“I’ve been worried about her,” he admitted. “If she was still on Gayle Street… Can you check into it if I give you a description?”
“Do you really want to know?” she asked him. “If it helps, tell yourself she bought a coffee to go, and was off of the street before the bombs went off.”
“The one who got away,” he grinned. “Literally.”
“Exactly.”
“I want to know,” he said, his surface colors taking on a stony resolution. “I don’t think I can let it go—it’s one of those things that’ll eat at me.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Rachel promised. “Maybe she was in one of the coffee shops that wasn’t bombed out.”
Meisner’s colors shifted to a confused orange-yellow. “Weren’t all of the shops on that part of Gayle Street destroyed?”
“Most of them. He missed a few.”
“Huh,” Meisner said, sinking back into the bed. “I wonder why he didn’t hit those.”
THIRTEEN
“YOU SURE YOU WANT TO go in here?”
“No,” Rachel replied, forcing herself to not peek inside the coffee shop from the other side of its locked front door. “Pretty sure I don’t, actually.”
It was still three hours from sunrise, and the buildings on the west end of Gayle Street were cast in black shadows. The fourteen blocks that had been affected by the bombings were still closed to traffic, pedestrian and otherwise, but these had been end-capped by two additional blocks: explosions weren’t clean, and debris and damage tended to travel. There was a single coffee shop which fell in this dead zone. It stood on the far side of Santino’s ruined bookstore, untouched by the bombs but still abandoned.
Hope Blackwell stood at Rachel’s back, her face turned towards the street as if she was expecting them to be attacked from behind, while Phil struggled with the front door. With the exception of the city cops standing watch down the road, they were the only living things in sight. The Forensics teams were still concentrated along the east end of the incident, and the paparazzi and other ghouls who haunted the crowd control barriers were down where the action was. That part of Gayle Street had portable generators and high-intensity floodlights. The three of them had a single portable scene lamp with a dying battery. Rachel tried to keep the light steady for Phil, as he jammed key after key into the security lock.
“Damn!” Phil snarled, dropping another key back on the ring.
“The lock’s a Schlage,” Hope said. “Are you trying just the Schlage keys, or all of them?”
Phil’s colors glazed over and he glared at Hope. “They’re copies of copies of copies,” he said, rattling the heavy ring at her. “The MPD got the originals from the store owners in case we needed to enter a building, and they’ve been handing the copies out like candy. I don’t know if any of these keys actually work.”
“Right,” Rachel said. She handed the lamp to Hope, then picked up a good-sized chunk of broken pavement and chucked it at the store’s front window. The window collapsed in on itself in a crash.
“It was already cracked,” she said to them as she kicked out the remaining glass from the bottom of the panel. “And I’m perfectly fine standing around in the dark, but if you guys want to run down the battery while you play with your keys…”
“We’re good,” Phil said.
Rachel shimmied through the opening and let the others in through the front door.
“Don’t move around too much,” she told them. “I need to scan the floor.”
“Stinks,” Phil said, covering his nose.
“Five-plus days of curdled milk,” Hope said. “Power’s been out.”
Five-plus days of dust, Rachel thought as she knelt by the entrance. Fourteen blocks, but three gas main shutoffs… I hope I’m not wrong about this. We’re running out of ideas.
Her lizard brain had scratched her awake at two in the morning, funneling numbers into her head. The math hadn’t added up. If each gas line was loaded for five blocks, why had only fourteen been affected? Shouldn’t the explosions have covered the full fifteen?
She had threatened her lizard brain with everything from whiskey to a hundred milligrams of diphenhydramine, but the math kept coming. In fact, new numbers started to wedge themselves into the equations. The two murdered officers, dead for nearly three days before they were found…
And then came the question Meisner had asked in the hospital—a simple “I wonder why”—and Rachel found herself unable to go back to sleep because those shops were left standing. She had finally dragged herself from her nice warm bed and started making calls.
Santino was nowhere to be found (and Zia had a privacy notice up), so she had left a message for him to meet her at the west end of Gayle Street as soon as possible. Then a call to Sturtevant; the Chief of Detectives might have been used to phone calls in the witching hours, but he had been excruciatingly clear about how he felt about being woken on a hunch. Still, he had arranged for a member of the bomb squad and a paramedic to join her, just in case. Phil dropped by her house to pick her up within five minutes, and neither of them were surprised when the paramedic turned out to be Hope.
Rachel walked into the middle of the coffee shop. She had decided not to explore the space until she was standing inside of it; she missed too much when she relied on her scans instead of walking the scene in her own body.
The air inside the store was stale and autumn-cold, and also somehow empty. The power was off, the only working electronics the odd battery-operated flashlight, the abandoned radio on a shelf in the back room. The digital ecosystem that defined her waking hours had been shaken to its roots; she needed to throw her mind a full block to the south before she pinged off of the nearest working streetlight.
She traced the gas lines from the front of the shop to the rear of the building. These lines were different from those in the building where she had fallen through the floor. There, the lines had entered through the basement; here, they came in through the back wall.
