Whispers of the Dead (21 page)

You cut it fine. You knew it wouldn't be long before the TBI agents arrived
at the house, but you left it as long as you dared. Too soon and much of the
impact would be lost. Too late and . . . Well, that would have spoiled
everything.
It was a pity you didn't have more time. You hate feeling rushed, even
though there was no avoiding it. You'd always known it would come to this.
The funeral home had served its purpose.You'd planned it all out in advance;
what you needed to take and what would be left behind. It had called for fine
judgement and more than a little discipline. But that was OK.
Some sacrifices have to be made.
You're almost ready for the next stage now. All you've got to do is be
patient. It won't be much longer. Just one final chore to nudge the last pieces
into place, then the waiting will be over.
You admit to a few nerves, but that's a good thing.You can't let yourself be
complacent. When the opportunity presents itself, you'll have to be ready to
take it. You can't afford to waste chances like this. You know that better than
anyone.
Life's too short.
17

In the end, all the precautions for Tom's safety had proved futile.
Doctors and medical staff at the ICU had been warned of the need
for extra vigilance, if not its reason, and a TBI agent had been
stationed in the corridor outside his room. No one could have
reached Tom without their knowing, and even if someone had, Mary
had been at his side throughout.
None of which had prevented him going into cardiac arrest just
after four o'clock that morning.
The medics had tried to resuscitate him, but his heart had
resolutely refused to restart. Stubborn to the end. The thought circled
aimlessly round my mind, refusing to settle.
I felt numb, still unable to take in what had happened. After I'd
spoken to Paul I'd called Mary and mouthed the usual, useless words.
Then I'd sat on my bed, at a loss as to what to do. I tried telling
myself that at least Tom had died peacefully with his wife beside him,
that he'd been spared whatever final ordeal had been inflicted on
Irving. But it was scant consolation. York might not have physically
killed him, but Tom was still a victim. Ill or not, he'd had a right to
live the rest of his life in peace, however long it might have been.
He'd had that taken from him.
An image of York's face came to me, beaming with false servility
as he'd enthusiastically pumped Tom's hand that morning at Steeple Hill. Dr Lieberman, it's an honour, sir. . . I've heard a lot about your work.
And your facility, of course. A credit to Tennessee. He must have been laughing at us even then. Knowing what he had planned, hiding his
greater guilt behind the petty misdemeanours evident at the
cemetery.
I can't remember hating anyone as much as I hated York just then.
Moping in my hotel room wasn't going to bring Tom back, or
help catch the man who'd killed him. I showered and dressed, then
went to the morgue. It was still early when I arrived. My footfalls
echoed as I walked down the empty corridor. The morgue's cold,
tiled surfaces seemed even lonelier than usual. I would have
welcomed the sight of a familiar face, but Paul had told me he had
more meetings to get through first, and I doubted that Summer
would be in any fit state to help out when she heard the news.
Kyle was there, at least. He was pushing a trolley along the
corridor as I came out of the changing room, and greeted me with
his usual enthusiasm.
'Hi, Dr Hunter. I've got to help with an autopsy this morning, but
if you want any help after that, you just let me know.'
'Thanks, I will.'
He still loitered. 'Uh, will Summer be coming in later?'
'I don't know, Kyle.'
'Oh. OK.' He nodded, trying to hide his disappointment. 'How's
Dr Lieberman?'
I'd guessed it was too soon for the news to have spread, but I'd
been hoping he wouldn't ask. I didn't want to be the one to have to break it.
'He died last night.'
Kyle's face fell. 'He's dead? I'm sorry, I didn't know . . .'
'There's no reason why you should.'

