[A Thousand Faces 01.0] A Thousand Faces

by Janci Patterson

  We sometimes sent things by mail, always from post offices so that our original location couldn't be tracked. "Can you do a search for me?" I asked. "See if you can find any more emails that reference Asylum."

  Kalif nodded. "Does that name mean anything to you?"

  I shook my head. "No, you?"

  "Never heard of them."

  "Your mom sent them something in the mail last week, a few days before my parents disappeared. Then she deleted the email."

  Kalif took a moment to respond. "There aren't any more emails using that name. What's the domain name?"

  I brought the laptop over to the desk so that Kalif could check the data on the email in question, and cross-reference it with Aida's inbox.

  "There's nothing here," Kalif said. "Let me see if there're any more deleted emails from further back."

  Kalif pulled up a few more exchanges, all similarly vague. How is the project? Asylum asked. We've found evidence, Aida replied. Give us more time.

  "That's odd," I said.

  "Why?"

  "She doesn't routinely delete emails from clients, right? Or that pile of deleted emails would have been a lot bigger."

  "True," Kalif said.

  "And she seems to be giving them information over email, but there are pieces missing. Like the address that she was going to send the profiles to."

  Kalif nodded. "It's possible she was also talking to them over the phone."

  "But if she got the address over the phone, she would have told them these things, too."

  "Maybe it's in the mission logs," Kalif said. "Let me check there."

  But if it was going to be there, I imagined Kalif would already know about it. If Aida hadn't logged the mission, that meant she was hiding something from my parents. Or Kalif.

  Kalif swore. "I'm not finding anything," Kalif said. "What the hell is going on?"

  I leaned toward him. "Can you trace the emails to the source?"

  "Of course I can," he said. "Let me work."

  While he did, I looked over that deleted mission again, searching for any connection to Asylum. I couldn't find anything. Maybe these files had gotten deleted accidentally. Those things happened, sometimes, whatever Kalif thought about his infallible records.

  "Ugh," Kalif said. "They're masking the origin. This is going to take a while."

  "Okay," I said. "Put that on hold. Let's try to piece this together with what we have."

  Kalif spun around on his stool. I sat on the edge of his bed, facing him. I'd never seen him look so grumpy. "I'm sorry about your files," I said. "Really."

  He sighed and shook his head. "It's not that. How could I not have known about this?"

  I set the laptop aside. "We haven't proven anything."

  Kalif planted his elbows on his knees, his fingers knotted together. "But my parents had something to do with those vans. Something they deliberately hid from me. How did they think I wouldn't find it? Do they think I'm stupid?"

  "They think we're kids," I said. "Which amounts to the same thing."

  He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, well. They also think when you delete a digital record, it's gone. In that way, they're just like most of the rest of the world."

  I sat on the edge of the bed. He needed a lead. We both did. "Let me ask you this," I said. "If your mom sent something through the mail, she'd have kept a copy of it, right?"

  He thought about that. "Probably," Kalif said. "But I didn't find anything on the server."

  "She wouldn't put it on the server if she didn't want you to see it."

  "Right," Kalif said.

  "So where would she keep it?" I asked. "Paper files she didn't want you to see. Where would they be?"

  Kalif dropped his hands to the side. "In her office."

  I shook my head. "She's been letting me sleep in that office. We can look there, but if she had files she didn't want me poking through, she'd have moved them."

  "Their bedroom, then. I never go in there."

  I nodded. "So that's where we need to look."

  We were both quiet for a moment. We were about to cross a line—one we wouldn't be able to step back across easily. It was one thing to investigate behind Aida and Mel's backs, and quite another to investigate them.

  "They're both out, now," Kalif said. "They said they were going to check on Circom."

  "If Circom is a diversion," I said, "who knows where they really went." Next time, we could try following them, but for today it was too late.

  Kalif stood, his palms slapping his legs on the way up. "I'll watch the front of the house. You go up and see what you can find."

