Darkness of the Soul (23 page)

Drakanis was standing up. He scrabbled for the pair of twenties he kept in the back of his wallet with one hand while the other rummaged in his long coat’s pockets. He dropped the money on the bar and then passed a small object to Brokov, who took it with curiosity. “What’s this?”

“Tape recorder. One of those voice-activated ones. Put it in his room, if you can.”

She arched her brows, gathering her purse and keys as she stood up. “I don’t get it.”

“When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, I’m going to get him to find me a linguistics specialist. Bribe him with the Advil, since it looks like he’s going to need it.” Drakanis gave Parker a friendly thump on the back, grinning as he did it, and then started to try to haul him out of the chair. Sheila tried to help, but it was slow going, and once he was standing, Drakanis was holding all the weight, though it didn’t seem to bother him much.

“Then we take the tape of whatever Damien says—if anything—to this guy, and see if he can spit out what language it’s from at least. That’ll help. Maybe even get a translation.”

Sheila shook her head. “But it’s just babble. And it’s not like it’s anything to do with the killer, or whoever did this to him.” Even as she was saying the words though, she knew they weren’t precisely true. The look in Drakanis’s eyes—combined with the stories she’d heard of his intuitive leaps and how well they worked out sometimes—had her half convinced that this was the magic key to all of it.

“If it’s gibberish, it doesn’t matter and one tape recorder and five minutes of some professor’s time are the only wasted resources. If it
isn’t
though, it could mean a lot. It’s all I’ve got to work with at the moment, so I need a shot at it. Are you going to help me or not, Sheila?”

Something in his voice seemed to indicate that he was nearing his wit’s end, that whatever sanity he’d managed to find since his removal from the force was near to running on empty. Maybe it was just the way he accented the final question, maybe it was just the look in his eyes, but Sheila believed that he believed. She could feel that conviction and that desperation burning off of him in waves, and she couldn’t find any real reason to deny the request. She
was
going over there now anyway. And he was right; what was five minutes of some professor’s time and a tape that had cost $1.99 at the nearest RadioShack, when it had the chance to put them back on track? She nodded slowly and then with more confidence.

“All right, I’ll do it. Want me to call if he says anything useful?”

Drakanis nodded back to her as he began to drag Parker back to the door. “Fuck yes, Sheila. You’ve got the cell number. And if he wakes up, I want to talk to him, ASAP. The fact that our boy said anything about him means that he’s got a part to play here, and I want to know what it is.”

Sheila sighed, not wanting to consider what that part might be, since it had apparently almost gotten him killed. But on the other hand, that seemed like reason enough to give Drakanis and Parker a hand. They’d all lost something important to them to this mess, and if there was anything she could do to help put an end to it, she was bound by both the vows she’d taken upon becoming a cop and on her own personal wishes to do it. “All right. I’m down. I’ll call if I hear anything. Need any help?”

Drakanis, straining and sweating as he tried to pull almost three hundred pounds of passed-out Scandahoovian toward the door and out to the car, most definitely looked like he could use some help, but he just flapped a hand at her. “Naw, naw. I’m fine. This won’t be the first time I’ve had to drag Mr. Vinny here out of a joint, and God willing, it won’t be the last either. Go on. Take care of that tape.”

She contemplated arguing the point but figured Mike would just pull more of the tough macho crap on her, so instead, she just shook her head, curled her fingers around the tape recorder, and blew past him, mumbling her good nights and heading to the car. She did sit outside, letting the old VW warm up a bit, until she saw Drakanis unload the meatbag into the vehicle though, just to be safe. Then she pulled away, heading to the hospital and trying not to be too hopeful.

Chapter
21
 

8:30 am, December 20, 1999

Head Coroner Dicky Hollis was already working himself into a fine snit by the time he parked his rebuilt RX-7 in front of the morgue. By the time he had gotten through the motions of shutting down the stereo, the fuel pump, the heating unit, and lastly the car itself, he was very prepared to spend a day carving up bodies instead of the turkey he should have been cutting at his mother’s house in Florida.

