Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “Come on, man, have a heart.” Chavez had a wounded look on his face. “Don’t make me stick up for the guy. Bad enough I’ve got to partner with him on this deal.”

  Izzie leaned down to look at the city map, and the tight cluster of dots where the Pinnacle Tower stood. “Do you have IDs on these friends of his?” She glanced over her shoulder at Chavez. “Might be worth checking out their records, see if there’s any prior convictions.”

  “We’ve pulled the names and addresses from his contact list,” he answered, “and I’ve got Harrison seeing what he can find out back at the station house.”

  “I don’t know, you guys.” Patrick scratched his chin. “Something about this still doesn’t add up. I can see one or two employees at a company getting mixed up in a drug business on the side, but this many? We’re looking at something like a half-dozen people, right?”

  “At least,” Chavez said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “We’ll have to keep mining through the email logs, though. There might be more employees involved than we know.”

  “What are you suggesting, Patrick?” Izzie asked. “You think this is some kind of company sanctioned thing?”

  “That’d be a hell of a team-building exercise, right?” Patrick shook his head. “But no, it seems pretty unlikely that Parasol would be involved directly. But maybe there’s some rot in the ranks? A manager or high-level employee who’s mixed up in some dirty deals, and recruiting runners and muscle from the cubicle farm? Some type of ‘I’m a little worried about your quarterly projections, Tom, but if you take this unmarked parcel to this address for me I’ll give you a glowing review’ kind of thing?”

  Izzie had leaned over and was scanning the email thread displayed on the screen.

  “It’s possible, I suppose, but that’s not how these messages sound to me,” she said, and pulled on one of the blue nitrile gloves, so as not to leave any prints on the keyboard.

  “What do you mean?” Patrick asked.

  “Even though they’re discussing drug deals on their personal email accounts …” Izzie said, hitting the arrow key to page down through the messages. She paused, glancing over at Patrick and Chavez, and added, “Assuming we’re reading the situation right, that is.” She turned back to the laptop, “Well, these sound more like interoffice memos and project briefings than the kind of chatter you’d get between dealers. I mean, I get that these folks are software engineers and coders and such, but … here, listen to this one.”

  Izzie leaned forward and read aloud.

  “‘Susan, I know we’re approaching the launch date, but I wanted to touch base with you about that latest batch of injectors. Todd tells me that the 7-gauge needles seemed to be addressing the viscosity issues, but with an inner diameter of almost 4 millimeters I wonder if we won’t be seeing some phasing issues with the material. Can we try bumping down to 11-gauge needles, instead? That’s a difference of a millimeter and a half in the inner diameter, which might still be big enough that the viscosity won’t be an issue, but small enough that we won’t have to worry about ana/kata leakage!’”

  She straightened up, exasperated.

  “I mean, seriously, what does that even mean?” she said, throwing her hands up in the air.

  Chavez shook his head, slowly. “If I said I knew, I’d be lying.”

  “Sounds like they’re talking about the auto-injectors, though,” Patrick said. “Like the ones we found in Price’s kitchen. Ink users inject the stuff into themselves with those, like people in anaphylactic shock injecting themselves with an EpiPen.” He shrugged. “Or so we think. We’ve never actually found one with the stuff still in it, just the empties that are left over.”

  Izzie looked from Patrick back to the laptop. “But if that’s what they’re talking about, this isn’t just a few bored tech guys selling drugs on the side to make a little extra money. This is product development level stuff.” She turned, taking in the modest apartment, the bachelor malaise. “Are these the guys that put Ink on the streets in the first place?”

  “No chance.” Patrick shook his head. “This Fayed character didn’t come to town until after I already started working the Ink case. Besides, his email was about dealing with existing problems, so if they were talking about Ink injectors, there were already some in circulation.”

  Izzie chewed her lower lip, deep in thought.

