Covenant (9 page)

Lucas Tyrell grinned at Lopez as he drove the car into the parking lot and killed the engine.

“You’ve gotta get used to it. Just don’t get
too
used to it, or I’ll have you sectioned.” He turned to Bailey, who sat quietly in the rear seat. “Sit tight, buddy, shouldn’t take too long.” He tossed a handful of biscuits into the rear of the car and then clambered out, mopping his brow as he caught his breath.

Truth was, he felt the same about morgues as she did, and he had far more experience than she. Not for the first time he wondered what had kept her in the District.

Nicola Lopez had emigrated with her family to DC almost twenty years before as a gangly nine-year-old from Guanajuato, Mexico, a ramshackle town nestled in the Veeder Mountains. She had been raised a Catholic amid the cobbled streets and quaint markets far from the hustle and bustle of America’s capital city. Dragged by a family searching for a better life away from the crippling silver mines of Las Ranas, they had found instead only a better quality of misery, where endemic poverty and poor sanitation had been replaced with housing projects, fast food, and type 2 diabetes. Her disillusioned parents had returned to Mexico five years previously, closely followed by her two brothers, one sister, and last remaining grandparent. She said that she hadn’t seen any of them since, although they wrote and spoke on the phone often.

Nicola had stayed, apparently enthralled by the rush, glamour, and danger of America. It had been the drastic change of surroundings and endless junk television that had prompted her to join the MPD as soon as she was old enough, her imagination flying high on a diet of cop dramas depicting police department and FBI offices as marvels of high-technology fecundity: ranks of glossy black desks and glowing blue lights, giant screens with satellite links and connections direct to the White House. The reality, Tyrell knew, had been far more austere. Even so, it was a better life for her than stabbing needles into her arm in some frozen subway shelter or running with the Latino gangs out of Shaw and Columbia Heights.

The medical examiner’s office was tasked with the investigation and certification of all deaths in the District of Columbia that occurred unexpectedly or as a result of violence. Positioned conveniently alongside the General Hospital, it was the first or, depending on how you looked at it, last stop for corpses in the city. A single ambulance sat with its rear doors open as a gurney was rushed with indecent haste from the building’s interior. Tyrell and Lucas watched in amazement as paramedics fussed over what looked like a surgeon lying on the gurney, his face pale white beneath his oxygen mask and his eyes rolling up in their sockets.

“Don’t patients normally get wheeled in, not out?” Lopez asked.

At the entrance, a beat cop barred their way. “Been an incident, sir, I can’t let you past right now.”

Tyrell and Lopez flashed their badges.

“What’s happened?” Tyrell asked. “Was that a doctor being wheeled out?”

“Toxic-material breach,” the cop said. “Something to do with three John Does brought here yesterday.”

“Out of the Potomac projects?”

“Yeah.” The cop nodded. “The hell’s going on with them? They’re supposed to be dead, but they’ve half killed one of the top surgeons in the hospital.”

Tyrell and Lopez shot a glance at each other.

“The Does are our case,” Tyrell said to the cop, “we need to get in there.”

The cop nodded and opened the entrance doors for them.

Tyrell led the way through the corridors and down a flight of stairs toward the morgue. A series of polished steel doors partitioned the morgue from the autopsy rooms, where corpses afflicted with the gruesome lesions of crime, neglect, or both were dissected and their decaying remains examined for silent testimony to their demise.

A small dressing room provided the chance to don gloves and a filter mask before Tyrell and Lopez pushed through into the autopsy room proper.

Three of the four steel trolleys dominating the room were covered with pale-blue plastic sheets, the interiors of which were flecked with ugly spots of fluid that even after all these years still made Tyrell’s stomach turn. He looked instead at a man dressed in a surgical gown approaching him. Tall, wiry, and with thin-rimmed spectacles adorning an aquiline nose, he looked every bit at home in a morgue.

“Detectives Tyrell and Lopez,” Tyrell announced.

“Dr. John Fry,” the surgeon said. “You guys pick up the three crackheads here?”

“Yeah. What’s the story?”

“You ever thought to check them over for toxicity?”

Tyrell shook his head. “We figured that was your job.”

“I’ve got one of my surgeons on his way to General with cyanide poisoning after he cut into one of your John Does.”

