The Dead Man: Face of Evil (2 page)

February 20, 2011

The forest rangers dug Matt's frozen corpse from the ice, zipped it up in a body bag, and had it delivered to the Clarion County morgue cooler, where it was left to slowly defrost like a Butterball turkey the night before Thanksgiving.

Matt's body was stacked on a shelf above Aurelio Rojas, age twenty-seven, who'd had eight margaritas too many and whose head and torso were packaged separately as a result of his freeway collision with a big rig, whose unlucky driver was bagged one shelf below and who, at the moment Aurelio's Chevy Cobalt crossed the median and slammed into him, had been thinking erotic and anatomically impossible thoughts about his upcoming sexual encounter with Carla DuPont, who was waiting for him at the Motel 6 in Bigsby and who, when he didn't show up, assumed she'd been fucked and dumped for the umpteenth time and, facing her fourth abortion in ten years, slit her throat with a box cutter.

But Clarion County assistant coroner Lyle Whittaker knew nothing about Carla DuPont, or what other dominos of fate had been toppled by the three corpses on his Sunday morning to-do list of autopsies. To him, the corpses were just leftover tasks from the previous shift that he had to complete.

Being a coroner was just a job to him, not a calling, an ambition, or even a remote interest.

He'd been struggling through medical school when, one day in class, as he was about to cut into a cadaver, he had an epiphany.

It would be a hell of a lot easier working with dead people than trying to heal the living
.

The idea became even more appealing after he watched a bunch of those
CSI
shows, which made the profession seem outrageously cool.

He could definitely see himself wearing Armani, driving a chrome-plated Hummer, and fucking a woman like Eva La Rue.

As it turned out, the profession was cool, but only in terms of the room temperature of his workplace.

He ended up wearing Kirkland, driving a used Camry, and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.

But even so, he wasn't bitter or unhappy.

Far from it.

He had a secure job that paid decently, that kept him from being a disgrace to his family of doctors, that required no customer service skills, and that left him pretty much on his own to do as he pleased, which was spending hours playing
World of Warcraft
and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.

And it looked like he'd be able to get back to
Warcraft
fairly quickly that Sunday morning. There were only three autopsies to do, and it wasn't like the cause of death in any of them was a great mystery. It was all by-the-numbers stuff.

Lyle decided to start with the simplest case, the guy who'd been buried in the December avalanche. He figured the body had probably defrosted enough to cut into by now.

The first thing Lyle noticed once he got Matthew Cahill's body on the table was that the corpse's skin didn't feel as cold or as rubbery as he expected, which meant something was wrong with the temperature-control mechanism in the cooler.

Not good.

The last thing Lyle wanted to walk into on his next shift was a cooler full of putrefying corpses. After he finished gutting Matthew Cahill, he'd alert maintenance to get the thermostat fixed right away.

Lyle took his scalpel and made a deep cut through the flesh at Matt's shoulder and was about to rip his way to the sternum and on down to the pelvis, so he could peel it all back, saw off the ribs, and remove the internal organs underneath.

He didn't get that far.

He'd barely moved his knife half an inch when he stopped what he was doing and stared in slack-jawed disbelief at what was underneath his blade.

Blood.

It seeped out of the wound like the juice from a ripe pomegranate.

Lyle watched in shock as the blood became a tiny rivulet, ran down the side of Matt's body, and dripped onto the steel table.

He stuck his gloved finger in the fluid and brought it up close to his eye just to be sure.

Yeah, it was blood.

But that was impossible.

The human body is mostly water. Within two hours under the ice it becomes a Popsicle with skin. On a molecular level, the crystallization shatters the cells, irreparably destroying organs and making resuscitation inconceivable.

The longest a person had ever survived being frozen was almost ninety minutes.

The longest any animal had been known to survive, in laboratory conditions, was three hours.

Matthew Cahill had been frozen
for three months
.

If the freezing didn't kill him, the oxygen deprivation alone would certainly have left him not only merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead.

And yet…

He was bleeding.

And for that to happen, there had to be circulation, and for that to happen, there had to be a beating heart, and for that to happen, the central nervous system had to be firing neurons.

