CHAPTER 18
I smoked half a pack, one cigarette after the other, on the cold gray wet smoking porch, looking out on the half-dead yellow grass stubs in the courtyard, the back of my mind telling me that I shouldn’t be here. A suspect had gotten killed here in front of me by a sniper, and no matter how many times I reminded myself the killer was locked up, it still felt dangerous.
Today, dangerous was okay. Dangerous was good. Meant I was alive. And the wind wasn’t even that bad today.
I felt the mind approach before I heard the door open.
“Hi, Michael,” I said without turning around.
“Cherabino says you’re working with us on the Wright case again?” He stopped then, half-formed questions about the rumors of my firing swirling in his head. He decided not to ask about any of them. Decided he wouldn’t have liked someone asking.
It was a painful effort not to respond to the thoughts. The Guild would have considered them public space, as clear and obvious as yelling into an empty room, and just as fair to hear.
“Wright case?” Michael prompted.
“Yeah,” I said, and stubbed out the cigarette. Might as well do something useful while I waited for the back of my head to deliver the miracle. I’d already called Swartz’s house and heard from Selah why he couldn’t be disturbed. I didn’t have time for a meeting, nor did I think it was advisable to go back to my apartment. I needed to keep moving while I figured this out.
“Isn’t the Wright case closed? That supervisor woman, with the odd mind?”
He looked at me, wondering if I was all right. Of course, he was a cop and cops couldn’t ask that.
I adjusted my coat down to cover my cold hand. I hadn’t wanted to get ash on the gloves. “I’m fine. Did the interview not confirm her as the killer?”
“The interview cleared her of all wrongdoing. She was with a boyfriend during the entire window of the murder.”
“Wait. She didn’t . . .” I trailed off. “Then who would have killed that guy with an ax? And the parts missing? Were they under a couch or something?”
Michael shook his head. “Cherabino and Ruffins are talking about it in one of the conference rooms. I thought you’d want to be there.”
• • •
It was surreal walking in on a meeting, in a conference room, at a place I almost didn’t work, on possibly my last day on earth. But the program said keep yourself distracted, keep yourself moving, keep doing something useful, and this was that. If nothing else, this was that.
I’d figure this out. Or I’d run, far and fast and wide, and roll the dice and pretend I could stay free for a week or two. Until they caught me.
I wondered if they’d have Stone torture me, as punishment for him and me both. More likely, send one of the students as a final project, with a mentor trailing, of course, to ensure that it was done correctly. It’s what I would have done, if I’d been a professor in Enforcement training.
I wondered if it would hurt more or less with a student. Probably more. The mentor would correct, over and over, until they got it right.
“Adam?” Cherabino asked. I couldn’t quite feel her emotions without reaching out, which bothered me.
“You didn’t say he was coming,” Ruffins said. The Tech Control Org agent didn’t seem happy to see me.
“You’ll just have to put up with your detection tattoo screaming at you for a while,” I said, with no sympathy. “I’m a member of the team today, and you should have thought of that before you had the damn thing installed.”
Ruffins scowled. “Left our manners at home, did we?”
I sat. “It’s been a hell of a day. A hell of a week, really.”
“Play nicely or I’ll kick you both out,” Cherabino said. Then, to me: “Ruffins is here because Wright was one of his informants for . . . well, another case. There are some legalities to the investigation, so it’s easier to just keep him in on.”
I noticed then that Andrew, forensic accountant and Cherabino’s cube neighbor, was seated at the end of the table. He waved, a small half wave.
I nodded back, and Michael sat.
“Like I was saying, it doesn’t add up,” Andrew said.
“Which part?” Cherabino asked.
“Wright’s accounts have been supported by payments from the TCO for a while now, for informing. There’s been payments from Fiske’s organization, like Ruffins told me to look for.”
Wait. Wright had been working for Fiske? And Ruffins had been the one to point this out? What had I missed?
But Andrew continued without pausing. “The payments just stopped, the day of the murder. Both sets. One or the other organization should have had some delay, but there’s none. But a third set of payments—from another account—started appearing a week before the murder and hasn’t stopped. They’ve been increasing, actually.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ruffins said. “A mysterious third set of payments? Doesn’t it seem more plausible that the bank made some mistake?”
“Who all was Wright working for?” I asked, finally tracking the conversation.
Heads turned in my direction.
