Frozen Solid A Novel

7




SHE AND EMILY WERE SWIMMING IN FRIGID WATER, THICK AS SYRUP, green and purple swirls coiling around them. In a black sky, iridescent birds circled, screaming. Hallie sank away from Emily, floating slowly down, flapping her arms, trying to breathe water now as viscous and silver as molten mercury.

She awoke and lay still, pulling herself up out of the dream, watching false light images glowing and sparking in her eyes. The room smelled of Lysol and, thanks to four days of traveling without a shower, her. And something else, so faint she had not noticed it until then. Licorice, of all things. She turned on one side, sniffed. The scent, barely discernible, was coming from the bunk mattress. Emily had had a sweet tooth, though more for dark chocolate than licorice, as Hallie remembered. Doubtless a year in this place could change a person in many ways, and who knew—licorice might have been the only candy she could get.

It had been a long time since Hallie had slept in a top bunk. She sat up, swung her legs over the side, stretched tall, and accidentally punched two of the ceiling’s acoustic tiles, which lifted out of their frames and then fell back into place. For a few moments she didn’t move. Then she got down and turned on the light.

She climbed back up and knelt on the bunk. Using both hands, she raised one of the tiles she had accidentally hit and laid it aside. She reached up through the vacant space and carefully explored the back of the second tile. Her fingers touched something metallic, shaped like a deck of cards, but with sharp edges and corners. She lifted the tile carefully out of its metal frame and set it on the mattress.

There was product information on the object:

BrickHouse XtremeLife DVR Camera

SXp1w3r

PIR Motion Detection

Two wires ran from sockets in the surveillance unit’s case. One connected to a microcamera that looked like a metal toothpick half an inch long with a tiny bulb at one end. That had been pushed down into a hole in the tile. The other was connected to a shorter, thicker metal tube—the motion sensor, she guessed. It, too, had been inserted into a hole. Hallie worked both loose, freeing the device, and saw a USB port on one side of its case.

She connected it to her laptop computer and set it on the bunk so that it was almost at eye level. On the screen appeared a black camera shape with the same information she had seen on the case. PIR, she knew, stood for “passive infrared,” the same motion-detection system that worked intrusion alarms and automatic lights like those in the halls. And—strange to think of it now—that should have prevented the airport door from clamping down on the crippled woman’s suitcase as Hallie had said goodbye to Bowman.

She double-clicked on the icon and a new screen appeared, showing nine MPEG-4 files. Hallie watched the first, created on January 23. It showed what the microcam had seen: a fish-eye view that included half of the room. There was no audio, and just enough ambient light for the camera to record grainy images. That light, Hallie reasoned, might have been coming from luminous numbers on a digital clock somewhere in the room, or perhaps from a night-light, or both. She saw a shape moving onto the bunk, vague but discernible as a woman. Emily, caught by her own camera. Or—someone else’s? Emily’s eyes closed; her breathing slowed. She fell asleep almost immediately.

Hallie kept watching. The camera recorded for three more minutes, then stopped. She thought it was probably set to turn off automatically after detecting no motion for a predetermined period. Hallie fast-forwarded through a number of false alarms triggered by Emily’s movements while asleep. Then she opened the most recent file, from January 31. Sixteen days ago. The same scene, so dark she could see only shadows moving. Then a flare and, after that died, soft and wavering light.

Someone had lit a candle.

Still too dark for sharp resolution, but better than the other recording. Hallie watched as one person and then another climbed up onto the bunk. Both sat with their backs against the wall. She could see the tops of their heads, shoulders, and their thighs. She could not see their faces.

One was a woman—Hallie could make out the swell of breasts under a skin-tight black suit of some kind. A wet suit? Indoors? No, a leotard. White stripes on the tops of the thighs suggested a skeleton costume. Emily. The figure next to her was larger, with bigger shoulders and hands. He had coarse black hair and what looked like bolts sticking out of his neck at the base. A baggy shirt with ragged sleeves.

A skeleton and the Frankenstein monster. So they must have come from a costume party. Or were going to one.

The man produced a metal flask, unscrewed the top, and drank. He passed it to Emily, who almost dropped it. He caught the flask and handed it to her more carefully. She drank, appeared to cough, waved a hand in front of her mouth.

She and the man talked. There was no sound, but it was easy to recognize what they were doing by their nods and touches and body movements. Occasionally they drank from the flask. After several minutes, the man peeled off fake scars and removed the plastic bolts that had been held in place by a semicircular wire running behind his neck. He pulled off the wig, which was attached to a bulging rubber forehead. He tossed all of the costumery down onto her desk chair. He was undisguised, but the overhead camera angle still kept Hallie from viewing enough to allow her to recognize him if she saw him later.

Emily half-turned and kissed the man, put her arms around him, pulled him closer. They kissed more seriously.

She had a lover. Well, good for her. A year is a long, long time. But, Hallie thought, should I keep watching this? It doesn’t feel right, spying on her like this.

