“Do you see anything else?” Messinger said. “Anything missing or out of the ordinary?”
Sandra shook herself, as if waking from a dream. “No,” she said. “Nothing jumps out at me.”
“All right. I’ll drop you back at the station, and you can take a cruiser home.”
They drove to the district station in silence. Halfway there, Messinger took a call. She listened for a while, and then said, “That was confirmation from DNA. The body found at the stadium was your father.”
Sandra nodded, unable to speak. Tears stung her eyes, and a hard ball formed in her throat. The last time she had seen him, she had walked out in irritation because he had called her Alex instead of Sandra. It seemed so petty now. All she had ever wanted was his approval. For him to look at her in admiration like he did Alex, or to get that excited gleam in his eyes when she suggested some new physics conundrum.
Despite that, she had always known he loved her. She would miss him desperately. She would have to call Claire and tell her, and somehow they would have to get the word to Sean in Poland. She imagined him in that distant country, hearing such dreadful news without any family members nearby. Would they give him leave to fly home for the funeral?
They pulled into the parking lot of the police station. Messinger pointed to a black sedan and made an exasperated noise. “Mr. Black Suit got here ahead of us,” she said.
“You mean Liddle?” Sandra said.
“That’s the one.”
As they drove past the sedan, Sandra could see Liddle himself standing there, and another cop helping a woman out of the back seat. It was her mother.
Sandra opened the door, heedless of the fact that it was still moving, and jumped out. Messinger called after her, but she didn’t stop. “Mom!” she called.
Her mother turned. Her beautiful long hair was loose, curling around her shoulders and arms, and her face was red and streaked with tears.
Sandra went to embrace her.
“Keep them apart,” Liddle barked, and the other cop, a man Sandra knew and had talked Philadelphia sports with over coffee, stepped forward with a cold expression to block her way.
“She’s my mother,” Sandra protested.
Messinger jogged up to join them, and Liddle glared at her. “Detective, get this woman away from here.”
Messinger took Sandra’s elbow, but Sandra shook her off. “I just want to see my mom. There’s no law against that.”
“The easy way, or the hard way,” Messinger said in low tones.
Sandra growled in frustration. “I’ll be back soon, Mom,” she called. “It’s going to be all right.”
She allowed Messinger to lead her away. “Sorry about that,” Messinger said. “But you know we can’t have you talking to her.”
“I don’t know any such thing. She’s not under arrest, and as far as I know, neither am I. We should both be free to walk out of here if we want.”
Messinger shrugged. “Maybe. But practically, we can hold you for twenty-four hours if we feel you’re interfering with the investigation or withholding crucial evidence. And we need to talk to your mother before you do.”
“What do you think I’m going to do, threaten her to keep her mouth shut? Feed her a story?”
“I don’t know you, Miss Kelley. I don’t know what you’re going to do. But we need to talk to her before she talks to anyone else.”
The clouds were low, and a strong wind was picking up. “My father is dead,” she said. “You saw his body for yourself. Isn’t that enough?”
“That doesn’t stop the investigation. The blast originated from his seat. We have to question everyone who knew him or saw him recently. Besides—his car was found at his house, not at the stadium. Somebody must have driven it home.”
“I told you—”
“I know what you said,” Messinger said. “It doesn’t matter. We have to investigate.”
Sandra thought about Alex and the Salt and Light mission. Was she afraid? Did she have a plan? Sandra didn’t know why she hadn’t told Messinger to look there for Alex, but she realized now that she didn’t trust the Philadelphia police department to investigate this mystery. There was too much going on, too much that was beyond their ability to understand. Even if the police did find Alex, they might not believe her story, and they certainly wouldn’t let Sandra talk to her. The only way Sandra was going to understand what was going on was if she found Alex herself.
She stopped walking. Messinger kept going for a few steps before turning to look at her.
“Am I free to go?” Sandra asked.
Messinger hesitated. “You are. But don’t go far.”
“I won’t,” Sandra said. But she didn’t mean it. She planned to go as far as it took to get some answers. She was on her own now. They didn’t trust her to be a cop, and she didn’t trust them with her family. Sandra didn’t know what next steps the police would take, but she knew one thing. She would find Alex before they did.
CHAPTER 12
“Dr. Oronzi!” Alex said. He was just sitting there on the bed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Please, call me Ryan.”
“Fine. But how did you find me here?”
“The module you stole uses an unclassified map server that we host outside of the lab. Whenever you teleport, it logs your location. We didn’t want anyone to teleport and not know where they ended up.” He chuckled. “You chose a pretty wet itinerary.”
Alex narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t want to die. How did you teleport in here so precisely?”
“I had your actual location to key off of. Normally, we have to do the same thing—either aim for water, or, more commonly, have someone waiting at the destination already to make more accurate measurements. I wasn’t mocking you; it was smart not to trust the data.”
Alex still stood with her back to the door. Though she supposed it would do no good to run from a man who could track her location and teleport to wherever she went. It was a disturbing thought. Though if she simply powered down her eyejack lenses, he would lose his track. And she was pretty sure she could outrun him.
She stepped into the room. There was no chair, but the dresser was low and bare, so she hopped up to sit on top of it. “You’ve been keeping secrets,” she said. “This technology can do more than you’ve been letting on.”
He shrugged. “It’s unproven research. Not ready for prime time.”
“Yeah? Or did you just want to keep it to yourself?”
“The government pays the bills. They know what I’m doing.”
Alex shook her head, still amazed. “I get the teleportation thing, at least partially,” she said. “We were already using tunneling concepts to shift the location of objects. But invisibility? How is that remotely possible?”
“Not that hard, really,” Oronzi said. “The Higgs projector makes it possible, but it’s just a matter of recalculating Maxwell’s equations for each photon that comes into the field, so that a new photon is released on the other side with the same direction and energy, as if the first had never been captured. There’s actually a small time delay, but not so much that anyone would ever notice.”
Alex crossed her arms and examined him. “So what do you want from me?”
“You promised you would tell me what you know about the varcolac. I did my part: if not for me, you would have been caught by now for certain.”
Alex felt a sense of indignation rising up in her, although he was probably right. “Maybe you underestimate me.”
He shrugged, acknowledging the point. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I need to know everything I can about this thing. I need to know how to beat it.”