Dead Ice

“I promise to behave until you tell me you’ve got all the information you can this afternoon.”

“Okay, then let’s watch this shit and try to find a clue.”

Brent hit the pause button and made it go again. The zombie’s scream cut through the quiet of the room. “Why is she screaming in this one, but not the others?” Larry asked.

“She’s tied up,” I said, “so she could struggle, or scream.”

“So they ordered her to lie down, let herself be tied up, and then removed the orders, and just let her be afraid like anyone,” Larry said.

“We think so,” Manning said.

We went back to watching the films, and I cracked my shields again, enough to try to sense something from the videos. I looked at the films not with my eyes, but with that part of me that could see the colors of Larry and Gillingham’s auras out of the corner of my eyes. The man in the corner ordered the zombie to go down on the man on the bed, and there was a flash of something. I so wouldn’t have wanted that rotted mouth on my junk, but it wasn’t my kink. Either the man was a good actor, which I doubted, or it felt good. It was hard to concentrate on seeing with the corner of my eye when what my main vision was showing me was so damn disturbing. When the white stuff spilled out through a rotted hole in her cheek, Larry got up and went for the door. Leaving sounded really good, but I stayed and tried to learn something useful. But I had trouble concentrating on the man in the corner and his possible tie to the zombie, because what he was ordering the zombie to do was just so terrible and sad.

I finally got close to the screen and put my hand over the man’s image. It was all I could think of to help me concentrate more on him and less on what was happening to the zombie. I felt a little silly with my hand over the screen, but when he gave an order I felt the pulse of it in my hand. I did it a few more times with different zombies, but it was there with all of them.

I had Larry try, but he couldn’t sense anything through the screen. Teresa Gillingham tried, too, but she could only feel the barest energy from all of it. “It’s like static to me.”

“I’m eighty percent sure, maybe ninety, that this guy is the actual animator.”

“Why not a hundred percent?” Manning asked.

“Because I’ve never tried to sense this kind of thing through a computer video, so I’m not going to say a hundred percent until we catch this guy and he really is the animator.”

Manning nodded. “Okay, we’ll never be able to use it in court anyway.”

“We want you there for the live feed,” Brent said.

“Do we, Gillingham? I mean, did I pass your little psychic test?”

She smiled and nodded, looking fresh and happy, as if she hadn’t been watching the same films. Larry had come back in, looking green around the edges. Gillingham might look like a lamb, but there was something a lot scarier in there, or at least a lot stronger than she looked.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we wait,” Brent said.

“Is there anything else we can do?” I asked.

“We have a file of stills for the man in the corner.”

“Anything useful?” I asked.

“He has a tattoo on his left lower arm. It shows in two videos where his sleeves are uncuffed and rolled back enough for us to glimpse it.”

“What is it a tattoo of?” I asked.

“Bring up the pictures, Brent. Maybe you can tell us.”

Brent did his magic with the keyboard and two images showed side by side. It was faded and that bluish ink that some tattoos seem to fade into after a few years. We had one image of a smeared circle and another with a line through the circle. Larry and I both turned our heads trying to decipher it.

“I have no idea what that is,” Larry said, at last.

“Me, either.”

“There’s a birthmark with a mole near it on one of the main leading men in the films, but other than that, no distinguishing marks,” Manning said.

“That’s not a lot to go on,” I said.

“The corner man is dark complected. He could be Hispanic,” Manning said.

“Or Greek, or southern Italian, or part Indian of either ethnic group,” Brent said.

“The report is as helpful as they can make it from the information we have,” she said. She seemed to feel like she needed to defend the FBI to us, or maybe she wasn’t happy with them either.

“It looks like I’m going to be here until after the live feed, at least,” Gillingham said. “So what do you do for fun in this town?” She gave me a look out of those brown eyes that didn’t match the conservative clothes at all.

“I go home to spend time with my fiancé,” I said.

Her lower lip did a slight pout that I was betting would have been more pronounced if she hadn’t been surrounded by other FBI agents.

“And boyfriends,” I said.

She raised eyebrows at me. “Fiancé, boyfriends, and girlfriend, if the rumors are true?” She smiled.

“Yeah, the rumors are true,” I said.

Her smile brightened. “Sounds like fun.”

I laughed. “I’m going home now; everybody be good while I’m gone.”

Manning was watching me and Gillingham with narrowed eyes as I went for the door. Larry was telling her how great the St. Louis Zoo was, and the Arch was a great view. I agreed about the zoo, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t the kind of wildlife Gillingham was wanting to see. I kept walking and didn’t look back. I had all the fun I could stand, and then some, waiting for me at the Circus of the Damned.