Chapter 14: Forgiving Ghosts

“So, uh, Officer, are there any risk factors here?” asked Tony.

“No,” I said morosely. “We expected something big. We found jack.”

“You look disappointed. Did not-finding anything break your algorithm?”

“Yeah. Basically.”

“I bet if you keep looking, you’ll find something.”

“You’ll find him,” said Shosh.

“Maybe bits and pieces.”

“Bits and pieces are better than nothing,” said Tony. I gave him a dirty look. “Christ, I’m sorry. This really that important to you?”

“It’s a matter of life and death.”

“Since when? I thought this was just a neighborhood watch type deal.”

“Yeah,” replied Shosh, “and it’s your job to find him, in whole or in part.”

“It’s hopeless.”

“You searched 2 properties,” reassured Tony. “You got lotsa data left.”

“He’s right. It’s not like you’ve searched high and low.”

“We’ve literally searched all the lofts up high and the bays down low.”

“There are other properties,” they both stressed.

“This was it. This was the one. This was the only one that made sense. He’s in the ground. Probably has been for weeks.”

“‘In the ground’?” asked Tony. “Who’s ‘in the ground’?”

Shosh reminded me, “You. Don’t. Know. That.”

“He’s dead.”

“You haven’t found a body!”

“Who’s dead?” Tony asked, more bewildered than frantic. “What are you talking about?”

“Because it’s gone, buried in the desert.”

“Officer, you seem like you’re having some kind of… trouble.”

“Not yet,” she insisted. “He isn’t dead yet.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“You’re… talking to yourself,” he observed.

“I gotta hunch,” she ‘explained’.

“‘A hunch’,” I echoed skeptically.

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘hunch’,” he said. “It’s pretty clear you just aren’t making any sense.”

“He’d be haunting you, just like me. You can’t let go of me, you won’t let go of him. If he’s dead, he would have joined me in the cast of people whose deaths you feel responsible for.”

“Because I am.”

“You’re not making sense… because you’re making sense?” he asked. “This is what I’m talking about.”

“You weren’t the one who killed me! They weren’t looking at the road!”

“It should have been me.”

Tony was dumbstruck.

I’d caught her off-guard. “That’s what’s been eating you for a decade?”

“Yes.”

“Esti. Being alive doesn’t make it your fault. Just let it go.”

“‘Let it go.’ My life isn’t a Disney cartoon. I can’t just magic away a decade of grief.”

“You, uh, wait here, Officer, I’ll get one of your friends to help you.” I don’t doubt that he left, but I wasn’t paying attention, so I failed to notice whither.

“I’m not asking you to ‘magic away’ anything, I just want you to accept this one little change to your worldview. I promise, reality won’t fall apart if you do this for yourself.”

“I can’t.”

“If not for you, for me. Because now I feel guilty.”

“Why do you feel guilty?”

“Because I died when it should have been you who got hit that day.”

I stared at her.

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“Do you really… mean that?”

“Of course I don’t, ya big dummy! I feel guilty for dying, you feel guilty for not dying, it’s neither of our faults, it’s both of our faults, pick one, pick both, move on, get over it. Apologize to me if you want, seek my forgiveness and you shall receive it. You can’t change the past. You can only accept that it was me who died, appreciate that you’re alive, and make it up to me by living a happy life, the way you’ve been living the past week. Make my death happy by making your life happy.”

I had no words.

“You need to stop blaming yourself, Esti. I’m begging you, let history be history, spilt milk under the bridge. If we can joke about it, maybe it’s time you stopped taking it so damn seriously.”

((How can I not take it seriously? On the other hand—why do I laugh when she makes light of it? Is death so dreadfully terrible that it’s impossible to laugh at it? It isn’t. Whether it’s her death or mine, humor is somehow acceptable.))

((Where are the lines? What parts of death can be mocked, and what parts are sacred? I’ll only find out if I test our boundaries.))

“The best part about that car hitting you was the funny sound you made.”

One surprised second later, she was cracking up.

“Ah! Oomf! Thud-thump.” I hadn’t actually been there to hear it, but it was easy enough to imagine how it went.

She slapped me on the shoulder. “Damn it, I can’t breathe! That’s exactly how it sounded, being tenderized by a speeding Escalade.”

“The punchline is you heard the ‘ah’ and the ‘oomf’ coming out of your own lungs, but you didn’t hear yourself hitting the ground until you were already standing next to your corpse.”

“Ha-ha-haaa! Yeah-yeah, keep ‘em coming!”

“‘Oy vey!’” I parroted her in distress. “‘Somebody hit that poor, poor woman! I hope she isn’t dead! I can’t find my cell phone, somebody call nine-one-one!’”

