The Day After Tomorrow

28

Click.

McVey knew it was 3:17 A.M. without looking because the last time he’d looked at the clock it was 3:11. Digital clocks were not supposed to make noise, but they did if you were listening. And McVey had been listening, and counting the clicks, while he thought.

He’d come back to his hotel, following his visit with Osborn and his frolic in the rain in front of the Eiffel Tower, at ten minutes to eleven. The hotel’s tiny restaurant was closed and room service wasn’t available because there wasn’t any. It was the kind of all-expense trip Interpol funded. A barely livable hotel, with faded carpets, a lumpy bed and food, if you could make it between six and nine in the morning and six and nine at night.

What was left was either to go back out in the rain to find a restaurant that was open, or to use the “honor bar,” the tiny little refrigerated cabinet tucked between what served as a closet and the bathroom that flooded every time you used the shower.

McVey wasn’t going back out in the rain, so it was the honor bar or nothing. Opening it with a tiny key attached to the ring on his room key, he found some cheese and crackers and a triangle of Swiss chocolate. Poking around, he also found a half bottle of a white wine that turned out to be a very nice Sancerre. Afterward, when he casually opened the desk drawer to check the honor bar price list, he found out why the Sancerre had been so agreeable. The half bottle cost 150 French francs, somewhere around thirty dollars U.S. A pittance to a connoisseur, a fortune to a cop.

By eleven thirty he’d stopped fuming and taken his clothes off and was about to step into the shower when the phone rang. Commander Noble of Scotland Yard was calling from his home in Chelsea.

“Hold on, McVey, will you?” Noble had said. “I’ve got Michaels, the Home Office pathologist, on the other line and I’ve got to figure out how to make this into a conference call without disconnecting everyone.”

Wrapping a towel around him, McVey sat down at the Formica-topped desk opposite his bed.

“McVey? you still there?”

“yes.”

“Doctor Michaels?”

McVey heard the young medical examiner’s voice join in. “Here,” he said.

“All right, then, tell our friend McVey what you’ve just told me.”

“It’s about the severed head.”

“You’ve identified who it is?” McVey brightened.

“Not yet. Perhaps what Doctor Michaels has to say will help explain why the identification is being so trouble some,” Noble said. “Go on, Doctor Michaels, please.”

“Yes, of course.” Michaels cleared his throat. “As you recall, Detective McVey, there was very little blood left in the severed head when found. In fact almost none. So it was very difficult to assess the clotting time in attempting to determine time of death. However, I thought that with a little more information I should be able to give you a reasonable time frame for when the chap was murdered. Well, it turns out, I couldn’t.”

“I don’t understand,” McVey said.

“After you left, I took the temperature of the head and selected some tissue samples, which I sent to the laboratory for analysis.”

“And—?” McVey yawned. It was getting late and he was beginning to think more of sleep than murder.

“The head had been frozen. Frozen and then thawed out before it was left in the alley.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I can’t say I haven’t seen it before,” McVey said. “But usually you can tell right away because the inner brain tissues take a long time to thaw out. The inside of the head is colder than the layers you find as you work outward toward the skull.”

“That wasn’t the case. It was thawed completely.”

“Finish what you have to say, Doctor Michaels,” Noble pressed.

“When laboratory tissue samples revealed the head had been frozen, I was still bothered by the fact that the facial skin moved under pressure from my fingers as it would under normal conditions had not the head been frozen.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I sent the entire head to a Doctor Stephen Richman, an expert in micropathology at the Royal College of Pathology, to see what he could make of the freezing. He called me as soon as he realized what had happened.”

“What did happen?” McVey was getting impatient.

“Our friend has a metal plate in his skull. Undoubtedly the result of some sort of brain surgery done years ago. The brain tissue would have revealed nothing, but the metal did. The head had been frozen, not just solid, but to a degree approaching absolute zero."

“I’m a little slow this time of night, Doctor. You’re over my head.”

“Absolute zero is a degree of cold unreachable in the science of freezing. In essence, it’s a hypothetical temperature characterized by the complete absence of heat. To even approach it requires’ extremely sophisticated laboratory techniques that employ either liquefied helium or magnetic cooling.”

“How cold is this absolute zero?” McVey had never heard of it.

“In technical terms?”

“In whatever terms.”

“Minus two hundred seventy-three point one five degrees Celsius or minus four hundred fifty-nine point six seven degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s almost five hundred degrees below zero!”

“Yes, quite.”

“What happens then, assuming you did reach absolute zero?’

“I just looked it up, McVey,” Noble interjected. “It means it’s a point at which mutual linear motions of all the molecules of a substance would cease.”

“Every atom of its structure would be absolutely motionless,” Michaels added.

Click.

This time McVey did look at the clock. It was 3:18 A.M. Friday, October 7.

Neither Commander Noble nor Dr. Michaels had had any idea why someone would freeze a head to that degree and then discard it. Nor had McVey, either. There was a possibility it had come from one of those cryonic freezing organizations that accept the bodies of the recently departed and deep-freeze them in the hope that at some future time, when there is a cure for whatever ailment killed them, the bodies could be unfrozen, worked on, then brought back to life. To every scientist in the world it was a pipe dream, but people bought into it and legitimate companies provided the service.

There were two such companies in Great Britain. One in London, the other in Edinburgh, and Scotland Yard would follow up on them first thing in the morning. Maybe their John Doe hadn’t been murdered, maybe his head had been severed after death and legitimately put away for some future time. Maybe it was his own investment. Maybe he’d put his life savings into the deep-freezing of his own head. People had done nuttier things.

McVey had gotten off the phone saying he was coming back to London tomorrow and requesting that the seven headless corpses be X-rayed to see if any of them had had surgery where metal might have been implanted into the skeleton. Replacement hip joints, screws that held broken bones in place—metal that could be analyzed, as the steel plate in John Doe’s head had been. And if any of them did have metal, the cadavers were to be immediately forwarded to Dr. Richman at the Royal College to determine if they too had been deep-frozen.

Maybe this was the break they were looking for, the kind of left-field “incidental,” usually right in front of an investigator’s nose but that at first, second, third or even tenth look still remained wholly unseen; the kind that almost always turned the tide in difficult homicide cases; that is, if the cop doing the investigating persevered long enough to go over it that one last time.

Click.

3:19 A.M.

Getting out of his chair, McVey pulled back the covers and plopped down on the bed. It already was tomorrow. He could barely remember Thursday. They didn’t pay him enough for these kind of hours. But then, they never paid any cop enough.

Maybe the frozen head would lead somewhere, probably it wouldn’t, any more than the business with Osborn had led anywhere. Osborn was a nice guy, troubled and in love. What a thing, come on a business trip and fall for the prime minister’s girlfriend.

McVey was about to turn out the light and get under the covers when he saw his muddy shoes drying under the table where he’d left them. With a sigh, he got out of bed, picked them up and carefully walked to the bathroom, where he put them on the floor.

Click.

3:24.

McVey slid under the sheets, rolled over and turned out the light, and then lay back against the pillow.

If Judy were still alive, she would have come on this trip. The only place they’d ever traveled together, besides the fishing trips to Big Bear, had been Hawaii. Two weeks in 1975. A European vacation they could never afford. Well, they would have afforded it this time. It wouldn’t have been First Class, but who cared; Interpol would have paid for it.

Click.

3:26.

“Mud!” McVey suddenly said out loud and sat up. Turning on the light, he tossed back the sheets and went into the bathroom. Bending down, he picked up one of his shoes and looked at it. Then picked up the other and did the same. The mud that caked them was gray, almost black. The mud on Osborn’s running shoes had been red.