The Big Sheep

by Robert Kroese

  Dr. Takemago’s mouth had fallen open in shock. “But I … I didn’t—”

  “What your superiors fail to take into account is that if you were the sheep thief, you’d have anticipated suspicion and surveillance. In fact, given that you’re the obvious prime suspect, you’d likely have planned a strategy of misdirection, deliberately inviting suspicion in order to demonstrate your innocence and utter guilelessness. If you had conducted this heist directly under your superiors’ noses, as it were, the last thing that would spook you into making a mistake is some eccentric detective poking around your lab, asking silly questions. This is one of the hazards of being an eccentric detective, by the way. Clients tend to rely on my reputation while discounting my ability. Esper hired me not to solve this case, but to put on my dog and pony show in your lab in order to flush you out. In addition to being completely misguided and doomed to fail from the outset, there’s one major flaw with this plan.”

  “I didn’t steal the sheep,” said Dr. Takemago.

  “No,” Keane said. “You didn’t.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Do you see this sheep?” asked Keane, walking over to Mark and patting it gently on its head. “The poor thing is terrified.”

  “So?” I asked.

  “Sheep are herd animals,” said Keane. “They hate being separated from their herd. It’s a little hard to tell, but this beast is having the sheep equivalent of a panic attack right now. Simply because it’s standing alone in this lab, a place where it’s probably been a hundred times before.”

  The sheep let out a low bleat, and Keane scratched its ear comfortingly.

  I held up my hands, indicating I wasn’t following.

  “Well,” he said, “imagine how Mary feels. She’s in a strange place, alone, separated from her flock. She must be out of her mind with fear.”

  I was about to interject, asking if he was going to get to the point sometime this week, but then I saw Dr. Takemago bite her lip, and I caught a glimpse of the picture Keane was painting.

  “Dr. Takemago’s surly demeanor is a cover,” said Keane. “She loves these sheep. She empathizes with them. You can tell by the way she fidgets when I approach it. It pains her to see poor Mark standing here, alone in the lab, being harassed by a strange man. Maybe at first they were just research subjects, but she’s come to have strong feelings for them. She would never willingly remove Mary from her herd. I suppose it’s possible that Dr. Takemago assisted the thief under duress, but it’s hard to imagine what sort of leverage the thief might use.”

  “The usual, I suppose,” I offered. “Threaten her family, or—”

  Keane shook his head. “Dr. Takemago tends to avoid eye contact and personal pronouns, engages in the bare minimum of personal grooming, lacks social graces, presents a virtually asexual affect, and demonstrates an abbreviated range of emotions. These characteristics, along with her chosen career in a highly technical, specialized scientific field, indicate that she possesses traits of autism and social anxiety disorder. I expect she has no friends and no close family. This job is her entire life, and those sheep are the closest things she has to friends. To get Dr. Takemago to betray her employer and cause suffering to one of her sheep, the thief would have had to threaten to take away something she values more than her job and her research subjects. There isn’t any such thing.”

  Dr. Takemago stared at Keane with something that was either annoyance or awe.

  “So,” I said, “this whole meeting has been a waste of time.”

  “Not at all,” said Keane. “We’ve accomplished two important tasks. One, we’ve eliminated Dr. Takemago as a suspect and saved her job. Two: we’ve demonstrated that I’m the only person in this building smart enough to find the real thief.” Keane craned his neck back and addressed the ceiling. “So,” he said, “if it’s all the same to you, I’ll get to work on that.”

  TWO

  The Case of the Lost Sheep was to be the eighteenth investigation Keane and I worked together. My association with Keane had begun three years earlier, on the Case of the Mischievous Holograms. At the time I had been the head of security for Canny Simulations, Inc., a company that creates artificially intelligent holograms of celebrities. CSI had the rights to most of the big names: Elvis, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Sheila Tong, the Weavil Brothers. A hacker had managed to get into our code base and was projecting our celebrities all over town: at strip clubs, children’s birthday parties … Bette Midler showed up at a bowling alley in Van Nuys. The hacker didn’t seem to be particularly malicious, but the CSI board of directors was understandably concerned that having unlicensed versions of our biggest names crashing bar mitzvahs in Glendale was diluting our corporate brand. The feds had pretty much given up on trying to enforce piracy laws by this point (this was shortly after the Collapse, so the feds had their hands full with more important things, like domestic terrorism and the threat of Chinese invasion), and the LAPD couldn’t be bothered to expend much effort to catch someone who was essentially a high-tech graffiti artist. The board hired Erasmus Keane over my stringent objections, and I insisted I be present at all Keane’s interactions with CSI personnel. I ended up accompanying Keane during most of the investigation, and spent much of the next three days thoroughly documenting his unprofessionalism, lack of social propriety, neurotic behavior, inability to execute mundane tasks, and poor hygiene. He was like an idiot savant without the savant part. At one point during the investigation, he locked himself in a bathroom stall for over three hours. After I’d gathered what I thought was more than enough evidence to get Keane fired, I asked to address the next board meeting. When I got there, Keane was already in the conference room, laughing it up with the CEO and the rest of the board. With him was a fourteen-year-old kid named Julio Chavez, who was conversing animatedly with Obi-Wan Kenobi, Teddy Roosevelt, and Greta Autenburg, who was the latest teen sensation at the time. Keane had not only found the hacker, he’d convinced the kid to come work for CSI. He’s the director of simulation development now.

