by Chelsea Cain
Kick let her hair fall forward to cover the bruise on her forehead. “I thought I saw a snake,” she said.
She heard James stifle a giggle.
The cop leaned forward and for a moment Kick thought he’d recognized her. But a call came over his walkie-talkie and he glanced at it, distracted. “You need to move along, son,” he said to James.
“Yes, sir,” James said.
James pulled sharply into traffic, causing a gray Taurus to slam on its brakes behind them. Kick reflexively braced for impact, but the two bumpers missed each other by an inch. She smelled burnt rubber from the Taurus’s tires. James didn’t seem to even notice. She could hear the tick-tick of his right-turn signal, still on.
She put on her seat belt. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” James said, glancing in the rearview mirror.
At this point Kick wasn’t worried about James. She was worried about her paint job. “Your turn signal’s still on,” Kick said.
James rolled his eyes and flipped the signal off, accidentally turning the windshield wipers on first. “They found Mia Turner,” he said.
Kick reached over to plug her phone into the car charger. “I heard.” She glanced in the backseat, a nest of fur-coated pillows and dog toys. “Where’s Monster?” she asked.
“I told him you’d been murdered,” James said. “I told him you must have been murdered because you’d promised that you’d text every two hours and I hadn’t heard from you in eight.”
“I called,” Kick protested.
“Twenty minutes ago,” James said. “From the airport. Because you needed a ride.”
Kick resented his tone. She had needed a ride. But she had also called the first moment she could so he’d know she was okay. “I told you, my phone’s dead,” Kick said. “And I lost my charger when my backpack blew up.” She really did feel bad about making him worry. “I’m sorry you had to come get me. My wallet blew up, too, or I would have called a cab.”
She opened the glove box and dug through half a dozen survival knives and a box’s worth of loose bullets until she found a pair of sunglasses.
James looked like he was concentrating. “Your wallet and charger blew up in your backpack?”
It had seemed too complicated to get into over the airport pay phone.
“My backpack didn’t blow up,” Kick said. The sunglasses didn’t help: it was still too bright, like her pupils were a millimeter overdilated. “The house blew up,” she explained. “My backpack happened to be in it.”
By the time James steered them onto I-84, Kick had told him everything, sparing no detail and indulging in some pretty vivid ones having to do with her current opinion of John Bishop.
“The house had a box,” James repeated.
He was going forty miles per hour in the passing lane. It was the kind of thing that Kick might usually mention, but she knew he wouldn’t take it well right now.
“Are you sure?”
“I was in it,” Kick said. She hadn’t told James everything. She hadn’t told him about Beth.
The loose bullets in the glove box jangled. “What was it like?” James asked.
Kick could hear Beth’s voice in the dark, an echo of her own. “It was kind of nice,” she said. It sounded crazy. But she knew James would understand. She glanced over at him. “Except for the dead body and the bomb,” she added.
“Is that what happened to your head?” James asked.
“Can you see it?” Kick asked. “Is it bad?” She flipped down the sun visor and adjusted the mirror.
“It’s hideous,” James said.
Kick studied her reflection and beamed. The lump on top of her forehead was developing a faint purplish hue. Her face shimmered in and out of focus. Kick blinked.
For a moment she thought it was the mirror, that it needed cleaning or was warped and refracting poorly. But when she moved her eyes away from her reflection, she noticed that everything in her view seemed to have a halo, a ghost of itself.
“By the way, your friend John Bishop doesn’t exist,” James said. “You’d know that if you checked your messages.” He gave her a knowing smirk. “I know how to find people online. The guy doesn’t show up on any networking sites, he doesn’t have a PayPal account, he’s not on mailing lists, he doesn’t show up on any of the people-finding sites, he’s not on alumni lists.”
Kick was dubious. “You’re telling me there’s no one named John Bishop with a PayPal account?”
