Memoria (4 page)

"When I arrived home, the lobby was wall-to-wall media," Frank hurried to add. "I elbowed my way to the reception, collected the mail and went upstairs. Ah! One other thing!
Kathleen
said to me on the phone that Mrs. Fletcher, my neighbor, had dropped by to see me."

This was something
Freeman
already knew from the crime scene unit report.

"She came back," Shelby went on, "when I'd just discovered Kathleen's body. It couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes since I'd spoken to Kathleen on the phone. It means that the murderer was in the apartment at that exact time. He strangled Kathleen with the tie which she'd given me recently. Why would he do that?" Frank put his hands together and shook them. "Don't you think it's too elaborate? He could have hit her on the head with something. Or stabbed her, or broken her neck-"

He could have,
Freeman
agreed. He couldn't tell Frank, but that was exactly what had happened. She was first knocked senseless, then strangled.

"It's as if the murderer was trying to leave a message. Another thing," Frank raised a warning finger, "Why did the murderer take the trouble of looking for this particular tie? It was shoved away in the back drawer. He could have taken one of those that hung on the wardrobe door. You think it could be jealousy? One thing I don't understand is how he got into my apartment in the first place. Could it be he was on our tail all that time?"

"That's possible,"
Freeman
said, thinking. "The girl could have known him, too. She could have answered the door herself."

"There, you see! So you believe me now, then? What's the point of me killing her? And how do you think I was going to get rid of the body?"

Freeman
nodded. Alternatively, the murderer could have made it look like jealousy. Could Shelby be trying to throw them off the scent?

"Have you ever seen her without her bracelet?"

"Why? Ah, no, of course not. No one can remove the bracelets, apart from Memoria people or one of you guys. And even then you can't do it without the explicit consent from the chief of police."

"That's right."

"No," Shelby shook his head, "I never saw her without it."

"Good," the detective shuffled through the papers and produced a yellow post office receipt. "Have you any idea what kind of item this is? Sent to you by general delivery this morning. You see," he pointed with a pen, "This is her name and the date. Kathleen Baker. Any chance this is your late girlfriend?"

Now Shelby didn't know how to react. He stared at the receipt in
Freeman
's hand, moving his lips. Finally, he leaned back and said,

"No idea who that might be. I didn't check the mail the doorman gave me. So I didn't know about this receipt. I went straight upstairs," he rubbed his forehead.

"Never mind, Frank. We'll find out."

"Listen, Ed
," the suspect perked up. "There was another odd thing about this. When I walked in, I didn't see Kathleen's purse anywhere. She always used to have this fancy little purse, black with those square buckles. She loves
...
" Shelby paused for a second, "loved black. She always used to leave it on the mirror shelf when she came. But the last time, the purse wasn't there."

Freeman
paused, then asked,

"Is that it?"

"It is."

Freeman
remembered the crime scene unit report. They did point out that the only things that belonged to the victim were her dress, shoes and a coat with its pockets empty. No keys, no IDs, no makeup whatsoever, not even a paper tissue. And the victim didn't look like one of those migrant girls or a penniless odd-job woman. But even those women have some items of personal hygiene on them, so their absence didn't look right. It just wasn't normal.

The door opened a crack. Bud Jessup beckoned
Freeman
.

"One moment,"
Freeman
rose and went to the door.

Jessup whispered a few words, gave
Freeman
a meaningful look and retreated, closing the door behind him.

Slowly,
Freeman
turned around. Frank looked at him, as if expecting them to tell him that Kathleen had somehow survived.

Freeman
returned to the desk and
leaned across it grabbing at its edges
.
"I'm afraid you're deep in shit, Frank. This girlfriend of yours, d'you know who she used to work for?"

The lights overhead went out. The station building shuddered, and the blast pounded against
Freeman
's eardrums. Something hit him hard on the face cutting his eyebrow open. He let out a cry and fell over the desk. When the emergency lighting flickered on, he saw that the lighting fixture had come off the ceiling and landed on his head, cutting his face with broken glass.

Blood flooded his eyes and streamed down his cheek.
Freeman
squinted, trying to stem the wound, his other hand feeling for the gun.

Shaking his head, a stunned Shelby crawled out from under the desk. He stared at
Freeman
round-eyed,
shouting,
"The handcuffs!"

The detective reached into his pocket for the keys and stepped toward Frank. Then, bullets started crackling through the door, covering it with a complex pattern. The camera cracked and exploded. The mirror partition broke into a thousand pieces. A bullet stung
Freeman
's shoulder. He staggered. Another one hit him, and he grabbed at his chest swaying. His legs gave. Trying to latch onto a chair,
Freeman
collapsed on his side, using the desk between him and the door as a cover.

For a few seconds, the whole building fell silent. Moving to the door,
Freeman
finally managed to get the g
un out.

"Get under cover
,
"
he croaked in whisper.

Shelby jumped up, glanced at the desk, grabbed the paperwork and clattered across the broken mirror to the observation room.

Freeman
turned to the exit and raised his gun, trying to keep it steady in both outstretched hands. The interrogation room door swung open. A masked black figure appeared in the doorway, machine gun at the ready.

The bullets sent
Freeman
to the floor. He didn't get one round off. The man started moving along the wall toward the observation room. Another masked man joined him, then two more. Four faceless figures moved slowly, their pointing guns scanning the room. Two more trained their guns on the detective. He was bleeding heavily, his chest burned, his mind started to collapse.

