Unidentified Flying Suspect (Illegal Alien Book 2) Page 6

  Nothing to be done about it now, though, so I focused on being as calm and reassuring as possible. Rickroll gave my badge and ID a thorough examination that might have been insulting under different circumstances. Finally, he held them out to me. He seemed nervous still, but it felt like a default for him rather than an admission of guilt.

  “Here, Officer Vor Kink.”

  He pronounced my last name like it was two different words, but I wasn’t going to correct him. “Thank you. Genaro and I have been talking about what happened today. About the dangerous thing they found on the strip. Can I talk to you about that?”

  “Thing?” He shook his head and began to rock again. “No. Monster. It was a monster, not a thing.”

  I blinked. “I was talking about the bomb.”

  Rickroll retreated a few steps into the bathroom and turned his back on us. His rocking became rhythmic, and he began to sing softly to himself.

  “Never gonna give you up… never gonna let you down…”

  His voice was soft and cracked and not the most musical thing in the world, but I felt for him. This was the toughest part of my job, when I had to push someone who didn’t want to be pushed. But if I didn’t, and the thing out there turned out to be some kind of newfangled explosive device after all, and Rickroll had known something that could have helped us catch the culprit before he or she got away scot free? I didn’t want either of us to have to live with that kind of guilt. I needed him to talk, but I didn’t have to be an asshole about it. From the glares Genaro kept shooting my way, he thought I’d already earned the title.

  I could think of nothing else to do but join in on Rickroll’s musical number. Maybe a little harmony might help calm him down. Sadly, I couldn’t carry a song in a bucket, but it was worth a try. So I joined in on the chorus, earning a startled look from both Rickroll and Genaro. But Rickroll didn’t retreat back into the corner again. The longer I sang, the more he came out of his shell. About halfway through the song, Genaro joined in too. He had a deep, reverberating bass that seemed at odds with our warbles, but we kept singing. Got into it a little too, and Rickroll gradually stopped rocking and started swaying to the beat. When the song finished, he rewarded me with a crooked, shy smile.

  “You sing good,” he said.

  I thought that was full of shit, but I couldn’t say that. Instead, I smiled and nodded.

  “Thanks. I really like that song.” I didn’t mention that it reminded me of when I was in junior high, before he’d even been born. “So, I know this is scary, but can you tell me about the monster? I’m never gonna let anyone hurt you. Like in the song.”

  “Never gonna make me cry?”

  With most of the people I knew, that would have been a smartass question, but this kid seemed in earnest. I nodded.

  “But I’m worried a lot of people will cry if I don’t find the bad guys and stop them,” I said. “It’s my job to keep people safe so they don’t cry.”

  He took a deep breath. “Okay. But can we get out of the bathroom?” He wrinkled his nose. “It stinks in here. I need to clean it.”

  Genaro laughed and put his arm around Rickroll’s shoulders, and we went back to the table and got ourselves a drink of water. I knew this time was necessary to get the information I needed, and I knew that Hardwicke and the bomb squad had the device under control. My job might be the least time-sensitive, but I still felt a certain sense of urgency, and it had begun to chafe. It took more than the usual effort to maintain my mask of neutrality.

  “Okay,” I said, after we’d had a few sips. “Is this better?”

  “Yeah.” Rickroll sat close to Genaro, well within his personal bubble, but the older man didn’t seem to mind. He looked at the boy with almost paternal approval, which made me think of something with horror. I was definitely off my game; I’d completely skipped the basics.

  “Rickroll, I forgot to ask. How old are you?” I said, my stomach clenching with nervousness.

  “Nineteen,” he said.

  Oh, thank freaking god. I hadn’t exactly been putting the screws to him, but if he’d been a minor, I would have been remiss not to offer to call his parents from moment one. Something told me that Genaro would have already taken care of it if it had been necessary, and maybe I’d flaked on it because he’d clearly taken that level of interest in the kid. But it cautioned me to slow down. A lot had happened today, and the day was only half over. I’d missed my lunch, and my rumbling stomach didn’t do much to bolster my mental state, which had been shaky enough on its own lately. I needed to slow down and make sure this investigation went by the book.

  I nodded. “Okay. Good. Now, Rickroll, can you tell me about what you saw today? When did you get here?”

  He glanced at Genaro before he spoke, licking his lips nervously. “I come to work on the 6:30 bus. Every day. It arrives to my stop at 6:33, and it gets to the airfield at 6:49. Today, it was two minutes late. I got worried, but then it came.”

  “I don’t like being late either. When you got here, who else was already at work?”

  He pointed out the same crew that Genaro had. Then he said, “And the monster. The monster was already here when I got here. I take out the garbage first thing in the morning. I put it in the golf cart. The dumpsters are all the way on the south side of the building. When I was driving there, I saw it.”

  “Was anybody else with you?”

  He shook his head, his face pale. I saw the telltale signs of nerves in the tension of his arms, and I sympathized, but I couldn’t exactly put an APB out for an unspecified monster either. Perhaps the person he’d seen had been wearing something that Rickroll had never seen before—like the lady wearing the burka in the gym this morning—and he’d labeled it as “monstrous.” Otherwise, I couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation, and this whole process had led me to another dead end.

