Timothy Zahn - A Coming Of Age

The door opened and the sergeant came out alone. He said something to the desk man, then walked back to where Lisa waited. "Well, there's both good news and bad news," he said as he sat down again. "The good news is that no one matching your friend's description has turned up dead in the past week, at least nowhere this side of the Tessellates. The bad news is that we don't have any runaways, detainees, or hospital unknowns like him, either. I guess we still can't help you."

Lisa sighed. This had been her last hope. "All right. Thank you anyway."

He gave her a searching look. "Have you talked to the various schools in town? He must have been enrolled in one of them."

She nodded. "He was at the Lee Introductory School, at least until last Friday. But he's gone from there now, and no one there will tell me anything about it."

"Maybe he was simply transferred. They do that sometimes."

"Then why won't they tell me that? Every time I call they tell me he's not there, but they won't say anything more. And why wouldn't he have told me about it before he left?"

Thoughtfully, the sergeant tapped his teeth with the end of his pen. "Good questions," he admitted. "I wish I could give you the answers."

"So do I," Lisa sighed, slumping in her seat. The last bit of emotional strength seemed to have drained out of her, leaving her more fatigued than long work days and even fights in the hive had ever made her feel.

"You all right?" the sergeant's voice came as if from the far end of a Five's play tunnel.

She managed a smile. "Yes, I'm fine. Thank you anyway for your help. I have to get back; it's almost dinner time."

"You're not sick or anything, are you? One of the men could drive you—"

"No. Thank you." Getting to her feet, Lisa nodded and walked past the desk to the exit.

Outside, she stood on the city building steps and took a deep breath, wondering what she was going to do next. The police couldn't help her; Lee Intro wouldn't. She could think of only one more avenue to try, and she would almost rather cut off a hand than take it. The humiliation of admitting her crimes to the one adult whose approval she still valued—

Do it for Daryl. If he's in trouble, it may be your fault... and humiliation's easier to live with than guilt.

Blinking away the dampness in her eyes—they were not tears—Lisa launched herself into the sky. Tonight, after dinner, she would tell Gavra everything.

"Thirty-eight," Hob Paxton muttered as the radiophone buzzed quietly, indicating a ring on the phone at the other end of the signal. It buzzed again: "Thirty-nine."

"Hang up," Tirrell said to Cam Mbar, feeling a minor wave of frustration wash over him. Once again, it seemed, Jarvis was one step ahead of them.

Cam replaced the radiophone handset and turned to Tirrell. "Do you think something's happened to him?" she asked anxiously.

"No, I think he's probably okay," Tirrell said, automatically soothing. "Maybe he's working outside or something."

But Cam was too intelligent to accept such reassurance blindly, even when it was what she obviously wanted. "Has he been working outside every other day this week, too?" She shook her head. "Something's wrong."

"Well, there's not much we can do about it," Paxton said gruffly. "Not now."

Tirrell threw his liaison an irritated look. Even if Cam was partially responsible for Jarvis's silence, there was no point making her feel worse than she already did. "It's also possible he's busy with a project and turned off the phone so he wouldn't be interrupted," he told her. "Or maybe there's a fault in his receiver—that does happen, you know."

She nodded heavily. "I hope you're right. If I somehow helped those..." She visibly searched for an adequate noun, gave up, and fell silent.

"I'm sure everything'll be okay," Tirrell said with more conviction than he felt. "You might as well go back to the lab—or home, if you'd like," he added, noting it was after four. "We'll have people standing by both here and with the direction finders twenty-one hours a day; if Dr. Jarvis contacts you, just press the button we've put by your phone and then keep him talking as long as you can."

"I understand." Nodding, Cam got to her feet, collected the notes she'd been planning to ask Jarvis about, and left the room.

"You might as well go, too," Tirrell told the two headphone-equipped men standing on opposite sides of the huge table map that dominated the center of the room. "Your relief's due in twenty minutes, and Jarvis wouldn't be able to reach Ms. Mbar before then, anyway."

"Yes, sir."

Paxton waited until the men had left before asking the obvious question. "You think Jarvis smelled the trap and ran?"

"That he smelled something seems pretty obvious," Tirrell snorted. "Whatever Cam said last week when she talked to him apparently made him at least suspicious enough to stay clear of his phone."

"Or suspicious enough to pack up and run," Paxton mused. "No, that wouldn't be very smart."

"Especially since we've already postulated his cabin is as secure a place as he's going to find anywhere near civilization," Tirrell nodded.

"Well, then, we should still have a chance. What about this building contractor search you've been doing? Any leads?"

Tirrell shrugged. "I've checked with every contractor between here and Rand—no luck. Either Jarvis did all the work himself—and supply purchases indicated he at least bought all the materials himself—or else the contractor he hired went out of business sometime in the last four years."

"Four years." Paxton looked thoughtful. "You have the time any more exact?"

"He seems to have started building in April of three-oh-four, just eleven months after Colin was born. At least that's when he was buying and moving his materials."

"Hmm. Three months after he and Somerset quit their Transition studies."

"Right." Tirrell was mildly surprised the other had picked up on that, given how often other equally simple facts had seemed to slide right past him. Perhaps he was finally starting to pay genuine attention to the case. "Possibly significant, but doesn't really tell us anything new."

"Sure," Paxton agreed. "You said he transported all the stuff that same month. How—rented vehicles?"

"Yes, and that's where most of what little we've got has come from. The mileage he put on the trucks he used give us an upper limit on how far from Barona the cabin is."

"Terrific," Paxton said, straightening in his chair. "Why didn't you say so before?"

"Because it's not an especially useful number," Tirrell countered dryly. "All it tells us is that he's somewhere within a hundred kilometers of Barona."

"Oh." Paxton looked deflated. "That's not a lot of help."

"Not much, but a little. It means he can't be in the mountains past Rand with a directional antenna to compensate for the extra distance. Also, the roads around here are not exactly straight, so doing a careful distance check along them shrinks the boundaries a fair amount. And, of course, we should be able to eliminate all the farmland south of the city."

"Also Plat City and the marshes near Banat," Paxton muttered. "Still leaves a hell of a lot of territory, though—and a fair amount of it in the mountains south of Plat City. That's going to be an absolute pain to search."

"Yeah." Tirrell hesitated. "There is one other thing that might lead somewhere—heavy underline on the 'might.' One of the truck rental owners remembers having to spend six hours scraping rock-mud out of the van's tire tread after Jarvis returned it—says he debated long and hard about sending the usual bill for the work and decided against it because Jarvis was such an important figure."

For a moment Paxton's eyes lit up, but the expression was quickly replaced by a rueful grin. "Damn! For a moment there... but we're talking about April, aren't we."