  I stood, too, hesitating by the end of his bed. "Are you sure?"

  Kalif rubbed his forehead. "Yeah," he said. "Do it."

  I wanted to hug him, to make him tell me that things were going to be okay, but he was already headed up the stairs. And that was smart; his parents wouldn't be gone forever. So I followed him up.

  Kalif sat in the living room, watching out the window for Mel and Aida's cars. He'd also be there to stall them while I extracted myself from their room, if necessary.

  I moved up the stairs, alone. I started in their office-turned-my-bedroom, looking through the closet and desk drawers. They'd obviously moved a lot of things out, as most of the spaces were empty. That made practical sense, if they were turning the room over to me, but was also unfortunate. We had no way to know what else they'd been hiding.

  I hesitated outside their bedroom door, checking the doorframe. No wires were visible from the outside, though if I were going to alarm a bedroom door with a visible mechanism, I'd have put the device on the inside. Better yet, I'd remove the door frame and carve a place for it inside the wood. I checked the frame, but the paint wasn't disturbed. I fetched a flashlight from Kalif's bedroom and shone it through the crack, looking for sensors, but didn't find any.

  I took a deep breath, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

  I froze in the hallway, half expecting an alarm, though if there was one, it would almost certainly be silent, routing alerts to their computers or cell phones. I checked the inside of the door frame, but it was equally clean. If Aida or Mel had installed sensors here, I couldn't find them. I scanned the room for cameras or motion detectors, but there weren't a lot of places in this room to hide things. It looked like a hotel—clean, fluffy bedspread made over a king-sized mattress, nightstands with lamps, but no adornments, and a natural wood bookshelf with photos of skylines and beaches, but, of course, no family photos.

  I started with the closet, checking the boxes at the top and the shoe racks at the bottom. That was the only sign that shifters lived here; the closet and dressers were both filled to bursting with clothing in all sizes, appropriate for both genders. In a normal house, there was no way this wardrobe would be in use by just two people. Twenty might be pushing it.

  In the bottom dresser drawer I found many of the things Aida and Mel had moved out of the office: pads of paper, stacks of bills in several different names, pens and pencils, staplers and tape. But no records, no files. Those were all supposed to be kept digitally, after all. That's what they'd told my parents when we first starting working together. Digital encryption was safer than paper.

  I spun around, despair clogging my windpipe. If there was nothing here, then what? I could confront them, but without evidence, they'd only lie. There had to be something else here.

  I stepped up to the bed—the last unchecked piece of furniture in the room. I pulled up the edge of the comforter, and that's when I saw it. A locked briefcase, tucked up under the foot of the bed. Exactly the sort of place I'd keep paper files, if I wanted them to remain secure.

  I tried to pop the locks as they were, but of course they'd been latched securely. I left the case where it was, so Mel and Aida wouldn't catch me with it, and ran downstairs.

  Kalif sat on the couch, watching the driveway through the sheers.

  "I found a locked case," I said, "but I need lockpicks."

&nbs
p; His eyes widened. "There're some in my bottom desk drawer. Do you need help?"

  I wanted him to come with me, to use his steadier hands to do the picking. But what he was doing was important. If Mel and Aida came home, I wanted a warning. "No," I said. "I've got it." I ran down and grabbed the picks, then headed back upstairs to the lock.

  I held my breath as I manipulated the pins, keeping my ear to the side of the case so that I could hear the tiny, insulated clicks. The first lock popped open, and then the second.

  I drew a slow breath. "Still clear?" I called downstairs.

  "Still clear," Kalif called back.

  I pulled the case into the middle of the floor, and opened it up.

  Inside were stacks of paper—printouts, photocopies, emails. I lifted the first stack, sifting through it. From the bottom of the pile, some photographs slipped out—pictures of a body lying in a pool of blood.