  “Can you describe the monster?” I asked, wanting to get this interview over with so I could move on to the rest of the staff. One glance told me they were beginning to get restless.

  “It was scary,” said Rickroll, wiggling his fingers at me like a child playing at bogeymen. “I thought it was going to eat me. It went into the sewers, and I ran and hid.”

  “Was it maybe someone in weird clothes? Or a mask? Like on Halloween?”

  “No. No way. It was a monster. In the sewers,” he repeated doggedly.

  I tried a few more questions, but I couldn’t manage to get anything more out of him description-wise. The continued questioning began to agitate him, and I decided to stop before he had a full blown meltdown. The poor kid had already had a tough day, and I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  “Okay,” I said soothingly. “Thank you for talking to me, Rickroll. I’ll make sure we take care of it. That monster won’t hurt you again.”

  I dismissed them and called up my next interviewee, more than a little frustrated at the lack of progress in this investigation. Hopefully Hardwicke was having better luck, because so far, I hadn’t come up with a single useful thing.

  CHAPTER 10

  The rest of my questioning proved fruitless. I talked to each of the mechanics and groundskeepers, and none of them had seen anything unusual before the discovery of the device on the grounds. None struck me as disgruntled beyond the usual minor quibbles, and I definitely didn’t see any of them as potential bombers. I’d pull the personnel records to be sure, but it felt to me like this was a dead end.

  The only employee who had reported seeing a suspicious figure was Rickroll, but a second attempt to get a description of the so-called monster didn’t get me much further. It was humanoid, about as tall as him, and when I asked him to describe it further, he did the bogeyman hands at me again. Exactly the kind of thing I needed for a wanted poster. “Suspect is about six feet tall, and he looks like wiggly fingers.”

  Having said all that, I couldn’t dismiss it entirely. After all, I thought I’d gotten into a fight with a creature with no mouth who had disintegrated after I’d dumped
a load of bullets into him. As much as I’d come to doubt that recollection, I had to admit that this could be the moment where I confirmed that what I’d seen had been real. Rickroll could have seen an alien too. I was sane enough to be skeptical about it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a possible explanation. The only way I’d know for sure was to search the area where Rickroll had seen the creature.

  I dismissed the workers after verifying their contact information. Some went back to their jobs, and others, like Genaro, went home to the missus. Rickroll seemed eager to catch his bus and was scandalized at the suggestion that he would take a different method home, so I dropped my offer to give him a ride. Then I went out to see how the rest of the crews were doing.

  The grounds sweepers had almost completed their walk-through and hadn’t found a thing. They walked a complicated, thorough pattern of the area which required meticulous attention by them and their canine bomb sniffers, so I didn’t talk to them long. The cluster of uniforms around the suspicious device hadn’t decreased, so it hadn’t been successfully detonated. I wondered what was taking them so long. After a quick sweep of the area, I found Hardwicke and Sheila talking off to one side.

  As I approached, they finished their conversation, and Sheila went to rejoin the group without noticing me. Hardwicke saw me, though, and he folded his arms and waited like I was late coming home from school and would be getting a serious talking to. I met his challenging stare with one of my own and felt ridiculously triumphant when he broke eye contact first.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Well what?” I shot back. “What did you find out?”

  After a moment of more intense glaring, he finally conceded. Maybe he realized he was being a ridiculous asshole. Miracles did happen sometimes, and it didn’t hurt to dream.

  “Not much,” he said, in a slightly more normal tone of voice. “We still don’t know what the device is. Sheila took some photos and a scraping from the casing, and she’s going to give it a go. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s some kind of weird airplane part, or a broken piece of one. The civilian mechanics here can’t ID it, but we’ve got a call in to the Air National Guard to see if they know what it is. This whole thing could turn out to be a false alarm after all.”

  “Smart.”

  It was, too. The Air National Guard base abutted the Toledo Airport, and I saw some of their people in the group clustered around the device. They held themselves like military police, though. Recognizing the signs was easy if you knew what to look for—the way they kept their hands free just in case something took them by surprise and the way their eyes scanned on constant alert to make sure the former didn’t happen. I wasn’t sure why they hadn’t brought in any of the military techs to begin with, but I suspected it was more political bullshit at work. I might be posting a picture of Commissioner Gordon on my punching bag at home if this kept up.

  “What did you find out in the interviews?” asked Hardwicke with begrudging politeness.

  “Not much, I’m afraid. Nobody saw anything except for the kid who helps with the odd jobs. He said he saw a monster in the sewers while he was taking out the trash.”

  “A monster? You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I was, but no. He was quite afraid of it.”

  “Well, good luck running that down,” he said in a voice drier than Aunt Rose’s martinis.

  I paused. This was the part where I should have asked him to come along as backup. He was supposed to be my partner, after all, and he’d given me a lot of grief about my tendencies to run off by myself. Ronda had gotten pissed about it too, right before she died, but then when I’d followed the rules, it had ended up getting her killed. I felt really conflicted about that, and the fact that Hardwicke seemed to be throwing me to the wolves only made it worse. If he was so eager to make sure I had backup, why wasn’t he leaping at the chance to show me how it was done?

