Death & the Brewmaster's Widow (17 page)

The sound of rustling paper drew their attention to Death. He had snagged a sheet from the open file and now he sat staring at it, trembling so badly that the paper shook in his hand. He looked up and met Sophie's eyes. “This is the dental record.”

“Yes, that's right.”

“And you matched this to the body? There's absolutely no mistake about that?”

“Yes,” she said, gently but emphatically. She sorted through the file for another page. “This is the dental X-ray taken of the corpse. You can see that they match.”

Death smiled. It started slowly and built, like a tsunami, until he was grinning so broadly that it hurt.

“This is
not
my brother's dental record.”

Sophie sat back in her chair and huffed in exasperation. “Yes. It is. We got it from his dentist. You can see his name on it, right there.”

“I don't care whose name is on it. This isn't Randy's file.” He turned it around so she could see. “You see this? It says his upper teeth are all original, one filling and a crown on a back molar.”

“Yes, and?”

“And Randy's left canine is an implant. I still have the scar where the original was surgically removed from my arm.” He rolled up his right sleeve and flexed an impressive bicep at them. A small, thin white line slanted down at an angle three inches below his shoulder.”

“He bit you?” Sophie was completely nonplussed.

“Not on purpose. We were playing punch football.”

“Punch football?” Wren asked.

“It's like touch football, but manlier.”

“Yeah, it would be.”

“But how could someone have altered the dental record?” Sophie persisted, still not ready to buy into the idea.

“I don't know. I'll find out.”

“I don't even know what to say,” Sophie said helplessly. “This is all just so fantastic. How …?” She trailed off, holding her hands up with her fingers splayed in a questioning gesture.

“I don't know,” Death said again. “I don't know and I don't care. The answers are there and we'll look until we find them. The only thing that matters is, my brother's alive.”

seventeen

It was a total
cliche, Death thought, but maybe it was a cliche because it worked. And, he conceded reluctantly, it was also pretty stupid. Careful to avoid the power lines, he clamped himself more securely to the top of the pole, palmed a miniature set of binoculars, and trained them on the back exposure of the Grey house. He wore a hard hat, tool belt, and orange safety vest and he'd set caution barricades around the light pole he'd chosen. No one had given him a second glance.

From this vantage point he could see over the roof of the kitchen ell and down into the back garden, where a large, middle-aged man was working with the roses.

There were three rows of windows above the ell, so he concluded that it was a four-story house. If it came to the point of breaking and entering, that could be important to know. Now that he'd fully embraced the idea that Randy was alive, he was desperate to lay eyes on him.

He could see movement on the second floor. One window stood open and there was someone just beside it, sitting in an armchair reading. He could see a man's left hand and the book it was holding, but not enough of the reader to identify him. A door opened and a uniformed maid came in. She spoke to the reader, then turned and closed the window. A glare of sunlight and the reflection of trees obscured his view and Death cursed under his breath.

Below, a horn honked insistently. He looked down and groaned.

Captain Cairn's sedan was parked behind his Jeep and Cap was standing beside it, reaching in the window to blow the horn. When he saw that Death was looking at him, he pointed sternly to the ground. Death loosened the safety strap he'd secured himself with and climbed down slowly.

“How, exactly, is getting yourself electrocuted supposed to help this situation any?” Cap demanded.

“Wren tattled,” he guessed, sadly aware that he sounded about five.

“Wren's worried about you.”

“I wasn't going to touch the wires.”

“Not on purpose, maybe. What if you'd had a coughing fit while you were up there? Are you still taking antibiotics?”

Death stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged.

Cap sighed. “It's hot out here,” he said. “Come sit in my car and let's talk about this.”

They climbed into Cap's car and Death had to admit the air conditioning was a relief. It was hot outside, hotter still in the full sun at the top of the light pole.

“Wren told you Randy's still alive?” Death asked.

“She told me your theory,” Cap answered carefully.

“Jeez! Why is everyone so set against seeing this? He's alive. He has to be. It explains everything and it's the only thing that makes sense.”

“Death, please try to understand, it's not that we don't want to believe you, and God knows it's not that we don't want you to be right. But it's just so farfetched. And yes, it would explain a lot, but there are also some pretty big questions left to answer. Like, if that was Andrew Grey's body, what happened to him between the time he collapsed and the time we pulled him out of that fire?”

“I don't know yet, but there has to be an answer and I will find it.”

