Fear the Darkness (9 page)

"Yeah, and he's not being too polite about it, either," she replied. Then, noticing Hass standing among the group gazing at the message on the wall, she winked jauntily and gave him a sarcastic smile.

"Mass hysteria, huh?" she said, nodding towards the unconscious body of Judge Brophy as it was carried away to med-bay. "Guess that means we must all be as crazy as he is."

FIVE

SILENT CADAVERS

"Leland Eric Barclay," Med-Judge Henderson said, pulling open a long metal drawer to reveal the damaged and ruined features of a fire-blackened corpse. "Male. Age: thirty-four. Cause of death... Well, why don't we make this one interesting? See if you can work it out for yourself."

They were alone in the Sector House morgue. Standing on the opposite side of the drawer from the young Med-Judge, Anderson looked at his smiling face and could see he wasn't joking. It had been a long night. First, there had been the Durand kidnapping, the frantic search through the Undercity and the demon. Then, there had been the holding cubes, the meeting with Hass, the Brophy incident and the bloody writing on the wall. Right now, the last thing she wanted to do was play twenty questions with a ghoulish morgue attendant who was so starved of human company he thought guessing causes of death was some kind of parlour game. But if she wanted Henderson to help her, it looked like she was going to have to play it his way.

Guess he doesn't get too many women down here, she thought, sighing inwardly. Probably thinks this is what passes for flirtation in the outside world.

"Smoke inhalation?" she said, wondering if Henderson made all the sector's Judges go through the same rigmarole when they wanted answers.

"Bee-Beep!" Henderson buzzed, imitating the sound contestants heard on the Tri-D gameshow
Wheel of Credits
when they gave the wrong answer. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? It's certainly the usual cause of death when a victim dies in a fire, and I bet our friend Barclay here only wishes he'd had it so easy. You want to try again? Double or nothing?"

"Why don't you just tell me, Henderson," she said, growing tired of the game already. "Blind me with science."

"Oh, okay," he said, peering closely at Anderson for a moment as though trying to decide whether she was being sarcastic. "Well, as I say, when a victim dies in a fire, usually you'd expect the smoke to suffocate them before the fire can kill them. Or, they breathe in superheated air, causing their throat to blister and swell up, with the same result - suffocation. Not Barclay. He literally burned to death. See this hole here?" Henderson pointed to Barclay's blackened ribs peeking out through the mess of his chest. "Fire burnt right through into the chest cavity. Turned his heart into a lump of charcoal. Of course, the post mortem report gives the cause of death as hypoxia. Oxygen starvation. The heart getting torched stopped his blood from flowing and caused his brain to shut down through lack of oxygen, but that's just semantics. The poor bastard burned to death, pure and simple."

Henderson fell silent as he stared down at the corpse in sober reflection. "I always figured that's got to be one of the worst ways to die," he said. "Burning to death. You feel every moment of it. Or at least you do until the fire burns away the nerves in your skin and you can't feel anything anymore. Even then, if you're conscious you still know what's happening. You can smell your flesh burning, hear the sizzle as the fat on your body cracks and pops. Human crackling. Grud, but that's a bad way to go."

"What about the cause of the fire?" Anderson asked. "What do we have on that?"

"Now that's a bit of a puzzle." His sombre mood evaporating, Henderson looked towards her and arched his eyebrows. "You get a human body hot enough it'll burn just like a candle. But Forensics haven't found any trace of accelerants or fuels that might have started the fire. Nor are there the type of burn patterns you'd expect if someone had used a plasma weapon, microwave emitter, broadbeam laser, or any kind of heat ray. It's a mystery. I hear the boys in Tek-Bay are really scratching their heads over this one."

"What about you?" Anderson said. "You got any theories?"

"Theories?" He adopted a comically irate manner as he attempted to do an impression of one of the characters from the cult Tri-D show,
Hell Trek
. "Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a theoretician!"

Guess that answers the question of what Henderson does down here when he's not cutting up corpses, Anderson thought. Looks like he watches a lot of bad Tri-D.

"We're talking about murders, Henderson," she reminded him. "Six of them so far. People are dying."

