Gun Machine (17 page)

“Do we get to complain yet?” Scarly said.

“When we get up there. But it’s not like you’re complaining, okay? It’s like you’re asking questions, learning their process, wondering if their clever company has good ideas. With me?”

“Okay, John.”

The pair from Spearpoint were looking through the hole in the wall at 3A.

“Goddamn,” Mike said, pulling off the fresh police tape. “This looks like it might be two trips.”

“So,” said Scarly, “what’s your procedure, Mike? I mean, once you’ve processed the guns at the scene and loaded them up. You going to drive them straight over to me at One Police Plaza? We have good coffee.”

“Nah,” said Mike, hands on his knees, bent over and looking into the room. “Too late in the day. We’re going to warehouse them tonight and drive them over tomorrow.”

“You’re going to…” Scarly began. Tallow put a hand on her shoulder. She brushed it off, but she knew what it meant. “…All right. I’m just going to say, that does put more links in the chain of evidence, which means more paperwork for you guys. It’d be a lot easier to drive everything right over to One PP.”

“We have people to do paperwork,” Mike commented absently.

“You have to remember,” Sophie said, uncollapsing a plastic box, “that we’re a lot more deeply staffed than you. Spearpoint’s capitalized to the extent that we can do a job like this for the city pro bono.”

“You’re not billing the city?” Tallow said, genuinely surprised.

“Why would we? Bad business.”

“I would have thought not getting paid was bad business,” Bat said, failing to ingratiate himself by unfolding another box for Sophie.

“That’s not how it works. You don’t crush your competitors by charging more. You undercut, you make yourself useful, then indispensable, and then you offer just one extra service for a little more money. And then another. And then another. And before the mark knows it, she’s giving you all her money and all your competitors are dead.”

Sophie realized what she was saying and gave an apologetic smile. “I know how that sounds, and I’m sorry. But private policing is the way of the future. It’s not like there aren’t already private police here, after all. Big Six Towers Public Safety in Queens. Co-Op City DPS in the Bronx.”

“Aer Keep,” Tallow said.

“Aer Keep! That’s us, you know.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. So Spearpoint trains us in evidence collection, and crowd control, and that kind of thing. You know. Police work. Because it just makes far more sense for us to do it. And, you know, we’re totally accountable, in ways you aren’t. I mean, we can be sued for failure to provide services. You can’t.”

“So that’s how Spearpoint became a big deal? It just killed all its competitors one by one?”

“I’m just saying,” said Sophie, “that it’s the way things are done. And it’s the way of the future. Public services just don’t have the budgets, you know? Look at this.” She pointed to her belt device. “This thing here? Because of this, Ops knows where I am at any time. It’s got a biometric lock, so it only works for me. It’s got environmental sensors. It’s reading my vital signs. It’s listening to the general area for spikes in the noise level. I’m on the Spearpoint net, and I’m on the Spearpoint map.”

“The Spearpoint map,” Tallow repeated.

“Sure. It’s like…here I am, present in the city. But I’m also a point on a map that’s overlaid on that. Our map. We get all the traffic data. All our people and units are moving points on the map. We have safe areas all over the city; they’re not publicly signposted, so you can see them only if they’re on the Spearpoint map. We have webcam take that ties into the map, through that…what’s it called, Mike?”

“Ambient Security,” Mike muttered from inside 3A.

“Right. Ambient Security. For some token fee, store owners get a sticker in their windows that says something like ‘This Property Secured by Spearpoint,’ and a webcam with a wi-fi memory card in it. And what it shoots, we call the take. The take gets beamed back to our servers and skimmed by an algorithm reader, which is a piece of software that’s maybe as smart as a puppy. It sits up and barks when something really unusual happens in its field of vision. But what’s important is that Spearpoint has live cameras all over Manhattan, just sitting behind storefront windows and sending us everything they see. You couldn’t do that.”

“Of course we couldn’t do that,” said Bat. “That’s your actual Big Brother shit.”

“Maybe, if it’s imposed by the state. But in this case it’s a side effect of a transaction for property security. Protection.”