  I dropped the papers, but the picture of the blood slid onto the floor, where I stared at it. The man in the photos was stocky, with brown hair down to his shoulders, now matted. His head twisted to the side. Nothing but a red-black pit remained where his eye had once been, and blood had smeared all down his face and pooled in the creases formed by his collar bones. My heart beat double time. Could this be my father? If it were, how would I ever know?

  I swallowed. We were going to have to go through these in more detail, which meant probably not in the house, where we could be so easily caught. I shoved the photo of the body back into the stack, and forced myself to gather the rest of the papers into my arms, ready to relock the empty briefcase and slide it back under the bed.

  As I lifted the last of the papers from the case, I froze in place. A small, flat box lay in the bottom of the briefcase, a tiny red light flashing on the side. The wires from the box had been slipped underneath the lining, running up to the second lock.

  An alarm, transmitting.

  I dumped the papers on the floor. "Kalif!" I yelled. "Alarm!" I broke the signal box open in my hands and popped out the battery, but it was too late. It would have begun transmitting the moment I opened the box.

  Kalif pounded up the stairs. His eyes widened when he looked at the box in my hands.

  "Where does the signal go?" he asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "Their computers? A cell phone?"

  "Laptops," he said, looking around the room.

  Then Kalif's cell phone rang in his pocket.

  We both froze, looking at each other in horror.

  I recovered first. "Answer it," I said. "If it's them, you can play it off. Say you'll check upstairs. We can find the box and break it open."

  Kalif's fingers twitched. "Okay," he said. He looked at the caller ID, and then punched a button to answer.

  "Hello?" he said.

  Mel's voice was loud enough on the other end that I could hear him. "What are you doing upstairs?" he asked.

  "What?" Kalif asked. "I'm in my room. Why, is there a problem?"

  Even though he was shaking, Kalif's voice sounded casual. I had to give him points for the cover.

  Mel, however, didn't. "Don't lie to me," he said. "I can see you right now."

  We both spun about the room, looking. As I stepped closer to the bookshelf, I found it: a recessed square had been cut from the underside of the top shelf, with a tiny notch in the decorative lip for the lens to poke through. A camera was glued in there, the kind that parents might use to spy on babysitters. The craftsmanship was good; from as little as a foot away, the lens was indistinguishable from the knots in the wood—that's why I'd missed it the first time.

  The alarm must have triggered an alert to Mel's phone, and then he'd checked on us through the transmitting visual. I turned away from the camera before I cringed. If I'd checked more thoroughly, I could have covered the lens before looking.

  Now we were caught.

  Kalif looked at me with wide eyes.

  "Hang up," I told him.

  He shook his head and glared at the camera. "Where are Jory's parents?" he asked. He dropped the phone from his ear, switching it to speaker.

  Mel barked over the phone. "Just stay where you are. We'll be there in a minute."

  I shook my head at Kalif. "Hang up."

  This time, he did.

  I scooped the papers up again, then grabbed Kalif by the arm and pulled him toward the door. Mel and Aida would be on their way already. "We have to get out of here. Get everything you need, but be quick."

  Kalif's phone rang again, and he looked at it.

  "I think we should talk to them," Kalif said.

  I spun around to face him. "Are you crazy?"

  He shook his head. "Not here, but someplace open."

  I hauled him out of the room and away from the camera. When we got to the stairs, I paused. Kalif's phone still rang in his hand.

  "You'd probably be safe talking to them," I said, "but they might do the same thing to me as they did to my parents." My heart beat faster as I thought about that body in the photo.

  Kalif put a hand on my shoulder. "They won't hurt you. I won't let them."

  I took a step downstairs. In a physical fight between him and his parents, I knew who I'd put my money on. But if we did meet somewhere open, I might have a chance to get away.

  The information about where my parents were might be in the papers I held in my arms. But if it wasn't, talking to Aida and Mel might be the best course of action, even if they did lie to me. Mom and Dad often deduced things from people's lies that they'd never have found out from the truth.

