Everyone at the food-court screamed as the man fled through.
He was a scary thing to look at, his beard black, his muscles
broad. His arms swung like a wild gorilla’s as he smashed tables
and chairs. But at least the little boy with him did not seem hurt.
At least, not yet.
Detective Caitlin Smiles felt confident about saving that boy. Yet the thought was but a distant, dim beacon in her mind. Right now, it was all she could do to keep pace with the gorilla.
Her legs pumped across the balcony overlooking the court. A robot waiter stepped in front of her; she dodged left, barely hearing its mechanical apology. From the awning of another restaurant floated a holographic menu.
“Come inside!” it welcomed. “Your lunch is waiting!”
Caitlin ran through it. Below she saw the gorilla—dragging the boy under one of its meaty arms—cut left towards the escalators. At the top of those escalators, she knew, were the trains. Depending on her luck, he would either be caught on the waiting platform there…or escape in one of the coaches.
Lungs heaving for breath, she reached the end of the balcony. The gorilla’s flight had caused a great deal of chaos. People everywhere ran and screamed. Amidst all of it, Caitlin could see the boy’s legs swinging as his captor spun off down the exit corridor. Not having much choice, she vaulted the rail.
More screaming from the civilians, more tipped over tables and flying food. Her boot slipped on a glob of red pasta. A robot lost its balance and spilled Coke all over her vest.
“Oh dear! Madame, I am terribly sorry!”
But Caitlin was already back to running. She bounced off a man, knocking a flexiphone out of his hand, jumped over a child’s new bicycle, and made for the escalators. By the time she reached the bottom, the gorilla was just disappearing from the top. The boy’s face, smeared with terror, looked down at her for an instant. Then it was gone.
Caitlin took the stairs two at a time. She thought she would faint soon. Her chest wheezed, her legs ached. Physical confrontations like this one normally went to the bigger, stronger cops on the force. Today, however, there’d not been time to call in backup.
“Police!” she gasped at the people in her way. “Move! Move!”
“Let us move you,” a pleasant female hologram sang from the top of the escalator’s handrail. “Cleveland’s RTA is here to eliminate all of your transportation worries.”
Caitlin reached the highest step in time to see the gorilla rough-house the boy through a line of commuters at one of the scanning arcs. The gorilla did not have a ticket. Also, he was carrying a weapon. Both of these facts were registered by the scanner the instant he passed through. Red lights flashed, alarms sounded.
Finally, thought Caitlin, a break.
Cries of FREEZE! FREEZE! broke out over the platform. Two other cops—men—had joined the pursuit. Caitlin fumbled under her vest, found her badge, flashed it as she ran through the scanner. More good fortune awaited on the other side. The gorilla either failed to understand the principles of that old law about things going wrong whenever they could, or he had never been tutored on it in the first place. Whichever, he was now standing at the edge of the platform with desperate eyes, in search of a train that had yet to appear.
With the male cops flanking her, Caitlin stepped closer to her suspect.
“Let the boy go,” she plumed, grabbing a stun ray from her belt.
The gorilla bared his teeth. “Let him go? He’s my responsibility.”
“I am with the Cleveland Detective Bureau and you are being placed under arrest. Release the boy now.”
“Save it, Detective. You don’t have a clear shot.” His head tilted. “Unless you want to hit the boy, too. No? Smart girl.”
With that, he began to step sideways along the edge of the platform. His hostage was dressed in a green V-necked shirt and dark blue pants. Caitlin made a mental note of this in case she should lose sight of him later. Then her eyes returned to the gorilla, who was glancing over his shoulder like a nervous driver in heavy traffic.
“No way out,” Caitlin told him. “Come on, fella. You keep walking like that you’re going to fall right onto the tracks.”
“Ma’am?” one of the cops next to her said under his breath. “There’s a service ladder at the end of the platform. If he reaches it he could get down to the street.”
“Get some of your boys down there,” she nodded. “And in the meantime remember: no shooting unless you’re sure the hostage comes away clean.”
The cop began talking into the Blurt-Band on his wrist as all five of them—police, boy, and gorilla—edged along the open pit of the tracks. Then the gorilla’s eyes widened at something over Caitlin’s shoulder. She knew better than to look—and after a loud blast from the approaching train horn there was no need anyway.
Ten coaches blew into the station on a heavy breeze that lifted coat collars and ruffled dresses. Caitlin’s hair fell in front of her eyes. When she brushed it aside, she saw the gorilla bolting for the ladder.
