Inheritance: A Novel Part 26

"Okay," Melinda said.

Randy and Melinda went out into the hallway while Julia went back to her desk and picked up her phone, but couldn't get a dial tone. She punched another line, but that was dead, too.

"What the...?" she said, and picked up the phone on Julia's desk. That one was dead. So was Randy's.

"Oh s.h.i.t."

She grabbed her purse and took out her service weapon, a short-barreled Glock 27. Then she made her way towards the front.

On the nightshift, they left most of the lights off, and the hallways leading from the Investigations Office to the front lobby were dark. Melinda moved through them, wincing every time her heels clacked on the floor, trying to hear what was going on up front.

All she heard though was thudding of her heart against her chest.

"Randy? Julia?"

No answer.

"Randy?"

She was almost at the lobby now. It was around the next corner. She went to the wall and inched her way closer to the corner. Straining to hear any kind of sound at all, she took a deep breath and waited in silence.

A long moment pa.s.sed.

Finally, unable to take it anymore, she called out, "Randy, answer me. Julia?"

Nothing.

Come on, girl. Get it together. You can do this. You can do this.

She took a deep breath, then slipped around the corner, gun up and ready for whatever was there.

Or so she thought.

Julia's leg was sticking into the hallway, holding the door open. Beyond her leg she could see Randy slumped onto the floor. Neither of them was moving. Melinda's breathing was coming fast and ragged now, her fear overriding her training. In her mind she kept telling herself to run. She had been to the schools, sure. She had a peace officer's license, yeah, but she wasn't a real cop. The closest she had ever come to a tactical building sweep was watching a video on it back in school. She wasn't made for this.

Stop that. You can do this. You can do this.

She peered into the shadows of the lobby. From here, it looked empty, but her eyes kept turning back to the unmoving bodies on the floor. Then she caught a glint of light on the floor and saw a puddle of blood spreading away from Julia's head.

"No," she said, and lowered her weapon. "No, Julia."

She knelt down next to her friend and searched her neck for a pulse. There was none.

"Julia, no! Wake up, baby! Please."

Crying, she rocked back on her heels and covered her mouth. Her gun felt like it weighed a million pounds in her hands. She could barely lift it.

Gla.s.s crunched behind her.

She gasped as she spun around. There, in the shadows, standing perfectly still and watching her with the cold, dead eyes of a psychopath, was a bone-skinny man whose long, greasy hair hung over his face like a curtain. In his hands, he held a big rock, and even in the darkness, Melinda could see the blood dripping from it.

"What did you do?" she said.

He was on her then, and he moved fast. She put up her hands to block her face, but she never had a chance.

Everett dropped the rock and it hit the carpet with a dull thud. He looked at the three bodies on the floor without any real sense of what had just happened. It was almost like there were two David Everetts. One was in a red haze, full of strength and purpose. The other was a balloon floating in the air above the red one. Balloon Everett was barely conscious, and when the red Everett moved, balloon Everett was pulled along behind him, almost like there was a string tied to his belly. He felt the tug and he went. There was no fighting it.

The red Everett went down a hallway, opening doors and throwing rolled-up towels down as door stoppers to hold them open, until he reached a stairwell. Balloon Everett could feel cold air coming up from the stairwell, and maybe a smell as well, though it was faint.

Red Everett used a chair to wedge open the stairwell doors, then went down another hallway and into the morgue. Balloon Everett watched sleepily as Red Everett opened the freezer doors, and he continued to watch as naked corpses rose from the racks of tables, sloughing off their sheets and staggering out through the open doors.

When the last of them was gone, Red Everett turned and headed back upstairs. He stayed well behind the long line of dead men, and Balloon Everett bobbed contentedly in the air, watching the parade as it made its slow way towards the waiting night.

At last Red Everett reached the front room, and there he stopped amid the broken gla.s.s. He reached down and picked up one of the guns from the investigators on the floor. Almost like he was studying it, Red Everett turned it this way and that before jamming the muzzle under his chin and pulling the trigger.

As the sound echoed away, Balloon Everett felt the cord that held him to Red Everett let go, and he went floating, bobbing away into nothingness.

