“My parents were killed when I was a boy,” Peter said quietly.
“You’re not making that up?”
Peter shook his head. “No,” he added for emphasis.
Carr hugged himself with the blanket. “I’m sorry to hear that. Were you angry after they died? I was so angry after I lost my wife and daughter. I lost control, and did a terrible thing. And now I’m going to pay for what I did. Both in this life, and the next.”
Carr had let his guard down. Peter gazed into his eyes, and read the doctor’s thoughts. It was like watching a disjointed movie, the scenes cutting into each other for reasons that only the doctor understood. In the first scene, Carr was taking his wife and daughter to a show in the city. In the next, a car was tumbling down a ditch on a darkened road. Badly shaken, Carr climbed out, but his wife and daughter did not. It was there that the movie ended. How ironic that Carr’s last good memory with his family had occurred seeing a show in the city.
“Tell me about the Devil you saw this afternoon,” Peter said.
“Who told you about the Devil?” Carr asked.
“I heard you tell the detectives.”
“You were listening in?”
“Tell me about him.”
“God sent him to punish me.”
“How did you know he was a devil?”
“Easy. He wasn’t human.”
Carr wasn’t making sense, so Peter took another look inside his head. The doctor sat in the back of a cab with a child’s knapsack resting on his lap. The door flung open, and a man reached in, and stole the knapsack. The man was only there for a brief moment; just long enough for Peter to get a fleeting glimpse at him. What he saw did not make sense. The man’s clothes looked burned. His face was dark. Not black or brown, but a sickly purple color. There was no life in his eyes. Peter wondered if the man was real, or a figment of Carr’s distorted imagination.
“How did you know this man wasn’t human?” Peter asked.
“It was his skin,” the doctor replied.
“What was wrong with it?”
Carr glanced suspiciously at the two-way mirror. He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “It was the skin of a dead man. He wasn’t alive.”
“He was a corpse? You saw a corpse?”
“That’s right,” Carr whispered.
Peter felt his body slowly deflate. Carr was insane. Dead men did not hijack cabs and steal knapsacks loaded with deadly nerve agent. The images he’d seen inside Carr’s head weren’t real, but the product of a sick mind. He was wasting time. He needed to help the police find the man with the knapsack. Rising from his chair, he went to the door.
“Are you leaving?” Carr asked.
“Yes.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
Peter was not going to lie, and shook his head.
“Just wait,” Carr said. “You will.”
Peter entered the hallway outside the interrogation room to find the two overweight detectives waiting for him. Both were smoking cigarettes. It was against the law to smoke inside buildings, but these were not the kind of men you said something like that to. Peter started to tell them that Carr was crazy, but stopped the words from coming out. He’d been reading minds since childhood, and not once had a person been able to substitute an image. Why should it be different for a crazy person?
“Learn anything?” one of the detectives asked.
“He told me a dead man took the knapsack from him,” Peter said.
“Hah,” the detective said.
Peter returned to the viewing room where Garrison and Perry were waiting. Garrison stood in the corner with his cell phone pressed to his face. The veins were popping on his forehead, and he looked like a candidate for a stroke.
“What’s going on now?” Peter asked.
“I’m not sure,” Perry admitted. “Garrison is talking to some cops downtown, and keeps swearing under his breath. This case is going to kill him if he’s not careful.”
“Did you hear what Carr told me? He said the man who stole the knapsack was a corpse.”
“Yeah, we heard him,” Perry replied. “There’s a hidden mike in the light fixture in the ceiling. It’s sensitive enough to pick up a fly buzzing around.”
“He was telling the truth.”
“Excuse me?”
“Carr was telling the truth. I looked inside his head, and saw the dead guy. That’s what caused Carr to flip out.”
Perry’s face betrayed her. She didn’t believe him. Peter wasn’t going to argue with her. When it came to the supernatural, nothing would change a nonbeliever. Perry didn’t believe in the spirit world, or that the forces of evil regularly did battle with the forces of good, often in plain view of people just like herself.
“I’m just telling you what I saw, that’s all,” Peter said.
“Right,” she said under her breath.
“I’m not making it up. Carr saw a dead person.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
Garrison had finished his call. He said something to himself that sounded like “So help me, God.” He jerked open the door, and looked back at them.
“You coming or not?” he asked.
“Where are we going?” Perry replied.
“To the morgue,” he said. “There’s a dead man on the loose.”
55
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York was located in Kip’s Bay, in a steel-and- glass building overlooking the East River. Garrison remained silent during the drive. He looked shaken to the core. Something had happened inside the morgue that rocked him. Peter had tried to glimpse Garrison’s thoughts to find out what it was. The wall of resistance he’d encountered was impenetrable.
They parked on the street in front of the building. Several uniformed cops stood on the sidewalk, blocking anyone from entering. Garrison identified himself and had a brief conversation with them. The cops looked equally rattled.
They went inside. The lobby looked like a cyclone had run through it. An employee stood on a ladder, righting a sign that hung on the wall. It read, LET CONVERSATION CEASE, LET LAUGHTER FLEE. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING THE LIVING. Looking around, Peter didn’t think that death had delighted anyone recently.
They took an elevator to the basement. Peter felt the cold return to his bones as they entered the harshly lit autopsy room, an antiseptic chamber with eight steel examining tables where the city’s dead revealed their secrets. The same cyclone had run through here as well, with broken equipment scattered about, the TV monitors used to film autopsies pulled off the walls and ripped apart. A maintenance man stood in the room’s center, mopping chemical preservative off the floor. “Can I help you?” he inquired.
“Who’s in charge here?” Garrison asked.
