by Amir Lane
“I got it, don’t worry.”
She wasn’t going home yet.
Moment Pharmaceuticals was Ekkehardt Schneider’s real baby. From what Lindy understood, it had been a tiny lab that didn't make much of anything when Ekkehardt had come to Canada with a Masters degree in some kind of chemistry. He'd climbed the ranks while getting a PhD and an MBA like the overachiever he was.
While the twins were raised by babysitters and nannies, Ekkehardt built Moment Pharmaceuticals from a nothing startup to full-scale company.
The receptionist didn't ask any questions. She'd been here since Lindy was in high school and had no problem handing her a visitor’s pass and letting her make her way to the fifth floor. The elevator stopped at every floor on the way. People in clothes ranging from suits to lab coats to jeans and t-shirts filtered in and out and aside from a few polite hellos, nobody paid much attention to her.
Lindy hadn't been here in years, but as soon as she stepped off the elevator, it was as if she'd been here just yesterday. Other than some names she didn't recognize on office doors, it was the same as it always had been. Ekkehardt even had the same assistant. Michael Lambert looked up before she was even at his door.
“Hi, Lindy. I didn't know you were coming by today,” he said, smiling as much as he could with burn scars covering most of the left half of his face.
He had started working for Ekkehardt when Lindy was in tenth grade, and for as long as she'd known him, he'd had those scars. She never asked how he got them.
“I wasn't planning on coming by,” she admitted, “but something came up, so I need to see him.”
Michael glanced back over his shoulder as if he could see through the curtains covering the glass wall between their offices.
“He's in a teleconference. Do you want me to have him call you after, or…?”
“I'll wait.”
For a while, Lindy had thought that Ekkehardt was trying to bridge the gap between them, but every time they talked, he always brought it back to Dieter. Maybe she was just too functional. She had her shit under control, and Dieter still had trouble keeping his spirits from trying to rip his face off. Who needed him, anyway?
She settled onto the small couch pressed against the back wall. There was a coffee table next to it with a stack of magazines. She grabbed the one at the top of the pile, some medical journal. The font was so tiny, the only things she could make out even behind her glasses without pulling the magazine to her face were the article titles. She could read them, but she couldn’t understand them. This was way beyond high school science.
Michael worked at his computer, letting her flip through the magazine in silence. Her eyes wouldn’t process the tiny print, and her eyes lost focus. After a while, he got up and stretched. His back and shoulders cracked loud enough that she heard it from her spot on the couch.
“Oh, Jesus,” he muttered.
His voice sounded muffled, like there was something in front of his mouth.
He glanced over at her but left the office without saying a word. She didn’t look up. She couldn’t. Something followed him through the glass door as he closed it, but it stopped short of following him down the stairs. The cafeteria on the first floor was fairly empty. It wasn't as big as the cafeteria at the private school she'd gone to, but it was bigger than the one at her call centre. It was well past noon, but there were still sandwiches in the fridge. He grabbed one and a salad. His hand lingered over the basket of brownies. After a moment of deliberation, he grabbed one and added it to his tray.
“Jenny, do you have any drink trays? Thanks.”
He set both trays down at the edge of the small coffee bar. He grabbed three paper cups and filled one with coffee and nothing else, and the other two with tea. Balancing the drink tray on the food tray, he carried them to the cash register.
“Busy day?” Jenny asked.
“Not as bad as yesterday. I was running around trying to get everything ready for the boss’s meetings today. It's much quieter now.”
They made small talk for another minute or so before Michael made his way back up, taking the elevator this time. He opened the office door with the back of his shoulder. The squeak made Lindy jerk.
“Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up.”
She was asleep? Of course she was asleep. That made so much more sense.
Michael set the tray on the coffee table and disappeared into Ekkehardt’s office for a few seconds. When he came back, he pulled his chair up to her. He offered out one of the teas and the sandwich to her.
“I wasn't sure if you’d had lunch. You aren't still vegetarian, are you?”
Lindy took the food and shook her head.
“That was my brother, and he got over that pretty quick.”
Dieter had been vegetarian for all of three weeks in high school while trying to impress Michael, who had been around a hell of a lot more than Ekkehardt in those days. It hadn't worked, and Dieter gave up as soon as he realized that tofu tasted like, well, tofu.
“I hear you're working with the police,” Michael said.
“Yeah. Just on this one case, though.”
“How is it? Working with police, I mean.”
“It's… It's pretty intense,” she admitted. “I honestly have no idea what I'm doing. I think I might just be making things worse.”
“I don't think you are. Your dad told me Ice Breaker said you're really speeding things up. I bet you bring a whole other insight to it.”
Right. Lindy always forgot that Michael was a witch. He was a fairly unimpressive empath, but he was still an empath. She was sure he picked up on the spike of anxiety that rose in her spine.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I just burnt my tongue. Do you know Ice Breaker?”
She kept her tone as conversational as possible.
“Not really, I only met her once. She seemed—” Michael paused and grimaced a little, but Lindy wasn't sure at what. “She seemed nice enough.”
“Yeah, no, she's great.”
