by Liana Brooks
He sat up.
“Hurry up. Get off the boat. My patrol car is waiting up there. We can run.”
“Can’t . . . can’t run.” He swayed as he spoke.
Ivy grabbed his arm and pulled him to the side of the derelict boat. “I’ll carry you. We need to leave. Now. Before he gets up.” Donovan wasn’t unconscious, just stunned. In another minute, he’d have adrenaline enough to work through the broken nose and come after her.
Bradet fell down in front of her. Ivy picked him up by the armpits dragging him into a standing position. “Up the hill. It’s not much. My car is right there on the highway.” He was heavy, a good thirty pounds more than she weighed, and barely walking.
He turned to look at Donovan scrambling to get up. “He’s going to kill us.”
“If he tries, I’ll hit him again.” She brandished her flashlight like a sword, but her legs were trembling. As if to echo that sentiment, the beam of light quivered, blinked, and faded, leaving them alone in the moonlight.
“We’re going to die,” Bradet repeated in a quiet whisper.
“You’re in shock,” Ivy said. She glanced over her shoulder. Donovan was watching them, the shadows of night making his face a harsh mask, but he wasn’t following.
They reached the crest of the small hill and found the road empty.
“Car?” Bradet asked weakly as he sagged against her.
Ivy looked up and down the road. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand. I left it here.”
Headlights flared up ahead. For the briefest moment, she hoped it was backup; and then she saw the license plate. It was her car. Someone had stolen her car and was approaching at a reckless speed.
At the last second, she pulled Bradet to the relative safety of the guardrail. Nothing but a handspan of cement between them and the inky inlet below. Ivy looked down at the dark water and wondered if Bradet could swim in his condition. If they jumped, where exactly could they swim for safety but back to the bridge and Donovan?
The car’s tires squealed on the asphalt as the driver turned sharply. It rushed toward them, then stopped with the screeching tires and the smell of burning rubber. The window rolled down, and a man leaned forward. “Hello.”
Ivy’s jaw clenched in anger. “That’s. My. Car.”
The driver looked casually at the lit dashboard and the torn-out dispatch radio. “It needs repairs.”
“Get out. I’ll make sure you get the mechanic’s bill.” She stepped in front of Bradet.
“That’s not how I work.”
“You are under arrest.”
The driver shook his head.
Bradet screamed, and there was a sudden draft of chilly night air behind her where he had been. She turned in time to see Donovan’s knife flashing toward her. For a precarious second, she balanced on the edge of the cement railing; and then she fell.
When she resurfaced, she could hear her car peeling away. She smashed her hand down on the water, but only gave herself that moment of frustration before finding Bradet—floating facedown—nearby. She flipped him over and, feeling for a pulse, found a faint one. Then, with one arm looped under his arm and across his chest, she dragged the young man to shore. He lost consciousness as they climbed the hill.
Sitting on the wet sand and shivering, she waited for backup to arrive as Bradet’s body cooled beside her.
Sam walked into the morgue with a scowl for Mac. “You skipped breakfast and didn’t wake me up. I take it that means you found Bradet?” That was the only reason she could imagine that Mac would sneak away like an embarrassed one-night stand. As reluctant as she was to admit it, she was growing accustomed to seeing him every morning, even if it was just the view of him snoring shirtless on the couch as she left for a morning jog.
“Clemens did.” Mac nodded to the clone sitting in the corner. His face was tight with worry.
Ivy’s face was paler than usual. Dark bruises marred her body. “I’m sorry, Agent Rose.”
“What happened?” Sam asked, breakfast woes forgotten.
Clemens stared at the wall and shrugged. “I’ve had better days.”
“I can see that.” The officer looked like she’d had better years. Sam turned to Mac for an explanation.
“She had to get a pint of blood at the hospital because clones from her generation don’t clot well,” Mac said. “It’s a minor miracle she survived until the ambulance arrived. Bradet wasn’t so lucky.”