“You!” she looked at one of the cops. “Cover the exit! The other one come with me!”
After that she was back in pursuit. This time the civilians let her be; in fact, all of them had moved to a safe distance not long after the gorilla’s arrival on the platform. As she ran down to the ladder, it seemed to Caitlin like the entire station was holding its breath. Later, when the boy was dead, she would believe that even more.
The gorilla reached the ladder about fifty paces ahead of her. Without hesitating, he flung one of his legs over the side.
“No!” Caitlin hollered. “You’re three stories up! At least give me the boy first!”
“This boy doesn’t belong to you!” the gorilla shouted back.
His hand plunged into his coat, came out with a gun, and fired it at her.
Screams from all around, like a million frantic scissor-blades cutting the air. But Caitlin had been shot at before. Throwing her arms over her head, she dropped to the platform in a slide. The projectile flew over her head and struck the cop she’d moments ago commanded backup from.
Caitlin came to a stop on her butt. Something over her shoulder had distracted the gorilla: He was leaning to his left, with the boy’s wrist locked in his grip almost a full arm-length away on the right. Knowing this was the best chance she was going to get, Caitlin aimed her weapon at the gorilla and fired.
Three things happened. Two of them were bad.
The pulse struck the gorilla’s left shoulder, and that whole side of his body convulsed as he spun backward over the ledge. On instinct, his right hand let go of the boy (later, Caitlin would blame instinct for everything that went wrong that day on the platform), but it was too late to regain his balance, and he fell off the ledge to his death.
Realizing her error, Caitlin let out a scream and jumped to her feet. The boy screamed back as he fell sideways on top of the ledge. Almost immediately, gravity began to pull him in the wrong direction. Panic filled his eyes. His arms writhed like snakes for something to entwine. All they could find was Caitlin’s hand, which got there just as both of his legs slipped all the way over the high drop.
“Got you!” she said through gritting teeth. “Hold on! Hold on!”
His fingers clawed into her wrist. Looking at his face, which was dark and smooth, Caitlin judged his age to be no more than ten. Ten years old, average height, average build, with legs that were kicking like mad for purchase over a three story drop onto concrete construction. Caitlin would later tell herself these things, over and over, whenever the voices in her head—the voices which usually helped her with research on a case, or documenting evidence at a crime scene, or questioning a murder suspect, or just shopping for next week’s groceries—asked to know why the boy was dead. He was just too heavy, she told them, and he wouldn’t stop squirming. I screamed for help. Honest I did. I screamed, but nobody came.
“Help!” she screamed. “Over here! Somebody!”
Her arm seethed like a pair of lungs on a held breath. Her boots slipped. The side of the ledge bit into her belly. The boy’s fingers slipped, scratched, and slipped some more.
“No!” Caitlin begged. “Hold on! You can do it! Hold on! WAIT!”
“Help me,” the boy whimpered—his last words ever. Tears spilled down his cheeks.
And then he was gone.
Caitlin could not believe her eyes. No, she refused to believe them. She stood at the ledge, empty hand still dangling, and waited for a different truth to come along. It never did. And upon realizing that it never would, Caitlin slumped back onto the platform, curled into a ball, and wept.
Hands touched her, tried to pull her to her feet. She jerked away, snapping at them to let her go. But they were as insistent with being there for her as they’d been at not being there for the boy. Whereas moments ago all the begging in the world couldn’t bring them, they were here, now, offering compassion in abundance.
“Go to hell!” she told them, hating their belated concern. “Go to hell!”
In the following day’s e-news, it was reported that through the effort of three unnamed heroes, Detective Smiles was pulled away from the ledge before she herself could jump. Caitlin did not remember that part. All she remembered, after hearing the boy’s head crack open on the concrete, were the hands. The hypocritical, sycophantic, self-congratulatory hands, touching her, squeezing her, pulling her to her feet.
“So you felt no compulsion to inflict harm upon yourself after the event?”
“I don’t remember,” Caitlin told the doctor again. “I was in shock. There were a lot of voices. Bad smells.”
“Bad smells?”
“Yeah,” Caitlin said, waving her arm. “You know. Body odor. Reheated food.” She paused. “Dead bugs.”
“Interesting. I have always known the RTA as being very clean. Do you still smell those things?”
“No.”
The doctor made a note in his pamphlet. The pamphlet wasn’t digital, Caitlin took in. Just the plain old paper and pen kind.
“Have your feelings of self-worth been stable of late?” he then wanted to know.
