Shadowfires

wife Reese had lost. In the dreams, she was always clutching the door of the blue Chevy van, the infamous van, and crying, “They've got Esther, they've got Esther!” In every dream, one of the guys in the van shot her exactly as he had shot her in real life, point-blank, and the large-caliber slug pulverized her lovely face, blew it away…

Reese got out of bed and took a very hot shower. He wished that he could unhinge the top of his head and sluice out the hideous images that lingered from the nightmares.

Agnes, his sister, had taped a note on the refrigerator in the kitchen. She had taken Esther to the dentist for a scheduled checkup.

Standing by the sink, looking out the window at the big coral tree in the rear yard, Reese drank hot black coffee and ate a slightly stale doughnut. If Agnes could see the breakfast he made for himself, she would be upset. But his dreams had left him queasy, and he had no appetite for anything heavier. Even the doughnut was hard to swallow.

“Black coffee and greasy doughnuts,” Agnes would say if she knew. “One'll give you ulcers, other'll clog your arteries with cholesterol. Two slow methods of suicide. You want to commit suicide, I can tell you a hundred quicker and less painful ways to go about it.”

He thanked God for Agnes, in spite of her tendency, as his big sister, to nag him about everything from his eating habits to his taste in neckties. Without her, he might not have held himself together after Janet's death.

Agnes was unfortunately big-boned, stocky, plain-looking, with a deformed left hand, destined for spinsterhood, but she had a kind heart and a mothering instinct second to none. After Janet died, Agnes arrived with a suitcase and her favorite cookbook, announcing that she would take care of Reese and little Esther “just for the summer,” until they were able to cope on their own. As a fifth-grade teacher in Anaheim, she had the summer off and could devote long hours to the patient rebuilding of the shattered Hagerstrom household. She had been with them five years now, and without her, they'd be lost.

Reese even liked her good-natured nagging. When she encouraged him to eat well-balanced meals, he felt cared for and loved.

As he poured another cup of black coffee, he decided to bring Agnes a dozen roses and a box of chocolates when he came home today. He was not, by nature, given to frequent expressions of his feelings, so he tried to compensate now and then by surprising those he cared for with gifts. The smallest surprises thrilled Agnes, even coming from a brother. Big-boned, stocky, plain-faced women were not used to getting gifts when there was no occasion requiring them.

Life was not only unfair but sometimes decidedly cruel. That was not a new thought to Reese. It was not even inspired by Janet's untimely and brutal death — or by the fact that Agnes's warm, loving, generous nature was trapped forever inside a body that most men, too focused on appearances, could never love. As a policeman, frequently confronted by the worst in humankind, he had learned a long time ago that cruelty was the way of the world — and that the only defense against it was the love of one's family and a few close friends.

His closest friend, Julio Verdad, arrived as Reese was pouring a third cup of black coffee. Reese got another cup from the cabinet and filled it for Julio, and they sat at the kitchen table.

Julio looked as if he'd had little sleep, and in fact Reese was probably the only person capable of detecting the subtle signs of overwork in the lieutenant. As usual, Julio was well dressed: smartly tailored dark blue suit, crisp white shirt, perfectly knotted maroon-and-blue tie with gold chain, maroon pocket handkerchief, and oxblood Bally loafers. He was as neat and precise and alert as always, but vague sooty smudges were visible under his eyes, and his soft voice was surely if immeasurably softer than usual.

“Up all night?” Reese asked.

“I slept.”

“How long? An hour or two? That's what I thought. You worry me,” Reese said. “You'll wear yourself down to bone someday.”

“This is a special case.”

“They're all special cases to you.”

“I feel a special obligation to the victim, Ernestina.”

“This is the thousandth victim you've felt a special obligation toward,” Reese noted.

Julio shrugged and sipped his coffee. “Sharp wasn't bluffing.”

“About what?”

“About pulling this out of our hands. The names of the victims — Ernestina Hernandez and Rebecca Klienstad — are still in the files, but only the names. Plus a memorandum indicating that federal authorities requested the case be remanded to their jurisdiction for 'reasons of national security.' This morning, when I pushed Folbeck about letting you and me assist the feds, he came down hard. Said, 'Holy fuckin' Christ, Julio, stay out of it. That's an order.' His very words.”

Folbeck was chief of detectives, a devout Mormon who — could hold his own with the most foulmouthed men in the department but who never took the Lord's name in vain. That was where he drew the line. In spite of his vivid and frequent use of four-letter words, Nicholas Folbeck was capable of angrily lecturing any detective heard to mutter a blasphemy. In fact, he'd once told Reese, “Hagerstrom, please don't say 'goddamn' or 'holy Christ' or anything like that in my presence ever again. I purely hate that shit, and I won't fuckin' tolerate it.” If Nick Folbeck's warning to Julio had included blasphemy as well as mere trash talk, the pressure on the department to stay out of this case had come from higher authorities than Anson Sharp.

Reese said, “What about the file on the body-snatching case, Eric Leben's corpse?”

“Same thing,” Julio said. “Removed from our jurisdiction.”

Business talk had taken Reese's mind off last night's bloody dreams of Janet, and his appetite had returned a little. He got another doughnut from the breadbox. He offered one to Julio, but Julio declined. Reese said, “What else have you been up to?”

“For one thing… I went to the library when it opened and read everything I could find on Dr. Eric Leben.”

“Rich, a scientific genius, a business genius, ruthless, cold, too stupid to know he had a great wife — we already know about him.”

“He was also obsessed,” Julio said.

“I guess geniuses usually are, with one thing or another.”

“What obsessed him was immortality.”

Reese frowned. “Say what?”

“As a graduate student, and in the years immediately following his acquisition of a doctorate, when he was one of the brightest young geneticists doing recombinant DNA research anywhere in the world, he wrote articles for a lot of journals and published research papers dealing with various aspects of the extension of the human life span. A flood of articles; the man is driven.”

“Was driven. Remember that garbage truck,” Reese said.

“Even the driest, most technical of those pieces have a… well, a fire in them, a passion that grips you,” Julio said. He pulled a sheet of paper from one of his inside jacket pockets, unfolded it. “This is a line from an article that appeared in a popular science magazine, more colorful than the technical journal stuff: 'It may be possible, ultimately, for man to reshape himself genetically and thereby deny the claim of the grave, to live longer than Methuselah — and even to be both Jesus and Lazarus in one, raising himself up from the mortuary slab even as death lays him down upon it.”

Reese blinked. “Funny, huh? His body's stolen from the morgue, which is sort of being 'raised up,' though not the way he meant it.”

Julio's eyes were strange. “Maybe not funny. Maybe not stolen.”

Reese felt a strangeness coming into his own eyes. He said, “You don't mean… no, of course not.”

“He was a genius with unlimited resources, perhaps the brightest man ever to work in recombinant DNA research, and he was obsessed with staying young and avoiding death. So when he just seems to get up and walk away from a mortuary… is it so impossible to imagine that he did, in fact, get up and walk away?”

Reese felt his chest tightening, and he was surprised to feel a thrill of fear pass through him. “But is such a thing possible, after the injuries he suffered?”

“A few years ago, definitely impossible. But we're living in an age of miracles, or at least in an age of infinite possibilities.”