by Jeff Edwards
I was surprised. “We’re leaving?”
She smiled. “No. We’re almost leaving.”
“Why are we almost leaving?” I asked.
“Because fifty-percent of winning the battle is holding the high ground,” she said. “And in this case, the high ground is downstairs in the parking lot.”
“Right,” I said, without the foggiest idea of what she was talking about. “Let’s almost leave, then.”
A few seconds later, the elevator doors opened. I followed her in. The doors closed smoothly, and the elevator dropped at a speed that ratcheted my adrenaline up a half-notch.
Pale blue holographic digits superimposed themselves on the burled paneling above the door and began counting down rapidly.
Vivien stabbed a button, apparently at random, somewhere in the middle floors. The elevator began to slow.
“Now, what are you doing?” I asked.
“We left quickly,” Vivien said. “Detective Bruhn needs a chance to catch up.”
The elevator coasted to a stop and the doors opened. Vivien waited patiently for them to close. The elevator dropped again, still moving too fast for my stomach.
When we got to the lobby, Vivien pulled out her phone again, thumbed an icon, and then put the phone back into her pocket.
We didn’t speak again until we were past the doorman, and standing under the parking shelter.
“What was the deal just now with your phone?” I asked.
“I was summoning my chauffeur,” Vivien said. “Ordinarily, I do it as soon as I know that I’m leaving. But, in this instance...”
I nodded. “You’re not in any hurry, because you’re waiting for Bruhn to catch up.”
“Precisely.”
I reached into the pocket of my gray windbreaker and pulled out a pack of Brazilian Marlboros. “Mind if I smoke?”
Vivien looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Suppose I say ‘yes?’”
I pointed across the parking lot. “Then I go stand way over there, and smoke by myself. And you can wait here for Bruhn by yourself.”
“Go ahead. Light up,” Vivien said. She shook her head. “Why does every man I meet today want to show me how large his testicles are?”
I touched the tip of the cigarette against the circular ignition patch on the bottom of the pack. It took a second or so for the catalytic reaction to light the tobacco. I inhaled a lungful of smoke and exhaled. “This is not about the size of my testicles. I just want a cigarette. Are your cancer immunizations up to date?”
She nodded.
“Then it can’t hurt you.”
“I know that it can’t hurt me,” she said. “I just don’t like the smell.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll go stink up the other side of the parking lot.”
Vivien grabbed my sleeve. “You’re staying right here.” She wrinkled her nose. “Why do you do that, anyway? Get your genes tweaked. You can walk away from those nasty things with no cravings at all.”
“I’m a dinosaur,” I said. “I resist change. My nasty little habits are damned near all that’s left of the old me.”
Vivien rolled her eyes. “What in the hell does that mean?”
I shrugged. “Makes as much sense as calling this parking lot the high ground.”
“Touché,” Vivien said.
I took another drag off my cigarette. “Tell me what you know about your daughter’s disappearance.”
“Not very much,” Vivien said. “No one does. What little I do know, you’ll be able to read when you get the police files.
“Indulge me,” I said.
Vivien took a deep breath, and then paused for a few seconds. “She... Leanda... came home on the evening of September seventeenth. The lobby security cameras caught a clear shot of her entering the building at six fourteen p.m. The camera recorded her walking into the elevator—then the door closed, and she was gone. No one has seen a trace of her since.”
Vivien looked at her watch. “Fifty-four days. She’s been gone for fifty-four days already.”
“I take it the security camera never caught a shot of her leaving.”
“No,” Vivien said quietly. “The police have been over every microsecond of video since Leanda’s disappearance at least twenty times. They even ran it through an AI designed to identify people by posture and body language, just in case she had decided to sneak out of the building in disguise.”
“Would Leanda do something like that?”
Vivien shrugged. “She might, if she thought she had reason.”
“Your daughter is an investigative reporter, right? Have you considered the possibility that she’s gone under cover to investigate a story? Maybe she’s working on something big, something with enough explosive potential to make it necessary for her to drop off the radar.”
Vivien’s lips turned up in a weak smile, a fraction of the confident grin she’d unleashed on Detective Bruhn. “You certainly know how to say what a worried mother wants to hear, Mr. Stalin. That’s precisely the scenario that my feverish little mind concocted when I learned that my daughter had taken an express elevator to Never-Never Land.”
Vivien brushed a lock of hair away from her forehead. “It may be foolish. It might even be delusional, but it helps me get to sleep at night.”
The look in her eyes told me that it was time to redirect my line of questioning. “Let’s get back to the night of September seventeenth,” I said. “Did Leanda make it up to her apartment?”
“Probably. It’s impossible to be absolutely certain, because nobody actually saw her up there, but the data files in her apartment’s AI were tampered with on the night she disappeared. Twelve hours’ worth of recordings have been erased—starting about six hours before she walked through the lobby, and ending about six hours later. The police think something happened in her apartment that night, and someone erased the AI’s files so we couldn’t find out what it was.”
“Maybe we should call in a data-retrieval expert,” I said. “Digital information can leave trace evidence, even after it’s been erased. With the right equipment, a skilled technician can read those traces. It might be possible to resurrect some of the data.”
