Lost Signals (33 page)

He smoothed his hand down the tie laying silver and crisp against his chest and made a small gesture with his fingers at his side. A helpful person scurried over. Joe muttered, ‘Find out what audio the first perpetrator-slash-victim had playing at the time.’

The minion nodded and departed without a word, ready and willing to do this simple task away from the gory room.

***

Despite the system’s notification of a service disruption at Pearl Harrison’s address, Lewis couldn’t discover any legitimate issues with the wiring or hardware in the house, and phone calls to his supervisor assured him that the recent work carried out in the street had nothing to do with her phone line. Every internal test and troubleshooting he undertook came with the same “All Clear”, and yet each phone plugged into the wall in her house would illicit identical cross-chatter. The static held the obvious sibilance of speech, but the technician never deciphered any words, not like the aged resident claimed.

‘Can I ask something, Pearl
 
?’

‘Of course, dear,’ she said with a tone of placid acceptance. Lewis had all but been welcomed into the family by now. Even the grandson gave a welcoming,
Hey, man, if you’re staying long enough, we should fire up a video game, I’ll demolish you at
Formula 1, as he meandered through the house.

‘Forgive me if this is presumptuous, but how sure are you that it was the voice of your husband if he died so long ago
 
?’

The elderly woman took a moment to nudge her glasses higher on her nose and gave a wide-eyed expression of surprise. ‘You don’t forget some things. Surely you would recognise any of your family or dear friends who have died
 
?’

Lewis shrugged one shoulder and turned to connect yet another spare phone to the wall, fresh from the box with its singular plastics-and-electronics smell wafting over the technician. ‘No one I’ve known has passed away.’

Static hissed out from the brand new handset, an angry, unsettled sound, garbled almost-words and unhearable voices.

***

‘Fuck five more months, after this case, I’m fucking
out
,’ Joe snarled under his breath, reloading his handgun in the moment of downtime by long-practised rote. He thought all the hostiles were dead, dropped by his bullets and those of his team, but without confirmation, he was still engaged in battle.

He had lost all of the first people granted direct access to the crime scene. Moments after going in to begin gathering evidence, they went crazy.
Don’t buy conjecture
no longer mattered. He had watched men and women he
knew
, for God’s sake, step over that threshold and go bug-nuts with no provocation or warning. The memory of Shane and Inari pounding each other’s faces in with the heavy-duty lenses on their cameras, heedless of the destruction unfolding around them burnt in deep. Some images never left a man. Joe knew that one would haunt him long into the twilight of his days. Watching those two, taking turns, smashing their co-workers’ features down to bloody pulp with the thick attachments, shattering bone and glass in equal measure.

The other investigators and forensics specialists to enter the cursed surveillance cubicle turned their uncompromising need for violence onto those nearest. Guns were unholstered, voices rose, orders flew, training kicked in without hesitation or delay by everyone on the outside. But those who had gone in were beyond rationalising with.

No option but to fire.

‘NO ONE enters that room
 
!’ Joe roared around the corner at his team as he scuttled sideways, on the alert for rabid co-workers and friends he might be forced to shoot.

***

With Lewis gone and Samuel resting, the house seemed ominous and barren. Even the nice workmen who had been installing cables outside for the past two weeks had packed up and left, so the silence extended beyond the boundaries of her property. Pearl could almost imagine the world growing devoid of other life.

Hey, doll. Hey, doll.

Would George’s voice still be there
 
? Left alone in her living room, she had lifted the receiver twice more but her limbs trembled and the fear settled into her chest and crept slowly into her throat, so she couldn’t quite bring the handpiece to her ear and listen for coherency behind all that static.

Marco curled over her slippered toes and ruffed in his sleep, a warm, quivering bundle. Her late husband was the only reason she had kept dogs, and when George’s last pet died years after his own passing, she went ahead and adopted this spaniel almost from habit more than a genuine desire to have four-legged company. Pearl did care for the small creature. Still. Dogs had been her husband’s joy.

