Vigil (26 page)

He left the cafeteria, and walking home decided to stop by the now-abandoned lab; he was about to finish up his report for the president’s office, and he wanted to make sure he’d covered everything he needed to. He stopped across the street, and from there he surveyed the yellow police tape, now drooping in spots, the loading doors twisted and bent by the intense heat, the outside walls blackened with smoke. He was surprised that the smell of the fire was still so strong.

And then he realized that the smell wasn’t coming from the lab; it was coming from much closer, from right behind him. He turned and saw a laminated ID card of some kind lying on the concrete. He bent to pick it up.

It was a driver’s license, for a man—African American, young—named Donald Dobkins. It was scorched around the edges, but the face in the picture looked vaguely familiar.

He glanced into the stairwell and saw an eyeglass case, open and empty.

The smell was even stronger now. And he could hear a sound—a soft rustling—in the shadows at the bottom of the stairwell.

What was going on? What was down there? Could whatever it was be connected in some way to the lab fire? But even if that were true, how would it have remained undiscovered, so close by, all these days?

The rustling came again, and Carter said, “Hey! Somebody down there?”

There was no reply.

“Anybody?”

Carter went down a step, and the burning smell—the odor of burnt meat, in fact—got stronger still.

And now he could see something, a blackened heap, lying on the ground.

He went down another step—and the heap now had shoes. Burnt, but recognizable shoes—with a high heel.

Carter stopped in his tracks. This was a body. Dead. But then the rustling sound came again, and he saw movement.

Oh my God,
he thought.
Maybe not! Maybe it’s someone still alive!
He vaulted the rest of the steps, and when his own feet hit the cement there was an explosion of activity—squeaking and scurrying, flashing red eyes and little white teeth. Rats—some as big and black as cats—shot off in all directions, running across his shoes, scampering up the stairs. Carter froze in place until the swarm was gone—this had actually happened to him once before, when he’d descended into an ancient sinkhole in the Yucatán—and he knew enough to just hold his breath and let it pass. The rats wanted no more to do with him than he did with them.

The corpse—his first impression had been the right one—looked as if it had collapsed in on itself, coming to rest in a pile of burnt limbs and charred bone. The face, or what little was left of it, was staring upward in a silent rictus of pain. As he bent closer, the aroma of cooked flesh was nearly too much to bear; he had to turn away, grab a breath, then turn back again with his mouth closed. What he saw was, like the picture on the driver’s license, strangely familiar. Did he know this person?

The words were coming back to him now.

The transvestite, the one who worked this corner.

That’s who this was—who it had
been
. But how on earth had this happened to him?

Carter turned his head away and grabbed another breath of air.

But what were the odds—first Russo, and now this guy, both burnt so badly? So near to each other? And just a few days apart? What were the chances of a coincidence like that? Carter didn’t put them very high.

He looked around the dark stairwell, but all he saw were ashes and shreds of burned newspaper. There was nothing else down here, and certainly nothing he could do for the dead Donald Dobkins, except call the police.

From the phone booth on the corner he dialed 911, and a squad car showed up one minute later. A homicide, Carter surmised, still rated with the police.

He gave one of the cops the driver’s license he’d found, and he was in the midst of explaining how he’d discovered the body when another car, this one unmarked, showed up; a middle-aged man in an old gray raincoat and big black eyeglasses got out. “You the guy who called it in?” he asked Carter, who nodded. “Then I’m the one you should be talking to.” He opened his coat to reveal a gold badge clipped to his sagging belt. “I’m Detective Finley.”

He glanced down the stairwell, through glasses that looked to Carter like their lenses were half an inch thick, then said rather wearily, “Wait here.”

Carter did as he was told, though he was already beginning to regret that he’d ever stumbled into this. Why hadn’t he just called it in anonymously, left the driver’s license where he’d found it, and taken off? It wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, but at least he wouldn’t be standing around here now, waiting to give what precious little information he could.

