The Sleepless (27 page)

‘You’re kidding me,’ said Thomas. He picked up the photograph. ‘You know who she is?’ 

Michael nodded. 

‘You’re
sure
you
know who she is?’ 

‘Absolutely. Her name’s Elaine Patricia Parker,’ said Michael. ‘She was the only one on the passenger-list in the Rocky Woods air disaster whose body we never found.’ 

Thomas was head-and-shoulders taller than Michael. He stared down at him for a long time, breathing harshly through his open mouth. ‘Elaine Patricia Parker?’ 

‘That’s right. She was an art student from Attleboro.’ 

‘And you can recognize her, after all this time, in spite of the fact that she’s been tortured like that, and beaten like that, and facially disfigured?’ 

Michael nodded. ‘Thomas, believe me, I studied every available photograph of that girl a hundred times over. I’m a professional.’ 

Thomas raised an eyebrow. 

‘I’m
still
a
professional,’ Michael insisted. 

Victor briskly drummed his fingers on his desk, stood up, and reached for the green surgical gown that was hanging on the hatstand next to the chart of lymph glands from
Hewer’s Histology.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’d better get back to it.’ 

‘Okay,’ said Thomas, without taking his eyes off Michael. ‘Let me know soonest, won’t you?’ 

Victor went out of the door and Michael and Thomas and Idle the skeleton were left together in uncomfortable silence. Thomas picked up the photograph of Elaine Parker and held it up, close to Michael’s face. Michael glanced at it quickly from time to time, but couldn’t stand to examine it too closely. He could feel that dreadful familiar sensation of vertigo, as if the floor were just about to open up underneath his feet – as if he were just about to plummet 20,000 feet into freezing darkness. Then whipping branches, and bruising trees. Then straight into solid ground, like a swimmer diving into concrete. 

‘You’re sure this is her?’ 

Michael cleared his throat. ‘I’ll pull her file at Plymouth and bring it over. She had distinguishing marks, too, as far as I can remember. A small strawberry birthmark underneath her right armpit.’ 

‘I’ll tell Victor to look for it,’ said Thomas. He kept the photograph raised in front of Michael’s face. Michael looked pale and distracted, and he kept swallowing, and Thomas was very interested to know why. 

Michael said, ‘Her parents are still living in Attleboro, as far as I know. You – uh – you could ask them to identify her, couldn’t you?’ 

‘I’ll have to, if I’m persuaded that it
is
her,’ said Thomas. With his left hand, without lowering the photograph, he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a cigarette. ‘But you can see my point of view. I’m not going to expose anybody to viewing this girl’s remains if there’s any serious question that it isn’t her. What was done to that girl – that gave
me
nightmares, and I’ve seen plenty of very unpleasant things done to plenty of people.’ 

‘It’s her, I’m sure of it,’ Michael insisted. And he
was
sure. 

‘If you’re right, Mikey, you’re giving us some pretty damned difficult questions to answer,’ said Thomas. ‘Like – how did she survive a high-altitude air disaster that nobody else survived?’ 

‘There are several possibilities,’ said Michael. ‘It could have been one of those freaks of physics, one of those million-to-one chances. Some of the Lockerbie victims were still showing vital signs when they were found, and
they
fell from 31,000 feet. Admittedly, they didn’t survive for very long. But when a human body falls from a great height, it reaches a terminal velocity of 110 mph, and then wind resistance prevents it from falling any faster. When it hits the ground, it’s no worse than a head-on smash between two automobiles travelling at 60 mph.’ 

‘And no better, either, I presume,’ put in Thomas. 

Michael shrugged. ‘The other possibility is that she wasn’t on the plane at all. She checked in, she was
seen
to check in – and her baggage was found on board, as well as a shoe and a purse. But of course we have no surviving witnesses to say that they actually saw her on board.’ 

