Blood Echo

by Rice, Christopher

  Right now, the microdrone cloud’s offering up four different angles from around the same fixed point: the front of the truck, the back, the passenger side, and the driver’s side. They alternate with a rhythm that’s just a beat or two shy of headache inducing.

  Another screen shows the feed from a shoulder-mounted cam on a conventional tail—if a guy who’s been trained to kill in a dozen different ways can be considered conventional. Because the camera’s got massive zoom capabilities, there’s no telling the actual distance between the tail’s vehicle and Davies’s truck.

  Cole could ask; the tail’s in constant radio contact with one of the techs seated before the row of screens. Or he’s supposed to be.

  He knows what it’s like to put one of these things together on the fly, and he’s not going through that hell again.

  Cole studies what he can see of the neighborhood Davies is driving through.

  “He’s scoping?” Cole asks.

  “Too early. The streetwalkers don’t come out until after dark.” The tech who answered him is Asian and tomboyish, with a neat pageboy cut and a heavy sweater to protect her from the blasting AC. Her lower lip tenses. Does she regret speaking up without being called on? Cole’s grateful for it; she made it clear, without meaning to, that Ed has brought everyone in the room up to speed on their target.

  Good. So Ed’s only being an obstinate jerk when I walk into the room.

  “Scouting locations, then,” Cole says.

  “Possibly,” Ed answers. “If the file is reliable, he’s taken girls from this area before. Not sure why he needs to get the lay of the land again.”

  Ed’s use of the word file sounds acidic, probably because the file came from an intelligence source he didn’t vet and select. An intelligence source Cole hasn’t yet shared with him, or anyone.

  “It’s been six months,” Cole says. “Things could change. Buildings get torn down.”

  “Yeah. Real estate’s booming round these parts.”

  “Newly abandoned buildings, then. Burned-out lots. They’re all good abduction sites.”

  “Sure,” Ed says as if he isn’t and doesn’t care if he is or not.

  “It’s another escalation, for sure.”

  Nobody answers him.

  Maybe if he’d phrased it as a question . . .

  Ed’s desire to keep Cole inside a plastic bubble, completely removed from the workings of Project Bluebird 2.0, is possibly protective loyalty. But it’s completely unworkable in the long run, and it worsens Cole’s concern that Ed might deliberately throw the project off track while Cole’s not looking.

  Either way, he’d like his director of security, formerly his mostly loyal and steadfast employee, to relax. Just a little.

  Even if everything they do in this room is entirely illegal. And possibly unethical.

  It’s only unethical, Cole tells himself, if Davies doesn’t turn out to be a butcher of women. And besides, when Ed answered to my father, he was no stranger to the unethical.

  “The link to your home server is secure.” Ed’s so close to him suddenly, Cole jumps. The man looks like a version of Mr. Clean that could take out ten guys in a bar fight, but he always smells like Ivory soap and Listerine.

  “Why are you whispering?” Cole asks.

  “It’s called professionalism.”

  “Oh, OK. Is this you apologizing for your insubordination?”

  “If you’re doubting my work, then I—”

  “I don’t doubt the link is secure, Ed. I wanted to be here. This is my operation.”

  “I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” Ed whispers.

  “I still didn’t ask.” The bite in Cole’s tone causes Ed’s cheeks to turn red.

  “Fine. Can I ask you something, then?”

  Cole just glares at him.

  “How’d you find this guy?” Ed asks.

  “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

  “For you, maybe.”

  So Cole had identified Richard Davies, organic farmer, as a potential serial killer without using a “digital services team”—their polite code for the black-hat hackers handpicked by Ed. So goddamn what. That means less work for Ed. He should be pleased. Grateful. Less mouthy. Instead he’s—

  “Bluebird’s coming online,” one of the techs says. He’s a pale-skinned, baby-faced nerd boy with a buzz cut and librarian glasses.

  “TruGlass?” Cole asks.

