The Day After Tomorrow

was.”

“Could you do it at absolute zero?” McVey was giving him his due.

“Of course. Because at absolute zero everything would be stopped.”

“Detective McVey,” Richman interjected. “It is possible to get temperatures to less than one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero. It has been done. The concept of absolute zero is just that, a concept. It cannot be reached. It’s impossible.”

“My question, Doctor, was not if it can or it can’t. I asked if someone was trying to do it.” There was a decided edge to McVey’s voice. He’d had enough of theory and now wanted fact. And he was staring at Richman, waiting for an answer.

This was a side of the L.A. detective Noble had never seen and made him realize why McVey had the reputation he did.

“Detective McVey, so far we’ve shown that the freezing was done to one body and one head. X rays have shown metal in only two of the remaining six cadavers. When we have that metal analyzed, we might be able to arrive at a more conclusive judgment.”

“What’s your gut tell you, Doctor?”

“My gut is strictly off the record. Accepting such, I’d venture that what you have are failed attempts at a very sophisticated type of cryosurgery.”

“The head of one person fused to the body of another.”

Richman nodded.

Noble looked at McVey. “Someone is trying to make a modern-day Frankenstein?”

“Frankenstein was created from the bodies of the dead,” Michaels said.

“Good Lord!” Noble said, standing and nearly knocking over a vessel containing the enlarged heart of a professional soccer player. Steadying the jar, he looked from Michaels to Richman. “These people were frozen alive?”

“It would appear so.”

“Then why the evidence of cyanide poisoning in all the victims?” McVey asked.

Richman shrugged. “Partial poisoning? A part of the procedure? Who knows?”

Noble looked at McVey, then stood. “Thank you very much, Doctor Richman. We won’t take more of your time.”

“Just a second, Ian.” McVey turned to Richman. “One other question, Doctor. The head of our John Doe was thawing from the deep freeze when it was discovered. Would it make any difference when it was frozen as to its appearance and pathological makeup when it thawed?”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Richman said.

McVey leaned forward. “We’ve had trouble learning John Doe’s identity. Can’t find out who he is. Suppose we’ve been looking in the wrong place, trying to find a man who’s been missing for the last few days or weeks. What if it had been months, or even years? Would that be possible?”

“It’s a hypothetical question—but I would have to say that if someone had found a means of freezing to absolute zero, then nothing molecular would have been disturbed. So when it thawed there would be no way to tell if the freezing had been done a week ago or hundred years ago or thousand, for that matter.”

McVey looked to Noble. “I think maybe your missing-persons detectives better go back to work.”

“I think you’re right.”

The telephone ringing at McVey’s elbow brought him back and he snatched it up.

“Oy, McVey!”

“Hello, Benny, and cut that out will you? It’s getting repetitive.”

“Got it.”

“Got what?”

“What you asked for. The Interpol, Washington, request for the Albert Merriman file was time-stamped by the sergeant who took it at eleven thirty-seven A.M., Thursday, six October.”

“Benny, eleven thirty-seven A.M. Thursday in New York is four thirty-seven Thursday afternoon in Paris.”

“So?”

“The request was for that file, nothing else—”

“Yeah—”

“It wasn’t until about eight A.M., Paris time, Friday, that the inspector in charge of the case for the Paris P.D. got a photocopy of the print. Just a print. Nothing else. But fifteen hours before that, somebody at Interpol not only had the print, they had a name and a file to go with it.”

“Sounds like you got interior trouble. A cover-up. Or private agenda. Or who knows—But if something goes wrong it’s the investigating cop who’s on the line because you can bet four ways from Sunday there won’t be any record of who got the first transmission.”

“Benny—”

“What, boobalah?”

“Thanks.”

Interior trouble, cover-up, private agenda. McVey hated those words. Something was going on somewhere inside Interpol, and Lebrun was holding the bag without knowing it. He wouldn’t like it, but he had to be told. The trouble was when McVey finally got through to him in Paris twenty minutes later, he didn’t get that far.

“McVey, mon ami” Lebrun said, excitedly. “I was just about to call you. Things are suddenly very complex around here. Three hours ago Albert Merriman was found floating in the Seine. He looked like a big cheese chewed over with an automatic weapon. The car he’d been driving was discovered about ninety kilometers upstream, close to Paris. Your Doctor Osborn’s prints were all over it.”

43

WITHIN THE hour McVey was in a taxi, heading for Gatwick Airport. He’d left Noble and Scotland Yard scouring missing-person files for anyone who bore the description of their John Doe and who’d had head surgery requiring the implant of a steel plate and, at the same time, quietly checking every hospital and medical school in southern England for people or programs experimenting in radical surgery techniques. For a time he’d entertained the thought of requesting Interpol, Lyon, to have police departments do the same throughout Continental Europe. But because of the Lebrun/Albert Merriman file situation he decided to hold off. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, was going on inside Interpol, but if something was, he didn’t want something similar happening with his investigation. If McVey hated anything, it was having things going on behind his back. In his experience most of them were petty and backbiting, aggravating and time consuming but essentially harmless, but this one he wasn’t so sure about. Better to hold off and see what Noble could turn up first, on the quiet.

It was now 5:30 P.M., Paris time. Air France Flight 003 had left Charles de Gaulle Airport for L.A. at five o’clock as scheduled. Doctor Paul Osborn should have been on it but he wasn’t. He’d never shown up for the flight, which meant his passport was still in the hands of the Paris police.

Increasingly, McVey was distrusting his own judgment of the man. Osborn had lied about the mud on his shoes. What else had he lied about?

Outwardly and under questioning, he’d appeared to be, and admitted being, exactly what McVey thought he was a well-educated man approaching middle age head over heels in love with a younger woman. Scarcely anything significant in that. The difference now was that two men were violently dead and McVey’s “well-educated man in love” was connected to both.

The killings of Albert Merriman and Jean Packard aside, something else was gnawing at McVey, and had been even before he’d spoken to Lebrun: Dr. Stephen Richman’s off-the-record remark that the deep frozen, headless