SEVEN
Hey, Skinner, this is unbelievable,’ the first cop said. The fat one. He’d flipped Caitlyn’s cloak over her head and had patted her down. He’d quickly discovered two folded pieces of paper beneath her microfabric and her knife in its sheath.
He’d tossed the folded papers into the front seat of the car, along with the knife.
Now her hands were cuffed behind her back. The cop had bent her over the hood on the driver’s side of the car, pressed her face sideways against the smooth metal. She could hear the ticking of the engine cooling down. And smell the fat cop’s body odor, like soured mustard.
“The knife?” the second cop, Skinner, asked. “Most of them carry something.”
“No.” Fat One was running his hands along Caitlyn’s back. Until this night, no one except her father, and once a doctor when she was a child, had touched the deformity. Now, twice in the space of hours, she’d endured violations that made her shudder with shame and rage.
“She’s wearing some kind of tight bodysuit,” Fat One said to his partner across the hood. “There’s some kind of opening, a vertical slit down the back. And something really weird underneath.”
The cop was going to reach inside. It was over then. Her secret exposed. She should have listened to Jordan, gone immediately to the surgeon he had sent her out of Appalachia to find.
“Leave her alone,” Razor said, handcuffed too and bent across the other side of the hood. “Unless you want a major civil liability.”
Caitlyn was blinded by the cloak over her head but heard a thump on the hood. And a groan from Razor.
“That give you any idea of why you should keep your mouth shut?” Skinner said to Razor.
“Monitor this,” Razor said. “I’m clearly saying that you lifted my head and banged it down. That’s another civil rights violation.”
Another thump. “Illegals don’t have civil rights. Even if they did, my partner has a probable cause to search for weapons. He already found a knife.”
The fat cop’s hands were pulling the microfabric apart where it had been designed to snap open easily.
His hands paused as he reached under the fabric. Then departed. He’d stepped back.
“Hey, Skinner, we need a shotgun on her.” His voice was quieter.
“You can’t just shoot—” Razor’s voice was cut off by a thump, harder than the first two.
“What do you have?” Skinner asked his companion. “I’m busy here. In a civil rights issue.”
Another thump.
“Whatever it is,” Fat One said, “we need it on digital record.”
“So lift the cloak and turn her back to the windshield. Let the monitor get it.”
Caitlyn knew what he meant. A wide-angle monitor mounted on the rearview mirror gave an unbroken surveillance of all squad car activities, including their arrest minutes earlier.
“You’re going to have to come here with a rifle and a flashlight,” Fat One said. “I don’t think the monitor will get enough detail.”
Every pistol and rifle carried by an Enforcer had a small video camera along the bottom of the barrel to record any situation where a weapon was drawn or fired. The surveillance records were used in postmortems, to justify an Enforcer’s actions in court, or analyzed for additional training. But only in situations that involved Influentials.
“Don’t think of moving,” Skinner told Razor. One more thump on the hood. “Understand?”
Scuffling of leather told Caitlyn that the fat cop was moving around the front of the car.
“Get a good shot of her fingers,” Fat One said. “This is some weird crap.”
Then the cop’s hands again, pulling apart the vertical slit of the microfabric. More tugging, oddly gentle, until her deformity was exposed and spread. Flashes of light told her that the cops were scrutinizing what they’d found.
“Insane,” the second cop said. “A set of fake wings. What will the Illegals come up with next?”
“Should we find out how this is attached?” Fat One asked.
“Only if you want hours of paperwork to justify our probable cause for why we undressed her. Let’s take her in and let one of the females find these…things.”
“Good call,” Fat One said, still staring at the wings. “Let this one be someone else’s problem.”