(Chapter 12. The house in Brentwood, a cruddy motel in Anaheim, other places in and around LA. March 6, 2033.)





Captain Bentley-Wagner pulled up beside Donovan and said, "Get in, Officer. Chief Sloan wants to talk to you ASAP."

Charles gulped, and climbed in. This was his worst nightmare. He had spoken to the suspect, looked her in the eye, even had his hand on her shoulder, and hadn't known it. He'd blown it big time. He'd had the opportunity to personally put an end to one of the biggest manhunts in the history of Los Angeles, and he'd blown it. Sure, as soon as he'd become aware of the situation, he'd called it in, and the captain had ordered everyone to be on the lookout for the tall, blonde, Jamaican woman, but it had been too little, to late. Now, Chief Sloan, his hero since the day he'd saved his mother in a bank robbery fifteen years ago, was personally going to fire him.

"You're pretty quiet, kid," the Captain said.

"I know I'm in deep trouble, sir." Looking desperately at his superior, he begged, "You know the Chief, sir. I would never dream of asking you to intervene on my behalf, but do you think there's anything I can do to save my job?"

Dion chuckled and said, "You could tell him you don't have the legs for a meter-maid's mini-skirt."

At the young man's horrified gasp, Dion broke into a grin and reassured him.

"Look, son, the Chief is a reasonable guy. I've known him just over thirty years now, and I'm pretty sure he just wants more information. Maybe he'll have you sit down with a sketch artist. He's not going to fire you."

Donovan seemed to breathe easier after that, and some of the color returned to his face, but he still appeared to be worried.





As Steven showed Donovan and the sketch artist into the den, Steve looked at Dion and said, "He seems pretty shook up."

Dion laughed and said, "You've been his hero since he was a kid, Chief. Everybody at the precinct knows it. You saved his mom in a bank robbery years ago, and that day he decided to become a cop. When I picked him up to bring him here, he was sure you were going to fire him."

Steve laughed, and said, "Emily called me a hero the day I interviewed her. Hope this kid doesn't prove to be as much trouble."

Dion said, "I don't know about trouble, but give him some time, and he could be just as good a cop."

Liv said, "Let me take him a cup of tea. It might calm him down. Then maybe we can finally get started."





Emily and Moretti were settled in a roach motel somewhere between Anaheim and Santa Ana. They had one cruddy room, two beds, a hotplate-minifridge- microwave unit, and no ocean view. Both were unhappy with the situation, but they knew it was the best place to hide out for the time being. Anyone who knew Em, knew she wasn't the type to choose a place like this, and Moretti, with his seedy looks and suspicious nature fit right into the neighborhood.

On the way to Anaheim, they'd made an excursion to La Mirada where Emily had placed a call from a pay phone to the number she had given the Chief. He hadn't said much, just that her folks were worried. Then they'd ditched the Tundra and stolen a nondescript little two-door Pontiac with dysfunctional automatic seatbelts and bad brakes. Less than a mile away, they'd dumped the Pontiac in favor of a Volkswagen Beetle III, so called because it was the third time the design had been brought into service.

They'd dumped the Beetle III somewhere between Fullerton and Anaheim, walked on to a cheesy-looking used car lot, and using new fake IDs so they wouldn't be associated with Elizabeth and John Morrissey from Santa Monica, paid eight thousand cash for a big, cream-colored LTD. After dropping Moretti at the motel, Emily had changed her disguise to become the kind of woman who didn't mind staying in the kind of motel where certain special clients paid by the hour. Then she drove back to La Mirada and called her contact from a different phone booth.

"They're looking for a black woman, blond hair, Jamaican accent. Does that make any sense to you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Care to explain it to me?"

"No, sir."

"Did you know Hannah Wagner is involved in the search?"

"No, sir. Thank you for telling me, sir. What does she do for a living, sir?"

"She's a Ph.D. candidate in microbiology at UCLA. Why?"

"Might help me figure out what they're doing to find me, sir. Sir?"

"What?"

"Have you found a safe house for us?"

"No. Even if I did, I don't know who I could trust to guard it. Wherever you are, stay there."

"Yes, sir."





Olivia sat the cup of tea down beside the young man, and as she turned to go, he shouted, "Wait!"

Liv turned and said, "Is there something else I can do for you, Officer?"

When he saw that his shout had interrupted the meeting Agent Wagner, Commander Banks, and Captains Cioffi and Bentley-Wagner were having in the opposite corner of the den, he apologized before pointing at the sketch artist and telling Liv, "Look at him."

Olivia turned toward the artist and smiled confusedly.

"The eyes," Donovan said, "she had the same eyes. That's what gave her away. Nobody else has eyes like that. Make sure you get the eyes right."

Olivia sat patiently for several minutes while the artist took special care to 'get the eyes right.' Finally, Steve came and got her, saying, "Liv, we need you out here now."





