A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0041

Chapter 41

The phone rang while Richard still had his tie in his hand.

He had arrived home less than forty minutes ago. Enough time to take off his holster, hang his jacket on the kitchen chair, and stand in front of the open refrigerator, unable to remember what he had gone to get there. The entire night still swirled inside him in disarray: the backyard, a crater-like wreckage, the black bag being lifted from the ground, the eight men handcuffed one by one inside the police cars, the arrest paperwork dragging on until the early hours of the morning, and the captain’s voice close to his ear, authorizing what isn’t written in a report. He hadn’t slept. He had only stopped moving, which the body, after a certain age, learns to accept as a poor substitute.

The voice on the other end of the line was that of a sergeant on duty, and the man spoke too fast, swallowing the ends of his sentences. Memorial Hospital. The morgue. No one could quite say what had happened down there, only that it was bad, and that the captain had sent his name before the sergeant had even finished reporting the incident. Richard listened to everything with the phone held between his shoulder and chin while he put his jacket back on, which still smelled of gunpowder from the previous scene. He didn’t ask any questions. At this point, questions over the phone were a waste. He hung up, grabbed his keys, and left.

The drive to the hospital crossed a city that was waking up the way it had been waking up for months, with half the shops closed even during business hours and the other half calculating whether it was worth opening. The sun had already risen high enough to wash the streets in a clean, yellow light, and that light, Richard thought, was the cruelest part of the day. At night, San Diego at least matched itself. In the morning, the sun illuminated everything with the indifference of someone who hadn’t been warned about anything, and the city looked like an old photograph torn in half.

He parked in the ambulance area, walked through reception showing his badge to a nurse who barely glanced at it, and took the service elevator to the basements. His eyes burned. He rubbed them with the base of his hand inside the elevator, and when the doors opened on the second basement level, the burning gave way to something else.

The smell came before any image. Formaldehyde, as always on that floor, but beneath the formaldehyde there was blood, lots of it, a smell of scrap metal and butcher shop that no fan could disperse. Richard hurried down the tiled corridor, his footsteps echoing against the low ceiling, and at the end of the corridor he saw the yellow tape stretched from wall to wall, and behind it the coming and going of white forensic overalls, the intermittent flashes of cameras pulsing against the walls like small lightning bolts trapped underground.

He went under the tape without asking anyone’s permission and stopped at the entrance to the drawer room.

Throughout his years as a police officer, Richard had built up a mental list of the worst things he’d ever seen, and the list was long enough that he believed, with some reason, that he could no longer be surprised. The room in front of him silently rearranged that list.

The entire floor was covered. There were no pools of blood; there was a continuous sheet of it, dry at the edges in shades of rust and still dark and thick in the center, covering the white tile from end to end, and on this sheet the remains were scattered. Pieces of meat whose origin the mind insisted on not recognizing, and then recognized, and it was worse. A curved sliver that could only be a rib. Something small and pale near the central drain. Fragments that the experts marked with numbered tags, and the tags already numbered more than thirty, and they were still adding more.

Along the back wall, the row of steel doors told a story of its own. More than half were open, and not open the way a drawer opens, but ripped off, the doors hanging by a hinge or thrown on the floor, the metal of the edges twisted outwards like paper crumpled by a hand too large. Richard approached one and looked inside. The steel tray was empty. In place of the body that should have been there, only pooled blood in the creases of the metal and, stuck to the bent handle, a paper label with a name, a date, and a registration number. He scanned the drawers. All the same. Intact labels, empty trays, blood.

The bodies hadn’t been moved. There were no drag marks leading out of the room, no trail to the door, nothing missing except the dead themselves. The bodies had ended up there, on that floor, reduced to what the numbered tags now cataloged. Richard felt his stomach give a short warning and ignored it out of habit.

That’s when he saw the footprints.

They began near the third row of drawers and crossed the room toward the door leading to the service stairs. Barefoot footprints, imprinted in blood, so clear you could count the toes, and the spacing between them was that of a man walking slowly, without any hurry, like someone leaving home to get the newspaper. One of the experts was crouched over them with a ruler, photographing each one. Richard followed the trail with his eyes until it disappeared down the hallway and stood still for a moment, measuring it. No one runs away slowly. No one who did something like that crosses their own carnage at a leisurely pace on a Sunday morning. Unless running away never crossed their mind.

