Expectation (Ghost Targets, #2) (2 page)

He leaned back and glanced down at the open casefile on his desk. "There's patterns in the database, though—fingerprints that show up when somebody starts ghosting. The Gevia case is interesting, because the crime was already in a restricted area, but somebody has been ghosting some minor details after the fact anyway." He met her eyes with a fascinated grin. "And that somebody is the US Army."

Katie shook her head. "I don't get it."

Brian said, "Craig, get Katie a copy of the Gevia casefile. Thanks." He closed the casefile on his own desktop and instead drew up location details on the De Grey Clinic, a medical research facility in Boulder, Colorado. "Gevia is—"

"The wonder drug, I know," she said, bending over the desk to skim the site profile for the clinic. "Did it kill someone?"

"Hah! No." She looked at him, surprised, and he shrugged. "Nobody's dead, actually, but the lead researcher—the nation's only real expert on the drug—is in a coma, and it doesn't look like he's coming out of it."

"Wow," Katie said. "Oh, wow, that's terrible."

"There's no real sign one way or the other of foul play—nothing obvious in his genome to trigger an attack, but also no real signs of a struggle or any physical damage to his person. The army has called it natural causes, and they're doing everything they can to keep it quiet."

Katie held up a finger to cut him short and said, "Wait, what's the army got to do with it?"

He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Gevia is currently classified a national resource. It was developed primarily with DoD funding, and since its commercial release it has been under tight security control by the army. That's why the clinic is a restricted area." At her blank look, he clarified. "Off-the-radar. Hathor-blind. The Aggregators get no data from the site, and the army has a special team tasked with keeping the records clean."

She whistled, impressed. "I didn't know the government had the balls to try something like that."

Brian shrugged. "They don't.
We
 don't, even. DoD is another matter, though. Still, there's maybe a dozen officially restricted areas
total
. For the most part, it's more trouble than it's worth."

"But Gevia's special."

He chuckled. "There's an understatement. I don't know about you, but I was really starting to like the idea of living forever."

"So the army wants us to—"

"Oh, no, no, no. They're quite satisfied with their examiner's report. All they want is to keep this incident out of the news."

Katie sighed. "It's the family, then? Some grieving widow digging for the truth?" Brian shook his head again, and Katie frowned. "Then why are we getting involved?"

Brian chewed his lip for a moment before answering. "Well, the local police chief is raising a stink, claiming it was no accident. Seems she's never been terribly fond of the army's big black hole in the middle of her town, and she's looking to get some media attention on this to push them out. Reed thought maybe if we went in and put an official stamp on things, that would smooth things over down there."

Something about his demeanor said that wasn't the whole story, so Katie pressed him. "What else?"

"Frankly..." He glanced over his shoulder to Goodall's old office, where Reed was still meeting with the GAO investigators, though he seemed more interested in something on his handheld than whatever the investigators were saying. Brian turned back to Katie and lowered his voice anyway. "I think Reed is looking for an excuse to get out of here."

While Katie was still considering that, a memo window appeared on Brian's desktop. Under the bureau letterhead it said in block text, "Stick to the facts, would you, Dimms? Thanks.—Reed." Brian grinned sheepishly, then dismissed the memo and brought back the casefile.

"Actually," Katie said, as Brian changed to another tab, "I don't want to waste your time going over stuff that's already written down." She pulled out her handheld and verified her access to the casefile with a quick nod. "I'll get back with you once I have more questions, okay?"

"Oh, sure," he said, a hint of disappointment dragging his eyes down. "I've just—yeah, I have other stuff I can work on."

"Perfect." She turned her back on him and headed toward her old desk in the corner. On the second step in that direction, her heart started beating faster. She took a breath, willing herself to calm down, and said quietly into her headset, "Craig, is desk twelve available for use? Details to my handheld. Thanks."

