Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
“There’s almost no paperwork in here,” Hallie observed, looking around the stockroom. “I know most things are digital, but she’d need a laptop at least to keep track of inventory and communicate with suppliers. The shop has a website, too, so she’d need to manage that.”
“There was nothing out on the shop floor, either. It’s always possible she took it with her?” Even without her truth sense, Hallie would have known Girard was just speculating.
“Possible, yes.” But it didn’t feel right.
Anyone who’d managed to escape the attention of law enforcement for so long, and who was so skilled at their work, wouldn’t be careless enough to connect the two parts of their lives.
It was far more likely that Zurine had an office space somewhere.
“If she was working on things for the shop - the legitimate business, I mean - then she’d want it close by, I would think.
And it would make sense to have it close to the stockroom.
A hidden door, perhaps?” It was Hallie’s turn to speculate.
“Hidden in plain sight. Like her,” Girard agreed.
They turned their attention to the shelves that lined the walls, moving away from each other.
Hallie focused her attention on the concrete floor.
If she was right and there was a hidden door somewhere, then the constant opening and closing might have left scuff marks on the otherwise polished surface.
As she reached the end of the stockroom, she found what she’d been looking for.
“Got something,” she told Girard. There were marks on the floor in a perfect arc, coming from the shelving unit out onto the floor.
There was a slender gap between one set of shelves and the next, but no obvious mechanism that Hallie could see.
She started moving the boxes that were on the shelves, and on one of the lower shelves found a plain metal lever hidden behind a box.
Pulling the lever got her a dull thud and the whole shelving unit swung towards her, brushing against the floor.
Hallie stood back, one hand on her gun as a precaution, watching as the shelves moved away then stopped at a right angle, revealing a modestly sized office with a plain desk, laptop, and filing cabinet.
Overhead lights clicked on as the door came to a stop.
Hallie moved into the room, noticing that there were also scrape marks on the floor in front of the filing cabinet.
With a glance across at Girard, she pushed the chest-high, metal cabinet and was rewarded when it swung quietly out of place, letting her see a plain door knob in the otherwise bare, painted wall.
The knob turned but the door didn’t open under Hallie’s grip.
There was a keyhole under the knob. She didn’t bother looking for a key.
Zurine would not be foolish enough to leave one lying around on her desk, not when this door was so well hidden.
So instead Hallie set her shoulder against the door.
It creaked but didn’t give at her first attempt, then Girard joined her and between them they forced the door open.
The room beyond the shop office was meticulously organised and crowded with equipment that Hallie didn’t begin to understand. But Girard muttered something under his breath and strode towards a machine that sat on the floor but rose to head height. He was scowling as he opened a panel on its side.
“You know what this is?” Hallie asked.
“It’s a chip manufacturing plant. The smallest ever built. They produce the ID chips that everyone in Daydawn has to carry. Every single machine is supposed to be licensed and in the hands of the government or its agents.”
“So, Zurine should not have had this,” Hallie concluded, looking around the rest of the room.
If she’d been asked to describe what she would have expected a forger’s workspace to look like, she’d have come up with something like this.
The place was spotlessly clean. One wall held two sets of shelves.
One was a rack of wide, shallow shelves which contained what Hallie thought were sheets of different weights of paper and plastics.
The other set of shelves were deeper, holding wire baskets all neatly labelled.
From what Hallie could read and understand there were various tools and different types of metal and other components.
There was a long workbench that held no fewer than three different printers, all of various sizes, and another workbench that held what looked to Hallie like a full chemistry set.
On the other side of the machine Girard was still muttering about was a wooden partition that went most of the way across the room.
On the other side of the partition was what looked, for all the world, like an ordinary shop front if shops had no windows.
The shop front was divided by a short workbench that sat in the middle of the room and had plain, three-legged stools on either side, for the forger and her customers, Hallie guessed.
From Hallie’s vantage point behind the bench she could see that the shelf under the bench was filled with bits of equipment and a couple of desk lamps whose heads could be angled and tilted.
There was nothing else in the room, not even a lock box for cash.
At the other side of the room was a plain door that would, if Hallie’s guess was correct, lead out at the back of the building.
So Zurine’s patrons would be able to come around the back, into an anonymous door and meet her in this plain room.
Zurine would be able to hide most of her equipment away behind the partition, which also had a sliding door so the business side of her operation could be sealed off.
And Hallie also guessed that the outside door was far enough away from the shop’s back door that, from the outside, the two felt quite separate.
Although she was also sure that Zurine would have conducted her side business when the clothes shop was shut.
The forger would not have wanted to risk the two getting mixed up.
“This is definitely her base,” Hallie said, coming back to the workroom.
Taking another look around, she could see a stool and a blank spot on the workbench next to the chemistry set, with a connector lead sitting on the scarred wooden surface.
“She had a laptop here, too. But I would wager she has that with her.”
“I’m not taking that bet,” Girard said. He shook his head, looking around.
“I’m not an expert, but this looks like exactly what you’d need to create false IDs.
And I’m guessing that that set up,” he pointed to what Hallie had mentally labelled the chemistry set, “would allow her to make fake skin as well, to mask the original chip.”
Hallie looked around the room again and felt a combination of frustration and elation.
She knew that this was a major discovery.
From what she knew, and what others had said, it was virtually impossible for someone to falsify identities down to the ID chip so that someone could adopt a completely new identity.
The hochlen would take this find as a major triumph, putting a stop to perhaps the only person in the world - and certainly the only person in Daydawn - who had managed to master the techniques.
But - and it was a big but - none of this took them any closer to finding Findo Trask, to working out if there was a connection between him and whoever was threatening the Conclave. That was the real job. That was why they’d been looking for the forger.
Someone would need to go through the room and see if there was any information or clues as to where Zurine might be going, or who her clients were.
But from a glance around, Hallie didn’t think there would be anything here.
For one thing, she had spotted a box of blue latex gloves in one of the wire baskets.
It was unlikely they’d find even a fingerprint in this room.
So nothing to trace it back to Zurine, if that was her name, and if they could find her.
There might be fingerprints in the shop area, although Hallie wasn’t confident about that.
Zurine seemed to be meticulous and careful, and Hallie could imagine she regularly cleaned all the surfaces that might hold prints.
Her mind spun in circles, trying to piece together what she knew and what she didn’t know, and fill in the gaps and make some guess as to where Zurine might go or what she might do next.
Without much information, it was a fruitless exercise, but Hallie’s mind still tried to do it.
That, combined with the sense of displacement she had after the rapid move the night before and her mother’s unexpected and angry visit was making her whole body itch, leaving her restless and slightly crazed. She wanted to do something.
“I need to move,” Hallie said to Girard. “I know someone has to go through the stuff here, but I’d like to move, to walk, for a bit.”
“I’ve sent the director the address and serial number of the machine,” Girard told her, putting his phone away.
“He’s sending Jasper and Dudon right now.
I’ll make sure this is secure, then head back to the shop front.
It will be easier to direct them there. Can you stay close by, perhaps walk around the block, until the others get here? ”