Debris is a puzzle if you look at it the right way. You can retro-engineer it. You look at a roomful of junk and you pay attention to what’s lying on what, because that will eventually tell you what fell first. When I was working homicide for Baltimore PD I had one of those classic cases where there’s a dead body amid a bunch of broken plates and scattered books. A novice would think that the victim came home and interrupted a robbery in progress and that the place either was already trashed or was trashed during a struggle. But the carpet under the body was completely clean, no litter, which established that the murder happened first. Sure, we considered the fact that the place could have been trashed afterward, but when we looked at what lay under what it became clear that someone had walked around the room smashing things. It had been done in a circular pattern-deliberate and systematic. That’s when we started looking at the wife, who had reported finding her husband dead. The debris pattern, plus the angle of the blunt-force blow that had killed him, gave us a pretty solid circumstantial case. After that it was a matter of breaking down her alibi and grilling her in a series of interviews.
This part of the mission was cop work, so I switched mental gears to let that part of me do his job. I may not be Jerry Spencer, but I can work a crime scene.
There were dozens of overturned boxes. We knew from the firefight when some of them were knocked over. Most of the boxes were sealed with two-inch-wide clear tape. The tape had burst on about a third of the boxes, and some of the boxes and papers had landed in pools of blood. We started in the driest corner.
So I had to do some horseback math: if a stack of ten boxes fell at such and such an angle, encountering an obstacle-and for the sake of argument let’s call that obstacle the back of my head-then they’d hit the floor with
And that thought made me aware of the torn bodies hidden under the box lids and I had to squash down the horror that wanted to make me either scream or throw up.
The boxes were also chewed up pretty well by gunfire. The Russians had emptied a couple of magazines each into the room. The cinder-block walls were pocked with holes and heavy-caliber bullets had plowed through the contents of the boxes. Luckily paper is a great bullet stop, so the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Grenades would have made this job impossible.
Each of the boxes was made from corrugated cardboard. Most were a dark brown with a faux walnut print and a little metal sleeve on the front in which an indexing file card could be placed. There was a code on the file cards that was apparently something used internally by Deep Iron.
It was Top who figured out the code on the file cards. He held out the card-HH/I/3/6-8/051779-and said, “Okay, the second
“Right with you,” I said, pleased.
“Six-dash-eight’s next. Sixth box in a stack of eight. See? And the other number’s got to be a date. These boxes have been here for a long time, so it ain’t a stretch to see that as oh-five, seventeen, seventy-nine. With this code we can restack every box in the right place without doing Sherlock Holmes stuff.”
“You just earned your pay for the month, Top,” I said. “And a pretty damn good bottle of Scotch.”
“Make it Irish and we’re square.”
“Let me guess,” Bunny said. “You like ‘Black Bush’?”
Top gave him a sniper’s squint. “Don’t make me hurt you, Farmboy. I know forty-three separate ways to make sure you can’t ever have kids.”
Bunny held up his hands. “We’re cool.”
We went back to work and now the only thing that slowed us down was deciding which papers went into which box.
“What is this stuff?” Bunny asked, reaching to pick up a clipped sheaf of papers.
“Careful,” I cautioned. “We need everything to go back in the right box.”
“Okay,” he said, “but… what
“Accounting?” Bunny asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Got something!” called Top. He was going through the boxes stacked by the door. “This one’s not paper. Looks like microfiche.”
He handed me several sheets of film, and when I held them up to the light I could see dozens of tiny pages smaller than postage stamps. Without a reader I couldn’t tell if they were the same as the pages we had here or were something else. We searched around and found only eight sheets of film, scattered as if dropped.
“If those are microfiche copies of this stuff,” Bunny said, “then it sure as hell doesn’t add up to all of this crap. I’m thinking the Hulk and his buddy took the rest of them.”
“Yeah, dammit,” I said, and reached for another box of paper.
We worked together to repack and restack the boxes that had fallen during our part of the fight. All of the boxes that had fallen on me were filled with the same kind of handwritten notes. Then Bunny found a page with annotations in a box he was carefully repacking.
“Take a look, boss,” he said and I squatted down next to him.
At the top of one of the columns someone had used a pencil to write:
“Is that German? What’s that mean?” he asked.
I nodded and took my notebook out of my pocket to copy down the ID code on the front of the file box. Something began niggling at the back of my brain, but it was too timid to step into the light. We kept working.
Outside the room there was only silence. No cavalry with trumpets blowing.
“What the hell are these?” Top asked as he held up a stack of index cards. Each one had notes written in some kind of medical code and in the upper left corner was a fingerprint. Top peered at the prints. “This ain’t ink, Cap’n. I think it’s old, dried blood.”
“Don’t smudge any of them,” I cautioned. “We don’t know what the hell we have here.”
A few minutes later Bunny said, “Hey, boss. I got another one with words on it. And… a couple of names.”
Top and I picked our way through the mess to see what he had. He passed me an old-fashioned wooden clipboard, marking its place on the floor with his canteen. The numbers here were written in a different hand, and on the lower right of each page were the initials “JM.” The words “Zwangs/Trauma” were scribbled on the upper left of the page, and over each column was either a single word or a few: “Geschwindig-keit,” “Winkel,” “Druck in Pfund pro Quadratzoll.”
Speed. Angle. Pounds of pressure per square inch.
Then vertically along the left side of the page:
“Kette,” “Schlager,” “Pferde-Peitsche,” “Faust,” “Barfuss,” “Gestie-felt.”
I swallowed a throat that was as dry as dust.
Chain. Club. Horsewhip. Fist. Bare foot. Booted foot.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, and the others stared at me. They peered over my shoulder at the page. I translated for them and saw the meaning register on their faces.
“Fuck me,” said Top, and he looked older than his forty years.
“If this is what I think it is, then we’re into some sick shit here.” Bunny said, “Who would collect this kind of information?”
I didn’t answer as I rifled through the rest of the papers and then handed the clipboard back to him. “Let’s repack this box. Check everything. I want to see any scrap of paper with words, especially handwritten notations.”
They set to work, but there was nothing else in that box.
The next box, on the other hand… well, that changed everything.
I was sitting on the floor putting the pages in some kind of order when I found a single handwritten note tucked inside a file folder. It was in German, which was no problem for me. As I read it my mind began spinning with shock and nausea:
