SAGN: Chapter Seven-The Lie On The Table free porn video

Chapter 7: The Lie on the Table ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Sometime in the night the rain had waned and then abruptly ceased. Just when that had been Jim wasn't quite sure. As he lay in the darkness with his mind slowly shifting into gear, he was pretty sure that he dimly remembered waking up when the steady drumming of the falling water slackened and petered out, but he hadn't stayed awake then. Not that time, waking up then was more a case of something that his mind couldn't ignore the absence of. It couldn't remain at rest when the steady drumming that was no longer there signaled such a noticeable change in circumstances without responding to it. The shift in background sound hadn't been enough to keep him awake, just enough for that small primitive part of his brain to come alert and insist that the rest of him come along for the ride while it checked things out to make sure everything was kosher. Once it had been satisfied it shut up and the rest of Jim's mind slipped back under and he had stayed that way until now. But from the way that he felt it hadn't been very long between the two. As he blinked his eyes in the darkness, the rain had resumed in the intervening hours and he vaguely remembered waking up earlier. It was a faint drizzle now that barely registered to the senses and he laid there his eyes slowly blinking against the gloom, still feeling every inch of the day before and feeling that he wished that he was still asleep. Even lying there in the darkness he felt the soreness of his overstrained muscles protesting and now that he was awake the main thing that brought him any surprise was that he was awake at all. The wind-up clock that was just out of reach on the bedside table glared at him in the pre-dawn gloom. He really was a bit of a Luddite in some ways. He admitted it in a half joking manner whenever someone called him on something like that. But he still did it. As far as he could see that was more of a feature than a bug and he wasn't inclined to change. The glowing hands slowly crawling across the clock face told him that it was almost half past six. That meant that he had only been asleep for a little more than five hours. Mitch and Andrea's home was really not that far from him and it had only taken a few minutes for him to be walking through his own door after he had left Mitch to the mercy of his wife. Raja, the big black tomcat that kept an eye on his place was sitting on the cinderblock divider that rose thigh high between the car port and the walkway that led to the front door when he got there. Raja wasn't really his cat; Jim didn't think he was anyone's cat, but that didn't seem to bother Raja. He didn't have that scrawny, jittery look that a lot of strays commonly had. He was a fairly big boy with sleek jet fur and if he knew you he could be quite the charmer. What his name really was or if he even had a name Jim didn't care enough about to let it bother him. The cat was just Raja to him. He had been ever since the big feline had jumped into his lap while Jim was sitting in the shade of his carport enjoying the evening. Jim had been just sitting outside in an old lawn chair. He still had that habit from time to time from when he was a boy. He used to sit out front on the porch with his grandfather then and he had never given the habit up. Particularly in summer when the air around him turned into a wet blanket that draped his pores in insipient prickly heat. The evening in question he had spent watching fireflies as they started to wink in the gathering darkness. It was not anything out of the ordinary about the evening until he heard the sound of a cat meowing next to him. Jim looked over to where the sound came from and that was the first time he laid eyes on Raja. Raja must have liked his odds because he had looked up at him, meowed to him again and then thrust his broad head into Jim's palm with a thunderous purr. Jim had been drinking some beer and had just reached that point where he was feeling relaxed and mellow so he hadn't brushed the cat away. Instead he had let his index finger and pinky drape behind the cat's ears and gently rewarded the cat's attention with a duel finger scratch right there in the big feline's sweet spot while the big black cat turned his attention to getting settled down in Jim's lap. Jim remembered that he had said something along the lines of "Of course your majesty" in a half buzzed, half sarcastic way and in that moment, Jim had started thinking of the animal as Raja even if he couldn't remember actually calling him that at the time. Raja had a regular route around the neighborhood. His friendly demeanor had got him the attention that he wanted as well as the food that Jim and others he collected tribute from occasionally threw his way on a semi-regular basis. Jim knew that Raja didn't need to depend on the kibble and other things that his admirers provided to him. He was an efficient and effective hunter and if he hadn't had a weakness for human attention Jim thought that he would be little changed physically from how he was even without the offerings that supplemented his diet. Jim thought that Raja would probably choose one of his admirers to stay with full time when he slowed down as he got older. Someone who wouldn't mind when they turned around and realized that, quite without meaning to, they had acquired a companion. But right now, he was apparently happy to live the way he did flitting between admirers and being the terror of the local squirrel population. Raja had gotten up from the dry spot in between the ornamental bushes and flowers that grew in the potting soil that was packed between the cinderblocks and had meowed for his attention when he got out of the car. It was nice and dry there and since the rain had started falling constantly it had become one of his preferred spots to wait out the storm. Jim had rubbed the cats thick neck when he jumped up on the little work table that he kept near the inside door and when he offered him a handful of kitty treats from the plastic box that he kept on an outside shelf the cat had rubbed against his arm and purred loudly in acknowledgement of the offering. There hadn't been much that took place between the moment that Jim had given Raja his tribute and when he crawled into his own bed. He remembered barely pausing just long enough to strip off the damp clothing from his body and hang the pants and jacket over a chair to dry out somewhat while he tumbled into the bed and passed out. Jim was wondering what it was that had caused him to wake up at this time in the morning though. Five hours was just not enough time for him to recover from yesterday and it had to be more than just the heightened awareness brought on by the events of the past twenty-four hours. Eventually he decided that it was habit more than anything that was to blame for why he was up so soon he decided. Routine was more responsible for him lying here in the predawn gloom than anything as mundane as rain ceasing to fall. The good thing was that he didn't have to stay awake though. This may be the time that he had trained his body to get moving in the morning but it was not an absolute law carved into stone by the hand of God or anything like that. Making that decision to go back to sleep and sticking to it was, like too many other things, easier said than done. Now that he was awake, regardless of wanting and needing more rest he found it not as easy to just do that. He lay there wide awake in the gloom, feeling the minutes crawling by and unable to get back to sleep right away. He thought that just wasn't right as he lay there contemplating the injustice of it. Even though he was exhausted and had only fallen asleep a couple of hours before, it was just not going to happen without outside intervention. His mind was too active now to just shut down and let him drift back into darkness. The lyrics to "Hello Darkness" began to rise unbidden in his mind. He just couldn't help himself. When he couldn't sleep it seemed that was the most common song that started playing in his mind and there were more than enough times that he had been forced to endure the performance of his inner radio station's rendition of that old song. Sleeplessness was an unwelcome visitor who had come to see him too many times already. When Janine left and filed for divorce after she couldn't take being a cop's wife any longer, it was a his constant companion for a long time afterward; when something traumatic happened in the course of an investigation, it came again to keep him company. The surprising thing to Jim was not that he was lying in the bed awake, listening to the absence of sound from the steadily declining rhythm of the falling raindrops, but that he was even awake at all. But maybe it was the rainfall that had been responsible for that in the first place and if it was then maybe rainfall would be the solution as well. Usually when he was plagued with sleeplessness he reached for his phone and booted up the app he had there for occasions like this. As long as there was something for him to focus his mind on like rolling waves or falling rain, he could stop his mind from racing. The repetitive droning of the recording would eventually do its job and he would salvage at least some sleep from the night. With the heavy rain over the last few days he hadn't had to use it and until now hadn't really thought about its role in his life this week until it was absent from it. The app was easy enough to find against the backlit screen of his phone. He set a timer for it to shut off and chose one of the different rain patterns there. He flipped the phone over on the table then. The light from the program as it ran would stay on for about twenty minutes or so and its illumination would be just one more distraction to keep him from drifting away. He closed his eyes and forced himself to remain focused on the sound of just the rain coming from the recording beside him. He focused on it and eventually slept. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- When the jangle of the alarm still just out of reach dragged him back into consciousness it was a little closer to the time that he had intended to get up. He rubbed his bleary eyes and blinked in the brightness of the late morning sunshine that was peeking through the heavy curtains he had drawn together the night before. He looked at the clock face after wiping the sleep out of his eyes and gave an involuntary yawn. The clock said it was just a little before ten in the morning. That was a lot closer to what he had in mind when he had dropped like a bag of sand into the bedding last night. He groaned as he shifted his weight and staggered upright. The abused muscles from yesterday had stiffened overnight and as a result he felt every inch of their protest at being forced into motion this morning. Muscles agreeing with him or not he had to get going. He had just over an hour to report in to Clayton and if he was going to have a chance of not moving like an arthritic mule, he needed a hot shower and some industrial strength coffee before he left the house. He needed to get a move on too. Clayton may have given him and Mitch a mandatory twelve hours, but that was exactly what it meant. Twelve hours and not one second more than that. That time would be up in a little while and he intended to be in earlier than that if he had anything to say about it. What happened after that was just what happened. By the time he had toweled off after his shower he had just enough time to deal with the clothing that he had just hung up to air out last night. The jacket and the trousers were still damp but it was nothing that a few more hours hanging from the overhead rack in the laundry cubicle wouldn't fix. Not that they would get that kind of treatment. The clothing was stained with grass and dirt and he wasn't entirely sure that it hadn't been damaged as well. The dry cleaners would have a job with sorting out this mess but that was for later on. Hanging it up would be the best he could do for now. He'd take the suit to the cleaners when he had time, but he could throw the rest of what he had been wearing into the wash so he did that and turned his attention to getting dressed to go back out. The lack of rain that had waked him up earlier hadn't lasted that long after all. Sometime after he had gone into the shower it had resumed and now was falling