Soulminder (25 page)

Blanchard looked at the witness. “You okay, Mr. Holloway?”

He swallowed. “Yeah,” he said, his voice soft.

“You did well, if that helps. I know it was hard for you.”

“I did what I had to do.” He took a deep breath. “I guess we’d better go.”

He walked around the bar and into the aisle, Blanchard sidling down her row to meet him. At the rear of the courtroom the last of the other spectators were just leaving; lengthening his stride suddenly, the witness caught up with them, leaving Blanchard behind. She broke into a jog, caught up as the group pushed open the heavy door.

Without looking back, he let the door swing back on her. She caught it, shoved it open again—

And stepped out into a blaze of light.

“Mr. Holloway?” someone called through the locust clicking of multiple camera lenses. “What can you tell us about the trial?”

Blanchard reached out blindly and grabbed his arm. “Give it a rest, people,” she snapped toward the reporters before he could answer. “You want a mistrial or something? You know there’s a gag order on Mr. Holloway. Come back after the verdict.”

“How about
you
, then, Dr. Blanchard?” someone else suggested. “What do
you
think of the trial so far?”

“No comment from me, either,” Blanchard growled, gripping the arm a little tighter and giving him a push toward the elevator. “Go light up some other corner of the world, huh?”

She stumbled out of the glare, cursing to herself at the spots dancing in front of her eyes. Modern video cameras could record perfectly well in normal background light; the only possible reason for the media to still use those half-sized searchlights was in the hopes of dazzling their victims into saying something they shouldn’t. Blinking away the tears, she turned—

And froze. The man whose arm she still held, the man frowning bemusedly down at her, was not Walker Lamar.

Letting go as if scalded, she looked around her. But it was no use. With a dozen courtrooms and offices simultaneously breaking for lunch, the corridor was filled with hurrying people blocking her view. Holloway was gone.

And he’d taken Lamar’s body with him.

“The first thing you need to do,” Soulminder Security Duty Officer Larry Carstairs said soothingly into her ear, “is to take a deep breath and
not
panic. Breathe; don’t panic. Think you can handle that?”

Blanchard gripped the pay phone a little harder. She would far rather have called in the alarm from the privacy of a stairwell, but she’d forgotten to charge her cell last night and this was all she had. At least there
were
still pay phones here in the annex, where enough poor people and other non-cell users congregated to make them both useful and necessary. “There are situations in life, Carstairs,” she bit out, “where a certain level of flippancy is welcome. This isn’t one of them.”

“You’re taking this way too seriously, Dr. Blanchard,” the other said with that same maddening calm. “This is no big deal—we’ve had witnesses getting away from their handlers ever since these Pro-Witness programs got going. Chances are he just wanted to wander around in the sunlight for a while without someone hanging around reminding him that he’s legally dead. He’ll be back—he knows he needs to be transferred out by twelve-thirty, after all.”

Blanchard gritted her teeth, last night’s nightmare flashing through her mind. The walking dead … “And what if he
doesn’t
come back?” she countered. “You’re not going to find him while you sit there making hopeful noises.”

Carstairs sighed audibly. “Even as we speak, Doctor, there are ten people at both ground level and at upper windows in the process of looking for him.”

“Oh, right,” Blanchard snorted. “Noontime at Ridley Square is a
great
time to go looking for somebody.”

“It’ll be easier than you might think,” Carstairs countered, his calm tone fraying a little at the edges. “Or did you assume that those god-awful powder-blue blazers the Pro-Witnesses wear are somebody’s idea of good taste? You wouldn’t believe how easily those things stick out of a crowd. I don’t tell you how to do your job. Kindly don’t tell me how to do mine.”

Blanchard took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to sound like she meant it. “I just—God, he’s stolen someone else’s
body
.”

“Only borrowed it,” Carstairs said, all soothing again. “Don’t worry, we’ll get him back. Even if the quick and dirty approach doesn’t work, there are other tricks we can try. You might as well come on in—we’ll bring him directly to the transfer room when we catch him.”

