Mohadevan got the call to expect an influx of bodies to the morgue, and she turned on the morgue television. The officer who had called her believed that none of the dead were police, but couldn't be sure. The explosion had happened right under the feet of a major departmental operation.
The TV news eventually made it clear that any dead would be found under the rubble, and that recovery was delayed by the need for Enbridge Gas to deal with their ruptured lines. The injured above ground were going to the hospital, and no officers' conditions were reported as being life-threatening. Leaving instructions to be called as soon as anyone knew more, she went home.
She was back at work in the late afternoon when the bodies began to arrive. They were trundled in on gurneys, still encased in black body bags. She directed them to the back laboratory, where they were lined up like a batch of burned loaves out of the oven. She and her staff went to work on them, photographing and autopsying as time allowed as they came in. They were all men: three Asian and three Caucasian.
She unzipped the third bag herself, and froze, looking at the young man's face. Two of her staff members joined her to assist, but she shooed them away, telling them to begin on another body. She stared a moment longer, then slowly, thoughtfully, she zipped the body bag back up, and went to the phone.
"This is Vicki," said the voice on the phone, a little less crisply than usual.
"Vicki, I'm so glad I reached you. This is Rajani. I am so sorry. Did you know your partner has arrived here at the morgue?"
"Henry? Thank God. Would you put him on?"
"No, I—"
"Wait, what time is it? Oh, shit."
"Vicki, are you all right? Where are you?"
"I'm still at the hospital." She sounded distracted, but then her tone turned focused. "Rajani, please, this is very important. Was—is—is Henry burned?"
"No, despite the gas explosion, none of the men I've seen are very burned. Vicki, were you and Henry there? I didn't realize that. I'm very sorry."
"Oh God. I've been out of it all day. How could I—have you told anyone who he is?"
"Not yet, but, of course—"
"Don't. Please, don't. You haven't—autopsied him, have you?" Her tone held dread.
"No." Mohadevan glanced around the room. None of her staff were within hearing range of her desk. "Vicki, remember, this is me? What's going on?"
Vicki's sigh of relief was audible over the phone. "I'm coming down. I'll be there as soon as I can get out of here. Rajani, I can't explain right now, but please trust me. Don't tell anyone who he is, don't process him at all, just put him straight into a locker. Please, please, please. I can't tell you how important this is. Just for the afternoon. Will you do it?"
"I can't delay this any longer than the afternoon."
"You won't have to. I swear it."
Mohadevan was silent for a moment. "I will do it," she said.
"Thank you," Vicki said fervently.
End scene
As the earth turned, showing a new face to the sun and letting its other half rest from the bright rays, the city of Toronto slid across the terminator, into shadow. The heart of Henry Fitzroy beat once, then after a long pause, beat again. As his heart rate increased, he took one breath of close, stale air, smelling of chemicals and death. After a few more small breaths and one deep, he woke.
And tried not to panic. This was not rubble he could hope to eventually dig out of, this was a coffin, a tomb. The air was bad; he stopped breathing but his heart beat wildly with fear. He'd been buried "alive" before, and not just after his official death. It was not suffocation he feared; it was worse—the slow, agonizing death from Hunger, and the raving madness that would come before. Desperate to do something, he struggled against the plastic shroud he was in.
He found a zipper. As he worked it down from its back side, questions—logical, reasonable questions—took control of his thoughts, vying with the panic. Shrouds don't have zippers, so what was he in? He took another breath, this time with the outside of the plastic pressed to his nostrils. Many scents, but one belonged to Rajani Mohadevan. He tried to still himself enough to listen to his surroundings, but his racing heartbeat was too loud.
Then his dark night of fear split open to the rays of joy. He heard Vicki's voice, and very near his head. His world snapped back to normal.
"Henry? Henry, are you awake?" She sounded worried.
Henry lunged unthinkingly toward her voice, and hit his head. He barely stifled the cry he wanted to give her, stifled it because he still couldn't be sure of their situation. What came out was a very un-vampirelike gulp. He forced himself to calm and answer her.
"Vicki," he said, hoarsely, "get me out of here." He took a breath in order to speak louder, but a pneumatic hiss interrupted him, and then fluorescent light hit his eyes. He made out Vicki's face below the opening, and behind her, her large eyes larger than ever, the face of Dr. Mohadevan.
Were there other people in the morgue? Henry didn't care. He launched himself out of the locker, less gracefully than he would have liked, because the lower half of his body was still tangled in a body bag. Vicki spared him the indignity of sprawling on the floor; she caught him by the upper body, and they both staggered together.
For one glorious moment, Vicki held him. Henry almost kissed her, but he remembered that his history with kissing women who freed him from prison was not good, and the memory was enough to cause him to quickly recover his balance. Vicki let him go.
One side of her head was bandaged. On the other side her dirty blonde hair was pulled into its usual ponytail, this one lying on the nape of her neck instead of at its usual jaunty angle. There were dark bruises under her eyes, but she wore a relieved smile. She had never looked more beautiful to him.
"Warrior princess," he said.
No, now she had never looked more beautiful to him. Flustered. "You're welcome," she said. "You all right?"
He smiled. "Better now."
They both turned to face Mohadevan. The room was empty of other people.
"I told her the truth," Vicki said. At Henry's look she added, "About the drug you took to simulate death. As part of our operation."
"I see," Henry said. "I thought we were keeping that to ourselves."
"Well, I had to tell somebody something, since you were going to wake up."
Mohadevan had been watching them both closely. "Interestingly, Vicki tells me she doesn't remember the name of this amazing drug. It seems surprising to me that the two of you would so casually use such a thing without doing enough research into it to at least know its name. And what doctor would administer it to you? Perhaps, Henry, you remember the name of this drug you took?" The smile she gave him was clearly disbelieving.
