At the station, Cherabino led the way back through the sea of open desks downstairs, nodding to junior cops as she went. Damn it. We were going to walk, weren’t we? Ninety-two degrees in the shade at eleven o’clock in the morning, and we were going to walk.
“How far to the morgue?” I asked her, hustling to keep up.
“Just three blocks down West Ponce,” she said cheerily, and didn’t even pause as she headed out the back door and into the punishing heat. I followed, cursing under my breath while I still could, sweat already breaking out on my neck.
I had my department ID on with the jeans and the button-up shirt. Cherabino’s white shirt, black slacks was the same standard cop-wear as anyone else’s in the department. Same as she’d been wearing for days.
We crossed over the office building’s courtyard and through a walkway to the street. West Ponce was a windy road in spots, but here it was three-story buildings on either side, mostly government buildings. We’d probably end up in one of those if I didn’t pass out from the heat first.
Our shoes padded silently, and the portable radio on Cherabino’s hip sputtered occasionally. I was breathing heavy from the cigarettes and the pollution. Not so bad as it used to be, though; she’d been dragging me walking enough that my wind was starting to come back. Even if I did feel like I was melting. Above us, cars and the occasional city bus whisked by in the sky lanes. I carefully did not look at Cherabino walking briskly down the street.
“So,” I started. “How does this morgue thing work?”
She slowed down, a graceful change. “You know, dead bodies in drawers, quantum stasis, autopsies, lots of chemicals. Weird smells. Don’t you watch television?”
“Don’t own one,” I told her. “Waste of time.” The truth was, I’d sold it my second time off the wagon for drug money and had never been able to replace it. The only way the department would take me back afterward—even with Cherabino putting her job on the line—was if I didn’t handle my own paycheck, and if I didn’t keep anything worth anything in trade. But if my rent was paid on time, groceries appeared every week, and Bellury took me out for clothes occasionally, I figured that was good enough. I had four pairs of shoes, none of them with any holes. It wasn’t too long ago I couldn’t say that.
Cherabino climbed the worn, chipping steps of a particularly boxy building and led the way inside. Blessed air conditioning, I thought, as I followed her down an old hallway and into a large, smelly freight elevator. She hit the worn button for the basement. After making sure she wasn’t looking, I fanned my shirt surreptitiously, trying to get as much air conditioning in the thing as possible.
“Why is the morgue in the tax office?” I asked Cherabino, having noted the signs on the way in.
She shrugged. “Decatur Hospital’s basement kept flooding, and the city had the extra room.”
The freight elevator moved very, very slowly, with creaking sounds I’d rather not have heard.
She took pity on me and started explaining. “They’re understaffed, just like everybody else these days, so be nice because we jumped the line to get here. They’ll have cleaned up the guy since the crime scene and done an autopsy—so he’ll be without clothes with a Y cut, cooled down some, and they’ll have taken care of the bugs. If you can’t handle what you’re looking at, stare at the floor on the other side of the gurney and try to breathe through your mouth, shallowly. You’re here because the bodies are the only real clues we have right now, and I want you to hear what the coroner has to say about cause of death.”
I thought about protesting that of course I could handle it—handle what exactly?—but the freight elevator chose that moment to come to a screeching stop.
The stainless steel doors opened up to a concrete-floored hallway with doorways on either side. Cherabino led the way to the first one on the left and I followed, nervous. What could be so much worse than the crime scene that she felt she had to warn me?
The first thing I noticed was the smell: decay and formaldehyde and metal. It was cold in here, even for me, and the faint Mindspace buzzing on the far wall was distracting.
The large room was painfully bright with fluorescent bulbs, the old-style artificial light combining with cold steel tables to assault the eyes. After I forced myself to focus, I wished I hadn’t. The three bodies out in the open lacked even the dignity of a towel, their splotched forms too still, too…absent. They lacked any form in Mindspace, even the decaying ghost of a last emotion, now well gone. The rows of steel drawers lining the back wall only made it seem more inhuman. I was betting the buzzing came from there, probably an activated quantum stasis generator disrupting the flow of Mindspace, but it didn’t help that the drawers looked like what they were—steel boxes to store corpses.
“Cherabino,” a woman’s voice greeted her from the far side of the room. “Thanks for coming.” Her accent had a hint of a lilt to it, maybe Jamaican.
Cherabino made her way past the bodies on the tables as if they meant nothing. I breathed shallowly, through my mouth, and followed her.
“Where’s Petie?” she asked the woman.
“Out sick. It’s just me as usual.” The coroner was dark skinned with her hair done in many tiny long braids, and had a beautiful smile which somehow seemed inappropriate while standing over a fourth body, this one from the crime scene, or so I thought. I didn’t look closely.
She gave me a bright smile. “I see you brought a friend.”
I thought about objecting to the title, but I didn’t have a better one. “You have information on the case?”
The coroner led the way to the far side of the table and picked up a clipboard. “Black male, thirty-five, identified via AO serial number as Tom Turner, a businessman from the west side.” I carefully didn’t look at the body, sliced up and empty.