Someone had prepared a tea tray, and Olivia helped herself to a cup as Steve, Steven, Officer Cioffi, and Keith got settled. She, Keith, and Steven were supposed provide background information on Emily while Mark, Amanda, and Jess tried to make sense of the information they had already gathered. Once Olivia, Keith, and Steven had provided all the information they could, they would all settle down at the table and try to sift through it again, fit it with what had been collected previously, and figure out what Emily was going to do next.

Steve started the discussion.

"Keith, Liv," he paused before including his son, "Steven. The three of you are the only people in LA who actually know Emily. I need you to tell me anything and everything you can about her. I want to know about her hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes, special skills, food and medication allergies, absolutely everything. Cioffi here, and a few other trusted people, will take that information and try to create a profile of Emily. If we can figure out what makes her tick, we might be able to predict what she might do and where she might go." Looking at his former lover, he said, "Liv why don't you begin?"

Olivia glanced at Keith for reassurance, and he nodded, indicating that it would be ok for her to share private details about her family with the police in order to help get her daughter back safely. She took several deep breaths, which Steve recognized immediately as a yoga technique, and he wondered whether Emily's current or past shenanigans were the cause of Olivia's stress.

"I told you when you called, Steve, Emily is a good girl, and she plays by the rules. I know that as surely as I know my own name, but beyond that, I don't know my own daughter as well as I probably should. We've never had an easy relationship."

She chewed her bottom lip for a moment, and Steve asked her to elaborate.

Looking at Keith, she got another nod and he said, "Go on, O. It might help them find her."

She nodded and continued.

"We knew early on that Emmy was special. She was just so smart, Steve! She could actually read by the time she was two. We started her in kindergarten when she was three. She was big enough, smart enough, and mature enough, the other kids had no idea she was two years younger.

"By the time she was twelve years old, I couldn't teach her anything."

Steve laughed lightly and said, "I remember the feeling all too well."

Steven blushed slightly, but shared his father's amusement. He could vaguely recall the unpleasant know-it-all he had been in his adolescence.

Liv shook her head and said, "You've got it all wrong, Steve. I don't mean that teenage 'I have all the answers already' thing, though she certainly had that attitude in spades. She was really that smart. By the time she was in sixth grade, I had taught her everything I knew about everything I knew anything about. I didn't *know* anything else to teach her. She had completely surpassed the limits of my knowledge, and I couldn't keep up with her any more. It kind of scared me. I would be talking to this child and things would come out of her mouth that were completely beyond my comprehension.

"One day when she was about twelve, she asked me, 'Mom, why are you afraid of me?' I tried to convince her I wasn't, but she could see through me like glass. After that day, we never *really* talked anymore."

Olivia poured everyone some more tea, then excused herself to the restroom. When she returned, her nose and eyes were red and she was sniffling, but no one commented that she had clearly been crying. She took up her narrative right where she had left off as if there had been no interruption at all.

"The school had her tested, and they ended up calling in some expert from a private facility out of state. They declared her a 'universal genius'. She's beyond joining Mensa. She's up there with da Vinci, Hypatia, Stephen Hawking, and Isaac Newton. When she was eighteen, she was believed to be one of the twenty-five smartest people in the world."

"I see," Steve said. "At the park, when we discovered the setup with the lasers, I told Dion she was brilliant, but I had no idea. What else can you tell me?"

"She was a mischievous child, very interested in computers. When she was fifteen, she was arrested on half a dozen counts of hacking into secure government systems. It wasn't the first time she'd been caught…exploring…places she wasn't supposed to be in cyberspace, but this time, it was serious. When the judge asked why she did it, she said she was bored and needed a challenge. She also told him she was highly disappointed in the Federal Government's security measures. She had expected hacking into their systems to be harder. He gave her five *thousand* hours of community service and assigned her to work for the Federal Government testing and improving the security for their systems.

"She developed her own programming language before she was legal to drive. It streamlined programming and applications to the point where computers running her system and software were about seventy percent faster than anything else on the market. Microsoft bought her out for one hundred million dollars. They were glad to pay it, too, because she'd written a conversion program that, when properly installed, would let her software run on Microsoft operating systems much faster and with fewer errors than Microsoft's own programs. The boys at Microsoft couldn't figure any of it out, but they realized she could bankrupt them in just a year or two if they let her go unchecked.

"Purely out of spite, she refused to tell them how it worked, but they paid for it anyway because they felt so threatened by it. The sale contract states that if they ever wish to sell the technology, she gets the right of first refusal, and if she wants it when they sell, they have to sell it back to her for just the hundred million they originally paid."

"Why did she sell it," Steven asked.

Keith laughed. "She said programming using her language was too easy. It bored her. Have you ever heard the expression 'a mile wide and a foot deep'?"

Steve nodded. "Sort of like 'a Jack of all trades and a master of none', right?"