in a steady drizzle. He thought that the hot shower and some ibuprofen gulped along with the coffee he made would have made more of a difference, but it really didn't do as much as he'd hoped it would. Dragging himself out of his house and into the car to head back to the station, now that was almost too much for him to do but he bit down on his lip and managed to power his way through it. He did feel better in a marginal way, but he was in no way one hundred percent. More like sixty percent would be more accurate if anyone asked him. He wasn't feeling tip top right now but it wasn't any way even close to how out of it he felt after dropping Mitch off with Andrea though. He was just gathering up his things to step out the door when his phone started vibrating in his pocket just a half a hair before the ringtone sounded. He looked down at the display screen and wasn't surprised to see that it was Andrea calling him. He really wasn't that surprised when she did that, he could tell she was in mama bear mode last night and he didn't think that the passage of a few hours had changed that very much. It didn't really matter anyway, he was going to call Mitch when he got into the car and she had just beaten him to it was all. Mitch's car was still in the station's underground parking floor and he doubted that Andrea was willing to let Mitch drive home on his own right now. Whether or not he actually could do so was immaterial to her. Jim expected that to be the case after dropping Mitch off. He answered the phone and told her that he would be there in a few minutes and that he was just stepping out the door. Andrea thanked him reflexively and asked him to talk some sense into Mitch when he got there. he said he would and as he hung up he already thought he knew some of what was going on this morning in the Traver's home. As he expected, Mitch had talked Andrea out of going to the hospital right away last night, but it was clear that by the time morning's waxy light was edging through the windows he wasn't going to be able to keep her from dragging him in now that he had some rest under his belt. She might have had to bend against that particular wind last night but last night was past and now the bit was in her teeth and she intended to have her way in this matter. Jim wasn't the least little bit surprised at that. Andrea was like a dog with a bone in its teeth when it came to Mitch and his physical welfare. She wasn't the kind of woman who tried to take his mother's place as far as calling the shots in his life, but at the same time she didn't let him get away with abusing himself in the name of being stoic. Mitch in turn didn't let her go too far either. She did tend to run away with her worst fears sometimes and he would need to back her down when it looked like it was one of those times when she was going too far. This morning wasn't going to be one of those times though. Like Mitch said when Jim brought him home last night. She needed this and Jim trusted his partner's instincts too much to try to second guess him over how to deal with his wife. Even with several hours of sleep, a good hot shower and a couple of cups of strong coffee in him what Jim knew he needed was more rest. He felt better now, but that was just a matter of degree. After the mad dash the three of them made out of the Grove's boundaries. After barely making their way out of the reach of the mad dryad lurking there. After followed that up with the long day spent cordoning off the area and dealing with everything else as well; Jim could honestly say that he was well and truly wrung out and he knew being on the near side of forty he still hadn't recovered from that yet. He might have been able to do so when he was in his twenties; back then he was a rubber ball by comparison to how he was now. He wasn't in his twenties anymore though and right at this moment he was thinking that he had a glimpse of what his sixties might feel like when they got here and if this feeling was in anyway true then he really wasn't looking forward to it. He picked up both of them before going into the station. Jim still felt like hell and Mitch looked even worse. Andrea fussed over Mitch while they drove in to the station. Jim could tell how bad Mitch really felt from the lack of objection that he made while she did so. He pulled the sedan into the underground bay and the three of them walked to the elevator that would take them up to the main floor. Usually Jim would take the stairs when he came in in the morning, but this morning he needed rest more than he needed the brief spasm of exercise climbing those stairs would give him. Lieutenant Clayton was in her office when they came in. She was on the phone with someone discussing what was happening with the blockade around Magnolia Circle. Jim could tell that was what it was from the side of the conversation that they could hear. Whoever it was on the other side of the phone was definitely not very happy about it and from the deference that she was speaking to him with it was a someone with a good deal of political clout. She hung up the phone when the conversation had concluded and fixed the two of them with a frazzled glare. "Remind me to thank the two of you for this mess sometime soon," she said. Clayton wasn't serious, but Jim knew her well enough that he recognized her when she was drawing them into one of her infrequent griping sessions. "That was Alderman McKinsey," she said. "He's been on the phone with me a dozen times already over what is going on over in Olympia." Jim didn't say anything. Dealing with politicians that had their tail in a knot over something was above his pay grade and he didn't envy Clayton for having to deal with it one bit. "He's been screaming about wanting to know what is going on ever since his constituents were forced to evacuate and I don't have anything to tell him other than it's just not safe for them right now." She looked the two of them over, her eyes fixed on Mitch's neck. "You," she said looking at him, "out of here, now. And don't tell me you can deal with it. Your head looks like it's about to pop off of your neck as it is. You're on medical leave effective immediately. I don't want to see you back here until a doctor clears you to return to duty." "That'll make Andrea happy at least," Mitch said trying for a reluctant grumble and just managing to sound wearier than anything else. "Thanks, Lieutenant," he added as he got up from the chair. "That may be," she said "But that's not why I'm doing it. Christ I should have gone with my gut and told the two of you to not come it at all today, but this whole situation has us all off base." She looked at Mitch. "Go have your wife take you to the hospital, Mitch," she said. "We'll hold down the fort here until you get back. I'm sure Jim will keep you posted." Mitch started toward the office door and gratefully thanked the lieutenant again on the way out. He went out of the office and the two of them could hear the murmur of the fuss that Andrea was making over him as she hustled him out slowly fade away with their footsteps. "I should have told you to not come in either," she said to Jim. "You look almost as bad." "I'll manage," Jim said to her. "That may be," she said leaning back in her chair, "but I'm inclined to think otherwise Jim." "I don't feel that bad lieutenant," Jim said, "I can deal with it." "Maybe," the younger woman said to him. "But I'll tell you what I really think. I think you feel worse than you look, but I need you here for now so I'll pretend that you're not just muddling through for the time being. Truth is, if I didn't need you here you'd be heading out the door right behind Mitch. I need you sharp, but not as much as I need you here so you're on light duty for now, you hear me?" she asked. Jim nodded. Regardless of what he said Mitch accepted the mandatory rest Clayton had ordered him to take and it didn't bother him one bit to go home when he was like this. He was one of those guys who would push through whatever was dogging him until he didn't have to, but if you gave him the option and he really was wracked up he would take it without much demurral. Jim was much the same way as his partner and he wouldn't have shied away from another twenty-four hours of down time if she had insisted on it, but he also would have tried to power through it as best he could as well. "I mean light duty, Jim," she said to him emphasizing the words again. "That means you do what you can here for now and you cut out early. I need the two of you on top of things and that doesn't mean that I want to look out my door and see a zombie going through the motions out there." At first, he had tried to say that he didn't need that much more time and that he could handle it, but all it took was one of Clayton's basilisk gazes to convince him that he was all but ramming his head against a wall in this case and he backed down. The truth was that it was more of a pro forma protest on his part, he still felt almost as bad as Mitch did, he just didn't look as bad off and he didn't have an Andrea to twist his arm and keep him from letting his own stubbornness write a check that his body couldn't pay as easily anymore. Jim asked her what had happened while he was out of it and she filled him in on what had filtered down to her level from the F.R.T. There wasn't much for her to tell. Singh had remained on site until the F.R.T. had taken over and he had been at Mercy General with Pantra since then. Other than the rain slowly easing off, there had been little that was apparently happening in the Grove that they could see. Jim nodded when she told him that. Singh had said that if the Hamadryad was able to calm her feral sister that things would settle down a bit soon after she went into the Grove itself. It looked like he was right. Jim couldn't say that he wasn't relieved that that seemed to be happening. He excused himself and went out of the office and made his way to where his and Mitch's desks huddled in the back of the room. As he did so he could hear a brief hush roll with him as he passed the desks of the other detectives. He and Mitch had had a close call just a few hours ago. Things like that didn't happen as often as movies and media made them out, but when they did it was a reminder to them all that this was not a nine to five job and there were consequences that went with carrying a shield, even in missing persons. The buzz of conversation resumed almost as quickly as it ceased. That was to be expected as well. No one was anxious to confront one of the consequences of what might happen to them or think on those consequences longer than necessary if they could help it. That was just human nature and he didn't fault any of the other detectives for doing so. Jim reached his desk and eased down into his seat and took a few moments trying to get as comfortable as he could get before reaching for anything. He thought about getting up and getting a cup of coffee, but he didn't want to move now that he had gotten settled. There wasn't anything in his in-box and there was not much else here for him to focus on. The Barnes case was at an impasse for the time being, unless he could winkle something out of what he already had. The Phillip's case was buried under what had happened in the Grove for the time being and there was nothing else for him to dig into since Clayton had made the two of them hand off the rest of their caseload. He shuffled through the witness statements and tried to see if anything jumped out at him first. There was nothing there, or at least nothing that he hadn't already noted. He still plowed through it again, slowly sifting through the data. That was what he did when he was stuck with a case that wouldn't cooperate. Look for connections that might not seem to be and run them down to their conclusions, but not this time. There just wasn't enough of the puzzle for him to latch onto the right loose end and tug on it until it made sense. Jim sensed movement near his desk and looked up. It was Detective Brad Sommers. He was the one that had taken most of their outstanding caseload the day before. He plunked a Styrofoam cup of coffee on the end of the desk. "You look like you need it Jim," was all he said when Brighton glanced up in his direction. Jim murmured thanks and pushed the paperwork away for the moment. "You sure you should be in here?" he asked. "Cause you don't look like you could stand up to a stiff breeze right now." "I'll manage," Jim