Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (3 page)

“The victim died here, in the alley,” I said, and in the back of my mind felt Cherabino making note of it.

Most of the other bodies were killed off-site,
she said, as if from a hundred miles away.
Any idea how it was done?

I walked out carefully and tested the area around the void. Fear permeated the space, and with it the stench of death so terrifying, anyone with any trace of Ability would know something bad happened here. I gulped down bile. This was probably why the victim hadn’t been robbed; no one with any Ability or any sense at all was going to get this close. The techs all had to be deaf as doornails.

I tried to put it into words: “He knew he was going to die, was dying already, no details on how. He was terrified—it’s pretty bad. Very bad. But…” I took a closer look. Something was wrong, the ghost of his mind almost…patchy. Disappearing in places, strong in others. “His ghost is wavering in and out like a bad radio station, even now. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

I combed the area carefully, looking for the traces of the killer. I found him, his mind separate from the victim’s. He was worried, scared, disgusted…but not angry. He also felt familiar, like a song just out of reach. I had no idea where I knew him from.

There was also another man, farther down the alley, this presence so faint it could mean nothing at all. Both men were telepaths, I thought, which was bad news. Anyone who could feel a man’s mind die while he killed him went at least a little insane. To do it outside a war or a threat to your family, to do it without any pressing reason at all…A chill came over me. I didn’t think I’d like these guys. Not at all.

One last look at the void, running my not-there fingers around the cold edge, trying to see if I could get any more information about cause of death, about the killer’s intentions or how he did it. I tried to pick that vaguely familiar trace out of the middle of a haystack of violence, sharp fear and urgent, dull pain, desperation—

Decade-old instincts were all that saved me, and I pulled back desperately. The world stopped. Then I was back in the alley, heart pounding a million miles per hour. Cherabino looked at me quizzically, as if she’d felt the edges of my panic.

“I’m okay,” I told her, trying to be convincing, working on breathing deeply to slow down my heart. What had just happened? The back of my head said…something bad.

I thought through it. That feeling, like I’d just escaped Falling In. Which was impossible. Nobody Fell In three days after a death.

Telepaths died occasionally from that sort of thing; there’d been cases where, if you knew a dying person well, if you were connected to him at the time, you could be pulled in after him. Almost happened to me once, when my then-girlfriend’s mother had died faster than anyone expected. We’d both almost been sucked in to…wherever minds went when you died. We’d barely pulled each other out. But even then, death was gone from the room a few seconds later. I wouldn’t have been able to Fall In if I’d tried.

I needed another look—dumb as hell, but what I needed. I opened myself back up to Mindspace, slowly, slowly, sinking back in all the way, to the depths, too deep to see anything but vibrations.

I approached the edges of the void, slowly, slowly, so carefully it hurt to move. There, overlapping the edge
of the void, was something, like the tiny chip in a wineglass you noticed more with your fingers than with your eyes—an aberration. Small, not exciting. But it could crack our case.

If the killer or killers had really used Ability, there should have been, well, a smear, where they’d walked away, taking the edges of the death with them for a few steps before it dissipated. But the smear wasn’t there.

Instead, the Mindspace puckered. Just a little pucker. And it was
good
to have a certified Guild education, because I knew what that meant.

Now I only had to explain it to Cherabino.

Sergeant Branen
was the head of Homicide and Cherabino’s boss, a short forty-something man with overstyled hair and an air of confidence that made you want to trust him immediately. This made me dislike him on principle. He didn’t understand what I did and didn’t feel he needed to—but he did believe in results, and the conflict made for interesting meetings.

Branen was also one of only three people in the department who could get me fired at any time. It was my goal in life—at least in front of him—to be twice as useful as annoying.

“So,” he said after the second time I’d gone through what I’d found in the scene. “There was a…pucker in…Mindspace. What exactly does that mean?” He smiled his habitual smile, his eyes tired. His tiny beige office was almost too neat, his battered desk and guest chairs scrupulously clean.

“It’s very rare,” I said, carefully neutral. “Like I said, it’s a small aberration in the fabric of Mindspace, a hiccup in the ghost, if you want to put it that way.”

