The Brain Vault (Stephanie Chalice Thrillers Book 3) (8 page)

“So what’s in the bag?”

Ambler placed the brown paper evidence bag on the sand next to Zugg. He stood and dusted the sand off his slacks.

“I emailed you the case information. The prints have already been lifted.” Ambler slipped on a pair of sunglasses.

“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?”

Ambler stopped and turned back. “This one’s important to me.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Whatever you can do, my friend—I’ll appreciate it.”

Zugg read a look of worry on Ambler’s face. “Don’t worry. What’s the worst that could happen, it kills me?”

Ambler shook his head in dismay. “Droll to the last. Call me as soon as you’ve found something.”

“What makes you so sure I’ll find something?”

Ambler grinned behind his sunglasses and walked off.

Zugg watched as Ambler climbed into his Volvo and drove away.

Looking around, Zugg confirmed that he was now completely alone on the beach. He quickly pulled open the bag. Within, he saw what appeared to be a sterilized human skull. Zugg took the skull out of the bag and examined it in the bright sunlight. He judged that it was the skull of a young adult male, nineteen to thirty years of age. Turning the skull in his hands, he examined it for abnormalities, but found none that were apparent to the eye.

In the sand, just off his fingertips, the shell of another large mussel protruded up through the sand. Zugg rested the skull on his lap and dug the shell out of the sand. He wiped the moist sand from its shell.
Mytilidae. Order mytiloida. Bivalve mollusk. Omega-3 rich.
Zugg tore off the beard, pried apart the stubborn shells, and chewed down the raw meat. He wiped his mouth clean and then picked the skull up again. Holding it in front of his face, he turned it in his hands, pressing his nose against it as one might sniff a melon at market. With his eyes closed, he paused with his nose almost touching the skull, sniffing hard like a dog trying to extract a scent. In the next instant, he was on his feet, eager and rejuvenated, rushing back to his car.

A
n
Oxford Inca Energy 400 Spectroscope
running IMQUANT software would normally be the last thing you’d expect to find in someone’s home.
Nonetheless, there sat Damien Zugg, surrounded by the tens of thousands of small bits he had collected over the years. Forensic pathology: no one living knew more about it. Only the dead were capable of revealing more secrets.

Bordering the basement, metal shelves were lined with boxes filled with the many specimens Zugg had collected over the term of his professional and intellectual career. Each box was clearly labeled and dated. They were of varying sizes, all except for the thirty-inch corrugated boxes stacked under the basement window; each of those contained some two hundred-six bones, roughly the number of bones found in a human skeleton. These were samples he had prepared and catalogued on his own, with hands he could once depend on, with eyes that once saw true. This skull, this pure white skull, it tore at him. He could sense a connection that had been intangible to all else.

The computer screen before him registered in both graphical and digital output, elemental composition—he had found the smallest traces of a substance running horizontally across the temporal bone, barely enough for assay. It had been undetectable in ordinary daylight, but had irradiated under infrared. Data began to fill the screen.

A number counter began to run across the center of the computer screen. When it was done, Zugg would know the specific gravity of the substance.

Zugg glanced at the clock in the lower left corner of the computer screen. It read 7:15 p.m. He closed his eyes and rested, face in hand. It had been days since he’d enjoyed a sound night’s sleep. His conscious mind was beginning to drift. He glanced at the clock again. It now read 7:40 p.m.
Where did the time go?
He was blanking out more and more often, succumbing to weariness, losing little bits of the day, unable to account for the missing time.

He removed his baseball cap.
Time for the seventh inning scratch
, he mused. It had become a part of him, adorning his head at all times, except when he attempted to sleep. The brim was causing irritation where it touched his surgical scar, and his itchy scalp was driving him to the point of distraction. He scratched his shaved head carefully. His scalp prickled constantly, but Zugg had a strong resolve; not wanting to initiate infection, he rarely succumbed to the annoyance.

The counter was now running quickly. He saw that it had finally stopped at 407,979, and then he clicked a tab at the side of the screen. The chemical composition was already there, C
₂₅
H
₃₀
ClN
_3.

