Whispers of the Dead (29 page)

She tried to speak, chest working as she gasped for air.
'It's all right. I'm here now. Don't move,' Paul told her.
I went to unfasten the straps holding Sam's ankles, and my foot
slipped on something wet. I looked down and saw dark splashes
pooled on the white floor tiles. Remembering the bloodstains in the
ambulance, I felt cold, until I realized the fluid wasn't blood.
Sam's waters had broken.
I tore at the ankle straps with a new urgency. Next to me Paul
reached for the windlass handle.
'Don't touch it!' I warned. 'We don't know which way it
turns.'
As badly as we needed to get Sam out of there, the windlass strap
was already digging into her throat. If we tightened it by mistake it
could kill her.
Indecision racked Paul's face. He started casting around on the
floor. 'Where's the knife? I can cut--'
An ear-splitting bellow drowned him out. It came from behind us,
from beyond the darkened archway by the plunge pool. It rose in
pitch, sounding barely human as it reverberated off the walls before
dying away.
The distant tap dripped in the silence. Paul and I stared at each
other. I could see his mouth frame a question.
Then York lurched through the archway.
The undertaker was barely recognizable. His dark suit was filthy
and stained, his hair matted. The cords on his neck stood out as thick
as pencils as he screamed at us, brandishing a long-bladed knife in
both hands. Even from where I stood I could see the blood on it,
staining his hand black in the poor light.
My limbs felt numb and heavy as I grabbed the wooden strut I'd
dropped.
'Get her out!' I told Paul, my voice unsteady, and stepped out to
face York.
He came towards me at a shambling run, roaring as he slashed the
air with wild swipes of the knife. The strut seemed pathetically flimsy_
in my hands. Just give them time. Forget everything else.
'Wait!' I yelled. Or thought I did; afterwards I was no longer sure
if I'd actually said it out loud.
'Drop the knife!'
The shout came from the corridor leading to the stairs. Relief
surged through me as Gardner emerged through the doorway,
Jacobsen close behind. Both had their guns drawn, levelling them at
York in a two-handed grip.
'Drop the knife! Now!' Gardner repeated.
York had turned towards them. His mouth hung open, panting.
There was time to think he was going to do it, that this was going
to end here.
Then, with an incoherent scream, he lumbered at Jacobsen.
'Stay back!' Gardner yelled.
York yelled something unintelligible but didn't stop. Jacobsen
seemed frozen. I could see the pale fixity of her face as he bore down
on her with the knife, but she didn't move.
There were two loud cracks.
They were deafening in the tiled confines of the room. York
seemed to trip. He stumbled sideways, falling into the big wall
mirror. It shattered as he collapsed on to a drinking fountain,
dragging it to the floor in a cascade of plaster and silver fragments.
The echoes of gunfire and breaking glass slowly died away.
My ears rang painfully. A faint blue mist hung in the air, a bonfire
reek of cordite overlying the stink of decomposition. York didn't
move. Gardner hurried over. Still pointing the gun at him, he kicked
at the hand holding the knife to knock the weapon away, then
quickly knelt and felt at York's throat.
Without urgency, he stood up and tucked the gun back into his
belt clip.
Jacobsen was still holding her own gun outstretched, although
now it was pointing down at the floor.
'I -- I'm sorry' she stammered, as colour rushed back into her
cheeks. 'I couldn't. . .'
'Not now,' Gardner said.
There was a sudden sob from the treatment room. I turned to see
Paul helping Sam to sit up, trying to calm her as she coughed and
gasped for breath. He'd cut the windlass strap, but a livid red line
circled her throat like a burn.
'Oh, G-God, I thought ... I th-thought. . .'
'Shh, you're all right, it's all right, he can't hurt you now'
'I c-couldn't stop him. I told him I was p-pregnant, and he said . . .
he said that was good, that he wanted to wait until, wait until . . . Oh, God!'
She doubled up as a contraction rocked her. 'Is she OK?' Gardner
asked.
'She's in labour,' I told him. 'You need to get an ambulance.'
'On its way. We were heading back to Knoxville when I got your
message. I put the call in for back-up and paramedics right away.
Christ, what the hell were you thinking?
But I'd no time for Gardner's indignation, or to ask how they'd
managed to find us so quickly from my garbled directions. Sam's face
was screwed up in pain as I went to her.
'Sam, an ambulance is on its way. We're going to get you to a
hospital, but I need you to tell me if you've any other wounds or
injuries apart from your throat.'
'N-no, I - I don't think so, he just put me in here and left me! Oh,
my God, all the bodies outside, they're all dead . . .'
