by Eric Brown
She was smiling at him. ‘Hal! Good to see you. I meant to get in touch. I wanted to apologise about...’
He shook his head and said, ‘Kim ...’
‘... the other night.’ She stopped and stared at him. ‘What?’
He just shook his head, unable to find the words.
Something in Casey’s expression, an awful dawning realisation of dread, seemed to compound Halliday’s pain.
He had told himself that when the time came he would be able to tell her what had happened, but when he opened his mouth, now, all that emerged was a strangled sob.
She stood up, tipping the chair, and came to him.
‘Kim’s dead,’ he managed at last, and collapsed into her arms.
* * * *
Eleven
Halliday walked around the dell, unable to bring himself to look upon what it contained. He stood on the bank and stared down at the river, unseeing.
He felt a small, cold hand slip into his and squeeze. He put his arm around Casey and she looked up at him, smiled bravely. Her face was white with shock, her eyes raw with shed tears.
He was aware of activity behind him as the Scene of Crime cops, forensic and homicide detectives, moved around the dell.
‘What you said earlier, Casey ...’ he began.
She shrugged, the tiny movement of her scrawny shoulders beneath his arm at once pathetic and touching. ‘When?’
‘Back at the apartment. You said you wanted to apologise.’
‘For last night, Hal. I was being silly—’
He moved so that she was facing her and held onto her shoulders. ‘You wanted to apologise? Chrissake, Casey. I was a mindless bastard. You were right. I needn’t have hit King with the incapacitator. I don’t know. Perhaps I hated him for being with ...’ He could not bring himself to say her name.
She reached up and touched his hand. ‘We were both wrong, Hal. You for doing what you did to King, and me for going off like that.’
He pulled her to him and kissed her forehead. ‘You were right to do what you did, Casey. I was stupid, heartless.’
She smiled at him through eyes filmed with tears.
‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you’ve grown up a lot in one year. You look so much older, and so damned ...’ He had been about to say pretty, but stopped himself. ‘I feel like the past year’s been a waste, Casey. A hell of a waste.’
‘Hey, you can put it behind you. Take more cases. Throw yourself into your work, okay?’
He smiled at her. ‘Okay, counsellor. When I get to the bottom of this damned case, I won’t look back.’
He made to turn, look into the dell, but Casey restrained him. He held her hand and stared across the river at the parched grassland sweltering in the early afternoon heat.
On leaving Casey’s place that morning he’d contacted Jeff Simmons, an old friend from his NYPD days, and given a full statement.
Once he’d started speaking, going over what had happened minute by minute, he was amazed at how much he recalled, and with every objective statement of fact came the painful freight of recapitulated emotion.
Halliday heard a throat being cleared behind him. Jeff Simmons joined them, nodded at Casey and looked Halliday in the eye. ‘Hal, if you’d care to come with me ...’
Casey looked from Halliday to the Lieutenant. ‘If you want, Hal, I’ll go and do the identification...’ She shrugged. ‘If that’s okay with you.’
Jeff was rubbing his jaw. ‘There’s only one problem, Casey,’ he said, and glanced at Halliday with an odd, almost suspicious, expression. ‘There’s nothing to identify.’
Halliday felt his vision swim. He pushed past Jeff and stared down into the dell. The grave where he had found Kim, and next to it the grave where he had seen Anastasia Dah shot dead, were exposed to the light of the day and empty; a third grave - Suzie Charlesworth’s, he had presumed - was also unoccupied.
Casey took his arm and, accompanied by Jeff, they walked into the dell. Halliday was aware of the Scene of Crime squad and the forensic team, ranged around the natural amphitheatre like a redundant Greek chorus, staring down at him.
He paused before the shallow grave where, just hours before, he had held the body of Kim Long.
‘Nothing,’ Jeff Simmons said. ‘Not even blood traces. But we’ll conduct tests to confirm that.’ He stared at Halliday. ‘Hal, I don’t know how to say this ... But are you sure about what you saw?’
His voice caught in his throat. ‘They were here . . .’ He pointed to the empty graves. ‘I saw the guy shoot Dah. Then I found—’
‘Okay, Hal,’ Casey said, squeezing his arm.
‘So how do you explain...’ Jeff gestured at the empty grave.
‘What do you think? They moved the bodies, obviously. I got away, didn’t I? You don’t think they’d leave the bodies, once I knew they were buried here?’
Jeff pulled a ‘maybe/maybe not’ face.
‘The nano-receiver,’ Halliday said, feeling relief. ‘It’s in my car, back in Manhattan. It’ll lead us straight to wherever her body is.’
Jeff nodded. ‘I’ll get someone onto it.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘You spend a lot of time in VR these days...’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Hal,’ Jeff said, and his expression was pained, ‘you ever heard of engramatic hallucinations?’
