The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  Coleman was mute for a few seconds. “Is that … what I think it is?”

  “Yeah. Pegnini. Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have chosen that one to show you.” She clicked the main lights back on.

  “That really got in your head, huh?”

  “Hard to get out.”

  The computer had finally booted up, so Del returned to her desk.

  “I looked up that thing you do,” Coleman said. “Being able to see if people are lying? I read a science article saying they can use thermal imaging to detect deception with ninety percent accuracy. Increased blood flow around the eyes and forehead.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t think I’m lying to you?”

  Coleman laughed. “I didn’t think that. I’m saying it’s interesting.”

  Del inserted the memory key from Esposito. A directory appeared with a massive list of thirty-three thousand files.

  She clicked on one.

  A grainy black-and-white image appeared with a red box around the suspect’s face. Not all the cameras in the network were as clear as the ones in the Meatpacking District. From this angle, it was hard to tell whether it was Roy. She had done her undergraduate degree in fine arts, but with a minor in computer science, mostly with an interest in digital image processing. She had told Esposito to widen the recognition filter. Maybe too much.

  She squinted at the picture, shrugged, and clicked to the next one. It was just as inconclusive. The guy in this one had on a baseball cap.

  Thirty-three thousand of these?

  “Hey, are you going to help?” she said. Coleman was looking at another of her paintings.

  Del opened up more images and tried to understand what she was seeing, but the time stamps added an extra level of complexity. Another dimension. She still had no idea whether any of them were really Roy. She opened another window on her desktop and began clicking multiple images. She picked a few and opened a digital map of Manhattan in another window and tried to correlate the image locations and times, to make sense of them.

  “This is your mom?” Coleman had switched walls. He pointed at a picture.

  It was Del’s mother, back in the seventies, at her first vernissage. Del loved the picture. “Yeah, that’s her.” She smiled. Her mother dressed up in an African kaftan, showing off hermaphroditic sculptures in bronze. She was such a firebrand back then, but then, she was still active in the community now, just in different ways.

  “Holy cow!” Coleman murmured.

  Del turned to look at him. “What?”

  “Your dad is Sergeant Devlin of the Seventh Precinct?” He pointed at another picture, of Del’s mother and father together.

  She returned to looking at the images on her screen, shaking her head. “And you want to be a detective?”

  “I just figured—”

  “My last name is Devlin. You did notice that, right?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t make the connection. He’s Irish. I mean, really Irish. Like more Irish than Jameson’s.”

  “And your point is?”

  “No wonder Esposito let us into One PP,” Coleman mused. “And I thought it was just because we were friends.”

  “It was,” Del replied. “Plus who my dad is. Plus Giants tickets. The parts add up—we’re partners, right? Now, come on, help me.”

  Coleman took one last look before coming to sit down beside her. “What do you want me to do?”

  Del opened another set of pictures. This was going to be impossible.

  Thirty-three thousand images.

  They needed another way to look at these. She needed to visualize the images together, find a way to see them clearly in time and space.

  Human vision was foveated, which meant that the eye’s cone-shaped light detectors became exponentially denser near the center. In effect, this meant that humans really didn’t see everything clearly—in fact, barely seeing anything more than movement and shadows in the peripheral vision. It was a trick the brain played. The eye really saw clearly, in detail, only an area about the size of a quarter held at arm’s length. The brain painted in the rest of the image to give us the impression we saw everything around us, but we didn’t, not really.

  She needed a way to get past this limitation.

  “Call your buddy Esposito. I have a little programming job for him.”

  37

  Angel Rodriguez squatted on top of the fancy toilet, his door still locked. He doubted the octogenarian night security guard would bother checking each stall. At best, the guy might just come in and take a pee. He bet the old guy had to do that at least a half-dozen times each night, so Angel wouldn’t have long to wait.

  That would give him enough time between the rounds.

  He was used to waiting. He had gotten adept at squatting on his tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the Kashmir Valley during training with the Indian troops. An easy way to suspend your ass over the ground without sitting, and get to your feet fast if you needed to. He could squat like this for hours.

  For most Westerners, it was hell on the knee and hip joints, but Angel was supple and strong. He could fall asleep in this position for hours but be wide awake at the snap of a twig. Was he afraid now, sitting on a toilet? Locked in an office after hours? About to break into the safe of a senior hedge fund manager? He laughed to himself. The only danger here was maybe a night in jail.

  On more sorties than he cared to remember, he’d been left alone in the dark where any small mistake would have gotten him killed. Where he had to kill to survive, thousands of miles from home in a hostile country. This was a cakewalk.

  In the worst case, he was sure he could explain it away by saying he had a job here, or get Roy to intervene. Roy had a seat on the board of directors of LCT Capital after all, and he had said he was okay with Angel getting the papers from Atticus’s safe.

  He was doing it for his new buddy, Roy.

  Nobody left behind.

  That said, he was worried about Roy. The poor guy was clearly starting to skip a groove. The money Angel was getting from Roy would make it possible for him and Charlie to buy their own little house in Brooklyn, to put down the deposit. He appreciated it.

  They needed to finish this investigation as fast as possible and get Roy back on track. Clear the air. Get everything in the open. Roy deserved that much.

