Whispers of the Dead (22 page)

I worked even later than I'd intended. Partly because I wanted to
make up for lost time, but also because the thought of spending the
evening alone back at my hotel held little appeal. As long as I was
busy, I could hold off confronting the fact of Tom's death for a little
longer.
But that wasn't the only thing that was bothering me. The feeling
of oppression I'd felt after Paul's visit stubbornly refused to diminish.
My senses seemed oddly heightened. The mortuary's chemical stink
was underlaid with an indefinable biological odour, a faint hint of the
butcher's slab. The white tiles and metal surfaces gleamed coldly in
the harsh light. But it was the silence that I was most aware of. There
was the distant hum of a generator, more felt than heard, the constant plip of a dripping tap. But, other than that, nothing. Normally I didn't
even notice the quiet.
Now I felt it all around me.
Of course, I knew all too well what was the matter. Until Paul had
mentioned it I'd never considered the possibility that York might
target someone else from the investigation. My concern had been all
for Tom, and even after what had happened to Irving, I'd blindly
assumed that he was the only one under threat. But it was naive to
think that York would stop with his death.
He'd just shift his priorities and carry on.
Paul hadn't really been involved with the investigation until now,
but there were plenty of others who might satisfy York's apparent
desire for high-profile victims. I wasn't arrogant enough to think that
I was one of them. Even so, for the first time in days I found myself
fingering my stomach, feeling the scar tissue under the cotton scrubs.
It was after ten before I finished. Noah Harper's bones revealed
nothing else of significance, but then I hadn't expected them to. The
fractured cervical vertebra had said enough. I changed and set off
down the mortuary's main corridor. I seemed to have the place to
myself. There was no sign of Kyle, but he would have finished his
shift long ago. One of the fluorescent strips wasn't working, making
the corridor dim. Up ahead I could see a thin beam of light seeping
out from beneath the door of one of the offices. I was walking past
when a voice came from inside.
'Who's there?'
I recognized the bad-tempered bark immediately. I knew the
intelligent thing would be to walk straight past. Nothing I could say
would change anything; it wouldn't bring Tom. back, heave it. It isn't worth it.
I opened the door and went in.
Hicks sat behind the desk, paused in the act of closing a drawer. It
was the first time I'd seen him since the scene at the cemetery.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. The lamp cast a low circle of light
on to the desk, throwing the rest of the small office into shadow. The
pathologist stared at me sullenly from the edge of it.
'Thought you were a diener,' he muttered. I saw the half-full
tumbler of dark liquid in front of him and guessed I'd interrupted
him putting away a bottle.
I'd gone in there intending to let Hicks know what I thought of
him. But as I looked at him slumped behind the desk, my appetite
for confrontation vanished. I turned to go.
'Wait.'
The pathologist's mouth worked, as though he were trying out
unfamiliar words before he spoke them.
'I'm sorry. About Lieberman.' He studied the blotter on the desk,
one fat index finger tracing an abstract pattern on it. I noticed that
his cream suit looked rumpled and soiled, and realized he'd been
wearing it every time I'd seen him. 'He was a good man. We didn't
always get on, but he was a good man.'
I said nothing. If he was trying to appease a guilty conscience I
wasn't going to help him.
But he didn't seem to expect me to. He picked up the tumbler and
stared morosely into it.
'I've been doing this job for over thirty years, and you know what
the worst of it is? Every time it happens to someone you know, it still
surprises the hell out of you.'
He pursed his lips, as though puzzling over the fact.Then he raised
the tumbler to his lips and emptied it. Reaching down with a small
grunt he opened the drawer and produced a nearly full bottle of
bourbon. For an awful moment I thought he was going to offer me
a drink, propose some maudlin toast to Tom. But he only topped up
his glass before putting the bottle back in the drawer.
I stood there, waiting to see what else he might say, but he stared
into space as though he'd either forgotten I was there or wished I
wasn't. Whatever urge had prompted him to talk seemed to have
been exhausted.
I left him to it.
The encounter was unsettling. The comfortably black and white
terms in which I'd seen Hicks had been undermined. I wondered
how many other nights he'd sat alone in the small office, a lonely
man whose life was empty except for his work.
It was an uncomfortable thought.
Tom's loss was a solid ache under my breastbone as I left the
morgue and headed for my car. The night was cooler than usual,
the damp chill a reminder that winter was still only recent history.
