Chills (18 page)

There was a filing cabinet by some cardboard boxes in the back wall's right corner and some sizable bins, each differently primary-colored and labeled as to their waste contents, in the left. Between them stood another tidy foam-green door, which Morris knew led to the refrigerated room where bodies were literally shelved in the walls. He liked that room even less; it lacked basic human dignity, despite the necessity of its existence.

Two bodies from the refrigerated room were laid out on the gurneys. Both were naked, sliced into pretty badly, and pale gray. The open eyes of the man nearest him were clouded over in white, the blue lips slightly parted. The older man on the table next to him was little more than a head and a ravaged lump of torso. Morris swallowed the knot of nausea in his throat.

“So, ah, what's the word on our cult vics? Jack sent me here to pick up any info you—”

“Ahh, there's not much,” Cordwell replied, the warmth in his voice cooling. He peeled off his gloves and then went to the sink to wash his hands. “Let's see.... No hairs and no fibers, human, animal, or otherwise. No fingerprints, of course, on the bodies, and from what I could find, none on the jars, either. Victims' stomach contents vary—some ate approximately ten to twenty minutes before, some as much as two hours or more. Preliminary examination shows no signs of sexual assault on any of the victims. No drugs as far as I can tell, either, although we'll have to wait for the tox screen to confirm, and with communication to the outside world being what it is . . .” He shrugged.

Turning off the water, he grabbed some paper towels from a roll near the faucet, and as he dried his hands, he said, “Now, there are numerous contusions on most of the bodies. If I had to guess, I'd say they were overpowered and possibly restrained manually by multiple people. No unique finger marks or human bite marks, though—nothing like that.” Cordwell wadded up the paper towel and pitched it into the big blue bin marked T
RASH
(N
ON
-O
RGANIC
).

“You weren't kidding. That isn't much to go on. Do you have anything I
can
use?”

“Well, those jars . . . standard mason jars you could get at any craft store. Filled with commercial-grade formaldehyde, not hard to get. The items in the jars—the eyes, tongues, and all that . . . we identified most of those as belonging to the victims.”

“Most?” Morris leaned against a gurney, but jerked and straightened as it wheeled away from him.

Cordwell looked as if he was trying to stifle a smile. “Yes. There were three fingers unaccounted for—three different people. All left ring fingers, removed from living people. Not our vics', because they have all their fingers and toes, just like the day they were born. Heh. And Brenner ran the prints on those loose fingers through AFIS but got no hits. So, I've got no idea if they belong to bodies you haven't found yet, or the cultists themselves.”

“Why would they belong to the cultists?” Morris frowned.

“Well, to reap great rewards, one must be willing to make great sacrifices—isn't that an occult notion? What connects a person more strongly to one's given goal than to give a piece of himself, eh?”

Morris grimaced. “I hadn't thought of that.”

“Not that those fingers are going to do you any good, without the hands they came from. These cultists you've got are ghosts.”

“Yeah, you're not the first person to say that,” Morris said flatly. “Anything else?”

“Hmm . . . well, the minority of lacerations, the ones we can attribute to human perpetrators, were caused by a three-inch blade. My guess would be a dagger. Flint fragments found in the wound.”

“Flint?”

“Yeah. Ceremonial stone dagger, maybe.”

Morris shrugged. “Probably. Seems a reasonable assumption. What about the animal attacks?”

“Animal attacks . . . yes, well, those are a little harder to identify. I've determined there are both teeth and claw marks present on two-thirds of the bodies. Teeth appear to be serrated on the inner edge, slope to a point, and run approximately an inch to an inch and a half long. I found traces of unidentified animal saliva with digestive enzymes in those wounds. The claws appear to be, oh, about three to four inches long, serrated on both sides—no flint, obviously, but tips appear to have a corrosive substance on them, something that continues eating into the flesh, after the initial wound is made.”

“Jesus,” Morris said.

“Like I said, they're unlike any animal-inflicted wounds I've ever seen. I'd hate to see the animal that made them.”

“My guess would be the things out there made them—those things in the snow.”