Another vague figure appeared in the doorway. This one had a smudge of white where others had masks.
Freeman
squinted, trying to focus. A tall blond man looked down at him, his eyes cold. He walked into the room, pointed his silencer at
Freeman
's face and said indifferently,

"Where's Shelby?"

Freeman
wanted to tell him to get stuffed but all his throat could manage was an unintelligible wheeze. Droplets of bloody saliva landed on the stranger's trouser leg and his combat boot.

The gun in his hand jerked, spitting fire. The breech resounded, ejecting an empty shell.
Freeman
didn't hear it. He was dead.

L
ater, Frank had trouble remembering how he'd made it to the parking lot. He seemed to have gone down a dimly lit hallway, pushed a door and ducked in, falling out onto a street lined with police vehicles. A cold drizzle hit his face and ran down the back of his neck.

He stole past the cars to a mesh fence. Behind his back, machine gun bursts still rattled, answered by lone loud claps of the besieged cops' service guns.

Frank reached the fence and ducked in behind a car. Holding his breath, he peered out. The station door opened, disgorging two masked people in black carrying machine guns. They didn't seem to be in a hurry to chase him. Frank ducked back in again, pressing his shoulder into a bumper. Only two of them, but there could be more in the building. It looked like a well-planned attack by trained professionals.

Frank listened, then lay on his stomach on the
wet
tarmac and looked between the cars' wheels. Two pairs of combat boots walked back to the door and disappeared behind it.

Frank exhaled, rose, jumped the fence and ran down the street.

He ran for quite a while until he came to an intersection. Unfocused, he glanced down at his torn coat and his wrists, wrapped in coat fabric. He must have done it to hide the cuffs, but he didn't remember doing it.

Frank looked around and started along the street, as naturally as he could, trying to figure out exactly where he was. Streets were teeming with people: up and down subway stairs, in and out of cars and buses, thousands of people on their way home or to the bar as night descended on New York City. They hurried to get in from the cold drizzle. The dirty blackened sky flashed lightning and rattled with thunder, threatening a good downpour.

Frank raised his collar, craned his neck forward and walked faster in order to lose himself in the crowd. The coming rain would make people take cover in shops' doorways and subway tunnels, making it hard for him to hide. It wasn't easy for a camera to detect him in the crowd, especially because they couldn't trace his movements without his electronic bracelet.

He walked past an electronic supplies store with rows of TV screens in its window. All were tuned to the same channel, and on all of them, the red
Breaking News
sign flashed in the lower part of the screen. Above it, he saw Kathleen's face. Frank edged along the crowd until his face was pressed against the glass. The news ticker read,
Baker's daughter found dead in West End
.

The picture of a middle-aged man replaced Kathleen's on the screen. John Baker, the great scientist who had founded Memoria, and one of the most influential people in the world, stared back at Frank. He had Kathleen's eyes and the same shape lips.

How stupid could he be! Frank shut his eyes and wanted to cover his face but remembered that his hands were cuffed and wrapped in fabric.

He should have known!

But of course. That's where Kathleen had acquired her expensive tastes, her manners, her human skills. Frank wasn't quite clear what she had done with herself all those years, though. The murder could have something to do with her job. Just before the explosion,
Freeman
had indeed said she'd been working but he hadn't told Frank where or for whom.

His own picture came up on the screen. Frank startled. The picture wasn't good quality: it looked like a
security
camera shot taken somewhere in his neighborhood. Why would the cops use that
when they'd just taken his mug shots
?

Frank turned away from the window and hurried on, trying not to run as he negotiated the crowd. He felt as if every passerby recognized him from the photo. It took him longer than he would have liked to settle his nerves: the people hurried along each their own way and didn't seem to notice him hurrying his own way, too.

Frank slowed down. He had to think what to do next. He had no money. He had to get rid of the handcuffs and lie low somewhere for a while. And he needed to have a good think. Who attacked the station, and why? What did they want with him?

Frank stopped and felt the inside pocket containing
Freeman
's paperwork. He had to collect this parcel from Kathleen's at the post office. It could be the key piece of murder evidence that could exonerate him and expose the criminals.

Now how would he do it? They could easily recognize him at the counter. A face isn't something easy to conceal, and even if it were, a postal worker or someone would surely spot the handcuffs and call the cops. There had to be a way around it.

A soft and soothing voice overhead helped him loosen up. It came from the
speakers mounted on the wall. "
...
happiness and prosperity. They are Memoria's gift to you. Plus one free yearly session, yours at any time, in one of our branches all over the world. Memoria's caring staff will be pleased to-"

The rest of the pitch was drowned out by the honking of traffic. A bright orange flower blossomed on a large publicity screen mounted on the building's corner. Frank felt the urge to walk into one of their branches and take advantage of the offer. But to do that, he would have to fill out a special form giving his name. that would allow their computer to identify him as a suspect on the run. Frank could barely resist the desire to erase Kathleen's death from his memory, but that wouldn't drop the charges against him. And you couldn't change your identity as fast and as easy as your memories. He could give them a false name pretending to be a migrant wishing to go legal, but this wouldn't work, either, because he didn't have an electronic bracelet. No, Memoria was of no help to him. He had to
deal with it
himself.