"Exactly," Keith confirmed. "That's our Em. She's interested in everything, but devoted to almost nothing."

"But," Olivia explained, "because she's so smart, she masters everything quickly."

"What did she do with the money," Steven wanted to know.

"Squandered a lot of it," Olivia said. "The rest she turned over to Meyer Goldstein. He's been managing it, along with my accounts, for about ten years now. Emmy takes an allowance, and the rest, Meyer invests in various charitable projects."

"Like the LA Promise Foundation," Steve said.

"Yep. But one of her pet projects is a school for the gifted and talented. She wants to create a place where the best and brightest will be challenged."

"I see," Steve said. "Trying to improve the lot of others like her."

"Exactly."

Keith took over here. "She's a mathematical genius, Steve, and has made discoveries and developed theorems that nobody I know can understand, not that *that's* saying much. She composed a two-hour opera at the age of four. People at the Julliard School of Music said it rivaled anything Mozart had ever produced. By the age of sixteen, she spoke, read, wrote, and could translate between about forty languages, including ancient Greek and Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Russian, Hebrew, several African tribal languages, all the Romance languages, all the Germanic languages, Basque, Mixteca, Guaraní, Nauhautl, and only God himself knows what else. I have to admit, I am a lot smarter now that I was thirty years ago. There's no way I could ever hope to know as much as Emmy does, but raising a prodigy forces you to educate yourself beyond anything you'd ever imagine."

"She's very artistic," Liv noted. "She can draw, paint, sculpt, write, sing, dance, play about twenty different instruments, and when it comes to acting, she's a virtual chameleon. In the third grade, she did a project on the 'Immigrant Experience in America from the Pilgrims to the 21st Century' and it stuck with her. She's developed about, oh, forty or fifty characters out of that and she used to do a stand-up routine at Boots based on them. Each of them has a history, a family, and goals. They're almost real people, and she could draw you a family tree and write the biography of any one of them on demand."

"So," Steve said, "We're looking for any one of forty or fifty different six-foot-tall females?"

"Ohhhh, no," Liv corrected. "Most of them are tall females, yes, but Yervant is an Armenian hunchback teenage boy who stands less than five and a half feet tall, and Nen is a forty-year old Egyptian paraplegic engineer who's wife took the kids and went back to Egypt after the car accident that paralyzed him. There are others but the point is, she can become any of those people at the drop of a hat."

"Come on, Liv," Steve said in disbelief. "She can't make herself shorter."

"No, but she has this way of carrying herself…"

Keith interrupted.

"You know how O can stand up straight, give you *that look* and it scares the beans outta you?"

"Yeah…" Steve reluctantly agreed, unwilling to admit that the tiny woman could still strike terror in his heart with just a look.

"Well, you know she's nothing to be afraid of, but she still looks larger than life. It's intimidating as all hell, right?"

"Uh-huh."

Olivia blushed.

"Emmy can do the same kind of thing, but she can do more than get scary, and she can do it whenever she wants, not just when she's peeved."

"Ok," Cioffi interrupted, "so is it safe to assume that she can do anything she pleases?"

Keith and Olivia looked at each other for a moment.

Nodding, they looked at Steve and Cioffi in unison and said, "Yeah."





"Em."

"Huh?"

"Why you a cop?"

"Dunno. Why you a crook?"

"Family business. Really, Em, what makes someone decide to be a cop? It's a helluva lot more dangerous than most jobs, and a lot harder than bein' a crook."

"What makes you think it's harder than being a crook?"

"Too damn many rules, and you still haven't answered my question."

Emily laughed.

"I think the rules are part of the reason I became a cop, Moretti."

"Explain."

"Well, when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time getting in trouble. I was sentenced to death when I was fifteen…"





"With all her skills, why did she become a cop," Steve asked.

Keith laughed, but it was more a sound of disgust than of humor. "That's a good story," he said. His tone made it clear that he would not enjoy telling it.

"Until she was about sixteen, Emmy spent most of her time dancing around the edges of the law. O told you about the hacking charges, but what she didn't tell you was that she managed to break into files on government agencies and programs that didn't officially exist. She was also up on espionage charges."

"At fifteen?"

Keith nodded.

Steve let out a low whistle.

"Before then, she'd been tried for and acquitted of a number of things from securities fraud to embezzlement to money laundering to rigging the state lottery," Keith continued. "To this day, I'm not sure what she did and didn't do. It was driving the cops nuts and just plain wearing out O and me. We were sick to death of the whole thing and didn't know what to do about it."

"It is so hard when your child is so smart that you can't even tell when she's getting into trouble," Olivia interjected, still clearly frustrated with her challenging child.

"Unbelievably hard," Keith agreed. "Well, when she was fifteen, she got convicted of six charges of hacking into government systems. Some of the stuff she got into was pretty serious, and that's why they charged her with espionage as well. The judge had to appoint someone from the CIA to be her guardian, in loco parentis, because O and I didn't have the clearance to know about some of the stuff she'd gotten herself into."