And for that to happen, there had to be life.

Lyle didn't have a stethoscope. There was no need for one in a morgue.

That left him only one immediate option for confirming what the blood was telling him, short of continuing his Y incision and cracking the body open to see what the hell was going on.

Swallowing hard, his hand shaking, he set the knife down on the instrument tray and leaned over the body, slowly and hesitantly placing his ear on Matthew Cahill's icy chest.

The skin was cold. But not
deathly
cold.

At first, all Lyle heard was his own blood pounding in his head. But then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

There it was.

Faint and muffled, but
insistent
…

It was like laying his head on a grave and hearing, through the six feet of dirt beneath him, someone pounding on the lid of their coffin.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

And as he heard it, he could see the blood continuing to seep from the wound that he'd cut in Matt's flesh.

There was no denying the evidence, as unbelievable as it was.

The dead man was alive.

Lyle ran to a phone and called 911.

November 18, 2010

The B. Barer and Sons Sawmill was built in the mid-1800s along a curve in the Chewelah River when the waterway was the best method for transporting logs from the northern forests to the mill and keeping them fresh until they could be cut.

Those forests had long since been stripped, graded, and reforested with tract homes, and the heavily polluted river was no longer used as a timber highway, but scores of logs were still stored in the man-made bay, less out of necessity than as a nostalgic nod to B. Barer and Sons' history.

So Matt figured that practice would end soon. Big changes were being made at the mill by the current generation of Barers in their effort to keep the business from collapsing, and nostalgia wasn't something they could afford anymore.

In desperation, the Barers had finally brought in an outside consultant, whose previous experience had been in the soft drink industry, to modernize their operations and find ways to save money. Roger Silbert was hated by the hard-core loggers, some of whom were fourth-generation workers in the yard, because he knew nothing about wood and had probably never held a saw in his life.

For decades, the mill ran on six circle rigs in four separate buildings. The logs were loaded on a sliding carriage and fed into a circular saw, where they were shaved and squared off into cants, which were turned after each cut by men with cant hooks, then re-fed down the line to the blade to be cut again and again, the lumber off-loaded and stacked with each pass.

It was a manpower-intensive operation that during peak periods required three eight-hour shifts and a hundred men throughout the plant to get the job done.

Matt had worked at the lumberyard since he was a teenager, and had done every job there was to do, before becoming a sawyer, the man running one of the circle rigs, an old Frick mill.

But for the last few days, he'd been running and testing a brand-new mill, a Wood-Mizer 3500, which Roger Silbert had urged the Barers to try out.

With the WM3500, the logs were loaded by a computerized, hydraulic system onto a stationary bed and were cut by a thin-kerf, laser-guided, vertical-blade band saw that passed over the cant on a gliding head.

Matt operated the system robotically from a chair at the head of the mill rig equipped with joysticks at the end of each armrest.

The log was turned hydraulically, and every piece of lumber that Matt cut from the cant was swept away by metal prongs behind the saw head as it slid back into starting position after each forward pass of the blade.

The freshly cut lumber was pushed down the line by a series of incline conveyors, roller decks, and pneumatic kickers and then off-loaded with hydraulic arms into neat stacks.

The WM3500 was a pleasure for Matt to operate. He was attuned to it in a way that he never was with the circle rig. It was all highly computerized, and yet cutting with it felt like an extension of himself and as natural as chopping wood each morning.

But he was ashamed of himself for liking it. He didn't have to be a professional hatchet man from Zippy Cola like Roger Silbert to recognize the savings that the WM3500 represented. The new system was more precise, yielding more lumber in less time. But it required half as many men to operate as the old circle rigs.

It was good news for the company and bad news for log hands and off bearers like Andy, who'd made their living with cant hooks and heavy lifting. It wasn't good for Deerpark, either.

Matt shut down the rig when he saw Rachel Owens come into the mill. She dressed like everyone else, in jeans and a flannel shirt, but she made it look stylish. She worked in the front office handling sales, but Matt knew she could do any job on the line as well as any of the men. Her father had been a logger.

Rachel approached his chair. “I was watching you cut. It looks like fun."

"Come on up and try it," he said.

