Shattered (4 page)

Gemmel grinned at her. "What'd
you
do to get on the shit list?"

"Was late, among other things. I'm sure you'll hear all about it." She motioned for Gemmel to rise. "I'm supposed to take your place."

"Restored to the land of the living at last!" Gemmel stood up with alacrity. "I've been down here for a week. I was beginning to think nobody else was ever going to screw up."

"Yeah, well, that would be me." Lisa took Gemmel's vacated seat, looked at the screen in front of her, glanced at the open file from which information was obviously being transferred, and stifled a sigh. "What do I do?"

"You don't have to type in everything." Gemmel stood beside her while they both looked at the screen. "Just fill out a form for each file, and give each file a number. Once you do that, you can just scan the rest of the documents in. If anything jumps out at you--you know, something like available DNA that we can do something with--set that file aside. Actually, Rinko is supposed to look out for that. You're just backup, in case he misses something."

"The Rink don't miss nuthin'," Rinko said. "Guaranteed."

Lisa looked at the stack of manila folders beside the computer. "After the information's entered, what do we do with the files?"

"It depends. Tell her, Rinko."

"Most of 'em, the ones we can't do anything with, they go back in the boxes," Rinko said. "Stuff that is still relevant, like a rape case or a murder where we got DNA to test, goes in this blue tub." He jerked his thumb toward a blue plastic tub with a few files in it that sat near the table. "Urgent stuff, like a prior on somebody currently in the can, we're supposed to call up to whichever prosecutor can use it. We've had only one of those since I've been here. Orders are not to destroy anything, or let anything leave this room without permission from above."

"Not God, Buchanan," Gemmel clarified.

"You're impressing me, Rinko," Lisa told him.

"Hey, I've been down here for weeks, so I know this stuff cold."

"That reminds me." Gemmel reached around Lisa for a file that had obviously been set aside at the far edge of the table, plopped it down where Lisa could see it, and flipped it open. "I was gonna call you to come down here and take a look at this anyway. What do you think of that?"

She tapped the open page with a forefinger.

Lisa obediently looked. She frowned at what she saw. Secured with yellowing Scotch tape to the inside cover of the grungy manila folder was a Polaroid snapshot of what appeared to be a family: a young couple, two small children, and a dog. They sat close together on the front steps of a nondescript one-story ranch house, with the adults on the top step and the children, a boy and a girl, maybe six and four years old, respectively, on the bottom. The boy had his arm draped around a big black dog that sat, tongue lolling, beside him. The date, September 2, 1980, was scrawled in fading ink on the white strip at the bottom of the snapshot.

There was a darkness to the picture, a sense of ineffable sadness of the type that often clings to images of people and things long past. Or maybe she just felt that way because, if the picture was taped to a manila folder stored in the prosecutor's office, clearly something bad had happened to somebody in it. But it was not that which made Lisa's eyes sharpen, or caused her to suddenly lean closer.

It was the woman, the mother, who caught her eye.

Clad in jeans and an oversized white sweater, she faced the camera unsmiling, her long, thick black hair blowing a little in what was obviously a breeze, her arms wrapped around her knees.

Lisa's first shocked thought was that she was looking at a picture of herself, as she was right now, taken, impossibly, almost thirty years in the past. Before she had been born, in fact.

2

"What'd you do,
time-travel?" Gemmel's tone said she was joking.

"Looks like it, doesn't it?" Lisa was still studying the picture. As near as she could make out--the image was small, old, and grainy--the woman in the picture looked enough like her to be her twin.

"Woo-ooo-ooo-ooo."
The eerie bit of tune came from Rinko. Then he added prosaically, "She wouldn't happen to be a relative, would she?"

"The family name is Garcia. The parents are Michael and Angela, the kids Tony and Marisa," Gemmel added.

Her eyes on the picture, Lisa shook her head. "Doesn't ring a bell."

