Novels 11 Adam Read online

  She looked up at him for the first time. “Classic Eve. Whatever killed her wasn’t introduced intravenously. Help me turn her over.”

  The body turned stiffly under their hands.

  “Beginning lumbar puncture.” She turned to the operating cart, lifted an iodine sponge, and began to swab the lower back. The victim had been dead for over a day, but the lumbar puncture required aseptic technique to ensure that the CSF sample wasn’t contaminated. She curled the body into a fetal position, felt along the spine until she located the space between L4 and L5, and inserted the tip of a spinal needle.

  The needle slid in easily. “Dura mater punctured. Drawing 10 cc’s of cerebrospinal fluid. Increased pressure indicates infection. As expected.”

  Daniel knew what they would find. The meninges were small membranes that covered the brain and central nervous system, designed to protect from infection. However, if a virus or bacterial infection permeated the dura mater and infected the inner meninges, the membranes swelled. This swelling placed a massive amount of pressure on the components of the central nervous system. The infection spread throughout the body, breaking down capillaries, thus the contusions and bruising. If the swelling didn’t kill the victim first, the disintegration of the organs eventually did.

  He knew the results already; Eve had killed this young woman, and he took every life the same way. But Lori approached her first autopsy in the case with the wonder of a scientist examining an alien body.

  Daniel glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes and the fear hadn’t returned. But the thought of a recurrence made his stomach turn. He reached up and switched the recorder off.

  Lori met his eyes. “Yes?”

  “I just need a second.”

  “Give me half an hour and I’m all yours.”

  “No. No, actually, I’m not sure it can wait thirty minutes.”

  “Okay.” She stepped back from the table, peeled off her gloves, dropped them in the wastebasket, and rubbed her face. “I needed fresh gloves for the heavy work anyway. What gives?”

  He nodded. “I uh . . . I’ve had a few . . .” Few what? He searched for an appropriate word. “Episodes. Fear. More like terror.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “You’ve been holding out?”

  “They’re not serious or anything, not as far as I can . . .”

  The fear hit him then, midsentence, like a battering ram to his gut. For an endless moment he knew he was dying. That’s what this was—a replaying of the moment of death, that moment when life is snatched by an unwelcome fate.

  He gasped and reached out to the table for support. Felt himself sag. “Oh . . .”

  And then it was gone. He gripped the table, drained.

  “Daniel?” Lori grabbed a chair and slid it toward him.

  “No, no, it’s okay. I just need to . . .”

  “Sit!”

  He sat.

  “Talk to me.”

  Daniel took a deep breath and rubbed his temples. Gooseflesh rippled up his arms. “On one condition.”

  “You don’t look like you’re fit to be making demands.”

  “One condition,” he insisted.

  “Of course.”

  “This stays between you and me and has no bearing on my investigation. I won’t be taken off this case.”

  “You are officially off it.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Okay. So talk.”

  He told her about the nightmare and the increasingly violent recurrences of fear that seemed to come out of nowhere, smother him for a few seconds, and then leave as suddenly.

  Daniel stood and glanced at his watch. “Twenty minutes. Please tell me this makes sense to you.”

  “Actually, it does.”

  “My death.”

  Lori sat in the chair he’d vacated, crossed her arms and legs, and stared at the victim. “DMT,” she said. “Dimethyltryptamine.”

  “The Schedule I drug? That DMT?”

  She frowned. “It’s still a bit of a fuzzy science, but research indicates that the pineal gland dumps massive doses of DMT into the brain at the time of death. It’s thought to be the primary cause of so-called near-death experiences. Hallucinations triggered by severe trauma. A chemical dump that generates a reflection of one’s beliefs. Christians see a tunnel of light and Jesus; American Indians see the great Spirit Warrior. DMT.”

  Daniel’s own research calling into question the myth of a supernatural reality clicked into place. “Near-death experiences are triggered by the belief that one is dying. Trick the mind into thinking it’s dead, and hallucinations erupt. You’re saying my mind still thinks it’s dead?”

