Whispers of the Dead

CHAPTER 5

EVERYTHING SEEMED TO slow down as the knife came towards me. I grabbed for it, but I was always going to be too late. The blade slid through my grip, slicing my palm and fingers to the bone. I could feel the hot wetness of blood smearing my hand as my legs gave way under me. It pooled on the black and white floor tiles as I slid down the wall, soaking the front of my shirt.

I looked down and saw the knife handle protruding obscenely from my stomach and opened my mouth to scream…

‘No!’

I bolted upright, gasping. I could feel the blood on me, hot and wet. I thrashed off the sheets, frantically trying to see my stomach in the dim moonlight. But the skin was unmarked. There was no knife, no blood. Just a sheen of clammy sweat, and the angry welt of the scar just under my ribs.

Christ. I sagged with relief, recognizing my hotel room, seeing I was alone in it.

Just a dream.

My heart rate was starting to return to normal, my pulse ebbing in my ears. I swung my legs off the edge of the bed and shakily sat up. The clock on the bedside cabinet said five thirty. The alarm was set for an hour’s time, but it wasn’t worth trying to sleep again, even if I’d wanted to.

I got up stiffly and switched on the light. I was beginning to regret agreeing to help Tom with the examination of the body from the cabin. A shower and breakfast. Things will look better then.

I spent fifteen minutes running through exercises to strengthen my abdominal muscles, then went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. I turned my face up to the hot spray, letting the needles of water sluice away the lingering effects of the dream.

By the time I emerged, the last vestiges of sleep had been washed away. There was a coffeemaker in the room, so I set it going as I dressed and powered up my laptop. It would be late morning in the UK, and I sipped black coffee while I checked my emails. There was nothing urgent; I replied to the ones I needed to and left the rest for later.

The restaurant downstairs had opened for breakfast, but I was the only customer. I passed on the waffles and pancakes and opted for toast and scrambled eggs. I’d been hungry when I went in, but even that seemed too much for me, and I managed less than half. My stomach was knotted, though I didn’t know why it should be. I’d only be helping Tom with something I’d done myself countless times before, and in far worse circumstances than this.

But telling myself that didn’t make any difference.

By the time I went outside the sun was coming up. Although the car park was still in shadow, the deep blue of the sky was paling, shot through with dazzling gold on the horizon.

The hire car was a Ford, the subtle differences in style and automatic transmission a further reminder that I was in another country. Although it was still early, the roads were already busy. It was a beautiful morning. Built-up as Knoxville was, this part of East Tennessee was still lush and verdant. The spring sun hadn’t yet developed the shirt-sticking heat and humidity of high summer, and at this time of day the air held an early morning freshness, unsullied by traffic fumes.

It was an easy twenty-minute drive to UT Medical Center. The morgue was located in a different part of the campus from the facility, but I knew my way there from previous trips.

The man on the morgue reception was so huge he made the desk look like a child’s toy. He was quilted with so much flesh that he seemed virtually boneless, the strap of his watch digging into the dimpled wrist like cheese wire into dough. His breath came in a faintly adenoidal wheeze as I explained who I was.

‘Autopsy suite five. Through the door and down the corridor.’ His voice was incongruously high-pitched for such a big frame. He gave a cherubic smile as he handed me an electronic pass card. ‘Cain’t miss it.’

I swiped the card on the door and went into the morgue itself. The familiar olfactory punch of formaldehyde, bleach and disinfectant greeted me. Tom was already in the tiled autopsy suite, dressed in surgical scrubs and a rubber apron. A portable CD player stood on a bench nearby, quietly playing a rhythmic drum track I didn’t recognize. Another, similarly dressed man was with him, hosing down the body that lay on the aluminium table to sluice off the insects and blowfly larvae.

‘Morning,’ Tom said brightly as the door swung shut behind me.

I tipped my head towards the CD player. ‘Buddy Rich?’

‘Not even close. Louie Belson.’ Tom straightened from the dripping wet chest cavity. ‘You’re early.’

‘Not as early as you.’

‘I wanted to get the body X-rayed and send the dental plates over to the TBL.’ He gestured to the younger man who was still hosing down the body. ‘David, this is Kyle, one of the morgue assistants. I’ve had him helping out till you got here, but don’t tell Hicks.’

