Cumulus (11 page)

“What happened to Erica? I was supposed to see her now.”

“I’m sure Ms. Edelman will find a convenient time to reschedule her appointment.”

“I told you not to come here again,” he said, fists clenched. “Ever. I was explicit.”

“My good doctor,” said Graham. “I’m afraid you may misunderstand the nature of our relationship. Which, to be frank, I find quite ironic given the nature of your expertise.”

“Stop fucking with me,” said Corvel, his voice high and thin. “Get out of here. I don’t ever want to see your face in my office.”

Graham could almost appreciate his attempt at toughness. Almost.

“When you are working with a patient who is skirting the edge of sanity,” said Graham, “do you find that there is a point, a very special point, when they just
snap
?”

Graham snapped his fingers to illustrate the point, and Corvel nearly jumped out of his skin. Graham rose to his feet and put his hand on the man’s shoulder, which trembled at his touch.

“I am here for a very simple reason,” said Graham, smiling like a proud uncle. “To congratulate you on your good work,” he held up a finger, “and to remind you who your true friends are.”

Corvel’s face looked like he had just swallowed sour milk.

Graham patted his cheek and turned toward the door.

20

IN RETROSPECT,
she probably shouldn’t have followed him.

Lilly walked through the BART ticket gate, trying to keep at least a few other people between her and the man. He had unruly brown hair and wore a loose flannel sweatshirt over torn jeans. A nondescript backpack hung from his shoulder.

She had snapped his picture through Sara’s living room window, her friend’s corpse splayed out on the couch behind her. What were you supposed to do when you discovered your friend had been murdered? She could have called the police, but they would have taken ages to respond. She could have called that beefy sergeant from Security, but he was just as likely to arrest her as listen to her.

But this man had been strolling out the side gate of Sara’s backyard like it was the most normal thing in the world. Lilly had never seen him before, and Sara lived alone. He had to be the killer. Remembering the camera dangling around her neck, she snatched it up to get a shot of him through the window. But by the time she had it ready, the angle was bad and she couldn’t see his face. She took the shot and then dashed out through the back, noting that the back door was closed but unlocked. She made it through the side gate just in time to see him round a corner at the end of the block.

Strolling through the neighborhood streets to the station, he looked like just another Slummer. She stayed at least a block behind, crouching behind an overflowing dumpster while he purchased a morning coffee from a street vendor. He moved on, and it was clear he was headed for BART. She had to tighten the gap to make sure she didn’t lose him in the crowd of people entering and exiting the station.

She stepped onto the escalator once he was a third of the way up. Keeping her camera down in front of her chest, she angled the lens up and took a picture as he stepped off the escalator and onto the platform. His face had flashed past for a moment, but she doubted she had gotten a good shot off.

Every BART car had two sets of doors—one near the front, and one near the rear. He stood waiting for the Richmond train. When it arrived, she entered into the same car through the other door.

Lilly’s entire body was trembling. Who was this man? Why had he killed Sara? Was she insane to have followed him this far? But if she didn’t, wouldn’t he just get away? The cops probably wouldn’t have shown up until that afternoon. By that time, he would have been long gone. She gripped her camera tight—at least she’d have some evidence to show for it once she got in touch with the police. Pretending to fuss with it, she fired off shots in his direction whenever the train screeched loud enough to cover the sound of the shutter.

He disembarked in North Berkeley, and she followed him past a couple of Security guards. Her guest pass was still valid so they didn’t harass her, but there was no way she would trust them to take her side if she reported the murder. For a moment, she was afraid they’d sense her fear and approach her, but they didn’t give her a second look.

Out on the street in the North Berkeley Green Zone, Lilly rounded a corner just in time to see the man duck into a café. She crossed the street and sat on a park bench, pretending to watch the foot traffic. Every time the café door opened, her eyes would dart over to see who was leaving.

She couldn’t stop her hands from shaking no matter how hard she tried. Sara’s empty eye socket stared back at her whenever she blinked. It was too much to take in. They had gossiped over a late-night glass of wine the night before last, when Sara had offered to let Lilly use the Land Rover for the Tobin wedding. Now her bodily fluids covered half the living room. The two mental images just couldn’t exist in the same universe.

She almost missed him. The man looked completely different. The grungy sweatshirt and jeans were gone, replaced by a crisp buttoned shirt and slacks. It was the hair that tipped her off. The brown rumpled locks still stuck out at odd angles. She did a double take and then paralleled his path by walking up the opposite side of the street.

Within a few blocks, they entered a residential neighborhood. The maples lining the sidewalk had leaves the color of blood. At least they gave Lilly the convenient excuse of photographing the trees. The man glanced back to check out a passing jogger, and Lilly got a decent shot of his face.

At this point, momentum was the only thing keeping her going. Panic had sparked her into action instead of freezing her up. Now she couldn’t stop for fear of falling into its paralyzing embrace.

On the opposite sidewalk, the man spun on his heels and headed back up the sidewalk, veering off to enter a small, shingled office building.

Lilly forced herself to continue up the block before doubling back. An aggressive bougainvillea bush bursting out of a neighbor’s yard gave her partial cover as she zoomed in on the building through her lens. A small sign near the door read, “Flint Corvel, PhD Psychologist, Private Practice.” A blonde woman who looked to be in her fifties came out the door and hopped into a waiting Fleet, which accelerated off down the road.

