Expectation (Ghost Targets, #2)

by Pogue, Aaron

  For a long time Reed said nothing. Then he rolled his eyes and leaned forward to clear out the medical report on the desktop and replace it with a full-screen rendering of the TMS analysis. The solid yellow line of Ellie's likely path had grown half a mile longer since they'd checked it in the car, but it had also split in two, snaking in different directions from the next intersection.

  Drake's eyes widened. "Is that her?"

  "It's a probability analysis based on inconsistencies in the Traffic Management System record," Reed said. "We have her leaving the clinic yesterday a little bit after two." Drake nodded offhand, and Reed considered him for a moment. "Is that right?'

  "That's right," Drake said. "One of our techs was in the garage when she requested a car, and he alerted me. She was gone by the time I got there."

  "Well, we're trying to track where she went. Your tech's little stunt makes our job a lot easier, because we know she can't have gone too far."

  The lieutenant stepped up to the desk and spent some time studying it. Then he reached out to trace the perimeter with a finger. "Somewhere in here," he said, shaking his head. "But her apartment is here." He jabbed a thumb down on the map northeast of the clinic, well outside the projected path. "She was already on the run, then. We've had people scouring the wrong part of town."

  "Now's the time to fix that," Reed said. "Get your men out west. I have Chief Hart's people knocking on doors, and US Marshals on the way." He saw the concern in Drake's eyes and shook his head. "Your sting is over, Lieutenant. Let it go. Right now our only priority can be catching this woman."

  After a moment Drake nodded. "Of course," he said. "I'll pass the order." He stepped out of the office and pulled the door closed behind him as he started giving commands over his headset.

  Reed looked from the closed door to Katie. She still stood on the other side of the desk. He dropped his voice nearly to a whisper. "What do you think?"

  "I think he knows he made a mistake, or you would not have survived telling him off like that." He looked offended and she laughed. "I'm sorry, sir, but I think he could take you."

  He shook his head. "You think we can trust him, though?"

  Katie bit her lip. She shook her head. "I think we're both after the same thing right now. That's not exactly the same as trust, but it's good enough."

  Reed nodded. "Then we need to get back to work." He brought up a list of datapoints on the desktop, each one mapped to a spot within the broad avenues of Ellie's likely trajectory, and said, "She had to stop at some point. Most of the plots in the the TMS analysis captured gaps in high-speed traffic, but there are a handful that represent entrances and exits. We can check audio sources at these places and times to try to find out what Ellie did once she abandoned the car."

  "How?" Katie said with a frown. "Do we stake out those spots in HaRRE?"

  Reed shook his head. "Wouldn't do any good. HaRRE only shows positive IDs. We're working low-confidence audio here." He opened another tab on the casefile, which showed a list of audio files. "These, to be specific. They generally match the times and locations of the traffic deviation events, and have voiceprints with a base confidence between five and fifty for Ellie."

  "That's quite a range," Katie said.

  "It's garbage," Reed said. "Most of it is just noise. But we start at the top, highest confidence, and work our way down. If we can find just one more definite location, it could easily collapse her location to something we could use." He divided the audio files into two batches and assigned half of them to Katie. "You work those, I'll work these. See what you can find."

  She went back to her chair and settled into it while the first audio clip played. It was marked as forty-seven percent base confidence, but all she heard over her headset was a brief yelp. It was a fraction of a second, and then it was over. She had Hathor generate the audio surrounding the clip, but there was nothing useful in the context. It could have been an audio glitch as easily as a person's voice, and there was certainly no way to identify it.

  She shook her head and moved on to the next file, which included a woman's voice in a brief gap in otherwise overwhelming traffic noise. The words "get there" were obviously in the middle of a sentence, and accented such that she couldn't possibly identify it. She brought up HaRRE then to see what was going on, and found a likely source of the audio clip in a woman walking down the sidewalk talking to a ghost. The woman with the positive ID was a local resident who worked for a bakery nearby, though. Nothing sinister there, and no connection to Ellie Cohn.