She blinked in surprise when she found the first entry for the desk said, "Assigned: Katie Pratt." She reached the desk and tapped it to wake it up as she sank down into the plush leather office chair. The casefile for her new case was already open on the desktop, and as she watched a memo window opened, again bureau letterhead and again from Reed. It said simply, "Welcome back, Katie."

She closed her eyes and let out a long sigh. With a smile tugging at her lips, she whispered, "This is my job."

As Katie dug into the casefile, she found it mystifying. The victim, Eric Barnes, was only forty-two, and for the last twenty years he'd been a respected researcher in the field of Senescence. It was easy to see why, too, with his dedication. He spent ten to fifteen hours a day, six days a week, at his clinic—all of it time lost to history, because Hathor hit a brick wall half a mile from the clinic, showing nothing but a flat, gray background. A wide-angle overhead of the city showed rolling hills climbing toward the mountains, vibrant green and brown carved into blocks by the obsidian lines of the highways and shining silver roads. Right in the middle of it all, though, there was a sharp square of nothing, a 2-D gray block in the middle of 3-D reality. She'd seen that before, where the records ran thin, but nowhere in the United States for at least a decade.

She tracked down the DoD order that had made the clinic a restricted area, some nineteen years ago, but when she rolled the HaRRE display back, she found nothing helpful. Back then, coverage had been pretty spotty, anyway, and if she remembered right, Colorado was one of the last holdouts on privacy rights.

It sure seemed that way as she surveyed the state, pulling farther and farther back. There were a handful of households in Denver, flecks of color and texture on the flat background, but it wasn't until she drew back far enough to see the distant Kansas state line that she saw a real landscape. It glowed, gold and rolling to the horizon, but the rich detail stopped dead in a squiggly gray line right along Colorado's border.

That was some foresight, she thought, for the army to restrict access to one clinic within a vast plane of nothingness. She sent the record into fast forward and counted two years before the state was well and truly textured, and another fifteen months before Boulder filled in, right up to the squared border around the De Grey Clinic. Foresight, indeed.

She turned back to the case at hand, reading through the incident report. Eric Barnes had been discovered by a research assistant, Meg Ginney, three weeks ago, collapsed on his laboratory floor. At the time, he was breathing normally with some brain function, but entirely unresponsive. Katie's eyes widened as she read about his Hippocrates watch, which was exempted from the DoD restriction but never gave a word of warning. Somehow his total coma didn't trigger any alarms until just after he was found, when his blood sugar dropped too low after thirty to forty hours without eating.

His medical condition was amazing—that he could have suffered an attack sufficient to put him into a persistent coma without triggering a medical alert through Hippocrates—but the real story in Barnes's casefile grew out of conversations between the army representatives and the local police chief, who had become increasingly incautious in the last ten days. There was a conversation with Reed from two days ago, Saturday morning. She played it back out of curiosity more than anything else.

He started it off with a tired-sounding, "Hello?" She checked the timestamp, but the call had started at eleven fifteen.

"Mister Reed," a chilly woman's voice answered. "This is Police Chief Dora Hart of the Boulder City Police Department. I understand your office has been looking into the De Grey case."

"I've got an analyst on it," Reed said, noncommittal. "We haven't seen any real reason to doubt the army's medical evaluation—"

"Mister Reed, with all due respect, that report is pure fiction, and I can tell you why." The woman on the line spoke with a surprising ferocity, every word hurled into the conversation, but there was a purr in her voice that tempered it. Katie paused the audio playback and opened up HaRRE. For a moment she considered checking in on Reed, to see what had him yawning at the crack of noon, but the case was more important. She found location details on Dora Hart at the time of the call, and resumed playback with audio.

The police chief was in her office, a spacious cage in the heart of a sprawling police station, and she prowled back and forth like a lioness while she spoke with Reed. She had the army's medical report open on her desktop, and she waved to it angrily as she went on. "Barnes is a vegetable, Mr. Reed, because of his research on Gevia. I saw the scene before the army investigators came to lock the place down, and I can tell you the man was the victim of some violence."

