Cast the First Stone

by K. J. Emrick

  “So look here, Harry.” I point to the page with the top of my pen. “The only days it was clear enough for Carol to take her walks were the days when Barlow would be at work. She was telling Carol when it was safe for her to come over. That’s the code.”

  Harry’s eyebrows go shooting up. “Ah! I see. Very well done, Sidney Stone. So, these were messages telling Carol when Barlow would be out of the apartment, but sent in code.”

  “Exactly. The times of day when it was clear enough for her to come over correspond to the times when Katarina was sure Barlow would be at work. When Carol got the message saying it was safe to come over, she always responded by saying she was going for a walk. That was code for ‘coming over.’ They were meeting secretly at Katarina and Barlow’s apartment!”

  “Hmm.” He rubs at his chin again, so I knew there was more coming. Didn’t need my superpower to figure that out. Sure enough, he doesn’t disappoint me. “So why were they meeting behind Barlow’s back, do you suppose? Surely, he would have allowed her to have friends?”

  “That… that’s a good question. I haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe they were talking about Katarina’s pregnancy and like we said, she wanted to keep that hidden from Barlow. Maybe Katarina and Carol were already making plans to get Katarina to leave Barlow. Maybe,” I add, coming around to this again, “the woman at the bank with Katarina really is Carol, taking out all that money before they both split Detroit by car or something. Or maybe she took Katarina against her will, and now she’s hiding her somewhere.”

  “Or she’s dead?” he asks, giving a voice to the one possibility I was most afraid of.

  “Yeah. Or maybe she’s dead.”

  He nods, following each of my points until I ran out of maybes to add to the list. “It would appear you are one step closer to finding Katarina, and yet no closer at all.”

  “Says you,” I argue. “Watch this.”

  Picking up Katarina’s phone from where it had been sitting on the table all this time, I scroll down her contacts to ‘Carol.’ Then I composed a message in their code.

  The rain will stop tomorrow around ten.

  And, send.

  Harry’s very expressive eyebrows pop up again. “You are trying to lure Carol out, pretending to be Katarina? If Carol knows about Katarina’s vanishing, she won’t be fooled by that.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a plan, my friend. If Carol is involved in Katarina’s disappearance, she will most likely respond because she’ll want to know who I am and how I cracked Katarina’s code and how much trouble she’s in. I could be the police. I could be the FBI. I could even be Barlow which would probably mean more trouble than the authorities, in Carol’s mind. When she answers, I’ll be ready with a few tried-and-true Private Eye tricks to get her to meet with me.”

  “Ah. Well then.” He claps his hands together, applauding my reasoning. “I approve of your plan. I would have done much the same thing when I was part of the civil guard. Except, of course, I would have sent the message by camel, since cellphones wouldn’t be invented for thousands of years.”

  “Of course.”

  It didn’t take long for the phone to buzz in my hands, and I look down at it hopefully…

  New message from Carol.

  Yes!

  Okay, not that I’m going to tell Harry this and spoil the newfound admiration he has for me, but I really wasn’t sure this was going to work. A smart woman—one who had just helped somebody run away from their boyfriend, or kidnapped them—would never, ever respond to a text message from that somebody. I mean, it’s just stupid. Thankfully, people all over the world suffer from the same non-curable disease: stupidity.

  But Carol responded to me. Now that she has, I just need to work the right combination of threats and promises to get her to meet me…

  Um. Or not. This is not the message I was expecting.

  Then I’ll go for a walk at ten. And yes, I’ll bring an umbrella.

  I frown and read it twice more to make sure I haven’t mixed it up somehow. No, that’s what it says. According to the code me and Harry figured out, Carol just said she’s coming to meet Katarina at Barlow’s apartment, tomorrow at ten.