Tyrell stopped in his tracks, Lopez alongside him. “There was nothing at the scene to suggest poisoning. Your man going to be okay?”

Fry regarded them briefly before turning to look over the top of his spectacles at the three corpses.

“He’ll be fine. Have you spoken to the district attorney yet?”

“Thought we’d wait and see what you had to say.”

Fry nodded almost absentmindedly before waving them to follow.

Tyrell watched as the surgeon lifted the sheets off the three bodies. Each had been opened with a Y-shaped incision across the chest, encrusted around the edges with dried blood. The skull caps had been placed loosely back atop their respective craniums, the brains still inside. Tyrell wondered briefly whether it made a difference if they somehow got mixed up, but refrained from asking.

“You say these were found in a crack den, a group overdose?” Fry asked.

Lopez took her cue when Tyrell remained silent.

“That’s how it looked to have played out, but Tyrell has reservations about it.”

“How so?” Fry asked him.

Tyrell voiced his doubts over the crime scene as he had found it. Fry appeared lost in his thoughts for several seconds before speaking.

“Only two of these men died from overdoses of crack cocaine.”

Tyrell noticed Lopez smile quietly beside him, but pretended not to. “What makes you say that?”

Fry gestured to the bodies.

“One of the victims shows none of the usual external signs of crack addiction. Crack is smoked through a hot pipe in order to obtain the maximum high between evaporation and inhalation. This gives habitual users
crack lip
—dry and blistered lips. This individual, we’ll call him Alpha, shows no sign of this affliction.”

“Sometimes addicts getting their hits off low-quality crack who then smoke something pure can inadvertently overdose,” Lopez suggested.

“Possibly, but when large amounts of dopamine are released by crack consumption,” Fry explained, “it also releases a large amount of adrenaline into the body, which increases heart rate and blood pressure, leading to long-term cardiovascular problems as a result of the release of methylecgonidine. Alpha shows no sign of such disorders, which precludes any kind of long-term addiction for him at least.”

“Cocaine-related deaths are often a result of cardiac arrest or seizures followed by respiratory arrest,” Tyrell pointed out. “So Alpha could’ve crashed from misadventure.”

“Indeed, but then why the crack den?” Fry asked. “In addition, Alpha shows external signs of recent medical procedures. Placing patients on saline drips is a common practice in order to rehydrate them and replace lost vitamins. Either way, checking in for medical help doesn’t fit the profile of someone contemplating suicide.”

Fry moved across to a metal trolley, upon which lay a file. He picked it up as Tyrell cast his eyes across the bodies.

“What would you estimate his age as?” he asked the doctor.

“Not less than thirty. Dental work and mild erosive damage to enamel suggest an age closer to forty.”

“Not like a homeless person to have access to good dental practice,” Lopez said.

“That’s not what bothers me the most,” Fry said, propping his spectacles farther up the bridge of his nose. “Rigor mortis does not give a reliable indication of death; however, livor mortis can and it tells me that Alpha did not die where he was found. The accumulation of red blood cells in the lower extremities suggests that he was lying on his back when he died.”

“So he was moved after death?” Lopez said.

Fry shrugged noncommitally.

“You’re the detectives, I’ll leave that to you. What I
can
tell you is that he suffered. His blood and lungs contain excessive levels of hydrogen sulphide, which is the compound that sent my colleague into hospital.”

Dr. Fry moved across to the corpses, his eyes scanning them with intense curiosity as though he could speak to them with the power of thought alone.

“Alpha’s body also shows signs of intense hypothermia.”

“You mean the discoloration on the fingers and toes?” Lopez asked. “Frostbite?”

“Yes,” Fry said. “Some of the tissues near the surface of the skin show signs of trauma consistent with sustained low body temperatures.”

“Maybe he was refrigerated to alter the apparent time of death?” Lopez suggested.

“That might make some sense.” Fry nodded. “Homicide victims are sometimes chilled by the killer in order to provide a plausible time alibi. What’s unique is that hydrogen sulphide has been shown to induce a state of hypothermic suspended animation in some mammals.”

Tyrell’s mind began working overtime. “Suspended animation?”

