“Sunrise! How’s it hangin’, baby?”
“Cold and deep, honey. Cold and deep.”
She chuckled at the tired old joke. “Long time no see. How come you ain’t been ‘round to see me lately?”
“Work. You know how it is.”
“Sure thing. My career keeps me busy, too.” She gave me a calculating look and lowered her voice. “You’re here on business I take it, not pleasure?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Too bad. Can’t I tempt you to combine the two?” She batted rhinestone-spangled lashes at me.
“Well...”
“C’mon, lover. We can...talk...back at my place.” A coy smile sealed the deal.
We walked arm in arm the half-block to her walk-up flat, looking like any hooker with her john. I couldn’t have come up with a better cover.
* * * *
Lola threw back the covers and padded naked across the room to the small bar by the fridge. That girl had one fine posterior. I slipped a C-note under the coaster on the nightstand. The money was for information. The rest was a bonus.
She looked back at me over a shapely shoulder and tossed me a coquettish smile.
“How ‘bout a drink?” She softened her voice to a purr. “Tequila, Sunrise?”
She knew I only drink Scotch, and coming from most people I’d find the pun annoying. But Lola was an old friend. Besides, she made it sound sexy as hell.
“Sounds good.”
She glided back to the bed and handed me my drink. “So, lover, what can I do for ya? Make that what else?”
Lola lay back on the bed, cocking a provocative hip in my direction. The view was distracting, and she damn well knew it. I dragged my gaze upward to her slender face and piercing emerald eyes. Their color was the result of cosmetic surgery, but the effect was stunning nonetheless.
“I’m looking for a girl.”
“What, ain’t I woman enough for ya?”
“Always, honey. No, this girl has gone missing. Her dad’s looking for her.”
Now Lola grew serious. She’d known more than a few runaway teens and battered women. A missing girl immediately had her sympathy. “Who is she?”
“A nineteen-year-old named Sara Scarpacci. She—”
“Scarpacci? You mean—?”
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
She whistled in surprise. “Wow. Who’d have the stones to snatch Scarpacci’s kid?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Assuming that’s what happened. So, you don’t have any idea what might have become of her?”
“Her specifically? No…” She must have noticed my expression fall, because she threw me a bone. “But I have heard rumors that some girls have disappeared recently.”
“More than usual, you mean?”
Girls were always coming and going, changing towns looking for the pot at the end of the rainbow. Rarely did the pot contain gold. More often, for these wayward girls it contained nothing but pain, suffering, and death. Every week, a floater washed ashore on the river, or a ripe neurostim whore stunk up a cheap motel room until someone called the cops. Just another Jane Doe for the body bag.
She nodded. “At least two dozen in the last couple of months.”
Now it was my turn to whistle. “How’d I miss that?”
I'm usually on top of stuff like that. Hell, it's my job to be on top of stuff like that.
Lola shrugged. “The cops are keepin’ it pretty hush-hush. It’s an election year, ya know. Wouldn’t look good.”
“No kidding. Any idea why the big jump in disappearances?”
She shook her pretty head, setting the hair ribbons to flapping. “Not really. There’s a rumor about slavers, but...”
“But,” I finished for her, “that rumor always pops up when more than the usual number of people disappear. I’m sure that’s all it is this time, too.”
She shrugged. “Prob’ly.” Her frown told me she had her doubts.
My guts tightened. I knew better than to discount Lola’s feelings. She was a walking barometer. When the criminal climate changed, she was the first to sense it. “Is that it?”
“Yeah. There’s nuthin’ else going on I know of.”
“Okay. Thanks, honey.” Maybe I hadn’t gotten anything concrete, but I wasn’t begrudging her the C-note. I’d gotten my money’s worth, one way or another.
“Take care of yourself, lover,” she said. Her expression was serious. No more banter. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“You know me, honey. I’m always careful.” Yeah, right. I favored her with a wink.
