As Chloe Cordon stared at the picture with huge eyes, the glimmer of hope that had sparked there for a moment winked out. She didn’t say anything, just buried her face in her husband’s shoulder again. Michael Cordon tensed, his whole stance becoming rigid, determined.
“What do you want to know?”
“Can you just walk us through the day of her disappearance? What happened and when? Did you notice anything strange before or after Lilly vanished?”
Michael Cordon pressed his lips into a thin line. “Lilly was such a wonderful girl. She was very good at school and working hard to get a scholarship for Oakbruck Preparatory School, a fancy private high school where her teachers wanted to send her because her grades were so good. She never hung out with the bad kids. In fact, she only had one close friend, Tricia, but she moved away about two months before Lilly was taken. Getting into Oakbruck was Lilly’s big dream. She wanted to become a doctor, study at the Medical School of South Carolina. The day she vanished, both Chloe and I had double shifts, so we only came home at ten in the evening. When Lilly wasn’t there, we first thought she might have gone to get some groceries, but she didn’t answer her calls. When she wasn’t home in the morning, we called the police. Detective Harris informed us that we could file a missing person report once she was gone twenty-four hours. Before that, he said his hands were tied. He wasn’t even interested in what we told him, that she would never just leave or not answer her phone.
“So we started searching on our own. We walked the entire way she took to the bus stop, and then we even followed the route the bus takes every day. We didn’t find anything until we went back in the direction of our house. About halfway between the bus stop and the house, I tried calling her again, more out of desperation than real hope. That’s how we found her cell. We heard her ringtone and followed the sound into a small park with a few trees. It’s so tiny, it doesn’t even have a name. Junkies meet their dealers there.” Michael Cordon scowled. “Her cell was battered, the casing chipped. I knew not to touch it and called Detective Harris. He took it with him for evidence but informed us later there weren’t any fingerprints except for Lilly’s own.”
Andi shared a look with George. There had been no mention in the report about a cell phone.
“That’s very good, Mr. Cordon. Now do you remember if Lilly said anything about being followed or feeling threatened by anybody?”
Michael Cordon shook his head. He had his wife cradled close to his side, as if to protect her or to draw strength from her, Andi didn’t know which.
“No. Nothing like that. She was so busy studying, she spent most of her time either in the library of her school or here in her room.”
George nodded. “Can you give us directions to where you found her cell?”
“That’s easy. You turn right at our driveway and just follow the street until you see an old factory to your right. On the left, you’ll find the park. It’s not fenced in, just some trees with a few small trails leading through.”
“Thank you, Mr. Cordon. My partner and I will take a look. And of course we will keep you informed about the progress of the case.”
Michael Cordon stroked his wife’s upper arm. “When do we get our baby girl back so we can bury her?” His voice broke at the end of the sentence.
Andi could see George struggling to keep up a professional front. “As soon as the coroner’s done with her, I will see to it that she’s transported to Spartanburg.”
“Thank you, Detective Donovan. Detective Hayes. We need to be alone now.”
It was a comparatively polite dismissal compared to the chilly welcome they had gotten.
“Do you want to walk?” George didn’t sound happy about leaving his new car alone. Andi could relate.
“How about you drive there and I walk? It’s not far, and we would get two different perspectives. We meet at the park and explore it together.”
George’s relief was a tangible presence in the air. “A great idea. See you there.” He opened his car and entered the driver’s seat. When the motor started, Andi walked toward the end of the driveway, already opening his senses in search for information that was over a year old. He still maintained enough control to be able to walk along the littered sidewalk, but the avalanche of impressions was overwhelming.
Blood and corpses and flesh and drugs and acid and death and decay, great feasts already transported to the nests or filled with eggs to nourish the brood.