  With all of that frustration in mind, I muttered, “Yeah, thanks,” and walked away when I really should have dropped my damned ego and asked him to come along. But I didn’t.

  #

  This time, I was a little smarter in the planning category, and I managed to snag a ride with one of the groundskeepers who was doing some lawn work in preparation for the thousands of people who would be descending upon the grounds in the next few days. He piled me into the golf cart along with all the clippers and trimmers, and off we went. I hadn’t met my driver during my earlier questioning of the staff, since he’d just come on shift about an hour earlier and seemed more disgruntled at all the chaos than anything else. Nothing had blown up, and he declared with certainty that the debris found on the tarmac was a bunch of junk and a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. Then he set off on a rant about spending policies and public services, moving quickly into some communist propaganda that I tuned out without guilt. I had my thoughts about politics, which I’d developed after conducting this strange thing called research, and no amount of extemporizing from some total stranger in a golf cart would make me change them.

  Instead of listening, I checked my email on my cell. Nothing useful this time, and no surprise messages from anonymous senders or former not-quite-boyfriends either. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or disappointed. It had begun to feel like I was stuck with the grunt work that should have been Hardwicke’s. I’d volunteered to conduct the interviews, sure, but the whole investigation felt fishier and fishier the longer it drew out. If the bomb squad couldn’t detonate the device, I’d logically conclude that the thing wasn’t a bomb. If that was the case, all of us were wasting our time on a piece of unidentified garbage, just like my communist driver had claimed.

  I’d always trusted Scorsone implicitly. I’d taken this assignment without blinking an eye because it came from him. But that no longer seemed like a good reason to follow along blindly. Scorsone had broken his word to me when he assigned me to Hardwicke, and maybe he’d had good reason to do it, but he still should have told me first. If he’d sat me down to talk through his reasoning, I would have agreed with it. Maybe not gracefully, but still. It might seem like a small thing, but in my line of work, minor cracks in a relationship often suggested something bigger underneath. Now he’d put me out here, investigating what might be a piece of trash, along with—what?—fifteen other personnel? I knew Commissioner Gordon was behind the assignment, but where was the Scorsone who stood up to the administration when they had their heads up their asses? He’d done something when I’d been on administrative leave after Ronda’s death. Why not now?

  With those troubling thoughts in mind, I stepped off the golf cart next to the dumpsters and waved as the commie drove off in the golf cart.

  CHAPTER 11

  One look at the tunnel entrance was enough to convince me that I shouldn’t go in there alone. Beyond the strongly-scented cluster of dumpsters ran a long culvert, dug deep to drain precipitation off the fairly extensive and very flat airport grounds. The summer had been hot and dry, so I assumed the bottom would be dry but couldn’t see it in all the overgrown weeds and field grass that had taken over the space. Looking at the overgrowth made me itch, and I hadn’t even stepped into it yet. Beyond the grasses, at the end of the culvert, a cracked concrete tunnel disappeared into the earth.

  Based on the set up, I was willing to bet that this was a drainage tunnel rather than sewers. At least I had that going for me. Of course, I wasn’t exactly an expert on below-ground city infrastructure, but I figured no city planner worth their paycheck would leave a sewer full of piss and shit open to potential explorers. I thought, although I wasn’t sure, that the two systems were exclusive. Rainwater would go through one set of tunnels. Toilet water through another. It was a logical conclusion, if you thought it over. Hopefully I was correct, or this little venture was about to stink.

  Even though I was fairly sure that I wasn’t about to go wading in excrement, I felt a strong temptation to chuck the whole expedition and call it a day. As much as I liked Rickroll, chasing monst
ers into any type of tunnel was a ridiculous notion and certainly a waste of my time. He’d gotten spooked by something for sure, but it could have been anything. An animal in the culvert. Shadows from the dumpster. The likelihood of my finding anything was so low that it didn’t seem worth the effort. Besides, I didn’t feel like getting lost in the tunnels today. If I’d had a solid lead, I’d take the risk without question, but to go there on such shoddy grounds seemed overly reckless. Another bad decision made on the grounds of paranoia. Maybe it was time to admit to quit chasing imaginary aliens and admit I needed help. As hard as it was to face that reality, maybe it was time to quit running from it.

  But then, as I started to turn away, I noticed something. Footprints in the long grass, leading down into the culvert. I didn’t think Rickroll had gone all the way down there based on how he’d told the story. Either his recall was inaccurate, or someone else had been here recently. Now I had no choice but to check it out. Because regardless of the reality of monsters or aliens, those footprints were real. They might not have any bearing on the device left on the airfield—which might just be broken machinery like Hardwicke had said—but I would do my job thoroughly until we knew for sure.

  Besides, Audrey Vorkink had survived a lot of things, and no culvert full of itchy plants and unknown footprints would get the best of her. I decided to heavily document the trip with my cell camera, just so I could show Hardwicke later. Since he’d been too busy to come along and all. I felt a strong urge to collect a big bucketful of the plants and stuff them into his locker at work, but I refused. Mostly because I didn’t have a bucket with me.