On the other side of the room, near the autopsy table, he located the hospital director. A man of about sixty, a white coat hastily put on over his dress shirt, his face the color of someone who had walked up and down those corridors his whole life without ever seeing the building become like that. Next to him, a forensic expert, clipboard in hand, was taking notes on what the director was saying, the pen gliding across the paper.

Richard crossed the room along the edge, stepping where the experts had cleared a path, and reached the two of them.

“Good morning, gentlemen. Detective Richard, homicide.”

The two turned, caught mid-sentence. The director responded to the greeting with a vague nod. The expert looked Richard up and down with an expression that suggested he already knew what was coming and didn’t like it one bit.

“I’m already taking the director’s statement,” the expert said, his voice carrying the territorial tone of someone who arrived first.

“Orders from Captain Jones.” Richard didn’t change his tone. “From now on, the case is mine. The forensics team continues its work of collecting evidence, but testimonies, images, and any other recorded material go through me before entering any system.”

The expert frowned. He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and all that came out was a curt nod. He tore the sheets from the clipboard, handed nothing over, put everything away, and walked away towards his group, muttering something that Richard preferred not to decipher. Before plunging back into his work, he turned to the director with a final touch of courtesy. “See you soon, director.”

The director stood there, alone in the middle of his own hospital room, looking like a guest in someone else’s home. When he spoke, his voice came out lower than he probably intended.

“How can I help you, detective?”

“First, take me to your security room.”

The director nodded and began to guide him. They passed under the tape again, leaving behind the glare of the forensics cameras, and continued down the service corridor in the basement. The security room was on the same floor, about fifty meters away, a design convenience that had become ironic that morning: the entire crime had happened within a half-minute walk of the screens that recorded it, and nobody had seen anything, because at four in the morning nobody looks at the morgue screen. Nobody ever did. The dead were the only population in the city that didn’t cause trouble.

Along the way, the director tried to fill the silence, and Richard let him, because nervous men talking to themselves give away more than men being interrogated.

“You need to understand the state we’re operating in,” the director said, rubbing his hands together. “I’ve lost a third of the nursing staff in the last few months. And security? Don’t even get me started. People are quitting because the parking lot has become a robbery hotspot, and I can’t blame anyone. The city cuts, cuts, and we just keep patching things up. The overnight shift in the basement is just one technician. One. For two floors.”

“And this morning?”

“This morning the technician went upstairs to help with the emergency room around 3:30. A gunshot victim was admitted, another overdose, the usual. He came back down at 6:10 for the shift change.” The director swallowed hard. “He’s the one who found him. The guy’s still upstairs, sedated. We haven’t been able to get a full sentence out of him.”

They arrived at the security room. It was a windowless cubicle with an entire wall of monitors, most showing empty corridors in black and white, and a counter with two tower computers that hummed like old refrigerators. Two hospital security guards sat before them, already working on locating the files from the basement cameras, their backs hunched, their faces with the specific pallor of those who had already spied on what was in those files.

Richard closed the door behind him.

“Director, I’d like a summary.” He took a notepad from his inside jacket pocket and opened it to a blank page. “Explain to me what is known, from the beginning.”

“It’s not much.” The director crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, unsure what to do with them. “Donald Dougie’s body from last night’s incident arrived here shortly after two. That case at the house, you know which one. It went into the drawer awaiting today’s autopsy. Between three-thirty and six, the floor was empty, for the reason I already explained. At six-ten the technician came down, found the room like that and alerted security, who then alerted the police. That’s all I can say for sure. The rest is there.” He pointed his chin towards the monitors. “The images are being retrieved now.”

Richard noted the times and nodded slowly, piecing together the timeline. The calculation added up with a precision he hadn’t asked for and that didn’t please him at all. Doug’s body had left that yard in a black bag shortly after midnight. By two o’clock it was in the drawer. Before six, the entire morgue had been emptied from the inside. And the captain, standing beside the corpse, had said the word no one wanted to write, and had also said the other thing, the one Richard couldn’t stop hearing since then. No one empties a gun into a dead man unless they’re afraid the dead man will get up.

Someone had had that fear. And they had been right.

“Director.” Richard closed the block. “As soon as the image collection is finished, I’ll need two things. The first is a complete copy of all the recordings from this morning, from all the cameras in this building, from the basement to the top floor. The second,” and here he paused to ensure the sentence fell through completely, “is the total erasure of this material from your systems. Servers, backups, everything. After my copy is made, nothing will remain.”

The silence in the room changed in quality. The two security guards stopped typing at the same time and turned in their chairs. The director frowned, and for a moment his weariness gave way to something more resolute.