I miss him so much.

The thought drove her to pick up the telephone and press the cool plastic against her ear. She waited for the hissing to part and reveal another message from her beloved. Haunted, demonic, whatever the explanation, Pearl received a rare opportunity to hear her husband’s jovial nature once again. Despair at being by herself swallowed her fear of the supernatural and the ungodly.

‘I was wondering if you would come back, doll.’

She heard the smile in his teasing and could picture the way his moustache would shift when he spoke. Her mind wasn’t always clear any more, but that memory rose bright and shiny, drawing forth a tearful sigh.

‘Oh, George.’

‘How’s my sea treasure
 
?’

Pearl’s answer swirled around her head, trapped behind her dry mouth and wetted cheeks. After her silence trickled over, her husband’s shade gave a chuckle through the line. She had heard that laugh daily for their whole married life whenever something obvious occurred to the good-humoured man.

‘Are you listening
 
? I have something important to tell you, doll.’

‘Yes.’ The aged woman leant forward and let her fingers twine through the spiral of the phone cord as though she were back in her twenties and falling in love. A coy movement which accompanied his voice washing over her.

She didn’t notice her torso dropped farther forward and stretched the tight curls of rubber-wrapped wire in her hand. Pearl closed her eyes to bask in the longed-for love of her husband, the precious gift of his company, heedless as her body moved. She never realised her arm extended downward, or her hand wound the cord tight around Marco’s thin neck.

She had no idea her frail arms held the makeshift garrote while George’s cherished voice lulled her mind away until her dog stopped squirming.

She didn’t know her fragile heart stopped beating.

***

‘Samuel, dear.’

‘Yeah, Gran
 
?’ He tried to force his exhausted eyes open. It didn’t occur to him that her voice was too close and clear. He thought she stood on the other side of his door, as she often did. His tired mind didn’t connect the voice to his Cochlear implants, to the whispers of his mother.

‘Are you listening
 
? I need your help.’

He felt no reason to question the particular phrasing. ‘Yeah, I am. Sure. What’s up
 
?’

They didn’t always agree on things, and as an old woman, she could harp on about the most inane concerns, resting her reasoning on qualities Samuel didn’t value, yet he still loved his grandmother above all others, living or dead. She had been his primary caregiver even when his parents were still breathing. His mother and father had earnt his hatred.

‘Samuel, in your grandfather’s gun cabinet, there are some things for you. Go along and fetch them, will you
 
? Then I need you to run an errand down at Baker High School.’

He rolled out of bed and pulled his shoes on, hardly awake. He fought to keep track of her words.
Gun cabinet. Something for him. Errand.
‘Yeah, okay, what do you need
 
?’

She didn’t answer.
Must have wandered off.

Grabbing a fistful of his own hair, Samuel hauled his lolling head up by the force of his arm and staggered out of his unlit room. Who knew what his grandmother would want at the nearby school, maybe she got the bright idea to volunteer again, like she had done four years back.
Passing the time
, she called it. One hand dove down the back of his collar to scratch at the persistent itch between his shoulder blades.

‘Hey, Gran
 
?’ he yelled toward the living area.

‘Yes, dear
 
?’ came her voice, oddly dissonant. More like a whisper in his ear than her crying back from half a house away.

‘What do you need me to do
 
?’

Samuel stepped into the old study, thick with the almond and vanillin smell of old books and deeper leathery scents to tickle down his nostrils. His hand ran over the studded armchair as he passed, then the polished mahogany desk. He mashed the code to unlock the tall safe with his thumb and stood for a moment before the steel door as it swung open, spacing-out in his exhaustion.

‘Take it all, Samuel,’ his grandmother murmured.

With the gentle order, he stopped thinking and began emptying the cabinet of firearms and ammunition.

***

Lewis set down his tablet computer on the table beside his plate of eggs and toast, disregarding the article filling its screen in lieu of tracking his eyes to the television beside his breakfast nook. The suburb name had pinged his attention. The same place he had visited, trying to help Pearl Harrison fix her phone connection. According to the bulletin, the most recent spree shooter had lived in the same town.