Morgue assistants were employed by the Medical Examiner’s office, which meant that Hicks was technically Kyle’s boss. I’d forgotten that the pathologist was based here, and I didn’t envy anyone working for him. Not that it seemed to bother Kyle. He was tall, with a heavy-boned build that was just on the right side of plump. His pleasant moon face beamed from under an untidy mop of hair.

‘Hi,’ he said, raising a gloved hand.

‘One of my students is going to be lending a hand, as well,’ Tom went on. ‘It doesn’t really need three of us, but I promised I’d let her help out on my next examination.’

‘If you don’t need me here…’

‘There’s going to be plenty to do. It just means we’ll finish sooner.’ Tom’s smile said I wasn’t getting away that easily. ‘Scrubs and the rest are in the locker room down the corridor.’

I had the changing room to myself. Putting my own clothes in a locker, I pulled on surgical scrubs and a rubber apron. What we were about to do was perhaps the grimmest part of our work, and certainly one of the messiest. DNA tests could take up to eight weeks, and fingerprints only provided an identity match if the victim’s were already on record. But even with badly decomposed bodies such as this, the victim’s identity and sometimes also the cause of death could be gleaned from the skeleton itself. Before that could be done, though, every last trace of soft tissue had to be removed.

It wasn’t a pleasant job.

When I went back to the autopsy suite I paused outside. I could hear Tom humming along to the jazz over the sound of running water. What if you make another mistake? What if you can’t do this any more?

But I couldn’t afford to think like that. I opened the door and went in. Kyle had finished hosing down the body. Dripping water, the dead man’s remains glistened as though they had been varnished.

Tom was at a trolley of surgical instruments. He picked up a pair of tissue scissors and pulled the bright overhead light closer as I went over.

‘OK, let’s make a start.’

The first dead body I saw was when I was a student. It was a young woman, no more than twenty-five or six, who had been killed in a house fire. She’d asphyxiated from the smoke, but her body was untouched by the flames. She was lying on a cold table under the mortuary’s harsh, revealing light. Her eyes were partly open, slits of dull white showing between the lids, and the tip of her tongue was protruding ever so slightly from between bloodless lips. What struck me was how still she looked. As frozen and motionless as a photograph. Everything she’d done, everything she’d been and hoped to be, had come to an end. Forever.

The realization hit me with physical force. I knew then that no matter what I did, how much I learned, there would always be one mystery I couldn’t explain. But in the years that followed that only increased my determination to solve the more tangible puzzles that lay within my scope.

Then Kara and Alice, my wife and six-year-old daughter, were killed in a car accident. And suddenly such things were no longer academic.

For a time I’d retreated to my original profession of medical doctor, believing that way might bring a measure of peace, if not answers. But I’d only been fooling myself. As Jenny and I had found out to our cost, I couldn’t run away from my work. It was what I did, what I was. Or so I’d thought until I’d had a knife thrust into my stomach.

Now I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

I tried to put the doubts aside as I worked on the victim’s remains. After collecting tissue and fluid samples to send for analysis, I used a scalpel to carefully cut away the muscle, cartilage and internal organs, literally stripping the last vestiges of humanity from the body. Whoever it was, he’d been a big man. We’d need to take more accurate measurements from the skeleton itself, but he was at least six two, and heavily boned.

Not an easy man to overpower.

We worked in near silence, Tom humming absently along to a Dina Washington CD as Kyle wound up the hose and busied himself cleaning the tray where the insects and other detritus from the body were caught after being washed off. I’d begun to lose myself in the work when the double doors to the autopsy suite abruptly swung open.

It was Hicks.

‘Morning, Donald,’ Tom greeted him pleasantly. ‘To what do we owe this pleasure?’

The pathologist didn’t bother to reply. The dome of his hairless head gleamed like marble under the bright lights as he glared at Kyle.

‘The hell are you doing in here, Webster? I’ve been looking for you.’

Kyle flushed. ‘I was just—’

‘He’s just finishing up,’ Tom put in smoothly. ‘I asked him to help out. Dan Gardner wants a report on this as soon as possible. Unless you have any objection?’

