Episode 1, Part 4: The Poor Wandering One

ROM squinted. “What?”

“Vagabond was kidnapped into sex ring. Probably grew up in that ring. If Vagabond hasn’t bullshitted us completely, Merryman is the guy who bought him. Instead of just renting for the hour.”

            That slapped the woman so hard she sat back, hard, in her chair. “Wha--? A sex ring? Where’d you get that?”

            “It’s the case file I stole all this from,” Orbis said, still raving. “A pedophila network.” He turned and—

            ROM rose, and grabbed his hand. “Don’t you go after Vagabond.”

            “That’s exactly what I am going to do.”

            “Jus’ wait. Think! Why didn’t Vagabond say anything about this? Ever think about that?”

            “Because the man is crazy!”

            “Yeah,” ROM said, calmly. “He is. And that means he’ll fry you as much as look at you, if you get all Navy SEAL on his ass. You wanna take that on?”

            Orbis stared at her grip on him until she got religion and let go. “I. Want. My. Life. Back.”

            “Fine. Same here. Getting my life back? All for it. But if Vagabond’s been holdin’ out, you gonna need a hell of a lot more than that photo.”

            “San Francisco Police Department,” Bo announced, bursting into Dr. Veracruz’s office. “Is the doctor in?”

            The secretary was at his back. “I’m sorry, Dr. Veracruz! I told him you were busy—“

            “What the hell?” Manny said, rising at the noise. “Bo? I’m with a patient—”

            The cop rounded on the young woman, eyed her all of two seconds, and said, “Here’s why your life sucks: It’s all your fault.”

            Manny gawked. “BO! Ms. Williams, I do apologize for this officer—“

            “Vagabond lied,” Bo hissed. “From the start, he lied. Why do you think he gets so nutty around you?”

            That shut him up. Manny paused. “Ms. Williams,” he said at length, “this is Officer Bo Bronsky of the SFPD, for whom I consult on occasion. I’m afraid I have to cut this session short. We won’t charge for this round.”

            As the two women walked out and closed the door, both heard Manny very uncharacteristically yell to the officer “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

            “Vagabond was kidnapped and sold into a human trafficking ring.”

            Manny’s voice caught his throat. “What?” he croaked. “When did that happen?”

“When he was a boy.”

“How the hell did you find that out?”

            “I really wish you could see right now,” Orbis muttered. “I came across a photo from an investigation. One we were told to stop.”

            “Stop? Why—“

            “The photo is Vagabond. Maybe seven years old, but it’s him. ROM aged the photo.”

            “Age progression is inexact at best—“

            “It’s him!” Orbis pressed. “He was bought and sold and he never told us. He’s never told us anything about his past. The only thing we know about his life is at and after Merryman’s assassination.”

            “Assassination? It was a drive-by—“

            “The hell is was. Merryman was eliminated.”

            Manny held up is hands. “Whoah, whoah, whoah. Let’s back up. OK, let’s just assume you’re not a raving lunatic pulling shit out of thin air and what you say is true. Why ‘eliminate’ him?”

            Orbis crossed his arms. “My best guess—“

“’Guess?’”

“—is that he was going to come clean about boy-Vagabond. At first, I thought Vagabond was a kept boy exacting revenge. Now I think he was completely fucked up to begin with, and went off the deep end when Merryman got shot. Vagabond keeps talking about how ‘they got Paul,’ but he never gave any hint on who ‘they’ were. We never asked because it looked like an anonymous drive-by. Because he’s never said, we’ve never figured it out! It was a needle in a field-full of haystacks.”

Manny was quiet for a moment, mulling the idea, trying to get things in a linear progression. “OK. Let’s start over. Hypothetically, why would Vagabond keep something like that a secret?”

Orbis recalled ROM’s dime-store psychology that, nevertheless, had a twisted logic. “I don’t think Vagabond wants admit what happened to him. He may be the world’s most powerful psionic, but he’s still a victim of abuse — and in total denial of it. But he wants to find Paul’s killer. He has two…I don’t know, ‘drives’ that are working at cross-purposes. He wants to forget whatever it was that happened to him when he was trafficked, and still find the killer, and I’ll bet you that killer, or killers, are members of the ring.”

Manny crossed his arms. “That is a pretty out-there theory, Bo.”

Episode 1, Part 3: The Poor Wandering One

            “That wasn’t a great print,” ROM said of the original image. “The computer cleaned it up, but there was some guesswork.”

            Orbis nodded. “Ok. How old would you say he is? Say, seven?”

“Eh. Give or take. Sure.”

“Cool. Can you age him by, say, 20 years?”

            “No problem,” ROM mused. Her fingers flew over the keys. Tikka-tikka-tikka… “But it ain’t going to be exactly like what this kid looks like now. And he’ll still be smilin’, since he was in the original. There was guesswork before, and there’ll be even more now. I mean, don’t they compare the kid with the parents and go from there?”

            The man nodded. “I’ll deal. Go for it.”

            “OK, Mista Man. This’ll take a few seconds.” ROM replied, and hit “Return.” Lines of light passed over the child’s head, and it began to spin and blur, as it aged and “grew” larger to the head of a young man. “OK,” ROM mused, looking at her screen. “Approximate age is 27.” She glanced over at the image and did an instant double take, her eyes wide. “You are shittin’ me.”

Orbis was already staring, his face an inhuman mix of satisfaction and rage.

“And, hey,” she said, “what’s say we grew his hair out and dye it black?”

            “And let’s assume he looks as if he’s done a few rounds of steroids to bulk up,” Orbis added, his voice dangerously chipper.

            With measured, deliberate strokes, ROM quietly set the new parameters.

            It was Vagabond. Even with all the compu-guesswork. It was Vagabond.