Any other year, Richard (“just call me ‘Dicky’”) Hollis would have flown out of Reno on the eighteenth, to return no earlier than January 10, but things hadn’t been going as planned this year. Apparently, unlike the previous ten years that he had been doing this job, everyone had decided to die in a suspicious fashion right during that week. Add in that one of them, the fallen Captain Morrigan, had been a close friend and one hell of a quarterback on their weekend pickup games, and life was already looking miserable. Then his sister-in-law had called this morning, and life continued to go down the drain.

Originally, he’d intended to do the cutting on Mr. Alvat this morning, but over the course of the evening, six so-called gangstas had decided to put a good number of holes in each other, and two had run off. That pushed the four who had remained behind onto his calendar, as ASAP items. That, in turn, pushed the janitor back, and that would have been just the same to Dicky. He found a great deal more purpose in digging slugs out of gangbangers so they could ID weapons than he would have in cutting on one janitor’s brain, looking for irregularities that he was fairly certain he wasn’t going to find. Of course, then Sheila had called, Marie had gotten pushy, and there went your nice, sedate morning.

Sheila apparently had a bug up her ass, considered poking at Alvat to be a great deal more important—for reasons she couldn’t state, of course—than any gangbanger’s autopsy. After all, she had argued, wasn’t it pretty obvious what had killed them? Dicky saw her point but could have argued the opposite, as well. The only thing that made Alvat interesting at all was what had happened to the officer who supposedly had been in the room with him when whatever had killed him had happened. Dicky personally put more money on figuring it out by checking the living member of the pair, but so far, the idiots down at St. Mary’s were mystified.

So, he had come downstairs this morning, found his wife on the phone talking with Sheila, and had then been given his marching orders. From past experiences with such discussions—and there had been many, especially at the beginning, over the course of their eight-year marriage—he knew that to fight about it was to accomplish nothing save to put them both in a fouler temper and ensure that supper would be cold unless he bought it or cooked it himself.

Then, of course, there had been all the usual holiday hang-ups on the way to the office: children who did not yet understand the concept of crosswalks constantly jumping in front of traffic, construction still going on in the most heavily traveled sections of the freeway, traffic jams as people rushed to make it to relatives’ houses or the airport, a great number of them from out of state and roughly as able to find their way around Nevada as the average otter was to build a skyscraper.

All of that served to put him in a fine snit as he stalked toward the low-slung brick house that had been converted into the morgue some fifty years ago, when one of the casinos had decided they wanted to expand and had bought the previous morgue and then plowed it under and built a coffee shop over it.

And
may
they
all
eat
rotten
food
and
be
haunted
every
day
for
it,
he thought, as he always did. Though Dicky was far too young to have actually ever seen the old morgue, his father and grandfather had both been well acquainted with the place—from the opposite side of the table, as undertakers rather than coroners—and both had proclaimed it vastly superior to the new facility. Their tales of ceilings that one did not have to squat to avoid, of spacious operating facilities where taking a step away from a corpse to avoid the gasses released in the first incision didn’t involve nearly tripping over another one that had been crammed in behind you, and of an air-conditioning system that worked well enough to allow the place to smell like anything other than a morgue during the summer months had spoiled him, and working without such luxuries often drove him to frustration, which he usually took out—in his mind, since he rarely had occasion to visit the casinos—on those who were sampling the wares of what should have been his office. Unfortunately, he had yet to hear of a single patron being bothered by things that went bump in the night, nor had he caught any notices regarding food poisoning coming from that direction. He considered this an unfortunate state of affairs.

