The Escape Artist Read online

  “Huh. Guess I heard it wrong,” Zig said, flashing the same charming grin that made those first years after his divorce so eventful. With mossy green eyes, a hairline scar on his jaw, and silver-and-black hair cut like Cary Grant’s, Zig didn’t look fifty-two. But as he swiped his ID and the metal double doors popped open, leading to the heart of the military installation, he was feeling it.

  A sign above the door read:

  Danger:

  Formaldehyde Irritant

  and Potential Cancer Hazard

  Womack paused, turning away. Zig grinned, picked up speed, and gave a hard push to the gurney that was draped with a light blue sheet, covering the corpse underneath. In between the corpse’s legs, pinning the sheet down, was a one-pound silver bucket. The gut bucket, they called it, because after the autopsy, it held all the internal organs. As Zig would tell new cadets: No matter how fat, thin, tall, or short you are—for every single one of us—all our organs fit in a one-pound bucket. For Zig, it was usually reassuring to know we all have that in common. Though right now, it wasn’t bringing the reassurance he needed.

  Automatic lights blinked on, lighting the medical suite. With a pneumatic hiss, the double doors bit shut behind him. For well over a decade, Zig had spent his days working in this high-tech surgical room, which served as a mortuary for the US government’s most top secret and high-profile cases. On 9/11, the victims of the Pentagon attack were brought here. So were the victims of the attack on the USS Cole, the astronauts from the space shuttle Columbia, and the remains of well over fifty thousand soldiers and CIA operatives who fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and every secret location in between. Here, in Delaware of all places, at Dover Air Force Base, was America’s most important funeral home.

  Be quick, Zig told himself, though when it came to preparing our fallen heroes for burial, Zig was never quick. Not until the job was done.

  Readjusting his own blue medical scrubs, Zig could feel the pain inching even closer. On the head of the gurney, he reread the name scrawled on a jagged strip of masking tape:

  Sgt. 1st Class Nola Brown

  “Welcome home, Nola,” he whispered.

  The corpse swayed slightly as he locked the wheels on the gurney.

  Sometimes at Dover, an incoming dead soldier would have your same birthday, or even your same name. Last year, a young Marine with the last name Zigarowski died of smoke inhalation at a base in Kosovo. Naturally, Zig grabbed that case.

  Nola, named for New Orleans, Louisiana, was different.

  “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Zig asked the shrouded body.

  Lowering his head, he said a quick prayer—the same prayer he said in every case. Please give me strength to take care of the fallen so their family can begin healing. Zig knew too well how grieving families would need that strength.

  On his left, on a medical rolling cart, were his tools in size order, from largest forceps to smallest scalpel. Zig reached for the blue plastic eye caps, which looked like contact lenses with small spikes on them. Zig generally was not a superstitious man, but he was superstitious about the eyes of the dead, which never close as easily as the movies would have you believe. When you look at a corpse, the corpse looks back. The eye caps were a mortician’s trick for keeping a client’s eyes shut.

  How could he possibly have let another mortician work this case? Nola Brown wasn’t a stranger. He knew this girl, even if she wasn’t a girl anymore. She was twenty-six. Even from her outline under the sheet, he could see it: strong and built like a soldier. Zig knew her from Pennsylvania, back when she was twelve. She was friends—a fellow Girl Scout—with Zig’s daughter, Maggie.

  Magpie. His Little Star, Zig thought, reliving those easy days before everything went so bad. There it was, the pain that now made his bones feel like they were hollowed out, simple to snap.

  Had Zig known Nola well? He remembered that night, back at the Girl Scout campout. Zig was a chaperone, Nola the new girl. Adopted. Naturally, the other girls seized on that. But it was more than that. Some girls are quiet. Nola was silent. Silent Nola. A few of the girls thought that made Nola tough. But Zig knew better. Sometimes silence is beaten into people.

  When you looked Nola’s way, her black eyes with flecks of gold would beg you not to engage. Zig had been warned: Silent Nola was already on her fourth school. Expelled from the other three for fighting, one girl said. Knocked out someone’s front teeth with the blunt end of a Yoo-hoo bottle. Another of Magpie’s friends said she was caught stealing too, but c’mon, ever since the Salem witch trials, groups of twelve-year-old girls couldn’t be trusted.

