Camouflage

by Aaron Pogue

  As soon as Eddie fell into the car, he turned to Katie with a grin. "That was fun! Where next?"

  Katie didn't look up from her handheld. "Driver, take us to the Motel Six. Thanks."

  "Oh yeah?" Eddie pulled out his handheld and scrolled through his message list. "Who's there?"

  "We are," Katie said. "Figured we should set up a command center, get settled in, follow up on the leads we've got...."

  "What leads? Jim didn't do it and Randall didn't do it! Those aren't leads."

  "They're not," Katie said. "But Randall gave us some. We need to look into those recorder exploits."

  Eddie yawned melodramatically, but Katie brought her hand down on the leather seat between them with a piercing slap. "We've been over this!" she snapped. "If you want to help, you help with the boring parts, too. Got it? If you just want to play, you can turn in your resignation to Craig."

  "Okay," he said, holding up both hands defensively. "I get it."

  She pointed a finger, threatening. "I'm done having this conversation. Got it?"

  "I get it. I get it."

  "Good." Katie tucked her hair behind her ear and fell back in her seat. "Good. And after we're settled in"—she checked her watch—"two hours or so, we'll stop in at the local bar and talk with some really seedy characters."

  Eddie's grin staggered back. "Okay. Now I get it. Veggies first, then dessert."

  "Sure," Katie growled, sick of arguing. "Look at it that way if you want to."

  They rode in silence for a moment, then Eddie leaned over to look at the driver monitor in front of Katie. He frowned. "That's kind of a way out of town."

  She glanced up. The driver said they had twenty-eight minutes to destination, winding southwest on highway sixteen. She shrugged. "Nothing in Bickmore, unless you want to bunk in Randall's trailer."

  Eddie shuddered. "No. Thanks." He thought for a moment, still frowning. "But why are we staying here at all?"

  Katie kept her tone carefully casual. "I don't understand."

  "It's just...." Eddie trailed off, then sat back and pulled up the casefile on his handheld. He read it over for a moment and nodded. "It's not like we have a ton of persons of interest. We could conduct these interviews today, then go back to DC and make that our command center."

  He didn't look suspicious, just confused. And maybe a little afraid of another outburst from Katie. She had to fight not to smile at that.

  She switched to a lecturing tone, almost bored. "What you've got there," she said with a wave to his handheld, "is an initial round of interviews. We've already learned some new factors from Randall, and we'll plug those into the casefile as soon as we get to the hotel. We might learn more from our interviews tonight, and then afterward we'll go back through the record of all those interviews in HaRRE. Chances are good we'll spot a lot of things we missed the first time through."

  "Ah," Eddie said, nodding slowly. "I get it. So by tomorrow—"

  "We could have another whole list of people to talk to," she said. "Or new topics to discuss with today's crowd."

  He fell silent for a while, satisfied, and she was gratified to see him reading through the casefile with real interest at last. She was about to start on some work of her own when he raised his head again.

  "But why do that here?" He held up a hand to forestall her. "Why do any of this here? If it's all just interviews...."

  "There are details you just can't get out of a HaRRE conference," Katie said. "Nuances of tone and nonverbal cues that tell you how to read a response." She met his eyes. "And they're always a lot more intimidated when you show up in person."

  "Aha!" Eddie said. "You're a font of knowledge."

  She shrugged. "Besides, it'll help to get to know the area, to get a feel for its social dynamics. That's what we used to have field offices for." Her eyes drifted involuntarily to the driver's monitor and she smiled, lips tight. "Now we've got Motel Six."

  Eddie chuckled and went back to the casefile. Katie watched him for a moment longer. Then she shook her head and lost herself in her work while the car carried them west.

  They rented two rooms—one Katie claimed as her own, and the other, Eddie's, that they'd use as an office during the day. As soon as the car arrived Katie headed to Eddie's room. She heard the old magnetic locks slam open as she approached, and she pushed right in.

