Maya folded the sheet halfway down the girl’s body and placed a file on the steel table above her head. Though I’d tried to keep the memory of Kira’s photograph clear in my mind, the sight of the girl’s face still made me gasp. It took me a deliberate moment, comparing that memory with the blotched face of the dead girl, to understand that it was not my niece lying there, straight brown hair parted off the green-tinged brow to either side, at peace.
My knees quaked with the force of my relief and I shot my hands out to steady myself, grabbing for Maya’s file to disguise my lurch and flipping to a photo of the body where it had been found. The child’s hair tied back in a ponytail, ill-fitting clothes: new green corduroys cinched by a thick piece of string around the waist, a slightly grubby pink T-shirt. Then the next pictures, the belly sunken between the sharp ridges of her hipbones jutting as she lay on the cold metal. It was unnatural to see a child like that.
Looking from the corpse to the photo and back again, I fought a numbness in my mind, its refusal to accept. I made myself note the autopsy’s Y-shaped slashes into her torso, puckered beneath their broad stitching, no longer any blood to bridge the gashes. Her little oval face seemed restful, but not in angelic repose: there was exhaustion there, desperation brought to a sudden halt.
She is real, I thought to myself. I wanted to touch her shoulder, wake her up. ‘Were you in on the autopsy?’ I asked Maya.
‘Yeah. With the prof.’
‘Did you find the cause of death? Was it… was she killed?’
Maya shook her head, and the metal in her nose and ears tinkled. ‘Not that we could tell. Apart from the lower-range musculoskeletal development she shares with the two boys, there’s no obvious cause of death. Although we did find severe serotonin and adrenaline imbalances.’
‘What could have caused that?’
Another tinkle from her face, far too airy for this oppressive room. ‘We don’t know. Professor Rossetti can only imagine – because of where she came from – that it might have been panic associated with some form of withdrawal. But the initial tox screen was clear.’
‘So no drugs?’
‘No.’ I scanned the girl’s body, her sleeping face, the gnawed fingernails and the picked toenails coated with a layer of coloured lacquer. At least no drugs had been forced on someone so young, and all the other horrors that would imply. ‘But she’s teeming with biotech,’ Maya went on. ‘She has to be from Green Valley.’
‘And there’s still no ID, I’m guessing.’
‘Nope.’ Across the shelf, Maya watched me from beneath the straight edge of her dark fringe, her black-rimmed eyes behind her black-rimmed glasses observing me as I fought myself. I traced my gaze around the girl’s hairline, over her temple, past the vale of her eye and over her cheekbone, in and then out again over the jaw. Again, I fought the urge to reach out to her – I didn’t need to touch her to prove to myself that she was real.
‘Do you have her clothes? Her possessions? I’d like to look at them.’
‘Jordan’s got them,’ she said, and I left her to shut the girl away as I made my way back to him.
In the common room, he was bent over the file, writing a note in his hooked left-handed scrawl. He looked up when I came in. ‘The one you’re looking for?’
‘No.’ I sat down across the table from him as he raised his eyebrows. Stanton wasn’t the most peaceful city on Earth, but three dead children in a week… that was enough to raise the eyebrows of a seasoned detective like Jordan Martinez.
Jordan looked into my face and read me. He put down his pen. ‘What’s the deal?’
I decided then to tell Jordan the truth. I knew I could trust him, and this situation was a serious one; I would need his help. ‘My niece is missing,’ I sighed. It was a relief to tell someone who might care.
He straightened and stared at me. ‘Oh. Shit.’
‘She’s nine years old. She was my sister’s daughter. She lives in Green Valley.’
‘What? You let your sister take her there?’
‘I didn’t let her do anything. I had no say in the matter. Besides, my sister died just before the partition, so neither did she.’ I watched Jordan’s face change and carried on talking before he felt the need to come up with a sympathetic response. ‘I went to Green Valley yesterday.’