Branen looked pained. It wasn’t a good look on him. “You want to fight the Guild for jurisdiction and data…because you found a hiccup?”

“Not exactly.” Although let’s be honest; I’d fight the Guild for a lot less. In this case, though, I just wanted
some information from them. Nothing for Branen to get so worked up over. Just information.

Cherabino noticed my attention flagging. “Does it work with the fish-tank analogy?”

“Um, maybe?” The downside to Cherabino’s sharp mind was that she got insufferably grumpy until she understood what was going on. Back in the beginning, she’d pumped me for weeks about the telepathy before I’d given her a good-enough analogy to get her off my case. She just didn’t understand Mindspace—no matter how eloquently I tried to explain it—so I’d had to get creative. Don’t ask me why the fish tank made her happy; it just did, so I used it a lot.

“I’m waiting,” Branen said.

“Okay,” I began. “Imagine the world is a fish tank. One of those huge, multigallon monstrous fish tanks they have in ritzy offices. Better yet, picture the alley as a fish tank. You have sand on the bottom, and a definite ceiling, maybe even a sand castle or two, some coral. It’s a nice place. There’s all sorts of fish in it—you and Cherabino and half the world are shiny orange goldfish, Guild telepaths are those monster Japanese goldfish—what do you call them?—and you have a couple rogue bottom-feeders. So you’re going along, doing your goldfish thing, until one of the goldfish discovers an Ability.”

Branen sighed. “How is this helping me?”

“I’m getting to it. Now, what happens if one of the goldfish goes quantum and pops over to the other side of the tank?” I stopped, then explained, “He teleports.” Cherabino seemed to be following okay; she wasn’t asking her usual slew of questions. “Two things happen. The water’s going to shoot out in a little explosion where he pops in, because now you have, say, an inch cubed of goldfish mass where there didn’t used to be
any, and the water has to move out of the way very suddenly. It’s kinda messy, though, and it’s hard to identify that’s what it was if you weren’t there at the time. But the other thing that’s going to happen is on the other side, where he started out. Suddenly, the water has the same-sized hole where the goldfish used to be, right? So it rushes in. But the water thing’s only an analogy—the way it works in Mindspace, the water moves weird, slow like honey, and what you’re left with is a little area where the water is less dense, and comes to a weird little pucker to show you where the fish used to be. At least for a few minutes.”

“A few minutes?” Branen echoed, struggling with the concept. “So, what you’re saying is, our suspect teleported out of the area slightly before the police arrived. He was visiting the body?”

“Not exactly,” I said, a little defensively. “It was a hot spot, and he was pulling along more than his own metaphysical weight, so it was like two of the monster Japanese pond-rats popped out together. The hole takes longer to fill in.”

Branen sighed. “So we’re talking teleporter. Which means Guild.” He rubbed his head. “And the victims? They’re not Guild, correct?”

“Correct, sir. They’re not in the Registry.” Cherabino sat back in her chair comfortably, but then again she and Branen got along great. Me, on the other hand…

Well, I had to say it. “They could be low-level, normal jobs, normal lives.”

They both turned to me. “What?” Cherabino said.

“You know the Guild’s Registry is only a partial list of members, right?” Their shocked looks told me obviously not. “It’s an industry list. If you want to hang a shingle and make money off your Ability—and you’re legit—you go through the Guild process, you get
trained and certified, pay the money, and you get registered. They get dues every year; you get the resources of a large organization and sometimes a job.” For the low-level guys, it wasn’t a bad deal. You kept your nose clean, you showed up at the mixers, you went home every night, and you raked in the money.

“So it’s like the Bar Association?” Cherabino leaned forward.

I shrugged, stretched out in the chair. “I don’t know much about them.”

“Organization for lawyers? Total control over your professional future, takes money from you and you have to be a member?”