"Only if I can sit on your lap."

He immediately blushed and looked around to see if anyone had heard her. She laughed at his embarrassment.

"Relax, Matt, nobody is paying any attention," she said. “Besides, it's not like there's a law against flirting."

But the truth was her remark was less flirtation than an honest expression of her desire.

They'd been seeing each other casually, going to movies and having dinner downriver in King City, for a few weeks now, but their romance hadn't advanced beyond some passionate kisses in the cab of his truck.

Something was holding him back and she knew exactly what it was—the simple gold wedding band that he still wore.

At first, the ring made him even sexier to Rachel. It demonstrated that he was a man of passion and deep emotion. But now she wanted to wrestle the ring off of his hand and throw it in the river.

The ring made Matt feel like he was cheating on his wife every time Rachel kissed him. He'd never said that to Rachel, of course, but it was obvious the way he tensed up whenever she touched him.

She thought it was time for him to get on with his life and, more urgently, get it on with her.

"What brings you down here?" he asked.

"You, of course. I'm looking forward to Saturday. Were you able to get us reservations at the lodge?"

He nodded. “It seems like everybody in Oregon had the same bright idea to go skiing this weekend, but I managed to get the last two rooms."

She'd call and cancel one of them as soon as she got back in the office. She had big plans for the weekend. “That's great. Deerpark is the last place we're going to want to be this weekend."

"Why is that?"

"Management is real impressed with the yields they're getting from this rig. They're going to retire the Fricks and order three more WM3500s."

"How many men are they going to let go?"

"Fifty, maybe more," she said. “It'll be in stages as the new rigs come in. But I'm sure your job is safe."

"I wasn't thinking about mine."

"Andy isn't your responsibility. He's barely even responsible for himself."

"That's why he needs me. When are they making the announcement?"

"Silbert is breaking the news to everybody today at lunch."

That gave Matt a whole hour to worry about how Andy would take it.

February 20, 2011

When the emergency operator answered, Lyle was struck dumb. He didn't know what to say. He certainly couldn't tell her the truth, or they wouldn't send anyone, except maybe a couple of cops to take Lyle in for a psych evaluation.

"I'm Lyle Whittaker, a coroner at the Clarion County morgue. I've got a man here suffering from extreme hypothermia and in need of immediate medical attention."

"Did you say
the morgue
?"

"Yeah, and this is where he'll stay if you don't send the paramedics right away."

So the operator, Roxi Witt, made the call and sent the paramedics.

But even as Roxi did it, something nagged at the back of her mind…

She was at the end of her eight-hour shift. No calls had come in about anybody being found nearly frozen.

The only incident she'd heard about was yesterday, a little girl who'd found the frozen body of a skier who'd been buried by the avalanche.

That had happened three months ago.

But this certainly wasn't a crank. The readout on her computer screen confirmed the call was coming from the county morgue and that an assistant coroner named Lyle Whittaker was scheduled to be on call that morning.

So, after careful consideration, Roxi looked around to make sure no one was watching her, opened her purse, and found the tiny scrap of paper that she'd been saving for years, just waiting for the right moment to come along.

And if this wasn't it, nothing ever would be.

She took out her cell phone and called the
National Enquirer
tip line to claim her five hundred bucks.

Lyle wheeled Matthew Cahill into the hallway, where it was warmer, and covered him with every sheet he could find to help him generate some body heat.

The paramedics arrived within a few minutes and immediately hooked Matt up to an EKG, which, to Lyle's astonishment, showed a weak heartbeat, in the low twenties. Critical condition for a living person but not bad for a dead man.

They put Matt on oxygen, started an IV, and were about to wheel him out to the ambulance, when one of the paramedics repeated the question that Lyle couldn't avoid answering any longer.

"How long was this guy frozen?"

Lyle handed the paramedic a copy of the forest ranger's report, the morgue log, and a bag containing Matthew Cahill's personal effects, which included his wallet, his watch, and a wedding band.

"Three months," he said and dashed off.

The paramedic was sure that he'd heard wrong, that the coroner had actually said three
minutes
, but he was in too much of a hurry to get the patient to the hospital to chase after Lyle to confirm the obvious.