Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (5 page)

“Heh, you’re right. Actually,” he said, pulling off the blindfold, “we’re lucky you were the one who showed up at that scene. The rest of us would have assumed it was a digital error, too. I know I wouldn’t have checked for a hidey-hole.”

“Weird, yeah?”

“Yeah. We got lucky. Keep your fingers crossed that this was just a fluke. The last thing we need is to have more violent crimes start disappearing from camera.”

She jumped up so quickly the stick went flying. 

“Penguin?”

She looked at him, eyes wide. “I need to make a few calls.”

Charley claimed to be out to dinner with his wife, but the background noise was very sportsbarish and he got distracted at regular intervals. She prodded him until he coughed up enough information for her to find the rest in the MPD database. Then she called Santino.

“The murder came last,” she blurted. She heard a woman gasp and sputter.

“Let me take you off of speaker,” he said groggily.
Rachel Peng, Destroyer of Afterglow
, she thought. There were footsteps as he moved to another room. “What?”

“Crimes that don’t show up on camera,” she said. “Charley tipped us off this afternoon but we weren’t paying attention. I went back and checked those cases. There’ve been two others similar to Griffin’s murder. The first was a mugging about three weeks ago. The victim comes out of a convenience store and gets mugged, gets smacked around a little, only he swears the mugger on the store’s security footage is not the same man who attacked him. The victim and two witnesses in the store? They say he got jumped from behind by an older white man. But the video shows the assailant as this tall, young black man. I swear to you, Raul, the man on the video looks so much like Hill it’s scary. They could be twins.

“And the second case? This one is really strange. This next victim, he’s a regular at a local coffee shop. He comes in every night at the same time and buys the same thing. He’s so dependable they have his order waiting for him on the counter. Then he goes outside, sits in the same chair, drinks his latte, and goes home. Last week, he got the crap kicked out of him in front of the building. Everybody in the coffee shop told the cops they saw someone walk up and beat on him with a crowbar, but the shop’s got an anti-theft camera and it shows him reading a book in his usual chair.”

“’S different.” Santino’s voice cut in and out, and Rachel imagined him rubbing his nose as he woke up. “Griffin’s killer was on camera. Those other cases sound like digital manipulation, or maybe a bunch of people got their stories straight before the cops showed up. If anything, her case was more like a… I don’t know. A magic trick. Don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain and all that.”

“Okay, then where is Griffin’s killer on the rest of the security footage? Not during the murder, but when he went into the bank? Or when he left after she was dead? He had to get in and out of that tunnel somehow.

“The techs examined the video from all cases, Santino. Everything’s authentic. The time stamps and light sources are solid. Every happy pixel is precisely where it should be. Denmark is knee-deep in dead fish.”

He was silent for a few seconds. “You’re wrecking my night, you know that.”

“And now you get to call Zockinski and Hill. You’re welcome.”

She updated Mulcahy and begged a ride from him to the convenience store where the first victim had been assaulted. (She would have begged a ride regardless, as he was about to marry into serious money and drove cars that were best photographed when half-naked supermodels were draped over their hoods.) The store was an old gas-and-go in a bad part of town, an option of last resort for those in search of overpriced milk and toilet paper after the bodegas closed for the night. The street seemed all but deserted, but Rachel felt the local element lift their heads and scent the air as Mulcahy’s classic Shelby Cobra rumbled up to the curb.

Mulcahy felt it too. “Wait here,” he said. He walked around to her door and let her out, his linebacker’s silhouette spread wide against the brick of the store in the waning evening light. He cut an iconic figure, his build and his dark blond hair overexposed on every television show and magazine cover in the country. As he waved and drove away, Rachel grinned, remembering a wildlife documentary about an adorable mother hippo and her calf. Mama had hauled the biggest, baddest crocodile in the river out of the water, crushed it into a thin red paste, and went off for a pleasant day to herself at the hippo spa while the surviving crocodiles protected her baby. With luck, some of the smarter ones skulking in the alleys would make sure she didn’t have to shoot the stupid ones who assumed small women were easy prey.

“Thanks,”
she said across the link.

“No problem.”
His taillights flashed, and he turned the corner and was gone.

After calling Charley, Rachel had found the footage from the convenience store assault on the Sixth District Station police server. The server was protected but Rachel already had permission to retrieve files from First, so had called the evidence room at Sixth and requisitioned a copy of the file for her tablet. She was absolutely certain the elderly officer in charge of the Evidence room had no idea what she had wanted or understood why she wasn’t coming in to pick it up, but the paperwork was signed and that was all that mattered. Bureaucracy was an inalienable force of nature; she could march through the front gates of Hell itself if the right paperwork was signed.

Rachel took out her tablet and queued up the video. She froze the image. Top-down, featureless concrete, a curb and the bottom third of a gas pump. The shadows were completely different: then, it was night; now, it was twilight.

She reached out to the security system and cringed when she found multiple cameras. Some Agents were skilled at splitting their perception and could reside in their own minds and electronic devices simultaneously. She was not. Being in several places at once made her nauseated.

Part of Rachel’s conscious self merged into the security cameras to watch its physical counterpart in the parking lot below. She was taller and her face was slightly longer than the average Asian woman’s, passing nods to her genes from her American father, but her features and her black hair cropped tight in a pixie cut were straight Chinese.

Rachel staggered slowly across the lot, trying not to throw up as she aligned the curb and the gas pump on the screen with her perspective through the cameras. When she found the spot where the assault had occurred, she pulled herself together and pinged the security system proper.
Recent and decent,
she thought,
good for them.
The store might be a shell of its former profit, but its owners had followed the code for security systems. Like the bank, this system also shot in black and white, but she gave them a pass considering the depth of the shadows pooling around her as the sun set.