Thomas put the cigarette between his lips, and it waggled, unlit, when he spoke. ‘If you’re right about what’s-her-name, Elaine Parker, then we have two girls – both in the Boston area – who have both survived air-crashes in one way or another – and who have both subsequently been abducted, imprisoned, tortured and killed. And the whys and the wherefores and the whodunits of
those
particular questions – well, God only knows.’ 

Michael said, ‘Of course we do have the pinprick connection – those scars that were made on both girls’ backs.’ 

‘For sure,’ Thomas agreed, tiredly. ‘But it’s not a whole lot to go on, is it? Somebody stuck needles in their backs. But so far we don’t have any idea
why
they should have wanted to. Part of the problem is that Jane Doe’s insides were too badly decomposed for Victor to determine what her assailant was trying to achieve – that is, apart from causing her extreme pain.’ 

‘When you say decomposed ... ?’ 

‘Maggots,’ said Thomas. ‘The larvae of the common flesh-fly. Ask Victor about it, he’s the expert. They ate her insides out like a condemned building.’ 

‘It’s all right,’ said Michael. ‘I’m pretty much up on maggots.’ He pressed the back of his hand against his forehead. He was feeling chilled and sweaty at the same time. It might be a good idea for him to call Dr Rice this afternoon, just to talk things over, just to re-orient himself. The real world was beginning to take on a cold and menacing cast, and he was beginning to feel very far away from Patsy and Jason, and Dr Rice’s quiet, reassuring office in Hyannis. 

The phone rang. Thomas picked it up and snapped, ‘Boyle.’ 

He listened, and then he put down the phone and said, ‘Victor wants me down in autopsy. He says there’s something I ought to see.’ 

He paused, and then he said, ‘Do you want to tag along?’ 

Michael hesitated for a moment, and then he nodded. ‘I guess I’ll have to.’ 

It had been a clamorous two days at the City Morgue. Twenty-two men and three women had already been killed in the rioting on Seaver Street, and worse was expected tonight. Apart from that, the medical examiners were having to deal with the usual daily quota of shootings, stranglings, knifings, burnings and drownings. Boston was a Mecca for drownings. The mayor had once indiscreetly boasted that more people had drowned in Boston Harbor since the turn of the century than the casualty lists of the
Lusitania
and the
Titanic
put together. 

Michael had to squeeze himself back against the wall while a green-sheeted corpse was rolled past them by a dwarfish black porter. The porter was singing to himself, ‘When a man ... loves a woman ... ‘ 

Victor was waiting for them outside the swing doors of the mortuary. He was holding up his bloodstained gloves as if he were making a blessing. ‘This is not at all pretty,’ he warned them. ‘But it’s
very
interesting.’ 

He pushed his way through the doors and into the chilled, brightly-lit room. The air was strong with the smell of antiseptic and bile and unfresh human flesh. Thomas, just behind him, was vigorously shaking his essence of cloves into his handkerchief. He turned around and said to Michael, ‘Want some?’ but Michael shook his head. 

On the white ceramic table in front of them, under a penetrating battery of surgical lights, lay something that looked like a huge burst-open sack of exotic fruits – browns and yellows and purples and reds. It was only when Michael walked around to the other side of the table that he could make any kind of sense of what he saw – because this burst-open sack of exotic fruits had a head and a face and two arms and two legs. It was the body of Sissy O’Brien, opened up from crotch to clavicle, split wide apart by a vast suprapubic incision, so that Victor Kurylowicz could find out just what her abductors had done to her. 

Michael found himself staring at her face. Her eyes were closed, and her skin was an odd pearly-grey, almost phosphorescent, but in death she had taken on a calm, mature beauty, and Michael found it almost impossible to believe that there was nothing at all inside that head, beneath that silky hair. Only darkness, and nothingness, a young life hideously ended for no earthly reason that he could imagine. He looked across the gaudy gruesomeness of her insides, and saw Thomas with his watering eyes and his handkerchief over his face and Victor watching him with light-reflecting spectacles. 

‘Here,’ said Victor, beckoning. ‘You’ll have to come closer.’ 