  It was worse than she'd expected—dark inside even with the lights on, claustrophobic, and ripe with the warring scents of cheap lilac perfume and years-old mildew colonies. The little wooden desk bolted into a far corner was just a desk, too, and instead of a wall-mounted monitor there was an ancient television set perched on a low table, receiving its programming from an old modified set-top box.

  She dumped her bag just inside the door and let out a sigh as Eddie stepped up behind her. "Looks like we're working from handhelds," she said, frustrated. "I'll see if Reed's willing to send us a desktop down from DC."

  "Good call," Eddie said. "I'll see if the motel has any tablets to loan."

  Ten minutes was enough to get negative responses to both requests. Katie was considering calling Reed up and pleading her case when Eddie said offhand, "Hard to believe the boss man turned you down. I suspect you could put a personal connection through to him, maybe use your sexy voice, and he'd get that thing airlifted out here before sunset."

  She hit him with a glare that should have knocked him dead and said coldly, "We can get by with what we have." She stooped to catch the strap of her bag, remembering she was supposed to drag this out for ten days anyway. "Why don't you finish reviewing the casefile? I'm going to grab a shower, maybe call my dad, then I'll check back in with you in...forty minutes?" She waited for his dismayed nod, then slipped out and headed to her own room.

  When she got back she found Eddie sitting on the foot of his bed, staring intently at the television set while idly scrolling a finger down the face of his handheld. Already distracted. She shook her head, but the rebuke died on her lips as she came farther into the room and saw the casefile displayed on the TV screen. He was using his handheld as a remote for it.

  "How did you..." she started, and he looked up at her, surprised. He grinned.

  "Spoofed the datastream," he said. "TV thinks this is an old rerun of Millionaire."

  Katie frowned. "Is that secure?"

  "Secure enough for government work," Eddie said."I wouldn't want to put my financials up there, though."

  "I bet you wouldn't," Katie said, but she softened it with a smile. She sank down next to him. "Find anything helpful?"

  "I found the hardware failure code associated with Randall's exploit and ran a report on it." He glanced over at her and gave a tired sigh. "And I filed a bug report with the manufacturer."

  "Good for you." Katie clapped him on the back. "And, hey, don't beat yourself up. I know you could have used that knowledge to design a pocket-sized camera killer that would have made you a million dollars. But instead, you did the right thing."

  Eddie's lip curled. "If I hadn't, you'd have thrown me in prison."

  Katie nodded, matter-of-fact. "I would have thrown you in prison. How'd you guess?"

  Eddie flicked his finger on his handheld, scrolling the casefile rapidly up to center on a note Katie had attached. "You wrote it in the casefile."

  She laughed. "Did I really?" He nodded, grim, but then the hint of a smile broke through. Katie nodded toward the report on the screen. "So. You said you generated a report. What did we learn?"

  "I'm still parsing it, but it was probably the exploit used to hide Timmy's death," Eddie said. "I can chart every instance of its use on the map, with datetime codes and usually a high confidence for the responsible party."

  Katie leaned closer as he pulled up the report. She scanned illegible columns of error codes. "So?"

  "So...there was a shutdown at the time of Timmy's shooting, triggered by one of the local townsfolk—"

  "Anyone on our POI list?" Katie asked.

  Eddie shook his hea
d. "Not at all." She could tell he was excited at the news. "I guess he is now, though, huh? Parson Paul." He moved the cursor on the screen to highlight one particular error code marked with the date of Timothy Burke's death. "This guy is the town's preacher, but he was out there in the woods forty minutes before the shooting, and he's almost certainly the one who blew the recorder."

  Katie looked at the meaningless report and shook her head. "You said you can plot this on a map?"

  "Yeah," he said, suddenly hesitant. "And it would be quite a hike to get from the camera's location to the area our shooter fired from—"

  "It doesn't matter," Katie said. Her attention was on her own handheld, showing an identity report for the preacher.

  Eddie mistook her meaning. "I know. Had to be him. I have two other locals in the woods at that time, but neither of them could have triggered the camera failure, and neither of them could have gotten into position."

  "It's not him," Katie said, sad to break Eddie's enthusiasm. "He's got a one-point-three confidence in Jurisprudence."

