A Killer Harvest Read online

  “You’re serious,” Uncle Ben says.

  “There’s more,” Joshua says. “As soon as we left the hospital and went to my grandparents’ house, I started using the Internet. I looked up the man who killed Dad.”

  The room goes quiet again. He looks from his mom to Uncle Ben. They stare at him, transfixed by what he’s saying. Or, more accurately, by what he’s about to say.

  “As soon as I saw him, I knew it was him. I know you’re thinking that because I was searching for it, I already knew what I was going to be seeing. But Uncle Ben asked if there were other people, and there were.”

  “Who else?” his mom asks.

  “I recognized myself too.”

  “The man who killed your dad,” Uncle Ben says. “What was he doing in the dream? Did you see what happened to your dad?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Please, Joshua, it’s important.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” Joshua says. “Even if you believe in cellular memory, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t?” Ben asks.

  “I saw him die,” he says, and he can picture it clearly and he tries not to cry. “I saw those nails being shot into him, and then I saw him fall. But that’s not possible, right? I should only be seeing things from Dad’s point of view. I can see . . . I can also see the way that Simon Bower looked at my dad. I see it like he’s looking at me. I see him standing over me, then pushing me with his foot. I see the look on his face, this completely expressionless look as I . . . as Dad falls. But I see the look on Dad’s face too. He was confused. He was scared. He knew what was coming.”

  His mom has gone completely pale. She’s starting to shake.

  “I remember looking down and seeing nails, as if they were sticking out of my chest, but at the same time I remember pointing the nail gun at him. That’s what I mean when . . .” he says, and his voice catches for a moment but he pushes himself to carry on. “That’s what I mean when I say none of this makes any sense.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  In the two weeks following his rooftop meeting with Erin Murphy, Vincent has done two things while refusing to do a third. The first is he’s been panicking. Erin survived an impossible fall because luck intervened, turning one big fall into two smaller falls, thanks to the signage attached to the exterior wall. The second of those two smaller falls still should have been enough to kill her—and would have, if not for the fact she landed on some poor son of a bitch on the ground. She landed on a homeless guy who, it turns out, used to work at this very hospital more than ten years ago. That unlucky bastard had his back broken and his spleen and kidneys ruptured and is facing months of rehabilitation, and even then he may never walk right. Vincent figures the guy probably isn’t in much of a hurry anyway—where’s the desire to get back on your feet when you’re going to get tossed out onto the street once you do? Maybe the guy will use the time in the hospital to turn his life around.

  For some reason, Fate decided to keep Erin alive, and when Fate pulls some bullshit trickery like that there’s often a reason, and he knows the reason might be so she can miraculously wake up and identify him.

  The second thing Vincent has been doing is his homework on Detective Inspector Ben Kirk. Emotionally bankrupting someone to the point of oblivion requires serious preparation. It also requires a list. On that list are the names of Ben’s parents, Erin’s Murphy’s parents, Ben’s new detective partner, his dead partner’s wife, his dead partner’s son, his friends, two aunties, three uncles, even his cat. The cat might get a pass, but everybody else on the list will be getting rooftop performances of their own—though he knows he can’t use the rooftop trick again. That would create a pattern and enable the police to make a list of their own—this one of suspects. At the moment, according to the news, the police don’t know if she jumped, fell, or was pushed.

  The third thing—the thing he has been refusing to do—is get a job. Not having a job gives him more time to focus on the crazy, and he knows that’s what this is—a whole bunch of crazy balled up tight in his mind that can be cleared away only once he’s finished with Ben. The thing is, he’s happy with the crazy. He doesn’t want it to fade. It all started with Ruby in the woods, and he wants to see how far he can run with it. Anyway, he has some savings. Not a lot, but enough to get him through this.

  He walks into the main entrance of the hospital. There are security cameras out front and dotted around inside. Vincent has parked his stupid, good-for-nothing car a mile away and walked, thinking that the real bad guys in this city aren’t throwing women off rooftops, they’re setting the rates for the parking meters. But at least his car won’t be captured on camera. Today he’s gone with a pair of jeans that he’ll throw out when he’s completed his mission and a black long-sleeve shirt that will get the same treatment. He’s wearing a baseball cap pulled down tight, revealing only the hair around the sides of his head, which he’s brushed talcum powder into to make it look gray. He’s brushed talcum powder into his beard too. He’s carrying flowers he stole from the graveyard where he visited Simon earlier this morning. He keeps them at chest level to help block his face. He takes the elevator and steps into the corridor of the intensive care ward in time to see Detective Logan’s boy and wife coming towards him. They don’t pay him any attention on their way past.

  He loiters outside the intensive care ward, holding the flowers in one hand, holding his cell phone to his ear in the other, and looking like he’s on an important phone call. When nobody shows any interest in him, he heads into Erin’s room.

  “Why didn’t you die on that pavement?”

  She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t stir, doesn’t twitch, doesn’t do anything other than take up a hospital room and give a bunch of machines something to monitor. If he killed her right now, the machine would start beeping like crazy. Doctors and nurses would race here to save her.