Henry responded with his own most winning smile. "Of course I do. It was seeds of henbane and senega root in a decoction of foxglove, mixed with sweet wine and garlic. The same recipe Friar Lawrence gave to Juliet, though the exact proportions are my own, and a trade secret."
Mohadevan blinked. Vicki blinked.
Vicki recovered. "Well, we should be going," she said, as if it were time to leave a party.
Henry nodded. "I've got a lot to tell you," he said.
"No, I'm afraid no one's going anywhere," Mohadevan said genially. She nodded toward the laboratory door. "If you walk through that door you are a corpse walking through a room full of my staff." She slid the shelf in and closed the door of Henry's locker. "I can get you out of here privately, but first I want to hear what you have to tell Vicki. The two of you can just sit down over there."
Henry and Vicki exchanged glances. "Rajani," Vicki said, "how long can you keep your staff out of this room?"
"I'm the boss. They'll stay out as long as I tell them to. You. Sit."
Vicki shrugged and Henry followed her lead. They sat.
Henry told them almost everything that happened in the bakery oven chamber, including what Mary told him, but not explaining his own ability to free himself and Mary, and he claimed the ammonia didn't affect him because he held his breath, which was little more than the truth. Nowhere in his story did he mention taking a decoction of foxglove with henbane seeds, senega root, wine and garlic, but Mohadevan took it all in stoically.
Vicki shook her head when he was done. "You know, I'm no expert, but doesn't this all seem a little non-Buddhist? Killing people to bring people back from the dead?"
"Tibet is an ancient land," Mohadevan said, "like India. There are things there that are much older than Buddhism. And it's a land that's been scourged and traumatized recently. Who can say what might have been awakened?"
"You're taking this rather well," Vicki said. "Do you believe this is possible?"
Mohadevan smiled. "What I believe can change from day to day. And today," she looked at Henry, "is an Easter morning. What I do believe is that your Mr. Gyaltsen is responsible for the deaths of these five men in his bakery, at the very least. One of those men is Officer Evans, by the way. Did you know him?"
"No," Vicki said, but she and Mohadevan shared the moment of grim resolution that always accompanied the mention of the active-duty death of a policeman.
"Can we go now?" Henry asked.
Mohadevan stood. "This way. There's a rear exit."
As they went through the door into a loading dock area beyond, Vicki paused. "Rajani, will you have any trouble explaining a missing body?"
"What body?" she answered, solemnly tearing up a paper form. "It happens all the time." The door closed.
As Vicki turned away from the building, she commented to Henry, "Am I the only one who finds that unnerving?"
"I find the whole place unnerving," he said. The cool night air eddied around them and the nearby traffic hummed as they walked down a loading ramp.
"Are you all right? Really?" Vicki asked. His hair was still salted with concrete dust and his nice clothing was in tatters.
Henry ran a hand through his hair. "I just hate being buried alive. It's happened before." He took a deep breath of the night air, and turned to touch the bandage on her scalp. "I am so glad you were there. Are you all right?"
"Mike and I were both knocked out, but nothing worse."
He smiled into her eyes. "So, what do we do now? Summon a posse and arrest the bad guys?"
"Not anytime soon, I'm afraid," Vicki said. She gazed out at the busy street and moved them both into a stroll. "While everyone who had any idea what was going on was out of it, Gyaltsen and Jokssari rabbited. Jokssari took a mirror from the exhibit with him. Collection inventory reports say it had a clear jewel in the center on the back."
"What about Mary?"
"Gone too. What are you looking so pleased for?"
"If she's with them, we should be able to find them. I put the police transponder in her coat."
Vicki halted and turned to face him. "What? Henry!" Her face lit with excitement and the scent of the chase.
Henry tried, but failed, to look modest. "If she's, you know, wearing the coat."
End scene
The police closed in on the trio at a private boat dock on the lake. They were just in time to prevent them from using a large motorboat to escape across the U.S. border. Mike, one arm in a sling, oversaw their arrests, and Vicki rode along. She watched as Mike personally inserted a handcuffed Dr. Jokssari into the back of a squad car. Then he joined her where she stood by a marina shed, while the other officers finished a search of the boathouse.
"Did you get the mirror?" she asked.
Mike slid it from his pocket to hers. "I got it while the guys were admiring his skull collection."
Vicki grinned. "Ghouls."
Mike gave her a tight smile with a cock of his head. "Speaking of which, I notice Henry didn't care to come along. Is your new partner not interested in following a case through to the end?"
"He wanted some personal time."
"Personal time? What the Hell does that mean?"
Vicki shrugged. "It's personal."
"Vicki?"
"Okay, okay. I don't really know, but he was clobbered under the same explosion that killed five other guys. He didn't lose a lot of blood, luckily, so he healed. But, then . . ." She wobbled her head, then winced.
Mike looked aghast, then controlled his expression. "He has to go chomp on someone. So, right now, he's home in bed sucking on some . . . victim."
"And you know that," he said, pointedly rubbing his neck.
"Haven't we finished this argument before? And didn't you lose the right to complain about his needs?"
Mike closed the mouth he'd been about to make further protests with, and dropped his arm from his neck. He scowled out over the lake. "What will you do with the jewel?"
"Henry knows a Rinpoche who might be able to neutralize it. Then it will be safe to give it back to the museum. You know, Henry broke this case for you. You get the collar and the points with Crowley. You are going to get him his digital identity, right?"
"Yeah, sure. I'll do what I can."
"Good. He wants a law enforcement certification. Say he completed a police academy in Regina, or something."
"What? Vicki!"
"Joking! I'm pulling your leg, Mike. Can't you tell anymore?"
Mike rolled his eyes. "It's time to get out of here."