by Ginger Booth
This church had all that. But then the pastor launched into a diatribe against Emmett, or at least some fictional straw man labeled Resco MacLaren. This MacLaren was a godless New Yorker. He shamelessly brought his harlot Baker in tow. That would be me. The tirade reminded the congregation that phones and Internet were the devil’s tools, and they’d seen God’s fearsome punishment. ‘Consort not with the godless, and carry no tales! Testify only for the Lord!’ was his strong close.
“What about it?” I asked Emmett. “Doomsday loons are a dime a dozen. It’s been Doomsday for a couple years now.”
“Uh-huh,” Emmett said unhappily. “Think I should reply that I’m born again?”
“No,” I stated categorically. “Weren’t you just saying that this morning? None of their business. And their religion is none of your business, Emmett.”
“They’re all like this,” Emmett complained. “Fast as their pudgy little fingers can tap. They’re all posting sermons.”
“It’s a public service,” I suggested, as an alternate perspective. “Come to our church if you agree with us. Sample sermon provided.” He looked deeply disturbed, though. “Emmett? Why is this getting to you?”
“Don’t underestimate religion here, Dee,” he murmured. “Bible Belt, or close enough. My home turf. Hacks me off that they call you a harlot.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Do you think I’m a harlot?” I looked to Gianetti for backup. “That’s so assymmetric. Why is it that women are always painted the whore? Why isn’t he a whore?” Gianetti smiled back.
Emmett canted his head and glared at me. “Uh-huh.”
“New top story on the news,” Kalnietis interrupted softly. He read the headline, “Reunion Lovers to Judge Pittsburgh.”
The rest of us switched to the news feed to read the story. IndieNews, of course, at their muckraking best. The story included a portrait of Emmett with his arms around me at last year’s Thanksgiving feed of Manhattan’s starving. Brandy O’Keefe had the by-line, my personal nemesis. She told me privately – and I believed her – that her sleazy innuendos about Emmett and me were nothing personal. We were wildly popular public figures. Attacking us made her stories sky-rocket in the rankings. The text of tonight’s article was fairly accurate. When Emmett left New York, he told people his assignment was to ‘evaluate’ the situation in Pittsburgh. And I went with him.
O’Keefe didn’t have any more facts, so she posed provocative questions. Will MacLaren take over as Resco of Pittsburgh? What heads will roll? Why send a New York Resco, instead of Pennsylvania’s own? Was Pittsburgh in revolt against martial law? Why would MacLaren bring his pretty paramour?
Yeah, because our private life was the important part of all this.
“Sex sells,” I murmured. “Should I cut the news feed?”
Emmett looked unsure. Kalnietis offered, “The second story is from Project Reunion News. States the same facts more calmly. Cautions against wild speculation. Does the news feed do us any harm? I think it shows the eyes of the Northeast are on Pittsburgh. That this investigation is important. Might help us.”
“Uh-huh,” Emmett breathed. He added sourly, “Also keeps their eyes on me and Dee instead of you.”
“That too,” Kalnietis agreed.
When we broke for bed, the waiting line for the recharging station had moved indoors, due to a sudden thunderstorm. The IBIS agents continued on ahead to the stairs while I paused with Emmett to check on the meshnet propagation. It didn’t take the locals long to recognize us as the ‘Reunion Lovers’ from the news photo and start pointing. Judging from his pursed lips and dangerous gaze on them, Emmett’s sense of humor was fraying.
So I called out to the line on the way to the stairs. “Good photo of us, huh?” I grinned cheerfully. “You should know, I work for the competing news service, PR News. IndieNews takes a cheap shot at me every chance they get,” I confided ruefully. “But we’re not all bad. Gave you the meshnet. Good night! Hope you enjoy the meshnet!”
I waved jauntily. Emmett turned his back on them.
“Harlot?” I asked, as Emmett slid into bed beside me. The hotel room and bath were bland and restful, draped in pastel peach and olive green. Heroic measures had been taken to clean and freshen, but I suspect this hotel room had lain unused for years. Nothing could quite mask the underlying miasma of mildew and dust wafting from the mattress.
