The Day After Tomorrow

157

“IT’S NOT my case. It’s McVey’s.” A day hadn’t passed that Remmer’s words didn’t ring in Osborn’s ears. What was the penalty for doing what he had done? Not only had he taken a police officer’s gun and identification, he’d used them to cross an international border. He could be ried in L.A. and then extradited to Germany or Switzerland to face charges there. Maybe even France if Interpol wanted to get involved. Or maybe, God forbid, those would be secondary charges, incidentals. The real one would be the attempted murder of Albert Merriman. Hiding in Paris or not, Merriman had still been an American citizen. Those were things McVey would not forget.

By now it was almost Christmas and Osborn hadn’t heard so much as a word from him. Yet every time he saw a police car he jumped. He was driving himself crazy with guilt and fear, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He could call a lawyer and prepare a defense but that could make it worse if McVey felt he’d been through enough and decided to let it go at that. Purposely he stopped thinking about it and concentrated on his patients. Three nights a week he spent in physical therapy working his broken leg back to normal. It would be a month before he could get rid of the crutches and two more before he could walk without a limp. But he could live with it, thank you, considering what the alternative might have been.

And daily, time itself was beginning to heal the deeper things. A great deal of the mystery of his father’s death had been answered, though the real why and purpose still drifted. Von Holden’s answer—”Für Übermorgen, for the day after tomorrow”—if, in truth, that part of Osborn’s experience on the Jungfrau had been real and not an hallucination—seemed a meaningless abstract that told him nothing.

For his own sanity, for his future, for Vera, he had to put it, and Merriman and Von Holden and Scholl, in the past. Just as he had to let go of the tragic memory of his father, which, little by little, he was finding himself able to do.

Then, at five minutes to noon, on the day before Vera and her grandmother were to arrive, McVey called.

“I want to show you something. Can you come down?”

“Where—?”

“Headquarters. Parker Center.” McVey was matter-of-fact, as if they talked like this every day.

“—When?”

“An hour.”

Jesus Christ, what does he want? Sweat stood out on Osborn’s forehead. “I’ll be there,” he said. When he hung up, his hand was shaking.

The drive from Santa Monica to downtown took twenty-five minutes. It was hot and smoggy and the city skyline was nonexistent. That Osborn was scared to death didn’t help it any.

McVey met him as he came through the door. They said hello without shaking hands, then went up in an elevator with half a dozen others. Osborn leaned on his crutches arid looked at the floor. McVey had said nothing more than that he wanted to show him something.

“How’s the leg?” McVey said as the elevator doors opened and he led the way down a hallway. The burn on his face was healing well and he seemed rested. He even had a little color, as if he might have been playing some golf.

“Getting there. . . . You look good.” Osborn was trying to sound easy, friendly.

“I’m all right for an old guy.” McVey glanced at him without smiling, then led him through a ganglia of corridors peopled with faces that looked at once tired and confused and angry.

At the end of a hallway, McVey pushed through a door and into a room cut in half by a wire cage. Inside were two uniformed cops and shelf upon shelf of sealed evidence bags. McVey signed a sheet and was given a bag that held what looked like a video cassette. Then they crossed the corridor and went into an empty squad room. McVey closed the door and they were alone.

Osborn had no idea what McVey was doing, but what ever it was, he’d had enough. He wanted it out in the open and now.

“Why am I here?”

McVey walked over and closed the Venetian blinds. “You see the TV this morning? Vietnamese family, out in the valley.”

“Yeah, sort of . . . ,” Osborn said, vacantly. He’d seen something as he was shaving. An entire Vietnamese family in an upscale neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley had been found murdered. Parents, grandparents, children.

“It’s my case. I’m on my way to autopsy so let’s do this fast.” McVey opened the plastic bag and took out the video cassette. “There are only two copies in existence. This is the original. The other is with Remmer in Bad Godesberg. The FBI wants this one yesterday. I told them they could have it tomorrow. It’s why Salettl sent us after Joanna Marsh. He’d given her a present. It was a key to a box hidden inside a dog cage. A puppy Von Holden had given her in Switzerland and she’d had shipped to L.A. Inside the box was another key. To a safe deposit box in a Beverly Hills bank. The cassette was in the box.”

McVey popped the cassette into a VCR under the TV set.

“I don’t get it.” Osborn was completely thrown off.

“You will. But there are a couple of things you ought to know first. You said that when Von Holden fell off the Jungfrau and disappeared over the side you never saw him land.”

“It was pitch-black.”

“Well, he fell, or we think he fell, into what’s called a dark ice crevasse. A deep hole in the glacier. A Swiss mountain team went, down as far as they could but found no sign of him. That means he’s either still down there somewhere and will be for the next two thousand years or—he’s not. By that I mean we can’t say for certain he’s, dead.

“The second thing has to do with Lybarger’s fingerprints. Or the fingerprints of the man calling himself Lybarger. The man both Remmer and Schneider saw and, talked to a half hour before Charlottenburg went up in smoke.” McVey coughed, and when he did, he winced a little. His burn still bothered him. “BKA fingerprint experts matched Lybarger’s prints with those of Timothy Ashford, the decapitated housepainter from London.”

“Jesus God.” The hairs stood straight out from Osborn’s neck. “You were right. . . .”

“Yeah,” McVey nodded. “The trouble is Lybarger is now like everybody else who was in that room. Ashes. So all we have is an assumption that the head of one man was successfully joined to the body of another and that the creature lived. And walked and thought and talked as if he were as real as you and I. And with no visible scars as far as either Remmer or Schneider could tell. Or Joanna Marsh, either, for that matter. She told us that in a deposition yesterday morning. As his physical therapist, she spent a great deal of time with him and saw nothing that would indicate surgery of any kind had been done.”

“The symptoms of a man recovering from a stroke,” Osborn mused, “were caused not by a stroke at all, but by recovery from a phenomenal surgical procedure.” He looked up at McVey. “Is that what the tape is about?”

“What the tape is about is between you and me and the fencepost. If anybody says anything at all, it will come from Washington or Bad Godesberg.” McVey picked up a remote and handed it to Osborn. “This time, Doctor, nobody does anything on his own. Personal reasons or anything else. I hope you understand that because there are other things we can come back to. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

For a moment the two men stood facing each other in silence. Then McVey abruptly opened the door and walked out. Osborn watched him cross an outer office and push through a wooden gate. Then he was gone. Like that, he’d taken him off the hook and let him go.