Project 17 (6 page)

“Ask for the departments,” Lillian said, a little too loudly. Jamie touched his ear.

“The guy who ordered this didn’t give a last name. But he mentioned a department. Maybe if you told me I’ll remember.”

Jamie turned on the charm with a megawatt smile.

“We have Laura in Pharmaceuticals and Laura in Nutrition.”

“Pharma!” Jamie said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Pharmaceuticals,” Lillian said. “Son of a bitch.”

“Great,” the receptionist said. “We don’t allow delivery people into the offices. She’ll have to come here to get them herself, okay? Let me call her.”

Laura from Pharma arrived at the lobby five minutes later. She looked different from her suited up colleagues in their whites and blacks and grays. She was an attractive girl in her 20s in a
paisley maxi dress, wearing bangles on both arms. She smiled when Jamie approached her.

“Oh, this must be from Tim!” she said, taking the vase and smelling the yellow roses. “That bastard.”

Outside the glass walls, Lillian heard Laura’s voice and said, “That’s her.”

“Sign here, please,” Jamie said, taking out his phone. “You don’t look like a scientist.”

Laura laughed.

“I’d assume someone from Pharma is a scientist,” Jamie said. “Laura Dizon. That’s a nice name.”

“What’s a scientist supposed to look like?”

“Less bangly. I don’t think they’d allow bangles in the lab.”

Laura laughed again. “Oh, no, sweetheart. I’m just a lowly secretary.”

“A lowly secretary who’s allowed not to follow the dress code? You must be working for the big bosses.”

Laura assumed a conspiratorial voice. “Head of Pharma. Surly guy.”

“As long as he pays well, right?” Jamie said. They shared a laugh.

Max was already searching with her phone. “Northpoint-Pascual VP for Pharmaceutical Research and Operations,” she recited. “Nikolas Morales.”

“Didn’t he marry that actress?” Lillian said.

Max looked up. “Morales.”

Lillian shook her head, not following.

“Wasn’t Zeke’s former boss a Morales? Northpoint CEO.” Max tapped on her phone. “Yes. Margaret Morales. Northpoint-Pascual CEO and concurrent Director of
Robotics.”

“Mother and son?”

“Siblings,” Max said. She showed her a picture of the Moraleses, taken last year for a Forbes interview, both looking very sleek in their business suits and glittering wristwatches.
“That’s interesting.”

“Anything on Laura?”

Max made a face. “Just a Tumblr on the clothes she wears.”

Lillian and Max met up with Jamie thirty minutes later in a restaurant two blocks away. Now flowerless, he was back in his all-black ensemble.

“’Have I told you yet that this is a bad idea?’” Max said.

“Shut up,” said Jamie, and they sat down to have lunch before heading to their next destination.

It wasn’t hard to get Zeke Ruiz’s last listed address, but it proved hard to actually find his house, what with all the street name changes and landmarks disappearing in the course
of a decade.

They finally found the address with the help of a cabbie who remembered the old name of the street the house was on. “You got a bad lead there,” the cabbie said. “Owner’s
now probably dead and buried. What is it, a grandma’s house?”

“Something like that,” Lillian said.

The former owners—at least two out of the three of them—were buried, but the house wasn’t. It remained standing in a silent alley behind the old Inquirer building. It was a
bungalow, with a wicker couch with bone-white throw pillows sitting like neglected children outside the door. A PRIVATE PROPERTY sign squeaked in the wind and below it, another sign said WARNING:
GUARD FENCE. Jamie picked up a tiny pebble off the ground and threw it at the house. The guard fence crackled and the pebble was reduced to powder. They weren’t kidding.

“Got to be corporate,” Max said. “Ordinary real estate agents won’t spend so much money putting up a guard fence.”

“Too bad,” Jamie said. “I was hoping it would be abandoned and we’d be free to snoop around.”

“Are you kids the new tenants?”

