Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (28 page)

“What’s it like?” she asked. He looked down at her in curious yellows. “Oh come on, you know you’ve done it. After hours, no guards…”

He didn’t blush but his conversational colors did, and she chuckled. “Okay, not quite what I meant but yay for you. Did she complain about the fake rocks?”

“They never did,” he said. “It was a really good job.
Summer
job,” he clarified as she burst out laughing. 

Their rapport was fragile and they were going out of their way to avoid carrying topics with any weight. Cyborgs were taboo, as were politics. They had mainly stuck to work: good stories were currency in law enforcement, and everyone banked away their best for situations like this. She wove some tales from her ongoing war with Mrs. Wagner into the mix
—
her neighbor was universally relatable; as far as Rachel knew, every street in America had a slightly racist, extremely homophobic gossip who kept her nose pressed against the window
—
and Zockinski retaliated with the tale of his epic battle with his homeowner’s association when he tried to build a tree house for his daughters.

“Rachel?”

She sighed quietly. “One sec,” she told Zockinski. “I’ve got a call.” She turned away and tried to miss the change in his colors that came up whenever he remembered what she was, and joined Phil in the link.
“What’s up?”

“There’s a courier coming towards us. Jason says he sees one, too. How about you?”

“Hang on.”
She glanced at the hall and saw nothing.
“Not yet. Let me go long-range.”

“The guys say something’s happening,” she said to Zockinski, and expanded her sixth sense to take in the first floor of the museum and the street. The surge of new information crashed into her and she grabbed on to the balcony’s railing to keep her balance; she had misjudged the size of the building and had pulled too much, too quickly.  “We’re looking for a courier service. Wait…” she said, as a distinctive brown truck pulled up to the curb. “South entrance.”

Zockinski radioed the undercover crew and every adult in the room was suddenly preoccupied with little plaques and large skeletons.

The courier was in his early twenties and resentful. He walked into the hall and searched the faces until he located Rachel and Zockinski. He stomped up the stairs when he realized they wouldn’t come down from the balcony to meet him.

“Here,” the courier said, jabbing the corner of a rigid cardboard envelope into Zockinski’s gut.

“Hill’s always saying how some people can’t tell I’m a cop,” Zockinski said to Rachel.

“Seems pretty clear to me,” she said, and smiled at the courier.

The courier blanched; assaulting an officer was a law writ wide.

The handwritten note on the package still smelled faintly of permanent marker. It read: OPEN IMMEDIATELY. 

And in smaller print below: NOT A BOMB.

“Don’t you hate those weeks where your life revolves around whether things are, or are not, bombs?” Rachel asked Zockinski as she waved over an undercover officer posing as a security guard. She set the officer on the courier with due prejudice. One did not shoot the messenger, but one certainly did lock him up in a small room and ask him pointed questions. 

She took the envelope from Zockinski and flipped it over a few times in her hands, looking for a way in that wouldn’t disturb evidence trapped in the sticky bits.

Zockinski told her to wait. “We have to call Forensics,” he said, and took out his cell.

She glared at him and pulled her badge off of her belt. Someone had added a slight hook to the crest and it served dual purpose as a letter opener. She threaded the leading edge under the flap on the envelope and ripped it open.

“Hey!”

“Oops,” Rachel said. “I’m not of your police community and am unfamiliar with your strange, alien ways. It’s just a few pieces of paper,” she added. “No electronics, no unusual chemicals or dust.” She ignored her bruised knees and knelt on the thin carpet to shake the contents from the cardboard package.

“Wait,” Zockinski took a plastic grocery bag out of his coat pocket and spread it flat across the ground. “We’re going to catch hell for this.”

“Sometimes dirt is just dirt,” Rachel muttered. In her soldier’s heart, she agreed with Edwards; the Forensics God demanded too much from its followers. “This is more likely to be time-sensitive than anything else.”

She carefully tapped the back of the envelope so the stack of paper slid onto the plastic. A couple of cards, covered in black dots slightly smaller than dimes…

Zockinski, father of two young girls, went white.

“Call Hill,” she said, giving Zockinski a task before his fears rose up and pulled him under. “Tell him to give the package to Phil. If Phil says it’s clean, have them open it right away.”

She reached out to her partner.
“Santino?”
Rachel asked when he answered the phone.
“The National Child ID Program. Does it apply to D.C. or just the states?”

“D.C.’s included,” he replied. “Why?”

“Trying to narrow the search,”
she said.
“Have you opened your package?”

“No, are you nuts? We’ve got Forensics on the way.”

Rachel stretched her mind across the distance between them. Her implant and her sixth sense might be infinite but her mind was not; the Castle grounds were directly across from the Museum of Natural History and were at the very edge of her ability to make sense out of raw data.

“Walk towards me and hold up the package,”
she said.
“I need to scan it before you open it.”

“Forensics is five minutes away.”

“And they’re bringing an hour of tests. Santino… Ours had ten-cards.”
She closed her eyes but couldn’t look away from the happy comic strip characters spot-printed around ten individual boxes, each box with a black dot in the center. 

The pieces of the conversation clicked. “Kids’ fingerprints,” he said in a dead voice, and she heard the sound of ripping, with Jason shouting in the background.

“Don’t! Let me scan—”
Rachel began, but Santino cut her off.

“Ours too. Rachel… I have three cards here. Three kids.”

“
Right now it’s an implied threat,”
she said.
“It might be a distraction. These children might be sitting in a math test as we speak. Turn the scene over to the security detail and meet us back at District Station as soon as you can. Tell Jason to coordinate with Phil; I need to calm down Zockinski.”