  Angel looked at his watch. Nine p.m. He hardly even needed to look. His brain had a hardwired counter in it. He could squat here, eyes closed, and know almost to the minute what time it was. A skill he had needed to hone. He focused on his breathing.

  He had spent this afternoon taking his new son—his new son!—Rodrigo, out for a walk in Central Park. He and Charlie had flown to Colombia months before to meet the five-year-old but had brought him back here only this past week.

  They were now a family of four, counting the mutt, Columbo, that they had just rescued from the pound. What kid didn’t need a dog as a best buddy? He rocked back and forth on his haunches, a grin on his face.

  After all the crazy stuff he’d been through, he couldn’t believe he had made it to this point in his life. His own family! He was going to give this kid such a great life; he was going to be the best dad ever.

  Rodrigo Rodriguez. His son’s name. It just rolled off the tongue, didn’t it? Didn’t that sound like a Latino pop singer’s name?

  The main door to the bathroom creaked open. Soft-soled shoes ambled over the ceramic floor, and then the tinkling sound. Angel checked his watch again. Nine twenty. He waited for the outside door to creak shut again before stepping panther-like off his perch. He opened the stall door and crept out, opened the outside door a crack. The guard was probably already back at his station, halfway back to sleep in front of the security monitors. Angel had disabled the one for Atticus’s office by rewiring the feed from the office next door. Simple enough, but still risk
y.

  Keeping low, Angel made his way between the cubicles to Cargill’s office and slipped a card into the locked doorjamb to open it. In the dark, he felt his way back to the credenza and pulled open the painting covering the safe.

  Roy had said that Atticus was old-school. Said he didn’t keep important files electronically, didn’t even keep them in a bank safe-deposit box.

  Angel clicked on an ultraviolet flashlight and lit up the keys on the safe. This model of safe had a five-digit code. He had slipped some UV-sensitive ink, invisible to the eye, onto a document he gave Atticus today. That was the easy part—the longer part had been getting hired as a file clerk using one of Roy’s unwitting friends as a reference.

  Angel had waited to see him open his safe from outside the room, through the glass wall of Atticus’s office. He’d been careful not to watch directly, but just from the corner of his eye, enough to catch the elbow motions. Watched him open the safe three times in the past week. To the top left, then down, and to the side and back. Now, under the UV light, the keys Atticus had pressed glowed bright.

  Angel just had to guess the sequence.

  Only four of the keys glowed. One. Three. Six. Nine. He remembered the motion of the elbow. Up. Then down. And back. A number popped into Angel’s mind: 19-3-66—Atticus’s granddaughter’s birthday.

  Not too smart, old man, but a sweet sentiment.

  Angel keyed the sequence into the safe’s keypad. The door clicked open. This was the risky part. Atticus might have a silent alarm on the door—an email or text message alert that was sent out each time the door opened. He’d looked up this model of safe, and it was an option, but if Atticus’s lax security protocols were anything to go by, maybe he had never enabled it.

  This had to be quick. In and out.

  Angel pulled out a sheaf of files and leafed through them, a plastic flashlight in his mouth. Still no noise from the front office. It took only a minute to find a file marked “Lowell-Vandeweghe.”

  The rest of the files were for other clients, and the rest of the safe was filled with what looked like bonds and checks. He closed the safe and locked it.

  He read through the file using his flashlight. He stopped on a page. Frowned. Switched to the calculator on his phone and punched a few numbers, then looked at a web page. He looked at the next page in the paper document, and his eyes went wide.

  He whistled quietly, then dialed a number.

  Roy picked up on the first ring.

  “Hey, where are you?” he whispered.

  “Uptown,” Roy answered. “Downtown.”

  “You okay?” Angel took the pages of the file and opened the safe again to put them back. Better to get done as quick as possible.

  “I’m fine,” Roy replied.

  “Man, I got something I gotta tell you.”

  Angel heard a shuffling noise in the office toward the front.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Can we meet? I gotta get out of here.”

  The detective scribbled on a scrap of paper and stuffed it into his pocket.

  * * *

  Angel stamped his feet in the cold and pulled his wool hat lower around his ears. Just over a week till Christmas. Man, they had to get a big Christmas tree up in the loft! Decorate it. Get some presents under it.

  Focus, he said to himself. Get your mind back on the job. Still, it felt as though everything was coming together and the mystery had been solved.

  Snowflakes began to drift in the orange glow of the sodium streetlamps. He had spoken to Roy, who said to meet him in ten minutes, two blocks from the Woolworth Tower on Madison Street, right beside the NYPD headquarters.

  That was fine.

  Maybe Roy wanted to speak to the cops. With the information Angel was about to give him, he might want to. Maybe he already knew. That was possible. Was it illegal? Angel didn’t know. Probably not illegal, but certainly surprising.

  A shape appeared on the corner, just beyond the huge concrete blocks on Madison that blocked the street so nobody could drive up it. Terrorist-proofing.

  He waved, and Roy waved back.

  Angel recognized the green-and-red parka that Roy had worn the last time they met. Roy had the hood of his coat pulled up against the snow.

