Intercepts: a horror novel Read online

  As Joe closed the door behind him, Chuck greeted him with a little wave. Across the room, Tariq’s screens were filled with spreadsheets of gas-distribution algorithms, or something. He had earbuds in and seemed to be engrossed in the mindless, day-to-day inventory requirements of the job.

  As Tariq reached toward his ears to remove his earbuds, Joe waved him off. “Just here to talk to Chuck.”

  “Yeah, kid, no one wants your fucking input,” Chuck shouted over his shoulder.

  Tariq smiled and leaned toward his screen to continue his work.

  Joe calmly pulled a chair over to Chuck’s desk and took a seat. “How’re the intercepts coming?” he asked.

  Chuck shrugged. “Not bad. It’s mostly slurring and mumbling now. HQ’s gonna have to scrub it to pull out actual intel. There was a bit of an abnormality a little while ago, though. Some of the stuff came out crystal.” He leaned forward at his desk and clicked around on his monitor until a transcript showed up. “Weird stuff. She kept saying ‘I don’t remember’ as if she were actually having a conversation with someone. Talked about being in darkness, or something. Super clear audio. I was gonna flag it and—”

  “Look, print out the transcripts and I’ll review them later. I just need something before I go.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I have a research request.”

  “Case number?” Chuck picked up a pen and a pad of sticky-notes.

  “Log it under today’s case. 10598.”

  “Subject to be researched?”

  Joe glanced over at Tariq one last time, making sure he wasn’t listening. Then he turned back to Chuck. “Katherine Gerhard.”

  The old timer’s hand froze. Joe watched the well-worn wrinkles on Chuck’s face draw tighter as he raised his head. Their eyes met.

  “Kate?”

  Joe didn’t respond.

  Chuck’s face now scrunched up in confusion. “How in the hell is Kate wrapped up in the Victor Aminov case?”

  “I wanna see inside her computer. Just log the research request under the open case file. No one will check. No one will know.”

  “Oh, come on, Joe. You know I can’t just—”

  “She killed herself, Chuck.”

  Chuck bowed his head. He didn’t speak. He didn’t register any shock or surprise, just sympathy coupled with discomfort. He obviously had known — everyone at work must have known — but didn’t know what to say.

  Joe took Chuck’s awkward silence as an opportunity to press. “You’ve eaten her cooking. You’ve been to our house. She considered you a friend.”

  “Oh, gee, come on… “

  “She killed herself. I need to know why.”

  The two men looked at each other.

  Finally, Chuck’s eyes turned downward. He looked at his belly, heaving underneath the red flowers of his Hawaiian shirt, and released a sad sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe in a week or two, Joe. But I feel Da Man’s breath on the back of my fucking neck right now.”

  “You and I both know that this ain’t the first time someone has used the resources at our disposal to spy on an ex-wife.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking ‘bout.”

  Joe’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched into a threatening glare.

  Chuck gulped. “I never snooped on Carol.”

  “I believe you. And I’m sure if I were to open up some old case files, there’d be no trace of someone on my staff looking up emails between Carol and her old college fling. In fact, I can downright guarantee that no one would find evidence of that kinda shit in there, right?”

  Chuck bit his lip. The silence sat between them. Finally, Chuck released a resigned breath. “Whaddya need, Joe?”

  “Just recent stuff. Last couple days. Emails, phone records. Crime scene reports of her death would be great. If she had any doctor’s visits in the last week, I’d like to see the physician’s notes. Whatever the system can dredge up. And I’d like them tonight, please.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Joe patted him on the back. “I owe you, Chuck.”

  “Yeah. You do.”

  With that, Joe turned and walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER 17

  The alarm chirped as Joe stepped into his house.

  Every light had been turned on, including the TV, which loudly blared out a news broadcast.

  Joe went to the alarm pad and entered his combination.

  “Riley?” he called. “I’m home.”

