"It was stolen from the basement record archive at three o’clock this morning," I said, looking directly at Vanessa. "Pried out of a locked county display case with a maintenance chisel. She used it to forge a transit voucher because no licensed mortician in Cascadia County would touch an unlogged body without a signed death certificate from the attending physician. She couldn't get an attending physician to sign, because an unmonitored equipment failure is a mandatory state sentinel event. If that sentinel event hits the public registry before the state accreditation inspectors walk into the main lobby at eight o'clock, Mercer’s operating certificate is suspended, the hospital loses its regional license, and the county board’s bond payout is frozen."
"That is slander!" Vanessa shouted, her hand slapping the wet aluminum siding of the scale house. "Miller, call the city police! I demand you clear these people from the gate!"
"I don't call city police on this dock, ma'am," Miller said, his voice entirely flat now. He took his hand completely off the gate console, reached for a black telephone receiver mounted beside the window, and dialed three digits. "I call the Cascadia Port Authority Enforcement Division and the County Sheriff’s Maritime Unit. And until they arrive, this lane is under safety impound."
A sharp, metallic clatter echoed across the asphalt.
Vance had dropped the cardboard box.
The tape split on the wet asphalt. Arthur Vance’s worn, oil-stained brown leather work boots spilled into the dirty rainwater, along with a folded wool jacket that still had an old union button pinned to the lapel. Vance didn't look at the boots. He took three long, running strides across the lane and grabbed the door handle of the Sprinter van’s passenger side.
"Vance, stop!" Vanessa screamed, her voice finally breaking into raw, uncontrolled panic. "Get away from that vehicle!"
Vance didn't stop. He wrenched the cab door open, reached inside, and grabbed the driver—a thin man in a dirty canvas vest and an Idaho baseball cap—by the front of his jacket, hauling him bodily out of the seat and slamming him against the van’s corrugated side panel.
"Unlock the back," Vance whispered. His voice was not loud, but it had the terrible, shaking weight of a man whose entire life had just been dismantled on a strip of wet concrete. "Unlock the back doors right now, or so help me God, I will put your head through this window."
The driver raised his hands, his boots scrambling on the slick macadam. "Hey, man, back off! I don't know nothing about no dead guy! She called the Coeur d'Alene depot, paid cash for an urgent biological transfer! She said it was tissue samples from the research lab! I got a private transport permit!"
"Unlock the cargo door," Vance said, his fingers twisting into the driver's collar until the man choked.
"Okay! Okay! The key’s on the ring!" The driver fumbled at his belt, detached a heavy ring of brass keys, and thrust them toward Vance's chest.
Vance snatched them. He stumbled toward the back of the van, his breathing ragged, sounding like a man drowning on dry land. Evelyn moved toward him, reaching out her hands. "Vance, wait. Let Dr. Sterling do this. Vance, don't."
Vance didn't hear her. He jammed the key into the heavy double-door latch, twisted it until the tumbler cracked open, and yanked both steel doors wide against the wind.
The yellow floodlights poured into the dark, refrigerated interior. The cargo bay was lined with diamond-plate aluminum, chilled by the rooftop evaporator that was humming like an angry hornet. In the center of the ribbed floor, secured to the wall brackets with heavy yellow cargo ratchets, lay the dull-black neoprene transport pouch.
There was no medical cradle. There was no blanket. There was no index card pinned to the zipper slider.
Across the pull tab, wrapped in three tight, ugly layers of industrial gray duct tape, was the torn yellow biohazard decal. The adhesive had turned white and gummy in the damp river air, but the ragged edge of the torn manila tag on the slider matched the piece sitting on Miller’s window counter down to the tenth of an inch.
Vance stopped at the lip of the bumper. He reached out with one shaking hand, his knuckles brushing against the cold, wet rubberized canvas of the pouch. His knees gave out. He sank down onto the steel step of the bumper, his face buried in his hands, his breath coming in high, strangled sobs that tore through the sound of the rain.
Vanessa stood twenty feet back in the lane, her trench coat dripping, her patent leather shoes resting in the runoff from Arthur Vance’s boots. She looked at the open doors of the van. She looked at Miller, who had stepped out of the scale house with a heavy iron padlock in his hand, ready to chain the gate arm in the down position. Then she looked past our shoulders toward the water.