Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 87

Jackpot, she thinks, keeping her hands at her sides as he closes on her. This wasn't what she was looking for, but she knew it was a possibility that she would find it. It's a start, and it will do. Adrenaline thrills through her, every nerve awake: she's ready to fight, and she tries to look relaxed.

He looks her up and down, drawing himself into a transparently intimidating pose, and glowers. "This path is closed."

"It's a public mountain," she says. Not belligerently, but with certainty.

He comes up on her another step, until she's looking up his nostrils as he tries to stare her down. "What's your name?"

"Sanchez," she says.

It's not a lie, for the duration. When she took the contract, Cascadia Law Enforcement Collective provided ID, gear, a whole ident.i.ty. They helped with transport too, which they never would have done if they could have found anybody qualified who lived closer. But this was specialist work. For a gig like this one, you had to be a modern-day Texas Ranger.

And maybe, she thinks, after the mess in Oakland, after everything it cost her-maybe this is a good place to start rebuilding her self-confidence. You had to get back on the horse, right? And the sooner the better.

It's a miracle she walked away with her reputation intact. But Cascadia LEC wouldn't have licensed her if they expected to fail utterly, so maybe Doe wound up with the blame after all. Maybe he kept his mouth shut, the way she's keeping hers. Or maybe if he talked they didn't believe him.

She doesn't know. She hasn't seen him since she moved out, though he's called several times. Well, of course. She lied for him, after all. And not the other way around.

Maybe she got lucky, and the long hiatus in licenses was in consideration of her near-death experience. Maybe they were just giving her a rest. Maybe she faked them out, and her reputation is intact.

It's not like anyone would tell her, one way or the other. She'll have to figure it out based on how people treat her. And the long silence has been unnerving. But this case-this complicated case, which may be two cases interlinked, one involving a dead body and the other involving a poaching operation-this feels like a vote of confidence.

Sanchez hopes she can do better than fake this one. She wants to solve it.

She says, "What's your name?"

He grabs her by the chin, doubtlessly because he's seen it over and over again in movies. It isn't an effective hold. He sneers. "You don't look like a Sanchez."

She's got red hair and hazel eyes, like her grandmother. "I'm f.u.c.king adopted," she says. "And you don't look like an a.s.shole."

That's a lie. Whatever a.s.sholes look like, at least one of them definitely looks like this guy. But her crack backs him off a little, enough so that there's s.p.a.ce between them when she reaches up and rubs her jaw.

"What are you doing here?"

She reaches up over her own shoulder and lays a palm against the orange nylon of the pack. "Hiking."

He snorts. "Then you won't mind me searching your bag."

"You're d.a.m.n right I mind. Who the f.u.c.k are you?" Even as she stands her ground, she's aware of how sharp is the dropoff at her back, how steep is the slope that anyone unfortunate enough to mis-step would tumble down.

She knows who he is. He's Edgewater. Private security solving public problems the old-fas.h.i.+oned way: through force of arms. It drips off him along with his att.i.tude problem.

So she hasn't found a crime scene. But she's found a private security force.

Well, that's interesting. Maybe her case is linked to the larger system of evil.

"You're trespa.s.sing," he says. "On restricted property." Careful choice of words there. Restricted makes it sound like something official. "Either I can search your bag here, Miss Sanchez. Or I can haul you inside, and search your bag there, and you can wait in a holding room until the cops come. Which could take days, out here. What do you say?"

She glowers-it's hard to glower, given the amount of information he just let slip-but relents. "I guess you have me over a barrel."

Inside. Holding room. Cops.

She doesn't believe Edgewater is going to call the cops on anybody. She's close enough to being a cop herself to have heard stories. But the mere fact that they're here, defending some secret facility, sends a chill up her spine.

If you start off looking for a murder scene and find something else- -keep looking.

The hired thug lifts one shoulder in a disarming shrug that doesn't make her forget the chin-grab. "I guess I do."

When the oiled canvas sack in Martha's hand quit twitching and making the honking sobbing noises, she got worried the bird inside was dead. But maybe it was playing 'possum, just waiting for her to loosen the drawstring and give it a peek of sky to fly to. It was still heavy, heavy and a little wet-with what, she didn't like to think-and she tried not to touch the outside while she carried it home.

