by Julia Keller
“I know,” Violet said. “I know.” She shook her head. Squared her shoulders. She couldn’t be stunned forever. There was work to be done. “I checked with Paul Stark down on Old Earth. I thought maybe he’d remember somebody who would be capable of this. Somebody who helped the Rebels two years ago.”
“And?”
“No dice. He confirmed just what you said. Nobody’s smart enough to create a whole new Intercept.”
Kendall’s eyes shifted in her direction. She could almost see his mind working faster now; she could almost feel the heat of the sparks generated by the runaway speed of its calculations. “Hold on. Not ‘a whole new Intercept.’ Just a part of it. And a relatively small part, all told. This isn’t the entire system. This is just a little piece. A sort of mini-Intercept. Not one big enough or sophisticated enough to run an entire civilization like New Earth and Old Earth—but one that could control a few dozen people, tops.”
“And maybe,” Violet said, her voice growing graver as the terrible certainty dawned, “somebody could do that without having a full set of specs—just a few pages.”
“Like the pages we rescued.”
They were quiet for a few seconds. This was the biggest secret of their lives—and maybe the biggest regret, too.
“But you hid them in a safe place,” Violet said. “Right?”
From the next room came the sound of the front door opening. Sara’s voice called out, “All done! See you next week!”
“Thanks, Sara!” Kendall called back. The front door closed. “Of course I did. They’re in a safe place.”
“No office is completely burglar-proof, Kendall. Not even an office in a police station.”
“I don’t keep them at the station.”
She stared at him. “You don’t mean that you keep the pages here? In your apartment?”
He shrugged. “Wall safe in the hall closet. Behind Shura’s portrait of Danny. I check every day to make sure they’re still there. And it’s a digital locking system with a tamper-proof, time-based algorithm plus nine additional layers of—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Violet said, interrupting him, impatience in her voice. “It’s not secure. If somebody figured out how to break into the safe, they could make copies of the pages and then return them. You’d never know.”
“I’d know.”
“How would you know? If they circumvented the algorithm and sidestepped those nine layers of yours, they could cover their tracks. Let’s face it, Kendall—you’re a lot better at coming up with world-changing technologies than you are at keeping your stuff safe. You’re focused on the big picture, right? Not low-level crap like burglar alarms. Using your brain for something like that is like building a rocket to cross a room. It’s overkill.”
“So you think…”
“Yeah. I do. I think somebody could’ve broken into the safe and grabbed those pages.”
He frowned. “But they’d have to get in the apartment first. And there’d be traces if somebody did that.”
“Sara Verity has a key, right? In case she comes by to clean when you’re not home? And the building superintendent. I bet she’s got a key, too, right? And me. I’ve got one. That’s three people. Any one of us could have stolen the pages and used them.”
Kendall shook his head stubbornly. “Sara doesn’t have the technical expertise. She’s never had any formal training with computers and wouldn’t have the faintest clue what to do with those pages. The building superintendent? Ditto. And you? I’m assuming you don’t consider yourself a suspect, Violet. Is that right?”
“Come on, Kendall. You know why I’m freaking out. The idea of the Intercept back in business, run by somebody who wants to murder people—it’s a little on the scary side.”
“Yeah. I get that.” Deep sigh. “Okay, let’s be detectives here. It’s what you do, right?”
She started to give him a smart-ass response but held back. This was too important. Being pissed at him could wait.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s what I do.”
“So how many people would realistically be able to create a new version of the Intercept? Me, Rez, and maybe three or four other computer experts. Some we may not even know about. Now, of those particular people, how many theoretically have access to the pages we saved?”
“Only you.”
“Right. Only me. And I’m giving myself the same break as I gave you; I’m not the bad guy. So where does that leave us?”
She nodded. “You’re right. Rez has the knowledge, but he doesn’t have the access to the pages. The only two people with knowledge and access are you and me.” She sighed. “That’s it, Kendall. We’ll just arrest ourselves. Problem solved.”
He laughed. She did, too. Violet was standing close to Kendall, and there was a part of her that wanted to reach out and touch him, just as she’d done in the park. Just as she’d longed to do back when she was still in love with him, two years ago.
Moments of tension did that to her sometimes. They sent her rocketing back into the past, when the problems seemed simpler, the issues less complex, the stakes lower. That wasn’t the reality, of course; the world had been just as much of a mess back then as it was now. But nostalgia was like frost on a windshield. It distorted the view.
A flash of memory: the first time she and Kendall kissed. It was two years ago, just after she’d found out he wasn’t Danny. Here in this very apartment. She wished she could feel that again, the special magic of a first kiss …
She shook her head.
No. The desire wasn’t there anymore. She couldn’t pretend that it was.
And besides, there was a crisis at hand. Her personal life was about 287th on the list of Things That Need Attention ASAP.
“Going forward,” Violet said hastily, “make sure you keep an eye on your trigger-trap in case our killer tries to access it again. I’ll check in with Jonetta. See if she’s found any common thread linking the victims. That’s all we can do. That—and hope that nobody else commits suicide in the meantime.”
