Recovery Man

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Talia nodded. A couple kids at school got moved to Child Watch. Child Watch took kids away from incompetent or abusive parents. Or took care of kids whose parents died suddenly, or kids who ran away from home too many times.

  Talia didn’t fall into any of those categories. But she supposed not a lot of kids had their mothers kidnapped in the middle of the afternoon.

  “Now,” Zagrando said, “judging from the instructions your mother gave you, she wouldn’t approve of sending you to Child Watch.”

  “She didn’t want to lose the house,” Talia said again, then wished she hadn’t. It made her mom sound really shallow. Mom wasn’t shallow. And she cared about Talia. She did. She wanted to know if Talia was all right. That was the last thing she said on the audio.

  Talia listened closely every time the police played it, just so she could remember that.

  “And the house would go into holding if we had to give you to Child Watch.” Zagrando folded his hands together and rested them on one knee. “The problem is that you’re thirteen.”

  “And not a real child,” Talia added.

  Bozeman looked alarmed. He reached for her, then brought his hand back, as if he wasn’t supposed to touch her. “You’re a real child, Talia,” he said. “By all Earth Alliance laws and definitions, you’re real. The problem comes—”

  Zagrando cleared his throat. Bozeman stopped.

  But Talia didn’t want him to stop. “The problem is what?”

  Zagrando sighed, as if Bozeman had failed him. “You started,” Zagrando said.

  “The problem is that in human communities, the definitions of your legal status vary.”

  “Huh?” Talia asked.

  “Inheritance, that kind of thing,” Bozeman said.

  Talia swallowed. “I can’t inherit the house. It’s part of Aleyd’s pool.”

  “That’s right,” Zagrando said a little too hardily. “Housing on Valhalla Basin goes to employees only, so if your mom quit, she’d get reimbursed for the worth of the house at the time of her departure.”

  “But I can’t do that,” Talia said.

  “Not at thirteen,” Zagrando said, as Bozeman was about to respond. But Talia knew what Bozeman would say. She couldn’t do that even if she were twenty-one, the age of majority on Callisto.

  “I thought you wanted to keep the house,” Bozeman said after a moment.

  “I do,” Talia said. “Mom likes it here.”

  ‘You don’t?” Zagrando asked.

  “I’ve never been anywhere else,” Talia said.

  “That you remember,” Zagrando said. He’d checked up on her. She’d been born in Armstrong.

  Supposedly.

  She sighed. She was questioning everything she knew. She wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t. She wished Mom was still here.

  Mom would know what to do.

  “That I remember,” Talia said.

  “Right now,” Zagrando said, “the house is a crime scene. You can’t stay here. We have to investigate, we have to take evidence, we have to see if we can find some other things in House’s systems, things that you may not know about.”

  Her cheeks flushed. She knew. She knew that all houses on Valhalla had redundant security systems that the dwellers couldn’t access. The personal stuff never completely went away; if she’d been as good at the technical stuff as they all said she was, she would have been able to snoop in the personal files of all the previous tenants.

  That’s why Mom insisted they never put their important data on House. They used their links and some special computers Mom bought just for that. She said she’d learned that much from her ex-husband, anyway.

  “What happens to me while you look through all that stuff?” Talia asked.

  “We can take you to the station for two days,” Zagrando said.

  Bozeman looked at him in surprise.

  “We do this all the time,” Zagrando was saying, “for children involved in crimes or custody battles or who have been served warrants. While we check the information, the child stays with us.”

  Warrants that came from aliens. Like the thing Mom asked the Recovery Man if he had.

  “What happens after two days?” Talia asked.

  “We figure that out then,” Zagrando said.

  “Hopefully,” Bozeman added, “we’ll have found your mom by then.”

  Zagrando gave him a small sideways look; he probably thought Talia hadn’t seen it. It seemed to her like Zagrando was in charge of this investigation, not Bozeman, even though Bozeman said he was.

  If Bozeman was in charge, shouldn’t Zagrando have treated him with more respect?

  She was tired and hungry and so worried that her stomach hurt.

  “Can I hire a lawyer?” she asked, thinking of what her mom wanted her to do with that Moon lawyer.

  “What for?” Now Bozeman looked at Talia like she was guilty of something.

  “For the House,” Talia said, “if you don’t find my mom.”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Zagrando said. “We aren’t allowed to recommend anyone, but don’t just take any old name from your links directory.”

  She nodded. Then she took a deep breath. “I would like to stay here.”

  “Detective Zagrando explained why you can’t,” Bozeman said.

  “I mean after the two days.” Talia was looking at Zagrando.

  His expression had saddened. “You don’t think we’ll find your mom.”

  She teared up again, then wiped at her face angrily. She didn’t know what to say.

  Zagrando was looking at her, that frown deepening on his face. “If I called a comforter, someone not connected to the department, would you talk?”

  Comforters were people who were like therapists, Mom said. Aleyd didn’t like its employees seeing therapists, so comforters started here. No one outside of Callisto knew what a comforter was, so no one could accuse people at Aleyd of having mental problems.

  Not, Mom always added, that anyone did.

