“I wonder if that’s why Whittaker decided to bring you into this,” I said.
“It would make sense. Johansson has a reputation for dirty work, and Akiyama has a reputation for keeping their hands clean. But either one would hesitate to strike at Novak.”
I nodded. “Plausible deniability. Just for the record, I haven’t spent the last twenty-two years plotting revenge. No one really knows what happened to my father, and his body was never recovered. Anyway, Whittaker wants to meet us at Sarah’s car tomorrow morning at six o’clock.”
I gave him the address and let him pay for my coffee.
After I left Mychal, I rode back to the office. Collins had promised to scan all the paper we found. I discovered he was as good as his word, and it was all available when I sat down at my computer.
While the various wars had crushed a lot of industrial infrastructure, computer technology had mostly survived. No one had nuked Singapore, Malaysia, or Boise, Idaho. The pandemics had scattered the computer work force, so programmers were mostly unaffected when Silicon Valley and Seattle were bombed. The computer power the Metropolitan Police Department had available to it was staggering compared to the technology in place prior to the first pandemic.
The first thing I did was set up the three hundred or so descriptions we had found as a search through the Missing Persons database. Then I set the descriptions contained in the buyers’ and sellers’ lists running against the Mid-Atlantic population database.
With that done, I took off for the day.
Chapter 23
The emergence of the Magi as the powers in the world had greatly diminished governments. Other than the police, the primary government functions included providing water and sewer service, electricity, and road maintenance. Almost everything else was owned by corporations, and the majority of the large corporations were owned by the Magi. I knew governments used to have armies, but most of those had been destroyed in the wars. Only the Magi’s private security forces survived, along with mercenaries provided by various Families.
My mother, like me, was a government employee. We weren’t what most humans would call close, but we were friendly, and I tried to drop by and see her at least monthly. Elves lived a very long time, and I guessed it would be exhausting to maintain close familial ties with people over the span of centuries. Kirsten had suggested that since my mom lost her own mother so young, she didn’t have a model for dealing with a grown daughter. But I was her only child, visiting her was relaxing, and with the week I’d had, I felt like I could use a little relaxation.
I hopped on my bike and blasted up the main north-south freeway until I left the city, then I took the road out to Loch Raven Reservoir. The area around the lake was publicly owned, and the water from the Gunpowder River that fed the lake was the chief source of drinking water for the original city of Baltimore.
As the chief ecologist for Gunpowder Falls Park, which included the reservoir, Mom had a house out near the dam. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but it was four times as large inside. And although she was only half elf, her magik was very strong.
Her pickup was in the driveway, so I left my bike under the roof overhang next to the garage. The pickup belonged to the government, and she kept her motorcycle and ATV in the garage.
The front door was unlocked, as it always was. If I wasn’t welcome, the consequences of walking through that door uninvited would be very unpleasant.
I didn’t even have to announce myself. Mom’s voice called, “I’m in the kitchen.”
Her telling me that was unnecessary. The smell of fresh-baked fruit tarts would have drawn me into the kitchen no matter what. And sure enough, a tray of apple tarts, still warm, awaited me.
“I had a feeling you might stop by today,” she said, as she pulled a bottle of golden sunshine wine from the fridge and set it on the table. “Grab a couple of glasses, would you?”
When I was a kid, she always knew what I was doing before I did. She was also a walking lie detector. I tried to avoid trouble, because there was no way I could lie my way out of it.
I retrieved the glasses from a cabinet next to me and brought them to the table. As with all the furniture, the table was crafted out of the same wood as the walls, floor, and ceiling, and looked as though it had grown there.
My mom, Amelie Jorensdottir, was a sight to behold. Six-feet-four, with white-blonde hair, slanted green slit-pupiled eyes, sharp high cheekbones, and a graceful way of moving that always reminded me of a willow swaying in the breeze. Exotic and beautiful, she seemed to have incorporated all the best features of her elven and human parents. She had a doctorate in ecology and taught occasionally at some of the universities in the area, but her main job was overseeing the reservoir area’s ecology, the dam, and its hydroelectric turbines.
I had met her father a few times, but he lived in Iceland, so the opportunities for contact were infrequent. I had never met her mother, who died before I was born. I grew up in that magikal house, with its warm, wooden walls, rounded corners, curved hallways, multiple elevations, and organically shaped windows. The magikally powered kitchen had not prepared me to cook in a human-designed house.
I hadn’t inherited much of her magik. She and Kirsten got along great, trading recipes—for both food and drugs—and spells. When we were all together, I usually felt like a third wheel.
After I finished my first tart, she refilled my glass and asked, “So, what brings you out here, or is this visit simply for the pleasure of my company?”
I lifted my