She had to go. She needed to get out of there quickly because she had work to do—and for another reason, too. She was afraid that Kendall was remembering that kiss right along with her, and maybe—in the heat of the crisis—he was hoping that she’d start to feel the same thing she had felt for him in the past, and that it could all be rekindled somehow, all that love brought back to life, just as the Intercept had been brought back to life.
Just like that.
But it couldn’t. And not because Violet didn’t have feelings. She had those, all right. Too many of them. In fact, as she bolted from Kendall’s study and moved quickly through the fruity-smelling living room toward the front door, she was hit with a realization that surprised her.
She actually was feeling it all over again: the tingling anticipation of a kiss, the deep and fevered longing for a certain person’s touch. But this time, the person she found herself thinking of, the person who—to her complete astonishment—inspired all of that internal chaos wasn’t Kendall.
It was Rez.
29
Rodney to the Rescue
Did she have the wrong office?
Violet stopped dead in her tracks. A man she had never seen before was sitting at the front desk of what she’d assumed was Crowley & Associates Detective Agency, fiddling with Jonetta’s computer—or, if this wasn’t the office of Crowley & Associates Detective Agency, fiddling with a remarkably similar-looking computer kept in the same spot where Jonetta kept hers.
The man paid no attention to her. He was exceptionally thin and wore his hair in a shaggy blue-black Afro. He had the biggest hands and the skinniest fingers that Violet had ever seen. He poked at the keys on the keyboard one by one by one, alternating index fingers. He looked like a mad musician, some kind of deranged composer who hoped that if he just picked random keys and pressed them diligently he might, after a millennium or so, end up with a symphony.
Violet took a quick peek over her shoulder
at the office door, which she had left open when she barreled in. On the frosted glass, she could see the letters painted on the front:
YCNEGA EVITCETED SETAICOSSA & YELWORC
Okay, she was in the right office. So who was this stranger?
“Vi!”
Jonetta called her name as she came rushing out of Violet’s office, waving a clipboard. “I was just checking the Wi-Fi in there to see if Rodney got everything put back right. It’s working fine.” She took note of Violet’s stupefied stare. “Oh, you two haven’t met yet. Rodney, this is my boss, Violet Crowley. Vi, this is my brother, Rodney. He’s making sure that there are no more trigger-traps. I got worried after the latest suicide. Something weird is definitely going on.”
Rodney looked up. His eyes widened when he saw Violet. He seemed too embarrassed to speak, and so in lieu of words, he swallowed hard several times and coughed.
“Glad you’re here, Rodney,” Violet said. “It was pretty scary the other day when that trigger-trap detonated. Good to be in the clear.”
“You’re not,” he said.
“We’re not?”
“Not yet,” he clarified. “I’ve still got some protocols to run through.” Down went his head again as he resumed poking at the keyboard. “Want to make sure it’s totally clean.”
“Okay, well, good,” Violet said.
Jonetta waved the clipboard once more. “While he’s finishing up, I’ve got some stuff to go over with you. Information about the case.”
They withdrew into Violet’s office. Violet sat down while Jonetta fluttered around the room, half pacing, half hopping, as she talked. It made Violet dizzy just watching her.
“So I think—I think—I found it,” Jonetta declared. “I mean, it’s still pretty sketchy, and I don’t have all the blank spaces filled in, and there’s still a ton of questions and it might all turn out to be wrong and stupid and—”
“Jonetta.” Violet willed her assistant to remain still for a tenth of a second. “Found what?”
“A link between the victims—Amelia Bainbridge and all the rest.”
Violet sat up straighter in her chair. Could it be?
“Tell me,” she said eagerly.
Jonetta grimaced ever so slightly as if she feared she’d oversold her breakthrough. “Well, it’s a link, yeah, but I still can’t account for Delia Tolliver. Like we talked about, she breaks the pattern. But it works for all the others.”
“We’ll get to that. First tell me about the common element.”
Abruptly, Jonetta stopped moving. She leaned across Violet’s desk and uttered the word in a low, conspiratorial way. “Transportation,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Transportation. That’s it. All the suicide victims except for Delia were involved with transportation. Or they had been involved with transportation. Nowadays, that sector has been almost totally wiped out by cuts to the pod program to Old Earth. Everything’s changing so fast lately, right? People change jobs five times before breakfast, or so it seems.”
Violet thought about it. “Amelia was still a student. She didn’t have a job. How was she involved with transportation?”
By now, Jonetta had gone back to her march. It seemed to keep her brain going. “Her father was the one in transportation. Frank Bainbridge. He was an engineer. He made the decision to shut down the transport site.”
Violet nodded. “And the Wilton twins?”
“Their mom and dad had been laid off from the metallurgy lab. Lost their jobs when the transport division cut back but found other jobs.”
“And Wendell Prokop’s mom invented the entire transport system,” Violet said, nodding. “Okay, so how about Oliver Crosby?”
“He used to work for a company that made guidance systems for pods.”
“Used to?”