“I didn’t sound like that!” In all ‘seriousness’, though, she found my impression convincing—she was just adding to the comedic tension, giving me a ‘yes, and…’ to riff on.

“You did, though. The most panicked you’ve ever sounded was when you saw your own body bounce off that car and hit the pavement.”

She giggled. “Alright. Yeah. I knew for certain I was staring death in the face, except I didn’t realize it was through the looking glass.”

“You mean the windshield glass.”

“Yes!” she exclaimed with a cackle. “How’s my Esti feeling, guilt-wise? Better?”

Suddenly sober again, I explained, “I still feel like I failed you.”

“‘I didn’t fail my mother.’ Say it.”

“Saying it isn’t going to make me believe it.”

“Humor me.”

“I didn’t fail my mother.”

She pulled me up and hugged me. “And even if you did somehow fail me, I’d never be disappointed in you, and I’d still depend on you no matter what, because I’ve always loved you and I’ll love you always.”

My throat was sore before I could reply. “Okay.”

She held me out at arm’s length. “Ya gonna move on, now?”

I nodded.

“Good. Now go find Alex.” And with a final squeeze, she left.

“Hey, Prax?”

Soft as her voice was, Georgina startled me. “Ah! Uh, hey.”

“You feelin’ okay?”

“Yeah, I had a discussion with—I did some thinking and got a new lease on this case.”

She nodded skeptically. “That’s… good. Very good.”

“Yep.”

“Tony said you were… talking things through.”

“Yes.”

“Out loud.”

“I think out loud sometimes.”

“Would you say that you ‘talk to yourself’?”

“You could put it that way.”

“And there’s… nobody… else there when you’re talking to yourself?”

((Fuck.)) “No. Just me.”

She bit her bottom lip. “Of course there isn’t.”

“I’m fine. I just think out loud when I’m stressed out, that’s all.”

“Okay. That’s just what you do sometimes.”

“Yes.”

“And there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Exactly.”

She patted me on the shoulder. “If you’re feeling stressed, you have like, 5 people you can reach out to at any time.”

“Of course.”

“Can I ask what’s on your mind?”

“He isn’t here. He should be here, but he isn’t. He’s somewhere else, where he doesn’t belong.”

“That’s how things seem to be. I’m sorry.”

“He was supposed to be here… (Hmmm.) Not now. Earlier. Maybe this morning, maybe yesterday, maybe a week ago, but he was here at some point.”

“We don’t have any evidence pointing to that, though.”

“Of course not. This is just a hunch. But even if it’s just a hunch, I’m still certain he was here but they moved him. And if it happened today…”

I sprang to my feet and inspected the ground outside each of the warehouse bays, ((1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…))

Until I found what I was looking for, outside an open bay door.

“Not this morning,” I said, pointing out deep tire tracks in the mud that easily could have belonged to a van. “A few hours ago, at the earliest.”

“Shit!” Georgina leaned over the gouges in the earth and got a good look. “Damn, Sherlock.”

“If I were Sherlock, I probably would have noticed them right away with my computer brain and not mention them until after we found Alex. We need to follow the crumbs.” She called Doll; after snapping some shots of the tread, the three of us traced the tracks to another gate on the other end of the yard, beyond which close inspection revealed that the tires had left a short trail of mud as they veered left onto Sylvester Street. “They went south.”

“And ditched the mud,” pointed out Doll. “I’m afraid our trail runs cold after this. But even if they hadn’t shaken off all the mud so soon, there would still be the mud of a million other cars crisscrossing the trail to throw us off.”

“They left after the rain started; this dirt is fairly silty, so the soil infiltration should be somewhere around half an inch per hour; given how thoroughly soaked the ground must have been for the tracks to be this deep… they left at least a couple of hours after the rain started. And on the topic of the tracks’ depth, I suspect they were in a hurry—and I think I can confirm that suspicion.” We checked back at where the tracks began, where they were indeed at their deepest, precisely where the rear tires would have been parked with the rear of the van up against the dock. “There. They tried to peel out and dug themselves a furrow. And now I’m wondering…” We went back and I inspected the mud tracks on the street. “The outer tracks are thicker than the inner ones, but end sooner. They took the left turn so aggressively that the van put most of its weight on the right tires and shed their mud more quickly. They needed to get out of here, ASAP. They were expecting visitors. They knew we were coming.”

Georgina whistled. “That’s some crazy good work, Detective. But, like Prissy already pointed out, the tracks end after the turn, leaving us with no breadcrumbs to follow.”

I pointed at the traffic lights. “Santa Virginians don’t like to drive in the rain, so the streets along the way might well have been empty. If they were really in a hurry, they might have felt brave enough to speed or run a red light—or several.”