I blinked. “Actually, that’s not too far off. But the Guild’s only like that if you’re powerful enough. On the low end of the scale, it’s optional. If you don’t want to work for them, if you want to be an accountant, or a lawyer, or a bricklayer, you can. Keep your nose clean, you’ll never hear from them. But there’s a point—usually a heavy five in telepathy—where it’s not a choice anymore. At that point you work for the Guild directly, you do what they say, and you’re registered in the lists the Guild provides the public.” Well, most of them. The Guild held back a lot of information from the cops. A lot. Which was why I got paid my consultant fee, to tell them at least what they didn’t know.

“What happens if someone wants to quit?” Cherabino asked, curious.

I suppose it was an obvious question, but the truth was…“That’s not really something we talk about.”

Both cops stared at me. I looked at my shoes, set on worn industrial carpet at least a decade old. When I looked up again, I stared past Cherabino at the speckled walls. Even in my situation—unusual, to say the
least—I had certain obligations, and I did
not
want Guild Enforcement coming after me, not for something stupid like this.

“The point is,” I changed the subject, “somebody at the scene—I’d wager the killer—teleported out of there. Considering there weren’t any drag marks on the ground on the way in, I’d wager he teleported in as well, carrying the victim with him. Means he’s at least a 3-T, plus a telepath as well—maybe a six or so. We’re talking double trouble here.”

I rubbed my neck. “There are maybe twelve guys in the whole Solar System who can do both those things that strong, and they’ll be on the Spook list. The Guild will know what they’re doing at every moment of every day, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because after one body, the Guild would have taken lethal action.”

Branen rubbed his head and picked up the phone on his desk, pushing a speed-dial button. After the call went through, he asked, “Have a minute? I need your expertise.”

In the silence after he hung up, I ventured, “Basically the—”

He raised a finger for me to wait.

I thought about attempting small talk, but I was bad at that sort of thing.

A knock came on the partially open door.

“Come,” Branen called out.

Lieutenant Marla Paulsen entered the room and gave me a nod. Great, he’d invited my boss.

She glanced at the chairs, and finding them occupied, leaned against the door frame.

Branen inclined his head in my direction, eyes on her. “You know he’s assisting with the multiples case,
right?” She nodded. “Well, we’ve got contradicting theories, and they all point to the Guild. You still keep up with the Koshna Treaty law changes?”

“Not too many changes lately, but yes.”

Paulsen was a strong woman with a strong face, skin the color of cinnamon sticks, and more than a few old-fashioned wrinkles. At a young sixty-mumble, she was a stickler for Tech Separation (she remembered the aftermath of the Tech Wars) and she wore her uniform like she’d been born to it. Paulsen had high standards, and as she’d told me more than once, she expected those standards to be met.

Branen caught her up on the discussion and my Guild ramble in about three sentences, then said, “So with a perp who shouldn’t exist and victims who aren’t registered, can we ignore Koshna?”

Paulsen frowned. “Well, technically the treaty says we’re supposed to call the Guild at first suspicion of anything, but the courts have been siding with the cops lately. Koshna Accords are there mostly to let the Guild police their own. Clearly they’re not policing themselves in this case.” She looked at me. “You sure this guy is a—what do you call it?”

“Double trouble,” Cherabino offered.

“Thank you. Double trouble. You sure he’s Guild?”

I straightened in my chair reflexively under her look. “I know a teleport when I see one. I know a telepath. But there were two guys there. I think it’s one guy who’s the telepath and teleporter, I’m almost sure. We’re not guaranteed, though. They could be different guys.”

Branen leaned back in his chair. “Worst-case scenario,” he addressed Paulsen. “We don’t report it. We track it down to its conclusion, capture the perp, submit
the findings in triplicate to the political guys to fight out with the Guild directly. What are we looking at?”

She shook her head. “Won’t get that far. Besides the legal red tape, we can’t hold him without Guild support.”

I nodded reluctantly and confirmed. “He’ll Jump out of the cell. Or convince the guard’s mind he wanted to let him out in the first place. The strong guys are hell to hold if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Branen sighed. “Let’s say we put boy wonder here on guard. What’s worst case?”

Hold on now. “I’m not nearly—”

Cherabino waved me down, and I seethed.

Paulsen frowned slightly. “It’s a high-profile case, or could be made one with a hint to the right reporter. They’d have to fight it in the courts.”