The site of the mysterious call for the authorities—a call that wouldn’t come in the Snapshot for about another hour—was an old apartment building with tags and graffiti sprayed all over it. The broken and grimy windows proclaimed it wasn’t occupied these days.
“Doesn’t look like the kind of place I’d take a prostitute,” Davis noted.
“Like you’ve ever taken a prostitute anywhere,” Chaz said, shading his eyes and looking upward. “I know this area. It was nice once—these were probably expensive apartments.”
They walked up the steps, then tried the door, which was locked tight. Davis looked to Chaz, who shrugged and kicked the door in. “Damn,” he said. “That was easier than I thought it would be.”
“Feel like a real cop?”
“Getting there,” he said, then peeked into the hallway.
A quick search didn’t turn up anything. The ground floor apartments were open, doors unlocked, but they had been gutted and were empty save for the nest some homeless person had made beneath more spray-painted tags. Even the nest seemed like it hadn’t been used in months.
Something smelled off. Musty? Davis wandered back into the main stairwell—near the entry door—sniffing at the air.
Chaz started toward the stairs to the second floor. “There are like twenty stories in this place, Davis. If we have to search them all, so help me, you’ll owe me a burrito. Extra mustard.”
“Let’s try down first,” Davis said, catching Chaz and pulling him to a door in the lobby, cracked open with only darkness beyond. He pulled it fully open, revealing a stairway leading down. The smell was stronger. Musty dampness.
Chaz tried the light switch, but the building’s power was off. Davis dug out a small flashlight and shined it down the stairs.
“Convenient,” Chaz said, trying his phone, which wasn’t as good at providing light.
“Always used to carry a flashlight,” Davis said, starting down the steps. “IRL, as a detective. You’d be surprised at how often it came in handy.”
At the bottom of the steps was another door, which Chaz opened with a well-placed kick. Dampness wafted over them as they stepped into the basement, which had walls lined with broken mirrors. Some old exercise weights lay abandoned in the corner.
“See,” Chaz said, holding up his phone for light. “This place was fancy, once upon a time.”
Davis led the way through the basement gym, darting his light right, then left, growing nervous. But there didn’t seem to be anything down here. They might have to wait until the phone call was made—and the squad cars showed up—to find out what it was.
Chaz stayed close to him, directing his phone’s frail light. Perhaps the call had come because one of the floors had caved in or something. Wouldn’t that be fitting? Two washed-up detectives, killed in a fake world because they couldn’t be bothered to sit back and take a break.
Chaz poked his side, then pointed. Davis turned his flashlight in that direction, noticing a doorway in the wall. Light reflected off a tiled floor beyond. And beyond that . . .
“Water?” he said, striding forward. The musty smell suddenly made sense. “Swimming pool? How is it still full in this place?”
“Damned if I know,” Chaz said, walking with him into the room. It was a pool, moderately sized, considering it was in an apartment building basement. Davis put his hand on his hip, shining the light around. The pool was only partially full. There was no—
His flashlight passed over a face underneath the water.
Davis froze, holding the light on the dead, glassy eyes. Chaz cursed, fumbling for his gun, but Davis just stood there staring. She was young, maybe just a teen. Beside her was another body, settled on the bottom of the pool, facedown.
Shaking, Davis turned his flashlight more slowly across the bottom of the pool. Another. And another.
Corpses. Eight of them.
Three
“What the hell, man?” Chaz said. “What the hell!”
Davis sat on the steps of the apartment across the street from the one where they’d found the bodies.
“I mean . . . what the hell.” Chaz paced back and forth, handgun out. Davis couldn’t blame him. He clutched his own gun before him, feeling as if some murderer were going to pop out from behind the building, wielding a rusty cleaver.
“How did they keep this quiet?” Chaz demanded. “There are eight bodies in that building. Eight! How is this not on every news station in the city, right? How come they don’t have every cop in the city working on this? Damn it!”
He paced back the other direction.