  That’s why he brought the flowers.

  He heads for the bathroom he passed earlier back down the corridor.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Dr. Toni is sitting in her office with her feet up on the corner of the desk. She’s staring outside but not taking in any of the view. She’s tapping a pencil against her knee in random Morse code as she thinks about Joshua. She is thinking about the surgery, and how one eye works and one eye doesn’t. There have been different results over the last two years from different doctors. Most operations have been a success. The rare few have not, and there are some with mixed results. Having one eye work and the other not isn’t unheard of, and the operation will still be deemed a success even though she’s disappointed it didn’t go exactly how she wanted. The scientific community will understand that the likely cause could be any number of things and won’t put the blame on her technique, or delay future surgeries.

  Since Joshua’s transplant, she’s been inundated with interview requests. She enjoyed the spotlight when she did the first surgery in New Zealand last year—hell, back then the hospital even put on a press conference and her photo was in all the papers, so the spotlight was something she couldn’t avoid. But this time the last thing she wants is to be put in front of a camera. Given what happened to Mitchell Logan, and given what they did to the man who killed him, she wants to be left alone and have the story fade away.

  A knock at the door breaks her from her thoughts. She spins her chair around, and before she can say anything, the door opens. Ben Kirk steps into her office. He looks like somebody put him in the spin cycle of a dryer and left him in overnight. He’s lost weight, he hasn’t shaved, his hair is a mess. He obviously hasn’t been sleeping much. She’s known Ben a long time—they dated for a few years from their late teens into their early twenties, and the only other time he looked this bad was when his brother died.

  “Can we talk?”

  “You look like hell,” she tells him.

  “Then I look how I feel,” he says, and slumps down into the chair in front of her desk.

  “I know y
ou’ve got a lot going on right now, Ben, but you really need to get some sleep, otherwise you’re going to be no good for Erin.”

  “I’m trying,” he says.

  “Maybe you should talk to somebody,” she says. “I can give you the name of somebody who might be—”

  “I’ll be fine,” he says, “and anyway, I’m here to talk about Joshua, not me.”

  “I still think you should—”

  “I know,” he says. “And I will, and I’ll get a prescription for some sleeping pills and—”

  “It’s not just getting a prescription, Ben, it’s about talking to somebody.”

  “Right now I want to talk about Joshua.”

  “Okay, fine,” she says.

  “This cellular memory thing, is there anything to that?”

  “They’ve told you?”

  “Just now,” he says.

  “Do you believe them?” she asks.

  “The kid has no reason to make any of this up,” he says. “He’s a good kid. I believe that he believes what he’s saying, but I know from the job that people mix up the order in which they remember things.”

  “That’s what I think this is, just him mixing things up.”

  “So you don’t think it’s possible.”

  “I think it’s unlikely.”

  “What about the dreams?”

  “What dreams?” she asks.

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  She shakes her head. He tells her about the dreams. She sits silently as she takes it all in. “It’s interesting,” she says when he’s finished. “But they’re dreams. Nobody can explain dreams. All sorts of crazy things happen when we’re asleep.”

  “If cellular memory is true, then Joshua saw the last thing his dad saw before he died.”

  She leans back. She’s no longer tapping the pencil against her knee. Instead she’s poking the eraser into her chin, as if it’s holding her head up. Ben isn’t here to discuss Joshua. He’s here to discuss something else. “I have a really bad feeling about where you’re going with this.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “You’re convinced somebody pushed Erin off the rooftop,” she says.

  “Somebody did.”

  “And now you think if you had her eyes that would give you a chance to see the person responsible.”

  “I’d only need one.”

  “Jesus, Ben . . .”

  “I know how it sounds.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “I know it sounds extreme.”

  “No, Ben, it sounds crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy.”

  “It’s worse than crazy, Ben, I’m sorry, but it is. You don’t know if anybody else was there.”

  “Somebody was there,” he says.

  “Even if you’re right, you don’t know if she saw them and—let’s run with your assumption that she did see them—we don’t even know if cellular memory is a real thing.”

  “Then we do our homework and see if it is.”

  “Even if by some chance it is real, you can’t control what you’re going to see. You could see somebody she saw at the supermarket the day before and suddenly you’re blaming them.”

  “But—”

  “Let me finish,” she says, “because we haven’t even gotten into the ethics of it yet, let alone the possible complications, not just the fact that I’d get fired, then discredited, and on top of that it would put future operations in jeopardy. There’s also—”

  “We’re beyond ethics,” he says. “The things we’ve been doing—”

  “Don’t give me that,” she says, pointing the pencil at him. “Don’t sit there and say we’re beyond ethics when everything I’ve agreed to was your idea to begin with.” She leans back in her chair. “Sometimes I don’t know how you and Mitchell ever talked me into this.”

