Monarch Falls

by Lumen Reese

  A door opened into the main room of the precinct, and I whipped around to watch as Jericho and two police officers came marching in. Stopping short at Woodrum's desk, Jericho started to speak but saw me when his eyes swept the place and started over.

  “Shit,” I muttered, then I called, “Hey,” as he started down the hall.

  Jericho had lost his entourage, but cast a look over his shoulder as if he hadn't noticed that the two men had hung back by their fellow officer. He puffed out a big breath around my name, “Stella.”

  I was painfully aware of the door open just a crack on my other side, how my body was the only thing between the two of them. S uddenly I was sure Jericho would want to step out of view, but he only folded his arms and leaned on the wall.

  “Is the girl inside?” he nodded at the door between us.

  “Yes.”

  “You saved her,” he said. “Whatever else happens, you saved her.”

  I felt my face heat up, but then I was taking a deep breath and readying myself for what I had to say next. “I'm sorry, but one of two things is going to happen now. Because she isn't safe. Either Henry goes with her to New York, where he personally places her in the protective custody of the Brooklyn PD, or -if Henry won't go- then you can bring a dozen officers of my choice to come in and get her.”

  He was surprised for a moment, then his face turned sad and he looked at the floor. “Yes, I see the necessity for that. Henry was on his way when we spoke, we'll discuss it when he gets here.”

  “Good.”

  “Dozens of bodies are being pulled out from under the cathedral…”

  “Anna woke up -her name is Anna- and she can describe her captors, where she was held, everything, in the morning.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Woodrum was finding her missing person's report and contacting local police, last I knew.”

  “I'll check in. Shall I come get you when Henry arrives?”

  “Yes… but quietly.”

  He was turning away and I had my hand on the doorknob but then he turned the corner heading for the center of the room where the three cops were gathered. I stayed put. Corso didn't make a sound emerging from the room, but I could feel him behind me.

  “How'd you like that?” I murmured.

  His voice was husky like usual. “You were magnificent…”

  The praise felt strange. My body was alert to him, as always. “You should leave.”

  “I'll find you when I can. Take care of yourself.”

  The door to the outside opened and closed behind me, letting in a gust of a cool, night breeze. I went into the room where Anna Goodspeed was sleeping, and sat on the couch opposite her.

  It was another hour before someone tapped on the door and I silently slid out. Henry and Jericho were both waiting there, in the hall, the former with crossed arms and a hardened face.

  “You want me to take the girl back to New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “That can't happen, Stella, it would take me away from you for a full day, at least!”

  “If you won't go then we'll have to have police brought in to get her. That will take days off our investigation that we already don't have.”

  “But you wouldn't be safe. We can send the girl out with Jerry and his security, she'd be fine, I promise.”

  “No,” I said. “Either you go or I'm shutting myself in that room with her until Brooklyn's finest show up. And we'll just let Spicer have a crack at the fugitive.”

  Jericho said nothing. Henry rolled his eyes and ended up turning his entire body, sighing, and turning back. “He's here, being pompous at the crime scene...”

  “I figured.”

  He asked Jericho, “What can we do?”

  I had wondered whether he might try to force me to leave the girl. He could have me extracted from the Four Quarters of Imagination as easily as squashing a bug.

  But Jericho said, “You should accompany the girl out of the Four Quarters first thing in the morning. Until your return -which shouldn't be later than sometime the next day- Stella can be escorted by someone else. I have a friend in this town who would do, if you would agree...”

  I was hesitant to agree to another protective detail, and especially a personal friend of his. He must have seen it in my face.

  “I am the one who suggested Henry for you in the first place.”

  I realized I had never considered that into my calculations of Jericho's character, and nodded.

  Henry was still frowning, looking at me. Finally he seemed to make up his mind. “Hatley?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Henry said to me, “You'll be fine. I'm gonna get some sleep.”

  Then he walked past me and into the next room over, which Corso had stood in the doorway of earlier in the night.

  “Who's Hatley?” I asked.

  “She's a kind of Mad Hatter of this place. She's got a toe in almost every storyline that comes through the quarter, and she has connections with all the main importers and exporters in Wonderland. She'd know if anything suspicious had been going on, or she could find out fairly quickly. And she's tough as nails.”

  “Sounds great.” Part of me was still anxious. “How about I keep Clark with me, too? He's the other priest from the cathedral.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Muscle?”

  Clark was all fat and no muscle, and Jericho looked like he knew it. But he nodded. “Consider it done. I'll see you in the morni ng.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  A tapping at the door woke me some hours later in a hazy time before dawn. My satchel still wrapped around my middle, propped up on one hip, and my hand on top of it feeling the heavy weight of my gun resting, reassuringly , a second away, I had slept decently for the first time since having entered the Four Quarters. Anna was sleeping across the room on the other couch, our faces at the same level. She stirred at the knocking, too, instantly awake where it took me a minute of rubbing my eyes and yawning.

  “What's going to happen today?” she asked, beginning to fold the blanket she had slept under and placing her pillow on top of it at the foot of the couch.

