On the monitor, Alexa was speaking, her eyes sunken, her hair matted. “I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy!”
The image froze, then broke up into thousands of tiny colored squares, like a Chuck Close painting. They scattered and clumped irregularly.
And then as the image redrew, she went on: “… They want Mercury, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I-I don’t know what that means. They said-”
“I unfired Jillian,” I said.
She hit a key without glancing at the keyboard, and the same few seconds of video played again: Alexa speaking, the picture freezing and then breaking up into jagged geometric detritus, and then reforming into a coherent image.
Dorothy murmured distractedly, “I didn’t fire her.”
“Well, I told her she can’t quit. What are you doing?”
“Cracking my head against a brick wall, that’s what I’m doing.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Yeah. Fire my ass.”
“You too? Nope.”
“Then I quit.”
“You’re not allowed to quit either. No one’s allowed to quit. Now tell me what’s up.”
Dorothy replied quietly and slowly, and I saw she was baring a part of herself she’d never shown before. “I’m not going to quit, you know that. I never quit. But I’m not earning my salary. I’m not doing what you pay me to do. I’m failing at the most important job anyone’s ever given me.”
Tears gleamed in her eyes.
Placing my hand on top of hers, I said, “Oh, come on. Whatever happened to the good old arrogant Dorothy I know and love?”
“She saw the light.”
“Dorothy,” I said. “You’re frustrated. I get that. But I need you on this full throttle. And I thought you never give up. Remind me what your father says about you?”
“Stubborn as a mule on ice,” she said in a small voice.
“Why ‘on ice’ anyway?”
“How the hell do I know? Nick, do you know how often I think of that girl and what she must be going through? I pray for her, and I keep asking myself who would do something like this to an innocent girl, and I just feel… powerless.”
“It’s not your job to save her.”
Her eyes shone, fierce and haunted. “In the Gospel of John it says, ‘We know that we are children of God and the whole world is under the control of the evil one.’ I never got that before. Like, what’s that supposed to mean? That Satan’s in charge of the whole show? But now I’m starting to get it. Maybe there’s just… evil in the world that even God is powerless to do anything about. And that’s the real point.”
“Why do bad things happen to good people?” I said softly. “I’ve stopped asking the big questions like that. I just keep my head down and do my job.”
“I’m sorry, Nick. I promised myself never to bring my religion to the office.”
“I never expected you to leave it at home. So tell me what you’re stuck on.”
She hesitated only briefly. “Okay, listen to this.”
She tapped a key, moved the mouse and clicked it, and we were back to that same loop of Alexa speaking. Dorothy raised the volume. Under Alexa’s words a hum grew steadily louder. Then the image froze and broke up into tiny bits.
“You hear the noise, right?”
“A car or truck, like we said. So?”
She shook her head. “Notice the noise is always followed by the picture breaking up? Every single time.”
“Okay.”
“Thing is, a car or a truck or a train, they’re not going to interrupt the video transmission like that.”
“So?”
She gave me the Look: she widened her eyes, lowered her brows, and glowered. The Look could turn a lesser being into stone or a pillar of salt. Our old boss, Jay Stoddard, found the Look so unsettling that he refused to deal with her directly unless forced to. Staring back was pointless. It was like a staring contest with the sun. One of you was going to go blind, and it wasn’t likely to be the sun.
“‘So’?” she said. “It’s going to tell us where Alexa Marcus is.”
62.
“There is some problem, Officer?”
Dragomir had learned that American policemen liked it when you used the honorific “Officer.” They craved respect and so rarely got it.
“Well, no big deal, sir. We just like to introduce ourselves, just so’s you know who to call in case you ever need any help.”
The young man’s ears and cheeks had gone crimson. When he smiled, his gums showed.
“Is good to know.” Exaggerating his bad English was disarming to most people. It made him seem more hapless. Dragomir had made a habit of studying other people as a butterfly collector examines a specimen.
The policeman shifted his weight from foot to foot again. The porch floorboards creaked. He drummed his fingertips against his thighs and said, “So you, ah, work for the Aldersons?”
Dragomir shook his head, a modest grin. “Just caretaker. I do work for family. Fix up.”
“Oh, okay, right. So I guess one of your neighbors kinda noticed some construction equipment?”
“Yes?”
“Just want to make sure there’s no, um, infractions of the building code? You know, like, if you’re building an extension without a permit?”
The youngster projected no authority whatsoever. He was almost apologetic for being here. Not like the police in Russia, who treated everyone like a criminal.
“Just landscape.”
“Is that-you’re not doing construction here, or…?”
“No construction,” Dragomir said. “Owner wants terraced gardens.”
“Mind if I take a quick look out back?”
This was going too far. If Dragomir insisted on a search warrant, the boy would be back in an hour with two other policemen and a court order, and they’d search the house too, just to show they could.
He shrugged, said hospitably, “Please.”
Officer Kent seemed relieved. “You know, just so I can tell the chief I did my job, right?”
“We all have to do our jobs.”
He followed the policeman around the back, onto the field of bare earth. The officer seemed to be looking at the tracks in the hard soil, then the gray vent pipe in the middle of the field, and he approached it.
“That a septic tank, um, Andros?”
Dragomir went still. He hadn’t told the cop his name. Obviously the neighbor had.
This concerned him.
“Is to vent the soil,” Dragomir said as they stood next to the pipe. “From the landfill, the… compost pile.” An improvisation, the best he could do.
“Like for methane buildup or something?”
Dragomir shrugged. He didn’t understand English. He just did what he was told. He was a simple laborer.
“Because you do need a permit if you’re putting in a septic tank, you know.”
The cop’s cheeks and ears were the color of cold borscht.
Dragomir smiled. “No septic tank.”
Tiny muffled cries from the vent pipe.
The policeman cocked his head. His ridiculous ears seemed to twitch. “You hear something?” he said.
Dragomir shook his head slowly. “No…”
The girl’s cries had become louder and more distinct.
“HELP GOD HELP SAVE ME PLEASE OH GOD…”
“That sounds like it’s coming from down there,” the policeman said. “How weird is that?”
63.
“I’m listening,” I said.
Dorothy sighed. “Let’s start with the basic question: How are they getting on the Internet, okay? And I don’t think it’s your standard high-speed connection.”
“Why not?”
She leaned back, folded her arms. “My parents live in North Carolina, right? So a couple of years ago they decided they wanted to get cable TV so they could watch all those movies. Only there wasn’t any cable available, so they had to put one of those satellite dishes on their roof.”
I nodded.