Greg Rucka - Critical Space

"This was taken last night in Dallas," the first voice said. "A rental company called Total Storage. The photograph was taken by the Dallas Police Department."

There was another chirp; the exterior photograph was replaced by an interior of the container. The colors were vivid but dark, in the way that all crime scene photographs seem under- and overexposed at the same time. The container was large, filled to perhaps half capacity with boxes and crates of varying size. On some of the boxes were brand names I recognized – Toshiba, Sony, Zenith – but most were unlabeled. It didn't matter. The boxes weren't the focus of the photograph.

The bodies were.

There were three of them, men. They looked to be roughly in the same age group, between late twenties and mid-thirties, and all were similarly dressed in the Texas casual I'd seen so much of when I'd been in El Paso. Cowboy boots, jeans, T-shirts. One of them wore a denim jacket. All had been shot.

The floor was raked slightly on all sides surrounding a small drain set at the center of the container, designed to keep any water that might leak in from pooling near stored objects. The lights shining on the scene made the blood that had flowed to the drain look like tar.

From behind the projector one of the two coughed, and the laptop chirped again, and the projector put up a new picture, a close-up of a Hispanic man. He had been shot in the head, from the side, and most of the top of his scalp was missing. It looked like he'd taken the bullet at close range, perhaps even point-blank.

"Joaquin Esteban Alesandro," the second voice said.

Another chirp, and the Caucasian man was now painted on the wall. Best as I could tell, he'd been shot four times, a tracking line that ran from the sternum up to the center of the face. The grayish white of bone was visible where a couple of rounds had stripped flesh and gore away. A discarded revolver was on the ground near his right hand.

"Richard Montrose," the second voice said. "And no, he didn't get a shot off."

The image changed; the last victim appeared on the wall. Unlike the other two, he lay facedown. The exposure was a little dark, but it appeared he had taken a bullet to the base of his skull. Probably while he had been on his knees.

"Michael Ortez," the second voice said.

The laptop chirped; the image dissolved into the Hallmark blue sky and white clouds once again.

"Never heard of any of them," I said.

"We doubted you had," the first voice said. Each time he spoke it sounded like he'd just run up a flight of stairs. "The murder weapon was recovered at the scene. A Smith and Wesson Model ninety-nine, nine millimeter. No prints."

"All three men were suspected by the Dallas PD in a string of burglaries over the last couple of years," the second voice said. "Electronics, vehicles, jewelry, guns – anything they could sell, but no narcotics, no drugs. Nonviolent offenders, as far as that goes. You following?"

"I'm following," I said. Funny how the mind works. They show me three photographs, two of explicit violence, and the one that's going to stay with me is the one where I couldn't really see the victim lying in his own brain.

"In doing the inventory, DPD has recovered a number of items that have been reported stolen." The first voice, again. "There are significant gaps in the collection, however. Presumably those items that had been sold off prior to the murders last night."

"No guns," I said. "No ammo."

"Correct. No weapons were found in the facility. There are several possible explanations for this. They could have been stored elsewhere. They could have been sold. Or they could have been removed by the killer after the crime. Each of these, or a combination of any of them, is entirely plausible."

"Didn't this place have security of some sort?" I asked.

"The gate requires a key code, but that's hardly a deterrent," the second voice replied. "Static cameras are placed at the office in the front, at the gate, and along each row of containers. Unfortunately, the cameras outside this particular container had been disabled."

"But," I said.

"But," the first voice answered, "DPD recovered the following image from the camera at the gate."

The laptop made its bird call, and a black-and-white picture, presumably pulled from the surveillance tape, appeared. It showed a large GMC truck moving out of shot, followed by a sedan, what looked like a Ford Taurus. The time stamp on the tape read the previous night, 23:49 hours. The camera had been placed on the right-hand side of the gate as one entered, and none of the drivers were visible.

"Entry," the first voice said. "We tried to augment the image, but we couldn't pull anything usable."

"But," I repeated, this time more to myself. I knew what was coming; I had known the moment Scott had picked me up at my office on a Sunday afternoon.

"But we were able to do something with the exit shot."

Chirp, and the Taurus was leaving alone. The time stamp read 00:08 this morning. The driver's window was down and a figure was partially visible, but only a portion, as if the driver was trying to stay out of the camera's line of sight.

Then the picture was replaced with an enlargement, pixilated and fuzzy at the edges.

"Is that her?" the second voice asked.

She was wearing spectacles, thin wire-frames not unlike my own, and she had once again altered her hairstyle, now wearing it very short so that the shape of her head was clear. But it was a token disguise, and there was no doubt that the woman on the wall in front of me was the same woman who had killed three men just minutes before; there was no doubt it was the same woman who had tried to kill me and Dale and Pugh the previous summer; there was no doubt at all.

I waved my fingers at the picture, cutting the light of the projector with the shadow of my hand.

"Hi, Drama," I said.

She didn't wave back. She couldn't. It was only a picture.

The knowledge didn't make me feel any safer at all.

The one with the Boston accent introduced himself as Ellis Gracey. Gracey was pushing into his fifties, with black hair that had lost its battle against encroaching gray, worn short and neat. He used a Montblanc fountain pen to take notes, and he smiled whenever he asked a question. The smile was blatantly insincere, and never reached his eyes. His companion was introduced as Matthew Bowles; I figured him to be twenty years Gracey's junior. Both men wore suits, but Bowles appeared the more fastidious of the two, keeping his tie tightly knotted at his throat.

Both claimed to be from the CIA, and considering what I'd just seen, I had no reason to doubt them.

"Has she contacted you?" Bowles asked.

"Twice this week I've been asked that," I said. "If she had contacted me, you would have heard about it, believe me. I'd have screamed so loud the whole damn city would be on notice."

"Twice this week?"

"A journalist I know asked."

Bowles fussed with his necktie, making the knot, if anything, tighter. "Chris Havel?"

"Read it, have you?"

"Book's gonna be a bestseller," Gracey said with a grin. "We've all read it. Hot stuff."

"Why did Havel want to know if you'd been in touch with Drama?" Everything Bowles said came out in the same rapid hush.

"She wanted to know if I could arrange an interview for her. I couldn't. Are you two saying that Drama's on her way to Manhattan?"

"We don't know, you believe that?" Gracey's smile grew momentarily brighter. "She could be in the city already, we haven't got a fucking clue. Only thing we know for a fact is that she ain't in this room at this moment, and that's it."

"Is she on the job?"

"You saw the crime scene shots, what do you think?"

"I think she's hunting, but I'd really like it if you told me I was wrong."