Matt met her by the gate. She held up the bag, fighting the way her mouth wanted to twist with worry when it didn't kick in response. "Wait 'til you see what I got!"

He bounced on his toes, then winced. She knew-she felt the same pain in her own joints lately, and Matt was older. "What what?"

"Inside," she said.

She let her brother lead her into their tumbledown cabin, up the steep mossy slope to the rocks and the great trees that sheltered it. Daddy's boots still gathered dust by the door. She set the bag on the crumb-covered table, which Matt had pushed out from under the hole in the tin roof. While Matt closed the door latch, she made sure the windows and the chimney flue were sealed. The roof hole wasn't big enough for the bird to get out, she didn't think.

When she came back to the table, she found Matt waiting.

"I never saw anything like this," Martha said, and unknotted the strings on the bag. With a breath of antic.i.p.ation, she upended it on the table.

And jumped back from a splash of viscous fluid that ran off the boards and splattered the floor, dripping in quick-flowing strings.

"What the heck?" Matt said, pulling back in dismay.

The sack was light, empty. But Martha couldn't help peering into it anyway. One lonely violet feather still stuck, curled and damp, to the inside weave. She pulled it out for proof.

"There was a bird," she said. "In the trap. A kind of bird I'd never seen, all purple and blue and goosey-necked. Fat, like a little turkey, with gooney wings. It had like a feather pompom on its head ... "

She trailed off, stricken. She held the feather out to Matt silently. Matt took it, sniffed it, touched it to his tongue-tip.

"Salty," he said, and made a face. "Well, there's no bird in there now. You figure it dissolved?"

Of course, he confiscates her camera. But doesn't find or recognize the spygla.s.s concealed inside her walking stick, and he leaves her the sniffer and GPS kit that is far more essential to her mission than any recording device. But she expected that and planned for it. And the end result is as she hoped: Now she knows what part of the mountain to concentrate on.

The GPS is programmed with a dozen likely hiking goals and the address of Sanchez's purported home in Redmond, along with the actual location where she left her actual bike-and it also tracks the sites she's visited and what she found there. That information, however, is under pa.s.sword lock.

Sanchez has found, over the years, that sometimes it's smart for a consulting peace officer operating on license, far from support, not to look like a cop. She must have pa.s.sed this time, because the goon lets her go, after roughing her up a bit, putting what he must consider a good scare into her and quizzing her about her purported hometown. Easier to send a tourist home with another scary story about Edgewater than explain a disappearance to a (fictional) wife and kids.

She hopes she doesn't run into anybody who actually knows Redmond well. She's studied photos and maps, but it's different from being on the ground there.

For now, she trudges on determinedly, admiring the ancient mossdraped trees of the temperate rain forest and remembering the view of Rainier from when she was still far enough away to see it. Here, on the volcano's flank, you could miss its existence: it might just be a virtually endless hill you could keep climbing for a subjective eternity. But from ten miles out, it had floated above the horizon like the ghost of a trillion tons of basalt, like something sc.r.a.ped across canvas with a palette knife. The mountain hadn't seemed to touch the earth, its near-symmetry rendering it unreal.

She wonders how it would look from the treeline. Would it be just too big to see from up close?

Sanchez pauses in the vaulted s.p.a.ce under one of the biggest trees and gazes upwards, frowning. Doable, with the right equipment and skills. Sketchy, but doable.

She shrugs her pack off and tucks it among the woody trunks of a stand of rhododendron, scuffing some leaf mould over it to hide the orange nylon and disguise the shape. The boot spikes for her feet and the hook straps for her palms are small, easily concealed. They are tucked inside the false back of the reader that the guy from Edgewater had pried at and returned, its mysteries undeciphered.

The reader even works. Although Sanchez's cover means it's full of hiking 'zines and romance novels.

Sanchez goes up the tree to the lowest boughs in a series of long kickand-grabs. Dislodged water scatters her hair and drips down her neck. Moss and damp bark stick between the tines of her hooks. Attaining the bough, she straddles it; the spikes make it difficult to stand on something horizontal, especially when that something was nearly as broad as an avenue.

Okay, a sidewalk, anyway.

A Douglas squirrel berates her from a perch just barely out of arm's reach, its fluffy tail flagging. Sanchez grins to herself and avoids eye contact.