said. "Clayton wants me on light duty for now. I can handle that." Sommers cocked his head as if to say that was a matter of opinion but he didn't say anything else. Jim told him he would be fine and after a few minutes Brad let the matter lie and mooched off to deal with his own business. He wasn't the only one though. Others made excuses to drift by his desk and check on him while he worked through what was available and while Jim appreciated the sentiment it did disrupt what little there was for him to do. But then since there were barely any straws for him to grasp at right now even those interruptions didn't sidetrack him much. Eventually he made it through all of what was there and he started in on the transcription of the Barnes's journal. He had gone as far as he could with everything else and Clayton did say that she was very interested in what it could mean as far as piecing together just what had happened to the vanished programmer. But how it factored into the emergence of this Grove was something that Jim couldn't figure out. The two were connected, he knew that but the question was how they were connected and that was something he wanted to know as soon as possible. He leaned back in his chair and started to plow through the transcription. Mitch's car was gone when he made his way down to the underground parking garage beneath the station. Andrea had no doubt shoved him into the passenger seat and was already well on the way to Mercy General before he had even left the lieutenant's office. Jim was fairly sure that it still mostly looked worse that it was but he was glad for Mitch's sake that his wife was so aggressive on his behalf when her mama bear claws came out. He on the other hand didn't leave until a little after three. Even staying that small amount of time was more wearing on him than he expected it to be. He got into his own car and slowly drove home and collapsed back into dreamless slumber not long after he had lay down. There were several messages from Singh waiting for him on his phone when his eyes fluttered open several hours later. He rubbed his eyes to banish the remaining sleep from them and made his way into his kitchen to get something to eat. He had needed that rest and needed it badly and now that he had gotten it he was starting to feel like he was something closer to normal rather than like he was still walking around in a fog of exhaustion punctuated by the protests his abused muscles made. He was also ravenous as well. The caloric bill for his exertions the day before was coming due with a vengeance and he tamped down the screaming black hole in his gut with some of the canned goods that he kept in the kitchen cabinet. He was halfway through a tin of cold pork and beans before it registered that all he had done was open it and start laying into it right out of the can. He finished it up and heated the rest of what he pulled out. Some Mac and cheese mix and a can of condensed soup rounded out the rest of his meal. He had slapped together a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches that got a quick run through the microwave to heat them up. He ate them while he puttered around on the stovetop with the rest of dinner. A can of peaches got the same treatment that he had given the pork and beans and after he drained the last of the sweet juice that lingered in the can he dropped the spoon in the tin to rattle around for a few seconds. He considered doing the dishes right away but there really weren't any that demanded his immediate attention. He ran the two pots that he had used to both cook and eat from full of water to soak until he was ready to take care of them and then dropped the spoon that he used to eat with to settle under the surface of the water soaking into the bigger pot as well. The cans he swept into the trash can along with the empty Mac and cheese box. That and a quick wipe of the counter afterward took care of most of his clean-up for now. He scrolled through the messages that Singh had sent him and other than the updates that Singh had passed along regarding Pantra's condition there was little there that was surprising. The FRT had taken charge of the cordon around Magnolia Circle and from what Singh had told him both he and Mitch were still high in the decision-making loop for the time being. Jim wasn't sure how that was going to work but it was good of Singh to give him a heads up about it. There had not been any word from M'Tehr so far about what was happening inside the Grove but it was clear that whatever she was doing in there was having some kind of effect. The constant rain had begun to let up and now that his attention was drawn to it Jim became aware of just how faint the rain really was against his windows now. Jim settled in and pulled the printout of the Barnes journal out of the briefcase and settled in to look it over again. The transcription was a lot cleaner this way and best of all he hadn't been the one having to figure out if something was just bad handwriting or intended to be written that way for some other reason. His eyes flickered over the pages as he worked his way through the meat of it a second time. The majority of it had been just as he expected it to be when he first went through it at the station and there was little there in that first glance that suggested that it was connected to the case itself. He had stopped about half way through it when he decided to call it a day and had left the rest of it to finish at home. Most of what he slogged his way through seemed more like some guy's idea of fantasy than anything else. It was interesting in its own way if your tastes ran to psychedelic fantasies but for the most part Jim didn't see that much that had any real bearing on Barnes disappearing or what Singh had uncovered when they were there. He slowly worked his way through the pages making notes on his own pad when something looked like it might have some bearing on the case crossed his gaze. There wasn't that much on his pad until he hit the last section of the transcript though. Most of the journal seemed to him to be a time sink. Parsing his way through some guy's drug trip scribbling ranks right now as something he had to do to make sure all of the bases in the case were covered. The last section wasn't like that. That part stopped him cold and he had to flip back to the earlier part of the document to make sure that this was supposed to be part of what he was reading. It seemed to his eyes like it was something else tacked on and that it really didn't belong but there it was and if this was not something that screamed that it was relevant then he didn't deserve his shield. He reached for a notepad and started jotting notes down for later as he combed through the last part of the journal again and then again after that. Once he had confirmed that he had what he thought relevant strained out of the rest of the words written he pulled up the digital copy of the journal and made copies of the sections that had gotten his attention. He closed out the file before pulling up the rest of the case file to see how what was there matched against what they already had. Some things did, but there were still others that didn't still quite fit in to the picture and he didn't like it when there were missing pieces to his puzzle. It made him cranky when that happened and then he started worrying at those details until they made some kind of sense. Missing pieces usually meant you had missed something or you had not gotten something else right and whatever that was then it was well on the way to screwing up what you thought was progress. Sometime just before midnight Jim woke up with his face mashed into a keyboard and a long string of nonsense scrolling across the screen. He chided himself for pushing too hard and did the best he could to repair the digital damage his face had inflicted and then crawled into bed before he did something more serious than just drool on the keyboard. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The phone was insistently ringing. Jim groaned and rolled over to reach for the phone where he had dropped it beside the bed. The low steady thrumming of the air conditioner could be heard clearly now that the storm was no longer drowning it out. Jim wished that he could have used the sound of the air conditioner in the same way that he used his phone, but the sound of the air conditioner was just annoying and made the problem of dropping off to sleep worse for him. He fished the phone off of the floor and started to tab the phone app but it wasn't a call though. He wondered what had possessed him to set the alarm app this time. He hated that damned thing even if he had it set to ring in a manner similar to his old alarm clock. He punched the cancel in a short savage jab and slipped it onto the bedside table. At least it wasn't a call. That was a good thing as far Jim was concerned. The last thing he needed right now as to try to talk while his brain was still AWOL. That would have been a disaster as far as he was concerned. He rolled over and dozed for a while, but not for long. The next time bells went off to jolt him out of sleep it was his alarm clock going off and he let out a weary groan as he heaved himself up from the bed to kill that sound before he was too annoyed at having to get up to have a hope of having a decent morning. He really must be getting his strength back he thought. After all he hadn't slept through his regular wake up the morning before and now here he was, this morning at least, able to be roused from sleep with only the normal resentment at being jolted awake. It was progress he supposed. This morning he was just tired and not unconscious because of bone deep weariness. Jim reflexively looked at the time before fumbling in back of the clock for the switch to kill the alarm. It was just after six A.M. That was his regular wake up. From the look of it, he had slept longer than he expected even if he hadn't dragged himself to bed until just after midnight. Despite what the lieutenant said about making certain that he was ready to go again before he came back, he intended to be back at the precinct before nine if he could. She would want answers and Jim thought he might have a few and if they weren't answers then maybe they would push them in the direction of some answers and that would be just peachy with him. Right now, though he needed to get ready. Jim lurched out of the bed and made his way to the shower. He would need a good hot one again. The last couple of showers he had taken were like that and they had done a little good for the sore muscles he still felt. Another one wouldn't hurt and at the very least it would finish the job of waking him up. The jangling of his phone drew his attention back to it while he was partially dressed. For a moment he thought that he had set a second alarm and forgotten it, but this time it really was the phone making the noise and not his alarm. Since he had been in the bathroom getting ready he had left the lights in the bedroom off. The sun was already creeping up and the light was streaming in through the barely parted curtains. It was bisecting the gloom of his bedroom and fell over his bed even if it hadn't quite reached where his face would be when it made it there. His hand fumbled with his Smartphone in the dim light and in his haste he missed the accept call button and cancelled it by mistake. Jim walked back into the brightly lit bathroom and started to flip through the menu. Just as he was pulling up the call log to see who it was and call them back the phone rang again. It was Mitch or at least it was someone using his phone to call Jim anyway. Jim's finger stabbed the accept button and he raised the phone to his ear. "Jim? It's Mitch," he heard his partner's voice say. "Yeah Mitch, I'm here. I hit the wrong button again. What's up?" "We need to go in now, something's come up," he said. "What happened? When I left everything was settled down for the moment," Jim said. His mind was already clearing even with the effects of an interrupted night's sleep still dogging him. "It is. It still is. This is something else," Mitch said. "What now?" "A little over ten hours ago they apparently extracted Hank Phillips from the...zone," Mitch hesitated a little when he had to refer to the Grove by the cover name that the Lieutenant had instructed them to use. "That sounds like a good thing to me Mitch," he responded. "What's the issue?" "He flat