“There are half a million John Bishops with PayPal accounts. None of them him.” James took a deep breath. “This involves data mining automated agents,” he explained, “and a custom-designed neural network filtering algorithm, and my ingenious hack of the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud. Still interested?”
“Sorry, I spaced out,” Kick said. “What were you saying?”
“The point is, the results came back empty,” James said.
Kick was puzzling over that when she saw James do a double take in the rearview mirror. She turned her head just in time to see a gray Taurus slip out of sight behind a bus in the next lane. It looked like the car that James had cut off at the airport.
James’s breathing had quickened. He took a hand off the wheel and wiped the sweat off his palm onto the thigh of his pants.
“It doesn’t mean we’re being followed,” Kick said. James had paranoid tendencies under ordinary circumstances. She needed him undistracted, reliable, so she could be the crazy one.
“I know,” James said. But she saw his eyes dart back to the rearview mirror.
12
“THE HOUSE WAS ON Vashon Island,” Kick said. She sat cross-legged, Monster’s head in her lap.
James typed on his keyboard, staring at his center monitor. “He’s not listed on any property deeds for Vashon, or any of the surrounding islands,” he said.
“What about the Tesla?”
“We did that already,” James said. “He doesn’t match any listings for the Washington DMV. There are only three hundred Teslas registered in Washington, none of them under his name. Look, the filtering algorithm would have found this stuff.” He paused. “You could call Frank.”
“I’m not calling Frank,” Kick said. The front of her head hurt. She reached up for the ibuprofen on James’s desk, rattled a few into her hand, and knocked them back with a swallow of flat Mountain Dew. “I thought it wasn’t possible to delete someone from the Internet,” she said.
“It shouldn’t be,” James said. “Not like this.”
But if it were. Kick knew not to get her hopes up, but she couldn’t help it. If John Bishop could wipe his own identity off the Internet, then . . .
James read her face. “The Beth Movies are in a whole different category,” he said. “They’re hosted on file-sharing services. They’re traded between individuals. There are millions of copies.” He shrugged miserably. “If there was a way to get them down, I’d know about it. I’d have done it already.”
Kick knew he’d already spent thousands of hours trying. “Yeah,” she said, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice.
Something shook loose from Kick’s brain. “The boys,” she said.
“What?”
“He had photographs in his house, of two boys,” Kick said excitedly. “I think one of them was him. And the other one was maybe his brother. I think something happened to the brother. He disappears. There are all these pictures of the two of them, and then there are a few of Bishop, and he gets older, and the other boy isn’t there. Maybe that’s why Bishop is so interested in missing kids. Check the website.” She didn’t have to say which website. There was a time when Kick had spent more hours on the website for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children than anyone thought was healthy.
Maybe Bishop had found a way to scrub himself from the Internet, but if he had a missing brother, the brother’s picture would be in the database.
The homepage was a sea of faces and s
ad facts. Missing from . . . Missing since . . .
“What years?” James asked, opening a search field.
Kick realized she had no idea. The images were in generic locations: the beach, a park. The boys wore commonplace, conventional clothes. “They were color photographs,” Kick said, struggling to remember. “But could have been anytime in the last twenty years.” She did the math and reconsidered. “Or forty.”
“So between 1970 and now,” James said. He brought up the results, and sighed. “That’s 2,700 kids. Almost three hundred missing in Oregon alone.”
“Can you sort them? Like by gender and hair color?”
“Not on this website,” James said. “You know who can do that?” He looked at her pointedly. “The police.”
“Can’t you use your algorithm?” Kick asked.
“No,” James said. “I could write another one. Just give me ten hours and a truck of Mountain Dew.”
Kick massaged her throbbing temples. “So we’ll skim through them,” she said, trying to sound more upbeat than she felt.