  Katie wasted five minutes following the pair until they wandered in range of a video camera, and when Katie switched to source video she got a clear view of the speaker. Definitely not Ellie Cohn—ten years too old and two inches too short.

  Reed didn't seem to be having much more luck. Katie was trying her hardest to recognize the words or the voice behind a ten-second whisper at thirty-three percent confidence when Reed suddenly jumped to his feet, threw his handheld down on the desk, and stormed out of the office in frustration. She turned to find him talking with Drake outside, but it didn't look like a confrontation. He'd probably just needed a break.

  Katie felt the need for one, too, but she fought it down. She closed out the unintelligible whisper, and then opened up the next file in the list. It was an old man in a convenience store, chatting with a young woman who Katie would guess was an employee. The girl's voice was nothing at all like Ellie's, and Katie was about to close out this file, too, when she clearly heard Ellie's voice in the background. "Just the coffee. Thanks."

  Katie's eyes shot wide, and she skipped back to make sure she'd heard it right. The voice was quiet, and the old man spoke over her on "coffee," but Katie felt certain. She pounded a hand on the office window then leaned forward over the desk to find the file. She played it as Reed and Drake entered the office, and the old man's flirtations blasted out of the desktop's speakers. Katie left the volume high.

  Reed frowned, listening, and he had the same reaction she had, shaking his head when the girl spoke, but a moment later Ellie spoke into the room and Reed and Drake both gaped. Katie grinned. "That's Ellie."

  "That is," Reed said. He hurried around the desk to get the details on the audio clip, and then he grinned. "That's square in the southwest corridor, Katie. Craig, connect me to Dimms. Thanks. Dimms! Katie found us another match. Plug this in." He looked at Drake. "She was at the store at two thirty yesterday afternoon. Get one of your men there to interview the employees. I'll pull surveillance footage within a half-mile radius for the next half hour, and grab identities on any other customers in the store, just in case. What?" He stopped, listening to something from Dimms, and nodded. "I'm not surprised. Put it up."

  He cleared out the file list so they could see the TMS analysis full-screen again, and now there was no circle, but a much narrower, much brighter corridor stretching south and west from the earlier line. "That's great, Dimms. Thanks. Yeah. Goodbye." He pointed to the map, aglow with victory. "That's maybe twelve square miles. It's not going to be easy, but we can find her in that."

  "Well," Katie said, "we can find where she was yesterday, sometime around three o'clock."

  "The car's dead," Reed said, "and if she'd gotten access to another one, we would have spotted it by now. Unless you've got truly remarkable resources on your side," he said, with a significant look to her, "transportation is pretty much ghost-proof."

  Katie remembered her own time ghosted, running from the authorities with Martin. The memory brought something else to mind. "What about her watch?" Katie said. "We've got Hippocrates data on Barnes from within the clinic. Did they all have special watches?"

  "Yes," Drake said, narrowing his eyes. "How did you know?"

  She smiled. "I know the man who invented them. Where's the server?"

  He shook his head. "I don't understand."

  "Those watches don't use the Hippocrates server. That's how they preserve the wearers' privacy. You had to set up a little local server,
and they all sync to it. When something happens, the watches can trigger an event that transfers the local records into Hippocrates."

  "Yeah," Drake nodded. "That's how it works, but we don't have a local server. The guy who set it up took care of that."

  Reed looked to Katie. "Martin?"

  "That's it," the lieutenant said. "Martin Door. That was before my time, though."

  Katie nodded. Reed still held her gaze, and she realized he was trying to ask her something without words. If she could get in touch with Martin, if he had access to the server, he could get an exact location on Ellie from her watch. Reed didn't know Martin was already doing eveything he could to track her down, though. Katie shook her head, ever so slightly, and then winced at the look of disappointment in Reed's eyes.

  "Not that, then," he said. "It was a good thought, though."

