Sketches

by Teyla Branton

  In the decade he’d been an enforcer, and in the nine years before that as the ward of an enforcer, he’d never seen or heard about a case with so much initial evidence that ended up leading absolutely nowhere. DNA was corrupted, fingerprints smeared beyond recognition. He’d follow up with witnesses, only to have them remember something different from what they’d previously told him.

  CivIDs, iTeev taps, surveillance cameras—and still no one could pinpoint a specific day when the men and woman had disappeared. He was as close to finding the missing people as he had been on the day the first man was reported missing, which meant he had nothing. If fringers were behind the abductions, as everyone suspected, they were invisible.

  The lack of evidence in the cases was why he’d hurried here to the scene when the victim had been found. But in the end, all Jaxon had today was a crime scene that really wasn’t a crime scene and a witness who’d seen nothing but the dead man.

  Stifling frustration, he nodded to his friend Evan Hammer as he came inside the yellow crime scene tape. Hammer, the leader of the CSI unit and a secret Teev expert, was a tall man with surprising bulk and an equally surprising lightness of foot. His long black hair hung down his back in a ponytail.

  “By the book on this one,” Jaxon said. “If you could tell your men to be even more thorough than usual, I’d appreciate it. We need a break. Might be connected to our missing people. Unfortunately, this is a secondary site.”

  “Thanks for the heads up,” Hammer said with a grunt. “I’ll make sure they do it right.”

  “Thanks, buddy.” Jaxon gave him a short rundown on what they knew so far. It wasn’t much, but it would help them decide where to start. “I’ve already got Pilar working on tracking down the black shuttle, but that’s a shot in the dark if they don’t want to be found.”

  “If there’s anything to find here, I’ll find it.”

  Jaxon gave a sharp nod and started to walk away, but he’d taken only one step when he turned around. “Oh, and Hammer?”

  The big man turned. “Yeah.”

  “Look, before you file your report, do you mind if I stop by and talk about what you’ve found?”

  Hammer’s brows shot high on his face, making him look a bit clownish. “I don’t let anyone mess with my evidence.” The words were casual, without rancor.

  “I just want to know what you have before it leaves your hand because every clue we thought we had so far has come to a big nothing.”

  Hammer’s eyebrows went impossibly higher. “You saying what I think you’re saying?”

  Jaxon shook his head. “I’m not saying anything. I just want to see and maybe copy whatever we can before it goes to the lab personnel. That’s all.”

  Hammer’s brows slowly descended to their proper spot. “You got it. I’ll expect you later.”

  “Thanks.” Jaxon nodded a farewell and headed for a woman with a gleeful, hawk-like stare standing close to the yellow tape. Might as well get the worst over with first. Women like her generally didn’t know anything, but they were sure willing to tell enforcers how to do their jobs. Still, there was a slight chance her eagerness might alert him to a third party—and someone here had witnessed at least a part of what happened. His hunches, like his more vivid flashes of premonition, were often unclear but never wrong.

  He was almost relieved when his iTeev vibrated on his sleeve. It was Bobby calling, and Jaxon didn’t hesitate before unfolding and slipping the screen over his eyes, pulling out the speaker nubs on the end of the ear supports and pushing them into his ears. He held up a finger in the woman’s direction, and she nodded in understanding.

  “Hi, Bobby.”

  The aged face of his mentor appeared in front of him, looking as solid as if he were there in person. His once bright red hair had faded to a pale ginger, and his freckles threatened to become a solid splotch of dark on his wide, pale face, but every time Jaxon talked to him, he saw the kind, vibrant, younger man who’d literally saved his life. Behind the holo figure, Jaxon could still see the crowd and his fellow enforcers. It was a sort of strange double vision that had taken him some time to get accustomed to when he’d finally become solvent enough to purchase his first iTeev.

  “Hi, my boy,” Bobby said. It was something a father said to a son.

  “What’s up?”

  “I heard a body turned up at the Fountain.”

  “That’s right.” Jaxon stifled a grin at the eagerness of his voice. Bobby had never made detective, working as a beat enforcer all his life, partly by choice but mostly because he’d never appreciated the research and politics that lined the path to advancement. It was a shame because he was good at seeing things from a unique perspective. Now that his wife had passed away, he and Jaxon spent more time together, and they often discussed cases.

  “I’m at the Fountain now,” Jaxon said.

  “Anything to go on?”

  “Not much. Camera view was blocked. The guy who found the body didn’t see anything.”

  Bobby grimaced—his quintessential thinking face. “The victim’s a scientist?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s connected then. Gotta be.”

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll see.”

  Bobby’s grizzled face bobbed up and down. “Remember to follow the logical path, even if it seems impossible.”

  “Thanks, Bobby.”

  “Later, kid.” The image vanished, and for a moment Jaxon wished he’d told him about Reese showing up and what it meant. But he hadn’t told Bobby about the other two either. If something was going on at division, he wanted to keep Bobby out of it.

  Across the stretch of decorative cobblestone that made up the floor of the plaza, he saw Reese talking with their witness. She was sketching furiously, her brow furrowed in concentration, as if focused on something only she could see. Had the man remembered more after all? Jaxon wished he could go see, but the hawk woman was waiting, and there were a lot of people to interview after her.

