiftly his blade sliced through vessels and ligaments. He lifted out the heart and lungs, to be weighed and inspected later, then moved on to the abdomen. All looked normal. These were the healthy organs of a man whose body would have served him well for decades to come.

  He moved, at last, to the head.

  Gabriel watched, unflinching, as Abe sliced through the scalp and peeled it forward, collapsing the face, exposing cranium.

  Yoshima turned on the saw.

  Even then, Gabriel remained focused, through the whine of the saw, the grinding of bone, moving even closer to catch his first glimpse of the cavity. Yoshima pried off the skullcap and blood trickled out. Abe reached in with the scalpel to free the brain. As he pulled it from the cranial cavity, Gabriel was right beside him, holding a basin to catch the first bullet that tumbled out.

  He took one glance at it under the magnifying lens, then said: “I need to see the other one.”

  “What are you thinking, Agent Dean?”

  “Just find the other bullet.” His brusque demand took everyone by surprise, and he saw Abe and Maura exchange startled glances. He was out of patience; he needed to know.

  Abe set the resected brain on the cutting board. Studying the X-rays, he pinpointed the second bullet’s location, and with the first slice, he found it, buried within a pocket of hemorrhaged tissue.

  “What are you looking for?” Abe asked, as Gabriel rotated the two bullets beneath the magnifying lens.

  “Same caliber. Both about eighty grams . . .”

  “They should be the same. They were fired from the same weapon.”

  “But these are not identical.”

  “What?”

  “Look at how the s
econd bullet sits on its base. It’s subtle, but you can see it.”

  Abe leaned forward, frowning through the lens. “It’s a little off-kilter.”

  “Exactly. It’s at an angle.”

  “The impact could have deformed it.”

  “No, it was manufactured this way. At a nine-degree cant, to send it in a slightly different trajectory from the first. Two missiles, designed for controlled dispersion.”

  “There was only one cartridge.”

  “And only one entrance wound.”

  Maura was frowning at the skull X-rays hanging on the light box. At the two bullets, glowing brightly against the fainter glow of cranium. “A duplex round,” she said.

  “That’s why you only heard one shot fired,” said Gabriel. “Because there was only one shot.”

  Maura was silent for a moment, her gaze on the skull films. Dramatic as they were, the X-rays did not reveal the track of devastation those two bullets had left in soft tissue. Ruptured vessels, mangled gray matter. A lifetime’s worth of memories atomized.

  “Duplex rounds are designed to inflict maximum damage,” she said.

  “That’s their selling point.”

  “Why would a security guard arm himself with bullets like these?”

  “I think we’ve already established this man was not a hospital employee. He walked in with a fake uniform, a fake name tag, armed with bullets designed not just to maim, but to kill. There’s only one good explanation I can come up with.”

  Maura said, softly: “The woman was meant to die.”

  For a moment no one spoke.

  It was the voice of Maura’s secretary that suddenly broke the silence. “Dr. Isles?” she said, over the intercom.

  “Yes, Louise?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you and Agent Dean should know . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “Something’s happening across the street.”

  ELEVEN

  They ran outside, into heat so thick that Gabriel felt as though he’d just plunged into a hot bath. Albany Street was in chaos. The officer manning the police line was shouting, “Stay back! Stay back!” while reporters pressed forward, a determined amoeba threatening to ooze through the barriers. Sweating Tactical Ops officers were scrambling to tighten the perimeter, and one of them glanced back, toward the crowd. Gabriel saw the look of confusion on his face.

  That officer doesn’t know what’s going on, either.

  He turned to a woman standing a few feet away. “What happened?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. The cops just went crazy and started toward the building.”

  “Was there gunfire? Did you hear shots?”

  “I didn’t hear anything. I was just walking to the clinic when I heard them all start yelling.”

  “It’s nuts out here,” said Abe. “No one knows anything.”

  Gabriel ran toward the command and control trailer, but a knot of reporters blocked his way. In frustration, he grabbed a TV cameraman’s arm and pulled him around. “What happened?”

  “Hey, man. Ease off.”

  “Just tell me what happened!”

  “They had a breach. Walked right through their goddamn perimeter.”

  “The shooter escaped?”

  “No. Someone got in.”

  Gabriel stared at him. “Who?”

  “No one knows who he is.”

  Half the ME’s staff was gathered in the conference room, watching the TV. The set was tuned to the local news; on the screen was a blond reporter named Zoe Fossey, standing right in front of the police barrier. In the background cops milled among parked vehicles and voices were yelling in confusion. Gabriel glanced out the window at Albany Street, and saw the same scene they were now watching on TV.

  “. . . extraordinary development, clearly something no one expected. The man walked right through this perimeter behind me, just strolled into that controlled area, completely nonchalant, as though he belonged there. That may have been what caught the police off guard. Plus, the man was heavily armed and wearing a black uniform very much like those you see behind me. It would have been easy to mistake him as one of these Tactical Operations officers . . .”

  Abe Bristol gave a can-you-believe-this? snort. “Guy walked right in off the street, and they let him through!”

