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  If she came here at all.

  “Can we go now?” I didn’t like the way it sounded, like a whine. I don’t whine, but damn if the horrid weather wasn’t making me behave in the worst manner possible.

  Jane was still in training and I was a seasoned as a Cajun fish fry. This cursed personal case spurred her on like an enraged lion. One that may attack its trainer.

  She shot me a brief smile that disappeared as soon as it began, barely lifting her cheeks and nowhere near finding its way up to her eyes.

  “You’re pouting,” she said, her voice flat and without emotion. Digging around in the hard dirt could do that to you.

  “No I’m not,” I said back defensively, huddling deeper into my coat. “I’m complaining and there is a difference.”

  “We’ve got company,” she muttered as she stood up.

  I looked over my shoulder in the direction of the humming noise of a blue wauto. It set down a few feet away, blowing loose dirt, dust, and debris across the area.

  “Cybil Lewis,” a male and annoyed voice called from the wauto’s roof-mounted speaker. The driver side door opened before the craft had time to completely set down.

  “Who wants to know?” I asked, my voice steady and firm.

  Through the raised door, Regulator Jameson stepped out. He didn't wear a coat, but he did wear a toboggan hat that matched his uniform. Twice in one day. How lucky I must be…

  “Mayor Christensen sent this,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact as he held out a dirt-brown satchel. “In it are a few containers of coffee, sandwiches, and napkins. Wouldn’t want you two ladies getting messy out here.”

  How did he know we were out here to begin with? How did the mayor know?

  The mayor had to have us followed. It wasn’t a wauto or I’d picked up on it. It was more than likely a tiny tracking device or something similar. Regs used them all the time. GPS too.

  Not for the first time did I think that Jane and I were being followed. Jane hadn't left it on the telemonitor as to where we'd be going. She was too smart for that and to the best of my knowledge no regulator followed us from Henry's to here.

  Jane stepped over to Jameson and took the satchel. She held it distastefully away from her as if it was filled with feces instead of food.

  Then again, the look could have been because Regulator Jameson had called us ladies.

  “Thanks,” I said to him. The sooner he was gone, the sooner we could leave too. I didn't quite trust him, but again, I rarely trusted anyone.

  He bolted to his heated wauto without further comment so quickly that I didn’t see the door open fully to allow him entry.

  In moments, he was gone.

  “Hungry?” Jane asked, a tight smile on her face. It looked like it hurt…a lot.

  “Don’t test me today, Jane. I’m freezing and tired.”

  I only wanted to be warm and to solve this case so that I could go back home. I missed my bed and my apartment. Familiar things—smells, sights, and sounds. My body still ached from Jarold’s punches and the sooner I could relax in a tub of hot water, the better.

  “Fine, I’ll let it sit. But when Aunt Belle asks about…”

  I heard the plop and clank of something against the embankment.

  I took several steps back to the edge of the river and glanced down.

  Suddenly, I lost all desire for food.

  Drifting amongst the debris and ice chunks of the Mississippi River and snared to a piece of wood, was a body.

  It wasn’t pretty, but rarely is death as glamorous as we’ve been lead to believe by movies. Death, up close, isn’t beautiful. It is gritty. Death pushes its way into life, snatching loved ones at inopportune times, taking hearts with it and leaving in their place a cold box of grief.

  Death hurt. It stank. And it was permanent.

  Jane crouched down closer to the body. Her sunglasses still kept her feelings from me, but I could tell this stab went deep, deeper than Marsha’s death had been, deeper even than her father’s abandonment.

  “Damn, Cyb. The regs were just here,” she said, her voice strained and trembling although she ignored it. “I didn’t see or hear anything.”

  “By the looks of it, it’s been in the water about three, maybe four, weeks,” I said calmly. My braids held back by a thinning rubber band, suddenly felt too tight.

  She wasn’t Amanda Christensen anymore, not a person, not a daughter, not an honor roll student and definitely not Jane’s cousin. Now, she was only “the body” or better, “it.”