Caitlin leaned back a little in her chair and let out a breath. It was two weeks since the train station—nowhere near long enough to understand or even identify whatever consequences were forthcoming.
“I don’t think about it much,” she admitted. “The case is still what’s important. This man they’re calling Madnishnue.”
The doctor’s brow went up. “As I understand it, Detective, you’ve been asked to take a leave of absence. Is the case still your responsibility?”
“Not asked. Told.”
“I see. And were you agreeable to that instruction?”
“Do I sound like I was agreeable, Doctor?”
The other paused to scribble something into the pamphlet.
“Tell me about the case, Detective.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Just the basics will do for now. Give me an outline. And when you’re done,” he pressed on, before she could begin, “I want you to think of one word to describe how the case makes you feel. Just one. Okay?”
She shrugged. “Okay. There’s a man living in Cleveland. A kingpin, I guess you could call him. His acolytes, his henchmen, refer to him as Madnishnue. His criminal network is huge. We’ve got him tied to narcotics trafficking, insider trading, extortion, prostitution.” She looked at the doctor. “Prescription medication.”
“You sound very frustrated.”
“Maybe that’s the word I’ll use later on. The one I’ll write down,” she added, when the doctor looked puzzled. “Anyway, we were doing what’s called a flank investigation on him. Or on one of his acolytes, I should say. No one in law enforcement has actually had a chance to see Madnishnue, so we don’t know what he looks like.
“The flank job involves a team of cops—a very visual team of cops—dogging a suspect. Collecting data. Where he lives, what he eats, who his wife is, who his girlfriend is, what his garbage looks like. That kind of stuff. All of this goes on while another, smaller team does surveillance on a far more covert basis.”
“And that was the team you were on,” the doctor said.
“That’s right. The whole idea behind the thing is to give the suspect false confidence.”
“So when he manages to evade the visual team he thinks he’s in the clear for…criminal engagement.”
“Yes. When in reality the covert team is there. Has been there all along.”
Her mind went back to the bearded gorilla. She sighed; she shook her head. They had almost gotten their man.
“This guy we were after,” she went on, “the one with the boy, he was under a lot of false confidence. The visual team ‘lost’ him. On purpose. They’d already radioed my boys about it.”
“I’ve noticed during this session you seem to be fond of antiquated vocabulary,” the doctor cut in. “Radios. Henchmen. Cops. Are you fond of old movies? Television?”
Caitlin looked up from her hands. “Not especially. But my mother…she used to watch.”
The doctor’s pen went back to the pamphlet.
“Pamphlet,” Caitlin said, watching him scratch away. “You’ve got some old habits yourself, Doctor.”
His head tilted. “Sometimes. But today I’m without my Dicta-Tab. Dead battery.”
“Oh.”
“Go on with your story, please.”
“Well,” she sighed, “he had the boy with him. We still don’t know why. It appeared he was playing babysitter. They went to lunch. They went to the park.” She paused. “Then they went to a garage in the flats to pick up a shipment of stolen CPUs. Android CPUs. Expensive. From there, it…” Her head shook; her eyes wandered. “All turned to shit,” she finished.
Except that she wasn’t finished—not quite. The case on Madnishnue remained open. Word at the bureau had him still doing business in Cleveland, despite their near miss at the RTA. Also—
“He spotted you,” the doctor said. “The man with the beard.”
“Yes,” Caitlin allowed. “We were careless. He shuffled the boy into his car and made a run for it. We followed. My team got separated.” Her mouth twisted. “The rest you know. Don’t ask me to recount.”
Silence fell over the office. The pen dashed away. When it stopped, the doctor looked up and asked Caitlin what, if anything, she wished she could do to rectify what had happened.
The question made her pull a face. Whatever could be done—undone—about that day? The first answer, the most obvious one, was also the most ridiculous.
“Invent a time machine,” she drawled. “Go back. Keep the boy away from ledges and platforms.”
“So your remorse is for him. The child.”
“Of course.”
Again, obvious. And ridiculous. What more appropriate place was there for her pain to reside?
But the doctor apparently had his motives for wanting to know. His next question concerned alternatives.
“You’re a police detective,” he pointed out. “Your problem solving skills are exemplary. Can there be another, more practical way?”
Caitlin looked back down at her hands. Between them, somewhere, was the soul of a little boy who had died because of her…
Her what?
“My problem solving skills,” she muttered.
The doctor heard. “Yes. There are always solutions, Detective. Always. Some of them fix everything. Others simply help to alleviate our pain. I feel you should search for something in that latter category.”
