Skin Deep

by Brandon Sanderson

  “Isn’t that a little sparse?” I asked.

  “The whole place is wired with alarms. If someone tries to break in, the security guard’s desk will light up like Christmas.” She grimaced. “We used to turn it on only at night, but they’ve had it on for two days straight now. Have to get permission to open a damn window these days . . .”

  I looked at the team.

  “Stephen,” Tobias said, “we’re going to need Ngozi.”

  I sighed. Well, it wasn’t too long a drive to go back and pick her up.

  “Here,” J.C. said, pulling out his phone. “Let me give her a call.”

  “I don’t think . . .” I said, but he was already dialing.

  “Yeah, Achmed, we need your help,” he said. “What? Of course I have your number. No, I have not been stalking you. Look, can you find Ngozi? How should I know where she is? Probably washing her hands a hundred times or something. No, I have not been stalking her either.” He lowered the phone, giving the rest of us a suffering look. He raised it back up, and a short time later, continued. “Great. Let’s video conference.”

  Tobias and I looked over J.C.’s shoulders as Kalyani’s face appeared on the screen, perky and excited. She waved, then turned the phone toward Ngozi, who sat reading on her bed.

  What to say about Ngozi? She was from Nigeria, with deep brown skin, and had been educated at Oxford. She was also deathly afraid of germs—so much so that when Kalyani held the phone toward her, Ngozi shied away visibly. She shook her head, and Kalyani was obliged to stand there, holding the phone.

  “What’s up?” Ngozi asked with a clipped, Nigerian accent.

  “Crime scene investigation,” I said.

  “You’re going to come get me?”

  “Well, I guess we kind of thought . . .” I hesitated, then looked to J.C. “I don’t know if this is going to work, J.C. We’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Worth a try, though, right?”

  I looked toward Ivy, who seemed skeptical, but Tobias shrugged. “What harm can it do, Stephen? Getting Ngozi out of the house is difficult sometimes.”

  “I heard that,” Ngozi said. “It’s not difficult. I just require proper preparation.”

  “Yeah,” J.C. said, “like a hazmat suit.”

  “Please,” Ngozi said, rolling her eyes. “Just because I like things clean.”

  “Clean?” I asked her.

  “Very clean. Do you know the kinds of poisons that are pumped into the air every day by all those cars and factories? Where do you think that all goes? Do you ever wonder what that crusty blackness is on your skin after you hold a handrail on your way down the steps into the subway? And think of the people. Coughing into their hands, wiping their snotty nostrils, touching everything and everyone, and—”

  “We get it, Ngozi,” I said. I looked at Tobias, who nodded encouragingly. J.C. was right; phones among my aspects could be a valuable resource. I took the phone from J.C. Nearby, Liza watched me with what seemed like the first genuine emotion she’d displayed all morning: Fascination. She might not be a psychologist, but physicians of all varieties tend to find my . . . quirks captivating.

  Good for her. As long as it kept her from thinking about how much—or little—time I had remaining of her original “fifteen minute” restriction.

  “We’re going to try this over the phone,” I said to Ngozi. “We’re at the icebox. By all accounts, the body was here at night, but gone the next morning. Nothing suspicious on the hallway security cameras.” Liza nodded when I checked with her on this one. “There isn’t a camera in this room specifically, but the building does have an intense security system. So how did they get the body out?”

  Ngozi leaned forward, still not taking the camera from Kalyani, but inspecting me with curiosity. “Show me the room.”

  I walked around it, scanning the place, fully aware that to Liza’s perspective, I was holding nothing. Ngozi hummed to herself as I walked. Some show tune; I wasn’t certain which one.

  “So,” she said after I’d spent a few minutes scanning the place, “you’re sure the body is gone?”

  “Of course it’s gone,” I said, pointing the camera toward the still-open corpse drawer.

