The Colour of Death (8 page)

Kostakis reached down with gloved hands and turned Vega’s head so the face became visible.  “Because of this.”  Jordache’s eyes were drawn initially to the deep vicious gash on Vega’s throat.  The killer was so powerful his knife had virtually severed the head with what appeared to be a single slice.  Then Jordache registered the bloodstained sheet of paper stapled to Vega’s forehead, obscuring his face.  A two-line message had been written on the paper in colored marker pen, each capital letter a different color:

SERVE THE DEMON
SAVE THE ANGEL

Why had the killer invested precious time doing that?
Jordache wondered.

“We don’t know what the message means yet,” Kostakis said.  “But look at what it’s written on.”  Jordache peered closer at the soiled paper and finally understood why Kostakis had called him.  “See what I mean about sensitive?”

Jordache mentally raced through the implications.  “Yes, Phil, I see what you mean.”  He instantly thought of Nathan Fox and wondered what the psychiatrist would make of it.

“What do you want to do, Chief?”

“I want to find the bastard who did this, that’s what I want to do.”

“But do we tell—”

“Nope.  We tell no one.  Not yet.  Think about it, Phil.  What good would it do?”  He thought of the message, wondering what it might mean.  “We got to be real careful about this.  With all the media attention the only connection could be in the killer’s sick mind.  I figure we keep this quiet for now and focus on what we do best:  examine the crime scene evidence for clues and motive — anything that explains what’s going on in the killer’s mind — and look for witnesses.  Someone must have seen something.”

Kostakis nodded.  “But what do you think, Chief?  Off the record?”

Despite his recent meal and current surroundings, Jordache had a sudden, irrational craving for the comfort of a cholesterol-rich cheeseburger.  “Off the record, Phil, I don’t know.  But I got a bad feeling we’re going to find out soon enough.”

Chapter 10

Oblivious to events unfolding across town, Jane Doe slumbered in her bed at Tranquil Waters.  She had declined the 10mg of diazepam and 50mg of chlorpromazine prescribed to help her sleep.  Her encounter with Fox had calmed her and she felt more comfortable in her new room, especially after moving the bed into the center.

When sleep came, however, the fragmented recurring nightmares that had plagued her since losing her memory returned:  crazed horses, nostrils flared in panic, galloping in ever-decreasing circles; a giant eye staring down at her from a high tower; a faceless figure — a man and yet somehow inhuman — chasing her frantically through the rooms of a silent hotel occupied only by the dead.

Hours from dawn, just as her malevolent pursuer reached out to grip her shoulder and drag her back from whence he came, she awoke screaming.  All hope of sleep banished, she lay awake until the light came, waiting for Nathan Fox to help reassemble the pieces of her shattered identity and make sense of the madness that threatened to engulf her.

The
mawashi geri
hit the man cleanly and he fell to the mat with a satisfying grunt.  After delivering the roundhouse kick, Nathan Fox instantly opened his eyes, regained his balance and stood over the fallen man.

“
Yame
,” shouted the sensei from the side of the mat, ordering the fight to stop.  Fox was panting hard with exertion, his pounding heart pumping blood through his veins.  His karate
giri
was saturated with sweat but he felt exhilarated.  After leaving Tranquil Waters he had gone straight to the karate dojo for his weekly bout of
jiyu kumite
, advanced free sparring.  Karate enabled him not only to vent his aggression and express his passion but also to relieve the stresses of the job.  This evening, however, no amount of karate could take his mind off what the orderly had told him about Jane Doe’s hallucinations.  Fox bowed and helped his opponent to his feet.

“You OK, Leo?”

The man smiled.  “Only a little hurt pride.  I swear, Nathan, I’m going to get you one of these days.”

As they left the mat, the aged but still formidable Sensei Daichi tapped Fox on the shoulder.  “Nathan
san
, you want to enter competition next month?”

“You know I haven’t competed in years, Sensei.  Anyway, I haven’t practiced enough.”

Daichi shook his head.  “I don’t agree.  I think you better now you don’t train so hard.  More relaxed.  More natural.”  He shrugged.  “Perhaps next time.”

