Marked (23 page)

“Mmmph!” Cherabino yelled at the closest guard.

He sighed, and ripped off the duct tape over her mouth all at once.

“—of a
bitch!
” she screamed. “That hurt, damn it.”

“Really? Glad to hear it. Stop squirming and I'll cut you free.” He pulled out a knife and cut at the duct tape, not very carefully. Cherabino stood absolutely still.

The assistant took a breath, ready to deliver a speech, but I cut him off.

“Yes, yes, we know. Come back and you'll kill us. Very dead. We get it. Can we go now?”

The assistant stared.

I tilted my head, implying “bring it on.” My mind had recharged, and there were five people here total. None of whom had license to kill me. “After the fourth death threat in a week, it's getting old. I believe you, don't get me wrong, but I'd like to skip the speech if it's all the same to you. She's going to be hell to get home.”

One of the guards went for his gun—

And I had him out cold on the ground. Everyone else's guns came out, pointed at the ground, the guards nervous as hell.

“Anybody else want to try me?” I asked.

A twitch—and the guy on the right dropped his gun. Outright. It hit the concrete with a
clatter.

“That's right,” Cherabino said, hands free, and stalked over to me.

“You're going to be impossible, aren't you?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

•   •   •

“Keys.”

“No way.”

“Keys or I leave you here.”

She handed me the keys. “You seem . . . pissed off.”

I slid into the driver's side of the police car and opened the door for her from the inside. Kept an eye on the guards lined up behind us. Everybody still looked wary, but that could change soon.

She was in and seat-belted, and I was driving. Away. Quickly.

“Is Jacob okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. He's been at home all day with the tutor.” She felt like an idiot for jumping in so quickly, but on the other hand, if her message was received . . . “The future can be changed, right?”

“Usually,” I said.

“Then he won't mess with Jacob.” That made it worth it, even if she lost her job for this.

I kicked the engine into higher gear and got on the right on-lane for Northside Parkway's skylanes. “We don't know that. All we know is that we've pissed off a very dangerous man.”

“You're not going to Decatur,” she said.

“No, I'm not.” I moved up into the skylanes, feeling okay about driving despite the fact that it had been a while. I was tracking all the other cars, hyperaware of even the birds coming through above me. I was pissed off, and the adrenaline was flowing.

“You're not going to tell me where you are going?”

I debated what to say. “Fiske said Wright wasn't one of his kills. I believed him. And then he said Wright was double-crossing Ruffins. There's . . . We need to check to see where Ruffins was during the murder. And we need to do it now.”

She processed that for a second, with conflicting emotions. I must have leaked information over the Link, because she finally settled on “You're still going to the Guild tomorrow. You're showing up for your own funeral on time and with a smile?”

“I'm going to fight,” I said. “And I have an idea.”

It took me a moment to identify the emotion coming off her—it felt faint and far away. Pride. It was pride.

“Stop that,” I said. “Seriously, stop.”

“What?”

I went through a dozen scenarios and couldn't find an explanation that made sense. “Nothing.”

She closed her eyes. “You're going to the Midtown TCO office, aren't you? For Ruffins.”

CHAPTER 20

“Look, Adam,
I
appreciate the fact that you had a heart-to-heart with a charming guy who happened to—”

“Are you calling me an idiot?” I asked.

“No.” She changed tactics. “Fiske has every reason to lie to us, and his charm isn't—”

“Stop. I've interviewed how many thousand suspects at this point? I can tell the difference between the charm and the truth, Cherabino. Plus he wasn't all that charming.”

“It's very likely he himself ordered the—”

“Seriously, Cherabino, don't treat me like an idiot. You think I'm falling for honeyed words? From somebody on that level? Which, by the way, he didn't bother with and I wouldn't fall for. I know better than that. You may not have been there, but I can do interviews. He was telling the truth as he understood it. I just want to check.”

That sat in the car between us for a good while as I navigated the skylanes with the other, homicidal drivers around me. In Atlanta, turn signals were information, not a request, and you were advised to react accordingly. I reacted, decelerating to allow the ugly green flyer to pull in front of me. He kept going across four lanes of traffic, of course.

“You've never ever been wrong about the lying thing? Nobody's ever lied to you and gotten away with it? Ever?”

I made a low sound of frustration in the back of my throat. “I strongly doubt this guy's good enough to lie to a telepath convincingly.”

“Even so. We check and we double-check before we accuse some officer who's only doing his job. Especially if you're operating out of some stupid theory. We can't go to the TCO office. It won't turn out well.”

“What? Why not?” I swerved to avoid a driver with engine trouble who was losing altitude into my flight space. Fortunately he had his screamers on and everyone else was swerving too. I pulled us back in an even flight space and remembered why I hadn't driven in Midtown even when I could drive. “What did you say?”

