Headcase, p.4
Headcase, page 4
I settle deeper into my chair. ‘It started with the guy in the river …’
CHAPTER 5
Seven years ago
I take your bike over and over. I melt it and build it anew. What am I doing?
I found Peter Luzhin behind his desk on the fourth floor of the FBI field office, still wearing his coat, chewing on a popsicle stick. According to rumour, he’d injured his jaw by grinding his teeth, and his doctor had given him the popsicle sticks to help him relax. He shot me a glare that implied the treatment wasn’t working.
‘The guy in Buffalo Bayou was murdered,’ I told him, by way of greeting.
He took the stick out of his mouth and examined the tooth marks. ‘How’s that?’
‘Put me on the case, and I’ll tell you.’
‘I choose the cases, not you.’
Luzhin was a bulky man with grey sideburns, a faded suit and a permanent slouch. He was forty-four, but the lines around his eyes made him look sixty. When I first met him, he was a detective in the Houston PD with a cocaine habit and a fondness for brothels. Now he was sober, and the director of the FBI’s Houston Field Office. It seemed like an impressive turnaround, but I knew him better. He let his agents plant evidence to secure convictions and encouraged violence to encourage confessions. In addition to all that, I knew his darkest secret—the deal he’d struck with me. He was worse now than he’d ever been.
‘The dead man had goggles on,’ I said. ‘Why? No chlorine in the river, and it’s not like you’d see anything at night either way. Anyway, who goes swimming in the middle of winter? And his Jeep was parked downstream.’
Luzhin went to sip a go-cup of coffee and then, finding it empty, tossed it into the recycling can in the corner. ‘You want to tell me how you know that?’
The truth was I’d been walking along the riverbank at dawn yesterday, unable to sleep. I’d found the body tangled in the mangroves. I should have gotten started on it then and there, but I was too greedy. I went to fetch my car so I could take the whole thing. By the time I got back, the police were on the scene, and I had to slink off before they saw me, empty-handed and hollow-bellied.
‘Internet,’ I said.
Luzhin gave me a look that was equal parts disbelieving and disgusted. ‘Whatever. I’ll pass the information on to the Houston PD.’
My heart sank. ‘You don’t want me to interview the family?’
‘Let me take a second to explain, again, what the FBI does.’ Luzhin started counting on his fingers. ‘Terrorism, organised crime, counterintelligence, missing persons. This is an accidental death—or, if you’re right, a plain old homicide for the county cops.’
‘I want my reward,’ I said.
‘Then you can work the cases I give you.’ He slid a file across his desk. ‘One for one, Blake. That’s the deal.’
I knew what he meant. He would give me a cadaver in exchange for every life I saved, not every case I closed. That was how he could look at himself in the mirror afterwards.
I’d long since given up on looking at myself in the mirror.
I opened the file and found a picture of a girl with a big chin, dark hair parted in the middle and a wry sort of smile. Lilah Parget, almost thirteen years old.
I sighed. ‘Where was she last seen?’
•
I was on the second floor of the parking garage, surrounded by oil stains and crumpled burger wrappers, looking at the sliding glass doors that led into the mall.
Special Agent Richmond rested his elbows against the chest-high wall that ringed the lot.‘Are we going in, or what?’
Richmond was perpetually bug-eyed, with a squashed nose and fat hands. He looked like a bulldog stuffed into a suit. As usual, he had a steaming cup of noodles in one paw.
I ignored him, examining the big, square trash cans next to the entrance. One was for recycling, the other garbage. There was a pile of squashed cigarette butts behind them, as though someone had been building a monument to cancer. I wondered why they hadn’t been thrown in the trash.
Texas is full of abandoned malls, killed by online shopping. This one looked like it was on its way out. Weeds were pushing up through the asphalt around it, the rain had left streaked stains on the concrete walls, and when I reached into the recycling—
‘Gross,’ Richmond said.
—it was only half full. I dug out a greasy receipt from three days ago. If there wasn’t enough foot traffic to fill the trash faster than that, surely the businesses inside the mall were dying.