  A hint of nausea was the only signal the premonition was coming. His step faltered, and he squatted carefully, pretending to examine potential evidence on the decorative cement beneath his feet. Though experiencing a premonition was usually far more uncomfortable than a mere hunch, it might be the break he needed.

  He sees a Teev in a hallway closet, next to an ancient picture of a bullfighter facing a deranged bull. Reese pulls it out and plugs in a device. It sputters to life, projecting its holo over her face. She moves aside while hands—maybe his?—swipe and tap on menus in the air.

  “There it is,” says another voice that moves just outside of Jaxon’s memory.

  Reese meets his gaze and smiles. “We got it.”

  Got what? He had no idea, but sometime soon, maybe today or six months from now, he would live that moment for real. They would live that moment. Unfortunately, the vision didn’t help him with finding a new witness today. Shaking off the premonition, he pasted on a smile and went to work.

  Chapter 3

  REESE APPROACHED THE witness with a friendly smile that she hoped hid the weirdness she felt at seeing Jaxon. “Mr. Sundry?”

  “That’s me.” Douglas Sundry was tall and lean, with dark skin, graying hair, and large brown eyes. He gave her a tentative smile that wrinkled the skin around his eyes. “Look, would it be okay if I go? I already had to reschedule my meeting, and I don’t want to miss it again.”

  “Just a few more questions, and then you can check out with that enforcer over there.” Reese pointed to Jaxon across the plaza. She wasn’t about to step on any toes until she learned the nuances of protocol here.

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “Was anyone else in the plaza when you discovered the body?”

  “Not really. Like I told the other enforcer, another hour and people would have been swarming the place as they left work for lunch.” Sundry raised a hand to indicate the crowd behind the yellow tape that spilled partway up the wide cement stairs leading into CORE city offices. “I mean, l
ook at them.”

  “Right, so no one was in the plaza. What about over by the buildings or across the street?” She tilted her head toward the walkway on the other side of the street that ran the length of the business district. Making suggestions was the best way to help his mind concentrate on any images that might be useful.

  “No one.”

  But Reese glimpsed a mental sketch of two men, a half-memory Sundry was barely aware of himself.

  “Think about what you might have seen across the street,” Reese prompted, placing her pencil on her sketchbook. “Maybe there were some men?”

  “Yeah, I guess, but I can’t really remember them.”

  “Which direction were they walking?”

  “Same direction as me. That way.” He pointed west across the plaza.

  “Can you describe them?” Reese already had one of the men nearly completed.

  Sundry shook his head. “No. I didn’t really get a good look—or at least not one I can describe. One guy had scruffy hair, though. They, uh, weren’t walking together. The guy with shorter hair was in the front. I really just saw the back of his head.”

  He’d seen a lot more than the back of the man’s head, but telling him that wouldn’t help. “Was he black or white?” Reese glanced up from her sketch.

  “On the whiter side, I think. Both of them.”

  He was wrong. The front man was Latino, but it was only the shape of his face and his build in the sketch she’d seen from Sundry’s mind that gave it away because his skin was the same light brown as the “white” man’s. Though they weren’t in the colonies where interbreeding was the only choice, the mixing of ethnicities in the past centuries often made race identification through color alone difficult, and without artistic training, it would be hard to spot.

  “Clothes?” she said. “Jacket?” She was already drawing the jacket on the Latino. The white guy had been wearing a T-shirt. “What about the white guy—I mean the guy behind the first?”

  “Yeah, a jacket on the front guy. You know, one like those enforcers use during their off-hours on that new Teev movie? The other guy . . . hmmm.”

  “A T-shirt?”

  “I think so.”

  If they’d been in an interview room at the district, she would have shown him pictures of facial features and clothing and made a pretense at letting him choose. Problem was, over half the time the witnesses couldn’t identify the scene they’d witnessed. Unlike with Reese, who was forced to see the images until she committed them to paper, they had only their one glimpse to go by. Sometimes, though, the images they passed to her were wrong or misleading, so she had to be careful in cases involving those identified as perpetrators of a crime. But she wasn’t as careful with identification of potential witnesses.

  She flipped the sketchbook around to show him. “Like this?”

  Sundry’s eyes widened. “Yeah. That’s them. You got all that from what I said?”

  “You’re a better witness than you know.” Reese wasn’t too concerned about identifying these two men, who had been in full view of the plaza cameras. They would have been recorded, along with their CivIDs, and the position of the men indicated they weren’t aware of the body. Or if they had seen him, they might have thought it was a guy wasted on sauce or juke. So the men were probably both dead ends.

  What she needed was something the cameras might have missed.

  “Now think about what else you saw,” she directed. “What about the steps near the building?” The stairs were wide and the majestic double pillars on the top landing would make a good place for someone to hide from the cameras.

  His head swung back and forth. “No one was close enough to see anything. Not even the girl.”

  Another flash and Reese saw her: oversized T-shirt, long hair that hadn’t seen a brush in days, knees pulled to her chest. “What color of hair?” she asked almost mechanically.

