Then that came to a halt as quickly as it had begun.

Her whereabouts unknown the past four or five years. Activities unknown. Purpose unknown.

I could feel my blood pressure spike. The message and storage unit key took on a heightened intensity.

Surely no one cared about Unitopia these days? Still, at lunch I went to a shitty little internet café, put on protections, checked to see if their website was active. Rather than upset Larry again.

Static, but still there. Mostly just a gallery of shots of the space. It had the slick, seamless feel of something put together by a branding company. Because it had been.

A floor plan that almost looked more like the schematic of a spaceship, or cathedral, with a long, wide space with circles and half circles for rooms branching off to both sides and leading eventually to the crux of it all: a huge dome in the back that housed the visitor center and a presentation about the environment billed as “planetarium-worthy.” But the sneak peek video didn’t exist anymore. Just some text about how Unitopia had been inspired by a diagram by Humboldt, the naturalist. A symbolic peak, showing the richness of the world’s habitats, altitude by altitude. From valleys to the oxygen-starved summit. The idea of wilderness integrating humans into it. The holistic view. “Unitopia.” Silvina’s word for it, not Humboldt’s. Her contribution to a lost canon.

Then I noticed in a photograph of the center a peculiar presence: taxidermy. Very ordinary, bear heads and more benign plastic models of sea life.

Did it mean anything?

Screw it. The more I dug, on a public computer, the worse things could get. But I was curious. Since the project had received city money, I wondered if there were line items for the budget or a proposal with vendors. Like, who had provided the taxidermy.

Sure enough, “assorted animal models” appeared in an old PDF proposal, with a company name, “Animal Magic,” that was easy enough to find online, although now bankrupt.

Animal Magic was a blanket company that provided a number of services, even animal mascots for birthday parties. They had a list of third-party vendors, if you looked hard enough.

Only one was a taxidermist: Carlton Fusk, based in Brooklyn.

I leaned back in my chair, in that humid, claustrophobic space, surrounded by the pecking and clicking of people searching for god-knows-what.

Was this a valid clue? Or was this just a coincidence?

Too early for me to know the difference.

But, deep inside, I felt a thrill.

My head felt clear, working on this mystery, like I’d been fuzzy before and hadn’t realized it.

That was enough to make me want to pursue it.

Which required me legitimizing it.

[22]

I stopped by Alex’s office: another glass cube with a minimalist desk, shockingly offset by a whaling scene in a gold Victorian frame and, in the corner, a stubby, faux Doric column with a bowl of gummy bears on top. Like usual, it smelled of his spice cologne. Reeked of it.