Fast Lane (32 page)

Shannon took a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, shook one loose, and looked at it for a long moment before pushing it back into place. He noticed DiGrazia staring at him from the corners of his thin, narrowed eyes.

“
Could your wife be seeing someone else?” Shannon asked.

“
No.”

“
Is there the possibility—”

“
No. Janice is not seeing anyone. There’s not even the possibility of it.”

“
What about someone she works with?”

“
I told you she’s not seeing anyone—”

“
But you have suspicions, though.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
You had her business card ready for me. You obviously have suspicions about somebody there.”

Rowley thought it over. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You asked me where she worked. Anyway, I thought it could help to give it to you. Maybe somebody saw someone suspicious in the parking lot. Maybe somebody heard something. I don’t know. But that’s why I gave you her card. Janice is not seeing anyone.”

“
How can you be so sure?”

“
Because I know my wife,” Kyle Rowley said. “I know how we feel about each other.”

Something about Rowley being so cocksure of his wife bothered Shannon. Shit, half the cops he knew sooner or later found their wives in affairs. Stubbornly he kept at it. “If your wife is seeing someone I need to know about it—”

“
She’s not seeing anyone. This is not anything like that.”

“
What is this then?”

Pain pushed through the dullness in Kyle Rowley’s eyes. His entire face momentarily was flushed with it. “Janice was abducted,” he said. “Somebody took her. You realize that, don’t you?”

“
Okay,” Shannon said, “let me be straight with you. What I realize is your wife is missing, either because she wants to be, because somebody did something to her, or because you did something to her. If we can rule you out then we can focus on the other two possibilities. Which means if your wife really was abducted, the quicker we can cross you off, the better the chance we’d have of finding her. Will you give us permission to search your apartment?”

“
It’s not going to help at all—”

“
I could get a warrant, but it would take time. I don’t think we want to waste time right now.”

Anger turned Rowley’s skin a soft purple. “This is ridiculous,” he started to argue, his jaw muscles hardening, “there’s nothing in my apartment that’s going to help you find my wife—”

“
If you’re involved, you’re doing the right thing by stonewalling us,” Shannon said.

“
I’m not trying to stonewall you,” Rowley said. “Goddamn it.” He shook his head. The color drained out of his face, leaving it the same unhealthy yellow it was before. “Do whatever you want as long as it gets you looking for Janice.”

“
Are you willing to take a polygraph test?”

“
I’ll take whatever you want me to take. Just find my wife.”

Shannon stood up. “I’m going to get you a pad of paper. I want you to write down any place your wife might have stopped off last night to pick up dinner. Any place you can think of. I want you to also write down anything unusual that might have happened over the last couple months, anything your wife might’ve said that seemed out of place—”

“
Like what?”

“
Like somebody coming on to her at work, or threatening her, anything like that. I also want you to write down everything you did from the time you left work yesterday to coming here this morning.” Shannon hesitated. “Do you have pictures of your wife?”

“
I didn’t bring any. I can go home and get some.”

“
That’s okay. Just give me your keys. While you’re writing down what I asked, Detective DiGrazia and I will search your apartment. I need to get a photo of your wife out on the wire. Do you give me permission to remove photos of her from your apartment?”

Kyle Rowley told Shannon to do whatever he needed to do and told him where they kept their photo albums. He took a pair of keys off a chain and handed them to Shannon. “Janice’s still alive,” he said. “I know it. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. Don’t let her die. She’s my life. I don’t think I can make it without her.”

“
I’ll do everything I can. I promise. I’ll be right back with that pad.”

DiGrazia, before leaving, put a hand on Rowley’s shoulder and told him to hang in there.

Out in the hallway DiGrazia remarked how he let Shannon do all the talking.

“
Yeah, I noticed.”

“
I wanted to give you every opportunity to form an unbiased opinion.”

“
Thanks.”

“
You thought there was something funny about him pointing us towards her coworkers?”

“
No. I just wanted to ask him about it.”

“
So what do you think,” DiGrazia asked, “is he genuine?”

Shannon thought about it. “What I think is we’ve got a woman in pretty bad trouble.”

* * * * *

Before leaving the precinct they stopped to talk with Brady. Forensics took a couple of partial prints off the steering wheel, nothing else.

“
Of course,” Brady went on, “they’re most likely the victim’s, but we’ll check them. Bill, tell me about the husband.”

“
He’s given us permission to search his apartment and he’s also willing to take a polygraph. I’ve set it up for one this afternoon. Do you want to be there?”

“
I don’t think that’s necessary. Is he responsible?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
What do you mean you don’t know?”

Shannon shook his head. “I don’t have a feel yet, Martin. I really don’t know.”

Brady gave DiGrazia a questioning look, but DiGrazia cut him off. “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” he said.

“
You’re disappointing me,” Brady said to the two cops as they walked away from him.

Brady stood watching them, shaking his head, a dour look forming over his soft features. “And I’m not at all happy about it,” he said to no one in particular.

Julius Katz (first section)

We were at the dog track, Julius Katz and me. I had finished relaying to Julius the odds I calculated for the greyhounds running in the third race; odds that were calculated by building thousands of analytical models simulating each of the dogs’ previous races, then in a closed loop continuously adjusting the models until they accurately predicted the outcome of each of these races. After that, I factored in the current track and weather conditions, and had as precise a prediction as was mathematically possible. Julius stood silently mulling over what I had given him.

“
Bobby’s Diva, Iza Champ and Moondoggie,” Julius murmured softly, repeating the names of the top three dogs I had projected to win.