“Really tired, Dee,” Emmett growled. But he pulled me over onto his shoulder and lay facing the ceiling, our usual posture for talking things over in bed. So I waited him out. He eventually sighed, and continued, “I’d rather be married, yeah. Kinda stings.”
“As a marriage proposal, that kinda sucked, Emmett,” I informed him.
“Chill,” he said. “I understand what we’re doing. We’re in a monogamous committed relationship. I intend to marry you. When we’re ready. I think you feel the same way.” He paused. “Don’t you?”
“I’m not going to hurry up and marry you because some preacher called me a whore,” I replied. I figured that was good for a chuckle, but he didn’t deliver. “Yes, Emmett. I intend to marry you. I think we still have a lot to work out.”
“Do we?” Dammit, he was going analytical on me. “What do we need to work out, Dee?”
I scowled. “Is it too much to ask that we be lovers even six months? Long distance doesn’t count.”
Emmett remained analytical. “Five months now, in person? Long distance ought to count for at least one more month. Talked to each other every day. Worked together. Known each other a year and a half.”
“Would it make you feel better to call us engaged?” I countered.
“No,” he whispered. “I want you to answer the question. What do we need to work out?”
My claustrophobia? My fear of choosing wrong? Our current deal was that I wanted to wait until I couldn’t imagine not being with him anymore. Then we’d call ourselves engaged for another couple years. I could mock up a lot of wedding dresses in two years. I could escape. I could refuse to admit I was getting married. I could give him time to run away from me.
“You’re not sure you want to be with me,” Emmett murmured. “And that hurts.” He extracted himself from me and rolled away.
I put a hand on his back. “That’s not true, Emmett. I love you. I’m just really claustrophobic. Marriage scares me.”
“Go to sleep, Dee,” he said huskily.
I tried a little harder to re-engage him. He threatened to find another room if I didn’t leave him be. It’s so hard to sleep when we know we’re both lying awake thinking unhappily of each other.
4
Interesting fact: Pittsburgh has 700 outdoor public stairways carved through its hills, with more than 45,000 steps, and 446 bridges, 3 more than Venice. Despite the hills, it is also touted as bicycle-friendly.
The last thing I needed was the first thing to greet me when I came down to breakfast in the morning.
“Hi, Dee!” called Brandy O’Keefe of IndieNews, grinning and waving manically. But not too manically – she wouldn’t want to obstruct her camera man. Whose lens was pointed straight at me, of course. Naturally, she also stood right next to the line of locals waiting for the recharging station. Who were indoors again, due to a soaking rain.
“Brandy, you bitch!” I greeted her. “Fancy meeting you here!” I beseeched the guards, “Get them out of here.”
“Oh, Dee, don’t be like that!” Brandy said, still grinning. Alas, the woman was my match that way. Gorgeous straight auburn hair, outdoorsy plaid flannel over jeans, clean fresh makeup, and she could wield a smile as both offense and defense. Though I wore Army cammies today. To be inconspicuous. Yeah, that wasn’t going well.
The senior soldier on guard duty, Penny, scratched her head sheepishly. “I’m not sure what grounds I have to exclude them, Dee. We’re letting the public in.”
“Brandy’s not public,” I argued. “She’s press.” Penny screwed her face up at that. “I’m not here as press. I’
m assisting an investigation.” Drat, I didn’t want to say that in front of Brandy.
“Oh, no, Dee!” Brandy cried. “I’m a hotel guest too! There is no other hotel in Pittsburgh.”
“You’ll just sleep in the gutter, then, Brandy,” I returned. “You’re used to it.”
“Dee gets so so cranky when her face grabs the headlines,” Brandy shared with the onlookers. “Maybe a little makeup?”
“You want a scoop?” I returned. “Reunion Lovers Split By Paparazzi?”
Brandy cooed delight at my slip. “Ooh! Bad night, huh, Dee?”
Penny wisely called in a higher pay grade to deal with the cat fight. Captain Johnson emerged from the breakfast buffet. “What’s all this, ladies?” he interrupted with a hopeful smile.
“I don’t think IndieNews should be in our local HQ,” I said.
“But there is no other hotel,” said Brandy. “So we’re staying here. Besides which, you have PR News here. Dee Baker.”
