Danielewski just shook her head and drained her coffee, eyes trained on Barrett & Sanders.
I scanned the building, a squat, unadorned brick cube of four storeys. While the blinds came up and the lights went on in the windows below, nothing stirred in the three storeys above. The thick drapes never twitched. ‘Surely someone lives there or works there. You don’t think it’s suspicious, the very lack of movement?’ The very… I cringed at myself. Next to this old-school Claymarket woman, and milk-fed in Fabian’s Museum District apartment, I’d become a hollow poser. Of course someone like her could see right through someone like me, the person I’d become.
‘Maybe. Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything.’
Officer Danielewski’s relief arrived, posting himself outside the diner’s window, and she eased herself off the stool and hobbled out, offering me a nod. I watched her go, feeling like a fraud. Wouldn’t it be great if we could switch between avatars at will? My problem then, I guess, would be choosing who the hell I wanted to be.
To my relief, Jordan came to rescue me from my mood before too long. ‘Up, up, Detective Lucie,’ he said, apparently over his gloom of earlier. His morning stimulants had evidently kicked in. ‘The daughter didn’t go to school today. We’ve got work to do.’
* * *
The first work we did was cross the street. Jordan rattled at the law firm’s door handle until the receptionist peered through the pane, frowning. I noted the steel bars slotted behind the new-wood frame, the double-thick, security-laminated glass. Trustful cottage gentility hadn’t quite completed its invasion of Claymarket yet.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ the receptionist asked as she retreated behind her desk to look at the large-format appointment book. The firm’s offices were neat and tidy, with an off-the-shelf anonymity of design, as if Vidal had paid someone to decorate the office and never looked twice at the result. The vase of sticks on top of the receptionist’s filing cabinet was silvered with dusty cobwebs, a redundant intricacy the cleaning service wasn’t paid to handle. Behind the desk, screwed into the pastel-purple wall, the firm’s name and logo: a yellow rooster, the stylised rooster David had found in Kira’s bedroom.
Jordan introduced himself and me to the woman, who said her name was Tertia Pineira and that she’d worked for Barrett & Sanders for four years.
‘Mr Barrett’s not in yet,’ she offered.
Jordan checked the clock on the wall. ‘He usually come in this late?’
‘No, not at all. He’s usually here before me.’ She paused, perhaps considering that she might be implicating her employer in something. ‘But he often has meetings, then he comes in.’
‘Did he tell you he had a meeting this morning? Did he log anything?’ he asked, bending his long frame over the desk in the direction of the appointment book.
As Jordan and the receptionist talked, my leg started shaking and I looked down at it, as if it was someone else’s, but along with the judder came a flush of panic, my chest filling up with lead and stopping. ‘We’re wasting time here, Jordan,’ I said. ‘None of this matters.’
But he seemed not to hear me, trading chitchat with this woman who could tell us nothing useful. My eye was drawn to the rooster, and I would swear that it spoke to me, if that didn’t sound crazy. ‘Are we going on holiday?’ it said.
I wandered away from the reception desk, goose bumps rising painfully over my skin, past a row of chairs in a waiting area and down a narrow side passage with a sign indicating Toilets. Maybe that’s where my leg wanted me to go. I was feeling nauseous, the bitter diner coffee churning with bile in my growling stomach. Cold sweat was pricking on my brow and a stream of saliva was washing my mouth.
I tried to make for the bathroom door, but my right leg dragged me further down the corridor towards a heavy, steel-riveted turquoise door at the far end. Then it stopped me there and the quivering moved from my right knee and into my arms, and the neurons in my head zapped as I waited. I knew I should move, but I couldn’t. My body had planted me there, and I had to wait.
Everything stopped but the palsy of my muscles. The world around me disappeared, and there was only the turquoise doorway and the quaking periphery.
Someone was bowling downstairs, somewhere beyond the door, hooves clacking like gunshots against the concrete.