I deserve this, Davis thought, slumped in his place. I should have just left well enough alone. All he’d wanted to do was keep Chaz in the Snapshot until 20:17. Now . . . this.
“Okay, Chaz,” Chaz said to himself, walking back the other way. “Okay, okay. They’re not real corpses, you know? Just dupes. Dead dupes. That’s all you saw.” He looked to Davis. “Davis? You okay, buddy?”
Davis held his gun in a trembling hand.
“Davis?” Chaz said. “What do we do now, man? You’re a real cop. What do we do?”
“I’m not a real cop,” Davis said softly.
“Yeah, not anymore. But you were one for . . . ten years?”
“I was on the force for ten years,” Davis said. “But I was never a real cop.”
Chaz, on the other hand, had been on the force for less than a year before being assigned to Snapshot duty to replace Davis’s old partner, who had finally retired.
“So, what do we do?” Chaz asked.
“Two options, I guess,” Davis said, holstering his gun. He took a deep breath. “We walk away, assume the IRL detectives are working on this, and pretend we didn’t see anything. We erase our phone tracks, claim we hung out in the diner a few hours longer, and forget this happened.”
“Okay, yeah,” Chaz said, nodding. “Yeah. No reason we have to be involved, right? And they obviously don’t want us knowing about this. So if we walk away, nobody is the wiser.” He looked down at the handgun he was holding. “What’s the other option?”
“Well, we’re stuck here until that domestic disturbance in the evening. We can poke around at these murders, maybe find out a thing or two that can help with the investigation. And if not . . . well, maybe we can figure out why the hell the precinct is hiding this from us. Those corpses look kind of fresh—not much bloating, not a lot of flesh sloughing off. Eight bodies found drowned in an old apartment building, and not a peep to the guys who could go back in time and find out who did it? Why the hell wouldn’t they involve us?”
“Yeah.” Chaz looked to him. “Yeah, damn. What’s going on?”
People became cops for a myriad of reasons. For some it was expected—it was a family thing, or just seen as good work for a blue-collar person. Others, they liked the power. Chaz was one of those.
But deep down, there was something in all of them. Something about wanting to fix the world. Whether you joined up because your family pushed you into it, or just because you got recruited at the right time, there was a story you told yourself. That you were doing something good, something right.
That story was hard to keep believing, some days. Other days it walked up, slapped you in the face, and said, “You going to do something about this or not?”
A good way to go out, Davis thought. Doing something that feels real again.
“You want to dig into this, don’t you?” Chaz asked.
“Yeah,” Davis said, standing. “You with me?”
“Sure. Why the hell not.” Chaz shivered, then finally put his gun away. “What do we do?”
“We wait,” Davis said, checking his phone.
A short time later, an autocab pulled up and a couple of people got out. White people, wearing business clothing. Real estate agents, Davis guessed. Or maybe people from a bank that owns this place. The woman dug in her purse for some keys while the man pointed at the broken windows, saying something Davis couldn’t hear.
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They seemed concerned by the forced door. Hopefully that wouldn’t introduce too big a Deviation. They went inside, chatting.
They rushed back out a few minutes later, visibly agitated. The man sat down on the steps, hyperventilating, holding his face. He threw up a short time later. The woman screamed into her phone, hysterical.
It took about ten minutes for the squad cars to come. There were two, joined by a third later, which arrived about a minute earlier than Davis’s records said they would, without lights on. Davis didn’t recognize any of the cops, but since he’d been on Snapshot duty for years, that wasn’t odd. He knew people back at the precinct headquarters, but not a lot of the beat cops.
Several cops consoled the real estate agents, while the others secured the building. Why wasn’t there anything in the precinct records? A complete hush. According to the forums, the cars would be gone in under a half hour.
“This is so weird,” Chaz said. “What the hell is going on?”
“No idea,” Davis said softly. “But I think I know how we can find out.”
