CHAPTER 20
“Look, Adam, I appreciate the fact that you had a heart-to-heart with a charming guy who happened to—”
“Are you calling me an idiot?” I asked.
“No.” She changed tactics. “Fiske has every reason to lie to us, and his charm isn’t—”
“Stop. I’ve interviewed how many thousand suspects at this point? I can tell the difference between the charm and the truth, Cherabino. Plus he wasn’t all that charming.”
“It’s very likely he himself ordered the—”
“Seriously, Cherabino, don’t treat me like an idiot. You think I’m falling for honeyed words? From somebody on that level? Which, by the way, he didn’t bother with and I wouldn’t fall for. I know better than that. You may not have been there, but I can do interviews. He was telling the truth as he understood it. I just want to check.”
That sat in the car between us for a good while as I navigated the skylanes with the other, homicidal drivers around me. In Atlanta, turn signals were information, not a request, and you were advised to react accordingly. I reacted, decelerating to allow the ugly green flyer to pull in front of me. He kept going across four lanes of traffic, of course.
“You’ve never ever been wrong about the lying thing? Nobody’s ever lied to you and gotten away with it? Ever?”
I made a low sound of frustration in the back of my throat. “I strongly doubt this guy’s good enough to lie to a telepath convincingly.”
“Even so. We check and we double-check before we accuse some officer who’s only doing his job. Especially if you’re operating out of some stupid theory. We can’t go to the TCO office. It won’t turn out well.”
“What? Why not?” I swerved to avoid a driver with engine trouble who was losing altitude into my flight space. Fortunately he had his screamers on and everyone else was swerving too. I pulled us back in an even flight space and remembered why I hadn’t driven in Midtown even when I could drive. “What did you say?”
“You show up at this guy’s work with accusations, and either they’re not going to respond well or they’re going to take you all too serious. Either you stall the inquiry or you tip him off or they take over, and none is good for us. I’m not implicating somebody who’s just doing his job.”
I made another frustrated sound while I thought it over. “Cops are touchy bastards.”
“I know.”
But I took the next exit, to look for a pay phone, like her mind was suggesting quietly.
“You know that stunt at Fiske’s house was stupid,” I said. “We could have both gotten killed.”
“Maybe. But it’s Jacob. He was screwing with my family. You can’t screw with a cop’s family and get away with it. He knows now that I’m paying attention. He knows there’s a line. He knows I know where he lives and how he works.”
“He got the better end of that deal.”
“Him spending all that time with you? And then you handling the guards at the end? Yeah, he got his bit, but he’s going to remember today. That’s all I wanted. He needs to hesitate before he does anything like that again. Bransen will back me up. Maybe.” But inside, she wondered, and regretted.
“We probably changed the future, right?” she asked me finally. “Kept him from hurting Jacob, for sure?”
“I don’t know. There’s no way to know yet.”
She made another frustrated sound. “Well, at least this won’t impact the task force. None of the critical evidence is a direct tie to me. Fiske will go down either way.” Even if she got fired, her brain said. And she was alive. “We had to have changed the future. Jacob’s safe. That’s what matters.”
I finally agreed, because she expected me to. I still wasn’t sure why she’d charged in like that. But what was done, was done.
• • •
Cherabino hung up the pay phone and trudged back to the car. In front of us, the back of the Fox Theatre rose, ancient and soot-stained, its lights still cheerful after so many years.
The car door opened, and she slid into the seat.
“So?” I asked.
She sighed. “His supervisor took my credentials. Ruffins was supposed to be in Montgomery that day. They pulled his tracking records and he was actually in the area of the victim’s house.”
“Tracking records?” I asked.
“You really think the government gives him all those shiny toys to play with and doesn’t keep track? There’s still satellites up there, for all people don’t want to talk about it. There’s still a big independent space station with full technology. And he’s got more than a few things tattooed on that arm of his.”
“There wasn’t a flag on it immediately if he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to?”
She shifted in her seat. “There’s professional courtesy. There’s trust. There’s a guy doing his job who doesn’t need his arm joggled every time he makes an independent decision. I don’t like this, Adam. It doesn’t prove anything, and that’s all they know.”
“Fine,” I said, “but we’re going back over the evidence with a fine-tooth comb. There’s something there. I can feel it.”
