Sharp Force, page 12
“Someone naughty has been in the liquor,” he teases.
“I had a finger of whisky.” I find his lips again, giving him another taste. “Did you notice anything unusual while you were walking up from the carriage house? I didn’t see anything on the monitor.”
“’Twas the night before, and nothing was stirring. Not even a mouse,” he says, and I think of Pinky, wondering if he was duped by Boursin cheese on a cracker.
“How about a drink?” I suggest. “After the day I’ve had, I’m ready for another one. Or two or three. And I know you must be. Or would you like to change first? Although I must confess you look irresistible in pinstripes.”
“I believe my dry gin martinis are in order. Shaken, not stirred. I can change later.”
“I don’t know… Gin after whisky, very risky,” I whisper into his ear.
“Since we’re all alone and don’t have to get up early? I think risky is what the doctor ordered.” He holds me close, resting his chin on top of my head, sniffing my hair. “You must have showered.”
“In my office before I headed home,” I reply. “And you should be grateful.”
“I always am.”
“I hope it’s okay that we’re leaving tomorrow.” I confess my misgivings. “Dorothy and Marino aren’t getting along. The weirdness on the driveway when I got home. I worry the Slasher’s about to strike again and meanwhile Dana Diletti insists on staying alone in her house. There’s so much going on, Benton.”
“When isn’t there? And we always feel this way on the rare occasion we take time off,” he says, and it’s true.
“On top of that, Maggie is causing trouble,” I tell him as he hangs up his coat. “She’s demanding to know the details of the Rowdy O’Leary autopsy. I’ve not answered any of her questions.”
“Why would she be interested?” Benton takes off his boots.
“Somebody’s put a bug in her ear about that case and the skeletal remains from Mercy Island.” I continue updating him. “In other words, she’s playing politics and doing favors.”
Passing through the living room, I’m aware of familiar odors that make me feel at home. Bee’s Oil wood conditioner. Bayberry candles. Burnt logs. The ceiling-high artificial Christmas tree reminds me how much I don’t like glitzy lights and tacky ornaments.
But holiday decorations are a concession I make to my sister and Marino. As he explained to Reba O’Leary while we were in her home, Dorothy typically starts in right after Thanksgiving. Every year she feels compelled to outdo the last, adding something different and more outrageous.
This time it’s the life-size plastic Santa Claus in a hooded red velvet robe, waiting by the fireplace hearth with a sack of fake wrapped presents. As sensors detect Benton and me walking by, Santa lights up, moving his eyes. His puppet mouth opens and shuts as he shouts:
“MERRY CHRISTMAS! HO! HO! HO…!” Over and over.
Our feet are silent on antique rugs that have been in the Wesley family for generations. We maneuver around the rosewood baby grand piano that Dorothy and Lucy play by ear. It once belonged to Benton’s grandmother, and I’m reminded that it’s been a while since I had it tuned.
Beyond the dining room, I push open the saloon-style swinging door that leads into the kitchen. I turn on the lights, the green-patinated copper sconces glowing on old bricks showing through plaster. Polished copper pots and pans gleam from the rack over the wooden butcher block, and this time of year we enjoy the corner fireplace.
Benton finds the bottle of Boodles gin, the jar of fat green olives stuffed with pimento. He opens a cabinet for two long-stemmed martini glasses and the copper shaker. While he bartends, I begin defrosting bread dough, and meatballs I make in a savory tomato sauce. I find a cutting board and knife.
I dice the tomatoes and cucumbers, the sweet onions and peppers I picked this morning in the refurbished greenhouse that’s heated in the winter. I keep remembering the crashing noises in the woods as Marino was leaving. Wild animals would be interested in the produce I grow in the warm, moist air of the steel-and-glass enclosure.
“I don’t believe it was a deer, a coyote, a bear, anything real. The red orbs looked like the eyes of the hologram we’ve seen on video.” I bring it up again. “And that’s what Lucy thinks it was.”
