“Leave them out of it,” she whispered to herself.
She replaced the card and composed herself. Deputy Marnes would have liked to have seen this, she decided. He was an easy man to figure, one of those who had grown old everywhere but in his heart, that one organ he had never worn out because he’d never dared to use it.
Inside her office, she was surprised to find she had company. A stranger sat at Deputy Marnes’s desk. He looked up from the computer and smiled at her. She was about to ask who he was when Bernard—she refused to think of him as even interim mayor—stepped out of the holding cell, a folder in hand, smiling at Juliette.
“How were the services?” he asked.
Juliette crossed the office and snatched the folder out of his hand. “Please don’t tamper with anything,” she said.
“Tamper?” Bernard laughed and adjusted his glasses. “That’s a closed case. I was going to take it back to my offices and refile it.”
Juliette checked the folder and saw that it was Holston’s.
“You do know that you report to me, right? You were supposed to have at least glanced over the Pact before Jahns swore you in.”
“I’ll hold on to this, thanks.” Juliette left him by the open cell and went to her desk. She shoved the folder in the top drawer, checked that the data drive was still jutting out from her computer, and looked up at the guy across from her.
“And you are?”
He stood, and Deputy Marnes’s chair let out its customary squeak. Juliette tried to force herself not to think of it as his anymore.
“Peter Billings, ma’am.” He held out his hand. Juliette accepted it. “I was just sworn in myself.” He pinched the corner of his star and held it away from his overalls for her to see.
“Peter here was actually up for your job,” Bernard said.
Juliette wondered what he meant by that, or what the point was in even mentioning it. “Did you need something?” she asked Bernard. She waved at her desk, which had piled up the day before as she had spent most of her time managing Marnes’s affairs. “Because anything you need doing, I can add it to the bottom of one of these piles, here.”
“Anything I give you goes on top,” Bernard said. He slapped his hand down on the folder with Jahns’s name on it. “And I’m doing you a favor by coming up and having this meeting here rather than have you come down to my office.”
“What meeting is this?” Juliette asked. She didn’t look up at him but busied herself sorting papers. Hopefully he would see how busy she was and leave, and she could start getting Peter up to speed on what little she herself had figured out.
“As you know, there’s been quite a bit of . . . turnover these past weeks. Unprecedented, really, at least since the uprising. And that’s the danger, I’m afraid, if we aren’t all on the same page.” He pressed his finger onto the folder Juliette was trying to move, pinning it in place. She glanced up at him.
“People want continuity. They want to know tomorrow will be a lot like yesterday. They want reassurances. Now, we’ve just had a cleaning, and we’ve suffered some losses, so the mood is naturally a bit raucous.” He waved at the folders and piles of pulp paper spilling from Juliette’s desk and onto Marnes’s. The young man across from her seemed to eye the mound warily, like more of the pile could shift toward him, giving him more of it to work through. “Which is why I am going to announce a forgiveness moratorium. Not only to strengthen the spirits of the entire silo, but to help you two clear the slate so you don’t get overwhelmed while you’re getting up to speed on your duties.”
“Clear the slate?” Juliette asked.
“That’s right. All these drunken misdemeanors. What’s this one for?” He picked up a folder and studied the name on the label. “Oh, now what’s Pickens done this time?”
“He ate a neighbor’s rat,” Juliette said. “Family pet.”
Peter Billings chuckled. Juliette squinted at him, wondering why his name seemed familiar. Then she placed it, recalling a memo he had written in one of the folders. This kid, practically a boy, had been shadowing a silo judge, she remembered. She had a difficult time imagining that, looking at him. He seemed more the IT type.
“I thought owning rats as pets was illegal,” Bernard said.
“It is. He’s the claimant. It’s a countersuit in retaliation”—she sorted through her folders—“for this one right here.”
“Let’s see,” Bernard said. He grabbed the other folder, held the two of them together, and then dropped them both into her recycle bin, all the carefully organized papers and notes spilling out and intermingling in a jumbled pile on top of other scraps of paper to be repulped.
“Forgive and forget,” he said, wiping his palms together. “That’s going to be my election motto. The people need this. This is about new beginnings, forgetting the past during these tumultuous times, looking to the future!” He slapped her on the back, hard, nodded to Peter, and headed for the door.
“Election motto?” she asked before he could get away. And it occurred to her that one of the folders he was suggesting could be forgiven was the one wherein he was the prime suspect.
“Oh yes,” Bernard called over his shoulder. He grabbed the jamb and looked back at her. “I’ve decided, after much deliberation, that there is no one better qualified for this job than me. I don’t see any problem with continuing my duties in IT while performing the role as mayor. In fact, I already am!” He winked. “Continuity, you know.” And then he was gone.
Juliette spent the rest of that afternoon, well past what Peter Billings considered “sensible working hours,” getting him up to speed. What she needed most of all was someone to field complaints and to respond to the radio. This was Holston’s old job, ranging the top forty-eight and calling on any disturbance. Deputy Marnes had hoped to see Juliette fill that role with her younger, fresher legs. He also had said that a pretty female might “do the public will some good.” Juliette had other ideas about his intentions. She suspected Marnes had wanted her away so he could spend time alone with his folder and its ghost. And she well understood that urge. So as she sent Peter Billings home with a list of apartments and merchants to call on the next day, she finally had time to sit down at her computer and see the results from the previous night’s search.
The spell-checker had turned up interesting results. Not so much the names she had hoped for, but rather these large blocks of what looked like coded text: gibberish with strange punctuation, indentation, and embedded words she recognized but that seemed out of place. These massive paragraphs were spread throughout Holston’s home computer, first showing up just over three years ago. That made it fit the timeline, but what really caught Juliette’s eye was how often the data appeared in nested directories, sometimes a dozen or more folders deep. It was as if someone had taken pains to keep them hidden but had wanted multiple copies stashed away, terrified of losing them.
She assumed it was encoded, whatever it was, and important. She tore off bites of a small loaf of bread and dipped these in corn spread while she gathered a full copy of this gibberish to send down to Mechanical. There were a few guys perhaps smart enough to make some sense of the code, starting with Walker. She chewed her food and spent the next hours going back over the trail she had managed to tease out of Holston’s final years on the job. It had been difficult to narrow his activities down, to figure out what was important and what was noise, but she had approached it as logically as any other breakdown. Because that’s what she was dealing with, she decided. A breakdown. Gradual and interminable. Almost inevitable. Losing his wife had been like a seal or a gasket cracking. Everything that had rattled out of control for Holston could be traced back, almost mechanically, to her death.