Julian turned back toward his car, his hand reaching for the driver's door handle. He wasn't trying to secure the documents anymore; he was trying to run.
I didn't let him. I grabbed the heavy wool collar of his coat, hauled him backward off the car's running board, and shoved him down against the front quarter panel of my pickup truck. "You stay right here until the county cruiser turns off the river road," I told him, pinning his shoulder against the steel body panel. "Arthur is in that cold bay, and you're going to watch him walk out."
"He can't walk," Julian spat, his voice breaking into a dry, breathless wheeze as he struggled against my grip. "The pentobarbital dose... Kessel administered fifty milligrams over the standard ceiling. If he stays in that refrigeration unit for forty more minutes, his core temperature drops below eighty-five. The cardiac arrest becomes real. You can't prove intent if the autopsy shows natural hypothermia secondary to clinical sedation."
The horror of what he had planned settled like lead into the pit of my stomach. Julian hadn't intended for the retort burners to destroy a warm man; he had calculated that the cold room would complete the physiological execution before anyone arrived to read the paper trail.
"Briggs," I roared, looking over my shoulder toward the glass booth. "Hit the gate release. Now."
Briggs stared through the mesh for one second, then slapped his palm down onto the red override toggle beside his registry console.
The heavy hydraulic pins groaned. The chain-link perimeter gate slid open with a screech of rusted iron rollers, opening the central tarmac of the municipal yard. I hauled Julian upright by his collar, dragging him through the open gate by the scruff of his coat so he couldn't bolt into the dark brush along the riverbank.
"Move," I said, shoving him toward the concrete bunker labeled Holding Bay B - Climate Controlled Vault.
The bunker was a windowless poured-concrete vault with a reinforced steel fire door secured by a digital push-button keypad. A red warning light flashed slowly above the lintel, indicating that the internal chilling compressors were active. Frost formed in thin crystalline patterns along the heavy rubber weatherstripping surrounding the steel doorframe.
Briggs trotted behind us, holding a heavy ring of brass utility keys and a battery-powered emergency lantern. He shoved the master maintenance key into the override cylinder beneath the keypad, turned it hard clockwise, and yanked the heavy cold-storage latch downward.
The door swung outward with a heavy, sucking hiss of cold air.
A wave of bitter, sterile refrigeration rolled over us, carrying the metallic smell of Freon, disinfectant, and chilled stainless steel. The interior vault was lit by a single strip of blueish vapor lighting hanging from the center beam. Along the left wall stood four tiers of stainless-steel mortuary trays, three of them closed and tagged with county indigent numbers.
In the center of the concrete floor, under the direct down-draft of the industrial cooling fans, sat the wheeled gurney from Oakridge.
Arthur Vance lay strapped flat to the thin foam pad. The orange nylon utility webbing was pulled tight across his chest, his forearms, and his shins, pinning him down beneath a stiff white paper utility sheet. His face was waxen, the skin around his cheekbones drained of color, his split lip frozen into a dark, crusted scab. His breathing was so shallow that the paper sheet barely moved across his ribs.
"Arthur," I said, lunging across the concrete and tearing at the quick-release buckles on the orange straps.
The nylon webbing gave way with a snap. I reached down and pressed two fingers hard against the side of his cold neck, searching through the numb chill of his skin for a pulse. For two agonizing seconds, there was nothing but the mechanical hum of the refrigeration compressors overhead.
Then, faint, slow, but distinctly rhythmic, the vessel beneath my fingertips throbbed against my skin.
Fifty-four beats a minute. Weak, suppressed by the barbiturate cocktail, but stubborn and alive.