  “What do you think she means,” Harry asks, looking over my shoulder, “when she says she’s bringing an umbrella?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I really didn’t. What I do know is that this changed things. If Carol is agreeing to meet Katarina, then Carol doesn’t know that Katarina is missing. Carol didn’t take her away from Barlow, either willingly or by force. She thought Katarina was still here and sending her text messages.

  It was like Harry said. One step further, but not any closer.

  “Well. I guess I’d better respond. After all, she’s coming to meet Katarina tomorrow.”

  “How can she do that,” Harry asks, “if Katarina is missing and we don’t know… oh.”

  He caught on fast to what I was planning, even as I typed out a response to Carol that I made sure was word-for-word from several others Katarina had sent her in the past. The conversation ended, and the meeting was set. At ten o’clock tomorrow, Carol would be at Barlow’s apartment. That was going to be my chance to meet this woman and ask her some questions. If she didn’t know where Katarina was then at least she would know about Katarina’s other guy. The one who got her pregnant.

  One step at a time.

  The clock on the wall said it was even later than it had been the last time I checked. That’s the way time works, after all. I yawn, and I stretch with my whole entire body. It was one of those perfect stretches that only happen when you’re really sleepy. When it ends, I found myself curled up against Harry’s strong body again. I didn’t move. He didn’t ask me to.

  “Sleep, if you wish,” he says to me. “I will make sure that you awaken tomorrow in plenty of time.”

  My eyes were already closed. For a guy built this solid, he was remarkably comfortable. “Seven-thirty,” I tell him, right on the heels of another yawn. “Not a minute later.”

  “Hmm. I was thinking more along the lines of six, perhaps?”

  “You’re right. Seven-thirty is silly.”

  “I thought as such.”

  “Make it eight.”

  “Sidney Stone…”

  “Harry…”

  “Fine. I shall awaken you at seven-thirty. Now, rest. The day will begin soon enough.”

  His deep voice is really soothing. I could feel it rumbling in his chest and the gentle humming of it lulled me further toward sleep. It had been a long time since I felt comfortable enough with anyone to do this. Not sleep with a guy, necessarily, because that definitely was not what was happening here. Harry is a business partner, and my friend, and not in any way a love interest despite his excessively masculine body. What I meant, was that I hadn’t let my guard down like this with anyone for a long, long time. It felt nice.

  “Hey, Harry?”

  “Yes, Sidney Stone.”

  I giggle sleepily at the way he always said my full name like that. Well, not my middle name, but I doubt he knows that. No one knows my real middle name. “Can you tell me more about your childhood?”

  His arm had come to rest comfortably around my shoulder, and I could feel him tense with my question.

  It was just a subtle shift in his posture, but this close to him it was hard to miss. It pulled me back up from the pleasant spiral of relaxation I’d been falling into. Twisting half around, I look up at him. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “No, it isn’t that,” he says, his voice soft and low. “It’s just that none of my other masters have ever asked… none of them have ever wanted to know about me as a person. They have only wanted to know what I could do for them. How far my powers could extend. What my limits were and how much they could wish for, before I was sent on to the next master, and the next one after that. No one has ever wanted to know about… me.”

  I wrapped my arm around his and settled back down against him. “I do. I wan
t to know about the happy kid you were when you were little. If you want to tell me, that is.”

  “My lady,” he says, his words seeped in emotion, “it would be my honor.”

  I’m not sure how long I managed to stay awake after that. I fell asleep to the tales of his childhood, of him running and playing with other children, of going to school until he was eleven years old, and then long days of helping his father working in the fields to grow food for their community. They weren’t always happy stories, but they were real, and he told them with such clarity that it was like I was there with him, living in a time that history had all but forgotten.

  I dreamt that night of running under a hot, white sun, with loose sand between my toes, palm trees in the distance, people all around greeting me and telling me to be careful, child, be careful! The youth are the future of our people! Days of carefree fun, and yes there was work to do but that was for later. Right now I could run, and I could play, and whatever the future was going to hold for me it would keep for just a little bit longer.

