The Dead Man: Face of Evil Read online

  …and the maggots squirming beneath his bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  November 19, 2010

  The original lodge at Mammoth Peaks was essentially a massive log cabin with several stone chimneys. It was the only authentic building in the resort. The stores, restaurants, and condos mimicked the look of the lodge, with facades of fake stone and artificially weathered timber that might not have seemed so artificial if the real thing wasn't right next door.

  Matt and Rachel were staying in the lodge, surrounded by the natural, rustic warmth of that aged timber, in a room with a huge fireplace and a bed made of carved wood that was eerily similar to the one in Matt's cabin.

  Rachel didn't know that, since she'd never been in Matt's bedroom, and thought his discomfort was the lingering result of the embarrassing "mix-up" in their reservations that meant they now had to share a room.

  "I am so sorry about this," Matt said. “I really did reserve two rooms."

  "You don't have to keep apologizing," she said. “I honestly don't mind."

  Especially since she'd dishonestly canceled the reservation herself and was relieved when the desk clerk told them the hotel was entirely booked up.

  "You can take the bed," Matt said. “I'll be fine on the couch."

  She stepped close to him and draped her arms around his neck. “I want to sleep with you."

  Rachel could feel him stiffen up, but not in the way she would have liked. His shoulders got tight and he pulled ever so slightly away from her. She responded by pressing herself against him and giving him a deep, tender kiss.

  She could feel him relax, and his hands found the small of her back. He didn't move away.

  "I don't know if I am ready for this," he said.

  Rachel never knew a man who wasn't ready for sex, and yet here he was, going so achingly, frustratingly slow. In a way, it was sexy, like the longest foreplay ever. But she was ready for it to end.

  "All I'm asking is for you to hold me close, to let me fall asleep in your arms, and to let me wake up beside you in the morning," she said. “Does that really sound so awful?"

  "No, it doesn't." He kissed her softly. “It sounds very nice."

  Rachel resisted the temptation to suggest that they take a little nap right now, which was smart, since it wasn't even eleven a.m. yet.

  She smiled and broke away from him.

  "Let's hit the slopes," she said.

  They took the lift up the peak, and then Rachel led Matt away from the crowds to her favorite spot, far from the day-trippers from King City, to a secluded, double-black-diamond run that was pure virgin powder.

  Chopping wood was how Matthew Cahill got in tune with himself and the world. For Rachel, it was skiing. The mountain was her church, and skiing was her form of worship.

  When she was skiing, she became one with the mountain, the snow, and the earth.

  Within moments of beginning their run, she shot ahead of Matt and her rhythm of skiing became fluid and instinctive. It was almost as if she'd fallen into a trance, her body perfectly tuned to the changing terrain beneath her skis. She wasn't even aware of the motions that went into what she was doing—some unconscious part of her mind was doing that. Instead, she simply reveled in the invigorating speed, the cold air whipping at her bare cheeks.

  It wasn't the same for Matt, who trailed far behind her. Skiing required his complete concentration. He was good at the sport, but he was acutely aware of each decision and move, of how fast he was going and how one mistake could send him flying smack into the trees that lined their narrow path.

  The run was full of sudden drops and big air, offering Rachel the giddy sensation of flying into the sharp, blue sky, before landing again on the snow and rocketing on down the glade.

  For her, catching air was pure freedom and unadulterated joy, comparable to nothing else except, perhaps, the body-quaking climax she fully expected to have with Matthew Cahill when they got back to the lodge.

  For Matt, the leaps were more terrifying than exhilarating, the joy more from the relief that he'd landed safely than from the thrill of momentary flight.

  But Matt marveled at Rachel's grace, how she somehow seemed connected to the landscape and yet was totally free. Her happiness, her soaring spirit, was conveyed in every natural, flowing movement that she made.

  Maybe if he could let go, and stop thinking about his skiing instead of just doing it, he might experience the same wondrous freedom that she was.

  Let go.

  God, the idea was appealing.

  What would it be like to just relax, to do something without thinking, to allow himself the risk, and perhaps the exhilaration, of making a mistake, of getting hurt?

  Let go.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  And that's when he noticed, for the first time, just how formfitting Rachel's ski suit was and how good the form was that it fit.

  She was beautiful.

  How could he not have noticed that before?

  And he knew she genuinely cared about him, that there was depth to her feelings beyond mere attraction.

  So why was he denying her the affection, the tenderness, and the intimacy that she obviously wanted?

  Why was he denying himself?

  They could be good together, if he could just…

  Let go.

  Rachel would have been gratified to know how something as simple as skiing, how just being herself, was allowing Matt to really see her, to finally appreciate all that she was offering him.

  But at that moment, she was so lost in her personal reverie, her unity with the mountain, that she wasn't thinking of him at all.

  Rachel didn't realize how far ahead of him she was until she heard the thunderous crack.

  Matt felt it more than heard it, a deep rumble as much in the air as it was under his feet. He looked over his shoulder and saw the mountain shear apart, a massive, roiling wave of snow rushing up behind him.

