Shadow Unit 6

Publishing Information

© 2007-2011 Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, Stephen Shipman, Amanda Downum, Leah Bobet, & Holly Black. Cover design and photo @ Kyle Cassidy.

Smashwords edition.

First edition. Published by CatYelling.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

All seasons of Shadow Unit are available online at www.shadowunit.org.

Hafidha Gates’ journal, 2008-11-16 11:09:00

That's not the rabbit hole.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/3722767/the-matrix-runs-on-windows

I wouldn't dig a hole for Windows even to bury it.

(Yeah, I love this. But you knew I would.)

(comments)

psst.

erik_not_erik @ 2008-11-17 05:30 pm

There are cupcakes and a spinach calzone at security. No, don't mention it.

Re: psst.

0metotchtli @ 2008-11-17 05:32 pm

<3<3<3<3<3

Hafidha Gates’ journal, 2008-11-17 15:03:00

Current mood: scared

[locked/work]

Guys, I have to go to the hospital now.

Tell Mom I'm sorry.

I'll call with details when I have some.

(comments)

trollcatz @ 2008-11-17 08:05 pm

Mom got your message. She says do what you need to do. We'll cover.

ace_cub_reportr @ 2008-11-18 12:12 am

Mom says you're off the clock for as long as you need it. We're on our way home with the day saved, thanks in no small part to your work last night.

Meaning, interpret off the clock for as long as you need it as You've damned well earned all the down time you want, plus some.

Any and all demands will be met to the fullest extent of our resources, so make 'em. Harpy and Platypus will likely head straight there.

0metotchtli @ 2008-11-18 01:50 am

<3

And if what I need is to be kept busy like a busy thing?

ace_cub_reportr @ 2008-11-18 02:11 am

I expect there's a thing or three needs doing.

I'm fairly certain I could take the entire network down inadvertently, given a few tries.

0metotchtli @ 2008-11-18 02:13 am

Honey, break anything you want. It'll save me doing it.

Worst phonecall ever.

ace_cub_reportr @ 2008-11-18 02:22 am

Yep, that one's right there at the bottom of the barrel.

If you decide to come in tonight, call first. I'll send out for pad thai.

0metotchtli @ 2008-11-18 02:24 am

Thanks, Uncle Duke.

Lemme see what happens when the Wonder Twins get here. Because driving and the Metro are both out.

Wind-Up Boogeyman by Elizabeth Bear

Act I

Glenwood Cemetery, Washington, DC November 2008

November was the perfect month for a funeral.

Hafidha Gates shoved her hands into the pockets of her violet coat, squeezing it against her ribs with her elbows, and leaned her shoulder lightly on Gail’s. The contact did nothing to attenuate a raw wind that cut through purple velvet, the black silk blouse underneath, and the silk longjohns she didn’t leave home without between September and May. Hafidha had no native insulation of her own. She might as well have been standing there naked, while tattered leaves blew past her feet like calendar pages in an old movie.

Straps as red as a fireman’s suspenders bent under the weight of the coffin as the winch put in slack. The coffin itself—matte-black under all those roses—would have amused Erik. It was the one Hafidha would have picked out for him, the way she had picked out this purple coat for his funeral. She would have paid for it out of her own pocket if it hadn’t turned out that his family—wonder of wonders—had money. And taste.

And approved of their crude, funny, hair-dyed, pierced-and-ink-marked son. And the decidedly unconventional women in his life.

Erik’s mother Caroline, a doe-eyed blonde impeccable in black wool, had smiled at Hafidha and Gail over the bridge of her elegant nose and said, I’m so sorry that I only get to meet you now. He spoke so highly of you both. You’ll sit with the family, of course.

His father—a small, generous, bearded, balding man who looked unaccustomed to grieving—introduced himself as Frederich-call-me-Fred. The pinch of sorrow at the corners couldn’t hide the fact that his eyes sparkled like Solomon Todd’s behind his bifocals, as if in argument with his stern continental accent. When Hafidha came to stand beside him, he reached out and patted her wrist, slipping a pressed linen handkerchief into her hand. I’m so sorry we had to meet like this, my dear.

As if Gail and Hafidha shouldn’t have been comforting him and Caroline.

Hafidha wondered, for a moment, what she would have done—where she would be today—if the people who had nearly been her in-laws and the man she had nearly married had shown half this much concern for her. Frederich Holt’s solicitousness couldn’t bring the tears, though, and if that hadn’t made her cry, Hafidha thought she’d be dry forever.

