I tried to reach Michael’s cell phone—nothing. His phone must have malfunctioned again, I supposed. I checked the time, just past eleven, and tried Aunt Eileen’s landline. She answered on the second ring.
“You must have gone to the early service Mass,” I said.
“We did for a change, yes,” Aunt Eileen said. “It’s actually sunny over here, and Jim said he wanted to get church over with so he could work in the yard.”
“Ah, that’s my uncle! Can I talk to Michael?”
“He’s not here. He borrowed Jim’s truck and drove over to the park. At least, he said he was going to the park to look at something. That new girlfriend of his lives over on Anza, I think it is, so I’ll bet that’s where he really went.” She paused for a maternal chuckle. “It’s close enough to the park so he wasn’t technically lying.”
“Hah! That’s probably why he turned off his phone.”
“Very likely, yes. Anyway, he promised to be back by noon. He and Jim were going to go buy some more annuals for the floral borders.”
“Okay, I’ll call later, or have him call me.”
“I will. Have a good day off.”
I ended the call and wondered why I felt dread like a knife between my shoulders. I remembered what Michael had told me about the “weird energy” in the doorway to nowhere. He’d gone to the park to “look at something.” The dread doubled. I went back to the living room.
“Nathan?” I said.
He made a sound like “wha urmph?”—the normal response of a guy interrupted while watching a game on TV.
“I’ve got to get over to the park. Michael’s in trouble.”
Unlike a normal guy, Nathan straightened up and switched off the box. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go get the car.”
The dread kept me company the entire way over to the lake and the portal. I wanted to be wrong, prayed that Michael was hanging out at his girlfriend’s house, but I knew better deep inside. Sure enough, when we drove up to the lake, I saw Uncle Jim’s old red Chevy pickup parked on the side of the road. As Nathan pulled up behind it, I was unbuckling the safety belt and unlocking the door. The second he turned off the engine I got out and ran for the monument.
“Michael!” I called out. “Mike, it’s me, Nola!”
No answer, just the quacking of ducks and the rustle of the long streamers of willow leaves in the wind. I pulled out my phone and hit his number on the speed dial. Nothing, not one ring—I gave it up and put the phone away. By then Nathan had caught up with me.
“He might have left the truck here and walked somewhere,” Nathan said.
“A teen who’s just gotten his driver’s license? Walk?”
“Improbable, yes.”
I trotted up to the portal and gave it a good looking over. Although I felt nothing unusual, it struck me as somehow different than the day before. When I climbed up a step to examine the pillars, I saw a faint scratch running from top to bottom along the inside of the left column, as if a vandal had scraped a car key down it—an eight-foot-tall vandal, maybe. The right pillar bore a similar mark. When I pointed it out, Nathan leaned close to peer at it.
“It almost looks burnt,” he said. “Just the scratch mark, though, nothing on the rest of the pillar, and there are no smoke stains.”
I stepped through and back again without experiencing the slightest sensation of an energy field. Either the thing Michael had noticed had disappeared, or I simply wasn’t attuned to it.
“Your pad and crayons are still in the car,” Nathan said. “Shall I get them?”
“Please,” I said. “Or wait, I’ll come with you. I can sit in the backseat to draw.”
As we started back along the path at a normal pace, I noticed the shallow bay, its water calm even though the wind rippled the deeper parts of the lake. I saw a change I’d missed on my frantic run to the doorway.
“Look at the water right here,” I said. “It’s clear, no green scum. Even if the gardeners spread herbicide, it wouldn’t work that fast.”
“They wouldn’t be working on the weekend anyway, would they?” Nathan said. “To skim it with nets, for instance.”
“Not when they’d get double overtime, no.”
In the trees beside the path a creature scuttled away with the snap of a twig. I caught a glimpse of a skinny blue tail, no fur, just scales. I turned fast and charged after it. One of the reptilian meerkats, all right—it tried to scamper up a tree, but I sketched a ward and flung the energy straight for its ugly little back. It squealed, then vaporized with a puff of yellow smoke.