After dressing, I gave her a quick peck on my way out, as if we were an old married couple. Some bizarro version of the perfect sitcom couple, substituting a street whore and a broken-down private dick for Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Citizen. Well, the john part was true, anyway.
I left the building, turned right and walked briskly toward my car. Tiny and Weasel fell all over each other scrambling to leave the coffee shop where they’d been surveilling me. I picked up my pace. I knew better than to try to lose them, but that didn’t mean I had to make it easy for them.
* * * *
I spent the next two days nosing around, starting with the list of Sara’s friends and classmates Scar had provided me. It was the same list he’d given the cops and it helped me about as much as it helped them—which is to say, not much at all.
The kids all bristled initially, then relaxed when I said I wasn’t a cop. Though willing, they weren’t much help. Take Frankie Broyles, a friend and neighbor of hers for two years.
“Naw, man. Last time I seen her she was supposed to come over and play Empire Attack II. But she never showed. I figgered she got hung up at home, or went cruisin’ the mall or sumthin’.”
“You didn’t think it was strange when she didn’t show up for school the next day?”
“Naw, man. She ditched class all the time. That wasn’t nuthin’ new.”
“So you have no idea what happened to her?”
“Naw, man. Can I get back to my game, now? I’m just about to bust through to the ninth level.”
“Sure. Thanks for your help.”
The rest of the interviews went pretty much the same. Clearly she didn’t hang around with braniacs.
I continued looking for anything out of the ordinary, any odd patterns, any rumors of weird occurrences. Although I found nothing solid, it soon became obvious that Lola wasn’t exaggerating; something was seriously wrong, and it was bigger than one mobster’s kid. The girls weren’t waking up dead and they weren’t bugging out of town. They would have said something to their friends before leaving. No, they were just...gone.
There were no new gangs in town, no new drug rings, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet women were disappearing. And it was only young women. The number of men, boys, and older women disappearing was no higher than normal.
Was Sara’s disappearance connected to those of the other girls? I was determined to find out. I have something of a soft spot for missing children.
Scar wasn’t the first parent who’s had to agonize for days, waiting to hear something—anything—about his daughter’s fate. He wasn’t the only one who’s torn his hair out with worry, and he certainly wouldn’t be the first to have to bury his daughter once he learned what happened to her.
Although I despised Scarpacci and all he stood for, I was determined that he wouldn’t have to visit the morgue and stand over the sheet-draped body of his precious Sara. That he wouldn’t have to stare down into that pale, pale face, drained of blood, drained of life, drained of all that made someone a person. That he wouldn’t have to fight back the tears as he said, “Yes, that’s her.” That he wouldn’t have to walk out of there, knowing there was no way he could survive the next day, or the day after, or the day after that, without her.
That he wouldn’t have to endure what I’d had to, six years earlier, with my Jeannie.
* * * *
It didn’t take long
to exhaust my list of ‘trustworthy’ sources. Most informants are loyal to whoever pays the most. They’re not called scum for nothin’. The only way to survive in this business is to distrust everyone and discount most of what you hear until you can verify it yourself.
In this case, though, everyone sang the same song: there was nothing going on that anyone could pinpoint. But they all had the same pit-of-the-stomach feeling that something wasn’t right.
The next step was to “jump the fence” and consult with some legit sources. There were a few cops who didn’t want to shoot me on sight. Not everyone believed I was on the take and had set up my partner in that ambush, but enough did that I wasn’t exactly welcome around the precinct house anymore. Still, I could always count on Joel McCready to give me the straight skinny on the evaporating girls.
He agreed to meet me after shift-change at a sandwich shop a quarter-mile from the one-five. He wanted to change into street clothes first. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to be tarred with the same brush as me either.
Five minutes before the appointed time, I stepped into the street across from the restaurant. I should have been paying attention to the traffic instead of the girl ahead of me. A huge metro bus nearly made me the blue plate special at Mel’s Pancake House. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a shapely pair of legs.
