Headcase, p.8
Headcase, page 8
I didn’t look like a cop, so I’d hoped to have more luck than the Houston PD, who’d been doing this all day. But after almost nine hours, I’d found nothing.
Whenever I saw a pedestrian, I slowed down and held Lilah’s picture out the window. ‘You seen this girl?’
Most people walked faster, pretending not to hear. But some looked, and sadly shook their heads.
When I stopped at one corner, a guy shuffled up to the car. He was white, with a knit cap, a puffy jacket and brows so thin he might have plucked them. ‘Hey man, what do you need?’
‘I’m looking for this girl.’ I held up the picture.
He didn’t seem to hear me. ‘I got a little bit of shirt and some pants.’
I thought those were probably drugs. ‘Seen this kid?’
He finally registered the picture. ‘Fuck you, man.’ He hurried away.
I kept driving. The sun would rise soon. The world had started to seem unreal because I hadn’t slept or eaten. The buildings looked like movie sets. I found myself gazing at the homeless people huddled in corners, sheltering from the wind.
I knew all too well that none of these people would be missed. One could vanish, and their friends would assume they’d found a place in a shelter.
There was plenty of room in my trunk.
Go home, I thought, but I didn’t.
When I slowed down at a crosswalk, a woman in fishnets and a crop top approached me. She saw me looking at all the exposed flesh and flashed me a wicked smile.
I rolled down the window.
‘Hello, handsome,’ she said, in a British accent that may or may not have been fake. Her smile faded as she saw the picture in my hand. I’d forgotten I was holding it.
‘You her dad?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said, too tired to work out whether I should have lied.
‘Try the tents,’ she said, then walked away, ass jiggling.
I knew where she meant—a public park which was basically a refugee camp. It expanded and contracted with each housing crisis, like the city’s lungs breathing in and out. Soon I was on the outskirts, looking at the wall of cardboard signs, scrawled with pleas for help. I parked nearby and wandered into the mass of tents, brandishing Lilah’s picture.
No one had searched here. The police assumed the girl was either dead or being held captive somewhere. No one had considered the possibility that she’d escaped from Garcia. But if she had, why would she hide here instead of going home? The sex worker’s tip seemed unlikely. Still I searched, too tired to think of a better plan.
For a place with so many people, it was eerily quiet. Tent flaps rustled and shopping cart wheels squeaked, but there were no voices. A fire crackled from a pile of broken two-by-fours, middle-aged women staring morosely into the flames. One of them had a bundle of blankets that might have been a baby. I made my way through the labyrinth, showing the photo to people who looked fat because they were wearing everything they owned. I tried to let my subconscious guide me again, but someone was cooking meat somewhere. I fought temptation, but the smell kept luring me back. I was circling like a mosquito around a bug zapper.
Eventually a man with a dirty face looked at the picture and wordlessly pointed a gloved finger down a narrow gap between the rows of tents. I trudged through and found myself facing a portable barbecue on which hot dogs were cooking. A few people were standing around it, warming their hands. I should have let my hunger guide me here after all.
A twelve-year-old girl was staring at the hot dogs, crying.
•
‘She says she can’t remember anything.’ Dr Norman peeled off a latex glove and threw it across the examination room. It landed in the trash without touching the rim. She was tall—maybe she played basketball.
‘Drugs in her system?’ I asked.
‘It’ll be a while before the blood test comes back, but there are no obvious signs of that.’
‘What about the saliva on the cigarette?’
Richmond had found a butt in Sam Garcia’s trash.
Norman pulled off her shower cap, freeing her wavy hair. ‘It’s a DNA match for the smokes you found at the mall.’
Luzhin, the field office director, was hovering nearby, looking relieved. DNA held more sway with a jury than a confession. Garcia was definitely going away.
‘Does Lilah have a head injury?’ My voice reverberated against the hard surfaces of the laboratory—the tiled floor, resin countertops, a full-length mirror on the back of the door. I felt like singing, and this would be a good room for it. The girl was alive. My luck had never been this good.