She nodded. “Okay. But what if I can’t find it?”
“Don’t tell yourself that. It’s there, Detective. And what exists can always be found.” He placed his pamphlet on the desk. “Let’s stop here for now. When you come back next week you will know what to do. I’m certain of that. But before you go”—he opened the pamphlet—“please write down that one word we talked about earlier. The word that best describes your feelings towards the case.”
Caitlin picked up the pen. She knew the word. It had come to her while contemplating the problem solving skills she was supposed to have. Oh yes. It had popped right into her head.
Mad, she wrote.
Then she closed the pamphlet, thanked her doctor, and went back out into the world.
Two weeks later she was feeding her ID card into a computer at the Cleveland Clinic. From that card came all the basic information there was to know about her life: name, sex, height, weight, address, occupation. Other tidbits included her marital status, birth certificate, and driver’s license number. Even her blood type came up on the screen.
That last one was important for the clinic. In order for her to conceive the healthiest baby possible, the father’s blood type had to be a good match for her own.
The card slid back out. Caitlin took it and looked around for the nurse she had spoken with earlier. She—the nurse—seemed to have vanished into thin air. Just down the glossy-tiled hall was an emergency room, where people of all sizes, shapes, and colors were rushing about like traffic around an overpass. Most of them wore nurse’s uniforms.
“Miss Smiles?”
Caitlin spun around. Her nurse stood by the door. Like Caitlin, she was short; unlike Caitlin, her frame was plump, her expression perfectly content.
“We’ve received your data,” she said. “A list of subjects should be available for you in about ten minutes.”
Caitlin swallowed hard. Of the few men she had been with in her life, none of them could rightly be referred to as subjects. Subjects was a word for tests. Experiments. It had no business being used to describe a sex partner.
“All right,” she answered, wondering all over again whether she was doing the right thing.
The nurse smiled. “Have a seat in the lobby. Your name will be called.”
Her estimate turned out to be spot on. In ten minutes Caitlin found herself in front of another computer screen, this one larger and in ultra-amazing resolution. Handsome faces floated in neat rows over the desk. They were of all styles and colors. Square, round, chiseled, smooth; white, tan, dark, black; blonds, browns, ravens, red-heads.
Caitlin’s head swam with confusion. She had no idea where to begin. After five minutes she decided to eliminate all of the ones that were smiling. She’d never fully trusted a man who smiled, and there was nothing remotely funny about what would happen later with one of these men.
But now she was stumped…and stayed that way. Thirty minutes passed with no progress. When the nurse returned to ask how she was doing, Caitlin told her the truth.
“I can’t decide,” she said. “Aside from hair and skin color they’re all described the same way.”
“Indeed,” the nurse nodded. “That’s because every applicant must meet the same list of requirements the hospital poses. Those requirements are very strict.”
“I understand. I’m glad they are.” Caitlin looked back at the screen. “Maybe I should just close my eyes and point.”
“You may also wish to fall back on the tried and true method of artificial insemination. Many women do.”
But Caitlin was already shaking her head. She still didn’t feel right about that, and told the nurse as much. She’d come here a week ago after deciding that bringing another child into the world might be the only way to cope with the pictures her mind’s eye would not stop looking at. The hospital had promised to help her by one of two methods: personal or impersonal. And after thinking about it for a couple of days, Caitlin had settled on the former. In order to create the healthiest baby possible, feelings needed to be involved. Intimacy. An exchange of some form of love, however precarious, between two people. So she believed.
If only romance was still alive. Courtships. Flowers and chocolate. Valentine’s Day dinners. Weddings. Alas, it had all been mostly forgotten, even by Caitlin herself until recent times. After all, sex was easy to come by. She’d seen dolls on the market (indeed, had played with a few) that looked so real you’d swear at any moment they were going to sit up and blink. And now androids were starting to catch on. They were pricey, but Caitlin didn’t doubt that time and technology would broaden their appeal. Sex without side-effects. Bliss without baggage. If it kept going the world’s population could be cut by a third before the century was out, and maybe that was a good thing. Caitlin hadn’t made up her mind yet. Until the boy’s death at the platform, she’d never contemplated such things at all. It hadn’t mattered. Men hadn’t mattered. Getting married, starting a family. Bah.
Even the war brewing with China and Korea, which had been all over the news of late, came in behind what mattered most to her: work. Or more to the point, work on the Madnishnue case.