Magdalena watched the dead melt into the darkness. One by one they left the building and then dissolved, like soap bubbles riding the wind. They were headed for the Iron Works again.

"Travel fast," she said. "There is much to do."

Chapter 12.

Anderson and Levy were in the car, headed for the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office. Anderson was driving. Levy was on his cell phone, talking with a detective named Carl Vince from the Night Utility Unit who was over at the Mulberry Green Mental Health Facility looking into David Everett's escape. Whatever Vince was telling Levy wasn't making Levy very happy.

Anderson said, "What's going on?" Levy just held up a finger for him to wait.

Off to the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. A copper pool was spreading across the horizon, dappling the rooftops of the shallow east side. It was going to be another hot and cloudless day, one of those relentlessly hot summer days that smothered the city and made you feel like you were being cooked inside your clothes. The dawn wasn't even here yet, and already the temperature gauge on the dash was reading in the low nineties. Anderson searched his memory, thinking back to the last time San Antonio had gone through a draught this bad. What had it been, five or maybe six years ago?

Beside him, Levy hung up his phone and tucked it back into his belt. He had to lean over almost into Anderson's seat to do it, and even then he had to pull his stomach up and out of the way as he searched for the clip.

Anderson said, "Well?"

"Just a second," Levy grumbled as he fought with his phone clip. "G.o.d, I'm getting so f.u.c.king fat."

Anderson waited.

"There," Levy said. He settled back into his seat, trying to get comfortable, then said, "They don't know s.h.i.t down there. Vince said from what they could see Everett just walked right out the front door."

"How is that possible?"

"I don't know," Levy said.

"Well, what did he say?"

Levy shook his head. "Apparently they had some kind of bug problem. A whole bunch of them got into the generator and it started a fire. The building filled up with smoke and the staff went around opening up doors. You know, standard fire drill. There were only two nurses working, I guess. They escorted their patients into a secure area behind the building and waited on the Fire Department. By the time Fire had the place secure, Everett was gone."

"Just like that? Gone."

"Apparently. Looks like he just walked off."

"Jesus H. Christ," Anderson said. "A bug problem?"

"That's what Vince said. Crickets or cicadas, some kind of bug. They're all over the place down there."

"That's just great," Anderson said.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and thought about the timeline for this fiasco. Anytime a Patrol officer was dispatched to an incident involving a dead body, he was required to contact the Medical Examiner's Office so that one of their investigators could make the scene and decide whether or not the body would need to be taken to the County Morgue for an autopsy. The Communications Unit supervisor told them he had first tried to contact the Medical Examiner's Office at three a.m. Patrol had been trying to raise the ME's Office for two hours before that. When the Communications Unit supervisor was unable to raise any of the ME investigators, he dispatched an officer to their location to find out why they weren't answering their phone. That officer had arrived at the morgue at thirteen minutes after three and found the murder scene Anderson and Levy were on the way to now.

"What time did Vince say this invasion of the crickets happened?" Anderson asked.

"Around eleven thirty. The Fire Department got there at eleven thirty-seven. Why? What are you thinking?"

"Just doing the timeline. Everett slips away sometime between eleven thirty and eleven forty. We know Patrol tried to raise the Medical Examiner's Office at around one o'clock. That means Everett had less than an hour and a half to get all the way across town, kill three armed people, and steal forty-three bodies."

"And kill himself."

"Yeah, and kill himself."

Levy made a deep sigh. "You're saying somebody had to have picked him up from Mulberry Green and taken him to the morgue."

"They would have to, don't you think? The morgue's what, about thirty miles away from Mulberry Green? Somebody picked him up and drove him to the morgue."

"Yeah," Levy said. "That makes sense."

"But who? If it was the same people who stole the bodies from the morgue that raises kind of an interesting question."

"What's that?"

"How'd they know Mulberry Green was gonna get swamped by bugs? That's not the kind of thing you plan for, you know? And it's not the kind of thing you do yourself."

Levy thought about that. "Yeah, I see what you mean," he said.

"So, for some reason, the people who did this got Everett out of Mulberry Green, brought him up here, stole a whole bunch of dead bodies, and then left Everett to kill himself."

