by J. D. Barker
Twenty minutes later Porter found himself standing in the lobby of Flair Tower on West Erie, a small puddle forming at his feet. He hadn’t planned on coming here, and as he pushed through the doors he considered turning right back around, but instead he found himself standing still, his eyes looking out across the lobby but not really taking anything in, dazed.
“Detective?”
Porter hadn’t heard her walk up. He hadn’t expected her to walk up, a building this size, but there she was, standing in front of him.
“Hello, Emory.”
The last time he had seen her was at the hospital shortly after she was rescued from 4MK. Bishop had placed her at the bottom of an elevator shaft in that building on Belmont, used her as bait to lure Porter in. She had been malnourished, gaunt, her skin pale. Her right wrist had been badly damaged by the handcuffs he used to restrain her, and Bishop had removed Emory’s left ear, yet she still managed to smile that day. Her hair was longer now, her face fuller, color in her cheeks.
“Detective, are you okay?”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry. I’m not really sure why I’m here. I meant to come and see you, you know, after, but things have been so hectic, the time got away from me,” he said.
“Let’s sit.” She took his hand and led him to some couches placed in front of a fireplace in the corner of the lobby. A log crackled, wrapped in thick flames, the heat reaching out and lapping at the air.
Porter tugged off his gloves, his fingers nervously twitching together. “I probably shouldn’t be here.”
Emory smiled. “That’s silly—it’s good to see you. I meant to stop by the station a dozen times but couldn’t bring myself to go. Silly. I guess it’s hard to find the words after something like that. The whole thing feels like a bad nightmare that happened to someone else. Like a movie I watched a few months ago and left at the theater. I can’t talk to my friends, they don’t understand. Ms. Burrow, either. She tried to coax the story out of me a few times, but I couldn’t . . . it all made her very uncomfortable. She wanted me to talk for my own sake, not because she wanted the details, and I didn’t see the point in burdening her with those details. It was my nightmare. There’s no reason for her to suffer too, have those thoughts in her head.”
“Did you see a shrink?”
Emory laughed and shook her head. “They sure wanted to see me. I don’t know how many dozens of them reached out. I tried to talk to one, but I couldn’t stop thinking she planned to write a book about whatever I told her, and the idea of walking past a book at the store, knowing this ordeal was carved in stone for others to read, the idea of all that shut me right up. I couldn’t tell her anything.”
“I don’t think they’re allowed to do that. She would have lost her license.”
“I suppose.”
Emory’s hands rested in her lap. Porter could still see a faint scar on her right wrist, but for the most part, the surgeons had done a wonderful job repairing the damage. On her left wrist, a small figure-eight tattoo—Bishop gave her that too.
She raised her right wrist and pulled back the sleeve. “They did a good job, right?”
“If I didn’t know what happened, I’d never guess. It’s barely noticeable.”
“I’m going back in next May. The doctor says he can wipe it out completely, but we need to give it a chance to heal up first,” she told him, rotating the wrist. “I still don’t have full motion, but it seems like it’s coming back.”
Porter’s eyes inadvertently went to her left ear, hidden behind her long chestnut hair. He caught himself, almost looked away, then figured he wasn’t fooling anybody. “How’s the ear?”
A wide grin spread across her face. “Wanna see?”
Porter couldn’t help but smile back. He nodded. “Is it gross?”
“You tell me?” Emory pulled her hair back, revealing a perfectly natural-looking ear. “Pretty cool, huh?”
Porter leaned in closer. Aside from a small scar visible at the base where doctors had attached the extremity, he couldn’t tell it wasn’t her original ear. “That’s amazing.”
Emory rolled up the sleeve of her right arm and showed him a small scar below her elbow. “They grew it here, using cartilage from my ribs. It only took a few months. The surgery was about six weeks ago. The doctor said Bishop removed mine with near surgical precision, so they had no trouble attaching the new one. Usually when they do this, the ear is torn off in some kind of accident and they have to try and piece the mess back together again. I guess I got lucky.”
“I think you’re a very strong girl.”
“You wanna know the best part?”
“What’s that?”
She turned her head and showed him her other ear. “Notice something different between the two?”
It took Porter a minute, and then it came to him. “Your right ear is pierced and your left one isn’t?”
“Yep.” She beamed. “The left was, but not anymore. I think I’m gonna leave it that way.” She held up her left wrist, showed him the small infinity tattoo. “I’m on the fence about keeping this. I think a small reminder of what happened isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s good to remember the bad. It makes other things seem not so terrible.”
“You are one remarkable, inspiring girl.”
She let her hair fall back. “Why, thank you, Detective.”
The two went quiet for a minute, not an awkward silence, but something a little more comfortable. Porter found himself watching the flames as they wrapped around the logs in the fireplace, the wood slowly growing red and white. The crackle they produced was soothing, relaxing. This girl had lost her mother as a child, now her father, and yet she smiled. Porter wanted desperately to smile. He wanted to smile and mean it.
As if reading his mind, Emory leaned in closer. “He wasn’t much of a father to me. I barely knew him. If not for the money, the way my mom drafted her will, I’m not so sure he would have wanted me around at all.”