Cordwell gave him a baffled look. “I guess that's possible. I haven't seen them, so I couldn't tell you, although Mr. Brenner certainly offers some fascinating reports.”

Morris shook his head. “Been spending a lot of time down here, huh?”

“Pretty much every waking minute since that first John Doe. What the hell, it keeps me out of trouble, right?” He winked at Morris.

“Yeah, I guess it does,” Morris agreed. He found himself put off by the coroner's nonchalance about everything. He figured detachment came with the job, but Cordwell described the details of the murders with what ranged from amiable indifference to casual admiration. “Speaking of Brenner, where is he?”

Cordwell looked away. “Not sure, to be honest. Never showed up for work today, which is rather irritating, considering the amount of work I have to do here all alone. Perhaps he couldn't get his car through the snow. As they say in the cold places,
Na cnàmhach fuar ar na cnámha na naimhde an laige iontu.
” He smiled.

“I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that phrase,” Morris said, smiling flatly.

Cordwell's smile grew. “It's Irish Gaelic. It means, ‘The lives of others should never be of such preoccupation that it keeps you from living yours.' Roughly translated, I mean.”

Morris said, “Ah. I don't know Gaelic, but I like that.” It was true; he didn't know Gaelic. However, someone had read him that very phrase and others in the same language recently, someone who had told him a great deal about the kind of occultists who used it. And Morris knew Cordwell had lied. That phrase meant something very different.

Morris changed the subject. “Okay, well what about those symbols carved into all the bodies?”

“Let me show you.” Cordwell led him over to the intact body. He picked up a scalpel from one of the counters and pointed out the symbol on the front of the man's left shoulder. “Okay, the invocation symbol carved into the first body, the John Doe—”

“Chris Oxer,” Morris said.

“Right, the poor, unfortunate Mr. Oxer,” Cordwell continued. “With him, the wound was clearly made by man, crudely, with the flint knife. It was painstakingly done, don't get me wrong, and pretty smoothly done, considering the man was alive during the entire carving of it into his skin. But still, it was done by hand. But these”—he pointed to the corpse's shoulder—“from every body retrieved at the three crime scenes last night, these were . . . branded, for lack of a better word. No variations in pressure or depth. But not branded with heat. It's actually a pretty remarkable thing; they were branded with a cold so intense that it actually caused the tissue to become necrotic and then to flake away—but with remarkable precision. I have absolutely no guesses for you regarding the tool used to make the symbols, though.”

“Ah,” Morris answered.

“So that's about it then. I'll call you or Jack when I have more. Hey, you be careful driving out there. Some weather, huh? Snow so late in the year?”

Cordwell hadn't really given him much to go on—not voluntarily, anyway. Morris supposed he could look at places that sold ceremonial daggers, maybe check the local stores for sales of formaldehyde or mason jars . . . that is, if any of the stores were open at this point. He didn't figure those leads would yield much. But Morris was certain Cordwell was hiding something, and that was the real thing to follow up on.

To the coroner, he said, “Oh, it's crazy, all right. You must, uh, have your hands full with more than the murders, huh?”

“Well, these killings are first priority, but yes,” Cordwell replied, somewhat less jovially. But his eyes sparkled when he added, “And of course, there are all these hypothermia deaths. It's fascinating, how the body undergoes such incredible changes when it freezes to death. I have to admit, I admire snow as a force of nature.”

“You sound like a winter person if ever I met one.”

“Oh, I am,” Cordwell said, turning back to the body.

“You ski, do you?” Morris asked, aware of how stupid the words sounded even as he was saying them. “I mean, everyone I know who loves the snow is into winter sports, skiing and snowboarding and whatnot.”

