CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Investigations
Heaven left the duffel bag where it was under Chevelle’s bed and took just a few bundles of money from it. Never having shopped in the future, she didn’t know how much to take, so she took three bundles. Three thousand dollars. There was no telling how expensive dresses were in 2099, what with inflation and all.
The mall was pretty easy to find, eventually. She just kept driving around in North Mapiya until she caught a sign pointing the way. When she found it the gas indicator on the bike indicated a quarter tank left, and she had no way of filling it.
Mapiya Mall was just outside of the city to the north, actually in between Mapiya and Lakeville, another suburb of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota’s Twin Cities.
It’s true, Chevelle and Eric weren’t her family, but what if they could be? What if she stayed in Mapiya. This city could be her destination; it was as good a place as any, wasn’t it? And there were people, well, a person here who liked her, or maybe he could start to.
That thought drove her on as she went from store to store in the mall, the money stuffed in her front pockets. One store, in particular, looked glamorous. Vis-a-Vis.
Even as her feet were itching to run back to her motorcycle and just move on, keep driving, maybe go to the Black Hills after all — or somewhere else, anywhere else — she stayed in Mapiya and went dress shopping. To find the dress that would make a boy fall in love with her.
It was a fantasy. She knew that, or tried to tell herself, even as her mind raced from thought to thought. She lost one fantasy irretrievably, no matter how crazy it had been in the first place. Her heart was aching to have something else to reach out to for fear she would otherwise go insane. So she went to Vis-a-Vis and bought a dress.
She strode in, already picturing in her mind what she was looking for. An employee greeted her, offered to help, and directed her to an empty stall. The employee explained how most of the store, now, was filled with holographic dressing rooms. Make a selection and you would be instantly wearing it.
As she was looking over the dresses another shopper came in. The employee directed her to the stall next to Heaven. She was a tall pretty lady with frizzy black hair. One red dress with a V-neck particularly grabbed her attention so she made a selection. A brief moment lady and her body was overlaid with a projection of the dress.
“Who’s the lucky guy?” the woman asked.
“Excuse me?”
She held out her hand with a grin. “Alina, 2012.”
“Ha.” Heaven accepted the handshake. “Heaven, also 2012.”
“A dress like that you buy for a guy you’re trying to impress,” Alina noted. “He must be someone special.”
“Yeah, maybe. He’s cute,” she said with a chuckle. “I don’t know. He’s 2099.” She said it like two numbers, twenty ninety nine.
“So you just met him?”
“Mmm hmm. It seems kind of fast, doesn’t it? But he’s nice. Kind of like the flip side of me.” Or exact opposite, having money, a parent, friends... “I’d be lucky to have him,” she said in a low voice, almost a whisper.
I’d be crazy to run away, wouldn’t I?
Heaven decided to keep the red dress. Using the computer, she indicated her selection. The employee who greeted her earlier came back with the long red dress draped across her arm, just Heaven’s size. She led Heaven with it up to the cashier. Placing the dress on the counter it automatically registered the price and the cashier read it back to her. 2,320 dollars.
Heaven fished the money out of her pockets. Two stacks for 2,000 dollars and she counted out 400 dollars from the third stack.
The cashier shook her head and pushed the money back to Heaven. “I’m afraid I can’t accept that, miss,” she said.
“Why not?” Heaven asked, acting offended but hoping there were no alarms going off saying this was stolen money.
“Miss, we just don’t accept cash,” the cashier explained. “Nobody does. I thought it had all been destroyed, anyway. If you want, you can give me your name and ID number and I can just look up your credit line. No trouble.”
Heaven shook her head. “No. Don’t worry about it,” she said, quickly stuffing the money back in her pockets. “Sorry.”
Like that, she was back to having nothing, and no dress to impress a guy, either.
***
“Thank goodness you people still use radios,” Kevin said as he stormed across the library. He ducked under the yellow police tape and walked to back where Joshua, the Sheriff and his great grandson, stood with another officer.
“Excuse me,” Joshua objected. “What do you think you are doing? This is an active crime scene.”
“And I’m still a Sheriff,” Kevin shot back. “Now what do you have here? Oh my—” He wanted to look away, but he was a Sheriff and his training had him examining the scene. The bodies were mostly hidden behind the last row of books.
“Well, good that you’re here, I guess,” Joshua said. “I was going to call you anyways. Speaking of which, here.” He handed Kevin a package. “It’s a phone, instructions inside. Deputy, take pictures so we can get this cleaned up.”
The other officer walked off, leaving Joshua and Kevin alone to examine the bodies. “It looks like a murder-suicide,” Joshua said. “And it looks like they belong to you.”
