Brett Battles - The Silenced

“I guess this isn’t a surprise,”Nate said.

“Not really,” Quinn agreed.

They were still in Manhattan, standing across the street from a place called Molly Dryer’s Delicatessen.

At the end of the meeting at the restaurant, Wills had asked Quinn to check out the address found on the dead man in the car outside Moody’s house. The name on the license had been William Burke, but the address listed belonged to the deli.

“Hard sell, soft sell,” Quinn said, pointing to Nate first, then himself.

“Fine by me.”

Inside, a long buffet table served up everything from chow mein to Salisbury steak. Next to it another table specialized in salads. There were also shelves with chips and cookies and snacks next to glass-door cabinets filled with drinks. Beyond the buffet were dining tables and chairs ready for the next influx of customers.

A typical New York deli.

The employees manning the kitchen all looked Latin, while the two women at the registers looked Middle Eastern.

He grabbed a bottle of water and a bag of chips and headed for the checkout.

“Are you Molly?” he asked the woman who rang him up.

She gave him an odd look.

“Molly,” he repeated. “The name on the sign?”

“Ah, right,” she said. She leaned toward him a few inches. “There is no Molly. It’s just a name my father picked out of a book. He said it sounded more American.”

Quinn laughed. “He’s right.”

At a signal from Quinn, Nate walked up.

“Excuse me,” Nate said.

The woman stopped herself in the middle of counting out Quinn’s change and looked at him.

Nate smiled. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. Says he comes here all time, so I thought you might know him. Bill Burke. Sometimes goes by William.”

The look on her face didn’t change. “Sorry. Don’t know him.”

“You’re sure?”

Again, she gave him the silent stare.

He raised a hand in the air. “Okay, thanks anyway.”

As Nate walked away, Quinn said, “Nate was a bit of a jerk, wasn’t he?”

“I didn’t notice.”

Quinn and Nate regrouped a block away.

“Like we thought, fake ID,” Nate said.

“You want these?” Quinn asked, holding up the chips.

“Are you kidding?” Nate said. “Of course.” He snatched the bag from Quinn.

“Is there anything you won’t eat?”

Nate smiled, but kept munching. When he was ready to pop another chip in his mouth, he paused long enough to ask, “This new assignment, have you ever been asked to do anything like it before?”

“I had to remove a corpse from a cemetery once. It had been in the ground about two years.”

Nate gave him an odd look. “Why would you have to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “Client never told me.”

“But why do you think… Never mind,” Nate said. “The thing Mr. Wills wants us to do, doesn’t it seem a little odd?”

“A little, maybe.”

“Couldn’t they just go in and remove the body themselves?”

“I assume there’s a reason they need us to do it,” Quinn said.

“But there can’t be much left, can there? Bones, maybe some clothes?” Quinn looked at him. “What is it you really want to say?”

Nate stuffed a potato chip into his mouth. “Okay, I know it’s going to sound a little weird given what we deal with most of the time, but this kind of gives me the creeps.”

“The creeps.”

“Yeah. Come on. It doesn’t make you feel a little odd?”

“No,” Quinn said. He started walking again.

Nate was a step behind him.

“Not even a little?”

“Not even a little.”

“Okay. Sorry I brought it up. It’s just, you know, you always said to go by your gut.”

Nate stuffed another chip in his mouth.

Despite what he’d said to Nate, his gut was telling him pretty much the same thing. Only it wasn’t the condition of the body that was bothering him. It was the whole nature of the project. For the first time in quite a while, he was starting to wonder if he was on the right side of things or not.

His phone vibrated, bringing a welcome diversion. It was Orlando.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s Garrett?”

“What? Oh, he’s fine,” she said, seeming distracted. “Okay, so I’ve got you on a 6:40 flight on Continental out of Newark.”

Quinn looked at Nate. “Get a cab.”

“I could change it to the 9:45 if that’ll work better,” Orlando said.

“No. Should be fine. Just need to pick up our bags and head over.” They’d left their luggage in the car they’d driven into the city. It was parked in a lot just off Broadway. “I’ll call you back if I think we’re not going to make it. Have you found anything on that photo I sent you?”

“Not yet. The age might be a problem. But I’m running it through several databases.”

“Here we go,” Nate said as a taxi pulled to the curb. Quinn’s apprentice climbed in.

“Our ride’s here,” Quinn said into the phone. “I’ll check in with you before we leave. See if you’ve found out anything then.”

“Quinn,” she said.

The tone of her voice stopped him on the curb.

“What?”

“That problem I told you about before…”

“What about it?”

“It’s worse than I thought.”

“Worse how?” he asked.

“Whoever’s trying to find out about you knows what they’re doing.” She paused. “They found your name.”

“Which name?” The sounds of the cars and the people on the street disappeared. Even the October chill seemed to vanish.

“Your real name. Someone hacked into the Social Security Administration ninety minutes ago and looked you up.”

“I don’t have a Social Security number.”

“You did once.”

“Yeah, but you got rid of that, didn’t you?” he asked. She hesitated. “I buried it, but I wasn’t able to delete it completely.”

“But you told me…”

“I told you I took care of it. Look, I’m sorry. I thought I had. No one should have been able to find it, but someone did.”

“Okay. All right. What-”

She cut him off. “Ten minutes later I got half a dozen alarm messages from some improved trips I set up last night on things connected to your life before Quinn.”

“Where?” he asked.

“IRS, the Phoenix Police Department-”

“I know for a fact my record with the Phoenix PD was removed.” His tenure there had been short and long ago.

“ Your file, yes. But you were cross-referenced on several others. I got what I could, but there were too many files to check. The tripwire at Phoenix did two things. Alerted me to the initial hack, then traced what the intruders were looking at. That’s how I knew it was the same people as the other day. They accessed two files. A burglary and an attempted rape. In both cases you were one of the responding officers.”

“What the hell?”

“There’s more,” Orlando said.

“Hey, you going to get in?” the cabbie yelled out at Quinn.

“Turn on the meter and give me a minute,” Quinn yelled back. Into the phone he said, “What more?”

“They’ve also hacked into the record at School District 690,” Orlando said. “That’s the school district for Warroad, Minnesota.”

“Warroad?”

“You don’t have a file there, either. There is no trace of you in their system. But the flag I have there worked the same as the one in Phoenix, so I know it was them.”

“Okay, so they checked, but I wasn’t there. So that’s good.”

She hesitated. “Yeah. That’s right. They didn’t find your file. But they did find Liz’s.”

Now it wasn’t just the noises of New York that disappeared, but the ground Quinn was standing on, too.