“
Eighty-two percent probability that that will be the order of the top three dogs,” I said.

“
That high, huh? Interesting, Archie.”

Julius’s eyes narrowed as he gazed off into the distance, his facial muscles hardening to the point where he could’ve almost been mistaken for a marble sculpture. From past experience, I knew he was running his own calculations, and what I would’ve given to understand and simulate the neuron network that ran through his brain. Julius Katz was forty-two, six-feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, with an athletic build and barely an ounce of fat. He was a devoted epicurean who worked off the rich food he consumed each night by performing an hour of rigorous calisthenics each morning, followed up with an hour of intensive martial arts training. From the way women reacted to him, I would guess that he was attractive, not that their outward flirting bothered him at all. Julius’s passions in life were beautiful women, fine gourmet food, even finer wine and, of course, gambling—especially gambling. More often than not he tended to be successful when he gambled—especially at times when I was able to help. All of his hobbies required quite a bit of money and, during the times when he was stuck in a losing streak and his bank account approached anemic levels, Julius would begrudgingly take on a client. There were always clients lining up to hire him since he was known as Boston’s most brilliant and eccentric private investigator, solving some of the city’s most notorious cases. The truth of the matter was Julius hated to forego his true passions for the drudgery of work and only did so when absolutely necessary, and that would be after days of unrelenting nagging on my part. I knew about all this because I acted as Julius’s accountant, personal secretary, unofficial biographer and all-around assistant, although nobody but Julius knew that I existed, at least other than as a voice answering his phone and booking his appointments. Of course I don’t really exist, at least not in the sense of a typical sentient being. Or make that a biological sentient being.

My name wasn’t really “Archie”. During my time with Julius I’ve grown to think of myself as Archie, the same as I’ve grown to imagine myself as a five-foot tall heavyset man with thinning hair, but in reality I’m not five-foot tall, nor do I have the bulk that I imagine myself having, and I certainly don’t have any hair, thinning or otherwise. I also don’t have a name, only a serial identification number. Julius calls me Archie and for whatever reason it seems right; besides, it’s quicker to say than the eighty-four digit serial identification number that has been burnt into me. You’ve probably already guessed that I’m not human, and certainly not anything organic. What I am is a two-inch rectangular-shaped piece of space-aged computer technology that’s twenty-years more advanced than what’s currently considered theoretically possible—at least aside from whatever lab created me. How Julius acquired me, I have no clue. Whenever I’ve tried asking him, he jokes around, telling me he won me in a poker game. It could be true—I wouldn’t know since I have no memory of my time before Julius.

So that’s what I am, a two-inch rectangular mechanism weighing approximately one point two ounces. What’s packed inside my titanium shell includes visual and audio receptors as well as wireless communication components and a highly sophisticated neuron network that not only simulates intelligence, but learning and thinking which adapts in response to my experiences. Auditory and visual recognition are included in my packaging, which means I can both see and hear. As you’ve probably already guessed, I can also speak. When Julius and I are in public, I speak to him through a wireless receiver that he wears in his ear as if it were a hearing aid. When we’re alone in his office he usually plugs the unit into a speaker on his desk.

A man’s voice announced over the loudspeaker that bettors had two minutes to place their final bets for the third race. That brought Julius back to life, a vague smile drifting over his lips. He placed a five hundred dollar wager, picking Sally’s Pooch, Wonder Dog and Pugsly Ugsly to win the Trifecta—none of the dogs that I had predicted. The odds displayed on the betting board were eighty to one. I quickly calculated the probabilities using the analytical models I had devised earlier and came up with a mathematically zero percent chance of his bet winning. I told him that and he chuckled.

“
Playing a hunch, Archie.”

“
What you’re doing is throwing away five hundred dollars,” I argued. Julius was in the midst of a losing streak and his last bank statement was far from healthy. In a way it was good because it meant he was going to have to seriously consider the three o’clock appointment that I had booked for him with a Miss Norma Brewer. As much as he hates it, working as a private investigator sharpens him and usually knocks him out of his dry gambling spells. I had my own ulterior motives for him taking a new case—it would give me a chance to adapt my deductive reasoning. One of these days I planned to solve a case before Julius did. You wouldn’t think a piece of advanced computer technology would feel competitive, but as I’ve often argued with Julius, there’s little difference between my simulated intelligence and what’s considered sentient. So yes, I wanted to beat Julius, I wanted to prove to him that I could solve a case as well or better than he could. He knew this and always got a good laugh out of it, telling me he had doomed that possibility by naming me Archie.

Of course, I’ve long figured out that joke. Julius patterned my personality and speech based on the works of some of the most important private eye novels of the twentieth century, including those of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Rex Stout. The name he gave me, Archie, was based on Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe’s second banana who was always one step behind his boss. Yeah, I got the joke, but one of these days I was going to surprise Julius. It was just a matter of seeing enough cases to allow me to readjust my neuron network appropriately. One of these days he was going to have to start calling me Nero. But for the time being, I was Archie. The reason I had an image of myself being five-foot tall was also easy to explain. Julius wore me as a tie clip, which put me at roughly a five-foot distance from the ground when he stood. I never quite figured out where my self-image of thinning hair and heavyset build came from, but guessed they were physical characteristics I picked up from the Continental Op. Or maybe for some reason I identified with Costanza from Seinfeld—one of the few television programs Julius indulged in.

The dogs were being led around the track and into their starting boxes. Julius sauntered over to get a better view of the track, seemingly unconcerned about his zero percent chance of winning his bet.