Serious Crimes (A Willows and Parker Mystery) by Laurence Gough Page A

said, “What’ve you got, Christy?”
    “Nothing much, Jack. I’m still trying to melt the ice off him.”
    “I thought you’d be finished by now.” There was an edge to Willows’ voice. “How long is it going to take?”
    “In some places, Jack, Lee’s covered in a layer of ice that’s as much as six inches thick. But the main problem is that his body’s frozen solid, too. If you think about it, the water falling on him couldn’t have frozen unless the entire corpse was thirty-two degrees or less.” Kirkpatrick paused, and then said, “You see what I’m getting at?”
    “Over the weekend,” Willows said, “the temperature in the city dropped to a maximum low of twenty-one degrees. The Sun Yat-Sen Gardens were closed to the public from six o’clock Friday evening until Monday morning. Was there enough time, during that period, for the body temperature to drop from ninety-eight point six to the freezing point?”
    “I don’t know,” said Kirkpatrick. “It depends how much the guy weighed, and I can’t find that out because he’s still covered in ice.”
    “Parker and I worked out roughly how long the hose had been running by the volume of the flow and the amount of water sprayed on the corpse and surrounding ice,” said Willows. “Our guess is between six and eight hours.”
    “What time was it Yang discovered the body?”
    “Approximately six thirty.”
    “So the hose was turned on, say, between ten and midnight?”
    “Somewhere in there.”
    “Then my guess is Lee was killed at least twenty-four hours before he was dumped in the pond. And that the body was frozen solid at the time he was dumped.”
    “So it’s fair to say the body was stored outside, or in an unheated building for twenty-four hours or more before somebody turned him into an ice sculpture?”
    “Right.”
    “How long before he thaws, doc?”
    “I’d say at least two days.”
    Willows sighed, and hung up.
    Kirkpatrick cradled the receiver and went back to the zinc table. He studied Lee’s face. The skin had a faint greenish tinge. Lee had combed his hair straight back, and that’s the way it was now, except for a bit sticking out over his left ear. Kirkpatrick resisted the urge to use his comb. Lee’s eyes were wide open. He was staring straight ahead, into distances so vast they were immeasurable. But then, that’s what you were supposed to do when you meditated, wasn’t it? Lose focus. Slip outside yourself. Kirkpatrick reached out and gently pinched Lee’s nose. The plugs of ice shot out of Lee’s nostrils and into the palm of his hand.
    Lee sat perfectly still — about what you’d expect from a man who was colder than a freshly-mixed margarita.
    Kirkpatrick took a quick pass with the dryer. A single tiny crystalline bead of water hung trembling from Lee’s eyelash. He remembered a late-night movie he’d seen on TV a few weeks ago, about a group of explorers who’d stumbled across a frozen stiff locked into an iceberg somewhere in the arctic. A Neanderthal type, who’d been in a state of suspended animation for several thousand years. The explorers had made the mistake of thawing him out, and he’d turned on them and… eaten them .
    Well, after a fast that lasted two or three thousand years, they should have expected the poor guy to have an appetite.
    Tentatively, Kirkpatrick reached out and touched the droplet of crystal-clear water that hung trembling from Lee’s eyelash. There was, of course, an explanation for the movement. Passing traffic would cause the building to vibrate. Although the vibrations were usually too minute to notice, they were always there. The whole city was constantly shaking, if you thought about it.
    One thing for sure, Lee sure as hell wasn’t alive .
    But just to make sure, Kirkpatrick reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger gently against the dead man’s eyeball. The orb was cold and unyielding. Lee’s eye, like his brain and all his thought processes, was