  He wondered if she could hear him over the loud TV. He walked over and turned it off. The house didn’t go quiet yet. The stereo also blasted at full volume. He stepped over and turned that off too, at which point he heard another noise. The radio in the kitchen was also on high, only not playing music — it had been set to static.

  A knot of worry twisted up inside Joe’s stomach. Riley had constructed a wall of sound throughout the house, apparently in some attempt to block out something else she was hearing.

  He walked toward the kitchen, passing the hallway. A figure caught the corner of his eye. A woman moved toward him from the shadows, a knife clutched in her hand. Joe jerked to a halt and spun around, too startled to even allow a scream to form in his lungs.

  The brief moment of terror passed as he realized who it was.

  “Riley?” he said as his eyes made sense of the fact that this frail, waif-like person who stood before him was, in fact, his daughter.

  Although she held the knife up, right at chest level, her movements lacked force or purpose. She just sort of drifted in his direction, stumbling around on legs that were too exhausted to support her. She stopped moving forward and instead just stared at him with glazed eyes that narrowed in either fear or confusion, Joe couldn’t tell which.

  “Riley? Are you okay?” he said. He put up his hands as he stepped toward her, the same way he would when facing an unknown dog. “Put the knife down.”

  Her head cocked to the side and her mouth hung open. Her eyes studied Joe. They darted around in her head, zeroing in on his face and then the rest of him. The entire time, she never relaxed her grip on the handle of the knife.

  “Are you real?” she finally asked.

  “I’m real, sweet-heart.”

  “How do I know?”

  Joe thought for a moment. He kept his hands up as he slowly advanced on her. “Remember when it was, um, Christmas? You were ‘bout seven, I think. I bought you every Nerf gun in the store. All of ‘em. We took every pillow in the house and built these huge forts all about. Everywhere. And then we shot at each other for hours.”

  Riley’s eyes continued watching him. Her face remained blank.

  He continued, “Your mom had gone out to help your grandparents with something. When she came home, though…” he paused to smile at the memory. “She seemed so mad. We had trashed the house. She stomped around, scolding us. But it was all a diversion. She just wanted us to drop our weapons as she grabbed this battery-powered, Gatling Gun lookin’ thing. Then she just unleashed on us. Chased us into the bedroom and pummeled us with little Nerf darts. God, that was one hell-of-a fun day. Wasn’t it?”

  The muscles in Riley’s face, which had been so tight, finally loosened. “I miss mom.”

  “I do too.”

  Clunk. The knife dropped from Riley’s hand and fell to the floor.

  Joe stepped toward her. They wrapped their arms around each other and held on tight. He could feel her take heaving breaths as the tears flowed freely from her eyes and soaked into his shirt. She sobbed a silent, painful sob. He put his hand on her head and held her close. Secure and safe.

  “We’ll get you help, Riley. It’ll be okay.”

  ***

  Joe knelt beside his daughter, holding her hand, as she sat at the head of the dining table. He motioned over to the doorway where Hannah stood. She smiled warmly at Riley, but she also kept her distance, waiting to be invited to the table.

  “Hannah has degrees in psychology and psychiatry, as
well as medicine,” Joe said.

  “Double Ph.D. with an M.D. to boot,” Hannah said. “Asian parents are a bitch to impress, what can I say?”

  Riley replied with a thin smile.

  It seemed to be all the invitation that Hannah needed. She took a single firm step into the room then paused by the table for a moment. “Let’s go ahead and flush all my amazing, awesome, badass academic achievements. I’m here as a friend. Is it cool if we just sit and chat?”

  Riley’s head bobbed in a little nod.

  Hannah used that nod as the final permission to slowly walk over and take a seat at the table. “God, I haven’t seen you in forever. You’re like a real, grown, human-thing now. Remember your sixth birthday party at this house? I got you a little robot. It could, like, lift things and stuff. I thought it was super-cool. What kid doesn’t want a flipping robot? But even for a six-year-old, you seemed totally unimpressed. Whatever happened to that little bugger?”

