The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [232]
Osborn looked at him uncertainly. “I don’t follow.”
“We’re going to tell him everything we know. About your father’s murder. The scalpel he invented and the occupations and murders of the other people killed the same year he was. And at some point we’re going to throw in a few things we don’t know but are going to act like we do. The idea is to put so much pressure on him that he breaks. Squeeze him so hard that he rolls over and cops out. Confesses to murder for hire.” McVey suddenly looked at Remmer. “How many backup units did you request?”
“Six. With six more holding—waiting for our instructions. We have uniforms behind that if there is a reason for mass arrest.”
“McVey,” Osborn said. “You said we were going to tell him what we don’t know. What do you mean?”
“Suppose, for Herr Scholl’s benefit, we tell him we’ve been searching high and low for a profile of his guest of honor, Herr Lybarger, and have come up with nothing. We’re curious and would like to meet him. For a lot of reasons he’ll refuse. And to that we say okay, since you won’t let us meet him we have to assume the reason we’ve come up with nothing is that the poor guy is dead and has been for a long time.”
“Dead?” Remmer said from the front.
“Yeah. Dead.”
“Then who’s playing Lybarger and why?”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t Lybarger. I simply said the reason we don’t know anything about him is that he’s dead. At least most of him is—”
Osborn felt ice creep down his spine. “You think he’s a successful experiment. That it’s Lybarger’s head on someone else’s body. Done by atomic surgery at absolute zero.”
“I don’t know if I think it but it’s not a bad theory, is it? Lying or not, it was Cadoux who made the connection for us when he said he had information connecting Scholl to Lybarger, and Lybarger to the headless corpses. Why else the mystery surrounding Lybarger’s stroke and his isolation with Doctor Salettl at the hospital in Carmel and his long recuperation at the nursing home in New Mexico? Richman, the micropathologist, said if the operation were done and successful, it would be seamless, undetectable, like a limb grown on a tree. Even his physical therapist, the American girl, wouldn’t know. Wouldn’t in her wildest imagination have any idea.”
“McVey, I think you’ve been in Hollywood too long.” Remmer lit a cigarette and held it between tightly bandaged fingers. “Why don’t you try selling that to the movies.”
“I bet that’s what Scholl says, but I think we ought to take a shot at proving it or disproving it anyway.”
“How?”
“Lybarger’s fingerprints.”
Remmer stared at him. “McVey, this is no theory. You actually believe it.”
“I don’t disbelieve it, Manfred. I’m too old. I can believe anything.”
“Even if we get Lybarger’s prints, which won’t be the easiest thing on earth, what good are they? If your Frankenstein theory is right and his own body from the shoulders down is dead and buried God knows where, we would have nothing to compare them to anyway.”
“Manfred, if you were going to have your head joined to another body wouldn’t you pick a much younger body?”
“This is a bizarre side of you I have never seen.” Remmer smiled.
“Pretend it’s not bizarre. Pretend it’s done all the time.”
“Well—If I was—Yes, sure, a younger body. With my experience, think of all the young, beautiful girls I could get.” Remmer grinned.
“Good. Now let me tell you we’ve got the once deep-frozen head of a man in his early twenties sitting in a morgue in London. His name is Timothy Ashford of Clapham South. He was once in a fight with a couple of