  I’d been so humiliated by this turn of events that I quit my job on the spot. Truth be told, I’d been bored stiff by the corporate security gig; I was basically a glorified mall cop. I’d only taken the job because it seemed like a cushy gig after three years of running security details for VIPS on the Arabian Peninsula. Anyway, it paid better than civilian law enforcement, and at the time I’d had some thoughts of planning for the future. But then Gwen—my girlfriend at the time—disappeared, and … well, by the time dead celebrities started showing up around town, I’d pretty much given up on the future.

  Three months after I quit, Keane showed up at my apartment with a job offer, saying I’d been “invaluable” on the hologram case. I almost punched him, thinking he had shown up at my door with the sole purpose of making fun of me. Taking my reticence as a bargaining tactic, he upped his offer by twenty grand. When I balked at this, he offered me five grand for my notes on the hologram case. That was when it finally penetrated that he was serious.

  I still probably wouldn’t have taken the job, but Keane’s timing—by chance or design—was fortuitous. I had spent every waking moment since leaving CSI investigating Gwen’s disappearance, and had come up with exactly nothing. One day she simply hadn’t shown up for work. I’d talked to her the previous night, and she had sounded fine. We were planning to see Sheila Tong at the Orpheum, and Gwen was complaining that she couldn’t stay out late because she had to work most of the weekend. She worked for the city planning department, and they had been short-staffed ever since the Collapse, so she often took work home. She had called me on the way home from work on Wednesday night, and as far as I could tell, that was the last time anyone had talked to her. It was unclear whether she ever made it home that night; her last documented location was the parking garage down the street from her office. I had talked to friends, family members, coworkers, neighbors … but nobody had a clue what had happened to her. She had vanished into the proverbial
thin air.

  In any case, by the time Keane showed up with his offer, I was out of leads, nearly out of money, and rapidly sinking into hopelessness and depression. I’m still not certain whether I took the job because I thought Keane could help me find Gwen or because I thought working with him would be an effective distraction from what I knew to be a lost cause.

  My official title was Director of Operations, but it became clear in short order that my function was essentially to be Keane’s tether to mundane reality. Keane’s mind dealt in concepts and abstractions; when it came to routine tasks like keeping case notes or doing laundry, he was hopeless. He subsisted entirely on Lucky Charms, Dr Pepper, and instadinners. He dressed in rumpled, mismatched clothing he bought by the pallet directly from a Chinese wholesaler; he wore a set of clothes for a week and then threw it out. Ironically, my first task as Keane’s employee was to locate the funds for paying my own salary. Keane possessed a bewildering array of bank accounts and investments, the value of which I eventually established at nearly a million new dollars, but for those first few weeks I was basically writing myself checks and holding my breath. Even after spending three years sorting out his accounts, it wasn’t uncommon for us to be two or three months in arrears on our lease. Currently it was closer to four. Hopefully the Case of the Lost Sheep would bring us close to being current, if I could keep Keane from spending the money on a new aircar.

  There was little doubt that Keane needed me, but I never did figure out exactly how I was so “invaluable” to him on the hologram case. I think maybe it helped him to have a sane person around to bounce ideas off. Either that, or he just liked having an audience. When we weren’t on a case, I felt like a babysitter for a manic-depressive eight-year-old. When we were on a case, I alternated between feeling like I was chaperoning a chimpanzee on acid and having flashbacks to Mr. Feldman’s advanced calculus class, where I’d been placed in tenth grade, despite my lack of mathematical aptitude, as a result of a computer error. Life with Erasmus Keane was not a low-stress existence, but on most days it beat the hell out of the boredom of a corporate job.

  “What do you make of Dr. Takemago?” asked Keane on the way back to the office.

  I took a deep breath. Questions like that were often tests. Keane had come to some conclusion and wanted to know if I’d reached it as well. Not so much to confirm his own hypothesis as to determine how much of it, with my feeble neurotypical brain, I had managed to piece together. “Well,” I said, “she’s clearly hiding something.”

  Keane let out a derisive sigh.

  “Something about the missing sheep,” I tried.

  “Yes?” Keane said.

  I thought for a moment. “Hang on,” I said, feigning a need to concentrate on my driving. There weren’t many other cars in the air at this time in the afternoon, but we were nearing a notorious bottleneck. Unlike in many areas of the city, where you could make a beeline to your destination, traffic in the downtown area was routed along a few narrowly defined channels. Sometimes when traffic got really bad, I would take a shortcut over the DZ, but we were in no hurry, so there was no point in risking some bored banger taking a potshot at us. I eased the car into the eastbound channel and put it on auto. A light went on, indicating that the car had successfully synced with the city’s traffic routing system, and it settled into a comfortable niche between two other eastbound vehicles. I’d take back control once we were clear of Downtown.