  Avalanche.

  He looked ahead and saw Rachel looking back at him in horror.

  "Go! Go!" he yelled.

  She hunched down and shot forward, and so did he, trying to build up speed but knowing there was no way he could escape what was coming. He could feel the enormity of it, building in strength, chewing up snow, snapping trees, blasting cold air and ice against his back.

  Rachel put everything she had into her arms, into her poles, into skiing faster than she ever had before.

  There was a ravine ahead of them. If they could leap over it to the other side, they stood a chance of survival.

  Matt saw what she had in mind and knew she'd make it. He glanced over his shoulder, and there it was.

  The mountain.

  Right in his face.

  Rachel sailed over the ravine, knowing as she shot through the air that she was alive, more so in that moment that she'd ever been before.

  And she knew that she would survive.

  She hit the ground and turned to face what was coming, which she hoped would be the sight of Matt arcing through the air ahead of the avalanche.

  But he was gone, lost in tons of cascading snow and trees and rock that spilled into the chasm with an earthshaking roar that was so loud, Rachel couldn't even hear her own scream.

  CHAPTER NINE

  February 20, 2011

  If a skier manages not to be smashed against a tree, or carried over a cliff, or crushed by the weight of the snow and debris, he can survive an avalanche.

  For about twenty minutes.

  After that, most survivors of the initial impact and burial will die of asphyxiation.

  A few lucky ones might find a pocket of air and hold on as their body temperature plummets and blood is diverted from their extremities to their vital organs.

  The cruel truth, though, is that even if they manage to be rescued alive, they are still very likely to die, except in the cushy comfort of a hospital bed, a catheter and an IV shoved into them, instead of in an icy grave.

  T
he key to surviving an avalanche is to be rescued within that first, critical half hour.

  Matthew Cahill was under the ice for three months.

  The facts of the case were unbelievable, so Dr. Jack Travis, the trauma specialist on call in the emergency room, chose to ignore them and deal instead with what he saw in front of him: a patient suffering from extreme hypothermia, typical of someone buried under the snow for an hour instead of months.

  In all likelihood, Matt was headed right back to the morgue.

  Hypothermia was a condition that Travis, having worked in the ski resort community for a decade, had plenty of experience dealing with.

  Matt's body temperature on arrival was sixty-nine degrees. Travis covered him with heating blankets and put him on an epinephrine drip to elevate his blood pressure.

  The patient was totally unresponsive to stimuli and his pupils didn't react to light, which indicated to Travis that Matt had suffered anoxic encephalopathy—severe and irreversible brain damage.

  Travis ordered a complete metabolic panel, chest X-rays, and an MRI to see just how grim things were. But when the results came back, the doctor was stunned by what he saw.

  The blood oxygen and muscle enzyme counts were normal.

  The lungs were clear.

  And the brain scan showed no swelling at all.

  It was as if Matthew Cahill wasn't hypothermic at all, just deeply asleep.

  But with the nerve response, pupil dilation, and core body temperature of a corpse.

  And he was rapidly defrosting.

  There really was nothing Travis could do except wonder how it was possible and wait to see what happened next.

  So that's exactly what he did.

  He pulled a stool up beside Matt's bed and waited, along with the leaders of nearly every department in the hospital except pediatrics and oncology.

  But even those two department heads found excuses to be in the ER, having heard the news, which was already beginning to spread far beyond Mammoth Peaks.

  In fact, a stooped-backed fisherman floating down the Yangtze River in a flat-bottomed wooden sampan was using his iPhone to catch up on the hash-marked tweets about "the frozen man" at the exact moment that Matthew Cahill startled everyone in the ER by taking a sharp breath and opening his eyes.

  Travis bolted up and leaned over Matt, looking into the man's questioning eyes.

  "You're alive," Travis said.

  It was supposed to be a reassuring statement, but to Matthew Cahill, it sounded more like a question, one that he was expected to answer.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Matt was fortunate that he was taken to a university hospital, not so much for their medical expertise and wide resources, but for their selfishness and greed.

  The university was known in the scientific community for offering lucrative salaries to researchers in return for retaining the patents on anything that anybody created or discovered, accidentally or intentionally, while on their payroll.

  The university was also known among pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, equipment manufacturers, and third world dictatorships as a shameless whore that would sell those patents to whoever offered the best prices, the biggest endowments, the most endowed escorts, the highest bribes, and the most decadent perks.

  So it was in the university's financial interest, over the three short days that followed Matt's admittance to the ER, to downplay reports of his miraculous rebirth and to keep him, and whatever lucrative secrets his body might hold, all to themselves.

  The hospital's public affairs director did an excellent job deflecting press inquiries by not exactly denying the facts, but by pointing out how ridiculous and unbelievable they were, implying that it was all either an elaborate hoax or a big mistake.

  The university was helped in their efforts by Matt's refusal to grant any interviews, take any calls, see any visitors, or allow any information about his condition to be shared with the media.