Did he know something? He must have picked up on something when they'd met. Maybe that was what the face was about.
Before she could find an appropriate way to ask, Ekkehardt’s door opened.
“Dietelinde,” he said, quietly but not surprised. “Please, come in.”
She gave Michael an awkward smile and followed Ekkehardt into his office. There were two chairs in front of his desk. She took the one closest to the door. It was much more comfortable than she'd expected it to be. Could they get a set of these for the kitchen? They were a million times better than the wooden nightmares they were using.
“You want to talk to me?”
“Yeah.”
Obviously. But Lindy didn't elaborate yet. Instead of sleeping, she should have thought out what she was going to say to him. Where was she even supposed to start? She worked through the sandwich, which was surprisingly good for cafeteria food, while he nursed his coffee. Had she actually even had lunch today? She had a muffin earlier… Oh well, she was eating now.
“Dietelinde?”
Lindy — Lindy — drummed her fingers against his desk and held her tea with her other hand between her thighs. Why couldn't she just get it out?
“Dietelinde? Did something happen? Are you okay?” A brief pause. “Are you pregnant?”
“What? No!”
What the fuck kind of que— Why was he smiling?
“That would be the worst thing you could say for both of us. Whatever you want to talk about is not that bad, then.”
Oh. Ekkehardt was trying to make her feel better. She gave a wry smile at the attempt. It might have been funny if what she was here for wasn't worse.
“Uhm… I think… Do you know what happened to Alistair’s family? I mean what really happened to them.”
Ekkehardt frowned and sat up straight, his hands still folded together on his desk. Yeah, this was worse.
“Is Diederich—”
“No, this has nothing to d
o with Dieter.” For once. “I need to know what happened to them.”
“Is this something to do with your case?”
She didn't even care enough to correct him.
“I don't know. You said once that everyone heard about it. Do you know what actually happened?”
“The girl killed her family.”
Lindy shook her head. No, no, that wasn't it.
“Why no?”
“It couldn't have been Abigail. Her throat was cut from behind,” she explained.
“How do you know this?”
“I have the file. Lenna said that's what it looked like.”
“Panthera?”
“Yeah.”
Ekkehardt was quiet.
“Panthera is a mechanic. How would she know?”
Okay, fine. Lenna wasn't an expert, that evidence was flimsy. But—
“I heard Abigail screaming for help. And Ice Breaker was there. Why would Ice Breaker be going to that house? What's Ice Breaker doing in Kitchener?”
“She worked for Kitchener-Waterloo before she moved here.”
“Exactly!”
Wait, what? Did that make more sense or less sense? Didn’t all of the victims come from K-W?
“She broke the doorknob. Why would she do that?”
“Why would she kill a family? That is what you are suggesting?”
Lindy stopped herself from answering. She didn't have an answer. She'd been a witness in enough trials to know that motivation was everything. It always came down to why.
“Dietelinde, when is the last time you slept?”
“I just took a nap on the couch.”
“I mean real sleep.”
“I've been sleeping.”
“How much?”
Hadn’t Dick just asked her the same thing?
“I don't know. Three, four hours? That's not important right now.”
“Your health is not important?”
“Right now. Ice Breaker killed Abigail and her parents. Please trust me on this.”
Ekkehardt started at her for a long moment. She was struggling to keep her breath even and her eyes dry. Why couldn't he just understand? She didn't want to believe it either, but it was the truth! The more she said it, the more she knew it was the truth. She knew it the same way she knew that Michael was on the other side of the wall eating his salad and that Aldo was at home trying to squeeze himself into the box for Lenna’s new computer and that some guy outside was fighting with the ATM.
He sighed and reached for her hand to squeeze her fingers in a rare display of affection. It only lasted a few seconds. She sniffed, refusing to let herself cry in front of him.
“Ice Breaker called me after the bodies were gone because of the spirits. They were Sensitive, like your brother was.”
“Did you do, like, an exorcism or something?”
He nodded.
No wonder he was having such a hard time with this. She’d killed an entire family and used him to cover it up.
“You and your brother were only seven. I wasn't with Mohr's Circle yet. They told me it looked like the girl did it and I… I believed it.”
“Why didn't anybody say anything about the doorknob?”
“What?”
“The front doorknob. Ice breaker froze it and pulled it off.”
He went silent again.
“It fell off when one of the officers opened it. There was damage. Ice Breaker said there had been a break in months before. There was a report. I never suspected she would lie.”
If Ice Breaker had gone so far as to kill a whole fucking family, faking a police report would have been nothing.
“So what did she have against them?” Lindy asked.
“I don't know. But I will find out.”
It was her turn to believe him.
16
After Lindy's very mild breakdown in the precinct bathroom, plus the one the day before, the general consensus was that she needed a break. Dick had obviously talked to Ice Breaker. Paranoia was cited as evidence of a larger impending breakdown, and Lindy had to wonder if Ekkehardt or Constable Ware had talked to her, too. But then, maybe that was her paranoia talking. They at least let her return to the phones, provided she visited a therapist.
She hadn't talked to Ekkehardt since she straight-up accused Ice Breaker of murdering three people.