‘You what?’ Jordan pushed back in his chair and his face flared in alarming blotches of purple. ‘What the—’
I faced up to him. ‘Hang on, hang on. Before you say any more, listen.’
‘Green Valley? Jesus. Seriously, what—’
‘Will you listen to me, Jordan?’
Jordan wound down with a few more mutters, but shut up and waited.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I know your thoughts on Green Valley.’ I imagined Jordan as a guest at one of Fabian’s dinner parties, the two of them bonding over their attitude towards people from Green Valley. I flinched at the thought: shabby and smoke-smelling, Jordan was the sort of office friend you drink with sometimes and generally look forward to seeing on Mondays, but never invite to your home. He would be made to feel like an ash stain in Fabian’s apartment. ‘Her father invited me,’ I said. ‘When the two boys turned up, I wanted to see her in case she was in trouble too.’ I shook my head, not telling him that I’d been fooled into believing she was safe. ‘I guess she was.’
‘So tell me, then,’ Jordan said, his ringed eyes drilling into me. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
I glanced at him. Was there any possible way he could know what Barbra had sent me to do? No, surely not. He knew nothing about Sentinel, or about the component I’d smuggled.
He went on. ‘Did that lying place offer you any answers?’ I had to remember: he’d just found a child’s body, clearly from Green Valley and entirely justifying his prejudice. ‘Did you speak to any parents? To anyone whose child had gone missing? Find any suspects?’
‘I hardly spoke to anyone – real. It’s… strange in there. All mirrors and masks. All I found was more questions than answers,’ I said. ‘But David did show me something he found by her bedside. Something that could be material evidence. A kind of calling card.’
‘Where is it?’
‘It wasn’t the sort of thing I could take out with me. Besides, I’m not sure if it… really existed.’
Jordan shook his head and sneered. ‘That place is a fucked-up waste of time. Nothing’s real. They all play make-believe in their little bubble. You should see the runaround we’re getting from their goddamn “liaison office” just to talk to someone in their security services.’
‘Have you got through to anyone yet?’
‘Uh-uh. A circle of we’ll-get-back-to-you and on hold. And we can’t just go there and talk to a real person. They’re going to make it disappear. They’ll just outwait us. We should just fucking let them rot.’
‘We have to keep trying, Jordan,’ I said, implicating Jordan in the case, trying to make it stick with him, ‘because my niece is missing, and three little children are dead. We need to find out their names and where they belonged. Who did this to them.’ My face was starting to betray me, beginning to melt and seize and for some mortifying reason I was about to cry in front of Jordan. ‘I don’t expect the PD to give a special fuck, and I know it’s just you doing all this work on your own, but my niece might be like that little girl in your fridge. Not just because…’ I stopped talking, wondering when we’d find Kira’s body, imagining the skinny little girl in the morgue wearing Odille’s sweet face. I got up quickly and turned away towards the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jordan said. ‘I wasn’t thinking. I get sick and tired sometimes. We’ve been up all night here, cleaning up their mess, and they’ve never asked for our help.’
‘I know,’ I said, brushing my eyes and turning back to him. It was big of him to apologise. ‘I understand. The official line on Green Valley jurisdiction is the most logical: just leave the Green Valley freaks to their own fate – the fate they deliberat
ely chose. But that has to change when we’re dealing with dead kids – right here in Stanton. I’m asking you for help, not just because of Kira, but for this little girl who ended up here. She’s not a freak; she’s not a simulation. These children are our business.’
Jordan nodded, pursing his lips in an earnest way.
‘Maya said you’ve got her things.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, pointing towards a specimen table at the back of the room. ‘I’m just checking them against patrol’s report. The captain wants a summary first thing. This is why I’m not getting my beauty sleep.’
‘Can I look through them?’
‘Look, but don’t touch.’