  “He said, ‘approaching the launch date,’” Chavez observed. “That sounds like he’s talking about a new retail product about to hit the market, not a drug that’s already on the street.”

  “Hey!” Izzie’s eyebrows went up. “These are tech guys, right? They release new software applications, sure, but they also release patches and stuff to fix bugs in versions of software that are already out in the world. That’s their basic business model. So maybe they’re talking about an upgrade?”

  “Ink 2.0?” Patrick said, skeptically.

  “It makes a certain amount of sense, actually.” Chavez nodded slowly. He turned to face Patrick. “She’s right, Tevake, that’s their business model. That’s how they think about these things. Would stand to reason that they’d approach Ink the same way that they do the apps they make and maintain for a living.”

  Patrick had his hand on his chin, his brow deeply furrowed in thought. “So … what? Are we back to this idea that somehow the biggest employer in Recondito, this blue-chip stock technology company, is secretly manufacturing illicit drugs and selling them on the city streets? Because that would be crazy, you guys.”

  “No, obviously not,” Chavez answered. “Why would they need to? They make a million bucks an hour selling games and junk for mobile phones.”

  “Is that true?” Izzie’s eyes widened. “A million dollars an hour?”

  “How should I know how much they make?” Chavez rolled his eyes. “They make a lot, I know that much, at least. But my point is, sure, there’s a lot of money to be made in selling drugs, but nowhere near the kind of money that outfit is already making. And completely legally, I might add.” He took a few steps away, waving his hand dismissively. “No, it might be some manager there or something who’s mixed up in this, just like you suggested, Patrick. But the company itself? Parasol? No way.”

  “Detective Chavez?” a voice said from the direction of the front door.

  They turned and saw two civilians with Recondito Police Department IDs on lanyards around their necks, carrying a box of computer equipment. No one had to inform Izzie that they were IT guys.

  “Is this the laptop, sir?” one of the IT guys asked, as he and his partner entered the apartment.

  “This is it,” Chavez answered, stepping to one side and indicating the laptop with a sweep of his arm, like a footman welcoming a princess into a ballroom. “It’s all yours.”

  He started towards the door to speak with the uniforms out in the hallway.

  “Shall we get out of here, too?” Patrick said, coming over to stand beside Izzie.

  “Yeah,” Izzie said a little distractedly, her eyes still on the laptop’s screen. “I guess we should.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was late afternoon by the time they got back to Patrick’s car, the last light of day fading in the west. Izzie was still lost in thought as she closed the car door and buckled up, her gaze somewhere in the middle distance.

  “Where to?” Patrick asked as he turned the key in the ignition.

  Izzie was silent, still staring into space.

  “Hello? Anyone home?” He reached over and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Hm?” Izzie blinked a few times, and turned to look in his direction. “Oh, sorry. I’m just trying to …” She shook her head, sighing. “It feels like there’s an idea trying to come together in my head, and it’s just hovering right out of reach, you know what I mean?”

  “That’s totally understandable, under the circumstances.” He glanced at the time displayed on the dashboard clock, then back to her. “I was thinking about heading back to the station house
, and looking over the evidence again.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, that sounds good. I want to take another crack at Fuller’s notes. I keep thinking there’s something that we’re missing.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and something will click this time.” Patrick put the car in gear and then nudged the car into the slow-moving rush hour traffic. “God knows we could use an even break.”

  The community room in the 10th Precinct station house was just as they had left it the day before. After Patrick unlocked the door and ditched his suit coat on a chair, he went to the break room to fetch them a couple of bottles of water, leaving Izzie to survey the landscape of evidence on her own.

  Something very strange was happening in the city of Recondito, that much Izzie knew for certain. And strange things had happened there before, it seemed. Were they connected? Or was it just one prolonged episode of strangeness that had never really ended, but simply appeared to go away? She didn’t know, but she could not shake the growing suspicion that the key to the mystery lay somewhere in the piles of documents and books and furiously scribbled notes in front of her.