“You're going to have to. The only way forward here, that I can see, is to get a court to intervene. If they can order Alaina to allow an independent physician to examine Andrew, we can have them do DNA tests. Or, hell, even getting his fingerprints would do it.”

“You think they'd have Randy's fingerprints on file?”

“I know they do. He and Talia had a response at a crime scene a couple years ago and they had to be fingerprinted so their prints could be eliminated from the investigation. The thing is, though, if you hope to convince a judge that there's merit to your claim, you're going to need answers to all those questions, even the hard ones. And you really need some sort of proof to back it up.”

“The body came out of the fire wearing a badge he wasn't wearing and the wrong helmet. Isn't that proof ?”

“It doesn't hurt,” Cap admitted, “but it's a pretty thin thread to hang a wild idea on.”

Death sighed. “What I want to do,” he said, “is go over there, kick the door down, and take my brother back.”

“And Alaina could shoot you for invading her home, the courts would believe you'd gone mad with grief, and who'd there be to rescue Bogie, if it
is
Bogie, then?”

“I know.”

Cap tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “You know, Wren's convinced they want you dead as it is. She's decided that the robbery you walked into was really an attempted hit.”

“She's from a small town. Convenience store robberies are a lot more rare there than they are here.”

“Still, it is pretty coincidental. The story about you investigating Bogie's death runs in the paper one day, you nearly get killed the next. It doesn't cost anything to be careful, son. At least, don't give them an excuse to get rid of you.”

“Yeah, I know.” Death ran a hand over his face, tired and frustrated. “I just want to see him. I want to see him so bad.”

_____

“That is the wildest idea anyone has ever brought me. And I did the interviews in the ‘aliens stole my pencil' case.”

“Aliens stole my pencil?” Wren asked.

St. Louis police detective Ray Starbourne leaned back in his chair and laced his hands together behind his head. “Nerd burglary. One nerd stole another nerd's Battle Beyond the Stars memorabilia. Lost his custom-made, engraved mechanical pencil at the crime scene. I asked him to explain how it got there.”

“Ah. Aliens stole my pencil.”

“Exactly.”

“This is not an ‘aliens stole my pencil' idea,” she said. “I know it sounds farfetched, but it also holds together, and it explains a lot.” She had spent the morning tracking down Detective Starbourne. He was in charge of investigating a string of break-ins at area dental offices and clinics. Thieves were stealing X-ray machines. It was part of a larger wave of similar crimes that had hit the Midwest during the summer. The police, and the FBI, which was coordinating the investigations, suspected terrorists, gathering material for dirty bombs.

Randy's dentist was one that had been hit, though in that case the burglars had left without the machine after getting it stuck in the lab door.

“Well, you're right about the break-in at Weableau's office. That was definitely a copycat by amateurs. The MO wasn't the same at all. I figured someone saw the news reports about the other burglaries and figured it'd be an easy way to pick up some extra money.”

“Look at this,” Wren passed across the copy of the fake dental records Sophie had made her. “This is the dental record sent from Dr. Weableau's office to the coroner's office. I took it back and showed it to Marlene. She's Dr. Weableau's office manager. It was sent because it's the most recently dated of the X-rays in the file, but when she cross-checked it against billing records, Randy wasn't there on the date it was supposedly taken. Then we went through the other records in his file. They're all on this same type of form. But their office changed paper goods suppliers about six years ago. The older records should be on one of the older forms, with different spacing and a different font.”

“You make a compelling case,” he admitted. “I just don't know that it would be enough to convince a judge to let us intervene. If you could bring me fingerprints or something with DNA on it maybe. A toothbrush, some strands of hair—”

Wren tipped her head to the side speculatively.

“Would you need to know how I got them?”

Starbourne tipped his own head, an unconscious mirror of her actions. “That would depend entirely on whether or not you got caught.”

_____

Death was waiting in his Jeep when Wren got back to Randy's house. He leaned across the seat and opened the door for her.

“Hop in. I want to show you something.”

“Okay. What?”

“You'll see.”

Wren shrugged to herself and got in. Death was practically thrumming with tension, the air in the Jeep charged with it.

“So,” she said, a bit hesitantly, “I called Captain Cairn and told him what's going on.”

“Yeah, I know. He came and found me and made me climb down from my light pole.”

“You climbed a light pole?” She turned in her seat to glare at him more directly.