lined about a half an hour ago. Singh wouldn't say over the phone what happened after they got him to Mercy General, but he said to call you right away and that both of us needed to get in there. he said he would be too busy to do that and for me to take care of it." "Did he give you any hint about what is going on?" Jim asked. "I just got the call myself," Mitch rasped back at him. "We want to know what's going on then we need to get in there now. We can be certain that the Lieutenant is going to be all over us and right now we don't have any answers." Crap, Jim thought to himself. This case was already well on its way to being a nightmare of epic proportions just with the existence of the Grove and the secrecy involved with that complicating their missing person's investigation. Throwing a possible homicide into their laps just felt like overkill to him right now. Especially since it was entirely too likely that nothing would come of a homicide charge since the prime suspect was who and what she was. Damn he hated it when something he was doing ended up trailing off into the den of some political trap. That never ended well and even if there was a first time for it to happen, he didn't think that it was too likely to be this time. "Are you sure you're up to doing this Mitch?" he asked. "Clayton was pretty clear about you staying off the clock until you get the doctor's thumbs up." "I'm fine Jim," Mitch rasped. "Doc told me that I can go back to duty now." Jim had his doubts if that was all that the doctor had to say, but if Mitch was pushing himself too far he'd find a way to intervene. "I'll be over to pick you up as soon as I square myself away here Mitch. You really don't need to be driving and I think Andrea will kill both of us if I let you try. We'll hit the morgue first and then go to whatever floor they had him on in Mercy General. That's where Singh probably is anyway if he's not already in the morgue and as long as he's there we don't have to chase him down." "See you in about twenty then," Mitch said. Jim ended the call and put the phone down on the counter. He was almost ready anyway; there wasn't any need to rush even if he had to leave a little sooner than he had planned to. He finished up and reached for his suit coat. On the way to the door his hands moved in the regular pattern that he had established for whenever he left the house. Briskly his hands passed over wallet, keys, phone, badge and pistol. All there. He stepped out the door and quickly locked it behind him. Raja was still there, but he had moved from the planter to find a more comfortable spot on the outside table. The big black cat raised his eyes a bit and made an interrogative mrrow to him as he headed toward the car. Jim let his hand brush over the cat's head for a moment and got it nuzzled in response. By the time the engine was cranked and car slowly backing out of the carport, Raja had gone back to sleep. Jim pointed the nose of the car in the direction of Mitch's house the sun would be fully up by the time he got there and Jim already suspected that whatever peace he had this morning would be gone already before too long. Mitch looked impossibly rested when Jim eased his car into the driveway and leaned over to call dispatch and inform them that they were now on the way to the City Morgue in the basement of Mercy General. Mitch was somehow managing to look almost indecently cheerful as well as rested. He slipped into the passenger seat with a barely audible grunt and closed the door behind him. He turned back toward the front door where Andrea was hovering watching him as he left. Mitch gave her a little wave and held eye contact with her as Jim pulled the car out of the driveway and backed into the street. As soon as they were away from line of sight to his house Mitch turned away and his face fell into his normal half worried expression that Jim was more familiar with. "Well that was fast," Jim said as he turned the car toward the main road. "What was fast?" Mitch replied. "How your face went from I'm loving life to I just stepped in a giant pile of dogshit," Jim said unconsciously signaling the turn onto Baxter Street. "I always smile when I leave in the morning and especially after something really does happen," Mitch said. "It keeps Andrea from worrying as much when I do. I don't let her see me any other way when I leave." "Does it help?" Jim asked. He must still be out of it a bit; he knew that Mitch did some variation of just now and he had overlooked it. Probably because he did expect for Mitch to do something like that at all. "Probably not," Mitch said, "But it doesn't hurt and after the last two nights I don't want her stressing more than she is if I can help it." Jim nodded in understanding. A lot of cops, the ones that weren't oblivious to little touches like that, did something along those lines when they went in. Jim had always told his wife that he loved her when he left, even when their marriage was nothing more than a torn rag of a thing. No matter what was going on between them, it was important to him that if that was going to be the last thing that she remembered him saying to her, then that would be what she heard from him. "Does Singh know the details of what happened with Phillips yet?" Jim asked. "He didn't say. He just said for both of us to get in as quickly as we could. He's been at the hospital off and on ever since he could get away from Magnolia Circle. He's been waiting to hear if Pantra is going to pull through or not." "He should be at the morgue already, by the time we get there then," Jim said. "We'll see what it is that he has for us then." Jim glanced over at Mitch as he drove. The mottled discoloration around his neck had finally bloomed into its full glory. A tapestry of purple on purples in deepening shades that encircled his neck where the root had left its mark deep in his flesh. Riding in the car was usually one of the times that they would usually bounce ideas and plow through case theories together. And after he had read through the transcription of the Barnes journal last night Jim had more than a few that he needed to bounce off of his partner while there were no other ears around to hear. The problem was that Jim wasn't sure about a couple of things this morning. The most obvious one was that Mitch looked like he still needed to be in to the hospital this morning and not coming there on case related business; the other was the contents of the journal itself and what it meant to him when he finally had gone over it after he had recovered from facing what was in the Grove. Mitch looked reasonably alert so after weighing the merits of holding off a little longer he decided that if it proved too much for his partner, he would just drop it and they would pick it up again later. "Did you go over that journal yet?" he asked quietly as he slowed down and stopped at a four-way crossing. "Yeah, I did," Mitch answered. Most of it was just a waste of time as far as things related to this case go." "Except?" he asked. "You know exactly what wasn't a waste," he said quietly. "You knew that before you asked me." Jim took a deep breath and forced his hands to loosen where they had gripped the steering wheel tight as the men were speaking. "The last twelve pages," he said just as quietly as Mitch had. When Jim had opened the transcribed document most of what he read there was more of a record of what Barnes was doing while he was experimenting with black lotus. There were several detailed passages early in the book that were focused on what he had experienced during his initial trip and how he was dealing with his discoveries on subsequent trips. If it were not for what Singh had told him, Jim would have chalked up a lot of what the man had written down there as a colorful recollection of a drug addled mind trying to make sense of what his state of altered conscience had wrought within his mind. But what Singh had to say in this matter carried more weight with Jim now than it had just a couple of days before so it had made him go back and look over what Barnes had written there and absorb what the man had written with a mind more open than usual when it came to matters such as these. Once he had done that, the account that he read there took on an entirely different significance in his mind and things that he would probably have overlooked or dismissed as the mental wanderings of a disordered mind demanded Jim give them more careful and sober consideration than he might otherwise have done. Once that due consideration was established, Jim found that what Barnes had written in the journal was actually extremely detailed. He wasn't just some bored techie out for a semi-illicit experience. He was someone who was genuinely curious about just what it was he had found in the fumes of burning lotus. He approached what he discovered in a cautious, methodical fashion. If anything, what the man had detailed in the pages seemed more like a form of scientific exploration than some druggie's trip record. Except for the last twelve pages. After what, according to the timeline of his notes, were several weeks of experimentation and exploration he abruptly ceased to write anything. From the discrepancy between the last dates and from where it resumed again there was at least a couple of weeks where, according to Barnes, he had completely abandoned his efforts to explore entirely with no reason given. And then without further explanation he resumed what he was doing only this time there was a more frantic vibe coming from the account written there. The last twelve pages were so completely different in tone and tenor from what Barnes had written before. Even then there wasn't much and from what he could make out by reading what the man had written there, those pages only covered the last few days just before his disappearance, but it was nothing like what he had written before. There was a tone of desperation that practically screamed from the pages and along with the desperation there was a deep undercurrent of fear. That at least matched up with what Singh had told them when he examined the house. The other thing was that Barnes seemed to have completely changed his writing style as well as he wound up his account. Where before he had been detailed and analytical and overall had an attitude of fascination with what he was doing. The last section was deliberately vague in those areas that, as the one investigating his disappearance, Jim found maddeningly unhelpful. There was something there, something critical, but the man's dominating fear wouldn't let him come out and say what it was. He kept talking about changes the last two days before the narrative abruptly stopped, but he didn't say anything about what those changes were. It was almost as if he was afraid that by writing out what it was that was happening it would make them even more real. Like the act of committing the words to paper would seal him in some irrevocable way so he was deliberately vague. And in addition to that he was strongly hinting about something else that was there as well. He didn't come out and say it either, but reading it as it was written Jim could only assume that he was being hunted and whatever was hunting him had found him. That also seemed to be something that Singh had already confirmed as well and Jim was glad that they had something physical to point to. Others may not believe them when they related how they got their information initially, but with this they could point to these pages and let the person asking assume that that was the source and not the corroboration. "What do you think it means?" He asked Mitch after he told him what he had gotten out of reading the journal. "I think he got in so far over his head that he fell in and whatever it was that scared the hell out of him jumped in after him and pulled the cover close after them both. But what exactly that is I haven't got the faintest clue." "Me neither," Jim said as he navigated the streets almost automatically. "I'll tell you what really bothers me," Mitch rasped. "And that's the idea that maybe this was planted there for us to find. I don't know why that might be, but maybe it's because of the fact that he wrote it down that way at all. Barnes was a tech guy. He writes software for a living. From what was in the house he was wired in almost every conceivable way that a guy with that background could be and when he goes to document what he's doing what does he do? He