The door smashed outward, and I saw the yellow slits of his eyes and the foul gnarl of his horns and smelled his breath before he ran right over me, belting me to the floor, crushing my shoulder against a waste bin as he went. As I fell, I caught a flash of the inside of the stairwell, a pair of small, bare feet pointed through the railing, a trail of blood running over the toes and lazily following the black ram’s course before the grey sheen over my eyes became too thick to see through.
When I could push myself against the wall and open my eyes, the turquoise door was closed and there was no blood on the floor. But my shoulder still throbbed and my gut was still swirling and the muscles in my back had seized up.
‘Where’ve you gone?’ I heard Jordan calling, and desperately pulled myself upright. I didn’t want him to see me like this again, but it was too late. Although I had managed to stand up, I was still leaning woozily against the wall and I guess my face looked as ashen and clammy as it felt because as he came to me, the receptionist trailing a couple of hurried paces behind him, he muttered, ‘Again?’ I was relieved that he didn’t make more of it in front of the woman.
‘I’m just having a look around, if you don’t mind,’ I managed, pulling my jacket straight. ‘Where does that doorway lead?’
‘Up to the apartments above, but it’s permanently locked,’ Tertia said, her eyes darting almost out of her head.
‘Who lives up there?’ Jordan said.
‘Tenants.’
He waited but she added nothing else. ‘How do they get into their apartments?’
‘Through the back,’ she said.
‘Will you show us?’
She led us back out onto Ocean Street, then into the access lane on the side of the building, and stopped in front of a weed-strewn lot that was closed off by a double-tall chain-link truck gate, which in turn was topped by a loop of razor wire.
‘Doesn’t look that easy to get in,’ Jordan commented.
‘The tenants have keys to the padlocks,’ Tertia said, warming to her lie, indignation creeping into her voice. She pointed out the two heavy chains that secured the fence.
‘Does Mr Barrett have keys to the padlocks too?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, of course. He parks here. When he’s at the office.’
Jordan moved to the fence and threaded his fingers though the links, staring up at the tenement’s windows, just as dead as the ones at the front. ‘It’s very quiet. How many people live here?’
Tertia shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I need to get back to my desk.’
‘Sure. Go ahead.’
I watched her go, and didn’t even have to tell Jordan that I thought she was lying. Something flickered at one of the windows on the second floor; I glanced up to catch the motion, but everything was still again. Maybe it was a pigeon or a cat; maybe not. The growl of the traffic from Ocean Street funnelled into the alleyway, making it impossible to hear any small sounds over the rumble. The scent of diesel smoke and piss and dirty drains wafted in the swirling breeze with cooking aromas and refrigerant from air-conditioning units – the back end of any building in the city. ‘It would be good to get in there, wouldn’t it?’
‘We’d need cause,’ he said. ‘And a proper warrant.’
So instead we plodded about the neighbourhood, asking shopkeepers and barmen when last they’d seen Vidal, if they’d seen him with any small kids – no, not his daughter, but younger ones, maybe a bit dirty, in clothes that didn’t fit them? We took out our sheaf of photographs, asking: did either Vidal or Sofie Barrett purchase new clothes, sneakers like this, hair ties like this? Had anyone overheard anything about missing children, any children who needed to move anywhere?
The first hit was at the Bayview Bookstore, where Sofie had bought a pile of markdown kids’ books. The old guy on the counter recognised her from her picture and remembered her because she was ‘pretty cute’. ‘She’s sixteen years old, you know that?’ Jordan said, the poison in his eyes making the bookseller shrivel.
The supermarket manager, for his part, didn’t have a clue: ‘Lots of people buy lots of stuff here.’
‘You remember, don’t you, Jordan?’ I said, as we clanked the security gate shut behind us and headed up the street.
‘What?’ Jordan stopped and curled himself around the cigarette he was trying to relight. An old woman with a wheeled shopping basket came past and tutted, presumably because he was lighting up over a tray of fish on ice outside a general store.
‘Closed-circuit TV. Aren’t you ever nostalgic?’
‘Don’t start,’ he sighed out with a mouthful of smog.
‘Imagine being able to rewind and get a photo of Barrett from the screen. Hey, remember computerised stock records and transaction details? You could see exactly what was bought at that till at that time, and the method of payment. Name, address, all that handy information.’
