Shadows Fall (29 page)

“I thought he was a
witness!
” Karen hissed, then cleared her throat and took a deep breath, apparently reaching for calm. “Captain Haywood really okayed this?”

“Yes, she did. I’ve got a signed memo out in the cruiser if you don’t fucking believe me.”

“All right. Easy, Tonto, relax. I believe you but… what exactly is he looking for?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t know. Whatever it is just pops up—or doesn’t. There’s no controlling it, but it’s all we have,” Charlie said. Then he turned away from Karen, because he was done chasing his tail trying to explain things to her, and walked back over to Titus.

Again, Charlie noticed the change in his eyes. The bright aquamarine of his irises had been almost completely swallowed up by inky black pupils—something that Charlie was beginning to realize was a sign that Titus saw something the rest of them didn’t.

“You okay?” he asked and plowed on without waiting for an answer. “I know it’s hard, seeing them like this. I mean, when you go to a funeral or a graveyard, it’s hard, but you’re not staring them in the face like in here.”

Titus didn’t look away from Brandon Meyers, who was covered up to his chin by a sterile sheet. It always came back to Brandon. Titus barely acknowledged Charlie at all when he replied in a soft murmur. “Doesn’t matter. To me, the whole world’s a graveyard.”

Charlie thought it was kind of a morbid sentiment, but he knew what the guy meant. What was one more dead person, when he was always surrounded by them. Sure, a body was different from a ghost, but dead was dead.

Titus reached out as if he might touch Brandon’s hair, but stopped just short of making contact. His mouth moved as if he were speaking, but no sound came out; it was just an eerie, silent conversation. Charlie shivered, imagining he could feel the spirit of Brandon Meyers brush past him.

Karen came over to stand on Titus’s other side. She stared at him for a few minutes before giving Charlie a quizzical look. “Is he okay?”

He shrugged in answer. “I guess? I think this is how it works. We just have to wait for him to… finish, or whatever. It’s not an exact science,” he said, repeating their go-to phrase to inadequately describe that which couldn’t be explained.

Hazarding a peek at David, Charlie noticed the guy was sort of frozen, staring wide-eyed at Titus like he might start speaking in tongues or burst into flames. He couldn’t really blame him; Titus’s affiliation with the police department was strictly on a need-to-know basis, and David had barely been brought into the loop about what was going on. He
was
only part-time, after all.

Nodding at David and then turning to Karen, Charlie took a few steps back. “Why don’t we all just try and give Titus a little space.”

Karen plopped herself into her rolling desk chair, and Charlie leaned against her desk. David visibly shook himself and turned around to finish scrubbing the counters—what he’d been doing when they came in.

“You got any toxicology reports yet?” Charlie asked.

Grabbing a file off her desk and sifting through it, Karen nodded. “I have Ross, Huneycutt, and Lewis so far. Unfortunately there’s nothing remarkable in any of them. We can retest for specific substances if you have reason to suspect something, but as far as the general constituents we test for, we’ve got zip.”

“
Fuck
.”

Suddenly, Titus whipped around and gazed unseeing in their direction—his eyes were still completely dilated. “Why’s the computer screen doing that?”

“Doing what?” was Karen’s cautious reply.

“That thing with the numbers,” Titus mumbled.

Charlie and Karen looked at the computer monitor, and then shared a confused look because they’d both seen the same thing—a blank screen.

Chapter Twenty-one

I’d put on the pendant right before Charlie ushered me into the morgue. I immediately wished I had scoped out the room first, because my five spirits were not the only ones lurking there. So many lives culminated in that laboratory, I was an idiot for not considering how crowded it would be.

However, it didn’t happen like it used to before the
sapaśaṭāzho
; they didn’t converge on me like I was the last piece of meat on a fresh kill, like vultures. They stared, they hovered, they gaped, but they left me alone… all except for my five.

As I stood over Brandon Meyer’s pale, stiff body, Brandon himself drifted over to my side. I glanced over and he gave me this look that bespoke disappointment and sorrow all wrapped up together. It was as if I was letting him down, and he could do nothing but watch it happen.

He pointed to something behind me, so I turned and saw the computer going crazy, scrolling those numbers again. I wasn’t sure when it happened at the shop, but this time I was certain Brandon was causing it… and it was his way of trying to tell me something.

Hoping maybe Karen could shed some light—it was her computer after all—I asked her about it. From the looks of bewilderment worn by all the other occupants of the lab, I realized that, unlike the first time with Riot, no one else was seeing what I was seeing.
Fucking Perfect
.

I looked at Brandon again, and he made an unreadable gesture in the direction of the computer, and then to Karen. I cleared my throat. I wasn’t in any hurry to sound like more of a lunatic than I already did but, in for a penny…

“Do you know what binary is?” I asked her.

She shrugged a bony shoulder encased in the white cotton of her lab coat. “Computer language? Yeah, I guess.” Her face had registered surprise, like maybe she didn’t think I was capable of carrying on a conversation while I was ‘reading’ the victims.

“Uh huh. Riot—my roommate—explained it to me a while ago, but it was all Greek to me. Supposedly every bit of digital information programmed inside a computer can be spelled out in ones and zeros.”

“Okay…” she prompted, giving me a dubious look.

And there it is
, I thought.
I’m the last nut in the crazy patch, and everybody knows it.
I put that line of discussion on hold and walked back to the body on the slab. “Can I touch?”

Charlie looked scandalized that I’d even ask, but Karen nodded toward a dispenser on the wall. “Wear some gloves. Actually, double glove on this one. He was HIV positive. There’s virtually no chance of communication, especially since he’s closed, but we don’t need that kind of liability.”