Hicks could hardly admit to it if he had. He turned his ire on Kyle again. ‘I’ve got an autopsy this morning. Is the suite ready?’

‘Uh, no, but I asked Jason to—’

‘I told you to do it, not Jason. I’m sure Dr Lieberman and his assistant can manage by themselves while you do what you’re paid for.’

It took a second or two to realize he meant me. Tom gave him a thin smile. ‘I’m sure we can.’

Hicks gave a sniff, disappointed to be deprived of a confrontation. ‘I want everything ready in half an hour, Webster. Make sure it is.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry…’ Kyle said, but the pathologist had already turned away. The heavy door swung shut behind him.

‘Well, I’m sure we all feel better for that,’ Tom said into the silence. ‘Sorry, Kyle. I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.’

The younger man smiled, but his cheeks still flamed red. ‘That’s OK. But Dr Hicks is right. I really ought to—’

The door burst open before he could finish. For a second I thought Hicks might have come back, but it was a harried-looking young woman who appeared rather than the pathologist.

I guessed she was the student Tom had mentioned would be helping us. She was in her early twenties and wore a faded pink T-shirt over well-worn cargo pants, both stretched by her ample build. The bleached blond hair had been pulled into some sort of order by a red and white polka-dot Alice band, and her round glasses gave her an amiably startled appearance. It should have clashed with the steel balls and rings that studded her ears, nose and eyebrows, but somehow didn’t. Once you’d got over the initial surprise, the painful-looking array of metalwork seemed to suit her.

Her words were tumbling out in a rush before the door had even swung shut.

‘God, I can’t believe I’m late! I left early so I could stop off at the facility to check my project, but then I totally lost track of time! I’m really sorry, Dr Lieberman.’

‘Well, you’re here now,’ Tom said. ‘Summer, I don’t think you’ve met David Hunter. He’s British, but don’t hold that against him. And this is Kyle. He’s been holding the fort till you got here.’

A dazed smile spread across Kyle’s face. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Hi.’ Summer beamed, revealing an industrial-looking brace. She glanced across at the body, with interest rather than revulsion. It would have been a shocking sight for most people, but the facility helped prepare students for such grim realities. ‘I haven’t missed anything, have I?’

‘No, he’s still dead,’ Tom reassured her. ‘You know where everything is, if you want to get changed.’

‘Sure.’ She turned to go out, catching a stainless steel trolley full of instruments with her bag. ‘Sorry,’ she said, steadying it, before disappearing through the doorway.

A stunned quiet settled over the autopsy suite once more. Tom wore a half-smile. ‘Summer’s our resident whirlwind.’

‘I noticed,’ I said.

Kyle was still staring at the door with a shell-shocked expression. Tom gave me an amused glance, then cleared his throat.

‘The samples, Kyle?’

‘What?’ The technician looked startled, as though he’d forgotten we were there.

‘You were about to get them packed up for the lab.’

‘Oh, right. Sure, no problem.’

With a last hopeful glance at the doors, Kyle gathered up the samples and went out.

‘I think it’s safe to say our Summer’s got an admirer,’ Tom said wryly. He turned back to the table and suddenly winced, rubbing his breastbone as though he had trapped air.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘It’s nothing. Hicks is enough to give anyone heartburn,’ he said.

But his colour wasn’t good. He reached for the tray of instruments and gave a gasp of pain.

‘Tom—’

‘I’m all right, dammit!’ He raised his hand as if to ward me off, then turned it into a gesture of apology. ‘I’m fine, really.’

I didn’t believe him. ‘You’ve been on your feet since before I got here. Why don’t you take a break?’

‘Because I don’t have time,’ he said irritably. ‘I promised Dan a preliminary report.’

‘And he’ll get one. Summer and I can finish off removing the soft tissue.’

He gave a grudging nod. ‘Maybe just a few minutes…’

I watched him go out, struck by how frail he looked. He’d never been a physically imposing man, but the flesh seemed to have melted from him. He’s getting old. It was a fact of life. But that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

Tom’s CD had long since ended, leaving the autopsy suite in silence. From somewhere outside I heard a phone ring. It went unanswered, and finally stopped.