“You sure about that?” Kevin said, tilting his head and kneeling down.
“Yes. They’re not in our registry, and judging by how they’re dressed, they came from 2012.”
“No, I know they’re from 2012,” Kevin said. “I meant about the murder-suicide.”
“He’s holding the knife,” Joshua snapped back. “And with what just happened, losing your entire time, everything you knew was gone, I don’t think it will be the last.
“Does that look like a knife that an officer of the school board would casually carry around town?” Kevin pointed out. It looked more like military grade. “In a suicide, he probably wouldn’t have stabbed himself like that. And murder-suicide is normally a more private affair. I can’t imagine he would take her here to kill her.”
“You know them, don’t you?”
Kevin nodded. “Yeah, Daniel Martin and Kelly Reid. They were on the school board.” He sighed, finally standing up and turning the other away. “I think they were having an affair.”
“And you can’t imagine, with all that’s happened, why he might do that?”
He shot a fierce glare at Joshua. “No, I can’t,” he said. “They were at the school the night of The Event when someone broke in. They said they could identify the perp. If anything, I think he’s the one that did this.”
“You have any idea who that might be? Anyone else from 2012 that might have come to the library?”
Kevin glanced back to the bodies again, as if the scene would change. His world was out of control, with the city suspended in time, the tornado, decent people murdered in a public library. But worst of all, his family was gone, dead for decades. To stop investigating would just make him dwell on that.
Kevin shook his head. “Anyone would want to come here, trying to find out what’s happened since 2012. They were the only the witnesses to the break in, though.”
“That does sound like motive,” Joshua said. He looked up and waved the Deputy over. “Take pictures. Bag and tag the evidence and get these bodies out of here. Let’s make this place respectable again.”
“We haven’t even begun investigating,” Kevin said, appalled. “Aren’t you going to leave this as an active crime scene?”
“We don’t have unlimited resources, even in the far reaches of the future, whatever you may think,” Joshua said, face flushed. “This is still a relatively small city and St. Paul or Minneapolis doesn’t have the time to dedicate their forensics lab to a murder investigation that could very well be a simple suicide case. I’m sorry, Kevin, but my job here is to get the mess cleaned up and the library back in business.”
“You’ll at least get fingerprints from the murder weapon,” he said, nearly making it a command.
“Yes, we’ll get fingerprints, and cross reference on AFIS,” Joshua said, then added under his breath, “for all the good it will do.”
***
The parking tower at the IIA was beginning to get busy as the day came to a close and those working banker hours left their desks. The first floor of the parking tower was reserved for others higher up in the chain of command, like the Director and the Deputy Director. Dravin and Cecilia sat in a rental car across the street. He lifted binoculars up, not for the first time, to examine the doors from the IIA building to the parking garage. It wasn’t open enough for just anyone to enter from the street. A thin, but strong, wire mesh surrounded the parking tower, and the entrance and exit was controlled by a guard. But that wouldn’t stop Dravin.
He had identified the Deputy Director, a portly older man, in the lobby of the IIA building, a lucky break for him. It meant he could proceed much faster than he had imagined. The Deputy Director left once in the middle of the day, allowing Dravin to identify his car. Dravin put the binoculars down. Now he just needed to wait for the man to leave for the day.
“I can’t believe I came with you,” Cecilia said, folding her arms. Having her with had been more than a little annoying, as well, rarely giving him peace and quiet. After her last attempt to stop him he had taken away her holophone; nothing was going to stop him. “This is pointless. You think you’re going to storm the parking garage of an agency like the FBI? And what? That’s supposed to gain you brownie points?”
“Does it make you feel better, hearing your own voice?”
“Oh, please. I’m not the one in this car obsessed with myself,” she shot back.
He brought the binoculars back up. “You never learned the value of patience, my dear.” There was movement at the door. Someone was coming out.
Cecilia sighed and rolled her eyes. “What does it matter? This is all my fault, anyways.”
It was the Deputy Director. Dravin watched as the man walked to his car, got in, and drove around to the exit. He put the binoculars down and shifted the car into gear, feeling it rise up off the ground. “And that, my dear,” he said, turning the car around to follow the Deputy Director, “is something you’re going to have to learn to live with, isn’t it?”
Dravin followed the other car for about ten minutes before it became apparent that they weren’t driving anywhere in particular. “He knows,” Dravin said. The man they were following had been in the IIA for many years; it didn’t take long to know how to tell when someone was following you. Hence he was driving apparently aimlessly so that anyone else, if they weren’t specifically tailing him, would be gone. But Dravin continued following him.