The climb is trickier from here up, because she must spiral and zig and zag to avoid the ponderous branches. As she ascends, the trunk grows thinner and thinner-and eventually, whippy. The claws are a blessing. Sanchez is an experienced climber, but she knows that by the time she had pa.s.sed the sixty-meter mark on this forest giant, her fingers would have been cramped and sore. Also, the bark is wet and slick throughout, and there is always the threat of it peeling off in her hands.

But the flickering rays of light from above urge her on. When she breaks into sunlight, she can see the last rain steaming off the canopy in plumes and trails of skimmed-milk vapor.

She locks herself to the tree with a length of webbing, the bole now no thicker than her thigh, and leans back on the spikes like a lineman. Gingerly, at first, until she is sure they-and the web belt-will hold. The treetop sways like a skysc.r.a.per-gently, with a long period of oscillation. After a moment, Sanchez becomes accustomed. She's climbed the masts of tall s.h.i.+ps, working the clipper trade, and this is not too different. The canopy below could be frozen green surf, the vapor misting off them spray.

Oceans didn't smell of clean compost and leaf mould.

The spygla.s.s she sets to her eye could have belonged on a pirate s.h.i.+p too, although it is considerably more high-tech than anything Captains Hook or Blackbeard might have fielded. For one thing, Hook probably would have given his eyeteeth for the autofocus feature. But the gla.s.ses are also equipped to register variations in temperature, and it is this feature Sanchez expects to be of service now.

It isn't. She tracks across the forest in a meticulous grid pattern, logging each anomaly, but the variation is never more or less than a few degrees. After half an hour, she bites her thumb in frustration.

All right, then, the facility is s.h.i.+elded. That makes sense; they'd want to avoid detection from the air. But she has a relief map, and she knows what trail she's been prevented from ascending. It's not easy-she's been years learning how to do it, and those skills are a large part of why she's here-but between those things, she should be able to hazard a guess of where you'd build- She trains her spygla.s.s upslope, on maximum magnification, and begins examining the canopy tree by tree, watching the shadows move. The sun thumps down on her, the shelter of a hat inadequate, and the beads of water that had rolled down her collar are replaced by sweat. She is exquisitely aware of her own vulnerability, the exposure of her position.

She has a birdwatcher's book on her reader, but really, there would be no explaining this.

Then, with the movement of the shadows, she catches sight of a curiously regular line of trees. She leans forward reflexively, the change in angle making her boot spikes creak, and skims along the line over and over again.

Yes. There, behind the trees, a span of camouflage netting.

It would fool an air reconnaissance or a satellite. But it has not, quite, fooled her. With the help of her trusty GPS and her reader's loaded map, she manages to take a bearing without killing herself.

Sanchez smiles softly to herself as she descends.

After the bird vanished, Martha and Matt went out to check the traplines and forage for plants. The fiddleheads were over, but she found a fallen tree full of promising grub-holes, and she and Matt chopped out enough of the waxy worms for supper. Martha loaded them into the pail to take back to the cabin, and Matt went to haul in firewood and bring water.

Martha thought there was still some kindling in the cabin, so she went straight in, tugging the latch string to lift the bar.

When she pulled the door open, a blur of purple feathers nearly took her nose off.

The bird thumped past her, running heavily between wildly flapping wings until one long bound finally lifted it clear of the ground. Martha shrieked in surprise as the thing took off.

Matt turned around, his arms full of sticks. He was just in time to catch the last flicker of purple as the bird vanished into the trees.

"Well, I'll be," he said, sounding exactly like Daddy Corey.

"See?" Martha said. "I told you so."

It hadn't been the endangered animal smuggling that originally brought the attention of Cascadia LEC to the slopes of Rainier. It was the dismembered body.

Not a complete body. On the list of reasons one might dismember a dead person, preventing identification of the remains is still high. Even in this era of skin-biota mapping and DNA identification (and forensic DNA reconstruction), it helps to get rid of the teeth and hands. Hiding cause of death is another popular reason, as is aiding disposal of the corpse. Bodies are awkward heavy things.

But not everybody is in a DNA database. And the reconstructive techniques only give an idea of what a person might look like-you only have to look at any pair of forty-year-old identical twins to understand that environment and accident have a certain amount of influence over a person's appearance.

Still.