'Don't worry about those. Can you tell me when your
contractions started?'
She tried to concentrate as she panted for breath.'I don't... in the
ambulance, I think. I thought it was some mistake when he came to
the door. He said I should call Paul but when I turned my back he
.... he put his arm round my neck and . . . and squeezed . . .'
She was describing a chokehold, I realized. Done properly it could
cause unconsciousness in a matter of seconds, with no lasting aftereffects.
Misjudged, it could kill just as easily.
Not that York would have cared about that.
'I couldn't breathe V Sam sobbed. 'Everything went black, and then
I woke up in the ambulance with this pain . . . Oh, Lord, it hurtsl I'm
going to lose the baby, aren't I?'
'You're not going to lose the baby,' I told her, with more
confidence than I felt.'We're going to get you out of here now, OK?
Just sit tight for two more minutes.'
I went out into the spa, pulling the door to the treatment chamber
closed behind me. 'How long till the paramedics arrive?' I asked
Gardner.
'Out here? Maybe another half-hour.'
That was too long. 'Where's your car?'
'Parked out front.'
That was an unexpected bonus. I'd thought they'd have come
across the hillside as Paul and I had, but I was too concerned about
Sam to wonder about it for long.
'The sooner we get Sam out of here the better,' I said. 'If we get
her to your car we can meet the ambulance on its way.'
'I'll get the wheelchair from upstairs,'Jacobsen offered.
Gardner gave a short nod, and she hurried out. Grim-faced, he
considered the corpses in the plunge pool.
'You say there're more outside?'
'And in here.' With a pang of regret, I told him about Summer's
body lying in the other treatment chamber.
'God almighty' Gardner looked shocked. He passed a hand over
his face. 'I'd appreciate it if you stayed behind. I need to hear what
happened.'
'Who's going to drive them?' Paul was in no fit state, not with Sam
as she was.
'Diane can go. She knows the roads better than you do.'
I looked at the corpses lying on the floor of the spa. I didn't want
to stay there any longer than I already had. But I'd trained as a
GP, not an obstetrician. I knew Sam would be best served by
someone who could get her to the ambulance as soon as possible.
If I belonged anywhere, it was here.
'All right,' I said.

Gardner and I stayed by the unbolted French doors after Jacobsen left
with Sam and Paul. It had been decided it was better for them to go
out that way rather than risking carrying her up the rotting staircase.
Gardner had phoned to check on the progress of the back-up and
ambulance, then gone to see if there was another way out through
the spa. He reported that the rooms beyond the archway were
blocked off.
'Explains why York didn't just take off,' he said, dusting off his hands.
'Must've been down here when you came in and couldn't get out
without going past you. Looks like half the floor above has collapsed
through there. Whole damn place is being eaten by termites.'
Which in turn had attracted the swamp darners.York's own hiding
place had given him away in the end. There was a poetic justice
there, but I was too tired to spend long thinking about it.
Jacobsen said little before they left. I guessed she was still reproaching
herself over her failure to shoot York. Hard as it must have been,
for a field agent that sort of hesitation could be disastrous. If nothing
else, it would leave a black mark on her record.
If not for Gardner it could have been far worse.
When they'd gone neither he nor I made any move to go back
inside. After the shuttered horrors of the spa, emerging into the sunlight
was like being reborn. The breeze carried the smell away from
us, and the air was sweet with grass and blossom. I breathed deeply,
trying to clean the foulness from my lungs. From where we stood,
the trees screened what lay in the garden. With the green mountains
rolling to the horizon, it was almost possible to think this was a
normal spring day.
'Do you want to take a look down there?' I asked, looking down
at the pond glinting through the trees.
Gardner considered it without enthusiasm. 'Not yet. Let's wait till
the crime scene truck gets here.'
He still showed no inclination to go back inside. He stared down
the hillside towards the pond, hands thrust deep into his pockets. I
wondered if it was to stop them shaking. He'd just killed a man, and
no matter how unavoidable it might have been that couldn't be easy
to deal with.
'Are you OK?' I asked.
It was like watching a shutter come down across his face.
'Fine.' He took his hands from his pockets. 'You still haven't told
me what the hell you thought you were doing, coming in here by
yourselves. Do you have any idea how stupid that was?'
'Sam would be dead if we hadn't.'
That took the heat out of him. He sighed. 'Diane thinks York was
waiting till the last minute, right till she was actually giving birth. He
would've wanted to make the most of the opportunity. Two lives for
one.'
