No Dogs in Philly by Andy Futuro Page B

pretty nasty surprises. It tried to send electrical
feedback at me once and stop my heart, managed to dodge that one.
And half of these are to hide it, to mask its presence. But
everything leaves a trace.”
    “ So, what does this have to do
with the girls?”
    “ This is the connection,” he said
excitedly. This is the link between them. I found this strange,
let’s call it a presence, whenever I did a search on one of them.
Like I found almost exactly what you would expect to find in a
textbook search—the birth records, school records if they went to
school, taxes, driver’s license registration, job IDs,
advertisements for sexual services, in one case. It was about as
ordinary as you could get. Except I saw that someone else had been
searching for these women, and after some digging I found this bot,
tons of these bots going through, running these searches. And so I
followed…that was a trip. And I found where they were taking this
info. An uber, like me, someone else searching for these
girls.”
    He couldn’t contain himself any more. With an
almost audible whoosh the virtual world vanished and they were
sitting back in the living room, squinting in the light. Jojran was
practically bouncing up and down with excitement.
    “ He made a list Saru! A list of
these girls. And I found it. I found it!”
     

Chapter 9
    There were thirty-seven names on the list—she
could cross out six—thirty-one, and there didn’t seem to be one
thing these girls had in common other than eye color. Whatever
criteria the feasters were using was beyond anything that made
sense to her, which itself made sense. She’d made Jojran print the
list out so she had something to clutch while she paced back and
forth tracking boot marks on his clean kitchen tiles.
    “ There has to be a connection,”
she said for the thousandth time.
    “ Uh huh,” he said, not listening.
He was doing the actual work of checking up on the women on the
list, prying through their lives, checking to see if they’d gone to
the same school, fucked the same guy, used the same hair dye or
tampon, if they liked the same music, watched the same feeds,
subscribed to the same religion or had any tiny thread that ran
through all of their lives.
    She unfurled the list and read it again.
Melissa Caton, Emily Brown, Geraldine Fibreria, Fanny Duvak—why did
that name seem familiar? She searched her memory, feeling as if she
should know that name. Had she seen it somewhere? It was right on
the edge of her memory…coming into focus and…lost it. Damn. Too
many knocks on the head.
    “ Anything yet?” she asked
Jojran.
    “ What are you expecting here? It
took me a week to find this lead, you want me to do it again in
three hours?”
    She grumbled something and went back to pacing.
The daylight outside was fading, the sunray over the Vericast tower
growing faint. The city lights were coming on, thousands of points
and squares of visibility in the gray-black evening. She could see
right across to an office building where a worker was pissing into
a plant by his desk. Was he drunk and desperate? Or was this a
grudge? Or just routine, working hard, too lazy to go to the
bathroom? She scanned the other windows, hoping to see a couple
having sex. The feeds made it seem common, but nothing
tonight.
    A thought occurred. Five of the six women had
been tortured before they died, but this most recent woman had been
killed before they opened her up. Was that significant?
    “ Jojran.”
    “ Uh.”
    “ The woman killed last night that
I told you about, Penny Wilshire. Let’s focus on her.”
    “ Why?”
    “ A hunch.”
    His eyes unglazed and the windows showed images
of Penny. Saru didn’t want to go back into his vik. It was
draining, and besides, her vision was flickering again, her brain
glitching out. Who knew what would happen—and that damn flower was
back in her hair again. Penny had been pretty before they’d scooped
out her eyes, and before she’d lost her cashier