“No, not really. Just love the snow. I always thought it was so beautiful. That first snowfall of the season. All glittery, you know? It reminds me of diamonds and stars, hard and cold and pure, just . . . clean. Like a new soul. Its pristine white, its unbroken smoothness. Then people come along with their cars and dirt and traffic and slush it up, like . . . like mashed potatoes, but dirty. And it loses that perfect whiteness, that purity. It becomes something ugly, because we touched it. Just like this planet. And like children. Children are pure. Even the devil loves children.” He laughed in a way that made Morris uncomfortable. More to himself than out loud, he continued, “But it's still a hell of a force of nature—brutal. Oh, sheets of it are hard enough to hurt, and ice edges sharp enough to cut, and the cold—that's enough to burn right into the skin. That's where the metaphorical comparison to children diverges. Because the snow, the ice and cold—it has power. Maybe we change it by touching it, but it changes us by touching us, too. In a way, it gives us a gift. It tries to preserve us, stripping out our softness and warmth because those things make us weak and rotting. The cold, it keeps us as we were in life, in childhood, a snapshot of our most tangible assets. It makes the water in us freeze . . . and there we are: cool and beautiful and pure.”

“I . . . suppose,” Morris said. The tone of the conversation, particularly given what he'd seen the last few days, had taken an uncomfortably weird turn.

“You know,” Cordwell said, turning to him, “most of our universe is cold. Do you know what the percentage of outer space is that is not near a star? How much of it is just cold, empty space? Well, empty to us, maybe, but who knows? Who knows? There's something to be said, I think, about how the most powerful, impossibly large, and wonderfully majestic locations in our existence are pure cold.” Lost in the reverie of his own words, Cordwell didn't notice the look Morris gave him behind his back.

“I hadn't really thought about it.” Morris frowned.

“Oh, I think about it. I think about it a lot.” Cordwell smiled, turning back to the detective. “But, I'm keeping you. Please, give my best to Kathy and Reece, and tell Jack I'm sorry there isn't much to go on from the preliminaries, but I'll get him the final reports as soon as I can. I know you all are under a lot of pressure to find these people.”

“We are. Thanks, Dr. Cordwell.” Morris turned to go.

“You will never find them,” Cordwell's voice came from behind him.

Morris paused. “Excuse me?” He turned to see Cordwell staring at him with a small, unpleasantly smug smile on his face.

“I said, ‘I hope you find them,' Detective Morris.”

“Uh, thanks,” Morris replied. He was suddenly very eager to get out of there, away from Cordwell and his talk of snow and space and his nonchalance with the mutilated dead.

Before he had even made it to the elevator, he'd written most of the text to Jack, Teagan, and Kathy. He hit send, praying it would go through, then pressed the elevator button and waited. As he did so, he absently touched the handle of his gun, wishing that some other member of the team was with him. He'd texted a hunch, but it was a strong one—so strong, in fact, that it had actually made Morris feel a little sick.

Cordwell's preoccupation with the snow and its ability to kill was unnerving, to say the least; it wasn't just idle philosophy, but a kind of gloating. But that was not what set off the alarm bells in Morris's head.

He suspected that Cordwell had let more slip than usual because he thought Morris was either too stupid or too green to catch on, too uninitiated. But Morris had eaten, slept, and breathed this case for two days, and while he found aspects of it almost too terrible to think about, a lot of little things had stuck with him. And those things, more than anything, had formed the basis of the hunch, had nudged it in the right direction.

For one thing, he knew he'd heard Cordwell right the first time, about finding the cultists. And the more he thought about it, the more he thought he'd heard something else in Cordwell's voice, something hostile, even hateful. What had Jack said that morning in his office, during his debriefing about the crime scene from the night before? Something about how the cultists didn't much care who knew what now, because they believed they were so close to their goal? It was like Cordwell had given up the pretense of caring what Morris and the others thought—about him, the case, everything.

What really bothered him, though, was the phrase in Gaelic. It didn't mean anything as live-and-let-live as Cordwell had made it out to be. Professor Majoram had translated it for him from an old, obscure book as an actual part of the summoning of the Blue People. He remembered, because he'd written it down phonetically in case it might be important later. It meant, “The cold chews on the bones of the enemies of the unfaithful.” And was a reference to the cold between the stars, like Cordwell mentioned. It was part of their belief system that the space between the stars was cold but not empty. Not empty. Because that's where those Old God things—