Chapter 8 - Duplicate
Holiday classes were cancelled the next day, but I still found myself in the school courtyard.
I hauled my laptop onto the bench, squinting down at it over my crossed legs.
I would have simply stayed at home, but Dad had been put in a protective mood after Birdy's death. As a result, he had been bumbling around the house every second, making an excuse to squint over my shoulder. I was forced to lie and say that classes were on after all, hauling myself through the door and to the empty school, in case he decided to track my phone or something.
Just as I had the thought, my phone buzzed with an incoming text.
10:43 AM Dad: It's unregistered, beetw. Don't worry about it, tourists do weird things.
Jolene had trekked into the forest after my call, as promised, and retrieved the half-buried gun. Earlier in the morning, all they knew was that it wasn't Rebekah's, even if there was a smear of paint on the tree.
"All her weapons were one brand, one source, like a serial killer's MO," Dad had said. "This one is different, so I assure you, it's unrelated. I'm having people look into it right now. I'll let you know when they report back. How'd you find it anyway?"
I had barely looked up from my cereal. "Danger calls and I answer, daddy dearest."
As I stared at the screen of my phone, I was caught between rolling my eyes at Dad for thinking the acronym BTW was typed beetw and sighing at the news. It wasn't that I wanted the gun to be an old relic of Rebekah's that had been left behind, but it seemed like there were more and more puzzle pieces being dumped onto my head that didn't fit with the bigger picture.
I turned my attention back to my laptop, then changed my mind and squinted around the courtyard.
This was not an ideal location. Tourists saw me sitting out on my own, and most slowed to peer at me as they passed through, like I was an animal on exhibit. I had even resorted to chucking a pebble at a flock that lingered to take a picture of me. They were probably going to post it online and caption it, "Murder Island Teenagers Sitting Alone."
I had turned my brightness all the way down to make sure no one would see my screen if they were spying on me. Still, for what I was about to do, I preferred nosy tourists over Dad.
"Alright." I rubbed my hands together. "Tell me your secrets."
The page loaded, right into Dad's confidential email inbox. He had a habit of keeping his passwords the same, with variations on the numbers at the end.
"I am definitely going to be punished in the afterlife," I muttered, scanning the subject lines.
The coroner's autopsy report on Birdy Lu was only the third one down.
Cause of death is cardiac arrest, I read to myself, scanning the medical jargon. Attending physician declared victim DOA.
What sort of healthy teenaged girl suffers from a sudden heart attack? I wondered, scratching at my wig, both in itchiness and in being completely flummoxed. She didn't have any medical issues. Apart from previously being shot in the head.
My throat twisted. Too soon.
I scrolled farther down the report, into the abnormalities of the organs.
Higher levels of potassium and chloride were present in all tests conducted. The elevated components are symptoms of hyperkalemia, a condition which has led to the cardiac failure of the victom. No further investigation is necessary.
By the language of the report, I figured the coroner wanted to believe Birdy's death had been completely natural. Nowhere was there an explanation on why her organs would suddenly fail. She had been shot in the head a few months ago and had recovered with successful tests. Of all times to go into cardiac arrest, why was it now, when she had reached full recovery?
I tilted my head up, taking a break from concentrating at the screen. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her parents screaming over her body bag, begging the paramedics to save an already dead girl.
Birdy was never supposed to die. Not so early, before she could live the rest of her life. She wasn't sick or addicted to drugs or skirting on the wrong side of the law, so why was no one at all suspicious about her sudden heart attack?
Birdy's death was reported in a tiny box at the back of the weekly newspaper, no demands, no questions, no nothing.
I drew up my browser. My fingers were trembling.
Potassium and chloride, I googled, uncertain about what I was trying to find. If my chemistry class knowledge checked out, I remembered that those two elements created a compound salt.
The first few links of my search dug up blogs from primary school science projects, fluttering little animations onto my screen.
Potassium chloride is a natural substance found within the body in its separate forms. They are vital in their role to aid the beating of the heart.