Fox smiled at his mentor.  “Perhaps.”

“Hey, Nathan, some of the guys are grabbing a beer at Scooters,” Leo said.  “You coming?”

“Not tonight, Leo.  Next week.”

“Leo laughed.  “Hope she’s worth it, my friend.”

After a hot shower Fox returned to his apartment in north-west Portland.  The neighborhood boasted many period houses and apartments but his open-plan home on the top floor of a brand new circular tower block was not one of them.  He had always preferred the space and light of modern buildings to the draughts, rattling windows, cracked walls and overrated ‘character’ of older homes.  He opened a cold bottle of Deschutes Cascade ale from the kitchen and cooked himself a steak — medium rare with a just a blush of red in the middle.

As he sipped his beer and prepared a Caesar salad he checked his voicemail.  There was a message from his uncle Frank in England inviting him to come to Cornwall to spend Christmas with his relations of his father’s side.  Christmas was half a year away.  Fox smiled affectionately at the thought of his uncle Frank, who was not an organized man, planning so far ahead .  He checked his watch.  The time difference meant he’d have to wait to call his uncle back.  Next was a bland message from Kate in New York and he felt a stab of guilty relief that he’d been out when she’d called.  They had been casually dating for three months and Kate had been hinting at moving into his apartment when, thankfully, her company had offered her a promotion to New York.  At first she had called him every day, now she only called him a couple of times a week, usually when he was out.  The thought that she might also be avoiding him didn’t upset Fox.

Sitting down to eat at the dining table, he ignored the plasma television on the wall above the fireplace and the panoramic views of Portland through the curved windows of the circular tower.  Instead he found himself reaching for the typescript document his aunt had given him that morning.  As he tried to concentrate on the words his mind kept wandering back to his encounter with Jane Doe and the orderly’s revelations about her hallucinations.  The same questions kept looping in his mind:  how had a woman with total memory loss known what had happened in that room all those years ago?  Could she have overheard someone talking about it and registered it subconsciously?  She had only been at Tranquil Waters a few hours but perhaps she had heard something while in Oregon State or known about it in her earlier life, before her amnesia.  But how? 
How?

When he went to bed and eventually fell asleep his unconscious continued trying to process what his logical mind could not.  He woke the next morning exhausted, dragged himself out of bed, ate a quick breakfast, checked on his aunt, then hurried to the clinic.  Professor Fullelove was in meetings all morning but he could guess her brisk response.  “There’ll be a perfectly logical explanation, Nathan, so don’t worry about understanding it now.  Let it become clear as you treat her.”

Treat what?  Her amnesia?  Her hallucinations?  Usually he would focus on the amnesia first, trying to discover the identity she had lost.  Most amnesiacs retained good operational memory so he would try to gain a picture of her past life by testing her for unforgotten skills, such as languages, sports and social activities.  Then he would take her back to the night of the fire, to the time when all knowledge of her old life had died and Jane Doe’s new identity had been born.  But the orderly’s revelation had made him question this approach.  Before seeing Jane Doe again, he decided to search the patient records of the original Pine Hills Psychiatric Hospital.

As he sat alone in the small windowless basement room that housed the clinic’s computer archive, his unease increased when he found Frank Bartlett’s file.  The report on his death by suicide confirmed everything the orderly had told him.  More searches revealed that twenty years before Bartlett’s death, another man had committed suicide in the same room — using his pajamas to hang himself from the ceiling beam, which had since been removed.

Fox played back the voice recording he’d made of Jane Doe recounting her hallucination, comparing it to the notes on Frank Bartlett’s file and the report on the hanging man.  They were virtually identical — chillingly so.  He went back to Jane Doe’s slim file.  The police report from the night she had been found raised more questions than it answered.  Dr. Tozer’s psychiatric assessments at Oregon State provided a few useful insights, and he was beginning to doubt Tozer’s assumption that she was psychotic.

