Lexa sighed. "Let me explain something, guys: Those scenes are rigged. You can't really make a blurry picture clearer; the information's already gone. Besides, when it comes to faces, your brains are better than any computer."
"Couldn't you give our brains a hand?" I asked.
"Look, I've created ocean waves, crashing cars, whirling asteroids. I've erased boils from movie stars' hands, made it snow and rain, even added smoke to an actress's breath after she refused to put a lit cigarette in her mouth. But you know what the hardest thing to animate is?"
Jen dared a guess. "A human face?"
"Exactly."
"Because it's so mobile?"
Lexa shook her head. "Humans aren't especially expressive. Monkeys' faces are more muscular, dogs have much bigger eyes, and cats have very emotive whiskers. Our crappy ears don't even move. What makes humans; so tough to do is the audience. We're human, and we spend our whole lives learning to read each other's faces. We can detect a glimmer of! anger on another person's face from a hundred yards through a fog bank. Our brains are machines for turning coffee into facial analysis. Take a drink and look for yourself.
I swallowed the cold dregs from my paper cup and stared at the picture. It was a face, I decided, and it was starting to look familiar.
"Although frankly, this might help." Lexa stood but didn't reach for ^ the mouse. She went to the kitchen drawer and pulled out a long, thin box. With a swish and a tearing sound, she extracted a large sheet of wax paper, the kind you wrap sandwiches in. She held the translucent paper over the screen.
"Don't ever tell anyone I said this, but sometimes blurry is better than clear."
Jen and I gasped. Through the haze of the paper something recognizable had resolved.
It was the face of the man who'd come after us in the darkness. The bald head was obvious now, the heavy brow and childish lips all somehow cohering in the blur. And Lexa was right: we could read the expression perfectly, right through the wax paper and pixelization and darkness. The guy was eager, determined, totally in control.
He was coming to get Mandy, like he'd tried to get us.
We sat there for a moment in silence, paralyzed, as if he'd stepped through the screen into the room. Then a bouncy Swedish tune started to play.
Take a chance on me….
Mandy's phone had come to life, its lights blinking away. Lexa took a step, lifted it to look at its little screen.
"That's funny."
"Who's calling?" I asked.
Lexa lifted an eyebrow.
"You are, Hunter."
Chapter 9
LEXA HANDED ME THE PHONE. THE SWEDISH TUNE KEPT PLAYING, insistent and diabolical.
The readout glowed in the darkness. Incoming calclass="underline" Hunter.
"It really is me," I said to Jen. "It's my phone calling."
"Maybe you should answer."
"Oh, yeah." I swallowed and lifted the phone to my ear. "Hello?"
"Hi, uh, I'm just calling because I found this phone. And I wanted to return it to the owner."
"Really?" My foolish heart lifted.
"Yeah, and this number was in the incoming call memory, so I figured the phone must belong to a friend of yours. Maybe you could give me the guy's name. Or his address?"
"Yeah, actually that's…"
My voice trailed off as I came to my senses: why did this person assume the phone's owner was a he?
"Uh, actually…" I looked up at the face on the screen, at arm's length now. The voice on the phone was male and sounded like a big guy
Maybe that guy.
I cleared my throat. "Actually, I don't recognize this number."
"Are you sure? You just called it an hour ago. Like four times in a row."
"Uh, yeah, that was a wrong number," I said, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. "I have no idea whose number this is."
"Oh, okay. Well, sorry to bother you… Shoe Girl."
The phone went dead.
Shoe Girl, he'd said. That was the name in my phone for Mandy: shugrrl, her instant-message handle. He knew I'd been lying.
"It was him, wasn't it?" Jen said.
I nodded, looking at the grim face on the screen. "He's calling the numbers in my memory, saying he wants to return a lost phone. He's trying to find someone who'll give him my address."
"Oh, crap," said Jen. "But no one would do that, would they?"
"I've got about a hundred numbers in that phone. Eventually someone will give him what he wants. Probably my aunt Macy in Minnesota."
"You could call your aunt," Jen said, "and all your close friends, the ones who know your address, and tell them what's going on."
"That might work if I could call them." I shook my head. "I don't actually keep anyone's number in my head. Without that phone, I'm toast."
"You don't back up?" asked Lexa, scandalized.
"Sure, at home." I tried to remember the last time I'd actually backed up the phone onto my computer. A boring day during Christmas vacation? "But by the time I get there and call everyone…"
"Okay, guys, I was just trying to help with this and not be too nosy. But this is getting weird." Lexa pointed at the screen. "How did that guy get your phone? And why does he care what your address is?"
"Well, after Mandy didn't show up, he did. You see, we were in this old building, and there were these… shoes."
"Shoes." Lexa sighed. "Why is it always shoes with you guys?"
"They were amazing," Jen said softly.
"Amazing? Define."
"Can you keep a secret?" I said.
"Sure."
"I mean, really keep a secret."
"Hunter, I got the script for…" (she named the third movie of a franchise in which a certain weight-lifting governor plays an unsmiling robot who shoots things)"… a year before it came out. And I didn't leak a single plot point."
"That's because there weren't any," I said. "Just don't tell anyone about this, okay? Go one picture back."
She clicked, and Mandy's picture of the shoe filled the screen, Lexa blinked, uncrossed her arms, and took a drink of her coffee. Stoking the machine.
It was grainy, jagged, the colors blotchy, but it was still the shoe.
"Wow, the client did that? Didn't know they had it in them."
"We're not sure," Jen said. "It's either a bootleg or some radical new marketing concept. You can't tell from this picture, but the logo has a bar sinister through it."
"It's the anti-client," I said.
Lexa smiled and gave a slow nod. The Nod. "Cool."
"Cool enough to kidnap someone over?" I asked.
"Sure, Hunter." Lexa stepped back, squinting now, blurring the jagged picture with her eyelashes. "Cool is money, and money can be worth anything. That's money's job."
It was a way that only computer geeks talked, but it made sense. Jen gave Lexa the Nod.
We sucked the memory out of Mandy's phone and made some calls.
Her office phone went to a machine, and we left the obvious "Where are you?" message. Cassandra's cell phone did likewise, and I explained that Mandy had missed a meeting and could Cassandra please call Lexa. When Mandy's home machine answered, I just hung up, not wanting to leave multiple messages all smelling of fear. Until we had something more solid, I didn't see the point in worrying Cassandra about her missing roommate/girlfriend.
Then we looked at Mandy's outgoing numbers. The last place Mandy had called was a car service, which was how she traveled since going full-time. The other outgoing calls led to the client's massive switchboards, nonspecific numbers that ended in three zeros—probably Mandy conferring with her bosses about "Don't Walk." The only other call in memory was one to her home the night before. There were no clues that she had arranged to meet anyone else besides us this morning.