Disappear (35 page)

‘I’ve got a feeling I’ve seen something like this before,’ Aroney said as Lachlan opened the fourth closed canister. ‘I mean, I just can’t - put my finger on it. You got any idea what these things are?’

‘There is something …’ Lachlan began, searching his memory.

Aroney reached across and put his weight into lifting the metal lid of the final canister, heaving it back with a flourish. Lachlan saw the detective’s head suddenly snap backwards, his other hand flying up to cover his nose and mouth.

‘What the..?’ Lachlan started, hurrying over to him. His partner seemed to be struggling for breath. Reaching the canister, the insidious stench rose to meet him. Overpowering. Unmistakable. The sick, rancid odour of decomposing human flesh. ‘Oh, God,’ he croaked, looking away.

Aroney buckled over, dry retching, forcing himself to keep the rising bile down. Lachlan quickly covered his mouth and nostrils with his handkerchief. Coughing, he inched closer and peered into the capsule. It was hard to tell exactly how long this body had been left to rot. It could have been weeks, maybe longer.

Unseeing eyes bulged from a ghastly white, bloated face. The hair hung in lank, yellow strands. The corpse was a naked female and the skin, peeling away, was covered in the ugly green and purplish stains of putrefaction. Liquid trailed from the nostrils and mouth, and the features had long since begun to liquefy.

Lachlan slammed the lid shut. No point corrupting the air further until they’d organised the removal of the body.

‘I say we get the hell outta here,’ said Aroney.

‘No argument here.’ Lachlan indicated the rest of the basement. ‘But we need to give the rest of this place a thorough search. Find out just what this is all about.’ Looking about as he spoke, he noticed the body size sack, made of foil type material, that lay nearby.

‘Oh, my God.’ Jennifer gave Carly an incredulous look as the first page of the Longer Life web site filled the screen

She read and then re-read the heads and sub-heads to the opening section:

Your introduction to death and its aftermath: suspension as a life alternative.

The beliefs and mechanics of cryonic suspension.

‘Long term frozen bodies,’ Jennifer muttered in realisation.

‘Is that what cryonics is?’ Carly asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know much about it?’

‘No. Not much at all.’

Carly sucked in a deep breath. Jennifer saw tears forming in the corners of her daughter’s eyes.

‘So Dad wasn’t alive all these years. He was killed eighteen years ago, then frozen. And hidden.’

Jennifer gripped her daughter’s arm. ‘I know it’s a shock but hang in there. We’ve got to see this through, for your father’s sake.’

‘I know. I’ll be okay.’

They squeezed each others hands in a gesture of support, then turned back to the computer screen and the first page of the text:

It began in 1964 with the publication of The Prospect of Immortality by American physicist, Robert Ettinger. He began developing his theory after investigating the work of a French biologist who had used glycerol to freeze frog sperm.

Ettinger proposed that human beings could be frozen with a minimum of cellular damage. Be perfectly preserved until, in some future time, they could be revived and cured of whatever illness caused their death. Ettinger’s book was not simply a cold clinical essay of scientific facts and theories, he had the stamp of the visionary. Ettinger envisaged a future society where immortality was commonplace.

There was no support from the scientific community, but Ettinger’s book sold well and became a Book Of The Month Club selection. Ettinger’s idea took hold, briefly, with the general public: people near death from illness or accidentally killed in accidents, frozen and kept in suspension until the medical world could cure them or bring them back to life.

Ettinger’s use of the term cryonics found its way into the language of the mass media but the physicist did not get involved personally in setting up any organisations. Those he inspired later formed the Eastern Cryonics Society. The group was established to develop and produce cryonic suspension techniques, and to promote the cause as widely as possible, but to this day the practice remains mostly unpublicised.

And one of those groups, thought Jennifer, was Lifelines Inc., later to become Longer Life.

‘It’s like the modern world’s answer to the ancient Egyptian mummification process,’ Jennifer said to Carly.