"It was a terrifying time, Steve," Olivia said. "Even Emmy got scared when she realized that espionage charges could carry the death penalty. She *was* only fifteen, but they tried her as an adult because of her intellectual capabilities. The DA argued she had a capacity for understanding the consequences of her actions that surpassed that of any adult, and she proceeded to hack into CIA and NSA systems anyway."

"My God," was all Steve could say.

"She was convicted on all counts. I told you about the community service for the hacking charges, but the judge gave her the death penalty for the espionage and then commuted the sentence because she was so young, and as far as he could tell, while she may have accessed the information and studied it, she hadn't used it for any personal gain or any anti-American activities."

"They gave her the death penalty?" Steve was astounded. "They gave a *fifteen-year-old girl* the death penalty?" He was bordering on outrage.

"Yeah, Steve," Liv told him. "The judge told us it was just to prove a point, but much later, Keith and I found out there was a lot more to it than that. He also made it clear that he would personally see to it that it would be the last break anyone would ever cut her. Keith and I were actually grateful. We were at wit's end with her, and the judge had provided a way for us to…handle her behavior."

"What do you mean?"

Liv shrugged, stood up, refilled her teacup, and moved over to the window.

"We sent her away," she said softly. "*I* sent her away, and she's never forgiven me."

"Olivia," Keith said. "It may have been your idea, but I agreed with it whole heartedly. We thought it was the best thing we could do for her."

Looking back at her husband with tears in her eyes, Liv said, "They were *using* her, Keith. I know she was guilty as sin, but that whole trial was just a sham. They didn't want to convict her and *punish* her. They wanted to *use* her. They convinced me to send her away to Washington. They said there were people there who could challenge her, but really they just wanted to use her mind in their *nasty* business…"

Olivia broke off, and wept for several moments. She eventually resumed, albeit in an unsteady voice. "I wanted Emmy to cut a deal, but she refused, convinced that she could get herself off. I asked the DA if there was any way the government could help us. I wanted to know if there were any schools for kids like Emmy who were so smart our regular schools and colleges couldn't challenge them. He said he'd talk to the judge and see if they could think of something. I was…"

Keith interrupted, "*We*, Olivia." Looking at Steve he said, "*We* were too worried or too foolish to see what they were doing. When the DA assured us everything would be ok, we were grateful. We didn't know they were going to take our child away from us for three whole years. Those deceitful bastards tried to turn her into one of *them*."





"And at my mom's request, I was sent to Washington, D.C. to do my community service," Emily explained. "I'd never been away from home for more than a couple of days before, and in Washington, everyone knew why I was there and they watched me like hawks. I was closely supervised when I was working and kept under guard when I wasn't. Child labor laws at the time meant I could only work 29 hours a week. I spent over three years in Washington. I even had to ask permission to go to the bathroom."

"That's harsh," Moretti sympathized.

"I hated my mother for it. I only got to come home two weeks a year, in June when school let out and in December for Christmas, and I refused to talk to her."

Moretti looked over at the young woman and saw tears sliding down her face.

"Emily, your mother loved you. She did that to keep you out of trouble. From what you said, it sounds like you were more than she and your dad could handle."

Emmy nodded. "I know, but it still hurts." She took a deep breath and continued. "Anyway, when I wasn't doing community service, I was being 'tutored' by some of the smartest and most talented people in the country. I was having the time of my life, finally being among people who could challenge me. What I didn't realize at first was that some of the little 'assignments' they gave me were actually CIA projects. They had me inventing bombs and biological weapons, and I naively thought I was just working on theory."

Emily choked up. She was clearly having trouble going on. After a time, she spoke again. Her voice was desolate.

"Israel used technology *I* developed to finally exterminate the Palestinians, and I created an anti-virus that they reverse-engineered into the China virus that decimated the population of Taiwan, making it easy for the Chinese to roll in and take over. I was just playing around, exercising my mind, and having fun with new ideas. Until I saw it on the news, I never dreamed anyone would actually *use* what I thought up to *kill* somebody. The blood of millions of people is still on my hands."

Emily rose and went to look out the window. She didn't make a sound for a long time, but Moretti could see her shoulders tremble with weeping.





"In June of 2020," Keith remembered, "Emmy and I were watching the news when they showed the end of the West Bank War. If you remember, nobody had heard of the electron bomb before then. Well, about ten seconds into the story, Emmy started screaming. At first, I didn't understand what she was saying. She just kept screaming, 'I did that. Oh, God, Daddy, I made that happen.' I couldn't calm her down. O had to sedate her. Olivia and I watched the eleven o'clock news, and they explained how an electron bomb worked. Emmy woke up, wandered into the living room, saw the report, and said, 'I was hoping it was just a nightmare.' Then she told us how months before, she and one of her 'tutors' in D.C. had been discussing various theories for ways to harness electrons for uses other than electricity. When she saw the pictures, she'd known right away what had killed all those people."

