Arkadian stepped into the hostel and was hit by the sound of activity and children’s voices. There were about a hundred kids here, some of them orphans of the disease, but many of them not. Most parents, once news spread that the young were immune from the disease, had elected to send their children out of the city, preferring that they be away from the newly formed ghettoes where fear and violence bubbled beneath the quiet surface of a city held together by little more than tension and the hope that the work of the doctors inside the Citadel would soon bear fruit.
He saw the girl with the wavy brown hair over by a table. She was clasping a locket around her neck tightly in her hand but now held a bottle in the other with a straw sticking out of it. Behind her a movement caught his attention and he looked up into the grim face of Bulut Gül staring out from behind the visor of his contamination suit, his face set in the grim way he had seen before when he had bad news to impart.
“Did you get the message?” Bulut said, his voice muffled and sounding like it was coming from a long way away.
“What message?”
“You need to get over to St. Mark’s quickly. It’s your wife. It’s Madalina.”
66
Cherokee hadn’t changed much in the nearly twenty years since Shepherd had last driven through it: rows of tacky souvenir shops still sold rugs, stone axes, arrowheads, feather and bead headdresses that owed more to Hollywood than to history. The one big change was the number of motels and fast-food joints that had sprung up along the only road through the middle of town. They spoke of prosperity but of a particular and transient form. The casino had not been open long the last time he was here but its influence had clearly spread wide in the intervening years. The whole town had a soulless quality, of the kind only gambling money could buy. It also seemed deserted; every hotel and motel had vacancy signs outside and the huge parking lot surrounding the glass tower of the main Harrah Casino contained lots of virgin snow and hardly any cars. The homing instinct that was taking hold of the world was not being kind to Cherokee. Clearly there were not many who called this place “home.”
Shepherd parked outside the Tribal Grounds Coffee Shop, drawn by a sign in the window inviting him to COME IN AND ENJOY OUR WORLD-FAMOUS ELK LATTE AND FREE WIFI. He kept the engine running and the heater on, opened up the laptop and hooked on to the Internet. A new window opened, asking for his security clearance codes. He punched them in and the saved search reappeared on the desktop. The processor crunched. The windshield wipers swiped back and forth and a ping rang out as the new search results loaded.
There were seven of them now.
He opened the first and scrolled straight to the PDF file attached to the bottom of the document. He clicked on it, holding his breath as he waited for it to open. A depressing parade of images appeared on the screen, similar to the ones he’d seen before, charting a blighted life then an early death. But it wasn’t her.
He closed the file and moved on, keeping the momentum going before his nerve failed him. The next result opened, a solid block of text cascading down the screen. He found the attached file at the bottom and clicked it open, bracing himself for the photographs.
They were different from the first photos but none the less tragic. A well-scrubbed, bright-eyed woman smiling from a picture that had been taken at a dressy function, the flashbulb capturing a moment of pure happiness and hope. The picture below showed the same face, the eyes now closed and bruised, her clear skin lacerated by the windshield she had passed through after her car had left the road and hit a streetlamp. A brief note beneath the photo read:
Melisa Erroll — junior attorney-at-law
Fatal RTA. 02:34 Feb 16th.
BAC negligible. No suspects sought.
The time of her death, the minimal blood alcohol concentration and lack of suspects told the whole story. She was probably just working late, fired by youthful ambition and a desire to one day make partner, and fell asleep at the wheel on her way home, never to wake again.
He closed the window and continued to work his way down the strange roll call of the dead, experiencing the seesawing of emotion between tragedy and relief. He reached the last result and clicked it open. And there she was.
He felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. He couldn’t breathe, his vision swam as eight years of hope evaporated in an instant and tears welled in his eyes. She looked exactly the same as he remembered, more beautiful even, her huge dark eyes staring out from a passport photograph. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and took a shuddering breath. “Oh Jesus.”
The blood drained from his face, and his breathing started to race. He forced himself to calm down, breathe more deeply, more slowly. His eyes darted over the file, trying to take in all the details at once. It was too much. Words and figures tumbled through his mind, disjointed fragments, missing pieces of someone he hadn’t seen in eight years. His brain reengaged and his focus returned. The top document was a visa application. She had applied for an extension to her F-1 student visa around the time she had disappeared. It had been denied. Had this been the reason she had gone, something as mundane as this? It can’t have been, they were going to get married; she wouldn’t have needed a visa if she was married to a U.S. citizen. It had to be something else.
His eyes shifted over the facsimile of her application form. There were details here he had never known. Her date of birth — she was two years older than he had guessed; her middle name — Ana; her place of birth — Ruin, in southern Turkey.
Ruin again.
His eyes flicked back to the photograph, her sharp-cheeked, almond-eyed face framed by long dark silky hair with a kink in it like ripples over dark water. He could see by the side of the file that there was another photograph farther down, just a scroll and a mouse click away.
He thought of all the other final images he’d seen, all tragic in their own way but nothing compared to what this would be. There would be an autopsy report too most likely, depending on how she had died. He wasn’t sure he could face either. But he had to. He had to know.
He clicked on the scroll button to bring up the final photograph.
Shepherd had been so prepared and braced for something else that it took him a few moments to register what he was looking at. It was a picture of Melisa smiling, her personality fully evident here in a way it had not been within the stiff pose of the passport photograph. It was attached to a scanned copy of a medical registration document showing that Melisa Ana Erroll had qualified as a midwife and was licensed to practice for an international aid organization called ORTUS. The document was simply to register the fact in the United States and qualify her for the company insurance.
He clicked on the scroll bar again but there were no more pictures. He switched back to the file and flicked through to the last page where the autopsy report or death certificate would have been. Nothing — just the insurance paperwork that corresponded to the photograph.
He laughed and cried at the same time, a sob of pure relief as he realized what had happened. The MPD search must have finished trawling through the death registers and moved on to the live files linked to the database. And then it had found her.