  "Yeah, but he's a ghost—"

  "Sure," Katie said, lecturing again. "If we had footage of him making the kill, that'd give us a confidence in the nineties. But even without that, if the man had any motive to kill the victim he'd be double-digits."

  "Still," Eddie said, holding out hope, but Katie shook her head.

  "Everyone in town has a better confidence for murder than that guy," Katie said. "Paul's the one who ended up reporting the death. Who are your two hunters?"

  Eddie didn't bother answering. Instead he jumped back to the suspects list in the casefile and found them for himself. Avery Dean and Ken Thomas. Both of them ranked higher than twenty percent. He shook his head.

  "Can't be them," he said. He pulled up the map on the screen, a trace overlay on a rendered photographic representation of the land. "I did the math. They'd have to be Olympic runners in some pretty awful terrain."

  Katie shrugged. "It could be the preacher. I mean, honestly, it could. But if it is, we're going to have a hell of a hard time raising that confidence score."

  Eddie sank back, defeated. "I thought...." His eyes were fixed, haunted, on the map of the small town and the surrounding woods. "We're going to be here a long time, aren't we?"

  "Oh, days and days," Katie said dramatically, and he squirmed as if she'd hit him. She suppressed a chuckle. "Days and days."

  4. In the Woods

  Katie let Eddie wallow for a moment, but then she bumped his shoulder and made him pull himself together. She had him show her exactly what he'd found in the recorders' error logs, focusing on the victim's time of death, and then she spent half an hour showing him how to do detailed background checks on their three new persons of interest.

  Eddie let her use the TV for that, watching over her shoulder with a newfound appreciation as she dug into the public record. Twenty minutes in, the preacher was still looking like the most suspicious of the lot—partly because he was the only person with even the possibility of getting into position geographically, but mainly because the man had demonstrated a startling obsession with shutting down the recorders. He'd done it hundreds of times over a space of four months, and Katie and Eddie both agreed that was terribly suspicious.

  And then Katie stumbled across the record of him approaching Randall Loney back in April to find out how to do it. Katie and Eddie watched as Randall asked him why he'd want to, and the preacher leaned forward, intent.

  "Confession," he said earnestly, his zeal clear in the months-old recording. "It's good for the soul but bad for the body in this day and age. If I could offer private confession to the members of my flock—"

  "Yeah, yeah," Randall said, already bored. He waved away the rest of the explanation. "All you gotta do is get the right kind of shotgun—"

  Katie killed the replay and sat back, rubbing her eyes.

  "Well damn," Eddie said softly. "I was hoping it was him. But he probably killed the camera just to go meet with one of our other two guys." Katie smiled to herself, as Eddie voiced her own thoughts. He was catching on.

  "He's still a good lead," Katie said, without opening her eyes. "If we can get him to talk anyway."

  "Oh yeah!" Eddie cheered. "All those confessions! Let's go get 'im!"

  "Can't," Katie said, climbing to her feet. "He's in LA visiting family."

  "Convenient timing!" Eddie snarled, warming to the police role. "See? Sounds like a guilty conscience."

  "Sounds like a dead grandma," Katie said, showing Eddie the relevant entry in the man's personal history. She pulled on her jacket and tossed Eddie his. "Come on. We stick to the original plan and interview some locals at the Wolf Trap tonight. Pastor Paul is gonna be back Thursday. If we run out of other leads before then, we'll call him up."

  "Fine!" Eddie said, following her to the door. "I just thought we had a break."

  "We did," Katie said. "Then we followed up on it and it broke. All part of the job."

  They got back into the car, and on the drive to Bickmore, Eddie was uncharacteristically quiet. Katie watched him work as he pulled up the colored coverage maps he'd been explaining to her earlier and scrolled back and forth through several months' worth of history.

  Just as she was about to ask, he glanced up and saw her watching him. He looked confused. "I think I found something."

  Katie nodded, encouraging. "What kind of something?"

  He gave her his handheld, which showed a color overlay map with a listed date of October last year. It showed nearly total coverage for Bickmore and the surrounding area—all the large circles and most of the small ones glowing green. He pressed a play button on the screen, and Katie watched the date stamp roll forward, nearly four days per second.