I turned back to the victim’s remains. The skeleton was almost completely denuded of flesh by now, leaving only the residual soft tissue to be removed by boiling it in detergent. Since it wasn’t practical to immerse the whole skeleton in a huge vat there was another grisly process that needed to be undertaken first.

Disarticulation.

The skull, pelvis, legs and arms would have to be severed, a job requiring both care and brute strength. Any damage to the bone would have to be carefully noted, so it wasn’t confused with perimortem trauma. I’d started to remove the skull, painstakingly cutting through the cartilage between the second and third cervical vertebrae, when Summer returned.

In her scrubs and apron she looked less out of place in the morgue, except for the ear and nose piercings. The bleached hair was concealed under a surgical cap.

‘Where’s Dr Lieberman?’ she asked.

‘He had to go out.’ I didn’t enlarge. Tom wouldn’t want any of his students to know he was ill.

Summer accepted it. ‘You want me to start with the detergent?’

I wasn’t sure what Tom had in mind, but that seemed as good an idea as any. We began filling large stainless steel vats with detergent solution and set them heating on gas burners. Although the powerful extractor hood over the burners sucked most of the steam and fumes from the room, the combination of bleach and boiling soft tissue gave off a smell disconcertingly reminiscent of both a laundry and a bad restaurant.

‘So you’re British?’ Summer asked as we worked.

‘That’s right.’

‘How come you’re over here?’

‘Just a research trip.’

‘Don’t you have research facilities in the UK?’

‘We do, but not like yours.’

‘Yeah, the facility’s pretty cool.’ The big eyes regarded me through the glasses. ‘What’s it like being a forensic anthropologist over there?’

‘Cold and wet, usually.’

She laughed. ‘Apart from that. Is it any different?’

I didn’t really want to talk about it, but she was only being friendly. ‘Well, the basics are the same, but there are a few differences. We don’t have as many law enforcement agencies as you do over here.’ To an outsider, the number of autonomous sheriff and police departments, let alone state and federal agencies, that operated in the US was bewildering. ‘But the main difference is the climate. Unless it’s a freakish summer, we tend not to get bodies drying out like you do here. The decomposition’s more likely to be a wet one, with more moulds and slime.’

She pulled a face. ‘Gross. Ever thought of moving?’

Despite myself I gave a laugh. ‘Work in the sun belt, you mean? No, I can’t say that I have.’ I’d talked about myself as much as I wanted to, though. ‘So how about you? What are your plans?’

Summer launched into an animated description of her life so far, her ambitions for the future and how she was working in a bar in Knoxville to raise enough money to buy a car. I said little, content to let her carry on her monologue. It didn’t slow her work and the torrent of words was relaxing, so that when Tom returned I was surprised to see that nearly two hours had passed.

‘You’ve made progress, I see,’ he said approvingly, coming to the table.

‘It’s been pretty straightforward.’ I didn’t ask how he was in front of Summer, but I could see he was feeling better. He waited until she’d returned to the pans bubbling on the gas burners, then beckoned me to one side.

‘Sorry I took so long, I’ve been speaking to Dan Gardner. There’s been an interesting development. There aren’t any fingerprints on file for Terry Loomis, the guy whose wallet was at the cabin, so they still need us to confirm if this is him.’ He gestured towards the remains on the table. ‘But they got a result on the print from the film canister. Belongs to a Willis Dexter, thirty-six-year-old mechanic from Sevierville.’

Sevierville was a small town not far from Gatlinburg, perhaps twenty miles from where the body had been found in the mountain cabin. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘You’d think so,’ he agreed. ‘They found several other of Dexter’s fingerprints at the cabin, as well. One of them on a week-old credit card receipt found in Loomis’s wallet.’

All of which suggested that Terry Loomis was the victim and Willis Dexter his killer. But there was something odd about Tom’s manner that told me it wasn’t that simple. ‘So is he in custody?’

Tom took off his glasses and wiped them on a tissue, a quizzical smile playing round his mouth. ‘Well, that’s the thing. It appears Willis Dexter was killed in a car crash six months ago.’

‘That can’t be right,’ I said. Either the fingerprints couldn’t be his or the wrong name must have been put on the death certificate.