Eventually the Deputy Director came to a stop and Dravin pulled in behind him. Cars passed them by, but there weren’t many people walking on the sidewalk here. “This is it,” Dravin said. He pulled a file from the briefcase under his legs. Cecilia made to get out of the car when Dravin snapped a pair of handcuffs around her wrist and in the same motion strapped her to the steering wheel.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Cecilia demanded.
“Can’t have you getting in the way now. Wait here.” Dravin got out. Cecilia screamed after him, but he ignored her.
The Deputy Director was already out, by the driver side door of his car, facing Dravin with a pistol held level with his belly. “You don’t need that,” Dravin assured him.
“I’ll decide that,” the man said in a gruff voice. He waved the pistol a bit, motioning Dravin off the street. “In the alley.”
Dravin did as the man said, casually stepping off the street, arms kept in front of him. When they were a step inside the alley he turned to face the Deputy Director. Dravin stood over him by a foot. Given the other man’s age and fit, if it weren’t for the gun he could quickly and easily take him down, Dravin judged, but that wasn’t why he was here.
“Why are you following me?” he demanded of Dravin.
Dravin moved to reach into his suit coat’s breast pocket but stopped when the man grunted. “I’m just going to show you my badge,” Dravin said.
“It’s on your hand,” the Deputy Director said.
“You know what happened with Mapiya, Minnesota yesterday,” Dravin said. It wasn’t a question. “I’m an FBI agent from 2012.” He slowly reached inside his pocket and pulled out his badge, tossing it to the Deputy Director.
He caught it with his left hand, holding the gun on Dravin still with his right. He looked at the badge and grunted, dropping it to the ground at Dravin’s feet. “Easily stolen or crafted. Agents from your time, if you’re really from 2012, also carried an ID.”
Dravin grinned, only slightly surprised that the man called him on that. Dravin reached for his back pocket, again slowly so as not to startle the man with the gun, and pulled out his wallet. He flipped it open, revealing the ID, and tossed it to the Deputy Director. He took a moment to examine it, the dropped it by the badge.
“All right, it looks authentic enough, though I’m no expert.” He nodded, looking at Dravin’s chest. “Drop your weapons, and we can talk.”
Quickly complying, Dravin reached to his shoulder holster with two fingers and pulled out the 9mm there, dropping it on the ground in front of him. He did the same with the gun at his waist. “The one on your ankle, too,” the Deputy Director said, pointing with his pistol. Dravin bent over and pulled out the small emergency gun strapped to his ankle.
The man visibly relaxed but didn’t lower his gun. “Okay, we can talk now. What do you have to say?”
“The Mapiya Event of 2012,” Dravin said. “The city disappeared, and now it’s back, exactly like it was.”
“We know that already.”
Dravin held up the file he brought. “But you don’t know why.”
The Deputy Director held out his hand for Dravin to give him the file, but Dravin held it back. “What do you want?” he asked, relenting.
“I need to talk to the Director,” Dravin demanded.
“Give me the file,” the man said, “and I’ll bring it to the Director.” Dravin shook his head. “Then I’ll shoot you and take the file,” he said, showing more frustration.
“You won’t do that,” Dravin said, his grin growing wider, if that was possible. “I was in charge of oversight on the project in 2012. The man that made the device that caused this, I worked with him in college. I know how it works. You need me.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, once again reaching for the file. Dravin handed it over. “If this turns out,” he said, stuffing it inside his suit coat, “how do I find you?”
“I’m registered now,” Dravin said, holding up his left hand to show the Deputy Director the distinctive metal bands of his phone. “Dravin Davidson. My name’s in that file, too. Call me. The sooner, the better. Time is a factor here.”
“Back up,” the man commanded. Dravin took a few steps back. “Don’t move until I drive away.”
The Deputy Director walked to his car backwards, keeping Dravin in his sight and the aim of his gun. When he reached his car he tossed the gun and the file on the passenger seat and took off.
With the other man gone, Dravin collected his weapons, badge, and 2012 ID from the ground and got back in the car. Cecilia glared. “You piece of—”
“I wouldn’t finish that sentence if I were you,” Dravin warned. He took out the key and unlocked the handcuff on the steering wheel, then twisted around to snap it on her right hand.
“Let me out of these,” Cecilia screamed in protest again.
“Something tells me I can’t trust you anymore.”
“Whatever,” she said, reaching with her cuffed hands for the door lock. When she pressed the button, Dravin quickly relocked the doors and hit the driver override.
“How do you want this to go?” Dravin asked, quite calmly. Cecilia bared her teeth and reached out for his neck. Dravin never let her get close enough, swinging his right elbow to connect with her temple. She collapsed in place, unconscious. Dravin hefted her up off the middle console and leaned her against the passenger window. “Now look what you made me do.”