The Warning

by Michelle E Lowe

  He checked the guest bedroom but found no one. He entered the living room where Fifteen stood in the center, her rifle in her hands.

  “He’s somewhere in here,” she said. “He’s aware of our presence. I would have heard him opening the door or window if he left.”

  Twenty scanned for potential hiding places as he moved farther into the room. His steps were heavy as he drew closer to the curtain near the balcony sliding glass door. Without a word, he signaled for Fifteen to move to the other side. As she did so, he waited for the right time to make his move. He clicked back his rifle and aimed it at the drapes. When the Alpha model burst from the antique wardrobe in the corner and made a run for the door, Twenty turned and fired. The rounds shot through the silencer, sounded more like heavy knocking. The Alpha got across the room, but wasn’t able to escape the bullets ripping through his back. He fell dead to the floor.

  “You knew where he was the entire time?” Fifteen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then why not shoot him where he hid?”

  “I wanted to toy with him and test my abilities.”

  She said nothing as she left the room. Twenty took a small canister, no larger than a tube of Chap Stick, from his pocket. He shook it a couple of times before depressing the top and sprayed a faint white mist over the nape of the Replica’s neck. The chemical mist left a glistening sheen on the skin. He unclipped an inch-wide circular device from his belt and placed it over the misted area. Through the lens, he read the Replica’s number written in black.

  He brought out his communicator and spoke into it. “This is 4020 reporting. We have eliminated 3010.”

  “Was he alone?” asked a voice on the other end.

  Fifteen reentered the living room, carrying her own circular devise. “Negative. Model 3013 has also been eliminated.”

  “Good work. We’ll have our people there to collect the bodies.”

  “There’s a problem,” Twenty informed. “There are humans here.”

  There was a pause before the voice spoke again. “How many?”

  “Two. A man and woman.”

  “Any children?”

  “No.”

  “Do they know what you are?”

  “Yes.”

  Again, there was silence, longer than before. “Make it look like a murder-suicide,” the voice came back. “They mustn’t be allowed to tell anyone what’s happened. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  The voice spoke after another short pause. “Make it painless, Twenty. They’re not to suffer.”

  “Understood.”

  Twenty clicked off the communicator, craned his neck over to his partner, and nodded to her. She nodded back and left for the master bedroom.

  Knox rolled off the hood of the luxury car. His entire body hurt so bad he felt like he’d just come out the loser in a bar fight. If only he’d known it was Crowe the moment he’d bumped into him, none of this would have happened.

  After the hooded man had clipped his shoulder, Knox peered into the room and seen a beautiful, dark-haired woman standing with her hand against her face. She’d seemed upset.

  “Doctor Crowe?” he’d guessed.

  “Yes?” she’d said with a sniff.

  He’d noticed the distress on her face and suddenly realized who the hooded man had been.

  He rubbed the back of his neck and studied the large dent on the hood. As he did, the automated voice of the car spoke. “Damage to hood.” The hood popped itself back into place.

  When the dent smoothed out, the car appeared factory-new.

  “Damage undone.”

  Knox noticed the parking garage cameras mounted on three nearby columns. The wires of a couple of cameras had been cut, those that would have recorded what had transpired.

  He identified what had saved Crowe. If anyone discovered that a Replica was protecting a homicide suspect, word would spread, sending panic through the city. Yet if he kept it to himself, he ran the risk of an officer getting hurt if one came across Crowe.

  Then he remembered what Crowe had said before the Replica threw him into the car.

  No, Eb, don’t kill him!

  Killing him would have been in Crowe’s best interest, but he’d ordered the Replica not to do it, which made him wonder about his involvement in the murder. What unnerved him the most was how the Replica had come to be Crowe’s guardian angel in the first place. He surmised that the thing came from the laboratory on Mill Rock since no one else in New York City—or the world—was known to make Replicas. But to question Linden about it was impossible. The government kept him well protected. In order to gain access to the island, he’d have to go through a web of red tape. He didn’t have time for such a headache only to hear Linden flat-out deny knowledge of any missing Replicas.

  He wouldn’t tell anyone about Crowe’s bodyguard until he could figure out how he fit in. If he could, he’d track him down, but in the meantime, he’d turn his hunt in another direction.

  He dismissed his interview with Doctor Crowe and headed for his car on the second floor. Sliding into the driver’s seat, he lowered his visor and unclipped a handheld tracking device. He touched the small screen, which brightened with the company’s logo.

  “Hello, Detective Lucas Knox. What have you misplaced?”

  “My gun.”

  “Thank you. Please say or type in your badge number.”

  He typed in the number on the machine’s keypad.

  “Thank you. One moment please.”

  The screen showed a satellite view zooming in on the gun’s location, where it lay in a trash can. He read off the street name below the image. Turning the device off, he clipped it back on his visor and revved the engine. He didn’t believe Crowe would be anywhere near the area. Everyone knew law enforcement officers had GPS tracking installed in their guns.