This particular dismembered body-or the portions of it that had been actually recovered here-turned out to have belonged to a University of Was.h.i.+ngton geneticist, one Darwish by name. Whose DNA was on file. And who had not been the sort of person to go casually missing, despite some gambling debts and an incautious affair or two. Which led to a Cascadia LEC operation, which led to the discovery that an Interpol-North America agent was already somewhere on the mountain, engaged in hunting down a poaching operation dedicated to s.h.i.+pping the Pacific Northwest's irreplaceable biodiversity to wealthy collectors everywhere else in the world.

Cascadia LEC would need to send in its own guns to investigate the murder, however. Enter the woman now known as Rebecca Sanchez, who in her secret other life made her living as a licensable peace officer- previously operating out of San Francisco, so local Cascadia crooks were unlikely to know her face or reputation.

The smuggling is the sort of thing you might get off of with a wrist-slap. A body, though-that could send somebody to jail for a long time.

Metaphorically speaking, Sanchez has her fingers crossed.

After Sanchez marks the position of the camouflaged facility she continues on until nightfall, making sure that it looks like she's left for real. Somewhere downslope is her contact-the agent licensed by Interpol whose presence on the mountain hinted that more was going on than a random murder, however gruesome that murder might have been.

At the rendezvous point, she makes a cold camp and eats energy bars for supper.

It was too hot for the fire, but Martha didn't like to eat the grubs Matt brought home without boiling or roasting them first, so she was piling sticks into the stove. Honestly, she didn't like to eat grubs at all, but they were better than going hungry. And she knew, because Daddy had said, that they were very good for you. Full of protein and amino acids. And easy to collect from under the bark of fallen trees. Much easier than catching a squirrel in a deadfall, for example.

They were one of the best things to eat in the woods, now that Daddy didn't bring them food any more. They didn't taste bad. Like the smoked kippers Daddy used to bring in tins, only wriggly. Unless you roasted them. But they were grubs, and Martha did not like them.

Daddy has also said that they were invasive, that they came with the palm trees when the winters got warm, and that he and she and Matt were doing a good deed by eating them.

So she was still trying to decide what to do about that-fire or no fire?-when the cabin door banged open and the man came in. He was big and dark, in stompy boots with moss and mud caked on the soles, and Martha's first impulse was to yell at him to wipe his feet. Daddy wouldn't like the mud in the house.

But then she remembered she wasn't supposed to let anybody but Daddy and Matt see her, and she shrank back into the corner by the stove and accidentally kicked over the big pail of grubs. They writhed horribly on the floor, and she danced aside, against the cold iron side of the stove, trying not to squish them.

He towered over her until he crouched down, reaching out a hand. He made himself smile. She still didn't like him.

"Hey, little girl," he said. "Are you Martha?"

"You can't come in here," she said definitely. "Your shoes are muddy."

"Are they?" He looked down. "Well, if you'll come with me I'll go right back outside. And then I won't be breaking the rules."

"I'm not supposed to go with strangers," she said. "Where's Matt? I want Matt."

He'd know what to do. He was older. He always had a plan. And they were supposed to take care of each other. Daddy always said so.

"Matt is outside," the man said. "Come on, sweetie. My name's Doselle Callandar. I'll take you someplace where you can get a clean outfit and something to eat that's better than that." He waved at the grubs. "Cake. You like cake? Kids like cake."

She backed away, wedging herself between the cold stove and the wall. "No."

"Look," he said. "Martha, I know it's you. I saw your picture. Your Papa Corey sent me. I'm going to take care of you and Matt now, all right?"

Now she knew it was wrong. That he was lying. Because if he knew Daddy, he'd know that Daddy was Daddy, not Papa. "NO!" she yelled, very loudly. "Matt, Matt help."

"Oh, bother," the man in the boots said, sounding like he wanted to say something else entirely. But even though she screamed, he reached out and grabbed her arm, and no matter how she twisted and wiggled-like the grubs squirming on the concrete-she couldn't keep him from pulling her out from behind the wood stove.

In Sanchez's line of work, reputation is all you have. The new models of distributed policing bear a debt of concept to the U.S. Marshals, Texas Rangers, and Mounties of old. It's a kind of knight-errantry, albeit with better communications technology. But if you work for hire for law enforcement agencies, they like to know what they're getting.