“What, you couldn’t cut it as a detective?” Crystal teased during one of their brief overlapping coffee breaks.
“I wish. Trail’s gone cold, so I’m back here until something happens.”
She tapped her nails against her teeth. They were too long. She really needed to cut them. She also needed to clean out her dresser. Maybe she'd finally be able to find that blue pen she'd misplaced forever ago. Or did it just run out of ink?
She was distracting herself. Something was going to happen, but she couldn’t say what exactly. She got flashes of a long, white hallway but her brain wouldn’t let her go any further with it. That meant hospitals. She couldn’t even begin to describe how much she hated hospitals. Every visit was unpleasant, usually involving stitches or hours in an MRI machine.
“This is crazy,” Crystal said. “Is it true he’s picking off witches?”
“I don’t think I’m allowed to say, but I’d keep my head down if I were you.”
Crystal snorted.
“As if we don’t already. It’s always something we have to worry about it, isn’t it?”
“Don’t I know it.” Lindy let out a long sigh. “We’d better get back, or we’re going to be late.”
Crystal let out an exaggerated sound of pain that made Lindy laugh. Half an hour wasn’t a long enough break in an eight-hour shift, but the coffee shop was just next door to the call centre, so they didn’t have to go far for coffee that didn’t taste more like dirt. She popped a piece of gum into her mouth to get rid of the taste of her lunch, a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie. Few things in the universe were stronger than Lindy’s sweet tooth. Besides, she’d finally gone kickboxing last night. She could afford the calories.
Lindy had forgotten just how awful the long days in front of the screen were on her eyes. She had another minute and a half before her break ended. There was a small bottle of eye drops in the bottom of her purse that needed to be replaced, but there was enough in it for now. She would have to pick some up on her way home. There was a pharmacy across the street from the gas station she and Lenna would pass on the way home.
As always, it took her a few attempts to get the artificial tears into her eyes. By the time she was done, she looked like she’d been crying, minus the accompanying redness. Waterproof makeup was probably something she should invest in, but the fact that it pretty much never came off was a pretty big con. Not that she ever washed the stuff off anyway.
She pulled the headset over her ears and flicked it on. Within seconds, a call was coming in, and she had to shut down every other part of her brain. The noises around her, the visions, the burn behind her eyes, none of it got through. She couldn’t afford the distraction.
“Nine-one-one, what’s the location of your emergency?”
“O mon Dieu, il y a un feu!”
“I just swallowed a bunch of pills and— and I don’t know what to do.”
“There are kids sitting on my lawn, and they won’t leave!”
“Oh, shit, wrong number.”
The last one was actually a nice relief. Most people just hung up when they accidentally got a 9-1-1 operator. That just meant that instead of moving on, she had to spend time trying to get a hold of them again to confirm that everything was okay. Sure, she understood that people panicked and hung up as a reflex, but still. It made her job more difficult than it needed to be.
“No problem, have a nice day,” she said.
“Yeah, you too.”
The line clicked shut, and Lindy barely had a chance to take a breath before the phone rang again. It was a sound that was really starting to get on her nerves.
&
nbsp; “Nine-one-one, what’s the location of your emergency?” she asked.
“Lindy? Is this Lindy?”
It only took less than a second to place the panicked voice as Selima’s. She could hear screaming in the background.
“Yeah, it’s me. What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
She dropped the pen she’d been holding and settled both hands above the keyboard.
“Yasir’s been shot. He— He’s bleeding so much, what— what do I do?”
Fuck. This— This was different from any other call. This was someone she knew, someone she liked well enough, who was either dead or dying. Selima sobbed into the phone.
“Selima, listen. I need you to listen very carefully. Where are you?”
“We’re just outside at Soares and Chenney, at 127 Fourth Street. Habibi, you’re going to be okay. Lindy is sending help.”
She sent the information to the dedicated dispatcher to be passed on to a squad car.
“Great, you’re doing great. Can you tell me anything about Yasir’s condition?”
Basically, did he still have a pulse. If someone was dead, the caller usually said so right away, but she still needed to check. Hysteria made it hard to tell.
“He’s bleeding so much,” she sobbed. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Selima, I need you to breathe for me. Just take a deep breath and let it out. Exactly like that, you’re doing great. I need to know where Yasir was shot, and if the shooter is still around. Can you tell me that?”
It was easier than it should have been to keep the urgency out of her voice. The last thing either of them needed was to push Selima further into panic.
“He— He left. We were walking out, and he just ran. I was too focused on— He just ran, I’m sorry, I didn’t— I didn’t—”
“Hey, it’s okay. Don’t worry about that right now. Right now, I need you to tell me where Yasir was shot and how bad he’s hurt so I can talk you through what to do.”
“In the— the chest. I don’t think he is breathing well.”
Lindy rubbed her mouth. A glance at the clock in the corner of her screen showed that they’d only been talking for just over a minute.
“Okay, no problem. Here’s what I need you to do. Are you still with me, Selima? Good. You’re doing great. Do you have a cloth or something you can use to slow the blood flow until the ambulance gets there?”