The bus dropped the pair of fearless investigators off at the sidewalk of an apartment building. The trail had led them here, but they still weren’t exactly sure what they were in for.
The building itself looked nice and it was in a good part of town, but the view was marred by a pile of furniture and personal belongings that had been carelessly stacked against the side of the building. The items must have only been outside for a short while, given that they didn’t show any signs of exposure to the elements yet.
“Someone appears to be evicted,” Niki remarked with surprise.
“Not just any someone, look!” Milly pointed at a picture frame laying on a couch, the kind that she’d seen on the wall at the dentist’s office. It looked a little different, though.
Cortex University. ‘Victor von Vector’. Doctor of Biophysics.
Folding her arms, Niki tilted her head while she stared at the doctorate. “Right…That would not be something to carelessly leave behind. Either Doctor Vector was abandoning his entire life, or he thought he was coming back the last time he left his apartment. That would have been something like a month ago if he is being evicted now.”
“Well, don’t just stand there.” Milly marched right on up to the refuse pile and started digging through. “Let’s see if we can find something to tell us where he might’ve gone!”
She must not have been the first one to get here. All the locks on the closets and desk were busted. That did make it much easier to get into them and look around.
“Uh, Milly? That is a crime.” Niki didn’t make any real effort to stop her, though. Rather, she was looking around as though to make sure nobody was watching while she lectured Milly. “Whoever moved these belongings outside must be taking them into storage, they will be back with a truck sooner rather than later.”
“What, why?” Milly paused mid-rummage and looked back to Niki. “I’m not stealing anything. Ugh, I guess we better hurry up then.”
There had to be some kind of clue. There always was. The tricky part was just whether she’d recognize it if she saw it. Well, that and the fact that everything was piled up. In the movies, they’d investigate a room of stuff, not a pile. Still, she was pretty sure the same principles would have to hold.
Milly riffled through a few boxes of papers that didn’t yield much of anything. She was thinking too small. If there was something to hide, it would have to be in a hiding place. Like, inside the couch cushions or a safe behind a painting.
“So, what exactly are we looking for here?” Niki asked while she paced a semi-circle along the edge, just observing for the time being. “Doctor Vector clearly is not here nor has he been back for a month.”
“Right now? Well, I don’t see any science stuff around, so I’m guessing he didn’t work from home.” Milly examined the desk and pulled out the top drawer, checking underneath it. Nothing. “Also, Meatcrawl’s first attack wasn’t near here. That means there has to be a lab and something here might tell us how to get there.”
“If he drove a car there, there might be a police record of an abandoned car in the area in the last month… Not that I think it is publicly available.” Niki pulled out her phone. “But he has a daughter, who… is also supposed to live here. Where is she? We could check if she knows anything.”
That explained why there were two mattresses leaned up against the wall.
“I dunno, maybe a dorm at school?” Milly replied while rummaging through a waste-paper basket, “but I’ve got three receipts from a place called ‘MoleMunchies’ here that are time-stamped at around lunchtime. If you can call a veggie burger a meal, anyway. Gah, it even says to hold the cheese if you can believe that! You know this place?”
Great. Now she was hungry for burgers. Maybe her Dad would fire up the grill tonight if she called now… and if she somehow crossed half the country in an hour. Dang it, maybe she missed home just a little bit after all.
Niki refused to accept the offered receipts, but she did take a look then tapped at her phone. “Not personally, but it appears to be a luncheonette located in the subway station… Hey did you see the dates on these? They are from right after Vector got fired.”
“Odd. Did he get a new job right away or something?” Milly backed away from the pile to come to look at the address as Niki pulled it up on DoodleMaps. The curious thing was that the highlighted subway station was three stations away. “That’s gotta be his destination, right?”
“Right. In addition, that is only a block from the site of Meatcrawl’s first attack!” Niki added excitedly. “We might actually be on to something!”
“Was there ever any doubt?” Milly grinned while she grabbed Niki’s hand then took off running. “To the Subway!”
----------------------------------------
It wasn’t hard to find MoleMunchies, home of the Munch Mound.
Too bad that was where their good fortune hit a snag.
“You’re sure you haven’t seen him?” Milly asked the teenager tending the counter. She held up her phone a little higher to let him get a better look at the one photo of Vector they’d found on his MyFace page. “About a month ago? Liked veggie burgers of all things? Come on! How many of those do you really sell?”
“I don’t know what you want from me.” He was wearing a ridiculous get-up with a hat that had a plush mole emerge from a molehill. It looked as though the mole was crawling its way out of his head. And still, he made it sound like she was the one being absurd. ”This is just a pair of eyes.”
“What? …Oh!” Milly quickly pulled her phone back. She’d completely forgotten she’d zoomed in so much before. Blushing, she pinched the screen to pull back until it showed his face properly and offered it up again. “How about now?”