  "I'll follow it up," she said. "I just—"

  "Yeah," Reed said. "Look, the TMS analysis is still running. We'll get our searchers out on the streets looking for her, but that program is going to continue to refine things. If we can find the car, chances are good she's there, or within a one-day walk of there." He nodded, getting his steam back. "And we can narrow that down by places she could get unseen and unheard. The car actively concealed her identity within a short range, but if she just climbed out of it and started walking back into town, Hathor would have had an ID on her within minutes."

  "Unless she concealed it," Drake said.

  "No," Reed said. "You filled me in on everything she can do. Remember, these are the tools of my trade. She can do some amazing work after the fact, but she can't ghost herself on the fly."

  "What if someone's working with her?" Katie said, still thinking of her time with Martin. She caught Reed's eye. "What if it's somebody special?"

  He frowned, then turned to the lieutenant. "What do we know about her buyers?"

  "Nothing," Drake said, bitter. "We've got nothing on them, and that's a frightening prospect. I was hoping you two had come up with something—"

  Katie shook her head. Reed answered more accusingly, "We were late to that party," he said. "We only just found out about it."

  Then a thought struck Katie, and she spoke up. "What about the recording?" Both men turned to her, and she nodded enthusiastically. "The recording from Theresa. Remember? We have Eric ending his relationship with Ellie."

  Reed looked blank, but Drake understood. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously at her. "We don't want anyone to know this." He pointed a threatening finger at Reed. "We don't want anyone to know this, but we have some suspicions that Eric could be an accomplice in her plans."

  Katie nodded. "I think we're getting our information from the same source," she said. "If their relationship was something other than romantic, then we might find something useful in the breakup."

  Drake looked across to Reed. "Have you watched it yet?"

  "It's just audio," Katie said. "And no, he hasn't. It was just me, and that was before I had any idea. Hathor, play the Snoopy audio file on this desk. Thanks."

  It started with Ellie's voice, that gentle purr promising him whatever he wanted, and Katie cringed again. Her new understanding didn't make it any better. Drake looked just as unhappy, hearing his soldier openly seducing the good doctor. He shook his head when Eric first told her no.

  "What was she doing before he showed up? That could be more useful than his sudden change of heart. Go back."

  "There's no back," Katie said. "Ellie cleared this whole conversation out of the archive. I only have this snippet because Mrs. Barnes had hired a service to make sure Eric wasn't trying to leave her."

  "So it's a copy?" He hung his head. "We can't even get location information out of it?"

  "We may be able to get some," Reed said, while Ellie screamed her objection over the speakers. "There's some ambient noise that we might be able to isolate. You can hear a voice through a window or wall at three seconds. It's muffled, but we may be able to get something."

  "I have a better idea," Katie said, rising from her position in the corner. "If you would excuse me...." She left the office and pulled the door closed. Then she said, "Hathor, connect me to Meg Ginney. Thanks."

  Katie didn't expect an answer. It was after five by then, but the girl could easily still be at the clinic. She answered on the third ring, though. "Hello?"

  "Meg, I've got a question for you and I need you to answer me honestly."

  "Wh—what?" She stammered, surprised by Katie's tone, but Katie didn't have time to soothe her.

  "You said you and Eric almost got together," she said. "Would it have been at the clinic?"

  "I...Miss Pratt, I really don't want to talk about that."

  Katie sighed. "This is important, Meg."

  "No," she said. "No, all he could think about was work at the clinic. It would have been somewhere else." She sounded bitter at having to answer, but Katie couldn't let it go.

  "Where then?" Katie said. "I know you said nothing happened, but if you can think of anything, if you know anything at all—"

  "Okay," Meg said, shouting. "There was a motel. Okay? We only went there once, and we didn't end up doing anything—"

  "But where?" Katie said, excited. "Where was it?"

  "The Sunrise Inn." The girl took a deep breath, and let it out. "I don't know where it is. Okay? Is that all?"

  "That's all," Katie said. "Thank you for your help." Before she could say more, Meg cut the connection. Katie had what she wanted. She burst back through the office door, triumphant, and said, "Craig, show location details for the Sunrise Inn on Dora's desk." A glowing marker appeared, just west of center in the TMS analysis projection path, and Katie smiled. "She's there," she said. "She's at the Inn."