Think. This is a surveillance camera. If she had wanted to make a sex tape, they would have used something else.

Emily lay down on her back, giving Hallie the first direct look at her face. Painted skull-white, it was brighter than anything else in the frame. The man lay down beside her, his face buried in her neck, nuzzling, kissing, hidden from the camera. His thigh slid over hers. One hand scurried over her body, nibbling, rubbing, pausing longer here and there. Emily’s back arched as though in spasm, and Hallie saw her mouth open, a silent moan.

She whispered something in his ear.

And fell asleep.

That seemed very strange. Emily never used drugs, rarely drank more than a beer or two, and here she was passing out?

The man sat back against the wall and watched her. It was maddening—Hallie could see the top of his head and shoulders and thighs, but nothing else. After several minutes, he climbed down from the bunk and out of the picture. When he reappeared, he had on tight-fitting latex gloves. Working carefully and without haste, he unzipped Emily’s leotard and pulled it off, leaving her in bra and panties.

The son of a bitch. He’d drugged her. With that flask? He’d been drinking from it, too. Or maybe just pretending. Something else, before they got to the room?

Hallie’s breath came faster. She felt angry and afraid for Emily. Said, out loud, “You better not touch her.”

He disappeared from the frame and reappeared with two hypodermic syringes. The barrels were the same size, but the needle on one was much longer. Using the smaller syringe, the man injected something into the vein, in Emily’s right arm, from which blood was typically drawn. Hallie watched with growing horror.

“Leave her alone!” She said that aloud, too.

Oddly, he was dressed. A date rapist would have been naked by now. He stood beside the bunk, watching. Emily was still asleep, her chest rising and falling slowly. After several minutes, her eyes floated open. She didn’t move or try to speak. Hallie strained, but she still could not see the man’s face.

He climbed up onto the bed and knelt between Emily’s parted legs, holding the syringe with the long needle up for her to see. Her blink rate and respiration increased. He took a deep breath, shoulders rising and falling, leaned closer, and began using the needle. Emily’s eyes stretched wide and her whole body tensed, but she didn’t move.

He had given her some kind of short-acting paralytic. Oh God.

Hallie thought she might vomit. Shaking with rage, she had to pause the video. It was some time before she could turn it on again. Now there was no question about watching. It was a thing she had to do.

The man went back to work.

God. Please make him stop.

He did not stop. Horror washed Hallie’s mind clear of words. Her jaw was clenched so tightly it ached. Her stomach churned, and she pulled the wastebasket close.

There was no blood. Only agony. He kept at it until Emily’s body went limp.

Tears of grief and rage were running down Hallie’s cheeks, blurring her vision. She brushed them away, blinked her eyes clear.

I will find you, she vowed. If it takes the rest of my life, I will find you. Wil Bowman will help me. And you will pay.

The man climbed down off the bunk. She still could not see his face, but the bulge of an erection was unmistakable.

Emily was unconscious but still breathing. He tapped his gloved fingers against the inside of her right elbow to bring up the vein and, with the smaller syringe, pierced it in several places without injecting anything. Then he took her right hand and pressed her fingertips to the syringe, her thumb to the top of the plunger, and moved to the vein inside her left elbow. He performed a smooth venipuncture and pushed the plunger all the way in, emptying the syringe. He left it attached to her arm.

He put the spent vial on her bunk and laid several more, still full, beside her body. He moved out of frame for a few moments, and when he came back into view he had the flask. He moistened a paper towel and used it to swab Emily’s lips, neck, other places where his mouth had touched her.

DNA wipe. He wants people to think she overdosed. Why in God’s name would anybody do this?

The man disappeared from the frame one last time. Seconds passed, and the wavering light went out.

He’d snuffed the candle.

The video played for three more minutes, then stopped.

She could not remember anything more horrible than what she had just watched. She grabbed the wastebasket and vomited. She tried to look out the window, but it was solid black. She could almost touch both walls with her arms outstretched. It felt as though the room were shrinking.

Something was trying to claw out of her. She felt sick, disgusted, enraged. If the man had been there, she might have attempted to kill him with anything in the room that would tear flesh and break bone. Including her bare hands.

A sound, part sob and part howl, erupted from her throat. She buried her face in the pillow, sat on the floor, and wept until her belly hurt. Exhausted, she stood, one hand on the bunk’s edge for support, trying to think rationally. The images of the man and the things he had done to Emily stayed where they were. Might as well try to push black clouds out of the sky, she told herself.

Keening wind suddenly hit the station, which jumped and shook like a plane flying through turbulence. The ceiling light blinked several times, and somewhere in the room a fly began to buzz. A final gust, strongest of all, and the room went dark. Dizzy, she lost her balance, flailed at empty air for some firm hold, finally grabbed the bunk.

The light came back on, flickered, then died and stayed out.

She thought: What if that man is still here?