Cherabino sighed. “I already called Michael to have him pull the files. I hope you’re expecting to work late tonight.”
• • •
We’d taken over one of the empty conference rooms, and I was going through every piece of paperwork in the room and driving Cherabino and Michael to do the same. There was something we were missing.
Hours passed, until Cherabino sent Michael out for food.
My hands landed on the fingerprint reports from the crime scene again. Ruffins, again, but he’d admitted to being there several times. Wright had been his informant.
I paged through them, eyes blurry, frustrated and feeling like Cherabino had won. It probably was Fiske. I’d probably been lied to.
I stopped, and went back. There. One of Ruffins’s prints. On the inside of the front door, like he’d hit it on his way out. The lab tech had grouped this print with all the others identified as Ruffins’s—but this one was in blood. The victim’s blood, in all likelihood.
It had been grouped in with all the others.
“I found the smoking gun,” I said.
Cherabino came over. “Oh,” she said, when she saw it. “Well, crap.” She sighed. “Let me talk to Bransen.”
• • •
An hour and a half later we were in Bransen’s office, and Paulsen was sitting in a guest chair on his side of the table.
“The evidence is damning if you know where to look,” Cherabino said, and with gravity laid out what we had, including Fiske’s assertion that Wright had double-crossed Ruffins, and the sudden appearance of the extra money in Wright’s account about the same time.
“Why were you there talking to our primary suspect in a major transagency case this morning?” Paulsen asked in her quietest, most dangerous voice. She was looking straight at me.
“If I don’t work for you anymore, you don’t get to yell at me anymore,” I heard myself say, and then looked down.
“Point taken,” she said.
Cherabino’s spine straightened. “As I told Sergeant Bransen, I received a credible threat against a member of my family and responded accordingly. We have discussed how the department would be better served through the use of normal channels and backup.”
“As well as sufficient patience and the use of protective duty personnel and case-building rather than stupidity,” Bransen added wryly.
Cherabino added, “Whether or not my information was sufficient to justify my actions is a question for the inquiry hearing. Right now we need to talk about Ruffins. What are we going to do?”
Paulsen thought. “This isn’t a good situation. Are you certain the prints aren’t cross-contaminated?”
“Certain, ma’am,” Cherabino said.
“We’re on dangerous ground accusing any member of another agency,” Bransen said.
“That’s why I came to both of you,” she said. But Paulsen was already on another line of thinking. She asked me, “You were there at the scene. Does Ruffins fit the profile of what you saw and felt?”
I went back over that crime scene in my mind, in detail. “The anger, the need for control, the carefulness at the end—it could be Ruffins. The mind wasn’t inconsistent with what I know about him. But he’s . . . he has a device that lets him tell when I’m around, and more so, when I’m reading him. I can’t get any information from him without a big red mental flag pointed right at me. So I haven’t read him much. I don’t have . . .” How to explain this to a normal? “I don’t have familiarity with his mind. You put him in a lineup with similars, his mind could be any one of them.”
“So the only thing we have definitive is this fingerprint in blood,” Paulsen said.
“All the circumstantials support it,” Cherabino said.
“Ruffins’s testimony and informants are a major portion of the case against Garrett Fiske,” Bransen said quietly. “It’s the result of countless man-hours and expense by this department and other agencies. Furthermore, his testimony and connections are key to prosecuting several of the hijackers we arrested a few weeks ago. The first of their trials starts in three weeks. We need to take a moment here and look at what we’re doing.”
“It’s a murder, sir. With an ax,” Cherabino said. “As near as I can tell, to cover up evidence and keep this man’s life work from being shared the way he felt it should be. Are we really comfortable letting a fed—with all the powers of a fed—wandering around with this kind of crime and violence on the table? Even if we’re only ninety percent certain?”
Paulsen shook her head. “Let’s think this through. We move on this, we don’t move on this, either way there’s injustice to somebody. The question is, which set of injustices serves the people better?”
“It’s murder, sir.”
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder, Isabella.”
“You can’t seriously intend to wait on this one,” I said.
“It would let us move forward on the Fiske trial. Revisit the rest of this later.”