He could tell almost immediately once he’d swiped his key and passed through the front door that something was wrong. One of the advantages to working in a place for long hours over the course of many years was that you started to get a sense of what it
should
feel like under given circumstances. Cold as it was this morning—it was not snowing yet but probably would be in the afternoon, if the cloud cover was any indication—and on a supposedly busy day, the morgue should have felt unpleasantly chilly, and the walls should have been creaking with the wet. Even though brick supposedly held up better than wood to the elements, he had never heard his elders complain of the walls creaking when it got wet, something that he’d been living with in this building throughout his entire tenure there. Some of the new hires occasionally got spooked at that sound and took off never to involve themselves in the business of corpses again. Others, like himself, just assumed it was the glue straining at the brick and trying to pull it in differing directions and got used to it.

His receptionist, an empty-headed lad whose given name was Stephen yet who insisted on being called “Hawk”—even going so far as to sign his paychecks and memos that way—was also nowhere to be seen. That was not at all like him. Regardless of his other problems—the basic inability to take a phone message, his bungled filing system, and his insistence on the idiot nickname—Stephen always made it a point to arrive on time, earlier than Hollis when he could make it, and stay for the entire duration. Hollis supposed that was one of the reasons he kept Stephen around, since finding help that was willing to show up so readily, at a morgue no less, was nearly impossible. At least he was around when you needed to find a file and couldn’t because of his creative reorganization of the alphabet.

That single thing, more than any other, put Hollis into a more cautious mode. The building was hot, and there didn’t seem to be enough moisture in the air. With each breath he took, Hollis felt like he was sandblasting his throat, but that took a backseat to his missing receptionist. Stephen was never late, unless he was suffering from something horrible, pneumonia or some such. So what had made him late this time?

Hollis crept toward the desk that dominated the front room, his shadow stretching long and looming over it as one of the overhead lights flickered to life, given a cue from the motion detectors set throughout the building. No incessant beeping came from the alarm box to the left of the door, which said to Hollis that
someone
had been in already at least. Either that or Stephen’s forgetfulness had reached a new level, and he simply hadn’t armed it the previous night before leaving. That theory didn’t hold water for long though, as Hollis remembered that he had been working late—carving corpses seemed to be a job that just never ended this fine holiday season—and he himself had set the alarm after ushering Stephen out. No one else came in this early, nor should anyone have been in over the late-night and early morning hours, so of course, Stephen must have been in.

The
door
was
locked,
darling,
the voice of Marie, always to be counted on for simple reasoning abilities, chimed in from the deeper reaches of his mind.
Perhaps
he’s
simply
in
the
restroom.
Hollis might have slapped himself in the forehead, if he hadn’t been concerned that someone might see him do it. Door locked, no alarm, the desk guy is in the john. Elementary, my dear Watson. That still didn’t account for the lack of a chill. Even with the heaters running full blast, the morgue was never truly warm in any sense of the word. Neither did it explain the sensation of something dark and unpleasant creeping up his spine, but it was at least an answer he could live with for a few moments.

He took a quick inventory of the front room nonetheless. It never hurt to be careful, his mother had always told him, and Dicky rarely forgot to pay attention to the suggestions and wisdom of that venerable old lady, even though she had been in her grave for nearly six years. So far as he could tell, everything was in place and nothing had been disturbed. The desk looked like it always did, too large and about to split from damp-rot, with a smattering of pens and old files scattered across it. And there was another sign that Stephen was there, somewhere: a fresh cup of coffee was still steaming on one corner, lending the space a lived-in look. The bookcases behind it still looked as big and ugly as ever, and the locks on all the filing cabinets lining the far wall still appeared to be engaged. In other words, everything was normal, but why then did he feel so uncomfortable?

He stepped toward the desk, almost subconsciously pushed the coffee mug further onto it to avoid any accidental spills, pushed past the divider between the front desk and the work areas, and made his way further into the back. He opened his mouth, about to call out for Stephen—given the time Dicky had spent fighting the flimflams, the youth should have come out of the bathroom by now—but stopped when he heard something else coming from the freezer.