Chaos breach. Something had happened here that should never have happened in our part of the multiverse. Nathan was waiting on the path with his hands on his hips and his head cocked to one side, watching me. I ignored him and walked to the edge of the pond. I took a deep breath and opened myself to the vibrations. Ducks came quacking softly toward me, then scattered, flew up in a frenzy of terrified honking and the flapping of wings as a blue crackle of sheet lightning skittered over the bay.
I shook my head and looked around. Ducks paddled calmly in the burned-clean shallows. The scene that I’d just perceived had occurred some while earlier in response to the Chaotic discharge, which had left a scar on the time stream. No ordinary electricity, whether natural or man-made, would have had that lingering effect. Nathan walked over to join me.
“Some sort of energy release happened here,” I said. “I can’t tell you any more than that, except my little brother probably got caught in the middle of it.” I could hear my voice shake. “He looks a lot like me, and there’s a goddamn serial killer out there who might not be able to tell the difference between us, not from a distance, not with Mike’s long hair.”
Nathan took a step toward me and held out his hand. I was tempted to take the offered comfort, but I turned away instead.
“You can’t mean an ordinary explosive,” he said. “A pipe bomb or such. It would have destroyed the monument.”
“Very true.” I breathed deeply and got myself under control. “No, this wasn’t anything ordinary like those—what do they call them? IEDs?”
“Yes, improvised explosive devices.” He reached inside his jacket and took out his phone. “I’m going to call Sanchez.”
“Are the police even going to take this seriously? If it weren’t for the circumstances, he could maybe have just wandered away somewhere into the park. Usually they don’t pay much attention to missing teens until it’s too late.”
“Usually I’m not involved with the case.”
“That’s true.” I managed to smile. “Let me try an LDRS first, okay? If he did just walk down to the men’s room it could be real embarrassing.”
The LDRS turned up nothing. I tried for a solid fifteen minutes—nothing at all, just the same cold emptiness I’d felt on occasion when looking for Johnson. I sat half-crouched in the backseat of the car while Nathan paced back and forth on the grass outside and called Sanchez. I only heard snatches of what he said. I didn’t really want to hear more.
An image rose in my mind, what the Agency calls a PI, a Possibility Image, something that might have happened, might happen, or maybe would never happen but could. Michael lay facedown on a pavement and bled from the mouth and nose. I tried to work with the image, but it refused to show me context. Only blood, a trickle of blood running across a dirty sidewalk—I killed the image before I screamed aloud. A cold rage filled my mind and heart. If these people, Johnson and DD, had harmed my family, I would make them pay. They would never regret anything in their lives the way they were going to regret harming Michael.
Chaos watch, O’Grady! I told myself. You’re slipping toward Chaos!
The universe has evolved forces of Order to counter those of Chaos and keep the balance. No matter how imperfect we are and how badly we employ them, human beings have created institutions of Order that mimic those evolved energies. Justice instead of revenge, for example: I reminded myself that I’d sworn to serve the balance, and with a Chaos breach to solve, that meant serving Order in the hope of Harmony. In this situation I had to trust in the principle of justice instead of seeking revenge.
At the moment Nathan was talking with a representative of the force of justice, who probably already had his hands full of Chaotic problems on what should have been a quiet Sunday afternoon. I thought of the family of that nurse, her life of helping other women ended by Johnson’s silver bullets, and of the driver of the carjacked truck, as well. I swore to myself that they too would have justice. I took one more deep breath and let my rage dissipate, which enabled me to leave the car as a civilized human being instead of a vengeance-crazed creature.
Nathan clicked off his phone with a satisfied little nod.
“How did Sanchez respond?” I said.
“He’s taking it seriously because I pointed out that our psychopath might have mistaken Michael for you,” Nathan said. “He wants me to go interview your aunt’s family and then report back to him. A squad car’s on its way here to take photos and dust down the truck for fingerprints, all that sort of thing.”
“Are we waiting for them?”
“It would be best if we did. I don’t want evidence disappearing before they get here.”
“Okay. That’ll give me time to call Aunt Eileen.”
“I don’t envy you the task.” He spoke quietly but sincerely. “Do you want me to call—”
“No. But I think it’s time to tell her who you really are.”
