Houston, 2030

by Mike McKay

  “Oh, as my grandpa said: Sehr Gut! Can't be any better. As I told you over the phone, her second day on the job, but she already knows her way around our bombs. I must admit Sammy's titration is way neater than Mike's or Arne's,” Frederick smiled. He pointed to the row of assorted jerrycans in the storage cage. “This is, officially, the Sammy's first batch! We drained almost fifty gallons of stuff today. On the market, this will be twenty-five thousand bucks. Twenty-six, if we are lucky. Not a bad day at all, considering your Mike and my Arne are both gone. And despite this damn rain!”

  “Sammy's first batch! As usual, you are too kind, Fred. Samantha is not a wizard, but a mere wizard's apprentice! I am pretty sure you conjured all this gas by yourself.”

  “Even the best wizard cannot do without a good apprentice. You see, Denny is an excellent asset as a foreman,” Frederick pointed to the young man in flip-flops on top of the scaffolding. Now he was pouring whitish powder from a plastic bucket into the bomb. “And the rest of the crew here is fine too. Hard workers. But as far as the technology goes they need constant control. The other day, Sammy comes to me and says: I am so sorry, Mister Stolz, but I think they forgot the catalyst in the number five. So I ask Denny: have you added the catalyst? And he says: oh! Why the heck did you seal the reactor then? If not for Sammy's sharp eye, they would run this bomb for next to nothing. This is her batch, no questions asked!”

  At this moment, Mark's phone rang. Mike told him that he and Arne had successfully passed the medical and would be sent to the boot camp today. Frederick and Samantha could not leave the plant till much later in the afternoon, but unlike Mark they did not require the urgent wash either.

  “OK, Fred,” Mark said in a hurry, “I will try to convince Mary. I mean, to let Samantha work here. Permanently.”

  “I will be more than pleased, Mark,” Frederick replied, “we all like Sammy. And about her school – no worries at all. At least as the ‘hard science’ and engineering goes, here she will learn more than in any school…”

  Mark rushed with Jasmine to the landfill gates and used his FBI badge to let her back in without paying the customary five dollars to the guards. Then, Mark ran across the highway, obtained his bike (and a bewildered stare from the parking lot owner) and raced to the West Canal. Three hours later, he and Mary were standing under the rain in the little crowd of friends and relatives, waving good-bye to the military motor-buses departing for the San Antonio boot camp. The good part, Mary was so worried about Mike, she did not even mention Mark's ruined office clothes.

  Chapter 19

  Mark decided to spend the Tuesday at the Station. After the landfill adventures yesterday, he needed some quiet time to recover. He arrived to the Station at few minutes past seven, shut the glass door of his tiny office and started digging through the paperwork. There were about two hundred unanswered e-mails – nothing of importance, just the usual ‘noise.’

  Then, he completed the scene investigation report. The details of the former Amelia Khan: the full name, the date of birth, and so on, were duly typed into electronic forms and sent traveling over the fiber-optics to some unbeknownst FBI server in Washington, DC. Not much left of the girl: a pile of fresh dirt at the cemetery and few kilobytes of data in the server. The case number sixteen was now officially suspended and added to the other fifteen cases in the Butcher pile. What new had they learned? Very little, Mark decided. They established the serial killer was a well-built man, about the size of Alex, and that he had a black balaclava and a small black backpack. Plus, not to be ignored, a first-witness reconfirmation that the killer had a pair of dark-color canvas sneakers, polka-dot work gloves, and a standard-issue Army knife. That was, surely, better than nothing, but not enough, and by far.

  Alex was of a perfectly average height: 5-9.5. If the killer had been of the same height, give or take an inch, around one quarter of the adult men in the area would be a perfect match. And what if Mr. Heller was mistaken, and the killer was slightly taller or slightly shorter? Then, the number of candidates would grow to something like fifty percent of the adult male population. They were not even sure the killer was a male. Naturally, the male serial killer was far more likely than a female. But the victims had not been sexually violated, and thinking about all the animal steroids, still widely available, a 5-9 woman with well-developed muscles, dressed in a dark outfit, would surely pass for a man. Take Liz, the Deputy from the Mesa Drive, he thought. Give her a loose-fitting black jacket and a balaclava, who could tell she was a woman, especially in the night, from several hundred feet away?

  There was another possibility, Mark contemplated. What if the Butcher was not from the Sheldon-Res area? Let say, as an extreme, what if he lived about thirty miles from here? That would place him around the Dairy Ashford on the west or the Dutton Lake at the east. How would he travel thirty miles to make his kills? Must be by bicycle, what else? Cars and riding horses would be far too obvious, and the public motor-bus service had been in decline for the last two years. Thirty miles on a bike, with a couple of rest stops, about four hours. And the same time to get back. Add few hours for the kill itself. He could be leaving in the afternoon and returning well before morning. Was it a bit far-fetched? Mark was not sure. If the killer lived in the Houston downtown, or even further west, he must be one of the endless traders, who traveled back and forth through the area, bringing sea products from the Gulf ports to the in-land areas. That would mean their killer had to have some version of a cargo bike and had to stay overnight. Mark made a mental note to ask the beat deputies to check the guarded parking and traders' guest-houses. He needed to come up with some innovative ideas for the investigation plan, or else the FBI experts in Washington would rip him and Ben an extra hole in the butt during the next teleconference. Or worse: send Mark to early retirement. Unfortunately, the innovative ideas did not come easy. In the past twenty-two months they had tried more or less everything.