“Think about that, sir. Garrett Fiske has the kinds of lawyers who are more than willing to drag all of us through the dirt on the slightest excuse. Cherabino and I just talked to him. I think it’s likely he knows that Ruffins committed this crime. Cherabino says all of the critical evidence for the task force was obtained through him.”
“The case is dead in the water either way,” Bransen said. He seemed composed outwardly, but internally he was burning angry at having Fiske slip out of his hands.
Paulsen looked at Bransen. Bransen looked at Paulsen.
“Fiske will wait,” Paulsen said, but her mind felt heavy all of a sudden, like she stood up under impossible pressure.
A spike of mixed emotions from Cherabino, quickly controlled.
“He’s waited this long already. He’ll wait a little longer until we get our house in order,” Paulsen said. “I’ll find the budget somehow.”
Bransen stood.
Paulsen followed suit, as did the rest of us. She looked at me, specifically. “Adam, good luck tomorrow. We’re . . . Well, good luck.”
I read her then, mentally, even though most of the time I didn’t feel comfortable doing so. I read her and found determination, and regret. The largest regret was that, even if there had been something she could have done for me now, she wouldn’t. She liked me, and regretted, but I had made other choices.
I turned and left.
The vision . . . in the little downtime I’d had, I kept thinking about that vision, that boy. Was it Jacob? I didn’t know. I couldn’t see him.
It might not matter anyway, not if the Guild took me out tomorrow despite my best efforts.
• • •
I did Cherabino’s paperwork with Michael while I waited for the arrest to go through. An hour into it, her phone rang.
I picked up the phone.
The dispatcher’s voice came through: “Adam Ward?”
“That’s me.”
A clicking sound, and one, droning line of the public service announcement that was the hold music.
Then: “Don’t hang up, Adam.” It was Kara, sounding torn up.
“I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you back?”
“The flyer crashed. The private long-distance flyer—the one carrying the Council members back from the international conference. There’s some evidence against . . . They’re saying Charlie did the sabotage, Adam.”
My old classmate turned Councilman. “That’s impossible. Charlie’s the straightest shooter I’ve ever met.” I looked at the clock. “Does this mean my hearing is rescheduled?” I had a moment of corrected priorities. “I assume everyone got out?” With teleportation the norm, it seemed unlikely that—
“They all died, Adam. Every last one.” She took a shuddery breath. “We haven’t had this many Council members die at the same time in the entire history of the Guild. We’ll have to promote people, find people, do an emergency election, and even then I don’t know—”
I had a sudden, horrible thought. “What political group were they in?” I looked at Michael, who had looked up and was now, carefully, studying paperwork.
“Oh, look, I need coffee,” he said, and left. I let him go.
Kara was still saying nothing.
“What political group were they in?” I asked. “Guild Firsters? Cooperists? Family groups? Independents? Who, Kara?”
“They were all Cooperists but one. And she was no fan of Guild First.”
I took a breath. “So, in one fell swoop, the entirety of the Council is favorable to Thaddeus Rex.”
“Diaz isn’t.”
“What is his health like?” I asked.
She was silent.
“The only other one standing up is who, Charlie?” I looked into the face of the abyss that was Guild politics. “Doesn’t it seem coincidental that he’s accused now?”
Again, a long silence.
Finally Kara spoke. “This isn’t a secure line. I wasn’t—”
“Give my regards to Gustolf,” I said, to make sure I understood what she was going to do.
“Oh, I will,” she said in the low, quiet voice that meant danger. “I will.” Good. Her family would get involved, and her family was a significant force to be reckoned with. With her at the helm, they might make all the difference.
I tried to figure out how to ask if I should run, get out of the country, show up in Dublin or Moscow and trade information for protection from the local Guild. Hope the chaos here kept them from coming after me. “The hearing?” I finally settled for.
Kara paused long enough that I knew she understood what I was asking. “It’s still being held tomorrow morning, early. Gustolf and I will be there.”
I asked the critical question. “Will you support me?”
A long pause. Then she said, “No one is dying on my watch for asking a reasonable question. Martin Cooper wouldn’t have let that happen. Besides, you’ve shown up for me plenty of times.”
A small sense of relief—and comfort. But Kara was playing her own game now, a game I was no longer sure had anything at all to do with her uncle.
I looked at my options—all of which involved me leaving everything I’d built for myself and all my systems of sobriety—and threw the dice in one critical direction.