Steven laughed sarcastically. "You're telling us *Emmy* invented the electron bomb? That's ludicrous."

Keith looked at him and said, "Kid, it's the God's honest truth."

"It's a *lie*." Turning to Steve, the young man hotly defended his lover. "Dad, Em is strong, tough, smart, and she *will* defend herself, but she's a complete pacifist. She would never, ever be involved in creating weapons of mass destruction."

Liv reentered the conversation to clarify matters.

"Why do you think she became a pacifist? Fifteen years ago, when she went to Washington, she was brilliant, creative, and pathologically naive. They filled her full of crap about how her theories could be used for mining, construction, and space exploration, and she believed them. The China virus that was used in Taiwan was developed from a broad-spectrum anti- viral medication Emmy developed for the CDC. She was just doing it for fun, to test herself and her abilities. She was a brilliant, innocent kid with no knowledge of how the real world works. They lied to her, and she *believed* them. Now she blames herself for all those people dying, and she blames me for making her go to D.C."





Turning from the window, Emily continued her story. "I learned so much about so many things while I was in Washington. I learned about the difference between theory and practice. I learned that the United States wasn't always the good guy in international conflicts. I learned to be careful whom I trust, and I learned to play by the rules, because I'd gotten screwed too badly by too many other people who didn't."

"Ok, but why'd you become a cop?"

Emmy chuckled.

"Family business. My daddy was a deputy for years, and my Uncle Kenny's the sheriff now."

Moretti laughed. "There's gotta be more to it than that, otherwise you wouldn't have told me that long, complicated story."

She shrugged.

"To give something back, I guess, to make up for the trouble and destruction I caused. I considered joining the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA, but I knew from experience that there were far too many backstabbing bastards among their ranks. Local cops, though, they're a comparatively good bunch."

"That's it?" Moretti was disgusted. "Just for some kind of pay back? You're riskin' your life every day, puttin' everything on the line for jerks like me, because some bastards in Washington used you when you were too young and stupid to know better? Emily, it ain't your job to make up for what they did wrong."

"Well," she said, "that's not the only reason."

"Why else?"

Shrugging, she said, "This job really makes me think, and it lets me use all my skills on a regular basis. People do strange things for strange reasons, and they think up some pretty creative ways of getting away with it. I have to find motive, method, and opportunity to make a case, and I actually enjoy trying to figure it all out. It's like putting a puzzle together, but first you have to hunt through the whole house for all the pieces."

She smiled then. "And people are a *whole* lot more complicated than computers, atoms, and viruses. It's a real challenge."

"So, you're a cop because you like it," Moretti simplified.

Emmy shrugged again. "Yeah."





"After the West Bank War ended, she initially refused to go back to Washington. The judge put her in jail, and…" Liv trailed off. She wasn't sure how to describe what happened.

Keith, on the other hand, had no problems voicing his impression of what happened to his daughter in prison.

"She lost her mind. She started talking to herself all the time, rocking back and forth in her cell, muttering nonsense. She was only seventeen."

"I have to ask," Steve prefaced his question, hoping to take the sting out of it. "Is she mentally ill?"

Both Liv and Keith snapped, "NO!"

Liv explained. "She was intellectually starving. Emmy can process a dozen different problems in different disciplines simultaneously, but in jail, there was *nothing* to do. For a while, it was like her mind imploded for lack of anything to occupy it."

"Ok. In other words she was bored out of her mind?"

"Yes, literally."

"So what happened?" Steven was avidly interested. He had never heard this story from his girlfriend.

Keith said, "I talked her into going back to Washington. She insisted that she would only work on computer security. She refused to even talk to anyone about anything else. She did exactly what she was sent there to do and nothing more for them. To pass the time, she developed her repertoire of immigrant characters. She finished her community service, and that last year, when she came home for good, the first thing she said was, 'Daddy, I want to be a cop'.

"I asked her why and she told me, 'Because I've gotten away with so much for so long I think I'll be really good at figuring out how other people do it. I can do everything I've always done without getting in trouble anymore, and maybe I can fix some of the things I've done wrong along the way.'"





Moretti studied the young woman. In his line of work, he'd learned to read people well. The way she shrugged told him there was definitely more to the story.

"So, you're one of the world's smartest people, and Bill Gates made you rich. You don't hafta to work, at least not in a job this dangerous. You coulda been a doctor or a lawyer if you wanted to help save the world, but you're a cop, gettin' shot at and workin' with the scum of the earth. Who you tryin' to impress?"





"She and I were no longer on speaking terms, then," Liv said. "I got all this information second hand through Keith. She didn't even let me come visit her in jail. But when I found out she wanted to be a cop, I was so relieved. I had been worried that she was going to turn into some kind of evil genius or something. She had been jerked around so much, and she was so angry about what they had done with her ideas. I was afraid she was going to try to get revenge.

