The Heaven Trilogy (34 page)
It took Kent ten minutes. The Phillips head he’d brought was a tad small and wanted to slip with every rotation. When he finally freed the panel under the dash, the wires were so far behind the steering column that he nearly ripped the skin from his fingers prying them out. But in the end his learning experience proved valid. When he touched the red wire to the white wire, the truck rumbled to life.
The sudden sound startled Kent, and he jerked up, promptly dropping the wires and hitting his head on the steering wheel in one smooth motion. The motor died.
Kent cursed and righted himself on the seat. He gazed about the compound, breathing heavily. The coast was still clear. He bent over and restarted the truck. His hands were sweating in the leather gloves, and he briefly considered pulling them free. But a dozen episodes of
Forensics
crashed into his mind at once, and he rejected the notion.
He shoved the truck into reverse, backed it into the lane, and nosed it toward the complex’s exit a hundred yards off. One look and any reasonable person would have known that the driver perched behind the wheel in truck 24, sneaking toward the exit gate, was not your typical driver headed out for deliveries. For one thing, typical drivers don’t sit like ice sculptures on the front edge of the seat, gripping the wheel as if it were the safety rail on a roller-coaster ride. For another, they don’t jerk their heads back and forth like some windup doll gone berserk. But then, none of that mattered, because there were no reasonable people—or for that matter,
any
people—to see Kent creep from the lot in truck 24.
Within three minutes he was back on the thoroughfare, headed west, anxious and sweaty and checking the mirrors every five seconds, but undiscovered.
He studied the gauges carefully. The company had seen fit to leave truck 24 full of fuel.
Way to go, Cruiser.
Kent flipped on the cooling unit and rechecked the gauges. In fact, he rechecked the gauges fifteen times in those first ten minutes, before finally settling down for the seven-hour drive to Salt Lake City.
Only he didn’t really settle down. He bit his nails and walked through every detail of his plan for the thousandth time. Now that he’d actually jumped over this cliff, the ground below was looking a little more rugged than before. In fact, having executed a brilliant plan that left absolutely nothing to chance, it occurred to him that he had virtually
depended
on chance up to this point. The chance that his alarm clock would actually work that morning. The chance that no one would be at Front Range Meat Packers on a Saturday morning, regardless of the fact that they were closed. The chance that the Iveco had not been moved into the secure compound. The chance that he could actually get the Iveco started.
And now Kent began to imagine the road ahead strewn with chances . . . with flat tires and traffic delays and power outages and routine pullovers. With boulders falling from the nearby cliffs and closing the road. Or worse, squashing his truck like a roach. That one would be God’s doing—if indeed Gloria had been right and there was a God. Unless it was an earthquake’s doing, in which case it would be Mother Nature reaching out to express her opinion of the matter.
Don’t, son. Don’t do this.
He glanced at the speedometer, saw that he exceeded the posted sixty miles-per-hour speed limit, and eased his foot from the accelerator. Getting pulled over for a speeding ticket, now, that would be a story for Stupid Street.
Kent reached the preselected dirt turnoff thirty minutes later and pulled into a grove of trees blocking the view to the interstate. It took him no more than five minutes to pull out the large magnetic signs he’d hidden in the tall grass midweek and slap them into place along each side of the truck. He studied his handiwork. For the next twenty-four hours, Front Range Meat Packers truck 24 would be known as McDaniel’s Mortuary’s truck 1. The signs along each side said so. In black lettering that was quaint and unobtrusive but clear and definite, so there would be no doubt.
Kent pulled back onto the highway and brought the truck up to full speed. Yes, he was most definitely over the cliff now. Falling like a stone.
FINDING THE right body, the “fish,” and arranging for the pickup had taken Kent the better part of a week. He’d approached the challenge in two parts. First, setting up a plausible body pickup and second, actually finding the body itself.
Although he’d established McDaniel’s Mortuary as a legitimate business only two weeks earlier, to look at the ghost company’s Web site you would think it was one of the older houses in the West. Of course, local mortuaries would be the first to identify a new player that suddenly appeared in their territories, so he’d been forced to use distance as a buffer against recognition. It wasn’t likely that independently owned mortuaries in Los Angeles, for example, would be familiar with funeral homes in Denver.