“Well, he was working for Fiske, or at least selling him secrets. I assume largely because you asked him to?” I asked Ruffins.
He looked uncomfortable, a little too uncomfortable for a man who was usually combative. If anybody else, I would have read him to find out why, but with his wrist tattoo, he’d know immediately.
“Yes,” Cherabino said. “He was bait. Him no longer being living, testifying bait is a problem that we are currently working to solve.”
Ruffins objected, “You shouldn’t be sharing task force information with this guy.”
“This one’s not going to make any difference to anyone,” she replied. Then back to me: “Finish your thought.”
“He was working for Fiske, he was working for the TCO, but all over that house I saw hobbies. Stuff that takes a lot of money. And he wasn’t just paying his bills. He was feeding those experiments, or projects, or what have you. Some of it looked recent. Obviously he was selling stuff—I’m betting some kind of invention that crossed the line into Tech territory, though who knows—but I’m also wondering if he had some kind of deal going with the company.”
“The lab?” Michael asked. “We didn’t find any evidence of that at all, and we dug deep enough that we should have if it was going on.”
Ruffins said with an odd tone, “Maybe they were paying him off the books, you know, on the higher levels.”
“After firing Wright so forcefully?” Cherabino shook her head. “Besides, we talked to nearly everyone. And who is the higher levels? There’s always a person. Or several. But concrete, real people, and we talked to everyone there, I thought.”
“Not the senior executives,” I said.
Michael shifted. “Maybe he extorted them for money and threatened to take that thing in his head public if they didn’t pay up. Then they went over with an ax to remove the danger.”
“But he’d already put so much up on data channels,” Andrew said. “How much more could there really be to leak?”
I glanced at him.
Andrew shrugged. “I’m curious. And you guys talk loudly one cubicle away. If it’s a case you’ve brought me in on, it seems fair game to listen. It’s also a slow week.”
“You listened in on confidential case information?” Ruffins asked. He looked appalled.
“Next time just come on over if you’ve got the time,” Cherabino told him, her mind very intentional. “I can always use another set of eyes on things.”
“Thanks. When it’s slow, I’d appreciate something to do.”
And I realized then why Cherabino had the highest close rate in the department. It wasn’t just that she obsessed over her cases’ details until she could quote them to you six months later with accuracy. It wasn’t just that she worked so many more hours than everybody else. It was this: that she asked for help in odd places and never, ever, turned down a second opinion.
You got interesting things with help sometimes, it seemed. An idea started to pick up its head from the back of my mind, but when I reached for it, it spooked and ran away. It would be back.
“The extortion tactic seems much more like Fiske anyway,” Ruffins said, with a suspicious glance to me. “As I said in the task force meeting, it seems easiest to lump this case in with the rest of his crimes and sort them out when we have him in custody.” He kept looking at me.
Cherabino sighed. “And as I said in the meeting, I’m happy for you to be here if it makes you more comfortable, but I’m going to follow the evidence. We’re not going to have a killer go free because we just assume it was him. Fiske is not all powerful, and this one seems too sudden to be coordinated.”
“Look, I have an appointment with a CI I need to get to,” Ruffins said. “Task force is at three, right?”
“It is,” Cherabino agreed. She was frustrated with him; I could feel it. But he was important to the Fiske case somehow.
As they walked out, the idea in the back of my head snuck back in and looked at me with wide eyes.
• • •
The idea coalesced.
Captain Harris had barged into Paulsen’s office earlier about the arbitration emergency. He was trained as a go- between and was good at getting agreements.
Second fact: the Guild had a long and distinguished history of using third-party arbitrators. The Koshna Accords were only the most famous example. If I’d paid my Guild dues long enough, I might have had access to one from inside the Guild. Unlike a lawyer, whose job it was to block as many runs from the other party as possible, a Guild arbitrator was assigned to find the best solution for the accused that the Council or accuser could live with. There was a lot more negotiation, and a lot less questioning of facts, since truth or falsehood was already established with a deep-read. A good arbitrator could get your sentence commuted, or paid slowly over time, or taken out of your salary and your community service and your creativity rather than your hide. Then he or she followed up to be certain both parties kept up their ends.
Third fact: Harris had once been married to Jamie; they had been divorced long before I’d had her as my mentor, but as a senior student I knew who she was. According to the rumors of the day, he had stayed over at the Guild for some of that time, in addition to his residence off-site. While the Guild might not accept just any police captain as a neutral party, Harris had been cleared as a former spouse of a Guild member, and a sometime resident.