Michael came closer. He felt the darkness beginning to rise up beneath him. Victor said, ‘
Closer –
she’s not going to jump up and ask you to dance the watusi.’ 

Michael edged as close to the table as he dared. Victor picked up a stainless-steel speculum and used it to push aside the beige, gelid heaps of Cecilia’s intestines. ‘Now here – ‘ he explained,’ – here are her kidneys.’ 

Cecilia’s kidneys were so kidney-like that Michael silently swore to himself that he would never eat kidneys again. Brown and curved and shiny – just slightly dulled from their recent exposure to the air. Victor prodded them and they wobbled slightly in their bedding of off-white fat and loose, veiny, connective membrane. 

In a matter-of-fact, lecturer’s tone, Victor said, ‘As far as I’ve been able to work out so far, the major injuries are all consistent with torture or sadistic gratification. They’re terrible – and when I say terrible, I mean that they’re far more extreme than anything I’ve ever seen before. But what I wanted to find out first was what those two needle-punctures in the lower back were all about – since obviously they might establish some connection between our Byron Street victim and this poor young girl here in front of us. I don’t think that the prime purpose of the needle-punctures was to cause pain. They
might
have caused pain, but compared with having a lighted cigarette touched against your bare nipples, forget it.’ 

‘So what did you find out?’ asked Thomas, growing nauseous and impatient. 

Victor looked up, and raised an eyebrow in self-satisfaction. ‘What I found out was that those needle-punctures led directly to the suprarenal glands,
directly.
’ 

Thomas, in a muffled voice, asked, ‘Would that be difficult?’ 

‘Extremely. You can see for yourself that the kidneys are pretty mobile.’ 

‘So whoever stuck those needles directly into those particular glands did it with skill – ‘ 

‘Oh, yes.’ 

‘ – and accuracy – ‘ 

‘Fantastic accuracy ... remember that the left kidney is always slightly narrower, and higher in the abdominal cavity than the right.’ 

‘ – and forethought.’ 

‘For sure.’ 

‘A surgeon, maybe?’ asked Michael. 

‘It’s a possibility. It sure wasn’t a darts player.’ 

Thomas took a deep clove-soaked breath, and then he said, ‘So what are these supra-what’s-their-name glands, then? Why would anybody want to stick a needle into them?’ 

Victor took a scalpel and cut away the fibrous outer layer of the glands that clung to the top of the kidneys. A little blood and fluid seeped out, but Sissy was long dead, she wouldn’t embarrass him by bleeding very much. 

‘Here, look – ‘ said Victor, and opened up one of the kidneys so that Thomas and Michael could see for themselves. Thomas couldn’t stop himself from thinking about that brunch he had eaten three weeks ago at Barrett’s, all those kidneys lying in a silver chafing-dish, wrapped in bacon. ‘This is the suprarenal gland, there’s one on top of each kidney, about two inches long and a little less than two inches wide. Inside it you can see this firm, deep-yellow layer, okay? This is what we call the cortical layer. And right inside the middle, here – this soft, dark-brown portion, this is what we call the medulla.’ 

‘Okay,’ said Thomas, swallowing. ‘But what does it do? Is it important?’ 

Victor stood up straight. ‘If you took out anybody’s suprarenal glands, they would suffer from muscular prostration and death within a few days. Inside that soft brown part, the medulla, that’s where adrenaline is produced.’ 

‘You mean the same adrenaline like when you get all hyped up?’ 

‘That’s right. Whenever you’re threatened or excited or stressed, your suprarenal glands pump out adrenaline – and it causes your eyes to widen, your hair to stand on end, your heart to beat faster, and your liver to fill your bloodstream with extra sugar.’ 

Michael could feel the darkness closing in, but he tried to keep himself rational. ‘What are you trying to say here? You mean to say that somebody deliberately stuck needles into these girls’ suprarenal glands, in order to tap their adrenaline? Is that it?’ 

Victor made an amused, dismissive face. ‘How should I know? That’s Lieutenant Boyle’s job.’