The cashier squinted at the picture then shook his head. “Sorry. I mean, a whole month? I see a ton of people, ya know. Also, I don’t know if I should be telling you and violating our cashier-customer confidentiality.” The cashier shrugged.
“That’s not a thing!” Milly called out before she turned toward Niki and asked, “Wait, is it?”
“No.” Niki shook her head without looking up from her phone.
What had her so engrossed that it was more important than questioning their only lead?
“Whatever.” The cashier shrugged again. It was starting to feel like that’s all he ever did. “Look, we have a security camera but unless you have a badge that’s not from the girl scouts, my hands are tied. You need to convince a cop to come to look at it for you. Otherwise, unless you want a burger, I can’t help you.”
That wasn’t a bad idea, to be fair. Could she get a cop to come down here? Vector’s disappearance had to be an open missing person’s case by now. Then again, what she was expecting to see on the footage to convince the police to help her? A guy in a lab coat ordering a burger a month ago? With any luck, it would show him with someone else, but it wasn’t as if he’d be holding a big sign with his schedule printed on it.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Coming here had been kind of a longshot in the first place.
“Okay, I understand… Sorry to waste your time.” Milly sighed and looked over to Niki to see if she had any ideas.
Niki was sitting in one of the booths and had set up her laptop while they’d been talking; she looked busy.
Turning back to the cashier, Milly glanced up at the menu above them. “We’ll have uh, a box of MoleMotes and two milkshakes. ”
“Now, that I can do. Have a seat, I’ll bring it when it’s ready.”
“Thanks, uh,” Milly glanced down at his nametag, “Ronald.”
Milly headed over to join Niki at the table. “Unless you are applying for a warrant over here or something, this might be a dead end. I suppose that’s why they say the first days are the most important when trying to find someone who is missing. Better odds that people will remember seeing them.”
“I am not, just chatting with some friends,” Niki said, barely looking up long enough to acknowledge Milly’s presence. “Besides, we do not have the time to get someone to listen and come down here. CCTV footage is typically only stored for a month. By tomorrow, it might be deleted… unless I ‘borrow’ it.”
Milly perked up. “You can do that?” she asked in a hushed tone.
Niki faintly nodded.
That was a huge boon! There was always a chance there would be some clue if they just looked hard enough. A couple of paper scraps brought them here after all. There was no way Niki would fail to crack whatever excuse for security a greasy fast-food restaurant had in place if she had already proven that she could bust into well-guarded medical records for Ruth.
“Great! Do you need me to create a distracti—Wait…” Milly’s train of thought stopped on a dime. Wouldn’t she be taking advantage of Niki too? Milly reached over and pushed the laptop shut, drawing a surprised look from Niki. “Never mind. Let’s just go back to Vector’s apartment and see if we can dig up another lead. There’s always something.”
Maybe there was nothing else to find there. Milly didn’t know. She just knew that since meeting the girl, Niki had been mindful not to do anything that could be perceived as illegal. Whether that was digging through evicted furniture, breaching a database, or holding onto potential blackmail material once she recognized what it was. Niki hadn’t accepted the trashed receipts, only looked at them.
Whatever was motivating Niki to act that way, Milly wasn’t about to push her to abandon that principle just because their trail was at a dead-end otherwise. Not without knowing exactly what she was really asking Niki to give up.
Niki gave a much more pronounced nod this time, like some tension had left her shoulders. “Okay, but we are not quite out of leads here yet,” Niki assured her and spun the laptop toward Milly and opened it with a flourish.
The screen showed the MyFace page of Vector’s daughter, Vanna. Unlike her father, she was very active, posting anything from memes to makeup tutorial links. Niki pointed to the last post. It was almost a month ago.
“So this is what you were really up to?” Milly asked. Now that she thought about it, Niki had withdrawn to the internet immediately after the cashier denied seeing Vector. Did that mean Niki immediately set out to find a new lead? That was some impressive quick-thinking.
“Yes!” Niki beamed as she launched into her explanation. “I thought I’d ask her, but then I noticed she stopped updating a couple of days after her dad got fired. According to her friends, she was complaining about having to help him move or something.”
Milly leaned over the table on her elbows to look at the screen as Niki flicked through the messages between her and Vanna’s friends. Milly peered up at a proudly smiling Niki. “So, you’re thinking if we find her, we might find Doctor Vector? Ya know, for a minute there I thought you were just bailing on me.”
“For a second there, I thought maybe I was too,” Niki replied without so much as a dip in her cheerful expression. She didn’t elaborate, but it wasn’t hard to guess what would have made her up and quit. “Moreover, I believe that is what we have been doing unwittingly. Vanna is a vegan!”
That explained the weird order on the receipt. It must’ve been Vanna’s.