  13. At the Sunrise Inn

  "Where'd you pull that out of?" Reed said, but Katie waved the question away.

  "Bring up the security footage for the place. Even if her ID is hidden, I bet you can get a good look at her face." She looked at the map and guessed at the distance from the convenience store to the motel. "Start at two fifty, but I'm guessing she got there around three oh five."

  Reed nodded and pulled up video source from the motel's parking lot. Lieutenant Drake was still curious, though. "How did you find that place?"

  "Barnes had used it for his romantic trysts before," Katie said. "She would have been comfortable there. Stands to reason if she were laying low, but had a reason to stay in town, she'd go somewhere familiar."

  "Somewhere she knows how to hide from Hathor." Drake nodded. "That's good thinking."

  "That's her," Reed said, and the other two turned to find a still frame of Ellie Cohn, frozen as she climbed out of her private taxi.

  "What room is that?" Katie said, leaning closer. Pull up a floor plan of the hotel."

  "No," Reed said, jumping to his feet. "Craig, save all that to the casefile and push it to my handheld, then clear out the desk. Thanks." He was already across the room, open door in his hand. "Come on," he said. "We're going to make this bust."

  Katie caught up with him in the hall, Drake a step behind her. Reed was talking into his headset. "Dora, we've found her. I'm sending you location information now. Can you assign one of your cars to bring Katie and me out there? Thanks."

  "That's not necessary," Drake said. "I have a car—"

  "And you're going to need it to bring Ellie back to the base," Reed said. "We'll ride separate. See you at the Inn." With that he pushed the outer door open and held it for Drake. The lieutenant had no choice but to step out into the sunlight, where his car still waited by the door.

  A moment later Katie and Reed followed after him as one of the police cars pulled up to the curb. Katie quipped, "Hoping for another private conversation?"

  Reed answered deadpan. "Yes," he said as he pulled his door closed. "I was hoping you could contact Martin for me."

  "I...." Katie's smile faded. "That's not how it works."

  "That is how it works," Reed said, "and you've been hol
ding out on me."

  "I don't just call Martin. He doesn't answer—"

  "I don't believe that," Reed said. "I've seen you two together, don't forget that."

  "Please, Reed, you've got to believe me—"

  Martin spoke in her ear. "It's okay," he said. "Find out what he wants."

  Reed spoke almost in answer to him. "I want to know who Ellie was dealing with, and exactly what information she was trying to sell them. If we can't get those, Drake's cooperation ends as soon as Ellie is in his custody."

  "I can do the first part," Martin said. He sounded agitated. "But I have no intention of telling him what Ellie knows. Katie, I'm serious—"

  "Don't worry about that," Katie said soothingly, then to Reed's questioning look. "I'll try to get it done."

  "Good," Reed said, settling back with his handheld. "I'm going to start putting our case in Jurisprudence. Now we know it's a poisoning, we can get things moving."

  For Reed's sake, Katie pretended to record a voice note to Martin, but Martin was already off the line working on Reed's search. After she passed on the request, Katie pulled out her own handheld and started reviewing the security footage of Ellie. She showed up at the hotel stumbling, looking tired in spite of the coffee she'd picked up down the road.

  "Hmm," Katie said, and after a moment Reed looked up.

  "What?"

  "Why...." Katie tapped her handheld and switched to the convenience store video. "Why would she stop for a coffee, if she was on the run?"

  "Did you see her at the motel? That girl was dead on her feet. Probably needed the caffeine just to make it to her bed." He shook his head. "I'm guessing she hasn't slept for days."

  "But why stop somewhere public?" Katie watched the short video loop through twice. Ellie definitely looked like she was dragging, swaying on her feet while she filled her coffee cup. "She had to leave traffic, which automatically added ten minutes to her drive, then go into a crowded shop just to get some cheap black coffee when she could have made up a pot in the privacy of her hotel room."

  "Habit," Reed said. "I checked while you were on the phone. Ellie's been to that convenience store before. On the day of Theresa's recording, for one."