It was all in abundance everywhere around him, almost all of it caused by human sins. Finding the clues that were relevant to their case was close to impossible. Insects had no clear concept of time, and most of them didn’t even live long enough to span more than a few months. When he wanted to know something about crimes that happened a long time ago, he needed to rely on social insects like wasps, ants, termites, and bees, with bees and termites being the most reliable sources while the “memories” of wasps and ants were a bit more sketchy and harder to interpret. Andi didn’t know the reason for it and had no way of finding out why some things just were a certain way. There was always the “dead space,” as Andi called it, indicating winter, where the life of social insects was almost completely halted, which helped a little in determining how much time had passed, but wasn’t accurate enough to truly rely on. To make matters worse, he only knew what Lilly “looked like” dead in the minds of ants, flies, and worms. It was hard to tell if he would be able to recognize her living shape in the collective memory of the thousands of little witnesses who saw every crime.
The arthropods in this area were doing well for themselves. The decaying houses were homes to termites, ants, spiders, roaches, and countless other creepers who needed damp and dark spaces to flourish. They also provided precious intel, though not the kind Andi was looking for. There were at least a hundred offenders—dealers, bandits, pimps, murderers—running around this place. And catching them would be easy, should the authorities know about thegeschenkand recognize it. But they didn’t, and so the scum of society went unpunished to commit their crimes another day.
The way to the small park wasn’t long, just like Michael Cordon had explained. It couldn’t be called a forest, didn’t even come close, was just a loose collection of surprisingly healthy trees—then again, given the vast amount of human tissue they were getting on a sickeningly regular basis, it was probably surprising they hadn’t grown even more. George was already there; he had parked his car practically on the sidewalk, no doubt to be able to keep an eye on it.
“I haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary.” George made a vague gesture with his left hand.
“Me neither. It looks like every poor city area in the States. Let’s see if we can find something under the trees.” They both knew it was highly unlikely after over a year.
“I can definitely see why her kidnappers chose this part of the way, though. I mean, most of the houses are empty anyway, but the trees offer sight protection from this side. It’s the most convenient spot for abducting somebody.”
Andi listened to George’s soothing voice. It became his anchor as he opened his senses even wider in the hopes of finding a glimpse of Lilly Cordon. Luckily for him, there was an ant’s nest, as well as a nest of wild bees, close by. Ants and bees saw the world very differently, and combining the information coming from them gave Andi a picture close to 3D. Of course, there were blank spots with things neither ants nor bees either perceived or deemed interesting, and then there was the dead space of winter, which in this case was actually helpful, since Andi knew that there had only been one since Lilly had vanished. Like a blind man in a house full of cobwebs, Andi fumbled along the memories of both nests, carefully adding impressions from other insects where he could see them aligning until he found the day Lilly had been abducted. It had been sunny and warm, perfect weather for insects. Lilly’s living shape only vaguely resembled that of her dead body; he mostly recognized her from a sweetness to her scent that was quite distinct and hadn’t been diminished by the drugs and death. If pressed to explain where that scent originated from, Andi wouldn’t have known. All he knew was that ants liked the scent of some people more than that of others, and Lilly seemed to have an especially alluring aroma, which fit with what he had gotten from the insects on her corpse. There had been two men whose general shape resembled the one of the murderer. They were likely somehow linked, if only through the drugs they were taking, which came from the same source.
Apparently, Lilly had fought the men. The ants remembered carrying some of that sweet blood into their nest, and the bees recalled a sharpness to the air Andi had learned to associate with physical resistance.
There wasn’t much else related to the case. Andi started erecting his mental shields again. He had been exposed for longer than he had anticipated, and he felt like somebody had hit him on the head with a hammer. At least now he had confirmation of the place of abduction, even though he didn’t know yet what to make of that knowledge. With a tired gesture, he wiped his face, wishing that for once his world could be completely quiet, if only for a few minutes. Shielding himself from the hum of the insects meant George’s voice was quickly turning from an anchor to a nuisance, and it took all of Andi’s remaining self-control to stay civil.
“Andi? Everything all right? You seemed out of it for a moment.”