Someone had to accuse Rex, right?
And I was the only one who really could. If anything, my idea would only strengthen that power. Rex, the man who’d twisted me into knots for stupid reasons, who’d threatened me over and over and over again, would face his peers over the truth.
“I’ll be there,” I said. “But, Kara?”
“What?”
“No matter how this turns out, you owe Isabella Cherabino a favor. A big favor. Anything she asks.”
“Agreed.”
• • •
I went to find the television in the break room and turned it on to the news station. News of corruption in county politics, a murder on the subway train system, illegal Tech smuggling, the usual. I was just about to leave when the screen changed.
“In breaking news,” the news announcer said gravely. Her face, frozen with age treatments, hardly moved. “Our station has recently heard of a major flyer crash near the Chattahoochee River. Nine passengers on board, all dead including the pilot. Three homes destroyed. We bring you live coverage of the scene.”
I turned the sound off as the footage began. A long, long furrow from the edge of the river, trees scattered in every direction, raw red dirt exposed like flesh. At the end of it, the reporter stood a hundred feet away from a twisted mass of wreckage and metal slammed into a wooden house, now splintered boards. Darker splotches fell into the furrow, what might have been seats or people or plastic, impossible to tell at this distance. The silence made the wreckage cold, and unfeeling.
I turned it off. Nobody could have survived that.
The powder keg that was the Guild’s political system was about to erupt, and this was the match.
But I had a job to do here at the police station.
• • •
Ten minutes later, I was sitting at an interview table by special permission from Bransen, ash and gall all I could taste. Outside, Cherabino read Special Agent Ruffins his rights while inside, a babysitter sat there, ready to report back to Bransen.
The door opened. A look of abject hatred came at me from across the room. The emotion in Mindspace was more of the same.
Ruffins shook his head. “I’m not going to be interviewed by a teep.”
Today, as in so many other days in this interview room, I swallowed the insult and—barely—forced a smile. “I’m all you have available today.”
Ruffins turned, but Cherabino stood in his way, very unfriendly. Behind her, some of the special tactics guys waited for an excuse. Nobody liked a dirty cop.
“Sit down,” Cherabino said.
“I want my phone call,” Ruffins said.
“You’ll have it after you talk to Adam. But don’t think about calling your supervisor. He’s been fully briefed. You’ve been read your rights.”
After a long, hate-filled moment, Ruffins sat.
Cherabino went to the corner—Bellury’s corner—and sat in the babysitter’s chair. That was different. That—well, it threw me off. I stared at her.
Don’t screw this up, I heard in my brain over the Link.
I turned back to Ruffins. He was holding his hand over his tattoo, nervous. Below that, the soft subtle smell of . . . fear. I felt fear in Mindspace, real fear, the kind of fear a recovering arachnophobe felt when seeing a tarantula through glass. Strict control, strict thought, but underlying terror, fear much bigger than any average normal felt when faced with a telepath.
And suddenly I knew how to handle this.
“Special Agent Ruffins,” I said.
He just looked at me. Silence was his best bet, and he knew it.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “That meter on your arm—you can feel it when I read you, is that right?”
He looked down at the multicolored band of his tattoo. Likely so, his brain supplied.
“We can test the theory if you—”
“No!” He took a breath, and returned to silent waiting punctuated by angry fear. It wasn’t illegal for me to read his surface thoughts if I told him I was a telepath, and he likely knew it.
I sat back in the chair, a slightly less threatening posture. “We can do this the easy way if you like. You tell me the truth and I won’t do an active read.”
I had his attention.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what that means. I’ll tell you. I’ll still be sitting here and I’ll still monitor Mindspace around you. That means if you have a strong emotion, I’ll get a whiff of it, like cologne. If you lie to me I’ll spot it. But I won’t get thoughts. I won’t get a view of the inside of your head at all. I stay over here, and you stay over there.”
“Why would you do that?” he asked, wary, still rubbing his arm.
“I don’t have a dog in this pony fight. Cherabino, over there, cares. She wins something if you’re guilty, but she wins something if you’re not. She has a preference for which it is. Me, on the other hand, I get the same pay either way. I only care about the truth. You give me the truth, the real truth, with no fudging or corrections or half lies, and I don’t have any need to read you.”
