Seeing Red

by Lyra Evans

  They all fell silent, each searching through whatever documents they had, typing away, staring at photos or notes. Niko paced around the area, having to circle his way around Cobalt and weave around the sofa to get any kind of movement. The room was large, but not large enough to make his pacing easy. He was momentarily stymied, too frustrated by the physical limitations of his surroundings to let his mind adequately work the puzzle.

  “I can’t find anything that connects Esther herself to Linden,” Starla said. “We’ve searched for connections to Preston in the past, but obviously that was a waste.”

  “She wasn’t very present on social media,” Coral said, squinting at her screen. “She had some basic profiles, but nothing much was posted there. I’ve also done an image search of her face, but I haven’t come up with anything particularly useful.”

  “No enemies I can identify,” Uri said. “All her bills were paid on time, no debt, nothing outstanding at the time she disappeared. She’d just made her rent payment and finished paying off her student loan two weeks before she disappeared.” He paused. “And her bank account shows a modest sum. Nothing crazy, no new deposits or withdrawals. And certainly not enough money to interest any unsavoury types.”

  Starla eyed him. “Her financial records?” she asked. “You shouldn’t have access to those without a warrant.” Her words were pointed, and Uri coloured slightly.

  “I am fully capable of breaking the law too, Star,” he said with misplaced haughtiness. “And we’re running short on time and options.”

  Niko finally settled into a route around the room that suited him. The others largely ignored his movements, but he felt Cobalt’s eyes on him as he paced. And while his mind was sinking into his pace, an image of himself with Cobalt popped up in his head. They were on a running track, similar to the one at the police academy, and they were poised to race. Eyes locked with one another, Niko felt his heart beat an excited rhythm, and then the two of them took off. In the scene, Niko ran at full tilt, pushing his legs past where he thought they could go, as if something was chasing him. Someone. And then Cobalt caught him round the middle and threw him to the ground, pinning him there. And they were both laughing, tangled together, happy and breathing each other in.

  Fingers to his forehead, Niko tried to free himself from the grasp of the thought. He wasn’t sure what brought it on, but when he looked over, he met Cobalt’s eyes. Heart yearning with a whimpering ache, Niko realized there were yards of space between them still, between them and that dream. The easy laughter, the competitive spirit, the simple intimacy—they were captive on the other side of a gaping canyon. And he wasn’t sure how to get across it.

  “It was never going to be that easy,” Niko said, his mouth moving before he realized it was him speaking. He hesitated, unsure if he meant his relationship with Cobalt or the case. Coming back to himself, he covered. “If something about this could be Phoebe Linden’s undoing, there’s no way it will be easy to find. If it was obvious, it would have already gotten out somehow.”

  Cobalt’s crystal eyes never moved from his face. The Selkie’s pale hair ruffled slightly as he tilted his head to the side. For a moment, Niko was overcome with the urge to walk over and straddle him, to settle into his lap and press their bodies together. He denied the impulse.

  “Then we go deeper,” Cobalt said. “What do your instincts tell you?”

  Niko moved his shoulder imperceptibly, his spine cracking slightly as he did. Tension inhabited him, setting up camp along the lines of his muscles as though it meant to stay long term.

  “Why did she go missing at work?” Niko asked, not expecting an answer. “She lived in a lower-end neighbourhood, not quite sketchy, but not quite family-friendly either. She lived alone. No one checked in on her. Her building had no real security beyond the front door, and that’s easily bypassed. She worked evenings and often got home late, when everyone else would be asleep. Her apartment building and the area around it are much more likely places for her to get abducted or attacked. Easier for the attacker to get away. No cameras. And people intentionally minding their own business.”

  “The dog?” Uri offered, thinking it over. “Dogs bark, attack intruders. Could have made someone targeting her hesitant.”

  “That’s if she was targeted,” Starla added. “We don’t know for sure this wasn’t random.”