Blanchard glanced around the courthouse corridor, already considerably less crowded than it had been five minutes earlier, hoping against hope she’d see her quarry waiting there for her. She needn’t have bothered. “Yeah,” she told Carstairs. “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

“I’ll talk to you then. And really, Dr. Blanchard, try not to worry. I’d be willing to bet you a week’s pay we’ll have him spotted before you even get here.”

It was a bet she should have taken. Leaving the courthouse annex, she hurried across the sun-drenched walkways bordering Ridley Square to the Soulminder building.

To find that the witness was still missing.

“He’s apparently taken off his blazer,” Carstairs grunted, his attention off on something out of range of Blanchard’s intercom camera. “Probably folded it inside-out over his arm—otherwise, we’d have seen
something
through the filters.”

“So what now?” Blanchard asked, fighting hard against the urge to let off something blisteringly sarcastic. Recriminations and blame placing could wait until after they’d found him. Assuming they ever did. “The three-hour limit expires in”—she glanced at her watch—“just under twenty minutes.”

“Thank you; I
can
tell time,” Carstairs growled. “I still think he’s probably somewhere in the general Ridley Square area, but we’ve got someone checking out cab and limo companies anyway.”

“Buses?”

“None of them hit the area since the window opened.”

“How about restaurants?” Blanchard persisted. “I had a witness once who said he’d kill for the chance to taste prime rib again.”

“Already checking them,” Carstairs said. “You got anything on Holloway himself that might be useful? Anything he said or did that might point to where he’s gone?”

“I’ve been trying to think,” Blanchard said, shaking her head. “But so far I’ve come up dry.”

“Yeah. Well, don’t worry about it. Like I said earlier, we’ve got a few other strings to our bow here. They’ll just take a little more time, that’s all.”

Blanchard nodded, fighting against the flood of utter helplessness rising to choke her. “Yes, I understand. What can I do to help?”

“Not much, really.” Carstairs studied her. “On second thought,” he amended, “they could probably use another spotter up on five. Outer corridor—they’ll have some spare binoculars up there you can use.”

Blanchard nodded. It was, she realized, little more than make-work—Carstairs’s people would be far better at this sort of thing than she would. But it would at least give her the illusion that she was doing something to help clean up the mess she’d made. “I’ll be right up.”

In the nine months since she’d arrived at Soulminder Los Angeles, Blanchard had become more or less acclimated to the incredible masses of people that descended upon the Ridley Square park every day at lunchtime from the office buildings surrounding the patch of green. Now, looking down at it from the fifth floor, that original bit of culture shock came back with a vengeance.

“You take that section of the park,” the surveillance chief instructed her, pointing out a rough wedge of Ridley Square bordered by two winding wood-chip paths and the outer sidewalk of the park itself. “Look at everyone already there, and check anyone who comes in.”

“Got it.” Lifting the binoculars to her eyes, trying to calm her pounding heart, she got to work.

The minutes ticked by. There were, probably not by accident, relatively few people in her sector, and all too soon she’d confirmed that Walker Lamar’s face wasn’t among them. “All negative,” she reported to the surveillance chief. “What should I do now?”

“Start on the next sector to the east,” he told her. “We’ve already covered the park,” he added, as if sensing her next question, “but it’s always possible he slipped back in while we concentrated on other areas.”

“Right.”

She’d covered that section, and was just starting on the next, when she heard a sudden quiet intake of breath from the woman next to her. “Got something,” the other announced. “Grid Double-A forty-seven; two-twenty vector.”

“Got it,” the chief said. “Blanchard—that switch on the right side of your binoculars? Push it forward.”

She did so, and to her surprise a faint heads-up grid abruptly appeared, superimposed on the view. “Where was he again?” she asked, searching the grid edges for the identifying letters and numbers.

“Double-B forty-three, now,” the woman beside her said. “Angling toward the Soulminder building, more or less from the direction of the courthouse.”

One look was all it took. “That’s him,” Blanchard nodded, a wave of relief washing over her.

“All right, the ground people are on him,” the chief said. He sounded relieved, too. “They’ll have him in the transfer room in two minutes.” He glanced at his watch. “Nice timing on his part—you won’t even get the satisfaction of chewing him out.”