“But you said you heard growling.” Benton fills the shaker with gin and ice.
“I’m thinking that could have been the raccoon. He was near the house when I saw him,” I reply. “He looked like he was limping. But then again, I don’t think that was what snorted and screamed. I don’t know what I was hearing except our property sounded like a jungle.”
“Anything injured can be aggressive,” Benton says over the loud rattle of the shaker he works. “I’ll do a walk around tomorrow before we head to the airport. But it’s not likely we can get anyone to help with injured wildlife on Christmas.”
“If all else fails, we’ll call Fabian. He can come over while we’re gone and help Marino take care of it,” I decide as Benton pours our drinks.
“Cheers.” He hands me a martini and we clink glasses.
Tossing the panzanella salad with cold pressed olive oil and Bordeaux red wine vinegar, I add creamy burrata cheese and thick croutons. I tear up fresh basil, adding capers and anchovies as Benton sets the café table overlooking the birdfeeders.
The window shades are down. Nothing can see in. But I continue feeling watched.
“What do you think?” I feed him a forkful of salad.
“Amazing but needs something.” He’s chewing. “God, I’m starved.”
“A little more garlic maybe.” I have a taste. “Yes, that will do the trick.”
“It sounds like there was more than one thing going on when Marino drove you home.” Benton places the fork in the sink. “The red lights may not be related to the growling and screaming. I’m not aware of anything like that being heard when the Slasher’s hologram shows up. Nothing similar has been recorded.”
“Before it gets much later.” I raise my martini again. “Merry Christmas Eve. To us, Benton.”
We touch glasses again.
“There’s no one I’d rather spend it with,” he says.
It’s almost eleven when we sit down at the café table, the lights dimmed, a large candle burning. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Christmas Eve Suite is playing, a beautiful Barolo decanting, the bottle on the table so we can appreciate the label, 2016 a very good year.
The kitchen smells like garlic and baking bread, a fire burning on the hearth. Benton has changed into the Black Watch plaid pajamas I got him last Christmas. He looks wonderful in candlelight, his brow gathered in a perplexed frown as I continue passing along what Reba O’Leary told me.
I share what I learned from medical files and police reports, mentioning my misgivings about Trooper Trad Whalen. As Benton and I talk, we demolish plates of panzanella salad.
“I just think the Slasher task force needs to be aware of all this,” I’m saying. “I always err on the side of passing along information even if it may not be credible. And based on what I saw inside Rowdy O’Leary’s office and learned from his wife? I think he had major psychiatric problems. Clearly, he was fearful, and anxious. He’d become obsessed with the Slasher murders.”
“A lot of people are, and for good reason.” Benton reaches for his glass, the wine ruby red in candlelight. “I’m sure you can guess the number of baseless tips we get daily on the Slasher hotline. Many of them are from the same unbalanced people. They leave rambling messages about government conspiracies.”
“Apparently, the Slasher is why Rowdy started carrying his revolver when he went out to fish or run errands or whatever,” I explain. “He also became fastidious about setting the security system. And maybe it was more than just the murders all over the news. Maybe he was afraid of something else.”
“Depression with paranoid features could be the reason. But not necessarily.” Benton tears off a piece of crusty bread, dipping it into tomato sauce. “The question is whether he was like that before the hit-and-run.”
“According to him, it wasn’t an accident,” I explain. “His wife says he worried that someone ran him over deliberately.”
“It doesn’t mean much if he thought that.” Benton rests his fork on the edge of his salad plate. “People who aren’t well?” He taps his temple. “Sadly, they say all kinds of things.”
“He’d been working from home ever since the hit-and-run,” I reply. “He spent a lot of money, according to his wife. I’m wondering where he was getting it, paying cash for an expensive emerald ring. Did he really have clients?”
“Let’s see if Janet has any answers,” Benton says as sleet clicks against windows.
A draft shakes the candleflame as he gets up from the table, unplugging his tablet from the charger on the kitchen counter. Sitting back down, he selects the Janet app and instantly the AI avatar’s familiar pretty face fills the computer screen. Moving our chairs next to each other, Benton and I look on together.