  Nicholas Fuller had been a murderous madman with a substance abuse problem, but he was no idiot. He was highly educated and widely read, not just in the scientific disciplines that had been his profession, but in history, religion, philosophy, and more. And it seemed increasingly clear that Fuller had brushed up against the strangeness that had wormed its way into the heart of the city. Like the ancient astronomers that Joyce had talked about, and the cargo cultists that Patrick had mentioned, Fuller had tried to make sense of the strangeness with the terms and the concepts that he had at his disposal.

  Of course, by the end Fuller had convinced himself that the only logical course of action to take in response to the strangeness was to murder a dozen of his former colleagues and friends, so his judgement had clearly deteriorated at some point along the way. But the fact remained that investigating what he thought was going on might provide necessary clues that would help Izzie and Patrick make sense of whatever it was that they were feeling around the edges of.

  The problem lay in deciphering what it was Fuller was attempting to say. The things he had jotted in the margins of books or scribbled in notepads were meant for his own eyes only, it seemed, and even when they weren’t written in some kind of code, his notes were full of references that Fuller didn’t bother to explain or connections that he failed to spell out in detail. He had known what he was saying, but it was likely that anyone else might find it completely baffling. It was like someone who had just learned to read the English language but who knew nothing about Dublin or the life of James Joyce trying to decipher Finnegan’s Wake. It was often possible to glean the meaning of individual words and sentences, but the deeper significance of the whole remained completely hidden.

  The trick was to start with what they could understand, and then hope that they could fill in the gaps.

  There was a dry-erase board mounted to the wall of the community room next to the doorway, and by the time Patrick returned with the bottled water, Izzie had already begun to cover it in tightly grouped clusters of words.

  “Going old-school, huh?” he said, handing her a bottle of water before opening his own. He slumped down on the nearest chair, looking exhausted, and started to roll up his shirt sleeves to the elbow.

  “There’s no school like the old-school,” Izzie answered, popping the cap back on the dry erase marker. Then she twisted the top off the bottle and took a sip, looking over what she’d written so far. “Okay, what I am missing?”

  She had divided the board into two general sections, with “INK” underlined at the top on the left side, and “FULLER” underlined on the other. On the left side she had written the names of the two dead men—“Tyler Campbell” and “Malcolm Price”—and the two suspects who were still in holding cells, “Ibrahim Fayed” and “Marissa Keiser,” with small notations under each of them. On the right, she had written “Undersight” with a list of the names of Fuller’s twelve victims, “Guildhall/ Recondito Mining Guild,” and “Eschaton Center for Emanant Truth,” with “mine shaft” in the middle with radiating arrows pointing from it to all three.

  “Keizer is spelled with a ‘z,’” Patrick pointed out.

  Izzie rolled her eyes as she smudged out the ‘s’ and popped the cap off the marker to replace it with the correct letter.

  “Anything significant that I’m missing?” she asked again.

  “Parasol?” Patrick suggested. “There’s some connection there, whatever it is.”

  Izzie nodded, popping the cap off the marker and writing the company name on the left, with solid lines connecting it to confirmed employees Fayed and Keizer, and an arrow with a question mark pointed at Price, who may or may not have worked there at some point.

  She connected Price to Keizer and Fayed, noting the address of Price’s rental house. Then the marker’s tip hovered over Campbell’s name for a moment before she put in a dotted line connecting Fayed to him, with “RC?” noted by the dead man’s name.

  Then she stepped back and turned to the right side of the board. “How about over here? What aspects of Fuller’s case am I leaving out?”

  She paused, considering.

  “Well, I guess I should include Fuller himself,” she said, leaning forward and writing his name in the center, “since it all connects to him, obviously.”

  She thought for a moment.

  “And there’s that drug that he was taking,” Izzie went on, and wrote “DMT?” next to Fuller’s name.

  “What about the old guy that owned the lighthouse?” Patrick said after a moment. “Aguilar?”

