Page 36 of Go Now
‘Yeah I guess it is.We can apply geographical parameters to a search for violent offenders, people recently released after long sentences, people who’ve been interviewed for related offences.’
‘You don’t sound very pleased.’
She looked at him.‘I’m just dog-tired,’ she said.‘And I’ve got this weird kind of dread feeling.As if something bad is about to happen, any minute now.’
‘That’s probably because you’re so tired.’
‘Might be.’
Her phone buzzed with an incoming message.It came from a colleague in the Maine office.She clicked on it. It was a YouTube clip, shakily filmed with bad sound.Kate instantly recognised the scene: the boulevard outside Caldwell’s apartment.
‘Oh jeez.I was right.’
They watched as the ugly scene unfolded, in an order they didn’t recognise.Caldwell shouted that he’d just had surgery right before Marcus and Kate jumped on him. Whilst he was struggling on the floor, he shouted that he couldn’t breathe, something he just hadn’t said at the time.The final frame was Marcus shoving his hand up to block the camera lens, as if he was about to go and commit further brutality.
After the clip ended, they stood there for a moment or two, numb with shock.Caldwell’s arrest hadn’t exactly been a smooth and seamless procedure.But it was nothing compared to this confected, doctored debacle.The clip had 8,000 views, a figure going up as they looked at the screen.
Marcus’s phone rang.
He stiffened in response to an angry invective from whoever had called him.‘No, ma’am.I can see that, ma’am.’
It wasn’t hard to guess who’d called.It was Assistant Director Winters.Kate could hear her voice.Winters never raised it.Or rather, she never had, until now.
‘It didn’t happen like that, ma’am.He resisted arrest but we subdued him with the minimum of force.And he never said he couldn’t breathe.Someone’s gotten creative with the AI.’
‘It wasn’t the easiest arrest; he jumped over a balcony to evade us and he resisted in front of an angry crowd.But I can assure you we didn’t put a foot wrong.’
‘I appreciate that, ma’am, thank you.’
He hung up, a look in his eyes that Kate had never seen before.He looked defeated, out of options.
‘She’s pissed, seriously pissed,’ Marcus said.‘But she’s backing us.Tech team’s going to look at the clip.Provided it demonstrates evidence of editing, they’ll issue a strong rebuttal.’He took a deep breath and shook his head, genuinely upset.‘She shouldn’t need to double-check, though.Why doesn’t she trust us?’
‘Look at it from her perspective, Marcus.Winters has got a whole chain of people she’s accountable to, going right up to the Attorney General.She has to be able to show that she’s done her due diligence.It doesn’t matter what she thinks or feels, or even knows.She has to show that proof.Besides which, we’re not exactly covered in glory, are we?’
‘What did we do wrong?’
‘Uh, hello?Caldwell’s front door?’
‘Oh.That.’He sighed.‘Normally, a thing like that.Getting chewed-out by the boss.It wouldn’t matter.But the investigation’s going nowhere.And I can’t offload to Cheryl about it, because she’s… she’s got too much of her own stuff going on, and she doesn’t seem to want to let me in beyond a certain point, either, and that hurts, Vee.It just hurts.Why has everything gone to shit?’
Her partner looked so down and crumpled in that instant, that it seemed the most natural thing in the world to give him a quick hug.They held onto each other for a couple of seconds, if that.
‘Oh, I-’
They sprang apart as if they’d been doing something wrong.Chen was standing in the doorway, eyes wide with shock.
‘I didn’t mean to, er…’
She didn’t finish her sentence, just darted away down the corridor.Kate called out to her, but she didn’t look back.
Marcus sighed.‘Today is the gift that keeps on giving.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
August 15th, 1983.That was when David Sterling fell in love. A savagely hot, endless summer, when it seemed as if the entire adult population of the Five Boroughs retreated into darkened rooms and the streets belonged exclusively to the rats and to the kids.Through the breathless oven-heat, wearing just his jeans and sneakers, ten-year-old David rode his bike all around the neighbourhood, pausing only to buy popsicles from the Korean corner store. He still remembered the smells of that summer: his kid brother’s sweaty scalp, the sour, fruity-shitty smell of the slowly-cooking trash on the sidewalk, the so-called ‘grown-up lemonade’ his mom and his aunts sipped all night long, past midnight, growing louder and more argumentative with every glass.David watched them.He watched everyone.He didn’t say much. Sometimes people threw stuff at him and called him ‘weird kid’.But all he was doing was watching.
The heat made people crazy.His grandmother said that. In the building on the corner, a skinny man with a purple mark across his face stood all day, all night, bare-chested at his window, bellowing hoarsely.He was mad because he’d been born with that purple stain, David’s Grandma said.The man’s mother had committed a sin, and God gave her a purple baby as a punishment, a purple that couldn’t be washed off with soap.Nobody knew what he was shouting at the window all day, or if they did, they didn’t care.They just wanted the shouting to stop.