“But that would be wrong,” he said. “There’s protocol. There’s chain of custody, there’s the hospital’s legal department, there’s the insurance company. I can’t simply destroy security records of a crime committed within my institution. If tomorrow someone…”

“Independent.” Richard interrupted without raising his voice. “Orders from above. From the police captain and the mayor’s office. Both of them.”

“Detective, with all due respect, I need to at least consult.”

“Director.” Richard stepped forward, and there was no threat in the movement, only the deliberate reduction of the distance between two men who needed to understand each other. “This isn’t a recommendation, it’s an order. We’re having serious problems, the kind you saw on the floor of that room, and these recordings can’t leak. Not to the press, not to your legal team, not to your insurance company, not to your most trusted employee. If even a second of this footage ends up on television, what’s happened in this city in the last few months will seem like nostalgia. Do you understand?”

The director held his gaze for a moment longer, searching for some room for negotiation, but finding none. His shoulders lowered a finger’s width. He nodded.

Richard then turned to the two security guards, who were watching everything motionless in their chairs.

“Get out.”

The two exchanged glances. They looked at the director, seeking confirmation, and the director, after a second, nodded. They stood up, collected their coffee mugs from the counter in an automatic gesture, and left, closing the door with exaggerated care, like someone leaving a funeral.

Richard pulled up one of the swivel chairs, sat down in front of the main panel, and scanned the workbench until he found the CD recorder attached to the larger tower—an external, tray-type device connected by a thick cable. In the drawer under the workbench was a stack of blank discs still in their plastic wrapping. He tore open the plastic, inserted the first disc, and began navigating the file system with the patience of someone who had done this in other rooms just like it. The system was old, the interface slow, and each camera folder took a few seconds to open. He located the basement directory, sorted the files by time, and began copying the entire night’s block of footage.

The progress bar began to crawl. Richard leaned back and spoke without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Director, we are in turbulent waters. And waters that no one here knows. I hope you will accept the order as it was given and that no information of any kind leaves this building. Do you understand?”

Behind him, the director nodded, and this time the nod came without any resistance. The man ran a hospital in the middle of a city in freefall; he knew, better than most, how precarious the thread was on which everything hung. Every night, the results of that thread snapping arrived, on stretchers, one by one.

As the copying progressed, Richard opened the file from the internal camera in the drawer room on a second screen and dragged it to the four o’clock mark in the morning.

He only intended to check the image quality. That’s what he told himself.

The video was in black and white, a high angle, covering the entire room from the corner opposite the door. For the first few minutes, nothing. The room was still under the emergency light, the row of steel doors closed, the digital clock running in the lower corner. Richard fast-forwarded in short bursts. It was at the 4:07 mark that the image changed.

One of the middle doors, in the third row, trembled. A small tremor, which on a screen that size could pass for recording noise. Then the entire door leaped out, ripped from the inside, and fell to the floor, and from the dark opening something that at first seemed liquid but wasn’t spilled onto the floor. Richard leaned forward in his chair.

What emerged from the drawer unfurled in the air like a boneless, thick, long arm, rising above the row of doors and swinging from side to side in a movement as if testing space. Richard had already seen the result of that scattered across the floor of the next room. Seeing the cause was different. The thing turned slowly and stopped, pointing at the neighboring drawer, and even through an old camera and a dirty screen, one could perceive the intention in the gesture, the attentiveness of a sniffing animal.

The neighboring door was ripped off with the same ease. Richard glanced reflexively at the drawer occupancy log that the forensics team had photographed and left on the living room counter, the sheet with the map of the third row, and found the matching name. Myrna. Nineteen years old, admitted three days prior, body awaiting only the release of the paperwork for the funeral home to collect. He returned his eyes to the screen in time to see the young woman’s body being pulled out of the drawer and dragged through the air until it disappeared behind the row of doors, towards the open drawer. What happened next the camera didn’t show in its entirety, and Richard was grateful for that for exactly four seconds, which was the time it took for the audio to compensate. The recording had sound. He hadn’t noticed until then because there was nothing to hear. Now there was, and the small speaker on the counter delivered everything with a fidelity that no cheap equipment had the right to possess. The damp, continuous sound, and beneath it the dry, serial, short cracks of things giving way.

Richard turned the volume down almost to the end. Not all the way. He needed to know when to stop.