  “I don’t know,” Talia said. Then she leaned forward. Detective Zagrando was nice to her. He seemed to understand her. “Can’t I just talk to you?”

  “I have to record every conversation,” he said. “If your family is hiding anything and you let something slip, I’m duty-bound to report it.”

  “We’re not hiding anything,” Talia said, then looked toward the kitchen. At least, she wasn’t hiding anything. That she knew of. “Maybe a comforter would be better.”

  She never liked talking to strangers, but Zagrando was a stranger and she was okay talking to him.

  “A comforter wouldn’t have to report everything, right?” Talia asked.

  “It depends.” Bozeman sounded really businesslike.

  “On what?” she asked.

  “Who hired it,” Bozeman said.

  Zagrando glared at him. Talia wondered what the issue between them was. It seemed like they didn’t really like each other.

  And then there was the word it. She’d never heard a comforter referred to as an it before. Weren’t they human?

  “I don’t have any money,” Talia said.

  “That’s probably not true,” Bozeman started, as Zagrando said, “We’ll worry about that later. Right now, we need to take care of you. You want to find out if crime scene’s here yet, Dowd?”

  Not detective, not mister, just his first name. Bozeman sighed, showing that he wasn’t happy with the order, then got up.

  As he left the room, Talia said, “I thought he was in charge of the investigation.”

  “He is,” Zagrando said, “but he’s not the senior partner.”

  “He’s learning?” Talia asked.

  “We’re supposed to take turns leading investigations.” Zagrando’s voice was soft. She got the idea that Bozeman wasn’t that good at leading anything, but she couldn’t say exactly why she had that idea. Something in Zagrando’s attitude.

  “He doesn’t like what you told me,” she said.

 
“He doesn’t have to.” Zagrando stood, then extended a hand to her. “The Basin’s tough for kids without guardians. Right now, your guardian is missing. So we have to make sure you’re taken care of.”

  She took his hand and stood up.

  “I can take care of myself,” Talia said, but even she knew that was mostly bravado. She wasn’t sure she could.

  “What would you do if those men came back?” Zagrando asked.

  “They’re not coming back,” Talia said.

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  She shrugged. She just knew.

  “You realize,” he said slowly, as if he was being careful, “that the holo those men left might be true. Those accusations might be accurate.”

  Talia swallowed hard. She knew that. But she didn’t want to admit it.

  “If my mom did something wrong,” she said, her voice shaking, “she did it for Aleyd.”

  “She’s worked for Aleyd long?”

  “Her whole life.”

  “So far as you know,” Zagrando said. And Talia winced. From now on, she supposed, everything she said would be suspect because her mom had lied to her. Talia was the kid who didn’t know anything.

  She didn’t know her own history.

  She didn’t know where her mom was.

  She didn’t know if her mom was even alive.

  “I know,” Talia said with as much force as she could muster. “Mom told me she started with Aleyd right out of school. You can check.”

  “I plan to check everything, Talia,” he said. “Much as I want to help you, I have to conduct an investigation first. Everything else is secondary.”

  “Even me,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “Even you.”

  Nineteen

  As he left his office, Flint found himself muttering softly, something he had never done before. He made sure the security system was on, then double-checked the door, uncertain when he would return.

  He walked to his aircar, which he had left in a lot two blocks away, and felt the dust slough off him. He should really go to his apartment and change first, but he didn’t want to.

  He wanted answers, and he wanted them now.

  The fact that someone might have believed Emmeline was alive raised several questions. The first was, simply, Why was anyone interested in Flint’s daughter?

  Although Flint had had contact with various alien groups, there were no warrants on him—that he knew of—and none in Paloma’s files that he had found. Rhonda had worked on the Moon her entire life, in two different companies that limited their employees’ involvement with difficult alien groups.

  Flint had no idea what happened to her after she left Armstrong for Callisto, but it seemed odd to him that someone would search for a child who had died years before Rhonda went to Callisto. A number of alien cultures took firstborn children as a punishment for various crimes of the parents, but none of those cultures went after the dead child’s memory. The firstborn child rule meant the firstborn surviving child in every warrant he had ever seen.

  His car was the only one remaining in the parking area. The car’s green surface had a fine layer of dust on top of it, even though the car had only been there for a few hours. So the filter systems in this part of the Dome were acting up, as well. That explained the amount of dust he found in the office. It had come in through the cracks around the door and in the permaplastic, cracks he couldn’t get rid of without replacing the permaplastic itself.

  The car chirruped a greeting to him and clicked as it unlocked. He got inside, put his hand over the navigation panel, and paused.

  He needed to do some research. Assuming that Rhonda had gotten herself in trouble on Callisto, which lead to Paloma’s search for Emmeline, then he needed to dig in public records to see what information was available on his daughter.

  He also needed to check police files and Emmeline’s death report. He had a copy of the death report as well as her autopsy result—he’d gotten those shortly after she died, and committed them to memory. But he’d learned long ago that the correct information didn’t always find its way into the correctly labeled file. In some database somewhere, Emmeline’s death information might have been placed in someone else’s file.

