Shades of Memory

by Diana Pharaoh Francis

  “Duct tape,” Arnow advised Price as he chuckled. “Buy it by the pallet. You’ll need it.”

  I was feeling jittery by the time we came down into Denver. I shouldn’t have topped my Red Bull off with a 5-Hour Energy bottle. At least I was awake.

  We still hadn’t heard anything from Taylor. I wasn’t sure when we would. But then, I didn’t know when they’d have started their attack, and I didn’t know how long it would take to secure the compound, and then find the information we were looking for. Realistically, it could take days.

  We didn’t have days.

  “Where to now?” Price asked.

  I considered the trace trails from the bloody balls. Those of the seven hostages hadn’t been nulled and flowed away in steady lines. The trace of Arnow’s three contractors was more difficult to read, but seemed to follow the same path. I just hoped the trail ended near Denver and we weren’t heading for the East Coast.

  “Keep following the freeway.”

  I turned to Arnow. “Tell us about the killer you were tracking. Why were you off the books with it? How is he connected to Savannah?”

  She unbuckled her seat belt and sat forward. “The FBI circulates reports from offices across the state about current cases. Mostly to keep everybody updated on the existence of other investigations in case something we’re working on overlaps. Mutual cooperation sort of thing.

  “A little over ten months ago, a series of killings started up along the east side of the range in Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Pueblo, and so on. Bodies were discovered in groups of three. In every case, the killer transplanted bits of each person onto another. It started with small things—patches of skin, fingers, toes, eyes, and ears. It didn’t take long before he started getting more extreme—whole limbs, organs, everything. Within a couple of months, he upped the ante again. He’d perform the transplants, and after, he dismantled his victims with precise butchery. He’d lay out the parts of all three bodies in single circles, always in the exact same order. In the last warehouse where he captured three of my squad, we found nine circles.”

  I frowned. “There hasn’t been any news about that.”

  “That’s because the FBI’s work hard to keep it under wraps. Even after we stopped investigating.”

  “Stopped investigating?” Price tossed a startled look over his shoulder.

  Arnow took a harsh breath, her shoulders tense. “Every agent in the state was on the lookout for something that might point to the killer. Forensics had found no DNA, no fingerprints, nothing. Then all of a sudden, the investigation shut down. Anybody who asked questions got shipped out to Timbuktu. All references and files got erased off the computers. Giant cone of silence.”

  “Why?”

  Arnow snorted at me. “Because someone with a lot of power and money decided to make it happen.”

  “The Consortium,” Price murmured.

  “I thought so.”

  The Consortium was a kind of mega power Tyet that operated deep below the radar. I hadn’t known they existed until Arnow revealed them to me. I frowned. “Thought so? Past tense?”

  Arnow got a look on her face I couldn’t interpret, but didn’t answer. “I’d kept copies of everything I could get before the case got shut down, and followed the local investigations as well as I could. They kept a pretty tight lid on things and it seemed to me their digging was shallow. I caught a break when four months ago, he started leaving messages.”

  “Messages?” Price repeated. “What kind?”

  “They looked like demented screeds. He’d leave pages covered with them, or scrawl them on walls and floors. Whatever was handy.”

  “What did they say?” I asked.

  “I’ve only seen three. But he’s obsessed with the Holy Mother, that he’d failed her and she’d turned her face away from him. He was going to earn back the Holy Mother’s blessing. He babbles about the ascent of man in heaven, of the gifts bestowed by the High One on the chosen people, and how he planned to bring the High One’s blessings to all.”

  “And the High One is God?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “Could be.”

  “You don’t think so?” Price asked.

  Again Arnow didn’t answer; instead, she changed the subject, much to my aggravation. I told myself to be patient. She must be getting to a point.

  “Savannah didn’t just keep a stable of girls. She kept boys, too. They learned a lot of the same skills we did. There was one who seemed to be a particular favorite of hers. Matthew was older than me—fourteen or fifteen when I got there. Like all the other boys, he was handsome as all hell.

  “Savannah used to take him on special trips. We never knew where. He worshipped the ground she walked on. He was her golden boy. He looked the part, too. Blond, tanned, muscular. Smart, too. She sent him off to college like everybody else. He came back right before I left for Vassar, but something was different. He’d changed. He’d hardened.

  “During college, I’d come back for summers and have to work the parties. The second year he and I hooked up on the sly. That lasted to the beginning of August, when we got found out. Savannah was furious. She sent me back to school. I never saw Matthew again. I thought maybe she’d killed him.” Her voice faded. She looked out the window, swallowing hard.

  The memory was clearly painful, and part of me wanted to reach out to her. The rest of me told me if I did, she’d chop off my hand. I kept both of them in my lap.

  After a minute, she continued. “I had such a crush on him. He made me feel—special. Like I mattered. He was confident and funny and always breaking the rules and getting away with it. He had a habit of sneaking into where he didn’t belong. He’d always leave something behind to prove he’d been there, like a secret signature.

  “Sometimes he’d carve it, sometimes he’d write it with a Sharpie marker. It looked like three wide Xs sitting sideways on top of each other.”