‘Yeah, sure I have. But I know what I saw, and it was no hallucination.’ He thought of Eloise, his dead sister, and the hallucination of her that had haunted him immediately after his first VR experience.
But he had held Kim in his arms, felt the weight of her body...
A car drew up and a uniformed sergeant climbed out and gestured down to Jeff Simmons. The big cop climbed from the dell, panting, and spoke with the sergeant.
Halliday turned to Casey. ‘I know what I saw, Casey.’ Even to his own ears, he sounded desperate.
She reached up and touched his cheek. ‘I know you did. They came back and moved the bodies, like you said. I believe you.’
Jeff was nodding at what the sergeant was telling him. He stared down at Halliday.
‘Christ, what now?’ Halliday said.
Jeff returned, negotiating the incline in a series of sidesteps. ‘They just got back from the house where you said you saw Anastasia Dah,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Not a thing, no beds, no medical equipment...’
‘So they’ve moved everything in the house. They had plenty of time.’
‘Or maybe you hallucinated the house, too?’ He reached out and took Halliday’s arm. ‘You were a cop, Hal. You know how this must look from where I stand, right?’
Halliday shook his head. ‘I know what I saw.’
‘Let’s go over the facts again. You were working on a missing person’s case. You were looking for this kid—’
Before Halliday could argue that he’d been over the facts half a dozen times already, a cop appeared on the ridge overlooking the dell and waved down at them. ‘Sir! We’ve found something.’
Halliday looked at Casey and hurried up the incline.
The cop was waiting for them on the edge of the lifeless forest. He gestured through the trees. ‘About a thousand metres west,’ he said. ‘A body.’
Jeff Simmons led the way through the trees, Halliday following with Casey by his side. Her hand found his, squeezed as if with reassurance.
Two minutes later they came to a knot of forensic scientists and Scene of Crime cops gathered in a small clearing. A couple of sniffer dogs sat on their haunches, pink tongues lolling. The group parted to let Simmons through.
Halliday stared down at the mound of earth. Emerging from the loam, half-buried, was a single red rose.
Two cops were digging with hand-trowels, uncovering a body. Halliday watched the operation, Casey leaning against him and observing the exhumation with a sour expression.
Halliday braced himself as a head emerged from the crumbling subsoil, a bullet hole marking its right temple.
Je
ff looked at Halliday. ‘Recognise?’
It was the black guy he’d shot. But he was sure, thinking back and re-running the incident in his mind, that he hadn’t shot the guy through the head.
He nodded. ‘He was with Charles and the guy in the blue suit.’
Jeff regarded the body as the forensic team began an examination. ‘You said that when these guys came after you, you fired, right?’
‘Sure I fired. What do you think I did, threw stones?’
‘You think you might’ve hit this guy?’
‘Listen, Jeff. I admit, I shot him. I even heard his cries as he went down. If I’d caught him in the temple, he wouldn’t have been able to utter one damned word. And I didn’t fire again until blue-suit came after me.’
A scientist looked up. ‘The shot that killed him was fired at close range, sir. He was also shot in the upper arm.’
Jeff nodded. He looked at Halliday. ‘You still have your automatic?’
Halliday stared at his friend. ‘You don’t think I... ?’
‘Hal, I gotta cover every possibility. You know that.’
He gestured to a forensic scientist who took Halliday’s automatic and placed it in a sterilised container.
He heard a shout from through the woods. ‘Over here!’
They moved further into the forest, to where a knot of forensic scientists gathered about a barking dog. Someone pulled it away to let the digging team through.
Halliday hung back, Casey next to him, gripping his hand. He had a terrible presentiment that this time the body they would unearth would be Kim’s. The odd thing was that, though he knew he had held her in his arms that morning, he did not want the fact of her death to be confirmed.
Jeff Simmons glanced back at him from where he knelt beside the grave. ‘Dah,’ he reported.
He stood and joined Halliday and Casey.
‘So now you believe me, Jeff?’
‘I never disbelieved you, Hal. I just had to be sure.’
Halliday felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to be away from the dead woods before Kim’s remains were found. ‘I’m outta here, Jeff. Is there a car—?’
‘I’ll drive you back to the city, Hal. I’ll contact you for further questioning as and when that’s necessary, okay?’
They rode back to Manhattan in an unmarked cop car, Halliday relieved that the questioning was over for a while. He went through what he’d experienced that morning, relived every second of the two hours from arriving at the house to escaping from the guy in the blue suit. Okay, so he’d suffered hallucinations in the past - but Eloise had never been as real as what had happened to him that morning. He’d never held his dead sister’s phantom in his arms, for Chrissake. This morning he’d felt the weight of Kim’s body in his embrace, experienced again the keening agony of knowing that she was dead.