  The problem was that he didn’t want to do this research in a public or traceable location. If Emmeline was alive—an extremely long shot that only his heart wanted to believe—then any search he made would alert whoever was looking for her. For all he knew, if she was alive, she’d already been found, but he had to act as if each movement he made would alert a Tracker, just as if Emmeline was a client.

  He didn’t want to use the yacht. He always felt uncomfortable doing private work in the Port, even though the Port guaranteed complete security to everyone in Terminal 25.

  He could only think of one other very secure computer system that he would have access to: His lawyer’s. He put his hand on the navigation panel and directed the car to Maxine Van Alen’s office.

  Flint hadn’t known Maxine Van Alen three weeks ago. He’d hired her to help him with the Paloma matter, and had come to respect her greatly. Van Alen had come highly recommended, and she deserved every word of that recommendation and more.

  Flint wouldn’t be a free man now without her cunning and her willingness to find obscure matters of law to bolster any argument she presented.

  The car rose, banked, and did a 180-degree turn as it headed toward Van Alen’s office. Flint leaned back in his seat. He liked flying the car manually, but he was distracted today. He was better off letting the automatic pilot take him to Van Alen’s part of town.

  Her office wasn’t far from his. It was in the historical downtown section of Armstrong, which was one of the city’s main tourist attractions. Unlike other cities throughout the solar system, Armstrong kept its original buildings wherever possible. The best were in the historic downtown—the early Moon brick buildings that had been built so solidly that nothing else in Armstrong, or on the Moon itself, compared.

  The car landed on the ground level in front of the Old Legal Building. The dust was thick here, too, even though this section of the Dome was newer, and supposedly had better filters. But the old Moon brick buildings were slowly disintegrating and the Historical Oversight Committee was wasting precious time debating how to rebuild the exteriors of these graceful buildings.

  Still, Flint loved them. All the buildings on this block were square, with solid foundations and an appearance of power. Modern buildings were too wispy for his tastes. He liked buildings that suggested strength and indestructibility, even when their outsides were slowly crumbling.

  He got out of the car and felt the dust pelt him. He needn’t have worried about the dust he carried with him. He would gain more as he went to the Legal Building’s front door.

  In the past two weeks, this place had become as familiar as his own office. He’d spent days here, doing work he didn’t dare do anywhere else. All he had to do was tell Van Alen that this search was part of the Paloma case, and she would let him use one of the unnetworked computers inside her office.

  And the thing was, he wasn’t sure he would be lying.

  The Old Legal building was five stories tall, and Van Alen had the entire top floor. Flint had tried the elevator to the top once and vowed never to do so again. The elevator was an ancient colonial model that had been updated piecemeal. It wobbled, felt unsafe, and probably violated all kinds of modern codes. But the Historical Oversight Committee couldn’t decide how to replace it, so it hadn’t been replaced yet.

  Ever since that first ride, Flint had taken the stairs.

  Now he took them two at a time, hurrying past employees from other offices. Some were heading back to work, and others were leaving. Both groups wore masks. Those leaving had them over their mouths and noses; those returning had the masks around their necks.

  No one liked to breathe in the dust. Flint rarely noticed it any more.

  He arrived on Van Alen’s fl
oor unannounced. The stairs opened onto the office itself—no hallway, no corridor, no door barring entrance. The office looked open and welcoming. Some of that was the scurrying employees, busy but friendly, and some of it was the maintenance ʼbots who unobtrusively made sure everything from the expensive live plants to the antique books along one wall were dust-free and pristine.

  The receptionist—a human, not an android or a ʼbot, which was unusual in legal offices—stood and smiled.

  “Mr. Flint,” she said. “We weren’t expecting you today.”

  “I wasn’t expecting me today,” he said, then smiled back. “But we’re both stuck with me. Can I see Maxine for a moment?”

  “She’s finishing with a client, if you don’t mind waiting…”

  As if he had a choice. If he wanted to see Maxine Van Alen, he would have to wait. He nodded, then went to the waiting area outside Van Alen’s office.

  The waiting area was past several desks at what looked like the end of a hallway. It wasn’t. The frosted glass wall beyond was actually the doors to Van Alen’s office. The glass had nearly invisible handholds so that someone trapped inside could pull the doors open, but usually they rose or fell like dome sections. The initials MVA were etched faintly on the glass, forming a floral pattern.

  Flint thought the glass one of the nicest touches in a classy and comfortable office. If he had his way, his entire office would be as nice.

  But Retrieval Artists should discourage their clients, and the first way to do so was to have them enter a dingy, dilapidated space. The client had to be uncomfortable from the start, off-balance and uneasy, so that the Retrieval Artist could start probing whether or not the client was sincere.

  A chill went through Flint as he realized that rule—like all the others he had about Retrieval Artists—had come from Paloma. He would have to rethink it, just like everything else.

  The glass doors rose, and a young man wiped at tears as he hurried out of the office. Usually, if someone was meeting with Van Alen, she let the client out a side door or she insisted that the waiting area remain empty.

  Either she trusted Flint or she had no idea he was there.

  Or she didn’t care about the crying young man.