Vignette 3: The Bad News (or, Young Franziska Investigates)
Disappearance can be far crueler than death, and at the age of five, Ema Skye understood neither.
She ran her nails along the chair's carvings, click-click-click, back and forth. Lana clutched her other hand tightly. They wanted to go home, but home was wherever Aunt Alice was, and that was currently unknown. Sitting on the floor beside them, knees drawn to his chest, Vincent Omnia stared down the hallway at the investigation team. They were talking about his brother. It sounded bad. An old lion of a man, towering even over the other adults, shouted orders at policemen, and a young girl with blue hair scowled together with him, arms crossed.
"Is Dr. Henry done yet?" asked Ema of nobody in particular. She hoped Dr. Omnia wasn't still angry at Aunt Alice; they'd been shouting a lot that morning. She'd told the tall man - the prosecutor - about this, and he'd smiled in a way that made her wish she hadn't mentioned it.
"I told you, the police are still talking to him," said Lana, maintaining a stoic front. "He'll be out soon. You're making Vince nervous."
To unsettle Vincent, who was only a year Ema's senior, was not difficult. "They think did Henry something wrong," he said. "That guy. That von Karma guy. He's saying stuff about Henry."
"Let's not jump to conclusions, all right?" said Lana, though she was already visualizing the impending disaster in her head. Even as a cadet at the police academy, she could recognize what Manfred von Karma's presence meant. From what she'd gathered, the only people who'd accessed this part of the building when Aunt Alice vanished were the Omnia brothers. Uncle Johann had been stuck in traffic, and few others came in on the weekend. And since even a von Karma would hesitate to accuse a six-year-old of murder or kidnapping, that left Henry Omnia as the sole suspect.
Sole suspects fared poorly in von Karma cases.
But perhaps it wouldn't even come to trial! Manfred von Karma hadn't maintained his perfect win record by taking every case that crossed his path. Without Aunt Alice's body, the most the Prosecution could say was that Henry had used some unknown method to erase her from existence, or at least the immediate area. And if Aunt Alice turned out to be alive after charges were filed - fallen out a window and concussed to a fugue state, perhaps? - it would be the greatest blunder of von Karma's career.
"No," said Lana, "He's definitely not going to arrest Dr. Omnia today. He might have more questions later." Once von Karma had found or fabricated evidence, anything was possible.
"Questions? Why?" asked Ema.
"To help him find Aunt Alice."
Reassured somewhat by Lana's expert opinion as a student detective, Ema ruminated quietly until Dr. Omnia's office door swung open. The man who'd introduced himself to the children as Detective Tyrell stepped out, followed by Henry. He looked downcast, but he wasn't in handcuffs. "If you think of anything," said the detective, "tell us. The longer she stays missing, the harder this gets. The forensic guys'll take your prints and DNA while we talk with your other partner."
Henry nodded and forced a smile at Vincent and Ema, before being led away by a forensics tech. Ema waved back, but Vincent only sighed. So Detective Tyrell knelt down on one knee and addressed them both.
"Hey. You've been real patient. I know it looks bad, but we're gonna figure it all out. I'll talk to your uncle, and then you'll all go home." He rummaged in the pockets of his bullet-riddled trenchcoat and gravely presented lollipops to Vincent and Ema. Both accepted them. Ema fiddled with the wrapper of hers, but didn't open it, just looked up at Tyrell expectantly. Vincent just rubbed the stick between his fingers.
"What if you don't find her?" asked Ema.
A slow shake of the head. "You shouldn't be thinking about that stuff at your age. That's for us adults to do. You're lucky, kids." He chuckled, a deep baritone. "As long as you've got adults to do your worrying for you, everything'll turn out okay."
"Um, there were adults on the Hindenburg," said Vincent.
"...Maybe so, maybe so. But none of them had my nose for smelling out the bad guys, or my mirror for - "
"Stop wasting time with those children!" shouted Manfred von Karma from down the hall. "They know nothing."
Ema frowned. Manfred von Karma seemed like kind of a jerk. But the girl beside him seemed cool! Although she couldn't have been more than two or three years Ema's senior, it was obvious that she addressed adults without fear or deference. "If Mr. Badd can't question them," said this miniature proto-lawyer, "may I?"
Already turning back to the office, von Karma wordlessly waved his daughter on. With an apologetic mutter, Tyrell rejoined the adult investigation team, trusting Lana to protect the children from Franziska's enthusiasm.
"Name and occupation, each of you!" said Franziska.
"I'm Ema," said Ema, perking up at the prospect of someone to talk to until Aunt Alice was found. "Who're you? Why is your hair blue?"