  It was a nice dream. For a girl who was used to having her dreams turn into nightmares of blood and bullets and screaming, the innocence of that dream was almost heartbreaking.

  When I woke up the next morning, Harris was still holding me on the couch.

  How to do surveillance, step one. Know where your target is going to be.

  In this case my target is Katarina’s friend Carol, and I know exactly where she’s going to be. Barlow Michaelson’s apartment door, sometime around ten o’clock this morning.

  Step two. Show up early.

  I’ve done stakeouts where I have literally sat in my Mustang all night long, watching a door and waiting for someone to arrive. This time it’s a little easier because Carol probably won’t show up much before ten o’clock. She won’t want to risk showing up before Barlow is gone. Even so, I still make sure that I’m standing in Barlow’s apartment hallway by nine, just to be safe.

  I haven’t told Barlow what I’m up to. The last thing I would need is him trying to confront Carol himself and scaring her off. Better that he just goes to work without knowing anything about this at all. I can tell him about it later, after Carol and I have had some time to talk, woman to woman.

  Of course, step one and step two are a lot easier if you know what your target looks like. I don’t know the first thing about Carol. Is she tall? Short? Fat? Hispanic? Flat chested or more like Nikki Minaj? I simply don’t know.

  On the other hand, I don’t have to. I knew exactly which door in this hallway she was going to go to. All I had to do was stand around and wait, keeping an eye on Barlow’s apartment door the whole time.

  Which brings me to step three. Keep out of sight.

  When you’re doing surveillance out on the street, that means sitting in your car until your target shows up, sometimes with a pair of binoculars depending on how far away you are. When you’re at a restaurant, that means ordering food, so you blend in with the other customers. If you’re at a sports event, you cheer for one team or the other.

  Right now, I’m in a straight hallway of an apartment building that’s about a hundred times nicer than my own. There’s no place to hide. No way to blend in. I’m about as obvious standing here as a fox in a henhouse.

  So to keep from being too conspicuous, I’m walking all the way down the hall to the door of the stairwell, and when I get there I turn around and go down the other way, past the elevators, to the door of the other stairwell. Back and forth, the whole time, without stopping. If anyone sees me, I’m just a visitor heading for the stairs. By the time ten o’clock gets close to rolling around, I’ve met my steps goal for the whole month.

  At least my future-sense will give me a little warning if someone comes. So far, no one has.

  Barlow’s apartment is in a pricey neighborhood not far from the Renaissance Center. Most of the residents are business professionals, near as I can figure, which means they’re all single and young and already gone for the day. So I’ve got that in my favor. The carpet in the hallway is nice, too. It’s plush, with artsy yellow and red swirls through the weave. Very easy on my feet. Everything here is new and modern and clean.

  In other words, boring. I haven’t even been here an hour yet and I’m bored out of my mind. I really wish Carol would just show up already—

  Oops. Can’t say stuff like that anymore. Can’t even joke about wishing for something. If Harry hears me, he’s going to grant my wish without doublechecking with me first, and as of right now I’ve only got one more wish to use on this case. That’s a weird rule, isn’t it? Why just three wishes? Why not, I don’t know, two or five or seven? Makes me wonder if there’s some bizarre mystical power connected to the number three.

  Like how I can see into the future, just three seconds at a time…

  Ding.

  There’s my future-sense now, letting me hear the elevator coming before it stops on this floor. I stop halfway down the hallway from Barlow’s apartment, and I wait. Sure enough, in three seconds I hear the little bell sound for real as the elevator opens. The way I’m facing it’s behind me, and so is Barlow’s place, so I listen intently as I pretend to be checking the watch I’m not wearing.

  I hear someone’s footsteps, muffled and soft, getting off the elevator. They pause in the hallway for just a second, and then turn away from me, going down the other end.

  Daring to glace over my shoulder, I watch as the person walks past every door without so much as a glance, until they reach number thirty-four. Barlow’s.

