by Adira August
“It’s not about me, no one cares about me, I’m just a convenient excuse for everybody to focus on you!” Cam’s index finger stabbed at Hunter’s chest.
“It is about you!” Hunt insisted. “If they just needed a famous guy to be fans of, they could have used Morganfeld.”
“No, because I’m way better looking than Morganfeld!”
“You’re way better looking than everybody!” Hunt shouted.
Cam smiled.
Hunt’s lips twitched. “Shithead.”
Cam shrugged. “It’s my home, Hunter. And nobody’s running me out of it. It’ll be fine. Do your psychic thing, and you’ll know I’m right.”
“And I told you, I can’t think, process,”—the elevator dinged; the door slid open— “when it’s about you. They were in your house.”
“That was me.”
Asher Gamble stepped off the elevator.
“YOU TWO, GET TO WORK,” Hunt growled at Twee and Merisi, pointing Asher toward the table.
Unconcerned with Hunter’s tone, Twee stood up and waved Asher over. “Sit here,” she said. “There’s plenty of lunch left over, too. You want a soda or some water?”
“Lieutenant?”
It was Cam, turning the laptop slightly so Asher couldn’t see it. Hunter looked over his shoulder. The screen held the image Dan Gordi promised: a corpse face they could show the boy.
Hunt touched Cam’s shoulder briefly and moved around the table. He shoved some papers out of the way and hoisted one hip onto the table, facing Asher.
Twee came back from the coffee station with a can of cola from the mini fridge. Asher was eying the sandwiches.
“You can take the meat out,” Hunter told him. “And there’s chips.”
Asher nodded and re-assembled two meat hoagies into one super cheese and veggie. With corn chips.
Twee hovered behind his chair until Hunt pointed her firmly at the door. She went, stopping long enough to stick her tongue out at him. Merisi went to his desk and started a report, keeping an eye and ear on the action at the conference table.
Moving to his usual spot, Hunter took a big bite of his untouched sandwich. Cam worked at the laptop, the big monitor blank. Hunt tried to recall if Leon’s penis had still been on it when Asher came in.
Natani moved quietly around the table, gathering up the remains of the other’s lunches. She carried the trash to a large wastebasket near the door. No cleaning crew was allowed on their floor, so staff took turns with the trash and vacuum.
“Leave it, okay?” Hunter told her, waving her back to the table. “Could you grab me a soda, too, while you’re over there?”
She hesitated. “Sure.” Hunter Dane never drank soda. She realized he was mirroring Asher, subtly making him comfortable. She got one for herself, too.
Aware of the by-play, Cam took a bag of corn chips. Asher glanced at him and ducked his head quickly. Guilt.
Cam crunched on a chip. “So, why were you in my house?” He kept accusation out of his tone and crunched another chip.
“I had to go to the bathroom. Just to pee,” he assured Cam.
Cam nodded sagely.
“I knocked in case you had someone else there, you know? But I had to go. The door was unlocked and I just ducked inside. That first door went to a bedroom and I saw there was a bathroom in there, so … I went. I was real careful. Only I washed my hands and the towel was new and …”
“You didn’t want to use it because we’d know someone had been in there?” Hunt asked.
Asher nodded.
Hunt cocked his head. “Your hands were wet. You reclosed the bedroom door with—what?”
“I just stuck my hand inside my shirt and used it.”
Hunt and Cam exchanged a glance. Asher’d wiped the knob clean in the process.
“Very thoughtful,” Hunter told him. “So, I’m curious, with all the woods around why didn’t you just go behind a tree?”
Asher shrugged and pushed his half-eaten sandwich away. “They have cameras in some of them; they watch everything.”
“Who watches everything?” Cam asked.
“Minnie’s army men.”
Natani held up both hands in a stop gesture. Hunter nodded.
“Asher, I’m Diane Natani. I’m an assistant district attorney. Who knows you’re here?”
“There’s no school,” he said. “They have teacher hang-out day or something. I have my phone. I’m fourteen, nobody cares where I am all the time.”
Cam’s keyboard tapping filled the brief silence. He looked up and nodded at Diane.
“Let me see,” said Asher.
Cam spun the laptop around. It showed a calendar for his school. No classes: teacher seminars.
“That was really fast,” Asher said. “I thought you were a famous ski—um—person?” Cam shrugged. Asher stared at the screen. “Show me the hidden thing.”
Cam started and looked to Hunter.
“Go ahead,” Hunt told him.
Cam loaded the autopsy image. Gordi had done a good job. The head was straightened, a sheet laid neatly across him. But he did not look like he was sleeping. The dead always just looked dead.
“That’s not Jason.” Asher reached out but stopped short of touching the screen. “He’s … secret … he wanted a dog but he never had one … he missed the ocean … you have the wrong glasses.”
Natani stared, frozen.
“Why did you come here, Asher?” Hunter asked.
The boy picked at his sandwich. “I had another visitation.”
“Your father?”
Asher shook his head. “No. Yours.”