reaches for a notebook and a pen. I'm thinking that it doesn't seem quite in character for this guy." Jim thought about what Mitch said. He chewed it over in his mind for a few minutes and thought about what he had seen of how Barnes had lived before he vanished and what others had said about him and as reasonable as his partner's doubt was, he didn't think that Mitch was making the same connections that he was. "Mitch," he began. "I think something like this just might be in his character. Sure, he's a techie. Sure, he's got every gadget and doodad that you'd expect a guy with that background to have. But this is also a guy with a sentimental streak a mile wide as well. In between every high-tech thing he has in his house he also shoehorned that collection of stuff that he picked up over who knows how many trips to flea markets, yard sales and antique shops. This guy likes his technology to be the latest thing but he's also got a strong connection to the past as well and I can see where keeping this account this way might appeal to the sentimental aspect of his personality." Mitch didn't say anything, but Jim could tell he was listening to what he had to say and considering it. "And there is something else that does factor into his techie background to consider," he added. "What's that?" Mitch asked. "No matter how good a hacker is, there is no possible way that anyone would be able to hack a handwritten journal without physically going into the house. As far as being secure from cyberspace intrusion that is about as safe as you can get." "I wonder what it saw," Mitch asked absently. "What do you wonder what it saw and what is the it we're talking about?" "His house," Mitch said. "What do you mean?" Jim said. "There wasn't any cameras pointed inside and if there were any there, we sure haven't found them." The lack of cameras was something that had disappointed both of them. Barnes did have cameras wired to his central system, but they had all been focused outside and on the days in question when he disappeared the imagery that had been recovered from his hard drives had distinctly unhelpful almost as if it had already been wiped clean. Whether Barnes himself had done it or someone else was responsible the absence of those digital timestamps what had made it clear was that this was not just some guy that had taken a powder, but it also had been of no use to them in determining just what it was that had happened. As far as being helpful the outside cameras were a complete disappointment from an investigative standpoint. At least there were cameras outside though. When Jim had seen that there was a digital recording system, he had initially had some hope that they could catch a break but that didn't last long. There was a distinct lack of footage inside the house entirely. Jim supposed that was not that surprising in its own way. When they had them most folks routinely pointed their security cameras outward, not inward. Jim figured that unless they had some reason to keep themselves under a camera inside that they wouldn't even bother and most of the time he was right. It would have made his job a lot easier if they didn't but he thought that was mainly because most people disliked the idea of being under surveillance even if it was being done by their own hands. "I don't mean the security system," Mitch said. "We took all of that data when we took every hard drive he had in the place. I'm talking about what the house saw. That smart TV was a broadcasting camera every time someone walked in that room. And that display screen on the inside of the front door might as well say smile for the camera. You know that every time someone walked in front of it it's more than likely it was taking snapshots. That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other things in there we might be able to access as well. Sure, we might not get film of anything that happened there, but there might be stills that we could use to piece together those last couple of days." Jim slowed the car to a stop and pulled over. "You are a magnificent bastard," he told his partner. "It didn't even occur to me to consider that. Barnes is a techie and his house is full of things with cameras and with all of those are nothing more than a collection of eyes looking everywhere. And one of those eyes is likely to have snapped something up." Jim reached in his pocket for his phone and called the station. While he was waiting to be connected, he asked Mitch if he had any idea of how long he thought those devices might hold that information before the system purged anything that would be useful to them. Mitch had a smart TV himself and when he thought about it, he estimated that at most any images would only be held a couple of weeks. When he was connected Jim quickly ordered that a pair of techs to be escorted to the Barnes house and for them to pull everything, they could find off of any smart devices that might have data in those systems for them to review. Jim hung up and eased the car back into traffic from where he had parked while he made the call. He told Mitch that they told him that it would be done before they got back from the hospital. Mitch nodded and turned away to stare out the passenger window for the rest of the trip. As he drove Jim had the thought cross his mind that the techs were a little too quick to comply with his request. They hadn't even tried to tell him about anything else that was baying for their time and resources right now. He mentioned that to Mitch and heard him murmur 'it's good to be the king' to him in response. He was going to ask him what he meant by that when he made the connection himself. They were right now the number two people in anything to do with the Grove over in Olympia and if that position didn't light a fire under people's tail feathers then he didn't know what would. Jim chuckled at the absurdity of two regular detectives with the ability to make the whole city hop. He was going to ask Mitch what he thought but when he cut his eyes at his partner, he was just leaning quietly against the window with his eyes barely closed. Jim gave up the idea and let Mitch get some rest while he drove them both the rest of the way there. When Mercy General had been built about twenty years before, one of the things that the architects had done was to build the new city morgue in its foundations. Just as the hospital that Mercy General was replacing could no longer cope, the old city morgue was already too small to meet the needs of the growing city as well. The city planners had decided to kill two birds with one stone since both projects were given the go ahead by the city planning office at the same time. Jim supposed that there was some cost savings option in there that made it more attractive to them. That didn't mean that they closed the old facility though, the old morgue was still around; since they hadn't demolished it they had just designated it as a satellite of the new one and it continued to soldier on from its location on the other side of town. The hospital that Mercy General replaced hadn't been so fortunate. It had been torn down and the land it stood on had been rebuilt as a public park. The smell of the morgue always struck Jim as something that was a bit out of place. It was overwhelmingly antiseptic with just the faint odor of decomposing flesh held in abeyance by a judicious use of modern technology. The all over smell of bleach and disinfectant that they used to stay ahead of the odor that did make it through the effort to banish it seemed like it was bleeding from the industrial grey paint that was slathered on the walls. The florescent lights that were the most common type used in government buildings came in two flavors. They either gave a steady bright light that the dark paint drank up or they flickered; like they were warning you in advance that soon they would crap out on you and leave you fumbling in the dark. Jim knew the morgue was supposed to smell this way. He'd been in far too many of them over the years, even though he had never worked homicide. Its background odor was just one of those things to him; but sometimes he had the stray thought that a place where the dead were kept should smell more than just a little dead as this place did. As a warning to others that this wasn't were you wanted to go to unless you had a reason. Not that he wanted to walk into a charnel house; he just always expected what his nose told was not fully there to be there. The sign in desk was empty. Mitch leaned over and hit the buzzer to let whoever was in the back know that someone was here in the front now. There was a long few minutes wait and then Jim leaned down and gave the buzzer a good long hard press. In the back of the room a pair of double doors opened inward and a short man in green scrubs with frizzy red hair tied back along the nape of his neck ducked his head in to look them over. "Detectives Brighton and Travers," Jim said laying his badge and department ID against the glass where the guy could see it clearly. "We're here about..." "I think I know why you're here," the short man said in a disturbingly relieved tone of voice. "Come around. I'll buzz you right in," he said and disappeared around the corner out of sight. Jim heard the harsh buzzing of an electronic door lock and pulled open the heavy door to walk through. "I'm not sure what to make of this Jim," Mitch said. "That guy seems a little worked up over a DOA from exposure. "Is that what we're calling it?" Jim said quietly. "Might as well," Mitch said. "It holds more water for those who don't know better than what did happen." "This guy might not agree," Jim said reaching for the inner door. "That's Singh's and the Lieutenant's problem, not ours," Mitch said as he followed Jim into the morgue proper. Through the double doors on the other side of the electronic door wafted the odor of more disinfectant and the underlying flavor that came from a blend of bodies in various states of decomposition. Even with measures taken to slow the natural process of decay at best all that could be done was arrest the process somewhat and failing that to lock it away where it would be as inoffensive as possible. The short man with the frizzy red hair was waiting for them on the other side of the door. He was practically hopping from one foot to the other as the two detectives walked up to him. "I was wondering if you guys would ever show up for one of these," the man said speaking rapidly. "You almost missed it. I'm supposed to ship this one on a community ticket to Bryar's in a couple of hours." "I'm not sure what you think we're here for," Mitch said. "We need to speak with the M.E. about a patient who just coded upstairs a couple hours ago. Name of Hank Phillips? He should be down here now." The short man stopped mid-way in holding the door open for them. "You mean you're not here following up my investigation request then?" He asked. His face fell and the excitement that had animated him ceased immediately. "Not unless it involves Hank Phillips we aren't," Jim said. Where's the M.E.? "Damn it," the short man said in an exasperated tone. "I thought someone finally took me seriously for once." "Is the M.E. finished with him yet? Mitch asked again. "M.E. isn't here right now," The short man said. "He has a court hearing he is giving testimony in this morning. He should be back just before noon." "Has one of the deputy M.E.'s or one of the other staff looked at Phillips yet? Jim asked. "Let me pull his name up on the master roster and I'll find out," the man said moving over to one of the workstations, his voice dull with disappointment. "But I really don't think so, there have been a lot of calls this morning and I think I'm the only one not out doing pickups right now. He asked them to spell Phillip's name and after his fingers tapped a few more entries onto the keyboard he shook his head and looked over at the two of them. "I'm not showing him in our system," he said. "He should be here," Mitch said. "We got the word about him over an hour ago. He would have come from the hospital upstairs." "That doesn't matter. It makes no difference where he came from. The system here is integrated and whether it's an internal transfer from the hospital above or an intake from the city; when it comes to us having a body, they're all logged here from the moment they get picked up until we release them to wherever," the man said. "If we had him, he would be in the system." "Then