I turned and pointed to a parking space. ‘Jeb Parget says he didn’t get out of his car. He watched Lilah go into the mall through these doors, then he drove off. When he came back to pick her up, she wasn’t here, so he called her, no answer, went inside, blah blah blah.’
‘No security cameras out here to confirm his story,’ Richmond observed. ‘Nine times out of ten, the kidnapper is the dad. You know that.’
I did. But in those cases, the parents were usually separated. Jeb lived with Lilah and her mother.
We’d met him two hours earlier. A slight man, with glasses and a button-down shirt. The sort of guy who got away with bad behaviour by looking respectable. There was a coldness behind his green eyes. An anger. His wife, Faith, was Vietnamese, and had let him do all the talking. I noticed that he told her, rather than asked her, to make coffee for everyone. When she poured it, her sleeve rode up, exposing a ring of yellow bruises around her thin wrist.
But that didn’t mean Jeb was the kidnapper.
I crushed the receipt in my fist. ‘The camera next to the boom gate confirms that Parget’s car arrived at four forty-six, like he said, and left five minutes later. Then it came back at a quarter to eight.’ I hadn’t seen the footage, but a guy named Vasquez had called me from the field office with a brief summary.
‘Five minutes is long enough to stuff your daughter into the trunk of a car.’ Richmond sipped his noodle soup. ‘And three hours is enough to take her fifty miles away, leave her tied up someplace and come back without her.’
He was right.
I approached the dirty glass doors. They slid open with a reluctant squeak, as though they could tell I had no money to spend. Inside was a tiled walkway with shuttered shops on either side, lit by murky skylights above. No people. I took a step, then another, and then the security camera came into view above me—a dark plastic bubble mounted on the ceiling.
I pointed. ‘If she’d actually gone into the mall, she would have been visible on that camera. Vasquez said she wasn’t.’
‘Great. So the dad did it,’ Richmond said. ‘We’ll get a warrant for the cell tower data to trace his movements during the three-hour window. Can we go back to the field office now?’
I walked backwards through the squeaky doors. As they slid shut again, I squinted at the trash cans.
‘Come on, Blake,’ Richmond said. ‘Jeb Parget’s alibi for the three hours is clearly bullshit. You said yourself that no one plays golf by themselves, in the rain, and that his clubs weren’t even wet. He has a history of violence. Neighbours have called the cops to his house several times. You saw the bruises on the wife. You’re making this more complicated than it needs to be.’
‘Imagine you’re Jeb Parget,’ I said. ‘You’ve decided to kidnap your own daughter for some reason. To punish your wife, maybe—domestic abusers often use their kids that way.’
Richmond glanced at his watch.
‘You wouldn’t do it like this,’ I said. ‘You’d open her bedroom window and make it look like she ran away in the middle of the night. Why would you put yourself in a position where you’d be the obvious suspect? The last person to see her alive, with the world’s least convincing alibi?’
‘He’s not a Rhodes scholar,’ said Richmond, who was himself not a Rhodes scholar. ‘Could’ve been a spur-of-the moment decision. Maybe he and Lilah had an argument in the car on the way here, and he decided to stuff her in the trunk to teach her a lesson.’
It was possible. But I remembered the look on Jeb Parget’s face, and the wobble in his voice. The fear could have been fake, or it could have been fear of getting caught. But his anger was all too real. He thought someone had taken his daughter.
I looked at the mountain of cigarette butts behind the trash cans. Someone had waited here for a long time. They could have thrown their butts in the trash, but they’d stayed hidden behind the trash cans instead and dropped their butts on the ground.
‘You stand over there,’ I said.‘Where the car was parked.’
Richmond groaned, but obeyed. I followed him about halfway.
‘You’re Jeb and I’m Lilah, okay?’ I walked towards the sliding doors again, stooping to match the height of a twelve-year-old girl. When I was almost at the entrance, I pictured someone leaping out from behind the trash cans and grabbing me. I stumbled sideways, like I was being dragged behind the cans. I opened my mouth to scream, then imagined a strong hand clamping over it.