  But most of all, the university benefitted from the media's short attention span, their insatiable hunger for news, and the timely discovery of video of a teenage Disney starlet enthusiastically engaged in a naked three-way with a couple of shockingly tumescent Nick at Nite boy toys.

  Life after death couldn't compete with celebrity jailbait sex, so Matthew Cahill was forgotten even faster than he'd been discovered.

  But not by the doctors or the scientific community.

  They all wanted to take a sample of something, anything, from Matthew Cahill.

  Unfortunately for them, they would have to make do with what they got from him in the first few hours after his arrival in the hospital. Because after that, as he rapidly regained his strength and became fully aware of his situation, he refused to allow any further blood tests, or X-rays, or CT scans, and rejected virtually all medical treatment beyond IV fluids the first day or so, and stitches to the cut the coroner made.

  Dr. Travis and all the other doctors on the team, now numbering well over a dozen, strenuously objected to Matt's decision, warning him of all sorts of dire outcomes. But having survived the most dire of all outcomes, Matt was not swayed.

  So on the morning of the fourth day, the doctors went off to conspire with hospital administrators and left him alone in his room to ponder his strange fate.

  The last thing he remembered was looking over his shoulder and seeing that wave of snow closing in on him. And then he woke up in the ER.

  He didn't much care how, or why, he'd managed to survive. He certainly didn't consider it a miracle. If anything, it was a cruel joke that his demise was quick, painless, and revocable, while his wife's demise was comparatively slow, unbearably agonizing, and utterly final.

  Where was her reprieve?

  Why was he spared the suffering and finality of death when she was not?

  He would gladly have traded his survival for hers, only nobody had offered him that opportunity.

  But Matt was a practical man, not one for pondering the philosophical meaning of things. He took events as they came.

  And the fact was, he was glad to be alive, to feel the warmth of the sun and the light breeze coming through the open window.

  He didn't care how it had happened.

  He simply accepted that it had.

  And all he wanted to do now was get on with life as if his death had never happened.

  And to see Rachel again. He found himself longing to be in her arms, to feel her warmth, to hold her close as he fell asleep.

  As he thought about that, and how comforting and safe it would feel, he drifted into a light sleep, waking up again moments later when he sensed someone else in the room.

  It was another doctor, standing at the foot of the bed, looking at his chart.

  "I thought I told you that I'm done," Matt said. “You can take that chart with you when you go."

  The doctor looked up, and Matt saw that he wasn't Travis or any of the others on the team.

  But Matt knew him.

  Even without the old-style reflector on his head and the enormous stethoscope around his neck. It was in the mischief in his eyes and the jauntiness of his pose.

  It was Janey's doctor.

  From hell.

  "Aren't you supposed to be dead?" The doctor grinned, toying with his stethoscope. “Should I listen for a heartbeat?"

  Matt remembered the horrible things that had happened when the doctor listened to Janey's heart.

  But that was a nightmare.

  Which meant…

  "You're not real," Matt said.

  "What about all the rest?" The doctor said. “This hospital room, the sunlight through the window, or you in that bed?"

  There was something unnaturally still about the air. The window was open, but the drapes weren't fluttering in the breeze. Matt could see flecks of dust floating in place in the streams of sunlight.

  "All of that will be out there when I open my eyes," Matt said. “But you won't be. You're nothing but a cartoon character in my nightmare."<
br />
  "Has it occurred to you that perhaps it's the other way around?"

  "That doesn't make any sense."

  "And what happened to you does? C'mon, Matt. You were consumed by an avalanche, swept off a cliff, and buried in snow for three months. But here you are, alive and well, not a scratch on you. We both know that's impossible. So what does that tell you?"

  The doctor from hell had a point, one that made more sense than everything else that had happened to Matt over the last three days. Matt was nothing if not pragmatic.

  "I'm dead," Matt said.

  "Don't look so sad," the doctor said. “Death has its advantages. For one thing, there's no need for pricey medical insurance."

  "What are you talking about?" Matt said. “I don't give a shit about insurance."

  "You may not, but we do." It was a woman's voice, and it came from the foot of the bed.

  Matt turned to her. She was a young, short-haired woman with glasses, wearing a crisp white blouse and a tight skirt and holding a file folder to her bosom.

  "We are not in the business of giving away medical care, Mr. Cahill. That wouldn't be much of a business, would it? You left your job at B. Barer and Sons the day before your accident and, as of that moment, lost your company medical coverage. You are uninsured. That means you are financially responsible for all the costs that you have incurred since being—how should I put this?—disinterred. The cost is well into six figures."

  "Who are you?" Matt asked.

  "I told you when I came in. Janet Dorcott, senior vice president of hospital administration. This inability to focus is yet another reason why you should heed your doctor's sound advice and remain here until we know the true nature of your medical condition."

  "I'm dead," Matt said.

  "You would be if not for the heroic efforts of our physicians and the resources of this hospital. But as I said, that all comes with a price."

  "Now this really is a nightmare." Matt turned to the doctor, but he was gone. In fact, so was the strange stillness. The drapes were fluttering in the light breeze again.