June 13th, 2013
* * *
Anne Tussey carried her latte, bagel and newspaper to an empty table. The hated cell phone was locked in her car for the duration of her daily sanity break: reading words on paper instead of a computer screen in a coffeehouse chain far from the institute. A two-person booth in the corner was her refuge.
She sat down facing away from the door.
Discarding the first section of the paper—the part where the news was—she read about the best farmers markets to visit. A recipe for raspberry iced-tea caught her eye as did a reviewer’s opinion that there were few bright spots on the summer blockbuster movie horizon.
“You’re Doctor Tussey, aren’t you?”
A man’s voice. Suit pants, a tie and an open suit coat paused next to her table. She didn’t look up.
“Minerva Anne Tussey Houston, to be precise?”
She froze. He sat down across from her, an attractive man about her own age in a business suit, smiling pleasantly.
“Jason Furney,” he said.
She gathered her things and started to get up, but he reached out and put a finger on her forearm. It wasn’t threatening. She paused. He took his hand away.
“You have a lunch meeting today with the SADAT board of directors. They’ll fire you at that meeting for tampering with your research data. By the time that meeting is over, your records will be confiscated, your research will vanish. A restraining order will keep you from the building and your employees. Your reputation in the scientific community will be destroyed. I have very little time to convince you to act, and you have very little time to save twenty years of data.”
“That’s insane,” she said, but she did not get up. “Wait a minute. Jason Furney? I know you, somehow …” She shook her head, not able to retrieve the memory.
He reached inside his coat and produced some folded papers he pushed across the table to her. She flattened them on the tabletop. The Effect of Human Consciousness on Electronic Devices by Jason Furney.
This was the paper she’d read so long ago in Everett Laurence’s office. This was the undergraduate project that fueled the research that became the Institute for the Study of Anomalous Data Acquisition and Transmission.
“You started all this?”
“We don’t have time for
explanations now,” he said. “You don’t need to believe me, but you do need to act. If we leave now, we can be locked in your office a half-hour before your staff arrives. We can get all your files copied to disc. Scan any hard copies you have. We need to get the information and you out of the building.”
“What do you mean, me out of the building?”
“You’re going home sick. Your life changes forever today. It already has.”
“Really? ‘Follow me if you want to live’?” she quoted from The Terminator and shoved the papers at him.
“If I’m insane or lying and you do what I say, the worst thing that happens is you have to reschedule a meeting,” he said calmly. “Nothing is damaged or destroyed. If I’m telling you the truth, if I have reason to know these things and you don’t act, you’ll spend your life wishing you had.”
“And if you’re an industrial spy trying to panic a woman with a tale from a rejected X-Files episode, the worst thing that can happen is you succeed in raiding SADAT.” She stood up. “You will stay here. There’s a cell phone in my car. Follow me and I’ll call the police. I am deadly serious. I’d better never see you again.”
Anne walked away at what she deemed normal speed. It took a great deal of effort, considering how frightened she was. Industrial espionage was no white-collar dalliance. The worst thing that could happen wasn’t that he’d get information; it was that he’d kill her after he did.
When she reached the exit, she made herself turn back and glare at him. He was still at the table—reading her paper.
Locked inside her car, it took Anne a couple tries with trembling hands to get the key into the ignition. She drove out of the lot, turning in the correct direction to go to SADAT. In one block, she was out of view of the coffeeshop and hadn’t seen anyone pull out behind her.
Making a fast right, she accelerated to the end of the block and made another.
In two blocks, a side street took her back to the main road. Anne parked in front of a convenience store, backing up to the building. She could just make out the exit from the coffeeshop lot. Jason Furney might have had time to rush to his car and drive away, but she didn’t think so.
What Anne couldn’t figure out, was what she was doing there?
What did she think she’d see if he left? Why wasn’t she reporting him? Calling security at the building to make sure they didn’t let him near SADAT?
Because you believe him, a voice in her mind whispered.
She didn’t, really. But she also wasn’t as surprised by what he said as she should have been.
Things had been odd at work for a while. Most of the last year, when she thought about it. Her contacts at nursing homes and hospices had dried up. Calls weren’t returned, or renovations were happening, or there just weren’t any likely candidates for her research. It seemed central New Jersey was in the mist of an epidemic of health.
Funding for a new generation of random pattern generators had been delayed with no estimate of when they might be available. She’d had a surprise visit from the attorney for one of their major donors, a man who provided forty percent of their funding. He wasn’t affable and interested, as she’d found him before, but skeptical of her findings, demanding explanations she couldn’t give him for small effect results.
And now that she was finally ready to publish, no one would take her findings.
But most disturbing to her was how she’d been feeling. It wasn’t a physical thing It was like a depression that surrounded her instead of residing within her. Like the air was heavier, the light dimmer. Her morning sanity breaks had become longer; she no longer looked forward to getting to her office.
Anne felt she was approaching a nexus to radical change. And she’d felt that way for weeks.
“…Your life changes forever, today. It already has.”
No matter who Jason Furney was, good guy or bad, he could still have delivered the truth. Her cell sounded.
