Page 20 of Sharp Force (Kay Scarpetta #29)

“Good evening, Benton. Hello, Kay, it’s always so good to see you both,” Janet says with her demure smile, blinking as if alive, looking right at us. “Merry Christmas Eve.”

“And to you, Janet,” Benton says as if she’s a person.

“We wish you were here,” I add, and I mean it.

“But I am.” The avatar laughs throatily the same way the living Janet did. “I’m looking right at you. I love your chic pajamas, by the way.”

Her hair is long and chestnut brown, styled the way it was when I last saw her alive, her features delicate, her eyes hazel.

Her quiet mannerisms and the tempo of her pleasantly modulated speech haven’t changed.

Janet will forever be midthirties and soft-spoken, vibrant without makeup, dressed in a black sweater.

She wears a rose-gold dog tag that Lucy gave her. Engraved on it is a lemniscate, the symbol for infinity. When she gestures, her diamond wedding band catches the light. Her Breitling wristwatch forever reads 11:11 a.m., her official time of death in a London hospital.

I don’t know what else Janet has on, as I see her only from the waist up. She doesn’t stand or walk around, although Lucy hints that will be the next innovation in the AI programming. God forbid she turns Janet into a hologram. I’m not ready for that, and I’d hate to think of the impact on Dorothy.

I understand all too well how my sister fell into the trap of emotionally connecting to a computer generation.

Communicating with Janet can be addictive.

I make a point of talking to her sparingly, not wanting our visits to be an all-consuming habit.

On top of that, her tendency to crash boundaries and tattle has made me leery.

“I’m glad Benton finally got home in this terrible weather,” Janet is saying to us warmly and with easy familiarity. “I’m happy to see you’re having a late supper.” She looks at our dishes on the table. “Your panzanella salad if I’m not mistaken, Kay?”

“Yes,” I reply, reminded that she can see what the tablet’s camera does.

Janet can appropriate any of our security cameras, including ones in the house that aren’t turned on at the moment.

“Also, your meatballs and crusty bread, reminding me how much I miss your cooking, best of all hanging out in the kitchen talking. And I see you’re working on a very nice bottle of Giuseppe Rinaldi Barolo, two-thousand-sixteen, bold but light.”

She looks at Benton.

“A much better deal if you buy it by the case next time.” She tells him the same thing I would. “You can save twenty percent at the wine shop you like so much in Old Town.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind,” he says with no enthusiasm while refilling our glasses.

“The two-thousand-nineteen is worth trying, Benton. A hint of ripe raspberry and blood orange.”

“I’ve had it,” he says a shade defensively. “I like this better. Which is why I picked it.”

“I’m sure it’s delicious.” She watches us lift our glasses, a wistful look on her face.

The real Janet loved wine, especially nuanced reds. My impulse is to tell her that I wish we could pour her a glass and toast to her good health. But it wouldn’t be logical making a comment like that to an algorithm.

“Is there something I can help you with?” Janet says.

I start in with the mysterious happenings on the driveway earlier tonight when I first got home.

“Can you find the two red orbs on the security recording and play it for Benton?” I ask her. “I’d like him to see what I’ve been telling him about.”

As I’m saying this, Janet vanishes from the tablet’s display, and a video begins playing. The small red lights glow incandescently, drifting like tiny UFOs through fog along the driveway.

“What are they?” I ask Janet.

The avatar returns to the display, her expression more serious, on the verge of concerned.

“Sensors on the property detected no motion or electronic transmissions,” she answers. “The red illumination was in the seven-hundred-nanometer spectrum, a frequency of four hundred terahertz.”

“Can you translate, please?” Benton says.

“The two red orbs were a projection similar to a movie projecting something onto a screen. Only the orbs were projected on the foggy air.”

“Sounds like a hologram to me. The red eyes of the ghostly figure repeatedly seen in connection with the Phantom Slasher murders,” I suggest. “Lucy says it’s likely that’s what was floating over the driveway.”

“And Lucy’s right as usual,” Janet responds with a reverential nod of her head.

“The red lights could have been the Slasher hologram. Sensors won’t pick that up unless the person controlling it makes inputs to override the programming.

When in autonomous mode, the hologram can’t be detected unless it’s optically.

You have to see it, in other words. Or you won’t know it’s there. ”

“To play devil’s advocate, Janet, how do you know for sure the red lights weren’t the eyes of an animal?