  “You're going home to New York,” I said. “I have friends on the police force there, and I'm going to make sure they're waiting for you, and they're going to protect you.”

  “You aren't coming?” She didn't look at me.

  “I have to keep looking for the others. My friend Henry is going with you. And you're going to be okay with him, I promise.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “It's a good thing we're in a police precinct. I bet they have donuts somewhere.”

  Henry woke grumpy, but went and sat wordlessly across from Anna while I ventured out into the bullpen, busier than it had been the night before. I was right and there were boxes of assorted on a cabinet at the other end of the room, along with coffee. Jericho was talking to one man in his office, only a pane of glass away. A third stood nearby, smartly dressed, but not in a uniform or wearing a badge. He waved for me to join him, but I brought a few donuts to Anna and Henry before going back out and then joining them.

  “Alright, Stella.” He didn't bother introducing the police chief, gesturing first to the standing man, “This is the sketch artist. Let's put him in with Anna while we figure out the rest.”

  The rat-faced artist had cards inside with varieties of face, nose, eye shapes on them. Once they were situated, Jericho and I went back into the chief's office.

  “Shall I call the precinct or should you?”

  I said, “You had better let me talk to them first.”

  He pushed a phone at me, across the desk. “We need to be careful about this. Obviously we don't want the press finding out about the human trafficking yet. The less people who know where she is after she's placed in police custody, the safer she'll be.”

  “I understand.” I dialed.

  The phone rang twice. “Brook
lyn PD, 83 rd Precinct, Officer Jankowski speaking.”

  “Eya,” I breathed, relieved to have gotten somebody I knew. She was a rookie but she was professional enough, and nice. “This is Stella Grady, I'm calling from a precinct inside the Four Quarters of imagination. I need you to put me through to Captain Halderez.”

  Her voice got quieter. “You're really in there, huh?”

  “Yes. Please patch me through to the Captain.”

  “Alright. Here you go.”

  The phone beeped. It was silent for a moment, then Frank Halderez answered. “Stella?”

  “Yeah, Frank, it's me. I'm here with Jericho Sullivan right now. We've got a situation and we need your help.”

  In the end he spoke to Jericho and then told us to send Anna his way, though there were still details to be figured out with his superiors. Jurisdiction was tricky.

  With the cathedral shut down and crawling with forensics experts, Clark had spent the night on a couch at the precinct. He lingered around the outskirts of our conversations until Jericho and I went back into the bullpen and Henry and Anna joined us. Henry looked somber. He offered me a stack of sketches, not saying a word. I assumed he was just put-off by what he had heard Anna describe, but when I looked at the first face I recognized the man.

  “He was in the First Quarter,” I said. Jericho looked over my shoulder. “His love-interest looked really young.” Henry looked at me sadly, I reached out to touch his arm, to tell him it wasn't his fault.

  “Yes I know this man,” Jericho said. “Mattias Lundgreen. His scenario ended a couple of days ago. I'll alert the authorities. And we'll spread the rest of these sketches through the quarters.”

  “Can you send them to my phone?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  It seemed that was all there was to say. I waved Clark over, too. He bolted from his spot on a couch, watching us from across the room.

  I said, “Hey, you're coming with me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But why?”

  “To protect me,” I said, and Henry tried to hide a snort in a cough.

  We started for the door and Jericho with his two men following lead the way. Once we had all crowded onto the street, and a string of three taxis were waiting there by the curb, Henry sighed and shrugged, with both hands in his pockets. I braced myself, stepped in and put my arms around him.

  “Take care of Anna,” I said.

  “I will.” He was smiling when I pulled away. “You take care of yourself.”

  “I will.”

  I was sad to watch him duck his enormous head into the first of the cabs, with Anna watching me from the back window. I gave her an encouraging smile, and hoped everything would be alright. Only once they had pulled out of view around the corner did I realize I had sent away the only person I trusted in the world.

  Old Stella was back for a long moment, tightness in my chest and heaviness of my feet as Clark opened the door of the second taxi for me. I glanced back at Jericho, as he was climbing inside his own taxi, and he stopped for just a second to nod at me.

  I took a deep breath, forced it all down, and slid inside. Clark followed. I told the driver the address for Hatley's building, and we started rolling away.

  I asked Clark, “Is it your first or last name?”

  “First. Clark Cullen.”

  “Like Tom Cullen,” I volunteered.

  “Who?”

  “He's one of the heroes in The Stand , by Stephen King.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Chicago. You?”

  “New York. Brooklyn.”

  “Oh. Cool. I always wanted to go to New York. This place is probably the closest I'll ever get. What's it like there?”

  “Probably a lot like Chicago.”

  “Right...” He was becoming just a bit less nervous. He smiled at me.

  “Why are you in here?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Seemed better than factory work. I thought it might even be fun. I thought it might be different. But I ended up getting knocked down from a 'C' to a 'D' and not being trusted with anything important. I messed up someone's storyline, it cost the company a lot of money. And then just like in Chicago I was a loser.”