‘I said don’t start.’
‘What’s that saying again? We threw out the baby with the bathwater.’
He darted his eyes at me and lowered his voice. ‘You shouldn’t speak like that.’ He let out a stream of smoke.
‘Why not? It’s a free country, isn’t it? Isn’t that what all the blissfully ignorant citizens fought for? Freedom?’ Less fighting than simple dismantling, I sometimes thought. It’s much easier to tear things down than build something. Much easier to go back than forward.
Jordan was scowling. I was ruining his cigarette break, so I decided to let it go, and walked on.
He caught up with me and matched my stride. ‘The baby was dead, Lucie. The spies, the corporations, those people we trusted to look after it – they killed it,’ he said, grinding his cigarette butt out on the ground before pushing into Sweet Times. ‘Then we threw it out.’
The bell tinkled, and a man in a full beard shot through with squirls of green came out from the kitchen area behind the counter, wiping his hands on his striped apron. I felt like I’d walked onto a stage set, but the warm, syrupy smells from deep in the store were real enough. I saw a row of candy presses on the back workbenches, like brass pasta makers.
Jordan showed him the pictures of Sofie and Vidal and asked if he’d seen anything.
The candy-maker bent over towards the photos and raised a pair of glasses to his eyes, leaning awkwardly over the counter and peering at the pictures.
‘You want to take them?’ Jordan asked.
‘Sorry, my hands are sticky. But maybe the girl looks familiar. I remember because it looked like a lot of sugar just for her. Yeah, yeah. It was… two pounds of gum snakes and a wholesale jar of jelly beans.’
‘Are you sure it was her?’ Jordan asked.
‘I couldn’t swear on it. I see a lot of kids.’
The cashier at the pharmacy remembered Sofie buying some hair ties and quite a lot of pain medication. ‘I remember because there was some paediatric syrup along with several tubs of paracetamol. I asked her if she knew how to use it, that she shouldn’t give tablets to children under six. Yeah, she said. And there was something so sad in her face that suddenly I remembered who she was. The lawyer’s girl – her mom died just recently. Do you think she’s got younger brothers and sisters that she has to look after? That would explain the little-girl stuff she was getting… She also bought two packs of panties with ponies on, some undies for little boys – cowboys and trains – and some little hairclips and Strawberry Fairy shampoo and I wondered why, I thought it was a bit wrong, somehow, you know. But, jeez, it just makes me want to cry. The poor kid.’
‘You know what this means, Jordan,’ I said, as we pushed out of the pharmacy.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They’re holding other kids.’
‘This is enough for probable cause. We have to stop messing around.’
I took Jordan’s car and drove back to the precinct, hurrying through to the Sentinel offices.
‘Come with me,’ Barbra demanded when I got in, angry enough to storm out of her office in the middle of a meeting with some important-looking people and down to me in the pool. She hustled me into the corridor towards the bathrooms. ‘I gave you special clearance to work on your case – two days ago, while we were waiting for the data. Then I called you back. I need your full attention on this.’
‘I’m sorry, but this case with the children’ – I used the word to try to appeal to some emotion in her – ‘the suspect is getting away.’ I watched her face ease, then added, ‘And we think he’s got more children with him. More are going to die. Every minute we don’t find him, he’s getting further away, and the children are in deeper danger. I’ve been asking around with CID but it’s so damn slow. All we’re getting is confirmation of what we already know.’ I paused, steeled myself. ‘You know what I really need?’
She did. But she said, ‘The children are from Green Valley, right?’
I stiffened. ‘They’re kids, Barbra!’ I was yelling at my boss and I didn’t care. I’d had enough of politeness. All I could see was that unclaimed, unwanted girl’s colourless little face. She’d been killed and nobody was looking for justice. Every hour that passed was condemning Kira to be next. In my hot eyes, Kira’s face merged with Odille’s, with my own, when I’d had only myself to count on, nobody to look out for me. ‘I don’t care where they come from. They’re children. We have to save them, for Christ’s sake!’