A honeybee buzzed by Lilly’s ear and she waved it away. Standing here under the bougainvillea, smelling the fresh-cut grass of an irrigated Greenie lawn, her thoughts began to settle into a semblance of rationality. She wasn’t a hard-boiled detective or private eye out of some noir graphic novel. She was a photographer. A
wedding
photographer. Sara had just been brutally murdered. Lilly shouldn’t be shadowing a suspect. She should let someone know. Someone who would know what to do in situations like this. Start with the police, go from there.

The office building door opened again, and the man emerged. She had a perfect angle on his face. Raising the camera, she snapped a shot. She clicked the shutter button again, but it didn’t open. Shit. It was out of film. There was no time to replace it with a new roll. She snatched her phone from her pocket and used her fingers to adjust the digital camera to maximum zoom. Then she tapped the screen repeatedly to take a series of shots as the man walked up the path from the building to the sidewalk.

“Error: photos could not be saved.” The message popped up in the middle of her screen. She dismissed the notification and took another rapid-fire series of shots.

“Error: photos could not be saved.” What the hell? Her battery was fine, and the phone displayed a strong Bandwidth connection. Again, she tried to snap a few more.

“Error: photos could not be saved.”

Fuck. He was crossing the street and approaching her corner. She heard the soft growl of an engine, and a Fleet pulled up to the curb next to her. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She lowered her phone and pretended to text, pulling down a bougainvillea flower to her nose as a weak last-minute cover for her presence.

“Hi.”

She looked up, and the man was standing right there in front of her. He smiled. Brown eyes stared down from a face that could have be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty years old. She thought she might have a heart attack.

She nodded back, not trusting herself to speak.

“I apologize if this is a little forward,” he said. “But I think you’ve got a killer sense of style.”

So this was what it felt like to be hit on by a hit man.

21

ANYTHING THAT CAN GO WRONG WILL GO WRONG.

Murphy’s Law was a bitch, especially because it was impossible to know whether or not you were anticipating all the things that could go wrong. As a matter of fact, you were pretty much guaranteed to be missing something.

Like yesterday, for example. Huian’s head of corporate development had fumbled a critical deal and proved himself to be a blithering idiot, forcing her to fire him. Said deal had stubbornly remained off the table thanks to Martín’s headstrong bid for independence. And a nuisance suit had skyrocketed from minor irritant to major liability threat. One could argue that all of that was par for the course, given that she was CEO of Cumulus. Thankfully, she had Graham to rely on. More and more, it felt like he was the only one she could depend on to actually get the job done. Her other lieutenants just hadn’t been producing results. Trust was the rarest of commodities.

But Vera asking for a divorce? That had blindsided her, even if Vera said it shouldn’t have. Sure, they had been seeing Dr. Corvel for a while now. But he wrapped everything in so many psychobabble buzzwords that Huian had stopped taking him seriously ages ago. Him and his damn bald spot. Whenever they were in his office, she couldn’t keep her eyes off it.

It told you a lot about your day when discovering someone trespassing on your property was the high point. Lilly. Lilly Miyamoto. There was something about her frank gaze, her unnerving sense of presence and practicality. Huian couldn’t help but find her fascinating. Her leather jacket, tank top, gray canvas pants, and boots were all very worn, but of high-quality manufacture. Thick black-framed glasses slightly enlarged her eyes. She looked like some kind of cyberpunk nomad with an aversion to technology. Or maybe she had found her entire wardrobe at the estate sale of a
1940
s-era archaeologist.

Regardless, Lilly was… different. Different from the industrious engineers, scheming attorneys, and ambitious businesspeople who made up Huian’s social circle. To be honest, her social circle had an embarrassingly large overlap with her professional circle, which meant Cumulus.

That was one of the things that had frustrated Vera. She had always complained that Huian conflated her personal and professional lives. But that was because, even after years of living together, Vera still failed to understand how important Huian’s mission was. The level of commitment required didn’t leave room for fluffy concepts like work/life balance. Huian’s calling wasn’t a hobbyist fascination with macramé. Technology was the only scalable tool available to help shape a better future. The question was whether people chose to participate in that future or not. Huian was a harbinger of that new reality. She would stop at nothing to push forward the inexorable, beautiful, conflicted locomotive of human civilization. Dystopias were the province of the undisciplined.

Unfortunately, success created its own problems. It made Cumulus a prime target for competitors, regulators, foreign governments, hackers, press, and activist investors. They’d grown too big not to become ensnarled in internal politics as well. Huian had to constantly question whether her executive team was working to advance the company or just their own careers. Sometimes it was difficult to tell whether so-called friends were interested in her or just her money. That’s why she had agreed to create the Ghost Program with Graham, to separate allies from enemies and protect Cumulus’s legacy. It was fucking hard. But fucking-hard problems were the only ones worth solving. History would be the judge.

Huian realized she was clenching her fists. Vera wanted more spontaneity? Inviting a trespassing photographer in for a drink was definitely a start. Not even Dr. Corvel could argue with that. Now all Huian had to do was figure out how to navigate Cumulus through turbulent seas and try to salvage her marriage at the same time.

“Ma’am?”

Huian shook her head, roping herself back from reverie.

“I’ve got Karl Dieter on the line.”

Karl was the Cumulus
VP
who ran the Security division. He had been CEO of Security when Cumulus acquired it, and Huian had kept him on as the operating executive. Karl was gruff, efficient, and aggressive, which was probably why they got along well. His passion for vintage arcade games was beyond anything Huian had ever seen. Whenever they talked, she couldn’t help but remember his basement lair that was packed to the brim with ancient pinball machines. Karl was consistent, but he didn’t go beyond the call of duty like Graham did. He didn’t think outside the box.

“Put him through,” she said and heard the line switch over.