As I crouched behind the cans, I spotted a plain black hair tie on the ground a few feet away. It didn’t look broken. No obvious reason to throw it away.
‘Well?’ I called. ‘Did it look like I went into the mall?’
‘What?’
I emerged from behind the cans. Richmond looked startled to see me, which answered my question.
I went over to the chest-high wall and peered down. There was a rusty ladder bolted to the exterior side, probably to meet the fire code. So it was possible to leave on foot without passing any cameras—but not if you were carrying a kid.
Richmond peered at the pile of cigarettes. He took out a Ziploc bag from his pocket and used it like a glove as he picked up a butt, then flipped the bag inside out and sealed it.
‘Tell Vasquez I need to see the security video from the boom gate,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Jeb Parget had Lilah in the trunk—but someone did.’
Richmond spent twenty minutes on the phone to the security company, alternating between listening to muzak and arguing with support reps. Eventually they emailed the footage to his phone. Three cars had gone through the boom gate between four forty-six and five o’clock. We checked the licence plates against the DMV registrations. One car was Jeb Parget’s. Another belonged to a 61-year-old woman named Victoria Jackson.
The last one belonged to a big, scary-looking guy named Sam Garcia.
CHAPTER 6
Two weeks ago
I am an organ, an instrument and the source of all music. What am I?
I left Garcia’s office at the Atmospheric Research Unit and stood in the corridor for a moment, surrounded by the rumble of the air-conditioning. Voices carried from downstairs, too far away to make out any words. My ears rang, one eardrum still vibrating from the punch.
According to Garcia, the body could have come from space. According to Franklin Anders, it couldn’t have. Anders was more convincing, but he hadn’t offered another explanation for how the dead man might have ended up in a restricted area, wearing a space suit and showing obvious signs of decompression.
The back of my neck prickled. I turned in time to see a young woman—shaved head, tan skin—peeking out of a stairwell at the far end of the corridor.
When our eyes met, she quickly shut the door.
‘Hey!’ I called. I ran down the corridor and shoved the door open with my good arm. I could hear her shoes squeaking on the polished concrete steps, but the echo off the cinderblock walls made it hard to tell if she’d gone up or down.
Peering over the painted steel handrail, I saw her tattooed arm a level below, exposed by a rolled-up denim sleeve. Her nails were painted silver.
I hurried down the stairs after her. She didn’t wait for me, shoving open a door on the ground level. Light flooded into the stairwell. By the time I reached the doorway, there was no sign of her. Just another empty corridor, lined by offices.
She could have gone left or right. I went left, operating on instinct. One of the doors had a small, square window inset. As I ran past I saw a flash of red through the glass.
I backtracked and peered in, not sure what I was looking at. One wall was lined with racks of vials.
They were filled with blood. All of them.
It didn’t make sense. This was a space research facility, not a blood bank. The vials were much smaller than transfusion pouches. Plus, the room wasn’t refrigerated. The glass was room temperature. It wasn’t until I made this observation that I realised I was pressing my palm against the window, almost hard enough to crack it. I’d forgotten all about the woman with the shaved head.
A voice came from behind me. ‘Ah, you must be Henry.’ The accent wasn’t Texan—Bostonian, maybe.
I turned. A short woman in a lime-green blazer that made her look like a leprechaun was coming down the corridor, towelling off her ash-blonde hair. Her tanned skin was damp and free of make-up. A gym bag hung from her shoulder.
‘Pardon me,’ she said. ‘I was just in the pool. You’re a bit early.’ She offered me her hand.
I was looking at the leprechaun, not really seeing her. The blood sang to me from behind that thin pane of glass. There must have been gallons of it.
She noticed my prosthesis and quickly lowered her hand. ‘How was the drive?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Just fine, thank you, Dr Laurie.’ Her surname was on the lanyard hanging around her neck.
She didn’t offer a first name. ‘I’ve been looking forward to your visit. Shall we go in?’
I didn’t know who Henry was or why he was supposed to be visiting, but I needed to get into that room. ‘Please,’ I said.