Detective Finley came back up the stairs, putting his fingers in his ears, just as the ambulance, siren wailing, arrived on the scene. When the ambulance stopped—and the siren with it—Detective Finley removed his fingers. “They always do that,” he said to Carter. “I’m going deaf from it.”

Carter smiled sympathetically. “Professional hazard, I guess.”

“Not the worst of them.”

No, Carter thought, probably not. The detective took a notepad out of his raincoat pocket and dutifully took down Carter’s name, his phone number, a few notes on how he found the body, why he happened to be in the area. When Carter mentioned that he worked in the lab across the street, the detective’s ears seemed to prick up. “I was the one who got the call about that,” he said. “We took out one body, burned as bad as this one, and another where the guy was still breathing.”

“That was a friend of mine, the one who was still alive. He’s at St. Vincent’s now.”

“I know. I held onto his hand until they got him to the E.R.” He shook his head, sadly. “Poor guy—glad he’s still hanging on.” He gestured at the stairwell, where Carter could hear the paramedics putting the body on a stretcher. “Now it looks like we’ve got another fire victim, only this one’s dead no more than a day or two.”

“I know who it is,” Carter volunteered, “in fact, I gave a—”

“We know who it is, too. It’s one of the transvestites who worked this corner. He got beat up once in a while—they all do—but nothing this bad ever happened before.”

“So you think some . . .
customer
did this to him?”

Detective Finley stepped to one side to let the stretcher go by. Even with the body wrapped in a plastic sheath, the smell was bad. The paramedics wore paper masks.

“Right now, I couldn’t say. But what kind of concerns me is, this happened right across the street from the last place I saw a couple of burn victims.”

Though it was tough to see Finley’s eyes through the thick glasses he wore, Carter felt he was being studied.

“Just what were you doing in that lab building, anyway?” Finley asked.

“Working on a fossil,” Carter said, “a rare find, from Italy.”

“Were you using flammable stuff, like chemical agents? Blowtorches?”

He was grasping at straws, that much Carter could tell, but for the first time it dawned on Carter that perhaps he should start watching what he said. “Some extra lighting had been rigged up,” he admitted. “The fire marshal thinks that’s what started the fire.”

Detective Finley pursed his lips, skeptically. “Awful big blast, for a bad fuse.”

Of course Carter could explain, if he’d wanted to, what really happened; he could tell him what Russo had said about Mitchell training the laser on the slab of stone, a slab of stone riddled with pockets of gas. But for some reason he didn’t. Nor did he say anything about what Russo had said, in his delusional state, about the fossil coming to life.

“You ever talk to this guy, Donald Dobkins, the hooker?”

“No,” Carter said, before catching himself, and saying, “Yes, once.”
Damn,
he thought. Finley would note his confusion. “I was upstate when the accident occurred, but right after I got to the lab, the day after the accident, I saw him on the street. He was babbling about seeing somebody, somebody coming out of the burning building.” Why did he feel, more and more, like he was offering an alibi?

“So who did he think he saw coming out?”

Carter hesitated. He could see where this might be going. Maybe Finley thought that the arsonist who had set the fire had been spotted by Donald Dobkins, and come back to dispose of the witness. But Carter knew that that wasn’t it. “If you really want to know, he said that he saw a naked man made out of light,” Carter replied, thinking that this would put an end at least to this line of questioning.

But Finley appeared strangely unsurprised. “Fits the general description.”

“Even though Mr. Russo was slipping in and out of consciousness when he was taken out of here,” the detective added, “he was mumbling the same sort of thing.”

“He was?”

The detective nodded as he dug around in his pocket and then produced a business card so worn it looked like he’d already handed it out a dozen times. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.” He turned toward his car. “In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye out for anybody walking around made out of light.”