  “No. Audio,” the tech answers.

  “Can you bring her up?”

  “On headset,” Ed says, walking to his desk chair.

  “No,” Cole answers.

  Several of the techs glance his way for the first time.

  “I’d like everyone to hear her so we can all appreciate the magnitude of what we’re doing here. Of what she’s about to do. For us.”

  Ed’s eye roll suggests he considers Cole’s words no more genuine than a politician’s stump speech.

  Worse, the baby-faced tech looks to Ed for permission to comply. Then he notices the glare he’s getting from Cole and spins back to his station without further delay. A second later, he gives Cole a thumbs-up.

  “Charley?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re on with me and the control room, so measure your words carefully.”

  “Hello, everyone,” she says.

  5

  Charlotte Rowe’s even tone sends send a ripple of new energy through the room, something between wonder and nervousness. The techs all look up from their computer screens at the same time—this must be the first time they’ve heard the voice of the woman they’ve been told to call Bluebird.

  “How are you feeling?” Cole asks.

  “It’s too big, Cole. I can’t wear it.”

  “The earpiece?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. Is your ground team with you?”

  “We are.” The woman who speaks next sounds as though she’s standing just an inch or two away from Charlotte inside their transport truck. “With respect, we think she’s being too cautious here.”

  Cole notes that Ed didn’t warn him his voice was being broadcast to Charlotte’s entire ground crew. There have been so very many things he’s had to note about Ed lately, so many of them sour.

  “It’s in keeping with the specs I approved?” Cole asks.

  “Absolutely,” the ground tech answers, “it’s matched to her exact flesh tone.”

  “It’s lumpy,” Charlotte says.

  “Isn’t it the size of a pea?” Cole asks.

  “It doesn’t feel like a pea,” Charlotte answers. “It feels like a marble inside my ear.”

  “Well, I can’t see it and I’m looking in her ear right now,” the ground tech says.

  “We still think he skins his victims, right?” Charlotte asks.

  There’s a new tension in her voice. But it’s her words that shock everyone in the room.

  Ed stops swiveling nervously in his rolling chair.

  The female tech who spoke up earlier drops her hands to her lap.

  Even Cole feels his breath catch.

  “Is that a yes or a no?” Charlotte asks.

  “That’s our assumption, yes,” Cole answers.

  “OK,” Charlotte continues, as if she’s indulging all of them, “then it’s reasonable to assume that at some point, either before or after he takes me, he’s going to examine my flesh. Or some part of it, at least. Does that sound right?”

  “I’d say that’s . . . probable,” Cole answers.

  “OK. Then what do you think he’s going to do if he suddenly comes across several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of technology sitting inside my right ear?”

  Try several million, Burning Girl.

  But Charlotte Rowe is alluding to another possibility without saying so explicitly.

  Tonight, she will be posing as the same type of sex worker they believe Davies has abducted and murdered five times over the past three years. Which means that to make his
introduction, Davies will first pay for access to her body. What she allows Davies to do and for how long will be entirely up to her. Which means, in order to accomplish tonight’s mission, she’s being forced to think of herself as a piece of meat. Literally.

  “If you don’t wear the earpiece,” Ed says, “then we have no audio connection to you.”

  “So?” she asks.

  “It means we can’t warn you if we see something you don’t.”

  “You weren’t in my ear last time and things went OK.”

  “Define OK,” Ed says.

  “Ask Frederick Pemberton. He’s on death row.”

  “And you’re a free bird, thanks to the cleanup job we did,” Ed says.

  “Define free.”

  “Ed,” Cole says.

  “What?”

  “Step out.”

  Ed just stares at him, then his eyes widen, and he sits forward with his elbows on his knees, frowning at Cole as if he’s a cat who just dragged a dead animal inside the house. “Excuse me?” he whispers.

  “I said step out of the room. Now.”