Chaz looked at him, then smiled. He seemed to be coming to grips with what they’d seen. “HQ?”
Davis nodded.
Not the real one, of course. The fake one, inside the Snapshot.
“Let’s go,” Chaz said, growing eager. “It’s been months since we had an excuse to do this.”
Four
Davis and Chaz burst in through the front of the 42nd Precinct headquarters, which housed Snapshot detail, among other special jurisdictions in the city. Davis tried to project confidence like Chaz did. But it was hard. In the real world when he visited this place, he felt small. Out of place. Maybe even scorned.
He paused inside the doors. The smell of coffee, the bustling of officers, everyone doing what they should—and everyone seeming to know Davis’s shame. That he’d failed them, and been banished as a consequence.
Fortunately, he had Chaz. “Insecurity” wasn’t really part of that man’s vocabulary. Chaz held his reality badge up high in the air and shouted, “Guess what, everyone. Y’all ain’t real!”
He sauntered forward, holding the badge and pointing it one way, then the other, grinning like he’d just won the lottery. Most people who saw it, they stopped and got that glassy look. Gina Gutierrez dropped her cup of coffee, which sent a spray into the air as it struck the floor. Marco’s jaw hung open, then he patted at his body as if trying to prove to himself that he was real.
Davis followed his partner, feeling an initial stab of pain for the officers who saw the badge. Then his empathy was consumed by memories of the last time he’d come into this room, in the real world. Gina had looked at him as if he were a rat slinking into the middle of a wedding feast. Marco had refused to speak to him.
People swarmed around tables, popping up from behind cubicles—each one wanting to see the badge for themselves. There was no reason for Chaz to display it as he did, held over his head for all to see. They could have been surgical, moved right to Maria’s cubicle, showed her the badge and gotten information without making a fuss. That was the sort of thing they were supposed to do. Fewer Deviations.
Davis didn’t chide his partner. Maybe those Deviations would stop Warsaw at 20:17 from happening, which was something a part of him really, really wanted.
Maria’s cubicle was in the rear half of the large workroom. Chaz and Davis settled into the cubicle doorway, looking in at her as the sounds of whispers, even tears, began around them.
Maria was a prim woman in her early fifties, with glasses and hair she kept dyed black. She looked at the two of them over her spectacles—a sign of her stubbornness, as she’d always refused surgery to rid her of them—and focused on the badge in Chaz’s hand.
“How’d you fake that?” she asked, turning back to her cubicle wall, which had a few virtual screens hovering before it.
“No faking, Maria,” Davis said, taking the spare seat in the cubicle. Chaz loomed overhead like a lighthouse beacon, badge in hand. “I’m afraid you’re a dupe. We’re in a Snapshot.”
She grunted, but otherwise didn’t seem bothered. She knew, despite what she’d said, that they weren’t faking. Dupes always knew. But she always reacted this calmly, which was one reason she was who they came to for information. Some people were reliable even after finding out that nothing they did mattered in the slightest.
“There was a call,” Davis said, ignoring Holly Martinez as she stepped up, pulled Chaz around to get a look at the badge, then stumbled back, hand over her mouth. “About an hour ago now, to an apartment complex over on Fourth. For some reason, it isn’t logged into my database when I check precinct call records.”
“That means you aren’t authorized to see the case,” Maria said dryly. “You know the database is dynamic, based on clearance.”
“I’m supposed to have full clearance.”
“You do. There are just levels beyond ‘full clearance.’ ”
“Well, fortunately, in here I have all those levels too.” Davis reached up and tapped the badge that Chaz was holding.
Maria looked at it, momentarily transfixed. What did they see?
“I’ll have to check with the chief,” she said, tearing her eyes away from the badge.
“Check what?” Davis asked. “In here, I have ultimate authority. What happened at that apartment on Fourth?”
“Let me call the chief.”
“No need,” Chaz said, pointing as Chief Roberts barreled down the aisle between cubicles. He wore a suit; probably had meetings with politicians today. He never looked right in a suit, no matter how well it was tailored—they always ended up too tight on him.