There was an old woman standing in front of the house next door. She was wearing soil-stained rubber gloves, her hands on her hips. There was a plantbox next to her.

Lillian walked closer. “Tenants?”

“No, you’re too young,” the old woman said after taking a good look at them. She went back to tending her flowers. “Some company owned that house. They bring corporate
types to live in it, but they don’t last long. This place is too quiet for them. I think they’d rather live a hundred floors up in some loud town.”

“Do you remember the tenants who lived here before?”

“Oh, they don’t mingle much. Never even knew their names, even when they had gone.”

“Did any of the corporate types live here with their family?” Jamie asked.

“Oh, were you looking for him?” The old woman’s face brightened. “I remember only one such tenant. Young man with a wife and a little girl.”

“Zeke Ruiz?” Lillian asked.

“Too strange a nickname to forget,” the old woman said. “Yes, he lived there years ago. But the family left like all the others. Then weeks after that we hear they died in a
fire. We were heartbroken. Dexter here, especially. He babysat that little girl. Didn’t you, Dex?”

Dexter was about Max and Jamie’s age, early 20s, but he looked younger in his oversized sweater. He was standing in the doorway, carrying a packet of seeds for his grandmother.

“You’re looking for the Ruizes?” he asked.

“We didn’t know they’ve passed on,” Lillian said. “My brother knew him, and we were in the area. Thought we’d drop in and say hi.”

Dexter made Lillian nervous. He looked at them as though he did not believe a word they just said.

“Let me just talk to them,
Lola,”
Dexter said. “Come in.”

“Yes, you kids go on in,” the old woman said without looking up from her plantbox. “There’s fresh juice in the kitchen.”

Jamie and Max shared a look but Lillian set her jaw and stepped inside.

Dexter led them to the kitchen, where they sat on high stools around the kitchen island. Lillian was reminded of Paul’s own kitchen, the steel cabinet and the pills they had to count every
day. Dexter gave each of them a slice of
biko
and a glass of iced tea.

“You said your brother knew him,” Dexter said. “Zeke.”

Lillian met his gaze and tried not to blink. “They went to college together.”

“Did he also work for Northpoint-Pascual?”

Jamie and Max focused on their respective
biko
slices.

“No,” Lillian said. “Zeke got on ahead because he had a scholarship. And he’s scary smart.”

“Yes,” Dexter said. “I was an intern there for some time. I was absorbed and got bumped up to probie status, but after a year I decided to go freelance so I could take care of
Lola.
But—”

They waited.

“You really didn’t know they were dead?” he said. “It’s been ten years.”

“They didn’t keep in touch. My brother probably missed the news. You said they died in a fire?”

“Yes.” Dexter looked at the countertop and sighed. “It was a small news article. I would have missed it if I didn’t put up an alert for their names in our Newspad. But
why would you suddenly think of visiting their house?”

He could smell us lying.
“I don’t know. We were in the area and we just thought—”

“Did your brother receive an email?” he asked. Dexter looked at the blank looks on their faces and sighed again.

“It’s just,” he said, “no one’s come here for years.” He took out his phone. “This is the news article about the fire.”

On the screen was an article they had already seen:

“I received this message about a year after that incident,” Dexter said, switching to his email.

“I tried to email back,” Dexter said, “but my reply bounced back. I even tried hacking the email—”

“You can hack accounts?” Max said.

Dexter was surprised by the interruption. “Yes.”

“Me too!” Max grinned. “Awesome.”

Max spent a good ten seconds just smiling at him. Dexter looked scared and confused.

“So you tried hacking the email,” Jamie prompted.

“It’s an inactive address,” Dexter said. “Like he made it just to send that one email.”

“So you think it’s Zeke?”

“Who else could it be?” he said. “Who else could know?”

“What do you think happened to him?” Jamie said.

“I think he got into trouble,” Dexter replied.

“Work
-related trouble?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He slid off the stool. “Let me you show you something.”

