The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [78]
Osborn’s eyes were heavy, and he was beginning to drift off. “The police?” he said, weakly.
Getting up, Vera crossed the room and turned on a small lamp in the corner, then shut off the overhead light. “They don’t know you’re here. At least I don’t think they do. When they find Kanarack’s body and his car with your fingerprints in it they’ll come here asking if I’ve seen you or heard from you.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
Vera could see him trying to put everything together, trying to tell if he’d made a mistake calling her, if he could really trust her. But he was too weary. The lids came down over his eyes and he sank slowly back into the pillow.
Bending down, she brushed her lips over his forehead. “Nobody will know. I promise,” she whispered.
Osborn didn’t hear her. He was falling, tumbling. He was not whole. The truth had never been as stark or as fearfully ugly. He had made himself a doctor because he had wanted to take away hurt and pain, all the while knowing he could never take away his own. What people saw was the image of a doctor. To them, helpful and caring. They never saw the rest of his personality because it didn’t exist. There was nothing there and never would be until the demons inside him were dead. What Henri Kanarack knew could have killed them, but it was not to be. Finding him had been a tease that made it worse than before. Suddenly his falling stopped and he opened his eyes. It was autumn in New Hampshire and he was in the woods with his father. They were laughing and skipping stones across a pond. The sky was blue, the leaves were bright and the air was crisp.
He was eight years old.
42
* * *
“OY, MCVEY!” Benny Grossman said, then as quickly asked if he could call him right back and hung up. It was Saturday morning in New York, midafternoon in London.
McVey, back in the pocket-size room in the hotel on Half Moon Street Interpol had so generously provided for him, swirled two fingers of Famous Grouse in a glass with no ice—because the hotel had none—and waited for Benny to call back.
He’d spent the morning in the company of Ian Noble, the young Home Office pathologist, Dr. Michaels, and Dr. Stephen Richman, the specialist in micropathology who’d discovered the extreme cold to which the severed head of their John Doe had been subjected.
After careful inventory taken at behest of Scotland Yard, neither of the two cryonic suspension companies licensed in Great Britain, Cryonetic Sepulture of Edinburgh or Cryo-Mastaba of Camberwell, London, reported a head—or entire body, for that matter—of a stored “guest” missing. So, unless someone was running an unlicensed cryonic suspension company or had a portable cryocapsule he was hauling around London with bodies or pieces of bodies frozen to more than minus four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, they had to rule out the possibility that Mr. John Doe’s head had been voluntarily frozen.
By the time McVey, Noble, and Dr. Michaels had had breakfast and arrived at Richman’s office/laboratory on Gower Mews, Richman had already examined the body of John Cordell, the headless corpse found in a small apartment across the playing field from Salisbury Cathedral. X rays of Cordell’s body revealed two screws securing a hairline crack in his lower pelvis. Screws that probably would have been removed once the fissure had properly healed had the subject lived that long.
Metallurgical tests Richman had had done on the screws revealed microscopic cobweb-like fractures throughout, proving conclusively that Cordell’s body had undergone the same extreme freezing—to temperatures nearing absolute zero—as had John Doe’s head.
“Why?” McVey asked.
“That’s certainly part of the question, isn’t it?” Dr. Richman replied as he opened the door from the cramped laboratory where they had gathered to view the comparative slides of the failed screws taken from Cordell’s body and the failed metal that had been the plate in John Doe’s head, and led them down a narrow, yellow-green hallway toward his office.
Stephen Richman was in his early sixties, stout but fit