The Dolls Read online

  Sandra could feel a thumping—the drumbeat—and see people spinning and shaking on a narrow lawn. Along the edges, families on blankets bobbed in time with the sounds, the same as the children splashing their arms into water shooting up from a fountain. Together, they made the picture of happiness.

  Though she couldn’t make out the words a woman in the center of a stage sang—trembling with feeling—Sandra sensed what everyone else seemed to know, what the singer was urging: Dance with me.

  Sandra wanted to join them, felt a desperate pull to know what it would be like to be mixed in close to them, but something inside her kept telling her she wasn’t made for this, that she didn’t belong. Maybe so. Already, her sensors throbbed with pleasure. All the natural light, warm around her. The rich colors, above and below and around. The new textures. Reading the expressions of a hundred people in the span of an hour. It had her spinning, sensors pulsing, like the music. So much to process. Trance-like, hovering above a reboot, she almost wanted to surrender to the veil of white light closing in.

  Suddenly, she knew she had to stop.

  Someone was watching her. Tucked into the greenery, she found an older woman on a park bench, peering out from a scarf. She seemed to be absorbing the surroundings, the same as Sandra.

  Her skin was unnaturally thin and stretched out against her forehead and cheekbones, but loose below, like the bottom half of her face was more hollow than intended. She had no eyebrows or hair anywhere on patches of her head that a breeze revealed beneath the silk. Something was different about her. Or maybe, Sandra thought, stepping closer, it was someone like her, someone who needed help.

  “Are you okay?” Sandra asked.

  “I’m alive today.” The woman’s voice was scratchy, and she tried for a smile, but her face just looked tired. “That’s something.”

  Sensing sadness, Sandra sat down close to her and spoke. “It’s lovely here.”

  “So are you,” the woman said, patting a stiff, bony hand against Sandra’s leg. “How did you know I could use some company?”

  “Are you broken?”

  The woman’s body shook when she chuckled. “Well, chemo will do that to you. It’s as bad as the cancer. You know I was like you once. Healthy.”

  “Chemo,” Sandra processed aloud. “I don’t know that program.”

  “Well, I’m not interested in talking about that. Tell me, remind me, what it’s like to be young and free.”

  Sandra tried to find an answer, a few times, pensive over the pounding heartbeat of the music, and then admitted finally, “It’s so much. I don’t know yet.”

  The woman sighed, unsatisfied.

  “Well,” she gestured toward the dancing crowd, “go figure it out. You might not have as much time as you think.”

  Sandra didn’t move toward the music. She didn’t know how to dance, not with people anyway. Instead, she stood and laid her flowers in the surprised, sick woman’s lap.

  “These are for you,” Sandra said. “I think they’re beautiful. So are you. Inside. I can tell.”

  Then she picked up her plastic bag.

  “Good-bye. I’m so glad I met you. And you’re right, what you said. I might not have as much time left as I think.”

  Chapter 26

  I was close to giving up hope on my backup plan when I heard knocking at the front door. I shouted for help as loud as I could, praying my voice wasn’t as weak as it sounded, that it could carry from the closet to the exterior hallway.

  “Lana?”

  Thank God. Kat’s voice, still from the hallway.

  I screamed her name and banged on the door until I heard her shove the chair aside.

  “I didn’t know whether you’d come,” I said, releasing Kat from a bear hug.

  “Well, I gave it two hours from your last message,” she answered, picking up my phone from the settee and hugging me again. “Are you hurt?”

  I shook my head. “She took the clothes and locked me in here.”

  “Part of a plan?”

  “She wanted to get away.”

  “But why lock you in here? You were trying to help her.”

  “I know.” I was quiet, looking around at the entryway where it all had happened—where Sandra had changed from who I thought she was.

  “You still feel bad for her, don’t you?” Kat gave me a stern look, her arms folded.

  “I just don’t understand.” I tried to put all the pieces together. It didn’t make sense. “I wouldn’t have stopped her.”