Laurie unlocked the door with a keycard. ‘I read the paper you co-authored with Dr Singh. It’s an intriguing area of study. I’m quite envious—the ethics committee here is squeamish about experimenting on vertebrates. I told them the subjects needed albumins, but they said …’
As she talked, I floated in after her. It was a laboratory as well as a storage room, two microscopes and an extractor fan on one side, the shelves of samples on the other. I half-expected the aroma of blood to wash over me, but the room smelled of nothing but disinfectant. I could see a jug of floor cleaner in the corner, next to a mop with reddish-brown stains on the head.
I picked up one of the vials. It was double-walled glass, so I could see the inner workings. A hypodermic needle was recessed within the device, protected by a safety cap. At the other end was a compressed spring. This seemed to be an auto-injector, like an EpiPen. Rather than a blood type, the label had a long list of letters. A serial number.
Laurie hung her gym bag on a hook behind the door, and unzipped it to cram her towel inside. While she was facing the other way, I pocketed the injector. I couldn’t help it. By the time she turned around, I had picked up another and was studying that.
‘May I?’ Laurie held out a hand.
I gave her the injector. She held it up, tilting it to catch the light.
‘In your email, you made the comparison to dodecafluoropentane emulsion, but this is a significant improvement on that technology,’ she said. ‘On a plane, they tell you to put your own mask on before assisting other passengers—that’s because after just a few seconds without oxygen, you’d be too confused to put on your mask, or even to realise that you were in danger. The higher the altitude, the faster it happens. And we work with very high altitudes here—’ She breaks off. ‘Sorry, I went into autopilot there. You obviously know all this.’
I smiled. ‘Obviously. But go on.’
‘Well, an oxygen mask tethers you to a tank. In an aircraft, that usually means you’re attached to the ceiling. You can’t help anybody who’s out of arm’s reach.’ I could tell she was trying not to look at my prosthesis. ‘And tanks of compressed gas are of course an explosion risk. Our idea was to eliminate those risks by oxygenating the blood directly via injection. In the event that the O2 in the air supply gets dangerously low, crew members just uncap a syringe and inject the solution intravenously. They’re essentially breathing through their veins, rather than their lungs. They’ll remain conscious for about sixteen minutes, which might be long enough to repressurise the cabin.’ She shrugged modestly. ‘Others have explored the possibility before, but I had the courage to see it through.’
I wasn’t a doctor, but I knew what an embolism was. ‘Wouldn’t having air in their blood cause a heart attack?’
‘This isn’t air. It’s oxygenated perfluorocarbon.’
Oh. I glanced at the shelves, less interested now. The blood was fake. Like the tofu in the supermarket that pretends to be chicken. I wondered if there was a way to casually return the syringe I’d stolen.
‘Excuse me a moment, Henry.’ Laurie was backing away towards the door. She seemed to have realised that Henry, whoever he was, wouldn’t have asked such a dumb question.
‘Henry?’ I tried to sound puzzled. ‘My name’s Timothy. Timothy Blake.’
Laurie stared at me. ‘What are you doing here, Mr Blake?’
‘I’m a security consultant for ClearHorizon. Sam Garcia sent me down here. He didn’t tell you?’
‘He did not.’
I laughed. ‘Well, that explains it! No wonder you were talking to me like I was a scientist. Sorry for the confusion. I’m investigating an incident in the Martian training area.’
‘What incident?’
I could have told her it was classified, but that would only have made her curious. ‘Some kind of equipment failure—I’m still waiting on the details. But Sam said you could answer some questions about the oxygen-hemoglobin dissociation curve.’ I was reading the words off the whiteboard behind her.
‘Well, I’m a bit busy right now—I’m expecting a visitor from Yale.’
‘Henry, I assume.’ I attempted another carefree chuckle. ‘What a mix-up! Who is he?’
‘He’s a professor researching emergency medicine. He wants me to publish my formula so paramedics can use it to prevent brain death after respiratory failure. And he’ll be here any minute now, so …’