He stormed right up to Chaz and took the badge from his fingers. The chief stared at it, then shoved it back at Chaz and barreled away without a word.
“Chief?” Maria said, standing up.
“Wait for it. . . .” Chaz said.
Davis sat back. He hated this part. He heard the door to the chief’s office slam at the rear of the room.
The gunshot came a second later. Maria gasped, stumbling back against her desk, eyes widening.
“Looks like you’re on your own,” Chaz noted. “Feel free to go check if he’s really dead. You do it about half the time.”
She looked at him, her mouth moving silently. Then she sank down into her seat.
“How often?” she whispered. “How often do you do this?”
“Every six months or so,” Davis said. “It’s easier than trying to get information from you people IRL.”
“I . . .” She took a deep breath. “What was it you wanted to know?”
“The call about an hour ago?” Davis prodded, speaking gently. “To Fourth Avenue? I think it was from some realtors.”
Maria called up another screen, which popped into existence hovering above her desk. She tapped her fingers on the desktop, typing on an invisible keyboard. “Oh,” she said. “Oh . . .”
“What?” Chaz said, leaning down beside Davis, both of them reading the screen. Information was coming in directly from the police investigating the old apartment building. Eight bodies. All presumed dead by drowning.
Fits previous pattern, one note said.
“Previous pattern?” Davis demanded. He reached over and tapped on her desk, calling up information. Pictures floated into the air—dead bodies with blue lips. Three people found suffocated, washed up on the shores of the city, in bags. They’d been preserved after death using chemicals.
The second discovery had been five bodies, this time found floating off the coast. They’d been in plastic bags, much like the first, though this time the deaths hadn’t been from suffocation. Instead the victims had been poisoned.
“Daaamn,” Chaz whispered.
“What connects these two sets to the corpses the group just discovered?” Davis asked, frowning and dragging some of the holo-pictures through the air above the desk.
“Looks like embalming fluid,” Maria said, reading. “Discover
ed by detectives on the scene—which is important.”
“It means finding these eight today was a lucky accident,” Davis whispered, narrowing his eyes. “The others were dumped in the ocean, but these were found while the killer was still preparing them. Soaking them first, before dropping them off. So this is a chance to crack the case.”
A quick scan of the files showed that detectives had been spinning their wheels until now. They were facing a meticulous killer who chose victims easy to miss: the homeless, prostitutes. It was sometimes shocking how the right people could vanish without anyone noticing—at least, not anyone who could make the cops or politicians pay attention.
He’s clever, Davis thought, feeling a chill as he read the notes on those cases. He’s very clever. In fact . . . Something struck him about it all, something that made him feel sick deep inside.
“This is Gina’s case,” Maria said. “She’s leading, at least. We’ve got a ton of people on it. I’ve been following it too, for obvious reasons.”
“Obvious?” Chaz asked, reaching across Davis and helping himself to some M&M’s on Maria’s desk.
Maria frowned, then zoomed one of the windows, showing a report Gutierrez had written, dubbing the murderer “The Photographer.”
“What?” Chaz asked. “Why that name? Does it have something to do with Snapshots?”
“He’s killing them in a specific way,” Davis whispered. “To prevent Snapshot detectives from being able to find him.”
Maria nodded grimly. “The Photographer preserves the bodies after killing them, which prevents forensics from getting a specific bead on when they were killed. Then, he or she dumps the corpses in the ocean, letting them drift and eventually wash up. The killer obviously doesn’t mind if they’re found, might even want it, but is stopping us from using a Snapshot on the case. He or she knows that we’d need to be able to point to a specific day or place to get a warrant.”
She scanned the report from today, which was still being updated by police on the scene.
Bodies show evidence of what we assumed earlier, one of them wrote. Killer was letting them soak in the pool to make it more difficult to tell when they were dumped in the ocean.
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