Bat snorted. “Protection racket? But no. The property security is a side effect of getting your own private camera system laid out all over New York.”

“What the fuck?” Mike said.

Tallow stepped into the apartment ahead of the others to find Mike with his fists on his hips, looking at the back of the apartment’s front door. Enough of the guns in the area had been lifted by the ECTs that Tallow didn’t have to tiptoe or stretch to get there now. “Yeah, I said something similar,” Tallow said to Mike. “Any idea how the thing works? It’s got me baffled.”

“Sure,” Mike said. “It’s one of ours. How the hell did it get on here?”

Tallow had been feeling sick ever since he’d met these two. Now his gut was nothing but ice and acid. “Wait. You’re telling me that this is a Spearpoint security system?”

“Sure as hell looks like it. Sophie.”

Sophie was already there, standing behind them. “Yeah. I think that’s the Spartan Wave, the seven version? Couple of years old. Very high end.”

Mike was about as pensive as Tallow presumed he ever got, searching his memory with a degree of manual labor. “Sure. I saw one being installed one time. Some banker guy. We were putting one of these on the back of the door to his panic room.”

“Tell me how it works,” said Bat flatly from the other side of the door.

Mike rubbed some dust from the device. Scarly, in Tallow’s peripheral vision, flinched.

“It’s a magic-card system. What we’ve done is taken the original door here, and gutted it. Steel core, electric strikes—”

“I don’t know what those are,” said Tallow.

“Rods that push out from inside the door into the door frame and lock,” Mike said. “And other stuff, but the important thing is there’s a long-life battery in here that feeds a low-energy sensor. Where your skinny guy is, there, you stand there and wave your key card like a magic wand; the sensor feels it and wakes up the door. Power goes to the magnets and motors, and the door unlocks.”

“So the card has a power source too?”

“Yeah, but it’s like, you seen those sneakers kids wear with the flashing lights in the heels? They run on power harvested from running around. Same thing with the card. Wave it around a bit, and it makes enough juice to work the card and open the door. Without the magic wand? No one’s getting in this apartment. You could fire a rocket launcher at this door and it’d still be giving you the finger when the smoke cleared.”

“Magnets,” said Bat. Tallow stepped away and looked out the hole to see Bat scrabbling around in his field bag, a worn credit card between his teeth. He came up with an old round tobacco tin that he’d done something to. Metal strips and wires were wrapped all around the tin. He opened it and produced a black metal puck with some occult electronics glued to the back. Bat pushed a little red-painted switch on it, and passed the puck from the left edge of the door to the middle. There was a clacking sound. He made several more passes, on both sides and at the top and bottom. Bat then put the deactivated puck back in its tin and put his credit card to the side of the door by the original lock. Within ten seconds, the door popped open.

“What the fuck,” said Mike.

Bat stood in the open door and said, “I am a Crime Scene Unit detective from the New York City Police Department, you heinous fucking mongoloid, and there is nothing I cannot do.”

“I think it’s time to leave,” said Tallow. “It was nice to meet you,” he said to the Spearpoint people, and he went directly to the staircase, not looking at the place on the wall where everything in his friend Jim Rosato’s head had splattered and slid.

Tallow didn’t break step until he reached the car. The CSUs were ten seconds behind him, seething. “Get in,” Tallow said. “I’ll run you back to One PP. And then I’m going to see my lieutenant.”

“You need to see your
captain
, apparently,” Scarly growled.

“No. I need my lieutenant to handle the captain. Get in.”

They got in. Tallow stamped on the gas. Scarly and Bat exchanged an awkward glance, but neither of them asked Tallow what the hurry was. Instead, Bat said, “How fucked are we? On a scale of one to ten?”

Tallow bit back his first response and chewed it over a bit. “I was going to say thirteen. But, honestly, we might have been at thirteen even before someone threw our evidence collection to the wolves. I’ve got nothing but connections I can’t prove because, hey, there’s no proof. We don’t even know when our guy’s most recent kill was. Profilers would laugh themselves sick at anything I had to say to them right now.”