She glanced over at the sheet of paper on top of the nearly inch-thick file. Handwritten, raggedly torn from a yellow legal pad, it appeared to be notes of some sort. What she could understand of it--the handwriting was hard to decipher--didn't tell her much. It looked like a detective's contemporaneous account of an interview with someone who basically stated that the Garcias were a nice family. She lifted it aside. A typewritten list of names, none of which meant anything to her, was next. She suspected it was a list of people the police had either interviewed or meant to interview, but she had no way of knowing for sure.

"So, what happened?" she asked, glancing up. If she knew anything about Gemmel, she'd read everything in the file.

"They disappeared. The whole family, including the dog. Vanished without a trace. One day the husband doesn't show up for work. Neither does the wife. The kids are absent from school. No answer when people try to get them on the phone. Finally somebody goes out to the house to check. They're gone."

Lisa frowned. "So, maybe they just took off."

"That's what the police originally thought. The husband's car was missing, although the wife's car was still there. They could all have piled in and headed out. But they hadn't told anyone they were leaving, and the house was ransacked. Dirty dishes from that night's supper were in the dishwasher, which hadn't yet been turned on. There was water in the bathtub, and a couple of floaty toys, too, and the dirty clothes the girl had been wearing that day were crumpled on the floor beside the tub, which made police think the mother might have been giving the daughter a bath. In other words, if they just took off on their own, all indications were that something occurred to make them leave in a hurry."

"Like what?"

"No clue," Gemmel said. "Unless maybe they were hiding from something or somebody and were afraid they'd been found. The police did follow a couple of leads that the husband was involved in criminal activity, but nothing seemed to ever really pan out."

"Tell her about the blood," Rinko said.

Lisa looked a question at Gemmel.

"There were indications that some blood had been spilled in the kitchen and cleaned up. Actually, a lot of blood. As in somebody bit the big one."

"Whose was it?"

Gemmel shrugged. "If they ever determined that, it's not in the file. Or at least if it is, I missed it."

"Hmm."
Conscious of a vague feeling of unease, Lisa glanced down at the file again. The tiny faces in the picture stared back at her solemnly. The man and boy were, like the woman, wearing jeans. The man had on a navy windbreaker with a baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes so that his hair was hidden and his features were in shadow. The boy was black-haired and handsome in a white sweater like the mom's. The little girl was chubby-cheeked and adorable in a long-sleeved blue dress that might have been velvet, with a lace collar, smocking on the bodice, and white tights and Mary Janes. Her hair was black, too, cut so that it just brushed her shoulders, with bangs almost reaching her eyes. There was something about the picture that Lisa found disturbing, which probably had a great deal to do with the way the woman looked. It was impossible that these people had anything to do with her, of course. Even the close degree of resemblance between herself and the woman might be the result of the small size and slightly out-of-focus quality of the images. If she had a good, clear photo, probably the similarities would come down to coloring and build, and that would be it.

"Weird," she said, closing the file and setting it aside.

"Yeah," Rinko agreed, adding another file for scanning to the small pile beside the computer, while Gemmel demanded with a trace of indignation, "Is that all you have to say about it?"

Lisa shrugged. "Don't they say that everybody has a doppelganger somewhere? Maybe this is mine."

"Well, if it were me, I'd sure want to know more, but whatever." Gemmel sounded disappointed. A few minutes later, she left the room, and Lisa got down to the truly stultifying work of computerizing the files.

By the time five o'clock--quitting time in her previous, much lamented position as a rising associate for Todd, Larchman, and Springer--rolled around, her back ached. Her arms felt as if they were ready to fall off. She was seeing purple spots in front of her eyes from staring too long at the computer screen. Conscious that she had been, as Scott had so kindly pointed out to her that morning, an hour and twenty minutes late, she kept doggedly working even after Rinko, groaning and complaining that his butt was numb, got up from the floor and gave every indication that he was ready to call it a night.

"Go on, I'll be fine," she urged him. It was, she saw with a glance at her watch, about ten minutes after six o'clock. By six-thirty, she would have made up the missed time and then some, and Scott could go take a flying leap.

"Yeah, I go off and leave you down here all alone and some psycho comes in and pulls a Jason." Rinko shook his head. "This place was made to be an abattoir. Come on, Grant, use your imagination. Get out while you can."