  “I can’t see that. But DMT is a natural drug tied into both dreams and memories. It’s thought that the drug may be tied to posttraumatic stress disorder, triggering flashbacks as the pineal gland dumps overdoses of DMT into the brain.” She shrugged. “Like I said, it’s not an exact science yet.”

  “But it explains a few things, doesn’t it? What triggers this release of DMT? Besides death.”

  “The belief you’ve died. A board falls on a construction worker’s head, and the visual image persuades his mind that he couldn’t possibly survive the impact. He has a near-death experience, when in reality he comes nowhere near death.”

  Daniel rubbed his jaw, thoughts spinning. “Point is, the mind can be fooled into an NDE. Or a nightmare. Or, in my case, reliving the memory of coming face-to-face with Eve.”

  Her eyes were on him, drilling through his, way ahead. It was as if she’d speculated as much all along but wanted him to draw the conclusion. Why? Because she wanted him to try something only he could decide to do . . .

  She averted her eyes. “This dark form you saw—what makes you think it’s Eve?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Unless, as you say, your memories from that night are being triggered by something like DMT.”

  Again Daniel was struck by the sense that she was driving him somewhere. Or leading him.

  “DMT,” he said. “You’re saying that this fear I feel could be a hiccup in my brain—an extra shot of DMT.”

  “If so, it’s the tip of an iceberg.”

  “The iceberg being my memory of Eve just before he killed me.”

  She faced him. Her eyes said it all.

  “Can a near-death experience be simulated?” he asked.

  “It happens every day,” she said. “We call it a bad trip.”

  “Acid?”

  She stood, walked to the cupboard, pulled on fresh gloves, and approached the body. “Lift her up, will you?”

  He helped her slide a rubber body-block under the shoulders, which caused the head to tilt back and the arms to swing away.

  “What about hypnosis?” he asked.

  “You’re the psychologist, you tell me. But something tells me sleight of hand won’t do the trick.”

  Daniel knew that hypnosis, while occasionally an effective tool in getting the mind to lower its defenses, didn’t trigger the recovery of traumatic events—outside of movies.

  “Beginning Y incision,” Lori said. “You might want to back up.”

  She covered her face with a transparent surgical shield, lifted the battery-powered Stryker saw from the operating cart, and pressed the power button. The whine was a sound Daniel could never quite appreciate.

  She cut from the tip of one shoulder to the other. Very little blood; most of it had already pooled in the posterior of the body. Once circulation ceased, gravity took over. Lori followed the first cut with another, this one from the base of the neck down the trunk, deviating to the left around the navel and down to the pubic bone. She eased off the trigger and let the saw spin down.

  Her eyes lifted. “DMT is endogenous, created in the human brain, but it can be synthesized.”

  The woman’s body lay between Lori and Daniel, cut up by the saw, but neither of them was focused on the autopsy now. The implications of what Lori was suggesting had more beari
ng on the case at the moment.

  What waited to be found in the cadaver wouldn’t likely shed new light on Eve. What waited in Daniel’s mind could very well blow the case wide open.

  “The synthetic form is so psychoactive that those who use the drug have to be supervised,” she said. “It hits hard and fast; a user will as likely drop the pipe they’re smoking as finish the bowl. Or leave the needle in their arm if using intravenously. The trip is extremely intense and reaches its climax within the first minute. Cool-off is five to thirty minutes. A bit like an NDE.”

  Daniel was breathing shallow. “You’re suggesting I consider a trip.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Face the monster from my dream.”

  “It’s illegal.”

  “Take his mask off. Demystify him. Unlock his identity.”

  She stared. “It could work.”

  “Like hypnosis on steroids. Would I feel the fear?”

  The intensity in Lori’s eyes lost focus. She frowned and visibly relaxed. “Forget it. It’s way too dangerous and irresponsible to even consider. Theory is one thing. Sending a healthy man on the most radical hallucinogenic trip is another.”