            The two were utterly silent for several seconds before ROM spoke. “Never saw him smilin’ befo’.”

            “That son of a bitch,” Orbis whispered. He paused. “THAT SON OF A BITCH!” He grabbed the photo off the scanner, practically breaking it. ROM wanted, very much, to be just about anywhere else—now. “Can you burn that to a CD?”

            “Uh. Sure. What—“

            “That asshole has been lying by omission from the start!” Orbis raged. “And we fell for it! And for what? To ‘psychically shield’ us from kidnappings or attacks that never came? Bastard!”

            “Orbis, get a grip…”

            The man focused such a baleful glare on her that ROM’s voice curled up and blew away in her throat. “Hit Missing Persons. I can’t. I’ll be watched. I had to get all sanctimonious on my sarge about burying this. He’ll have eyes on me. ‘Young Vagabond’ has to be in some database somewhere. Then, hack into Paul Merryman’s bank account records. And assume something is being hid or has been covered up. I don’t care what you have to do. Pull up everything about that man.”

            ROM whirled around to the computer. “But what am I lookin’ for?”

            “A large monetary purchase.”

            “How big?”

            “Anything over 10 grand.”

            “Why?”

            Photo in hand, Orbis turned to leave. “Because I’m betting Merryman wasn’t his lover. He was his owner.”

The Poor Wandering One: Episode 2, Part 3

“Uh-oh, it the police,” Romeesha muttered, pronouncing the word “poe-leece,” a pause between the two syllables. Then she grinned.

“Love you, too, Miss Was-Just-Illegally-Hacking-the-Pentagon,” Bo said, grinning back. 

“Bitch gotta earn a livin’.”

“Gotta sec?”

Romeesha smiled again. “Sure. Come on in. What up?”

“You’re good with software, right?”

“That a joke?”

“Go with me on this,” Bo pressed. “You’re good, right?”

ROM stopped, turned, saw the seriousness of his expression. Crossing her arms, her eyes narrowed slightly. “Better than good. You need me to write something for you?”

Orbis shook his head. “I need you to age someone for me.”

She wasn’t expecting that question. “Say what?”

“Law enforcement does it all the time,” Bo explained. “Say a kid goes missing 10 years ago. They can take a picture of that kid and ‘age’ it to show what he might look like today,”

“Oh, right! I got you,” ROM, replied, brightening. “But you got computers down at the station. Or the FBI—“

“No. I can’t do that. Not with this,” Orbis took from his backpack a print out of a photo. The child in it, a smiling little blond boy, could not be more than seven years old. But it wasn’t the age that took ROM back. The child was naked. And tied up.

ROM stared at the photo quietly. She held it for several seconds longer than she should have before she finally spoke. Searching for the right thing to say, she began, “This kid is—“

“Yes.”

“Why is—“

“Stop.”

ROM looked up to see a face devoid of any humor.

The woman slowly rose her eyes to the man. With a tilt of her head, they headed to the basement.

Without a word, ROM quickly opened a small panel on the wall behind the light switch and pressed a series of codes. There was a flash, followed by a low buzzing. The hologram vanished, revealing ROM’s lab. With equal lack of ceremony, she sat down in front of the screen, her fingers flying over the keyboard.

There was a low buzzing.

“Ok, scan is complete,” ROM announced. Orbis was the perfect Navy SEAL: he was born paranoid. He’d see conspiracies in a flower garden. And take them out. “We clear. Now why can’t you manipulate that photo yo’self?”

Bo sat down. “This is from a cache of evidence my department was ordered to bury.”

ROM blinked. “’Bury?’”

Orbis was quiet. He opened his mouth to speak, and then paused again. Finally, when he did speak, it was in a very low voice. “I got this photo from a human trafficking case.”

“Somebody want you to bury that?”

“Yes. Somebody powerful. Somebody powerful above the law.”

ROM stared at the man. “Who?”

“I can’t say. I’m not sure. I stole this photo from the file. Stole a few more, too.”

The woman’s face turned slightly to the side, her eyes focused on the man, who, until 15 minutes ago was not a goody two-shows, he was THE goody two-shoes. Class validictorian, never drank until he was 21, and then never drank after that, first in his class at West Pointe, never smoke, a die-hard teacher’s pet—if it weren’t for the fact that he was gay, he’d be absolutely the biggest pain in the ass ever. He made Buddha look bad. “You? Stole? This?”

“I really don’t think I should tell you any more.”

“Orbis, who is that kid?”

The question was dodged. “Can you age it?”

            “No problem. But why?”

            “Just age the photo. You’ll see if it is who I think it is. If it isn’t, you can just write me off as a crazy person.”

            ROM knew when to cut the sass and get to work. She placed the photo on a glowing glass panel and beams of light passed over it, top to bottom and side to side.

            “Pull it up on the screen.”

            “I’ll do better. You watch.” She pointed to what looked like to two glass disks, one over the other. With a high hum, they pulled away from each other, and the glass took on a faint, pink glow. “3D holographic projection.”

“How did you and Miss Gwen get all this in here?”

            “Secret,” ROM replied slyly.

            “She designed all this?”

            “And built it. I did all the programming.”

            “This must have taken years—“

            “Weeks.”

            “Do you ever get out and have, you know, fun?”

            ROM looked at him, wided-eyed. “That? From you? ‘Sides, you shittin’ me? That was paradise!”

            Orbis had seen a lot in his time, but these girls were just plain weird. He was about to say so when the holographic device beeped chirpily, and in a puff of sparkles, the head of child appeared. ROM had, thankfully, instructed her computer to not show the boy bound. His face simply hung in the air, suspended, perpetually smiling. You’d never know what was happening below his neck.