Marked (20 page)

Cherabino was gearing up for a righteous lecture. “Sir, you can't possibly—”

He waved that hand again, and she shut up. Cold.

I stared. Even in the middle of my storm of emotions, I'd never seen her stopped from a full anger lecture before.

“That is
all
I can or will do in this situation, and you'd better be grateful for that, Isabella. It's your word—and yours alone—that's making me do half of it. I'm already late for a meeting with the captain. You'll see yourself out.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, turned, and left, suppressed anger vibrating every fiber of her body. I stood and left too, numb and afraid.

Hearing him tell me what they'd do if I died made it that much more real. No one—no one—could help me now.

Except, well, except maybe me. There was always a way out, always. I just had to figure it out.

CHAPTER 18

I smoked
half
a pack, one cigarette after the other, on the cold gray wet smoking porch, looking out on the half-dead yellow grass stubs in the courtyard, the back of my mind telling me that I shouldn't be here. A suspect had gotten killed here in front of me by a sniper, and no matter how many times I reminded myself the killer was locked up, it still felt dangerous.

Today, dangerous was okay. Dangerous was good. Meant I was alive. And the wind wasn't even that bad today.

I felt the mind approach before I heard the door open.

“Hi, Michael,” I said without turning around.

“Cherabino says you're working with us on the Wright case again?” He stopped then, half-formed questions about the rumors of my firing swirling in his head. He decided not to ask about any of them. Decided he wouldn't have liked someone asking.

It was a painful effort not to respond to the thoughts. The Guild would have considered them public space, as clear and obvious as yelling into an empty room, and just as fair to hear.

“Wright case?” Michael prompted.

“Yeah,” I said, and stubbed out the cigarette. Might as well do something useful while I waited for the back of my head to deliver the miracle. I'd already called Swartz's house and heard from Selah why he couldn't be disturbed. I didn't have time for a meeting, nor did I think it was advisable to go back to my apartment. I needed to keep moving while I figured this out.

“Isn't the Wright case closed? That supervisor woman, with the odd mind?”

He looked at me, wondering if I was all right. Of course, he was a cop and cops couldn't ask that.

I adjusted my coat down to cover my cold hand. I hadn't wanted to get ash on the gloves. “I'm fine. Did the interview not confirm her as the killer?”

“The interview cleared her of all wrongdoing. She was with a boyfriend during the entire window of the murder.”

“Wait. She didn't . . .” I trailed off. “Then who would have killed that guy with an ax? And the parts missing? Were they under a couch or something?”

Michael shook his head. “Cherabino and Ruffins are talking about it in one of the conference rooms. I thought you'd want to be there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

•   •   •

It was surreal walking in on a meeting, in a conference room, at a place I almost didn't work, on possibly my last day on earth. But the program said keep yourself distracted, keep yourself moving, keep doing something useful, and this was that. If nothing else, this was that.

I'd figure this out. Or I'd run, far and fast and wide, and roll the dice and pretend I could stay free for a week or two. Until they caught me.

I wondered if they'd have Stone torture me, as punishment for him and me both. More likely, send one of the students as a final project, with a mentor trailing, of course, to ensure that it was done correctly. It's what I would have done, if I'd been a professor in Enforcement training.

I wondered if it would hurt more or less with a student. Probably more. The mentor would correct, over and over, until they got it right.

“Adam?” Cherabino asked. I couldn't quite feel her emotions without reaching out, which bothered me.

“You didn't say he was coming,” Ruffins said. The Tech Control Org agent didn't seem happy to see me.

“You'll just have to put up with your detection tattoo screaming at you for a while,” I said, with no sympathy. “I'm a member of the team today, and you should have thought of that before you had the damn thing installed.”

Ruffins scowled. “Left our manners at home, did we?”

I sat. “It's been a hell of a day. A hell of a week, really.”

“Play nicely or I'll kick you both out,” Cherabino said. Then, to me: “Ruffins is here because Wright was one of his informants for . . . well, another case. There are some legalities to the investigation, so it's easier to just keep him in on.”

I noticed then that Andrew, forensic accountant and Cherabino's cube neighbor, was seated at the end of the table. He waved, a small half wave.