  Jane and I hated losing, but we lost this one. We didn’t find Amanda in time. From the looks of it, we didn’t have a chance anyway. She’d been killed almost immediately after disappearing some three to four week ago.

  Hopefully the forensic team for the Memphis Regulators could come up with an exact time, but I’d bet my last bit of district dollars she was killed if not as soon as she disappeared, but shortly there after.

  Jane stood up fast. “I’ve got to get some air and call Aunt Belle.”

  She stalked past me, still careful of preserving the muddy tracks, because now this was a violation scene. The regulators would be swarming all over this area, mucking up the case and ruining evidence.

  But hey, it was their case and I didn’t want us catching the blame for missing evidence, and such.

  With one glance downward to Amanda’s floating corpse, I asked myself, not for the first time, why I did this job.

  Oh, yeah, because I earned a paycheck and the army didn't want me anymore. I'm not good with authority. But cases like this, made my chosen profession difficult to stomach.

  Jane’s laptop was out and soon the screen was filled with the face of Mayor Christensen. “Aunt Belle, I’ve got something to tell you…”

  I turned away to crouch down by the edge. This river once held entertainment; its purpose as a port and host to showboats was now legendary. Today it carried death. I took out a pair of latex gloves from my pants pocket. Technically, I could not remove evidence and I definitely wasn’t supposed to touch anything at the vio scene. As a private inspector, I was a second rate citizen when it came to the regulators. Citizens could do citizen arrests, but private inspectors couldn’t. The i.d. chip placed beneath my skin told everyone with a scanner my identity and profession.

  Deep down I had the feeling Captain Hanson didn't want me snooping around any more than I wanted to be here, despite his forthcoming personality. The suspicion that he was hiding something nagged at me.

  Jealousy was at the heart of anti-p.i. rules, I’m sure. Regulators were trained and paid to regulate the laws, but rarely did they do that. Some regulators were the most dangerous violators on the planet.

  I stopped thinking about that as I stared at the partially frozen body.

  Amanda Christensen’s chocolate-brown hair melted into the soiled ice and shot out of the Mississippi water like whiskers on a cat. Bloated due to being in the water for so long, her facial features, distorted and grotesque, loomed out from beneath the water’s top layer, almost like a film. Difficult to really make out her face, I was certain it was Amanda.

  The necklace around her neck identified her as such. That present came from her father and she liked it most according to her mother. It spelled princess in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and it was specially made for her during a recent trip to see the pyramids.

  Memphis was in fact named from the real city of Memphis in ancient Egypt and it was this reason that Amanda first became interested in Egyptology. When she grew up, she wanted to be an archeologist.

  That wouldn’t happen now.

  I couldn’t see a lot from my spot by the water’s edge without waddling in or taking her out.

  I knew the cause of death wasn’t drowning.

  It was a laser gun blast to the left temple.

  The mayor’s usual warm, rosy face held very little color and looked like watered down coffee. Her mouth drawn into a little wrinkled o did not ask any questions and her shoulders s
lacked. Her posture was normally so correct that I could hang pictures with it.

  “Mayor?” I could feel her shock at the news. The expression on her face was one of internal debate, a process I knew very well.

  The three steps of grief, to which I am so familiar, would commence at any moment. In fact, I bet the mayor was agonizing over all the things she would have, could have done, and what she could and did not say to her only offspring.

  I am an un-certified expert in grief management having lost my mother, my father, my secretary and an extremely-too-long list of loved ones to violent ends.

  Death and I were on a first name basis.

  “Are you sure it’s Mandy?” she asked, her voice croaking on the name. It was so soft it reminded me of crushed rose petals in a fist. "Janey, are you one hundred percent?"

  Mayor Christensen’s internal debate had spilled out to us. Phase two of the grief cycle. Blame. In order for her to make sense of this, she needed to assign blame. This definitely didn't make any sense. Children weren't supposed to die before their parents. It was out of sync and definitely wrong.

  "If only the damn regulators hadn't taken so long to get started…" she trailed off, her voice small and shaky. Plenty of blame to go around this time.