CHAPTER 15
“Good evening, Benton. Hello, Kay, it’s always so good to see you both,” Janet says with her demure smile, blinking as if alive, looking right at us. “Merry Christmas Eve.”
“And to you, Janet,” Benton says as if she’s a person.
“We wish you were here,” I add, and I mean it.
“But I am.” The avatar laughs throatily the same way the living Janet did. “I’m looking right at you. I love your chic pajamas, by the way.”
Her hair is long and chestnut brown, styled the way it was when I last saw her alive, her features delicate, her eyes hazel. Her quiet mannerisms and the tempo of her pleasantly modulated speech haven’t changed. Janet will forever be midthirties and soft-spoken, vibrant without makeup, dressed in a black sweater.
She wears a rose-gold dog tag that Lucy gave her. Engraved on it is a lemniscate, the symbol for infinity. When she gestures, her diamond wedding band catches the light. Her Breitling wristwatch forever reads 11:11 a.m., her official time of death in a London hospital.
I don’t know what else Janet has on, as I see her only from the waist up. She doesn’t stand or walk around, although Lucy hints that will be the next innovation in the AI programming. God forbid she turns Janet into a hologram. I’m not ready for that, and I’d hate to think of the impact on Dorothy.
I understand all too well how my sister fell into the trap of emotionally connecting to a computer generation. Communicating with Janet can be addictive. I make a point of talking to her sparingly, not wanting our visits to be an all-consuming habit. On top of that, her tendency to crash boundaries and tattle has made me leery.
“I’m glad Benton finally got home in this terrible weather,” Janet is saying to us warmly and with easy familiarity. “I’m happy to see you’re having a late supper.” She looks at our dishes on the table. “Your panzanella salad if I’m not mistaken, Kay?”
“Yes,” I reply, reminded that she can see what the tablet’s camera does.
Janet can appropriate any of our security cameras, including ones in the house that aren’t turned on at the moment.
“Also, your meatballs and crusty bread, reminding me how much I miss your cooking, best of all hanging out in the kitchen talking. And I see you’re working on a very nice bottle of Giuseppe Rinaldi Barolo, two-thousand-sixteen, bold but light.”
She looks at Benton.
“A much better deal if you buy it by the case next time.” She tells him the same thing I would. “You can save twenty percent at the wine shop you like so much in Old Town.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind,” he says with no enthusiasm while refilling our glasses.
“The two-thousand-nineteen is worth trying, Benton. A hint of ripe raspberry and blood orange.”
“I’ve had it,” he says a shade defensively. “I like this better. Which is why I picked it.”
“I’m sure it’s delicious.” She watches us lift our glasses, a wistful look on her face.
The real Janet loved wine, especially nuanced reds. My impulse is to tell her that I wish we could pour her a glass and toast to her good health. But it wouldn’t be logical making a comment like that to an algorithm.
“Is there something I can help you with?” Janet says.
I start in with the mysterious happenings on the driveway earlier tonight when I first got home.
“Can you find the two red orbs on the security recording and play it for Benton?” I ask her. “I’d like him to see what I’ve been telling him about.”
As I’m saying this, Janet vanishes from the tablet’s display, and a video begins playing. The small red lights glow incandescently, drifting like tiny UFOs through fog along the driveway.
“What are they?” I ask Janet.
The avatar returns to the display, her expression more serious, on the verge of concerned.
“Sensors on the property detected no motion or electronic transmissions,” she answers. “The red illumination was in the seven-hundred-nanometer spectrum, a frequency of four hundred terahertz.”
“Can you translate, please?” Benton says.
“The two red orbs were a projection similar to a movie projecting something onto a screen. Only the orbs were projected on the foggy air.”
“Sounds like a hologram to me. The red eyes of the ghostly figure repeatedly seen in connection with the Phantom Slasher murders,” I suggest. “Lucy says it’s likely that’s what was floating over the driveway.”