After I got my ticker started again, I had to laugh. The animated commercial crawling around the exterior of the bus showed a woman guzzling a soft drink. I’d seen the ad before, so I knew she was supposed to say, “Drink Starlight Cola. It’s refreshing!” Instead, I heard, “Mayor Connolly is an idiot!”
So much for the mayor’s vaunted anti-graffiti campaign. The hackers always manage to find a way.
Joel showed up a few minutes late. As he entered, he glanced over his shoulder, clearly checking for tails. Who might be following him, I had no idea. Just being careful, I guess. He slipped into the last booth at the rear of the restaurant, across the table from me. The booth’s high partition hid Joel’s face from the other patrons.
“Thanks for coming, Joel. I know the guys at the one-five would be none too happy to see you talking to me.”
“No problem. Let’s just keep it quick-like, okay?”
“Sure thing. Like I said on the phone, I need whatever you’ve got on all the disappearances lately. The rumor mill has it they’re mostly young women, in their teens and early twenties. Are we looking at a serial killer?”
Joel lowered his head and spoke softly. No one outside our booth was going to be able to say they heard Joel spill the beans to me.
“The captain’s gettin’ some real heat on this one. Girls are disappearin’ right ‘n’ left and we ain’t got a clue why, or who’s behind it. There’s no bodies, no fingerprints at the scenes, no DNA evidence, no ransom notes, nuthin’. If it was just whores and runaways, we might be able to sweep it under the rug. But a councilman’s niece and the sister of a cop in the two-seven are missin’. This one’s startin’ to stink like last week’s tuna on rye, but we ain’t no closer to an arrest than we were a month ago.”
“There must be some clues, something out of the ordinary,” I prompted.
“Well, there were a few odds-and-ends that didn’t seem to belong, but nuthin’ that pointed to a perp.”
“Such as?”
Joel glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Apparently satisfied, he reached into his hip pocket. A soft click and a vibration behind my left ear indicated that my neural implant was receiving data. Implants are expensive, but they’re essential in my line of work. Best investment I’d ever made. After a few seconds, the vibration stopped. I nodded once to indicate receipt of the data.
“There ain’t much there,” Joel said with a shrug. “But what we got, you got.”
I acknowledged his gift with another nod. He was taking a risk by giving me evidence from an ongoing investigation. On the other hand, I’d helped him out before. After all, I might just find a clue that broke the case wide open using methods the cops couldn’t legally employ.
“Let me know if you come up with anything,” he finished as he rose from his seat. “My career could stand a boost.”
He’d been a Detective 3rd for four years and showed no indications of moving up the ladder. Solving a high-profile case could be just the ticket to getting that gold shield. Joel was one of the good ones—a cop with integrity—so I didn’t mind helping him out. Besides, he’d done me a few favors over the years.
“You bet.”
His wry smile was his goodbye.
* * * *
I drove back to the rat-trap hotel where I lived. Hey, why do your own housekeeping when you can have a maid do it for you?
I had my implant check the hidden sensor I’d installed in the doorframe. There was no sign of intruders. Still, I glanced around before entering, looking for evidence of tampering. There were ways to beat the sensors. The room was sparsely furnished, with just the usual bed, chair, sofa, coffee table and desk to the right, and a serviceable kitchenette to the left. A corner of the faded green and white wallpaper above the desk was starting to curl. The bedspread was threadbare, but I didn’t mind. There was just me, and I didn’t spend much time in the room. Maybe I lived alone, but I was never lonely. How could I be with so many pets to entertain me? That is, if you consider mouse-sized roaches as pets.
I sealed the door behind me and threw myself on the creaky bed, raising a faint cloud of dust. Time to get on housekeeping’s case again.
Sure, I’m good at my job, but it doesn’t always pay well. When you’re a dishonored ex-cop, you don’t get the cream of the crop, you get the cream of the crap. Crappy clients mean crappy pay—when you can get them to pay at all—and crappy pay means crappy living quarters. Such is life.
