Fourth Body

He stood in the doorway with rain pouring off his coat, and his face was the color of old putty.

"Put your jacket on," said Leo. "We've got a fourth."

I looked at his hands. In the right was a paper cup of black coffee, trembling a little at the rim. In the left, a radio, turned down to a murmur. His hair was plastered flat. He smelled of wet wool and sweat and the sour breath of a man who has been awake too long, and he had a look in his eyes that I had never seen there. It was not alarm. Alarm is quick and bright. This was a long, dull, dawning dread, the look of a man who has put his finger on a crack in a wall and found that the whole house has been hollow all along.

"Where?" I said.

"Calloway Tower. Market and Seventeenth." He swallowed. "Elevator."

"Whose?"

"Girl called Kaylee Rhodes. Thirty-three. Does one of those, uh, internet shows."

I took my coat from the hook.

My hands were perfectly steady. I noticed this as I would have noticed a stranger's. I buttoned the waistcoat, adjusted my spectacles, put the folder in my briefcase, locked the drawer, and followed him out through the dark corridor with the sensation of a man stepping, willingly, into a very deep river.

…

The Calloway Tower stands forty stories over Market Street, a sheer black spire of glass and brushed steel, which a magazine once called the most sophisticated residential address in the Commonwealth. It had a doorman. It had a lobby with a fountain. It had, on its ground floor, a wine bar whose menu I had once looked at and put down.

At four-forty in the morning it looked like the set of a disaster film.

Six police cruisers and an ambulance were nosed up on the pavement in a ragged crescent, their lights turning silently through the rain. A fire engine stood at the curb, its engine ticking. Red and blue light washed back and forth across the glass front of the building, so that for a moment it seemed to ripple like water. A small crowd of residents in dressing gowns and raincoats had been herded behind the yellow tape, and stood there with their arms folded, gawping, a few of them filming with their phones. A woman in a fur coat was weeping into a poodle.

Leo showed his badge to a patrolman and the tape lifted. We went through.

The lobby was warm and bright and smelled of lilies. Water ran off us onto the marble. A young fireman in a yellow slicker was leaning on the concierge's desk with his helmet under his arm, looking sick. As we passed he gave a jerk of the chin, toward the bank of elevators.

"Third car," he said. "Fourteenth floor. They had to cut her out."

The third elevator door stood open on an empty shaft. The cage itself had been jacked up through the door by a pair of hydraulic spreaders, the same grim machines that peel a car like a tin of sardines, and lay half out of the shaft at an angle, with its panel lights still glowing. The shriek of the metal as it gave must have been unholy. Even now the air in the lobby carried a thin burned smell, steel on steel.

We took the stairs.

…

I will not pretend that I was composed.

Fourteen flights of fire stairs, concrete and gray, lit by a bar of fluorescent tubes. A smell of damp cement, and, as we climbed, a sweeter, fainter, more intimate smell that I did not at first place. Our footsteps rang. On the ninth landing Leo stopped with a hand on the rail, breathing hard, and I waited for him without a word. On the twelfth we passed two officers, pale, smoking in the stairwell, who stood aside to let us go by. One of them crossed himself.

The fourteenth-floor corridor was long and carpeted in cream. It had mirrored panels and brass wall-sconces and a smell of someone else's expensive perfume. Halfway down, a door stood open into the elevator lobby, and in the door stood a woman in a surgical gown, with a camera.

"Captain," she said. "Doctor."

"Hannah," said Leo.

Dr. Hannah Frost was perhaps forty. She was tall and thin and very pale, with high cheekbones and white-blonde hair scraped back under a paper cap. She had a surgeon's hands, long-fingered and exact. She had, I had been told, joined the medical examiner's office the previous spring, after the retirement of someone whose name nobody liked to mention; and she wore the careful, slightly brittle composure of a woman who has stepped into a dead man's shoes and is very much afraid of the pinch.

"Dr. Vaughn," she said. "I've heard about you."

"How terrible."

"Not that terrible." A very faint smile. "Come and see."

…

They had left the cage as they found it.

It stood in the elevator lobby, tilted slightly, with its doors dragged open like the jaws of a trap. The interior was lit by the harsh white glare of the portable lamps that the fire crew had set up. It was a small box, five feet by six, paneled in dark mirror-polished wood. A brass handrail ran round three sides. In the back wall, the control panel, a column of lit buttons.

In the corner, on the floor, with her knees drawn up, sat a young woman.