Rachel moved her sixth sense away from the utilities and into the room. Her scans caught on a trash can, full of flies and mold, and churning with life. She winced and shifted her attention to the floor. Nothing. Could have sworn…
Her scans caught on the light tracing of footsteps through the dust behind the counter.
Bingo.
“Phil? You’re sure nobody’s been in this building since Gayle Street was locked down?”
“You saw that key ring. Of course I’m not sure,” he said. “But my best guess? Yeah, we’re the first ones in here. This store isn’t a priority site. It’s out of the blast zone but within the lockdown, and no one’s had the time to check for structural integrity yet.”
“Okay,” she said, kneeling. “Might want to call for a Forensics team, then. Someone else has been in here within the past five days.”
“Let’s hold off on that,” Phil said. “If we are dealing with a potential bomb site, I’ll have to secure it first anyhow.”
“I can tell when you’re lying,” Rachel said, grinning at him to show no harm done.
Phil blushed pink. “It’s a wild goose chase, Penguin.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe. But try to walk where I walk, just in case.”
The three of them crept through the store to the back room in a single line. “There,” Rachel said. “What do you see?”
Hope crouched low. “More dust?”
“Drywall dust,” Phil said, his colors beginning to brighten. “Someone’s busted up an interior wall.”
“Recently, too,” Rachel said, noting how the white layer of drywall dust had fallen on top of the ashy residue that had covered all of Gayle Street since the bombing.
The source of some of the dust was a roundish indentation about five feet above the floor. “This was caused by hard contact with someone’s head,” Hope said.
Rachel, who had seen Hope in a fight, didn’t question what she considered to be a professional opinion. Instead, she kept walking to
wards the back of the store where a trail of dried liquid droplets fluoresced as organic.
“Hope?” she called. “Can you take a look at this?”
“Oh, man.” The other woman knelt a second time, and brought the light as close as she could to the droplets without touching them. “Blood. Mostly skeletonized around the edges… Whatever injury caused this probably happened at least two or three days ago.”
“There’s a piece of pipe against the wall,” Rachel said, pointing. “There’s more blood on it, plus some hair.”
“Yummy,” Phil said. “I think I’ll call Forensics now.”
Phil stepped outside to make the call in peace; the Agents had learned it was harder to ignore distractions without an actual phone. Somehow, an object pressed against the ear helped ground the conversation.
“Some spatter up the wall,” Hope said, following the spray of blood with the light of the lamp. “And by the back door… Rachel, is that blood?”
Rachel nodded. A black stain had spread, thick and noxious, across the floor and towards the drain in the center of the room. Neither of them felt the need to mention that whoever had lost that much blood was undoubtedly dead. Someone had walked through the pool, leaving a crisp trail of footprints across the back of the room.
“What happened here?” Hope asked softly.
“I think this is where the two cops were killed,” Rachel told her. “The timeline’s right.”
“Why would they be in this store?” Hope asked as she set the lamp on top of a nearby rack of old pastries. A swarm of flies rose in protest, and she waved them aside. “This block wasn’t part of the bombing.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said, following the gas lines again. “But it should have been… Hah! C’mere,” she said to Hope. “Take a look at this.”
Hope tilted the head of the lamp towards Rachel, and joined her at a utility panel large enough to be a good-sized doggy door. “What am I looking at?”
Rachel removed a pen from her suit coat pocket, and used it to swing the panel door open. A faint smell of gas wafted out. Inside was a cluster of utility junctions. One of these, a copper tube only slightly thicker than the pen itself, had its two exposed ends hanging free in midair where it had been cut in the center.
“See?” Rachel pointed to the open ends of the copper tube with the pen. “The gas line was pinched and cut, probably with a pair of heavy-duty pliers. Whoever did this was working in a hell of a hurry. I’d bet they were removing one of those gas storage cylinders.”
“Oh shit,” Hope whispered.
“Your guess that the blood’s a few days old seems right,” Rachel said. “Gas dissipates pretty quickly. I think any major leakage would have taken about that long to clear out if he had locked the room up behind him.”
“Why didn’t he blow this place, too?” Hope said.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “If it were me, I would have punctured the canister and chucked a lit cigarette at it on my way out of the door. Maybe there was equipment failure. Maybe the cops interrupted him, he killed them, and then he panicked.”
“Or maybe he knew that if the bodies were found here, they’d pick the place apart.”
“Interesting theory,” Rachel said, sweeping her scans out again. “But now that we know what happened, it’ll be picked apart anyhow.”
She went over the bloody footprints, her mind lightly brushing over the ridges which separated the dried blood from the dust. In and out, over and through, a pattern she had seen before…
God damn it.
“What’s wrong?” Hope asked her.
Rachel glanced up at her; she didn’t realize she had spoken aloud. “Shoes.”
“The footprints?”
“No, the whole… Okay, sorry, this might be wordy but I need to talk it out.”
“Shoot.”
“Here’s the thing about shoes,” Rachel said to Hope. “In the early days of forensics, shoes were a pretty useful tool. You could tell a lot about a person based on the type of shoe they wore, how they wore it… Sometimes you could break a case if you matched a print to a wear pattern.
