She let out a long breath. “It’ll take some getting used to. I keep looking around for her. Which is only normal, I guess.”
“You weren’t prepared for her leaving, were you.” It wasn’t really a question.
“No,” she admitted. “But I’m OK with it.”
“I’m sure you are.” Tommy’s smile was knowing. “But it still took you by surprise. You never thought about her retiring.”
“I was busy,” she said, and then winced inwardly. Had she ever said anything lamer? “But you know, things, uh, change.” Now she had.
“They do that.” Tommy pushed himself to his feet. “It’s not a steady-state universe.”
“No, I guess not.” Ruby stared after him as he ambled over to introduce himself to Rafe Pasco, wondering why his words seemed to hang in the air and echo in her brain. Maybe it was just having him and Ostertag ask her if she were OK within a few minutes of each other had put a whole new level of odd over the day.
The call came in about twenty minutes before Ruby had tentatively planned to go to lunch. Which figured, she thought as she and Pasco drove to the east midtown address; it had been a quiet morning. Any time you had a quiet morning, you could just about count on having to skip lunch. Of course, since the Dread had moved in on her, it hadn’t left much room in her stomach. Not a whole lot of room in her mind, either—she missed the turn onto the right street and, thanks to the alternating one-ways, had to drive around in a three-block circle. If Pasco noticed, he didn’t say anything. Maybe she would let him drive back to the station.
She was a bit surprised to see that patrol cars had almost half the street blocked off, even though there were very few curious onlookers and not much in the way of traffic. The address in question was a six-story tenement that Ruby had visited with Rita a few times in the past.
“Is this an actual residence or a squat?” Pasco asked her as they went up the chipped concrete steps to the front door.
“Both,” Ruby told him. She wasn’t actually sure anymore herself.
The uniform standing at the entrance was a young guy named Fraley; Ruby thought he looked about twelve years old, despite the thick moustache he was sporting. He opened the door for them as if that were really what he did for a living.
The smell of urine in the vestibule was practically a physical blow; she heard a sharp intake of breath from Pasco behind her.
“Straight from the perfume counter in hell,” she said wryly. “Ever wonder why it’s always the front of the building, why they don’t take a few extra seconds to run to the back?”
“Marking their territory?” Pasco suggested.
“Good answer.” Ruby glanced over her shoulder at him, impressed.
There was another uniformed officer in the hallway by the stairs, a tall black woman named Desjean whom Ruby recognized as a friend of Rita’s. “Sorry to tell you this,” she told them, “but your crime scene’s on the roof and there’s no elevator.”
Ruby nodded, resigned. “Do we know who it is?”
Desjean’s dark features turned sad. “Girl about twelve or thirteen. No I.D.”
Ruby winced, feeling acid bubbling up in her chest. “Great. Sex crime.”
“Don’t know yet,” the uniform replied. “But, well, up on the roof?”
“Local kid?” Ruby asked.
Desjean shook her head. “Definitely not.”
Ruby looked at the stairs and then at Pasco. “You can go first if you think you might go faster.”
Pasco blew out a short breath. “I’m a geek, not a track star.” He frowned. “Ostertag did tell you that, didn’t he?”
“Uh, yeah,” Ruby said, unsure as to whether he was kidding around or not. “Before we go up, one thing.”
“Don’t talk to you on the way?” He nodded. “The feeling’s mutual.”
She felt a brief moment of warmth toward him. Then the Dread overwhelmed it, crushing it out of existence, and she started up the stairs.
A uniformed sergeant named Papoojian met them just outside the door on the roof. “Kid with a telescope spotted the body and called it in,” she told them as they stood catching their breath. “I sent a couple of officers over to get a preliminary statement from him and his very freaked-out parents.”
“Kid with a telescope.” Ruby sighed. “I don’t know if that’s an argument for closed-circuit TV surveillance or against it.”
The sergeant looked up at the sky worriedly. “I wish the lab guys would hurry up and get here with a tent or we’re gonna have regular TV surveillance to deal with. I’m surprised the news helicopters aren’t buzzing us already.”
As if on cue, there was the faint sound of a chopper in the distance. Immediately, one of the other three uniformed cops on the roof produced a blanket and threw it over the body, then turned to look a question at Papoojian. Papoojian nodded an OK at him and turned back to Ruby. “If the lab has a problem with that, tell them to get in my face about it.”
Ruby waved a hand. “You got nothing to worry about. No I.D. on the body?”
The sergeant shook her curly head. “Except for a charm on her bracelet with the name Betty engraved on it.” She spelled it for them.
“There’s a name you don’t hear much these days.” Ruby looked over at the blanket-covered form. She was no longer panting from the long climb, but for some reason she couldn’t make herself walk the twenty feet over to where the body lay on the dusty gravel.
“Hey, you caught that other case with the kid,” Papoojian said suddenly. “The Dumpster boy.”
Ruby winced inwardly at the term. “Yeah.”
“They dumping all the murdered kid cases on you now?”
She shrugged, taking an uncomfortable breath against the Dread, which now seemed to be all but vibrating in her midsection.
Was this what she had been dreading? she wondered suddenly. Murdered children?