  He flew onto the street and screeched to a halt by the trash can near the curb. Casually he got out and peered inside. With a deep sigh he reached in and pulled out his weapon. Holstering it under his coat, he went back to his car. Inside the glove compartment was a spare cell phone. He turned it on. He had four missed calls from Rivera.

  Why don’t you find the real killer? Crowe had said. He’d also implied that Mason had roughed him up. Had he said something to cause Mason to react violently toward him? It was a very good possibility. Mason had a reputation for having a short fuse and was one of the many cops who’d embraced the More Aggressive Law.

  Or was he and Shaw trying to get Crowe to do something he wouldn’t do?

  He thought back to what Osborn had said about Crowe refusing to confess to the crime.

  Is that it? Were they trying to force him to confess?

  He searched through his satchel for a portable TV with an MIR card of the footage from the victim’s apartment building already inside. The light projecting from the screen illuminated the inside of the car. He pressed SKIP until he came to the section when the murderer left the apartment with a sleeping bag over his shoulder. When the murderer turned toward the camera, Knox pressed PAUSE to zoom in on his face. Three deep marks were carved in his cheek down to his jaw. Fingernail scratches.

  “She did fight back,” he muttered to himself.

  Crowe hadn’t had any scratches on his face when he’d encountered him in the parking garage. Even if he’d cleaned them, the wounds would still be visible. It occurred to him that whoever was on the footage would have left his DNA under the victim’s fingernails.

  A burst of excitement charged into his veins.

  He sped onto the street and headed for the morgue. After some time on the road, his car phone rang from his dashboard. The name of the caller flashed until he tapped on it. “Hey, Rivera.”

  “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you,” came Rivera’s voice through the car speakers.

  “Sorry,” he said, cutting another driver off. “I … uh, shut my phone off earlier.”

  “Listen to me. The bodie
s at the bank—they were already dead.”

  “What do you mean ‘already dead’?”

  “I mean Judith checked the dental records on both a subject and hostage and verified that they’ve been at the morgue for at least a week or more.”

  “Wait, I’m confused,” he said. “Are you telling me all those people in the bank were dead before the blast?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Someone stole the bodies from the morgue and replaced them with mannequins. It was all a decoy.”

  At the mention of the word decoy, he thought back to the interview he saw on TV between Sakura and one of the hostages from the bank.

  “How did they choose which hostages to let go?” she’d asked the Jersey man.

  “Weird you’d ask that, ’cause they were choosy.”

  “They couldn’t have,” he uttered to himself. “Could they?”

  He became so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he nearly plowed into a line of parked cars on the side of the road. Before he struck them he regained focus and swerved back onto the road, narrowly missing other moving cars.

  “Knox, are you there?” Rivera asked as car horns blared. “What the hell is that noise?”

  He regained control of his car and accelerated away from the pissed-off drivers. “Yeah, I’m here. Where’s Judith? Is she with you?”

  “No, she left for the Farwell Morgue to do an examination. I think on Jade Sho’s body.”

  “Good, I want to talk to her about something. What about the security videos at the morgue? Did the cameras catch anything?”

  “Whoever stole the bodies hacked into the building’s security system and programmed the cameras to film a loop. They’ve been playing in circles since the other night, and no one noticed until we tried to review them.”

  That was no surprise. “How did they get the bodies out?”

  “There’s a side door in the room next to the refrigeration unit that leads into a back alleyway. Anyone could’ve loaded the bodies inside a van.”

  “It sounds like they were let in from the inside. Has anyone working there gone missing?”

  “No. I’m guessing they hacked in through the automatic locking system to that particular door.”

  He wasn’t surprised about that either. If a hacker could get into the security system of a building, they could just as easily scan over its outside layout by satellite. But how would they have known where to find the bodies without help? What Rivera said made sense, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone from the inside had a hand in it. “Meet me at the bank. I’m on my way there now.”

  “If the traffic has died down, I ought to be there in thirty minutes.”

  The inside of the car went dark when the light from the car phone dimmed away. Jade Sho’s body would have to wait. He had a sinking suspicion that the bank and the mysteries surrounding Sho’s murder were somehow linked.

  Nikolai downed two more painkillers. “We have to stop for a minute,” he said, ducking into a nearby alley and leaning against the wall for support.

  Ebenezer followed him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I fell down the stairs trying to get away,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket for an ice pack. “I’ve already had my back clobbered by a nightstick. Falling on it didn’t exactly feel like a soothing massage.” He cracked the ice pack and placed it under his shirt.

  “Let me have a look,” Ebenezer offered, lifting up his shirt. He removed his hand so Ebenezer could examine the bruise. “You’ve been hit.”

  “Didn’t I just say that?” He turned around to meet Ebenezer’s gaze. “And having you throw me against the wall earlier didn’t help, you steroidal ape.”

  “Why did you risk seeing your sister? Does your back hurt that bad?”

  He gave a frustrated sigh. “No. It wasn’t that at all. Jade visited her right before she died. I needed to know if she’d said anything to her.”