  “I don’t know. Brown probably.”

  He was right. Reese’s pencil made curls in the girl’s hair. “Curly? Or straight?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “And she was sitting between the pillars on the right?” That was where the girl was in the sketch Reese received from him. Despite what he thought, the girl was close enough to have witnessed something.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was she wearing a skirt?”

  “I think so.”

  A pleated one about knee length. Reese glanced at her sketch, wanting to be finished with Sundry now that she had this to go on. “Anyone else? A man by the Fountain maybe? A woman with a stroller?”

  “No. That’s it.”

  No half-remembered sketches contradicted the words, so it was time to move on. “Thank you, Mr. Sundry.”

  “Then can I go?” He flashed her a smile that made his face seem somewhat cadaverous.

  “Sure—once you check in with that enforcer.” Reese turned from him, studying her picture.

  The girl sat leaning up against the pillar next to a black bag, hugging thin legs clad in tights. Her feet stuck out awkwardly in heavy boots from a bygone era. Retro girl. She was also a punk by all appearances, which meant someone who worked in the underbelly of the CORE. The type who was normally consigned to a poor colony like the Coop—or to the factory of a wealthy CORE business owner. But Reese judged her to be about fourteen, and this young, she might have run away from her parents, who could even be CORE members in good standing.

  More important, Reese had seen her before. Here.

  She scanned the area and found the girl on the other side of the fountain, sitting and watching the crowd. She met Reese’s stare with a blank one of her own. No sign of guilt or hint that she was hiding a secret. Maybe she hadn’t seen anything.

  Reese watched as her new partner Garrett approached the child, spoke to her for a few moments, then nodded and passed to the next person. With a satisfied half sneer, the girl started for the break in the orange perimeter cord that Reese’s colleagues had used to encircle the crowd, trapping them between the cord and the yellow crime tape. An enforcer near the break was allowing people who had been interviewed to leave.

  Reese headed over, ducking under the yellow tape and pushing through the crowd. “Wait,” she called to the girl.

  Her head turned. “What do you want?”

  Was that a flare of defiance or fear?

  With large strides, Reese covered the space between them. This close, the girl was pretty under the dirty, ratted hair. She looked even younger than in the drawing, but her eyes were deep and knowing. People nearby stepped away, as if afraid of getting caught up in whatever trouble the girl was in.

  “I need to know what you saw.” Reese held her pencil ready to draw.

  “Didn’t see nothin’.” Her jaw jutted out, marring her features. “I already told the other clipper—enforcer. He said I could go.”

  “Look, you’re not in trouble. Just tell me what you saw, and you can go. You were here when the black shuttle dropped the body, weren’t you? What did you see?”

  “Nothin’. I wasn’t here.”

  “We have a witness who says you were up between the pillars.”

  “Then he’s a pus-lickin’ jukehead, because I wasn’t here.”

  She was lying. The sketch came to Reese in a customary flash: dark shuttle, two figures leaping out. Reese started sketching. “I know you saw the shuttle.” She tried to make her voice gentle. “What did the men look like?”

  There. Another image came from the girl. Two men dressed in black, their faces covered with hoods. Reese’s pencil worked rapidly over the page as the drawing consumed her. The girl leaned forward, peeking at the sketchbook. A sudden intake of breath startled Reese.

  “No!” the girl said, desperation leaking into her voice. “I didn’t see nothin’ like that!”

  Her panic made Reese take note of the enforcer uniforms on the men she’d drawn. Exactly like the uniform she was wearing. All around her, everything seemed to slow to a crawl. CORE enforcers h
ad dumped the body? They would have the resources, but it went against everything Reese had ever understood about the CORE she served. No. There had to be another explanation.

  With a start, she realized the girl had whirled and was sprinting toward the orange perimeter rope, jolting with the electric shock it gave her as she touched it while ducking under. Faltering only for a heartbeat, the child hurtled across the plaza, her black bag thumping up and down on her back.

  Reese recovered from her surprise and hurried after the girl, vaulting over the cord as she shouted at her to stop. A black-haired enforcer joined in the chase, but by the time they reached the end of the courthouse, the girl was gone.

  The girl would know every nook and cranny and safety net in Amarillo City. Reese understood this because once upon a time she’d been that girl, and Reese hadn’t lived here long enough to compete.

  She looked at the other enforcer. “Where would she go?”

  He gave a little shake of his head. “Anywhere. Not a big deal. Her CivID will be recorded. We’ll pick her up later.”

  Obviously, he wasn’t inclined to pursue. Reese had worked with people like him before. Several of her partners had been like that—they enjoyed the power gained from working for enforcement but did only enough to get by.

  “That’s assuming she has a CivID and wants to be found,” she said, a reprimand in her voice.

  The man blinked as if the idea hadn’t crossed his mind. No wonder they have six missing people, she thought. But that wasn’t fair. Jaxon was on the case, and he’d always been thorough when they were kids—too thorough sometimes.

  Of course, she didn’t know him anymore, or know what he’d endured to get here and how the experiences had changed him. A wave of guilt made her stomach ache.

  “What happened?” Jaxon arrived at her side, panting slightly from his hurry.