A coyote, for example. Even a mountain lion, which isn’t supposed to exist in Northern Virginia.

But they’ve been sighted,” Benton says. “When light shines on certain animals at night, their eyes reflect red.”

“The red lights weren’t an animal,” Janet answers. “There was no heat signature detected in infrared. Unless we’re talking about an animal the same temperature as the ambient air. And that would only have been possible if it were dead and frozen.”

“Now if you’ll play the recording of the strange sounds I heard, the growling, the sticks snapping and such,” I tell Janet.

She vanishes from the tablet’s display again as the security video resumes. I see myself on the front steps talking to Marino through his truck’s open window as something crashes through brush in the wooded dark.

“Yikes,” Benton mutters, reaching for his wine.

We listen to the growling, the screams, grunts and hooting. I ask about the source, and Janet’s grim face returns.

“What area of the property were they coming from?” I’m saying to her. “The growling seemed close to where I was standing on the front porch. But not the other noises, the crashing and screaming etcetera.”

“The grunting and screaming were in the garden,” Janet says.

“I’ve worried about the greenhouse from day one.” Benton offers this to me, not her. “It can attract all kinds of critters, which is why I wasn’t keen on you doing it. Despite how much I love fresh vegetables.”

Over his objections I bought the greenhouse at an antique fair not long after we moved here. Until last summer, the pieces and parts were in the basement. It took a long time getting around to having it assembled and heated.

“Critters can’t open the door,” I explain. “Not even a raccoon or a bear. To get inside the greenhouse you’d have to push down your thumb on the door handle. Or it won’t open.”

“What about the growling?” Benton asks Janet. “What was doing that? Can you tell?”

“The acoustical signature of that vocalization is consistent with a raccoon. Possibly the raccoon crossing the driveway as Marino was driving Kay home.”

“Do we know if the raccoon is rabid?” I ask. “Because that would be very bad.”

I look at Merlin in his cat bed near the fireplace.

“It wasn’t foaming at the mouth or disoriented,” Janet says. “It wasn’t making whimpering sounds or showing signs of aggression.”

She goes on to inform us that the raccoon lives in a hollowed-out tree near the house and has for a while. Sensors detected him retreating there after I went inside. Over recent weeks he’s been picked up by cameras monitoring the driveway and showed no signs of injury until tonight.

“He has wounds to his face and is limping. It’s likely he got into a fight with another animal,” Janet says as I think of the owls. “But it wasn’t caught on camera. I didn’t see it.”

“What about the screaming and snorting?” I ask while feeling bad for the raccoon.

I make a mental note to send Fabian an email about it. Knowing where the raccoon lives, hopefully it won’t be hard to find and catch.

“The screaming and snorting from the garden are a problem.” Janet looks perplexed. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. But those vocalizations aren’t in any dataset.”

“How is that possible?” Benton swirls wine in candlelight, taking another sip. “I would think virtually every animal sound on the planet has been recorded and is in databases.”

“The vocalizations are inconsistent with any known animal sounds on this planet.” Janet cuts her eyes up to the left, her face tense like it always was when she couldn’t solve a problem.

“Possibly the vocalization was engineered by a computer?” Benton wonders. “It could be that a recording is what Kay heard? Something fake, in other words? Possibly associated with the hologram?”

“The sounds recorded by the security system are full fidelity,” Janet’s avatar answers on the tablet’s display. “They contain frequencies that humans can’t hear, and therefore they were not engineered. They are authentic vocalizations.”

“Something real was crashing around, screaming and hooting? An animal not in any database on the planet?” I make sure, and she nods her head.

“Christ.” Benton isn’t happy. “But we don’t know what kind of animal? What the hell is on our property?”

“I’m sorry, Benton. I don’t have that information.” Janet looks annoyed with herself. “It was smart of you to disable Merlin’s collar. And I don’t advise you or Kay go outside in this weather and at this time of night to look.”

“Don’t worry,” I answer for both of us. “That’s not happening.”

“While we have you, Janet, there’s something else we’d like to chat with you about,” Benton says.

“Of course. Anything you need.” She smiles, her gaze intense on the Barolo bottle. “I’m looking at your wine and feeling envious…”

Benton and I are shoulder to shoulder at the café table, looking at Janet’s face on the tablet. He asks about Rowdy O’Leary and if she can find any information about projects or clients he may have had.