It almost felt as if she were tearing each foot loose from slow-hardening cement as she urged herself to go over and look at the victim, Pasco at her elbow with an attitude that seemed oddly dutiful.
“Ever see a dead kid?” she asked him in a low voice.
“Not like this,” Pasco replied, his tone neutral.
“Well, it’s gruesome even when it’s not gruesome,” she said. “So brace yourself.” She crouched down next to the body and lifted the blanket.
The girl was lying faceup, her eyes half-closed and her lips slightly parted, giving her a sort of preoccupied expression. She might have been in the middle of a daydream, except for the pallor.
“Well, I see why Desjean was so sure the girl wasn’t local,” Ruby said.
“Because she’s Japanese?” he guessed.
“Well, there are a few Japanese in east midtown, not many, but I was referring to her clothes.” Ruby shifted position, trying to relieve the pressure from the way the Dread was pushing on her diaphragm. It crossed her mind briefly that perhaps what she thought of as the Dread might actually be a physical problem. “That’s quality stuff she’s got on. Not designer but definitely boutique. You get it in the more upscale suburban malls. I have grandchildren,” she added in response to Pasco’s mildly curious expression.
She let the blanket drop and pushed herself upright, her knees cracking and popping in protest. Pasco gazed down at the covered body, his smooth, deep gold face troubled.
“You OK?” Ruby asked him.
He took a deep breath and let it out.
“Like I said, kids are gruesome even when they’re not—”
“I think this is related to this case I’ve been working on.”
“Really.” She hid her surprise. “We’ll have to compare notes, then. Soon.”
He didn’t answer right away, looking from the blanket to her with a strange expression she wasn’t sure how to read. There was something defensive about it, with more than a little suspicion as well. “Sure,” he said finally, with all the enthusiasm of someone agreeing to a root canal.
Ruby felt a m
ix of irritation and curiosity, which was quickly overridden by the Dread. She couldn’t decide whether to say something reassuring or simply assert her authority and reassure him later, after she knew she had his cooperation.
Then the crime lab arrived, saving her from having to think about anything from the immediate situation. And the Dread.
At the end of the day, Pasco managed to get away without talking about his case. It was possible of course that he had not been purposely trying to elude her. After spending most of the day talking to, or trying to talk to, the people in the building, checking on the results of the door-to-door in the neighborhood, looking over the coroner’s shoulder, and through it all pushing the Dread ahead of her like a giant boulder uphill, she was too tired to care.
She made a note about Pasco in her memo book and then dragged herself home to her apartment, where she glanced at an unopened can of vegetable soup before stripping off and falling into bed, leaving her clothes in a heap on the floor.
3:11.
The numbers, glowing danger red, swam out of the darkness and into focus. It was a moment or two before she realized that she was staring at the clock radio on the nightstand.
Odd. She never woke in the middle of the night; even with the Dread pressing relentlessly harder on her every day, she slept too heavily to wake easily or quickly. Therefore, something must have happened, something big or close, or both. She held very still, not even breathing, listening for the sound of an intruder in the apartment, in the bedroom.
A minute passed, then another; nothing. Maybe something had happened in the apartment next door or upstairs, she thought, still listening, barely breathing.
Nothing. Nothing and more nothing. And perhaps that was all it was, a whole lot of nothing. It could have been a car alarm out on the street, an ambulance passing close with its siren on, or someone’s bassed-out thumpmobile with the volume set on stun. Just because she didn’t usually wake up didn’t mean that she couldn’t. She took a long deep breath and let it out, rolling onto her back.
There was something strange about the feel of the mattress under her and she realized that she wasn’t alone in the bed.
Automatically she rolled onto her right side. Rafe Pasco’s head was resting on the other pillow. He was gazing at her with an expression of deep regret.
Shock hit her like an electric jolt. She jumped back, started to scream.
In the next moment she was staring at the empty place next to her in the bed, her own strangled cry dying in her ears as daylight streamed in through the window.
She jumped again and scrambled out of bed, looking around. There was no one in the room except her, no sign that anyone else had been lying in bed with her. She looked at the clock. 7:59.
Still feeling shaky, she knelt on the bed and reached over to touch the pillow Pasco’s head had been resting on. She could still see him vividly in her mind’s eye, that regretful expression. Or maybe “apologetic” was more like it. Sorry that he had showed up in her bed uninvited? Hope you’ll forgive the intrusion—it was too late to call and there wasn’t time to get a warrant.
The pillow was cool to her touch. Of course. Because she had been dreaming.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, one hand unconsciously pressed to her chest. That had been some crazy dream; her heart was only now starting to slow down from double time.
She stole a glance over her shoulder at the other side of the bed. Nope, still nobody there, not nobody, not nohow, and most especially not Rafe Pasco. What the hell had that been all about, anyway, seeing her new partner in bed with her? Why him, of all the goddam people? Just because he was new? Not to mention young and good-looking. She hadn’t thought she’d been attracted to him, but apparently there was a dirty old woman in her subconscious who begged to differ.
Which, now that she thought about it, was kind of pathetic.
