Page 68 of Cadaver Lab: Mind Over Murder

“Fuck the shop.” He glared. “You are what’s important.”

How she loved this man, even when he was overprotective. “I’m fine. Just tell me, why are we here?”

Still looking unhappy, he reached for the cell phone he’d plugged into the dashboard charger because they couldn’t keep a battery charged nowadays in Mudville.

“We’re here to make a phone call,” Liam answered.

“To?” she prompted.

He lifted his gaze from the cell’s display and said, “The one person who might be able to help us get rid of this thing. For good.”

Liam tapped the screen and then put the cell on speaker so Natalie could hear.

After three rings, a deep voice said, “Well, well, well. If it isn’t Doctor Liam Walsh. How are things back in Mudville? You bored yet?”

Liam let out a snort. “Definitely not boring here. That’s why I’m calling. As much as I hate to admit it as a proud Army veteran, I need a favor from the US Navy. And since you’re one of the few sailors I actually like, I figured I’d call my old buddy Dean.”

Discounting Liam ribbing Dean about the legendary Army-Navy rivalry, Natalie tried to piece the rest of this puzzle together.

Dean was Liam’s friend from his military days, though unlike Liam, Dean was still on active duty, stationed somewhere in Virginia, if she remembered correctly.

Natalie had gotten to meet Dean last year while he was home on leave visiting his parents. In fact, it had been Dean who’d given Liam a head’s up that the perfect property for his cadaver lab was for sale in his hometown in upstate New York.

“Happy to help if I can. You know I owe you,” Dean said.

Liam let out a snort. “Yeah you do, considering you stole the best lab intern I ever had from me. How is Tessa? You two still cohabitating?”

Tessa, the grad student Liam had hired to help at the lab… until Dean came to town. The two met and fell for each other on his visit home. Then Tessa had moved to be with him.

“Sorry, Walsh. Love trumps lab any day. And Tessa’s great. Happily working hard on experiments that I still don’t completely understand. Unhappily counting down the days until I ship out again.”

Natalie saw Liam react to that. “You’re shipping out? Soon?”

“Yup. Sunday, zero-seven hundred, so it’s good you caught me now. Never know what kind of communications there will be aboard ship.”

“Where are you going? Or can you not say?” Liam asked in a convincingly casual tone that didn’t match the tension she saw in his jaw or the muscles in his forearm as he clenched the phone in one fist.

“It’s not a secret. We’ll be training over the Mariana Trench.”

Liam’s eyes widened.

Why? What was the significance of this Mariana Trench?

Natalie picked up her own cell phone, also plugged into the dashboard to charge. She navigated to the browser and searched Mariana Trench. What she read had her own eyes widening.

Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it is the deepest oceanic trench on Earth.

She remembered during the meeting at the shop when they were discussing where they might possibly dump the brain that would be far enough away from any living people.

Liam’s idea to use the ocean wasn’t random. In all the stress she’d forgotten he had a friend in the Navy. A friend with access to a ship that would be sailing over the deepest part of the ocean, and it was leaving Sunday.

But how deep was this trench? Was it deep enough?

Her heart pounded as she read further. When she found the answer she gasped.

Seven miles.

Double what the ghosts could travel.