The Disappeared Read online

  The boy was gone, but Flint could still smell him, talcum and that sweet smell that all human children under the age of three had. Flint had been holding him for so long that the child’s scent had gotten on his uniform.

  Opal left the back door open and took a seat beside the crib, so that she would be there when the boy woke up. John Harken sat cross-legged on a pillow in the corner of the living room and watched Flint interact with Jasper—or try to.

  Jasper was having a hard time controlling his tears.

  The Harkens had already sent for a doctor, just to make sure both boys were well treated by the Wygnin. But John Harken had told Flint outside that Jasper’s reaction wasn’t that unusual. Children his age who were abducted seemed to lose all their moorings, and didn’t know how to cope.

  Flint was sitting on the arm of the ruined couch, Jasper beside him. The boy had sores on the back of his hands and arms from enhancements that the Wygnin had removed. Obviously Jasper’s parents had some money; they had hooked their son up to various links and to a security system that the Wygnin had somehow circumvented.

  Flint held out little hope that the Wygnin had left Jasper’s identity chip. All children born into the Earth Alliance got one, but not all parents kept the information updated. Still, it would give Flint a place to start.

  He’d activated one of the readers on the palm of his own hand, and he kept his fingers curled over it until Jasper gave him permission to try.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Flint said again. “I just want to see if you have an identity chip.”

  “I’m Jasper,” the boy said. He kept his face averted whenever he spoke to Flint, just like Flint had seen DeRicci do with the Wygnin. He didn’t know if the boy did that because he was nervous or because the Wygnin had already gotten to him on a deep level.

  “I know,” Flint said. “I want to find out who your parents are. I want to let them know you’re all right.”

  Jasper kept his head bent. A tear fell off his cheek onto the back of his hand.

  “I’m sure they’ll want to hear.”

  Jasper shook his head.

  Flint frowned. Was he wrong? Had this boy been picked up for a reason other than familial crime against the Wygnin?

  He decided to try a different tack. “How did the Wygnin find you?”

  “I don’t know.” The words came out small, choked, as if Jasper had been wondering that himself.

  “What happened when they found you?” Flint asked.

  Jasper bit his lower lip. Blood oozed between his teeth. Flint wasn’t even sure the boy noticed.

  Had the Wygnin killed his parents? Or had he been on his own before that?

  It wasn’t like the Wygnin to kill adults. The Wygnin didn’t kill anyone for anything. It wasn’t part of their code. They did what they believed just. They took something of value when something of value was taken from them. But they did not take a life for a life.

  “Jasper,” Flint said. “Sometimes it helps to talk about these things.”

  “I just woke up,” he said. “I woke up and they were there. I thought it was a dream and then they grabbed me and I didn’t even have time to scream. Maybe if I screamed….”

  He stopped himself and shook his head.

  “Maybe if you screamed,” Flint prompted.

  “I’d still be home.” Jasper said that last in a whisper.

  “We might be able to get you home now,” Flint said.

  “No!” Jasper turned so fast that Flint wasn’t prepared for it. The boy grabbed his arm. Small fingers dug into his skin, pressing some of his police enhancements against bone. “Don’t. Please. Don’t take me home.”

  “Why not?” Flint asked. “What’s wrong with home?”

  “Nothing.” Jasper’s eyelashes stuck together like little spikes. His eyes were red. “Home’s perfect.”

  “Then why not go?”

  “Because.” His grip remained tight.

  “Because why?”

  “Because then they’ll realize they got the wrong guy.”

  John Harken made a slight movement across the room. It was surprise. Flint recognized it. He felt the same thing himself. But he didn’t dare move. It was the first time anyone had gotten the boy to speak.

  “Who’s the right guy?” Flint asked.

  Jasper shook his head.

  “Jasper, I can’t help you if I don’t know.”

  The boy’s eyes narrowed and then filled, but this time the tears didn’t fall. “They said it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Who said?”

  “Those creatures.”

  “What wasn’t your fault?”

  “Why they came. They came because someone else was bad.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice rose into a wail. “I don’t know, but what if they make another mistake? June, she’s only three and Jocelyn, she’s just a baby, and if they get taken, they’re not going to understand. At least I understand, Mister.”

  “I don’t,” Flint said, and that was partly true. He wasn’t sure he understood what the boy was getting at.

  “Those Wygnin. They steal children, Mister. And they don’t like it when people don’t do what they want. They got really mad when I talked to those cops. I shouldn’t have said nothing.”

  “If you hadn’t said anything,” Flint said gently, “you’d still be with the Wygnin.”

  “But they told me I’d still have to go with them. They said the cops were wrong. And I’m scared.” Although his voice had stopped shaking. It seemed as if, now that he had started to speak, he was getting a bit calmer.

  Flint nodded.

  “What if they don’t want me any more?” Jasper asked. “What if they think I’m bad. They might take my sisters, just to show me. You know?”

  Flint understood the fear. He also knew the only way to combat it would be through logic. He had to find out who Jasper was, and in order to do that, he had to get past the boy’s terror.

