After the Golden Age

TEN

CELIA was riding the bus to Smith and Kurchanski when one of Bronson’s lackeys called her cell.

“Bronson wants you here right away.”

“Why? What happened?” Jury selection had been a complicated, contentious process—the lawyers faced not just the problem of finding jurors who didn’t have a strong opinion about Simon Sito, but of finding ones not likely to be intimidated by the presence of the Destructor in the courtroom. It was over now, a jury had been seated, and the trial was due to start. Celia worried that something had happened to stall that.

“He wouldn’t say, he just said he wants to see you immediately. When can you get here?”

She looked at her watch, looked out the window to the route the bus was taking. She was going the wrong way. “Give me half an hour.”

“You can’t get here sooner?” The guy sounded like he was having a seizure. Bronson probably held him personally responsible for not being able to teleport her to his office instantly.

She hung up on him, then called work to tell them she’d be late.

Exactly a half hour later, she knocked on the door of Bronson’s office.

“Who is it?” His voice was rough, exhausted.

“Celia West.”

“Get in here, close the door.” She did so, shutting it quietly behind her, not willing to let go of the doorknob. She wanted to be able to escape.

“Look at this.” Bronson, sitting behind his desk, offered her a sheet of paper.

She stepped forward to take the page from him, moving softly, gently, as if that would calm Bronson and make whatever was wrong less terrible. “What is it?”

“The witnesses the defense wants to call. Read it over.”

The page held a list of about a dozen names, in alphabetical order. Mostly doctors, testifying to Sito’s insanity. The very last name, though, was Celia West.

She flushed, her cheeks burning. She felt like she was going to faint. Or throw up. She set the page down and dropped her arms to her sides, so Bronson wouldn’t see her hands shake.

“Why would they do that?” she said. “What could they possibly—”

“Come on, you know. They’re going to discredit you, that’s what this is about. Discredit every piece of evidence you’ve touched by blowing your story wide open.”

“They can’t, the record’s sealed—” Her voice was shaking, and she wished it wouldn’t.

“They can. Yeah, it’s sealed, but you can bet Sito told his lawyers all about you. All they have to do is bring it up. Even if the testimony gets thrown out, it’s still there. What was it you said? They’re using you to get to your parents.”

Mechanically, she shook her head. She’d leave town. She’d go into hiding. Get Dr. Mentis to induce a coma so she’d sleep through the whole trial—“I can’t do it, I can’t get up there and let them do this.”

“I’ve already lodged a complaint. That’s why we get to look at all this stuff beforehand. You were one of Sito’s more prominent victims. That was what made the papers, and no judge would expect you to face that guy in court. But I thought you should get a heads-up. If this leaks to the press at all, someone else will dig up your record like I did. Consider yourself warned.”

She couldn’t be Celia West without that record, without her parents, without the publicity. She should have figured that out by now. “Thank you.”

White-faced, still shaking, she left and tried to have a normal day.

By midday, someone had leaked the defense’s witness list. It came out in special news flashes all afternoon.

Everyone had an opinion about it. Most of the opinions expressed outrage that the defense would stoop so low. The thought was the defense was going to use what Sito had done to Celia as yet more evidence of his insanity. But they didn’t know the truth.

Mark and Analise, in separate phone calls, told her that no judge would make her testify.

“They can’t do it,” Mark said with inspiring vehemence. “That’s ludicrous. If anything, you should be testifying for the prosecution. Why isn’t Bronson putting you on the stand?”

She couldn’t tell him. She just kept saying, “I don’t know,” and sounding scared. He threatened to rush to her office and take her home then and there, but she talked him out of it. He promised to bring her Thai food for supper instead.

When Analise offered to bring her supper, Celia had to turn her down. “Mark’s bringing food.”

“Hm, good for him. Wait a minute, he’s a cop. Can’t he make the judge keep you from testifying or something?”

“I don’t think it works like that. The DA’s already filed a protest. That’s all we can do.”

“They’ll listen to him, right?”

Wrong. All the defense had to do was present evidence that Celia wasn’t the squeaky-clean victim everybody thought she was, and the judge wouldn’t be able to wait to haul her onto the stand. But she couldn’t tell Analise that any more than she could tell Mark.

“I don’t know.” Feigned ignorance made a hell of a shield to hide behind.

She received her subpoena by courier that afternoon.

She felt grateful that she had work to bury herself in. City Hall had deeds and street plans going back far enough to track down Leyden Park. This was the part of her job she liked, hunting down the elusive clues, tracking her quarry, and pouncing on the target. Since she didn’t have superpowers, she had to settle for battling evil from behind a desk.

The Leyden Park building still existed, but it was vacant. It was located in an industrial neighborhood northeast of town, an area populated by oil refineries and chemical plants. A wasteland. No one would notice an empty warehouse building there. Demolishing it wasn’t worth the expense, since the demand for the land it was on was low. At least until now. The site was marked as one of the areas Mayor Paulson’s superhighway would pass through. His office had recently ordered surveys of the land.

Based on the date, the building had apparently been abandoned, written off as a capital loss and donated to the city, shortly after the accident that had put Sito in the hospital. All Celia had to do was find the original deed, and the original owner who’d hired Sito and sponsored the failed experiment. Never mind that the original deed seemed to be missing.

Celia went to the clerk and recorder’s office and talked to the front-line assistant. The woman looked harried, and Celia tried to be polite.

“I’m trying to trace an original title deed for the DA’s office. It’s for this property.” At least she’d been able to track down the address.

“Have you checked with records?”

“I just came from there. The information seems to be missing, and they thought you might have some other ideas.”

The woman heaved a long-suffering sigh. “It’s probably misfiled. Which means we may never find it … unless you feel like cleaning out the place?”

Celia liked digging for information, but not that much. “What about the property tax records? Even if we can’t find the deed, we should be able to find out who was paying property tax on the building back then, right?”

The woman brightened. “I think I can help you with that.”

In a back corner of the office sat an ancient microfiche machine and a row of filing cabinets. The woman chatted as she opened drawers and scanned file-folder tabs. “They put everything on microfiche about twenty years ago. Now they want everything on computer. Because no one can find the time or energy to transfer the microfiche to digital files, we have to keep both. You’re lucky you’re not trying to find something that got entered during the transition. Then, it could be anywhere.”

Celia waited patiently, but she tapped her foot.

The clerk thumbed through one of the file folders, then thumbed through again. “Hm. It should be right here—”

It was enough to make Celia think that someone had taken the data, that someone was hiding something.

“Oh, here it is!” The clerk pulled a folder from a file bin on top of the cabinet, near the machines. “Someone else was looking at it and didn’t get around to putting it back. Ah, that’s why.”

She showed Celia the label on the file folder, which read CITY URBAN RENEWAL. “That building of yours must be in one of the areas they want to put the highway through. The mayor’s people are in here all the time looking up property assessments. I’ll find your building in a minute.”

She sat down at the reader with a sheet of microfilm and started searching. While grateful for the clerk’s helpfulness, Celia almost offered to work the machine herself; bringing the little squares of film into focus was taking forever.

“There it is,” the woman finally said. She pressed a button, and the machine’s printer whirred and spat out a sheet of paper. The clerk handed the page over proudly.

Celia studied it. She had to read it three times, convinced her eyes weren’t focusing right. There was the right property, Leyden Industrial Park, and the right address, and this was the data for the year that Sito’s accident had happened. Everything was right.

West Corp had paid the site’s property tax for that year.