The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [54]
There were two such companies in Great Britain. One in London, the other in Edinburgh, and Scotland Yard would follow up on them first thing in the morning. Maybe their John Doe hadn’t been murdered, maybe his head had been severed after death and legitimately put away for some future time. Maybe it was his own investment. Maybe he’d put his life savings into the deep-freezing of his own head. People had done nuttier things.
McVey had gotten off the phone saying he was coming back to London tomorrow and requesting that the seven headless corpses be X-rayed to see if any of them had had surgery where metal might have been implanted into the skeleton. Replacement hip joints, screws that held broken bones in place—metal that could be analyzed, as the steel plate in John Doe’s head had been. And if any of them did have metal, the cadavers were to be immediately forwarded to Dr. Richman at the Royal College to determine if they too had been deep-frozen.
Maybe this was the break they were looking for, the kind of left-field “incidental,” usually right in front of an investigator’s nose but that at first, second, third or even tenth look still remained wholly unseen; the kind that almost always turned the tide in difficult homicide cases; that is, if the cop doing the investigating persevered long enough to go over it that one last time.
Click.
3:19 A.M.
Getting out of his chair, McVey pulled back the covers and plopped down on the bed. It already was tomorrow. He could barely remember Thursday. They didn’t pay him enough for these kind of hours. But then, they never paid any cop enough.
Maybe the frozen head would lead somewhere, probably it wouldn’t, any more than the business with Osborn had led anywhere. Osborn was a nice guy, troubled and in love. What a thing, come on a business trip and fall for the prime minister’s girlfriend.
McVey was about to turn out the light and get under the covers when he saw his muddy shoes drying under the table where he’d left them. With a sigh, he got out of bed, picked them up and carefully walked to the bathroom, where he put them on the floor.
Click.
3:24.
McVey slid under the sheets, rolled over and turned out the light, and then lay back against the pillow.
If Judy were still alive, she would have come on this trip. The only place they’d ever traveled together, besides the fishing trips to Big Bear, had been Hawaii. Two weeks in 1975. A European vacation they could never afford. Well, they would have afforded it this time. It wouldn’t have been First Class, but who cared; Interpol would have paid for it.
Click.
3:26.
“Mud!” McVey suddenly said out loud and sat up. Turning on the light, he tossed back the sheets and went into the bathroom. Bending down, he picked up one of his shoes and looked at it. Then picked up the other and did the same. The mud that caked them was gray, almost black. The mud on Osborn’s running shoes had been red.
29
* * *
MICHELE KANARACK looked up at the clock as the train pulled out of the Gare de Lyon for Marseilles. It was 6:54 in the morning. She’d brought no luggage, only a handbag. She’d taken a cab from their apartment fifteen minutes after she’d first seen Agnes Demblon’s Citroën waiting outside. At the station she bought a second-class ticket to Marseilles, then found a bench and sat down. The wait would be almost nine hours, but she didn’t care.
She wanted nothing from Henri, not even their child who’d been conceived in love less than eight weeks earlier. The suddenness of what had happened was overwhelming. All the more so since it seemed to have sprung from nowhere.
Once outside the station, the train picked up speed and Paris became a blur. Twenty-four hours earlier her world had been warm and alive. Each day her pregnancy filled pier with more joy than the day before, and that had been no different, and then Henri called to say he was going to Rouen with Monsieur Lebec to see about opening a new bakery there, perhaps, she even thought, with the promise of a managerial