  “I’m certain Aunt Belle, but of course, someone in the family will need to make a positive id,” Jane whispered back, her voice level and firm. She was family of course, but someone other than the people hired to investigate Amanda's disappearance, needed to come down and make a positive match. “I’m sorry, Aunt Belle, I’m so sorry…”

  Mayor Christensen’s hazel eyes watered, but no tears fell. Her mouth was a grim line and for once, I actually felt sorry for her.

  “Yes, of course. Janey, get out of there and I will send the regulators immediately. This is not your fault. You did the best you could.”

  Phase three, pretend everything is all right and get back to business. The three phases would be repeated over and over again for days, maybe even years until at some point the mayor stopped it and faced death head on. Grief knew no end, and that was a tough lesson to learn.

  Hell on some days, I find myself back in the grief cycle again. Mother's day was a biggie. Maybe you never get out of the cycles.

  “We’ll give statements to the regs,” Jane said. "I'm so sorry.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said gently over Jane’s shoulder, though at the sound of my voice I thought the mayor actually scowled.

  She nodded numbly and disconnected the feed.

  We’ve been paid up front and agreed to find the mayor’s daughter. We had done the job in remarkable time, but somehow it felt unfinished. We didn’t actually find her alive, but we did twist her boyfriend’s arm hard enough to find out where he’d last seen her. So hard in fact, Jane thought she broke it, but that was his word against hers.

  So why did I still feel like worms were crawling around in my stomach?

  The return ride to our rental room at Henry's resembled a mime convention…no talking. Jane maneuvered the aerocycle as it zipped so that it dipped and skipped across other lanes and wautos. In her wake, drivers honked, cursed and tried to cut her off in road rage protests and life endangering retaliation.

  I held on for dear life, tightly gripping Jane's black leather bomber.

  But she seemed oblivious to all the chaos that sprang up in her wake as she raced across town. Lost in thoughts and no doubt memories of her cousin, her driving made me wonder if Jane wasn’t eager to join Amanda in the morgue.

  If there would even be enough of us left to scoop up and put into a jar. Mid-air collisions were often fatal and pieces of humans, wautos and whatever else floated down to the earth with such speed and force that very little remained of the individual or people in the crafts.

  Have I mentioned I hated aerocycles?

  Enclosed in a shell of reinforced fiberglass and metal, I feel safer. Although a collision at this height either in a wauto or aerocycle would probably kill me, I still liked being in a wauto.

  Jane jetted along.

  Not all cases ended with a happily ever after.

  All right. None of my cases end up with a happily ever after.

  Honesty. My best policy.

  Yeah right.

  The elevated lanes were miles up in the air. Down below us rested a quiet, rain-drenched Memphis. The afternoon sun, cutting through a tiny section of sky, spotlighted a section of the partially wet city as we zoomed above in lighted lanes. We passed over a small pond and from this distance it resembled a sullen gray coin.

  The air whipped across my throat where my helmet stopped. So cold that I envisioned it stripping away flesh and forcing my eyes to tear up. It made my wounds itch and beg to be scratched.

  I knew we were in for a little more rain. The air was damp with promise that a downpour was on tap for later. In the distance, the lowering sun turned the clouds a mustard color. Thick with moisture, the air smelled like rain.

  And I thought of Buffy, the VSI girl.

  “Looks like rain is coming,” Jane said into her microphone.

  The aerocycle’s X blasters roared so loud that there was no way for me to hear her speak. So we both wore helmets with little microphones so we could talk to each other.

  “It may turn into snow,” I said. "Or ice if the temperature dips down enough tonight."

  “Yeah,” she said. Her voice had that quietness that came with immense sadness.

  As if hearing our conversation, icy rain leaked from the sky, spraying us with tiny ice pebbles. The sun still peeked out from rends in the clouds.

  It wasn't the first time today that I'd been caught out in the rain. Despite that knowledge, it still didn't put me in a better mood.

  Finding Amanda dead didn't help either.

  After Marsha’s death, Jane continued to work. As did I. We were smack in the middle of a case that wouldn’t, no, let me correct that, couldn’t be dropped. Some people wanted us, and the rest of humanity that wasn’t a hatchling, dead.