who has him?" Mitch asked. "Beats me," the man said. "I suppose he might have been sent directly to a private mortuary. That's always a possibility if they know to do that and there's no call for an autopsy. They'd know what happened with him for certain upstairs, but I can tell you that we don't have him in here. Or at least we don't have him officially. I can't vouch for him just being stored in the back without being in the system though." "We should call Singh," Jim said quietly. "Perhaps because of the circumstances he was sent somewhere else." "We should have considered that aspect. But I think he would have said something if that was the case," Mitch agreed. "We should track Singh down and see what's going on with this then." "Hey, I know you guys are here for something else, but before you go can I get you to please have a look at this. It'll just take a couple of minutes and I've got to ship this body in a couple of hours. No one is taking me seriously on this and I think that there's something seriously wrong here." Mitch looked over to the man. "What are you talking about...?" "Matt," the short man said easing back from his office seat an extending one hand toward them. "Matt Gregor." The two men looked down at the extended hand still encased in a tight blue surgical glove. Neither of them made a move to take his hand. Matt blinked wondering why neither of the men were willing to take his hand and then realized he hadn't taken off his examination gloves. "I'm sorry," he said. "Give me a second here." Matt stripped off the surgical gloves and threw them in a wastebasket. He reached into the desk drawer and retrieved a small bottle of hand sanitizer and quickly rubbed some over his hands. "Occupational hazard, I wear these things so much here that I sometimes forget I'm wearing them," he said as the two men took his hand in turn. "One time I met this girl in a coffee shop on the way home from work. She seemed into me and I was just about to ask her if she wanted to meet up again for something later when she asked me what my job was." Matt reached into his pocket and took another set of gloves out. "I completely forgot that I was wearing these and when I told her I worked in the M.E.'s office she got this look on her face. You could tell she was really creeped out by the idea of it. That conversation hit a brick wall in a fast hurry and she practically disappeared a few minutes later." "That must have been disappointing for you," Jim asked. "You run into that a lot?" "More than you could possibly guess," Matt said "Most either let you know it creeps them out openly like that one did, or they don't say anything about it, but it still creeps them out and they ghost you." "Must make it hard for you to get to know someone long enough for you to have them get past it. I'm guessing you don't have a girlfriend that often," Mitch said. "Nope, but I'm telling you I could have one that quick if I wanted to," Matt said snapping his fingers. "How's that work then?" Mitch asked. "Look, I get it that most people are creeped out by people like me; people who work with the dead. I knew that would happen when I got this job, but the freaky thing isn't the ones who get creeped out by my job. The freaky thing is the ones who don't get creeped out. They have literally the opposite reaction" "So maybe that's your solution then," Mitch said. Matt looked at Mitch in amazement. "Are you kidding? Those girls creep me out and I hang out with dead people all day," he said firmly. "So just what is it that you're so desperate to have someone looking at anyway?" Jim asked. They did have a few minutes to spare, but only a few. The body wasn't here and Singh was probably still speaking with the attending physicians, locking down any details that might possibly compromise the secrecy of what was taking place at Magnolia Circle. In his opinion, Singh didn't need their help with that and having them there looming over the medical team may not be the message Singh was trying to send to them. "Some class-A weird shit," Matt said. "M.E. won't even listen to me; seriously he doesn't. He tells me I'm just seeing things and then he says I'm too inexperienced to know what it is I see. But I'm really not, I mean it's so obvious that even a guy like me can see it and I'm not saying that because I think I'm super smart at this. I'm saying it that way because if somebody like me can see it, anyone else has, like, no excuse." "That sounds like you're awfully close to making some kind of allegation there against your colleagues Matt" Mitch said. "I know that," Matt said. "And at this point I guess I am. I can't point to anything specific, but I know that the M.E. is being creative with the rules in these cases. That's my opinion. I'm not thinking he's trying to hide anything; it's more like he doesn't want to look. Like if he did, he'd have to do something he doesn't want to do, and at the same time he couldn't avoid doing anything once he did see it." Jim looked over to Mitch. While Matt was talking to Jim, Mitch had gotten a text and had just looked down from checking it. "Anything from Singh?" he asked. "he said he's speaking with Phillip's doctor now. he said that we should get up there as quick as we can and he'll bring us up to speed; whatever that is supposed to mean." "Sounds like he's got it in hand and there's no urgency for us to get up there just yet," Jim said. "Not really. But we should wrap this up pretty quick Jim," Mitch replied putting his phone away. "Please guys, I really need someone else to look at this. It is seriously not right." Jim exhaled. "Okay, okay, we'll take a look at what you've got," he said. "But we can't promise that anything will come of it." "If you see even half of what I see, you'll make something come of it," Matt said confidently. They followed him through the grey painted doors. Doors like those were cheap. Meant to be banged open by gurneys and pushed aside casually and then swing back unattended. That's what they were. Cheap but sturdy. They didn't need to be more than that. The first few doors on the left and right of the hallway led into offices. Most of the doors were closed, but a couple of them stood open. They passed those doors and moved down to the end of the hallway. A second set of double doors opened into another long hallway turning off to the left and ending in another set of doors that needed a key card to get into. On the frosted glass of the door windows was marked examination room two. Matt swiped his key card and took them down into the refrigeration room and then led them toward a floor to ceiling bank of storage bins for the bodies that were currently kept in the morgue. He reached up for the outside latch and opened one of the middle bins. Once he did that he reached inside and then slid the body out for them to see it cradled on the movable stainless-steel tray inside the bin. The toe tag was a deep manila yellow. Jim had seen them before so it was no surprise to see it first as the body slid out. The stiff paper barely moved on the thin wire that lashed it to the flesh when Matt flipped the white sheet covering the body away with a flourish like an aspiring magician. Jim almost expected him to say ta-da while he did it but he didn't. "This is what I wanted you to look at," he said trying to be as earnestly serious as he could to the two detectives. The body that he revealed to them was that of an elderly female. At first glance there were no marks that either of them could discern to indicate cause of death on the naked body. The 'Y' incision that marked where the autopsy had been performed had been fastened back together with a few medical staples. Those were really the only marks to indicate that violence of any kind had been done to this old woman's corpse. "Is this some kind of joke?" Jim asked him. "No, I promise you that it's not," Matt said. "Maybe it's just me, but I'm failing to see how an old woman who looks like she died in bed like this one does rates as class A weird shit," Jim said. "Who is she anyway? "Jane Doe number 5452," Matt said. "I'm still not seeing anything that suggests anything that demands an investigation here," Mitch said. "I'm with Detective Brighton on this Dr. Gregor. She looks to me like just an old woman who died of natural causes." Mitch was getting formal in his tone. Jim couldn't say that he didn't expect that. Neither of them had much use for people who wasted their time in stupid ways and this was starting to look like it was going to be one of those times. Gregor was about half a tick away from hearing it from both of them and if he didn't know it then he was not as bright as he thought he was. "Yeah, I know that's what she looks like, but it's not," Matt said insistently. "She was brought in last week. They found her in an alley, no sign of any assault and the M.E. said to just write it up as natural causes and ship her out. "Sounds like a reasonable assumption. Why didn't you do it? Was there anyone fitting her description reported missing during that time or did you get any hits from the federal data system on her fingerprints? Why didn't you do just like your M.E. told you to do? Jim asked him. "Did you think she was just lost then? Did you think that as old as she looks, she might have just wandered away from her nursing home and made it as far as the alley they found her in?" Mitch suggested. "No to any of those questions," Matt said, "No woman matching her description was reported missing and there was nothing on the FDS. She is the same as all of the others that I flagged, it's like they all just dropped out of the sky." "What others?" Jim asked. "How many of these old women have you flagged like you said?" Whether he knew it or not Gregor was getting close to a set of gross abuse of a corpse charges if he didn't make himself clear otherwise, he decided. "More than this one here I can tell you," he answered. "Like I said she's not the only one and it's like they all came out of nowhere." "I'll grant you that's a bit strange, but it's not that far out. Street folks come and go all the time and more than a few just drop dead like this. I have to say I'm not seeing anything here Gregor. It looks like a garden variety homeless woman who died of natural causes to me just like your M.E. says it is. Matt leaned over the woman's face. "Have a look here. I think this will get your attention," He reached into the woman's mouth and peeled back her lips and forced the jaw open slightly so the two of them could get a better look inside. "That's a good set of dentures," Mitch said after a moment of looking at the woman's mouth. I wouldn't have expected a homeless woman to have something like that, but that doesn't count as weird, just unusual." "Look again," he said. "Those aren't dentures." Mitch looked closer and then gestured Jim over to confirm that he was seeing the same thing. "That's right," Matt said. "Now you're seeing it. This woman has all of her teeth. And check this out." Matt pointed to the back of the woman's mouth. "Her wisdom teeth haven't even erupted yet." "That's impossible. That should have happened decades ago," Mitch said. "I'm not a doctor and even I know that." "Doesn't matter," Matt said. "That's what I see in my professional judgment and more important I have the x-rays to back it up." Matt pulled the jaw open a little further. He had to strain a bit to force the stiffened flesh of the jaws open wide enough for the two detectives to get a good look. "Look at the back molars," he said. "Tell me what you see." Jim leaned over and aimed the examination light that Matt had flipped on directly down the woman's throat. Leaning this close the odor of her decay was stronger and he had to hold his breath as he did so, so as not to breathe in any more of her corruption than he had to. Jim stood up and turned his head to the side to get a breath of cleaner air. "That's pretty remarkable. She has better teeth than I do." "It's not remarkable, it's impossible," Matt said. "I don't know what this woman is, but those are not the teeth of an octogenarian. She's not missing one tooth. Not one. She has the small beginning of a cavity on a couple of teeth and that's it. These teeth are as clean as you could expect from someone who hasn't brushed in a couple of weeks when she came in here. There are no stains whatsoever except the faintest ones from a cup of coffee or something like that. Mitch was looking at the woman intently while Matt was talking. "He's