by Seth Patrick
The isolation was the worst. She needed to talk, but who to call? Her father was her only family. She had a roster of colleagues, some of whom she thought of as friends, but each time she’d come close to ringing them she’d stopped. None was close enough for this kind of burden, bemused sympathy and well-meaning encouragement all she could expect. Worse than nothing, she thought.
Nine weeks before and she would have called her then-boyfriend, a record four-month relationship that had come crashing down so fast it had left her head spinning. Even so, as she’d got increasingly drunk she’d come close to making the mistake of calling him.
As she dried her tears in the morning she thought about her failed relationships, and the way she spent so much time worrying about her father, gearing up each year for another emotional beating and resenting him for it.
There was a curious paradox. She was always relieved when a relationship ended, and it was because her own parents had loved each other so completely. It was that absolute love that had led her father into his absolute despair. Into grief so deep that he was still drowning in it.
Love always turned to grief. Was it any wonder she was relieved whenever she failed to find it?
Hungover, waiting for the police to call and struggling to function; she did nothing that day, her mind always returning to one thought: I wasn’t here. I wasn’t here to help him.
She considered pouring the alcohol away, but opted instead to move the bottles out of sight. After all, she reasoned, she might really need them.
* * *
Two detectives came to the house the next afternoon. It was still very warm and humid, but everything seemed drained of colour. Both detectives looked tired and harassed.
‘Hello, Miss Harker,’ said the older-looking of the two, a gray man in a gray suit. The colour was even leeching from the police, Annabel thought. ‘Detective Harrington; this is Detective Weathers.’ His colleague was a woman, just as colourless save for a hint of lipstick. The woman nodded as her name was spoken.
Annabel stayed at the door, reluctant to invite them in. She’d been told they were coming, by phone call that morning, but letting them inside would cut the final strands of denial. It felt dangerous, like inviting a vampire across the threshold.
‘Is there news?’ she asked. ‘They wouldn’t give me much over the phone.’
‘Yes. May we…?’ said Harrington, and Annabel opened the door wide and led the way into the living room.
‘Ah!’ said Weathers to Harrington. ‘Thank God, cooler in here.’ She looked to Annabel. ‘Car air con’s given up, apologies if we’re sweaty.’
Annabel found herself smiling and was glad of it. ‘Sweat away,’ she said. ‘But cut to it.’
The officers sat and shared a glance. Harrington spoke: ‘Your father’s case has been escalated, Miss Harker.’
‘Annabel. Please.’
Harrington nodded. ‘Annabel. We found withdrawals from your father’s bank account. One was from an ATM at a gas station in Greensboro, North Carolina. This was six days ago, 11.23 p.m. Five hundred dollars. A second in Atlanta two days later. Nothing else, and no credit card usage. Just those cash withdrawals.’ Harrington paused, seeming to gather himself. He glanced at his colleague, and Annabel felt cold. ‘Security camera footage at the gas station clearly shows your father’s car.’
At this, Weathers produced a photograph, CCTV from the station forecourt, two vans and one car, a silver Volvo. Then an enlargement showing the car licence plate, clear enough to make out.
Annabel’s voice was trembling: ‘So have you found him?’
Weathers produced another photograph, a still from inside the station. She handed the picture to Annabel. ‘This man was the only known occupant of the vehicle,’ Weathers said.
A tall man, scrawny, plain white tee shirt and jeans. Thinning hair. He could have been anywhere from his twenties to his forties. Wearing sunglasses at night.
‘Who is he?’ said Annabel.
Weathers didn’t flinch, but Harrington’s face registered disappointment.
‘You don’t recognize him?’ said Harrington. ‘A friend of your father’s?’
Annabel looked again. ‘I don’t know him.’ She felt empty. ‘What is this? What’s happening?’
‘Your father’s a rich man, Annabel,’ said Harrington, and the ground lurched under her.