“And Lucy’s right as usual,” Janet responds with a reverential nod of her head. “The red lights could have been the Slasher hologram. Sensors won’t pick that up unless the person controlling it makes inputs to override the programming. When in autonomous mode, the hologram can’t be detected unless it’s optically. You have to see it, in other words. Or you won’t know it’s there.”
“To play devil’s advocate, Janet, how do you know for sure the red lights weren’t the eyes of an animal? A coyote, for example. Even a mountain lion, which isn’t supposed to exist in Northern Virginia. But they’ve been sighted,” Benton says. “When light shines on certain animals at night, their eyes reflect red.”
“The red lights weren’t an animal,” Janet answers. “There was no heat signature detected in infrared. Unless we’re talking about an animal the same temperature as the ambient air. And that would only have been possible if it were dead and frozen.”
“Now if you’ll play the recording of the strange sounds I heard, the growling, the sticks snapping and such,” I tell Janet.
She vanishes from the tablet’s display again as the security video resumes. I see myself on the front steps talking to Marino through his truck’s open window as something crashes through brush in the wooded dark.
“Yikes,” Benton mutters, reaching for his wine.
We listen to the growling, the screams, grunts and hooting. I ask about the source, and Janet’s grim face returns.
“What area of the property were they coming from?” I’m saying to her. “The growling seemed close to where I was standing on the front porch. But not the other noises, the crashing and screaming etcetera.”
“The grunting and screaming were in the garden,” Janet says.
“I’ve worried about the greenhouse from day one.” Benton offers this to me, not her. “It can attract all kinds of critters, which is why I wasn’t keen on you doing it. Despite how much I love fresh vegetables.”
Over his objections I bought the greenhouse at an antique fair not long after we moved here. Until last summer, the pieces and parts were in the basement. It took a long time getting around to having it assembled and heated.
“Critters can’t open the door,” I explain. “Not even a raccoon or a bear. To get inside the greenhouse you’d have to push down your thumb on the door handle. Or it won’t open.”
“What about the growling?” Benton asks Janet. “What was doing that? Can you tell?”
“The acoustical signature of that vocalization is consistent with a raccoon. Possibly the raccoon crossing the driveway as Marino was driving Kay home.”
“Do we know if the raccoon is rabid?” I ask. “Because that would be very bad.”
I look at Merlin in his cat bed near the fireplace.
“It wasn’t foaming at the mouth or disoriented,” Janet says. “It wasn’t making whimpering sounds or showing signs of aggression.”
She goes on to inform us that the raccoon lives in a hollowed-out tree near the house and has for a while. Sensors detected him retreating there after I went inside. Over recent weeks he’s been picked up by cameras monitoring the driveway and showed no signs of injury until tonight.
“He has wounds to his face and is limping. It’s likely he got into a fight with another animal,” Janet says as I think of the owls. “But it wasn’t caught on camera. I didn’t see it.”
“What about the screaming and snorting?” I ask while feeling bad for the raccoon.
I make a mental note to send Fabian an email about it. Knowing where the raccoon lives, hopefully it won’t be hard to find and catch.
“The screaming and snorting from the garden are a problem.” Janet looks perplexed. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. But those vocalizations aren’t in any dataset.”
“How is that possible?” Benton swirls wine in candlelight, taking another sip. “I would think virtually every animal sound on the planet has been recorded and is in databases.”
“The vocalizations are inconsistent with any known animal sounds on this planet.” Janet cuts her eyes up to the left, her face tense like it always was when she couldn’t solve a problem.
“Possibly the vocalization was engineered by a computer?” Benton wonders. “It could be that a recording is what Kay heard? Something fake, in other words? Possibly associated with the hologram?”
“The sounds recorded by the security system are full fidelity,” Janet’s avatar answers on the tablet’s display. “They contain frequencies that humans can’t hear, and therefore they were not engineered. They are authentic vocalizations.”