Zugg allowed his head to fall limply to the side, his expression, a cross between revelation and disappointment. The scientists at the FBI’s forensic lab were capable of identifying the most obscure amounts of almost any substance. What he had found was one of the most common materials used in modern day forensics. The question running through his mind was, had it gotten there by accident? Had someone been clumsy in the lab? Good sense told him that there was no other explanation for gentian violet to be on this otherwise sterile skull, but this was what made Zugg the scientist he was. Somewhere, deep in the recesses of his cancer-riddled brain, a neuron fired telling him not to ignore the clue. 

He reached for the phone and dialed Ambler.

A
delaide Tucker rarely strayed from the nurse’s station in the middle of the night, except to make necessary rounds.
The evening had been quiet and her supervisor was on her meal break for the next thirty minutes. It was time to shut her eyes and take a catnap. It was the only way for her to keep going. No matter how she tried, she had never been able to adjust her sleeping pattern and often ran out of gas at about this hour. She had at first tried ducking into an empty room to get off her feet, but was always being walked in on by randy interns. Nowadays, the chair was good enough. She’d conditioned herself to fall asleep within seconds. Twenty minutes was all it took. It was better than working groggy. God forbid she made a mistake with someone’s medication. She felt her eyelids lower and was almost out when she heard the scream. She was used to almost every noise a patient could possibly make: moaning, crying, heaving—she had heard it all and had learned how to ignore or sleep through most of it, but this scream, this one was serious. She had hoped it would be a single outburst, but no, it was followed by another, and yet another. She jumped out of the chair.

It wasn’t difficult to follow the screaming to its source. In a moment she was standing over John Doe. “Quiet now, Honey. Calm down.” She placed her hand on his shoulder and tried to calm the comatose patient. “I thought you were in a coma. Easy now, it’s alright.” Doe continued to scream. She could hear the rest of the floor waking up around her. She paged the attending physician and continued her attempt at calming Doe. “What’s going on in there?” she said as she stroked his head. “What’s got you so worked up?”

John Doe lay motionless in his stark, white room, searching within for the courage to set himself free. Somehow, the spark of life within him had reignited.

He was once again naked upon a bed in the room he had been imprisoned within from the very start.

The surface of his skin, his tapestry of scars was growing in detail and complexity with each passing day—like ancient hieroglyphics, they chronicled his history in the white room. Cigarette burns, needle punctures, electrical burns, and bruises: each a badge of honor, a testament to John Doe’s will to survive.

Still here. I’m still here.
These words that once tormented him had become his mantra. He had once wished for death, but the end never came, and the torture never stopped. “I’m still alive, goddamn it. I’m still here.” He was not a brave man, but extreme circumstances had forced him to find courage.

A tab each of Valium and Ambien had been squirreled away in the crevice between his cheek and mandible. He’d discard them when he was fully awake, but for now, the soft, uncoated pills leached just enough medication into his bloodstream to produce a semiconscious stupor.

A coroner stood over him in his dream. “John Doe is a male Caucasian, approximately twenty-five years old.”

“I’m Brian,” he mumbled in his sleep. “My name is Brian.”

“Height, approximately sixty-eight inches, weight, roughly one-hundred-and-forty pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. Note: the corneas appear to be damaged. More on that to follow. Apparent cause of death—”

“I’m not dead,” he said, refuting the coroner’s observations. “I’m alive, I’m still alive.”

Running his hand over his leg, he noted how loose the flesh had become over his quads, quads that were once taut from competition track and field. They had begun to grow softer after high school, in the years in which he allowed himself to languish—too much dope, too many lazy days—one piled on top of another, years lost in the blink of an eye. His muscles had further atrophied from lying in bed. He knew the exact placement of every scar on his body and could find them with ease, his fingertips reading the raised surfaces on his skin like brail—each conjuring a horrifying memory.  