“You’d do that?” Ruffins asked, a feeling of contempt, anger and a note of relief coming off him.
“Ask Cherabino over there if I keep my promises.”
We looked. She, reluctantly, nodded.
In Mindspace: Not about the drug, her mind echoed.
I never made you a single promise about Satin, I left in her mind. And there’s a reason for that.
She shifted uncomfortably in the chair, but I was already onto Ruffins.
“Do we have a deal? The truth in exchange for keeping my mind to myself?”
“If I lie?”
“You know the answer to that,” I said, injecting as much certainty and doom into the statement as possible. His imagination would be far, far worse than anything I could say to him.
He considered it and then nodded, cautiously.
Line on a hook, I had him. The way I had primed him, any half-truth or fudging would now carry a burst of that same fear.
“Let’s begin,” I said, with a smile. I asked him where he was the day of the murder, the usual softening-up question.
“I killed him,” Ruffins said quickly. “It wasn’t intentional, or, well, it wasn’t planned. It just . . .” He trailed off.
“Start from the beginning of the conversation with Wright and tell me what happened,” I said, in my most neutral interviewer voice. Wow, that had been easier than expected.
He nodded and sat a little taller, his voice taking on that official confidence I’d seen in him already so many times. “Noah Wright was a valuable asset into the workings of Fiske’s crime organization. He’d already sold information to the man through an intermediary and was poised to meet some of the organization directly. When he lost his job, I applied subsequent financial pressure to get him to agree to infiltrate the higher-up portions of Fiske’s enterprises on my behalf. I gave him information, a good mix of accurate and false approved by my superiors, and set him loose. He was doing well.” He took a breath.
“And then what?” I prompted.
“He started getting cold feet. Saying that this wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to sell some of his inventions. Or, really, with that insane Free Data mantra of his, he wanted to release them as widely as possible. He started talking about giving away that medical device he was so obsessed with. I thought I talked him down. I thought . . . ” Ruffins was looking at the back wall of the interview room, no longer at me, no longer at anything. Telling the story. “The day before, I’d checked his accounts to make sure he’d been reporting all of Fiske’s payments correctly. And I found the other payments. Payments even my superiors had trouble tracing.”
No fear anymore, not any. His emotions had the even keel of someone telling a true story from recent events.
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, I went over there and confronted him about the payments. He told me it was the Chinese. He’d sold them the Galen device! Like it didn’t even matter! The US military was already under contract. I pushed him, why would he do that? National security trumps freedom. We could all die in a slip. And then—”
“And then what?”
“And then he said he hadn’t sent all the data yet. I lost it. The ax was just sitting there, just sitting there.” Disgust filled the air. “I swung it and I swung it until he couldn’t get up. Until he’d never sell anything again. He’d never destroy anything again. And then I took out the prototype in his head.” He looked up, meeting my eyes. “I took it and all its parts to the shed in my backyard and I burned it. Once with wood and once with a blowtorch and once with lighter fluid. No one’s going to use that DNA now. Not the Chinese, not anybody.”
“You burned it?” I prompted, when he was silent for a minute.
“I protected the American people. You would have done the same.” He paused. “You really haven’t read me, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
He nodded. “Respect. Respect was all I was really looking for.”
And there was the truth. He could have turned the man into the authorities, arrested him, locked him up, allowed his information to be used to benefit everyone. But instead the disrespect of his own informant turning against him had made him turn violent, ax murder violent. It had made him act to control Wright at any cost. This was not a heroic man, for all he protested otherwise. This was not a heroic act.
I tidied up the last few lingering details gently and then ended the interview.
Cherabino and I stood in the hall, totally silent, as the special tactics bruisers escorted him downstairs to the holding cells. He never struggled.
And I wondered. Had we done the right thing? He’d done wrong, very, very wrong, but so had Fiske. It didn’t seem fair that his wrongdoing should buy Fiske freedom—but I didn’t know what else we could have done.
And maybe that—that—was why Fiske was in charge of one of the largest criminal organizations in the Southeast. He was a puppet master, and I couldn’t help feeling like I’d had my strings pulled.
But Ruffins had killed a man.
I’d caught a killer. But this was not a happy day for me, not at all.