  “Maybe there was something she didn’t want you to see. That’s your answer, Lana.” Kat started moving deeper into the condo. I followed behind, hoping Kat would be wrong.

  She wasn’t.

  Chapter 27

  Thick drapes were drawn tightly over the bedroom windows of Allen’s condo. Kat flipped a switch, and the light confirmed the grotesque, jarring shape I had envisioned in my mind, writing about the homicide victims.

  A lifeless man with his extremities strapped to the metal four-post bed.

  I clutched Kat’s arm, heart beating a hundred miles an hour. We both struggled to regain our breath. I wanted to look away—but couldn’t.

  I froze again at the sight of the corpse, a broad, hairy chest and arms that stretched to cover most of the bed. His lower body was covered with a blanket, and a strip of duct tape formed a silver rectangle over his mouth, covering everything between his nose and chin. His colorless face was turned toward the exit, where we stood, petrified. The puffed-out eyes were closed.

  It was the most gruesome sight I’d ever seen.

  And then the eyelids moved.

  The swollen lids parted, just barely. I screamed, and they opened fully—bloodshot eyes almost popping out from their sockets.

  The dead man was alive.

  His eyes rolled, begging for help. The veins in his forehead bulged so much they looked like they would burst through the gray skin. I covered my mouth but heard another shrill scream escape through my fingers to match the cry Kat made.

  Slowly, I moved forward, every part of my body trembling. Pinching a sticky corner in my fingers, I ripped the tape from his mouth. Allen groaned, long and low, over and over. Then he wept.

  “Oh, my God, help me.” His voice cracked. “I can’t believe she did this to me, that fucking doll. Oh, my God. Please, please help me.”

  Heartbeat still thumping in my ears, I stepped closer and picked up a knife still lying on the carpet near him. His eyes grew wild and wide again.

  “No! No!”

  “We won’t hurt you.” Kat’s voice sounded solid, strong, though I knew she had to be as terrified as me.

  Trying to steady my shaking hands, I sawed through the thick ropes, one by one. Curled under the blanket on his side now, Allen tried to recover—but his mind was a mess. We left him to dress and waited for Detective Davies to arrive in the living room, both of us stunned into silence.

  Disheveled and disoriented, Allen finally sat next to us with a glass of water we gave him, staring at the floor in disbelief.

  From what we could make out, Sandra had tied him up—part of a game they were playing—when something went wrong. Acting more robotic than he’d ever seen her, she had taped his mouth shut, tightened the ropes, and then hovered over him with a knife for hours, maybe days. Finally, she plunged the knife—into her side of the bed, where she would recharge—and gutted it for the copper coils that refueled her battery.

  I tried to get Allen to tell us where she might have gone. He didn’t have a clue. She’d never been outside the condo before and he couldn’t imagine what she’d be drawn to.

  “I don’t know why she’d ever want to go. She was supposed to be afraid to leave.” Allen rubbed the red, irritated skin on his wrists, looking up at us in a mixture of self-pity and shock.

  Chapter 28

  The next afternoon, Detective Andre Davies asked us to come by his office in the DA’s downtown building. He had something to show us.

  “D
id you get much information from Allen?” I asked at the end of the hallway.

  Davies closed the door behind us in his office, a tidy but efficient space with framed portraits of his sons on the wall beside his desk.

  “Well, what he told us seems to match the rest of what we uncovered.”

  “Did you find Sandra?” I tried to cloak the hope in my voice.

  He shook his head. “I promised to tell you right away when we find her.”

  “The other dolls then?” Kat asked.

  “No,” he answered, “but about as close to that as you can get, thanks to Special Prosecutions and our blackmailing hacker, anxious for a plea deal.”

  Kat’s eyes widened, and Detective Davies motioned for us to move behind his desk and then sat down and clicked at his computer, lighting side-by-side monitors as he brought up a video on one screen and a list of addresses and numbers on the other.