* * *
They sent a forensic team before five that evening. Annabel watched every move, aware that they must have been cursing her – cursing the time she’d spent in the house, tainting every part of it. But there had been no signs of struggle when she’d first arrived, nothing to indicate that her father had been assaulted there. Kidnapped still seemed so bizarre to her. No motive necessary other than greed.
With no contact and no demands for payment, the police were working on the theory that Daniel was being forced to transfer his own money. There had been no movement in any of her father’s ordinary bank accounts. The police spoke of the possibility of offshore funds, and of private accounts with daily transfer limits that would require any kidnapping to extend over time. They seemed too certain, Annabel thought. Neither she nor her father’s accountant knew of any such accounts, but the police insisted. Then she realized that it was the only scenario they had with a positive outcome. Of course that was what they would tell her.
She was left alone again by ten that night. It would be better to keep the story quiet, they told her, while investigations proceeded. She would be informed of progress.
Whatever the reason he had been taken, and wherever he was, her father would be frightened and alone. Even if he was returned safe, he would be forever changed.
She sought out the alcohol she’d hidden the day before and retreated, surrounded by the ghosts of her family. The days passed, and she took her cue from her father, calling nobody. When the phone rang, it was always the police, to inform her that nothing had changed.
But things had changed. She knew it, because she had no more hope left. Each day that passed made the outlook more bleak. She told the police not to call again until they had something to tell her.
And so eight nights after leaving England, Annabel sat in the darkening house, staring at a phone that refused to ring.
She knew that it would ring soon enough.
12
It was late afternoon on Sam Deering’s last day at the FRS, and Never was sitting at his desk writing up the first of three in-house revival reports he had to complete before the day’s end. The prospect of Sam’s retirement party that evening was buoying him.
Sam had been buzzing around the office constantly, increasingly agitated, desperate to tie up loose ends. He headed Never’s way.
‘You got a minute?’ asked Sam.
‘Yep.’
‘I’m going to sign off on that hardware request you gave me last month.’
‘The one you said stood zero chance?’
‘The same. It’s a going-away present. You want?’
‘You kidding?’ said Never. ‘I want.’ Sam nodded and smiled, but Never could see how tired he looked. ‘You OK?’
‘I’ve got, what…’ He checked his watch. ‘Less than two hours. Then Hugo’s in charge, and I’m retired. Nothing to do.’
‘You’ll be fine, Sam. You have the symposium in a few weeks, and I’ll bet that’s not all you’re down for.’
Sam smiled. ‘Yes … but the occasional conference is hardly the same. And Helen won’t approve when she finds out. She’s expecting her husband to be a man of leisure from now on.’
A moment of silence. The air between them had been frosty since Jonah had taken on the Wood case, but not today. Time running out, Never thought.
‘Look, Sam,’ he ventured, but Sam was ahead of him.
‘I’m sorry too, Never. I was feeling guilty, and I took it out on you. We’ve both done it, pandered to the boy.’ Sam frowned. ‘Shit, listen to me. Boy. Jonah’s a man now, and there’s my problem. I still treat him like a
kid. I let him have his own way too often, and so do you.’
‘Yeah … we do.’
‘Look out for him, Never.’
‘I’ll do my best. But for the record?’
Sam raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’
‘I’m glad Jonah handled the Wood case rather than Jason Shepperton.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t help it.’
Sam leaned over and lowered his voice. ‘You know what, Never? I am too.’
As Sam went back to his office, Never heard someone call his name from the office entrance. He looked over to see J. J. walking towards him.
J. J. had returned from Seattle the night before, after a two-week stint helping train new technicians at the West Coast offices. The timing of the trip had meant Never hadn’t seen him since the Decker revival, for which J. J. had been the technician. That morning, things had been rushed, and there had barely been time for J. J. to give Never a summary of how his Seattle trip had gone before he’d had to go out for an onsite revival.
‘Hi, J. J.,’ said Never. ‘How did the onsite go?’
J. J. shrugged. ‘By the numbers. Nothing interesting.’ He paused. ‘Hey, Never, maybe this can wait until later, but…’
‘Go ahead.’