  Yes. I got you, Carol.

  She’s in jeans and wearing a bulky hoodie, hands crammed into the pockets. Her hair is mostly up under that baseball cap she’s wearing although here and there a few long strands of it have escaped. And… are those sunglasses? That’s taking the clandestine rendezvous look a little too far, if you ask me.

  She knocks with one knuckle against the apartment door of thirty-four. It was a little rhythm she was obviously used to tapping out to announce her arrival.

  This was definitely who I’d been waiting for.

  “Carol?” I call out to her, starting back her way with slow and easy steps so she won’t spook. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Her head whips my way, and I get just a quick glance of a pointy chin and overlarge ears. The rest of her face is obscured behind those big sunglasses and the brim of her cap.

  I know what she’s going to do, just before she turns and bolts for the stairway entrance at that end of the hallway. Stupid, I tell myself. I should’ve waited to say anything until I was closer!

  “No, no, no, it’s okay,” I try again. “Carol, I just want to talk!”

  But she’s already gone, the sound of the crash bar ringing through the hall and the pneumatic door closing slowly behind her as she runs down the stairs.

  I don’t need my future-sense to know where she’s going. She went down, which means she’s going to try to get to the exit before I do and disappear into the crowds on the sidewalk outside. I also doubt she’s going to use the front entrance this time. She won’t want to make a scene running through the lobby of Barlow’s building. She’ll take the emergency exit at the bottom of the stairwell. The one that leads out into the side alley.

  The stairways on both ends have that exit. Hers opens onto that alley between here and the Chinese restaurant. On this side of the building the exit door opens onto an empty lot. If I try to chase after her down the stairs she’s already halfway down, I’ll lose her. If I take the stairs on my side I’ll have to circle around the building and by then she’ll be long gone, and I’ll lose her again.

  Thankfully, I don’t have to do either.

  When you know you’re going to be doing surveillance on a place, you always scope the area out and get the floorplan set in your head. I know just about everything I need to about this building. Including the quickest way down.

  To meet code, this place has emergency exits on every floor, leading to a metal balcony
and fire escape stairs going down at a slant to the balcony below. The access is through the window to the right of the elevators.

  Thank God for the State of Michigan’s fire prevention code.

  The window opens easily enough when I pull the bottom sash up. There was no screen, because this is an emergency exit meant to be used quickly, and that was good because speed was just what I needed right now. I had no idea why Carol was running from me, but I did know that if I didn’t catch up to her now, it was likely that I’d never find her again. Whatever she knew or didn’t know about Katarina’s disappearance, she wasn’t leaving until I’d heard it straight from her.

  Under my feet, the metal grate of the balcony rattles, and the switchback stairs going down make a loud clatter as I descend floor by floor as fast as my feet will carry me. In the Marines we used to do running drills with a full pack on our shoulders, up and down sand dunes, as part of our training. Compared to that, this is a breeze.

  There were no stairs at the bottom landing, just a ladder that was meant to slide up when not in use and then down when it was needed. It dropped fast when I kicked the release mechanism, making an awful racket and vibrating the whole structure as it bounced to a stop at its full length, still a good ten feet above the paved parking area.

  I didn’t even bother with the rungs. Hooking a foot on each side I slid my way down, and then let gravity do the rest of the work, landing in a crouch on the asphalt. Spider Woman couldn’t have done that better.

  As I stand up, dusting off my hands, Carol is just coming around the corner. I guess she had her car parked back here instead of out on the street, even though this area was supposed to be for tenants only. Her mouth drops open into a big “O” when she sees me standing here.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” I smile as I came closer. “I’m just that good. Now. I’ve got a few questions about your friend Katarina, and some information about her that I’m pretty sure you don’t know anything about, since you were expecting to find her up in Barlow’s apartment today. There’s no reason to run. I just want to talk. I just want to… oh, wow.”