It didn’t stop. On the screen, a figure rose from inside the broken drawer, and Richard saw for the first time the entire body of the man he had last seen inside a black bag. Doug climbed down from the steel tray to the floor with the clumsiness of a newborn, his knees buckling at the first step, one hand seeking support on the row of doors. And in the center of him, at the level of his abdomen, was the origin of everything. The black and white image stole the colors, but not the form: an opening across his belly from side to side, wide, bordered by rows of bright dots that gleamed when he moved, and from within it the long appendage entering and exiting like a tongue. A mouth. A second mouth, the size of a forearm, embedded in the middle of a man’s body, chewing.

Richard stood motionless. He had spent the previous night, along with the captain, constructing a theory that already seemed too large to fit into a report. Men with superhuman capabilities. One who could tie someone up without killing them, another who could crush a chest with a single blow. The theory hadn’t foreseen that.

In the recording, Doug went from drawer to drawer. He no longer used the appendix for everything; as he progressed, his own hands gained steadiness, and he began to tear open the doors himself, to pull out the bodies himself, and with each one consumed his gait changed a degree, less stumbling, more weight planted on the ground, until at some point between the seventh and eighth drawer there was nothing newborn left in that body. There was a naked, soaked man, moving through a morgue room with the ease of someone navigating their own kitchen. Richard observed, and the part of him that was police recorded the detail that mattered beneath the horror: the method. There was no frenzy there. There was appetite, and the appetite was organized. That thing ate like someone stocking up.

At 5:52 a.m., according to the clock, Doug stopped in the middle of the room. He stood motionless for a long moment between the ripped-off doors, his chest rising and falling deep, and then his head spun, in a continuous, almost too smooth movement, and he looked directly at the camera.

Richard felt the entire back of his neck go cold.

It didn’t make sense. It was a recording, hours old, of a place he’d never been. And yet the feeling was immediate and physical, that of having been found. On the screen, Doug’s eyes had no white, two dark, full cavities that the camera reflected as two holes in the image, and he tilted his head to the side, slowly, at the angle of a dog listening to a distant sound, and held that position for three, four, five seconds. There was no challenge in the gesture. There wasn’t even interest. It was the look one gives to a piece of furniture, cataloging the camera among the things that exist and don’t matter. Then his head returned to its place, and he crossed the room towards the service staircase door, with the same tranquil step that had left his footprints on the floor, and left the frame. The room became still again, broken and red in shades of gray, and the clock continued running above it as if nothing had changed in the world.

Richard realized he was a hair’s breadth from the screen and moved away, pushing his chair back. He ran a hand over his face. Behind him, he heard the director’s breathing, and when he turned around he found the man as white as his lab coat, one hand resting on the edge of the desk, his mouth slightly open, making no sound. He had watched everything over the detective’s shoulder. No one had told him to look. No one had managed not to look.

“That’s why, sir,” Richard said, his voice hoarser than he expected, “I need your silence.”

The director nodded. He nodded again, repeatedly, like a mechanism that had engaged and no longer knew how to disengage. A dead man had risen inside his building. He had healed himself by eating the other dead and had left on foot through the service entrance. There was no hospital protocol, code of ethics, or board meeting that encompassed that phrase, and Richard saw the man understand it in real time, saw the understanding descend upon him like a fever.

The detective returned to the panel. The copy of the first block was finished; he recorded the disc, labeled it with the pen he carried in his pocket, and began the next copy, and then the next, cameras from the hallways, the service stairs, the side exit, the parking lot. In one of them, the one by the ground floor side door, he found the last frames: Doug walking out into the still-dark street, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk with his head held high, the wind stirring nothing because there was no clothing to stir, and then turning south and disappearing from the lens’s view. Heading south. Richard noted this in the notebook and underlined it twice. The south of the city had an owner, and the owner was the cartel Doug had come from.

When the last disc finished recording, he stacked them, six in total, put the stack in the inside pocket of his jacket, and then began the second part of the job. He accessed the system manager and deleted the files from the early morning, directory by directory. He emptied the trash can. He located the backup routine, found the mirrored drive, and deleted that too. The director watched everything silently, without uttering any further objection, and when Richard finished, the detective stood for a moment looking at the two towers buzzing beneath the workbench.

Deleting wasn’t enough. He knew this from other cases, from experts who resurrected deleted files with software and a free afternoon. He took a small pocketknife, one of those with a worn wooden handle, opened the smaller blade, which served as a screwdriver, and crouched down in front of the first tower. The screws from the side panel came out one by one, lined up on the workbench. He disconnected the hard drive cables with two sharp pulls, released the bracket, and removed the piece, cold and heavier than it appeared. He repeated the procedure on the second tower. The monitors on the wall remained lit, showing the corridors live, powered by another circuit; what died there was only the memory.