They went up to his room. One large framed print on his wall showed a time-lapse microscopy of a dividing cell. Next to it hung a reproduction of Rene Magritte’s
The Human
Condition
. A computer with a 20-inch monitor sat on his work desk.

Dexter led them to the window. “Look.”

His window lent an unobstructed view of the Ruizes’ house and driveway.

“I was with the company for more than a year,” he said, “so I would know a Northpoint car if I ever saw one. Sometime in 2017—it was summer vacation—two Northpoint
cars pulled up in front of their house. Big cars. Big, black, heavily tinted.”

“You saw who got out?” Lillian asked.

Dexter sat in front of his monitor, searched through folders.

“You took pictures,” Max said, gleeful.

“I did,” Dexter said. “I used my phone.”

The first photo showed two men coming out of one of the cars. Corporate people, from the looks of it, except that they were both wearing gloves and black sunglasses. One of them carried a black
canvas bag.

Dexter clicked Next. The men were entering the front door.

“I heard screaming a few minutes after that,” he said.

“Screaming?” Jamie said.

“Who was home then?” Lillian asked.

“Sophie and Toni. Zeke was at work.”

“How old was Sophie in 2017?”

“Two,” Dexter said. “Almost three.”

Jamie pointed at the other car in the picture. “No one got out of this car?”

Dexter shook his head.

“You called SentryServ?” Max said.

They turned away from the computer. “I did,” Dexter said. “Anonymously. This is more than a decade ago so response time was slower then than it is now, where it’s almost
instantaneous. But even then this Sentry force was uncharacteristically slow. Zeke arrived forty minutes later, after the men and the cars had gone, and only then did the Sentries reach the
house.”

“What did they do?”

“Nothing,” Dexter said. “Nothing that I could see from this window. When I rushed downstairs to go over there, I saw a car parked behind the house drive away. The Sentries
followed on their motorcycles soon after. Maybe the car had taken Zeke and his family with it.”

“How did Zeke look to you when he came home?” Lillian asked.

Dexter shrugged. “Normal. He didn’t go running into the house or anything. But I wondered about him coming home. He came home too early.”

“Do you think those two men hurt Toni and Sophie?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think they’re still alive?”

“Oh, man,” Dexter said. “I’ve been asking that for years.”

*

After taking Dexter’s contact information and thanking him for his time, they stepped out of the house. They found a Sentry helping Dexter’s grandmother move some potted plants on
the front lawn.

“Thank you so much,” Lola said.

“Have a good day,” the Sentry said, and went back to making his rounds.

“A lot of people fought the idea when they were first introduced in 2015,” Lola said, pointing at the walking Sentry, aware that she now had an audience. “I remember. They said
it was government control, that it would pave the way for a second, stronger Martial Law, a literal hand of steel that we wouldn’t be able to fight. But I’m 60 years old and I remember
the state of law and order long before the Sentries came, and it doesn’t compare to this. It just doesn’t compare. I remember a time when troops operated as local officials’
private armies. They tortured people on order and made them disappear. Others shook down citizens, asking for money and planting evidence, or making up bogus violations when people wouldn’t
pay up. Some were kind but flawed, shooting hostages instead of the hostage takers, endangering bystanders because they either got nervous in front of the TV cameras or were just plain stupid. Some
were good souls, but the corrupt system broke them. Do you know that some cops used to shoot their guns on New Year’s Eve just for the heck of it, killing people with stray bullets?
How’s that for ‘serve and protect’? That there’s your police and military, and you can’t trust them. Justice can only be delivered by someone who doesn’t care
about how much he’s paid, or where he is in the chain of command. Someone whose ego won’t be inflated by grandeur or power. Someone who won’t be influenced by this guy’s
being the CEO of this or his being the Mayor of that. And let’s face it: that someone couldn’t be human.

“This is one complicated case, boss,” Max said.

Lillian handed out her remaining Candy Stripes to her two companions, and they sat silently, nibbling on licorice until they reached Bulacan.