  “Well,” Ngozi said, “it’s going to be hard to do any traditional forensics here. But the question we should ask first is, ‘Do we need to?’ You’d be surprised at how often something is reported stolen, only to be found lost—or stashed—someplace very close to where the theft happened. If getting the body out of the room would be so hard, maybe it never did leave the room.”

  I looked at the other drawers. Then, with a sigh, I put the phone aside and began pulling them open one at a time. After a few minutes, Liza walked over and helped me. “We did this,” she mentioned, but didn’t stop me from double-checking. Only three of the other drawers had corpses, and we checked each one carefully. None were Panos.

  From there, I looked in the room’s cabinets, closets, and even drawers that were too small for a corpse. It was a long process, and one that I was actually pleased to find unfruitful. Discovering several bags full of elbows or whatnot wouldn’t have been particularly appealing.

  I dusted off my hands and looked toward the phone and Ngozi’s image. Kalyani had joined her on the bed, and the two had been chatting about how I really did need to stop working so much and settle down with someone nice. And, preferably, someone sane.

  “What next?” I said to the phone.

  “Locard’s principle,” Ngozi said.

  “Which is?”

  “Basically,” she said, “the principle states that whenever there is contact, or an exchange, evidence is left behind. We have very little to go on, as the victim was already dead when abducted, and presumably still zipped up tight. But the perpetrator will have left behind signs they were here. I don’t suppose we can get a DNA sweep of the room . . .”

  I looked hopefully at Liza and asked, to which I got a sniff of amusement. The case wasn’t nearly important enough for that. “We can try for fingerprints on our own,” I said to Ngozi. “But the police aren’t going to help.”

  “Let’s do obvious contact points first,” Ngozi said. “Close up on the drawer handle please.”

  I brought the phone over and put it very close to the handle of the corpse drawer. “Great,” Ngozi said after a minute. “Now the door into the room.”

  I did so, passing Liza, who was checking her watch.

  “Time might be running out, Ngozi,” I said softly.

  “My art isn’t exactly something that can be rushed,” she noted back at me. “Particularly long-distance.”

  I showed her the door handle, not really certain what she was looking for. Ngozi had me pull the door open to look at the other side. The door was heavy, made to swing shut after anyone who left. Once I was outside, I couldn’t open it again. Liza had to unlock it with a key card.

  “All right, Leeds,” Liza said as I turned the camera to show the strike plate on the inside of the door frame. “You—”

  “Bingo,” Ngozi said.

  I froze in place, then looked back at the door frame. Ignoring the rest of what Liza said, I knelt down, trying to see what Ngozi had.

  “See those dust marks?” Ngozi asked.

  “Um . . . no?”

  “Look closely. Someone put tape here, then pulled it off, leaving behind enough gum to attract dust.”

  Liza stooped down beside me. “Did you hear me?”

  “Tape,” I asked. “Do you have some tape?”

  “Why—”

  “Yo,” J.C. said from inside the room, holding up a roll of the translucent industrial tape that lay on the counter.

  I brushed past Liza and fetched the tape—J.C. had to set down his imaginary copy before I could see the real one—then rushed back. I placed a strip of it over the strike plate, stepped out of the room, and let the door slide closed.

  It thumped into place. That thump covered the lack of a click. When I pushed on the
door, it opened without needing help from the inside.

  “We know how they got into the room,” I said.

  “So?” Liza asked. “We knew they’d gotten in somehow. How does this help?”

  “It tells us it was likely someone who visited the day before the body went missing,” I said. “The last visitor, perhaps? They would be in a position to tape the door with the least chance of discovery during the day.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’d have noticed if the door were taped,” Liza said.

  “Would you have? With the key card unlocking, you never have to turn or twist anything. It’s natural for you to push the door and have it just swing open.”

  She thought about it for a moment. “Plausible,” she admitted. “But who did it?”

  “Who was last into this room that day?”

  “The priest. I had to let him in. The others had gone home for the evening, but I stayed late.”

  “Had a FreeCell game that you just had to finish?” I asked.

  “Shut up.”