I went over to the table and looked at the girl’s paltry life arrayed there. A paper gum packet with two pieces left in it: strawberry mint. An almost-empty sample-sized tub of strawberry lip gloss. A balled-up tissue. A piece of grubby plain string in a small, fraying loop that she’d probably worn as a bracelet. Three cheap plastic hairclips and two sparkled elastics that looked pretty new, the type you get on cards of a dozen at the chemist. Someone had done a limited job of caring for this child. Was someone doing the same for Kira right now, or was she dead already?
I shook the thought off and moved across to her clothing: the rope, something like a bell pull or the tassel of an ornate, heavy curtain, that had held her trousers up. The oversized green corduroys, worn blue canvas shoes, white cotton underpants with blue spots. And the plain pink T-shirt, the type you get in three-packs at the thrift store.
‘What’s this on the shirt?’ I asked Jordan, who was hovering a couple of paces behind me to make sure I didn’t touch anything. There was a thick dusting of powder on the T-shirt, and looking again, I noticed it blushing out from the seat of the trousers too, on the heels of the shoes.
‘Flour. Bread flour, we think. Forensics are still busy.’
‘Flour?’
‘The body was found outside a bakery in Claymarket. She didn’t die there, though.’
8 The alleyway was guarded by two officers. I shrugged into my hood and quickly walked by, catching a glimpse of a police-tape cordon near the bakery’s back entrance and a cluster of white-suited techs working the area along with a couple of plainclothes detectives.
I darted into the back lot of the building across the alley and spotted a dumpster in deep shadows at the far end of the lot. I could just about poke my head over the wall from there.
Slow water dripped off the rusted ladders and balconies, the oblong of sky above brick-grey, weatherless neutrality, the condensation being sucked out of the fog in the cold night air and gathering into russet drops around me. Dirty yellow streaks of light from nearby windows shivered on the surface of the puddles, as cold wind petulantly ripped through the alley.
I could have asked Jordan to escort me to the scene rather than sneaking around alone, but I hoisted myself onto the dumpster anyway. The movement and the noise sent several things scurrying away behind it as I peered down at the crusted slit windows into the back room of the bakery. Normally at five in the morning, the windows would be steamed up and glowing with a warm light, figures in white rushing to complete orders; but no bread was baking here this morning. Cubby Rosenior would be losing money for every hour he remained shut, and he’d be telling everyone he knew about his pain.
Intending to move across the wobbly lids to the next dumpster, I turned and shifted my foot, finding a warp in the thin sheet metal that boomed like a massive gong as it snapped from convex to concave. More scurrying, but something bigger this time. A definite sigh; a heavy, putrid exhalation.
It’s a person, I told myself; just someone sleeping here who I’ve disturbed.
I heard footsteps on the asphalt coming from behind me, from the mouth of the alleyway: solid, confident, well-shod. The clicking step of new shoes, not a worn-out shamble, click-click-clack, coming calmly into the alley. New shoes, not hooves; not hooves.
Taking a deep breath, squeezing my eyes shut and then opening them, I turned.
A neatly uniformed officer, his hand on his holstered weapon. ‘Help you, ma’am?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. ‘Give me a hand down, will you?’
He came over and offered me his arm. I used his shoulder to vault off the top of the dumpster. As I righted myself, I took him in. He was from the precinct patrol. The guy’s face was as tightly pressed as his uniform; his hair shone as slickly as his polished shoes and fell over his brow in a precise blonde flip. ‘This is a crime scene, ma’am,’ he said half-heartedly. ‘What’s your business?’
‘I’m Lucie Sterling, special consultant with Stanton CID.’ I reached for my ID card slowly. The officer watched my hands closely but didn’t judge me a big enough threat to unholster his gun.
He scrutinised the card and checked my face against the picture, then handed it back. ‘Special consultant’ was a deliberately vague title that could involve any work, and was designed to be bland enough not to provoke questions. ‘Okay, but you still need a detective with you if you’re going to enter a scene.’
‘I know. I was just having a look.’