I nodded back, and Michael sat.

“Like I was saying, it doesn't add up,” Andrew said.

“Which part?” Cherabino asked.

“Wright's accounts have been supported by payments from the TCO for a while now, for informing. There's been payments from Fiske's organization, like Ruffins told me to look for.”

Wait. Wright had been working for Fiske? And Ruffins had been the one to point this out? What had I missed?

But Andrew continued without pausing. “The payments just stopped, the day of the murder. Both sets. One or the other organization should have had some delay, but there's none. But a third set of payments—from another account—started appearing a week before the murder and hasn't stopped. They've been increasing, actually.”

“That's ridiculous,” Ruffins said. “A mysterious third set of payments? Doesn't it seem more plausible that the bank made some mistake?”

“Who all was Wright working for?” I asked, finally tracking the conversation.

Heads turned in my direction.

“Well, he was working for Fiske, or at least selling him secrets. I assume largely because you asked him to?” I asked Ruffins.

He looked uncomfortable, a little too uncomfortable for a man who was usually combative. If anybody else, I would have read him to find out why, but with his wrist tattoo, he'd know immediately.

“Yes,” Cherabino said. “He was bait. Him no longer being living, testifying bait is a problem that we are currently working to solve.”

Ruffins objected, “You shouldn't be sharing task force information with this guy.”

“This one's not going to make any difference to anyone,” she replied. Then back to me: “Finish your thought.”

“He was working for Fiske, he was working for the TCO, but all over that house I saw hobbies. Stuff that takes a lot of money. And he wasn't just paying his bills. He was feeding those experiments, or projects, or what have you. Some of it looked recent. Obviously he was selling stuff—I'm betting some kind of invention that crossed the line into Tech territory, though who knows—but I'm also wondering if he had some kind of deal going with the company.”

“The lab?” Michael asked. “We didn't find any evidence of that at all, and we dug deep enough that we should have if it was going on.”

Ruffins said with an odd tone, “Maybe they were paying him off the books, you know, on the higher levels.”

“After firing Wright so forcefully?” Cherabino shook her head. “Besides, we talked to nearly everyone. And who is the higher levels? There's always a person. Or several. But concrete, real people, and we talked to everyone there, I thought.”

“Not the senior executives,” I said.

Michael shifted. “Maybe he extorted them for money and threatened to take that thing in his head public if they didn't pay up. Then they went over with an ax to remove the danger.”

“But he'd already put so much up on data channels,” Andrew said. “How much more could there really be to leak?”

I glanced at him.

Andrew shrugged. “I'm curious. And you guys talk loudly one cubicle away. If it's a case you've brought me in on, it seems fair game to listen. It's also a slow week.”

“You listened in on confidential case information?” Ruffins asked. He looked appalled.

“Next time just come on over if you've got the time,” Cherabino told him, her mind very intentional. “I can always use another set of eyes on things.”

“Thanks. When it's slow, I'd appreciate something to do.”

And I realized then why Cherabino had the highest close rate in the department. It wasn't just that she obsessed over her cases' details until she could quote them to you six months later with accuracy. It wasn't just that she worked so many more hours than everybody else. It was this: that she asked for help in odd places and never, ever, turned down a second opinion.

You got interesting things with help sometimes, it seemed. An idea started to pick up its head from the back of my mind, but when I reached for it, it spooked and ran away. It would be back.

“The extortion tactic seems much more like Fiske anyway,” Ruffins said, with a suspicious glance to me. “As I said in the task force meeting, it seems easiest to lump this case in with the rest of his crimes and sort them out when we have him in custody.” He kept looking at me.

Cherabino sighed. “And as I said in the meeting, I'm happy for you to be here if it makes you more comfortable, but I'm going to follow the evidence. We're not going to have a killer go free because we just assume it was him. Fiske is not all powerful, and this one seems too sudden to be coordinated.”

“Look, I have an appointment with a CI I need to get to,” Ruffins said. “Task force is at three, right?”

“It is,” Cherabino agreed. She was frustrated with him; I could feel it. But he was important to the Fiske case somehow.