  I smiled. “Did you recognize the priest?”

  She shook her head. “But he was on the list and his ID was valid.”

  “Creating a fake ID wouldn’t be much,” Ivy said to me, “considering what was at stake.”

  “That’s probably our man,” I said to Liza. “Come on, I want to talk to your security officer.”

  As Liza pulled the tape off the door, I thanked Ngozi for her help, turned off the camera, and tossed the phone back to J.C.

  “Nice work,” Ivy noted to him, smiling.

  “Thanks,” he said, slipping the phone into a pocket of his cargo pants. “Of course, it’s not actually a phone. It’s a hyper-dimensional time—”

  “J.C.,” Ivy interrupted.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t ruin this moment.”

  “Oh. Yeah, okay.”

  13

  I hit the restroom in the hallway before going to the security station. I didn’t really need to go to the bathroom, but Tobias did.

  The room was clean, which I appreciated. The soap dispensers were full, the mirror spotless, and it even had a little chart on the door listing the last cleaning, where the staff had to sign to prove they’d done their job. I washed my hands, looking at myself in the mirror while Tobias finished his pit stop.

  My own mundane face looked back at me. I’m never what people expect. Some picture me as some sort of eccentric scientist, others imagine an action star. Instead, they get a rather bland man in his thirties, perfectly normal.

  In some ways, I often feel like my White Room. A blank slate. The aspects have all the character. I try very hard to not stand out. Because I am not crazy.

  I dried my hands and waited for Tobias to wash up, then we rejoined the others outside and walked toward the security station. It consisted of a circular desk with an open center, the type you’d find at a mall beneath a sign proclaiming “Information.” I walked up and the security guard looked me over—like I was a piece of pizza and he was trying to decide how long I’d been sitting in the fridge. He didn’t ask what I wanted. Liza had called him to tell him to prepare camera footage for me.

  The desk really was too small for this hulk of a man. When he leaned forward, the inside front of the desk pressed into his gut; I was left with the impression of a grape being squeezed from the bottom.

  “You,” the guard said with a deep baritone voice, “are the crazy one, aren’t you?”

  “Well, that’s not actually true,” I said. “You see, the standard definition of insanity is—”

  He leaned forward farther, and I pitied the poor desk. “You’re armed.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “So am I,” the guard said softly. “Don’t try anything.”

  “Okaaay,” Ivy said from beside me. “Creepy guy manning the security station.”

  “I like him,” J.C. said.

  “Of course you do.”

  The guard slowly lifted a flash drive. “Footage is on here.”

  I took it. “You’re certain the security system was on that night?”

  The man nodded. His hand made a fist, as if me even asking something so stupid was an offense worthy of a pounding.

  “Uh,” I said, watching that fist, “Liza says you leave it on during the day now, too?”

  “I’m going to catch him,” the guard said. “Nobody breaks into my building.”

  “Twice,” I said.

  The guard eyed me.

  “Nobody breaks into your building twice,” I said. “Since they did it once already. Actually . . . they might have done it twice already, since the first time they placed the tape on the door—but you might call that more of an infiltration than a break-in.”

  “Don’t give me lip,” the man said, pointing at me, “and don’t make trouble. Otherwise I’ll thump you so hard, it’ll knock some of your personalities into the next state.”

  “Ouch,” Audrey said, flipping through a magazine she’d found on his desk. “Ask him why, if he’s so amazingly observant, he hasn’t noticed that his fly is down.”

  I smiled, then made a quick exit. Liza watched me go from the doorway of her office.

  Outside, I held up the flash drive, then began moving along the side of the building. I waved to Wilson, who was still in the car. Panos’s brother sat sullenly in the front passenger seat, drinking a glass of lemonade.

  I rounded the building, aspects trailing, so we could get a good look at the exterior. It had small windows, maybe large enough to fit through. No fire escape. I approached a back door; it was locked tight. I gave it a good shake anyway.