YOU HAVE MY # IF YOU NEED ME.
I’LL BE CLOSE. BE CAREFUL.
Anne found little comfort in the idea of this stranger stalking her, which is the only way she could interpret “I’ll be close.” He’d followed her to the coffeeshop, so he must have been at her home. He knew where she lived, hung out and worked.
Time. She needed time.
Public phones were almost extinct, but there was still one on the outside wall of the convenience store. She got some change and called the only person in the world she’d trust with her life.
He answered on the third ring.
“Talk fast, whoever you are. I have planes to catch.”
“You still want to whisk me away to far-off lands?”
“Annabanana! Always, darling, but I leave in twenty minutes for the airport.”
“Pick me up on the way?”
“Are you on drugs? I love you, you know I do, but you’re about as impulsive as Gibraltar. That would be the rock. Though their currency is a bit ploddy, as well.”
“I’m not on drugs, Davey. I’m in trouble.”
Silence. Then, “Where are you?”
She gave her location.
“I’ll have a cab there in five; he’ll take you to the plane.” A pause. “Stay inside the store.”
He hung up.
Anne made one more call from the pay phone. Furney had also been right about when her staff got to work. She called her assistant’s phone and was routed to voicemail. By the time anyone found out she’d stayed home sick, she’d be aboard a private plane going wherever her favorite cousin was giving his next concert.
She hung up and went inside the store to find the ATM machine and see how much she could get out of her account.
She’d have to buy a few clothes.
“WHAT ON EARTH is all that?” David Morganfeld eyed the boxes his cousin took out of the cab’s trunk and set on the tarmac.
“Personal stuff. Help me get these inside?” She hefted the last box higher in her arms.
Davey rolled his eyes and waved at a flight steward to come over. He took the box from Anne.
“Raul!”
Davey’s personal assistant appeared in the open doorway of the private jet and hurried down the stairs to take the box from the steward, who bent properly at the knees and picked up another box.
“You know I do not risk injury to my hands,” Morganfeld said. “And my guests don’t carry their own luggage.”
The cab pulled away, leaving them standing next to two more boxes Raul and the steward came back for.
“Tell me you are not in such financial trouble that you have been reduced to using cardboard boxes for packing,” Morganfeld said as they climbed the airstair.
“No, but I am possibly in a kind of trouble that means I arrived without anything but the clothes on my back,” she said.
“Possibly?”
The airstair was retracted; the door closed. Raul and the steward moved the boxes to passenger seats and belted them in.
Anne wrapped her arms around her cousin and hugged him. “I can’t tell you now, because I might be completely wrong and badly overreacting.”
He sighed and kissed her cheek. “In that case, we’ll lounge around, drink things we shouldn’t, and you’ll tell me what you can, when you can.”
“Thank you, darling.” She released him. “What exotic locale are we flying off to? Nowhere offshore, I hope. I don’t have my passport.”
He sat her next to him on a comfy sofa at the side of the plane. “San Francisco with a stop in Denver to see a property I’m interested in.” The steward approached. “Now, Anna-b, what would you like to drink?”
12:05pm - Fanboys and Dead Guys
* * *
“So you can find out anything? You solve crimes and stuff online?”
Asher Gamble sat next to Cam at the table, the boy’s eyes moving between the big screen and Cam, who seemed to have captured his heart with research.
“I help,” Cam tol
d him. “The lieutenant’s the one who figures it out.”
Asher ducked his head, and Cam felt his slight body, hard with tension, press against his arm. It was something his younger sisters did, when they wanted comfort but didn’t want to ask.
Cam wasn’t at all convinced he had any psychic ability, but he did have a talent for reading body language. Asher was conflicted and angry and frightened. So Cam did what he did with his sisters—pretended not to notice and stayed still until they were ready to talk.
At the head of the table, Hunter waited. He could feel Natani worrying next to him, wanting to get on with things, running the implications of a teen-ager in their offices through her mind, wondering how he’d found them at all.
Asher shot a look at Hunt from under lowered brows. “You know what guides are, right?”
Hunter nodded. Cam felt the boy press into him harder. He brought up a contour map of Red Rocks Park and Mount Morrison as if he hadn’t. Natani sat back and folded her hands in her lap.
“They change, some of them. Last night, your dad, he said he’d be around for a while. He said to stay with you.”
Hunter removed himself from his feelings. It was a thing he did with deliberation, locking them away in a heavy metal box in his mind. Inaccessible.
“Were you awake this time?”
Asher’s body relaxed, slightly. His head came up. “Asleep. It was on a beach, a little beach. He was burying a starfish in the sand. You know, a hard, dead one like you buy in a store.”
Hunt’s metal box flew open. His throat tightened; he felt prickling behind his eyes. He needed to be in the here and now. Help me, he asked his father. The feelings receded and something cool settled inside him.
“I see,” he said. Cam looked over at his tone.
“It’s supposed to be a secret from everybody. I promised.” Asher sat forward suddenly, leaving the warmth of Cam’s arm and shoulder. Hunter knew he needed to be reassured by someone here. By him.