‘When I got back in I went through my emails. I got to the one from you, about the Decker revival.’
‘Oh, that. I was just thinking we should make it standard practice to leave the recording going until we take the equipment down. We can set it up so the police copy can be taken without stopping everything. I wasn’t criticizing, just thinking it’d be sensible.’
J. J. nodded. ‘Thing is, your message reminded me. There was an outage after the revival. I should’ve told you about it before I left, but things were hectic. Sorry.’
‘Outage?’ The suggestion made Never’s pride bristle – it was his system, designed with enough redundancy to cover most eventualities short of a nearby nuclear explosion.
‘Yeah. And I didn’t even see it until I went to pack up the gear. There was no notification.’
‘The power to a camera died? And it didn’t warn you?’
J. J. shook his head. ‘Not one. All three.’
For a moment Never thought he’d misheard. That kind of thing simply didn’t happen. ‘Did you see them go?’
‘No. I was chatting to the guys and ripping their copy. Didn’t notice it. You know how it is, the revival was over, recording had stopped.’
‘It should have chimed a warning.’
‘I know, but it didn’t.’
‘So all the backup batteries failed and the warning system’s broken?’ Hardware failure happened often enough, Never knew, but for it all to go at once … Then, suddenly, he made a connection and felt ice in his veins.
‘That’s the thing. When I went in to take them down, I noticed the power was out on the main-shot camera. Then I saw the other two were gone as well. I went to power-cycle the wide-shot camera, but before I touched it, all three came back up on their own. I checked it out when I got back and I couldn’t find anything wrong, not with any of it. Couldn’t work it out.’
Silent, Never realized that his skin was goosebumping.
J. J. spoke again: ‘While I was away, I was thinking – there was plenty of static from the carpets in that office. I noticed when I was setting up.’ He leaned in, whispering, ‘I think we may have a static problem. We need to do some testing.’
‘Right, yes. Static.’ He suppressed a shiver. ‘Look, J. J., do me a favour and don’t say anything about this. Not until we know. I mean, we’ve not had trouble before, but some of the kit configuration is only a few months old.’ They’d switched to a different brand for the backup power units six months before. Maybe that’s it, he thought, unconvinced.
‘I wasn’t going to. I’ll write up a test plan.’
‘Thanks, J. J. Good work. We’ll get the testing done next week, OK?’
When J. J. left, Never found himself thinking of static and the camera power dropping. He thought of Alice Decker’s face in the footage he’d watched. He thought of Jonah, looking up after the revival had ended, seeing that face rise, malign and leering. This time, the shiver came.
* * *
By the time the day’s work ended, Sam was nowhere to be seen. Without a victim to impose a grand emotional farewell on – which Never presumed was exactly why Sam had disappeared – the office dispersed, everyone heading off to get ready for the evening’s event in the venue room of a nearby sports bar. The farewell would wait until then.
Rather than have to go all the way home and then all the way back again, Never had worn what he considered his best clothes to work. Nobody had noticed the difference.
He walked to Jonah’s apartment. Since getting the good news from Stephanie Graves, Jonah had seemed upbeat enough to stop Never worrying as much as he had been, but not completely.
‘Thought I’d pop in,’ he said as Jonah opened the door. ‘Then we can go together. Share a cab.’
Jonah smiled. ‘So you could make sure I didn’t decide to stay home?’
‘Oh, I know you wouldn’t have stayed home,’ said Never, sitting on the sofa beside a snoozing Marmite. He tickled the cat’s neck. ‘You’d have turned up as late as you thought you could get away with.’
‘What can I say. My cat would miss me.’
‘So this is what you spend your time off doing, huh? Pampering your cat?’
‘Yep. That and thinking.’
‘Sounds ominous,’ said Never. ‘What about?’
‘My life.’
‘That is ominous. Come to any conclusions yet?’