"Uh... right," Henderson replied, crestfallen that she did not share his sense of humour. "Well, we can rule out spontaneous combustion. Sponcoms always start inside the body and burn outward, while the fire that killed Barclay started outside and burned its way in. Of course, it could be the work of a pyrokinetic."

"You think so?" Anderson asked. "SJS Hass already had a Psi-Judge scan for pyrokine activity and came up empty."

"Nah, not really," Henderson shrugged. "The thing is, there aren't really any forensic signs specifically associated with a pyrokine attack. It's more like a diagnosis by default. You know, you can't find any other evidence of how a fire started - a pyrokine must have done it. But in this case it's pretty unlikely. Barclay was alone in a locked room, the surveillance cameras were out and the observation-port in the holding cube door was closed. There wasn't even anybody in the corridor outside when the attack started. And pyrokines, like most psychics, usually need a clear line-of-sight to their target."

"There are ways around that, though," Anderson said. "If the pyrokine was already mind-linked with the victim, or had given him some kind of focus-"

"The focus idea is definitely out." Henderson shook his head. "Remember, Barclay was in a holding cube - they would have taken all his personal property off him in Processing. It could be a mind-link, or a really powerful pyrokine who's learned how to get by without line-of-sight. But we come back to the same problem: Hass had a scan done for pyrokines and didn't find anything. Then there's the fact there was no collateral burn damage to Barclay's clothes and surroundings." He shrugged. "I don't know. I've looked at it every way I can think of, without even getting close to coming up with an answer."

He pursed his lips as he looked at the body. Long seconds passed as the two of them stared at the corpse. Looking at the burnt and tortured flesh of what had once been a man, Anderson found herself frustrated. She had come to the morgue in hope of answers, but there were none. Only more questions.

"One strange thing," Henderson said. "When the body came in, it was in foetal position. That's not unusual in deaths by fire: if they can't escape the flames, victims tend to adopt the foetal position as a way of trying to protect themselves. Then, when I tried to straighten the body out so I could perform the autopsy, I found the limbs were in rigor mortis. This isn't unusual in itself: the heat of the fire causes the muscles of the victim's body to clench, inducing a premature state of rigor. But what
was
unusual - and, between you and me, I can't even begin to explain it - is that Barclay's muscles had been so badly damaged by the fire that there should have been no way they could have sustained a state of rigor. Look at him for yourself, and you'll see there's little more left of his arms than scorched bone and charcoal. Yet, somehow, even with no muscles left, those arms were so strongly clenched around his body I had to break the elbow joints to open them. It's a physical impossibility, but that's exactly what happened. Look in the autopsy notes if you don't believe me."

"I believe you," Anderson said. "Right now this whole case makes so little sense, I wouldn't say that anything's impossible."

She looked closely at Leland Barclay, trying to read something in the open-mouthed expression of agony he had taken with him to death. For a moment she was tempted to put out her hand and lay it on his forehead to try to scan him, but that would come later. She was hunting a killer, and if she was going to build a picture of who that was, it was better to follow a certain order of things. Which meant first of all that she wanted to see the rest of his victims.

"All right," she said to Henderson at last. "So that's Leland Barclay. Now let me see the others."

Eugene Detwiler. Bartley Gribbs. Evan McShane. Montgomery Wheatley. Reynaldo Wu. One by one, Henderson showed her the bodies. In each case, the particulars were the same: the same cause of death, the same fire-ravaged corpses, the same scorched and damaged faces with features permanently set in a silent rictus scream. And with each body, the same unanswered questions.

"Thanks for your help, Henderson," she said after he had showed her the last one. "I'd appreciate it if you'd leave the drawers open and give me some time alone with them. I'm going to try to do a scan."

Standing beside one of the bodies as she heard Henderson's footfalls recede behind her, Anderson breathed in deeply and removed her gloves to lay her hands across the man's forehead. Courtesy of the refrigeration systems hidden inside the morgue drawer, the sensation of the cold clammy flesh beneath her palms was enough to make her shiver. Worse, she could feel small pieces of burnt flesh breaking off to adhere to her hands. Grud, wish I could've left my gloves on for this, she thought, but she cast the thought aside. She had a job to do. She was a Psi-Judge and she was hunting a killer. Squeamishness was not an option.