  “You really took a beating that night, didn’t you?” Zig asked Nola’s corpse as he grabbed the outdated iPod that sat in a SoundDock on a nearby shelf. With a few clicks, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell was playing from the cheap speaker. Even morticians needed working music.

  “I owe you forever for what you did that night,” Zig sighed.

  To this day, Zig still didn’t know who threw the can of orange soda into the campfire, or how long it was there. He could still see the campfire’s smoke blowing sideways. For a moment, there was a high-pitched whistle, like a shrieking teapot. Then, out of nowhere, a loud pop like a cherry bomb. Hunks of aluminum exploded in every direction. Most of the girls screamed, then laughed.

  Maggie’s instinct was to freeze. Silent Nola’s instinct was to jump sideways. Nola slammed into Maggie, who was standing there, frozen in fear as shards of razor-sharp metal flew at Zig’s daughter’s face.

  At the impact, Maggie crashed to the dirt, completely safe. Still in mid-fall, Silent Nola let out a yelp, a screech, like an injured dog, then held the side of her head, blood everywhere.

  The metal can had sliced away a chunk of her ear. The smoke was still blowing sideways. To this day, Zig didn’t know if Nola did it purposefully, tackling his daughter to protect her—or if it was just dumb luck, the fortunate result of Nola’s flight reflex. All he knew for sure was, without Nola, his daughter would’ve taken that metal bomb in the face. Everyone agreed. On that night, Nola had saved Zig’s daughter.

  Before anyone could react, Zig had scooped Nola up and drove her to the nearest emergency room. Maggie sat next to Nola in the backseat, thanking her for what she did, and also looking at her dad in a whole new way. For those few moments, on the way to the hospital, Nola—and Zig for scooping her up—were heroes.

  “Thank you!” his daughter kept saying to Nola. “Thank you for what y— You okay?”

  Nola never answered. She sat there, knees to her chest, eyes down as she gripped her ear. No doubt, she was in pain. The top of her ear was gone. Tears ran down her cheeks. But she never made a sound. Silent Nola had learned to take it in quiet.

  At the hospital, as the doctor got ready to stitch her up, a nurse told Nola to hold tight to Zig’s hand. Nola shook her head.

  Three hours and forty stitches later, Nola’s adoptive father stormed into the emergency room, smelling of bourbon and the breath mints to cover it. The first words out of his mouth were, “The Girl Scouts better be paying for this!”

  As Nola left the hospital that night, head down and shuffling her feet as she trailed meekly behind her dad, Zig wanted to say something. Wanted to thank this girl, but more than that— Wanted to help this girl. He never did.

  Of course, Zig and Maggie brought a huge gift basket to Nola’s house. Nola’s adoptive dad opened the door, grabbed it from Maggie’s hands, and grunted a thanks. Zig kept at it, making calls to see how Nola was doing. One night, he even stopped by to check in on her. He never got a response. Undeterred, Zig nominated her for one of the big Girl Scout honors. Nola missed the ceremony.

  A year later, Zig had the very worst night of his life. It took his marriage, his life, and most important, it took his daughter, his Magpie. Nola had saved her on the night of the campfire, but all Maggie got was another eleven months. Zig would forever blame himself for all of it.

  Though Zig didn’t know it at
the time, Nola had moved on to her fifth school. Zig never saw her again. Until tonight.

  “Don’t you worry, Nola, you’re in good hands now,” Zig promised as he gripped the surgical sheet in one hand and the eye caps in the other. “And thank you again for what you did.”

  In the Mortuary at Dover, some say they do the job because they see their own children in the lives of these dead soldiers. Zig shook his head at maudlin explanations like that. He did this job for one reason: He was good at it. This was the gift God gave him. He saw every dead body as a puzzle, and no matter how bad the wounds, he could put each body back together so the family could say a proper goodbye. He did it day after day, soldier after soldier—over two thousand of them by now—and none of them had made him see those darkest days with his own daughter. Until tonight, when he saw the woman who saved her.