The company of choice also needed to be large enough to handle transfers to and from other cities on a regular basis. The request for a particular body on ice could not be an unusual occurrence. In addition, the mortuary had to be computerized, allowing Kent some kind of access to its data files.
These first three restrictions narrowed the field of eligible mortuaries from 9,873 nationally to 1,380. But it was the fourth requirement that put the breaks on eligibility for all but three unwitting participants. The mortuary had to be in possession of the right body.
The right body.
A body that was six-feet-one-inch tall, male, Caucasian, with a body weight of between 170 and 200 pounds. A body that had no known surviving relatives. And a body that had no identifiable dental records outside of the FBI’s main identification files.
In most cases mortuaries hold cadavers no longer than two or three days, a fact that limited the number of available bodies. For a week, Kent ran dry runs, breaking into the networks using the Web, identifying bodies that fit his requirements. The process was one of downloading lists and cross-referencing them with the FBI’s central data bank—a relatively simple process for someone in Kent’s shoes. But it was arduous and sweaty and nerve-racking nonetheless. He ran the searches from his system at home, sipping at the tall bottle next to his monitor while he waited for the files to download.
On Tuesday, he’d found only one body, and it was in Michigan. That had put the jitters right though him, and it had taken nearly a full bottle of the hard drink to bring them under control.
On Wednesday, he’d found three bodies, one of which was actually in Denver. Too close to home. The other two were in California—too far. But at least there were three of them.
On Thursday, he’d found no bodies, and he had shattered his keyboard with a fist, a fit he immediately regretted. It ruined both his right pinkie—which had taken the brunt of the contact, somewhere between the letters J and U by the scattered keys—and his night. There were no twenty-four-hour keyboard stores that he was aware of.
Friday he’d found three bodies, to shuddering sighs of relief. Two on the East Coast and one in Salt Lake City. He downed two long slugs of liquor at the find. Tom Brinkley.
Thank you, Tom Brinkley. I love you, Tom Brinkley!
Tom Brinkley had died of a gunshot wound to the stomach, and according to the records, no one seemed to have a clue about him beyond that. From all indications the man had shot himself, which also indicated to Kent that there
was
at least one other thing known about the man. He was an idiot. Only an idiot would attempt suicide with a bullet through the gut. Nevertheless, that is precisely what the authorities had concluded. Go figure.
Now poor Tom’s body sat awaiting cremation in Salt Lake’s largest mortuary, Peace Valley Funeral Home. Kent had tagged his “fish” then—processed an order for a transfer of the catch to McDaniel’s Mortuary in Las Vegas, Nevada. Reason? Relatives had been located and wished a local burial.
Now I lay my fish to sleep
. The funeral home had informed him by e-mail that the body had already been stripped and prepared for cremation.
Not a problem. Will pick up as is.
It was in a sealed box. Did he want it in a body bag? A body bag was customary.
Not a problem. Will pick up as is.
He scheduled a “will call” Saturday between 3 and 5 P.M. He would pick up the fish then. Only he knew it was not a fish, of course. It was just one of those interesting quirks that a mind gone over the edge tends to make. It was a dead body, as cold as a fish and possibly gray like a fish, but certainly not a fish. And hopefully not slimy like a fish.
He confirmed the order an hour later from a pay phone. The girl who answered his questions had a bad habit of snapping chewing gum while listening, but otherwise she seemed cooperative enough.
“But we close at five. You get here a minute past, and you won’t find a soul around,” she warned.
It had taken a mere forty-five minutes with his fingers flying nervously over the keyboard to make the changes to Tom Brinkley’s FBI file. The tingles of excitement had shortened his breath for an hour following. Actually
that
had been the first crime. He’d forgotten. Breaking into the FBI files was not a laughable prank. It had not seemed so criminal, though.