Psychotic patients lost contact with reality.  They believed and accepted their hallucinations, voice and urges unquestioningly — sometimes enjoying them.  They had little insight into their own condition, felt no anxiety or guilt for their actions, no empathy for their victims and were convinced they were completely sane.  People suffering with neuroses, however, were different.  They were aware that their experiences — whether hallucinations, anxieties, thoughts or compulsions — were irrational and found them terrifying and repugnant.  Essentially psychotics embraced their irrational experiences while neurotics fought them.  Jane Doe was fighting hers with every fiber of her being.

Only when he reread the brief accounts of Jane Doe’s hallucinations at Oregon State and checked that hospital’s online files did he discover something interesting enough to make him return to the Pine Hills patient records and conduct more searches.  The pattern that emerged sowed a disturbing thought in his mind.  Irrational and resistant to logic, the notion quickly took root and began to grow.  When he printed off his findings and placed them in his briefcase, he discovered another document that fed the insane but insistent idea blossoming in his mind.  As he studied it, he began scribbling more notes.  Most were questions, impossible questions.  He was reaching across to make a phone call when he noticed the clock on the wall.  It was time to see Jane Doe.

Chapter 11

Jane Doe seemed comfortable in her new room so Fox had arranged to meet her there.  As he walked through the new wing, he decided not to tell her about the suicides until it was necessary and helpful to do so.  When he arrived at her room Jane Doe opened the door before he could knock.  Her beautiful face looked tired but expectant.

“Hello, Dr. Fox,” she said, ushering him into the room and gesturing to the chair by the window.  “Welcome to my humble abode.”

Then two things happened.

The first wasn’t significant in itself, merely embarrassing, but Jane Doe’s reaction
was
significant:  when Fox placed his briefcase on the table and moved to the chair he tripped on a shoe she had left on the floor.  As he broke his fall, he turned his right wrist.  Anyone else would have missed the small hand movement she made as she apologized and tried to help him up, but it was the exact same gesture Fox would have made if he’d been sitting in her place and seen what she’d just seen:  she rubbed her left wrist.

He sat on the chair and watched her sit cross-legged on the bed.  “Did you feel that?” he asked.  “Did your wrist hurt when I fell?”

“Only a little.”

He thought this interesting but not necessarily relevant as he looked around the room.  “Why’s the bed in the center of the room?”

“It feels more comfortable away from the walls.”

He considered this and her fear of being trapped in rooms and wondered again if she could have been one of the Russian traffickers’ captives.  “Do you have any memory of the place you rescued those girls from?  Or the men holding them captive?”

She shook her head.  “None at all.  I can’t even remember breaking the girls out.  Did anyone there recognize me?”

It was Fox’s turn to shake his head.  “No.  No one claims to have seen you before that night.”  He gestured to her neck.  “May I see that?”

Her hand shot up and gripped her locket protectively.  “Why?”

“I just wanted to see the photograph inside.”

“It’s of a baby.”  She made no move to show it to him.

“Do you know who the baby is?”

“No.  But I must have done once.”

He smiled.  “The locket’s important to you, isn’t it?”

“It’s my only link to who I was.”

He nodded and retrieved her medical file from his briefcase.  “I understand.”

Then the second thing happened.

As he laid her file on his lap she pointed to the name written on the cover and said, “I kind of like my new name.  I like the way it tastes on the tip of my tongue.”

“The way it
tastes
?”

“Yes.”

“What does ‘Jane Doe’ taste of?”

“Salmon and chives.”

“What does my name taste of?”

“You don’t know the taste of your own name?”

“What does it taste like to you?”

She closed her eyes and said his name slowly, syllable by syllable, savoring it.  “Doc-tor Na-than Fox.”  She smiled.  “Cider and cream.  Quite yummy.”

This bizarre exchange, and the way she had stroked her wrist, made what was already an intriguing case even more so.  Then he remembered how she attributed colored auras to people and cursed himself for not making the connection earlier.  He took a pen and notepad from his jacket and scribbled down a list.  It wasn’t exclusive but it covered every variety he could think of off the top of his head.  He immediately ticked off the first two entries.  Then on a blank page he wrote a large letter A in black ink and showed it to her.  “What color is this letter?”