I had seen her face on television. I had seen her, a few hours earlier, in my mind, with her wide Instagram smile and her ropes of tawny hair. She did not look like that now. She wore a white silk slip dress, soaked dark at the hem, twisted and torn at one shoulder. Her bare feet were drawn up against her. Her hair had come undone. And her face—

I must describe her face, because I looked at it for a long time.

It was frozen. I use the word exactly. The muscles had set in the instant of death, as they do, and had held their last expression like wax in a mold. The mouth stood wide open. The jaw hung. The eyes, which had been green, were open to their full extent and bulging, showing a thin rim of white all the way round the iris, fixed on something a few inches in front of the nose. The eyebrows were raised to the hairline. The skin of the forehead was drawn into a tight ladder of lines.

It was not the expression of a woman who has slipped, and fainted, and died in her sleep. It was the face of someone who had seen the world end.

And her hands.

She had raised them to her chest, as if to push something away. I saw them in the lamp's glare: ten fingers, ten nails, every one of them broken. The tips were scraped raw. Blood had dried in dark trails down both palms and across the wrists. And on the wall beside her, at about the height of her shoulder, the cream-colored vinyl paper had been shredded in long ragged strips, ten parallel grooves, scored to the plaster, clotted with red. She had clawed at the wall until her fingers broke.

"Time of death?" said Leo, hoarsely.

"Between midnight and one," said Hannah. "She was found at one-fifty by the night security officer, when the car failed to respond to the call. She'd been trapped about three hours."

"Cause?"

"I'll know on the table." She tipped her head. "But I'll give you a preliminary. Panic attack. Sudden cardiac arrhythmia. There's a history of claustrophobia in her file, her management company told us. She was seen leaving a party on the thirty-fifth floor at about nine, and then the car stuck between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors at eleven thirty-eight." She shrugged. "The car's ventilation was working. The oxygen level was normal, I measured it myself. She had air for twelve hours. She wasn't injured. There's no sign of assault. There's just—" She gestured at the wall. "This."

"Fear," I said.

She looked at me.

"In my experience," said Hannah Frost, a little stiffly, "fear is not a cause of death."

"Nor is it," I said, "a cause of life. And yet we do a good deal of both."

…

Leo made a sound that might have been a laugh.

"Same as Magnus's three," he said. "Same exact thing. Ten fingers. Same wall. The ones he pulled out of the system." He turned his face toward me. "Doc, tell me I'm seeing it wrong."

I did not tell him that.

I was looking at the corpse. I was looking, to be more exact, at the line of her mouth, at the creases that ran from the corners of her nostrils to the corners of her lips, and at the place where the muscles of the jaw met the soft tissue under the ear. They did not belong. They were the muscles of a woman who had been screaming, but they had also been clenched. The mandible was thrown forward. The lips were drawn back from the teeth in a rictus I have seen on soldiers and on hanged men, and have seen nowhere else.

She had not died of fear alone. She had died of something she had understood.

I knelt.

It took some doing. The lobby floor was wet, and there was an arrangement of cables around the cage that required careful stepping. Hannah made a noise of protest. Leo said, "Let him." I crouched on the threshold of the elevator, ten inches from the dead woman's face, and breathed out slowly through my nose, and then in.

I closed my eyes.

I am aware of how this must sound. I am aware that it is the kind of gesture one sees in a poor film. But there is nothing mystical about it. The sense of smell is the oldest of the senses, wired directly to the part of the brain that stores memory and judges threat. It is the only one that cannot be fooled by a trick of the light. If I wished to know what had happened in that cage, I needed to be able to ask the air, and the air does not answer when one's eyes are open.

So I shut them out, and left the lamplight behind, and began to breathe.

Blood. Old copper, dried. Her own.

Perfume. Something expensive, vanilla and oud, sweet and heavy. On the neck.

Sweat. A great deal. The sour animal reek of a body that has been afraid.

Grease. A thin film of machine oil on the cables above.

Disinfectant. Bleach. From the fire crew's boots.

I held my breath. I let it out.

And then, from somewhere under all of it, very faint, no more than a hair's breadth of scent, laid down so thinly that I might have imagined it, came a smell I knew.

It was sweet. It was sharp. It had a kind of dry, bitter, almond-shell undertone that sat at the back of the nose like the memory of a sneeze.

Bitter almonds.

I opened my eyes.

Atticus Vaughn crouched in a dead woman's elevator, with the rain drumming on the roof, and understood two things at once. The first was that nobody else in the room could smell it. The second was that someone had meant him to.