"I went to her and told her how happy I was that she had finally found something she really wanted to do, and I told her how proud I was of her, and how good I thought she would be at her job.

"She threw her arms around me and said, 'Oh, Mommy, are you really proud of me?'"

"I promised her I was. It's still not easy between us, but she hasn't shut me out again. I just hope someday she'll be able to forgive me for what I did to her."





Emily shrugged again and said, "I just want to make my mama proud, I guess."

Moretti knew he wasn't getting the whole truth, but he decided not to press the issue.





Steve rubbed his hands over his face. The picture he was getting of Emily was so convoluted and so far from what he expected that it made his head swim. They'd only been talking for an hour or so, and he was already worn out. Looking at Cioffi, he asked, "Have you got enough to make a profile?"

Art pursed his lips in thought, then said, "This *is* a lot of information, sir, but if I'm not mistaken it stops when she was just eighteen." He looked to Liv and Keith for conformation, and when they nodded, he looked to Steve and continued. "A lot can happen in twelve years, sir, and every little detail helps." Looking back to Olivia and Keith, he said, "Mr. and Mrs. Stephens, is there anything else you can tell me?"

Liv gave a defeated looking smile and nodded.

"For the next eight years, life was basically run-of-the-mill stuff. She got her education, found herself a job (at which she excelled), moved into an apartment in Punx'y. She married Ian Baer, Tom's son, back in '26, and they built a house on my parents' old homestead. They were planning to wait to have kids, but they never had the chance."

"Why not?"

Olivia thought a moment before she tried to explain.

"Ian was a deputy, just like Em, and he knew how dangerous the job could be. What upset him even more was the fact that Emmy *volunteered* for difficult and risky assignments. She was good at her job, one of the best they had, and frankly, for the kind of things they had her doing, she was more likely than anyone else to come through it unscathed, but she and Ian were having trouble because he worried about her so much."

Steve nodded. He knew what she meant. He'd waited years to find the right woman. It took a special kind of person to be a cop, and it took someone even more special to love a cop.

Liv continued.

"About three years ago, things went from bad to worse."

"Why?" Steven asked.

"BioGen." Cioffi answered, and was pleased to see the Chief look impressed.

"Uh-huh," Liv confirmed. "Out of four hundred people exposed, less than a hundred survived. Emmy is one of nine who have not been permanently and totally disabled. You remember Beechie?"

Steve nodded.

"He'll be on a respirator the rest of his life. You never met Jeff Hargrove, but he's one of Sophie and Sylvie's nephews. He's still comatose, and his brother Chuck is paralyzed. Cliff and Alice Redmond died in each other's arms at home. Apparently, they were among the first afflicted, and, thinking it was just the flu, they both called in sick. We figure they were both gone before anybody knew what it really was."

"Liv, Keith, I'm sorry. I know they were all friends of yours. It must have been horrible."

"It was," Keith said. "The worst part was trying to support and draw support from other people who were going through the same thing you were."

"Everybody in Cloud Nine was affected. We don't know anyone who didn't lose someone."

Steven smiled softly, "But Emmy recovered."

"Yeah, mostly," Liv said with a sad smile.

After a quiet moment, Cioffi asked, "What do you mean, mostly?"

"You don't come through an ordeal like that…unmarked," Keith said.

Steve said, "She told me about her problem with the cold."

Liv rubbed her arms as if she suddenly felt a chill and said, "That's really not even a problem. The big problem is, between the commuted death sentence when she was fifteen and the BioGen virus, which should have killed her, she's got this crazy idea that she is living on borrowed time. She even joked with me for a while about being a zombie, calling herself one of the living dead, and a dead woman walking. She continued taking the dangerous assignments and everything, but she had a much more cavalier attitude about it. She didn't take unnecessary risks, but she wasn't nearly as prudent as she had been in the past either. That's when Ian asked for a divorce. He just couldn't handle it anymore."

Steve was thoughtful for a moment, then he asked, "Liv, forgive me, but if anyone I know could tell, it's you. Is she suicidal? Does she have a death wish?"

Olivia laughed so long and hard, Steve began to wonder if the stress had gotten to her. When she finally answered, it was the only thing she could have said that was worse than 'yes'.

"Steve, in a way she is more screwed up than I was before I met you. I wanted to die, but I was afraid. Emmy doesn't *want* to die, but she is *not* afraid."





Donovan and the sketch artist interrupted the uneasy silence.

"Chief, we have a picture."

Steve looked at the sketch and saw Olivia's eyes staring out of the face of a beautiful young Negro woman with long golden spiral curls, a gold-capped tooth, Coke-bottle glasses, and a toboggan hat.

Steve's face rumpled into a frown and he gave Donovan an, 'Are you sure?' look.