There were 295 pages to look at, with nine faces per page. At first it went quickly. Kick moved her eyes from face to face, looking for a match to the image in her mind. Most of the pictures were school photographs. Some were snapshots. The babies looked up from high chairs or the lap of an adult. Some were forensic sketches. Those kids had been found, or at least their bodies had. It was their identities that were missing. Thirty pages in, the faces all started to look the same: babies, teenagers, girls, boys, black, white. “Stop,” Kick said, rubbing her eyes. She was so tired, she was starting to see double. She reached, absentmindedly, for James’s wire talisman. “Where did you find this thing, anyway?”
James plucked it from her hand. “I’ll do it,” he said, setting the little wire man back down in his place by the monitor. “I’ll sort them.”
“How?”
James reached for his Cthulhu mug. “With my brain.” He took a sip from the mug, clicked on his mouse, dragged a copy of one of the photographs to his other monitor, and dropped it in an open document. “Go walk the dog,” he said.
When Kick and Monster got back from the walk, James was still at it. Kick, woozy and sore, curled up with Monster on the couch and fell asleep.
The mechanical spitting sound of the printer woke her up. Monster was snoring softly with his tongue out, one ear twitching as he dreamed.
“How long was I out?” Kick asked, sitting up.
“Two hours,” James said. “Look at this.” He scooted back his chair so she could see the computer station. Kick blinked and her head swam a little. All three monitors were tiled with the faces of dark-haired missing boys. “I pulled all the boys who fit your description, between the ages of six and ten,” James said. “There are 190. Do you see the boy from Bishop’s photographs?”
“Give me a second,” Kick said, reaching for the ibuprofen again. She swallowed a pill as she scrutinized the faces on the screen, which seemed especially bright. Kick was struck by how different they all looked. Maybe it was their set of basic similarities that made their uniqueness stand out. Most Kick could dismiss right away. The neck was too long, the head the wrong shape, eyes too far apart, chin too pointed. But some of the faces made her pause. She had to look harder for differences. “No,” she said. “I don’t see him.” She pointed at one of the boys, a thin-armed, floppy-haired boy with a forced class-picture grimace. “But he’s close,” she said. She cocked her head, and studied another of the boys, also slight and dark, with pale skin and a hesitant expression. “And he kind of looks like him,” she said.
James had the self-satisfied smile he got when he’d figured something out. “Check the printer,” he said.
Kick reached across the desk and lifted a stack of paper from the printer tray. As she flipped through the still-warm pages, she recognized the two boys she’d pointed out, as well as others from James’s screens. Removed from the context of the others, the differences between these boys evaporated. None of these boys matched the boys in Bishop’s photographs, but they were indisputably similar. They could have all been brothers.
“I found ten of them,” James said, talking fast. “Look at the most recent, on the bottom.”
Sometimes James could see patterns that no one else could. Sometimes he could see patterns that weren’t even there. Kick riffled through the printouts to the last page.
Her skin goose pimpled. The boy she was looking at was eight years old. Caucasian. Dark hair. Light eyes. But this wasn’t the boy from Bishop’s wall. This was a picture of Adam Rice.
Kick carried the stack of images to the middle of the room, got down on her knees, and started spreading them in a circle on the floor around her. “Print Adam Rice’s investigation report,” she said. “Print everything we have: media reports, anything.” She studied the boys’ faces. She didn’t know what it meant or what she was looking for. What stood out, again, were the pieces that didn’t fit. Mia Turner. Josie Reed. If Adam Rice’s abduction had something to do with all these other boys, what did they have to do with them?
“Synchronicity,” Kick said.
“Events that reveal an underlying pattern,” James said. “How long did you see the Jungian?”
“Just once,” Kick said. “But she talked a lot about synchronicity. She kept trying to get me to see the meaningful coincidences in my life.” Kick stood, eyes roving the circle of images she’d made on the floor. “My dad bought me a puppy,” she said. “I let the puppy get out.” She glanced at Monster, still snoring on the couch. “I went after the puppy, and Mel was there, and he used the lost puppy to get me into his car. All those years later, when I couldn’t remember anything from before, I remembered Monster; I remembered enough that Frank was able to figure out who I was and get me home. Is it a meaningful coincidence that Monster was at the center of my abduction and my rescue? Is it a meaningful coincidence that my dad left us just months after I was reunited with the puppy he bought me? Or that I couldn’t remember my name but I remembered my dog’s?”