‘Doesn’t seem so, does it?’ Tom put his glasses back on. ‘That’s why we’re exhuming his grave first thing tomorrow.’

You’re nine when you see your first dead body. You’re dressed in your Sunday clothes and ushered into a room where wooden chairs have been set out facing a shiny casket that stands at the front. It’s balanced on trestles covered with worn black velvet. A piece of blood-red braiding has come loose on one corner. You’re distracted by how it’s curled up into an almost perfect figure eight, so that you’re almost up to the casket before you think to look inside.

Your grandfather’s lying in it. He looks… different. His face seems waxy, somehow, and his cheeks have a sunken look, like they do when he forgets to put in his teeth. His eyes are shut, but there’s even something not quite right about them, too.

You stop dead, feeling a familiar pressure in your chest. A hand presses into your back, propelling you forward.

‘Go on now, take a look.’

You recognize the voice of your aunt. But you didn’t need any urging to go nearer. You sniff, earning a swift cuff on the head.

‘Handkerchief!’ your aunt hisses. For once, though, you weren’t clearing your nose of its almost permanent drip. Only trying to discern what other odours might be masked beneath the perfume and scented candles.

‘Why’re his eyes shut?’ you ask.

‘Because he’s with the Lord,’ your aunt says. ‘Don’t he look peaceful? Just like he’s asleep.’

But he doesn’t look asleep to you. What’s in the casket looks like it’s never been alive. You stare at it, trying to see exactly what’s different, until you’re steered firmly away.

Over the next few years the memory of your grandfather’s corpse never fails to bring with it the same sense of puzzlement, the same tightness in your chest. It’s one of your seminal memories. But it isn’t until you’re seventeen that you encounter the event which changes your life.

You’re sitting on a bench, reading during your lunch break. The book is a translation of St Thomas Aquinas‘ Summa Theologiae you stole from the library. It’s heavy going and naive, of course, but there’s some interesting stuff in it. ‘The existence of something and its essence are separate.’ You like that, almost as much as you liked Kierkegaard’s assertion that ‘death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent.’ All the theologians or philosophers you’ve read contradict each other, and none of them have any real answers. But they’re closer to the mark than the sophomore posturings of Camus and Sartre, who hide their ignorance behind a mask of fiction. You’ve outgrown them already, just as you’re already on your way to outgrowing Aquinas and the rest. In fact you’re beginning to think you won’t find the answer in any book. But what else is there?

There’ve been whisperings at home lately about where the money’s coming from to send you to college. It doesn’t bother you. It’ll come from somewhere. You’ve known for years that you’re special, that you’re destined for greatness.

It’s meant to be.

You chew and swallow the packed sandwiches mechanically as you read, without enjoyment or taste. Food is fuel, that’s all. The most recent operation cured the nasal drip that blighted your childhood, but at a cost. By now your sense of smell is all but burnt out, reducing everything but the spiciest of foods to the blandness of cotton wool.

Finishing the tasteless sandwich, you put the book away. You’ve just gotten up from the bench when a screech of brakes is followed by a meaty thud. You look up to see a woman in the air. She seems to hang for a moment before crashing down in a sprawl of limbs, almost at your feet. She lies twisted on her back, face tilted to the sky. For a second her eyes meet yours, wide and startled. There’s no pain or fear in them, only surprise. Surprise and something else.

Knowledge.

Then the eyes dull and you know instinctively that whatever force had animated the woman has gone. What lies at your feet now is a sack of meat and broken bone, nothing more.

Dazed, you stand there as other people crowd round the body, jostling you aside until it’s screened from view. It doesn’t matter. You’ve already seen what you were meant to.

All that night you lie awake, trying to recall every detail. You feel breathless and shaken, on the verge of something immense. You know you’ve been given a glimpse of something momentous, something both everyday and profound. Except that for some reason the woman’s face, the eyes that seemed to burn into yours, now maddeningly elude you. You want—no, you need—to see that moment again in order to understand what happened. But memory isn’t up to the task, any more than it was when you stared into your grandfather’s casket. It’s too subjective; too unreliable. Something this important demands a more clinical approach.

More permanent.

Next day, withdrawing every cent of your college savings, you buy your first camera.