Not so Gail, small and buxom in her corset, high-necked dress, and Victorian mourning jewelry paved with glitter-black hematites, who stood beside Hafidha with her fist stuffed against her teeth so hard she’d split her lip, staring blind through a mirror of tears. Hafidha leaned a little harder, until Gail ducked her head down and made a horrible stretched small noise, pressing back. Hafidha pulled her hand out of her pocket with that handkerchief knotted in it and waved the square of linen under Gail’s nose.

Gail grabbed it as if it were a lifeline. Since Hafidha had her hand out of her pocket now anyway, she put it on Gail’s shoulder and pulled her into an awkward embrace, glad of the warmth even as she wondered if her own bony self was capable of giving comfort.

Maybe not. She turned her head, needing some comfort of her own.

Chaz Villette, Tricia Andreoli, and Daphne Worth huddled shoulder by shoulder on the opposite side of the grave. Tricia, blond and comfortably curvy, round-faced, snub-nosed, had one arm around Daphne’s waist, and Hafdha could tell from here that both of them needed it. Daphne wasn’t holding on to Tricia, but that was because her arms were wrapped around each other as if to keep her from flying apart.

They both glared down at the tips of their shoes. But Chaz’s stare was aimed right at Hafidha, his mismatched face all scrunched up around his mismatched eyes, and when she caught his gaze the eyebrows lifted. Hafidha nodded.

She let her arm fall from Gail’s shoulders. Are you gonna be okay, cherie?

Gail nodded, gulping air through Hafidha’s handkerchief. It’s just so damned... random, she said. He was twenty-seven.

Hafidha thought about what Chaz would say—or, these days, restrain himself from saying. That misadventure and suicide were the leading causes of death in males under thirty, with homicide a significant contributor. She shook her head, her braids too tightly dressed today to snake over one another the way they should. There was too much coincidence, and she didn’t believe in coincidences.

"If it is random," she said, and stepped away from Gail while Gail was still reaching after her. Caroline and Fred had each other for now, and for now that would have to be enough.

Chaz’s embrace—when she got to him—was just as bony and awkward as her own. He wrapped long arms around her as if fencing her in with sticks. Between the cold air and the beta metabolism, he wasn’t any warmer than she was, but she leaned into the protection with a sigh. Daphne patted her hair, and Hafidha let her forehead fall forward against Chaz’s shoulder.

It sucks, he said, a dry admission, and she could have kissed him for not saying It’s all right.

She turned back to the coffin, safely out of sight under the rim of the grave now. More curled leaves slid past Hafidha’s ankles, some slipping and swirling down to where Erik lay. She thought of water running into a sinkhole.

As Caroline walked forward to cast down the first fistful of dirt, Hafidha’s phone buzzed against her thigh. She jumped, not sure if she were furious or relieved for the distraction. She knew already who was calling and what the text message would be before she slid her hand into her pocket and pulled out the device. Still, she held it up where Daphne and Chaz could see it, because she could sense their phones buzzing silently too. It was awfully creepy when they all went off at once.

The LCD screen said, Wtf. Sorry. It cant wait.

Hafidha closed her eyes, just for a second. A distraction. Somebody is having a worse day than me. Thank God.

I’ll— Daphne started, but Chaz cut her off, his car keys ringing softly in his hand as he drew them from his pocket.

Drive. Your car needs to get Tricia home.

Damn, Daphne said, and kissed her wife on the corner of the mouth before dropping her keys into Tricia’s open palm.

Shotgun, said Hafidha. She turned away to take her leave of Gail and the Holts, deciding that she felt enough guilt over her relief that for another ninety seconds, the FBI could just bloody well wait.

Behind her, Daphne was trying to lighten the mood. Back seat of the Blue Beetle? I’ll take fates worse than death for a thousand, Alex.

Hafidha glanced over her shoulder, but Duke wasn’t there to finish the cathecism. And Chaz wouldn’t answer so glibly, any more. She sighed and folded her arms across her shivering torso. There are no fates worse than death.

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC

Daniel Brady hadn’t expected to arrive in the Briefing Cabinet before half the team, but he accepted his luck—and the corner seat between Nikki Lau and Stephen Reyes, sliding it a little closer to Reyes as he settled into it. Lau caught his eye with a small stressed-out nod. Reyes didn’t glance up from the display of his BlackBerry, but Brady knew Reyes had registered his presence. Reyes’ frown-lined face stayed impassive, making it impossible to tell if Brady’s intentional invasion of his personal space was working. Briefly, bitterly, Brady thought he’d be happy if the string-tugging son of a bitch would just look at him, or even lean away subconsciously in his chair.

He wanted to drive his nails into his palms. Instead, he laid his unclenched hands gently on the table before him, ready for the folder Esther Falkner slid into his grasp.

So much for that pressure tactic. But two could play the ignoring game.

