Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (27 page)

“Then why bother asking?” Santino reached into his briefcase and pulled out his laptop. 

“Because I’m reminding you how you’re a cop and this is your job and I think you should take a look at what they posted. They claim to have some info on our guy.”

His colors brightened as he came fully awake. “No kidding?”

“Yeah, but it’s all… Ah, look for yourself.”

Santino loaded the forums and scrolled down. His original posts had exploded, the words
liar
or
fraud
peppering each response. “Eric Witcham? That’s not possible.”

“I saw his name come up on a few threads,” she said. She hadn’t bothered to read the messages in detail once they were dragged down by the surreal. “Who’s Eric Witcham?”

“A dead man,” Santino replied. 

“Yes, thank you. I noticed that. But why do they think he’s back?”  She stuck her fingers out straight and let her eyes roll back as her head drooped to the side. “We’re chasing zombies?”

“Wouldn’t that be fun? No, Glazer’s plagiarizing Witcham’s signature. The tech community is pissed. Witcham was a legend.

“Hey guys,” he called out to the others, who were still poking through the reports from Forensics. “We’ve got some feedback on the signature.

“Okay,” he said, skimming a biography of Witcham at lightning speed while he spoke. “Here’s the abridged version. Glazer is using a maker’s mark unique to a man named Eric Witcham. We would have gotten responses last night as soon as I put up the posts, but Witcham hadn’t been active since 2001 and he died in 2004, so anyone who isn’t a community veteran wouldn’t know of him. When he was active, he was the leading authority in pretty much everything related to tech. He gave lectures, he wrote textbooks, you name it. His specialty was encryption and he did a lot of work in biological enhancement…”

Santino looked up from his laptop to where Rachel sat, Phil and Jason standing behind her. “Guys, some of his research was used to build your implants. He was working on the first-generation tech right before he disappeared.”

Another OACET connection,
Rachel thought.
Glazer did his homework.

Then an idea niggled at her, and she did a quick search.
“Guess who his employer was,”
she said to Phil and Jason.

She wasn’t sure if one or both answered:
“Hanlon Technologies,”
but Phil bled white and Jason tore open in reds.

“Add it to the list, guys,”
she told them.
“It’s got nothing to do with the here-and-now.”

“And there’s no doubt he’s dead?” Zockinski asked. “We still haven’t found the assailant from the gas station, the older man.”

“Um… No, Witcham is definitely dead,” Santino found the right link and scrolled down through the news report on Witcham’s death.  “Murdered, actually. They found him in the trunk of a junked car. He had been killed about six months before, so they had to ID the body through DNA and dental.”

“Is Glazer is his son?” Rachel hadn’t seen any mention of family in Witcham’s obituary, but it was worth asking.

“I don’t think so,” Santino said. “There’s always the chance, but he never married and there’s no record he had any children. It’s more likely that Glazer worked with him, or maybe was a student of his when Witcham was still teaching.”

“Or Glazer just admired Witcham’s work and plagiarized his signature,” Rachel said. The detectives agreed with her
—
they only considered zebras after every horse had been shot
—
but Hill still went to update Sturtevant and to assign a few officers to track down any possible relationship between Witcham and a man who would now be in his early thirties. 

“So, dead end, literally,” Santino said, and pushed his laptop aside.  “I guess we’ve learned Glazer knows his history, but that gets us nowhere. Did Forensics find anything?”

“No,” Zockinski rifled through the stack of files and threw one to Santino. “Of the three sets of prints from his apartment, one belongs to his superintendent and the other two are unknowns. I’m thinking his prints and DNA aren’t in the system.”

“Strange,” Rachel said, reading over Zockinski’s shoulder from her place on the couch. “Hill and I would have sworn Glazer was military.”

“Nope,” Zockinski said. “He’s not in their databases.”

The huddle broke and they fell back to their tasks. It was a repeat of the previous evening; after the run on the bank and Glazer’s apartment, they had nothing to do but wait for something to break. They had been counting on Forensics finding something they could use as a new starting point, but the tests that were already back had yielded nothing. 

Still…

The flutter of motion through the walls drew her attention first, followed by a quick change of colors which jumped from person to person. Bad news moved almost preternaturally fast and she saw it seep into the building, those outside of their office shifting from the colors of early morning boredom into the oranges and reds as fast as spoken words. 

Rachel realized she had cocked her head to the side as though she could hear the growing anxiety. Her partner was watching her. “What?” Santino whispered.

“Something’s wrong,” she replied. 

She found Hill in the mess, plowing through a group of people who flashed panic and anxiety, each of them crowding him with questions until he managed to break away. 

She had the door open for him when arrived.

He stared down at her, then looked over her head at the rest of the team. “We need to go.”

THIRTEEN

She was glad the dinosaurs were dead. Not because of the teeth or the tonnage, but for the selfish joy she stole from their bones. Rachel checked to make sure the security guard was busy with Zockinski and she leaned out over the glass partition to stroke the spine of the closest skeleton. Her fingers lightly brushed the pebbly-cool surface; stone, but not stone, and somehow still alive in the way of all inanimate wonder. Rachel flipped the frequencies on her implant to read the plaque
(Camptosaurus, herbivore)
, and looked around the room to see if she could manhandle the Tyrannosaur before getting caught. 

Sadly, no. A child too young to have wandered off from her school group watched her with a scowl. 

“...n’t do hat,” the girl said. She was in the final stages of finding her new front teeth, but some of her consonants were still missing. 

“Shh,” Rachel whispered conspiratorially. “I’m a cop.”

“Sill sln’t do hat.”