“Go ahead, but I’d prefer it if you left the situation at my working for Interpol.”
Aunt Eileen took the news that Michael had gone missing surprisingly calmly, though the calm sounded to me like the kind of shock that keeps a person from truly understanding a bad situation.
“I had such a strange dream about him last night,” Aunt Eileen said. “He was standing on a street that ran through sand dunes. What was odd was that there were streetcar tracks down the middle of the street, but nothing else around. He was trying to call you, but his phone wouldn’t work.”
I hoped he still existed in a place where he could find another phone, but I didn’t say that, of course. “That sounds prescient.”
“I hate those. I never know what they mean until it’s too late for me to do anything about it. I’d rather not know anything about the future. The present’s usually quite messy enough.”
“I’ve got to agree with that. Which reminds me in a weird sort of way: I don’t know when the police will be finished with Uncle Jim’s truck.”
“Well, when they are, I’ll drive him over to fetch it.” Her voice weakened as the shock wore off and left her half in tears. “Nola, I hope and pray Michael’s all right.”
“So do I.” I had to snivel back my own sudden stab of fear. “Look, I’ll be coming over with a police officer. You’ve already met him, though I never gave you his real name.”
“Morrison?”
“Yeah, but his real name is Ari Nathan. He’s an Israeli officer from Interpol. I’ll tell you more later.”
“All right, dear. Israeli?” Her voice brightened. “At least he’s not a Protestant or something worse.” She hung up before I could say anything further.
I turned around to speak to Nathan and saw that he’d opened the trunk of the unmarked squad car. He retrieved a roll of bright yellow DO NOT CROSS—CRIME SCENE tape, then stood looking around him.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“This area’s too big to close off with one roll of tape,” Nathan said. “Well, I can at least block the path behind the thing.”
Seeing the tape made me feel like vomiting. My brother, my little brother, the youngest of us all, was the subject of a police investigation into what might turn out to be murder. Nathan strode off around the lake. When he began stringing the tape from tree to tree, I couldn’t bring myself to help him. I leaned against the hood of the squad car and watched from a distance.
Nathan had used up all the tape by the time the San Francisco police finally arrived, a patrol car first, then a van. A cop wearing only a pair of blue swim trunks got out of the van. He began pulling on a wet suit. The sickness in my stomach intensified.
“He’s a police diver, isn’t he?” I said. “He’s going to look for Michael’s body in the lake.”
“They have to rule out every possibility,” Nathan said. “It doesn’t mean they expect to find him there.”
I nodded, unable to speak. This time, when Nathan held out his hand, I took it, just for a brief clasp, but it helped. A police sergeant, the driver of the van, strolled over to ask who I was.
“The sister of the missing boy,” Nathan spoke for me. “She’s the one who reported that he hadn’t come home on schedule. Now, when your man does the underwater search, tell him not to ignore any recently dead animals.”
“Okay.” The sergeant nodded, then trotted back to the van. I realized that to him, the situation was just business as usual.
By that time passing cars had begun to slow down to allow their passengers to rubberneck. I turned my back on them and propped myself against the hood of Nathan’s car. The police diver pulled on a mask and waddled, awkward on his swim fins, into the lake. In the shallow water, he didn’t need scuba gear. With a splash he dove. Like a seal he surfaced, sucked in some air, and dove a second time.
Eventually he waddled out, dripping pond weeds and water, carrying a very dead duck. The few feathers it had left were singed black. The blue lightning had caught one member of the flock. With his free hand he pulled off his mask.
“This was the only thing I found.” He held up the duck. “God only knows what killed it, huh? I thought it was worth a look.”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “Save it for Forensics.”
Again, I found it impossible to speak. I could comfort myself by thinking that if the blue lightning had caught Michael, he’d be lying dead on the marble steps. It must, therefore, have missed him. Not much comfort, I admit, but all I had.
Just as the diver began stripping off his wet suit, another unmarked car drove up. Sanchez got out and strode over to consult with Nathan. I returned to the front seat of our car to give my wobbly legs a rest. After a few minutes Nathan slid in behind the wheel and pulled his door shut.