"So far, so good," I muttered, then like a weirdo, added murder to my search.
The very first link I arrived at sent my heart plummeting to my stomach.
Due to the properties of potassium chloride, it is the last ingredient in the "three drug cocktail" of most lethal injections.
I clicked onto the next page.
Experiments have found that simple biological tests are inadequate to differentiate endogenous from exogenous potassium. The compound breaks down into potassium and chloride, in which the chlorine binds with the human body's naturally occurring sodium to create sodium chloride, otherwise known as common table salt.
The resultant heart attack is found to have no known cause, as all that is found in the body is a slightly elevated level of salt. Too much potassium in the body causes tachycardia (fast heart-rate), which then leads to something known as ventricular fibrillation, which is one of many types of cardiac arrest.
I slammed my laptop shut, shoving it into my bag in a deft move with one hand as I unlocked my phone with the other.
"Hello?" Dad answered immediately. "How's prep going?"
"Simply biological tests are inadequate to differentiate endogenous from exogenous potassium!" I snapped, tugging my bag to my shoulder.
Dad cleared his throat. "Excuse me?"
"Endogenous," I continued, "noun: internal in origin." I was marching through town now, a crazy faux blonde girl tottering on ankle boots at a hundred miles per hour. "Exogenous. Noun: external in origin."
I halted underneath a wide oak tree, pausing to yank up my socks before setting off again.
"Potassium chloride is released in sudden cardiac arrest and is a method of inducing cardiac arrest. Do you see what I am getting at here?"
Silence. "Luca?" Dad said. "Are you feeling quite alright—"
"I'm fine!" I tore the phone from my ear and hung up, throwing it into my bag.
What part of this wasn't clear? Someone had injected Birdy with a dose of potassium chloride and stopped her heart, trying to play it off as natural incident.
And since no one would believe me, I would prove it.
I skidded to a stop outside the hospital, adjusting my wig.
Like last time, I marched straight past the receptionist, moving at a brisk pace as if I had somewhere important to be. The hallway split approached and unlike my previous visit, I took the other one, moving into the bustle of the hospital's main wing, pressing close to the wall as doctors ran by with their surgical masks pulled to their chins. My pocket began buzzing.
I ignored it, slipping through a door that had been left ajar. My breaths were coming deeply as I scanned the dim room. All the curtains had been drawn but there were no patients in the beds. Each bed was made neatly, with the covers pulled up to the pillows.
I strode to the drawers. The first one was filled with spare pillow cases. I closed it. The second was overflowing with patients' frocks. I dug through the mounds of fabric, and at the very back, found a spare set of scrubs.
"Jackpot."
With another glance to make sure no one was coming in, I pulled off my sweater and shrugged the scrub shirt over my normal top. Shivering, I jumped into the pants over my jeans. It didn't matter if this was a hygiene issue, I was only trying to bypass security.
I paused in front of a metal tray, watching as it reflected back my pale face under the blonde wig. I was hardly recognisable as Luca Fern, but just in case, I found a surgical mask that looked vaguely used and put it on.
I could only cross my fingers and hope that I didn't contract a contagious disease.
Leaving my bag and sweater in the corner of the room, I slipped back into the hallway with only my phone in my hand. It promptly started buzzing again.
"The patient in room 308 is having a seizure," a nurse up ahead yelled. "All units—"
I took a sharp left, moving out of view before he could mistake me for a real nurse. The security cameras that operated in every corner of this ward were easy to avoid as long as I kept my head down.
My phone was still buzzing. I finally looked down, catching the tail end of Gabriel's display picture—the snapshot I had taken of him with brain freeze a few months ago. His face faded to the home screen.
Gabriel Kingston: (3) missed calls
"Sorry," I muttered to the screen, shoving it into the waistband of my jeans. I slammed my shoulder against the exit doors of the floor and took the stairs down to the main sub-level. As soon as the door of the lower level closed after me, I was hit with the chill of the air conditioning, humming below zero. There was a vehement buzzing at my waist again, short this time, but loud in the vacated silence.