right Jim," he said. "I saw a lot of street folks when I was in vice and none that were this age would have a mouth like this." "There's more," Matt said. "Take a closer look at the molars." "I just did," Jim said. "I didn't see anything that jumped out." "And that's the problem. Most people don't see something like this until it's pointed out," Matt said. "Run your tongue over your own molars right now." Jim looked at him quizzically. "Just do it," Matt said. "What am I looking for?" Jim asked his voice distorted from speaking with his tongue rubbing his molars. "You feel how one side of your very back teeth are worn down and the other is almost untouched?" "Yeth," Jim said. "That's from a normal chewing pattern. Over a lifetime most people favor one side of their mouth while they are chewing and that side gets worn down much more consistently than the other side of the same tooth." "Ok," Jim said. "So, what's the connection? Why the dental lesson?" "Her molars aren't worn at all. That's what the connection is," Matt said aiming the light directly at the woman's back teeth. "The plain truth is, if I were to show just these teeth and nothing of the face to a dentist and ask their opinion on them; I'm pretty sure they would confirm what I'm saying about this woman. "And what's that?" Jim asked. "That she is impossible. She is a walking contradiction. Those teeth belong in the mouth of a woman somewhere between twenty-two and twenty- six years old. And that's not all." "What else do you have?" Mitch asked. "A lot more. Her joint and bone structure match that of a younger woman too. Same goes for the organs. I don't care what the outside of this package says. Body systems don't lie. Not like this they don't. The organs I pulled out during my autopsy do not match those from a woman her apparent age. There is no trace of any form of geriatric disease of any kind. No joint or skeletal degeneration, very few traces of bone density loss, and none of the organs look even remotely like they came from a woman in her eighties who has been living on the street for god knows how long." Matt pointed at the woman's corpse. "She is a lie. Everything I can test for medically tells me that this woman should be in her mid-twenties. Everything I see here forensically backs that up as well. Now you look again knowing that and tell me that I'm wrong." Matt gestured one last time for the two men to have a last look at the woman and when both of them declined he re-draped the sheet back over her and slid her body back into the refrigerated storage box. Matt stripped his gloves off and threw them into a nearby wastebasket and fished more sanitizer out of his pocket. "That's what I mean by class A weird shit," he said while he rubbed it into his skin. "She's just like every other one that I flagged before her. And every single one of them the M.E. just signed off on and told me to forget it." "If that's his position, how'd you ever get him to authorize an autopsy?" Mitch asked. "I logged it as personal training time after hours on the books. After the first one got my attention I had to do that just to get a closer look and make sure that I wasn't just seeing things and when I was sure and I saw more of them go past me that's what I've been having to do just to make any progress on these. I flag one whenever it comes in, I send in a request for an investigator, and then I document what I can a few hours before I have to ship the body. I add what I find to my digital and my hard copy files and then I wait for what comes next. Usually it's another body and still nothing happens. What I have is from every one of these that I could verify for my unofficial investigation, nobody else even touches it, that's why I was so glad to see you guys. I've taken it as far as I can and unless someone like you can take over, all I can do is keep documenting every case like this that I see when they come in." "How many of these cases have you seen? I mean cases that you can verify," Jim asked him. "Over two dozen easy," Matt said. "And that's just my count since I actually noticed it and started looking for it in others when they came in. I have no idea how many slipped past me before that." "Jesus," Mitch said. "You said she's going to Bryar's on a community ticket in a few hours. What happens there?" Jim asked. "She gets cremated like all the other indigents when we can't find family to claim the body. Bryar's has a municipal contract to cremate and store remains until a family member can claim them. Most never do." "So, once she's sent there everything you just showed us goes up in smoke then?" Jim asked. "That's about it," Matt said. "But ever since I started seeing these I've logged as much as I can. Every autopsy I could swing, every dental record, fingerprints and whatever else I could think of. I got everything down as much as I could. I have a rack of tissue samples stashed away in the freezer and about a dozen reprimands from the M.E. for exceeding my authority so far. I'm about this close to getting canned, but I really don't care." He gestured back toward the freezer. "Whatever this is it's something so not right that I can't even begin to process the why or the how. All I know is the what." "Give me what you have," Mitch said. "I'll do some digging off the books as well and I think you should have a talk with a Detective Singh. We'll tell him to get in touch with you when we see him." The look of relief that washed over Matt's face was visible to both of them. For a half moment he closed his eyes as he exhaled and they could see some the restrained tension that he must have felt constantly draining from him. His shoulders sagged a bit in relief as well. Jim had seen more than a few people react like that when stress over something that dominated their life fell away and Matt just got himself added to the running count that Jim maintained in his head of people like that. They followed Matt back to his cubicle. He gave them a copy of all of the data he had. Apparently, from the immediate access that he had to spare already loaded flash drives, he had already made several copies. Mitch wondered if he had already salted a few other copies away to be released in the event something happened to him, but he didn't ask him about that. He probably had done so, considering what he was sitting on it would have been the prudent choice. Mitch didn't ask him because no matter how he could think to frame the question there wasn't any way that he could say it that wouldn't imply that Matt was just seeing a conspiracy and taking it around the bend. He knew that because Mitch smelled as big of a rat in this as Matt did and all he could say to him for now was that Detective Singh would be in touch with him and that if they had anything come up from their end, they would keep him in the loop. Matt looked even more relieved when they said that. Jim was pretty certain that it was him putting down that mental load that he had been carrying around down since he stumbled across this. They gave him their cards and told him that if another body came in to do exactly what he had already been doing and to immediately send them the results if they were unable to be there in person to witness the autopsy. Matt nodded and thanked them profusely. They turned and headed toward the elevator and punched the floor for ICU. "What did you think about that Jim?" Mitch asked while the elevator hummed toward its first stop. "He was right about the class A weirdness part. But what it means I haven't got a clue." "I'm going to check the FDS again. I've got a few things I can try that I'm pretty sure that he can't do." "You got to love Detective privileges," Jim said quietly. The door opened on the second floor and about a dozen people crowded into the elevator. Jim and Mitch stopped talking and waited until the elevator doors opened onto their floor. They wormed their way through the crowd and stepped onto the floor. Jim didn't see Singh anywhere in sight. The desk nurse had stepped away for a moment but they only had to wait a couple of minutes for her to come back. When they told her that they were here to join Detective Singh her face froze. Whatever it was that caused that reaction in her it was in no way good Jim decided. She called over another nurse and asked her to man the desk while she took them into the back. The other nurse looked at Jim and Mitch and turned to the charge nurse and mouthed 'that one' quietly. The charge nurse simply nodded her head and didn't say anything more other than she would be back in a couple of minutes. She led them down the long hallway behind the nursing station. Most of the doors were closed and those rooms that had windows facing the hallway for observation were mostly closed as well. Unlike the basement walls the walls here were a lighter cream color but except for the absence of the undercurrent of decay there was still the same overpowering odor of disinfectant reeking from every surface around them. "He's back by isolation room four," she said briskly as they turned another corner. Jim could tell that if ever he had seen a woman that was spooked by something it was this woman. She was in her mid-thirties and after being a nurse this long she would be as hard in her own way as he was toward things that happened on the job. It wouldn't make her callous, but you had to be hard to handle what their jobs threw at them and not crack up yourself. So, if she was spooked by something, Jim wasn't sure that it wasn't something that he was probably going to be disturbed by as well. But then he was already disturbed more than a bit. Despite how much they downplayed what it was that they could do, what Matt had showed them in the morgue was disturbing on a whole other level and he was already certain that when they told Singh about it he would be after some answers as well as soon as they got this Grove business settled. Singh was speaking with a tall older man when they rounded a final corner and the charge nurse handed them off and turned back to her desk. As they approached them Jim could both tell that whatever the two men were saying it was both hushed and urgent. As they heard the soft muffled footsteps from the two detectives' approach both of them ceased their conversation and looked in their direction. "Where have you two been?" Singh said. "I expected you both here almost an hour ago!" "We went to the morgue Singh..." Mitch started to say before Armin interrupted him. "Why in the blazes did you go to the morgue when you needed to come here?" he said just a little irritated at what he viewed as self- evident. "You said he flat-lined," Mitch answered. "Where else would we look for him?" "He wasn't down there anyway," Jim said. "Did you have the body sent somewhere else? Because of what happened?" Singh looked at both of them and his face drooped and he hung his head before shaking it slowly. "I am such a fool," he said after a moment. "I should think more carefully about the words that I chose, especially in matters such as these." Singh gestured to isolation room four. "A couple of hours ago, Hank Phillips did flat-line, but gentlemen, as you can see, he is far from dead." Jim and Mitch looked into the observation window of the isolation room. Hank Phillips lay almost motionless in the hospital bed. The monitors were placed facing the observation window at an angle that he could not see them from where he lay. From the lack of response any sound from the warning system had been suppressed as well. They could see the warning lights indicating that the patient was absent almost all indications of life and they knew that there should be multiple high-pitched warning sounds warbling from the instruments, but there was only silence. As they watched him lying there, he absently raised one hand to scratch at one of the many minor injuries that had been bandaged when he was brought in. "Shortly after he arrived his breathing became erratic, and that was swiftly followed by an extreme period of tachycardia. Before the response team could even begin to assess his condition he abruptly ceased to breath and his heart stopped mid-beat. As the doctor informed me, they immediately started CPR. Less than one minute after he had crashed, he was on a ventilator and they were using the defibrillator; first at a low setting but then rapidly applied up to the maximum setting. The response team followed every protocol they have and there was no response and no change in his