My footsteps echoed off the darkened buildings. Hospitals were
never truly abandoned, but when visiting hours had passed they
could seem lonely places. And the morgue was always set well away
from casual eyes.
It wasn't far to the car park, and I'd left my car in an open,
well-lit area in its centre. But Gardner's warning whispered in my
mind as I walked towards it. What had seemed safe in daylight now
took on a wholly different aspect. Doorways were shadowy holes, the
grassy spaces that I'd admired in the sunshine now fields of solid
black.
I kept my steps regular and even, refusing to give in to the primal
urge to hurry, but I was glad when I reached my car. I took out my
keys and unlocked it while I was still a few paces away. I'd started to
open the door before I realized there was something on the
windscreen.
A leather glove had been slipped under one of the wipers, its
fingers spread out on the glass. Someone must have found it on the
ground and put it there for its owner to see, I thought as I went to
remove it. A subliminal voice tried to warn me that it was the wrong
time of year for gloves, but by then I'd already touched it.
It was cold and greasy, and far, far too thin for any leather. I snatched rny hand away and spun round. The darkened car park
mocked me, silent and empty. Heart thumping, I turned back to the
object on the windscreen. I didn't touch it again. It wasn't a glove, I
knew that now. And it wasn't leather.
It was human skin.
18

Gardner watched as a crime scene agent lifted the windscreen wiper
and carefully removed the scrap of skin with a pair of tweezers. He
and Jacobsen had arrived twenty minutes ago, accompanied by the
large van that was the TBI's mobile crime scene lab. Lights had been
set up round the car, and the entire area taped off.
'You shouldn't have touched it,' Gardner said, not for the first time.
'If I'd realized what it was I wouldn't have.'
Some of my irritation must have leaked into my voice. Standing next to Gardner, Jacobsen took her eyes from the crime scene team
dusting the car for fingerprints. She gave me a faintly worried
look, the slight tuck visible between her eyebrows again, but said
nothing.
Gardner, too, fell silent. He had a large manila envelope that he'd
brought with him, although so far he'd made no mention of what it
might contain. He watched, expressionlessly, as a forensic agent carefully
placed the skin in an evidence bag. This was a different team
from the one I'd seen before. I found myself wondering if they were
on another job or just standing down for the night. Not that it
mattered, but it was easier thinking about that than what this new_
development might mean.
Holding the bag carefully in a gloved hand, the agent brought it
over. He raised it up so Gardner could get a better look.
'It's human, all right.'
I didn't need him to tell me that. The skin was dark brown in
colour, with an almost translucent texture. It was obvious now that
it was too irregular to be a glove, but the mistake was understandable.
I'd seen this sort of thing often enough before.
Just not on the windscreen of my car.
'So does this mean that York's been skinning his victims?'Jacobsen
asked. She was doing her best to appear unruffled, but even her
composure had been shaken.
'I don't think so,' I said. 'May I?'
I held out my hand for the evidence bag. The forensic agent
waited until Gardner gave a short nod before passing it across.
I held it up to the light. The skin was split and torn in several
places, mainly across its back, but still retained a vague hand-like
shape. It was soft and supple, and an oily residue from it smeared the
inside of the plastic bag.
'It wasn't flayed off,' I told them. 'If it had been then it'd be in a
flat sheet. This is split in places, but it's still more or less whole. I think
it sloughed off the hand in one piece.'
There was no surprise on either Gardner's or the forensic agent's
face, but I could see Jacobsen still didn't understand.
'Sloughed?'
'Skin slides off a dead body of its own accord after a few days.
Especially extremities like the scalp and feet. And the hands.' I held
up the evidence bag. 'I'm pretty certain that's what this is.'
She stared at the bag, her usual diffidence forgotten. 'You mean it
slid off a corpse?'
'More or less.' I turned to the forensic agent, who'd been watching
with a sour expression. 'Would you agree?'
He nodded. 'Good news is it's nice and soft. Saves us having to
soak it before we lift the fingerprints.'
I felt Gardner looking at me, and knew he'd already made the connection.
But Jacobsen seemed appalled.
'You can get fingerprints from that?'
'Sure,' the agent told her. 'Usually it's all dried and brittle, so you
have to soften it up in water. Then you slip it on like a glove and take
the prints like normal.' He held up his own hand and waggled it to
illustrate.
