IN THIS WINDOWLESS CHAMBER THREE STORIES underground, the four living and the two dead were for a moment so silent that Ethan imagined he could hear rain falling in the streets far above.
Then the meat hauler with the pompadour said, “You mean you released Whistler to the wrong people?”
The attendant, Toledano, shook his head adamantly. “No way. Never did in fourteen years, not startin’ today.”
A wide door allowed bodies on gurneys to be conveyed directly from the garden room into the ambulance garage. Two deadbolts should have secured it. Both were disengaged.
“I left them locked,” Toledano insisted. “They’re always locked, always, ’cept when I’m overseeing a dispatch, and then I’m always here, right here, watching.”
“Who’d want to steal a stiff?” Pomp asked.
“Even some perv wanted to steal one, he couldn’t,” Vin Toledano said, pulling open the door to the garage to reveal that it lacked keyholes on the outside. “Two blind locks. No keys ever made for it. Can’t unlock this door unless you’re already here in this room, then you use the thumb-turns.”
[54] The attendant’s voice had been quickly worn thin by worry. Ethan figured that Toledano saw his job going down the drain as surely as blood was drawn by gravity down the gutters of an inclined autopsy table.
Jose Ramirez said, “Maybe he wasn’t dead, you know, so he walked out himself.”
“He’s deader than dead,” Toledano said. “Total damn dead.”
With a slump-shouldered shrug and a koala smile, Jose said, “Mistakes happen.”
“Not in this hospital, they don’t,” the attendant insisted. “Not since once fifteen years ago, when this old lady was in cold holding almost an hour, certified dead, and then she sits up and screams.”
“Hey, I remember hearing about that,” said Pomp. “Some nun had herself a heart attack over it.”
“Who had the heart attack was the guy in this job before me, and it was the nun chewin’ him out that gave it to him.”
Stooping, Ethan extracted a white plastic bag from under the gurney that had held Dunny’s body. The bag featured drawstrings, to one of which had been tied a tag that bore the name DUNCAN EUGENE WHISTLER, his date of birth, and his social-security number.
With a wheeze of panic in his voice, Toledano said, “That held the clothes he was wearing when he was admitted to the hospital.”
Now the bag proved empty. Ethan put it on top of the gurney. “Ever since the old lady woke up fifteen years ago, you double-check the doctors?”
“Triple-check, quadruple-check,” Toledano declared. “First thing a deader comes in here, I stethoscope him, listen for heart and lung action. Use the diaphragm side to hear high-pitched sounds, bell side for low-pitched.” He nodded continually, as though while he talked he were mentally reviewing a checklist of steps he’d taken on receipt of Dunny’s body. “Do a mirror test for breath. Then establish internal body temp, take it again a half-hour later, then a half-hour after that, to see is it dropping like it should if what you’ve got is really a deader.”
[55] Pomp found this amusing. “Internal temperature? You mean you spend your time shovin’ thermometers up dead people’s butts?”
Unamused, Jose said, “Have some respect,” and crossed himself.
Ethan’s palms were damp. He blotted them on his shirt. “Well, if nobody could get in here to take him, and if he was dead—where is he now?”
“Probably one of the sisters jerking your chain,” Pomp told the morgue attendant. “Those nuns are jokers.”
Cold air, snow-white ceramic tile, stainless-steel drawer fronts glistening like ice: None of it accounted for the depth of Ethan’s chill.
He suspected that the subtle scent of death had saturated his clothing.
Places like this had never in the past disturbed him. He was disturbed now.
In the space labeled NEXT OF KIN OR RESPONSIBLE PARTY, the hospital paperwork listed Ethan’s name and telephone numbers; nevertheless, he gave the harried attendant a card with the same information.
Ascending in the elevator, he half listened to one of Barenaked Ladies’ best songs reduced to nap music.
He went all the way up to the seventh floor, where Dunny had died. When the elevator doors opened, he realized that he had needed to go only as high as the garage on the first subterranean level, where he’d parked the Expedition, just two floors above the garden room.
After pressing the button for the main garage level, he rode up to the fifteenth floor before the cab started down again. People got on the elevator, got off, but Ethan hardly noticed them.
His racing mind took him elsewhere. The incident at Reynerd’s apartment. Dead Dunny’s disappearance.
Badgeless, Ethan nonetheless retained a cop’s intuition. He understood that two such extraordinary events, occurring in the same morning, could not be coincidental.
The power of intuition alone, however, wasn’t sufficient to suggest the nature of the link between these uncanny occurrences. He might as well try to perform brain surgery by intuition.
[56] Logic didn’t offer immediate answers, either. In this case, even Sherlock Holmes might have despaired at the odds of discovering the truth through deductive reasoning.
In the garage, an arriving car traveled the rows in search of a parking space, turned a corner onto a down ramp, and another car came up out of the concrete abyss, behind headlights, like a deep-salvage submersible ascending from an ocean trench, and drove toward the exit, but Ethan alone was on foot.
Mottled by years of sooty exhaust fumes that formed enigmatic and taunting Rorschach blots, the low gray ceiling appeared to press lower, lower, as he walked farther into the garage. Like the hull of a submarine, the walls seemed barely able to hold back a devastating weight of sea, a crushing pressure.
Step by step, Ethan expected to discover that he wasn’t after all alone on foot. Beyond each SUV, behind every concrete column, an old friend might wait, his condition mysterious and his purpose unknowable.
Ethan reached the Expedition without incident.
No one waited for him in the vehicle.
Behind the steering wheel, even before he started the engine, he locked the doors.