“It’s just scrapes and bruises,” Ivy argued.
“Scrapes, bruises, and a run-in with a knife-wielding maniac out in the swamps.” Mac gave Ivy a look of near-paternal disapproval.
“Start at the beginning,” Sam said.
Mac cleared his throat. “Devon Bradet of Cowansville in what used to be the Quebec Territory of old Canada. He’s twenty-seven with a mixed racial profile, brown eyes, recently shaved head—”
“It was for charity,” Ivy said in a weak voice. “He shaved it Thursday on air for child-cancer awareness or something like that.”
Mac nodded. “ . . . and a master’s in communication arts from Elon University in North Carolina. Moved here a couple years ago and took the job of radio intern. He’s been working his way up since then.”
“How’d he die?” Sam asked, watching Ivy. The clone shrank away from her gaze, but Sam couldn’t tell if the other woman was scared or suffering from loss of confidence. Worse, she didn’t know how to make Ivy better.
“Blood loss and internal hemorrhaging. There’s a graze mark along Bradet’s neck. Officer Clemens said he was bleeding when she found him. It looks like he was shot while running away from someone.”
“Like a home intruder?” Sam guessed as she silently berated herself. She should have gone looking for Bradet first and had someone else process the scene.
Mac nodded.
“Clemens?” Sam turned to the injured officer.
Ivy shook her head. “We had a tip-off that a man Bradet’s height was seen walking along A1A near Ponce Inlet. I went up there and found him duct taped and locked in a boat. I thought we were alone, but there were two men. One said his name was Donovan—he had the knife that killed Bradet and sliced me. The other didn’t give his name, but he snuck up and stole my patrol car.” She closed her eyes. “I’m an idiot.”
At least she wasn’t scared. “Could have happened to any of us,” Sam said.
“If it’s any consolation, I don’t think the knife killed Bradet,” Mac said. “He had the bullet wound already, and the knife wound was shallow. Neither were fatal, but there was severe internal bleeding. They worked him over thoroughly before locking him up.”
Clemens looked up. “Bradet said they wanted Henry, but that Henry was dead. It didn’t make any sense to me.”
“Henry was his roommate. He died in a lab accident on Monday. There was no evidence of foul play.” At least not in the details they’d released to the public. His killer was almost certainly not running loose in the current timeline. Probably. The thought gave her headaches. If Henry had survived, Sam felt certain she would have strangled him for this nonsense.
“And now we have Donovan,” Mac said.
Sam nodded as the gears started turning. “I’d like to speak with Mr. Donovan, wouldn’t you, Mac? Ask him why he wanted to talk to our boy Henry?”
Mac nodded; so did Ivy. It was good to see the team working together.
“There were security cameras on the complex entrance and at the gas station across the street,” Sam said. “We have video of everyone going in or out of the complex. So we’re going to take those videos and talk to every single person who went in or out of the complex on Thursday.”
Clemens hunched her shoulders. “Sounds fun.”
“Most police work isn’t fun,” Sam said. “It’s chasing down every clue like a terrier, following
leads, following hunches, and worrying about the safety of strangers every hour of the day.”
Ivy’s lips creased with a resigned smile. “The academy made it sound so much simpler.”
“Well, you have to lie to cadets,” Mac said. “No one would try to get through basic training if they knew about the paperwork that was waiting for them.”
Sam nodded agreement. Paperwork was the bane of her existence as a senior agent. A shadow of a thought begged for attention, and she frowned until the memory of Nealie Ro’s face surfaced in her mind. “New topic, where are we with the pirate?”
“Oh!” Ivy held up a datastick. “I almost forgot, I found this in our files. Nealie had a history of calling the police nonemergency line. He was the only one who called for months. I pulled the records yesterday afternoon before I was sent out looking for Bradet. His last one says he’ll meet with someone, said six in the morning, but didn’t give a date or place.”
“Wrong number?” guessed Sam.
