Editor’s note: This is the third installment of a 15-part, serialized mystery by best-selling author Robin Sloan. Start at the beginning with chapters one and two.
CHAPTER THREE: The Painter’s Algorithm
Under a clear blue sky, the Bay Area’s greatest detective and I raced to meet the painter who saw everything.
Why? Stella Pajunas, the all-powerful executive of Alta Bay City Development, had vanished on the sidewalk, then reappeared a day later, and now claimed nothing had happened. Her security chief had secretly directed Annabel Scheme to investigate.
Rhinesville was a cowboy town buckled into the shadow of Mount Diablo. It had a central square and a custom typeface. It was nauseatingly cute, and I immediately wanted to live there.
Scheme brought the pickup to a clattering halt just outside of town in front of a broad-faced barn. Usually, our destinations were creepy warehouses or creepy science labs or creepy boats anchored in creepy harbors on the Mendocino coast. This was just a barn. In Rhinesville.
Scheme jabbed a finger and I followed it to see the orange-topped plastic pole poking out of the dirt near the road. “You want the real map of the world, Will, look down. Ask yourself, why does an old barn need gigabit internet?”
We didn’t even have gigabit internet in Rotten City yet.
The master of the barn was a man named Lazar Lobo. Scheme introduced him as a painter, but that wasn’t necessary. He was ostentatiously A Painter, his jeans flecked with color and his creations arrayed in the cavernous space behind him.
“Annabel,” he said smoothly. “What a nice surprise.” His voice was rich and resonant. He wore an artful stubble. He probably owned a winery.
“Lazar, this is my partner, Will Portacio.” Scheme always said partner when she could have said assistant. It was one of my favorite things about her. “We’re here about a case.”
The barn was stuffed with canvases so enormous they brushed the rafters. The paintings depicted ghostly figures caught mid-gesture. Here, a man looking over his shoulder, indecision palpable; there, a woman leaping neatly over a puddle. Small moments made meaningful by the work’s monumental scale.
Lobo took a step towards the nearest canvas. “Do you want to see my newest—“
“No,” Scheme said flatly. “I need your cameras.”
“You know my rules, Annabel. I don’t do surveillance.”
Scheme turned to me. “The renowned Lazar Lobo monitors security cameras all over the bay. Continuously. Hundreds of them.”
“Thousands,” the painter clarified.
“He has the skills of a hacker, but the soul of an artist.”
“I just sold a painting to the deYoung,” he said. “And I don’t do surveillance.”
“Here’s a loophole for you, Lazar. I’m not looking for a person; I’m looking for the absence of a person. You don’t have a problem showing me an empty sidewalk, do you?”
Lobo took a moment to decrypt that question. Reasonable.
“Besides,” Scheme said, “you owe me a favor.”
I followed the detective and the painter to the back of the barn, where a rack of computers sat whirring beneath the hay loft, and a bank of monitors fluttered through an endless flip-book of images snatched from street corners and parking lots, bank lobbies and dispensary lines.
I looked back at the canvases. Suddenly, the grain of security camera footage — the blotch, the gloom — was unmistakable. The cameras were this man’s subjects. His muses.
“Lazar doesn’t review all the footage himself,” Scheme explained. “Impossible. Instead, he programs his assistants here”— she patted one of the computers—“to identify interesting compositions, which he then copies.”
“The Cartier-Bresson algorithm,” Lobo sniffed, “is only the beginning of my process.”
Explaining the case to him, Scheme sketched out an algorithm of her own. She wanted to know where in the Bay Area, in the last six months, a figure had disappeared suddenly — there one frame, gone the next — and then reappeared in the same spot approximately one day later.
“That does happen,” Lobo said. “But usually it’s a glitch in the camera.”
“I’m looking for a glitch in reality. Come on, Lazar. Find it for me.”
He sat down in front of the monitors, Scheme leaning in beside him. I wandered back to the enormous canvases. One of Lobo’s paintings captured two men embracing on a street corner, one clinging to the other like he would never see him again. Another showed a woman at an ATM, her face crumpled in utter defeat.
And then I saw Scheme. Even through the haze of the security camera, as reproduced faithfully by Lazar Lobo’s brush, it was unquestionably her. And, unlike the painter’s other subjects, caught unsuspecting in his voyeur’s gaze, Annabel Scheme stared straight back at the camera. Had this been their introduction?
“GOT YOU!” Scheme shouted from the computers. “Will! Come look at this.”
One of Lobo’s monitors showed an empty sidewalk. A young woman appeared; gone one frame, there the next. A moment later, the sound followed: a quiet pop. The woman stood absolutely still. She carried a boxy, fashionable bag. When she took her first step, she did so with the matter-of-factness of someone exiting an elevator.
“I want to paint her,” Lazar murmured.
“So, that’s the reappearance. Let’s find out when she disappeared,” Scheme said. Lobo scrubbed the video back and back and back, pedestrians zipping up the sidewalk like slot cars. An hour became a day became a week. There was no sign of her.
“Oh,” Scheme said.
How long had the woman with the bag been missing?
“Wrong question,” Scheme said. “We didn’t see someone return. We saw someone arrive. Lazar, when did this happen?”
Lobo scrutinized the image. “Yesterday. About… 20 hours ago. This camera is in Berkeley.”
Scheme’s nostrils flared. Then, she was in motion, hurtling through the barn, framed for a moment against the giant painting of herself, bound for her pickup parked outside, and she was calling back, “Come on, Will! Thank you, Lazar! COME ON, WILL!”
Tomorrow, Part 4: Three Coffees