I could see him searching for something to say. 'He was a nice man.'
'Yes, he was,' I agreed. There were worse epitaphs.
I tried to keep my mind blank as I went to the autopsy suite, wanting
to focus on what I had to do. But it was impossible in an
environment that I associated so much with Tom. When I passed the
suite where he had been working, I paused, then went in.
It looked no different from the day before. Terry Loomis's skeleton
still lay on the aluminium table, now almost fully reassembled. It was
like any other autopsy suite, with no lingering trace of Tom's
presence. I started to go back out, but then I saw the CD player still
on the shelf next to the neat pile of jazz albums. That was when it
really hit me.
Tom was dead.
I stood there for a while as the unalterable fact of it soaked in.
Then, letting the weighted door swing shut, I went out and walked
down the corridor to the autopsy suite where the bones of a petty
thief were waiting.
The reassembly and examination of Noah Harper's skeleton
should have been finished by now. The delay was no one's fault, but
the task had been given to me and I felt responsible for how long it
was taking. Now I was determined to complete it, if it meant staying
all night.
Besides, I welcomed the distraction.
The cranium and larger bones of the arms and legs had been laid
out on the table in an approximation of their anatomical position,
but the rest had only been roughly sorted. I intended to reassemble
the spinal column next, which was perhaps the most complex part
of the process. The spine is essentially an articulated sheath that
protects the cord of nerves at its centre. It's a perfect example of
nature's ingenuity, a marvel of biological engineering.
But I was in no mood to appreciate it right then. Starting with the
cervical vertebrae, I began carefully fitting the irregular knuckles of
bone back together.
I didn't get far.
The cervical vertebrae that form the neck are smaller than the
thoracic and lumbar vertebrae of the back. There are seven in all,
numbered from the skull, each neatly dovetailing into those above
and below. I fitted the first five together easily enough, but when I
searched for the sixth I couldn't find it.
Come on, Hunter, concentrate. Exasperated, I went through the
remaining vertebrae again. But the only cervical vertebra I could find
was the wrong size and shape. It was clearly the seventh, not the
sixth.
One was missing.
Which was impossible. Although it was badly decomposed, Noah
Harper's body had been fully intact when we'd exhumed it. If one of
his cervical vertebra had been absent we'd certainly have noticed.
So where was it?

With an odd sense of certainty, I went over to where the microscope
stood on the workbench. I felt no surprise when I saw the
small white object on the stage beneath the lens. If anything I should
have realized before. I'd wondered what Tom had been doing in here
when he'd had his heart attack.
Now I knew.
The image was blurred when I looked through the eyepiece. I
adjusted the focus until the vertebra swam into view. It was as
delicately fluted and spurred as coral, its porous surface appearing
pitted under the magnification.
The hairline cracks looked as deep as a chasm.
Straightening, I took the piece of bone from under the microscope.
The fractures were almost invisible to normal eyesight. There
were two of them, one on each of the laminae, the slender bone
bridges that link the main body of the vetebra to its more delicate
neural arch.
Feeling strangely clear-headed, I set it down and went back down
the corridor to the autopsy suite where Tom had been working.
Going straight to Terry Loomis's skeleton, I picked up the sixth
cervical vertebra from the examination table and held it up to the
light. The fractures were even less obvious than on the laminae I'd
just seen. But they were there all the same.
So that was it. I felt no satisfaction, only a sudden welling of
sadness.This was Tom's discovery, not mine. I took out my phone and
called Paul.
'I know how they were killed.'

'So it's definitely strangulation.'
Paul looked dispassionately down at the vertebra he was holding.
We were in Tom's autopsy suite. I'd already shown him the fractures
in Noah Harper's sixth cervical vertebra before bringing him in here
to examine the matching cracks in Terry Loomis's.
'I can't see any other way you'd get such precise breaks,' I said.
While a blow to the back of the neck could have broken the
vertebra, the damage would have been much more extensive. And
the chances of blunt trauma causing near identical injuries to two
different victims was too remote to consider. No, these fractures were
the result of something altogether more focused. More controlled.
That was a word that seemed to figure a lot with York.
'At least now we know for sure how Loomis and Harper came by
the pink teeth,' Paul agreed. 'And it explains what Tom was doing
in the other autopsy suite. He found the fractures in Loomis's
vertebra and went to see if Harper's had them as well. That how you
see it?'
'More or less.' And then York had phoned him while he was
examining it under the microscope. I supposed there was an irony
there, but wasn't sure what it was.
Paul gently set down the bone. 'Lord, it makes you want to weep.'
He sounded as exhausted as he looked. Tom's death had hit him
hard, and the false alarm with Sam the previous night hadn't helped.
He'd cut a faculty meeting short when I'd called him, and the strain
of the last few days was evident as soon as he walked in. The lines
I