“Maybe,” Ivy said. “But I’d like to see his phone records.” There was a pause, and her face turned bright red. “I mean, if it were my investigation. Which it’s not. So I’ll shut up now.”
“He didn’t have a phone,” Mac said.
“Right,” Sam said. “Edwin told us the pirates weren’t on the grid at all. No bank accounts or credit cards, and that would mean no cell phones either. Where was Nealie calling from?”
“Are there pay phones?” Mac asked.
Sam blinked in confusion.
Mac raised his eyebrows.
“Sometimes I forget how old you are!” Sam said. “Pay phones died with the dinosaurs. Are you really that ancient?”
Laughing, Mac shook his head. “Pay phones are a real thing in some countries!”
“Not since the 1950s,” Sam said.
“They were a little bit more recent than that,” Mac argued. “I think.”
“No,” Ivy broke in, “the city doesn’t have ancient technology or landlines. The last ones were phased out in 2048 as a health hazard. Telephone posts fall in high winds and can cause damage. Cell towers and wifi relays can be spaced away from property and fenced in so no one is near them if they do accidentally fall.”
Sam snapped her fingers. “What about those tire tracks? Have we figured out what they belonged to yet? If one of his friends had a car, he might have borrowed a cell phone.”
“The tire tracks belong to an older-model Alexian Essence,” Mac said. “The bureau database couldn’t narrow it down much more than that.”
“Then we have two leads to chase down,” Sam said. “Find out whose phone Nealie had so we can get the phone records and see who called him back. Can you chase it down, Clemens, or will the department get mad that the bureau stole you?”
Clemens smirked as she got up to leave. “They’ll never notice me missing. I’ll give you a call when I find out anything. And I’ll see if anyone’s reported an Essence lost or stolen.”
“Check the impound, too,” Mac suggested.
Sam sighed as Ivy walked out the door. “That means we’re stuck with no minions to read through Henry’s work folders.”
Mac looked over at her, his eyes filled with an emotion that was half hunger, half something she couldn’t quite define. It was a look that made her want to cross the room and lean in close. To touch him and reassure herself she wasn’t alone.
“Sorry I left without telling you,” Mac said quietly. “I won’t do it again.” He waited a beat. “Shoog.”
“Shoog?”
“Like sugar?” Mac smiled unrepentantly.
“No.” Sam shook her head. “And no more possessive-boyfriend routine with Petrilli. We aren’t in that kind of relationship.” She wasn’t sure she could label what they had between them if pressed.
“What are we then?”
Sam shot him an annoyed glare. “I don’t know. We’re . . . something. But boyfriend sounds too immature. You’re my Mac. I like eating breakfast with you in the morning and dragging you out for runs. It’s easy to fall into the habit of having you around.”
“That could be a dangerous habit.” His words were playful, but his smile was pure masculine pride.
“Especially since Chicago wants you back,” Sam said with a sigh. “I had a friendly inquiry in my in-box this morning asking if I was done with you yet. I think your district director is getting ready to send down an extraction team.”
He chuckled. “Did you tell them you’re done with me?”
“I told them I was petitioning my district director to have you transferred full-time.”
Mac froze, and she couldn’t tell if the expression on his face was one of shock or horror.
“Don’t worry about being forced to give up your penthouse overlooking the park,” she said quickly. “There’s no way to fit you into the budget.”
He rolled his eyes. “I live in a third-story walk-up apartment. It’s not as fancy as you think.”
“Whatever. You’re not in danger of having to pack and move a second time.” The moment stretched between them, full of unspoken possibilities. What-ifs and maybes crowded the silence. Until duty, ever sovereign, demanded Sam’s attention once again. “I’m going to go talk with the apartment manager about their security footage.”
Mac looked down at his desk. “I’ve . . .”
She cut him off before he could drag them back to dangerous territory. “You can stay. I don’t need backup on this.”
“Be careful?” His eyes were filled with emotions she didn’t want to acknowledge: yearning, fear, desire, love . . . Powerful emotions reined in by an inner strength Mac rarely acknowledged.