  Anyway, why not to try the female perp idea, as crazy as it sounded. Mark started a browser and typed the Armed Forces' Career Office database URL in the address field. After typing his e-mail for a login, he struggled to recall the password. It took him two full days of bureaucracy paperwork to get himself the access rights, but strangely enough, he was using it just once or twice per month, relying on the CSIs to do the name searches. Last time, Frederick mentioned the Pentagon was now after the girls? I must check, Mark decided, if my daughters got in here somehow, and if I should start worrying. Because he only had a read-only access, the interface was very simple. He clicked the ‘Female’ check-box under ‘Gender,’ typed ‘P*’ in the surname field, then clicked ‘Search’ button. Two seconds later, the lines popped up on the screen. Nineteen hits. Palmer, Panini, Parno, Peabody… The surname ‘Pendergrass’ was not in the list. Thanks God, he thought, not yet. Interesting, how many females had been registered in their area? He deleted ‘P*’ in the form and clicked ‘Search’ again. After a little delay, the server replied: “1,492 record(s) found.” He expected more. Obviously, the mass-registration of the female conscripts had not yet started, and the database contained only the volunteers. Unlike in the North, in Texas it was not too popular for the girls to join the military. The names had been neatly arranged in pages, one hundred names on each. He mindlessly scrolled the first page, and a familiar surname caught his eye. “Bowen, Aleisha S., 05/23/09, volunteer, US Navy, 08/26 – present, Active Duty.” “Bowen, Wanda, 02/17/03, volunteer, US Navy, 08/20 – 08/25, Reserve-USN.” He would probably have missed it, if not for the ‘volunteer’ and the ‘US Navy’ in the table. Kate Bowen, the girlfriend of Deputy Kim, he thought. She was in the US Navy and was a volunteer. Why she was not shown in the database?

  Suspecting he was up to something, Mark clicked the ‘Male’ check box and hit the ‘Search’ button again. As expected, this time it took the server full two minutes to reply. “Sorry. In the current form, the search returned 338,521 result(s). This number too large to be displayed. Please narrow your searc
h by providing more details in the search form field(s).” Tom the CSI once said, this database only covered the suburbs on the eastern side of Houston, slightly over a million of total population, Mark recalled. We might try this. Mark cleared the ‘Female’ box, typed ‘Pendergrass’ in the surname box and searched again. The server quickly responded: “3 record(s) found.” Pendergrass was not a common surname, after all. “Pendergrass, Mark M., 09/10/82, registered, NA, NA – NA, Reserve-S.O.” “Pendergrass, Michael D., 03/11/13, conscripted, US Infantry, 04/2030 – present, Active Duty.” “Pendergrass, William M., 01/29/11, conscripted, USACE, 10/2028 – present, Active Duty.” Surprised, Mark scratched his head. The first two records were quite as expected. He himself had never served in the armed forces, but was listed as the ‘special orders’ reserve. In case of a global war, the FBI agents would be called to fill the ranks of the Military Intelligence and the Military Police. Mike just passed his medical yesterday and was on his way to a boot camp. Naturally, somebody in the AFCO had updated the record. But the last record could not be right. William, being an amputee vet for over nine months, with his discharge papers and now even with his disability compensation, although not yet paid, was still listed as an ‘Active Duty,’ with the service dates shown from the October 2028 to the present! The discovery was so significant, Mark could not sit still. He raced to Tom, who was the resident database geek.

  The CSI was at his desk, typing some report. “Can I interrupt you for a sec?” Mark asked.

  “Sure. Anything for the FBI. And anything to get away from this shite. I am assigned to investigate some bootleg gas case. As if nobody knows that all the real gasoline available for the general public in Houston is stolen from the Army…”

  “Can you log in into the AFCO for me?” Mark quickly explained the issue he had with the query, and within seconds the CSI had the same result reproduced on the screen. “See: here. My son William is still listed as an ‘Active Duty,’ but he has been a vet for over nine months.”

  “A stale record, nothing special. You see, people often assume the computers know everything instantly. In reality, somebody has to tell the database that your William is not in the Army anymore.”

  “But… William got his discharge papers at the Dumpster, sorry it's the Santa Lucia, a floating hospital… Back in August, last year. Surely somebody had to type his status into a database. Besides, he just got his disability compensation papers. So the computer knows he has been discharged, no?”

  “Yes, but this would be the central Joint Military database in the Pentagon. The local AFCO database is a totally different system on a totally different server.”

  “And how do they know somebody is discharged? Or killed in action?”

