Collecting the Dead (23 page)
Red drops.
I suddenly remember the scene from
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
where Aunt Bethany shows up with a nicely wrapped gift that’s sticky and wet at the corner. It’s only after Uncle Eddie bravely—
stupidly
—tastes the seepage that they realized that feeble-minded Aunt Bethany has gift-wrapped her lime Jell-O mold. Something tells me the package in Steve’s hand isn’t Jell-O.
“Hey, Stan.” I give him a what-up? chin-lift, like we’re old pals.
“It’s Sheldon, Sheldon Michaels.” His voice is dry: sand blowing against sun-scorched wood; a rasping, scratching, etching voice.
“Sheldon. Right. I knew that.”
“Please take this,” he says, unimpressed.
“Uhhh … no. Not until you tell me what it is.”
“I have no idea.” He’s impatient; irritated. “The manager ordered me to bring it down here. I refused, but he insisted. Please take it.”
Jimmy snaps on a pair of latex gloves and approaches the tainted box like a snake charmer moving in on a king cobra. “Where’d it come from?” he asks.
“Some guy just walked up to the counter about an hour ago. I was going to give it to you when you returned to the hotel, but about fifteen minutes ago Tracy noticed it was leaking out one side … that’s blood, right?”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Jimmy replies, intent on the box. Taking hold of the ribbon, he lifts it from Sheldon’s hands and gently swings it through the reception window. Tami is one step ahead of us and lays down a thick section of yesterday’s newspaper on the counter next to the window, and Jimmy lands the box dead center with just one glitch: a single drop of viscous red falls and
splat
s next to a coffee mug full of pens just inside the window.
Tami’s not happy.
Without missing a beat, she hands me a can of Lysol and a roll of paper towels. I’m kind of pointing at Jimmy and raising an eyebrow, but she doesn’t get it, so I hose down the red dot with disinfectant and wipe it clean.
Sometimes it’s just easier to
do
than to
argue
.
“What’d the guy look like?” Jimmy asks as his eyes walk over every side of the box, lingering long on the raspberry corner.
“I don’t know … average.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Average height?” I suggest. “Average weight, average haircut?”
“Uh-huh.”
That wasn’t a statement
, I think, but before I can say it Jimmy heads me off.
“How old was he?”
Sheldon screws up his face, his eyes drifting up and to the left. “Maybe forty. I don’t know. He could have been fifty. Now that I think about it, his hair was funny, like a bad toupee or a wig, only real big in the front, like Donald Trump.”
“Donald Trump, huh?” Jimmy mutters. “Hold that thought a minute.” Turning to Tami, he says, “Can I borrow your scissors?”
She rises from behind her desk, a pair of pink-handled Fiskars in her hand. Passing them to Jimmy, she takes a step back and watches from behind his right shoulder as he snips the ribbons one strand at a time and peels them back. The phone rings on Tami’s desk, but she doesn’t move. When I look at her, she just shrugs, saying, “If it’s an emergency, they’ll call 911.”
Jimmy uses one side of the scissors to draw a slit in the white tissue paper and then peels it back in multiple sections, exposing a rectangular removable lid. With one gloved hand holding the box, the other on the lid, he mutters, “Hold your breath.”
We do.
He lifts.
* * *
If there was a lexicon of geek-speak, a cumbersome tome dedicated to every term, phrase, and acronym devised by computer engineers, programmers, and users since the abacus was invented, it would include a word that is known, embraced, and practiced by only the most sophisticated of nerds; that word is
overclocking
.
It’s a term used by computer geeks to describe the process whereby a computer’s central processing unit, or CPU, is tweaked, allowing it to operate at a faster speed than intended by the manufacturer. Faster speed means more computing power, thus speeding up processing time and allowing the computer to do more work in less time.
The human brain also has an overclocking function. Unlike on a computer, where overclocking is achieved by adjusting the CPU’s operating parameters, the brain goes into overclock mode when it detects the surreal, the dangerous, the shocking. When that happens, the brain begins to work so rapidly and thoughts are finished so quickly that those experiencing overclocking find that everything has slowed down and crystallized. They’re more acutely aware of their surroundings and, after the fact, are amazed at the number of things they observed or thought about in the span of seconds or microseconds.