She ducked into the store and found a bottle of water. The small room reeked of old nachos and pot. The main source of these odors, a lanky kid in his early twenties, gawked at her from his clerk’s station behind bulletproof glass.

“You know Mulcahy?” The kid had his face pressed up against the store window as if hoping the old muscle car would suddenly cruise back into view.

“Yeah, I work with him,” she said. Celebrity was not the same as acceptance, and she was careful with her words. 

The kid studied her and decided she didn’t fit his image of an Agent. Apparently she was dressed as a politician’s flunky as he asked her, “You’re up on the Hill?”

“No, First MPD,” she replied, and his conversational colors went flat and retreated to wrap around his core. Now she was on familiar ground. Most of her early practice in reading emotions had come from talking to people who wanted nothing to do with the police. 

“Mulcahy’s pretty cool,” she slid a few bucks through the slot under the glass and twisted open the bottle. “He showed me his gun. I work with the cops so I see guns all day long, but his was different. Don’t know what kind it was, though.”

The kid seized the bait, and Rachel played dumb for several excruciating minutes as he grabbed every weapon magazine in the store and had her find the one that looked most like Mulcahy’s. She picked out a shiny hand cannon at random and he got to tell her why Mulcahy shouldn’t be carrying
that,
he should be carrying
this,
because
that
was garbage and
this
was a million times better. From there it was easy to steer the conversation to personal security, and the kid stated with authority how he knew America was messed up thanks to a beatdown in his very own parking lot.

“I know, I heard!” she said, crossing her arms and leaning forward as much as the glass barrier would allow. The kid’s eyes strayed south; she was wearing a ballistic vest under her shirt but young men lived in hope. “It’s why I’m here. Someone…” she said, glancing over her shoulder as if checking for nefarious villains, “… down at First MPD told me I should come down and check it out. You saw it? You were the one on that night?”

He had and he was. The kid spoke to her breasts and told her a story of two men in his parking lot. The first was minding his own business when the second grabbed him and started pounding away. “But!” he said, leaning close enough to kiss her if the glass hadn’t been between them. “You want to know what’s weird?”

“Yes!”  Rachel said, feigning wide-eyed and eager. She had pinged Zockinski’s work phone earlier that afternoon to get its electronic serial number, and had been tracking its movement since she talked to Santino. The police-issued cell had been slowly crawling through the late evening traffic and had finally broken free about two blocks from the store.
Hurry it up, kid.

“When it was in real life, the mugger was a white guy. But when we watched the tape, it was a black guy.

“Me and my friend, we were here in the store, we saw it happen. Then the guy who got mugged comes in, calls the cops, and he says me and my friend have to watch the video from the security camera right now. Right then, I mean. Like he wanted to go chase the guy down himself.

“So we did, but the guy on the tape is not the right guy. I mean, it’s the guy who got mugged but not the guy who…”

Rachel put a palm on the glass to stem the flow of shoddy grammar. It was usually best to hear about an event in the witness’s own words but she might have made a terrible mistake. “The victim was assaulted by a white man in the parking lot. Then the victim came into the store, called the police, and requested to view the tape. It was then you saw that the assailant on the tape was a different man than the one who attacked the victim?”

She had strayed too far into police jargon territory. The kid peered at her with mild suspicion. “You sure you’re not a cop?”

“I just work with them,” she said again. “But the victim was the same person, right? He didn’t change?”

“No. Yes. I mean… no, it was the same man. Real life and on the video.”

Okay. That’s who we’re looking for.

“And he wanted to see the tape, you’re sure of this?”

“Oh yeah, for sure. Guy said he wouldn’t leave until he did.” 

“When did he leave?” 

“After the cops showed up,” the kid said. “When they saw the tape, they wanted him to go with them. They said they needed to talk to him down at the station. But he told them he couldn’t go, and then he took off.”

I’ll bet. And since he was the victim, they couldn’t hold him. 

Zockinski’s phone arrived in the parking lot on the other side of the gas pumps. She peeked through the window to lead the kid’s eyes.

“Hey, the cops who sent me over here just sent some more of their friends,” she said, spreading a thick layer of fudge on the truth. “Can you do me a favor and tell them the same thing you just told me? It’s been really, really interesting!” 

His colors waned slightly but he seemed agreeable. “Sure, I guess.”

Part of Rachel wondered if shameful flirting might go a long way towards helping bridge relationships between law enforcement and the community, and the rest of her shouted that part back down into its little hole. She was still working this out in her head when she turned the corner and nearly ran straight into Santino.

“When did you get here?” 

He looked surprised. “Right this second. Weren’t you tracking me?”

“No, I was following Zockinski.”

He pressed a hand to his heart and gasped.

“Shut up.”

“Zockinski looks pissed,” he said as the two men got out of Zockinski’s car. From Rachel’s point of view, pissed didn’t even begin to cover it. Zockinski’s surface colors were churning. Hill’s mood, by contrast, was rigid, that same strange shade of teal woven within several different grays and a Southwestern turquoise she had recognized as her own core color only after seeing it reflected in others. Rachel was familiar with that weaving effect before and had categorized it as internal conflict, but the teal was new. If she was being brutally honest with herself (and if nobody with any fashion sense was listening), she might admit it was her favorite color.

“What did you say to them?” she asked.

“Nothing. I called Zockinski and told him what you told me. He made a few observations about my anatomy and the appropriateness of certain household objects which might reside therein, and hung up. Then he calls me back a minute later and says they’ll be right over.”