“Hydrogen sulphide binds to cytochrome oxidase and thereby prevents oxygen from binding,” Fry explained, “which results in a dramatic slowdown of metabolism. Most animals and humans naturally produce some hydrogen sulphide in their body, but not at the levels I’ve encountered here.”

Lopez stared at Fry.

“Why would somebody want to slow down his metabolism?”

“Like I said, you’re the detectives,” Fry replied. “But this man cannot have ingested such high levels of hydrogen sulphide in a natural environment: it’s a broad-spectrum poison, meaning that it can affect several different systems in the body. Its toxicity is comparable with that of hydrogen cyanide, forming a bond with iron in the mitochondrial cytochrome enzymes, thereby stopping cellular respiration.”

“You got any other evidence of this?” Tyrell asked.

“Other than the victim’s blood turning purple in color?” Fry asked. “The treatment for exposure can involve immediate inhalation of amyl nitrite or pure oxygen, injections of sodium nitrite or administration of bronchodilators. I found excess sodium nitrate in Alpha’s blood pathology.”

“So he was poisoned and then revived?” Tyrell asked, struggling to connect the disparate pieces of information.

“Apparently so,” Fry agreed, obviously enjoying the mystery. “In addition, at his lower extremeties we have evidence of the extraction of reproductive materials from the testes.”

Tyrell felt a momentary spasm of disgust shiver through his own family jewels, and didn’t bother moving round the gurney as the doctor continued.

“But what is most astounding about Alpha is that his blood contains a genetic signature that I have not been able to identify.”

“Genetic signature?” Lopez said. “You mean blood group?”

“I mean
signature,
” Fry said to her over the top of his spectacles. “But as you’ve mentioned it, Alpha bears the rare O-negative blood group that is the mark of the universal donor. Only seven percent of human beings possess this blood group and its origin is completely unknown, the purest human blood on Earth.”

“You mean that his blood has been altered in some way?” Tyrell asked.

Fry nodded. “Transfused. The blood now in Alpha’s body is not his own, and I’ve been unable to determine its origin. I’ll need to run more tests.”

“Dr. Fry,” Tyrell said, “what’s your assessment of what happened to him?”

Fry exhaled a lengthy breath.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before. He must have undergone an ordeal that required suspended animation,” Fry answered, his enthusiasm for the mystery apparently tempered as he considered what the victim had endured. “My guess is that his metabolism was slowed in order to hinder the immuno response to whatever process he was enduring. I’ll have to run more tests, but I’d say Alpha died from acute hemolytic reaction to a blood transfusion that replaced the original AB blood I found traces of in his kidneys with the rarer O-negative blood. Alpha was originally a universal recipient, someone who could receive blood from any other group, but this transfusion still killed him because his T-lymphocyte cells mounted an attack on the foreign blood entering his body, causing hemorrhage and liver failure.”

Tyrell shook his head slowly.

“I need something that I can follow here.”

Fry turned to a smaller table beside him, retrieving from it a long, slim metal object that he held in his hand.

“You’ll be needing this then,” he said. “It’s a titanium implant belonging to Alpha.”

Tyrell smiled. “Serial number?”

“All in order,” Fry said, handing him the rod. “It’s from the right femur, probably a result of an automobile accident. Maybe whoever caused his death wasn’t as thorough as they thought.”

“What about the other two?” Lopez asked.

“I’ll send blood specimens to the state crime laboratory,” Fry said. “I can use radio or enzyme immunoassay here, but only gas chromatography or mass spectrometry will give us a clear answer as to what happened to these poor souls and be admissible in court. My guess is that they’re genuine overdose victims, although still homicides, and that Alpha was made to look like one of them.”

“Keep me informed,” Tyrell said, turning from the gurneys, “and let me know of any developments, no matter how insignificant.”

Tyrell led the way out of the laboratories and into the fresh air outside. He heard Lopez breathe an audible sigh of relief as they left the labs, but managed to keep his own quiet enough for her not to hear.

“How do you want to play it?” she asked as they reached the car.

“Carefully,” Tyrell murmured. “Our victim Alpha’s had his blood transfused after being cryogenically frozen and had God knows what extracted from his body, for reasons I can’t possibly fathom. If I can’t work out why, I doubt the district attorney’s going to see this as anything other than a freak overdose.”