Looking in the rearview mirror, Tallow could see Bat fiddling with his tablet device and his wi-fi pod.

“Hey, Bat, you asked the question. At least listen.”

“I am listening. Keep going.”

Tallow found that he didn’t have much farther to go down that road. “So unless you can get some DNA out of that paint, or the next set of processed guns gives us a kill from last week, the evidence isn’t going to put us anywhere useful for a while yet. No. Let me add to that. Unless the guns give us some more kills that could paint in the picture a bit.”

“Do you still want to talk to someone at the Property Office?” Scarly asked.

“My lieutenant wants to work through channels on that. But right now, it’s enough just to know that he has a connection with it. Did you get to smell the air in the apartment, by the way?”

“Got a little bit distracted there, John,” Bat said.

“Yeah, I figured,” Tallow said. “Damn it.”

“I wonder if anyone from Spearpoint had a little accident in the last couple of years,” Scarly said, slowly. “Maybe an installation guy.”

“Oh hell,” Tallow managed to grit out. “You’re absolutely right.”

“So maybe our guy met a Spearpoint installation technician in a bar and said, Hey, for cash in hand and a hefty tip, maybe you could help me out. And a security door just kind of fell out of their depot into the installation guy’s van, and on a quiet afternoon, or a Sunday, he put the door in. But the thing is, the installation guy will have seen our guy. Like the Property Office cop will have seen our guy. And that cop’s dead.”

“Varangian Security,” said Bat from the back. “Founded in Rochester, New York, by Phil Lyman twenty-some years ago, providing private security services in the tristate area, its expansion curtailed by the tragic death of the charismatic Lyman in blah-blah-blah…bought out by and subsumed into Spearpoint Security two years later.”

“What?” said Tallow.

“What what? I’m reading this off Wikipedia. Your tablet screen’s fucked, by the way. It’s like trying to read through a film of old semen. Anyway. Just working the evidence we’ve got, you know? Embracing the crazy.”

Tallow stopped at an intersection. A bus rattled past, the digital ad down its side glittering. Apparently there was another musical based on an old Disney movie opening on Broadway. An animation flicked across the hexels: the prettiest, whitest “Indian” princess you ever saw, attending to the feathers in her hair before looking over her shoulder at Tallow, smiling, and winking.

Tallow drove on.

“While you’ve got the tablet on, Bat, look up
Werpoes
for me.”

Bat clicked away. Tutted to himself. “Fucking autocorrect.
Wempus
? How d’you spell that?”

“God, I don’t know. She said
Werpoes.
W-e-r—”

“Wait,” said Bat. “Wait. Shit. Pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull the fuck over.”

“Damn it, Bat…” Tallow checked his mirrors and pulled to the roadside within an awkward twenty seconds.

Bat leaned forward and thrust the tablet device in front of Tallow and Scarly. He’d pulled from the web an image of beadwork of some kind, a broad strip of shell art featuring odd patterns and shapes and the occasional rippled angle.

“It’s called wampum,” said Bat. “Wampum belts.”

“Oh fuck,” said Scarly, seeing it immediately.

“It says the Native Americans wove these things out of beads to codify history and law, to mark social events, transmit information…they made them here in Manhattan, before the Europeans came. And when they did come, they saw how the natives prized the wampum and began manufacturing it themselves, as money.” Bat tapped the screen with a jagged fingernail. “These things were art and book and device. John, wampum belts were
memory
.”

Tallow rubbed his eyes. Looked at the photo of the wampum belt again. He could see the similarities. The photographed belt of beads was finer work, and swirls were harder to execute…but then, whoever had woven this belt wasn’t crazy. The similarities were striking. Their killer had turned the entire apartment into a memory machine, using guns.

They were both looking at him.

“All right,” Tallow said. “We know why he did it now. His motivation beyond totem phase. It’s one more piece of information. But it’s not a case. Let’s get you two back to One PP. I told you before—it’s CSU that’ll solve this thing. And so far I’ve been right.”

“You are a lazy asshole, John,” Scarly said, but she was grinning.