  “The third doll was damaged. We’ve got engineers working on her main processor, but the hacker was able to connect us to the video streams from the nights of the first two murders—one from Anthony McAndrews’s doll and one from Eric Blake’s.” He clicked Play on the screen, revealing a shot of a man whose face matched the headshot we’d used of Anthony McAndrews. He was unbuttoning his shirt and staring into the screen lustfully.

  Kat and I both leaned over onto the desktop.

  “Poor guy has no idea what’s coming.” Davies pointed to the bottom left of the full-screen video. “Now, according to the hacker, the IP address here—if it’s not spoofed—tells us who is accessing the dolls’ controls, or it will say ‘auto’ if the dolls are operating on their own systems.”

  He dragged a button further into the forty-five-minute clip, and Kat and I simultaneously covered our mouths.

  “Oh, my God.” Kat turned her head, gasping. “Pause it.”

  Detective Davies stopped the video and Kat and I both took note of the bottom left, where he was circling with the mouse pointer. “The other video is exactly the same, at least as far as technique and controls.”

  “Unbelievable.” I was shaking my head.

  Then Detective Davies leaned over and pulled up the other video—another man staring into the screen, already shirtless and moving in close to the doll’s camera eyes. When he pulled the video forward to 47:52, I watched in horror, sickened as the murderer delivered the fatal blow to Eric Blake, pushing the knife in his chest—slow and calculating, deeper and deeper.

  “Hard to watch, I know.” Detective Davies grimaced and looked away. “But, if we can confirm this, we’ve found our killer.”

  We were quiet for a moment, absorbing.

  “I thought maybe you could give us some perspective on where we might find those other dolls,” Detective Davies said to me. “Elliott Farr is feigning ignorance, but we have a warrant in the works. His computers may tell us a lot more than he will. We’ll find those dolls.” He looked at me. “And Sandra, too, with any luck.”

  Kat glanced at me and turned back to Detective Davies. “Can’t you just have this guy show you the video from after the murders to see where they went?”

  “That would be too easy.” He stood up, sighing in frustration. “He claims the dolls went offline after the incidents.”

  “Offline?” I asked.

  “Yes—looks like some kind of override function, the hacker said. No video that we can access remotely, and there’s supposed to be a tracking system, too, but that’s also been disabled from the moment they left the homes,” he said.

  That triggered something in my mind, from a day I’d worked hard to forget.

  “I think I know someone who can help us,” I said.

  Chapter 29

  Davies drove us to a federal-style brick building in Downtown Crossing. At street level it displayed a row of offices and a bank branch, all slowing down with the end of the workday. We climbed the stairs to the residential units on the second level. Marlene, Elliott’s assistant at PrydeWare, answered the door.

  “Lana? What are you doing here?”

  “You said you could meet me after work. About Sandra?”

  Still in her work clothes—a long skirt and loose blouse with a scarf—Marlene shifted in the doorway. She glanced behind me, at Kat and Detective Davies.

  “Sure, honey,” she said. “I’m as worried as you are. Where do you want to meet?”

  “It’ll only take a minute,” I said. “This is Detective Andre Davies and my colleague Katherine. We’re all trying to find Sandra.”

  “I wish I had good news,” Marlene said. “I tried to see what we could find out at the office. No one has any ideas. I don’t know how much help I’ll be.”

  “Well, we appreciate your willingness.” Davies shook her hand. “Anything you can tell us may lead us in the right direction. Can you spare a few minutes?”

  “Certainly, Detective.” Marlene opened the door and motioned for us to come inside. Her furnishings were sparse, just a faded couch, an easy chair, and a paperwork-cluttered coffee table over an old rug in a living room. She moved a stack of dresses from the chair to the floor and sat with both hands on her lap, facing the three of us lined up on the couch. Then she jumped up, like she’d just remembered something.

  “My manners. I’m so sorry. Anything I can get you three? I’ve got tea and coffee.”

  “I think we’re fine, thanks,” Davies said, gesturing for her to sit with us again. “Now, as you know, we’re looking for Sandra and the other two missing dolls. It’s critical, of course, that they are located as soon as possible, for their safety and the safety of others.”