  “They don't. And they don't care. For the Armed Forces' Career Office, it's only important to record who they can call in. What happens is: once somebody returns from the Active Duty, he reports to the local AFCO. There is a Federal law, and also the State legislation. You must report to the AFCO within a month of your arrival, right? No big hassle, really. You can now do it over the Internet. Just log in with your full name for the user name and your SSN for the password. But the law applies only to those, who are listed in reserve. Fit for the active duty, that is.”

  “And why the vets can't register over the Internet?” - Mark asked.

  “Before – they could. Ten years ago, when the draft was introduced, there was a special form for that. One had to add a medical report in PDF. Well, after a little while some smarty-pants figured out that the PDF could be faked. So, you served for three years, and then registered yourself as a disabled vet. Bang, and AFCO did not bother you anymore. So, the AFCO decided that the vets had to register in-person: with your photo ID and your missing leg. They would still double-check it with the Pentagon, of course.”

  “Such a great care about the vets! Imagine: somebody returned on crutches and had to walk ten miles to update the stupid database.”

  “Well, when they canceled the mandatory vets' registration, they said exactly this: no need to walk ten mines on crutches. But the real reason was quite different. It turned out that at any given time there would be cripples in front of the AFCO office. Sometimes just one or two, but sometimes – few dozen. And that was too bad for the morale.”

  “Whose morale, the vets?”

  “Who gives a damn about vets' morale? The morale of the new draftees, I mean. I remember how I myself came to AFCO for my own medical. So I walked in, and there was a whole gang of cripples. Seven or eight, all on crutches. So they asked me: hey, boy, are you going far? Want to play some war? Oh, but of course! You still have two legs, ah? Don't you worry, that's not for too long… And so it was going on like this for the whole half an hour I was waiting for my appointment time. Frankly, I was on the brink of deserting, even before passing the bloody medical… Anyway, the following year AFCO decided that the vets could skip the registration.”

  “And so, they are still listed as ‘Active Duty’?”

  “Right. What happens next: once a year, the local system admin in the Career Office would perform what they call a ‘base purge.’ He or she would make a list of all people who have been to the Active Duty and are due to return within the previous two years. Then, he would send the list to a sysadmin in the Pentagon, and he would reply with the status update. If the person was discharged in reserve, but failed to report to the local AFCO, they would start sending letters, make phone calls, or ask us, the Police, to go and check the last known address. Not reporting your location is a criminal offense. The AFCOs also reconciles their DB with the IRS. In case somebody is paying his taxes, but does not want to register for the military service. Those, who are still missing in action, will remain listed in DB as on the Active Duty. So they would check on them next year. It's automatic.”

  “And what happens if the Pentagon replies that such and such person is disabled or killed?”

  “Then, the record is marked as ‘purged,’ and it doesn't show anymore. Who needs these amputees, anyway? The AFCO doesn't need them – for sure.”

  “Got it,” Mark replied. The thought that his William firmly belonged in the ‘who needs these amputees, anyway?’ category was somewhat disturbing. “Now, could you list all the females in the database?”

  Tom obliged, and the list appeared on his computer screen. “Who are you after?”

  “She is not in the list. The new girlfriend of Deputy Kim, in the Garret Road Slum Beat. She was a volunteer in the Navy. You see, here, Bowen and Bowen, both from the Navy. The girlfriend's name is Katherine Bowen, so she must be in-between. But she is not here!”

  “When was she back?”

  “A couple of months, I guess.”

  “That means she failed to report, right?”

  “Does not need to. She came back with no legs.”

  “No legs? Deputy surely has interesting taste for girlfriends!”

  “Nothing as such. She is his very first and very-only girlfriend. Legs or no legs, she is cool. Helped us on the Butcher case too, by the way. Back to the DB, if what you have told me is right, she should appear here, listed as on an ‘Active Duty.’ Same as my William.”

  “Ah, then, she must be not from the Eastern Houston, right?”

  “No. She is from Detroit, Mich.”

  “That's why she is not listed! The AFCOs' databases are totally decentralized. In case of the big, that's thermonuclear, war. In Houston alone, we have seven: the Central Houston, North, East, South and West, the Gulf Coast, and one more – for the countryside around the city. Although, the last one is not as large as the others. We here only have access to the East Houston DB. Likely, Kim's girlfriend is still listed in her home database in Detroit. They will purge her out after her volunteer term is over. She is not in a big hurry, right?”

  “Right. Without both legs, it's difficult to be in-hurry, anyway. Presumably, she would be still in the military database in the Pentagon, and listed as a disabled vet, no?”

&nbs
p; “Correct. The Pentagon keeps the service records forever. Even for the dead. But we cannot search them. I mean: do a dil-q.”

  “Dil-what?”

  “DLQ. The Direct Logical Query.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember you were explaining this to the Major… That burnt corpse case… Could you go over it once more? I was not paying attention back then.”

  “Sure. Basically, for the Pentagon DB, we can only use the dick!”

  “What?”