Justice Keepers Saga - Books 1-3

Chapter 8

Soapy water filled the basin of the sink nearly halfway to the top with the odd plate popping out from under the surface. Through the window above the tap, Harry could see a starry sky and the shadow of the house next door. A beautiful night. Even the chirping crickets seemed to agree.

Harry frowned as he stared through the pane. He blinked, trying to put his thoughts in order. Unless your ex despises you, he thought. If that"s the case, it"s not at all perfect.

Unless your ex despises you,If that"s the case, it"s not at all perfect.He scrubbed a dish with a sponge, wiping the last suds away from the floral pattern. Della had insisted on taking the dishwasher when she moved out – it had been a gift from her father, after all – but Harry didn"t mind. Doing the dishes always left him with time to think and wind down.

herHis small galley-style kitchen was little more than a narrow corridor between two lines of cupboards with the sink on one side and the fridge on the other. Not much room to maneuver, even for someone who had never really learned the art of cooking. It was a common feature in houses built in the eighties, and another sore spot for Della. Even now, he could hear her complaining that her father would gladly buy them a larger house. That might be so, but Harry had wanted to make it on his own.

“Dad!”

Claire came running through the space between the cupboards. Barely more than three feet tall, she was an angel in her blue dress. Paternal bias perhaps, but Harry wasn"t about to amend that statement.

A grin bloomed on his daughter"s round face as she stared up at him with big brown eyes. “Miss Collins said my painting was good.” She lifted up a picture of a stick-figure cat on a field of green grass.

Harry c****d his head to the side, examining the painting. He felt his eyebrows try to climb up. “Miss Collins is a smart woman,” he said, dropping to one knee. “You might be a famous artist one day.”

Claire"s smile was infectious as she came closer. She threw her arms around his neck, burying her nose in his chest. “Will you drive me to school tomorrow?” she asked. “I don"t like taking the bus.”

“I can"t, sweetie,” he replied. “Missy will look after you.”

Harry sucked on his lip, nodding slowly to his daughter. “Now, you need to get to bed,” he said, mussing her hair with the palm of his hand. As always, Claire let out a little squeal when he did that.

She stepped back.

Planting fists on her hips, Claire lifted her chin. She squinted at him. “You"re in a lot of trouble now,” she teased. “The other day, you said that messing up someone"s hair was against the rules!”

Yes…he had told her that. Of course, "the other day" had been last month, and at the time he had been trying to get Claire to stop tormenting her sister, but the rules were the rules. Amazing how much children retained. “Yes, I did say that,” Harry conceded. “You have a very good memory.”

“You told me if I kept doing it, I was grounded,” Claire added. “Doesn"t that mean you"re grounded, Daddy?”

He pinched her nose, and Claire squeezed her eyes shut. She squealed like a pig in a frenzy. “I am grounded,” Harry agreed, “which means I have to go to bed early, and you get to pick what we watch on movie night.”

amFortunately, that probably meant nothing worse than a Dora the Explorer marathon. Missy would be annoyed, but she was usually good-natured about that sort of thing. She"d probably spend most of the night on her iPad. Of course, that meant frequent glances over her shoulder to keep an eye on what she was reading. He would never have imagined that parenthood would turn him into the Gestapo.

“Upstairs now,” Harry said. “It"s bedtime.”

“But, Dad-”

“Claire…”

Without another word, Claire turned on her heel and marched through the narrow aisle. She paused just in front of the kitchen table. “Love you, Dad,” she said just before charging up the stairs.

The smartphone on the counter lit up and began to buzz, rotating around with each vibration. Harry snatched it up and took the call. God Almighty, this had better be pretty damn important.

God Almighty, this had better be pretty damn important.“Detective Carlson?”

“How can I help you, Bates?”

“We found new evidence in the Penworth case,” Bates replied. “You"re gonna want to get down here, Detective. Trust me when I tell you that you"re going to have to see it to believe it.”

“Fine,” Harry muttered. “In the morning.”

“But-”

Harry felt his face crumple, sweat beading on his forehead. He shook his head in frustration. “No buts, man. I"ve got the girls; I can"t find a sitter, and they don"t like it when I randomly take off.”

