With a thought in mind, Knox left the room and went into the adjoining one. He paced out measurements, doing rudimentary architectural calculations in his head. Having satisfied himself, he walked outside, around the building, examining the walls that contained the scene from the prying eyes of the outside world. He was confident in what he could see, and returned to find Lane sitting on the floor, his head hung in despair.
“I can't find anything out of the ordinary. There's not a loose board in this floor, so there's no hidden trap door. We're stuck.”
“Yes we are. I looked around, and none of the walls surrounding us are deep enough to accommodate a hidden passage. There really was no way for anyone to have gotten in and out of here, other than the locked doors and windows.”
“Which no one could have done.”
“Exactly.”
“So we just wound up right back where we started.”
“Yes, but you were right about needing to challenge ourselves. It didn't work this time, but it will eventually.”
“You sound more confident than I do. How can that be?”
“Because you didn't hear the good news yet.”
“We got kicked off the case?”
“No. The tech guys have finished decrypting the drive we found. Let's go find out if there's anything useful on it.”
“There had better be.”
“Admit it, you had fun ripping this place apart.”
“Sure, but puzzle solving is only fun when you know there's an answer waiting for you. For all we know, we're trying to lasso the moon.”
“Maybe, but think what a trick it would be if you pulled it off.”
“You're not helping.”
“I don't try to. It's not my style.”
“No kidding.”
Chapter 14
Yelling At Clouds
Computers were strange beasts to Detective Knox, plastic boxes filled with magic, a portal into a world he didn't want to understand. Walking into a room filled with them, and the artificial hum of life they give off, made him uneasy. The light was different in rooms filled with technology, fuzzy, as though your eyes were out of focus. He understood that technology brought with it great advances, leaps that were able to make his job easier, but his relationship with it was still strained. He did not want his job to be easier. The difficulty of sifting through clues, to be able to string them together in the perfect fashion, that was the beauty of the job.
Detective Knox had not remained in the force as long as he had, as the very foundation of the world cracked and shattered under his feet, for any other reason. He lived for the puzzles, and the elegance of solving them. There were now countless tools created by geniuses to help him achieve that goal, but just as many were being used to obfuscate the truth and change the rules of the game. Technology, he reckoned, existed merely to give people something new to complain about, though the task at hand never changed. A new coat of paint was slapped upon the same old problem, and people were convinced they were looking at a whole new work of art.
Detective Lane's youth gave him a different insight, and his ignorance of the old ways made him prone to thinking Knox was merely upset that the world was not the way he remembered it. Lane was quick to embrace anything that could help him in his quest to be a detective, not because he wished to take the easy way out, but because he was determined to help people, to answer the call and give people answers in their darkest moments. In doing that he would often require help, and he was not too proud to ask for it.
“Let me guess, Lane, you're going to try to explain all of the technological gobbledygook the nerd squad is going to run through. Let me save you the trouble. Please don't.”
“You really need to learn at least a little bit of this stuff. You're going to sound like you don't know anything if you get put on the stand at a trial. If you want to put killers away, you have to have an air of authority about you.”
Detective Knox laughed at his partner, not a snort of derision over the idea that his younger cohort had any idea what authority meant, but a gentle acknowledgment that despite how much time they were forced to spend together investigating crimes, Lane had yet to understand how Knox's mind worked.
“Did it ever occur to you that what you described is precisely what I'm going for?”
“Why on earth would you ever want to sound ignorant?”
“Because, partner, the ignorant aren't asked to be expert witnesses. There's going to come a time when your puppy dog enthusiasm wears off, when the job grinds away the shine of your smile, and when that happens, you're going to be as tired and bitter as I am. The last thing you're going to want to do is sit in a courtroom and listen to people trying to tell you the sky isn't blue.”
Lane looked at his partner, trying to assess how genuine these feelings were. He knew that Knox was not a fan of the non-investigative duties the job entailed, but he had never heard it phrased so bluntly. He was disappointed to hear that Knox appeared to have stopped reaching for personal growth, resigned to being the old coot sitting in a rocking chair, yelling at clouds, telling stories about how much better everything used to be.
“You say that, but we both know that you like to put on an act. You're afraid of letting anyone think that you still care, to make sure they leave you alone. I get it. I know what you're up to, but I'm going to let it be.”
“You'd better, if you want to see what tomorrow looks like.”
As the door opened, and the stale, recycled air hit his nose, Detective Knox wondered what it must be like to spend an entire life in such rooms, surrounded by machines designed to mimic and impersonate life. To spend day after day engaged with a facsimile, communicating entirely through the pounding of keys and flickering written words, could not be a life with much value in it. Being human, he thought, required embracing what life had to offer. Even for a solitary man like Knox, humanity could not be found in an endless string of ones and zeros.
The technicians never broke their focus as the detectives entered. Their eyes were fixed in a trance upon their screens, their fingers falling like a steady rain upon the keys. Knox listened to the tapping, a rhythmic white noise that only further convinced him no consciousness could survive in such a place. Impatient, he spun a monitor around, breaking the connection between eye and screen. The technician's fingers stopped, but his eyes did not move, as though he were processing what had just happened. Seconds later, he looked up, and the blank expression on his face was as lifeless as his reflection on the screen.
“Nice to see you back in the land of the living. I hear you have some information for me?”
The technician didn't know what to make of Detective Knox, nor what to make of face to face communication. An expression of discomfort was evident on his face, a fact that Knox took great pride in admiring.
“I assume you're Detective Knox?”
“My reputation does seem to precede me.”
“Yes, we managed to decrypt the flash drive you gave us. There was a . . .”
“Let me stop you there. I don't need to know the details of what hoops you had to jump through to get the files open. I won't understand any of it, and you probably don't want to talk to me any longer than you have to, so how about you just tell me where the files are, and I'll leave you to ogle your little screen again.”
The technician reached into a pile of neatly organized trinkets, arranged in a pattern that Knox knew meant something, but was not important enough to waste his time thinking about. Though he was a fan of puzzles, cracking the enigmas of which most people consisted was something best left for his retirement. He did not care to know much about people until he had no choice but to depend on them and had nothing better to waste his time on.