When people have a close encounter with death and talk about their life flashing before their eyes, they’re talking about overclocking. Some researchers even speculate that déjà vu is a form of overclocking—though they don’t use that term. They believe the brain operates so quickly at times that it remembers something at the same time that it’s experiencing it.
Overclocking.
It’s a good description of what happens in the front office of the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office at 11:27
A.M.
on June 29. In the time span of three eternal seconds, three distinct things happen simultaneously: First, Jimmy drops the box on the counter and cracks an Indiana-Jones-style whip of profanity, which is pretty impressive, since Jimmy doesn’t swear. He’s still swearing as he tosses the lid back on the box and cringes away, his face set and grim.
At the same time, Sheldon pokes his head through the counter window, his raspy, dry voice saying, “What is it?” though in the slow-motion of overclocking it seems to me the vowels are drawn out, sounding more like, “Whaaat iiiiis iiiiitt?” His beady eyes pry at the box, trying to disgorge its secrets.
And the third thing that happens: Tami faints dead away.
She drops like a bag of cement.
I’m right next to her when her knees buckle and she starts for the floor, which is both fortunate and miserably unfortunate. I manage to grab her by the arm and somehow prevent her head from hitting the desk and then the floor. In the process she takes me down with her, our legs and arms knotted together and falling in slow motion—overclocking.
We land in a frumpy pile.
It’s not a good look for me.
Jimmy’s eyes haven’t left the box. “We have to get this to Evidence.” He taps the counter with an arched index finger. “It’s going to need to be refrig—” He turns and sees Tami doing the limp-fish sprawl on the floor and me trying to untangle myself from a nest of limbs.
Grabbing my hand, he helps me to a sitting position and then kneels next to Tami and shakes her gently by the shoulder, calling her name in progressively louder tones. She’s unresponsive. Taking her left earlobe between my thumb and index finger, I pinch down for a second.
Her head moves.
“Tami,” Jimmy says again.
This time her eyes flutter and open. A second later she’s wide awake, eyes darting from me to Jimmy and then back. “What happened?”
“You fainted,” I say gently.
Her eyebrows press together, confused. “I didn’t faint. I never faint.”
“Then you died,” I reply, patting her hand. “Welcome back.”
We help her to her feet and walk her over to a chair.
Now the box—what do we do about the box? More specifically, what do we do about the
contents
of the box? I’ve still got my special glasses on, so I can’t see the shine on the lid or the base or on the contents within, but I don’t need to see it to know who’s behind this. The game has changed and Sad Face is playing by new rules.
And once more we’re playing catch-up.
As the level of buzz-and-hum in the front office begins to pick up, I escort Sheldon down the hall and introduce him to Detective Courtney Smith, who’s going to interview him—and babysit him—until a sketch artist arrives in an hour. Sheldon is less than pleased … until we make a call to his boss, who tells him he’s still on the clock, still getting paid, even if it runs into overtime.
Now he won’t shut up.
Somehow he’s figuring out a way to stretch a one-minute contact in the lobby of a hotel, where less than a dozen words were spoken, into a five-hundred-page novel, and possibly a sequel. Only one word in ten is of any value:
bla blah, bla blah, bla bla blah
, box
. Bl-blaaaa, bla bla bla blah
, scar.
It’s okay. His blather doesn’t faze me in the least.
Detectives Division has thick walls …
… and I’m on the other side.
Jimmy’s still fussing over Tami when I return to the front office. We kill another ten minutes taking her pulse, checking her pupils, that sort of thing, but the inevitability of the box is thick in the air. At last, we drag ourselves back to the counter, back to the raspberry-stained paper towel and the snow-white bleeding box.
I pull Lauren Brouwer’s locket from my pocket. It’s still pulsing. She’s alive.