He glared at me. ‘You can visit the site with an authorised detective.’
Knowing that there was nothing more I could do, I was dumped by a wave of exhaustion. I’d been running on adrenaline for hours and now it washed away, leaving bitter scum in its wake. The Sentinel office wouldn’t be open until nine, and there was no point in standing here for another couple of hours, making small talk with Officer Flip. The idea of nursing a couple of coffees and reading my book in a back booth at Verla’s was tempting, but I knew Fabian would be worried. ‘Officer,’ I called – he was already clopping his way back to the street, and he turned fussily.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Do you have a junction handset I can borrow?’
‘No, ma’am. There’s a callbox on the corner of Onyx and Nymph.’ Another half-hearted remark, because he knew as well as I did that any public callbox in Claymarket was purely symbolic. The creep had a junction set, but I couldn’t force him to lend it to me. I’d call from Verla’s.
Walking out of the backlot, I was aware of the skittering ghosts I was leaving behind me. I tried not to look back. For the moment, at least, that gore-matted ram was not trailing me. I hoped that whatever had got into my blood in Green Valley was working its way out.
* * *
‘Where have you been, Luce?’
I cupped my hand around the receiver and glanced from the small, doorless booth at the early-morning diners in Verla’s coffee shop: the dead-tired workers at the end of a shift, the early-risers fuelling up for the day, and the bone-thin ghosts trying to refill with lost life as they hustled from their first job to their second and back again. All of them sitting alone, seats apart, tightly wound in the shrouds of their own lives. They wouldn’t be interested in some stranger’s domestic minutiae, but I spoke quietly anyway.
‘I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk.’ Keeping my voice down on the phone made me sound like the liar I was.
‘Are you all right?’ Fabian said. ‘Can I do anything?’
‘No. No. It’s just… I think Green Valley really messed with my head, with my body. I needed to come down.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you come home, then?’
‘Hardly worth it. By the time I get there, I’ll have to leave for work.’
The untruth weighed heavily on the line between us. Did he suspect the real nature of that work? It would almost be a relief if he brought my lie out into the open. But all he said was, ‘You’re going to be exhausted.’
I sighed. ‘I know.’
‘Any news about Kira?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Let me know, right? And come back early tonight.’
‘I will.’
Fabian wouldn’t ask me to promise. We were more grown up than that.
9 At five to nine in the morning, greasy t
oast and coffee from Verla’s churning in my stomach, I joined the cluster of administrative workers waiting outside the precinct’s front doors, eager to get inside. I greeted a couple of archivists I knew, then flipped my hood over my head and hunkered into the leeward corner of the entranceway to wait for security to open for us. Stanton’s bylaws discouraged non-essential work outside office hours, a progressive stance taken after the Turn. Hyperproductivity and twenty-four-hour industriousness had been recognised as another repressive part of the digital economy we had rejected; only critical staff could work non-office hours, and analysts at my grade still needed special clearance for overtime.
A man rounded the corner with his big black umbrella pointed into the wind and I started, heart hammering in my throat, that nightmare ram invading my senses again, when I’d just about managed to tamp the memory down and convince myself it was only the remnant of some electronic dream. Every car passing on the road was a menacing shadow. By the time the door finally opened for us, my jaw was clenched so tight it hurt, and cold acid flowed through my muscles.
Up on the fourth floor, Jordan was typing at his desk, making whiffling sounds over the soft-touch typewriter he’d recently requisitioned when his carpal tunnel syndrome flared up. When he noticed me coming in, he paused and looked up, rubbing at the black support bands around his wrists. ‘Get any sleep?’
‘No.’
‘Uncomfortable to sleep in an alley, I guess.’ I pursed my lips. That officer from the crime scene had been quick to report to his masters. ‘I told you I’d take you there if you wanted to see it.’
‘Yeah, thanks. I’ll take you up on that. But I wanted to get a feel for myself.’
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