“These days?” she said, casting her scans to retrace the light holes in the dust. “Basically you’ve either got very poor people who wear their shoes until the soles fall off, or not-very-poor people with closets full of them. Manufacturing methods help—most makers will stamp their brand into everything, and it’s become so cheap to innovate and produce a rubber sole they can make a new design for every shoe—but there’s a tradeoff to that because mass manufacturing means mass manufacturing. Cheap to buy, cheaper to ditch, especially if your average murderer has turned on a television set in the last fifteen years and realizes his blood-covered shoes are a one-way ticket to the needle.”
“Your Texas is showing,” Hope said, grinning.
“No, we’d still hang them in Texas if we could,” Rachel said. “But my point is that shoes are nearly useless in an investigation, unless…”
“Unless?”
Rachel was quiet for a moment. “Unless the person wearing them got them from the military.”
“Oh hell,” Hope muttered, her kaleidoscope of colors catching gray along the edges.
“It gets worse,” Rachel told her. “Did you know there’s no such thing as standard military-issued footwear these days? Or,” she amended. “I should say instead that you always get something when you go through boot camp, but the days of every soldier wearing the same style of shoe are over. The military’s got multiple suppliers, multiple types of footwear… Soldiers like me from hoity-toity suburban families never bothered with military issue, either. Our parents usually shipped us something nice which matched our ballistics vests each Christmas.”
“So these footprints aren’t… I’m not following you.” Hope said, staring down at what she couldn’t see.
“Well,” Rachel said. “There’s an exception to every rule. With the military and shoes, it’s Special Forces uniforms.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yup. Everybody’s supposed to match when they go on missions. Part of their outfit is a pair of top-of-the-line combat boots. Anybody can buy them, but only a very few people outside of Special Forces wear them. Unless they’re civilians with dreams of grandeur,” she corrected herself. “Military guys know better. They strut around in those boots, and they’re treated as though they’re pretending they’ve earned them. Usually doesn’t end well.”
“So we’re hoping these footprints were left by a civilian?”
“That, and we’re also hoping the bullet stuck in the cinderblock doesn’t match Special Forces issue,” Rachel said, pointing to the far wall.
Hope tilted the light to shine on the pocked hole. “There’s no blood around the hole,” she said.
Rachel nodded. “Looks like a stray. I don’t know why they didn’t bother to dig it out of the wall when they left; cinderblock can wreck a bullet, but Forensics will still be able to get something from it.”
“I don’t like this place,” Hope said, glancing warily around the room like a rabbit in an open meadow. “Something is not right here.”
“I’m with you,” Rachel said. The hairs on the back of her neck were itching. “I think we should wait outside.”
They left the room as quickly as possible, backtracking through the shop until Hope could close the front door behind them. They kept walking until they found themselves standing in front of the stationery store across the street, as far from the coffee shop as they could get.
“I hate bombs,” Hope muttered under her breath. “Cannot stand the ticky things.”
Rachel grinned at her. “Me too.”
“You’re both nuts,” Phil said as he rejoined them. “A bomb is more predictable than a person. I’d take an unstable bomb over an unstable psychopath any day.”
“What about unstable psychopaths wearing combat boots?” Rachel asked, and told him her theory.
Phil’s colors brightened and dimmed in turns. “This is
the best lead we’ve had yet,” he said. “But…”
Rachel shook her head. “It wasn’t us.”
“Rachel…”
“It’s not,” she insisted. “The evidence can point wherever the hell it wants. There is no motive big enough for us to do this to ourselves.”
A major advantage of finding a smaller crime scene within a larger one was the response time. The nearest Forensics unit arrived within minutes, a team from the FBI that had just finished processing a site three blocks up. Rachel caught sight of a familiar core color from within their group. “Stay here for a sec,” she said to the others, and jogged back across the road.
“Campbell,” she called to the man with the pea green core. “Got a minute?”
His conversational colors brightened when he saw her. “Peng? They said an Agent had found the site. You?”
“Yeah,” she said. She and Santino had assisted Special Agent Campbell on a bank robbery a few weeks back. He was a good man, and the Forensics team he led was solid and thorough. His voice reminded her of Laurence Olivier’s; Campbell tended to ramble, and she didn’t mind at all. “I came down here on a hunch. If I had thought it was a real lead that would pan out, I probably would have waited until morning.”
“No,” Campbell chuckled. “We’re thrilled. We needed some real evidence.”
She nodded. Everyone working the Gayle Street scene was wearing the same gray across their uniform blues, but Campbell’s team had shaken most of it off. Phil had been right: everyone had needed a new lead. Desperately.
“Do you need our help?” Rachel said, indicating Phil and Hope across the street. OACET had the authority to freeze Campbell out, but Rachel was well aware Campbell and his team were more qualified to process the scene.
“It’s better if we work it alone,” Campbell hedged, his colors going a slightly-sick green as he thought about them clomping through his near-pristine crime scene. “Unless you want to watch?”
“That’s not necessary,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “A note that OACET found it would be nice. For the record, I was the one who broke the front window, and the paramedic and I walked into the back room to check if anyone was injured.”
Maker Space Page 19