The information in the article was comprehensive, complete with diagrams and photographs. Cryonics was clearly the immortalists’ extension, some would say flight of fancy, from the actual science of cryobiology. The cryobiologist studied the effects of cold temperatures on living creatures. Cells, tissues and organs had successfully been frozen and preserved. Those applications had particular use in surgery, and the past two decades had seen rapid growth world wide in cryosurgery.

Outside the established scientific and medical communities, the cryonicists trod their own maverick path. They believed that once a person died, immediate freezing would preserve the body in a near-life state.

The first client had been a seventy-four year old American lung cancer patient named James Bedford, frozen at the moment of clinical death in 1967. Since then thousands of people had signed up for the service with various suppliers. Thus far more than fifty had been cryonically frozen.

The court case in the 90’s was due to a family that legally challenged their father’s will. He had wanted his head cryonically frozen by LifeLines Inc. The children were against it. The case was overturned but not before local media headlines about frozen heads had cast a gruesome public image on the cryonics firm. They’d changed their name and location, for a fresh start.

Jennifer wondered what it would be like to awaken, cured of your illness and brought back to life, to continue living in a far flung future society. She didn’t believe it was possible. Surely a human being, whether dead or alive at the time of freezing, couldn’t re-awaken after centuries, or even decades. But these people not only believed it, they were committed to it as an alternative approach to life and death.

What possible connection, she wondered, had Brian had to any of this?

Rory McConnell tapped away on his computer keyboard until he heard the knock at the door. Helen Shawcross stood there, wide smile, dressed suggestively in a tight fitting cotton blouse and denim shorts fashionably frayed around the edges. Two small suitcases stood beside her.

‘What are you doing here?’ Rory snapped.

Her smile crumbled. ‘Nice to see you too, lover.’

‘Well?’

‘I’ve had it with Henry. Couldn’t spend another day in that mausoleum he calls home. I decided - what the hell - to move in with you for a while. Your other friend won’t mind, will she?’

‘For God’s sake, Helen, it’s over. I was going to text you today. Break the news.’

‘Text me?’ She glared at him.

‘It’s been a lot of fun but it’s run its course. It’s over. We’re done.’

‘Done? You used me to get what you wanted, information for your hot shot news stories, then you tell me it’s over!’

‘Don’t make me call the cops and have you cited for stalking, Helen. Leave with a little dignity, eh?’ He slammed the door.

She stood there, fuming, clenching her fists. She wanted to kick the door in, scream at him, throw whatever she could lay her hands on at him. Instead, she picked up the suitcases and walked away. She could get back to the house at Vaucluse, unpack, and Henry would be none the wiser. He wasn’t fun anymore, and he was fast losing everything that made him useful, but he’d have to do for a little while longer.

‘Sure you don’t want to take a break from this?’ Jennifer asked. ‘Leave me with it awhile.’

Carly’s eyes had dried but her expression remained grim, her body stiff with the tension of their extraordinary discovery. ‘No, Mum, I want to read on. I need to know how and why this happened. And who was responsible.’

Jennifer gave her a re-assuring smile. It took every ounce of her inner strength to remain calm, to focus on the information. She was glad Carly was with her. Her hand moved to the mouse again and she clicked to the next page:

‘This is the cryonics process -

The body is placed in a watertight sack of strong thin material. In order to prevent cellular damage, the body is perfused with an anti-freeze Ringers lactate solution. The perfusion is performed with a surgical pump. It continues until the blood, draining from the right jugular vein via a tube is colourless.’

This, thought Jennifer, explained the puncture to Brian’s throat, not evident with the other victims because of the garrotte wounds to the same area. Draining the blood and replacing it with an anti-freeze solution minimised the damage to the body’s fluids.

‘A second perfusion is then performed with a cooled solution of glycerol in the lactate solution.

The next step is to wrap the bloodless body in heavy-duty aluminium foil, preventing ice crystallisation and external cell damage. Strapped to a slab, the body is then inserted into the capsule.

The capsule resembles a giant thermos flask, eight feet tall and thirty inches in diameter. Inside it, the body floats vertically in minus 320F liquid nitrogen, which must be replaced once a month. The body can be preserved like this indefinitely.

It is not the goal of cryonicists to simply reverse the freezing process once a body can be medically revived. It is equally important for the patient to be fully restored to good health - to return to an active, satisfying lifestyle.’