“He was your father. I’m sure he cared for you. He just had trouble showing it.”
“He was a horrible man,” she said quietly. “Not to me but to so many other people.”
Porter considered telling her something to the contrary, try to build him up, thought better of it. She was a big girl. She deserved the truth. “It’s important to remember he’s not you. He never was.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she fought them back. “That’s not what the press says. They say it’s worse now than ever. All his assets going to a kid, leaving nobody to run the business. Building inspectors shut down one of his skyscrapers last month, and the press blamed me. Nearly four thousand lost jobs.”
Porter knew the building. Talbot had used substandard concrete in the construction. When the shortcut was discovered, he’d tried to retrofit the building (and most likely pay off inspectors), but the project was shut down anyway. The building cost a little over $700 million dollars, and it was set for implosion. Better to end it now, Porter supposed, than let construction complete and the thing topple over down the road. “They’re trying to sell papers. How could that be your fault?”
“There’s a lot of fighting going on at Talbot Enterprises,” Emory explained. “Three of my father’s senior officers are contesting his will. They’re saying he drafted it under duress, that my mother forced him to leave everything to me. With all of them making grabs for the money, key decisions aren’t happening, and things are falling apart. I’m not old enough to assume control, so Patricia Talbot stepped in as interim CEO until somebody can take over full-time.” Emory let out a sigh. “She’s suing me directly. She claims my father didn’t have the right to leave all that he did to me, that everything rightfully belongs to her. Then there’s Carnegie . . .”
Porter knew all about Carnegie, Talbot’s other daughter. She regularly made the papers before Talbot died. Constant partying and arrests, a fixture on the Chicago social scene, and not a good one.
“She’s been badmouthing me on so
cial media and in every interview she does, whenever she gets the chance,” Emory said. “She calls me Bastard Bitch. She ends every message with hashtag BastardBitch. I’ve never met her, and she acts like she’d stab my eyes out with a pen in the street if we were to cross paths.”
With that, the tears did come, and Porter put an arm around her.
After a minute or so she wiped her eyes. “I’m being so selfish, going on about me. What about you? How are you doing?” Emory asked. “I heard about those girls. The papers say it’s 4MK. That they wouldn’t have been taken if it wasn’t for you. The Tribune actually said you let him go, which is silly. I should know.”
“It’s not 4MK.”
“No?”
“Nope,” Porter replied.
Emory shook back the tears and forced a smile. “You’ll find them. You found me.”
Porter hoped to God she was right.
Nearly an hour had passed. He had to go.
Emory somehow understood. She rose from the couch, and when he did too, she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. “I can’t talk to a shrink. Maybe we can talk sometimes? If you’re willing to listen?”
“I think I’d like that.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
When Porter left Flair Tower, the hole in his heart felt a little smaller.
22
Lili
Day 2 • 12:19 p.m.
“No! No more!” Lili screamed.
The man reached for her anyway, his large hands tugging at the quilt wrapped around her. “We must continue,” he said.
Lili scrambled across the damp floor, sliding, her feet slipping, trying to get a grip on the damp concrete. She found herself in the back corner of the cage, unable to go any farther. “Please stop!” No place else to go.
The man raised the stun gun and pointed it at her. He pressed the button, and Lili watched lightning jump across the two metal prongs, smelled ozone in the air. “One more hour, then we can do it again, I promise. I promise.” She tried to say this, but she shivered so hard that only a handful of syllables actually came out, fragments of words.
If they did it again, this would be the fourth—no, fifth time. Wait, maybe the third time. She couldn’t be sure. Her thoughts didn’t want to come together; her string of consciousness had a knot, something that kept her brain from working properly. White flakes whirled across her vision, making it difficult to see what was happening around her, a snowstorm in the basement, that’s what it looked like, a whiteout of haze and gray.
He reached for her through the snow, the fingers of his left hand outstretched. “Now, while we’re close.”
His other hand, the one with the stun gun, drew within an inch of her, the gun nearly touching her neck. Lili couldn’t take the pain of another shock. It felt like fire chewing at her bones, gnawing away from her inside out. A pain worse than dying.
She knew what that felt like now too, to die.
He thrust the stun gun at her face, pressed the button again near her eye.
“Okay!” she shouted. At least, she tried to shout. Only the sound of the letter k left her throat from somewhere behind chattering teeth.
The man pulled back, if only slightly. His free hand scratched at the knit cap, at the festering incision beneath.
Lili tried to stand, but her feet failed her, her legs folded, made of jelly now.
He reached in and offered a hand. His nails were bitten to the quick, the tips of his fingers red and puffy
Lili’s fingers wrapped around his. His palm felt cold, clammy. She didn’t want to touch him, but she knew she couldn’t stand on her own, not now. And she had to stand. She had to do this willingly, or it would only hurt more. He would make it hurt more.
He led her from the cage, Lili putting most of her weight on him to stay upright.
When they reached the water tank, she looked up at him. She looked deep into his cloudy, lifeless eyes. “Thirty minutes, please. Just let me rest.”
“We’re too close.”