“You show up at this guy's work with accusations, and either they're not going to respond well or they're going to take you all too serious. Either you stall the inquiry or you tip him off or they take over, and none is good for us. I'm not implicating somebody who's just doing his job.”

I made another frustrated sound while I thought it over. “Cops are touchy bastards.”

“I know.”

But I took the next exit, to look for a pay phone, like her mind was suggesting quietly.

“You know that stunt at Fiske's house was stupid,” I said. “We could have both gotten killed.”

“Maybe. But it's Jacob. He was screwing with my family. You can't screw with a cop's family and get away with it. He knows now that I'm paying attention. He knows there's a line. He knows I know where he lives and how he works.”

“He got the better end of that deal.”

“Him spending all that time with you? And then you handling the guards at the end? Yeah, he got his bit, but he's going to remember today. That's all I wanted. He needs to hesitate before he does anything like that again. Bransen will back me up. Maybe.” But inside, she wondered, and regretted.

“We probably changed the future, right?” she asked me finally. “Kept him from hurting Jacob, for sure?”

“I don't know. There's no way to know yet.”

She made another frustrated sound. “Well, at least this won't impact the task force. None of the critical evidence is a direct tie to me. Fiske will go down either way.” Even if she got fired, her brain said. And she was alive. “We had to have changed the future. Jacob's safe. That's what matters.”

I finally agreed, because she expected me to. I still wasn't sure why she'd charged in like that. But what was done, was done.

•   •   •

Cherabino hung up the pay phone and trudged back to the car. In front of us, the back of the Fox Theatre rose, ancient and soot-stained, its lights still cheerful after so many years.

The car door opened, and she slid into the seat.

“So?” I asked.

She sighed. “His supervisor took my credentials. Ruffins was supposed to be in Montgomery that day. They pulled his tracking records and he was actually in the area of the victim's house.”

“Tracking records?” I asked.

“You really think the government gives him all those shiny toys to play with and doesn't keep track? There's still satellites up there, for all people don't want to talk about it. There's still a big independent space station with full technology. And he's got more than a few things tattooed on that arm of his.”

“There wasn't a flag on it immediately if he wasn't doing what he was supposed to?”

She shifted in her seat. “There's professional courtesy. There's trust. There's a guy doing his job who doesn't need his arm joggled every time he makes an independent decision. I don't like this, Adam. It doesn't prove anything, and that's all they know.”

“Fine,” I said, “but we're going back over the evidence with a fine-tooth comb. There's something there. I can feel it.”

Cherabino sighed. “I already called Michael to have him pull the files. I hope you're expecting to work late tonight.”

•   •   •

We'd taken over one of the empty conference rooms, and I was going through every piece of paperwork in the room and driving Cherabino and Michael to do the same. There was something we were missing.

Hours passed, until Cherabino sent Michael out for food.

My hands landed on the fingerprint reports from the crime scene again. Ruffins, again, but he'd admitted to being there several times. Wright had been his informant.

I paged through them, eyes blurry, frustrated and feeling like Cherabino had won. It probably was Fiske. I'd probably been lied to.

I stopped, and went back. There. One of Ruffins's prints. On the inside of the front door, like he'd hit it on his way out. The lab tech had grouped this print with all the others identified as Ruffins's—but this one was in blood. The victim's blood, in all likelihood.

It had been grouped in with all the others.

“I found the smoking gun,” I said.

Cherabino came over. “Oh,” she said, when she saw it. “Well, crap.” She sighed. “Let me talk to Bransen.”

•   •   •

An hour and a half later we were in Bransen's office, and Paulsen was sitting in a guest chair on his side of the table.

“The evidence is damning if you know where to look,” Cherabino said, and with gravity laid out what we had, including Fiske's assertion that Wright had double-crossed Ruffins, and the sudden appearance of the extra money in Wright's account about the same time.

“Why were you there talking to our primary suspect in a major transagency case this morning?” Paulsen asked in her quietest, most dangerous voice. She was looking straight at me.

“If I don't work for you anymore, you don't get to yell at me anymore,” I heard myself say, and then looked down.

“Point taken,” she said.

Cherabino's spine straightened. “As I told Sergeant Bransen, I received a credible threat against a member of my family and responded accordingly. We have discussed how the department would be better served through the use of normal channels and backup.”

“As well as sufficient patience and the use of protective duty personnel and case-building rather than stupidity,” Bransen added wryly.

Cherabino added, “Whether or not my information was sufficient to justify my actions is a question for the inquiry hearing. Right now we need to talk about Ruffins. What are we going to do?”

Paulsen thought. “This isn't a good situation. Are you certain the prints aren't cross-contaminated?”

“Certain, ma'am,” Cherabino said.

“We're on dangerous ground accusing any member of another agency,” Bransen said.

“That's why I came to both of you,” she said. But Paulsen was already on another line of thinking. She asked me, “You were there at the scene. Does Ruffins fit the profile of what you saw and felt?”