  “Right.” Izzie snapped her fingers. “Ricardo Aguilar. No, Roberto Aguilar, Ricardo is the grandson.” As she wrote his name on the board and connected it with a line to Fuller’s, she added, “Which reminds me, Kono said that Ricardo Aguilar will be back at the university tomorrow. We should check in with him, see if he has any insight to share about his grandfather, specifically what the old guy and Fuller might have been up to.”

  “Sounds good,” Patrick answered. “I’ll call in the morning and set up an appointment.”

  Next to “Eschaton Center for Emanant Truth” she wrote “Jeremiah Standfast Parrish,” the organization’s founder.

  “I’m pretty sure you misspelled ‘eminent’ there.” Patrick pointed at the board.

  Izzie turned to look, scrutinizing. “Did I?”

  She turned to the table, scanning for the copy of Parrish’s self-help book. After a moment she found it, and pulled it from the stack. “No, that’s how he spelled it. See?”

  She held the book up for Patrick to see the title, In Search of Emanant Truth.

  “Well, then that kook misspelled it,” Patrick said, arms crossed.

  “Mmm.” Izzie opened the book and flipped through a few pages. “No, he spelled it right. But it’s not the word you think. He means emanant as in emanating or coming from a source, not eminent as in famous. Here, listen. ‘And it is by following these precepts that the diligent practitioner will come to discover that truth lies not within ourselves but without, and if we surrender our own sullied memories and fears, then wisdom will flow into us from a direction orthogonal to the length and width and breadth which confine our physical forms, emanating to ana from kata out of the higher realms beyond’”

  “Jesus,” Patrick said, rolling his eyes, “that guy sounds crazier than a sack full of cats. Maybe if people had—”

  “Hang on.” Izzie held up one finger to request a moment’s silence, and then closely scanned the page again. “Emanating to ana from kata,” she read aloud, then looked back to Patrick. “Wasn’t there something about ‘ana/kata’ in that email of Fayed’s that I read?”

  Patrick sat up straight, feet on the floor. “I’ll be damned, I think there was.”

  Izzie flipped to the back of the book, searching for an index, but there wasn’t one, just a meandering author’s note and
then an advertisement for the recently-founded Eschaton Center with a post office box address to send off for additional information. Somehow Izzie doubted that anyone was still answering reader mail.

  “But what the hell does it mean?” Patrick said.

  “I’m not sure,” Izzie answered, shaking her head. She turned back to the page from which she’d just been reading aloud. Fuller had written a note in the margin, “cf. C.H. Hinton” and just below that had added “Unlearner = loss of memory and/or personality?”

  As she closed the book and put it back on the table, Patrick stood up and walked to the dry erase board. “But whatever it means, it’s a possible connection between that”—he pointed to the left side of the board, with its cobweb of Ink dealers and software engineers—“and that,” and pointed to the right side of the board, with the various players in Fuller’s manic writings. “So …”

  He picked up another dry erase marker and wrote “ana/ kata” in the middle of the board, then stepped back.

  “That’s something, at least,” he added with a shrug.

  “There’s the brain stuff, too,” she answered. “The vacuoles that Campbell and Price and all of Fuller’s victims had. And I guess the three dead bodies in Price’s basement, too.”

  She stepped past Patrick, wrote “vacuoles” below “ana/ kata,” and then added black dots beside the names of each of the people who were known to have exhibited the condition, and added “3 John/Jane Does” beside Malcolm Price, with a cluster of three black dots beside it.

  She glanced from the list of the Reaper’s victims to Parrish’s self-help book. “Hey, Fuller mentioned the loss of personality and memory. Those are both things that Joyce said could result from damage to the frontal lobe, and his victims all had those holes in their brains, so possibly he was talking about behavior of theirs that he’d observed.” She turned to Patrick. “But aren’t those also side effects of taking Ink?”