The lid is askew and upside down on the box where Jimmy had tossed it. You can see the edges of its gruesome contents through the gaps around the lid. It’s the stuff of nightmares: a severed finger and two eyes still firm and a little wet from the plucking. Even the thought elicits an involuntary shudder. But there’s something else, something I didn’t see in the initial three-second examination.
Jimmy sees it, too.
Crammed into the underside of the lid is a neatly folded piece of lined paper stained in blood at the edge. Jimmy pries it gently from the lid and opens first one fold, then another, and lays the paper flat on the paper towel. I can see markings on it: numbers and letters in black pen, but I can’t make them out.
Jimmy picks the note up and turns it toward better light.
“Fourteen seventy-three Bracker Street,” he reads.
“That’s all it says?”
“That’s it.”
“Bracker Street? Why does that sound familiar?”
“I don’t know,” he replies. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Curious, I lift my glasses an inch and take a look at the blood on the fringe of the page. The instant I do, my stomach knots into a tight ball and my legs go wobbly.
“Oh, God!”
It’s a prayer, not a curse.
I remember now
.
July 1, 11:52
A.M.
The interior of the town house is orderly and spotless.
It’s everything I expected …
… except for the body.
The foyer—if it can be called that—empties into the living room to the right, and up the stairs to the left. Straight ahead a narrow table adorns the hall, upon which are three items lined up in a row: a cell phone, a set of keys, and a name badge.
Two dark-wood bookshelves stand sentinel in the living room, equally spaced on either side of the TV. As a book collector and connoisseur, I’m always intrigued by the titles one finds on the bookshelves of others. It’s almost a window into their personality, a peek behind the curtain and into the hidden clockwork of the mind.
I’ve always thought that every book tells two stories: one told by the author and one by the reader. The reason a person picks up a book in the first place is a story unto itself. One person picks up
Mein Kampf
because he’s an anti-Semite, another because he wants to learn the origin of monsters.
The books on these shelves display the mind of their owner not just by their titles but by their order and symmetry. The books are arranged by height
and
by color, beginning with lighter colors on the bottom, such as oranges, pinks, and yellows, and working up to navy blues and blacks on the top shelves. As I stare at the books, I wonder if their owner at one time arranged them alphabetically by author, at another time by subject.
Probably, but it doesn’t matter.
Visual symmetry won in the end.
My eyes drift to the body, to the paramedics, to the crimson-stained carpet that had recently been so clean.
Dammit! We should have taken precautions … but who could have known?
In a neat line centered perfectly under the wall-mounted flat-screen in the living room is a row of DVDs, ordered alphabetically from left to right starting with
Æon Flux
and ending with
Zardoz
. Most of the movies in between are of similar genre, as are the books on the shelves.
Chas Lindstrom was a science fiction fan.
I say Chas
was
a science fiction fan because to say he
is
a sci-fi fan would be to imply that he’s still alive, and, sadly, he isn’t. His body lies in the breezeway between the living room and the dining room, cold to the touch and nearing rigor mortis, that clinical-sounding Latin term that simply means “stiffness of death.”
He’s been dead a few hours.
His hands are bound behind him with duct tape smeared wet and red, the same red that covers his face, his neck, his shirt. The outer edges have already started to dry, turning from bright red to carmine. Every inch of his face shows signs of a savage beating. His eyes are gone, of course, and his right index finger. They’re still in the box tucked under Jimmy’s arm.
I don’t know why he brought them.
Probably in such a hurry that he didn’t even think about it, just tucked and ran. And as we blazed through town to the shrill scream of a dozen sirens, there were many among us delusional enough to believe that Sad Face would cut out Chas’s eyes, cut off his finger, personally deliver them gift-wrapped to the hotel, yet leave Chas alive so that we, his adversaries, could feel the gushing relief of saving him. So that we could smile and pat each other on the back and hold his hand while the ambulance rushed him off to a life of blindness … but a life.
I knew better.
I always know.
On the carpet next to Chas, written in his own blood, is a sad face … with no eyes. The sick bastard thinks he’s funny.
“You did good, Chas,” I say to the emptiness. It’s a hollow sentiment, meaningless, too late. I don’t know why I say it.