  “So people, then,” Niko said. “If it was random, her attacker would have had to spot her at work. It’s possible they were waiting in the parking lot for someone to appear they liked, but then why this building? Why not just roam the streets anywhere in Maeve’s Court to pick up a victim? There are hundreds of places where you could abduct someone off the street without ever being spotted at all, let alone caught on camera.”

  “They clearly didn’t care about the camera,” Coral said. “The car had no plates and tinted windows.”

  “They knew the cameras were there,” Cobalt reworded. “They were prepared.”

  Niko nodded. “Which means this was targeted,” he said. “Either it targeted Esther or this particular building.”

  “Who was working that night?” Cobalt asked.

  Starla pulled up the information. “That head of the cleaning staff, Photine Carob, An and Akash Bael, along with Esther were the night’s cleaning crew. Maintenance wasn’t in that night, only on call. And as for security, the guard was Uriel Cyclamen. He’s the one who provided the security footage.”

  “They did background checks on all the workers that night,” Niko said, thinking back over the file. “Carob and Cyclamen left after Esther, their presence marked on the security footage in different parts of the building at the time she vanished. An and Akash Bael left earlier, but they were confirmed at an all-nighter diner a few blocks away at the time she disappeared. They had receipts to prove it, and the waitress remembered them. She said they were both hitting on her at once.”

  “So none of the workers are likely involved in her disappearance,” Cobalt concluded. “But something strikes me about that list.” He paused, staring into nothing. “Carob and Esther were the only two women present that night, correct?”

  Starla nodded. “Apparently one of the twins—Akash, I think?—identifies as non-binary, but they present male. If that matters to your thought process.”

  Cobalt mulled it over, shifting his jaw as though he was tasting the information. “And Carob is much older than Esther, is she not?”

  “She’s about a year away from retirement, apparently,” Uri said. “So yes. A good few decades older.”

  Niko understood where he was going. He just wasn’t sure it cleared anything up. “You think she was targeted or chosen because she was young and a woman,” Niko said. “A sexually motivated attack? Or at least physically motivated.” Cobalt nodded. Niko looked at the image of the victim they had. She was a conventionally attractive woman. Her long purple hair was a shade dark enough to look black in low lighting, and it flowed down over her shoulder in shiny waves. Her dark eyes were round and open, her lips forming a sweet cupid’s bow and quirked in a pleasant smile. Her skin was slightly paler than the norm for Maeve’s Court, but Niko imagined she didn’t get much time to spend lounging on the beach. The dappling of freckles across her nose and cheeks indicated she did soak in sunlight some of the time.

  “But that doesn’t tell us who attacked her,” Starla said. “Or kidnapped her. Or whatever word you want to use. We still don’t know exactly what happened.”

  Something itched at the back of Niko’s mind, though, now he was thinking of her attack as sexually motivated. He struggled to scratch at the itch, to unravel the shroud around it, to understand what it was he was thinking.

  “Pull up the stills from the security footage, will you?” he said, moving around Starla to look at her screen over her shoulder. She did as he asked, and he had her scroll through them, one by one. As she did, he scanned the images closely, searching for something, though he couldn’t quite say what. It started with her stan
ding outside the building, without moving, her face serious. Her expression wasn’t entirely clear from the angle of the camera, but the moment the car drew up beside her, Niko realized he could see her reflection in the tinted windows. The seriousness on her face was lined with something else—indecision. She seemed to be fighting with herself. And from that angle, Niko also noticed something else about her. There seemed to be a mark under one of her eyes, along the top of her cheekbone. It was difficult to tell in the reflection, but Niko was almost certain it was the beginnings of a bruise. “She was injured,” he said. “At some point during her shift.” He had Starla pull up the security stills of her coming in to work at the start of her shift. Her face was completely clear of marks, and she seemed in good spirits. “Was there any mention of that in the file?”

  Niko knew the answer before Uri said, “No. No one mentioned her getting hurt at all.” He paused. “The officers went through the security footage of her that night, though. They didn’t note anything about her getting hurt.”

  “Are there cameras everywhere in the building?” Cobalt asked.