condition." "They realized that they were dealing with something beyond their experience when they tried to administer adrenalin directly to the heart. The cardiac needle barely even penetrated that deeply and when they tried to drive it in a second time it broke. Throughout the entire procedure Mr. Phillips remained unresponsive. There was one measure of his vitality that did not cease however." "His brain functions since he was admitted have been operating at an unusually high level; when his cardiopulmonary systems crashed that did not. His EKG did exactly the opposite. It spiked even higher and those readings have remained at a consistently high level ever since. He regained consciousness shortly after the crash team gave up attempting traditional methods of resuscitation." "The doctor was just telling me when you gentlemen arrived that his preliminary blood work is complete and what they found is in their experience impossible." Singh looked at the doctor and indicated that he should be the one to relay the results. The doctor nodded to him in acknowledgement and faced the two detectives. "I assume from Detective Singh's tone that you men are conversant with the unusual aspects of Mr. Phillips circumstances?" "That's putting it mildly," Mitch answered. "We're so conversant with it that it's about a meter above both of our heads. We're practically saturated in it." "We were the ones who initiated the initial containment of the zone with Detective Singh yesterday," Jim said. The doctor merely nodded to them both. "I just needed to be sure before I divulged these results. As you know this is an extremely sensitive area of examination and not just for local authorities. What is happening here is already being felt much higher than any of us at this level." He motioned for both of them to come closer and began to flip through papers fastened to the patient chart in his hands until he reached the one, he was looking for. "This is Mr. Phillips's blood-work taken when he was admitted earlier this morning. This..." he said pointing to one part of the printout, "...is his white cell count. It is literally the highest white cell count that I have ever witnessed in a patient in almost fifteen years as a doctor. At first glance it appears that he has suffered a major multi systemic infection and the body has initiated a massive cellular response to fight it. With levels such as this in conjunction with his other body chemistry levels it would appear that whatever had sparked such an insane production level of white cells had been able to fight it off and that we could expect to see a steadily decreasing white cell count." He flipped to the next sheet and pointed to a similar printout. "Within an hour his white cell count had almost doubled. I have never seen anything like it. His blood stream is literally swarming with white blood cells at this point. At the same time..." The doctor flipped to another section of the chart. "...his EKG began to steadily, randomly spike and then stabilized into a rapid climb. His EKG was registering activity on a scale I have never seen before and he was still unresponsive. A few times, when it reached the higher levels, its output exceeded the levels that the EKG could register. When it did that the EKG started reporting low level brain activity. Whatever is causing this he has literally broken through the scale. He changed the paper and pointed at the results. Two hours after the onset of his acute cardiopulmonary failure we monitored an extreme drop in white cells and just as unthinkable almost as high of a drop in red blood cells as well. After we ceased efforts at resuscitation, I ordered regular samples to be taken and a full workup done on them." He turned back to the paper that he had been showing Singh when the two of them walked up. "This is the situation as we understand it now detectives. Mr. Phillips's EKG continues to register at extremely high levels. The reading that you see displayed there looks a little higher than normal, but that is actually representing a rise of nearly four times a normal person's higher brain functions. Along with that high level of brain activity there has still been little change of his condition. He is awake now, but he seems to be functioning at an extremely low cognitive level. He is aware of people and does make some minimal response but mostly he does very little. He has ceased to have either heartbeat or lung function and his body temperature has been steadily decreasing to match the ambient temperature around him. The last set of blood analysis that we were able to make any sense of showed no trace of white cells and an unsustainably low level of red blood cells. I don't know why he isn't dead. By every measure we have, except for brain metabolic activity, that man in there should not even be alive. And I have no idea why he is." Jim looked at Hank Phillips through the glass of the observation window. "Is what is happening to him contagious doctor? Is it possible that whatever is affecting him has already been spread to others?" "It is a distinct possibility detective. I've never seen anything like this before. The CDC is already on the way and frankly I'll be glad to hand it over to them, whatever this is it's rare to the point of obscurity and I don't feel competent enough to deal with it," the doctor answered. "Have you instituted quarantine procedures for those who came into contact with him?" Mitch asked. "I ordered a full quarantine the moment that Mr. Phillips was established as alive when he should be dead. All personnel that have been in contact with him have been sequestered in the other isolation rooms on this floor and are being rigorously observed at the moment." "How many people is that?" asked Mitch. "A little over a dozen at the moment," he answered. "Any chance that there could be contact that you don't know of?" "We're investigating that now. The biggest wild cards are the paramedics and the nursing staff. The paramedics were pulled from duty and were called back. They didn't report any contact yet, but we can't be absolutely sure." "When do you think you could hazard a guess about this doctor?" Jim asked. "Assuming that whatever is affecting him has a rapid development, I would expect that if it is infectious, symptoms will begin to present in the paramedics within the next twelve to twenty-four hours. That is of course assuming that this condition has a minimum incubation period, followed by a highly contagious phase two. Something I think very likely since we can narrow Mr. Phillips's own contraction of whatever this is to within the last forty-eight hours." "So, what are our possibilities then, realistically?" "The best case is that this is something that is confined to Mr. Phillips alone. That it is not a disease and is possibly a reaction to an outside influence that is not disease based. Like a chemical contamination or an unknown reaction to some kind of radiation exposure. In that case we have one individual whose continued existence is an aberration and an anomaly." "And the worst case?" asked Jim. The doctor exhaled and looked away from the still form of Hank Phillips and directly at Jim. "The worst case is he just became patient zero. That whatever he has, be it viral, bacterial, fungal or microbial is not only highly virulent but is spread aggressively possibly across multiple vectors. In that case we're looking at an infection that could be spread by touch, by body fluids and possibly even airborne contamination. Worst would be all three simultaneously. It will have a rapid onset and we will probably be unable to prevent it from spreading throughout the population. In that case the only way to contain it would be to create a quarantine zone that enforces separation from the larger population with lethal force. The only good thing I can say at this point is that whatever this it has not killed him. The problem is that we don't know if this is just an intermediate stage or if this is the final result." "And if it's the final result?" Mitch asked. "As fast as this appears to spread once it has been introduced into the body's systems, I don't see how anyone who is in an infected zone would even be alive after two weeks. If this is the end stage then by the time it exhausts its available population, then you would have a zone filled with people just like Mr. Phillips. Barely conscious and almost unable to move; I don't know how he is still alive, but without food or water anyone still living would be the exception rather than the rule." "And if it's an intermediate stage?" Jim asked. "I don't even have words to begin to even process that level of contagion. Let's just say that it would be everything that I just said and factor in whatever is next after multiplying it at an exponential rate." Jim could see the fear in the doctor's eyes and hear it in his voice. This was a man who was used to at least being able to operate within the scientific laws that governed the behavior of life from the cellular level to the human level. Now he was confronted by not only a case that from the beginning contravened those rules, but also threatened to spill out to everything around him and include him and all he knew in a whirlwind of chaos and uncertainty and his spirit trembled even as it gathered its reserves to stand against it. He had good reason to be afraid of what he was seeing but he apparently wasn't going to let it stop him either. "Is there anything else we should know doctor?" Jim asked him humbled by the implications that he had just heard. "Not at this time," he said. "If there is any change you are the top of the list at the moment." "Thank you. Keep us posted," Mitch said quietly. With nothing more to say the doctor glanced at Singh. Singh told him that he would be leaving with Jim and Mitch but they would be in frequent contact from now on. The doctor walked briskly away from them. For a man who was clearly feeling a deep dread over the worst-case scenario that he laid out, evidence in Jim's opinion that what he had described was how he privately expected this to play out, he moved with a serene determination that belied the presence of any fear at all. He couldn't help but admire the man and wondered how many like him had been around during the Spanish Flu epidemic. Dedicated healers who walked into the line of fire deliberately and glared in defiance at two of the four horsemen while doing whatever they could to stand against them even if it was very little. The doctor passed out of sight and he turned back to Singh. "What is the next step Singh?" Mitch asked in a tone greatly subdued. Jim could tell that when the doctor started detailing the worst case that Mitch's mind was already divided without him being aware of it. There was the problem and there was Amanda and what could he do to keep her safe from it. Jim didn't blame him for that. He couldn't honestly say that he wasn't also concerned for the welfare of the people that he knew and the few he cared about. "The next step is us having to speak with M'Tehr as soon as possible. We need to interview that nymph. She is the lynchpin that holds all of this together." "Will having the CDC here do any good?" Jim asked. "The CDC team will have doctors who are familiar with mystical afflictions as well. They just won't advertise it outside of their ranks. And when they get here, they will see what I do now," Singh said looking intently at Phillips. "And that is?" asked Mitch. "That at this moment Mr. Phillips is practically radiating a strong visceral connection to the aether. Whatever happened to him while the nymph held him captive is still holding him fast, it's holding him fast and rapidly bringing him under its full sway." Singh looked away from the barely responsive man in the hospital bed and started to lead the two men away from the isolation ward. "I had hoped that once we retrieved Mr. Phillips and Mr. Barnes that we would be closer to bringing this situation to a close sooner rather than later." They reached the elevators. Mitch told him that they were parked in the underground lot adjacent to the morgue. Singh pressed the button and resumed speaking. "That outcome is not to be," he said with finality. Events are spiraling out of control. Try as we must it is likely that this morning's events instead of giving us a reprieve and instead given us another graver problem to deal with," he said in his coldly serious tone. ======================================================