At my mental command, my implant uploaded the encrypted data to the computer built into the desk. The computer was several years old, but still serviceable. I thought the correct decrypt passkey—the same one Joel and I had used before—and the wall screen came to life with the first image.
Frankly, it was a disappointment. I was hoping for something instantly recognizable as a clue. What I got looked like a crumpled piece of foil. What made the cops think it might be a clue was beyond me.
The next image clarified things a bit. It was the foil again, this time flattened out into a wrinkled square. A notation at the bottom of the image said, “Unidentifiable metallic substance.” That got my attention. They should have been able to determine what it was made of. I magnified the image. Now I saw that the foil had some sort of writing on it. At least, I assumed it was writing.
Indecipherable squiggles scrawled around the edges in a spiral leading toward the center. Or maybe starting at the center and working outward. I couldn’t be sure. Either way, it gave the impression of writing. It wasn’t written in any language I could identify, but I’m no Einstein. I wouldn’t know Kanji from Sanskrit.
The other pix of “clues” were equally uninformative: an odd bit of metal, a piece of clear plastic broken off something larger, two droplets of some unidentified scintillating pinkish liquid, and so on. They might mean something and they might not. They were merely the items the cops couldn’t identify.
The next batch of images showed the missing girls so far—all twenty-seven of them—plus their bios and copies of the police reports. The pix were from high school and college graduations, weddings, Bat Mitzvahs, and backyard barbecues. There were blondes, brunettes, and redheads, with long, short and medium-length hair, arranged in waves, curls and straight. The girls were beautiful, pretty, and plain. They seemed to be of every race, religion and economic background, from wealthy to homeless. They were married and single, straight and lesbian.
I couldn’t find a single thing to tie them together, except that they were all young (aged seventeen to twenty five) and petite. None were tall or overweight—five-foot-two or less and around one hundred pounds. Did that mean anything? Lots of young women are slight of build
. Still, it seemed unlikely to be pure coincidence. As a cop, I’d learned there aren’t many coincidences in life. Maybe we were dealing with a serial killer with a thing for petite young women. You never know which insight into the mind of a criminal might be the one that breaks the case wide open.
The final image was of a city map. The site of each disappearance was marked with a numbered and dated dot. According to the label, the red dots indicated precise locations, while the blue ones were only approximations, using the victim’s last-known whereabouts. The dots appeared to be scattered all across the city. There were no clusters pointing to certain neighborhoods, or along a particular highway. Nothing that revealed a pattern.
And yet… Something gnawed at the back of my mind. What was it about those locations? I couldn’t put my finger on it, but…
It just wouldn’t come.
I spent another twenty minutes examining the pix, for all the good it did me. I donned kinesthetic gloves, which allowed me to tie into what each crime scene investigator felt and recorded for posterity: the coolness of the foil, the sharp edge of the plastic, the weight of the metal, the sticky-oily feel of the viscous liquid. My implant enabled me to hear what the CSI had recorded in each location: the echo of an alley where one victim was last seen, the sound of dripping water somewhere in the dilapidated warehouse where a homeless victim was known to sleep, the cry of a hungry cat in another victim’s apartment, a ship’s horn sounding in the harbor. I heard plenty, but nothing useful.
The next step was to check out the crime scenes in person. It was unlikely I’d spot anything the cops hadn’t already found; still, I was a pretty decent detective once, so it was possible. Plus, it might give me a better feel for what happened than I could get from the pix and the kinesthetic gear alone.
I drove to the nearest place, a warehouse at the east end of the bay, across the street from the wharves. The stench of dead fish and seaweed was strong that day, and the fierce afternoon sun already had me sweating. The main doors of the cinderblock warehouse were padlocked, so I walked around the side, looking for a window. Finding one was easy; getting in was another matter. I could have jimmied electronic locks with my implant—another not-quite-legal enhancement, but this place was old-fashioned, relying on steel bars for security. I tried to finesse one of the padlocks, but it was state-of-the-art, nearly pick-proof.
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