flash of nose wrinkle, slight upper lip raise—disgust at the memory
“How didn’t you see the guy before then? Body’s pretty obvious.”
Barry shook his head. “Look, I got out of the cab and walked around the front of the truck, so the truck was blocking my view. I wasn’t looking all around or anything.”
“What about in the side mirror when you were backing up the truck.”
“Man, then I’m looking at the edge of the truck and the loading dock. I’m not taking in the whole scene.”
People can often miss things that are right in front of them. Their minds are somewhere else, and they’re moving without even seeing their surroundings. You could walk right past your brother in a crowd and never even see him. Still, Laughton didn’t love it. The body was pretty obvious.
“Do you know the guy?” Laughton said. “Look familiar?”
micro-expression—sadness—lying?
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so, or you know?”
“No,” Barry said, shaking his head. “I don’t know him.”
Laughton waited a beat, giving Barry a chance to add something, to change his answer. But instead, the deliveryman covered his expression by taking another drag of his vape.
“Where do you live?” Laughton said.
“Charleston.”
“And you deliver anywhere else?”
“The whole preserve. Beaufort, Georgetown. This is my last stop.”
“Can I see inside the truck?”
Barry nodded. “Sure.” He led Laughton around the front of the truck, up the stairs to the loading dock, and pulled the back of the truck open. It was empty, and cold from the refrigeration unit. Laughton’s footsteps echoed as he walked in. There were a few leaves of lettuce crushed into the floor of the truck. A hand truck was bungeed to the wood slats along the inside left wall. Laughton stepped back onto the loading dock, and he noticed that the body wasn’t visible from there. Barry wouldn’t have seen it while unloading the truck.
“You’re heading back to Charleston now?”
Barry nodded. “Yeah.”
That micro-expression bothered the chief. People generally didn’t show sadness over the death of a stranger, but it could have just as easily been sadness that he couldn’t help. But if he had been involved in the murder, Laughton would have expected fear or anger. “All right,” Laughton said. “We might need to contact you again. Can we get your info?”
Barry took his phone out of his back pocket, and Laughton tapped his phone against it. There was the confirming buzz of receipt. Then Barry grabbed the canvas strap hanging from the truck’s back door and pulled the door shut with a clang.
Laughton hopped down from the loading dock, joining Mathews as Barry locked up the back of the truck.
“Carl was living over in Crofton,” Mathews said. “Whole town to himself, except Sam something-or-other. I think they were living together.”
“Shit,” Laughton said. He closed his eyes and sighed. “We better go talk to him in case he decides it’s time for a road trip.” He opened his eyes and tried to calculate if he needed to let his counterparts in the other inhabited towns of the preserve know the situation. There was nothing the chiefs of police in Beaufort and Georgetown could do. Chris Ontero, the police commissioner in Charleston, was technically not his superior, but as the head of the police in the preserve’s one large city, the commissioner was the face of preserve law enforcement. He would have to talk to the press when this went wide.
“You sure you’re okay, Chief?”
“No,” Laughton said. “Just give me a moment.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called the Charleston Police Department. As it rang he said to Mathews, “Come on. You’ve got driver’s seat.” He headed for his truck while Mathews told his partner to wait for the ambulance. The delivery truck pulled away from the building, Barry leaning back in his seat in the cab.
The CPD system shuffled the chief around until he got a voice mail recording. He didn’t want to leave the news on the phone—he didn’t know if a secretary answered the commissioner’s voice mail—so he just left a message asking the commissioner to call him. He stepped up into the passenger seat, texting his wife with one hand, the auto-suggest anticipating each word, allowing him to just tap: “I’ll be home late.” Either it was something he texted often enough for the phone’s memory to fill in the blanks or it was such a common thing to say—thousands of people always late, always apologizing—that it was in the phone’s programming. He dropped his phone in the cup holder, and let his head fall back on the headrest and closed his eyes. If only the pain would stop.
Mathews jumped into the driver’s seat, pushing the power button before he’d even gotten the door closed. “Battery’s a little low, boss.”
“It’ll be fine,” Laughton said without opening his eyes. His phone buzzed twice. It was probably his wife responding to his text. He didn’t bother to get the phone out to check.
Then something in his head clicked on. Timing, he thought. He put down the window, and called, “Dunrich.”
Dunrich looked up from his phone, and then jogged over to the truck. “Boss?” he said.
“Find out how often they take the garbage out,” the chief said. “Give us some idea of how long the body might have been sitting here.”
“Okay.”
“And ask the other employees about strangers.”
“Right.”
Laughton raised the window. He should have thought of the timing question when he was interviewing Larry and Ryan. This didn’t bode well, if his mind was this fuzzy. What else had he forgotten to ask?
“Ready?” Mathews said.
The chief nodded.
Mathews punched “Crofton” into the GPS, and the truck managed a U-turn, the whole cab bouncing as they went through a pothole. The junior officer, mercifully, didn’t say anything.
It was just falling dusk as they made their way through Crofton. The front lawns of all the houses had gone to hay, about knee-high, and there wasn’t a single electric light on anywhere. Even the streetlights were dark. The robots must have figured, Why waste the bulbs?, and took them with them. Otherwise, it was hard to know the town was deserted. The houses had been inhabited recently enough that they’d yet to show signs of ruin. A United States flag hung from a flagpole in front of one home. Solar panels remained on many roofs, harder to take away than lightbulbs. Porch furniture waited loyally for sitters that would never come. Laughton could never decide if the robots had afforded humans so much land to humor the pro-orgos, who thought consolidating humans would encourage a population boom that’d require space to grow into, or if the machines just wanted a wide cushion zone.
The two policemen didn’t know where Smythe had been living, so they meandered up and down the backstreets, Mathews driving manually. He turned on the headlights, then about twenty minutes later, the brights. The lights turned the hay a yellow white, and the black shadows of the houses rising from the wild lawns made Laughton think of old pictures he’d seen of elephants on the savannah, although he didn’t know how big elephants had really been and couldn’t imagine an animal that large.