His mouth dropped open with brutal horror when the news report flashed to a picture of the long-time home of the murderous young man.

The wide pair of date palms which stood sentinel on either side of the path leading to the green-painted front door were all too familiar to the technician. Lewis squashed his finger on the Volume Up button, sending it rising as if being louder would help him better understand the shock of what he witnessed.

‘Not the kid . . . ’ he muttered at the exact moment an old school yearbook style photo of Pearl’s grandson was added to the upper corner of the bulletin, overlaying their live feed of the Harrisons’ residence. The well-kept white awnings and neat azaleas held the same evident sweet attention of the elderly woman through the news cameras as he remembered from his attendance. Someone reported in morbid detail the number of dead, and how many firearms were found on his person.

And none of it made a lick of sense.

‘He wasn’t like that,’ Lewis whispered, as if he could have known after his brief meeting. As though he could undo the facts being reported by incredulity alone. All the stereotypes he had complacently believed about the kind of psycho who would do something so terrible, so very atrocious, were unmet, unrealised in Samuel. He had been cheerful, direct, pleasantly mannered, and enthusiastic. He had invited Lewis to join him in a video game
Formula 1
race, of all things
 
!

What makes a person break
 
?

Lewis felt a cold rush of uncharacteristic superstition. A bleak belief, nay,
certainty
that this had something to do with the unfathomable sounds trickling through the phone line at the Harrison house. He swiped across the surface of his tablet’s screen and navigated to composing a new e-mail, batting his fingertips rapidly against the glass to write an urgent message to his boss.

***

Mr. Black peered at the notifications leaping up on his mobile phone. An e-mail had been flagged. There was now some confusion through the hierarchy as to whether or not the telecom people were already
accounted for
. Higher-ups needed to know the new system would not be compromised, not when the first round of testing was already producing such remarkable data.

Sure, the operation needed a few tweaks here and there. Figure out how to insulate the system to prevent further unplanned contact with the public. Establishing if and how they could utilise the unique qualities of this program as a targeted weapon. But overall, their experts were calling the new listening lines a complete success. Confirmed. They were getting intelligence from the dead.

His sleek monochrome vehicle accelerated out of the underground carpark of his nondescript office block and headed to the headquarters of the local telephone service provider, where he would have a fine little talk about national security, the integrity of the government’s vigilance, and one Lewis Carlisle.

***

Lewis nearly dropped his disposable cardboard cup of coffee as his car pulled up the quiet semi-rural street. Ahead on the left, where the charming house had sat amongst its happily tended garden, now lay a thick dirt wasteland and the looming yellow machinery responsible for its demolishing.

It had been less than a day.

‘There’s no way . . . ’

He pulled his sensible four-door sedan into the nearest neighbouring driveway and parked in front of the metal and wire farmer’s gate. Pearl’s paved driveway was gone. Torn up by a great excavator, the debris somehow already removed, carted away in the back of some absent dump truck. He had watched the live coverage at 7:00AM, and now, glancing at the dashboard clock reading 4:08PM, there was little-to-no evidence that a full three-bedroom house, garden, manicured lawns and decades-old trees had been standing in the lot some nine hours earlier.

Lewis fumbled his half full cup into the plastic holder without spilling any of the steaming brew over its flimsy lid and flung his door wide. The whisper-snick of his seatbelt retracting was the only sound to fill the dangerously silent environment. Nothing moved outside his car. Nothing
breathed
. The vacant machinery sat in the late afternoon sun, radiating old warmth back into the air, shining in places where dust didn’t caress the painted metals. His shoes crunched through the drying grass waving along the verge. Tiny spearheaded seeds gripped the exposed edges of his socks and detached to accompany him on the sombre journey of denial. Lewis didn’t realise his head perpetually swung side to side, an unstopping motion to match the silent litany of
no, no, no,
streaming through his mind.