“Reported missing?” Cherabino asked. The coroner must have called down to the county records office, or have a copy of the database or something, but wasn’t it Cherabino’s job to do that? Seemed odd, but what did I know?
“Yes, the wife reported it Tuesday morning after he didn’t come home Monday night.”
“I’ll see if the uniforms have talked to her yet,” Cherabino said, making herself a note.
The coroner waited for her to finish, then continued. “I’m putting time of death as Monday between eleven a.m. and three p.m. He didn’t have anything in his stomach and the heat accelerated decay, so that time is approximate. Hopefully when the entomology tests come back we’ll have a precise window.” She pointed out a few of the more disturbing features of decay, including the insect damage on the man’s face. At that, I had to look away or throw up. I took Cherabino’s advice and stared at the floor on the other side of the steel table, shielding against empty Mindspace.
The coroner’s cheerful voice kept talking, my mind freaking out as I accidentally took a far-too-deep breath through my nose and smelled a scent I hoped to never smell again—a more concentrated, alcoholed version of the decay I’d experienced at the crime scene. In triplicate. I took a step back and fought down bile.
Cherabino put her hand on my shoulder—I was shielding too hard to read her—but I remembered suddenly I was here to hear what the coroner had to say. I started to pay attention again.
“This one like the others?” Cherabino asked.
“Yes. A few defensive wounds.” The coroner pointed to scrapes on the man’s knuckles, bruises on his forearms. “The scrapes are clotted well enough I’m putting them several hours before death. He didn’t fight right before, unless the bruises on his back are from more than falling down on concrete. Same damage to the brain, but something new…” She pulled the man’s head to the side slightly, displaying a discolored stripe with more insect damage I had to look away from. “Bleeding from the ears.”
“What’s the cut on the neck?” Cherabino leaned forward, clearly a lot more comfortable in this situation than I was. I didn’t look.
“That? Oh, that’s the incision for me to take out the artificial organ—a thyroid gland, in this case. I made it right over the old scar.”
“Didn’t we identify the last few bodies from AOs?” Cherabino asked.
“They’re more common than transplants now and most of them are traceable, especially the glands to administer drugs. It’s usually the easiest way to identify someone,” the coroner said. “Sometimes a person will request his name be kept out of the database. But usually it’s straightforward, and they send me a new version every year, so it’s not too far out of date. I’d say half of the bodies I get these days are identified through that database.”
“That many?” Cherabino asked. “What happened to dental records?”
The coroner laughed. “With the insurance companies pushing the new glands over med regimens? We’ll all have AOs before the decade is up. Dental records are going the way of the dinosaurs.”
Artificial organs were old news to me, since they had to be tuned to the body’s neural net by a telepath to ensure compatibility. So I changed the subject, back to what had bothered me earlier.
“Do you have a picture of the brain damage?” I asked, interrupting their conversation and not caring. The coroner was grinning merrily, which disturbed me to no end.
“Let me show you the tissue—”
“No, a picture. An HD MRI or something?” I asked a little desperately.
She shrugged and pulled a few films from the bottom of the clipboard. “Couple of cross sections on the scanner, nothing fancy.” Turning on the light on a board on the wall, she clipped the film up. “What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know, exactly.” As I walked closer, I put my hand up to touch the bottom of the third film, the tacky texture of the biofiber sticking to my fingers. I didn’t know what I was doing; I was a software guy, not wetware—not the brain tissue itself. But I’d had to study structure in depth as part of my deconstruction training, not just the mind, but the brain. So I did know what I was looking at.
The first slide showed some damage to the hindbrain centered around the pons, likely what had killed him in the end. Intermittent damage across the temporal lobe. But on the third slide a burned-out section as big as my thumb in the lower parietal lobe. I put my thumb over it, thinking.
“It’s very odd. That section shouldn’t do anything. There’s no reason for it to be burned out in every victim,” the coroner put in.
I peeled my thumb off the film and backed up, then asked a question about the kind of cross section it was, just to be sure. Then I sighed. “No, it’s not. That’s a major center for processing Mindspace signals, if the rest of the brain is set up to receive them.” I didn’t have the right cross section to see if this guy had Ability—though a few extra folds in certain spots weren’t guaranteed in even the stronger telepaths. Brain waves were a better indication. But the fact he had damage in that spot really, really wasn’t a good sign.
“What does that mean?” the coroner asked.
I sighed, not knowing how much I could safely explain. “It means we have a problem.”
As we walked back, Cherabino pestered me until I told her, “Look, I’m not a wetware guy. I could be wrong. But if I have it right, and the damage is—well, somebody’s overloading their brains. Through Mindspace.” If that didn’t point to the Guild, I didn’t know what did.
West College Avenue was, if anything, even hotter, with almost no one around. You could fry an egg on the pavement, and I had no idea why we were walking. Even the wilted brown grass was trying to get out of the sun. I was already sweating, already miserable.
