Chapter 10 - The Ledger of the Air
The radio room in the Sangamon County building was quiet at two in the morning.
The amber screens had been replaced in two-thousand-and-four with flat-panel LCDs that had a grey-blue cast, like the ice on the public landing when the sun goes down behind the grain elevators.
Claire Johnson sat at Console 1.
She was forty-eight now. Her hair had two wide ribbons of silver that ran back from her temples into a braid that reached the middle of her shoulder blades, held by an elastic band she had stolen from the supply closet in ninety-nine.
The headset was the same Plantronics, though the ear-loop had been replaced three times with clear silicone tubing she bought at the aquarium store on Dirksen Parkway.
The call came in at 02:14:10.
It was an automatic cellular drop—a nine-one-one from a tower on the interstate near the dive bridge, sixty miles an hour, five hundred yards of jitter on the GPS plot.
"Nine-one-one," Claire said. Her voice was the same voice that had taken the call from Maplewood Drive fourteen years before—low, flat, level, the vowels round and unhurried as the water in the Sangamon. "Where is your emergency?"
A young man’s voice came back through the digital channel—compressed, clipped by the packet loss, full of the background roar of three lanes of concrete blacktop and an open driver’s window.
"Yeah... hey. I’m on fifty-five. Northbound. There’s an old guy in a Dodge truck... he’s all over the fog line. Looks like he’s having a stroke or he’s three sheets to the wind."
Claire’s right hand moved to the keyboard.
Her fingers didn't hit the plastic; they dropped onto the keys with that heavy, rhythmic cadence that never changes, whether the line holds an overturned gravel hauler or a boy with a fishhook in his thumb.
10-73. TRAFFIC HAZARD.
I-55 NB AT MM 94.
VEH: DODGE PK, OLDER MODEL.
DISP: COUNTY 4.
"What color is the truck, sir?" Claire asked, her eyes moving to the CAD monitor where the blue patrol units were crawling like small electronic lice across the grey road map.
"Grey," the driver said. "Faded out. Got some kind of ladder rack on the back made out of angle iron. Looks like he’s got three or four drywall buckets rattling around in the bed."
Claire’s left index finger hovered over the mute toggle.
For three seconds, she didn't breathe.
The room behind her was dead quiet, save for the hum of the three-phase power supply in the utility closet and the rhythmic clack-clack of a printer in the supervisor’s office running the morning warrant list for the sheriff’s road deputies.
"Did you get a plate on that Dodge, sir?"
"Illinois," the driver said. "Truck plate. B-division. Looks like... nine-two-four... Mary-Lincoln. He’s pulling off at the South Grand exit now. Going slow. Thirty miles an hour with his hazards on."
Claire looked at the screen.
The address field was empty.
Beside her console, pasted to the laminate with yellowing Scotch tape that had curled at the corners until the adhesive was grey with fifteen years of cigarette smoke and street dust, was a three-by-five index card.
On the card, written in Daniel Harris’s old, square, police-docket printing with an indelible purple pencil, were three lines:
EMILY MILLER.
1427 MAPLEWOOD.
CASE CLOSED DEC. 14, 1998.
DISPOSITION: SECURED.
Claire didn't touch the card.
She didn't look at the CAD window that held the active units for the city beats.
She reached out with her middle finger, keyed the district channel for the county units operating south of the city limits, and spoke into the windscreen:
"County 4, County 7. Be on the lookout for an older model Dodge pickup, grey primer, angle-iron rack, entering the south grid at MacArthur. Driver is a sixty-year-old white male, possible medical or post-release supervision check. Use the felony approach, boys. He’s got forty years of rust on his knuckles and he doesn't know the house was torn down."
The radio clicked twice.
"County 4, copy," a young voice came back—a kid who hadn't been born when the Allis-Chalmers plant was still running three shifts. "We’re at Sixth and Hazel. We’ll take him on the ramp."
Claire unkeyed the mic.
She reached into her canvas bag on the floor, took out a small brass pocketknife with two bone scales, and pried the edge of the Scotch tape off the console laminate.
The paper came away with a dry, fibrous zip.
She didn't drop it in the metal wastebasket by her stool; she didn't tear it into four pieces for the shredder bin.
She laid the three-by-five card flat on the palm of her left hand, took the small brass knife, and cut the paper into sixteen clean, square ribbons, each an eighth of an inch wide, until the name Emily was just five letters of blue ink scattered across the green felt of her blotter.
Then she opened the small drawer under the keyboard—the one where the spare ear-loops, the throat lozenges, and the plastic hairpins had lived since nineteen-ninety-four.
She swept the white paper shavings into the drawer with the heel of her hand, pushed the drawer shut until the spring-latch clicked into its strike plate, and put her fingers back on the numeric pad.
May you like
"Nine-one-one," she said to the next open trunk line on the board, her voice dropping down into the warm, heavy center of the room where the coffee was still boiling. "Where is your emergency?"
Outside the high, reinforced windows of the basement room, forty feet below the granite steps of the courthouse, the wind came off the Sangamon River, cold and wet, moving through the new grass in the park where the herons were already standing in the shallows, waiting for the sun to hit the water before they lifted their wings and flew north toward the lake.