POLICE-CHANNEL FLOW
on the drive from One Police Plaza to Ericsson Place:

A dead man found folded into a suitcase that was left in the back of an empty building in Williamsbridge. First guess was that he’d been in there three months.

A dead woman found in front of St. Brigid’s in the East Village. Police on scene commenting that they didn’t know what she’d been drinking, but she appeared to have no stomach.

A dead man found in a Bronx apartment, stabbed to death within the past week, forensics complicated due to the corpse having been partially devoured by rats and a small pet dog.

An unknown individual blew him- or herself up at the Bushwick Inlet. One other fatality: the individual’s arm had somehow been launched laterally at ballistic speeds, went through a parked rig’s window, and broke its driver’s neck.

Tallow killed the radio. He’d taken a slight detour on the way back to Ericsson Place, up Fulton, and now he wanted to concentrate. Driving slowly, he looked at the building frontages across the street from the Fetch.

There was a ripple of fear in his chest as he saw the
PROTECTED BY SPEARPOINT SECURITY
sticker on the window glass of a cheap shoe store not quite directly opposite the Fetch.

Tallow peered and calculated. The shoe store did not face the side of the Fetch that had the alley adjacent. There was a good chance that any clever camera located in that store window had not seen a thing.

He also noted that there was no police tape across the mouth of the alley, nor were there any notices to potential witnesses posted nearby.

Tallow drove on, well aware that his luck had been tested again.

His cell phone rang just as he was parking at Ericsson Place, and he fumbled it over the wheel trying to do two things at once when his mind was already in seven places at the same time. Tallow managed to keep the phone at his ear on the third try. “Hello?”

“Detective?”

“Mrs. Westover?”

“Yes.” Emily Westover gave a little laugh that disturbed him. “I just wanted to thank you again. You know, for looking after me.”

Tallow listened to the ambience of the call. She was in her apartment. Her voice had that deadened quality that came with thick glazing, the kind that silenced the outside city and absorbed interior sound. There was music of a sort, playing in another room. Native American chants, he realized, but the authenticity was off. It was one of those nineties records where ethnic audio sources were put to muted beats and electronic chill-out washes.

“You’re very welcome, Mrs. Westover. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Don’t go to Werpoes,” she said in a rush.

“What? Why would I?” Tallow said, thinking,
Let’s see
.

“It’s, it’s just not safe. I worry that maybe I made you think about it.”

“Your husband went back to work?”

“Yes. He doesn’t know I’m calling you. I suppose he might when he gets the phone records, you know, the itemized billing. But I’m calling to thank you.”

“Mrs. Westover, I meant to ask earlier. That brooch on your jacket. What is it?”

 “It’s an elk symbol. It’s…do you promise not to laugh?”

“I promise,” he said, letting her hear the smile in his voice.

“It’s protective. Protective magic. In Native American medicine, the elk protects you from the unknown.”

Tallow felt a sudden crest of deep pity for Emily Westover. That brooch must have cost her five hundred dollars. She probably had a stack of CDs and a drive full of MP3s that were no more Native American than the pap she was playing right now. He couldn’t help but think of Vivicy, of the mysterious wizards Machen hired but understood not at all, of the office that spoke of money without the basic grasp of aesthetic and arrangement that nature bestowed on even the common rat, and of the music that evoked some prefab heaven whose furnishers shopped at off-brand stores.

So there she was, living in a fiction, her wealth buying her nothing but pretty fakes, locked in a glass castle where all the guards worked for her husband.

“I see,” he said. “Mrs. Westover, why don’t you tell me what you’re really worried about?”

She was trying to tell him, in her damaged way, that she knew. She had somehow found out that Westover and the killer were connected, and she was unable to do anything with that knowledge. It broke her. All she could do was learn as much as possible about what little she’d found out. She’d tried to learn about Native Americans. The sum of her achievement was that she was now scared of everything.