As they walked out, the idea in the back of my head snuck back in and looked at me with wide eyes.

•   •   •

The idea coalesced.

Captain Harris had barged into Paulsen's office earlier about the arbitration emergency. He was trained as a go- between and was good at getting agreements.

Second fact: the Guild had a long and distinguished history of using third-party arbitrators. The Koshna Accords were only the most famous example. If I'd paid my Guild dues long enough, I might have had access to one from inside the Guild. Unlike a lawyer, whose job it was to block as many runs from the other party as possible, a Guild arbitrator was assigned to find the best solution for the accused that the Council or accuser could live with. There was a lot more negotiation, and a lot less questioning of facts, since truth or falsehood was already established with a deep-read. A good arbitrator could get your sentence commuted, or paid slowly over time, or taken out of your salary and your community service and your creativity rather than your hide. Then he or she followed up to be certain both parties kept up their ends.

Third fact: Harris had once been married to Jamie; they had been divorced long before I'd had her as my mentor, but as a senior student I knew who she was. According to the rumors of the day, he had stayed over at the Guild for some of that time, in addition to his residence off-site. While the Guild might not accept just any police captain as a neutral party, Harris had been cleared as a former spouse of a Guild member, and a sometime resident.

So, unlike Bransen, Harris could actually walk in the doors of the Guild and speak for me. Furthermore, he was qualified to do it reasonably well.

That is, if he would.

•   •   •

I bought sandwiches from Swartz's favorite deli, fresh homemade bread like clouds cradling a bounty of beautiful soy-pepper loaf and vegetables, real roast beef, and fresh-made stone-ground mustard, with slices of fancy cheddar cheese cut so thin you could see the shadow of your finger through them. Best part? I bought them myself, with real money, in the regular line, without having to talk to a manager. The department had been handling my money for years, and now I had it myself. There was temptation there, sure, but here, now, it was freedom. Bittersweet to taste that freedom today. Today of all days.

I took a taxi—a real, honest-to-goodness taxi with a grumpy taxi driver who wanted to talk sports—and paid him with real money.

And then I was climbing Swartz's front steps.

Selah answered the door in a ridiculously flowered dress and wool socks, a scarf around her neck. She smiled when she saw me—and the deli sack I carried in my hands. “He's awake,” she said. “And he'd love a visit.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She stopped me. “It's not that high-sodium thing, is it?”

“No, ma'am.” I smiled. I'd remembered. Low-sodium and healthy, all the way. I felt virtuous.

She let me through.

Swartz was seated on his faded old couch, fiddling with some kind of wire hook. Fishing gear, maybe. Clear line and oddly colored feathers littered the TV table in front of him like the leftover bits of a bird left by a messy cat's lunch. He frowned at it through thick reading glasses. The frown turned into a smile when he saw me.

“Come in, come in.” He pulled a pocketed envelope from the couch beside him and started tucking things away into it.

“What are the feathers for?” I asked.

“Ah, even pollution-resistant bioengineered fish like a fly with some shine to it. Makes them bite better. I don't go much, anymore, but I like the flies. Plenty of call for them, and keeps me busy.” Subtext in Mindspace was that a little extra money was welcome while he was on teacher's disability, and his doctor liked the activity. “Sit down. Tell me all about things. Did you ask her to dinner?”

I looked for Selah.

“Let's get the food on the kitchen table, dear,” she said kindly. For all Swartz lived here, the house was hers.

I unpacked my offering on the old wooden kitchen table while Selah got out the good plates.

“So, did you?” he asked.

I looked up. “You're a meddler, you know that?”

He sat, setting the cane against the wall next to him. “So what if I am?” He was breathing heavy, even from that little move across the room. I wondered if he was getting worse, somehow. “So, did you or not?”

“I did,” I said, almost sheepish. For once in my life I didn't really want to talk to him about it. Too new, too fragile, too uncertain. Too . . . improbable now, with what today meant. “Well, she said yes. It was, well, it was awkward. But okay. Really okay. I think she likes me.”

He pulled the deli bag toward him. “I could have told you that years ago.”

“Then why didn't you tell me to ask her out years ago?” I asked, a little forcefully.