Donovan nodded. "Like I said, Chief. I only knew it was her because that guy mentioned the eyes. Nobody has eyes like that."

Steve nodded his understanding. After Liv chose Keith over him, those same eyes had haunted his dreams many a night until he'd met his Maribeth.

"I shouldn't have missed the eyes," the young man said quietly.

Olivia sidled up to the men and looked at the sketch. With a chuckle, she said, "That's Mandisa."

"Huh?"

"One of Emmy's characters." Looking at Donovan she said, "Was she wearing a tight little midriff-baring t-shirt, painted on cutoff denim shorts, and hiking boots?"

Donovan nodded dumbly.

"That's *definitely* Mandisa. She's the Jamaican-born daughter of West African parents who immigrated to the island to escape political and social turmoil. She came to the U.S. on her own at nineteen to find a job and get a medical degree. She's spent the last six years working full time in a factory that makes women's undergarments, progressing from cutter to seamstress to sales rep, and taking classes part time at Penn State's Williamsport campus while she saves as much money as she can toward med school. When she gets her medical degree, she wants to join Doctors Without Borders."

"Mandisa, huh," Steve asked.

Olivia nodded. "Yep. It means sweetness."

"And you say she's got about forty of these characters?"

"At least. Maybe more."

Steve shook his head and sighed. "We're gonna have one hell of a time finding her."

After a cursory glance at the sketch, Steven groaned and Keith sighed, and they both wandered off to see if they could help Mark, Amanda, and Jesse with the information they had spread out all over the kitchen table.

"Chief," Donovan said nervously, "I've got an idea."

"What is it, Donovan?"

Looking at Olivia, the young man asked, "Do you know all of the Lieutenant's characters as well as you know this Mandisa, ma'am?"

Liv nodded. Looking at Steve, she said, "Except for the years when she wasn't talking to me at all, her immigrants were the one thing we could always talk about. Sometimes they were the *only* thing we could talk about."

"Well," Donovan suggested looking at his Chief, "if Dr. Stephens would sit down with the sketch artist and describe each of the characters, we could distribute all the pictures, and improve our chances of finding the Lieutenant."

Steve nodded thoughtfully. "That's a good idea, Officer."

The young man beamed.

Steve turned to Olivia. "What do you say, Liv?"

"I can do better than that," she said confidently. "Emmy doesn't do things by halves. She's fanatical about perfecting her characters. Whenever she performs, she has someone record it. She's got hours and hours of digital video on these characters. If you tell me where to send the files, I can call Kenney and have him download all of it. Then you can pull color stills from the video."

"Liv, that's super!"

"Chief," Cioffi jumped in. "If I could watch the videos, I could profile each of the characters, maybe figure out where they'd be likely to hang out. Then we could prioritize our search by area. Look hardest for the people that would be most likely to spend time in each neighborhood."

"Cioffi, that's brilliant!"

While they conversed, Olivia noticed what Steve did not. When Steve complimented Cioffi's idea as brilliant, the light had left Donovan's eyes.

Steve got excited knowing they might have just caught another break in this case. "Ok, Liv, let me put you in touch with my assistant. Leigh Ann has a high-speed internet link at the office. I assume we're going to be receiving some large files?"

Liv confirmed with a nod.

"She'll be able to handle it best, then." He picked up the phone and dialed his office. "Leigh Ann, I'm with Lieutenant Stephens' mother here. She has an idea that we need your help with. I'm going to put her on so the two of you can work out the details, ok?"

As Steve placed the call, Olivia again noticed Donovan's reaction. When Steve said, 'she has an idea,' the young man had wandered over to take a seat by the window. Liv could see him staring sadly out at the bright Southern California day.

Steve handed her the receiver, and, before she greeted Leigh Ann, Liv nodded toward the dejected young cop and said gently, "Steve, I think someone is feeling left out."

Steve looked in the direction she indicated and said, "I think you're right. He did sort of get trampled as other ideas started rolling in, huh?"

Liv nodded.

"I guess I'll go talk to him."

Smiling, Liv said, "That's a good idea."





Steve looked around. The house was a flurry of activity. Cheryl, Dion, Captain Cioffi, and Ron had been coming and going all afternoon. Right now, though, they were meeting in the den, comparing notes, and compiling their information for Mark, Amanda, and Jesse. Steven and Keith had just offered Steve's dad and friends some help, and both had been instructed to see if they could help the younger Cioffi make sense of Emily's movements on the map. Liv was on the phone, talking animatedly with Leigh Ann. Hannah was fiddling with her immunometer, trying to convince herself that it really was working properly and, as he looked through the dining room into the kitchen he could see that CJ, Lauren, and Jesse's wife, Katie Lynne, had slipped in under his radar to begin setting out a dinner from BBQ Bob's.