Sighing a puff of warm air into my surgical mask, I retrieved my phone.
11:09 AM Gabriel Kingston: Luca are you okay??
11:10 AM Luca Fern: i'm fine
His reply was immediate.
11:10 AM Gabriel Kingston: ur dad called me. Where are you?
I started at my phone. What was my dad doing calling Gabriel? No, wait, since when did my dad have Gabriel's phone number?
On my way to the morgue, I started typing. Pls hope that my mental condition isn't going down the toilet— I hit the delete button and erased the entire message, starting again.
11:11 AM Luca Fern: at school
11:11AM Gabriel Kingston: the high school?? why?
11:12 AM Luca Fern: gtg and concentrate sorry. i'll drop by tonight
11:12AM Gabriel Kingston: wait why are you at the high school
11:12AM Gabriel Kingston: Luca?
11:12AM Gabriel Kingston: Luca i swear...
I took a long look at the time, then put my phone on Airplane Mode to block the rest of Gabriel's texts. 11:12AM. I couldn't lose chunks of time within the section of the hospital where all the dead people were kept.
A set of double doors loomed into view, with a little panel on the side kept them locked at all times. I peered through the glass panel on the left door, finding the room inside empty save for a single metal "bed."
I pulled my sleeves over my hands, jabbing in the code 0000. The little red light turned green and the doors gave an audible click.
"Good old Altswood and its habit of having the same security code in all public areas," I muttered. No wonder why we had a serial killer running loose for so long.
The coldness of the morgue hit me with a physical shock, a sudden shift into near freezing as the door closed firmly. Rows and rows of drawers revealed themselves in front of me.
I couldn't move.
Entire lives were in these tiny, silver slabs, labelled with nothing except a number code. My mother had been put in one of these, cut open and dissected and shoved back together, before being buried under six feet of dirt.
"Maddison," I whispered, running a finger across the top of the drawers. "Carter. Alicia. Manny. Larkin. Shannon. Connor." I knew that there was no way those who died by Rebekah's hand were still here, but the room had doubtlessly seen all of them come and go.
I splayed my hand along the metal edge. I wondered if I would end up here one day.
"Focus," I whispered to myself, moving to the middle of the room. "Where are the files?"
They revealed themselves the moment I asked, in the form of a filing cabinet beside the door. Someone had conveniently sorted the room records chronologically, and it didn't take long to find a file labelled with LU, BIRDY that cited a reference number. Still clutching the file, I searched for the matching reference number on the drawers.
It was on the very lowest row.
Slowly I got to my knees and set down the file beside me, breathing deeply. The extra oxygen helped, but the stale smell of death and blood was even more disturbing. I wrapped one hand around my mouth and used the other to tug at the drawer.
The drawer opened with ease. It kept opening and opening and opening, until I had pulled out the entirety and was looking down at the shape of a body underneath a sheet.
I didn't know what else I had expected. I pulled back the sheet with fierce determination, and Birdy's cold, blue face was staring up at me. Well, it wasn't, really. Her eyes were closed—purple veins visible through her thin skin.
My breaths were coming too fast.
I tore my gaze away, focusing on the ceiling instead. It brought on a sudden light-headedness, but I welcomed it over the blotches of red that were forming over my vision.
A bang sounded outside, in the hallway.
Gasping, I jumped to a crouch, watching the door. I could have sworn I saw the slightest movement through the glass panel, but when no one came barging through, demanding to know why I was in here, I determined it was safe.
Before I could chicken out, I drew the sheet further from Birdy's body. I tried not to look at all the incisions where her autopsy had been performed, at all the ugly stitches that ended just below her chin so no one would ever know her organs had been removed and shoved back in.
What I needed to focus on were her arms.
I searched along the inside of her elbow, even prodding at her cold arm with my fingers.
There was nothing but unblemished skin.
"You might really be going insane," I said aloud, prodding at the other arm. "Who the hell sneaks into a morgue and then inspects a dead person? Oh God, Birdy, I'm so sorry."