“I can’t take the risk,” he said, standing up with a hard drive in each hand.

And the director, this time, agreed without any hesitation, because after what he had seen on that screen, the word “risk” had taken on a whole new meaning for him.

Richard stored the hard drives in a bag of materials he borrowed from his own office, and then, with his notepad open on his lap, he took the director’s formal statement from beginning to end. Full name, position, length of service. The routine of the basement shift. The hours, once again, now dictated slowly for brevity. The name of the technician who found the scene, his condition, the room where he was sedated. Richard wrote everything down in small, cramped handwriting, had the director confirm each point, and finally closed the notepad and stood up.

“The coach doesn’t talk to anyone before talking to me,” he said. “Not even his family, if you can avoid it. I’ll come back to talk to him later today. And if anyone contacts you—press, lawyer, curious onlookers, whoever—the answer is the same: vandalism in the basement, investigation underway, no details. You didn’t see any images, because from now on there are no images. Do we understand each other?”

“We are,” said the director, and his voice had aged a decade since the “good morning.”

Richard left the security room and retraced his steps down the basement corridor. He passed the yellow tape one last time, and from the entrance, he looked again at the drawer room, where the experts continued the slow work of cataloging what remained of nine people who were already dead before dying again. One of them was photographing the barefoot footprints near the door. Richard thought about the technician on duty, the sedated young man upstairs, who had gone down the service stairs at 6:10 in the morning, thinking the worst of the shift was over. He wondered how long it would take the young man to be able to go down a staircase again.

On the ground floor, he walked through the reception area, pushed open the glass door, and stepped out into the parking lot. The morning had warmed up. He stopped beside his car, took his flip phone out of his pocket, opened it with his thumb, and dialed the captain’s direct number.

The line rang once, twice, three times. Jones would answer quickly in the early hours of the morning; in the morning, after a night like that, the three-ring delay meant the man was in the middle of something else equally bad. The call went through.

“Richard. What do you have for me?”

“One answer, sir. To the question from last night.” Richard rested his elbow on the roof of the car and looked at the street as he spoke, a twenty-year habit of never turning his back on a parking lot. “You asked why someone would empty a magazine into a man who was already dead. Whoever shot him knew what they were doing. They just didn’t shoot enough.”

On the other end, a short silence. “Go on.”

Richard narrated. He kept his voice steady and the account technical, hour by hour, the way the captain preferred, but he didn’t soften anything, because softening it would mean misinformation. The body that arrived at the two checkpoints. The empty room between 3:30 and 6:00. The drawer ripped open from the inside out at 4:07:00. The opening in the abdomen, and he had to stop and restart this part because there was no report vocabulary for it, and he ended up saying only what it was: a mouth. The consumption of the nine bodies, one by one, and the visible recovery of the man with each one. The look at the camera. The unhurried exit on foot through the side door. The direction.

“South,” Jones repeated, and in his voice Richard recognized the same calculation he himself had made. The silence that followed lasted long enough for the creaking of the captain’s chair to be heard in the background. When Jones spoke again, his voice had dropped half a tone. “This is very disturbing, Richard. On levels I’m still counting.” Another pause. “Do you have the recordings?”

“One copy, six disks, in my pocket. The hospital systems are clean and the hard drives are with me too. Outside of here, nobody saw anything except the director, and the director understood the message.”

“Bring everything to me. Now, straight here, without going through the department.” The chair creaked again, the sound of a man standing up. “I need to show this to the mayor with my own eyes in the office. He won’t believe a word I say, and I don’t blame him, because I saw it and I’m still deciding if I believe it.”

“As you wish, sir.”

Richard snapped the phone shut and stood there for another second beside the car, feeling the weight of the six discs against his chest, on the left side, where other men carry lighter things. Somewhere south of there, walking or already standing, there now existed something the whole town still called Doug for lack of a better name, something death had refused and returned with interest, and which had learned, on the first morning of its second life, that it could recover from any damage as long as there was meat nearby. And meat, in a town that size, was the only thing that wasn’t lacking.

He got into his car, started the engine, and drove out of the parking lot toward the city center, knowing that the situation, which last night seemed to have hit rock bottom, had just proven that “rock bottom” was a matter of opinion.