Blanchard looked at her own watch. Twelve twenty-eight; just those same two minutes until the legal time limit ran out. “Don’t bet on it,” she said grimly, handing him the binoculars and heading for the elevator.

She made it to the transfer room maybe twenty seconds before the witness and his security escort got there. “Holloway, what the hell was
that
all about?” she snarled as they came through the door. “You have any idea how much trouble you’ve just caused?”

She’d been prepared for him to argue back at her. Instead, he avoided her eyes as the security guards hustled him to the table. “I’m sorry, Dr. Blanchard,” he said, his voice as meekly and humbly apologetic as if he were an eight-year-old caught stealing from the cookie jar. “I didn’t plan to run away from you like that—really I didn’t. But when those newsmen grabbed you—well, I just thought it would be nice to walk around in the sun for a while. It’s … you know. My last chance to do something like that.”

Blanchard clenched her teeth hard enough to hurt. Exactly what Carstairs had suggested he might be doing.

And despite her resolve, she could feel her anger melting away into an impotent frustration. How—really—could she blame him for something like that? “I understand. I guess. But you still shouldn’t have done it.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. Well.” He swallowed, his lip twitching slightly as the doctor applied his hypo. “Gotta go, Dr. Blanchard,” he murmured, eyes already glazing over. “Walker needs his exercise.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Holloway,” she murmured. A moment later Michael Holloway’s soul was back in its Soulminder trap, and Walker Lamar’s body was again dead.

She sighed, looked at her watch. Twelve thirty-two exactly. They’d gotten Holloway out of Lamar’s body two minutes late.

“A technical violation only,” the doctor assured her. “Two minutes aren’t even worth anyone slapping our wrists for.”

Blanchard nodded silently. The doctor and techs busied themselves with their work, and a minute later Walker Lamar was back in his own body.

Blanchard stepped to his side, forcing her best imitation of an unconcerned smile. “Hi,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

He blinked at her, then at the ceiling. “About the same as always,” he said. “Fine. I guess.” He focused on her again. “How did it go?”

“Dorfman sounds confident,” she said with a shrug. “Though who can tell what that means with lawyers? So. You ready for lunch?”

“In a little while, maybe.” With a jerk of legs and shoulders he sat up on the table. “I think I’ll take a little walk first—get used to having legs again, you know.”

“Sure.” Blanchard glanced over his shoulder at the doctor. “Actually, I’ve got some things I have to do first, anyway. What do you say I meet you up in the cafeteria at one o’clock or so?”

Lamar seemed to bring his attention back from somewhere else. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. See you then.”

Easing his hips forward to the edge of the table, he touched feet to floor and got his balance. Walking a little unsteadily, he passed between the two security guards still flanking the doorway and left.

Blanchard watched him go. Then, steeling herself, she headed over to the intercom. Somewhere, she knew, there would be a mass of paperwork waiting for her on this one.

It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared it would be. Under Carstairs’s watchful eye she filled out the first wave of forms, accepted with thanks his assurances that his own report wouldn’t blame her for what had happened, promised to be back by two to tackle the second wave of paper, and managed to make it to the cafeteria by ten after one.

Lamar was waiting for her. “I was starting to wonder if you were coming,” he said as they picked up trays and started down the line.

“I had some paperwork to do,” Blanchard told him. “It took longer than I expected.”

He reached over and selected a salad, and placed it on his tray. “You’ve never had paperwork to do right after a transfer before,” he said quietly, making a minute adjustment in the salad plate’s position on his tray. “Something went wrong, didn’t it?”

Blanchard grimaced. She’d hoped to keep Holloway’s little solo run quiet, at least until Lamar had had a little more time to recuperate. “Holloway got away from me at the courthouse,” she told him. “He just had a little time out on his own, that’s all.”

Lamar seemed to straighten up, shoulders hunching as if settling himself more comfortably into his clothes. Or into his body. “What did he—I mean—”

“He was out for barely half an hour,” Blanchard said, keeping her voice as reassuring as possible. “The worst he could have done was get you a little sunburned.”

“Yeah.” The corners of Lamar’s mouth twitched, as if he were trying to smile but couldn’t. “Well … I can tell he didn’t eat, anyway.”