Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (6 page)

Zockinski hung back at the car, but Hill walked straight up to her and held out his hand. Rachel couldn’t help but blink at it before she decided it was probably real enough to shake. 

“I was with the 7th,” he said.

Oh.
“Afghanistan?”

He nodded, then turned and went back to join the other detective.

“What was that about?” Santino asked. 

Santino, who had never served, would pretend to understand but wouldn’t, not really, so Rachel shrugged and headed towards the store. OACET Agents’ files were supposed to be sealed but that had never meant anything. Rachel had enlisted in the Army straight out of high school, and had a teenager’s talent for being in the wrong place at the right time. Her service record read like the plot of a Michael Bay film. If she had pegged Hill’s age correctly, he had probably gone in with the second or third deployments and would know what a record like hers had cost.

Baby steps,
she thought as Hill, using Zockinski as cover, furtively wiped his hand against his jeans. 

Motion in the store pulled her perspective to front and center as the kid behind the counter windmilled his arms to get her attention. When she met his eyes, he pointed frantically at the two detectives. She slipped back in the store and he opened the door to his glass cage.

“C’mon, get in here!” He tried to grab her arm to pull her into the cage with him, but she brushed him off. He made a second grab and Santino stepped between them.

“It’s okay,” she told her partner. The kid was bubbling yellow. “He’s just scared.”

“That’s the guy!” The kid stabbed at the glass with his finger. “The guy who mugged the dude!”

Santino made a rolling gesture with his fingers to hurry the kid along. He had no patience for people who were lazy with their nouns.

“That’s the guy!” the kid said again as Zockinski and Hill entered the store. The kid abandoned her and shut the door of his cage. “I’m calling the cops!”

“We
are
the…” Santino began, then looked at Rachel. “Could you?”

She rerouted the call before it connected. The letter of the law was hazy about the right to block 911 calls, so she shifted it over to the Coast Guard’s main line. The kid stared at the store phone, maybe wondering if he fell within the definition of a maritime emergency, then went into his pockets for his cell.

Rachel tapped on the glass. “It’s okay,” she said. “They’re just here to talk.”

“But he’s the guy from the tape!” the kid hissed, pointing at Hill.

And then she got it. Rachel remembered her own surprise when she had first viewed the video and learned the assailant was a dead ringer for the detective. This was a violent neighborhood and the clerk probably witnessed ten assaults a month. The typical attack was an inconvenience, like a snowstorm or a flat tire. But a magical assailant he had only seen on film, suddenly living and breathing and walking through his front door?

“We know. You saw it happen, right? So this is
obviously
…” she said, placating the kid by stressing that word as hard as she could. “…a different man. There’s a glitch somewhere in your system, and we’re just trying to find out why he was on the tape. Go ahead and tell them what you told me.”

She must have hit the right notes as the kid plucked up his courage and went back into his story. She sometimes assisted in the translation, but he rambled through it admirably. When he was done, the four of them went back outside.

“Two things,” Zockinski said. “This is Ward Six. We’re First. We shouldn’t be messing around in this District. And we’re going off of the word of a guy from a neighborhood where lying to the cops is the norm. There’s no proof the man that shows up on tape wasn’t the same man who did the mugging.”

“That kid was terrified,” Rachel said. “He honestly believed Hill was the assailant.”

“Or he’s lying. Which of those do you think is more likely?”

Rachel saw their conversational colors withdraw and knew she had lost them.
Hail Mary time,
she thought. “Just watch the video. Watch it from the camera’s perspective before you decide,” Rachel said.

“Yeah. Tomorrow. It’s in evidence,” Hill said, and he and Zockinski turned to leave.

“I have a copy here,” she said. Santino puffed and braced himself.

“What?” Zockinski rounded on her, furious. “What did you do, cyborg?”

Hill reached over and gave Zockinski a light slap on his arm, and Zockinski reined himself in. “What did you do?” he asked again, quietly.

“I requisitioned a copy,” she said as she took her tablet out of her purse and flipped back the cover. “Or I broke into Sixth, grabbed the tape, and burned down the station to cover my tracks. Which of those do you think is more likely? Now, gentlemen, can we just watch the damned show?”

She held out the tablet to Zockinski, who recoiled as though she had handed him a viper. “You are children!” Rachel snapped, and propped the tablet against the hood of a parked car to queue the video. 

The angle was terrible. It was fast and done in under a minute, and the back of the assailant’s head was the only constant. With every other punch or kick, some cheekbones and jaw got some screen time. It was only towards the end that the assailant swung the victim around and the doppelganger’s full face was shown.

“Holy…” breathed Hill. “That’s me.”

Zockinski snatched her tablet off of the car. “When was this taken?” he asked Hill.

“Two, three months ago? This was from that training seminar when I still had my ankle taped up. Same shirt, same shorts.”

“Hang on,” Santino said, and moved closer to the monitor. “You mean this guy doesn’t just look like you?”

“No,” Hill told him as he hit replay. His digital twin attacked the victim and started the assault anew. “This
is
me.” He looked around, almost panicked. “This video, it’s… I’ve never been here.” He gestured with the tablet, taking in the parking lot, the dark buildings, the old and broken street. “This is me, but it’s from a class a while back where we did unarmed combat. I was picked to do the demonstration. They had me subdue…”

“This guy.” Hill paused the video. “This guy right here.”

The victim on the screen appeared to be in his late twenties and in great physical shape. Rachel had wondered why he hadn’t fought back. 

“This is a setup,” Zockinski said, and glared at Rachel.

“If you don’t stop thinking what you’re thinking,” she growled, “I will kick you so hard you’ll be able to pee out of your knees.”

