Lock In (18 page)

Then we moved on to the next Haden in the pen, this one in for punching some woman who had called her a “clank.”

*   *   *

“Welcome to the next four days,” Vann said to me as we exited the second district headquarters. “We’ve got a bunch of incarcerated threeps in the first, third, and sixth district to get at, too. Then when we’re done with those we can come back here to the second and start all over. And then over and over again until the march is done and all the Hadens go home. You should probably tell your caregiver to put you on a caffeine drip.”

“What about Johnny Sani and Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.

“Terrorism’s got Loudoun Pharma,” Vann said. “We’re only on the edges of that one. Sani’s in our morgue and not going anywhere. Both of them can probably wait until Monday. Unless you think you’ve got something.”

“I think I have something,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Vann said. “We don’t have time for ‘maybe’ at the moment. We’ve got a whole line of threeps that we have to decide what to do with.”

“I want someone to look at Sani’s neural network.”

“We’ve already got our forensics people looking at it.”

“I want someone looking at it who knows their way around one,” I said. “Someone who works on them every day.”

“You have someone in mind?” Vann asked.

“My new housemate,” I said.

Vann reached into her jacket pocket for her e-cigarette. “You’re getting an early start on your cronyism,” she said.

“It’s not that,” I said, annoyed. “Johnny Sani had an IQ of eighty. He had no business having an Integrator’s neural network in his head. Someone installed it in him and someone used him, and then when they were done with him, they made him slit his own throat somehow. I think there’s something going on in the software of that network.”

“Something that forced him to slit his own throat?” Vann said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“There’s that ‘maybe’ again,” Vann said. She sucked on her cigarette.

“Tony does neural network software all the time,” I said. “And he contracts with the companies who make them to test their security and troubleshoot issues. He would know what to look for. Or at the very least, he would be able to see if something was wildly off.”

“And ‘Tony’ in this case is your new housemate.”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s done confidential work for the government before. Has a vendor ID and everything.”

“Is he expensive?” Vann asked.

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Of course it matters,” Vann said, and it was her turn to look annoyed with me. “One of us is going to have to make the case for any expenditures we make outside ourselves. And if they don’t like it, they’re going to yell at me to yell at you.”

“I think it’s going to be worth it,” I said.

Vann took another suck on her cigarette. Then: “Fine, let’s get him in. I’ll tell them it’s related to the Loudoun Pharma thing if they bitch about it.”

“And they’ll buy that,” I said.

“Maybe,” Vann said.

“Because I really do think there’s something going on there,” I said. I recounted to Vann my brainstorming session of the night before.

“Do you do that a lot?” Vann asked, after I finished. “That tossing things into space and drawing lines between them thing.”

“When I can’t sleep? Yes.”

“You need to find some other evening activities,” Vann said.

“I’m not even going to touch that one,” I said.

Vann smiled wryly at that, took one more suck on her cigarette, and then started to put it away. “Well, I don’t want to take a run at Lucas Hubbard if we don’t have anything to take a run at him with. If we come after him I want him off guard. We can ask after Cassandra Bell, but I guarantee you the terrorism people already have a microscope shoved up her colon after the Loudoun Pharma thing, so she may not want to speak to us, and terrorism might not want us stepping on their dicks even if she does. What was the name of that woman Integrator that Schwartz was using?”

“Brenda Rees.”

“I’ll knock on her door today,” Vann said. “See if anything shakes loose there.”

“Am I not going with you?” I asked.

“No,” Vann said. “Since you seem to think all this is on some sort of timetable, you need to go out to California to follow up on that money order and then head over to that City of Hope place to see if anything comes of that. That should keep you busy.”

“What about Tony?” I asked.

“Give me his information and I’ll get him set up and over to the morgue today,” Vann said. “If he’s a flake, I’m going to take it out on you.”

“He’s not a flake, I promise.”

“He better not be. I’d hate to have to kill him and frame you for it.”

“That reminds me,” I said.

“Me threatening to kill someone reminds you of something?” Vann asked, surprised. “We haven’t known each other that long, Shane.”

