Colour of Death, The Read online

  Deciding not to disturb her, Fox moved on to the next study. Although it had been unused in the years since Alzheimer’s had claimed her husband, Samantha had left it unchanged. Fox could still smell his uncle’s Virginia pipe tobacco and feel his presence in the room. You could guess Howard Quail had been a professor of ancient history and archaeology from the artifacts in the display cases and the textbooks and periodicals on the groaning shelves, many written by him. Howard’s controversial and outspoken theories had not only affected his career but also that of his brilliant wife. If Howard had been less of a maverick, Samantha would almost certainly be teaching quantum physics at some Ivy League school rather than at Portland State. Fox suspected, however, that even if Harvard or MIT had come calling she would have stayed where she was — a big fish in a small pond. As Fox studied Howard’s books about the ancient past, the irony wasn’t lost on him that in the months preceding their author’s death Howard had been unable to recall anything of the present, least of all his own name.

  Fox picked up a flat stone paperweight from the desk. The size of a hardback book, it was polished smooth and dyed a deep ruddy brown. His uncle had once told him that it was part of a Mayan sacrificial stone, upon which victims were held down and their hearts cut out to appease some ancient god. He replaced the stone and picked up a silver-framed photograph displayed prominently beside it. A small boy in a white uniform held a trophy almost as big as he was, flanked by a younger Howard and Samantha Quail who were smiling like proud parents. The boy was staring directly at the camera, blue eyes fierce. As Fox stared back at the boy his focus shifted and he saw his adult face reflected in the glass. The fire in his eyes was more controlled now, but its glowing embers remained. He remembered the time — about six months after the orphaned Fox had moved to America to live with Howard and Samantha — when his uncle had promised the principal of his new school that he would handle his nephew’s constant fighting.

  Resigned to punishment or at least a long lecture, a sullen Fox was surprised when his uncle drove him to a nearby department store, told him to stay in the car, returned with a wrapped package and then drove to a strange-looking building on the outskirts of town. Inside, Howard had set Fox in the lobby and returned with a small, stern-faced Japanese man. “You’re angry, Nathan, and I don’t blame you,” his uncle had said. “After what happened to your parents and sister, I can only imagine what you’re going through, but you’ve got to harness and control your anger.” He had pointed to the Japanese. “Sensei Daichi has agreed to help you.”

  Daichi had bowed his head. “Welcome to my dojo, Nathan-kun.” Then had gently touched Fox’s black eye. “If you’re going to fight, Nathan-kun, I suggest you learn to do it properly. Karate is self-defense, not self-destruction; it’s about protecting and developing the mind and body, not destroying them. I’ve been your uncle’s sensei for five years and, if you wish, I will be yours.” Fox’s uncle had then opened the package, pulled out a white karate uniform and told him to put it on.

  Fox replaced the photo on the desk. If he closed his eyes he could hear his sensei’s constant refrain: ‘Never let them get too close and never lose control.’ Reaching into one of the display cases, Fox picked up an ancient Minoan vase his uncle had excavated at Knossos. Holding the three-thousand-year-old vase in his hands he could feel the weight of history, as if it were a tangible thing. When he put it back he spied a dog-eared document on the top shelf above the desk. Intrigued by the title page, he blew off the dust and began to flick through the pages. Then his phone rang in his pocket. He pulled out the iPhone he had bought for personal calls but, inevitably, it was his work BlackBerry that was ringing. He checked the caller identity: Chief Detective Karl Jordache.

  “Hello, Karl.”

  “Nathan, you got a moment?”

  “Sure. How can I help?”

  “You know the Jane Doe who saved those girls from Russian traffickers? Well, we’ve got all the evidence we need to convict the Russians renting the house but we’re now looking at the owner. We’ve found the bodies of two girls who tried to escape buried in the garden but a few others are unaccounted for. The Russians say they gave the girls to the owner to keep him quiet, but he denies this. He claims the house is just one of many properties he owns in Portland and he knew nothing about what was going on in there. His paperwork’s all in order but something smells funny.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Do your thing: interview the guy, find out what makes him tick and give us your take on his story. We’ve got him at his hunting lodge, about two hours out of town. If I text you the satnav coordinates can you come over?”