“Lost his position. A lot of companies went out of business when the immigration program changed and fewer pods were needed. But he found something else to do. So did the others. They landed on their feet—even though they had to sort of reinvent themselves to do it. All of them had worked with transport.”
“Except for Delia.”
“Right. Except for Delia.”
Jonetta’s information was interesting, but Violet didn’t yet know what to do with it. How would it help them unmask the perpetrator—the person who had somehow reanimated the Intercept and was using it to kill?
She was quiet for a moment as she reflected on the newly unearthed facts.
Jonetta misinterpreted Violet’s silence as a reproach.
“I know, I know,” Jonetta said, “I have to keep digging. Right now, it’s only a theory.”
“So’s gravity. But it seems to work pretty well.” Violet smiled. She wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass. It was just that her father had taught her to disdain the notion that theories were rickety, tentative things with no lasting value. Theories were everything, he believed, and he had transferred that belief to Violet with no lessening of intensity. A theory was the prime catalyst behind New Earth.
A rustle in the doorway instantly drew both of their gazes. Rodney stood there with a sheepish smile on his face. The moment he realized that his sister and her boss were looking back at him, he froze, and then he seemed to recoil in a spasm of embarrassment, ducking his head and coughing. He simply could not bear being looked at.
“Um … I’m sorta finished for now,” he said. His eyes jumped all over room, anywhere except toward Violet and Jonetta. “No more trigger-traps. And I set a deflection code so nobody’ll be able to reinstall one. Or if they do, I’ll know about it. Right away.”
“Thanks, Rodney,” Violet said.
A vein in his forehead began to throb. Violet was half-afraid he would self-immolate from the sheer agony of being, even momentarily, the center of attention.
“Um … I … well,” he said, swallowing between each word. “It’s really no big deal. I utilized the Grafton-Boulan Coefficient Analytics and then spliced it with the Simpson-Sosa Sine Curve and—”
“Rodney,” Jonetta said, interrupting him. “She doesn’t care about any of that. Take the compliment and go home.”
He dropped his head even lower. Then he backed out of the doorway, twirled, and fled.
Violet listened to his footsteps, a panicked-sounding patter that finally tailed off into a silence that meant he’d cleared the floor. “Your brother’s a little on the shy side, huh?”
Jonetta rolled her eyes. “If somebody says hello to him he almost passes out. He used to be even worse, if you can believe it.”
“Really.”
“A few months ago, he was barely able to leave the house. He’s better now. More confident.”
“What changed?”
Another eye-roll. “He got a girlfriend. That was a first.”
“A girlfriend.”
“Yeah.” Jonetta snickered. “She had to practically hit him over the head to get his attention, but once she did—wow. He’s really into her now. Guess what they do on their wild and crazy dates? She asks him a bunch of heavy-duty questions about computers. And he takes his time answering her while she smiles and tells him how brilliant he is. Boring, right? I heard her do it one day when she dropped by here to pick him up. I’d asked him to work on my computer. You hadn’t come in yet that morning. Late night at Redshift, I guess.” If it was anybody but Jonetta, Violet would’ve suspected a dig. But not from her assistant. Jonetta didn’t do digs.
“I guess,” Violet said.
Jonetta snapped her fingers. “Hey. I think you know her. I just remembered—that day she came by the office, she told me that you guys are friends.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sara. Sara Verity.”
Violet felt a funny prickling sensation on the back of her neck. Her palms started to sweat. So Sara had a means of getting advanced training in computers. Rodney Loring sounded like an excellent instructor.
What if Sara had broken into Kendall’s safe and found the pa
ges? The Intercept specs were sketchy, but to a person with the proper expertise, they would be enough. Enough to jump-start a junior version of the Intercept. Enough to create a device that could scoop up a person’s worst memories and then reinsert them at will, causing suicidal despair.
Rodney might very well be innocent. He might not know what he’d done in those tutoring sessions. He might not realize how he had helped his girlfriend with her deadly plan.
If it was really her.
If Sara was the one who had hijacked the Intercept.
Wait. Maybe I’m making a big mistake here, Violet thought, cautioning herself. I have to give Sara a chance to defend herself before I go any further with this.
Fine. She’d do just that.
Violet tapped her console. A yellow jewel rose with a fussy shimmer. Sara answered before the end of the first chirp.
“Hey, Sara,” Violet said. She forced herself to keep her voice normal. Friendly, low-key. She smiled at the screen. “We said we’d get together soon, right? I sure could use a quick break. How about a walk in Perey Park?”
30
Peril in the Park
Sara stood at the edge of a small circle of yellow light beneath one of the streetlights. She looked left. She looked right. She clenched and unclenched her hands.
Violet had not noticed before just how much her friend had changed over the past year. Her hair had lost a lot of its springy bounce. It spread out, frizzy and listless, across hunched shoulders.
Why hadn’t Violet observed that when she spotted Sara at TAP? Or later when she saw her at Kendall’s apartment?
Because both times I was wrapped up in my own problems. And because I’m not really a very good friend.
Maybe if I’d been nicer to her, maybe if I’d looked closer and seen her suffering and tried to help … she wouldn’t have resorted to this.