He closed his eyes and pulled Casey to him.
He must have dozed. He awoke with a start at the sound of a voice. ‘Where you want dropping, Hal?’ Jeff Simmons asked. They were motoring through Harlem on Fifth Avenue.
He looked at Casey. ‘Where’s Kim’s apartment?’
‘Hal...You shouldn’t—’
‘I need to look around, see if I can find anything.’
‘Okay, but I’m coming with you.’ She leaned forward and gave an address off East 86th Street.
Five minutes later the car pulled up outside a five-storey apartment block in Yorkville. Jeff turned in the driver’s seat. Halliday made to get out. ‘Hal, I’ll be in touch, okay?’
‘Sure, Jeff. I’ll contact you if I come up with anything.’
‘Likewise. Take it easy, okay?’
Halliday nodded, not particularly enjoying the look of concern on the cop’s face.
He climbed from the car and followed Casey across the sidewalk. He showed his ID to the doorman and rode the elevator to the third floor.
He leaned against the mock-timber panelling and massaged his eyes.
Casey was watching him. ‘You okay, Hal? You sure you want to go through with this? Why not some other day, huh?’
‘I need to find out who did that to her, Casey. I can’t waste time because I happen to feel like shit, okay?’
Casey shrugged. ‘Just thinking of you,’ she whispered.
He mimed a right hook to her chin. ‘I know you are, and I appreciate it, okay?’
They alighted on the third floor and Casey led the way to Kim’s apartment. Halliday swiped the lock with six of his pass-cards before the door clicked open.
He hesitated, for no more than a second, then pushed open the door and stepped inside.
It might have been the apartment of a stranger, for all that it reminded him of his ex-girlfriend. She had left most of her possessions - the few pieces of furniture she’d scavenged from the Salvation Army store - in the loft above the office when she’d walked out, taking only toiletries and clothing.
She’d done well for herself since then - no more sale purchases from the Salvation Army store. The five-piece suite looked brand new, along with the plush throw rugs and expensive lamp stands.
He stood in the middle of the big lounge and looked around. The furnishings might not have reminded him of Kim, but the strategic placement of everything in the room certainly did. He saw wind chimes hanging in the northwest, the picture of a sunrise on the south wall...and he could not prevent a sore tightness burning his throat like a draught of acid. Kim had been obsessed with feng shui; she had never entered a room or building without whispering to Halliday how she could improve the energy flow, the chi, to bring about prosperity, health and happiness to the owner. He wondered how she would have squared her obsessional quest for good fortune with what had happened to her in the forest north of Nyack.
He swore to himself. Strange, but why was he angry at her for going and getting herself killed?
He moved to a shelf above a heater. A line of pix showed Kim with friends and a couple of guys. There were no photographs or holo-cubes of Kim and him.
What the hell had he expected, he asked himself.
‘So,’ Casey said. She was standing by the door, watching him. ‘What’re we looking for?’
He stirred himself. ‘I don’t know. Letters. Pictures. A diary.’
Casey smiled. ‘Kim never kept a diary.’
‘She didn’t? Well, whatever. Anything that might point to contacts you might not’ve suspected she had. Anything to do with a silver-haired guy. Or something called the Methuselah Project.’
‘The what project?’
‘Methuselah,’ he said. ‘A guy in the Bible who lived a long time. It was something she was into with Dah and Charles. God knows what. Okay, where do we start?’
Casey went through the little paperwork Kim had accumulated, and then her possessions, knick-knacks and clothes. Halliday overrode the password to her personal com and accessed her letter file. He found scads of business letters but nothing of relevance, and not the slightest hint of anything about any Methuselah Project.
‘Hey, Hal,’ Casey called from another room. ‘You know she had a jellytank?’
He looked up from the com. ‘News to me.’ He stopped reading through Kim’s letters, a lump in his throat at her quaint use of the English language, and considered.
A jellytank?
He stood and moved to the bedroom.
A red dress lay across the bed. Halliday picked it up, crushed the material in his hand. She’d had the same dress, or one very much like it, when she had lived with him.
The sudden vision of her, standing with the dress pinned against her naked body as she asked for his opinion, flashed into his head.
He dropped the dress on the bed. Casey was leafing through an old photograph album. ‘Some pictures here of when Kim was a little kid, Hal.’
He nodded. ‘I know. I’ve seen them.’ They had traded histories, and gone through their respective albums, shortly after she had moved in with him. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the pix of Kim as a cute kid just ye
t.
The jellytank was a fashionable Mantoni model, all streamlined curves and silver flashing - as if the damned thing had been modelled to fly through the air.
He activated the tank and accessed the history file.
He stopped, his hand poised above the touchpad, and stared at the blank screen.