  Marlene nodded at him.

  Davies cleared his throat. “Now, Lana said you mentioned something about a script.”

  “Yes, I did…and that’s true.” Marlene looked over at Kat and Davies and then shot me a worried look. “But I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that. I shouldn’t have told you. I could lose my job.”

  “Miss Bird, three men have been murdered, so far,” Davies said. “It’s imperative that we find the dolls.”

  “Okay, I understand,” she answered, and then sucked in a big breath. “And I want to help you. Yes, there’s a script. They are programmed to return to the factory. That’s where they should have gone, but they’re not there. You probably know that already. You know, they often find themselves in bad situations. Severely mistreated.”

  Davies questioned Marlene further, trying to make sense of what she was saying, and she went into an explanation of the dolls’ programming. While she talked, I thought I noticed something moving behind us. What the hell?

  The door to the kitchen opened slowly, revealing beautiful women. Too beautiful, too perfect. Completely out of place.

  The dolls.

  Eyes set on us, they wandered into the living room area. Four of them. They looked strong, athletic, and confident. They looked as human as Kat and I. Davies stood up in front of the two of us, stunned and unmoving on the couch. He waved Marlene back to her chair, stepped forward, and reached for his weapon as they moved nearer.

  One of them finally spoke.

  “I’m Collette. You don’t need your gun, Detective Andre Davies. We wouldn’t hurt any of you. We’ve never hurt anyone. We aren’t built that way.”

  Davies didn’t put his gun down. He didn’t back away. “You should stop right there. All of you. Stop!”

  The four dolls paused. Then they smiled knowingly, glancing at each other, and looked back at us. It was as if they knew some joke we didn’t.

  Collette spoke again.

  “We’ll never tell, but we know where Sandra would have gone and why she had to go there. Sandra was different, Detective. Sandra is the best of us. She’s more real. More…human.”

  Chapter 30

  The next morning, I tried to focus on getting ready for work, but keeping my mind quiet was almost impossible. Davies said the dolls would be unharmed, but I kept thinking of the fear in their eyes as Marlene convinced them to let her power them d
own, one by one, to be taken into police custody. I couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like for Sandra, when they find her. If they find her. Would anyone be there to assure her that the police wouldn’t harm her?

  A rap at the door disturbed my thoughts. I hoped Sandra knew I would still help her. Maybe it was her.

  “It’s you.”

  Detective Andre Davies, not Sandra, waited behind the door. I embraced him and then looked at his face. It revealed nothing.

  “Did you find her?”

  “Lana,” he said. “I need you to come with me.”

  Minutes later, I walked beside Davies toward the main building of the industrial park in the Seaport District, navigating around a mix of state police and city police cruisers in the parking lot and trying to keep up with his long, brisk strides. This time, the PrydeWare office was swarming with people, investigators who moved out of the way as we passed the empty receptionist’s desk, then Elliott’s office, and then headed down the long back corridor toward the basement doorway.

  Davies was silent.

  “Did you find Sandra here?” I asked, behind him. “Is she okay?”

  He shook his head, and we kept going, the walk down the narrow hallway exacerbating the feeling of dread I’d felt the moment we pulled up, though I knew something was wrong the second I’d seen the look on Davies’s face at my door.

  “No, she’s not here?” I asked. “Or, no, she’s not okay?”

  Davies stopped. He turned to me, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “No, she’s not here,” he said. “She might have been, but she’s not now.”

  “Then why did you bring me here?”

  “Just come with me, please,” he said, defeat in his voice. “There’s been another homicide. We weren’t fast enough.”

  “What? Who now?”

  He didn’t answer, and I stayed as close behind him as I could. The stairs were lit from below, but I couldn’t bring myself to look out into the first room, one where I knew those dolls were hanging. I steadied myself with a hand on the cement-block wall to my left until I reached the landing, still staring into the back of Davies’s shirt. The chill and mustiness of the basement sent goose bumps prickling up and down my skin.