James Knapp - State of Decay

I didn’t have a good answer for that. Something stopped me. It had been a mistake. Now, after all those years, we reconnected just long enough for me to listen to her last words over a cell phone, unable to lift a finger to help her.

The face of the apartment building looked old and weathered. The front doors were double locked with bulletproof glass. I held my badge up to the scanner, which made a ticking sound.

“Unauthorized for access,” a voice said. “If you are visiting a tenant, you may—”

“I’m a federal agent,” I said, still holding up the badge. The scanner ticked again, reading the badge number then running it.

“Go right in, Agent.”

The doors snapped and I pushed them open. A bank of mail slots were arranged on the wall to my right in ten-by-ten grids. Scanning them, I found hers was empty. At the end of the empty entryway was a single elevator door. I took it up to the ninth floor.

The hallway was quiet as I made my way down toward the yellow tape that had been crossed over the door at the far end. Most of the commotion seemed to be over.

“Hello?” I called. Someone stirred inside, and a moment later a man with graying hair approached the door. His eyes narrowed when he saw me.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked me from the other side of the tape.

I showed him my badge. “Sorry to barge in.”

His expression stayed fixed for a few more seconds; then he sighed and took a step back.

“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve had to chase camera eyes off all day. Name’s Bill Turner.”

“I understand. I’m Nico Wachalowski.”

I ducked under the tape and moved inside. It looked like everyone else had gone, leaving the place eerily quiet.

Her apartment was small but clean, and had a warm, cozy kind of look, in contrast to the exterior of the place. She had a decorator’s sense I didn’t have. The furniture looked secondhand but mostly real wood, and the prints hanging on the walls were picked carefully. It had warmth to it, a haven from the outside world.

“You were her partner?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “That was Doyle Shanks.”

As soon as he said it, the name began to eat at me. I knew that name.

“Was?”

“He got it too,” he said, pointing down at the floor in front of the sofa. The outline of a human body had been drawn there, arms and legs sprawled. A large bloodstain had formed there, trickling across the slightly uneven surface. Traced over the sofa around a swath of blood was a second outline: all that remained of Faye Dasalia.

“What did you say her partner’s name was?” I asked.

“Shanks,” he said. “Doyle Shanks.”

Doyle Shanks.

The dock revivor; it was carrying a partial list of names in its memory. I brought up the list.

5. Mae Zhu

6. Rebecca Valle

7. Harold Craig

8. Doyle Shanks

“Who was the last victim before him?” I asked.

“Guy named Harold Craig,” he said. “He was killed shortly after victim number six, Rebecca Valle. Before that was—”

“Mae Zhu.”

He looked at me, his eyes sharp.

“That’s right.”

My gut felt hollow. I never even asked her partner’s name. We were sitting face-to-face; all it would have taken was one question. All it would have taken was just one piece of small talk, as I struggled to think of what I was going to say to her next. I would have known her partner was a marked man, and the danger that put her in.

“I’d like a full list of the victims’ names.”

“You got it.”

“He was here, then?” I asked. “Her partner?”

“Probably dropping her off,” he said.

Zoe knew. She tried to warn me. She knew this was going to happen.

“What is your interest in this case?” Turner asked. “If you don’t mind my asking?”

“Detective Dasalia was a witness in an ongoing investigation,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you any more than that right now.”

Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Her coat still hung on a coat rack near the wall, and a remote rested on the sofa next to the dark stain that had seeped into the cushion. The white outline in the shape of her body was seated upright. Based on the position, it looked like she had fallen there from a standing position. I’d seen tracings like that plenty of times before, but this one hit home. It was like she was suddenly erased from existence, leaving behind only an outline to indicate the space she had once occupied.

“Forensics been through already?”

“Yes.”

“So they’ve been taken to the morgue, then?”

“Shanks was.”

When I looked back at him, he was frowning.

“Heinlein’s got Dasalia. She signed up for it,” he said.

Right. “She signed up for it,” I said. I kept my voice stony.

“That all you’ve got to say?” he asked.

“I wish she hadn’t. I was told she was returning home from the last crime scene.”

“They dropped off a sample at the lab, then came back here. He must have already been inside.”

“Security pick anything up?”

“Nothing, but that’s this guy’s MO; he uses a baffle screen, stays off the cameras. Seems to trick the motion sensors, thermal sensors, even a heartbeat monitor, and just slips in and out. The cameras didn’t pick up anything. I’m not sure how he got in.”

“What kind of sample did she drop off?”

“Substance found at the crime scene,” he said. “She thought it was blood, but I called the lab and it came up false positive. Some kind of silicate.”

“Does that sound like the kind of mistake she’d be likely to make?”

“No.”

I wondered. I could think of a substance that resembled blood even at the molecular level but contained silicates. After reanimation, marrow stopped producing red blood cells, which had limited the life span of early revivors. They’d eventually switched to a synthetic.

Flipping through a series of filters, I brought up a custom set I’d created back during combat duty in order to zero in on revivor activity: their heart signatures, their unique heat signatures, and their blood. I hadn’t used it in years, but it still worked like a charm. Everything went flat, almost monochrome, and a series of dots stood out, bright white, each about two feet apart. They traveled from the front door to the center of the living area, where they stopped. It looked like that spot had been cleaned. No one would have picked it up unless they were looking for it. A revivor had been here. One that had been injured.

“What are you looking at?” Turner asked.

Based on the position of the body outlines and where the revivor must have stood, it was impossible that they wouldn’t have seen it. It was standing right there in the same room with them, not six feet away.

Except they don’t need to breathe , I thought. They don’t even have heartbeats, not in the traditional sense. When they need to, they can be very quiet and very still for long periods of time. They could fool thermal sensors and duck heartbeat monitors. I thought about the outline Faye said she saw, the one that had seemed to stand nearby in the parking lot where the prison truck burned. It wasn’t an illusion; someone was there, wearing a light-warping suit. The suspect in the garage too had worn one, and so had the shooter outside the FBI building. It was very unlikely that this was unrelated to the high-grade military contraband uncovered at Tai’s operation.

“I’m going to have a look around,” I told Turner. “Are you finished here?”

“For now,” he said. “It’s been a long day. I’ll leave you to it.”

He walked away, stopping when he reached the tape crossed over the door to ask, “Do you know why she died?”