Patrick shook his head. “Not a word. Nothing about the bus driver, either.”
Izzie rubbed her chin, thoughtfully. “Aside from those kids who were tagging that wall on the boardwalk and that homeless guy, I don’t remember seeing any other civilians out on the street. And they ran off before the Ridden got there. So maybe no one else saw them?” Even as she said it, Izzie knew she didn’t really believe it.
“Yeah.” Patrick had a skeptical look on his face. “Or maybe someone saw it but couldn’t tell anybody about it, or call for help. No cell service, remember?”
“That broadcast van on the boardwalk was probably blocking our phones, right?” Izzie glanced around the table. “Who knows how big of a radius that thing covered.”
“It was probably a stingray,” Daphne said, almost like an afterthought. “Sorry, I was still trying to process all of this last night in the lighthouse and didn’t think to mention it.”
“Damn!” Patrick slapped a hand to his forehead. “I should have thought of that.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Izzie said. “I’ve used the damn things on investigations before, and I was too distracted to think of it.”
“Um, hello?” Joyce held up a hand, looking like the only one not in on the joke. “What the hell is a stingray?”
“It’s a cell site simulator.” Daphne explained. “It mimics a cell phone tower’s signal, in other words. They’re used to track cellular devices, or intercept signals, or even just to boost cell signals. But they can also be used for jamming. The stingray broadcasts a stronger signal than any of the legitimate cell phone towers in the area, forcing all of the compatible devices in range to connect to it, instead. But if the stingray isn’t set to passively transmit that data on to the network, then any of the connected devices are basically useless. You’ve got full bars, but no real signal.”
“Recondito PD has one,” Patrick said. “We used to bring it out on stakeouts to scan the cell phones of suspects we were monitoring, pulling their call logs and text messages without them ever knowing about it. But there were a whole rash of lawsuits in the courts, with people suing the city and arguing that it was an invasion of privacy, or overreach. That kind of thing. It was a mess.”
“Wait.” Joyce sat up straighter. “So that thing wasn’t just blocking our phones, but it could have been scanning them, too?”
“Could be.” Izzie frowned. “There’s no way of knowing for sure.”
Joyce crossed her arms over her chest, scowling.
“Okay, let’s think this through,” Patrick said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his temples with his fingertips. “Those . . . those ‘Ridden’ guys came down to the warehouse because they knew we were there.”
“They knew because the loa knew.” Daphne glanced around the table, and then turned to Izzie. “That’s what you called it, right?”
Izzie nodded. “Don’t ask me how it knew, though. Those people were barely alive when we got there.”
“Well,” Joyce said, “what we’ve been calling Ink is just part of this higher dimensional . . . whatever, if your theory is correct. And the Ink appears to highjack the host’s nervous system, which is how it’s able to direct their movements. So it obviously would have access to their senses, as well. So even if the hosts were dormant . . . like those six bodies we found in the basement . . . the Ink in their brains would still be receiving any incoming sensory data.”
“You’re all missing my point,” Patrick interrupted, an impatient edge to his voice. He stood up from the table and began to pace across the floor. “The Ridden knew we were there last night. More importantly, Martin Zotovic and his people had to have known we were there, too. He had to have been the one to send the broadcast van to block our radios and phones. So we can’t dismiss the possibility that he knows who we are, too. Hell, he could be tracking us right now.”
Izzie couldn’t help but steal a glance down the hallway at the front door, as though a horde of shambling Ridden might burst through at that very moment.
“Crap,” Joyce said softly, looking down at the phone in her hand like it had suddenly turned into a poisonous snake. Then she suddenly set it down on the table at arm’s length before hurriedly leaning back away from it.
“But these Ridden guys, they can’t go out in the daylight,” Daphne said. “So even if they did know where we are right now, they wouldn’t be able to come after us.”
“Yes and no,” Izzie answered. “Malcolm Price had enough Ink in his system to turn Ridden after he jumped out a third story window, but before that he was walking around in the daylight without any trouble at all. So I’m not sure how that works.”
“I have a theory about that.” Joyce pushed back from the table, perhaps to put even more distance between herself and her phone. “You described how Price’s skin changed after he got back up from the pavement. How quickly the blots spread.”
Izzie nodded. She could still remember the way that the inky blots had bloomed across his skin from one instant to the next, until he looked like a walking shadow, staggering toward her with murderous intent.
“And the blots on those six bodies in the warehouse moved in response to external stimulus,” Joyce went on. “They aren’t bruises or blemishes. I think that the blots are Ink, the substance itself. We assumed that the Ink was somehow being manufactured in the hosts’ bodies, and extracted from their brains and spinal columns by those hoses and pumps. And that fits the available evidence. But if the blots are Ink, then where did it go when Malcolm Price died? There was no trace of it when I examined him postmortem. More Ink appears in