'Don't let us keep you, Deke,' Gardner said. The agent lowered his
hand, a little shamefaced, and went back to the car. Gardner tapped
the manila envelope against his leg. The look he gave me was almost
angry. 'Well? Are you going to say it or shall I?'
'Say what?'Jacobsen asked.
Gardner's mouth compressed into a thin line. 'Tell her.'
'We've been wondering how York managed to leave his victims'
fingerprints at the crime scenes months after they were dead,' I said
as she turned to me. I gestured at the car. 'Now we know.'
Jacobsen's frown cleared. 'You mean he's been using the skin from
their hands? Wearing it like gloves?'
'I've never heard of it being done to plant fingerprints before, but
that's how it looks. That's probably why Noah Harper's body was so
badly decomposed. York wanted the skin from its hands before he
switched it with Willis Dexter's.'
And then he'd waited a few more days before going back
to the woods and collecting the sloughed skin from Dexter's
hands as well. Scavengers wouldn't have bothered with scraps of drying
tissue when they'd got the entire body to feed on. And if they
had ...
He'd just have used someone else's.
I felt a weary anger at myself for not realizing sooner. My subconscious
had done its best to tell me, prompting the deja vu at the
sight of my wrinkled hands when I'd peeled off the latex gloves, but
I'd ignored it.Tom had been right. He'd told me I should listen more
to my instincts.
I should have listened to him as well.
Jacobsen took the evidence bag from me. Her expression was a
mixture of disgust and fascination as she studied its contents.
'Deke said this wasn't dried out. Does that mean it must have
come from a body recently?'
I guessed she was thinking about Irving. Although no one had
actually said as much, we all knew that the profiler must be dead by
now. But even if he'd been killed straight away, it would have taken
longer than this for the skin to slough off. Whoever this had come
from, it wasn't him.
'I doubt it,' I said. 'It looks like it's been deliberately oiled to
preserve it and keep the skin supple . . .'
I stopped as something occurred to me. I looked over at the car
windscreen, at the greasy smears left on the glass by the skin.
'Baby oil.'
Gardner and Jacobsen stared at me.
'The fingerprint on the film container in the cabin was left in baby
oil,' I said. 'Irving thought it was proof that the killings were sexually
motivated, but it wasn't. That's what York's been using to keep the
sloughed skin supple. Its natural oils would have dried out, and he'd
have wanted the fingerprints to be nice and clear. So he oiled it like
old leather.'
I remembered Irving's mocking jibe. Unless the killer has a penchant
for moisturizing . . . He'd been closer to the truth than he knew.
'IfYork's been harvesting his victim's fingerprints, how come he
didn't take the skin from Terry Loomis's hands as well?' Jacobsen
wanted to know. 'That was still in the cabin with the body'
'If it hadn't been we'd have noticed and guessed what was going
on,' Gardner said, self-reproach making his voice harsh. 'York wanted
to pick his own time to let us know what he was doing.'
I watched the forensic agents carefully dust another part of the car
with fingerprint powder. They were making a thorough job of it. For
all the good it would do.
'So "why now?' I asked.
Gardner looked across at Jacobsen. She shrugged. 'He's bragging
again, telling us he isn't afraid of being caught. Obviously, he doesn't
think our knowing this'll do us any good. Sooner or later we
would've realized what he was doing anyway. This way he gets to
stay in control.'
The other question remained unspoken. Why me? But I was afraid
I already knew the answer to that.
Gardner looked down at the manila envelope he was holding. He
seemed to reach a decision. 'Diane'll drive you to your hotel. Stay
there till I call. Don't let anyone into your room; if someone says
room service, make sure it is before you open the door.'
'What about my car?'
'We'll let you know when we're done with it.' He turned to
Jacobsen. 'Diane, a word.'
The two of them walked out of earshot. Gardner did all the
talking. I saw Jacobsen nodding as he handed her the envelope.
I wondered what might be in it, but I couldn't raise much
interest.
I looked back at the white-suited figures working on my car. The
fine powder they were using to dust for fingerprints had dulled its
paint, making it seem like something dead itself.
There was a bitter taste in my mouth as I watched them. I ran my
thumb across the scar on my palm. Admit it. You're scared.
I'd been stalked by a killer once before. I'd come here hoping to
put it behind me.
Now it was happening again.