  Fox checked his watch. He had a commitment this afternoon but could shift his morning appointments. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He waited for the coordinates then replaced the phone in his pocket.

  “Nathan, what are you doing here?” His aunt was standing in the doorway, headphones dangling from her neck.

  He shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. “I was worried so I came to check on you. I rang twice but you didn’t answer.”

  She tapped the headphones. “I was working.” She sighed. “You really must stop worrying about me, Nathan. I didn’t lose Howard last week. I lost him years ago. My period of mourning isn’t just starting. Hopefully, it’s coming to an end.”

  “I know, but…”

  “Please don’t give me any of that psychiatric gobbledygook. I’m fine. Really.”

  He smiled. “I was just trying to help.”

  She kissed his cheek. “I know. And I love you for it.”

  He showed her the document he had taken from the shelf above his uncle’s desk. “What’s this?”

  She looked at it and sighed. “It’s the last paper Howard wrote before he got sick. He made me promise to try and get it published in Archaeology magazine but…” She grimaced.

  “But what?”

  “It’s even more controversial than his other stuff and I was worried it would be dismissed as a product of his Alzheimer’s.”

  He read the title page again. “What’s it about?”

  “You know when you enter certain rooms or buildings you can sense something, an atmosphere?”

  He glanced around his uncle’s study. “Yes.”

  “Howard always claimed that the ancient sites he visited over the years had a distinct atmosphere, an echo of their unique history. For example, the Coliseum in Rome and, more recently, Auschwitz resonate with suffering and misery whereas some sacred sites or places of learning have a calmer, more peaceful ambience. Archaeosonics promises to explore and explain this phenomenon scientifically.”

  “Really?” Fox had grown accustomed to his uncle’s own brand of gobbledygook. “Archaeosonics?”

  “According to the old saying: walls have ears. Archaeosonics proposes that they also have a memory, with the voices of the past invisibly but indelibly imprinted into their subatomic fabric — like a tape recording.” She took the dog-eared document from Fox and replaced it on the shelf, then beckoned him to follow her back to her study. “As Alzheimer’s took Howard from me I found his paper comforting. It felt like my last link to his healthy mind. The more times I read it the more I wanted to use my knowledge of science to back up its bizarre premise. I wanted to prove that his paper contained the last flash of his brilliance and not the first signs of his madness.”

  In her office she handed Fox a freshly typed document with the same title. “So I rewrote his paper, trying to underpin his theories with hard science. The concept of archaeosonics has been around for decades but with our growing knowledge of quantum physics and state-of-the-art acoustic technology we could soon explain and unlock these trapped echoes.” Reading the skepticism in his face, she smiled. “I know it sounds nonsense, Nathan, but read it first, then tell me it’s rubbish. Be as ruthless as you like.”

  Fox didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to realize his aunt’s reworking of Howard’s paper owed more to love than hard science
. “It’s not exactly my area.”

  “I don’t care, Nathan. You have an excellent mind and I’d value your opinion.” She kissed him again then waved him away. “Now go to work. I know you’re busy.”

  Chapter 5

  Two hours later Nathan Fox found himself in the Oregon wilderness, eyeball to eyeball with a suspected killer. “What is it with you shrinks?” George Linnet spat. “You think you can know me just by asking me a few questions and seeing where I live. You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.”

  “I’ve no interest in knowing any patient, George.”

  “I’m not one of your sicko, psycho patients, you Limey asshole.”

  “No, you’re the prime suspect in multiple homicides,” Fox said evenly. “You’re a puzzle to me. Nothing more. I don’t need to know you, George, just solve you. So I can discover what you did with the girls.”