  “You know exactly how,” he says, and he’s right. She does know. “Our job,” he says, and he leans back too, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen somebody in as much pain emotionally as he is right now. First with what happened to Mitchell, and now Erin. “It’s reactive,” he says. “We get to people after they’ve been hurt. This was a way for us to be proactive. A way to help.”

  “I bought that line back in the beginning,” she says. “If I hadn’t, then none of this would be happening.”

  “We’ve helped a lot of people,” he says.

  “At a great cost.”

  “You can’t put a cost on something like that.”

  “No? You can’t put a price on your soul? That’s how it feels, Ben.”

  “These were bad people, Toni, and now they’re gone and in their place we have good people,” he says, his voice hard. “I haven’t sold my soul, and I sleep better because of it.”

  This Ben isn’t like the Ben she was in love with all those years ago. What he’s doing now would never have seemed possible to Ben of the Past, but what she’s doing would never have seemed possible to Past Toni either. Sometimes she wonders what life would be like if they had stayed together. He broke her heart when he left her to travel. When he came back five years later she was no longer angry with him, and of course you can’t be mad at somebody who returns home to spend time with his dying brother. She was also far too busy with her studies to hold on to that kind of resentment, but whatever had been there when they were in love had disappeared for him, but not, it turned out, for her. There was still something there—still is—and that’s why she agreed to help him when he and Mitchell came to her five years ago.

  All of this, she thinks, started with Ben’s brother, Jesse.

  Now Ben has Erin, and she’s happy for him. For them both. She wonders if Erin knows the reason Ben is sleeping so well at night.

  “Please, Toni, I love her. I know I have no right to ask you, especially because . . . well, because of our past, but she means everything to me.”

  “Our past has nothing to do with it,” she says, and she wonders if he ever felt this way about her. She doesn’t think so. If he did, he never would have woken up that Friday morning back in the summer of their youth and told her over the pancakes he made for her that he was planning a trip. He never said the words I’m leaving you. No, he said, I hope you’ll be happy for me.

  “If it were simple, I would. You know I would. But this . . . this is too much. You can’t expect me to unplug her eye and slot it into you long enough to have a vision and then switch it back. It’s not like plugging in a TV, Ben. We’re talking about serious operations here, with some serious healing time and some serious risk.”

  “I need to know what happened.”

  “I know you do.” She softens her voice. “I know you do, and I know you love her, but what you’re asking isn’t about love. It’s about revenge. Listen to yourself. You’re asking to put Erin’s body under more stress. What if something goes wrong with the operation? What if there’s an infection and her body is too weak to fight it? What if she dies? What then? What if by looking for answers, you end up killing her? What then, Ben? What then?”

  “I can’t lose her,” he says. “But I can’t . . . I can’t not know what happened.”

  “Then do what you do and find another way to figure it out.”

  “It’s all I’ve been trying to do.” He sighs, then hangs his head in his hands for a few seconds before looking back up at her. “I’m sorry I came to you.”

  “It was a crazy idea,” she says, “but you had to ask.”

  “No, not about Erin. I mean I’m sorry I came to you five years ago. I know how hard it’s been.”

  She isn’t sure how to respond. She also wishes he hadn’t come to her five years ago. She can’t deny he’s right about one thing—there are good people out there now who would be dead if he hadn’t. She’s still figuring out what to say to him when the fire alarm goes off. Without any hesitation, Ben jumps out of the chair and races into the corridor.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Smoke comes out from under the bathroo
m door. On the other side, the flowers Vincent brought with him, along with all the rolls of toilet paper he could find, are on fire. He doused everything in lighter fluid before removing the central stem of the door handle so if anybody tries to turn it, it will turn without gripping any of the mechanics. It isn’t going to open.

  He walks calmly into Erin’s room. He takes the syringe out of his pocket, extends the plunger so the tube is as full of air as he can get it. And he waits.

  Somebody pulls the fire alarm.

  He jams the syringe into her neck.

  He presses the plunger as fast as he can.

  Nothing happens.

  Vincent is confused.

  Outside the room, there are warning shouts, confusion, and a lot of movement. The fire alarm is loud, a whining whoop, whoop with the second part of the whoop increasing in pitch and intensity. People are running in different directions. Some away from the smoke, some towards it.

  He puts the syringe into his pocket. According to all the crime shows, when somebody forces an air bubble into a target, the effect is quick. If the bubble is big enough, it can get lodged in the bloodstream and cause a blockage, which can lead to a heart attack. He’s also read about it online. It comes down to the amount of air and how quickly it’s injected. Sometimes it’s fatal, and sometimes it isn’t. If it works, it can be undetectable in an autopsy. In this case, Erin fell from a rooftop and probably crushed every organ in her body and broke every bone—why would they look for another cause of death?

  Why isn’t it working?

  Maybe it takes time. Maybe it takes thirty seconds, or five minutes, or an hour. Maybe it doesn’t work at all, and it’s like one of those childhood myths that are frightening to kids but utterly ridiculous, like the one about blowflies laying eggs inside your ears and their babies eating your brain on their way out.