  She revved up the saw and returned her attention to the cadaver. With the Y incision made, Lori spread the skin, made lateral cuts across the ribs, lifted the rib cage, and set it on the cart. The internal organs were now exposed.

  Daniel was so distracted by the notion of peering behind his mind’s veil that her dissection of the body sat in his mind like elevator music—distant and inconsequential. She continued to work, engrossed in the task at hand or in his dilemma, he didn’t know. Starting with the heart and working down to the stomach, she examined and withdrew the organs, looking for signs of trauma, infectant traces, ingested bacteria. They’d not yet determined the method by which Eve infected his victims, concluding only that it was never intravenously.

  Worse, they’d never actually identified the meningitis as either bacterial or viral. The symptomatic presentations of bacterial meningitis were all there, but only minute traces of the bacteria itself, not necessarily more than the average human carried at any given time.

  “She could have lived ninety years, this one,” Lori said. “Her body was in pristine condition.”

  “No unique indications?” Daniel asked.

  “Nothing new that I see. Classic presentation of acute meningitis in the trunk. If I were to guess, I’d say it was inhaled.”

  Trunk finished, Daniel helped Lori slide the rubber block beneath the head. Working with calm precision, she made an incision from behind the right ear, across the scalp, to the same spot behind the left ear. She peeled the face down over the skull and reached for the saw again.

  Daniel sighed and walked to the wastebasket. He peeled off his gloves, glad to be rid of the clammy things. The saw ground behind him as she worked to expose the brain.

  But Dr. Lori Ames, forensic pathologist from Phoenix, had already exposed her mind to him. He’d looked into her eyes and seen himself. They were cut from the same cloth. Neither was saying anything now, but they’d both opened themselves up to doing the unthinkable for the same passion. Uncovering Eve.

  The saw quieted. He could see Lori lifting the front quarter plate of the skull. She stared at the brain.

  “Take a look.”

  Daniel stepped up to the operating table and saw what she saw. The entire brain was swollen to the point of epidural hemorrhage. Blood pooled in vascular dilatation, almost black.

  “Like the others,” he said.

  The phone chirped and he crossed to it, lifted the receiver off the wall. “Morgue, Agent Clark.”

  “It’s Riley, Dr. Clark. We have a hit on AFIS.”

  Daniel caught Lori’s questioning eyes. He hit the speaker button. “Go ahead.”

  “Her name is Natalie Laura Cabricci, aged twenty-four, from Phoenix, Arizona. Her parents are being informed now.”

  “Any details on her abduction?”

  “Only that she went missing six days ago after going to the supermarket for milk.”

  “Religion?”

  “Catholic. Agents on the ground will have more as soon as they finish questioning the parents.”

  “Thank you, Riley.”

  He broke the connection. Lori turned back to the body and resumed her work. The autopsy would take another hour, and he no longer had the stomach for it. With next of kin identified, another pathologist would close up the body and prepare it to be returned to Phoenix. Except for the heart, stomach, lungs, and brain, the other organs would be incinerated.

  He’d been through this same requiem of death sixteen times in the last two years, each time feeling just one breath, one glance, one word away from that one piece that could make a perfect picture of this illogical puzzle.

  At the moment, the missing evidence felt inconsequential. What was truly of consequence was locked away in his own mind. If there was any way, any possible hope no matter how—

  The fear swarmed him before he could finish the thought. Like a pack of wolves lunging for his neck, clamping fangs on his heart and mind. Howling rage through one vicious tearing of flesh.

  I see you, Daniel . . .

  Then it was gone, so brutal and so fast that he didn’t have time to react until the fear left him. Then he caught his breath and instinctively clutched at his chest. He closed his eyes and warded off a stab of pain through his head with a moan.

  “You okay?”

  Lori was facing him again. Had he blacked out? It occurred to him that he might have trouble driving.