  Starla was already pulling up security plans. “Everywhere except the bathrooms,” she said. “And one suite on the top floor.”

  “Am I to understand, then, she could have been in any of those places, been injured, and there would be no evidence of it?” Cobalt asked.

  “No, not any of those places,” Coral said. “Seems like the shifts are divided into floor sets. Each cleaner takes care of a handful of floors on their own. The assigned floors are different every shift.” She was reading something on her screen. “The night in question, Esther was assigned the top ten floors.”

  Uri heaved a sigh. “Great, so she could have been hurt in any bathroom on ten floors, or the suite on the top floor,” he said. “That’s still a lot of area and time.”

  “She was a diligent employee,” Niko said, and everyone glanced up at him, confused. He was still thinking it all out himself. “That’s what Carob said. Diligent and efficient. She paid all her bills on time. She paid off her student loan as quickly as possible. Took her dog out twice a day. Kept her own place tidy. Arrived for her shifts on time.” His eyes traced lines along the ceiling. “It’s protocol for jobs like these to report workplace accidents. To protect everyone involved—the employee, the employer, the building owners.” He paused again. “She would have told Carob if she was hurt doing her job. Would have filed a report about it. The officers working the case would have come across it at some point, relevant or not. But as far as we can tell, she didn’t report this to anyone.” He looked around the room. “Why would that be?”

  Cobalt nodded. “She wasn’t injured doing her job. Something else happened.”

  “Which means either she was doing something she should not have been,” Niko said, though he didn’t think so. “Or else, someone else was involved. Maybe someone who wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “She doesn’t seem the type to be doing reckless things on the job,” Starla said. “Nor the type to do any kind of corporate espionage-type stuff.”

  Niko agreed but asked anyway. “What companies had offices on the floors she was responsible for?”

  “Only two companies used those ten floors,” Starla said. “The majority of them are rented by an accounting firm called Division Financial. Their clients are mostly small businesses and retail accounting. The top floor belongs to a consulting firm called Helix and Co.”

  “What the hell is a ‘consulting firm’?” Coral asked.

  “A consultant is someone who gives advice and direction to a company for a fee,” Niko said. “They mostly get called in when a company has some kind of problem they need to solve—a deficit, a lack of growth, losing market share, that kind of thing. They also call in consultants to make it look like they’re taking things seriously. They’re specialists, really, and they charge exorbitant fees.”

  “Sounds cushy,” Coral said with a flat expression. “Like exactly the kind of job that draws in assholes and douchebags.”

  Niko laughed, despite himself. “Well…” Then he paused, his mind sparking with something. “But Helix and Co rings a bell. Why is that?”

  Uri’s eyebrows shot up. “They were in the news a while back. Business news, mind. Got acquired by another company. One of the biggest deals in Maeve’s Court history. I’m surprised you noticed.”

  “What company?” Niko asked, and the buzzing at the back of his mind intensified.

  “Deeproot Capital,” Uri said. “They’re—”

  “Ambert Redwood’s company,” Niko said sharply. Uri stopped, mouth open.

  “Well, I was going to say one of the largest investment companies in the Three Courts, but that too, I guess.”

  “So that’s the connection?” Cobalt asked, not quite believing it. It didn’t sit quite right with Niko either. The buzzing was louder, stronger, but it hadn’t cleared yet. He was still missing something.

  “I don’t know,” Starla said. “The acquisition happened after Esther was abducted, according to the official filing. Helix and Co didn’t belong to Redwood at that time.”

  Then it started to fizzle in Niko’s head. Information sifted away like sand from a prospecting pan. Something Noor Juniper had said. He teased at the strings of the memory, coaxing it to the light.

  “How long after?” he asked.

  “About three weeks,” Starla said.

  Niko sucked on his teeth. “Acquisitions take longer than a few weeks to negotiate and close. They would have been working on it for months before.”