“Detective,” the voice on his phone protested. “You"re really gonna want to see this. Someone managed to tear up whole chunks of a city street, and the neighbours claim they saw a man hurling lightning.”

Could this week get any more bizarre? Holes punched in concrete pillars, tiny girls beating up grown men twice their size and now lightning bolts? This really was starting to sound like a cheesy X-Files plot. “I"ll be there in the morning,” Harry insisted. “No one is in any immediate danger, right?”

X-Files“Uh…no.”

“Then I"ll see you at seven.”

The morning sun was shining down on small houses with black shingles on their gabled roofs. Under any other circumstances, this would be a peaceful neighbourhood on a warm summer"s day, complete with maple trees that sighed in the wind. Not today. Today, the place was roped off by police tape.

A thick layer of asphalt had been scraped off the road"s surface, leaving a pit about the size of a child"s bed. Several paces beyond that, chunks of pavement were scattered across the street.

Harry let out a grunt.

He marched around the pit with hands shoved into his pants pocket, pausing near a group of uniformed officers. “Well, this is a new one,” he said, shaking his head. “Do we have any theories?”

Officer Brandon Mitchell was a heavyset man with stubble along his jawline. He reached up to grab the bill of his cap and pulled it down, shading his eyes from the sun. “I can"t say we have, sir.”

Tilting his head back, Harry closed his eyes. He took a deep breath then let it out again. “Not even a guess?” he inquired. “So we"re just going to sit here and conclude that the hand of God came down and scooped up some pavement?”

Mitchell crossed his arms with a sigh. “Couldn"t say what happened, Detective,” he grumbled. “All I know is that somebody"s trying to get in on the construction market.”

whatHar har…

Har har…As he took in the sight of the massive pothole, Harry felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had ordered Jean to keep quiet about the strange devices that she had been examining – the last thing he needed was to start a panic – but with each new incident, a pattern began to take shape.

Clearly, they were dealing with technology that was decades ahead of anything they had ever seen before. So, either the military had lost track of some incredibly impressive hardware or…or Ottawa had just become centre stage in an interstellar turf war. That had its own set of implications.

If aliens really were walking the streets of Canada"s capital, they had done so for nearly a week without being noticed. That meant they had the ability to look like human beings. Harry had always considered himself a die-hard Scully – show him a palm reader and he"d show you a con-artist – but with every passing day, Mulder"s position felt more and more plausible.

Harry narrowed his eyes. “Get CSIS down here,” he ordered, squatting down near the edge of the pothole. “They"re going to want to take a look at this. And someone get me some coffee!”

“Detective.”

A glance over his shoulder revealed a woman in a blue pantsuit striding across the road. Her round olive-skinned face was tight with anxiety. That was the sort of thing you noticed after a few years of interrogations. “I appreciate your professional courtesy,” she began, “but CSIS has been here for the last four hours.”

“Harry Carlson,” he said, standing and offering his hand.

The woman took it and gave a single pump. She smiled up at him, holding his gaze for a long moment. “Aamani Patel,” she said with a quick bob of her head. “I thought you might like to meet someone.”

Harry arched an eyebrow.

Patel stepped aside to reveal a tiny old woman in a pair of pink sweatpants and a white t-shirt standing on the curb. “Detective Carlson,” she said, stepping into the street. “I saw it all.

“It was a little blonde thing, sir,” she went on. “She fought with an older man who…well I can only say he loosed thunderbolts at her. I went to my window when I heard the commotion.

“A blonde woman?” Harry asked. “In a brown coat.”

The woman went pale before lowering her eyes to stare at the ground. Her gray hair was in a state of disarray. “Yes, sir,” she whispered. “I take it you"ve seen her as well. She was…well, the thing about it is, she wasn"t the aggressor, I don"t think. That older fellow had her on the defensive.”

“The defensive?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “It was…well, I can"t really put it into words except to say he made a wall of lightning and it…scraped up the pavement. I"m also pretty sure he pulled a g*n on her.”

Baring his teeth, Harry turned his face away from her. “Thank you for your statement, ma"am,” he managed at last. “I"m sure it will be of assistance.”