  “I told you already. I knew nothing about the girls those perverts were stashing in that property. They paid their rent on time and that was all I cared about.”

  “The Russians say they gave you girls to keep you quiet.”

  Linnet glared at him. “You calling me a liar?”

  Fox allowed himself a smile. “I think I’m calling you a lot worse than that.” Dressed in check shirt and corduroy trousers, Linnet looked more like one of Fox’s colleagues at Oregon University Research Hospital than a killer but after meeting him and looking around his hunting lodge the psychiatrist was beginning to get the measure of the man. He had interviewed enough psychopaths in his time to know there was more to Linnet than met the eye. After finding nothing in Linnet’s impersonal apartment, offices and rental properties in Portland the police had driven Linnet to the one place they hadn’t looked: his remote hunting lodge. Standing in the kitchen, Fox registered the immaculate granite worktops, porcelain floor tiles and Smeg cooking range. Though obsessively neat and over-specified for a basic lodge, everything fitted the profile he was building of the owner. He might profess not to know Linnet but Fox already knew him better than he knew his own neighbors in north-west Portland, which probably said as much about him as it did about Linnet. As Fox glanced around the lodge the idea of hunting and killing for pleasure mystified him. A city boy at heart, Fox cherished the illusion of order and civilization that man’s footprint brought to the world.

  He turned his attention to the crime scene investigators, CSI emblazoned in big yellow capitals on the backs of their blue boiler suits. He watched as they closed the kitchen blinds and prepared their spray guns of Luminol. Within seconds of spraying the chemical around the darkened room, hitherto invisible traces, copious traces, of scrubbed-away blood magically appeared on the walls, worktops and floor as a ghostly blue glow. By highlighting these indelible bloodstains the Luminol acted like the building’s conscience, revealing how on more than one occasion this apparently spotless kitchen had been used as a slaughterhouse. He followed one trail of glowing blood spatter and, in his mind’s eye, saw Linnet dragging one of his victims into the back yard. More glowing stains led to stairs in the corner of the room.

  “Did you kill them all, George?”

  Linnet made a sudden move toward him and one of the police escort yanked at his cuffs, snapping his arms behind his back. Linnet winced in pain and Fox winced with him, feeling the cuffs cut into his wrists, the tendons stretch in his shoulders. Fox quickly averted his eyes — a protective gesture he had perfected over the years.

  He was seven when he first realized he was the only kid in school who experienced the physical sensations of pain whenever he witnessed another being touched or hurt. Years later his hyperempathetic condition would be given a name but at the time the other kids had just assumed he was plain weird and laughed at his discomfort when watching anything violent, even cartoons on TV. As a boy in England he had wanted only one thing: to fit in and belong. But after the death of his parents and sister, and leaving everything he knew in England to settle in the States, he’d stopped trying to fit in and accepted he would always be on the outside looking in.

  He moved to the stairs in the corner of the kitchen and descended into the basement. There were no CSI down here yet; they were all in the kitchen or out in the back yard digging up the newly laid wooden deck. As soon as Fox saw the refurbished basement he knew instinctively that this was Linnet’s private den. Rows of books lined one of the wood-paneled walls: cheap bodice-ripping romances with lurid covers, telling stories in which red-blooded men tamed wild women called Storm or Tempest. Not what most people would expect on a serial killer’s reading list but it fitted the profile of a weak, inadequate man who could only court — and conquer — women in fantasy.

  Or with a weapon.

  His eyes moved to the locked case next to the books. It contained at least five assorted rifles and handguns, and three serrated hunting knives arrayed in ascending order of size. At the far end of the basement was a leather couch facing a plasma television screen. Beside the screen was a stack of pornographic DVDs and a display case of stuffed animals: chipmunks, raccoons and squirrels. No doubt caught, killed and stuffed by Linnet himself. Studying the stuffed animals and weapons, and mentally revisiting similar cases, Fox could guess what Linnet had done with the girls: he had brought them there, released them into the wild and hunted them down. But where were his trophies? Looking around the room Fox noticed something odd. Although the basement was directly beneath the kitchen…

  “We’ve got something. There’s something here.” The tired voice calling from outside sounded angry but triumphant. Fox hurried back upstairs. Through an open window he could see more police in boiler suits and white antibacterial masks standing on the wooden deck in the back yard. The middle planks had been prized open like the ribcage of a whale, revealing a trench beneath. He frowned, strode past Linnet an went outside. The air was warm and he could already smell the decomposing fruits of their digging.