“So First MPD holds a training seminar,” Santino said, touching her shoulder until she relented. “Was the man on the tape the instructor or an assistant?”

“Assistant,” said Hill.

“Hill performs a few takedowns with the assistant. A month after that, the assistant is assaulted here, and the security film shows Hill in place of the assailant. Definitely sounds like a setup.”

“No shit,” said Zockinski. “When did this happen?”

“Uh…” Rachel checked her notes. “July ninth.” 

Hill exhaled, relieved. “That’s the day my sister got married. There’s a hundred witnesses who saw me give a toast at a botanical garden in New York.”

“This is really clever,” Santino said. He had taken her tablet and was reviewing the video. “You couldn’t swap Hill’s face over the original without having to render everything separately, and there’d always be a seam between the real and the altered. What I think they did here is take a clean shot of the background and then add the figures over it. They’d have to adjust the lighting but…”

He looked up to three blank faces. “Ah, this is how they make cartoons,” he said. “They take a background and then superimpose the action over it.”

The detectives turned to Rachel for confirmation. She shook her head. Excepting drunken binges on old
Powerpuff Girls
reruns in her late teens, she hadn’t seen a cartoon since she was twelve.

“Don’t you know how this stuff works?” asked Zockinski.

“I’m a pretty lousy cyborg,” she said.

Santino’s expression didn’t change but he glazed over with a white opaque film. She had seen this reaction before, always when he had resigned himself to explain something which was, to him, extremely straightforward. 

“This is a composite,” he said, holding up the tablet. “The footage of the background is real and so is that of the fight. They made it by putting the one over the other. The end result is a fabrication, but they grounded it by adding light sources and shadows. And since it was shot in black and white, they didn’t have to worry about color matching.”

“Is that possible? You can make a video out of pieces?” Zockinski was completely out of his element.

“Definitely. It’s very similar to how they use green screens in movies. A digital forensic specialist can tell you exactly what was done here.”

“Do we have one of those at First?” Hill asked Zockinski. 

“Yes, but I know where you can find a really good one,” Rachel said.

The detectives went gray and cold.

She shrugged. “Fine. Your funeral.”

“The tech doesn’t matter,” Zockinski said. “All we have to do is track down the other man.” 

“Who? The guy that taught a class to a bunch of cops just to set one up for assault charges?” Santino snorted. “I’m sure he’ll be easy to find.”

“The cameraman,” Rachel said. “Even if he works for the MPD, talk to him. He needed to get a specific angle to make it seem as though the video was shot from the security cameras, so the cameraman was either in on it or had contact with them.”

Hill nodded, his tension easing. Old-fashioned police work was a comfort.

“We can’t do anything until we clear this with Ward Six,” said Zockinski. “And we have to talk to the Lou first.”

“Yeah,” Hill said. “That’ll be an interesting meeting. ‘Hey Lieutenant, want to see something that will put me away for ten to twenty?’”

“God, yeah. What a cock-up this’ll be.” Zockinski took off without another word. Hill followed, then paused to give her and Santino a cautious wave goodbye.

Baby steps.

FIVE

“Oh hello,” Santino said. “Look who’s here.”

They had decided to check out the coffee store where the second assault had occurred before they called it a night. Santino had driven them back to Ward One along posh tree-lined streets where each person was accompanied by a minimum of two yappy dogs. Rachel was struck by the differences between this neighborhood and that of the gas-and-go, which was just miles away but was worlds apart. 

The sun had set, leaving the front wall of the coffee shop a bright bank of windows in the night. Inside, Judge Edwards was standing and addressing a few dozen people. Reporters with handheld cameras made up a third of the group.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Rachel, delighted, opened the door and jumped out. Santino yelled something about waiting for him to stop the car first, but he was barely crawling forward and she had never been at one of Edwards’ press conferences before. She was sure no Agent had ever attended one in person, and she didn’t want to miss the opportunity.

The door to the coffee shop was propped open by a carved wooden owl. Rachel bent down and patted it on its head before she stepped inside. The store was one of those old places formed entirely from dovetailed aesthetics. A small room made tiny by the number of people jammed inside, Rachel moved her sixth sense past them to look at the old brass hardware and hand-cut mosaic tiles of what must have once been the local apothecary. A glass mirror gone smoky with time was stationed behind shelf after shelf of canisters holding exotic teas, and a heavy stone countertop polished by a century of elbows displayed working antique Gaggia brewing equipment worth slightly less than her house. The very air pulsed with the scent of chocolate and freshly ground beans. Rachel had never wanted a cappuccino more in her life.

An eclectic assortment of furniture had been pushed to the side to clear a stage for Edwards. It was not a good location for a press conference, but in Rachel’s recent experience, press conferences didn’t happen the way they did on television. The crash of reporters clamoring for quotes was great drama but made for a terrible working environment. Large conferences were calm and civilized. The best analogy Rachel had come up with was that of a classroom where the teacher’s pet was chosen first, and if they didn’t ask the right question then the second-favorite was called, and so on down the pecking order. Geeks, nerds, and hanger-ons rarely made the cut and were forced to compete for interesting sound bites dangled over their heads by the popular networks.

Smaller press conferences were not nearly as friendly. Since the only ones who bothered to show up were the bottom feeders, the rules of the false society did not apply. Most of these conferences were about backpatting and grandstanding instead of news. If something of interest did take place, the networks had found it more cost-effective to purchase clips from their lesser affiliates rather than pay to send the trucks out. Reporters at these lesser conferences knew the only reason they were there was because they weren’t important enough to be somewhere else, and they behaved accordingly.