  Angel walked toward Pearl Street, the falling snow lit up by the fluorescent lights of a Rite Aid pharmacy glowing bright on the next block. “Check this out, bro. You’re not going to believe this.”

  Without thinking, automatically, Angel suddenly reacted—twisted his body sideways and slammed one hand down. The wind was knocked out of him, as if he’d been punched in the gut, but he felt nothing. He gasped for air and looked down. A wicked blade stuck halfway out of the side of his chest.

  He clawed at it, but Roy gripped the handle tight and ripped it out. He tried to make another stab, but Angel managed to dodge, and the knife went through only his coat. But the damage was done.

  Angel dropped to his knees, his fingernails gripping Roy’s coat. Still no pain, but a sudden fear. Not now. Please. I’m so close. How hadn’t he seen it?

  His last thought was of Charlie, and then of Rodrigo’s little face smiling in the park, before the blackness took him.

  38

  Roy tightened his grip around Primrose Chegwidden’s throat and squeezed. Her face turned mottled purple, and then as red as that stupid colored hairdo. Her head separated from her body and floated away.

  Just like Roy’s.

  He let go and put his arms out to get some lift, to hover over the ground. Angel looked up at him, gave him a thumbs-up, but Roy couldn’t stop himself. He dived down, straight into Angel, straight into his heart.

  His eyes opened to blackness. He gasped for air.

  The darkness felt as if it were constructed of invisible Styrofoam cubes. Soundlessly, the cubes of darkness squeezed into each other, pressed, and then came the awful teeth-gritting squeak of the foam collapsing into itself. New cubes formed from the old, and the process repeated, the empty black space reforming and reshaping, gathering speed.

  He blinked. He was lying on his back. The dim light of the streetlamp outside bled in past the tatty, washed-out curtains of his apartment. It was still dark out, and freezing cold in here. His lips were parched, his mouth filled with sludge. He needed water. He struggled to roll to his right, and then left, and then just to get up onto his elbows.

  Nothing.

  He sucked in another lungful of air and smelled the stale sweat, the metal tang of blood in his mouth. He felt the cold and the prickle of the cheap mattress against his skin. He could breathe, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t budge so much as a finger.

  What had he done? What happened? The last he remembered, he was in the basement with the crazed Shelby Sheffield. Was that what lay in store for him, too? He would kill himself first. He remembered thinking someone should put Shelby out of his misery.

  And then what? How had he gotten here? Had he injured himself? Severed his spinal cord somehow? Gotten into a fight again? He took another breath and tried to calm a rising panic. Again he tried to move an arm, even a finger. Nothing. God, he was so thirsty. His head throbbed.

  What have I done?

  How long could someone survive without water? A day? Two?

  When did he last take the antirejection drugs?

  He remembered an article he’d read in the Times. The Japanese had a word for this: kodokushi. The lonely death. People dying alone in their apartments, remaining undiscovered for weeks while their bodies decomposed.

  How much time had he paid the landlady for? Two weeks? Or was it a month in advance? Would he die of thirst, his desiccated body rotting for a month before anyone came in? He doubted it would be the first time someone had died in this dump.

  And then another thought.

  Had Danesti done this to him? The implants still in
his temples, under the skin near his skull, in his legs and arms. What were they capable of? Had Danesti disconnected the implants? The bastard. Would he leave Roy to rot here? Had he pissed him off too much? Become too much of a liability? What else could those implants do? He didn’t feel as if he had his exo-suit on—he usually took it off and put it in his backpack at night.

  Roy closed his eyes and tried to calm down. Breathe deep. Just breathe.

  * * *

  Bam, bam, bam.

  Roy’s eyes shot open.

  Bam, bam. “This is the police,” called out a voice. A man’s voice.

  Without thinking, Roy rolled over and fell out of the bed. He stopped for a second, crouched, realizing he could move again. Had he only been dreaming his paralysis?

  “Open up!” yelled the policeman.

  What did they want? Did they find Primrose’s body? He paused a beat before thinking. Did they find the storage locker?

  There had to be cameras. He shouldn’t have been so stupid. He should have gotten rid of the evidence. But why? He should just turn himself in. He scrambled in the dark to find his jeans and put them on, grab his phone and wallet. He put on his sneakers and grabbed his backpack with the exo-suit. He felt in the pack to check—it was rolled up inside.

  Don’t let them catch you, said a voice in his head. You don’t want to be caught like this. Like an animal.

  “Roy, we know you’re in there,” said another voice from outside the front door.

  A woman’s voice.

  He knew that voice.

  39

  “Damn it,” Del muttered.

  White puffs of vapor billowed out with each exhalation. It had to be five degrees below freezing. It had been snowing on and off for two days, and a few flakes were drifting down.

  A clear set of footprints led into the apartment. They had to be from this morning. One set of prints.

  She and Coleman had sat in their cruiser across the street and waited. It was a long shot. She had asked Esposito to reformat the data he’d sent her, but to put it into a three-dimensional visualization color-coded with a frequency map of the facial recognition hits. With this new tool, she’d had him expand the filter even wider to gather more hits. Once it was done, she could cycle back and forth through time and see the hot spots.