  “. . . we’re told there is also an inner police perimeter. But it’s inside the lobby, which we can’t see from here. We haven’t heard yet if this man penetrated the second perimeter. But when you see how easily he walked right through the outer line, you can imagine he must have caught the police inside the building by surprise as well. I’m sure they were focused on containing the hostage taker. They probably didn’t expect a gunman to walk in.”

  “They should have known,” said Gabriel, staring in disbelief at the TV. “They should have expected this.”

  “. . . it’s been twenty minutes now, and the man has not re-emerged. There was initial speculation that he’s some self-styled Rambo, trying to single-handedly launch a rescue operation. Needless to say, the consequences could be disastrous. But so far, we’ve heard no gunfire, and we’ve seen no indication that his entry into the building has touched off any violence.”

  The anchorman cut in: “Zoe, we’re going to run that footage again, so that the viewers who’ve just joined us can see the startling development. It took place about twenty minutes ago. Our cameras caught it live as it happened . . .”

  Zoe Fossey’s image was replaced by a video clip. It was a long-shot view up Albany Street, almost the same view they could see out the conference room window. At first, Gabriel did not even know what he was supposed to focus on. Then an arrow appeared on screen, a helpful graphic added by the TV station, pointing to a dark figure moving along the lower edge. The man walked purposefully past police cars, past the command post trailer. None of the cops standing nearby tried to stop the intruder, though one did glance uncertainly in his direction.

  “Here we’ve magnified the image for a better look at this fellow,” the anchorman said. The view zoomed in and froze, the intruder’s back now filling the screen. “He seems to be carrying a rifle, as well as some sort of backpack. Those dark clothes do blend in with all the other cops standing around, which is why our cameraman at the time didn’t realize what he was seeing. At first glance, you’d assume this is a Tactical Operations uniform he’s wearing. But on closer inspection, you can see there is no insignia on the back to indicate he’s part of the team.”

  The video clip rolled forward a few frames and again froze, this time on the man’s face, as he turned to glance over his shoulder. He had receding dark hair and a narrow, almost gaunt face. An unlikely Rambo. That one long-distance frame was the only glimpse the camera caught of his features. In the next frame, his back was once again to the camera. The video clip continued, tracking the man’s progress toward the building, until he vanished through the lobby doors.

  Zoe Fossey was back onscreen, microphone in hand. “We’ve tried to get some official statement about just what happened here, but no one’s talking, Dave.”

  “You think the police might be just the slightest bit embarrassed?”

  “To put it mildly. Adding to their embarrassment, I hear the FBI has just stepped in.”

  “A not-so-subtle hint that things could be better managed?”

  “Well, things are pretty chaotic out here right now.”

  “Any confirmation yet on the number of hostages being held?”

  “The hostage taker claimed, during her call to the radio station, that she was holding six people. I’ve since heard from sources that the number is probably correct. Three hospital employees, a doctor, and two patients. We’re trying to get their names now . . .”

  Gabriel went rigid in his chair, staring in rage at the TV. At the woman who was so eager to reveal Jane’s identity. Who could unwittingly condemn her to death.

  “. . . as you can see, over my shoulder, there’s a lot of ye
lling going on. A lot of rising tempers in this heat. Another station’s cameraman just got shoved to the ground when he tried to get too close to the perimeter. One unauthorized person has already slipped through, and the police aren’t about to let it happen again. But it’s like shutting the barn door after the horse gets out. Or, in this case, gets in.”

  “Any idea who this Rambo is?”

  “As I said, no one’s talking. But we’ve heard reports that the police are checking out an illegally parked car about two blocks away from here.”

  “They think it’s Rambo’s car?”

  “Apparently. A witness saw this man leaving the car. I guess even Rambo needs transportation.”

  “But what’s his motive?”

  “You have to consider two possibilities. One, that the man’s trying to be a hero. Maybe he knows one of the hostages, and he’s launching his own rescue operation.”

  “And the second possibility?”

  “The second possibility is scary. That this man is a reinforcement. He’s come to join the hostage taker.”

  Gabriel rocked back in his chair, stunned by what had suddenly become obvious to him. “That’s what it meant,” he said softly. “The die is cast.”

  Abe swiveled around to face him. “It meant something?”

  Gabriel shot to his feet. “I need to see Captain Hayder.”

  “It’s an activation code,” said Gabriel. “Jane Doe called that radio station to broadcast the phrase. To get it out to the public.”

  “An activation code for what?” asked Hayder.

  “A call to arms. Reinforcements.”

  Hayder snorted. “Why didn’t she just say, Help me out here, guys? Why use a code?”

  “You weren’t prepared, were you? None of you were.” Gabriel looked at Stillman, whose face was gleaming with sweat in that oven of a trailer. “That man walked right through your perimeter, carrying in a knapsack with god-knows-what weapons. You weren’t ready for him because you never expected a gunman to walk into the building.”

  “We know it’s always a possibility,” said Stillman. “That’s the reason we set up perimeters.”