Dead Rising by Debra Dunbar

files. I had a couple of hours to kill until my shift started. Might as well root through a few boxes of microfiche.
    “No one will know. It’s Friday. Most everyone is off today anyway.” He grinned. “Besides, I can trust a Templar. If it weren’t for your Order, I wouldn’t even have been born.”
    I don’t know how trustworthy I was, but I certainly wasn’t going to run off with a bunch of microfiche or some giant heavy piece of viewing equipment.
    Rob ushered me into a small room with two desks, two chairs, and two viewers. I sat. And waited. The donut was long gone and I was wishing I’d brought a bottle of water by the time my-man Rob came back in, two boxes stacked high in his arms. He slammed them down on the table, his face red with exertion.
    “I had to hurry, they were back farther than I expected.” He waved a hand at the dusty boxes. “This is all I have onsite from forty years ago. I can’t guarantee you’ll find what you need.”
    “Fingers crossed,” I told him, lifting the lid off one box and staring at the little rolls of cartridges inside. “Thanks for this.”
    Rob went back to work, leaving me with the sterile room and a daunting amount of tape to search through. I felt like that miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, facing a room full of straw and expecting to spin it all to gold. I had two hours. Better start spinning.
    Half an hour later I was regretting my decision. There had been a lot of crime in Baltimore forty years ago. There was probably just as much now, but catching the news every now and then meant I missed a lot, and I’m sure many robberies and petty crimes didn’t make the papers. This was all laid out in front of me—day after day of car break-ins, assaults, thefts, drug arrests. It was hard, reading all of this. And it was hard not to get sucked into the details of cases that had nothing to do with the Robertsons. One carjacking of a priest had me especially intrigued.
    Finally I found something, but it wasn’t exactly what I’d been looking for. Shay Robertson had been reported missing by her parents four months before their murders. Interesting. She’d been listed as pre-deceasing her family in the obituary, so I’d just assumed she’d died much earlier. Turns out she must have passed away not long before her parents and three of her siblings.
    Lincoln and Tanya had reported that their eldest daughter, aged fourteen, hadn’t come home after school one day. They suspected she had a boyfriend, but had never met him. The officer taking the report noted it as a possible runaway, although the parents had insisted they had a good relationship with Shay and there hadn’t been any arguments or friction at home.
    Three days after her parents visited the police station, Shay Robertson was officially listed as a missing person. The officer assigned the case had spoken with her friends, and they stated she’d been sneaking out of her house to meet a boyfriend late at night—someone older, someone her parents definitely wouldn’t approve of.
    The case remained open. Shay was never found. I frowned at the casual detective work in the case, the lack of urgency. Nowadays there would have been amber alerts and the girl’s picture on milk cartons all over the country. Fourteen, and probably run off with some creepy pedophile. Had things been that different forty years ago? Had the race or economic status of the girl played into the less-than-adequate police attention?
    And just as important, how had her relatives known she was dead? They’d listed her as pre-deceasing her family, but the case was still showing open.
    I made a note and kept going. With just fifteen minutes to go before I needed to leave I found the microfiche, buried deep in the second box of tapes. It was a grisly murder, attributed to gang revenge, although the detective assigned to the case could find no evidence that any of the Robertsons were involved in gang activity. A few neighbors wondered if