Part of me wanted to do a little jig here in the middle of the street, celebrate the Guild screwing up. Get the newspaper to print a huge front-page story: guild screws up, me proved right. Start the media sensation of the century over exactly how and why, rub their noses in it. But the rest of me—well, that athletic guy hadn’t asked to be dead. Shouldn’t be dead, bug damage or no.
Cherabino pursed her lips. “So?”
I avoided looking her in the eye, but kept my voice even. “I’m only going to say this once, so listen up. I’m in over my head. I need a lot more information and some more resources. Maybe another telepath, a Battle Ops guy. We need to call the Guild.”
She stopped walking and stared. “Call the Guild? Seriously? It’s our freaking case! And you…”
“I’ll admit they’re not my favorite people,” I said. “I’m not talking about Enforcement. I don’t want to deal with them right now. I’m talking about help. About information. About getting this guy off the street faster—a couple phone calls and some begging.”
“I don’t beg,” Cherabino said.
I gritted my teeth. “Asking nicely, then. I’ll do that much. With this getting so much press, even they have to know they can’t drop off the radar at this point. A little help, a few diplomatic channels, that’s all I’m asking, Cherabino.”
She strode on down the street, her legs stretching at a painfully fast walk. Her annoyance drifted off her in waves. “You were there when the brass decided not to consult the Guild. You can’t just go off on your own, you know. The decision’s been made. If you have new information, great, but right now the only thing we even have that points to the Guild is your say-so—”
She was cut off by the distinctive whine of a whipcord-thin humblade beginning to vibrate behind us. We turned. Cherabino fell into a defensive crouch and went for her gun.
A light-skinned man so thin his cheeks were gaunt held the highly illegal humblade, brandishing the thin hilt and vibrating cord that would slice through concrete like butter. The bruises along his arms underscored the desperation in his face. A junkie.
“Give me your money,” he said, in a voice frighteningly committed.
Cherabino shifted her grip on the gun. “You have got to be kidding. We’re within sight of the police station. You’re holding up a cop right next to the police station. How stupid can you get?”
Please don’t antagonize the junkie with the humblade, I thought as the man tensed to move. His mind was on the sharp edge, coming down off a high. I needed to disable him….
He sprang at me. I snatched at his wrist—not the blade, his wrist—and missed. I dodged to the side—the edge of the blade hummed far, far, too close to my face. The junkie caught his balance again.
Cherabino kicked him, a sweeping roundhouse kick—connected with the wrist I’d missed, her gun somehow now in its holster. I danced back, back, away from the flying humblade, which whooshed past.
The blade embedded itself in the concrete sidewalk two feet behind me. As it vibrated, the hole it made widened with small cracks. A flash of decision from the junkie, and I was moving away again. He swung at me wildly—he had to have the money, he had to have the drug. At any cost he had to have it. I understood, but not now—he couldn’t steal from us.
He hit Cherabino and she fell, sweeping his legs out on the way down. I jumped in, trying to pull him off her. He had the strength of the insane, laying blows left and right and hitting my face. I saw stars.
I opened up, my mental training coming into play as I held him desperately with my hands, wrestled him down. His mind was erratic, spotty, hard to hold; whatever he was on changed the shape of it. I paused, trying to find a hold—
Cherabino got the grip she needed and flipped him facedown on the concrete, his arm wrenched behind him. She muttered under her breath about stupid unarmed perps, “Give me an excuse to shoot you, just give me one.”
The perp pushed up against her, tried to get away, only hurting himself worse in the process. His high was starting to wear off, his strength gone.
I disengaged. Sat back, panting. She had him. I didn’t need to disable him—I didn’t have to find a grip on that slippery mind.
Cherabino pulled out her cuffs and forced his other arm behind him. The alloy strongcuffs snipped as they engaged.
The strength slipped out of the junkie, and he collapsed. I got a grip on his mind, but it wasn’t a ploy. He was beginning the slide into withdrawal. I held him down, my right knee in his back. I hated everything he stood for, everything I used to be and hoped I wasn’t still. I understood his desperation all too well. Impotent anger pushed at me, but I held on. I could do this. I would do this.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Cherabino began, continuing to recite his Mirandas. Then straight into the Paglinos, one phrase flowing naturally into the next.
Abruptly, my precognition kicked in. I got a flash, Cherabino putting a hand out to catch her balance, a hand that landed on the still-active humblade. Blood everywhere, pain, pain. Then, a jarring shift, and I was back in the now.
Cherabino shifted in her crouch to keep the man down, but she was losing her balance….
I grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked her in my direction.
We both fell, on top of the suspect, who oofed and started whining.
“What in the hell was that for?” Cherabino punched me and pushed up. A long, bloody scrape marred one of her cheeks.
I yanked her to the side suddenly, away from where she was stepping. “Humblade.”
Understanding hit her like a freight train as she looked over to where she would have put her hand, where she could have stepped. She bent over to turn the blade off. Added the safety.
She met my eyes as she straightened, tucking the now-harmless handle and floppy cord into a pocket.
“Let’s go,” she said. Fear and anger roiled off her. I hurried to keep up, my own heart beating far too fast.
That had been far too close.