“We see what we want to see,” James said. “It’s called cognitive bias. Synchronicity has potential in fractal geometry; otherwise, it’s bunk.”
“But what if I’m right?” Kick asked. She hadn’t gotten caught up in a missing-child case in over a year. Maybe there was a reason that Adam Rice had broken her streak. She gazed down at the lost boys. “Maybe I’m supposed to save them.”
“That’s what’s called an error of inductive inference,” James said.
Kick wasn’t so sure. “I’ve spent the last ten years training myself to be stronger, and smarter—offensively and defensively,” she said. “Two kids are abducted a few hours away. John Bishop shows up. He has photographs in his house that send us down a rabbit hole, and we end up back at square one: Adam Rice. And nine other boys who fit the same profile.”
James scratched his head. “We’re looking at ten boys with recognizably similar features and comportment, abducted over a fifteen-year period, from locations all over the map.”
He was doing the math, she could tell, backtracking.
“I would probably come up with ten other groupings from a sample size this large,” he said. “It’s compelling, but it doesn’t tell us anything. We didn’t find the boy from Bishop’s photographs, did we?”
“He’s dead,” Kick said. It seemed like the obvious answer. If she was right, and Bishop’s brother had been abducted, then the only reason he would have been taken off the missing-child list was if he had been found. Dead. Or alive. Call it flawed inductive inference, but Bishop had lost someone. Kick had seen Bishop’s dead stare. Her mind went back to Adam Rice looking out the window in that satellite photo. It had been Adam Rice, hadn’t it?
“You’re doing it again,” James said. “You’re obsessing.”
“Give me some paper,” Kick said, standing up.
James hesitated, then pulled a quarter-inch stack of copy paper off the feed tray of the printer and wheel
ed backward in his task chair to hand it to her. “There’s not enough data to draw any conclusion.”
“I’m going to need more paper than that,” Kick said.
Two hours later Kick had plastered James’s apartment with notes. She’d made bulleted lists, circled words, drawn arrows, underlined, and used all caps—everything she knew about Bishop, about the missing kids, everything he’d told her, everything they’d found out. Some items she’d written in pencil, some in ink, some in purple marker. It was all color coded, though when James had tried to puzzle out her methodology, Kick wasn’t able to put it into words. She’d torn the copy paper into jagged pieces in order to make it stretch. They were laid out piecemeal on the floor, were taped on the wall, and covered the sofa cushions. Kick stood up and inspected the images of the boys that she’d arranged over James’s travel posters. See Italy! a poster of the Leaning Tower of Pisa commanded, over which Kick had taped a photograph of Adam Rice.
“And you think I’m messy,” James said.
“This isn’t a mess,” Kick said. “I know where everything is.”
“Remind me to talk to you about chaos theory sometime,” James said.
Monster lifted his head, yawned, then did a sort of pratfall off the couch onto some notes that Kick had fanned out on the rug. Dog hair floated in the air. Monster circled the notes once, flopped down on them, and closed his eyes. Kick rocked back on her heels. It had all been for nothing. She had thought that getting everything out of her head would help. But sitting in the center of the paper blizzard she’d created, nothing connected. There was no synchronicity.
“I’m going to bed,” Kick said. It was almost ten p.m.
“You can sleep on the couch,” James said. Change Your Thoughts and You Change Your World, advised the poster above his desk. This from a guy who thought the Jungians were full of shit.
Kick rubbed the back of her neck. Her head was throbbing. “No, thank you,” she said. She went over and kissed James on the cheek. His skin always tasted a little sour. It was probably from all the medications he took.