  “The Wygnin won’t take your sisters,” Flint said.

  Jasper’s grip tightened. It felt like he was cutting off the circulation in Flint’s arm. “How do you know?”

  “Because,” he said, “if they wanted your sisters, they would have already taken them. The Wygnin were in your house that night, weren’t they?”

  Jasper nodded.

  “Before you woke up, right?”

  Jasper nodded again.

  “So they’d probably looked at everyone before they decided on you.”

  “But what if Mom and Dad come, and they leave the girls home, and the Wygnin get them? It’ll be all my fault.”

  This wasn’t his fault, but Flint didn’t know how to explain that. He didn’t want to scare the boy any more. If Jasper was who the Wygnin wanted, then one of his parents had done something wrong. And if he wasn’t, then all Flint would be doing in telling the boy that was setting a fear in deep, a fear that any time his parents made a mistake, the Wygnin would come.

  “We’ll make sure someone protects the girls while your parents are gone.” Flint could guarantee that if Jasper was from anywhere in the Earth Alliance. While the negotiations with the Wygnin went on, all the children could get protection, even though it was usually the first-born that the Wygnin wanted.

  “Promise?” Jasper whispered.

  “I promise.” Flint had a small window. He could feel it. He had to take advantage of it now. “May I see if you have a chip now?”

  Jasper took a shaky breath and let go of Flint’s arm. Flint put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He felt a slight click, then saw the information float across his eye. Jasper Wilder, followed by an address in Tycho Crater. The information had been updated recently. It was current.

  “Thank you,” Flint said.

  Jasper seemed calm now. It was an eerie calm, as if he had no emotions left. “The Wygnin said I belonged to them. Is that true?”

  Flint had learned early in his space cop days that lying about such things did
no good. Telling only part of the truth was all right, but lying was the worst thing he could do.

  John Harken watched intently.

  “I don’t know if it’s true,” Flint said.

  “So I might have to go back with them?” Jasper asked.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  Jasper’s lower lip trembled. “How could I belong to them? I don’t even know them.”

  “I know,” Flint said.

  “You’re gonna save me, right?”

  Flint let out a small sigh. That was a sentence he knew he’d never forget, no matter how this went.

  “Right?” There was desperation in Jasper’s voice.

  “I don’t know.” Flint lightly touched the boy’s bruised hands. “But I’m gonna try.”

  Seven

  The First Rank Detective Unit had been locked down for the night. Flint pressed his palm against the door. The lock registered his print, along with his body temperature and the movement of blood within his veins, verifying that it not only had the correct hand, but that the owner of that hand was alive. There were a thousand ways to circumvent such a lock, but all of them took so much technological advancement that the Dome couldn’t afford the upgrades.

  The Unit was on the fifth floor of the First Detective Division. The law enforcement buildings encircled the Armstrong City Complex. In the Moon’s early days, when Armstrong was still an Earth colony, manpower was scarce. The Dome’s police force found itself not just monitoring inside the dome, but activity outside—and activity in orbit around the Moon itself. Those duties got grandfathered into the force, and now law enforcement had become one of the most important professions in Armstrong.

  This part of the Unit, where lower ranking detectives—first year like himself, and those who couldn’t move higher, like DeRicci—worked, was the largest section. Still, each detective had his own office, small as they were. Assistants, most of whom were hired outside the police force, sat in the grouped desks in the center.

  Flint walked past the assistants’ desks. They were clean, surface computers off, lights turned down. The assistants were supposed to field tips and leads, and do basic legal research into the various laws that the detectives were supposed to uphold, but more often, they did a lot of the legwork and didn’t get paid for it.

  Flint had examined that job years ago, when he first thought of entering the force. In those days, he was more suited to the assistant job. He had been designing computer systems, and one of his specialties had been creating hacker-proof security programs. Not that any system could ever be completely hacker-proof, but most could be upgraded.

  In order to make something hacker-proof, he had had to learn how to hack, and he had been good at it. When he first applied with the force, they wanted to use those skills.

  He had been the one who had insisted on Traffic. Something different. Something far away from the City Complex, and the memories it held.

  Flint pushed open the door to the small office he had just off DeRicci’s slightly larger one. Inside, he kept a handful of mementos: his crystal graduation certificates—the first from the police academy and the second from his successful detective’s training—and tokens from important cases he’d had as a space cop, from a tiny necklace an Ebe child had given him when he saved its parents to a seashell he’d confiscated from a smuggler carrying Earth artifacts.

  But he kept his most important memento in the upper left-hand drawer. A small stuffed dog, its fur rubbed smooth, its hind leg thin from the grip of a tiny hand. He hardly ever looked at it, and almost never touched it. But knowing it was there kept him honest and reminded him of all the reasons he’d chosen this crazy profession, all the reasons he stayed.