Christ. I stared across at the mountains, trying to dispel the images
that had been conjured.
'You think she'll be OK?' Gardner asked.
'I hope so.' Providing they got her to hospital in time. Providing
there were no complications with the baby. It was a lot to hope for,
but at least now she had some sort of chance. 'How did you manage
to get here so fast? I wasn't sure you'd heard my directions.'
'We hadn't. At least, none that made sense,' he said, with a touch
of his old acerbity. 'We didn't need to, though. After York left the skin
on the windscreen we put a Bird Dog on your car.'
'A what?'
'A GPS tracking device.We knew where you'd left the car, but the
old road you took isn't on any maps. So I took the one that seemed
nearest and it led us right to the front gate.'
'You put a tracker on my car? And didn't bother to tell me?'
'You didn't need to know.'
That explained why I hadn't seen anyone following me the night
before, and how the TBI agents had arrived at Paul and Sam's so
quickly. I felt a flash of annoyance that no one had seen fit to let me
know about it, but under the circumstances I could hardly complain.
I was just glad it had been there.
'So how did you know you'd got the right place?' I asked.
He gave a shrug. 'I didn't. But there was a new padlock on an old
gate, so someone obviously wanted to keep people out. We'd bolt
cutters in the trunk, so I cut the lock off and came to take a look.'
I raised my eyebrows at that. Breaking into private property without
a warrant was a cardinal sin, and Gardner was a stickler for
protocol. His face darkened.
'I decided your phone call constituted probable cause.' His chin
came up. 'Come on, let's get back inside.'
The cloying odour of decomposition wrapped itself around us as
we went back down the corridor. The light from the French doors
didn't reach into the spa, and after the bright sunshine the dim
chambers seemed more dismal than ever. Even though I knew what
to expect, it didn't lessen the impact of seeing the corpses heaped in
the plunge pool like so much rubbish.
York's body lay as we'd left it, as unmoving as his victims.
'Lord, how did he stand the smellV Gardner said.
We went into the small chamber where we'd found Sam.The severed
ends of the leather strap that Paul had cut from her throat lay like a dead
snake on the old massage table. The windlass bolted to its head had been
crafted with obvious care. The ends of the strap fed into an intricate
arrangement of finely machined cogs, operated by a polished wooden
handle. Turning it would cause the strap to tighten, while the cogs
would prevent it from slipping when the handle was released.
A much simpler construct would have been just as effective, but
that wouldn't have been good enough for York. Narcissist that he
was, he wouldn't have been satisfied with a cord twisted round a
piece of wood.
This was his life's work.
'Helluva device.' Gardner sounded almost admiring. Suddenly, he
stiffened, cocking his head. 'What's that?'
I listened, but the only sound was the still-dripping tap. Gardner
was already out of the treatment room, hand poised on his gun. I
followed him.
Nothing in the spa had changed.York still lay unmoving, the blood
pooled around him as black and still as pitch. Gardner quickly
checked through the archway leading to the blocked-off rooms. He
relaxed, letting his jacket fall over his gun again.
'Can't have been anything . . .'
He seemed embarrassed, but I didn't blame him for being jumpy.
I'd be relieved myself when the back-up arrived.
'You better show me the other bodies,' Gardner said, all business
again.
I didn't go with him into the small chamber where Paul and I had
found Summer. I'd already seen more than I wanted. I waited in the
spa, standing by York's body. It lay sprawled on its side in the shards
of broken mirror, the jagged fragments like silver islands in the blood.
I stared down at the unmoving form, struck as ever by the gulf
between its utter immobility and the roaring energy it had possessed
a short while ago. I felt too empty for either hate or pity. All the lives
York had sacrificed had been a futile attempt to answer a single question: Is this all there is?
Now he had his answer.
I was about to turn away, but something stopped me. I looked back
at York, uncertain whether I was imagining it. I wasn't.
s Something was wrong with his eyes.
Careful to avoid the blood, I crouched beside the body. The sightless
eyes were so bloodshot that they looked scalded. The skin around
them was badly inflamed. So was his mouth. I leaned forward and
flinched back as acrid fumes made my own eyes water.
Darkroom chemicals.
My heart was thumping as I tugged York's body on to its back. The
bloodstained hand with the knife flopped limply as it rolled over. I
remembered how Gardner had kicked at it before checking his pulse,
yet the knife remained clenched in the dead fist. Now I saw why.
Clotted with drying blood, York's fingers had been nailed to the
handle.
In that instant, everything fell into place. The agonized keening
and York's unintelligible screams; the frenzied slashes of the knife.