Kent let the memories run through his mind and kept his eyes peeled as he negotiated I-70 west. The trip over the mountains was uneventful, unless you considered it eventful to bite your nails clean off every time a patrol car popped up in your rearview mirror. By the time Kent reached the outskirts of Salt Lake, his nerves had frayed, leaving him feeling as though he’d downed a dozen No-Doze tablets in a single sitting. He pulled in to a deserted rest stop, hurried to the back of the truck, and popped the refrigerated box open for the first time.
A cloud of trapped vapor billowed out, cold and white. The cooler worked well enough. Kent pulled himself up to the back bumper and then into the unit and waved his hand against the billows of vapor. The interior drifted into view about him. Metal shelves arose on the right. A long row of hooks hung from the ceiling on the left like claws begging for their slabs of meat.
For their fish.
Kent shivered. It was cold. He imagined the gum-snapping gal at Peace Valley Funeral Home, clipboard in hand, staring up at those hooks.
“What are those for?”
“Those? Oh, we find that bodies are much easier to carry if you take them from their caskets and hook them up. You guys don’t do that?”
No, the hooks would not do. But then, he was not some white-trash bozo from Stupid Street, was he? No sir. He had already planned for this eventuality. Cruiser had told him that all trucks carried thermal blankets to cover the meat in case of emergency. Truck 24’s blankets lay in a neat stack to Kent’s right. He pulled them off the shelf and strung two along the hooks like a shower curtain. A divider.
“What are those for?”
“Those? Oh, that’s where we hide the really ugly ones so people don’t throw up. You guys don’t do that?”
Kent swallowed and climbed out of the cooler box. He left the rest stop and slowly made his way to the mark on his map that approximated the funeral home’s location. To any other vehicle parked beside him at a light, he resembled a mortuary truck on a Saturday run. Right? The magnetic signs were dragging on the street, exposing the meat packer’s logo, right? Because that would look obscene. So then why did he have such a hard time looking anywhere but straight ahead at stoplights?
Liberty Valley’s wrought-iron gates loomed suddenly on Kent’s left, bordered by long rows of pines. He caught a glimpse of the white building set back from the street, and his heart lodged firmly in his throat. He rounded the block and approached the main gate again, fighting the gut-wrenching impulse to drive on. Just keep on driving, right back to Denver. There was madness in this plan. Stealing a body.
Brilliant software engineer loses sanity and steals a body from funeral home
.
Why? It is yet unknown, but some have speculated that there may be other bodies, carved up, hidden
.
Then the gate was there in front of him, and Kent pulled in, clearing his throat of the knot that had been steadily growing since entering this cursed city.
The long, paved driveway rolled under him like a black snake. He followed a sign that led him to the rear, where a loading bay sat empty. A buzz droned in his head—the sound of the truck’s wheels on the pavement. The steady moan of madness. He backed up to the door, pulled the parking brake, and left the engine running. He couldn’t very well be seen fiddling with wires to restart it.
He set himself on autopilot now, executing the well-rehearsed plan. From his briefcase he withdrew glasses and a mustache. He fixed them quickly to his face, checked his image in the rearview mirror, and pulled out his clipboard.
A blonde-headed girl with a pug nose pushed open the rear door of the funeral home on his second ring. She was smacking gum.
“You from McDaniel’s?”
He could feel the sweat breaking from his brow. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Yes.”
She turned and headed into the dim storage area. “Good. You almost didn’t make it. We close in fifteen minutes, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“So, you from Las Vegas?”
“Yeah.”
“Never heard of McDaniel’s. You ever win big money?”
Big money?
His heart skipped a beat. What could she know of big money?
She sensed his hesitation and glanced over at him, smiling. “You know. Las Vegas. Gambling. Did you ever win big?”
“Uh . . . No. I don’t gamble, really.”
Coffins rose to the ceiling on all sides. Empty, no doubt. Hopefully. She led him to a huge side door made of steel. A cooler door.
“I don’t blame you. Gambling’s a sin.” She popped the door open and stepped through. A dozen coffins, some shiny and elaborate, some no more than plywood boxes, rested on large shelves in the cooler. The girl walked over to one of the plain boxes, checked the tag, then slapped it.