  “Yes.” Daniel walked forward on numb legs. Glanced at the recorder. She flipped it off and turned back to him.

  “You have to help me, Lori. I don’t care what it takes, we have to do something.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. “Maybe you don’t understand how dangerous this is. There’s a reason why it’s a Schedule I drug.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a bullet to the head! If it can stop this”—he jabbed at his forehead—“we need to try it.”

  “It’s a violation of the Controlled Substances Act. A felony.”

  “Special circumstances. This could lead to evidence critical to apprehending Eve.”

  “Its effects aren’t predictable. For all we know, another trip might only make things worse.”

  “That’s my decision, not yours.”

  She hesitated. He had no doubt that she wanted this, but her concern for him gave her pause.

  Daniel reached out and gently took her hand. “I can’t do this alone.”

  “Montova wouldn’t approve.”

  “I don’t work for Montova anymore.”

  Her thumb rubbed the back of his hand. Her eyes shifted away. “It could work. We could start with a small dose.”

  “Can you get it?”

  “DMT? I’m sure they have some under lock and key here. If not, the Phoenix lab has some.”

  He released her hand and paced away. “The sooner the better, right? Tonight. After our meeting with Heather.”

  “Meeting with Heather?”

  He hadn’t told her about the phone call. He wasn’t sure what had stopped him, but the reason seemed immaterial now.

  “She has something to tell us. Tonight. At eight.”

  THIRTEEN

  HEATHER SPENT THE fifteen minutes leading up to eight o’clock trying to keep herself busy in the kitchen. Making coffee. Wiping the counter. Setting the milk out by the coffee. Placing a batch of chocolate chip cookies she’d baked next to the milk and then putting the milk back in the refrigerator after deciding it might get warm sitting out. Then, after removing the milk, deciding to put the carafe of coffee and the cookies on the kitchen table, where she and Daniel could sit and talk without things getting uncomfortable.

  For starters.

  It had been two months since she’d talked to Daniel. Six months since she’d seen him. Considering the undeniable fact that, as Raquel put it, she was
smitten by him, it was no wonder that her palms were moist with sweat.

  Perhaps smitten was too strong a word. She had been the one who controlled the relationship, not he. To say that she was subdued or smitten by him mischaracterized the relationship.

  Obsessed maybe. But that was even worse. Mutually respectful. Enamored. Afflicted with a very real case of liking. Loving. Daniel had always fascinated her, not as a mere object of interest but as a passionate man who tore through life with acute focus. Unfortunately, acute focus only benefited a relationship when the object of that focus was the relationship itself.

  She had been Daniel’s focus once. The fulcrum of his life. His living passion. And he claimed as much to this day. But she’d drawn her line to test his love, and he’d failed miserably. His leaving her for seven out of twelve months to serve his career despite repeated cries for help had been the final straw.

  Maybe she was a fool to love him; maybe she was as twisted as he; maybe she was the one who needed a year or two of therapy.

  More likely they were both so screwed up that neither deserved more than the misery they found themselves in. Their mutual obsession with Eve had crossed another line. For the first time in her life she was truly afraid for Daniel’s life. For her own.

  She glanced at the kitchen clock, a round white plate without marks. The minute hand had passed vertical. Daniel was running . . .

  The bell chimed.

  . . . late.

  Heather took a deep breath, wiped her hands on her jeans, and crossed the carpet. Stepped onto the wood floor leading up to the front door. Daniel had insisted on wood over carpet when they remodeled. A good choice.

  “Here goes,” she breathed, pulling the door open.

  A woman stood on the porch next to and slightly in front of Daniel. The idea that Daniel might not come alone hadn’t even crossed her mind. She expected he would come to be with her as much as for what she would tell him. Clearly not.

  Before Heather could properly process her disappointment, the woman stuck out her hand. “Hello, Heather. Dr. Lori Ames, FBI. Daniel thought it would be helpful for me to hear what you had to say.”