  “And did she?”

  His face contorted as he tried to make sense of what Jean had told him.

  “Jade told her she had a secret in her bedroom closet. She wouldn’t say what she meant, but she repeated it more than once.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  He placed the ice pack against his back. “Don’t really know, but I think I ought to go to her place and find out.”

  “It’ll be dangerous to go there.”

  “I know, but if something’s there I have to know what it is. There may be answers to this.”

  Ebenezer nodded. “If you think it will be helpful. But with a fifty thousand dollar reward on your head, are you still opposed to journeying underground?”

  He hated to admit it, but the Replica was right. “I suppose it is the best season for sewer travel.”

  Knox parked his car in front of the bank and got out. His phone rang while on his way to the front doors. “Hey, Judith.”

  “Hey, Knox, I’m at the Farwell Morgue now. I’ve got something for you.”

  “Rivera told me that’s where Jade Sho’s body was taken. What’s up?”

  “I just examined her and found something interesting.”

  “Is it by any chance blood and skin under her fingernails?”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s a long story; I’ll tell you later. I’m at the bank right now. As soon as I’m done here, I’m going to make one more quick stop before heading over to you. Don’t do anything until I get there. I want to look at the body myself.”

  “No problem. I’ll be here when you arrive.”

  He pressed END as he reached the front doors.

  “Got here fast,” Rivera said as he entered the building.

  “That’s the great thing about sirens. Everyone gets out of your way.”

  “Why did you want to come back here?” Rivera asked, taking his flashlight out.

  “If the bodies were nothing but props, that means the bomb didn’t go off prematurely.” He lowered his voice. “That tells me the suspects must have had another escape route.”

  They walked across the lobby, shining their flashlights along the floor. The fire marshal and a few other firefighters were giving a tour to insurance agents, showing them the extent of the damage.

  “Has the bank president been by yet?” Knox asked.

  “He came by earlier before I went to see Judith. He didn’t ask anything about the money or the vault, though.”

  “What did he ask about?”

  “Nothing, really. He wanted to go upstairs to his office, but the fire marshal wouldn’t let him. Said it wasn’t safe. He didn’t like that and got pissed.”

  “How pissed?”

  “On a scale of one to ten, I’d say he was at twenty. He said he needed to check on something. When the fire marshal tried to explain that nothing upstairs could have survived the blast, he got even more upset.”

  That struck a chord in his string of hunches. I wonder what’s up there.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Rivera asked, entering the men’s restroom with him.

  Knox slowly moved his light across the ceiling and over the floor before peeking into the stalls. “A way out. Check the ladies room, will ya?”

  “The ladies room?” Rivera moaned.

  “I don’t think there’s going to be a woman in there taking a piss, Alfonso.”

  His instincts had brought him to this area of the building, and he began to think logically. If the suspects did have another way out, it would be someplace secluded and not easily found.

  After searching the restrooms, he met Rivera back in the short hallway. “I didn’t find anything.”

  “Me, either. There must be some other way they could’ve …”

  Nearing the end of the short hallway, Knox saw the custodian closet. Without a word, he walked toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  He reached the badly damaged door and pushed it open with little effort. Everything inside the small closet had been burned in
the intense heat of the flames. Debris littered the floor. He studied a fallen shelf where cleaning supplies were kept.

  “Knox?” Rivera said at the doorway. “What is it?”

  He moved to one side of the heavy shelf. “Help me lift this.”

  Rivera set his flashlight down and took hold of the shelf. On the count of three, they heaved it back against the wall. Rivera brushed his hands and turned his eyes to the floor.

  “This is how they got away,” Knox said, crouching to examine a four-foot hole in the floor.

  Rivera’s eyes widened. “But that’s impossible.”

  “Not as impossible as you think.” He shined his light into the hole, but it was too deep for the beam to reach the bottom. “Remember when the earthquake hit and cracked open the city’s underground like an eggshell? Buildings fell in on their foundations as far as three stories down. The city couldn’t save them all, so they decided to raze the buildings and rebuild over the remains below.”

  “I was just a kid then, but I remember those crazy times.”

  “If memory serves me correctly, the old Wanderers Inn East Hostel used to be here,” he recalled. “I bet we’re right above its lobby. The subjects came up through this old building—most likely through the subway tunnels—and set bombs on the floor while inside the bank.”

  “No one heard any explosions outside.”

  He stood, holding his flashlight at his side. “The exterior of the bank is built out of solid marble. From where this closet is located, C4 could have gone off and not been heard by anyone outside. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d had another group detonating explosives underground to meet them in the middle.”

  “I knew it,” Rivera said. “I knew the hostages weren’t hostages.”

  “Yep.”

  “I guess they brought the bodies up through here, too.”

  “It would seem that way,” he said, sidestepping the hole.

  “The people who were released out of good faith were the actual hostages. The subjects needed to get them out so they could blow open the floor and bring the bodies up to lay out as hostages. You were right, Alfonso; the hostages left inside worked with the robbers.”