“Ah.” Doll nodded, and a smile shortly crept into her lips. “Do you think you could convince Traffic to fork over the pics?”

“I’ll have to, while crossing my fingers our perps ignored traffic regs.”

“Ladies, where ya been?” asked Tony, catching up with us. “You disappeared!”

“Just gathering more data,” I said. “There may be a risk factor in the lack of pavement on this property. Dust attracts crime, and mud… encourages… trespassing.”

“That makes sense,” he said after mulling over my nonsense for a few seconds. “What was all that about life and death earlier, and a guy being in the ground? Is something bad going on?”

“Um.” ((Shit, do I really have to make something up?)) “Uh. Yeah… I was thinking out loud, and… I sometimes think in metaphors.”

He looked at me dubiously. “You were acting like somebody’s actually dead.”

((Tell him the truth? Does he have a need to know? No. But he’s going to hound me until I give him a satisfactory explanation.)) “I… Okay. There was a—my mother—she died several years ago, and—I have a case I’m working on and it’s reminding me of her, so I’m reliving some trauma and I—had a breakdown. Because I’m a woman, with lots of feelings. And I’m on my period.”

“Oh.” He seemed to believe my mostly bullshit explanation. “How did she die?”

“I’d rather not talk about this, if you don’t mind. You know, like, the way a man buries his feelings. I’m trying to be tough, like a man. Because I’m an insecure woman who feels the need to pretend she’s masculine around men.”

“Oh. Sure. Of course.”

“Thank you for your understanding. And thank you for your assistance!” I gave him a grateful pat on the shoulder. “We’re finished here. Now we have to do some number crunching and some data wrangling. We’ll give you your results in a month, after we’ve processed all our data.”

“It was nothing,” he said cheerily.

“Alright, ladies, move out.”

The trail was cooling, but still warm to the touch—the situation was much further from hopeless than I had convinced myself, but there was no time for fucking around. We discussed our plans over Bluetooth on our way back to the station house and met up at my desk. I called Diane and asked her to submit a department information request to Traffic on Doll’s behalf, and she was able to send one from her phone. Regina decided to take a potty break when I bid Doll good luck and sent her on her way to First Precinct Traffic Squad—I sent her in my stead because I figured Traffic might give me a hard time.

After about 3 minutes of radio silence from her I was about ready to burst out of my own skin as I came closer and closer to concluding that they were giving her a hard time.

“You okay?” asked Georgina.

“Yes. No. Nervous. I’m worried they’re going to give her as hard a time as they would have given me.”

“She’s charismatic, she’s sweet, but she knows when to be assertive.”

“She should have texted something by now.”

“There could be a line.”

“She would have said so. Besides, it’s night shift, no one’s going to be waiting in line to talk to Traffic.”

“Well… It’s probably just the regular bureaucracy and red tape slowing things down. Or whoever’s at the front desk decided they wanted to chat about something random.”

“Maybe.”

“Hey.”

“Hm?”

“They have to give her the traffic data.”

“Not right away.”

“Sending her was your idea, remember? Like I said, she’s nice, she’s professional, she’s polite, people like her.”

“Unlike me.”

She chuckled. “Exactly! She’ll convince them to give our request top priority.”

“But does she know how to lie if they ask her the wrong questions?”

“She’s an adulteress. If she can get away with keeping a secret from her husband, she can discreetly neglect to mention that this request is actually for your case.”

I hummed doubtfully.

“Christ, there’s no way to satisfy you.” She scanned the room—empty. “Well, there might be a way…” She straddled my lap and brought her mouth to my neck, and I felt and heard gentle moisture, forcing a sigh-groan from my throat.

“We—don’t have any privacy here, Koko.”

“It’s night shift.” Another kiss stole my breath. “There’s nobody around.”

“This is a bad—(ah)—idea…”

“We fucked next door to a crime scene—‍” Another kiss, another sigh. “—while it was being investigated.”

“But this is—‍” Her mouth smothered my words. During the next kiss she undid my top button. When she gave me room to breathe, I muttered, “(Koko… I don’t think we should…)” She kissed me again, and I kissed her back. Another button came undone. I wrapped my arms around her neck. “(This is a bad idea…)” I whispered half-heartedly.

“Yeah, well—(mwa)—you shoulda considered the cons—(mwa)—when you got with a girl—(mwa)—who gets off on doing it—(mwa)—in unusual places.”

“‘Unusual places’?”

“Why else would I have been so eager to fuck right next door to a bloody crime scene?” Kiss. “If I could have fucked you in that very room, I would have done it in a heartbeat.” Kiss.