Kid would change her mind if I let her pet the T-rex,
Rachel muttered to herself. She flipped open her suit jacket to put her badge on display and walked the girl over to a gang of children wearing matching shirts which branded them as property of the Essex County school system. She passed the girl off to a harried teacher’s aide and told the woman in dark terms that she was to keep her students in sight at all times. There was a thinly veiled
or else!
in there, and Rachel made sure the aide saw her badge and its hallmark stamp of OACET green before she stalked off. Sometimes it was good to be a monster.

She turned back to her post and caught Zockinski sneaking a soft pat on the thigh of the Triceratops. He was warm blues over golds, his colors almost reverent, and Rachel thought maybe it wasn’t a fluke that he had ended up with her in the Hall of Paleontology.

The call had come in to First District Station at seven in the morning, the man from the Department of Homeland Security claiming that someone had hacked the Smithsonian. The same nineteen images kept rotating through the security system, he said, locations from the Institution’s nineteen core museums and parks. Each image had two names written beneath them in an elegant copperplate script, set off in a decorative frame. The images formed a list of people and places; most of those on the list were cops, but the members of the task force had been included. Detective Hill and Phil Netz were sent to stalk the Renwick Gallery, while Santino and Jason Atran were given an especially picturesque location on the Castle grounds.

And she and Zockinski had pulled the dinosaurs. 

There was no evidence whatsoever to connect the hijacking of the security system to Glazer, but the Metropolitan Police Department was done coddling coincidence.  The gut reaction had been to interpret the images as an overt threat and to shut the Smithsonian down for the day, but saner heads had prevailed and had decided there was no reason to take anything other than precautionary action. The museums would remain open, and security would be increased. Including those thirty-eight persons named in each of those nineteen rotating images.

Chief Sturtevant had raged: the task force had been moving so quickly that this was most likely a delaying tactic designed to buy Glazer some time. Sturtevant had said, loudly, he wouldn’t allow his team to waste an entire day standing around waiting for Glazer to make the next move, that Zockinski, Hill, and the rest would be put to better use following known trails than standing around, genitalia in hand, waiting for the unknown.

He had been overruled.

Thirty-five personnel from First MPD and three Agents had marched with slow and measured steps to their designated locations. They weren’t alone. The parks and museums were crawling with cops in plainclothes. Attendance among younger and middle-aged males was up, the janitorial service was ridiculously overstaffed, and tourists were ushered into groups with guides who stammered and had to consult their notes.

Hours of this.

Her early morning had disappeared into mid-afternoon, but apart from the feeling that someone had chained her in place, Rachel was enjoying herself. As far as stakeouts went, the Museum of Natural History was a far cry above the typical parked car or seedy diner. She had told herself she needed to visit the Smithsonian at least once a week since moving to D.C., but it had never popped on her to-do list. She needed to come back when she wasn’t working, maybe take some time to appreciate the collections and the building’s gliding lines of architecture without worrying about whether she was lined up in a sniper’s telescopic sight. 

And working with Zockinski had been astonishingly pleasant. The first few hours were like standing in barbed wire, as they didn’t so much as move for fear of getting cut. After that, boredom and the ever-present swarms of students had blunted their edges. It was impossible for Rachel to maintain an active snit among the dinosaurs, as wave after wave of children swept into the hall in a prismatic riot, followed by a crash of emotion breaking over them as they saw the raw stuff of dreams.

Or nightmares: some of the younger ones plunged into terror. Rachel and Zockinski had made a game out of picking those kids who would break down in tears. They had played for money until they realized nothing was changing hands; they were each too good at reading the crowd. When he asked, she had straight-up lied about being trained by the Army to read microexpressions, and Zockinski eventually let slip that he had worked as a guide in this very hall during his college summer breaks.

He came back towards her and they made the rounds again. Ten times an hour they walked the circumference of the room, checking for anything new or out of place. Rachel had run so many deep scans she was familiar with the gobs of chewed gum shoved into almost every available cranny, some so old they were practically fossils themselves.

“They’re shutting this place down soon,” Zockinski said as they crested the stairs and resumed their vantage point on the balcony.

“The Smithsonian?” she scoffed. “I don’t think so.”

He shook his head. “This exhibit. Some rich guy gave them thirty-five million to fix up the dinosaur hall.”

She whistled. “That’s a lot of new dinosaurs.”

“No new ones. They already have the best in the world,” Zockinski said, looking down at the Triceratops. “They’re just going to repair the hall and update the displays. Place’ll be closed for five years.”

Rachel leaned on the rail and watched the field trip kids rocket up and down the aisles, shrieking at a decibel that would have made James Joyce hastily rewrite his definition of God. Some of those kids would be headed to high school when the hall reopened, she realized. And there would be a good part of an entire generation who would miss out on this experience completely, five years of disappointed field trippers who would come to the museum only to find a barrier of painted plywood between them and the lost world.

Five years was an eternity. 

Five years could change everything…

Zockinski was still talking. Rachel shook off her malaise and asked, “Sorry, what?”

“I said this used to be called the Hall of Extinct Monsters.”

Rachel smiled and made a note to tell Mulcahy. “I love that. It’s poetry.”

“But it wasn’t accurate,” he said. “They’ve remodeled the hall a couple of times to make sure it all keeps up with the science, and they’ve always changed the name. They keep the same dinosaurs, but those’re changed too, put in new poses or on new stands.

“You used to be able to walk under that,” he said, and pointed at the gigantic skeleton of the Diplodocus. “Back before they remodeled the hall in the Sixties.” The sauropod stretched the length of the room, blocked off from the tourists except for the skull suspended sixteen feet above the ground. It dangled like a low-hanging fruit and the bolder children would leap up to grab it, then squeal when they crashed back down to earth.