  As he rolled the sheet down to Nola’s neck and slid the eye caps into place, shutting her eyes, his throat tightened like it was gripped by a fist. This was the pain he was dreading. Even when you’re ready for it, nothing sneaks up on you like grief.

  Nola’s head was turned sideways, her left cheek flash-burned from the plane crash that killed her. Fallen #2,356.

  “You have my word, Nola. We’ll get you looking great in no time,” Zig told her, fighting to keep his voice steady, even as he calculated how much makeup this one would take. He should’ve never grabbed this case. He should ask one of his fellow morticians to switch right now. But he wouldn’t.

  Since the moment he first saw Nola’s name on Dover’s official big board, Zig couldn’t stop thinking about that night at the campfire…couldn’t stop seeing Nola crashing into young Maggie, knocking her out of the way…couldn’t stop seeing the smoke blowing sideways, or Nola’s mangled left ear…and couldn’t stop replaying that look in his daughter’s eyes when she saw Zig as a hero. Today, Zig knew his daughter was wrong, even back then. He wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t even a good person. But damn, it felt good to be a dad again, or at least to play the role of Dad again, one last—

  Mothertrucker.

  Zig glanced down at Nola’s left ear. It was charred but otherwise perfect. Not a piece missing. How could that—? He looked again. Her entire ear was there. There wasn’t even the hint of a scar. He leaned closer to make sure. Could he have remembered it wrong? Maybe it was the other ear.

  Gently, he turned Nola’s head, faceup, her cold skin like a glass of ice water. On the right half of her face, her skin was perfect, not burned at all. According to the casualty report, her military plane crashed just after takeoff, outside of Copper Center, Alaska, on the edge of the national park. All seven people aboard, including the pilot, were killed. Nola was considered the lucky one, thrown clear of the plane—or maybe she jumped, considering the compound fractures in her legs. Definitely a jump, Zig thought, recalling Nola’s instincts at the campfire. Since she landed in the snow, with the right side of her face in the slush, the ice protected her from the gruesome burns she would’ve suffered all over her body as the plane went up in flames.

  “There you go, turn just like that,” Zig whispered as he rotated Nola’s head all the way and got his first good view of—

  Look at that.

  Nola’s other ear was perfect too. Two pristine ears. No pieces missing, no scars. It made no sense.

  Zig looked back down at Nola’s face, at her closed eyes. He hadn’t seen her since she was twelve. Was her nose flat like that? Could she have had her ears repaired? Absolutely. But as Zig knew firsthand, ears are difficult to rebuild, and however great the surgeon who did it, they always showed a hairline scar.

  Zig stepped down to the foot of the table, rechecking the laminated bar code around Nola’s ankle, matching it to the ones on the gurney itself. The Mortuary at Dover is considered one of the military’s true no-fail missions. The most important part of all its jobs is to make sure that one body is never mixed up with another. When fallen soldiers come into Dover, they don’t even get to morticians like Zig until their identity has been triple-checked: by DNA, then dental records, then fingerprints.

  Fingerprints.

  From under the surgical sheet, Zig reached for Nola’s hands. Both were burned black. With charring this bad, they usually couldn’t get fingerprints. But that didn’t mean there weren’t any.

  Racing out into the hallway toward the kitchenette in the breakroom, Zig grabbed a metal pot from one of the cabinets, filled it with water, and put it on the stove. As he waited for the water to boil, he pulled out his phone and dialed one of the few numbers he knew by heart. Area code 202. Washington, DC.

  “What do you want?” a female voice asked.

  “Thanks, Waggs. So nice to hear your voi—”

  “Don’t sweet-talk. Spit it out. You want something.”

  “Just the same things I always want: true friendship…more two-in-one restaurants, like when they combine Dunkin’ Donuts with Baskin-Robbins…oh, and an end to people who make you take off your shoes in their house. We need to band together and fight against those people.”

  He could practically hear Waggs rolling her eyes. “This better be something for work,” she said.