Or three, Brady amended, as Chaz entered the room. Hafidha and Worth flanked him like the director had set it up that way, their square-shouldered presence another line drawn in the sand. Chaz sat at the corner of the table diagonally farthest from Brady, across from Lau so he would not be facing either Brady or Reyes. Hafidha and Worth dropped into chairs on either side of him, Hafs at the end of the table and Worth across from Brady, beside Reyes.

Daphne Worth, human shield.

All three of the new arrivals were dressed formally in somber colors, good fabric, ironed and lint-brushed. Worth had on a black pantsuit, Hafidha a queenly velvet frock coat and a ruffled blouse, hematite jewelry all cold and wrong against the warm tones of her skin. Chaz was brittle as fatigued metal in a tailored charcoal suit that Brady hadn’t even known he owned, sleeves of a shirt that actually fit him buttoned close at his wrists. He still wasn’t wearing a watch, and Brady wondered if he’d ever start again.

Chaz breathed in, breathed out, and flipped his file open with a thumbnail. Hafidha opened her laptop. Daphne glanced once around the group and then trained her attention on her own folder as if she planned never to look up again.

A couple of months ago, Brady would have grinned at Chaz and asked him where the funeral was. But he’d lost that privilege. Nor could he shake the uneasy suspicion that whatever had brought three of his teammates out all dressed up on a Saturday afternoon—it might very well be a funeral. One no one had seen fit to mention to Danny Brady, because Danny Brady did not deserve to be told.

Brady’s coffee slopped, a color printout wrinkling in his other hand. Lau, on his left, silently handed over a napkin and continued flipping through scene reports, frowning over each one as if it had been calculated to offend her. She gnawed a thumbnail, flakes of polish decoraing her lower lip until Brady handed her a ballpoint to chew instead. The briefing closet door swung open one more time, leaving Sol Todd framed in the aperture.

Sorry I didn’t make it, Todd said, laying a hand on Hafidha’s shoulder as he passed.

Thank you for wanting to come, she answered, ignoring the contact as if by force of will she could make it cease to exist. Todd was hip to the social signal. His hand dropped away just before he too accepted a folder from Falkner and went to lean against the wall.

Okay, so yeah. If it wasn’t a funeral, Brady would eat his Tony Lamas.

That realization came with a sudden, profound urge to turn around and beat the everliving bejesus out of the wall behind him. Or, preferably, his superior officer.

Christ, this was bad. Half the team wasn’t talking to the other half. Factions were being drawn up, lines in the sand. Secrets being kept. This was about as bad as Brady cared to imagine it. Maybe there was some percentage in punching Reyes after all.

Daphne cleared her throat. I think we’re all here?

As a matter of fact, Reyes said, We’re not. He lowered the palmtop he’d been angling up before him like a shield, staring at Daphne over the case.

She stared right back for three measured seconds. Who are we waiting for?

Me, said Pete Pauley from the door. I’m sorry to keep you, folks. I’m afraid Celentano wants me to liaise on this one.

•

And at a glance, Pete Pauley could see why. The air of distrust and misery in the tiny WTF briefing room was palpable; he felt it wadding up in his lungs like cigarette smoke every time he took a breath. Pauley nudged the door shut with the heel of his shoe and accepted the folder Falkner extended to him without meeting her eyes. That was the problem, in a room full of people like this. Avoiding eye contact could be just as damning as significant glances.

For a moment, Pauley wondered what he’d done in this life or the last one so awful that he deserved to find himself in a position where his job required he withhold information from Stephen Reyes. And then he shrugged and flipped open the folder, even though he’d already seen everything in it. Reyes would probably figure it out. He’d probably figured it all out already. The only question was if it would change his behavior any. Things had been damned weird Down The Hall since Villette got himself half-killed, and Reyes had to know his people were attracting administrative attention.

Pauley wasn’t real surprised that Reyes often didn’t seem to like people much. It had to be easy to despise them when you habitually saw through them like so much window glass. It couldn’t be easy to like yourself under those circumstances, either.

Welcome to Chillicothe, Missouri, Lau said. Where you have a higher than average chance of becoming the victim of a serial killer.

Villette cleared his throat. Chil-ih-co-thee, he said. Sorry, the E isn’t silent. It’s a Shawnee Indian word. It means ‘Big town where we live.’

Lau blinked at Villette. But he was still a thousand miles away, affectless and staring straight into space as if he was reading off the wall behind her head. Pauley liked the kid—had liked the kid, anyway: now he felt like he barely knew him—but he did understand why some of the gang found him just a tad creepy. His thinking face doubled as one heck of a thousand-yard stare.

It’s a rural community, population around nine thousand, in Livingston County. Faye and Ray Copeland, an elderly married couple, were arrested there in 1989 for murdering an unknown number of transients.