So, unlike Bransen, Harris could actually walk in the doors of the Guild and speak for me. Furthermore, he was qualified to do it reasonably well.
• • •
I bought sandwiches from Swartz’s favorite deli, fresh homemade bread like clouds cradling a bounty of beautiful soy-pepper loaf and vegetables, real roast beef, and fresh-made stone-ground mustard, with slices of fancy cheddar cheese cut so thin you could see the shadow of your finger through them. Best part? I bought them myself, with real money, in the regular line, without having to talk to a manager. The department had been handling my money for years, and now I had it myself. There was temptation there, sure, but here, now, it was freedom. Bittersweet to taste that freedom today. Today of all days.
I took a taxi—a real, honest-to-goodness taxi with a grumpy taxi driver who wanted to talk sports—and paid him with real money.
And then I was climbing Swartz’s front steps.
Selah answered the door in a ridiculously flowered dress and wool socks, a scarf around her neck. She smiled when she saw me—and the deli sack I carried in my hands. “He’s awake,” she said. “And he’d love a visit.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She stopped me. “It’s not that high-sodium thing, is it?”
“No, ma’am.” I smiled. I’d remembered. Low-sodium and healthy, all the way. I felt virtuous.
She let me through.
Swartz was seated on his faded old couch, fiddling with some kind of wire hook. Fishing gear, maybe. Clear line and oddly colored feathers littered the TV table in front of him like the leftover bits of a bird left by a messy cat’s lunch. He frowned at it through thick reading glasses. The frown turned into a smile when he saw me.
“Come in, come in.” He pulled a pocketed envelope from the couch beside him and started tucking things away into it.
“What are the feathers for?” I asked.
“Ah, even pollution-resistant bioengineered fish like a fly with some shine to it. Makes them bite better. I don’t go much, anymore, but I like the flies. Plenty of call for them, and keeps me busy.” Subtext in Mindspace was that a little extra money was welcome while he was on teacher’s disability, and his doctor liked the activity. “Sit down. Tell me all about things. Did you ask her to dinner?”
I looked for Selah.
“Let’s get the food on the kitchen table, dear,” she said kindly. For all Swartz lived here, the house was hers.
I unpacked my offering on the old wooden kitchen table while Selah got out the good plates.
“So, did you?” he asked.
I looked up. “You’re a meddler, you know that?”
He sat, setting the cane against the wall next to him. “So what if I am?” He was breathing heavy, even from that little move across the room. I wondered if he was getting worse, somehow. “So, did you or not?”
“I did,” I said, almost sheepish. For once in my life I didn’t really want to talk to him about it. Too new, too fragile, too uncertain. Too . . . improbable now, with what today meant. “Well, she said yes. It was, well, it was awkward. But okay. Really okay. I think she likes me.”
He pulled the deli bag toward him. “I could have told you that years ago.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me to ask her out years ago?” I asked, a little forcefully.
“You weren’t ready, kid.”
I digested that for a moment. Still, regret burned at my stomach. Deep, full regret, of what might have been.
He regarded me. “You had to learn to believe in the program. In God. In yourself. You’re not there yet, but you’re on your way now. That is, if you keep up praying.”
I blinked. He thought I was on my way. Even with the qualifier, it was one of the best compliments I’d gotten in a long time. And from Swartz. Today of all days.
Selah arrived, found the little red pepper salad I’d gotten for her, and pecked me on the cheek. She moved it to the dining room table, where she had some papers laid out for a project she was working on. So it was just me and Swartz. We ate, companionably, together.
Swartz finished about half the sandwich, blotted at his mouth with a napkin, and pushed the plate away. He looked tired, but his mind was still razor-sharp. “You’re not here in the middle of the day to talk about Cherabino, are you?”
I took another bite of sandwich, which was suddenly ash in my mouth.
“What are you here to talk about?”
I looked at my plate.
Swartz sighed. “I have a cane now, you know.” A reference to how many times I’d told him to whap anyone who got in his way.
“I . . .” I trailed off. Took a breath. “The Guild’s been making threats. Credible threats. They wanted me to investigate this thing for them.”
“You told me. It was Kara who asked, right?”
