Read Online The Rackham Files by Dean Ing - Free Book Online

macadam. Not so long gone that I didn't almost catch him nearing Concord. I hung back enough to let him find the freeway before me. After all, there wasn't any need for breaking records now; hard driving was simply the only way I could use up all that adrenaline before I met the Feds off the freeway in East Richmond, near the foothills. I kept thinking that from downtown Richmond to some very steep ravines was only five minutes or so. And wondering whether my buddy Quent had still been alive during the trip.
     
    Linked to Dana by phone, I found the location a block off the main drag, a long neon strip of used-car lots and commercial garages. Evidently Dana's people had shooed the locals away, though a pair of uniformed cops still hung around waiting to control the nonexistent crowd, and I seemed to be it. The guys doing the real work wore identical, reversible dark jackets. I knew that "f b i" would be printed on the inner surfaces of those jacket backs and, when Dana waved me forward, a strobe flash made me blink.
    I saw the chalk outline before I spotted the partially blanketed figure on a foldable gurney in the extrawide unmarked van. The chalk lines revealed that Quent had been found with his legs in the street, torso in the gutter, head and one arm up on the curb. The stain at the head oval looked black, but it wouldn't in daylight.
    We said nothing until I followed Dana into the van, sitting on jump seats barely out of the way of a forensics woman who was monitoring instruments while she murmured into her headset. The gadget she occasionally used looked like my StudyFrail but probably cost ten times as much. I leaned forward, saw the misshapen contours of a face I had known well. I knew better than to touch him. I think I moaned, "Awww, Quent."
    "He was deceased before he struck the curb, if it's any consolation," said Dana. "Long enough before, that he lost very little blood on impact. Presumption is that someone dropped him from a moving vehicle."
    I couldn't help wondering what I'd been doing at the time. Nodding toward the forensics tech, I managed to mutter, "Got a time of death?"
    Dana said, "Ninety minutes, give or take." I would've been licking my fingers right about then. "We thought it might have been accidental at first."
    "For about ten seconds," said the tech dryly. She wasn't missing anything. Her gloved hand lifted Quentin Kim's lifeless wrist. It was abraded and bruised. She pointed delicately with her pinkie at the bluish fingertips. The nails of the smallest two fingers were missing. The cuticles around the other nails were swollen and rimmed with faint bloodstains, and the ends of the nails had been roughened as if chewed by some tiny animal. "He still had a heartbeat when this was done," she added.
    "Pliers," I said, and she grunted assent. "Somebody wanted something out of him. But how could pulling out fingernails be lethal," I asked, shuddering by reflex as I tried to imagine the agony of my close friend, a friend who had originally hired me for physical backup. Fat lot of good I had done him. . . .
    The tech didn't answer until she glanced at Dana, who nodded without a word. "Barring a coronary, it couldn't. But repeated zaps of a hundred thousand volts will give you that coronary. Zappers that powerful are illegal, but I believe Indonesian riot control used them for a while. The fingernails told me to look for something else. Nipples, privates, lips, other sites densely packed with nerve endings."
    "I'll take your word for it," I said. She was implying torture by people who were good at it, and I lacked the objectivity to view the evidence.
    "But that's not where I found the trauma," said the tech. "It showed up as electrical burn marks in a half dozen places where a pair of contact points had been pressed at the base of the skull, under the hair. Not too hard to locate if you know what you're looking for. The brain stem handles your most basic life support; breathing, that sort of thing.