  Amy Waggs wasn’t stupid. As head of the FBI unit that pulled terrorists’ biometrics from explosive devices, she was a specialist in what people leave behind. She was even left behind herself when her husband of twelve years decided he was gay and wanted her permission to date his law partner Andrew. When it happened, Waggs couldn’t tell anyone at work. But she told Zig.

  “Let me know what you need,” she said in exasperation.

  “Oh jeez. You’re one of those people who makes everyone take their shoes off, aren’t you?”

  “Zig, if this isn’t important, you’re now the only thing holding me back from my date night with a reality show about a little dwarf family. Tell me what’s going on.”

  On the stove, wafts of steam rose from his pot of water. “I need you to run a fingerprint.”

  “You got the Fang?” she asked, referring to the FBI’s best weapon.

  “I will in a minute,” Zig said, leaving the boiling water behind and heading back into the hallway. It was late—after 7 p.m.—in a military location. The building was a ghost town.

  Zig’s surgical shoe-covers whispered down the hallway as he headed toward the closed door of Waggs’s former office: the FBI’s Latent Print Unit, a section of the building for FBI employees only.

  “Is this for something personal, or did Adrian okay it?” Waggs asked.

  “Whattya think?”

  “Zig, please don’t tell me you’re about to break into our office.”

  “I’m not. I’m just checking to see if you have the same old password. Yup. There it is. You really should update that code,” he said as the door clicked open.

  “Zig, don’t do this. You know you’re not allowed in there.”

  “And I’d never go in,” Zig said, stepping inside. It was a small room, even by Dover standards: single desk, stand-alone computer terminal, and a cabinet to hold evidence. Plus one other tool.

  From the top drawer of the desk, Zig pulled out a black device that looked like a cell phone made with mil-spec hardware, meaning you could drop it and it wouldn’t break. Zig didn’t plan on dropping it. The Fang cost more than his annual salary.

  “Are you even listening?” Waggs shouted through the phone as Zig darted back to the breakroom. “If Adrian hears that you took that without his permission—”

  “I have permission. I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

  “Don’t do that. It’s not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. Funny is when I’m reminiscing about two-in-one restaurants.”

  “Zig, how long do I know you? If you’re making jokes, especially weak ones like this—”

  “Hold on, did you say weak?”

  “Are you in trouble? Tell me what’s going on.”

  Grabbing the pot of boiling water from the stove, Zig didn’t answer. He raced back t
o Nola’s body.

  “Does the body at least have good prints to give?” Waggs added.

  “Absolutely,” Zig lied, swiping his ID, waiting for the lab doors to click, and once again approaching the gurney. From afar, even with the gut bucket between her legs, Nola almost looked like she was sleeping, but a dead body always lies differently. There’s a permanence that’s unmistakable.

  At Nola’s side, Zig grabbed her lifeless hand, scraped some of the black charring from her fingers, then held her hand over the pot of boiling water.

  “Nola, I’m sorry for this,” he whispered as he dunked her hand in the hot water. He had to do this part right. No more than a few seconds.

  When hands get badly burned, the ridges of the epidermis become black and unreadable. But like a burnt steak, if you scrape the charring away, there’s a pink layer underneath. The dermal layer. The only problem is, the dermal ridges are too flat to give a proper fingerprint. But as any medical examiner—or mortician—knows, if you dip that finger in boiling water for seven seconds, the ridges will plump up.

  Sure enough, as Zig pulled Nola’s hand from the steaming water, her pointer and middle fingers were thick and swollen.

  “Turning on the Fang,” Zig said as he hit a few buttons. The Fang got its name from the two green lasers that pointed out from the bottom of the device. Lining up the lasers with Nola’s pointer finger, Zig hit another button, activating the scanner.

  “Work email or home?” Zig asked.

  “This official business or not?”

  “Home it is,” Zig said, hitting Send.

  Through the phone, there was a musical ping. Fingerprint delivered. It’d take only a few minutes for Waggs to check the FBI database.

  “What’s the story with this soldier? Why the personal interest?” Waggs asked, already clicking on her keyboard.

  “It’s just a case,” Zig said. “According to the ID here, she’s Sergeant First Class Nola Brown, female, twenty-six years old.”