“She’s not in the picture anymore.” I forced myself to move on, no matter what it cost me. The words came out slowly, at first: “Now it’s the politicians. And I’ve stepped out of line, to their thinking, and gotten too ambitious, and gone after somebody too high up. I’ve caught somebody in wrongdoing, but it’s the wrong guy for the murder and they’re . . . well, they’re threatening to mind-wipe me, Swartz.”
Surprise and concern came from him across Mindspace. “What . . . what exactly does that mean?”
“In this case, they say they’ll erase the last ten years of my life.”
He sat, grave. After a moment: “Can they?”
“They can. Maybe they won’t. Cherabino has ideas. I have ideas. I am going to fight. But reality—”
“The Koshna Accords,” Swartz said.
“Yeah.”
A long pause, in which he thought and I tried not to feel.
“I’d . . . I’d rather they killed me, you know. Leaving me back there after they kicked me out of the Guild, without any of this.” I waved my hand around the kitchen, to him. “Without any of me.”
“Ten years ago you were sliding toward the street. Addicted.”
“Yeah.”
“The habits are still in your brain.”
“I know.”
Odds were, I’d wake up in the middle of the worst Satin addiction I’d had, and if I wasn’t physically addicted at first, those desperate habits and cravings would send me right back into the throes of it. I didn’t know if I could get myself out a second time. Not without Cherabino and Swartz, and what were the odds of finding them again?
“They might kill me anyway,” I said.
Swartz leaned on the table and thought. And thought. I could see the thoughts, like a master cardplayer shuffling through cards, dealing and collecting and fanning them out one after the other.
And I waited, an idea—and this hope—the only thing left.
Finally he nodded. Then he looked up at me, and the pain in his eyes hurt me. Physically hurt me. “We can’t stop it?” he asked.
“I’ll try, but . . . I can’t run. I’m marked. I’ll show up at the Guild or they will make me.”
“That’s it?”
I nodded.
“I’ll go with you,” he said, and grabbed the cane, half standing.
“I don’t think you can,” I said. With all the Tech and various Mindspace devices at the Guild, even if they’d let him in the door, there could be issues. I didn’t know how stable his heart was right now, and the heart was controlled by tiny neurons linked into the rest of the body’s neural net. One of the scariest lessons in Deconstruction was learning how to manipulate that net in someone with a weak heart to cause worsening of symptoms and possibly death. Not that I think anyone would do anything deliberately . . . Well, maybe I did. They’d used his condition against me before. I took the plunge and lied: “They wouldn’t let you in anyway. It’s tomorrow. I’m getting Cherabino to take me.”
Swartz nodded. “Isabella will know what to do.” He settled back in the chair, leaning on the cane. “What do you need?”
“Not to think for a while. Cigarettes aren’t doing it, and I’m wanting the drug way, way too much.”
He nodded. “Stay here today. Selah needs some help in the garden, and there’s plenty of flies to be made. You can talk if you need, and we can put our heads together.” But the feeling I got from him, for the very first time, was uncertainty. Huge, gaping uncertainty and worry. And sadness, over and through it all.
And that scared me worse than anything so far. If Swartz didn’t have an answer . . . Maybe there wasn’t one.
• • •
I was covered in sweat and dirt in a borrowed oversized sweatshirt of Swartz’s, digging holes for fence posts in the semifrozen ground, when Cherabino’s police car pulled up, sirens flashing, in the front yard.
Selah stood up, taking off her gardening gloves.
I felt Cherabino before I saw her, strong emotions hitting me like a blow, layer after layer of panic and worry and anger and everything else, layer after layer poured out. Raw strength with no control—my strength, perhaps, and her lack of control, if the Link had anything to do with it. Maybe I was just attuned.
She trotted to Selah, emotions so painfully loud, so painfully out of control. “I’m sorry. I need Boy Wonder.”
“Will he be back?” Selah asked, eyebrows down. “My husband—”
“I’ll call Swartz later.” Cherabino moved next to me. “Let’s go.”
I set down the shovel. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, I’m just running in a hurry. You were hard to find, and my informant gets twitchy if I’m too late.” She’d closed two cases the last time he contacted her, and she didn’t want to miss the guy.
“Okay . . .” I pulled off Swartz’s gardening gloves and dropped them on the ground. “You realize I’m covered in dirt. It will get in your cruiser.”
“You realize I said out of time? We’ll clean up the dirt later.” She grabbed my arm and pulled.
Selah watched us go.