“Too early for check-in time,” Johnson evaded.
“We’re exhausted,” Brandy assured him. “Drove all night to get here. Someone wouldn’t let us on the train you took. I wonder who. But we’ll happily pay for last night’s lodging.” She batted eyelashes at him, and looked tired and vulnerable. “Oh, there’s the colonel!” she cried.
Emmett and his usual daybreak guards pushed into the hotel, clearly just back from their morning run. Brandy and her camera man pivoted to push microphone and lens at him. Two guards blocked them with rifles. Brandy ignored them and called out, “Colonel MacLaren! Have you found the murderers yet?”
“Get them out of here,” Emmett ordered Johnson. To their cries of this being the only hotel in Pittsburgh, my beloved replied, “They can sleep in the van.” The stairway door closed behind him, as he headed upstairs to change out of his running shorts. He’d never stopped walking across the lobby.
“I’ll be back for press conferences,” Brandy pledged. Penny caught her elbow and started leading her to the door. Brandy kept talking over her shoulder. “Dee! You have to call me, and get me into press conferences!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
The lobby grew very quiet as the door closed behind our press intruders. I realized I was standing next to the locals line. I caught an older woman’s eye on me.
“Brandy and I work for competing news outlets,” I explained wanly. “But mostly I partner with Colonel MacLaren. Doing tech stuff. Like the meshnet. Are you enjoying the meshnet?” They broke out in nods and a weak round of applause. “Thank you. Yeah, I set up the meshnet. Excuse me. I should eat before I say something stupid.” Too late, was only implied.
I was long done with breakfast and studying my meshnet propagation in the lobby when Emmett re-emerged, flanked by Tibbs and Nguyen and a pair of our usual guards from New York. “Emmett! Where are we going?” I called out to him.
Emmett glanced at the line of locals, who were watching rapt, and prudently walked over to me to talk quietly. “You can stay here. Finally got Beaufort’s address. Need to pay my respects to Marilou Beaufort and the kids. Find out where they want to go.”
I glanced over his formal uniform. He clutched a book in his hand. “Is that a Bible?” I asked in surprise.
“Dee?” he bit out. “Yes, it’s a Bible. This is not my first bereaved widow, or fallen comrade.”
No, I imagine he’d done that before. With his Army division based in Kentucky, he’d likely prayed with them, too. I swallowed, and whispered, “Let me come with you, Emmett.”
“Not now. Come with IBIS later.”
‘Later’ turned out to be less than half an hour. I had time to visit our room to change into a somber navy dress, flexible enough to cover business meetings or funerals. Emmett had left a note on my pillow.
Need to cool off. E.
At least he hadn’t moved out of the room like he’d threatened last night. I was sitting on the bed, unhappily contemplating the note, when my phone chimed with a mesh text from him.
Everything missing. Bring IBIS.
Major Beaufort’s place was a modest wood-frame house on Mt. Washington, not far from the hotel. The ever-popular ‘level lot’ was accomplished by a postage-stamp front yard at one level, stairs down to a back yard a full story lower, and practically a cliff off to the right. Fortunately we drove there. The house had quite a view from the cliff side, down over the Monongahela River and the skyscrapers of the downtown triangle, over the tops of the trees below.
We stepped into a nicely furnished living room, with wood floors and a fireplace. Someone had opened up the living room to the next room, leaving partial load-bearing walls at the edges. Beaufort had selected that middle room for his office. Emmett, Tibbs, and Nguyen were rifling it. Beyond lay the kitchen, completing the street-level ground floor.
Emmett emerged and flopped onto the couch, gesturing us to take seats. “No sign of Marilou Beaufort and the kids,” he reported. “Computer and phone are here, both wiped. Tibbs might be able to get something off them anyway. Can you help with that?” he asked the IBIS partners.
Gianetti left us for the office to see.
Kalnietis asked, “Found Beaufort’s second in command yet?”
“Nope,” Emmett breathed. His phone chirped, and he took it out immediately for some reading.
At Kalnietis raised eyebrow, I showed him how to set meshnet ring tones for preferred contacts. Emmett used a chirp to indicate a fellow Resco, and his mother and me set to chimes. “Different chimes,” I hastened to clarify. Kalnietis smiled wryly.