  The emotion drains from Ed’s face, then he gets to his feet and leaves. If it were possible to slam the bank vault–style door behind him, he might have, but it’s far too heavy. Once Ed’s gone, Cole feels a pang of regret. But just a pang.

  Ed just drove them dangerously close to an uncomfortable truth at the very moment Cole needs peak focus from everyone.

  For Cole’s security director to express any opinions on Charlotte’s past performance was colossally stupid. For starters, five months ago they’d been monitoring her without her consent. Worse, she’d been deceived into taking Zypraxon by Bluebird 1.0’s lead scientist, who decided to start posing as Charlotte’s therapist after Cole shuttered the original project and denied him access to his labs.

  When the dust finally settled and the full consequences of Dylan Cody a.k.a. Noah Turlington’s betrayals became clear to everyone involved, Cole gave Charlotte what he considered a reasonable deal, with a pretty good exit plan, if she chose that option.

  But he’d hardly call it fair. Reasonable, but not fair.

  Fair is for kindergarten.

  In the end, she’d agreed to keep working with them. So he wasn’t about to let Ed’s former-cop ego and loose lips screw up the fragile peace he’d established with the woman the world once knew as Burning Girl. The same woman who now happened to be the only human on the planet in whom Zypraxon actually worked.

  “Ed’s going to sit this one out, Charley. I apologize for his . . . insensitivity.”

  “Your call,” she answers. “And thank you.”

  “And the earpiece is your call.”

  “Good, ’cause I’m not wearing it.”

  Cole pulls his iPad from his satchel and opens the PDF of Richard Davies’s case file.

  “How about we do a little quiz to get you ready? I assume you’ve read Davies’s file.”

  “Five times.”

  “OK. Then spell his last name for me.”

  “Really?”

  “Just a little verification that you’re doing what I asked. That’s all.”

  “D-a-v-i-e-s. Not David. Davies.”

  “Excellent. And where was his father’s farm located?”

  “Cashmere, Washington. It’s east of the Cascades.”

  “Correct. And what happened to Richard’s family when he was nine years old?”

  “His father shot his mother three times in front of him and then turned the gun on himself. Richard was doing his homework on the other side of the motel room they were living out of. Police believe that after they lost the family farm his mother’s meth addiction became worse and his father forced her to start prostituting herself on Aurora Avenue North. The night of the murder-suicide, Richard told police his father was angry because his mother came home with less than her usual take.”

  He listens carefully for any sounds of sympathy in Charlotte’s voice, but she sounds like she’s reciting sports statistics. And when her voice does waver, it seems due to distraction, like she’s studying her reflection to see how convincing her costume is.

  “It’s a sad story,” he says.

  “A lot of us have sad stories. We don’t have to turn them into horror shows.”

  “Good point.”

  Charlotte clears her throat, then starts speaking again. At first, Cole’s got no idea what she’s saying—until she gets to the third name. “Shayla Brown. Deborah Clover. Maryanne Breck. Patrice LaVon. Janelle Cropper. Shouldn’t you be asking me about them? Given that, you know, I’m about to become one of them?”

  “You’re not going to end up like they did.”

  “Missing, you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Still, it might be a good idea to quiz me about the victims instead of trying to figure out if I’ve developed some sort of identification with a psychotic killer just because we both had shitty childhoods.”

  He considers arguing with her but decides against it for two reasons. One, he’d then be guilty of the same thing he just gave Ed the boot for doing. Two, she’s right.

  “Touché,” Cole mutters.

  “A suggestion from your lead scientist perhaps?”

  Cole feels his chest tighten and the pit of his stomach go cold.

  “We will never solicit suggestions, tips, or advice of any kind from Noah Turlington when it comes to you and your psychological well-being. And I can assure you, he’s not present in this room right now, nor will he ever be.”

  “Noah, huh?” she says. “Not Dylan?”

  “A condition of his reemployment is that he’s to use his birth name at all times.”