"But why would Everett kill himself? If he did kill himself. I mean, we don't know that, do we?"

"No, I guess we don't. Not conclusively, anyway."

"We could get that off the morgue's cameras, though."

"Yeah," Anderson said, but he was lost in thought.

They exited the freeway and headed up Wurzbach to the main entrance of the University of Texas Health Science Center campus. The campus police department had three cruisers blocking the roadway, and when Anderson turned into the driveway, two officers stepped forward to flag him down.

"Too bad they didn't have this kind of security before this happened," Anderson said.

"Yeah. Well, at least the press won't be getting in. G.o.d, can you imagine this footage playing out on the six o'clock news?"

Actually, yeah, Anderson thought. He'd been thinking about exactly that, as a matter of fact. He'd been thinking about Jenny Cantrell sitting on her couch, trying her best to hold it together after learning of Ram's death, then having the news come on with this mess. Jesus, what was he going to tell her about this?

He rolled down his window, and the campus police officer leaned in.

"You guys from SAPD?"

Both Anderson and Levy held out their IDs. "Homicide," Anderson said.

"Okay, sir," the officer said, and stepped back. He waved them through, and Anderson drove on.

"Chuck," Anderson said, "what in the h.e.l.l are we gonna tell Jenny? Have you thought about that yet?"

"I thought about it," Levy said. "I thought about it, and I have absolutely no f.u.c.king clue."

They drove in silence down the winding tree-lined road that Anderson had driven just a day before. Ahead of them they could see a circus of red and blue lights. There were police cars and evidence technician vehicles parked all over the place. Uniforms were setting up barricades and marking off safe lanes for entering and exiting the scene. Anderson parked out of the way and watched the show.

"There's Allen," Levy said.

Anderson spotted the deputy chief easily enough. He was the only suit in a sea of uniforms, and he looked agitated. Poor guy's probably had even less sleep than me last couple of days, Anderson thought. And that ain't much.

"You ready for this?" Levy asked.

"I guess. Ready as I'll ever be." He shook his head. "Jesus, this is something else."

As Anderson stepped through the barricades and onto the lawn in front of the morgue, he saw Allen talking with a group of people in plain clothes. He recognized several of them as investigators with the Bexar County Sheriff's Office Homicide Unit. A few he knew by name; others, he just recognized their faces.

Levy joined him on the front steps and together they walked inside the lobby. Anderson stopped just inside the doorway and waited for a pretty young evidence technician to get the picture she was trying to take. He stood there and took in the scene.

There were four bodies in all, and he knew all of them. The two young women both had their eyes open. One of them, Julia Culpepper, was on her stomach in the middle of the doorway that led back into the rest of the building, one leg holding the door open. The other young woman was slumped against the wall to his left. Her head was turned towards them, her eyes and mouth open in a gesture of surprise that Anderson found both disturbing and pitiful. He could only imagine what she must have been thinking at the last moment, how scared she must have been. There was a nasty gash on the side of her head that Anderson guessed was caused by the melon-sized rock in the middle of the floor. They'd have to confirm that during her autopsy, of course, but it looked pretty obvious to him. A few feet in front of her, one hand close enough he might have been able to touch the heel of Melinda's right shoe, was the body of Randy Sprouse. He'd known Sprouse for twenty years, and as he stared down at the body he thought, I was at your retirement party. Jesus H. Christ.

Off in the far corner, sagged down between two heavy couches, was the body of David Everett. He was dressed in a filthy white t-shirt and blue jeans and sneakers with no socks. The t-shirt had a bib of blood and brain matter down the front. There was a hole under his chin and one arm was slung limply over the arm of a couch.

Melinda Sanchez' gun was on the floor in front of him.

"Whose footprints are these?" Anderson asked, pointing at the tread print on a piece of broken gla.s.s in the middle of the room.

Levy looked at the gla.s.s. "Looks like a Hi Tech boot print. Probably from one of the Patrol officers who made initial entry. I talked to him out front. He said he came here, saw the scene, then called for backup. Once they got back up, they did a protective sweep of the rest of the building."