  He sat down and rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. As soon as he left the holding suite, he had contacted Jasper’s parents, Jonathon and Justine Wilder. They had been ecstatic, planning to get the first available shuttle out of Tycho Crater. Before he called them, he had contacted the Tycho authorities and explained his problem; they promised to send someone to the Wilder house to make certain that the younger children were protected.

  That was all Flint could do in that case.

  It was the baby that worried him—and not just because of the reminders of Emmeline. The boy had had a chip in his left shoulder, just like Jasper had, identifying him as Ennis Kanawa of Gagarin Dome. Young Ennis’s mother had answered Flint’s call and had expressed her profound gratitude that the authorities in Armstrong had found her son.

  She had not asked why the boy had been with the Wygnin.

  That disturbed him. He hoped it was an oversight, that she was so joyful in knowing her son was alive that she had forgotten to ask the next question. But his instincts told him more was going on than that, and he worried that he had just given a family some false hope.

  Flint glanced through the adjoining door. DeRicci was not in her office. She hadn’t answered his pages, so he’d hoped he would find her here. He wasn’t surprised that he didn’t, just disappointed. He wanted to know how her afternoon with the Wygnin had gone.

  But her lights were still on, which meant she had been there recently. So was her surface computer, the one the department insisted all the detectives use for major information searches and for record-keeping. Any work done on the surface computers automatically got recorded in the department’s database, which made things easier for the prosecutors come court time.

  Flint hated the surface system, with its slower access rate and its inconvenient screen, but he understood the necessity for it. He’d seen more than a few cases shot down because the investigating officer had done the work on his own time and with his own systems instead of the department’s.

  The theory was that personal links could be modified. The department’s couldn’t. It wasn’t true, any more than taking a palm print to unlock a door prevented a criminal from finding a way around the system, but it sounded nice to a jury.

  Flint punched on his surface computer. As he had hoped, a message waited for him on the office system. It was from forensics. They had identified the victims of the Disty Vengeance killings. Files were attached.

  Flint opened the files, saw faces that had no longer existed when he found the bodies. Two men and a woman, former college friends from Stanford who were on their first trip off Earth. All of them were mid-level managers with no family who lived in various parts of the world.

  As he flipped through the bits of information that the system gathered from the identification chips in the bodies, the records that supposedly said who a person was without giving a sense of him at all, he noted something odd. None of the three had space piloting certificates.

  In fact, none of them had any piloting certifications at all, whether in-atmosphere flight or orbital flight. Their jobs were not mechanical in any way. They were supervisors, people who had no idea how things ran.

  Flint leaned forward. This information intrigued him. It meant that these three hadn’t flown the yacht. They were passengers.

  The crew was missing.

  He opened a new window on his screen, searching through the day’s databases. He found no trace of an escape pod rescue anywhere near the Moon. In fact, the day’s databases showed no recent escape pod rescues at all.

  Had these three been prisoners, not passengers? That wasn’t the Disty style. A Disty vengeance killing didn’t happen in space unless it couldn’t be avoided. The Disty liked the vengeance killings to be public, as a deterrent. That was probably why the ship had been on a collision course with the Moon, so that someone would find it and then find the bodies.

  He shook his head and stood, the restlessness remaining. If the Disty found the three passengers along with the crew, no matter who had committed the crime, the Disty would have killed everyone. The crew would have deserved death for helping the criminals avoid the Disty.

  If the Disty had killed the crew, then those bodies would have been on the yacht. But the
evidence suggested there had been a battle and during it—or before—the crew, and possibly other passengers, had left the ship.

  The Disty would have gone after the pods, and if they found the pods, they would have brought the crew and passengers back to the yacht, killing them all there and then launching it toward the Moon.

  Flint cursed silently. He wondered if forensics was done cleaning the ship. He wanted to hack into the ship’s systems. He was sure he would be able to use the ship’s records—both official and unofficial—to let him know where the yacht had been when the Disty found it. Then he could have that area checked for pods, pod pick-ups, and space debris.

  The thought of the Disty made him glance at the files again. Mid-level managers, one from New Orleans, another from Nice and the third from Teheran. None of them had been off-Earth before. No one in their families had been off-Earth. Their companies—three separate Earth-based and Earth-bound companies—had no ties to the Disty.

  The three did not work in areas that dealt with international, let alone interstellar, business.

  The Disty had no reason to target these people. The Disty had a strong personal code. They did not commit random killings and did not tolerate unnecessary violence among their own in any way. There had not been a Disty-upon-Disty murder in nearly a thousand years.

  One of those three had to have some tie to the Disty, something Flint could find. It wasn’t in the records—and it should have been.

  The Disty wouldn’t stop a space yacht and brutally murder three people, leaving them in vengeance killing positions, for no reason at all. The Disty always had a reason.

  Always.

  Flint ran a hand through his blond curls. The three dead people’s records were pretty straightforward. They were in order, as if someone had tidied them to make an application of some sort. Usually when files got opened, pieces carried information tags from various other sources—loan applications, messy divorces, legal actions.

  All three files were clean, and that just wasn’t normal.