why wouldn’t the guilty party let Sandy Kirk’s crematorium destroy the evidence?
Apparently they needed his body.
For what?
A cold dew had formed inside my clenched fists, and the back of my neck was damp.
The more I thought about the scene that I had witnessed in the garage, the less comfortable I felt in this lightless way station for the dead. These peculiar events stirred primitive fears so deep in my mind that I could not even discern their shape as they swam and circled in the murk.
A murdered hitchhiker would be cremated in my father’s place. But why kill a harmless vagrant for this purpose? Sandy could have filled the bronze memorial urn with ordinary wood ashes, and I would have been convinced that they were human. Besides, it was unlikely in the extreme that I would ever pry open the sealed urn once I received it—unlikelier still that I would submit the powdery contents for laboratory testing to determine their composition and true source.
My thoughts seemed tangled in a tightly woven mesh. I couldn’t thrash loose.
Shakily, I withdrew the lighter from my pocket. I hesitated, listening for furtive sounds on the far side of the locked door, and then I struck a flame.
I would not have been surprised to see an alabaster corpse silently risen from its steel sarcophagus, standing before me, face greasy with death and glimmering in the butane lambency, eyes wide but blind, mouth working to impart secrets but producing not even a whisper. No cadaver confronted me, but serpents of light and shadow slipped from the fluttering flame and purled across the steel panels, imparting an illusion of movement to the drawers, so that each receptacle appeared to be inching outward.
Turning to the door, I discovered that to prevent anyone from being accidentally locked in the cold-holding room, the dead bolt could be disengaged from within. On this side, no key was required; the lock could be operated with a simple thumbturn.
I eased the dead bolt out of the striker plate as quietly as possible. The doorknob creaked softly.
The silent garage was apparently deserted, but I remained alert. Someone could be concealed behind one of the supporting columns, the paramedics’ van, or the panel truck.
Squinting against the dry rain of fluorescent light, I saw to my dismay that my father’s suitcase was gone. The orderly must have taken it.
I did not want to cross the hospital basement to the stairs by which I had descended. The risk of encountering one or both of the orderlies was too great.
Until they opened the suitcase and examined the contents, they might not realize whose property it was. When they found my father’s wallet with his ID, they would know I had been here, and they would be concerned about what, if anything, I might have heard and seen.
A hitchhiker had been killed not because he had known anything about their activities, not because he could incriminate them, but merely because they needed a body to cremate for reasons that still escaped me. With those who posed a genuine threat to them, they would be merciless.
I pressed the button that operated the wide roll-up. The motor hummed, the chain drive jerked taut overhead, and that big segmented door ascended with a frightful clatter. I glanced nervously around the garage, expecting to see an assailant break from cover and rush toward me.
When the door was more than halfway open, I stopped it with a second tap of the button and then brought it down again with a third. As it descended, I slipped under the door and into the night.
Tall pole lamps shed a brass-cold, muddy yellow light on the driveway that sloped up from the subterranean garage. At the top of the drive, the parking lot was also cast in this sullen radiance, which was like the frigid glow that might illuminate an anteroom to some precinct of Hell where punishment involved an eternity of ice rather than fire.
As much as possible, I moved through landscape zones, in the nightshade of camphor trees and pines.
I fled across the narrow street into a residential neighborhood of quaint Spanish bungalows. Into an alleyway without streetlamps. Past the backs of houses bright with windows. Beyond the windows were rooms where strange lives, full of infinite possibility and blissful ordinariness, were lived beyond my reach and almost beyond my comprehension.
Frequently, I feel weightless in the night, and this was one of those times. I ran as silently as the owl flies, gliding on shadows.