When the red mist had cleared, I saw Barbra holding her hands up, pacifying. ‘I get it, but keep your voice down, Lucie.’ She waited for me to take a few deep breaths then continued, in a low voice barely above a whisper. ‘You know as well as I do the official policy on people from Green Valley. The jurisdictional boundaries are perfectly clear. I happen to think, though, that dead children in Stanton, wherever they come from, should very much be our concern.’
I tried not to widen my eyes at what was close to a treasonous admission.
‘I know you want live data on the suspect,’ Barbra continued, ‘but let’s go one better. We need someone to test the capabilities of the hardware as we have repurposed it using the new data streams, and finding your suspect may be the ideal exercise.’
I followed her up to the labs, where Schindler passed me the lens I had smuggled out in its little box, and explained how they had adjusted it.
‘We want it back by five today,’ Barbra said. ‘And no more bullshit, I’m warning you.’
18 It was embarrassing how easily I tracked Vidal and Sofie, after all that. No, more than embarrassment – a deep clot of guilt congealed inside me as the Sentinel-enhanced lens showed me Vidal’s devious route and his car’s current location on a map laid over my eyeline. It was apparently parked in a barn on a farm on the other side of Green Valley. For all my cant about progress and my private belief that the Turn had betrayed our potential, I felt like a heartless super-predator, gliding towards my unsuspecting prey. Vidal was a canny shrew, scuttling to a hidey-hole where the other shrews couldn’t find him, but I was an eagle with the intelligence of a million processors wired in. When this sort of tech was unleashed on us, the sneaky little shrews – the citizens of Stanton – wouldn’t stand a chance.
But today I couldn’t allow my sensibilities to slow me. I found it hard to correlate a teenaged girl who bought sparkly hair ties and pony underpants for children being a murderer, or working with one. But what did I know? Vidal Barrett would know where Kira was, and that was all that mattered.
I raced eastwards towards the farm, chased by the ram and pulled by the memory of Kira when I last saw her, dozing in her papoose on David’s chest, so content. I was already halfway around Green Valley’s wall before I wondered if I should have asked Jordan to come. It was too late now. If I managed to find a callbox to phone the station
and ask a patrol officer to tell me where Jordan was, and if he drove out here, even if he could help me, even if he wanted to – even if he could stomach the idea of me getting a live surveillance feed beamed into my retina – it would be too late by the time we made it to the farm. Barbra wasn’t joking when she said she wanted the device back by five. Getting fired wouldn’t be the least of my problems then – I could be prosecuted for stealing classified property, espionage, treason. I wouldn’t put it past Barbra if I crossed her again.
When I finally rounded the wall and made it beyond Green Valley, the road spooled out before me into an undulating basin bounded on both sides by ice-grey mountains. The rich soil of the valley floor was a patchwork of fruit and grain farms and rolling pastures. Elegant signs advertising guest cottages hung before many of the farms’ entrances. They were popular with weekenders and tourists, who must have felt the same as I did out on this road, lighter once they’d pulled away from the dark gravity of Green Valley’s monolithic wall.
But The I was taking me beyond the last of the picturesque properties and told me to turn down a dirt road into a shadowed nook in the hills, where warehouses and rundown farm buildings squatted together, out of the holidaymakers’ sightline. A few hundred yards away from the arrow on the map, I crunched to a halt, out of sight of the low assembly of anonymous grey warehouses and workshops beyond. I checked my watch. Half past two already; I’d have to hurry.
I called up the file on the property and skimmed it, scrolling through it on The I. The land belonged to someone called Roger Basson, sole proprietor of Misty Vale Farm. The farm, a large swathe of diversified land, had almost been repossessed for unpaid arrears on a development loan, but had been bailed out by an investment from a company called Blank Slate Holdings six years before. Now, scanning through Misty Vale’s and Basson’s tax returns and lodged contracts, I noted that its only source of income for those past six years had been a lucrative contract for ‘sundry supplies’, paid quarterly from Blank Slate’s account. All of the paperwork, though deliberately vague, seemed above board and correctly processed.
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