She smiled. For him, she’d be careful. “Always.”
Ivy sat cross-legged at the end of her bed, flipping through the dead-wood papers filled with phone numbers. The nonemergency police line kept a record of the time of the call, the phone number, a name if given, and the complaint. Some of the calls were marked with a small asterisk that indicated emergency assistance had been sent, usually an ambulance.
There was no pattern. Not at first. She tried marking all the same numbers in the same color, but there were few repeat calls, and those that existed were usually within a few minutes of each other, probably because a caller had another question. In one peculiar instance, the same man had called three times trying to order pizza.
She wiped dewing sweat from her face and leaned over to switch on the AC unit fitted into her window. Muggy, barely cool air came with a harsh buzzing sound and the scent of garbage from the alley on the other side of the fence. Another few months of saving up, and she’d be able to buy a new one during an end-of-season clearance sale.
She looked at the file. Patterns were the natural order of things. Waves, clouds, genes . . . all of them had set patterns. Even phone numbers had patterns eventually. If only I could see this one . . . Then, like watching a cloud take the shape of a pirate ship, she saw it. There were repeat numbers. The same number repeated a dozen times, but scrambled so the time, date, and phone number made the same repeating pattern. Twenty repeated digits, sixteen when she crossed out the four digits designating the year. She ordered a fresh printout from her computer and highlighted them.
Even with the times doctored, she saw the pattern. The person had called every day ending in a prime digit between the hours of eight in the evening and two in the morning. She got a drink of water from the tap and went to work untangling the phone number. Theoretically, there were scramblers on the market like this. High-end tech toys used by paranoid billionaires. It made sense that a pirate might have something like that . . . almost. Except Agent Edwin said the pirates weren’t tech users. They were off-the-grid ecoterrorists.
She stabbed her pen into the paper and willed the numbers to give up their secrets.
Two long hours later, s
he had ten digits in her hand that were, most likely, Nealie Rho’s private phone number. Logging into the limited-access police database she could use from home, Ivy ran the numbers.
Jamie Rex Nelson-Gardner.
Ivy rubbed her eyes. Gardner?
As in Sheriff Gardner?
She’d only met the man in passing, but he wasn’t the fatherly type. He didn’t have a spouse at any public events. Not that she was an expert on families. She’d been raised with thirteen other clones in a Shadow House, where the closest she had come to parents were men and women in lab coats monitoring their diets and making sure they had plenty of exercise and very little communication with the outside world. Speaking to non-shadows, aside from answering questions for the doctor, was discouraged although not actually punished. The keepers couldn’t risk scarring the precious, expensive skin of a shadow. But minds? Well, everyone knew a clone’s mind wound up in the trash. Eyes and tongues and teeth might be harvested for the Real Person, but the rest was waste. A shadow’s brain was its least valuable organ.
She smiled. Life after the Shadow House was proving her mind was her most valuable asset. Eat that, White Coats. I am more than a body for you to sell.
Ivy sighed and flopped back on her bright pink sheets. There weren’t difficult answers, only complicated questions. Living a double life, doing one thing and saying another, that led to complicated questions.
If you said murder was wrong but allowed yourself to get enraged and think about killing every day, then your life was complicated. If you knew killing was wrong and treated everyone with respect and admiration no matter what they did, life was simple.
As a police officer, it surprised her how often people chose the complicated life. How they were willing to break the law even though they knew the odds were stacked against them. She shook her head. It was a nonsensical gamble.
No one ever won betting against the house.
She sat back up and pulled her clunky laptop off her desk. It wasn’t a nice sleek datpad like Agent Rose had, but it was what she could afford on her salary. She typed in Jamie’s name and pulled up a picture of a wide-eyed boy staring mournfully at the camera. The headline read, LOCAL BOY REMANDED TO FOSTER CARE AFTER CAR WRECK KILLS MOTHER.