  Jane took the left lane and we headed downward toward the city. Overhead clouds rippled as if a giant finger poked the sky creating a mass of crinkles.

  Fate was like that too.

  A huge finger that jerked everybody’s chain.

  When we arrived at the rental room, Jane immediately packed herself an overnight bag and disappeared into the hallway, heading toward her aunt’s house. I logged onto to my handheld and booked an eleven p.m. flight out to the moon colonies. Although I knew that Amanda was dead and not playing hooky on the moon, I wanted to talk to the people at the places she frequented there. Perhaps, someone knew something about the mayor’s only child.

  I didn’t admit it to myself, but I had a bad case of restlessness. Not that the mayor was paying to find out who killed her daughter—she wasn’t. Despite my own hunger to get home, I couldn’t sit in the rental room as if nothing had happened at all. Every time I closed my eyes, Amanda’s bloated and laser beam blasted face drifted up to greet me.

  A ghost, unable to sit still at the morgue, Amanda was reaching out to me. Yeah, I didn’t believe that any more than you, but I l wanted the creep who killed her captured.

  I stuffed clothes and other necessities into my satchel, spilling out the non-necessary contents onto my bed. I didn’t plan to stay overnight on the moon. The trip took about a day and half, but going up and turning around and coming right back gave me something to do. Warfare streaked across the gravity fields and people lay dead up there. The moon wasn’t exactly a vacation spot. I read in a recent article in the D.C. Mirror that there were so many deceased soldiers, dozens of open cargo trucks had become mass gravesites.

  What people wouldn’t do to become citizens of certain territories.

  For the next several hours, I slept. I woke up around five and had an early dinner of peanut butter and jelly. I drank some pretty decent coffee. Both the sandwich and the coffee came from a small deli across the street from Henry’s and two doors dow
n from the liquor store. The deli, a place called Little HoFi’s Deli, had an extensive selection of something I couldn’t get in the D.C. District—cheese. Cheese required milk, but the owner, Henry Williams, said that his father managed to thread out any mutations from four of his cows. The cows had bred other cattle, which were no longer prone to mutations. Those claims were difficult to prove, for threading out mutations wasn’t as easy as Henry made it sound. It took years, hell, from what I’ve read on it, it could take centuries to do. Needless to say I was sorely tempted, but I erred on the side of caution and ordered peanut butter and jelly instead.

  I’d only had cheese once in my life and that was with my grandmother, a long time ago when I couldn’t have been more than two or three. I remembered the day because it was my birthday and I got to wear my favorite skirt, a denim one with rhinestones along the pockets. They made an arc of glittering stars along each pocket mouth—gleaming like teeth, at least to me. I used the deep pockets for my toys. My grandmother and parents, along with Tisha, had chosen to go out for my special day and I was lucky enough to get to pick the place.

  I chose Manny’s Pizza. The place was only down the block from our house, and served big, gooey slices of heaven. Grandmother loved the idea, but the cost, well, was high for our family. Only special occasions could warrant pizza with cheese—real dairy cheese.

  The memory called up ghosts of birthdays past and riding the recall’s current were emotions of longing…to be a family again, to hear them speak, and to be embraced by unconditional love.

  Shuddering at the thought, I ate my dinner in record time, savoring the coffee and its warmth before I headed out in the Memphis chill. I rechecked the traveling bag, shoved in an extra pair of jeans and a long-sleeved tee-shirt in case I got stuck there unexpectedly. I picked up my jacket, checked my weapons in my bag, separating the batteries from the guns, and left the rental room.

  Back in the safety of my own wauto, I wondered what Jane would do as I headed for the Memphis Launcher. She didn’t speak to me, but her jerky actions told me that she was hurting …badly. Without waiting for my comments, she fled to her family. They would need her of course to lean on, to help out with notifying others and putting together the arrangements. I had no real clue as to how Christensen was taking it. Every time I’d seen the mayor on webcast programs, interviews, etc. she presented such a well put together front that my attempts to imagine her as anything else, met with mental blank gaps in my mind.