  “Someone impersonated a priest,” I said to the aspects, “and slipped in to inspect the body and place the tape. Then they came back at night to extract the corpse. So why didn’t they just take a sample of the body’s cells when they were first there, in the room with it?”

  I looked toward the others, who all seemed baffled.

  “I guess they didn’t know where on the body the modified cells were to be found,” Tobias finally said. “There are many, many cells in the body. How were they to know which place held the information they wanted?”

  “Perhaps.” I folded my arms, dissatisfied. We’re missing something, I thought. A very important piece of all this. It—

  The back door burst open. The security guard stood there, puffing, hand on his sidearm. He glared at me.

  “I just wanted to check,” I said, inspecting the now-open doorway. Tape wouldn’t work here; the door had a deadbolt. “Nice response time, by the way.”

  He poked a finger at me. “Don’t push me.”

  He slammed the door. I continued on my way, rounding the corner into a little alleyway between this building and the next, looking for other entrances. I was about halfway down it when I heard the soft click behind me.

  I spun, as did my aspects. There stood Zen Rigby beside a large trash bin, holding a paper bag with one hand inside of it, her posture innocent.

  “SIG Sauer P239,” J.C. said softly, looking at the bag, which undoubtedly held a gun.

  “You can tell the type of gun by the way it sounds to cock?” Ivy asked.

  “Well yeah,” J.C. said. “Duh.” He looked embarrassed as he said it, though, and gave me a glance. He felt he should have spotted Zen sneaking up on us. But he could only hear or see what I did.

  “Mister Leeds,” the woman said. Like last night, she wore a pantsuit and white blouse. She was dark and short with straight black hair. No jewelry.

  I inclined my head toward her.

  “I will need you to divest yourself of your sidearm,” Zen said. “With attention and care, please, lest an unfortunate incident result.”

  I glanced at J.C.

  “Do it,” he said, though he sounded reluctant. “She probably won’t try to kill us here.”

  “Probably?” Audrey asked, looking pale.

  I slowly slid my gun out, then leaned down and set it on the ground before kicking it away. Zen s
miled, sack still carried in a way that would make it easy to raise and shoot me.

  “You called me earlier,” she said. “A ploy which I must commend. I assume the purpose was to determine if I was following you or not?”

  I nodded, hands at my sides, breathing quickly. I found myself in situations like this far too often. I wasn’t a soldier or a cop; I wasn’t cool under fire. I did not like having a gun pointed at me.

  “Control the situation, Skinny,” J.C. said from beside me. “The people who end up dead are the ones who lose control. Don’t let your nerves determine how this plays out.”

  “Now,” Zen said, “I’ll need that flash drive.”

  I blinked. The flash drive . . .

  She thought the flash drive contained the code to unlock Panos’s data. How must it look to her? I got hired by Yol, then spent the night working. I headed to the coroner as soon as possible in the morning, then walked out with a flash drive.

  She’d guessed that I’d recovered something important. Ivy laughed, though J.C. looked concerned. I glanced at him.

  “If she thinks she has what she needs,” he said softly, “we are in serious danger. If you give her the flash drive, don’t go anywhere with her.”

  I backed away from Zen, hands still to the sides, until I was against the wall to the building. She studied me. Her gun was probably suppressed, but it would still make a sound. Relatively exposed as we were, she had to be worried about firing.

  My heart beat frantically. Control the situation. Get her talking, perhaps? “Who did you get to impersonate the priest for you?”

  She frowned. Then she raised her bag and the gun inside. “I asked you politely for something, Mister Leeds.”

  “And I’m not going to give it to you,” I said. “Until I at least know how you pulled off the heist. It’s a quirk of mine. I’m certain you’re aware that I’m prone to those.”

  She hesitated. Then she glanced to the sides.

  Looking for my aspects, I thought. People did that, unconsciously, when they were around me.

  “Good,” Ivy said. “Playing the insanity card does tend to throw people off their game.”

  Think, think, think. I knocked my head back.