Lev Rosen - Depth

In the center of the room under the bright lights was a pool of blood, slowly creeping out towards the edges of the room.

WHERE WAS THE BODY? Was there a body? Simone went out the opposite exit, careful not to step in the blood. No one in sight. She checked the water. It was dark now, and the fog was heavy, making it hard to tell, but she couldn’t see anything besides a single plastic bag, a few feet below her like a boil on the water’s skin. Gunshot, blood, no body.

Simone saw two possibilities: Someone was injured, but everyone had escaped, or someone was dead, and his body was bobbing somewhere just out of sight. She could hear her father’s voice in her head, his old lessons drilled into her, telling her she couldn’t be certain of anything.

She stared at the pool of blood as the light outside disappeared completely and the waves grew louder, angry. She could call the police, but she wasn’t sure what to tell them, and they would definitely screw up her investigation. Kluren would see to that. She could call Peter. But he was a Boy Scout, he’d call it in. Instead, she called Linnea. Voicemail.

“Linnea, it’s Simone Pierce. Please call me back as soon as you get this. Thanks.”

Simone crouched down in front of the blood and took out a small piece of cotton from her pocket. She dabbed it in the blood until it was nearly red all over, then took out a metal vial and stuffed the cotton inside. She locked the vial and looked down at the top. The screen there was blank for a long moment. She felt the wind pick up and shivered. The vial finally beeped and Simone read, “O positive, male.” Simone couldn’t remember Henry’s blood type, but O positive was common, and unhelpful. Making a mental note of the location, she headed out the way she’d come, winding slowly east over bridges, towards home. The wind blew her coat up around her, spraying her damp in the darkness.

At home she changed out of her wet things and toweled off her skin. She sent out Henry’s photo to Danny and other contacts, asking them to keep an eye out. She had no other moves until Linnea called her back to say her husband was alive, or Henry’s face showed up on the recycling website. She confirmed Henry’s blood type was O positive. It didn’t tell her anything. And the photos she’d taken of the shadow approaching the building were just blurs, even enhanced with the night filter.

Simone had seen many deaths in her years as a PI and had long ago learned to compartmentalize. The death of her client’s husband was a mystery to be solved, not a loss to be mourned. She leaned back in her chair, put her feet on the desk, and tried calling Linnea again. Voicemail. Simone left another message. She stretched her arms out behind her head. A message from Danny came in on her touchdesk. It was a video with a note attached: “Is this her on the right?”

The video was taken off a security cam, but high quality, a clear image panning back and forth. It was the interior of Delmonico’s, all dark-green carpets, brown leather, and dim chandeliers. Caroline had taken Simone there after the first big case she’d done for her. It was out of Simone’s price range to even stop in there for a drink unless someone else was picking up the tab.

On the right side of the image, panning in and out of view, was a woman with blonde hair to just above her shoulders sitting alone at a table. But it was just the back of her head. Simone wasn’t sure it was The Blonde, instead of a blonde. But she trusted Danny and kept her eyes on her and, sure enough, when she next panned into view, she stood and shook hands with another woman who had just walked over to the table. In profile, it was clearly The Blonde. She was shaking hands with a tall black woman in a sapphire-blue cape coat and a skirt to just below the knee. Simone couldn’t make out her face before the camera panned away, though she had a guess. When the camera panned back, her guess was confirmed: Anika Bainbridge was sitting at the table.

She sent a thank-you back to Danny and then dialed up Anika. Straight to voicemail. Not unexpected. As a vice-president of Belleau, the second largest commercial cosmetics company in the world, she was a busy woman. Technically she oversaw foreign sales (which were most sales), but the city was considered outside the mainland, and Anika was a native New Yorker, so she’d set up her offices here. She’d once told Simone she went to the mainland only as long as she needed to. She didn’t intend to live anywhere else again. But she was always flying around—the mainland, the EU, Africa—doing whatever it was that she did. Simone wasn’t totally sure. But she had hired Simone for some corporate espionage on several occasions and paid well. Simone liked her. She was cold but sensible, and Simone liked to think that if she’d been more ambitious, she might have ended up like Anika. She wasn’t sure Anika felt the same way—they’d never clicked, gone out for drinks or anything—but Simone thought maybe that was just because she had never asked.

Simone had never read Anika as the violent type, though. She’d always seemed to find violence distasteful; if she couldn’t achieve what she wanted through scheming alone, she’d just walk away. But maybe Simone was wrong about that.

“Hi, Anika,” Simone said into the voicemail. “It’s Simone Pierce. I was hoping you could give me a call sometime soon. I have something I’d like to ask you. Thanks.” Keep it vague. Hopefully Anika would call back. She was the closest thing Simone had to a lead on any of this.

There wasn’t anything to do now, unless she wanted to call the cops. And she didn’t. So she lit a cigarette and smoked it near the window, looking out at the darkness punctuated only by the sickly green of algae generators and their paler reflections, rippling as the water breathed. Then she turned to her other case: babysitting.

Two buildings: The Broecker Building and the Hearst Tower. Simone brought up all the intel she had on her touchdesk about each of them. The Broecker Building was finished just before the water reached the streets, built with the city’s flooding in mind. An adjustable system with separated frames meant it was one of the few buildings with an elevator that never flooded or stalled, and the Glassteel and titanium carbon alloy frame had held, showing few signs of corrosion. It was a huge glass column of a thing, bulletproof and wave-proof, with a special repair team on-site daily, and it housed several of the more important businesses in the city, mostly ad agencies. They loved the city, as it was the one place left where ads could be suggestive or even lewd. There were a lot of accounting firms, too, because people still paid taxes, if they wanted to collect benefits. Companies with branches on the mainland paid because the mainland would use any excuse to shut them down, if they saw money in it.

So the Broecker was suits and probably fairly easy to break into. Make an appointment somewhere. Duck down a stairwell instead.

The Hearst Tower posed a larger problem. A much older building in midtown, retrofitted well enough to survive the water, it was privately owned. Sold a year before the water hit street level (and so at a low price), it had traded hands over the years and was now in the possession of Ned Sorenson, a Boro-Baptist minister and the church’s head missionary to New York. The mainland had several large branches of Christianity, but Boro-Baptism was the largest. Their ministers weren’t just religious figures, but also political ones. The current president, and the past several before him, were all Boro-Baptists. The sect had been founded by a Baptist minister who felt the rest of the conservative branches of Christianity weren’t responding to the rising waters seriously enough and started preaching against them from his pulpit in the town of Boro, North Dakota. It painted itself a religion of values and protection in this, the time of the second flood. The religion that could get people through. And people believed it, or pretended to. Simone, like most New Yorkers, thought all religions were crap, and Boro-Baptism was just the latest name for a generations-old addiction to fear and an overwhelming hope that someone else could save you. But Boro-Baptism had stalked further ahead than its antediluvian predecessors, and the chaos of the flood and the loss of life that followed had fed it like a fat toad. Pastor Sorenson was like the emissary from the mainland: ambassador, spy, maybe even fist. Whatever you wanted to call him, he was someone with lots of powerful connections. Someone you did not want to get mixed up with. Getting into his building would be much harder.