"I am the prodigy Franziska von Karma. And no questions from the suspects! And you, boy! Who are you?" she said, clapping her hands sharply for emphasis.
"Vincent Omnia," said Vincent. Then, with what surely couldn't have been precocious sarcasm, he added, "Your dad says I know nothing." Lana smiled, and Franziska narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
"How do you three know the victim?" asked Franziska.
"Huh? Victim?" said Ema. Aunt Alice was missing, but she hadn't heard anything about a victim.
"Alice Palmstroem," snapped Franziska. "Have you been paying no attention?!"
That stops now, thought Lana. "Watch it," she said, rising up from her chair to loom over Franziska. "She's having a difficult day." Then, seeing that Franziska was entirely unmoved, she added, "If you alienate everyone you talk to, you won't get far as a prosecutor. She wants to find her aunt as much as you do."
Franziska considered this. In spite of his demanding temperament, her father did know how to be charming when the situation demanded. "Duly noted!" she said, relaxing her posture a little and curtseying. "Let's start over."
"Okay," said Ema, brightly accepting the olive branch. "Why is your hair blue?"
Rare indeed was it for Franziska to meet someone as persistent as herself in pressing a question. "Because my mother's hair is blue. How do you know Alice Palmstroem?"
"So it's DNA?" asked Ema.
"Irrelevant. How do you know Alice Palmstroem?"
"She adopted me and Lana. Mom and Dad had an accident."
This was spoken without obvious distress. Her parents had died when she was only an infant, so Aunt Alice and Uncle Johann were the only guardians she had ever known.
"My condolences for your loss," said Franziska. As her father used that phrase often, it seemed the proper thing to say in such circumstances. "So you've known the victim since then."
"Don't say 'victim,'" said Vincent.
"Fine. What is her relationship to you?" asked Franziska.
"My brother takes care of me," said Vincent. "But she helps. So does Dr. Johann. Sometimes she shows me things in the lab. And he gives me puzzles, too. Lots of puzzles."
The Palmstroems seemed to have an endless well of puzzles for Ema, Vincent, and Lana. To Alice, these problems were a way to tease apart ideas and promote a healthy mind, but to Johann, puzzles and riddles represented something deeper: a way to be understood, to cut away the social rituals, the mazes of signals and counter-signals that he found so tedious.
"I see," said Franziska, frowning with a jealousy she couldn't articulate. "Does your brother have a financial motive? Would he get money if Alice Palmstroem died?"
Lana hurriedly hushed Vincent's reply for fear that he'd say something unfortunate. "Besides being a co-founder of Saturn Tech," said Lana, "Henry didn't have any special financial stake. He wouldn't inherit anything from Alice Palmstroem. He might have gotten a bigger share of the company, but it'd be hard for it to keep going without Aunt Alice."
"That," said Franziska, "will be for a court to decide. After we finish our investigation."
"We? Your dad lets you investigate with him?" It was Ema's turn to be jealous. Lana had never let her come along on field training, not even to see the field. Ema was unsure if the term implied exciting police work, a place with cows and grass, or both, but she wanted to know for herself.
"Investigate? Of course he does," said Franziska, a shade too defensively. "Always. Every time. Let's go to the crime scene!"
"Crime scene?" asked Lana. "How can there possibly be a crime scene?"
"I'll show you!"
Despite an initial attempt at a steady and dignified gait, she soon broke into a skipping dash down the hall. With the others trailing behind, and her father safely absorbed in the questioning of Johann Palmstroem, she flung open the machining room door.
"Here! The suspect says he last saw her here!"
The machining room held a hodgepodge of equipment and reagents. Cabinets of chemicals with obvious spill-marks lined the walls nearest the door, and a fabricator suite took up the entire back half of the room. Between the clutter, the fabricator, and the central table covered in power tools, there was little room to maneuver. Something faintly blue was splashed over the table and floor.
"But just because she was last seen here doesn't mean this is the scene of the crime," said Lana. "If there even was a crime."
"Objection! There was definitely a crime. A big crime," said Franziska. "Kidnapping or murder. We know she came up here. And we know she never left."
"The keycard records for the east wing elevator," guessed Lana.
"Correct," said Franziska. "And the receptionist saw her coming up. She was with Dr. Henry Omnia. They were arguing!"
Vincent nudged the chemical cabinet with his foot. It was open. "What are you saying? My brother wouldn't kill anyone."
"I'm saying," said Franziska, pausing to find the right words, "I'm saying the man killed Alice Palmstroem here! Then he cut up the body with those power tools! And dissolved it in carbon cleaner! They did a luminol test... blood all over!"