Unknown? Falkner said.

Five bodies recovered, Villette clarified. At least five victims. He craned his gawky neck around to look at her. Pauley didn’t miss the way his narrow gash of a mouth twisted before he said, Faye Copeland made a patchwork quilt out of the victims’ clothing.

According to the city website, Gates interrupted, Chillicothe is the home of sliced bread.

So now we know who to blame, Todd quipped from his corner, dry and forced.

So that was 1989, Brady said. He was still turning pages. 1989 is not an emergency meeting now.

No. Falkner pressed a button on the remote in her right hand. As the screen at the back of the room brightened, she said, This is.

Pauley knew what to expect of these images too, but that also didn’t make it easier. Which was fine; you didn’t want it to get easy. First, the information on the three known victims, as Falkner introduced them one by one, just as Pauley had introduced them to her that morning.

Darrel Edwards, Caucasian, Baptist, married, three sons. Age 43, master carpenter. Civic volunteer. Washed-out blue eyes and hair sun-bleached brown, with a ruddy jowled face that looked like it spent a lot of time smiling. In the photo, he leaned against the door of a muddy pickup truck, grinning, in jeans and workboots.

Karina Christopher, Caucasian, Protestant, married, one son and one daughter. Age 45, school secretary. Her photo was a yearbook portrait that showed black frizzy hair shot with gray, brown eyes smiling at the corners even while her mouth stayed professional.

...and Jane Doe, Caucasian and in her late forties or early fifties. There was no image to go with this information, even a scene photo, and Pauley knew the next slide would explain why, when he got around to explaining the next slide. A typical Missouri roadside, the black interstate sizzling along between fields broken up by narrow lines of cottonwood trees. A couple of heavy-duty orange waste bags dotted the sunburned grass.

This is likely not the dump site, Falkner said.

Likely? That got Brady’s attention. Why the slide, then?

Pauley leaned forward, paper crinkling under his elbows. Because the dump sites have not been precisely identified.

Worth swiveled in her chair and gave him a skeptical look. How can you not know where the bodies were dumped?

Because the bodies were recovered from a tertiary crime scene. At the local landfill, Pauley said, and waited for one of them to figure it out.

Villette glanced from Pauley to Falker to Reyes. Guiltily? Fearfully? They looked a lot alike. Whatever was going through his head, he seemed to make up his mind to say what he thought anyway. The DOT garbage bags. Work crews—convict crews?—come through and clean up the roadside, bag the trash. Then later another truck comes along and loads up the bags. Then they all get trucked to a processing facility and dumped in a big pile, don’t they? Except sometime between A and B, somebody else is coming along and adding a few bags.

Bingo, Pauley said. The first victim was badly decomposed by the time they turned her up.

Lau was chewing on the end of her pen. She put it down carefully across the open folder, as if she’d just noticed, and said, Sounds garden-variety so far. So what makes it ours?

Well, Pauley said, with a grimace. The two victims we have identified had children who attended the same school, which was also the school Christopher worked at. They were both associated with a parental networking website. So they knew each other. Moved in the same social circles. Which is not much of a trick in Chillicothe, Missouri, I’ll grant you—

It earned a ring of tepid smiles, the widest one Nikki’s. That’s a heck of a coincidence.

C word, fifteen yard penalty, Hafidha said, glancing up over the tops of her glasses. We don’t believe in those.

Nikki also tossed Pauley the lifeline of a prompt. And?

And forensic evidence—bite marks on the recovered portions of the victims—indicates that Darrel Edwards assaulted Karina Christopher. There are also bite marks on Jane Doe from Christopher, another set on Edwards. Dental records indicate that the person who left them on his body is one Roze Cutler, who has a daughter attending classes in the same school.

Brady closed his file on his hand. Is Cutler in custody?

She’s missing.

Reyes stood up so fast his chair banged off the wall. Hafidha. Get to work on that website. Lau, Falkner, Brady. He paused. Villette. Get your things. Todd, you and Worth are the home team this time. Todd, papertrail. Find out if there’s a missing person associated with the school who could be our first vic. Worth, get on the horn to whatever passes for an ME in Livingston County and get the victims released to Frost.

Pauley folded his arms over the file in his hand. A shiver of tension had run around the room when Reyes said Villette, and it had included more than one sidelong glance at Brady. Villette, however, had no more reacted than a stone dashed by waves. He just shuffled his papers together and stood, head bowed as if deep in thought.

Twenty minutes, people, Reyes said, as Falkner folded her hands over the remote in a manner Pauley thought was meant to mask clenching them. Go.

•

As soon as he walked up the steps, Brady realized: the jet felt weird with Pauley on it. Not bad, just weird. Like they were all on their company manners.