CHAPTER 3 2

I guess I did fine because they issued me my new badge, which was now in its place in my ear lobe, and my new gun, an Eliminator series Mark VII double action over and under pulse pistol. The gun now lay next to my chest under my jacket in the shoulder holster fresh from supply. I was one of them, now. I was a Sweeper. Well, those who were one did not call them that, though that’s what they do. They sweep things up. Fix messes. Clean up the town. Mop ‘em up. All those great adjectives now applied to me. With the title came twice the pay. Twice the pay meant I could provide for my wife and daughter. For a second I realized how many were not able to provide for their families at all. Half of the population was unemployed, on the government dole, and a lean dole it was. Then I swept my feelings of sorrow away because the government had found ways to eliminate poverty; it was just that the people didn’t follow the rules.

Children didn’t just come along any more; you had to earn one. Most couples never made the list. The government figured you were less likely to have a starving, snot-nosed kid if you weren’t allowed to. There were still plenty of illegal births, but most were terminated before they got that far. Everyone was provided for. They could wait in the food lines and fill their bellies; sleep in their assigned apartment and if they were lucky go to their assigned job.

Finally the train let me off just across the river. I walked through the streets between the rows of fifty-story cinder block apartment buildings with their lower level sidewalk shops and corner delis and made a right on Fordham, a left on Jackson and then straight up Bangor to the old homestead. I used my magnetic pass to get by the electronic security system and onto the elevator that took me up to 17 and home sweet home. Kirby would be waiting, dinner close to ready. Elise would either be on the Net in the family room or playing quietly in her room with one of her dolls. I would have my share of kisses that night, I was sure.

As I entered the apartment I noticed right away it was too quiet. It was too dark, too wrong. “Kirby?” I called from the doorway. “Elise? Daddy’s home.”

Nothing.

“Kirby, honey, what’s going on? Another brown-out?” I started for the front room in the nearly pitch dark of the apartment and tripped over something. My fall left me face down on the coffee table; blood started seeping out of my nose after colliding with the prefabricated plastic top. I did curse then, wondering what toy it was that Elise had left in wait for me this time. “I swear, young lady, this is the last…” I smelled it then. Blood. Not just mine but there was more. There was too much blood. I had worked too many years as a soldier and a cop not to recognize the sickening, coppery smell of fresh blood.

I fumbled for the light switch after righting myself from my belly flop onto the table and then saw what it was I had stumbled over. It wasn’t a toy, but my wife. Now, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t think about little Elise for the next few minutes. Nearly out of my mind, I first drew my gun, checked my wife’s pulse with my trembling fingers on the side of her slick neck and then it really hit. She was dead. I sat weeping at her side for a moment, letting my pistol drop to the floor. The whole world was spinning and I wanted to scream in anger. But Elise came to mind, and I had to find her.

I checked every room, silently making my way with the gun drawn, clearing the apartment as I had been trained to do at the Academy. I simultaneously hoped to find no one, and hoped to find someone who would pay. During that strange, unending, maddening few minutes before the Emergency Service Techs arrived with the gurney and the resuscitation equipment that would not work, I cried, screamed, sat holding my wife on the floor and called for Elise who was nowhere to be found. When the Techs arrived I must have put up a struggle because they had to sedate me. I came to sitting on one of the second-hand kitchen chairs staring over at a fellow MP who had his typical little notebook flipped open near the middle, a stubby pencil in his hands. I had been talking, I guess, but I can’t remember the in-between time from when the Techs got there and I “woke up” at the kitchen table in the middle of the line of questioning.

The apartment was crawling with your basic homicide unit, dozens of MP’s doing their duty, giving it the good Metropolitan Protectorate all for the cause. A lost cause, I might add. Only one out of a thousand homicides ever got solved. It was the times. The MP’s didn’t have the manpower to even begin solving the more than 1,000 suspicious deaths that happened each day in the sprawling city with its wall-to-wall people, not even close. Serial killers lived long, productive lives in those streets.

“So, you checked the apartment and found no traces of your daughter, Lieutenant?” The detective asked me as I ran my shaky hands over my face, slumped down in the chair. In spite of his efforts I could read the suspicion in his face. There was no code of honor or automatic thinking to make him believe it hadn’t been me who had killed my wife and disposed of my young daughter in a manner that would explain her disappearance. I knew I was still in shock, but I had to try and help in any way I could. He didn’t come right out and accuse me. After all, I outranked him. In the end, there wasn’t much to tell and the detective probably knew that. The only evidence they could find was my wife’s body.

“Elise? Where is Elise?” I was pretty much out of it still, but I remember it like it was yesterday. The realization that your wife is dead and your five-year-old daughter is missing kind of gets burned into the old gray matter between your ears. I’ll never forget that night.

“Lieutenant Hatcher, sir, your daughter is missing,” the detective said as patiently as he could. He didn’t hide the tone of his voice, as if he were saying, “You know where she is, don’t you?” If I had been anyone else he would have slapped me back into reality and given up. If I hadn’t been an MP they wouldn’t have been there at all. The Techs would have come and picked up the body, mopped up the mess and called it a day. Having a little rank, no matter how new, and being “one of them” was cause for the establishment to at least go through the motions, though the outcome would be the same. “Your daughter is missing, sir,” he said once more.

“I know,” I finally admitted. “I know.”