“I had a run-in with Detective Trinh last night,” I said.

“Really.”

“Yeah. Among other things, she implied that you drove your former partner to attempt suicide.”

“Huh,” Vann said. “What else did she tell you?”

“That you have high work standards for other people but not yourself, that you’re sloppy, a little bit dangerous when it comes to procedure, and that you have various addictions that are either the result of, or the contributing factor to you, washing out of the Integrator corps.”

“Did she tell you I set puppies on fire, too?” Vann asked.

“She did not,” I said. “It may have been implied.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think you set puppies on fire,” I said.

Vann smiled at that. “I mean the things Trinh actually said.”

“This is my third day with you,” I said. “You ride me hard—which I don’t mind, by the way—but then you do stuff like you did in there, where you let a bunch of assholes with firearms slip away rather than charge them with assault. If they did lawyer up, the fact you threatened them with ‘false personage’ wouldn’t have helped your case any.”

“You caught that,” Vann said.

“I did,” I said. “So maybe that qualifies as sloppy. I do notice that you smoke a lot, and when we talk after six
P.M.
you always seem to be in a bar, looking for someone to screw. As far as I can see it doesn’t affect your work, and your free time is your own. So I don’t actually care, aside from thinking that basting your lungs with insect poison is a bad idea in general.”

“Do you think it has to do with my time as an Integrator?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said. “I don’t get the feeling you’re in a rush to tell me about those days, which tells me something really fucked up probably happened way back when. But either you’ll tell me when you want to, or you won’t. The same with whatever the hell is going on between you and Trinh, because clearly she’s got a bug up her ass about you.”

“That’s an interesting way to put it,” Vann said.

“Here’s the only thing Trinh said that I worry about,” I said. “She thinks you’re going to fall apart on me, and that when you fall apart, you’re going to end up taking me with you.”

“And what do you think about that?”

“Ask me after the march is done,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have an answer for you then.”

Vann smiled again.

“Look, Vann,” I said. “If you promise me that you’re not going to fall apart on me, I’m going to believe you. But don’t promise me that if you’re not going to be able to follow through. If you can’t promise, that’s fine. But it’s something I want to know up front.”

Vann paused for a moment, looking at me. “Tell you what,” Vann said, finally. “When this weekend is done you and I will sit down somewhere, and I’ll have a beer and you’ll do whatever, and I’ll tell you why I stopped being an Integrator, and why my last partner shot herself in the gut, and why that asshole Trinh has it in for me.”

“Can’t wait,” I said.

“In the meantime: I’m not going to fall apart on you, Shane. I promise.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Well, good,” Vann said, and took out her phone to look at the time. “That’s settled, then. Now come on. We have two more district houses to hit.”

“I thought I was going to California,” I said.

“No one’s going to be around until nine
A.M.
out there,” Vann said. “That’s still a couple hours away. Let’s see if we can punt a bunch more troublemakers back home before then. One of the threeps in the first district holding cell is there on a drunk and disorderly. I want to hear how
that
happened.”

Chapter Fifteen

I
LOOKED AROUND
and I was in an evidence room in the FBI offices in Los Angeles. An FBI agent was looking at me. “Agent Shane?” she asked.

“That’s me,” I said, and started to get up. Which is when I encountered a small problem. “I can’t move,” I said, after a minute.

“Yeah, about that,” the agent said. “Our actual spare threep is being used by one of our local agents. Her regular one is in for some maintenance. The only threep we had available for you was this one. It’s been in storage for a while.”

“How long is a while?” I asked. I found the diagnostic settings and started running them.

“I think maybe four years,” the agent said. “Maybe five? Could be five.”

“You’re letting me use a threep that’s evidence for a crime?” I asked. “Isn’t that, I don’t know, tainting the chain of possession?”

“Oh, that case is over,” the agent said. “The owner of that threep died in our detention center.”

“How did that happen?”

“He got shivved.”

“Someone shivved a Haden?” I said. “That’s pretty cold.”

“He was a bad man,” said the agent.