‘No injuries at all.’ Norman signed a form, closed a manila folder and handed it to Luzhin. ‘My guess is she’s blocking something out.’
‘I don’t believe in repressed memories,’ I said. ‘At least not right after the event.’
Norman raised an eyebrow. She always towered over me, but today she seemed especially imperious. ‘Remind me—where did you study medicine?’
‘You work mostly on dead people. Don’t pretend psychology is your specialty.’
‘Okay, that’s enough.’ Luzhin stepped between us. ‘Do you have anything else we can charge this asshole with? Signs of sexual assault, maybe?’
‘Nothing physical,’ Norman said.
This was consistent with Garcia’s statement. After Lilah was found, he finally broke down and confessed to the kidnapping—but swore he’d never harmed her.
Still, people had varying definitions of ‘harm’. When investigators asked him why he’d taken Lilah, he clammed up.
‘I’m just saying people often pretend they don’t remember something when they’re ashamed of it,’ I said. ‘He could have done all sorts of things to her without touching her, things she might not want to tell us about.’
‘How can we make her remember?’ Luzhin asked Norman. ‘Without her statement, we only have him on the kidnapping charge. He could be paroled in six years.’
‘You can’t make her remember. The brain doesn’t work like that. It might come out in therapy twenty years from now, or it might not.’
I thought Lilah could probably be coaxed, since she was only pretending to have forgotten. But I didn’t care how long Garcia went to prison for. I’d saved Lilah, so I got my reward. One for one.
‘A person doesn’t just wake up one day and decide to kidnap a stranger,’ I said, trying to move things along. ‘Garcia will have been building up to this for a while. You’ll find child exploitation materials on his computer, or the number of a trafficker in his phone. Or evidence of a previous attempt. Show his picture around. Some kid will recognise him as the guy who claimed to have a puppy in a windowless van. Then you’ll be able to put him away for longer.’
Luzhin perked up a bit. ‘Yeah, I guess.’ He turned to Norman. ‘Thanks for coming in at short notice, doc.’
‘No problem,’ Norman said. ‘I wanted to come in anyway—my morgue is missing a body, and I thought it might have been sent here by mistake.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Whose body?’
‘A serial rapist they executed in Huntsville. Nasty piece of work. There wasn’t going to be a funeral, but some family came out of the woodwork at the last minute.’
My poker face was better than Luzhin’s. He was sniffing and fiddling with his watch, like it was suddenly too tight.
‘No sign of it, though,’ Norman continued. ‘Maybe it’s already at the funeral home. These mix-ups happen more often than you might think.’
‘I’ll bet,’ I said. ‘See you round, doc.’
CHAPTER 11
Two weeks ago
Stay away—I’m sharp and thin. Send some money, shave your skin. What am I?
The fence around Space City was chain-link, with razor wire at the top. The kind of thing you see around a minimum-security prison. The security cameras were blocky, weatherproof things, mounted every thirty or forty feet.
‘The fence looks new,’ I observed, as we rolled towards the checkpoint in Zara’s Prius.
‘It is,’ Zara said. ‘Space City was recently identified as a target for cyberattacks, because it’s the primary source of visual data about the sky over the United States. The network isn’t connected to the internet, which helps with security, but they needed the fence, too. The air gap is pointless if anyone can just walk in and install a virus manually.’
‘Like we’re about to do?’
‘Correct.’
As far as Zara was concerned, the crashed Chinese plane explained everything. It must have been flying over Space City on a reconnaissance mission, taking hi-res photos of the equipment below—the same photos her source in Shanghai had seen. The plane had malfunctioned somehow. The pilot had bailed out. But he’d been too high, and his suit had leaked. Decompression killed him before he hit the ground. The plane had continued on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea. The pilot’s body hadn’t burned up on re-entry because it never reached orbital velocity. Everyone else at the CIA was apparently scrambling to work out where the plane had taken off, since it didn’t have the range to get from China to here.