  Riley looked down at the table. A grin cracked her face. “I walked it off the counter. It fell and never worked right again.”

  “What?! That thing cost a hundred bucks.”

  “It wasn’t a very good toy,” Riley said, shaking her head and letting out the barest hints of a laugh.

  “It was an awesome toy. It was a fucking robot.”

  “It just walked and made beeping sounds.”

  “Yeah. Like I said — awesome.”

  The two women looked at each other and smiled.

  Hannah threw up her hands. “Fuck it. I don’t know what kids want. I shoulda gotten you a Barbie or something.”

  “Yuck.”

  “How about a machete? Are girls into machetes these days?”

  “Now that woulda been awesome.”

  “Next year. For your high school graduation.”

  “I graduate this year.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re old. I guess I am too.”

  They sat silently for a moment.

  Joe stayed crouched by Riley’s side. His gaze glanced from Riley to Hannah, but neither made eye contact with him, opting instead to look down at the table and smile to themselves. It was then he realized that Hannah seemed to be purposefully mirroring Riley’s posture. The slouch in the seat, the downcast eyes, the hands rigidly clasped on the table.

  It felt like a good time for him to join in as well. He rose from his crouch and pulled out a chair. He began to lower himself into the seat.

  “Joe, can we have a minute? Just us gals?” Hannah asked. Her voice was pleasant, as if she was just making an off-hand suggestion, but when he looked up at her face, he saw her eyes motion him to the door.

  He glanced over at Riley. She didn’t protest.

  “Um, yeah. Yeah, of course,” Joe said as he stood.

  He gave Riley a little pat on the hand and then walked out into the living room.

  He swung the door mostly shut but left a small crack.

  “All the way,” Hannah called out. “I wanna hear a click.”

  With a sigh, he pulled the dining room door behind him until it snapped closed. He stood in the living room by himself. The muffled conversation from the dining room drifted through the closed door and into the silent house. He knelt down and held his ear close to the door’s paneling.

  “Look, when I say we’re friends, I mean it,” he heard Hannah say. “You can trust me. Anything you tell me, I won’t judge. There may be things you don’t want me to tell your father. I can’t make any promises, but I’m totally open to discussing it and seeing where we end up. Is that all cool with you?”

  There was a pause. Joe could only assume that Riley nodded in agreement.

  Hannah continued, “Please just level with me — are you on any drugs? No judgment. Honesty is the best way I can help, and believe me, I’ve done some shit in my day. Anything?”

  “No.”

  “And I’m not just talking hard stuff. Are you using pot?”

  “Not in a few months.”

  “Prescription meds, like oxy?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know what else kids are into these days… Shrooms? Molly? ADHD meds? Sniffing glue?”

  “No.”

  “Alcohol? Are you drinking?”

  “Sometimes at parties. On weekends. But not now.”

  “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “No.”

  “How’s your appetite? What have you had to eat today?”

  “Nothing.”

  “None of this is uncommon considering what you went through yesterday. It’s okay to grieve, Riley.”

  The voice that replied was strangely forceful. “It’s not grief.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  Riley didn’t answer.

  Joe pressed his ear harder against the door. The house was so quiet he could hear the hum of his Wi-Fi router. He could hear his own breathing and the scratching sound his clothes made as he adjusted his position. But he couldn’t hear what Riley was saying, if anything.

  Finally, he slowly straightened himself, trying hard not to make any noise that might betray his eavesdropping. Then, one gentle step at a time, he tiptoed from the room.

  He went to his bedroom and closed the door.

  Then, he sat at his desk and logged into his computer. He opened the home security app. The feeds from various security cameras tiled onto his screen. A fish-eye, overhead view of Hannah and Riley sitting at the dining table came up. The camera had been hidden inside the screw-cap that held the dining room’s light fixture to the ceiling. When the crew installed the security system, oh-so-many years ago, Joe had instructed them to hide every single camera lens. He didn’t want his wife and daughter to know they were being watched.