  “Like the XXX for porn?”

  She nodded. “Only tipped sideways.”

  She fell silent. I made myself wait a whole minute before I prompted her again.

  “What about the killer?”

  She sighed, looking upward and blinking, like she fought back tears. “That was his signature. The killer. He signed the screeds with it. He wrote it on the bodies. When I saw it, I knew it had to be Matthew, and he had to be working for Savannah, but I had no idea why or how she could be connected to the Consortium.” Arnow paused. “I hated her more than you can begin to imagine. I’ve spent every day of my professional life trying to figure out how to bring her down. I wanted to be the one to kill her.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, you can kill my father,” I offered.

  Price snorted, then looked at Arnow in the mirror. “So that’s when you decided to hunt him down?”

  “He needed to be stopped and nobody but me had any real idea of who he might be or his connection to Savannah, and she or someone else had clearly managed to short circuit the investigation.” Arnow rubbed her fingers over her lips. They trembled. “If Matthew’s discovered that she’s dead, who knows what he’ll do to the hostages. The nature of the murders says he’s unhinged. And then there’s my people. What’s he doing to them?”

  “They’re alive.” That much I could tell from looking at their trace. I hadn’t tried to get an emotional read on them. There wasn’t much point to knowing without being able to be right there to help.

  Arnow’s lips twisted in an attempt at a smile. “Alive. But in what condition? And for how long?”

  Since I had no good answer for that, I circled back to the big questions. “Why would Savannah want him to kill those people? And what’s up with all the religious stuff?”

  “I’ve wondered if the Holy Mother and the High One referred to Savannah.”

  “I can buy o
ne, but both?” Price asked.

  “Unless there’s another player we don’t know about.”

  Neither Price nor I responded. There could very well be another hundred players we didn’t know about.

  “If Savannah was behind the murders, she had a reason,” Price said. “Savannah was nothing if not ambitious and she didn’t let much get in the way of her goals.”

  “If?” Arnow laughed. “Nobody gets away from Savannah. He’s working for her or he’d be dead.”

  “When were you going to tell me about him?” I asked.

  “You didn’t need to know. All you had to do was find them. I’d take care of the rest.”

  Arnow clearly had a personal stake in this guy. Maybe she thought she could save him.

  “It’s not your fault,” Price said.

  Arnow threw herself back on her seat. “What’s not my fault?”

  “The killings.”

  She scoffed. “Of course they aren’t. I had nothing to do with them.”

  Price didn’t let it go. “You’re blaming yourself for getting caught with him way back when. You’re thinking Savannah punished him by turning him into a killer, and that it broke him.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “You don’t deny it.”

  She rubbed her hands over her face and scraped her fingers over her scalp. “The guy I knew couldn’t torture people this way. She did something to him. Twisted him somehow. This isn’t his fault.”

  “It’s not your fault, either,” I said.

  She gave me an unconvinced look, but didn’t say anything.

  “Is there anything else we need to know?” Price asked finally.

  “Nothing concrete.”

  He looked at her in the rearview. “But you’ve got a theory.”

  “I’m pretty sure he uses a mix of talented and untalented people in every murder. Usually the one who gets the Frankenstein body replacements is the normie. They found evidence of Sparkle Dust on his most recent victims.”

  “So what’s he trying to do?”

  Just the mention of SD made me cringe. Instantly addictive, it allowed people to experience a magical talent for the first time, or if the user already had a talent, a new one. With continued use—and everybody continued—the stuff turned you into a wraith. Your body faded from the outside in until you died. Almost no one came back from using it. No one that I knew of at all, except me and Taylor, who’d been force-fed the stuff.

  Then there was Josh, Taylor’s ex-fiancée. Like us, his kidnappers had forced him to take it. Unlike us, he’d ingested a lot more SD. Cass and Maya had done all they could to cure him, but I hadn’t seen him since the night we’d rescued him. The night he’d tried to kill me. Who knew if he’d managed to keep off the stuff?

  “I have no idea what Matthew’s doing or why,” Arnow said. “Is this some sort of twisted religious ceremony? Maybe satanic? Or something Savannah ordered him to do?”

  “Do you have any pictures?” Price asked.

  Arnow dug in her pocket and brought out her cell. She brought up her photo gallery and passed it up to me. I held the phone so Price could see and thumbed through them. There were only a few, and each one worse than the last. I had to look away after the first couple or I’d have been spewing the contents of my stomach all over the car.

  “Anything you’ve seen before?” Arnow asked.

  Price shook his head as he changed lanes. “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “When the investigation was live, the SAC didn’t share pictures. He didn’t want those getting into the papers. I got these from the local LEOs before they buttoned up.”

  “Fucking politics,” Price said with a knowing shake of his head.

  “You know better than anyone that corruption in law enforcement is high and you never know who you can trust,” Arnow said in a resigned voice. “We both were dirty. I still am.”

  “Sounds like you haven’t had much choice,” I said. I have no idea why I wanted to comfort her.

  “We all have choices,” she replied.

  WE FELL QUIET for a few miles.