around his eyes looked etched, and patches of blue-black bristles
were already shading the pallor of his chin where he'd shaved in a
rush.
He tried to stifle a yawn. 'Sorry.'
'Do you want to get some coffee?' I asked him.
'Later.' He made an effort to pull himself together.'What about the
cervical vertebrae from the remains in the woods? Have you checked
them as well?'
'While I was waiting for you to get here. Two of them are missing,
but the rest are all intact. Including the sixth.' That was no
surprise. Willis Dexter had died in a car crash, not been murdered
like Noah Harper or Terry Loomis.
'So we're looking at a steady pressure exerted on both victims'
necks, powerful enough to fracture the laminae but without breaking
the hyoid.' Paul held up his hands and considered them. 'Can you
remember how big York's hands were?'
'Not big enough to do this.' The only thing I could recall about
York's hands was their nicotine-stained fingers. But both Loomis and
Harper had been grown men; it would have taken a huge span to
wrap far enough round their necks to fracture the vertebrae. And that
would more than likely have broken the hyoid as well.
'Most likely some kind of ligature or garrotte rather than manual
strangulation,' Paul said. 'Whatever he used, it must've fastened
around their necks at exactly the same point, causing identical
damage to the same vertebra each time. Hard to say exactly what it
was, though.'
'Tom had worked it out.'
_.He looked at me in surprise. 'He did?'
'Remember what he said to Mary when he was taken into
hospital? Spanish. At the time we didn't know what he could have
meant.'
It was a further sign of Paul's tiredness that it took him a moment to
make the connection. 'Spanish windlass. Christ, I should have realized.'
So should I. Wrap a bandage or piece of cloth round a bleeding
limb, then place a stick underneath and twist it. That was a Spanish
windlass. At its most basic it was little more than an improvised
tourniquet that could be wound tighter or loosened at will, a simple
device that had saved countless lives.
But not the way York had used it.
I thought about the photographs the TBI had found in York's
garage. The agonized expressions of his victims, their dark and
swollen faces. Suffused with blood as York had incrementally
tightened the windlass, steadily choking the life out of them.
And photographing it as it happened.
I pushed the images from my mind. 'York might not even have
realized he was leaving any visible evidence at all. There'd be no way
for him to know the laminae had been fractured. And even if he
noticed the pink teeth, they're a pretty obscure phenomenon. He
might not have realized their significance.'
'That still brings us back to the blood in the cabin,' Paul said. 'Loomis
was strangled, so there's no way it's all his. So who the hell's is it?'
'Another of York's games, perhaps?' I said. The DNA analysis
would tell us eventually, but I'd an idea that we might not have to
wait as long as that.
Paul gave a weary shrug. 'I spoke to Gardner earlier. He didn't
come right out and admit it, but they're obviously taking your theory
about Tom seriously. The bottom line is they can't rule out that York
might try for someone else on the investigation now he's screwed up
his chances with him.'
I suppose that should have occurred to me, but somehow it hadn't.
I'd been too wrapped up with what had happened to Tom to follow
the idea to its logical conclusion.
'So what's Gardner going to do?'
'Not much he can do except warn people to be careful,' Paul said.
'He can't wrap everyone in cotton wool, and there isn't the
manpower to do it even if he wanted to.'
'I'll consider myself warned.'
He smiled, but there wasn't much humour in it. 'Just keeps getting
better and better, doesn't it? Turned out to be one helluva research
trip for you.'
It had, but I was still glad I'd come. I wouldn't have missed the
chance to work with Tom, regardless of how it had turned out.
'Are you worried?' I asked.
Paul's stubble rasped as he passed a hand across his face. 'Not really.
York had surprise on his side before, but he's lost that now. I'm not
saying I won't be careful, but I'm not going to spend my life looking
over my shoulder in case some psycho decides to come after me.'
'You get used to it after a while,' I said.
He gave me a startled look, then broke out in a laugh. 'Yeah, I
suppose you do at that.' He grew serious. 'Look, David, if you want
to bow out, no one's going to blame you. This isn't your problem.'
I knew he meant well, but the reminder still felt like a slap. 'Perhaps
not. But it sort of feels like it is.'
Paul nodded, then looked at his watch and grimaced. 'Sorry, but
I've got to go. Another damn faculty meeting. Things should settle
down in a day or two, but right now I need to be in two places at
once.'
The silence of the autopsy suite seemed to press in around me
after the door had closed behind him. I looked down at the partially
assembled skeleton waiting on the examination table, and thought of
Tom.
Clearing my mind, I went back to work.