“God or whoever, please, save me from that,” Ruby muttered, and stood up to stretch. Immediately, a fresh wave of the Dread washed over her, almost knocking her off balance. She clenched her teeth, afraid for a moment that she was going to throw up. Then she steadied herself and stumped off to the bathroom to stand under the shower.
Pasco was already at his desk when Ruby dragged herself in. She found it hard to look at him and she was glad to see that he was apparently too wrapped up in something on his notebook to pay attention to anything else. Probably the mysterious case he was working on and didn’t seem to want to tell her about. Shouldn’t have slipped and told me you thought it might be related to the one we caught yesterday, she admonished him silently, still not looking at him. Now I’ll have to pry it out of you.
Later. She busied herself with phone calls, setting up some witness interviews, putting in a call to the medical examiner about getting a preliminary report on the Japanese girl, and requesting information from Missing Persons on anyone fitting the girl’s description. It wasn’t until nearly noon that it occurred to her that he was working just as hard to avoid catching her eye as vice versa.
She drew in an uneasy breath and the Dread seemed to breathe with her. Maybe he had the same dream you did, suggested a tiny voice in her mind.
As if he had sensed something, he looked up from his notebook at her. She gave him a nod, intending to turn away and find something else that had to be done before she could talk to him. Instead, she surprised herself by grabbing her memo book and walking over to his desk.
“So tell me about this case of yours,” she said, pulling over an empty chair and plumping down in it. “And why you think it might have something to do with the dead girl from yesterday.”
“Do we know who she is yet?” he asked.
Ruby shook her head. “I’m still waiting to hear from Missing Persons. I’ve also put a call into the company that makes the charm bracelet, to find out who sells it in this area.”
Pasco frowned. “She could have bought it on the Internet.”
“Thanks for that,” she said sourly. “You can start with the auction sites if I come up empty.”
He nodded a bit absently and then turned his notebook around to show her the screen. The dead girl smiled out from what seemed to be a formal school photo; her eyes twinkled in the bright studio lights and her lips were parted just enough to show the thin gold line of a retainer wire around her front teeth.
“Where’d you get that?” Ruby demanded, incredulous.
“It’s not the same girl,” he told her.
“Then who is it—her twin?”
“Can’t say at this point.” He smiled a little. “This girl is Alice Nakamura. I was investigating a case of identity theft involving her parents.”
“Perps or victims?”
“To be honest, I’m still not clear on that. They could be either, or even both.”
Ruby shook her head slightly. “I don’t get it.”
“Identity theft is a complex thing and it’s getting more complex all the time.”
“If that’s supposed to be an explanation, it sucks.”
Pasco dipped his head slightly in acknowledgment. “That’s putting it mildly. The Nakamuras first showed up entering the country from the Cayman Islands. Actually, you might say that’s where they popped into existence, as I couldn’t find any record of them prior to that.”
“Maybe they came from Japan via the Caymans?” Ruby suggested.
“The parents have—had—U.S. passports.”
Ruby gave a short laugh. “If they’ve got passports, then they’ve got Social Security cards and birth certificates.”
“And we looked those up—”
“‘We?’”
“This task force I was on,” he said, a bit sheepishly. “It was a state-level operation with a federal gateway.”
Here comes the jargon, Ruby thought, willing her eyes not to film over.
“Anyway, we looked up the numbers. They were issued in New York, as were their birth certificates. There was no activity of any kind on the numbers—no salary, no wit
hholding, no income, no benefits. According to the records, these people have never worked and never paid taxes.”
“Call the IRS; tell them you’ve got a lead on some people who’ve never paid taxes. That’ll take care of it.”
“Tried that,” Pasco said, his half smile faint. “The IRS records show that everything is in order for the Nakamuras. Unfortunately, they can’t seem to find any copies of their tax returns.”
“That doesn’t sound like the IRS I know,” Ruby said skeptically.
Pasco shrugged. “They’re looking. At least, that’s what they tell me whenever I call. I have a feeling that it’s not a priority for them.”
“But what about the rest of it? The birth certificates? You said they were issued in New York?”
“They’re not actually the original birth certificates,” Pasco said. “They’re notarized copies, replacing documents which have been lost. Some of the information is missing—like where exactly each of them was born, the hospital, the attending physician, and, except for Alice, the parents’ names.”
Ruby glanced heavenward for a moment. “What are they, in witness protection?”
“I’ll let you know if I ever get a straight answer one way or another on that one,” Pasco said, chuckling a little, “but I’d bet money that they aren’t.”
“Yeah, me, too.” Ruby sat for a few moments, trying to get her mind around everything he had told her. None of it sounded right. Incomplete birth certificates? Even if she bought the stuff about the IRS, she found that completely implausible. “But I still don’t understand. Everything’s computerized these days, which means everything’s recorded. Nobody just pops into existence, let alone a whole family.”
“It’s not against the law to live off the grid,” Pasco said. “Some people do. You’d be surprised at how many.”
“What—you mean living off the land, generating your own electricity, shit like that?” Ruby gave a short, harsh laugh. “Look at that photo. That’s not a picture of a girl whose family has been living off the grid. She’s got an orthodontist, for chrissakes.”
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 74