Emmett was done reading his chirp. He stared off into space, looking grim. “Something wrong?” I asked.
Emmett roused. “It can wait,” he said. He brought up his lead buckets of messages, responses to my meshnet announcement. “They don’t know what a Coco is. When we get back to the hotel, maybe I should just talk to locals. Need to understand the social structures around here.”
A Coco was a community coordinator, a civilian leader reporting to a Resco, usually a militia leader. At least, we called them Cocos in New England and New York–New Jersey. I thought that was standard everywhere.
“What would you like me to do?” I asked. The other four seemed more capable investigators than I was, and they were searching the house.
“Don’t know,” Emmett replied coolly. “You think differently. Look around?”
Well, that was vague, but not entirely pointless. I understood the big picture of what Emmett needed to accomplish in Pittsburgh. And I had questions. For instance, why communications were so limited in this city.
I wandered back to the kitchen. There was a washing-machine sized footprint on the vinyl floor, a faintly rusty outline surrounding a square where the vinyl pattern was less faded. Something stood there for years. It was heavy enough for its wheels or legs to leave dents in the floor. The missing object’s position relative to the room yielded no clues. That box wouldn’t have fit anywhere else.
I tried the gas stove. It worked fine. Hot water in the tap. The house had power, too. A quick thermostat test generated heat as well, but no air conditioning. The fridge was nearly empty, and the cupboards. Yet there were clean dishes in the dishwasher, and a soaking casserole dish in the sink, maybe meat and pasta. The only remnants in the fridge were bowls of leftovers covered in plastic wrap. Canned chili with egg. Broccoli with cheese sauce. Beaufort cooked and ate here. Whoever wiped his computer also stole his food, anything they could pack and carry. That probably wasn’t all they took. The kitchen trash was empty, with a fresh trash bag. He still used plastic wrap and trash bags. A trash can somewhere might bear clues.
I found the trash bag and plastic wrap boxes. The plastics were biodegradable, made from crop residue right here in Pittsburgh. I tucked the boxes into my purse to discuss with Emmett later. We sorely needed these products back home.
I wandered back into the office. Based on what I overheard, Gianetti and Tibbs labored to read data off the computer’s wiped SSD drive. It
didn’t sound like they’d succeed. Solid state drives can be erased pretty thoroughly. I admired the view from the generous window on the cliff side of the room. The rain had paused. Low-scudding clouds and the darkness of the sky suggested this was temporary.
Why would Beaufort have his office here with no communications? Emmett lived on his phone.
I took my security sniffer out of my purse. My founding partners on Amenac, the Amen1 hacker team, were wizards in the cyber security arena. They developed these gizmos for surveillance protection during the heyday of HomeSec enforcing the Calm Act. Our lives depended on it. We’d made our peace with HomeSec now, but I still carried my comms sniffer wherever I went – handy for finding a better phone signal. And after repeated exposure to mortal threats, the paranoia is slow to wear off.
The living room had only the familiar meshnet chatter. The desk in the office likewise. But yes, there was a WiFi signal by the office window. A bookcase stood beside the window, maybe 7 feet tall. I retrieved a three-step stool I’d seen in the kitchen to stand on. Yes, atop the bookcase was the usual accumulation of dust – who dusts above eye level? – with a scuffed blank spot. I held my sniffer there. Yeah. Right about there was a good enough WiFi signal to use a repeater.
To test my theory, I replaced the sniffer with my phone. Yes, my voice-over-WiFi app would work there. But the WiFi was password-protected. On a lark, I tried ‘Marilou’, but that wasn’t it.
“Dee, what are you doing?” Emmett asked, causing me to jump in surprise. He’d stepped into the office behind me to watch.
“Investigating the house,” I said. “I think Beaufort had Internet and voice-over-IP. Someone took it, but I think he had a repeater right here to boost WiFi through the house. Probably a string of repeaters up the mountain from the hotel. Good system for giving a few people true Internet. Bit slow. You wouldn’t want many people sharing, though. Too little bandwidth. Say, Emmett, what were the kids’ names? Beaufort’s kids.”