She gave that broken-glass laugh again. “The things I’m really worried about. Good God, Detective, I could be on this call all day. But then I think, you know, what do I have to be worried about? I’m surrounded by everyone I know. It’s just that sometimes it feels like, well, I’m surrounded by everyone I know. If you know what I mean. I say that a lot. I worry that people don’t always know what I mean, these days. I don’t think I speak as clearly as I used to. Or think as clearly. But that’s hard, because life was always simpler before, and there just weren’t as many things to think about. It’s like, walking through the city, on sidewalks, you only have to think about one thing at a time. But if you’re walking a deep forest trail, you have to think about three or four things at the same time—”

“I’ve never walked a deep forest trail,” said Tallow. “Do you get to the countryside much?”

“I wish people could see what I meant,” Emily said, sounding wistful. Her mood seemed to Tallow to be changing by the moment, and her voice was all but doing the scales. He thought of Bobby Tagg and clamped his lips shut against a surge of bile.

“We all say it, don’t we?” she said. “We say ‘I see what you mean,’ it’s the metaphor for clarity. But sometimes I wish people could see the pictures in my head, instead of my having to describe them with words. Words are clumsy. I wish I could communicate in pictures.”

“Like wampum belts,” Tallow tried, experimentally.

“I just wanted a friend who didn’t report to my fucking husband!” she screamed, and killed the call.

Tallow looked at the phone for a moment, debating whether or not to call her back, apologize for whatever he said or did wrong. He convinced himself that pretty much anything could have set her off. He’d think about it later. Her number was logged in his phone, and he added the number to a contact page and saved it.

The main office was full of people, none of whom would look at Tallow as he entered. The lieutenant’s office had all its blinds down. Tallow stood in front of his lieutenant’s office door, and knocked.

“I said this was a private meeting.”

“I wasn’t here for that, ma’am. Sorry.”

“Tallow? Is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come in, please.”

Tallow opened the door, feeling the eyes of the people in the outer office on his back. It was apparently safe for them to look at him when he couldn’t look at them.

“You’re awfully polite for a maverick cop on the edge, Detective,” said the captain with a smile, putting out a fragile hand. His fingers seemed to move in the wind like brittle, vine-choked branches.

“The only thing I’m on the edge of is dinner hour, sir. Hello.”

“John doesn’t do the rulebook-chewing-mad-dog-cop thing so well,” said the lieutenant from her desk chair. “Honestly? He’s far too lazy for that.”

“You’re lucky I know she’s joking,” said the other man in the room. That man did not extend his hand. He seemed to be expecting something.

“Assistant Chief,” Tallow said, offering his hand.

Assistant chief Allen Turkel was the commanding officer of Manhattan South, with ten precincts under his oversight, including the 1st. His two stars were very well polished. So well polished, in fact, that it looked to Tallow like he’d had to retouch the gold.

“Detective,” the assistant chief said, with the barest incline of a nod and a weak, cursory shake. Tallow had the impression the man was holding out for a salute. He had the posture of a man who regularly sucked his stomach in. “I imagine you’re here to talk to your lieutenant about your charming apartment on Pearl Street.”

“Among other things, sir, yes.”

Two plastic chairs were out, for the captain and the assistant chief. There wasn’t a third one. They returned to their chairs. Tallow chose to stand with his back to the closed door, a position that had him facing their profiles. He clasped his hands behind him, reading the room.

The assistant chief chose to address the lieutenant. “You have a very smart lieutenant here, you know that, Detective? Smartest lieutenant of detectives in my whole borough. I like to think that one day she’s going to be working with me at One PP. And then I think,
Why would I take my smartest lieutenant out of the line where she’s doing the most good?
”

He laughed. The lieutenant chuckled. Something like the sound of dry twigs snapping came out of the captain’s mouth. The assistant chief’s intended meaning escaped nobody. He checked his watch while everyone else dutifully faked amusement. Tallow eyed the watch. It looked like a Hublot, a Swiss device in brushed rose gold, and a bezel and dial in black ceramics, decorated in screws, grilles, and pistons that evoked the 1920s science-fiction constructivist aesthetic of the film
Metropolis
. The strap was black rubber. It wasn’t a policeman’s watch. It was a fetish object. Tallow had read that Hublots now came with electronic security cards so that you could prove on the Internet that you owned them.