  Detective Karl Jordache was standing with his team, looking into the trench. He patted a colleague on the right shoulder and Fox felt it on his left shoulder as strongly as if Jordache had patted him. The detective beckoned to Fox and removed his mask. He had a strong Roman nose, thick dark hair streaked with gray, and quick brown eyes that missed nothing. “Hey, Nathan, look what we got here.” He pointed down at the three corpses lying in the dirt and Fox experienced a sudden pang. Not because of the smell or decomposition but because they appeared so forlorn and abandoned. He found it perversely comforting that the bodies had each other for company and he remembered some lines of poetry his mother used to recite:

  The grave’s a fine and private place,

  But none I fear do there embrace.

  Jordache glanced at Linnet. “Gotcha, you bastard. At least we can now identify the victims and inform the families.”

  Glancing back to the lodge Fox thought he caught the ghost of a smile on Linnet’s lips. “You only found three, Karl?”

  “Only?” The detective frowned. “You think there’s more, Nathan?” Keeping his eyes locked on Linnet’s, Fox considered the man’s hunting lodge: the immaculate kitchen, the books, the DVDs, guns and stuffed animals. The insight, when it came to him, made Fox groan. “What is it?” said Jordache.

  Fox stayed focused on Linnet. “You need to control your immediate environment, don’t you, George? Everything must be ‘just so’. You like to keep everything you value close to you. There’s only one reason you’d bury your hunting trophies out here.” Linnet paled but said nothing.

  “What reason’s that?” Jordache demanded.

  “The house is full,” said Fox.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Check the basement, Karl. It’s smaller internally than the kitchen above. I bet it’s got false walls.” He took some satisfaction from Linnet’s fading smile. “You should find the rest of the bodies in the walls.”

  As his team ran off to investigate, Jordache studied Fox for a moment. “Christ, Nathan, your mind’s an interesting place to visit but I’d
sure as hell hate to live there.” Both men had known each other for years, ever since Jordache, as a young rookie cop, had escorted a ten-year-old orphaned boy out of a blood-spattered Chevron garage. Over the years the cop had kept in constant touch. When Fox had qualified top of his class from Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, a newly promoted Detective Jordache had taken him out for a congratulatory beer and sought the younger man’s psychiatric advice on interviewing a particularly difficult suspect. Since then, Jordache had become chief of detectives and Fox the youngest member of the psychiatry and neurology faculty at Oregon University Research Hospital. In many ways the older man was Fox’s opposite. Fox was a commitment-phobe who jumped ship before relationships became too serious and lived for his work. Jordache was a committed family man who put his wife and two daughters before everything — including his work. “How many bodies are they going to find, Nathan?” the detective asked, turning back to the lodge.

  “My guess, given the space, would be about half a dozen.”

  The sound of drilling, sawing and splitting wood filled the still air. Followed by silence and a muffled exclamation: “JEEZUS.” A shout: “Hey, Chief, the doc’s right on the money. You better come see this. We got five more bodies in here. Maybe six.”

  “I’m coming,” said Jordache.

  Fox checked his watch. “Look, Karl, you don’t need any more help from me with Linnet’s little house of horrors. You mind if I get going?”

  Jordache stopped outside the doorway and shook his hand. “No problem, Nathan. We’ve got it from here. Thanks for your help, as always, I owe you a brew the next time we’re at O’Malley’s.” He glanced into the lodge. “Before you go, though, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”