  Uri nodded. “They were. It took about six months total to close the deal,” he said. “And there was a little while there when people thought it wouldn’t go through. Supposedly they’d hit a stalemate in the negotiations. Helix and Co weren’t willing to come down on their asking price or something. Said the company’s performance in the last quarter was so good, and their projections for the next three quarters were up.”

  Niko turned. “How did they agree in the end?”

  Uri blinked. “Eventually, Helix and Co did come down. I don’t know what changed, but—”

  “I do,” Niko said, suddenly absolutely certain. “Ambert Redwood happened. He did something. He—”

  “Broke in to the Helix and Co offices?” Uri asked, incredulous. “That’s a bit insane, Nik.”

  Hesitating, Niko couldn’t make the simple determination this was the answer meet up with reality. He couldn’t explain how Ambert Redwood could have gotten into Helix’s headquarters without their knowledge.

  “Who owns the building, Starla?” Cobalt asked. When she stared blankly at him, he added, “The building in which Helix’s offices were located.”

  Scratching her nose, she said, “Meadowfield Property Management. They’re a smaller property management company that—” She stopped abruptly, brow furrowed at the screen. “Weird. It looks like they were bought out by a company called Loyalty Investments about a month before all this.”

  Uri stilled. “Loyalty?” he asked. “You’re sure?” Starla nodded and pointed to her screen. He looked up slowly at Niko. “Loyalty’s parent company is Deeproots Capital.”

  Again, the clarity blew out the edges of fog in Niko’s mind. “Ambert Redwood didn’t break in. He got into the building because he owned it. And because he owned it, he was able to do so without being tracked or noticed. Everyone in that building was essentially employed by him. If he wanted them to be quiet about his being there, they would be. Why should it matter if the building owner shows up, anyway?” Niko shook his head. He had no real evidence to support this, but it was painfully obvious now. “He went in to get dirt on Helix. To find something to force their hand. And when he was there, he ran into Esther.”

  The memory Niko had been pulling at finally surfaced. Noor Juniper chatting with Preston about having to sit through tales of Ambert Redwood’s adventures in assaulting unsuspecting women. The moment solidified in his mind’s eyes, and he heard her offhand
comment as though she was in the room with him.

  “If I have to hear about one more young woman he corners in one of his office buildings late at night, I’m going to kill him myself.”

  “How did the other officers not notice him in the footage?” Coral asked.

  “They didn’t go through it themselves,” Uri said, reading through the notes again. “Not all of it, anyway. For legal reasons, the security team only provided footage specifically involving Esther. And the security team was with them when they went through it.” He sighed. “If Redwood was in the Helix suite the entire time, he wouldn’t have appeared on any of the footage anyway.”

  “So our hypothesis is that Ambert Redwood, without any evidence to support this, was not only present in the building but decided to attack Esther Cottonwood…because she was pretty? And then to abduct her afterward?” Coral shook her head. “It sounds kind of thin, yeah? And she looked like she sort of made the decision herself to go around the car. Maybe to get in. But if he attacked her in the building, why would she willingly do that? Why not run away?”

  “He does this,” Niko said. “Juniper and Preston were talking about it. He corners young women, usually cleaning staff, in his office buildings late at night. Juniper said he ‘does things’ to them.” Fists balled, Niko felt his short nails digging shallow trenches into his palms. “She was pretty, young, and very much unsuspecting. But she was also independent and resourceful. Maybe when he tried to corner her, she fought back? Maybe she managed to get away from him and somehow got injured in the process?”

  Starla rubbed at her cheek, as though she had a bruise of her own. “He’s her boss, right? And a major player in Maeve’s Court. He’s rich and powerful. Easy to convince yourself you misunderstood, or that it was a mistake, in that kind of scenario. You’re no one, right? And he’s powerful. What else can you do?” She squinted at the stills on her screen. “Looks like the front passenger window is rolled down slightly. Maybe he was speaking to her. Offered her a ride home to apologize for his behaviour. Asking forgiveness. She wouldn’t want a hostile relationship with the building’s owner. And it’s safer than walking home, right?”