I went back over that crime scene in my mind, in detail. “The anger, the need for control, the carefulness at the end—it could be Ruffins. The mind wasn't inconsistent with what I know about him. But he's . . . he has a device that lets him tell when I'm around, and more so, when I'm reading him. I can't get any information from him without a big red mental flag pointed right at me. So I haven't read him much. I don't have . . .” How to explain this to a normal? “I don't have familiarity with his mind. You put him in a lineup with similars, his mind could be any one of them.”

“So the only thing we have definitive is this fingerprint in blood,” Paulsen said.

“All the circumstantials support it,” Cherabino said.

“Ruffins's testimony and informants are a major portion of the case against Garrett Fiske,” Bransen said quietly. “It's the result of countless man-hours and expense by this department and other agencies. Furthermore, his testimony and connections are key to prosecuting several of the hijackers we arrested a few weeks ago. The first of their trials starts in three weeks. We need to take a moment here and look at what we're doing.”

“It's a murder, sir. With an ax,” Cherabino said. “As near as I can tell, to cover up evidence and keep this man's life work from being shared the way he felt it should be. Are we really comfortable letting a fed—with all the powers of a fed—wandering around with this kind of crime and violence on the table? Even if we're only ninety percent certain?”

Paulsen shook her head. “Let's think this through. We move on this, we don't move on this, either way there's injustice to somebody. The question is, which set of injustices serves the people better?”

“It's murder, sir.”

“There's no statute of limitations on murder, Isabella.”

“You can't seriously intend to wait on this one,” I said.

“It would let us move forward on the Fiske trial. Revisit the rest of this later.”

“Think about that, sir. Garrett Fiske has the kinds of lawyers who are more than willing to drag all of us through the dirt on the slightest excuse. Cherabino and I just talked to him. I think it's likely he knows that Ruffins committed this crime. Cherabino says all of the critical evidence for the task force was obtained through him.”

“The case is dead in the water either way,” Bransen said. He seemed composed outwardly, but internally he was burning angry at having Fiske slip out of his hands.

Paulsen looked at Bransen. Bransen looked at Paulsen.

“Fiske will wait,” Paulsen said, but her mind felt heavy all of a sudden, like she stood up under impossible pressure.

A spike of mixed emotions from Cherabino, quickly controlled.

“He's waited this long already. He'll wait a little longer until we get our house in order,” Paulsen said. “I'll find the budget somehow.”

Bransen stood.

Paulsen followed suit, as did the rest of us. She looked at me, specifically. “Adam, good luck tomorrow. We're . . . Well, good luck.”

I read her then, mentally, even though most of the time I didn't feel comfortable doing so. I read her and found determination, and regret. The largest regret was that, even if there had been something she could have done for me now, she wouldn't. She liked me, and regretted, but I had made other choices.

I turned and left.

The vision . . . in the little downtime I'd had, I kept thinking about that vision, that boy. Was it Jacob? I didn't know. I couldn't see him.

It might not matter anyway, not if the Guild took me out tomorrow despite my best efforts.

•   •   •

I did Cherabino's paperwork with Michael while I waited for the arrest to go through. An hour into it, her phone rang.

I picked up the phone.

The dispatcher's voice came through: “Adam Ward?”

“That's me.”

A clicking sound, and one, droning line of the public service announcement that was the hold music.

Then: “Don't hang up, Adam.” It was Kara, sounding torn up.

“I'm in the middle of something. Can I call you back?”

“The flyer crashed. The private long-distance flyer—the one carrying the Council members back from the international conference. There's some evidence against . . . They're saying Charlie did the sabotage, Adam.”

My old classmate turned Councilman. “That's impossible. Charlie's the straightest shooter I've ever met.” I looked at the clock. “Does this mean my hearing is rescheduled?” I had a moment of corrected priorities. “I assume everyone got out?” With teleportation the norm, it seemed unlikely that—

“They all died, Adam. Every last one.” She took a shuddery breath. “We haven't had this many Council members die at the same time in the entire history of the Guild. We'll have to promote people, find people, do an emergency election, and even then I don't know—”

I had a sudden, horrible thought. “What political group were they in?” I looked at Michael, who had looked up and was now, carefully, studying paperwork.

“Oh, look, I need coffee,” he said, and left. I let him go.

Kara was still saying nothing.

“What political group were they in?” I asked. “Guild Firsters? Cooperists? Family groups? Independents? Who, Kara?”

“They were all Cooperists but one. And she was no fan of Guild First.”

I took a breath. “So, in one fell swoop, the entirety of the Council is favorable to Thaddeus Rex.”

“Diaz isn't.”

“What is his health like?” I asked.

She was silent.

“The only other one standing up is who, Charlie?” I looked into the face of the abyss that was Guild politics. “Doesn't it seem coincidental that he's accused now?”