The place was as busy as any squad room, maybe more so, but it was occupied by all his closest friends and family. Looking over by the window at the lone young man still staring out at nothing in particular, he realized poor Donovan was the odd man out.

He went over and sat in the chair that faced the young man's. Slowly, Donovan realized he had company, and when he saw who it was, he jumped, and started to stand as a show of respect.

"As you were, Officer," Steve said blandly.

"Yes, sir. Did you need something, Chief?"

"Yeah, Donovan. I need to talk to you…"

Before he could continue, Donovan began to apologize.

"Look, Chief, I know I screwed up. If I had apprehended her when I first saw her, it would all be over by now. Please, sir, I can be a good cop. It's all I ever wanted to do, sir. I don't have the legs for a meter maid's mini-skirt, sir. Please, please, give me another chance. I'll make it right, sir, if you just give me the chance…"

Steve was caught off guard by the meter maid comment, but suppressed a grin. Finally, he interrupted the young man's rambling.

"Donovan, you interrupted me. It is rude to interrupt, and it is very foolish to interrupt the Chief when he wants to talk to you."

"Sorry, sir. Shutting up now, sir."

"Look, Donovan. Your name's Charles, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you go by Charlie or Chuck?"

Donovan shook his head. "It's Charles, sir. My dad is Charlie, and my granddad is Chuck."

Steve smiled, trying to get the youngster to loosen up. "That's my son and me. I'm Steve, and he's Steven. I guess if he ever gives me a grandson, he might be Stevie."

"Or a granddaughter might be Stephanie, sir."

Steve's smile softened as he remembered that Emily's second middle name had been chosen to honor him. Then the smile left his face as he remembered that he might have another, even more personal connection with his fugitive lieutenant.

Reading his change in mood, Donovan asked, "Uh, sir, did I say something wrong?"

Shaking his head to clear the troubling thoughts and focus back on the matter at hand, Steve said, "No, Donovan, not at all."

"Oh, ok. Sir?"

"Hmm?" Steve was still distracted.

"What did you want to talk to me about, sir?"

"Your job performance."

"Oh," Donovan said quietly as he dropped his head and lowered his eyes.

"You did a good job today, Charles. I was impressed."

The head snapped up. "Chief, I was three feet from her. I had my hand on her shoulder, and I let her walk away, sir."

Steve nodded. "So did three other officers, Charles, but you're the one who eventually realized it and got us looking for the right woman."

"I guess, sir, but I was a little late, and it was only luck that some surfer I questioned commented on her eyes."

Reluctantly, he related the whole tale of how he'd questioned Emily/Mandisa, and let her go only to realize later what a blunder he had made.

"I was also impressed with how quickly you worked out what she had done with those lasers in the park this morning."

Donovan grinned. "That was nothing, sir. My dad used to do special effects for Universal Studios until he retired. When I was a kid, he used to take me to work with him during summer vacations."

"Even so, son, you're becoming a damned good cop. I want you to keep up the good work."

Charles looked down again, suddenly ill at ease. "Even though I let her go once already?"

Steve sighed. "Look, Charles, one thing you have to learn, soon, before you tear yourself up, is, police work is ten percent luck and ninety percent hard work, but neither luck nor work will get you anywhere without something to hold them together. Do you know what that something is?"

"No, sir," the officer whispered.

Tapping two fingers to each of the young man's temples, Steve said, "What's inside here holds the luck and work together."

Donovan looked up.

"While you were with the sketch artist, the Lieutenant's parents told us a lot about her. Did you know she is one of the smartest people on earth? I mean smart like Einstein."

"No, sir, is she really?"

Steve nodded. "And we wouldn't have a chance in hell of catching her if it weren't for your quick thinking and good ideas."

Donovan blushed. "Thank you, Chief. I, uh, I was thinking…we could also put all the characters in the FBI's most wanted database. Then if she went into any facility that was linked to the facial recognition program, we'd know right away, just like at the bank."

"That's another good idea, Donovan," Steve said encouragingly. "I'll run it by Agent Wagner as soon as he's done meeting with the captains and Commander Banks."

The young man grinned.

"Now," Steve said, looking through the house to the kitchen, "I want you to help yourself to some dinner out in the kitchen. Then go home and get some rest. Report to my assistant's office at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. I don't know where I'll be, but I'll leave your assignment with her."

"I won't turn down the free meal, sir, but to tell you the truth, I'd rather stay and help if I may. I really think I can contribute to the search."

Steve thought a moment. It was six in the evening. He, Jesse, Cheryl, Ron, Dion, Liv, and Keith had all been up since the previous morning. This kid was certainly more energetic and resilient than any of them.

"Ok, but eat first, and next time I tell you to knock off for the night, follow orders," he grinned.

Donovan positively glowed now. "Yes, sir." He got up and headed toward the kitchen.

"And, Donovan," Steve called.

"Sir?"

"Welcome to the task force."

"Thank you, sir."