  “Better start going more south,” I said as the trace bent a little more sharply. That was positive news. The closer we got, the quicker we got off target. “South and east.”

  “Valley Highway is close,” Arnow said.

  Price took the off-ramp. We passed through a few miles of industrial warehouses before the vista returned to businesses and houses. The recent snow made everything appear fresh and sparkling clean beneath the brilliant sun.

  Half an hour later, we hit a traffic jam, and I started twitching in my seat. Price reached over and laced his fingers through mine, but didn’t offer any reassurance. There wasn’t any. Every second that ticked by was a second the hostages and kidnapped agents didn’t have. Not real agents. Vigilantes. Bounty hunters. Arnow paid them with any money they found doing the job, and they collected any available rewards. I had a feeling she dipped into her savings to pay them, too. My guess is she had a healthy bank account, working for Savannah. Especially given the designer labels on her clothing.

  It really sucked to find out that under her ice-and-steel exterior, the iron maiden had a gooey center. Or at least a little warm blood and something resembling a heart. Made me start questioning my opinions of other people, like Dalton.

  We inched along for nearly forty-five minutes. An accident between a car and a pickup had closed two lanes. A pair of tow trucks were hooking up the crumpled vehicles by the time we passed by. A half dozen police cars and two fire trucks completed the scene.

  After that, we sped up a little, but still drove well under the speed limit. I pulled out my phone and texted Taylor a one-word question: Update?

  I stared at the screen but no immediate reply was forthcoming. Gritting my teeth, I dropped my phone in my lap and tapped impatient fingers on the arm of the door.

  Every few miles I checked the trace to see if we were still on track.

  “We need to go more east,” I said after we started passing the Denver Tech Center. The angle of the trace is shrinking.”

  Price nodded and started heading for the next exit, which was East Orchard Road. We drove past clumps of shops and a Starbucks, and into a vast landscape of cookie-cutter neighborhoods. Eventually we dead-ended into a broad swathe of open fields. On the other side, far in the distance, the march of houses resumed.

  “Which way?”

  “Straight,” I said.

  “South, it is,” he said and turned parallel to the field.

  “Do you recognize the area?” I asked Arnow, who leaned between the seats to see better.

  “Vaguely, but mostly from the maps. It’s Cherry Creek State Park. They’re close, right? Any idea how far away they might be?”

  I gave a little shrug.

  “But they’re here in Denver somewhere?”

  Arnow’s sound of frustration made me take pity on her. She was on edge, and I actually sympathized with her. Maybe because she wasn’t acting like her usual ice-bitch self. Maybe it was because I’d started not hating her.

  “It doesn’t work that way. There’s no way to tell how far away anybody is. I have to follow until I find them.”

  “Fucking useless,” she muttered, flinging herself back on her seat.

  Aaaand there she was again, the Agent Ice Bitch.

  Almost immediately she popped forward again. “What happens when you’re tracing someone who gets in a car or a train or an airplane. Or goes overseas? Or travels?”

  “The trace is still there. It’s like a ribbon following their track. It settles down onto the ground, no matter how high up in the air they are when they leave it or whether they cross water or quicksand or whatever. Travelling works pretty much the same way, the trace falling into
the real world once the person exits from dreamspace. It can take awhile to settle, but eventually I can follow.”

  “How long is awhile?”

  I just shrugged. I had no idea.

  She made a disgruntled sound.

  “So what you’re saying is, we’d better find them before they are travelled away, or it’ll take you awhile to find them, and also they might not be in Denver.”

  “He’s close. Otherwise the angles of the trace wouldn’t be narrowing. And I doubt he’s going anywhere. He’s got a place to hole up and he knows the area,” I said by way of offering comfort.

  “Unless he got bored or drunk or some voice in his head told him to get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “We know if he has the hostages—and given the ping-pong balls, I’m leaning toward believing he does—then he’d have to move at least ten people,” Price mused. “Which wouldn’t be easy to pull off. My bet is Savannah sent travellers whenever she wanted the hostages back in Diamond City. It’s not likely he could just order them up himself, which means he’d have to use ordinary transportation to move his captives. That means leaving a trace for Riley to follow now rather than later.”

  Price made sense, and Arnow nodded. None of us speculated on what Matthew might do to his captives when he learned of Savannah’s death.

  Every mile wound my stomach up tighter. Between worrying about what was happening in Diamond City and what we might find at the end of our journey, I thought my head might pop off.

  “Next time, fewer energy drinks,” Price said, glancing at me as I squirmed and fidgeted, checking my phone for texts every ten seconds.

  “What do you think is happening back in the city?”

  “I think that they are doing their jobs and that they’re too busy to report in,” he said, so calmly I wanted to kick him.

  “Or they’re all dead.”

  “Nobody’s dead.”

  “And you know that because?”

  “Your family is too stubborn and obnoxious to be dead, and even if they decided to start throwing themselves on bombs, Savannah’s Seedy Seven would stop them. They aren’t going to let anything happen to your family until you find the hostages and bring them home. Anyway, you know you’ve been checking their trace.”