‘Graves told me it was all in my head, Never. And I want to believe it. I want to, more than anything. But I started to wonder if that was because it’s all I can do, you know? This job is all I am. If I can’t think Decker was in my head, where does that leave me? If I believe what I saw, it would mean something’s out there.’
Jonah’s head fell. Thinking of what J. J. had said, Never was relieved that Jonah wasn’t looking at him; his eyes might have given away the unease he felt. He scolded himself for being so stupid – this was the kind of superstitious idiocy he derided in others. Letting Jonah see he had any doubt was the worst thing he could do for his friend.
‘Come on, Jonah. Graves was right, and you know it. This is what you want to do, because you’re good at it. Christ, think about Nikki Wood – you’ve handled dozens of cases like that. You make a real difference.’
Jonah looked up at him. ‘Maybe that’s the problem. If I can’t walk away, not even from one case, when I know it’s for my own good … I’ll let the workload grow again. Graves suggested I go private. Maybe then I’d be able to let go of it. Lose the urgency. It’d let me recover. I said no, but I’m starting to think leaving the FRS might be the only way. I’ll be back at work next week. I guess I’ll find out how I feel then.’
In the silence that followed, Never watched him, sizing up how much Jonah meant what he said, and not liking what he saw. ‘Shit, mate,’ he said at last, trying to shake the moment off. ‘Maybe. If it’s what you decide. But that’s for another time, OK? If we try hard, I think we may still have fun tonight. If that’s fine by the moggie.’
‘OK,’ said Jonah, defeated. ‘Give me a minute to change.’
* * *
They were on to their second drink of the evening by the time Hugo Adler called for quiet. Sam was in torment, standing at the front as uncomfortable as Never Geary could recall seeing him; his face was reddening with every moment, as more and more people drew close and aimed their attention his way.
It got redder still as Hugo gave him his send-off speech, which ended with heartfelt applause. As it grew, Sam’s eyes started watering. Then came the farewell gifts.
First, a small selection of impressive wines. Nothing ridiculous, just half a dozen that were expensive enough to put Sam off removing the cork.
‘We asked Helen,’ said Hugo, as Sam looked at each bottle in turn. ‘She told
us you were always saying you’d start a wine cellar, if only you could resist drinking what you buy. So we got you some bottles you’ll think it’s a shame to open.’
‘I’m not sure that isn’t a form of torture,’ Never whispered to Jonah, but judging from Sam’s smile the gift seemed a good one.
Second, a more personal memento: a framed photograph of the original FRS team moving in to the Richmond offices: Sam looking trim and Never grinning out of the middle row; Jonah there too, joining them as the expansion began, scarily young.
Sam took a moment to look closely. Calls for a speech made him wince, but he nodded, wet-eyed. ‘There’s not much I can say that you don’t already know. It’s been a privilege. I’m proud of you, and I’ll miss you. And now, I have one last order as your boss. Enjoy yourselves!’
* * *
Every conversation that night seemed to turn to FRS nostalgia, leading back to Sam, in the end. It was no wonder, Jonah thought. Sam had founded it, tended it; the FRS was his child in many ways, and Sam had been a father figure to many of his staff over the years. None more so than Jonah, orphaned by his mother’s death and befriended by this principled man, a man who was fighting for honour and justice. A man who Jonah wanted to make proud.
Sam was sitting at a table on the far end of the room, with his wife, Helen, on one side, and Robert Thorne, the Chicago-based FRS director, on the other. In theory, Robert Thorne had shown Sam significant respect by coming, but he was a humourless bureaucrat and Sam’s expression spoke volumes.
‘Thorne has him trapped,’ said Jonah.
‘Probably making him feel guilty about the cost of the evening,’ Never said. ‘Look at Sam’s face. Every time Thorne speaks, you can see a flinch…’
They watched as Sam spoke to Helen and shook hands with someone who’d approached his table. Then Thorne spoke up. The flinch was visible, even at a distance.
‘Let’s give him some respite,’ said Jonah.
‘Good idea,’ said Never. ‘He’s nearer the bar too.’