Vivien shook her head. “The police called in a whole team of data retrieval experts. The files weren’t just erased; they were eradicated, using a custom-tailored virus that wrote and re-wrote nonsense data to the deleted file sectors thousands of times. Any trace data that might have been left in the AI’s memory is long gone. I hired a few experts of my own, to get a second opinion. They spent a week on Leanda’s AI. They provided me with a nicely bound report of their findings, essentially repeating what the police computer evidence team had already told me: the data was irretrievable. The bill they sent me was positively obscene.”
“Somebody definitely doesn’t want us to know what happened in that apartment on the night of the seventeenth.”
Vivien nodded. “I would say that’s a safe assumption.”
A sleek green Dornier hover-limousine slid up to the curb. It stopped with the right rear door carefully aligned with the tips of Vivien’s shoes. The big car settled onto its ground-effects apron with a sigh that was barely audible. The blowers were whisper-quiet, and I couldn’t hear the car’s turbines at all. Hover-cars are noisy by nature. It took serious money to build a car that quiet, and equally serious money to maintain the kind of near-silence that the rich were apparently accustomed to.
The gull-wing door opened with a muted hiss, folding itself up and out of Vivien’s way. The interior was an elegant womb of dark green diamond-tucked leather. The rear seat was more like an overstuffed couch than anything I would expect to see in a car, however luxurious. With the addition of legs, it would have been at home in a Victorian parlor.
I looked at Vivien again. “The fact that Leanda’s AI was tampered with doesn’t necessarily rule out the idea that she arranged her own disappearance. If she was planning to drop out of sight, she might well have zapped her own
files to cover her trail.”
Vivien got in and slipped over to the far side of the pseudo-couch. “A possibility that I’ve considered,” she said. She patted the leather beside her and cocked her head impishly. “Do I have to issue a formal invitation?”
“My car is parked over there,” I said. “Anyway, I thought we weren’t leaving.”
“We’re not. This is how we’re going to almost leave.”
I took another hit from my cigarette and held it up as I exhaled. “Can we almost leave in a minute? I’m not done with this yet.”
“Put it out,” Vivien said. “At what I’m paying you, I’m reasonably certain you can afford another one.”
I dropped the cigarette and ground it out with my toe. “Alright, but this is going on my expense account.”
I climbed in. The leather was even softer than it looked.
“Leave the door open,” Vivien said.
“Of course, Madam,” said a disembodied voice.
I glanced up toward the front of the car. There was no driver. In place of the traditional wraparound instrument panel and control yoke was another Victorian couch. An AI driver. In my mind, the already-staggering cost estimate for the car surged upward by an entire income-bracket.
“I thought the rich preferred human service to machines,” I said.
Vivien brushed a lock of raven-colored hair behind her ear. “As a rule, I do. But human servants will talk. I don’t always care to advertise where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing.”
I nodded.
She turned her face toward me, the first signs of strain glimmering in her gray eyes. “Can you really find my daughter?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m pretty good at this kind of thing, but I don’t work miracles. Right now, I’m just trying to get a feel for the case. I don’t know enough about your daughter, or the circumstances of her disappearance, to give you a better answer than that. If I reach a point where I don’t think I can help, I’ll tell you. I don’t pad my expenses, and I’m not in the habit of wasting my clients’ money.”
“I knew that before I hired you,” Vivien said. “That’s one of the reasons I chose you over the big firms.”
“One of the reasons?”
She dipped into a side pocket of her silk jacket and pulled out one of my business cards. It was a simple affair, black lettering on white cardboard. No holograms, no active-matrix graphics, not even a logo.
My contact information was on the back.
Vivien fanned herself with the card. “It certainly wasn’t your stellar advertising campaign.”
I shrugged. “The people who need me seem to find me.”
I looked back toward the doors of the building. Bruhn was coming down the front steps, two at a time. “Speaking of advertising, your most recent campaign seems to have snared a customer.”
Bruhn covered the distance between the stairs and the curb in about three long strides. He stopped when he got to the car, took a deep breath, and leaned over to glare through the open doorway. He was coming to Vivien on her turf, now, and the look on his face said that he knew it.
He let out the breath. “All right, Ms. Forsyth, it looks like your phone tips heavier on the scales of justice than my badge. For the moment, anyway.”
“I expect full access to the files,” Vivien said, “and anything else pertaining to my daughter’s case.”
“Of course,” Bruhn said quietly.
“You will extend that courtesy to Mr. Stalin, as well.”
The muscles in Bruhn’s jaw tensed. “I understand.”
“Good. You can begin by giving Mr. Stalin a copy of the computer files.”
“I don’t carry them with me,” Bruhn said.
Vivien turned her wrist over and glanced at her watch, a slim Breguet on a braided gold bracelet. “I didn’t really expect that you would,” she said. “I’ll send a bonded courier to your office in two hours. I trust you’ll have a copy ready when he arrives?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Perhaps you’d better make Mr. Stalin a copy of the door key, as well,” she said. “He may want to spend some time there, to get the scent of the case, or whatever it is that Private Detectives do.”