He spun around.

“Vitello!” Harry barked. “Mitchell!” Two of his uniformed officers who stood with their backs turned suddenly stiffened. There were times when people claimed that Harry"s voice cracked like a whip. He tried to control it, but today was not a day to be walking on eggshells. “Call the station,” he went on. “I want every report involving a blonde woman over the last ninety-six hours. Arrest reports, 911 calls, anything. If Marilyn Monroe was caught sneaking out of the prime minister"s house, I want to know it. We clear?”

anything.“Detective!”

When he turned, he saw Aamani Patel standing in the middle of the street with her hands clasped behind her back. “Look at this…” she said, tapping the road with her foot. “Very odd.”

He marched over to find a few slugs embedded in the asphalt, having kicked up the pavement on impact. Who would fire at the goddamn road? “Very odd,” Patel repeated. “I had one of our ballistics experts analyze the trajectory. From the angle of impact, the shooter would have had to have been on the roof of the house to your left.”

“It just keeps getting weirder,” Harry lamented.

“Oh, I think we can go one step further,” Patel replied. “Come with me, Detective. There"s something I"d like to show you.”

Fluorescent lights in the ceiling shone down on a sterile room with white-tiled walls and a stainless steel operating table that supported what was clearly a man"s corpse. The body was covered with a plain white sheet, the fabric tented where a large nose stuck up from his face.

Patel stepped into the room and stood in front of the table with fists planted on her hips, scrutinizing the body. “Several of your officers recovered this fellow last night,” she said. “We had him transferred here.”

Harry felt the blood drain out of his face. Closing his eyes, he nodded slowly, then let out a sigh. “From the crime scene, you mean.” It wasn"t a question. “Why wasn"t I told about this?”

“Apologies, Detective, but you had…other priorities.” The woman scowled but covered it in an instant. If he didn"t know better, he might have thought he had imagined that brief flash of emotion. Harry stifled his anger. His family life was none of her concern. “I ordered a full autopsy, but so far, we"ve only done the most preliminary examinations. We can confirm that he is human with blood type B positive.”

“His species was in question?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

Harry donned a pair of rubber gloves, then pulled back the sheet to reveal a dead man"s face. This fellow might have been handsome once, but his skin was pallid, his hair unkempt. Nothing about the corpse stood out to him. “Check his hands,” Patel said from behind. “I"m an expert at reading the back of a man"s head. Yours says you"re wondering why I brought you here. Check his hands.”

“Checking his hands,” he muttered to himself. “Please tell me I"m not about to find ten-inch nails.”

He seized the man"s wrist and turned it palm up to reveal…something. A metal disk embedded in the man"s skin. An implant of some kind? Who would graft a chunk of metal onto his own hand?

Suddenly, a thought jumped into his head. One of the guards from the Penworth building had mentioned something about a man with a metal disk in his palm. The poor guy had been so beat up that Harry hadn"t put much stock in his statement, but now… “I don"t suppose you know what this is?”

He turned.

Patel stood there with her arms crossed, a frown on her face. She shook her head ever so slowly. “We have no idea,” she replied. “That little hunk of metal is why we have not begun an autopsy. I had a bomb squad check him out from top to bottom before I let anyone else in this room.”

why“Wise…”

Human. So, the man was human. That meant Blondie was probably human as well. The prospect of extraterrestrials seemed less and less likely, but it was abundantly clear that they were dealing with technology they had never seen before, and Aamani Patel seemed to be at as much of a loss as he was.

It was all well and good to imagine clandestine meetings between high-ranking government officials, and secret black projects where advanced weaponry was developed without the public"s consent, but Patel was sharing information freely. She was trying to get to the truth, not cover it up. That being the case, he could only draw one conclusion: if there was a conspiracy here, CSIS wasn"t in on it.

He needed to find that blonde woman.

Seems I"ve underestimated you, Goldilocks, Harry thought to himself. But you can rest assured that"s a mistake I won"t make twice.

Seems I"ve underestimated you, Goldilocks,But you can rest assured that"s a mistake I won"t make twice.