  A twinge of guilt passed through Joe as he watched the conversation unfold in the dining room. He knew Riley assumed it was private. But he was her father, and she was suffering. To Joe, safety always trumped privacy.

  He plugged a headset into the speakers.

  “And this woman you’re seeing…” Hannah said, leaning forward. In the short length of time it took Joe to go to his room and load up his computer, Hannah had evidently steered the conversation right into the meat of Riley’s problems. “… have you ever seen her before?”

  “No,” Riley said. Her voice quivered in the response.

  Joe could see that Riley’s head was angled in Hannah’s general direction, but she seemed to be focusing more toward the seat beside Hannah.

  Hannah noticed too. She glanced to the empty seat, but quickly returned her focus to Riley. “So, this woman isn’t anyone you know? A friend’s mom? A teacher? A neighbor?”

  “No.”

  Hannah nodded. “When was the first time you ever saw this woman?”

  “Yesterday,” Riley said. “On the drive here.” She continued staring off to the side.

  Joe leaned forward. He examined the area of the screen that Riley’s eyes fixated on. The only light in the dining room came from the overhead fixture. It shone down brightly on the table and on the crowns of Hannah and Riley’s heads, but the rest of the dining room stayed dim and shrouded in shadows. It was designed that way, of course, Joe realized. It made for a more intimate dining experience.

  “Did you ever see this woman, or someone like her, in maybe a dream?” Hannah asked.

  Riley didn’t answer. She visibly gulped as she continued staring to Hannah’s side.

  Hannah seemed to stiffen in her seat. By now, it was all-too-obvious that Riley’s focus was not on Hannah, but on something else in the room.

  “Riley?”

  Riley’s breaths came heavier now, but her head stayed fixated on that empty seat.

  “Do you see something next to me?”

  Riley’s answer was a whisper, said quickly as if it were snatched from her lips by the wind. “Yes.”

  Joe stared at the area of the table beside Hannah. The table wasn’t exactly centered in the room, and the overhead light didn’t particularly catch th
e seat to Hannah’s right. The light threw shadows across the chair and made it blend in a bit with the floor. The more Joe stared, the more his eyes strained, the more that the shadows in that area of the table seemed to swirl and move. The feed had the slightest delay. It caused a hiccup. A small glitch in the unfocused background images.

  He leaned even closer.

  The shadows seemed to coalesce. Joe’s eyes went wide and the breath became trapped in his throat. The faintest outlines of a pale figure emerged from the blackness.

  On the screen, Hannah pivoted in her chair. She looked toward that ghostly, pale form who seemed to shift and stare right back at Hannah.

  But Hannah had no reaction.

  She simply moved her head around and scanned the darkness for a moment. Then, without an extra breath or twitch, Hannah turned back toward Riley.

  “Can you describe to me what you’re seeing?” Hannah said with all of her professional calmness.

  The steadiness of Hannah’s voice made Joe take a calming breath of his own. He blinked his eyes. The figure in the chair was gone, or perhaps it had never been there to begin with. A trick of light being caught on an outdated camera system.

  To be sure, he scrolled the file back a few seconds.

  He looked again.

  No figure. No shadow. No nothing. Perhaps just some wood-grain catching the light wrong.

  Joe smiled to himself as he rubbed his eyes.

  “Fuck man,” he said. “Keep it together.”

  He took the earbuds out of his ears and leaned back in his seat.

  Ding! — his body jerked at the sharp sound of his “new message” alert. He didn’t realize how quiet his house had been that such a common sound could startle him so.

  With another embarrassed grin at his own jumpiness, he pulled out his phone and checked the message. The smile immediately vanished from his lips.

  “The requested files are on the server. — Chuck”

  Joe leaned toward his computer. He opened the remote server, entered all the info for the multi-step verification process, and logged in.

  There it was — an entire folder labeled “KATHERINE GERHARD.”

  He opened the folder. He read the names of the various subfolders.