Page 49 of Unnatural
What is this all about?
He picked up the phone and called the district where the detectives working the case were stationed. Mark made his request, and an hour and a half later, another delivery person arrived with a second package.
Mark thanked the young man, tipped him, and shut the door, and despite his tired eyes, he was eager to get started poring through more video.
“Where did you come from?” he murmured to the unknown girl, rewinding through time, going farther outside the radius, tracking her to the moment it appeared that she spotted the tall man, jerked to a halt as though in shock, and then raced across the street and followed his path.She didn’t plan to be at that school. She was only there because of him.
Back…back…she’d been walking briskly, looking over her shoulder frequently as though she expected to see someone behind her.Did you think you were being followed?
All his hackles were raised.
“Come on. Bring me somewhere helpful.”Somewhere that will help me learn your name.
He paused the video. There she was, exiting a building. He zoomed in. The Department of Social Services?
“Okay, okay, now we might have something.” He was talking to himself the way he did when there was a possible break in a case. If Laurie had been there, he’d have looked up to see her smiling at him. She knew his tells.
He used a search engine to find the number to the department and then dialed it and waited on hold. He identified himself to the receptionist, who put him through to someone else and then someone else. It was a big department, and lots of people had been working that day…he got the same hopeless answer once, twice, three times.Finally, the fourth person he was transferred to suggested that he speak to a social worker named Chantelle who was a manager and definitely would have been in the office as she didn’t go out on calls.
When the woman named Chantelle answered in a clipped greeting, he once again gave his spiel, with much less enthusiasm than when he’d first given it twenty-five minutes before.
“Hold on, what time?” the social worker asked.
“A few minutes after one.”
“Oh. Yes.” She sighed. “That would have been Autumn Clancy. I’m not sure what you’re calling about, but if it has anything to do with the fact that she stole my files—”
“Hold on, please.” His heart drummed. “You said her name is Autumn Clancy?”
“Yeah. She’s been a thorn in my side for years. But she’s never outright stolen from me. I was surprised, honestly. She’s a pest, but she’s never been a thief.”
“Is Ms. Clancy a client?”
“She was one of my cases for several years. She was put into the system at birth. I took over her case when she was fourteen and placed in a foster home and later adopted.”
The system.Faint alarm bells started ringing. Mark Gallagher was very familiar withthe systemand the myriad ways children could be victimized, whether by those inside or out.
“She was an ADHM baby,” Chantelle was going on. “And she was raised at a hospital just outside the city.”
“ADHM baby,” he murmured.
“Mm-hmm. You’re familiar with ADHM kids, right?”
“I am.” Mark knew as much as the average person did, he supposed. It had been a terrible, tragic time when somany babies were being diagnosed and subsequently passing away from what turned out to be cancer. It was almost too much to watch unfold on the evening news. Of course, the kids affected were children born of addicts, most of whom became wards of the state, so few people who didn’t also live that lifestyle knew anyone personally affected. In short, it was not a suburban problem, so if you lived in the suburbs, you were mostly removed, for good or for bad. Good for obvious though perhaps selfish reasons. Bad because those with the most means to help weren’t helping as much as they might if they’d been confronted by the very real human cost day after day. At first, people were afraid to touch the ADHM kids, even medical workers. Afraid they were contagious. There was one public service announcement after another, especially when a few of the kids survived. Apparently, Autumn Clancy was one, because the woman he’d followed down the street using dozens of cameras looked to be in her early twenties. Which would exactly coincide with when the first reports of ADHM babies being born had occurred.
He hadn’t thought there were very many ADHM survivors left, if any at all.
The system.
Had the tragedy been used to victimize children already suffering?
How is this linked to your case, Autumn Clancy? To the lost?The children he’d been searching for for years who’d been sold into cruel experiments for profit, the “profit” taking any number of diabolical forms. Mark didn’t know for sure if there was a link to the program here because there was no way ADHM kids could ever be expected to do the work they sponsored.
Even so, he had a deep feeling there was a connection that he currently couldn’t see.
“Ms. Rogers, I very much need to speak with you. Can you meet me now?”
“Now, well—”