The ambulance pulled away from the curb, and a moment or two later the detective’s sedan pulled out after it. One of the cops was still standing at the top of the stairwell, speaking into a walkie-talkie, and Carter finally realized, even though nobody had given him formal permission, that he was now free to go.

It all seemed so . . . anticlimactic somehow. He’d discovered a body—a dead, burnt body—and now it was all over. He was walking away. Nobody had any more questions for him, there was nothing more that he could do. And maybe that was why, like a delayed reaction, it suddenly hit him—the full horror of what he’d seen. With nothing to do, and no one to talk to, he could suddenly focus on the reality of it, on the grim, appalling discovery he’d made. It wasn’t the first corpse he’d ever seen—on his work expeditions he’d occasionally encountered natural and accidental deaths—but this wasn’t anything like those. This was the kind of sight that came back to haunt you in your dreams—and that was all he needed. He was already having enough trouble getting to sleep these days.

He shivered and put up the collar of his leather jacket; it might be time to break out the parka, he thought. Even though it was only late afternoon, the light was getting pretty thin. The days were growing shorter. At the corner of West Fourth Street, while he waited for the light, he suddenly felt like there was someone right behind him. Watching. He turned around, but the nearest pedestrian was an elderly woman with a walker, her eyes riveted to the cement.

He crossed the street and walked the rest of the way home at a brisk pace—not only to keep warm, but to shake that odd sensation of being tracked. Once or twice he turned around abruptly, but he never saw anyone suspicious. When he got to the foyer of his building, he stopped to pry the mail out of their little metal box—these boxes, he thought, had obviously been designed long before mail-order catalogs had been invented—and instead of waiting for the unreliable elevator, took the stairs, two at a time.

Beth wasn’t home, and the apartment was dark. He went from room to room, turning on the lights, and put a CD of the Hives on the stereo. He wanted upbeat, fast, attention-grabbing music, and he also wanted it loud. He popped open the fridge, took out a beer, and went into the living room. He flopped down on the sofa and stretched out his legs; above his head, he could see the Audubon bird prints. One of which Russo had temporarily replaced with that crucifix. What, he wondered, had all of that really been about? He’d never had a chance to ask, and now it would definitely not be a good idea.

Maybe, after dinner, he’d hit the hospital one more time, just to say good night.

He picked up a copy of
New York Magazine
from the floor beside the sofa and was just starting to flip through it—maybe there’d be a review of some downtown restaurant that he and Beth could try tonight, someplace crowded and noisy—when he heard someone outside the door to the apartment. He stopped flipping the pages and waited. It was a little early for Beth to be getting home; Raleigh usually liked to extract his full pound of flesh. As he started to get up from the couch, the door swung open, and he saw Beth holding her leather valise in one hand, and a bulging plastic bag, which smelled suspiciously like Chinese food, in the other.

“Here, let me get that,” he said, hurrying over to take the Chinese food before the plastic bag, already stretching at the top, burst.

“Thanks,” Beth said, kicking the door closed behind her. Then she turned the lock and threw the bolt on the door. And glanced through the peephole.

“You’re being especially cautious tonight,” Carter said, putting the bag on the kitchen counter.

“Yeah, well, I had kind of a scare downstairs.”

Carter left the bag where he’d put it and went to Beth.

“What happened?”

“Nothing, really. I just wasn’t paying attention when I came into the building.”

Carter waited.

“I was carrying all this stuff, and I was already in the foyer before I realized that somebody was in there. I’m usually more alert than that.”

“Who was it?” Carter was remembering the feeling he’d had, of being followed home.

“I don’t know, I didn’t get a very good look at him.” She pulled off her overcoat and hung it on the wooden rack by the door. “I think he didn’t want me to. He was tall, blond I think, with sunglasses on, and he turned around and went out almost as soon as I got into the foyer. I was going to get the mail.”

“I already got it,” Carter said numbly.

“Good, because I didn’t. He was standing right in the way; in fact, I could swear he was running his finger around our names on the box.”