The detective was off in the corner, a riot of fear in yellows and grays. He had his phone pressed to his ear as he left a quiet message.

She walked over to him as he hung up. “Your daughters,” she said. “Where are they supposed to be?”

“With my wife,” he looked down to where the security staff was herding a mob of protesting children from the hall. “They’ve got morning kindergarten… They should be home but she’s not picking up.”

Rachel lowered her voice. “I can check on them,” she said, and he flared a different sort of yellow, uncertain but hopeful. “You give me your wife’s phone number, and I can go to her cell.” She pulled her tablet from her bag. “Or I can go straight to your house if you tell me your address. You can use me as your eyes, like we did at Glazer’s apartment yesterday. You tell me know where to go and what to look for, and we’ll see if your family is safe.”

She took a step away from him; she didn’t recognize the sudden burst of red, and reds outside of passion were never good. “But if I do this
,
even if you give me permission
,
this’ll be a huge violation, you understand? There’s no guarantee that I won’t pop in on your wife when she’s cooking, driving...” She let the ideas dangle and hoped he understood. Rachel was the ultimate Peeping Tom and he would be turning her loose on his family.

He did. He closed his eyes and weighed his choices. “Five minutes,” he finally said. 

She nodded and shoved the tablet back in her purse, willing to wait if he was. They slipped the cards back into their envelope, bundled it up in Zockinski’s plastic bag, and left at a run.

They caught up with Hill on the old dry lawn of the Mall and traded their sedan to an officer with a conveniently-parked patrol car. Hill drove them back to First District Station, siren blaring, while Zockinski sat in the passenger’s seat and divided his calls between Sturtevant’s line and his wife’s voice mail. 

The details were starting to trickle in and a pattern was emerging. The team back at the MPD had tracked down some of the names on the fingerprint cards, but the children they belonged to could not be easily located. Hill asked why, and Zockinski said those children were supposed to be on a field trip but the parents and teachers chaperoning them weren’t answering their phones.

They stopped talking.

Hill dropped Zockinski at the front doors and they parked five floors down in the garage. The smell was rank; the ventilation system never seemed to penetrate the lowest parts of this concrete well. They kept close to the center of the garage as they hurried upwards, the void created by the split levels their only source of fresh air. 

“This place is too new to be so poorly designed,” Rachel said, mostly to herself.

Hill heard her. “Lowest bidder.”

They reached the security doors and Hill stepped to the side, waiting. It took her a moment to realize he wanted her to open the digital locks. 

“You’re kidding,” she said.

He shrugged. 

“You realize I can’t win with you guys,” she said. “I’m the biggest freak on the planet, right up until you have to grope around for your keys.”

Hill went mustard yellow in surprise. He gave Rachel the same curious probing look he had used on Phil the day before in the interview room, a trace of that wine red coursing through the yellow, then took out his ID card and opened the door for her.

“Thanks,” she said, stepping into the chute. She popped the lock on the second door and returned the favor.

Zockinski had acted as their vanguard, delivering theirs and Hill’s packages to Sturtevant. The older detective was finishing a phone call in the hall, relief washing over him in blues. 

“They’re fine,” Zockinski said as he hung up, then laughed. “They went to get ice cream and she forgot her cell, can you believe it?”

“Of all the days,” Hill said, almost smiling.

“What’s so funny?” Rachel asked.

“My wife’s a diabetic,” Zockinski said, then shook his head and chuckled. “Doesn’t keep anything sweet in the house. The girls have to wear her down for weeks before she gives in.”

Sturtevant and a handful of other high-rankers were waiting for them in the task force’s glass fishbowl. They entered the office and Rachel saw the six bureau chiefs were wearing Sturtevant’s core colors over a layer of reds. She would have loved to have been an out-of-body fly on the wall when Sturtevant tore the MPD’s administration apart for letting half of their finest officers loiter around the Smithsonian while their suspect snapped children up off of the street.

Rachel picked a quiet corner and fell straight into parade rest. The cards and envelopes that had come in with Zockinski were waiting for Forensics in two clean Tupperware bins. She noticed a stack of identical containers off to the side and realized each of the teams sent into the field had gotten the same type of package.

Her new autoscript put Phil and Jason in the same car as Santino’s cell, barely half a block away and closing fast. The adrenaline rush was starting to fade and doubt was stealing its way in, helped along by the six bureau chiefs sneaking quick and angry glances at her. Someone was always at fault in cases like these, and it was easy to hang the outsiders. In fact, now that she thought about it, it was amazing it hadn’t happened before now.
Hello OACET, you’re early…

Hill tapped her on the shoulder and pointed her towards the empty chairs on the other side of the room.

“The handwriting on the packages matches samples from Glazer’s apartment,” Sturtevant said to her and Hill as they found their seats. “We’re willing to bet he’s our guy. If we’re wrong, you’re gonna be another day behind, but...” the Chief stared daggers at his counterparts as he spoke, “...that’s not your fault. We all agree these missing kids are the priority.”

Rachel closed her mind against the image of dull red brushstrokes across white marble. Dead was dead and children were children, but Maria Griffin deserved better.

“We don’t know much right now, but what we do know is that the kids named on these cards are missing,” Sturtevant said, and tapped the side of the closest bin. “They were on a field trip from a school in Virginia. Guess where they were headed.”

This might as well have been a rhetorical question. Another batch of kids had been robbed of their chance to see the dinosaurs. 

“The principal sent us their itinerary,” Sturtevant continued. “They were supposed to start at the Castle, then split up into groups to cover other parts of the Smithsonian. We’re still checking the ten-cards from the other teams, but they all seem to be enrolled at the same school. The principal can’t find the buses, the drivers, any of the chaperones…”