One-by-one, Doe’s eyes snapped open to explore the hazy darkness. A small light had been left on to prevent him from tripping. He was now virtually blind, his corneas damaged from caustic applications of Drano. The small light was redundant. Doe knew how to maneuver in the dark using his sense of the room’s layout, arms extended forward for precaution—sensory organs adapted for survival like an insect’s antennae, searching, sensing, directing.

An electrical generator rested on the floor. It was large and heavy, with sharp metal corners he seemed unable to avoid. He had smashed his leg into it several times before finally growing savvy.

Doe fine-tuned his hearing—the house was silent. He’d heard the front door close, the car starting and pulling away. Still he waited several minutes to be absolutely sure. The threat of more electric shocks had trained him very well. At times it was little more than a pulse. Other times, when he had been “bad”, the jumper cables had been clamped on with the current running until he had passed out. As a result, he had learned to stay perfectly still during those occasions when his hair was sheared and his head measured and marked.
How long?
He wondered. How long before they were ready for the next step. How long would they keep him alive?
Not long. I have to do it now.

Doe counted the seconds until five minutes had elapsed, and then pushed the remnants of the two pills from his mouth. They were soft from saliva absorption but they had maintained their integrity. He could distinguish the Valium’s small button shape and the Ambien’s oblong contour as he ground them into powder between his thumb and forefinger and flicked it away. He was no longer bound to the bed as he had been in the past. His captor was relying solely on sedatives to keep him secure. The reason, he assumed, was because they felt he had been broken, and no longer had the will to escape.

One foot off the bed, then the other—cigarette butts beneath the pads of his feet. He scraped the sole of one foot against the other to remove the butts, and then turned to face the bed. Beneath the frame, stashed by the headboard, a paper grocery bag had remained unnoticed for days. Doe retrieved it. Holding it between his hands, he pressed lightly on the sides of the bag. It was still there, still inside. He placed the treasure on the bed for safekeeping and moved to the opposite wall, the outside wall, where a solitary window was covered with wrought iron bars and a shade.

He tore away the shade. On prior nights, he had opened it cautiously so that his work would go undetected. There was no need for precaution tonight. The bars were secured to the inside of the window, lag bolted into studs. It was not uncommon for the windows of a ground level dwelling to be covered with security bars, but Doe’s prison was three levels up; the top level of a New York brownstone.

Doe’s fingers explored the exposed metal threads of the three-inch lag bolts that he had wormed out of the two-by-four studs, one excruciating micron at a time over a period of weeks, twisting the bolts with his raw fingers. The plasterboard around the bolts had been ground away. Doe could now feel the hard pulp of the pine studs by pressing his fingertips into the holes. A mere half-inch of the lag bolt’s thread remained buried in the wood. Doe took hold of the bars with his two hands. One foot up against the wall and then the other, he positioned himself like a huge spider over the bars and began to tug.

He was amazed by how firmly the last half-inch of the bolts still held.
Push with the legs.
He stiffened his back and squeezed with every ounce of his strength. He felt his runner’s legs growing rock hard, his muscles becoming tetanus from the strain.
I’m still strong,
he thought,
I can do it.
Sweat ran into his eyes. A cramp developed in his calf, forcing him to ease up. He took that foot off the wall and waited for the pain to stop and then back on, the moment it disappeared.
Pull, pull, pull, goddamn it. Pull!
The shade had been destroyed. It would be impossible to hide his efforts—if he didn’t get out now, the torture would be devastating. The bars would be reinforced, making future attempts impossible. It was now or never. His back felt like a bow that had been bent too far and was about to snap.
One last tug.

The bars came free with a loud creak. They were still in his hands as his back smashed onto the hardwood floor with a thud. Pain seared his spinal cord in waves. He fought to stay conscious. The pain gradually diminished.

Rising, he allowed his fingertips to revel in the exquisite cool of the window’s exposed glass, for scant seconds only, and then he picked up the security bars he had just pried free and shattered the window. The sounds of the outside world flooded into his ears for the first time in weeks, the sound of traffic, the even hum of the central air unit, and the patter of rain against tree leaves.