Franziska beamed in the face of Lana's horror. Both Ema and Vincent seemed distinctly uncomfortable with this account of events.
"Objection," said Lana, with the barest minimum of force. "The cleaners they use could easily give a false positive. And Vincent, did you even hear any power tools?"
"Yeah. But she was working on invention stuff all morning," he said, pointing to a gold belt, a small gold harness, and two little tripods on the table. The belt and harness looked unfinished, but both tripods had their apical LEDs lit. "The noise was probably her. Really loud, I could hear from Henry's office. But there's no way my brother did that!"
"People always say that," said Franziska. "And then Papa shows that they are wrong."
"No," said Vincent. "It's not because of that. It's just impossible. That's a fact."
"What?!" In a well-ordered world, a hypothesis from a von Karma rightly outranked a fact from anyone else.
"I saw it on TV. You can't dissolve a human body in acid fast at all. And, and what about all the stuff Aunt Alice was wearing?"
Lana was unsure whether to be impressed, or have a serious chat with Henry about the boy's television habits.
"Her body couldn't be melted? Then where did she go?!" asked Franziska.
In spite of the girl's galling tone, it occurred to Lana that intellectualizing the problem might help her keep her own composure. So she took the bait. "What if she left out a window?"
"Henry Omnia threw her out a window?"
"That's not what I said," corrected Lana. But wheels were already turning in Franziska's mind.
"We're high up, so she couldn't just jump... An accomplice! An accomplice!" exulted Franziska. "Henry Omnia knocked her out. Then threw her down to someone waiting on the ground."
Vincent shook his head. "That'd be really, really hard. This place is built in a hill, so the ground's all slanted. You couldn't stand there and catch someone." Though he sounded confident enough in that, his foot began to tap uncontrollably, a tic that always meant his nerves were on edge. Dealing with Franziska was taking its toll.
Lana found this duel of prodigies a little unsettling, but some ratiocinative impulse urged her on. "So no ladders, either. On that grade, they'd probably slip, or at least leave obvious marks in the soil."
"Um," said Ema who'd been silent for the entire exchange. "What about... a helicopter? Uncle Johann says black helicopters sometimes get people."
"That's just one of his notions," said Lana hurriedly. "Aunt Alice told you not to talk about it."
"But what if the helicopters took her away?" asked Ema. On a bad day, Johann Palmstroem could be quite explicit about his elaborate fantasies. What Ema had seen as a normal and even charming facet of her uncle's character, Lana, Henry, and Alice had rightly regarded with alarm.
But Franziska, lacking a few critical pieces of context for these wild claims, saw only the chance to score a lead in the investigation, one that even her father had missed. "The roof! Is there a way to the roof?"
"Maybe the stairs, but -"
Before Vincent even finished his sentence, Franziska had run out the door, found the emergency stairwell, and set off the fire alarm.
"Oh, no," said Lana. Outside in the hallway, Manfred and Franziska argued loudly, with occasional attempts to calm the waters by Detective Tyrell Badd. It was impossible to make out the details over the racket. "Well," shouted Lana to be heard over the fire alarm, "at least we know now that nobody used the stairs. You didn't hear an alarm earlier, did you, Vincent?"
"No," he said, much too quietly given the circumstances. "I was in Henry's office all morning. But no alarm."
Then, quite unexpectedly, Ema shouted, "Mouse!"
"What?" What had distracted her now? Sometimes, Lana wondered if her sister had a some situation-specific version of attention-deficit disorder.
Ema pointed to the hulking fabricator. "A mouse just ran behind there. It was wearing... something weird. All metal and shiny."
Brow furrowing, Lana crouched to peer under the machine. It was too dark to see and too loud to hear, but something was moving there. But why would a mouse be wearing anything? Was it some kind of lab specimen?
"Henry says they test stuff on the mice," said Vincent, then added, noting Ema's look of worry, "It doesn't hurt them. But they don't do it in here. They, um, test in the animal testing -"
The door swung open, interrupting these murine speculations, and Manfred von Karma prowled in. Franziska was not with him; the detective must have taken her off his hands. "Out," he growled. "Out, all of you! Except Omnia. You stay."
So Ema and Lana were escorted by a forensics tech to the lobby, where Detective Tyrell Badd was comforting a sulking Franziska. It was there that they waited for Dr. Johann Palmstroem to come out of questioning about Saturn Technologies and his wife's activities, and it was there that they at last received the bad news.
A thorough search of the surrounding area, including hospitals, buses, taxis, traffic cameras, and the morgue, had turned up not the slightest trace of Alice Palmstroem. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the earth.