The phone arrived moments later, just as Maynard was pulled away by news of power outages in Oakland. The Bettses drove away in the Kenworth, expressing concern about their extended family at their remote farmstead. Despite the alarming possibility of attack, Olivia felt relieved that everyone had left. It allowed her to fumble with the phone with a minimum of witnesses. It was one thing to know what other people could do with their phones and another to actually get the phone to do what she wanted.
Aiofe explained how the phone worked to Olivia and the fascinated royal marines. “These EIA models remind me of the toy phone I had when I was little. Just like these, it had big buttons, a green digital screen, and was virtually indestructible. I’m glad that I could use my own phone for work. My first year here, I went through three smartphones before I found one that worked in Pittsburgh.”
“I’ve never had a smartphone,” Olivia admitted reluctantly. If she was going to build a network, she had to stop keeping people at arm’s length. “My mom had this really religious upbringing. It was like Amish, only worse. She was really strict about things like that.”
Her mother had left the Ranch as a teenager but she hadn’t escaped it. The brainwashing had gone too deep. She saw most “normal” American life as ungodly.
“That had to suck,” Aiofe said.
“Not really — not at first. I didn’t notice when I was really little. I had books and dolls and Legos. I don’t think I noticed until I was about third grade that all the other girls wore pants or dresses without leggings. By the time I was in sixth grade, I would have killed for blue jeans. I wanted a phone because all the other kids had one.”
“Me mum got me mine when I went off to boarding school so she could check in on me. She didn’t like me going off so young. I saw it as my first chance to do a real anthropology study: the indigenous race of an Irish all-girl private school. She didn’t like me coming to Elfhome either but here I am.” Aiofe handed the phone to Olivia. “Here I’ll stay until Tinker domi can figure out how to get us back.”
Olivia nodded as she realized that she might be the only person in Pittsburgh who didn’t want to go back to Earth. For the first time in her life, she was able to choose what she did. Even Maynard wouldn’t — and perhaps couldn’t — stop her.
“I want to get this over with,” she said. “I want to see if I know this John Doe and then try to find out what happened to the others.”
Aiofe stayed in the parking lot with the marines. The anthropology student was trying to explain human burial customs to the obviously horrified elves. The warriors were all shaking their heads and inching back.
It left Olivia alone amid the dead, steeling herself against the upcoming ordeal. No one in that tent can hurt me, she told herself. They don’t deserve to be feared. They have gone before God, nothing more.
She’d expected bodies laid out on tables but there were only body bags being shuffled around via workers in hazmat suits. They had some kind of mobile air conditioner cooling the tent, making it at least twenty degrees cooler. The space smelled like the slaughter yard at the Ranch; all that was missing were the screams of frightened pigs.
Olivia didn’t want to go around unzipping random body bags. She was sure that the bodies within would look like horror movie victims. Her stomach was already queasy from morning sickness. She didn’t want to lose her lunch onto one of the dead.
The weirdly familiar feel of the slaughter yard made it possible for Olivia to walk up to the nearest worker and explain what she wanted. Either Maynard or his assistant, Mrs. Walker-Buckton, had spoken with the staff, or the presence of the nervous royal marines had convinced them to be helpful. It quickly became obvious that while the people working at the overflow morgue wanted to be helpful, they were so overwhelmed that they had an utter communication breakdown. Workers from the EIA, the coroner’s office, and volunteers needed to discuss and consult paperwork over and over again as they tried to figure out where the John Doe body might have been stored.
A woman came trotting into the tent. She was short, had brown hair and eyes, and smelled of sunblock. There was something vaguely military about her, though she lacked any name badge or insignia. She wore a blue boonie hat, a khaki work shirt, black carpenter jeans and combat boots. They looked like a soldier’s uniform made out of civilian clothes. “I heard you’re here to identify our John Doe!”
“Actually, I hope not,” Olivia said. “I only know a few people in Pittsburgh. Some of them are missing. I hope none of them are dead.”
The woman nodded grimly. “I understand. I’m Linda Gaddy. My friends call me Gaddy. I’m working with the police. I’m the one that found our John Doe. I’ve been knocking on doors and such, hoping to put a name to the face.”
“You’re a police officer?” Olivia said.
“I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades. I’ve got an eye for detail and a knack for being able to add two and two together. Sometimes I shuffle paperwork for someone that’s trying to jump through the EIA hoops, and sometimes I’m a glorified meter maid during Shutdown, making sure off-worlders don’t gum up the works by illegally parking.”
Olivia had learned the hard way that the largest employers in Pittsburgh were the EIA, the University of Pittsburgh, and the city itself. The three paid well and had good benefits. Most of their coveted positions, however, went to off-worlders with post-doc college degrees. The police and fire fighters were the exception; neither required a college degree. It meant anyone who worked for them were locals.
Neither job description — accountant or meter maid — explained how and where Gaddy had found the unidentified body. Were those her normal street clothes or some kind of impromptu uniform?
“So currently you’re…?” Olivia said.
“Searching the back alleys for dead,” Gaddy said. “The oni made a thousand elf bodies vanish into the wilderness. There’s no telling how many humans are lying dead in the city. I won’t lie to you, this is going to be grisly, but it would really help out solving this mystery.”
“Mystery?” Olivia echoed.
“Who he is. How he got to where he was. Who or what killed him.”
Olivia noticed that the questions didn’t include “how he died.” Apparently that had been obvious. “Where is he?”
“I figured that he wouldn’t have anyone coming to claim him, so I had the last shift move him to that first trailer.”
The body was already bloated from the heat. Someone had used the face for a punching bag, breaking the nose and smashing out two front teeth. Olivia cringed, forcing herself to look. Did she know this man? It was hard to tell with all the damage done. All the male prostitutes had short, blonde hair. The man had been shot in the neck, the neat hole just above his left collarbone leading to a massive wound where it exited. He definitely had been murdered.
She scanned downwards. His shapeless gray T-shirt used to have a decal from the University of Pittsburgh on it; the logo had partially worn away in the wash. He wore a pair of loose drawstring shorts. She gasped as she saw that he had LOVE and HATE tattooed on his fingers. She tugged aside the body bag to verify that he had the start of a sleeve tattoo on his left arm that looked vaguely like a sekasha protective spell.
“Do you know him?” Gaddy asked gently.
She nodded, blinking away sudden tears. “He liked looking sexy at all times; he would have never left his house in such ratty, loose clothes. I think he must have been home when he was shot.”
“What’s his name?” Gaddy pressed. “Where does he live?”
“I don’t know his real name, just his street name.” She knew that wouldn’t help identify him to more than a handful of people. She knew that he had parents on Earth who thought he was still in college. She knew the agony of losing a child. Somehow his parents had to be told. “The reason he used a street name was because he’d used a student visa to get to Elfhome but it had expired. I do know that he turned twenty-one on August twentieth. They had a party for him.”