  She watched, patient, and saw the occasional flashes of yellow here or there—natural failure of the cheap cameras. Randall's glitch was coded red, so she watched for that. Mid-January she blinked in surprise when the entire left half of the map flashed yellow, but it was gone in an instant. It happened again in early February, and she was just about to ask about it when she saw the first flash of red.

  Its impact was much smaller—one half-mile circle blinking red instead of the seven or eight she'd seen in yellow—but since she knew what to make of this one it seemed even more significant. That was Randall's first accidental crash of the recorders. Three days later she saw it again, and then it became a steady flicker as he tested it out; then she watched, fascinated, as the phenomenon spread. She could see the growth as the red spots appeared more frequently and more red spots appeared at a time.

  "That's fascinating," she said, breathless.

  "I know." He nodded to the screen. "Watch."

  She watched the spread, noticed the sudden drop-off to green back in June when Randall went to prison, and then the gradual spread again as the townsfolk got their nerve back. And then it reached the day of Timmy's murder and froze on that frame.

  Katie stared at it a moment, uncomprehending. Then she said, "What's this?"

  "Green's a reliable signal," Eddie said. "Red's the shotgun glitch, and yellow is normal failure."

  "I know how to read it!" Katie snapped, impatient. She turned the handheld to face him. "What's with all the yellow?"

  He shrugged. "I told you I found something."

  The screen showed the right half green, all of the town and both highways under perfect coverage. And out in the woods, just barely covering the crime scene, the angry red circle they'd traced back to Pastor Paul. But that red dot was lost within the same massive, sprawling yellow failure markers she'd seen twice before. It stretched half a mile past the red dot to the east, and all the way back to the west edge of the map.

  "Is this a coincidence?" she said, doubtful.

  "No way," Eddie said firmly. "No way. Normal failures on those things should be in ones and twos. To get a big bunch of them like that—and I checked, they're perfectly synchronized—the odds against that are astronomical."

  He took h
is handheld back, looking at the map. "You probably didn't notice, but the same thing happened before—"

  "I noticed," she said.

  He nodded. "That matters."

  She looked at him for a moment, mind racing. "What does it mean?" she said at last.

  He held her gaze for a moment, then looked away. "I have an idea," he said quietly.

  "Spill it."

  Instead of answering, he went back to the map and zoomed it out. He turned his handheld to her again, and she nodded slowly, understanding seeping in.

  The yellow was a circle, too. Much larger, at least six miles in radius, indicating the simultaneous failures of dozens of recorders, all of them in the deep woods.

  "Remember what Randall said?" Eddie held her gaze. "About the radio tower?"

  Katie's eyes widened for just a moment, then she nodded comprehending. Eddie nodded at his handheld.

  "I think we know where it is."

  Katie was silent for a moment, thinking. She stared at the map, at the big yellow dot, and she tried to imagine what it represented. Her mind kept returning to the memory of a big black cloud, a perfect globe in HaRRE, obliterating reality at a rate of six cubic centimeters per second.

  Her voice sounded distant in her own ears when she said, "Are there any more after this?

  Eddie nodded. "Two. One on the same day and another later Sunday night."

  She thought. She shook her head. "I need you to figure out what this means. Okay? You isolated the shotgun bug in half an hour. Can you figure this out?"

  Eddie nodded, quick.

  "Good," she said. "That's your job. And I'll work on figuring out why."

  He still waited, clearly sensing she had something on her mind. At last she sighed. "Give me the coordinates." Eddie read off the locator, and Katie said, "Driver, take us as close as you can get to that location. Thanks."

  She watched the route change on the driver's monitor. It couldn't get her very close, but that wasn't much of a surprise. It was pretty dense woods covering mountainous terrain on both sides of the highway. The driver found a turnoff that would take them five miles out on a twisting logging road, but even that could only get them within two miles of the circle's center. A quick glance at her handheld showed it would take nearly twice that far to get there, factoring in the terrain.