“I appreciate that, sir,” the lieutenant said. “And I appreciate you coming all the way over here personally. You didn’t have to do that.”

Tallow didn’t smile at the well-planted stroke, but he wanted to.

“Oh, I did, I did,” the assistant chief proudly faux protested. “It’s my borough. It’s my call. I just felt you were entitled to a direct explanation about all this.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Oh, no need, no need. I mean, you know, Charlie here”—indicating the captain—“knows that I’ll give you anything you need to get a job done. But we also have to be attentive to the way of the future. And a case like this one—oh, yes, yes, Charlie, I know it’s a nightmare—we have to be attentive to resources. Evidence Collection Teams were a good idea, and they help balance the load, but a case like this one completely knocks that out of whack.”

The captain looked, to Tallow’s eye, simply too weak to talk. He was only ten years older than Turkel, but he had thirty-five years on the job to Turkel’s twenty-five, and the past ten had evidently bled the man in ways Tallow had never learned of. It was left to the lieutenant to negotiate the landmines Turkel had scattered.

“None of us ever expected that ECTs would be tested like this, of course,” she said. “And I’m not averse, in principle, to the idea of us receiving help from the public sector. I would like to know how the chain of evidence is going to work, sir.”

“Oh, no need, no need. Just think of it as adding an extra link or two to the chain. I’ve known Jason Westover a long, long time. He really does understand our needs in this.”

Tallow prickled.

“And he is…?” asked the lieutenant.

“The founder and CEO of Spearpoint Security. We go way back.” The assistant chief said it in that dismissive, it’s-nothing way that meant it was not to be dismissed and that it was in fact very important for everyone to know he knew wealthy and impressive people.

“I met Jason Westover earlier today,” said Tallow.

To Tallow, in that second, it seemed very much like ghost bombs were hanging from invisible threads above the room: like the cascade of circumstance had guided him into a trap when all the while he’d believed he was slogging his way toward the light. Like the hopeful sunrise at the end of all this turning out to be the glow of burning bodies and a house on fire.

“Really?” said the assistant chief, with a half-raised eyebrow of feigned half interest. Tallow could read the man. He was very interested.

“Yes. And his wife.”

“Oh, yes, yes, Emily. She hasn’t been well recently. I’m hoping it wasn’t, um, a professional…?”

“Not really a subject for the room, sir.”

Turkel’s face lit up. “Right. Yes. Thank you.”

“So,” said Tallow, “I have two people from Spearpoint literally loading my evidence into boxes and intending to drive it all to one of their storage facilities in two trips.”

“They told you that?” the lieutenant said, wincing a little.

“Yes, ma’am. Right after they explained to me that the very elaborate security mechanism on the apartment’s door came from Spearpoint.”

“What?”

“That’s right, ma’am. Which, in an ideal world, would lead us to sales and installation data at Spearpoint that would put a name on our man. But this is the real world, and I fully expect CSU to eventually match a gun from the cache to a dead Spearpoint employee who used to take on side jobs for cash. Just like we found a dead man from the Property Office when we looked for an explanation of how Son of Sam’s handgun was in the cache.”

Tallow discovered that the captain was looking at him, the expression on the man’s face difficult to decipher. “What was your name again, Detective?”

“Tallow, sir.”

“No. Your full name.”

“John Tallow, sir.”

“John Tallow. Okay. Carry on.”

Tallow had no idea what that was about. “Well, I don’t have a lot more to say, right at this moment. The assistant chief obviously couldn’t know that the kind offer from his friend came from the same company that fitted the locks to our man’s door. Perhaps that doesn’t even matter. That said, the same company that had a security system walk out of its depot and affix itself to the door of a presumed serial killer is intending to look after almost all of our evidence overnight.”

“Detective,” warned the lieutenant.

The captain stirred himself. “I think John’s just laying out the obvious concerns here, Lieutenant.”

“Yes,” said Turkel. “Well. It was a very kind offer from a company that wants to help serve this city and a police department already overstressed by case management. I don’t think we can throw that kind of offer away on the strength of could-bes.”