Milly was not about to let that distract her from the more concerning point, though.
“Wait. You knew we were barking up the wrong tree, so what was up with the offer to get the CCTV?” Milly frowned. She didn’t like the idea that Niki had been trying to trap her. “If that was a test, that’s messed up.”
“I… Okay, maybe a little,” Niki admitted. At least she had the good decency to look embarrassed while caught in the act. “In my defense, I would have given you the information on Vanna either way… just with some more snark.”
“Mhm,” Milly grumbled but held her tongue as she spotted Ronald emerge from the kitchen with their order.
“Oh! Good timing!” Niki called out as he approached. She wasted no time showing him Vanna’s picture. “What about her? Did you see her a month ago?”
Ronald let out an annoyed groan while he placed the order down. “Look, I barely even remember who came in an hour ag—Vanna? You girls know her?” His demeanor shifted as he suddenly stood up a little straighter and brushed a greasy lock of hair out of his face.
“Success!” Niki moved to high-five Milly but just hovered her hand for an awkwardly long moment while Milly left her hanging. “…are we good?”
Even if Milly had wanted to, she couldn’t exactly stay grouchy in the face of victory, nor Niki’s adorably clumsy attempts to move on. She wasn’t that petty. The uncomfortable moment would have to be enough retribution.
“… Yeah. We’re good.” Milly finally high-fived Niki.
“Yes!” Niki smiled then turned her attention back to Ronald. “As for you, Vanna has gone missing. We thought perhaps if we retrace her steps we could find something that was missed. Anything you could tell us would be great.”
“Oh… I had no idea. Uhm, okay, so,” Ronald took one of the empty seats at the table and started his story.
About a month ago, Vanna had started coming around in the afternoons to get a burger. The two of them had chatted. As could be expected, Vanna wasn’t pleased to be down here helping her dad out. The strange thing was that as far as Ronald knew, Vector wasn’t a scientist but part of a maintenance crew in overalls that were working on tunnel C5.
Apparently, their lunch options weren’t to Vanna’s liking, which made her leave the worksite and come on over to MoleMunchies. Once, Ronald had seen Vanna hop down onto the tracks and just walk down the side of the tunnel. That was also the last time he’d seen her.
That was more than enough to work with.
----------------------------------------
Just ahead of them, the C5 tunnel loomed like a gaping maw.
A surprisingly well-lit maw. Milly would have assumed that subway tunnels were dark.
“Milly, no. I am not doing this.” Niki took a step away from the edge of the platform. “We’re not allowed down there. Not to mention it is dangerous. Even if Meatcrawl is no longer there, getting electrocuted on a rail or hit by a train is just as bad.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Milly nodded then she took one more step and hopped down onto the concrete between the rails. She spun around and shot a grin up at Niki. The look of shock on Niki’s face was delicious. “I’ll go have a look.”
It couldn’t be all that dangerous. Vanna made the trip just fine and Meatcrawl was slow enough that she could outpace him long enough to phone for backup. Not that Milly was sharing any of that with Niki. Niki could stay there and put her own nerves to the test this time. See how she liked it.
Okay, maybe Milly was a little petty after all.
“Are you crazy?” Niki hissed and ducked down to offer Milly her hand. “This is neither funny nor part of the plan. There is no cell coverage in those tunnels, how are you going to call in ACE if you get into trouble?”
Dang, was her plan that obvious? She didn’t have a good response ready.
Milly looked at Niki’s hand while she contemplated her options.
It probably did make more sense to call ACE now and let them handle it from here. They were used to putting themselves in danger like this. It was just… there were two nagging thoughts that she couldn’t shake.
First, what if there was nothing down there? Or nothing that ACE would recognize as important? She would be trading on good faith with them this time, but after monumentally wasting their time, would they take her seriously the next time she called? She didn’t want to cry wolf.
Adding to that was Niki’s claim. If there really was no cell service down the tunnel then nobody would be able to call on ACE while they were down there. If a real emergency happened on the surface, people could get hurt for nothing.
Second, ACE would be bringing the big guns. They already knew Meatcrawl was vulnerable to fire. If he really was down here in a concrete tunnel it would be the best time to take him out. Yet, Milly couldn’t stop thinking about what the art teacher had said. The eyes conveyed terror. It was such a dumb thing to get hung up on, but what if Meatcrawl needed help?
Worse, what if she told ACE about her suspicion and one of them got injured while trying to help what turned out to be a mindless monster?
There was no way Milly could ask anyone to risk their lives on a dumb hunch like this.
No one else’s life.
Milly shifted her gaze up to Niki’s face and forced the most confident smile she could muster. “Then I’m counting on you to call them if I’m not back in an hour. I trust you.”
With that, Milly turned and ran down the tunnel, ignoring Niki’s shout.