I had other questions. ‘Why didn’t the fighter pilot have a parachute?’
‘Parachutes are usually attached to the ejector seat rather than the pilot, at least in the US Air Force. If he wasn’t buckled in properly, the seat could have landed in the bay, miles from his body. I don’t know much about Chinese aircraft, though. Did it look like there was room for a chute in his backpack? They pack down pretty small.’
‘Maybe.’ I hadn’t thought to look for a chute compartment. The flight suit had looked so much like a space suit that I’d seen only what I expected to see when I opened the backpack. As usual, the meat had distracted me.
We stopped in front of a security guard, who checked our IDs while two others looked inside the trunk and peered under the car with a mirror on a stick.
‘Can I walk along the fence-line?’ I asked the guard.
A guard peered at me over her sunglasses. She had piercing blue eyes, with crow’s-feet around them—she was older than she’d looked. Thin lips, a crucifix on a gold chain around her neck. ‘Who are you?’
‘Timothy Blake. You just checked my ID. I’m here to update the security protocols.’
‘If I get orders from my CO to let you look around, then sure,’ the guard said. ‘Not that there’s any point. Until then, I’ll have to ask you to move along.’
Zara started to ease the car forwards, but I yanked the park brake. ‘Why isn’t there any point?’
‘I did a full perimeter this morning,’ the guard said. ‘I do it every day. There were no gaps in the fence, no holes under it, nothing. Whatever security problems you’re here to fix, that fence ain’t one of them.’
‘Thank you.’ Zara released the brake and zoomed forwards before I could ask any more questions.
‘I need you to listen carefully,’ she said, once the windows were up.
‘I’m listening.’
‘The investigation is over. Our mission is to plant the USB modem, erase the security footage and leave. That’s it.’
‘What’s the point of trying to cover this up?’ I asked. ‘The media already ran the story.’
‘They ran a story about a dead astronaut. The MSS doesn’t know we’ve figured out what really happened, and we want to keep it that way.’
‘We don’t know what happened,’ I said. ‘How did the pilot land without breaking his legs or arms? Whose footprint was that in the field? And why would Bluffdale alert us to a space launch that apparently didn’t happen?’
Zara huffed. ‘Why do you care? You got some meat.’
‘Hardly any.’ Those exploded lungs weighed three pounds at the most.
‘Well, the sooner we move on to our next assignment, the sooner you can get more. So, for once, let’s just do our jobs without making things more complicated than they need to be. Okay?’
Years ago I ran a mail-order business solving riddles and puzzles for cash. It was supposed to be a money-laundering scam, but it surprised me by becoming a genuinely profitable side hustle, at least for a while. I liked solving those puzzles because it kept my brain from straying into dark territory.
With my son dead and Thistle out of my life, there were only two things I cared about. Food, and puzzles. The dead fighter pilot was both. I didn’t like leaving him unfinished, in either sense of the word.
But I shrugged. ‘Fine.’
The museum was two buildings, one low and flat, the other more like a cube. A sign said Space Center Houston, which seemed like a confusing name for a museum housed within the Johnson Space Center in Houston. We parked in the shadow of the Space Shuttle Independence, which was mounted on top of a giant plane. This was where I’d seen all the police cars yesterday.
Hazel Cuthbert, the deputy cybersecurity chief, worked in this building. With her boss on leave, she was the only one who could give us access to the video footage from Tuesday night.
As we approached the front doors of the museum, I saw that one of the ground-floor windows had been boarded up.
‘I saw cop cars parked here yesterday,’ I said.
‘You mentioned that,’ Zara said. ‘So?’
‘I figured Detective Jones’ team had gone to the wrong address. Now I’m thinking they were here to investigate a break-in.’ This meant that the 911 dispatcher could have leaked the story about the astronaut to the media after all. But I still liked my theory that Garcia had done it.