She breathed deeply, in and out, letting her own body set the rhythms of the trance. Her heart. Her lungs. Her blood. Her pulse. Retreating to a quiet place deep inside herself, she opened to the psi-flux and waited for the rush of sensations as she tried to connect to the memories and emotions still lingering in the cold flesh before her. She waited and felt...

Nothing.

Confused, she opened her eyes. It was the same as earlier when she had tried to scan the cube where Leland Barclay had died. The corpse felt blank. Empty. There were no residual memories. No emotions. No thoughts. No sign whatsoever that what was now dead flesh had ever once been a living man.

For a moment she wondered if there was something wrong with her powers. As quickly as the thought occurred to her, she dismissed it. She could feel her psychic senses operating just as they always had. She had felt the undercurrents of animosity during the meeting with Hass, Grimes and Franklin. She had felt the panic in the corridor outside the meeting when Brophy went crazy. She had felt Henderson's awkward lust towards her. No, there was nothing wrong with her powers. But if there was nothing wrong with them, then that meant...

Moving to each of the bodies in turn, she tried to scan them one by one. The result was the same. Nothing. At last, calling an end to her fruitless labours, she shivered, not with the cold this time, but at a thought that came to her. Six bodies and six murder scenes, all of them psychically blank and empty. Whoever, or
whatever
, was at work in Sector House 12 had done something far worse than simply kill these men. It was as though it had annihilated them, leaving their cold dead bodies behind but otherwise scouring away every trace of their existence. Thoughts. Memories. Emotions. Six bodies, and it was like there was nothing left of the men they belonged to, nothing but burnt, empty shells.

It was monstrous. She realised there was something she had been putting off for some time, hoping that if she found the answer in the morgue she might never need to do it. An obvious task she had been avoiding. The bodies in the morgue could tell her nothing. She had spent her time with the dead when there was still a living victim who might be able to answer her questions and tell her everything she needed to know.

Brophy.

She could not put it off any longer. If she was going to find the answers she was seeking, it looked as though she was going to have to journey into the mind of a madman.

SIX

THE SINS OF WILLIAM BROPHY

It's just not possible, Vernon Hass thought as he sat brooding at his desk. There is no conceivable way it could have happened.

He had just received the forensics report on the bloody writing that had appeared in the wake of Judge Brophy's sudden and spectacular descent into madness. Leafing through the report, Hass found to his dismay that every claim Chief Warder Sykes and his men had made about the earlier messages in the holding cube's walls had been supported. This time Hass had even seen the message on the corridor wall himself.

By the time the first Tek-Judges had arrived on the scene it had disappeared. Worse, forensic analysis of the wall and the residues left there by the sprinkler system showed no sign of any blood, ink, or any other conceivable substance that could have created the red letters seen by more than a dozen witnesses. Nor, despite Hass's most fervent wishes, could the collective testimony of these witnesses - himself included - be explained away as the effect of mass hysteria. The existence of the message had even been recorded on the Sector House's surveillance cameras. Impossibly, somehow the message had appeared and then disappeared without leaving any physical trace. It was a mystery, but if his time in SJS had taught Hass nothing else it was that mysteries were simply unanswered questions. If a man was ambitious and wanted to rise far in SJS as Hass did, he had better find answers quickly.

Perhaps it was a holographic projection of some sort, he thought. I always suspected there was advanced technology at work in these murders. This could simply be more of the same.

He found the thought pleasing. Early in his investigation he had developed the theory that there was a conspiracy at work inside Sector House 12. He had decided the murders in the holding cubes were examples of vigilante justice, meted out by rogue Judges who had become disenchanted with the system they were sworn to uphold. He was sure at least some of the Judge-Warders were in on it, perhaps even Chief Warder Sykes himself. As to why the conspirators had waited until now to begin their killings, the answer was obvious. They were using the fact that Sector House 12 was closing to their advantage, hoping the chaos of the move to the new Sector House would help them in covering their tracks. So far, Hass had been unable to unearth any hard evidence to support his theory - nor any to even establish the identities of the main conspirators. All the same, he was sure it was solid. Just as he was sure, given enough time, he would eventually crack the case wide open.