And then I felt a bump.
I stopped short, my hand halting. My index finger could feel the slightest of grooves.
I lifted Birdy's floppy arm, stretching the skin at her elbow. There was nothing in the area of abundant veins, where a coroner would check first and foremost. Instead, there was the smallest little dot in the folds of skin at her elbow, swollen by a millimetre around the centre.
This had to be it. This was undoubtedly a track mark, a clear injection site. No one could say that this wasn't a case of homicide.
But I was more flabbergasted that this had gone unseen.
I drew the sheet over Birdy's face and quickly pushed the drawer back in again, securing it with a click. Her folder still lied hazardously beside me, and as I scrambled to get to my feet, I shuffled through the papers inside, searching for the processes her body had gone through. The first page was the same report that I had seen scanned into Dad's email. I read through, recalling all the information. It wasn't until I got to the third page that I noticed a discrepancy.
"Version two?" I read aloud, spotting the small watermark along the bottom. "Where is version one?"
I shuffled through all the papers, going through page after page of writing that I didn't understand until I came to the end, where a report that looked almost identical to version two came loose from the file and floated to my feet.
Almost identical, except for some very crucial sections.
Higher levels of potassium and chloride were present in all tests conducted. Suspected track marks have been found along the left elbow and between the big and second right toes. Further testing is necessary to determine the source of these elevated concentrations, though they are the cause of sudden cardiac arrest. Investigation is recommended to conclude the victim a result of homicide.
"Oh my god," I whispered, scrambling for the camera on my phone. I took pictures of every page, concreting its reality with my twitching fingers. For every one page, I snapped at least five photos, an effect of my rapid finger seizing.
I held out the two files, comparing the details. They were both signed by the same physician who sent the email to Dad.
So why had the report been heavily changed the second time around?
I shoved the rest of the papers back into the file, all except the original report that I clutched to my chest. Using my hip, I checked the cabinet shut again with a vehement bang, having slid the file back into place. Only when the echo stopped did I realise my mistake.
A shadow moved by the glass panel in the door.
I dropped to the floor immediately, cringing as I pressed my face against the cold floor. The large filing cabinet hid my body, but I didn't dare breathe as the silhouette lingered by the door.
All the little hairs along my neck rose. Why weren't they coming in? If a doctor saw someone suspicious lurking in the morgue, I would expect them to come barging in demanding a full explanation.
Unless the person outside wasn't hospital personnel either.
My head whipped up. The shadow had left.
Taking care not to make any sudden movements, I sidled to the double doors, peering through the glass panel into the long hallway outside. The bright bulbs that illuminated the otherwise lightless hallway were steady, revealing an empty corridor. I tugged at the door, easing myself back into the hallway, making sure the surgical mask was still secure on my face. The blinking security camera was located directly above the entrance to the staircase, and unless I wanted to take the elevator at the other end of the hallway, I would have to face the camera.
Then the elevator made a noise that signified its arrival.
I stopped short, immediately trying to conjure an acceptable excuse for why I was down here. The paper crinkled as I clutched it desperately to my chest. Nothing mattered, as long as I could get out of here with this report.
The elevator doors slid open. But no one was there.
Eyebrows furrowed, I crept closer, squinting as something small rolled from the elevator and into the hallway. It almost resembled an aerosol can, from its small circular shape to the hissing noise it made. When the elevator doors closed after it, the can stopped too, its fizzling paused.
Too late did I realise that I needed to run.
The explosion threw me back a few metres, throwing me hard against the wall. A wave of heat rippled by in the shock, pressing against my skin and squeezing by in a deafening bang.
I fought to stay conscious, but something had hit the reset button in my brain. My ears hummed with a continuous whine and my entire world blurred into an abstract painting. I tried to roll onto my side, but I wasn't entirely aware which way was up and which was down. All I could see were little blobs moving about, and a darker blob that got bigger and bigger before bending down and picking something up from beside me.
A sudden sharp pain ran along my arm, and then my eyes were sealing shut.