  “You call me by the name I picked.”

  “You’ve earned the right,” Cole says. “He’s done quite the opposite.”

  It never occurred to Cole that Charlotte might assume Noah would be present in the control room. Maybe that explains her quick temper with Ed. Or maybe it’s the fact she’s about to do something no human being should be able to do, and for the second time in five months.

  The baby-faced male tech says, “Her TruGlass feed’s coming online.”

  A few seconds later, a previously dark screen lights up with a jerking point of view on the cargo bay of a container truck that’s been soundproofed and carpeted. There are several flashes of darkness—blinks, Cole realizes—then a few glimpses of Charley’s ground team members scuttling to get out of her eye line. Costume racks flash across the screen, then a vanity and makeup table.

  She takes a seat, and a second later, thanks to a prototype on loan to their operation from a family friend, Charlotte Rowe is staring into the mirror—and directly at everyone in the control center—by way of a pair of contact lenses that broadcast crystal-clear images of everything their wearer sees via an encrypted satellite connection.

  The costuming job is perfect.

  It helps that Charlotte lost fifteen pounds for tonight’s performance, introducing sharp angles to her face that suggest the first stages of a serious drug habit. Her eye makeup’s so heavy a john will assume she’s trying to hide dark circles or a full-on black eye left by a vicious pimp. But it’s what they’ve done to her hair that Cole finds most striking. He figured they’d opt for some shiny costume wig. Instead, they’ve thinned out Charlotte’s actual hair unevenly and then sprayed it down so that it looks like she’s been clawing at her scalp for days and is just now trying to hide it with some cheap hairspray.

  Cole’s only direction to the ground team was to costume her in keeping with the other missing women. And apparently that’s exactly what they’ve done. Charlotte Rowe, a healthy, fresh-faced twentysomething, has been turned into the kind of haunted, prematurely aging streetwalker you’d see in a grainy black-and-white photo shot by a photojournalist.

  “Well?” Charley asks.

  “I think we’re good,” he answers.

  As soon as it’s out of his mouth, he expects her to make a biting rem
ark about his inappropriate use of the word good. Instead, she gives him a thumbs-up, suggesting she considers the two of them teammates.

  For now, at least.

  “Cole?”

  “Yes, Charley.”

  “How’d you find this guy?”

  The same question that encouraged him to kick Ed out of the room.

  With her, he doesn’t have the same luxury.

  “Trust me,” Cole says, “he’s a bad, bad man.”

  It takes her a second to grasp the significance of his last four words. They’re the same ones Charlotte said to Frederick Pemberton five months earlier, right before she squeezed his right hand hard enough to crush every bone in it.

  The stern look she gives him doesn’t quite indicate trust.

  But it doesn’t indicate a desire to quit, either.

  6

  It’s cold out, but Charlotte’s grateful for it. She’s been practicing the symptoms of drug withdrawal for weeks now. The shivers are the hardest to fake. Now she won’t have to.

  Her pantyhose are new, but they’ve got precisely placed runs made by a razor blade, so they do little to protect her legs from the damp chill. The tiny jacket they’ve put her in—dark denim, stained with cigarette smoke and some dabs of spilled beer—barely covers her lower back, much less her butt.

  As for the rest of her outfit, maybe it’s a skirt. Maybe it’s shorts. Maybe it’s that thing they call a skort. She doesn’t care, so long as she doesn’t stick out from the other women working Aurora Avenue North.

  It’s not her first time in Seattle. Her father made her do a couple of public appearances here as a girl. But it’s her first time in this part of town, a desolate stretch of urban eyesores that prostitutes and law enforcement call a track, a place where motorists can still summon a streetwalker to their car window with a wave.

  In this digital-driven era, when sexual connections both legal and not so legal can be made at the press of a button, only the most desperate sex workers still prowl the streets—the ones who move from payment for services rendered to their latest fix with the speed of basketball players crossing a court.