Darcy, still winded, labored to keep up.
They rode the lift up two levels. Brevard thought about how the body with the gun wound had felt as he had inspected it. The man had been as cold as a stiff in a morgue, but then weren’t they all when they first woke up? He thought about all the damage the freezing and thawing produced, how the machines in their blood were supposed to keep them patched together, cell by cell. What if those little machines could do the same for a gunshot wound?
The lift opened on sixty-eight. Brevard could hear voices from the OR. It was difficult to let go of the theories that’d been percolating between him and Stevens for the past hour. It was hard to let go and adapt to everything Darcy had told them. The idea of records being tampered with made this a much more complex problem. Only three shifts to go, and now all this. But if the victim was indeed alive, catching their perp was all but guaranteed. If he was in any condition to talk, he could ID the man who shot him.
The doctor and one of his assistants were in the waiting room outside the little-used OR. Their gloves were off, the doctor’s gray hair wild and unkempt as if he’d been running his fingers through it. Both men appeared exhausted. Brevard glanced through the observation window and saw the same man they’d pulled from the pod. He was lying as if asleep, his color completely different, tubes and wires snaking inside a pale blue paper gown.
“I hear we’ve had an extraordinary turnaround,” Brevard said. He crossed to the sink and dumped his coffee down the drain, looked around for a fresh pot and didn’t see one. He would’ve taken on another shift right then for a hot mug, a pack of smokes, and permission to burn them.
The doctor patted his assistant on the arm and gave him instructions. The young man nodded and fished in his pocket for a pair of gloves before backing his way through the door and into the operating room. Brevard watched him check the machines hooked up to the man.
“Can he talk?” Brevard asked.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Whitmore said. He scratched his gray beard. “We had quite the scene up here when he came to. The patient is much stronger than he appears.”
“And not quite as dead,” Stevens said.
Nobody laughed.
“He was very animated,” Dr. Whitmore said. “He insisted his name wasn’t Troy. This was before I ran the tests.” He nodded at the piece of paper Brevard was now carrying.
Brevard looked to Darcy for confirmation.
“I was using the john,” Darcy admitted sheepishly. “I wasn’t here when he woke up.”
“We gave him a sedative. And I took a blood sample in order to ID him.”
“What did you come up with?” Brevard asked.
Dr. Whitmore shook his head. “His records have been expunged. Or so I thought.” Taking a plastic cup from one of the cabinets, he ran some water from the sink and took a swig. “They were coming up partials because I don’t have access to them. Just rank and cryo level. I remembered seeing this before on my very first shift. It was another guy from the executive wing, and then I remembered where you found this gentleman.”
“The executive wing,” Brevard said. “But this wasn’t his pod, right?” He remembered what Darcy had told him. “The blood on the lid matches the pod, but the man inside is someone else. Wouldn’t that suggest someone used their own pod in order to stash a body?”
“If my hunch is correct, it’s worse than that.” Dr. Whitmore took another sip of water and ran his fingers through his hair. “The name on the executive pod, Troy, matches the swab I took from the lid, but that man should be in Deep Freeze right now. He was put under over a century ago and hasn’t been woken up since.”
“But that was his blood on the lid,” Stevens said.
“Which means he has been woken up since,” Darcy pointed out.
Brevard glanced at his night-shift officer and realized he’d misjudged the young man. That was the blasted thing about working these shifts with different people every time. You couldn’t really get to know anyone, couldn’t gauge their worth.
“So the first thing I did was look in the medical records for any strange activity in the Deep Freeze. I wanted to see if anyone had ever been disturbed from there.”
Brevard felt uneasy. The doctor was doing all of his work for him. “Did you find anything?” he asked.
Dr. Whitmore nodded. He waved toward the terminal on the waiting room desk. “There has been activity in the Deep Freeze initiated by this office. Not on my shift, mind you. But twice now, people have been woken up from coordinates that place them there. One of them was in the middle of the old Deep Freeze, that storehouse from before orientation.”
The doctor paused to allow this to sink in.
It took Brevard a moment. His sleep-deprived night guard proved a hair quicker.