Face of Evil

CHAPTER THREE

February 20, 2011

The forest rangers dug Matt's frozen corpse from the ice, zipped it up in a body bag, and had it delivered to the Clarion County morgue cooler, where it was left to slowly defrost like a Butterball turkey the night before Thanksgiving.

Matt's body was stacked on a shelf above Aurelio Rojas, age twenty-seven, who'd had eight margaritas too many and whose head and torso were packaged separately as a result of his freeway collision with a big rig, whose unlucky driver was bagged one shelf below and who, at the moment Aurelio's Chevy Cobalt crossed the median and slammed into him, had been thinking erotic and anatomically impossible thoughts about his upcoming sexual encounter with Carla DuPont, who was waiting for him at the Motel 6 in Bigsby and who, when he didn't show up, assumed she'd been fucked and dumped for the umpteenth time and, facing her fourth abortion in ten years, slit her throat with a box cutter.

But Clarion County assistant coroner Lyle Whittaker knew nothing about Carla DuPont, or what other dominos of fate had been toppled by the three corpses on his Sunday morning to-do list of autopsies. To him, the corpses were just leftover tasks from the previous shift that he had to complete.

Being a coroner was just a job to him, not a calling, an ambition, or even a remote interest.

He'd been struggling through medical school when, one day in class, as he was about to cut into a cadaver, he had an epiphany.

It would be a hell of a lot easier working with dead people than trying to heal the living.

The idea became even more appealing after he watched a bunch of those CSI shows, which made the profession seem outrageously cool.

He could definitely see himself wearing Armani, driving a chrome-plated Hummer, and fucking a woman like Eva La Rue.

As it turned out, the profession was cool, but only in terms of the room temperature of his workplace.

He ended up wearing Kirkland, driving a used Camry, and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.

But even so, he wasn't bitter or unhappy.

Far from it.

He had a secure job that paid decently, that kept him from being a disgrace to his family of doctors, that required no customer service skills, and that left him pretty much on his own to do as he pleased, which was spending hours playing World of Warcraft and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.

And it looked like he'd be able to get back to Warcraft fairly quickly that Sunday morning. There were only three autopsies to do, and it wasn't like the cause of death in any of them was a great mystery. It was all by-the-numbers stuff.

Lyle decided to start with the simplest case, the guy who'd been buried in the December avalanche. He figured the body had probably defrosted enough to cut into by now.

The first thing Lyle noticed once he got Matthew Cahill's body on the table was that the corpse's skin didn't feel as cold or as rubbery as he expected, which meant something was wrong with the temperature-control mechanism in the cooler.

Not good.

The last thing Lyle wanted to walk into on his next shift was a cooler full of putrefying corpses. After he finished gutting Matthew Cahill, he'd alert maintenance to get the thermostat fixed right away.

Lyle took his scalpel and made a deep cut through the flesh at Matt's shoulder and was about to rip his way to the sternum and on down to the pelvis, so he could peel it all back, saw off the ribs, and remove the internal organs underneath.

He didn't get that far.

He'd barely moved his knife half an inch when he stopped what he was doing and stared in slack-jawed disbelief at what was underneath his blade.

Blood.

It seeped out of the wound like the juice from a ripe pomegranate.

Lyle watched in shock as the blood became a tiny rivulet, ran down the side of Matt's body, and dripped onto the steel table.

He stuck his gloved finger in the fluid and brought it up close to his eye just to be sure.

Yeah, it was blood.

But that was impossible.

The human body is mostly water. Within two hours under the ice it becomes a Popsicle with skin. On a molecular level, the crystallization shatters the cells, irreparably destroying organs and making resuscitation inconceivable.

The longest a person had ever survived being frozen was almost ninety minutes.

The longest any animal had been known to survive, in laboratory conditions, was three hours.

Matthew Cahill had been frozen for three months.

If the freezing didn't kill him, the oxygen deprivation alone would certainly have left him not only merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead.

And yet…

He was bleeding.

And for that to happen, there had to be circulation, and for that to happen, there had to be a beating heart, and for that to happen, the central nervous system had to be firing neurons.

And for that to happen, there had to be life.

Lyle didn't have a stethoscope. There was no need for one in a morgue.

That left him only one immediate option for confirming what the blood was telling him, short of continuing his Y incision and cracking the body open to see what the hell was going on.

Swallowing hard, his hand shaking, he set the knife down on the instrument tray and leaned over the body, slowly and hesitantly placing his ear on Matthew Cahill's icy chest.

The skin was cold. But not deathly cold.

At first, all Lyle heard was his own blood pounding in his head. But then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

There it was.

Faint and muffled, but insistent…

It was like laying his head on a grave and hearing, through the six feet of dirt beneath him, someone pounding on the lid of their coffin.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

And as he heard it, he could see the blood continuing to seep from the wound that he'd cut in Matt's flesh.

There was no denying the evidence, as unbelievable as it was.

The dead man was alive.

Lyle ran to a phone and called 911.