The Nearest

6

Kate found a small motel where the clerk was happy to take cash up front, and for a modest surcharge allowed her to check in without showing ID. In her room, she sat on the bed staring down at the torn carpet, trying to decide who she could trust to be her allies, now that Chris had been ruled out. She drew up a list of twelve names, but when she thought about each one seriously, her confidence began to wane. It was not that any of them had failed to be loyal and supportive in the past, but when she pictured the actual conversation she would need to have with them to enlist their help, the idea that they would back her seemed preposterous. Each time she played out the scenario in her head, every trace of the old friendships she was relying on simply faded away, and the encounter ended with a cold stare.

More than friends, she needed evidence. And since no epidemiologist was going to drop everything and come to her aid, she needed to start with testimony, from as many people as possible, showing that the symptoms she’d observed in her own family had been seen elsewhere.

Without knowing the mode of transmission it was hard to say how the disease might have spread, but the neighborhood around Natalie’s house was the obvious place to begin. Kate left the motel and set off on foot, taking care to avoid intersections where she knew there would be cameras.

When she arrived, the house itself was still cordoned off. She started with the neighbors on the right, but no one was home; it was only four doors down that she finally got an answer. Her knocking summoned an elderly man who was clearly not pleased to have been woken from sleep—but then, chastened by the gravity of the subject, he invited her in.

“I know you’ve spoken to my colleagues already,” Kate explained apologetically, “but if there’s anything else you remember from that time, it could be important.”

“Like what?” the man asked. “I never heard Natalie and Rob fighting. The kids could be noisy; you know how girls that age screech sometimes? But that was just playful. It never sounded like someone was hurting them.”

Kate said, “Apart from the family, has there been anything unusual you’ve noticed going on in the area?”

He pondered the question, but shook his head.

“Anyone acting out of the ordinary? Maybe a stranger, maybe not. Maybe even someone you thought you knew well.”

He ran his fingertips across his forehead, disconcerted by the apparent suggestion that some neighbor he’d joked with over the fence might have stabbed this family to death.

“Anyone acting out of character?” Kate pressed him.

“No,” he said firmly. But with the stakes seemingly so high, perhaps he felt compelled to err on the side of caution. Using the murders as a pretext for her questions was going to make it harder to get an honest response.

She worked her way down the street then back, sketching a map of the area as she broadened her search. Having missed her appointment at Roma Street and trashed her phone, she suspected that her badge number would have been revoked by now, so whenever people answered the door with their phone in their hand, she made an excuse and withdrew, lest they TrueCop-ped her and made things awkward.

By early evening, she’d conducted thirty-seven interviews. She was thinking of taking a break and grabbing some food when a door opened and before she’d even raised her badge, the middle-aged woman standing in front of her asked anxiously, “Have you found him?”

“I’m afraid not,” Kate extemporised. Whoever the woman was talking about, that was almost certainly true. “But I’d like to ask you for a few more details, if I could.”

“Of course.”

Kate identified herself and followed the woman into the house. In the living room, there were family photos: mother, father and teenage son.

“Is anyone else at home right now?” Kate asked.

“No, my husband’s in the city. He’s still looking for Rowan. Game arcades, McDonald’s… he’s got no money, but we don’t know where else he’d go to pass the time.”

Kate glanced again at a photo of the boy. The face looked familiar; he was one of the missing persons whose cases she’d been reviewing when the Grimes murders took over.

“Before Rowan went missing,” she asked, “did you notice any change in his behavior?”

The woman frowned. “Yes! I made a point of that to the other officer!”

Kate nodded apologetically. “I know it’s frustrating to have to repeat yourself, but part of the process is for me to try to come at this with fresh eyes, and make sure we haven’t missed anything.”

“All right.” The woman shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Kate wished she could remember her name, but there’d been more than thirty files.

“So can you tell me, in as much detail as possible: In what way did your son seem different?”

“He was so cold to us,” the woman replied. “He might have had his moods before—he might have been embarrassed or irritated when I said something that a thirteen-year-old boy doesn’t want to hear from his mother—but the day before he left, it was like he had no heart at all.”

“You mean he was deliberately cruel?” Kate asked.

“No. It wasn’t that I’d annoyed him and he was trying to be hurtful; it was as if I just didn’t matter to him, one way or the other.”

If Rowan had caught the disease that had afflicted Natalie’s family, what was the route of transmission? Kate confirmed with the boy’s mother that he’d attended the high school where Natalie and her husband had taught, though he hadn’t been in either of their classes, and it was hard to see how an airborne virus could have affected him while sparing most of the other students.

“Have you spoken to the families of Rowan’s friends?” Kate asked.

“Of course.”

“And have any of their children undergone personality shifts?”

“Not that anyone admitted.” The woman hesitated. “I don’t believe that Rowan was taking drugs, but I’m past the point where I’m certain of anything. So if you think that’s a possibility, and it could have something to do with the reason he’s missing, I don’t want you ruling it out just because my own instincts say otherwise.”

“All right.” Kate didn’t like misleading her, but her own hypothesis was hardly more reassuring.

On her way back to the motel, she bought a small notepad with Wi-Fi only, then she used the motel’s internet connection to download a gallery of missing persons whose names and photos had been made public. Rowan da Silva was there, and most of the other people Kate recalled from her review. At least she hadn’t been listed herself, yet.

In the next three days, as she spiraled out from the epicenter, she encountered twelve families with sons or daughters, husbands or wives who’d gone missing. In four cases, the person had fled without anyone noticing warning signs, but in the others, the distressed loved ones claimed that the event had been preceded by a change in behavior or demeanor that made them feel as if their relationship had disintegrated, for no discernible reason. “That morning, I swear he looked at me as if he was a trapped animal and I was a zookeeper,” one woman told Kate. “Maybe he woke up and decided that our whole marriage had been a mistake, and it took him another two days to find the courage to walk out. But two days before, he’d either been as happy as I’d ever seen him, or he was the best actor in the world.”

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Kate knocked on a door and found herself talking to a woman who spoke with a forced cheeriness and couldn’t quite look her in the eye. She had no missing family members, or any information to offer about suspicious activities in the neighborhood; she just seemed discomfited by Kate’s presence. Either she had a drug lab and a fresh corpse in her living room, or Kate’s time was up.

She found a café with Wi-Fi and did a quick search. Authorities had expressed concern about a missing police officer, Detective-Sergeant Katherine Shahripour (pictured). It wasn’t exactly the kind of news that would muscle its way into everyone’s feeds; she suspected that maybe one in fifty people in the city would see it. But the woman she’d spooked would have reported the encounter. It would no longer be safe to keep door-knocking the area.

Kate wasn’t ready to come in from the cold. Eight families with stories of sudden alienation wouldn’t cut it; after all, the original investigators had written that off as being down to the usual causes: teenage angst, midlife crises, drug problems, infidelity. At the very least, she needed to bring in some of the afflicted in person, fleshing out her collection of hearsay with actual subjects. Reza might have talked his way out of the emergency department, but if she could drag half a dozen of these fractured families, reunited, into the spotlight, that might be the start of a proper investigation, and the first step on the road to a cure.

As she left the café, she tried to picture a future where everything was normal again. But all she could think of was Reza’s bizarre charade, and the husk of her son lying in his cot like a cheap plastic doll. She lowered her sights, and made do instead with memories. The days before, when they had still been themselves, remained as vivid to her as ever. She would hold her feelings for them in that vault, and keep working to find a way to revive them.