Reed answered with a little more vigor. "I've seen stills of the man in medical care, Miss Hart—"

"Yes,
after
 the army's doctors got to do their work on him." She growled and slammed a hand down on her desk. "I'm telling you, they will do anything to keep this quiet. This is a real problem for them," she said. "It's political. Gevia is important, and they don't want anyone to know what happened." Reed tried to answer, but she cut him off. "It's not
safe
, Mr. Reed. Everyone in the nation is either on Gevia or scheduled for an injection. This is too big for us to let them keep it secret. Something happened to that man, and we have to know what."

Reed didn't seem to have an answer, and finally Katie's impulse got the better of her. She shut off the playback and pulled up his medical records. She'd had her Gevia shot eight months ago, back when it was still limited to military and police forces, but she hadn't ever really thought much about it. Reed had been scheduled for a shot in December, barely a month away, but she saw he'd put it on hold after his conversation with Dora Hart. She double checked that and grinned. It had been after his conversation with Dora Hart, followed by a brief call to Brian Dimms.

She checked into the medical stills, too, to see what Reed was talking about. There was a wide shot of him on a hospital bed, naked from the waist up, pale and unconscious but otherwise looking fine. Then there were a handful of others—a close up on the back of his head showing a slight bruise beneath his thick brown hair, another one showing a bruise and abrasion on his right ring finger like someone had removed a ring forcibly, and a nick on his neck that could have happened while shaving. All of them seemed pretty inconsequential, and Reed had commented to that effect in the casefile.

She looked up at a sudden motion and saw the door to Rick's old office fly open. Reed strode out into the bullpen ahead of the GAO investigators, and Katie quickly cleared away his details from her desktop. She got rid of the medical stills, too, and pulled up Eric Barnes's personal details to track down some footage of him at home, the evening before the incident.

His location history showed him at the house at eight twenty-three, but nothing before that at all. It seemed odd, because his two-story Victorian was in a suburb west of town, well outside the clinic's restricted area. She opened up the playback at eight twenty-two, curious, and found the camera focused on the steps out front of his house. Cars rolled by on the busy residential street but there was no sign of the approaching researcher. She heard the front door open and panned the camera to find Mrs. Barnes opening the door with a warm smile, apron on, and then a moment later Eric appeared in front of her. He popped into existence on the top step, mid-stride, and Katie saw the wife give a friendly wave toward the street, but when she turned the camera back that way there was no one there.

She followed Eric into the house. He was already on the couch, feet up on a plush ottoman and reading through something on his handheld. She tried to check out what it was, but that information was restricted. In HaRRE it showed up blank. She tried switching to source video, but an error screen informed her that the video feed for this location was flagged private and reserved for household and law enforcement purposes.

That, at least, was perfectly normal. She figured half the families she knew still had their home recorders set to private. It took a simple command, run from a macro on the desktop, to request special access to the home video, but none of the cameras gave her a look at the victim's handheld screen. They were relatively low quality cameras, anyway, so she would have been very lucky to get even a guess at what he was reading. She did get a good look at his right hand, though, and she saw he was wearing a heavy gold class ring. By the time the medical examiners got to him that would be missing, but it didn't really mean much. For all she knew, they might have removed it as part of their investigation.

Theresa returned with two plates full of food, and Eric tossed aside his handheld in favor of dinner. Katie watched them eat, listened to their idle conversation about her trip to the grocery store and the book her friend had recommended. It had been years since eavesdropping like that had made Katie feel uncomfortable. It was just part of the job, now, and she zoomed in close and watched the tiny facial expressions, listened to subtle clues in the voice, watching for any indication that something was amiss. He had two hours left in the evening, before he went to bed, and he would leave in the morning before she woke up. Then he disappeared into the void, and left his mind there when he came out again.

She watched and listened, snooping for all she was worth, but there was nothing there. It seemed for all the world like a happy suburban dinner. Theresa finally heaved herself back up off the couch and held out a hand for his plate. "I could use some ice cream," she said lightly. "You want anything?"