“Huh.” I was too turned on by how intensely weird she was to be disturbed by said weirdness.

Another kiss, another button, another kiss, another button… Once enough of them were loose she snaked her hand up my bra cup and tweaked my nipple, inspiring me to moan a little more forcefully than seemed wise to me—which in the first place was with any force at all. As it was, there was an audible echo within the squad room.

“For someone who’s scared to fuck at work, you’re awfully noisy.”

“Shut up and kiss me, but keep your eyes peeled.” But my own eyes grew heavy, and I stopped paying attention to the outside world. I hadn’t recently spent much time with Koko, so it was nice to bond

Somebody cleared their throat from across my desk.

My heart skipped a beat, my eyes shot open, and my head jerked to the source of the sound. To my relief, it was Doll.

“Christ almighty,” muttered Koko. “Good job keeping watch, Prax. I just about had a heart attack.”

“Sorry, I’m sorry. I was just so relaxed…”

“Fortunately for you,” pointed out Doll, “it’s only me who caught you.”

“And me,” said a voice behind us. The voice belonged to Regina. She had been watching for God-knows-how-long.

Koko dismounted me, and I rebuttoned. “Oh. We were… passing the time until the two of you got back.”

Doll snorted very cutely. “Did you see my SecreText?”

“You sent one?”

“Yes, they were able to identify a brown van speeding through the first intersection, and said the files would be in your CaseCloud in ‘a few minutes’—which was a few minutes ago, so it might be there by now.”

“Oh.” I finished buttoning and logged in. “(Yesss,)” I hissed victoriously as CaseCloud opened to reveal the coveted pictures and records of violations. “Clues, precious clues.” They pulled up chairs for a better view of the first traffic light photo, which was at the intersection of Adams and Sylvester. “There’s our brown van alright. 1987 Ford Econoline E-150, license plate B120NKL7, registered to Advanced Plumbing Services, Inc. I’m a little disappointed that it’s hard to make out the driver, but we’ve got plenty to work with here.”

“I’ll say,” said Koko. “Are those photos for every intersection they passed through?”

I snorted. “Looks like they really were in a hurry.”

We plotted the red lights south and west, all the way to the Cargo District north of the wharfs, due south of Santa Virginia Bay, where the traffic cameras ended their vigil—and the trail, once again, ran cold.

“We know they went in the direction of the wharfs,” said Doll, “but we don’t know if they stopped there or kept going.”

“Yeah. Fuck.” I stared at LEGIS’s satellite view of the Cargo District and tried to get inside our culprits’ heads.

Tried. But I didn’t know them. They were sadists, probably working class, the loyal servants of capitalists. I didn’t know how to think like them, and I began to doubt being able to wouldn’t bring me any closer to understanding and predicting their behavior in doing something so mundane as driving.

So I was left with the question, ((Where would they try to go?)) Which I quickly realized ought to have been, ((No, if I’m a rat whose hole might be trapped, where do I shelter to avoid getting my leg snapped off? If only I had more than one rat hole.)) “Oh my God, I’ve been staring at this screen for like 3 minutes and the answer is in another file.” I opened up the property plot I had crafted earlier in LEGIS. “This will show us the way.”

My girlfriends ‘ahhh’ed.

I imported the coordinates of the traffic violations into the map to give us an idea of what other properties our kidnappers had to choose from. Filtering out everything except G&S’s holdings left us with 3 properties located south of the Bay. The largest was the massive cargo processing facility leased by Customs and Border Protection (no doubt G&S’s biggest cash cow). The next down in size was Delta Nile’s third largest fulfillment center in Southern California, which I doubted had any convenient hiding spots for kidnappees. But my pulse spiked as I saw that the smallest G&S property in the neighborhood was a container terminal operated by Ulysses TransPacific Solutions.

I tapped on the screen excitedly as I announced, “He’s here, he’s here! Alex Brookvale is here! If he’s alive, he’s here!”

“Let’s go, Clover,” said Doll, smoothly. “Let’s rescue him.”

((They might have chopped him into pieces and tossed him in the ocean.)) I shook my head. ((I can’t handle this case if I think that way. If he’s alive, time is of the essence. I have to assume he’s alive, or else I’ll drag my feet and allow this prophecy of his death to fulfill itself.)) I checked my holster just to be absolutely certain I had my piece, checked my coat pocket for my cuffs and grabbed an extra pair from my desk, and locked my laptop. “You guys ready?” They nodded. “Holy shit. He’s so close, I’ll fucking die if it turns out they kill—‍” I stopped myself with a deep breath. “Don’t think about that possibility, Andrea… just focus on the mission. Let’s go, girls.”