Lili stared at him for a long time, the seconds ticking away like hours. Finally, she nodded. Lili released her hold on the quilt around her neck, and the tattered material fell to the ground, pooling at her feet. She hadn’t gotten dressed again after the last time. Not after he said they would do it again in a few minutes. Instead, she only curled up with the quilt, the soft green quilt, her quilt. She curled up with the quilt in her cage and waited. She saw the clothing he gave her—his daughter’s clothing, he had told her—folded neatly in her cage, just inside the door. He put the clothing away sometime after she dumped the articles on the floor beside the tank.
Lili had thought they were alone in the house. The last time, an hour or so ago, Lili screamed for his daughter, but there had been no answer. She pictured a girl her age sitting alone in a small bedroom upstairs, her hands over her ears, unwilling to accept what her father was doing down below. How could she? How could anyone? At first Lili refused to believe the girl knew what was happening, but soon she realized she must; the house wasn’t that big. Lili’s own house was much larger, and she was certain she’d hear cries from the basement. This girl, this man’s daughter. She understood all too well, and she did nothing.
“Get in,” the man said.
Lili looked down at the water. She knew it was warm, warmer than the basement, soothingly warm, comforting, but she feared it more than anything else in her entire life—more than the anger of her parents or the pain of a horrible injury, more than this man beside her.
It was death.
“Get in now,” he said.
Lili took a deep breath, but it did little to stem the quivers passing through her body, the weakness building deep within and slowly taking hold of her all. She took a deep breath, placed a hand on the edge of the large freezer, and climbed over the side. Then she sank into the water and lay down, the man holding her head above the surface at her shoulders. When her ears dipped below the water line, she lost all the sounds of the basement and heard nothing but her own breathing, the echo of her pounding heart, even the sound of her eyelids snapping shut and open again.
The man lifted her up just a little, enough to bring her ears back into the air. “Remember this time,” he said. “Remember it all.”
“I will,” Lili said.
The man shoved her beneath the surface, pressing her weakened body against the floor of the tank. Lili didn’t try to fight him this time, she didn’t even suck in one last breath. Instead, she inhaled the water. She choked back the pain as fluid filled her lungs, she fought the urge to cough, and breathed in more. She breathed in more until the wavy image of the man hovering above her faded away, until all went black, until it didn’t hurt anymore, telling herself to remember she had to remember.
Lili would not wake up again.
23
Nash
Day 2 • 12:20 p.m.
“You can’t possibly expect me to work my magic surrounded by the scent of freshly ground coffee without a venti caramel macchiato in my hand, can you?” Kloz said as he sat behind the manager’s desk in the back office of the Starbucks on Kedzie.
The room was cluttered, no more than a hundred square feet, with the desk pressed against the back wall and random boxes of supplies littering every inch of open floor space. With Kloz behind the desk and Nash standing to his right, the manager had to stand in the hallway outside the office.
“What about you? Would you like something?” the manager asked Nash. He had thinning brown hair, glasses, and about thirty pounds more than his frame was built to carry. He shuffled from side to side, his hands in constant movement. Nash couldn’t help but wonder what inhaling coffee fumes for ten hours a day would do to a person. “Can I get a regular large coffee, black?”
“What kind? We’ve got blond, dark, decaf Pike Place, Caffè Misto, Clover—”
“Regular large coffee, black,” Nash repeated.
His shoulders slumped. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Nash
watched him disappear down the hall toward the front of the shop, then turned back to Kloz. “Well?”
Kloz had three windows open on the monitor. He was studying the text on the third with narrow eyes. “This thing is old, at least five years. The drive is only a half gig, and they’re running an HD camera setup at 1080p.”
“Don’t make me hurt you. I need it in English.”
Kloz rolled his eyes. “Because the camera is recording a high-end, detailed image, it takes a lot of space to record. This computer doesn’t have a lot of space. When the drive runs out of room, the program automatically starts recording over the oldest images.”
“How far back can you go?”
Kloz expanded one of the windows and studied the text. “It’s not as bad as Sophie said. I can pull all recordings going back for about two and a half days. Full recordings, nothing deleted. When computers overwrite data, they don’t do it in a linear, date-based way as we would, they record in bytes. This means when older videos are written over, fragments of that full video can stay on the drive.”
Nash leaned in. “So you can pull snapshots older than two and a half days but not full, uninterrupted video?”
A grin spread over Kloz’s face. “Now you’re getting it.”
“So, anything with our girl?”
“I think we’re too late for that too. I’m running a program to piece back together the fragments, but so far the oldest image we’ve got is less than two weeks.”
“And she went missing three weeks ago.”
“Yep.”
The manager returned holding two large cups and handed them to the detectives. Nash sniffed at his, then took a sip. “It’s coffee?”
“That’s what you wanted, right?” the manager asked.
Nash nodded. “Yeah, I just expected you to come back with some froufrou drink.”
Kloz took a slurp from his cup. His lips came away covered in white foam. “I love me a good froufrou drink. This is three hundred calories of yum.”
“Are you serious?” Nash frowned. “Three hundred?”
The manager shrugged. “That’s a venti, twenty ounces at one hundred fifty calories per ten, so yeah. Three hundred.”