“Look, uh—” I realized I had not gotten the agent’s name.

“Agent Isabel Ibanez,” she said.

“Look, Agent Ibanez,” I said. “I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but I just ran a diagnostic on this threep, and its legs don’t work at all. There appears to be significant damage to them.”

“It’s probably because the threep got hit with a shotgun blast,” Ibanez said.

“A shotgun blast,” I repeated.

“During a firefight with FBI agents, yes,” Ibanez said.

“The owner
really
must have been a bad man.”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“You understand that having a threep that can’t move its legs is going to be a hindrance to the work I need to do today,” I said.

Ibanez stepped to the side and then motioned to the wheelchair she had previously been standing in front of.

“A wheelchair,” I said.

“Yes,” Ibanez said.

“A threep in a wheelchair.”

“Yes,” Ibanez repeated.

“You understand the irony, right?”

“This office is ADA compliant,” Ibanez said. “And as I understand it you are going to a post office, which are also required by law to be ADA compliant. This should be sufficient.”

“You’re actually serious about this,” I said.

“It’s what we have available at the moment,” Ibanez said. “We could rent you a threep, but that would require approvals and paperwork. You’d be here all day.”

“Right,” I said. “Would you excuse me a moment, Agent Ibanez?” I disconnected from the wounded threep before she had a chance to say anything else.

Twenty minutes later I stepped out of an Avis office in Pasadena with a shiny new maroon Kamen Zephyr threep I had rented out of my own pocket, got into the equally maroon Ford I had also rented, and headed toward the Duarte post office. Take that, paperwork.

The Duarte post office was an unassuming box of beige bricks, with arches at the windows to give it a vaguely Spanish air. I went in, stood in line politely while three separate old ladies got stamps and mailed packages, and when I got to the front of the line displayed my badge on my threep’s chest monitor to the postal clerk and asked to see the postmaster.

A small, older man came to the front. “I’m Roberto Juarez,” he said. “I’m the postmaster here.”

“Hi,” I said. “Agent Chris Shane.”

“That’s funny,” Juarez said. “You have the same name as that famous kid.”

“Huh,” I said. “I suppose I do.”

“Was one of you, too,” he said. “A Haden, I mean.”

“I remember that.”

“Must be annoying for you sometimes,” Juarez said.

“It can be,” I said. “Mr. Juarez, about a week ago a man came into your post office to get a money order. I was hoping to talk to you about him.”

“Well, we get a lot of people asking for money orders,” Juarez said. “We have a lot of immigrants in the area, and they send remittances back home. Was this an international or domestic money order?”

“Domestic,” I said.

“Well, that will narrow it down a little,” Juarez said. “We do less of those. Do you have a picture?”

“Do you have a tablet I could borrow for a second?” I asked. I could display the picture on my chest screen but it turns out people feel uncomfortable staring into your chest. The postal clerk, whose name tag listed her as Maria Willis, gave me hers to use. I signed in and accessed the picture of Sani—cleaned up, eyes closed—and showed it to them. “It’s not the best picture,” I said.

Juarez looked at the picture blankly. Willis, on the other hand, put her hand up to her mouth in surprise.

“Oh my God,” she said. “That’s Ollie Green.”

“Ollie Green?” I repeated the name. “As in Oliver Green, and like the color.”

Willis nodded and looked at the picture again. “He’s dead, isn’t he,” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. You knew him?”

“He would come in every week or so to get a money order, an envelope, and a stamp,” Willis said. “He was nice. You could tell he was a little
slow
”—she looked at me to see if I understood the implication—“but a nice man. Would make small talk if you let him and there wasn’t a line.”

“What would he talk about?” I asked.

“The usual things,” Willis said. “The weather. Whatever movie or TV show he’d seen recently. Sometimes he’d talk about the squirrels he saw on the walk here. He really enjoyed them. He once said he’d like to get a little dog who could chase them. I told him that if he did that, the squirrel and the dog would end up getting run over.”

“He lived nearby, then,” I said. “If he was walking over to the post office.”