  This channel lined up more or less with the old I-10, which was basically an automotive graveyard at this point. The freeways had gotten so hopelessly snarled with traffic during the Collapse that nobody’d ever been able to unsnarl them. In fact, nobody had even really tried. There seemed to be sort of a general agreement that the Los Angeles freeway system was an experiment that hadn’t really worked out, like nuclear power or rap metal. These days, if you wanted to get somewhere in LA, you had to take the surface streets; pay to drive on one of the privately funded, ultrafast expressways known as Uberbahns, which had been constructed on top of the old highway system; or—if you had the means—take an aircar. Thanks to the occasional deep-pocketed client like Esper, Erasmus Keane had the means, barely. His car was an old Nissan, one of their first aircar models, but it was in reasonably good shape and beat being stuck on the surface streets.

  “What about the sheep?” asked Keane impatiently. He was sitting, his seat reclined as far as it would go, his feet up on the dash, his eyes closed.

  “It’s just a sheep,” I said finally. Keane sighed again and put his palms on the top of his head, as if trying to shield his brain from my stupidity. “No, wait,” I said. “What I mean is that it’s just a sheep, for Pete’s sake. Even if it’s got some magic transplantable organs in it, so what? Why do they care so much? If they made one magical sheep, they can make another, right? It’s not like it’s irreplaceable. It’s not the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s a sheep.”

  “Good,” said Keane, taking his hands off his head and opening his eyes.

  Encouraged by this indication that I was not, after all, a complete moron, I went on, “As I see it, there are two possibilities: either there is something unique about that sheep that they aren’t telling us, or there is some reason why they really don’t want that sheep to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Or both,” said Keane. He sat upright and stared straight ahead.

  “Right,” I said. “Either way, there’s something about Mary they aren’t telling us. Are you certain we’re even still on the case? I thought you said they hired us only to provoke Takemago.”

  “That was when they thought Takemago was behind the theft,” said Keane. “Now that I’ve cast doubt on that hypothesis, they’ll need someone to conduct an actual investigation. In any case, Esper is contractually obligated to pay us through the week.”

  “Do you think they’ll call the police?”

  “No,” said Keane. “Even if they were certain Takemago was the thief, they’d have involved the police if there weren’t some pressing reason to keep them in the dark. They didn’t hire me simply because I put on a better show than the police. They hired me because there’s something they don’t want the police to know.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Keane didn’t respond, and I didn’t press him. When Keane was done talking, he was done. Unlike most detectives, Keane rarely brainstormed about a case out loud, preferring, except for the occasional question, to ruminate silently. He believed that the process of translating abstract thoughts to language was “unavoidably reductionistic,” which I took to be a bad thing. That was another reason why I could never quite figure out how I had helped him on the hologram case. Or any other case, for that matter, other than preventing him from getting hopelessly lost or killed, which were admittedly prerequisites to solving any case. We rode the rest of the way to the office in silence.

  The office was a rundown three-story building bordering the Disincorporated Zone. The DZ, as the zone was commonly known, was a conglomeration of areas that, like the freeway system, had been disowned by the civil authorities. LA had nearly gone up in flames during the Collapse; the city had survived by virtue of a sort of municipal triage process. The LAPD and National Guard had been instructed to protect and fortify “vital areas” of the city, but LA was so spread out that in the end it was easier to bottle up the bad areas of the city than to defend the parts considered worth saving. A vast swath of the city, including South Los Angeles, Compton, and Huntington Park, became essentially a free-range prison. Faced with massive riots, arson, and looting, the powers that be chose to preserve the financial infrastructure while allowing the rest of the city to go to hell. Temporary police barriers became concrete walls topped with razor wire, and any pretense of equality under the law evaporated. If you had the misfortune to live in the DZ post-Collapse, you were automatically suspect. The breakdown of the freeway system made it easy to control movements in and out of the DZ; checkpoints were set up with the ostensible purpose of id
entifying terrorists and other criminals and to stem the flow of illegal drugs and weapons. The drugs were usually coming out of the DZ; the weapons were going in.

  It took almost a decade for the legal formalities to catch up to the harsh reality of the situation: the majority of the residents of the DZ at the time of the Collapse were undocumented immigrants, and the legal status of tens of thousands of others was thrown into question by the loss of records during the Collapse and subsequent years of near anarchy while the state and federal governments were reconstituted. In many areas of the country the legacy of the Collapse was little more than a temporary lapse in government services, with local governments and ad hoc civilian organizations picking up the slack. But in the DZ, the Collapse was near-total. Income taxes went unpaid, vehicles went unregistered, children were born without birth certificates. Criminal enterprises burgeoned. By some estimates, over 90 percent of economic activity in the DZ was off the books. By the time anyone started to get a handle on the scope of the problem, there was neither the will nor the means to reincorporate the DZ into American society. Los Angeles had given birth to a third-world country within its borders, and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. There was a lot of blame to go around, and a lot of people in the city government lost their jobs, but the impression I got from Gwen—who had a privileged vantage point from her position in the city’s planning department—was that pretty much everybody in the city was doing everything they could just to control the chaos.