  “I know that feeling,” I said, because there wasn't any way I was going to say out loud that I would be his friend.

  He got it, though, and gave me a tiny smile and a nod.

  We were in what seemed to be the business district of Spades, passing skyscrapers and many well-dressed people. Stuck in traffic on the main stretch but turning off after a few minutes of queuing into a smaller road where the sun was blocked. The cab slowed and stopped at a red brick building at least five stories tall with not a single window anywhere on it, on the corner at the end of the alley.

  “Here we are.”

  “Thank you,” I said, climbing out.

  Clark followed, and I climbed the set of steps at the front and seeing no door knob, pressed the button for the buzzer.

  After a second of the hum, an overly bored, female voice chimed out, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

  Pressing the button again, I stumbled over the words, “Well- that doesn't have an answer… officially. This is Stella Grady, I'm looking for Hatley.”

  Cheery, then, the voice in the box answered, “Alright then! Come on up.”

  The door swung in on its own, allowing both Clark and I to step through and then closing itself just as I reached for it. We were in a bright lobby, somehow. The walls were not brick but chic steel and glass, the windows floor to ceiling and leaking sunlight and showing the street outside as if the light was unobstructed. Clark, too, looked impress. I had the feeling he hadn't ventured far from his cathedral.

  A pretty receptionist at a large, round desk beamed at us. “Hello! Top floor for Miss Hatley, elevator at the back-.” She gestured.

  We crossed the lobby, took the elevator up, and it opened straight into a similarly bright office. The walls showed a bright day and a great view. The woman who sat at the glass-topped desk with papers spread around in several stacks and was busy writing looked up as we entered.

  I stalled for a moment at the sight of her while Clark did not, so I rushed a few steps to even myself up with him as we approached. She was probably forty. Pretty, glowing brown skin wrapped around a pretty, angular bone structure, sharp chin, cute nose, flat and wide; her hair and big eyes were both a shade darker brown. She had her curly hair fluffed up on one side and pinned down with a diamond clip on the other.

  “Hello Stella and Clark. I'm Hatley Morrison. Please sit. I swear-,” she began stacking stacks of papers and placing them to one side, “-Jericho couldn't have picked a worse time to be in crisis. I'm as busy as always, plus it's grant season and everyone comes to me for those because they know Jericho listens to me. But screw it!” she tossed the last folder down, smiling with charmingly crooked teeth very sincerely, I could tell from the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, the freckles that danced higher around a crinkle in her nose. She was British, not as posh as Jericho. “I always make my deadlines and this sounds serious. Fill me in.”

  I wasn't sure how much Jericho had told her. “There's a story jumper in the Four Quarters, we're pretty sure he's here. The head designers brought me in to find him, but the situation has changed, some. First we found the body of a teenage girl, when we were tracking him. Then he spoke to me, and told me he was looking for his sister. She was kidnapped along with dozens of others. There's a human trafficking ring inside the Four Quarters. We found a girl -alive- left in a grave in the catacombs under a cathedral, just a few miles from here, and the priest -the primary priest- is missing. The girl confirmed everything and one of the men she identified was a buyer who recently left the Four Quarters. Authorities are looking for him and the priest, both. The girl is on her way to New York with Henry, to be put into protective custody.”

  Hatley's face had gone hard, she was taking it all in slowly. “That's
horrifying. And we have to assume someone with a high level of influence over the company is involved, for this to have happened. The girl you found, she's with Henry Haskell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then she's safe for now, but who is he handing her over to?”

  “Police,” I said only. “My people.”

  “Alright, good. You sound like you've got your head on straight. So you're still looking for this fugitive, that's what you're being paid for, but of course you're worried about the integrity of the company's investigation into these missing girls, so you're keeping your eyes open on that, too.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “In fact,” she said, glancing at Clark for a moment and seeming to assess him as no threat, “If you bring in this fugitive, you might be bringing in the only person really looking for the girls, and you'd be removing yourself from the equation as well.”

  I said nothing, neither confirmed nor denied her thinking, though I suddenly felt very strongly that she was on my side; that she wouldn't worry for the company so much as for the victims.

  “So does that about sum it up?” she asked.

  “The fugitive said that once the girls were safe he would turn himself in, and Jericho says we have two days before they evacuate the entire Four Quarters. That about sums it up.”

  “God. That would be catastrophic. You have my undivided attention. We need to find these people. I know everyone in shipping, even some people I'm not supposed to know, we can make the rounds. When can we expect Henry back?”

  “Maybe tomorrow morning, assuming nothing goes wrong.”

  “Nothing will go wrong,” she said, and she might as well have promised with her sure, steady voice. “The girl will be fine with Henry.”

  “That's funny,” I said, “he said the same thing about me, being with you.”

  “We go way back,” she said. “What are we talking about, in terms of you being in danger?”

  “A few people have tried to kill me,” I said.

  Hatley stood, opened a black drawer on one side of her desk by entering a combination into the pad, there. She pulled out a black gun that fit nicely in her hand. “You look pretty banged up.”