He'd have been in agony, the toxic chemicals searing his mouth and
all but blinding him as he'd tried to pull the nails from his hand. We'd
seen only what we'd expected, the crazed attack of a madman, but
York hadn't been attacking us.
He'd been begging for help.
Oh, dear God. 'Gardner!' I shouted, starting to scramble to my feet.
I heard him emerge from the chamber behind me. 'For Christ's
sake, what the hell do you think you're doing?'
What happened next unfolded with the treacle-slow helplessness
of a dream.
The remains of the big mirror that York had broken was still fixed
to the wall in front of me. In its fragmented surface I saw Gardner
pass the plunge pool. As he did, one of the bodies in it moved. My
voice died as it detached itself from the others and rose up behind
him.
Time started up again. I gave a shout of warning, but it came too
late. There was a strangled cry, and I came to my feet to see Gardner
struggling to pull free of the arm that was clamped vice-like round
his throat.
Chokehold, I thought, dumbly. Then the figure standing behind
him shifted its grip, and I felt a shock of recognition as the dirty light
from the shuttered windows fell on to its face.
Kyle was breathing raggedly through his open mouth. The round
features were the same, but this wasn't the amiable young morgue
assistant I remembered. His clothes and hair were clotted with fluid
from the putrefying bodies, and his face had a deathly, consumptive
pallor. But it was his eyes that were the worst. Without the usual
smile to disguise them, they had the flat, empty look of something
already dead.
'Move and I'll kill him!' he panted, tightening his hold.
Gardner was clawing at the constricting arm, his face congested,
but he didn't have the leverage to pry it loose. I felt a surge of hope
as he dropped one hand to the gun at his belt. But he was already
losing consciousness, his coordination failing as his brain was starved
of blood and oxygen. As I watched his hand limply fell away.
Stooping under the agent's dead weight, Kyle jerked his head
towards the treatment room where we'd found Sam.
'In there!'
I was still trying to force my mind to work. How long had
Gardner said it would be before the first TBI agents arrived. Half an
hour? How long ago was that} I couldn't remember. Broken pieces of
mirror crunched underfoot as I automatically took a step towards the
small chamber. Then I saw the massage table, its leather straps open
and waiting.
I stopped.
'Get in there! Now!' Kyle roared. 'I'll kill him!'
I had to moisten my mouth before I could answer. 'You're going
to kill him anyway'
He stared at me as though I'd spoken a different language. The
pallor of his face was even more noticeable now, shockingly white
against the black stubble and bruised skin under his eyes. A greasy
sheen of sweat filmed his skin like Vaseline. He was wearing what
looked like a medic's uniform, although it was so filthy it was hard
to tell.
It could easily have passed for a security guard's.
'Do it!' Kyle yanked on Gardner's neck, jerking the TBI agent like
a doll. I couldn't tell if he was still breathing, but if the pressure was
sustained much longer there'd be brain damage even if he survived.
I bent and picked up a piece of broken mirror. It was long and
thin, like a knife. Its edges gouged my palm as I gripped it tightly,
hoping Kyle wouldn't see my hand shaking.
He watched me uneasily. 'What're you doing?'
'Let him breathe.'
He tried to sneer, but it was as brittle as the shard of mirror. 'Think
you can hurt me with that?'
'I don't know,' I admitted. 'But do you want to find out?'
His tongue darted out over his lips. Kyle was a big man, fleshy and
heavily built. Just like York. If he dropped Gardner and rushed me I
doubted I'd have a chance. But his eyes kept going to the glass shard,
and I saw the doubt in them.
He slackened the chokehold enough to let Gardner draw a few
rattling breaths, then tightened it again. I saw him flick a look at the
doorway.
'Just let him go and I promise I won't try to stop you.'
Kyle gave a wheezing laugh. 'Stop me? You're giving me your permission?'
'His back-up's going to be here any second. If you go now you
might--'
'And let you tell them who I am? You think I'm stupid?'
He was a lot of things, but not that. Now what? I didn't know. But
I didn't think he did either. He was sucking in breaths, stooped and
flushed with the effort of supporting Gardner's weight. From the
corner of my eye I could see the gun on the agent's belt. Kyle
obviously hadn't thought of it so far.
If he did. . .
Keep him talking. I gestured towards York's body.'Did you enjoy it,
mutilating him like that?'
'You didn't give me a choice.'
'So he was just a diversion'? You did that to him just so you could
get away?' I didn't have to try to put contempt into my voice. 'And
it didn't even work, did it? All that for nothing.'