“Your daughter’s apartment is still classified as a crime scene,” Bruhn said.
“Only because it’s a high-profile case. If my daughter had been a mid-grade computer programmer for one of the multinationals, you would have turned her apartment back over to the property manager a month ago. We both know that preserving a crime scene for this long in a missing persons case would be unheard of—if the victim’s family didn’t have money and power. Well, we do have money. And we do have power. I’ll get that key, Detective. I’d rather not run over you to do it, but I will get it. Do you understand?”
“I... understand,” Bruhn said.
Vivien nodded. “Excellent.”
Bruhn paused for a second. “Why are you doing this?”
“I want my daughter back, Vivien said flatly.
“Obviously,” Bruhn said. “But I don’t understand why you aren’t letting us handle it. I thought you guys were big time pro-cop. It seems like I can’t turn on the vid without catching a sound byte of your husband painting himself up like Mr. Law-and-Order. Cops have a friend in the Government. Is that all just bullshit?”
“Not at all,” Vivien said. “My husband is quite sincere; I assure you. He really does think he’s a one man crusade against crime. But he has his agenda, and I have mine.”
Bruhn didn’t bother to mask his scowl. “So, as far as you’re concerned, cops can pretty much stuff it?”
Vivien flashed him a sardonic little smile. “I didn’t say anything like that. I happen to agree with about ninety percent of the senator’s political beliefs. You and your fellow officers are overworked, underpaid, and improperly supported. Despite that, you manage to do a pretty damned good job most of the time. I respect that, and I am grateful to you for doing it.”
Bruhn cocked his head and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “But you’re still going to yank my chain?”
Vivien shook her head. “I have no desire to yank your chain, Detective. But I would dance naked in the streets if I thought it would bring Leanda back even ten seconds sooner. If you find her, I will be forever in your debt. Mr. Stalin is here in case you don’t find her. Think of him as a frightened mother’s insurance policy.”
Bruhn turned his eyes to me. “I think you’re throwing your money away,” he said.
“It’s my money,” Vivien said. “I’m certainly entitled to throw it away.”
“I guess so,” Bruhn said.
“I know so,” Vivien said. “Now, unless you have something other than opinion to add to this conversation, that will be all.”
Bruhn stared for a second before it occurred to him that he was actually being dismissed. He straightened up, turned on his heel, and began walking toward his car.
When he was out of earshot, I nodded in his direction. “You could have gotten the files without stepping on him. You could have made a single call to one of your gophers, and gotten what you wanted in half the time.”
“Of course,” Vivien said. “In fact, I already have a copy of the files, current up to a couple of days ago.”
“You just wanted to kick him in the balls?”
The expression on Vivien’s face said that I had missed some crucial point in her exchange with Bruhn. She paused for a few seconds. “Are you armed, Mr. Stalin?”
I pulled back the left side of my windbreaker to reveal the 12mm Blackhart riding in my shoulder holster.
“Could you shoot Detective Bruhn from here?”
“Why on Earth would I want to do that?”
“I didn’t ask if you would,” Vivien said. “I asked if you could.”
I looked through the window at Bruhn’s retreating back. “Yes,” I said.
“Could you hit him?”
I gauged the distance and his dwindling size. “
Probably.”
“How?” she asked.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“How would you do it? Or, more precisely, what gives you the ability to do it? I assume there is a certain amount of skill involved.”
“Some,” I said. “And also some practice.”
Vivien said, “Exactly. Your weapon—one of them, anyway—is that cannon you call a pistol. You know how to aim it, and you know when to pull the trigger.”
I nodded.
“I have my own weapons,” she said. “I know how to aim them, and I know when to pull the trigger.”
She sighed. “I didn’t enjoy rubbing Detective Bruhn’s nose in the dirt, but someone should have explained the rules to him as soon as he took over the case. Evidently that didn’t happen, so it’s actually fortuitous that he decided to be difficult early-on. It made his education quick and relatively painless. Better for all of us. He’ll be petulant for a while—his ego demands it—but I believe you’ll find him cooperative.”
I nodded. “And how will you handle me, when I become difficult?”
“I have no intention of handling you,” she said. “As long as you’re working to get my daughter back, you can prance around in women’s underwear and act like a flaming son of a bitch. I don’t care in the slightest. And, I frankly don’t care whose throats you have to cut along the way.”
I climbed out of the car and stood up. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
I took a step back and watched while the door closed and the apron inflated. Vivien’s limo glided away from the curb.
My own car was a six-year old Pontiac Shockwave with fading metallic blue paint. It was a good car, not quite the opposite end of the spectrum from Vivien’s limousine, but a pretty far cry nonetheless. The alarm system emitted a warning bleep to notify me that I was entering the car’s sensor perimeter. I pulled out the key chip and let my car scan it, so the poor dumb machine would know that Daddy was home. It bleeped again, a friendly welcoming tone this time, and then it buzzed once to tell me that someone had been close enough to my car to make physical contact. I waited, but there were no more of the ominous buzzes, telling me that my unknown visitor hadn’t actually attempted to enter the vehicle, or open any of its maintenance accesses.