He blushed and cringed defensively. “I didn't get electrocuted.” He waited, but she just continued to glare, so he went on. “I was trying to get a better look at the Grey house. The bedrooms are on the second floor. There was a man in one of them reading a book, but I couldn't see enough to identify him. The house is four stories. They have at least one maid and a gardener built like Mount Rushmore.”

“You're thinking of breaking in?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I talked to the detective who's investigating the dental office burglaries,” she told him. “He suggested that we try to get fingerprints or DNA. He's interested, but he doesn't think we have enough grounds for a judge to allow the police to intervene yet.”

“Cap said the same thing.”

Death pulled into a small lot and stopped. “Do you recognize where we are?”

Wren looked around. There was a playground off to her right and a scattering of picnic shelters. “Yeah, this is the park with the entrance to the underground caves.”

“Right, now look at the building on the other side of the ravine. What would you say that is?”

“I dunno. A factory of some kind?”

“Yeah, that's what I thought. But then I started digging into what I could learn of the Grey family holdings. Hold on.”

He pulled back into the street, drove down to the corner, and turned. They came up beside the building and he turned again, driving past the front facade. A small, discrete sign beside the entrance read, “Lloyd Parkour Research Facility.”

“A research facility?”

Death glanced over, eyebrows raised, and gave her a meaningful look. “Medical research. Specifically, they specialize in cryobiology.”

“Cryobiology, that's like cryogenically freezing people?”

“Well, they don't do it with the aim of reviving them in a couple of hundred years, like what you're thinking. Mostly it's freezing blood and tissue samples, eggs and sperm, organs. There are a lot of current medical and scientific applications. But they do have facilities for whole-body cryonics. And you know who the president of the board of directors is?” She shook her head.

“Dr. James Gregory—Alaina Grey's brother.”

They drove back to Randy's house in silence. Wren waited until they were seated at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee brewing before she spoke.

“You think they froze Andrew when he died and then warmed him back up in time to switch him for Randy, right? Honey, I don't want to throw cold water on your idea, but I don't think it's possible. The freezing would have caused his cells to rupture, wouldn't it? And something like that would show up in an autopsy.”

“But they freeze tissue to transplant back to living people, so there must be something they can do do keep it viable.”

“Something that wouldn't be obvious?”

Instead of answering, Death took out his phone and dialed. He waited a minute before he spoke. “Sophie? It's Death. Sorry to bother you. Do you have a minute? Wren and I have a question. We've discovered that Alaina and her brother have access to a crionics facility …” He outlined his theory and Wren's objections and listened for a minute. “Yeah, we're staying at Randy's … sure, that'd be great. Okay, thanks. See you then.” He hung up. “She wants to think about it a little. She's going to come over and talk to us on her lunch break.”

_____

By the time Sophie arrived, Wren had put together a simple meal of homemade potato soup and sandwiches. Death thanked Sophie for driving over and invited her to come in and have something to eat while they talked. Sophie took her place at the table, unfolded her napkin in her lap, and sat fiddling with it nervously.

“It's okay,” Death told her gently. “Whatever you have to say, it's okay. I promise I'm not going to get mad at you if you're here to shoot down my idea.”

She sighed and put the napkin back on the table.

“I'd actually meant to come shoot down your idea,” she admitted. “That's why I wanted to come over here. To let you down gently. But I thought about it, did some research, and talked to some of my colleagues. The thing is, yeah, I think it is possible.”

He brightened. “Really?”

“Really. Whole-body cryogenics is done with the intention of eventually reviving the person being frozen. To keep the body viable, they drain the blood and replace it with a solution that acts as antifreeze. That would keep the cells from rupturing during the freezing process. Then they'd have to warm the corpse back up to 98.6 and replace the antifreeze with blood. The subject's own blood could have been preserved for that by freezing it separately. Again, there are substances added to the blood to protect it during freezing, but they wouldn't show up in an autopsy unless we had some reason to look for them.”

“So that works,” Wren breathed. “It makes perfect sense.”

“No, it doesn't,” Sophie objected. “If Andrew died when he first collapsed, as he would have had to have, then you're suggesting that Alaina had his body frozen and kept it around for four months in the bizarre hope that she could find a lookalike to kidnap under circumstances that would allow her to leave Andrew's dead body in his place. It's absurd.”

“I don't think they kept Andrew's body around because they were planning to kidnap someone,” Death said. “They were just trying to hide the fact that he'd died until after the point when Alaina would inherit. It's impossible to get an accurate estimation on time of death, or even date of death, when a body is immediately frozen, right?”