‘Interesting,’ Zara lied, and led the way into the building.
The entrance was filled with exhibits—a Mars rover, a detached cockpit from a rocket, some moon rocks in glass cases. In keeping with NASA’s ‘for all mankind’ ethos, the curators hadn’t limited themselves to American achievements. There were flags from several countries next to examples of their contribution to space science. The place had a model UN feel. Tourists in polo shirts wandered around with DSLRs dangling around their necks, oohing at replicas hanging from wires.
‘Isn’t this better than the Kennedy Space Center?’ an old man whispered to his family, who ignored him.
The shatterproof glass had been swept off the floor, but hastily. Some was trapped in the corners of the room. While Zara introduced herself to a receptionist and asked to speak to Cuthbert, I examined the debris.
Most of the glass was transparent and of uniform thickness. But some was thinner, coloured and curved. This window had been rammed by a car, and the car had cracked a headlight. Some of the pieces had flecks of paint on them, too. But the flecks were too small to identify the colour.
I pocketed some glass and wandered over to one of the exhibits—it looked like a giant robotic butterfly. Apparently it was a half-scale replica of a Japanese probe called Hayabusa that had collected dust from an asteroid and returned it to Earth.
I was reading the plaque when Zara approached with a willowy woman in her fifties. She was unexpectedly glamorous, with vivid lipstick, a wraparound dress and dangling earrings shaped like atoms, diamond electrons caught mid-spin around a pearl nucleus. But she had nicotine nails, and looked stressed.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘My boss was scheduled to take some leave next week, but he seems to have decided to go early. I confess I wasn’t quite ready. I’m Hazel Cuthbert, by the way.’
‘Timothy Blake. We’re here to see some security footage so we can prepare a report for the air force.’
‘Yes, your authorisation just dropped into my inbox.’ She gestured to the butterfly robot. ‘You’re admiring Hayabusa?’
Actually, I’d been wondering why anyone would bother to collect asteroid dust. ‘Yeah.’
‘I was in awe of the Japanese when that one came back. Hayabusa2 is in the sky right now. Scheduled to return in 2031.’
‘Do the scientists need more dust?’
Cuthbert’s laugh was high and nervous. ‘Let me put it this way. Valuable metals, such as gold, tend to be heavy. This means that over the last four billion years or so, most of the gold on Earth has settled towards the lower levels of the crust, too deep to mine. But asteroids don’t have as much mass as the Earth, and therefore not as much gravity. So the gold is on the surface, just waiting to be scooped up. In fact, most of the gold mined on Earth has come from ancient asteroid impacts. One asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, called 16 Psyche, contains enough gold to make every person on Earth a billionaire.’
That seemed unlikely to me. If that asteroid were ever collected, I figured one rich person would get a whole lot richer and nothing else would change.
‘Is gold useful?’ I asked. ‘Or just expensive?’
‘It makes an excellent shield against infrared light in spacecraft and flight suits.’
‘So we go into space to find gold so we can keep going into space to find more gold?’
‘Ah, you’re a cynic.’ She sounded amused.
‘So, the footage …’ Zara prompted.
‘Right. My office is this way.’ Cuthbert led us through the crowd of tourists towards a bank of elevators.
I pointed back at the boarded-up window. ‘Looks like you’ve had a break-in.’
‘On Tuesday night. Fortunately, nothing seems to be missing. The culprit was probably a vandal rather than a burglar.’
She held the elevator doors open for Zara and me, then let go. The steel doors slid inwards, trapping us. A thought popped into my head, the same one that appears any time I’m in an elevator with another person: If we get stuck between floors, how long should I wait before I suggest we draw straws?
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Cuthbert said.
I doubted that.
‘Why would the deputy head of cybersecurity choose to work in the museum?’ she continued. ‘You’ll understand when you see the view from my office.’