I pulled out four sterile gloves and hastily tugged them on. I hated the artificial feeling of them, that sensation of skin but not skin, touching things but not really perceiving them. I stepped up close to the exam table, near Brandon’s head. Touching his jaw gently with two fingers and trying not to give in to the urge to vomit, I turned his head slightly so I could get a good look at the cuts on his neck.

Arranged in a rectangular pattern, the tiny gruesome slashes and circles stood out deep red against his anemic dead skin. They taunted me. I knew they should mean something—they
had
to mean something—and it was right in front of my face, but I wasn’t seeing it. I stared at the cuts until my eyes watered, then I looked back at the computer. The binary code was still scrolling. The binary…
See!

“Binary,” I muttered, and then the light came on. It was so obvious, I almost laughed out loud. I might have, if I hadn’t felt so stupid for not realizing it the first time Brandon showed it to me. “That’s what it is. That’s what it’s fucking always been.”

“Pardon me?” Karen said.

“What do you mean, Titus?” Charlie asked more gently, coming over to stand beside me.

I brushed an almost nonexistent touch across Brandon’s marred skin. “I always thought they were just like, random shapes, I guess… that they only had meaning to the killer, but they’re not just lines and circles. They’re ones and zeros. Binary.”

“How do you know that?”

It was first time the young lab tech, David, had spoken to me. He’d been watching me with quite obvious skepticism the whole time I’d been there. I wasn’t really surprised to get such a reaction. I might’ve acted the same way if I didn’t live with this reality. “I can’t really tell you that, David. I wasn’t exactly brought here for scientific analysis of the bodies, you know?”

He just narrowed his eyes and said nothing else.

“I think what David meant…” Karen said, glaring at her apprentice, “… is what makes you think that?”

“It’s just the images I’m seeing, I guess. Riot said that all the information in a computer can be spelled out by an infinite combination of ones and zeros. I’m not really a techie, so I don’t know how it works.”

Charlie sounded almost excited when he spoke up, and his eyes had a new sparkle to them. “Are you saying that these marks could actually make words? Is that possible?”

“I guess. If I’m right, I mean. And if Riot is, of course. You’ll probably want to consult a computer expert or something. It might not turn out to be anything,” I added, absurdly trying to avoid getting Charlie’s hopes up only to disappoint him with another dead-end lead.

“Hey, anything is more than we’ve got now. Stay here and see if you… see anything else. I’m going to get on the phone with DeRossi and see if he can run us down a computer guru.”

I nodded, but then a thought occurred to me. “Or we could just ask Riot.”

“You think he would know about this?”

“I’m convinced that Riot knows a little about nearly everything, and he definitely knows computers.”

Charlie seemed to think it over, then jerked a quick nod as if he’d come to a decision. “I need to fill DeRossi in anyway, and whatever we come up with will likely have to be verified by an expert, should it come before a judge. It will probably take him a while to find somebody, so in the meantime, let’s ask Riot.”

I watched as he disappeared into the hallway to make the call, and then I turned to Karen. “What happened with the chimera thing? Did you figure anything else out about it? It certainly didn’t make sense to me.”

“Oh! I completely forgot,” she said excitedly. She yelled for Charlie in the general direction of the hallway. “Hale! Get back in here.”

Charlie came back in shortly after, looking disgruntled. Whether it was Karen’s summoning or his conversation with DeRossi that caused it, I couldn’t tell.

“What?” he said tersely.

“Titus just reminded me about the chimerism thing. I forgot to tell you that’d I’d made a little headway down that avenue.”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Karen. Why didn’t you tell me this hours ago when I called you.”

“Hey, I’m not murdering these people—I’m just the one with the unpleasant job of carving them up, so back the
fuck
off!”

“Easy, guys,” I said. It looked like I was to be cast in the role of referee.
And why not? I’m already the intermediary between the police and the ghosts
. “You’re not going to get anywhere by sniping at each other. Dr. Johanssen, would you please tell us what you found?”

“
Finally
, someone with some goddamn
sense
. Maybe you can fuck some manners into him one of these days, eh?”

And then we all kind of froze. I had no idea how much Charlie told Karen, or how close they were. I couldn’t drum up a response without blatantly confirming or denying her assertion, so I settled on “uh, excuse me?”

“Karen!” Charlie said, clearly mortified as twin spots of red bloomed on his cheeks. “I cannot believe you just fucking said that.”

“What? You already told us you were gay and had a boyfriend. From the way you’re acting around him…” she tipped her head in my direction, “… anyone with half a brain could see that he’s the one you’re all worked up about.”

She turned to me with her hands spread out, like she thought I was going to back her up. I had nothing—
nada
—to say on the subject. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could form a coherent sentence, as my brain was on lockdown from the embarrassment of it all.

“Karen, this is completely inappropriate. You’re embarrassing him! Not to mention me… Look! You’ve got to have talent to make someone with his complexion turn fire-truck-red.”

“U-um…” I stuttered, unable to offer anything more useful to the conversation. Charlie wasn’t making it any better by drawing attention to my discomfort.

“You don’t have to say anything, Titus. Karen’s going to drop it. Aren’t you, Karen?”

Karen snorted, and I resisted the urge to whinny at her. In my opinion, the only things that needed to be snorting were horses.

“I didn’t hear a no,” she said with a smirk.

“Just tell us what you found out,” Charlie prodded.

It seemed like Karen was finally willing to stop the teasing, or hazing depending on who you asked, and get down to business. “Okay, so after Titus had his little revelation about chimerism—one of these days you’ll have to explain that to me—I went over my autopsy findings again, and did a little research on the vics who we had medical records for.”

She walked over to her desk, picked up a file, and leafed through it. “I’ve concluded that at least two out of the five victims have conditions that could
possibly
have been caused by chimerism. And two others look suspicious.