  We needed someplace that was not just open, but nearby. "Tell them to meet us at the park down the street. But they have to come right away. Don't give them any time to prepare."

  Kalif's phone stopped ringing, but he began to dial as we charged down the stairs.

  I wished I'd brought the case to carry the papers, but if it was bugged it might also have a tracker in it, and I didn't have time to stop for a bag or a purse. I clung to them as I ran out the front door and moved around the block of houses to the back alley. Kalif followed behind me, phone to his ear. A thought came into my mind, one I immediately wanted to squash. If Aida and Mel were against me, who was to say that Kalif wasn't in on it?

  Stop, I thought. He'd let me search his parents' room, where the evidence was. He'd let me take the papers. He'd found the emails himself.

  My feet hit the concrete with heavy thuds. That was the way a con worked, though. You gave the victim just enough evidence that you were on their side, just enough clues to keep them trusting you.

  And then you led them in the wrong direction.

  I slowed a little, to catch his conversation.

  "The one on the corner," he was saying. "Now. Come fast, or we'll be gone."

  Then he hung up.

  I hurried to the park on shaky knees, Kalif following behind. He'd brought all this to me, even when he realized his parents were involved. He'd told me the truth when he could have hidden it. But a creeping voice deep in my mind asked me why he should be any different. If Mel and Aida were against me, how could I ever know for sure that Kalif wasn't the same?

  Fifteen

  The park down the road was more of an appendage playground attached to a large soccer field. On the far side of the field were buildings that used to be an elementary school, but the school had been closed so long that the original playground had been demolished. A new playground had been added closer to the street—a small neighborhood park on the edge of the forgotten buildings.

  Kalif and I picked a corner of the field near the old school buildings. The padded pit where the old playground used to be was a few feet away—I could see the stumps of poles still sticking out of the ground where the slide had been. Standing in the open in our home bodies made me feel exposed, but I wanted the truth, and that meant that I needed to resist the urge to hide. We were far enough from the buildings that Aida and Mel wouldn't be able to sneak up on us, but not so far that we'd be caught entirely in the o
pen, with nowhere to run and shift. I kicked myself for not bringing a change of clothes, but it wasn't safe to go back for one, now.

  Kalif took my hand. "I'm so sorry."

  "For what?"

  He gestured toward home. Or what used to be our homes. I couldn't go back now. "Not protecting you from this," he said.

  He glared in the direction of the parking lot, where I expected his parents would come.

  "You didn't know," I said. And then I couldn't help but add: "Right?"

  He squinted. "I should have. All the pieces were there."

  I squeezed his hand. Of course he didn't know. But I wished I could quiet the niggling doubts. My parents thought I needed more training, but at least in the area of suspicion, I clearly had too much.

  This wasn't the time for those, though. We needed to prepare. I drew my hand away and gave him part of the stack of papers. "Look through these," I said.

  I read through the second half of the stack of papers while keeping one eye on the parking lot. A mother and her daughter walked up to the playground, the little girl running ahead, pigtails bouncing, with a shovel in one hand and a bucket swinging in the other. That could have been them—anyone could. But I hoped these were innocent bystanders, because the more witnesses we had, the safer we'd be.

  I flipped through the papers in my hands. They were profiles, in the same style as the ones Kalif managed on the server. But all these people had been murdered; most of them shot in the head. Aida and Mel had collected information as if they were building profiles on these people to impersonate them, but they'd also collected the details on the crime scenes, the newspaper reports of the killings, and the obituaries. As I shuffled through, I watched my parents die a thousand times before my eyes. But these deaths were too old. Not one of them had occurred in the last week.

  "What is this?" I asked.

  Kalif shook his head. "Not your parents." He looked up at me. "That's good news, right?"

  No news wasn't good news. Just because none of these bodies belonged to my parents didn't mean my parents weren't dead.