“This one,” Caitlin said, hovering her finger over a man with dirty blond hair, the same color as her own.
“Very well,” the nurse replied, looking pleased. “Let’s try for this Tuesday at 2PM. If anything changes the hospital will contact you.”
Caitlin thanked her and left. On the way home she hardly thought about her choice. She’d done pretty much what she’d suggested to the nurse: closed her eyes and pointed. As long as everyone was healthy it didn’t matter. A man was a man.
But she almost cancelled the appointment. On Monday night, Madnishnue was apprehended. She drove to the station after receiving an emotionally detached call from her captain, telling herself that it couldn’t be real, that there had to be a mistake.
It took time for things to become clear. A colleague led her to a room next door to where the interrogation took place. Here she would be allowed to watch a video of it.
“How did they get him?” she asked, looking at the screen, which for the moment showed nothing but an empty room.
“Apprehended at a charging station in the flats,” the colleague—a pup of around twenty with dark hair—said.
“What was the make and model of his vehicle?”
“I don’t know that. It’s in the police report.”
“So you didn’t make the arrest?”
“No, ma’am.”
The door came open as he answered. In it stood a black woman of Caitlin’s height. Her eyes looked bitter and disappointed.
“Caitlin,” Captain Sherri Jacobs said before putting her coffee down on the table. “I was wondering when you’d arrive. Have you seen the video yet?”
“We were just—“
“Never mind. You still look curious so I’m guessing that to mean no. Officer?”
The pup turned on his heel. Caitlin thought for a moment that he meant to salute, which she would have found grotesque.
“Ma’am?” he asked instead.
“Detective Smiles would like some coffee.” She raised a brow at Caitlin. “Wouldn’t she?”
“It’s all right. I—“
“Cream and sugar,” Jacobs told the officer.
The pup nodded and left the room. Caitlin’s eyes followed him out. An awkward silence arose in which she could sense Captain Jacobs’ stare, resting on her like a spider. Their previous exchange had been volatile, with Caitlin defending herself as best she could in between accusations of recklessness, negligence, and bad decision-making. At the end of it all, of course, had come the suspension. One month. Not long but still too long. Being alone with her thoughts was not what Caitlin wanted.
“Your new gofer seems eager to please,” she said, not knowing how else to break the ice.
“No. He’s just trained to do as he’s told.”
The message in this remark did not go lost on Caitlin, but rather than rise to it she asked to see the interrogation video.
Looking at Madnishnue’s face after snapping at his heels for so long fascinated her. She watched the screen as a large black man strode into the camera’s field of view. He sat down at a table and waited. Soon two other people—one of them Jacobs—appeared in the room.
“When was this recorded?” Caitlin asked.
“Couple hours ago,” Jacobs said. “We have more than enough evidence to hold him.”
“And you know for sure that it’s Madnishnue?”
“A pusher, a pimp, and two prostitutes from East Cleveland identified him. Plus we got a confession.”
More fascinated than ever, Caitlin watched on. Despite the lore of bloodshed that surrounded him, Madnishnue did not seem like an unstable man. He answered the bureau’s myriad of questions in a low, even tone of voice, never once appearing irritated, even when the same question was asked over and over. Towards the end of the session, he did as Captain Jacobs had promised:
“I am Madnishnue,” he said.
Caitlin’s hand squeezed her now empty coffee mug. She could hardly believe her senses.
“I wanted you to see this,” Captain Jacobs said, “because I know how important the case is to you. You’ve sacrificed a lot. But Caitlin?”
Their eyes met over the screen, in which Madnishnue was now rising from the table.
“You can stop now. It’s over.”
She looked at the screen again. The room had been abandoned. Regardless, Caitlin could almost see herself sitting in Madnishnue’s chair. The questioned. The accused.
How did the boy die? Why didn’t you help him?
“Caitlin?” Jacobs said from somewhere near. “You all right?”
Her mind snapped back to the present—and then on to the future. To the clinic. Tomorrow promised to be an important day.
“Almost,” she said to her captain. “Almost.”
Ten hours later Caitlin was standing in front of her closet wondering what the hell she was going to wear on this trip. Solutions were elusive. Her wardrobe was small, the pickings slim. Would the blond-haired man like her better in a dress or a skirt? Did it matter either way?
Frustrated, Caitlin spoke to a small, pink box mounted on the mirror. “Select-O-Suit,” she said.
The box came alight. “Good morning, Miss Smiles,” it purred. “Please describe the event or circumstances for which you need to be attired.?