Looking up from the screen, Lisa had to laugh. "I'd rather not use my imagination if that's where it's going to take me."

"These files aren't going anywhere, you know. I've been down here since the middle of May and haven't even made a dent. I think they reproduce in the dark."

The bit about the files not going anywhere was so true that Lisa was persuaded. Pushing the chair back, she got up and stretched. God, her back was stiff! Her eyes fell on the Garcia family file. She knew that it was ridiculous to imagine that it had anything to do with her, but still she was intrigued by it, by the thought of the family that had so mysteriously vanished, by the resemblance. Maybe they
were
relatives, some sort of distant cousins. Somebody at home might know. At the very least they might remember when the family had gone missing, because it was bound to have caused an uproar in the local media.

"You're supposed to lock up, aren't you?" A lightbulb having suddenly come on in her mind, she grinned at Rinko as she retrieved her purse and briefcase from the floor. The keys he jangled impatiently while he waited for her gave it away. "That's why you want me out of here. You can't lock up until I'm gone."

"Maybe." His answering grin told the tale. "Maybe there's a concert I got tickets to, and it starts at seven. Just maybe, that's all I'm saying."

"What concert?" With a guilty glance at Rinko, who was returning the unread files from the floor to the box from which they had been taken, she picked up the Garcia file and slid it into her briefcase. She would read it tonight on her own time and bring it back tomorrow with no one the wiser and no harm done. She wouldn't even have concealed what she was doing from Rinko--who couldn't have stopped her, in any case--except she didn't want him to get in trouble if anyone found out she'd borrowed the file.

"Dead Vampires. They're playing with Scooter Boys and La Gordita."

Those were, as Lisa kind of vaguely thought she knew, local bands.

"Sounds lovely." She led the way out of the room, waited while he turned off the lights and locked up behind her, then walked with him to the elevators.

"Should be great," he agreed.

"Rupp Arena?" she asked as they stepped into an elevator, thinking of the traffic that would clog downtown if this main venue for the performing arts and every other big event, including, and most important, University of Kentucky basketball, was involved.

"They wish." He shook his head. "It's outdoors, at Frawley Park."

"Do you have a date?"

"Just hangin' with friends."

The elevator stopped, and they, the only two in it, stepped out into the building's vast, echoing, marble-floored entry court and joined the stream of stragglers exiting the building. The warm, mellow sunshine of a late-June evening spilled over them as they pushed through one of the many tinted doors that formed part of the long front wall of amber glass. The textured concrete beneath their feet still retained enough heat to fry an egg, the sun still hung like a blaze-orange tennis ball a few feet above the horizon, and the inside of the Jaguar, which had been repaired and delivered to the parking lot while she worked, would be hot as an oven. But these soft, golden evening hours were what made summer magical in Kentucky's bluegrass region. They were what Lisa had missed most when she had gone away to Wellesley College in Massachusetts and from there to Boston University School of Law, then to a fast-track job as an associate in one of Boston's premier law firms. She had come home last October because of her mother, but this, her first summer spent in the South in years, reminded her why, when the time had first come for her to go away, she hadn't wanted to leave.

"It's a beautiful night for it," Lisa said.

"Yeah."

"'Night, Grant, Rinko." Jantzen spoke over her shoulder as, juggling an armful of books and files as well as a briefcase and her purse, she hurried past them and toward the parking lot.

" ' Night," she and Rinko called back in unison.

A glimpse at the wistful expression on Rinko's face as he looked after Jantzen's swinging blond hair and swaying skirt provided Lisa with a surprising revelation: He had a thing for Jantzen.

"Go offer to help her carry some of that stuff," she urged Rinko in an undertone.

Glancing at her in some surprise, as though he was suspicious that she might somehow, mysteriously, have divined his secret, he shook his head.

"Nah. She's got it under control, and anyway, I got to get to my concert." They had reached the parking lot by that time, and Rinko, lifting a hand in farewell, turned right toward his ancient Dodge Caravan while Lisa proceeded straight ahead to where the man from the dealership had told her he'd parked the Jaguar. "See ya tomorrow."