Jennifer wondered whether the cryonics societies could have imagined that their extraordinary system, would be used by a demented killer for an entirely different purpose.

She reached across the desk for her cell phone. ‘We should let Detective Lachlan know what we’ve discovered.’ She phoned the special unit.

Max Bryant answered. ‘He’s out of the office, Ms Parkes,’ he said gruffly. ‘But he’s on the mobile and asked to be called with anything important.’

‘It’s Jennifer Parkes,’ Lachlan said to Aroney, ‘but I can barely understand her. Too much interference. I’m going outside.’ With the phone pressed to his ear, he retraced his steps to the area immediately outside the warehouse basement.

Despite his amazement, he listened without interruption as Jennifer quickly outlined what she and Carly had learnt so far.

‘That explains what Aroney and I have found here,’ he responded. ‘Listen, Jennifer, I can’t stop and talk right now. Can you phone Bryant back and give him that web address for Longer Life?

‘Consider it done.’

Lachlan rejoined Aroney, who was poking around at the wall opposite the cylinders. Aroney had identified a pile of canisters marked liquid nitrogen.

There were several tables with packages of foil. Once again Lachlan thought of the hum that would have once pervaded this room, the quiet, sinister energy of the machines. The thought unnerved him. He told Aroney what he’d learned from Jennifer about the cryonics.

Aroney whistled. ‘Explains how those missing people hadn’t aged. I remember reading something about cryonics in the papers, years ago. That’s where I’ve seen pictures of these containers. I didn’t realise how much it had grown over there in the US. So what do you think, Neil? Brian Parkes and the others were murdered in the 90’s and have been here, perfectly preserved, until just recently?’

‘Yes. At which point the killer reversed the process, then re-dressed them and dumped them back where they were last seen.’

‘And the body over there?’

‘My theory is that the cylinder was faulty. That body began to decompose, very, very slowly, over the years. When the killer found out, he simply left the body there.’

‘Why go to all this bother and expense?’ Aroney said. ‘Shit, why not just bury them somewhere in the bush in the first place?’

‘Perhaps because they’d have been found, eventually,’ Lachlan suggested. ‘No chance of that here. Who’d come scrounging around the basement of a little used, Kaplan owned warehouse? But I expect there’s more to it than that. This killer is in it for the thrill, there appears to be no other motivating factor. By freezing his kills and storing them here he had his own private trophy room.’

Aroney winced. ‘Sick bastard. It’s as if he was trying to go one better than someone like Ted Bundy.’

They walked across to the rows of metal filing cabinets at the far end, and began to rifle through the drawers.

‘Air tight plastic bags,’ Aroney said. ‘To keep everything in its original condition.’

‘Every eventuality was planned for, Ron. Containers over there stored the blood …’ Lachlan had seen such containers at the Red Cross blood bank, refrigerated units that could cryo freeze blood, in liquid nitrogen. The blood was treated with a special coolant, used for the long-term storage of rare blood types. ‘The cryonicists didn’t necessarily keep the blood, in some cases they didn’t even keep the whole body, just the head. But this demented killer has gone the whole hog - bodies, blood, clothing, items, preserved thanks to LifeLines/Longer Life.’

Lachlan paused a moment, allowing the facts to settle in. Then he continued: ‘The more I think of it, the perfect trophy room for a psychotic mind like this one. And he prepared everything he needed to put the bodies back - those containers of fresh water …’

‘Yeah. To douse Parkes’ clothing, recreating the conditions of the night he vanished. But why thaw out the original six now? Where’s the killer been..?’ Aroney’s voice trailed off. ‘What’s this?’

Lachlan joined him and looked into a draw full of standard size envelopes. Many had been opened. All had been posted at varying intervals over the years. Aroney pulled out the typewritten page from one. ‘Letters?’ he said with a note of puzzlement. He read aloud:

‘Dear Mother,

They’re still watching me, you know. After all these years, even though it’s a long time since I’ve tried anything. Sometimes I wonder how I’ve managed to remain sane. Of course, the girls who are sent help …’