Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) (6 page)

She frowned. "I know what you would say. 'Give it time.' That's what Rick says, and he's my boss, but...it's just...." Her breath caught, and she made sure it didn't come out a sob. She wanted to admit that she was only getting frustrated to hide from the fact that she was lonely. Or homesick. Whatever. She wanted to tell him she missed him. But, as she reminded herself for probably the tenth time that day, she knew how a cop behaved, and it wasn't like a scared little girl. Her dad didn't need to hear about all her little problems.

She glanced at her watch, just for something to do, and said, "Oh, holy cow. It's late, Dad, and I've got work to do tomorrow." She smiled. "Thanks for keeping me company." She wished for an answer, one real word of encouragement, but it was a voicemail after all. Her smile turned sad, but didn't go away. "Goodnight, Dad," she said. "Goodbye."

The click from Hathor let her know the line was dead. She glanced at her watch again, and thought about going shopping anyway. Someplace would be open. She didn't really want to anymore, though. She contacted the front desk to request a welcome basket, and the system told her one was waiting in her mailbox. She grabbed her handheld, pulled up her apartment details, and found a map to the mailboxes, right down on the other side of the courtyard.

The welcome basket was a cardboard box with a handful of necessities. She dumped it in a pile on the kitchen table, grabbed the soap and shampoo, and headed back to her room. She stripped down and threw her clothes in the wash, then settled in for a long, hot shower. Afterward, she had just time to whisper a word of thanks to Hearth for picking an apartment with a luxuriously soft bed before sleep wrapped her up and carried her away.

The next morning she learned that the complex's community cars weren't available for round trips over half an hour, inside business hours, but the nearest subway station was less than a quarter of a mile away. She caught a train downtown, and stepped through the doors into Ghost Targets ten minutes to eight. The other part of her dad's old law, "Always beat the boss to work," and she'd certainly managed it, but before the morning was over she found herself wondering why she'd bothered.

She spent two hours digging for dirt on the victim, anything to suggest a motive. She crawled backward through time, listening in on every conversation Ms. Linson had had on the day of her death (at least, she thought bitterly, every conversation that Hathor cared to remember). Rick stopped by her desk a little after noon to invite her to lunch, but she saw the rest of his team waiting for him—and Reed glaring at her—so she politely declined. As he was turning to go, though, she spoke up.

"Rick."

"Yeah?"

"I, uh...I have a case going before the bench tomorrow. Back home, I mean. Would it be too much to ask—"

"Not at all." He pulled out his handheld and glanced at it, probably checking the calendar. "No, that's perfect, actually. I know you've been chomping at the bit, but we're just swamped here."

"About that," she said, and he must have seen the frustration in her eyes. He threw a glance at Reed and the other three headed for the elevator. Rick finally turned his full attention to Katie.

"Look, kid," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to overwhelm you. Probably shouldn't have dropped a homicide on your first day on the force, but it would have been gathering dust otherwise."

"No," she said. "It's not that. It's just—"

"It wasn't fair of me," he said. "You should be watching over somebody's shoulder, not running blind. I can get you on—"

"Don't," she said. The word came down like a stomped boot, and stopped him dead. He raised an eyebrow in question, and she spoke a little more softly. "I haven't been pulled off a case since I was twenty-six. Don't do that to me. I can handle this."

He chuckled, but she saw a sparkle of pride in his eyes. "Dammit, girl, you've got gumption. Don't worry about it. It's the software that's the trouble, it's the tricks of the trade, and we're the only ones in the world who do what you need to learn. It's not a personal judgment."

"I know," she said, "but—"

"Reed told me you two talked yesterday. He told me how worried you are, and I should have known better than to ask it of you."

"No," she said, suddenly forceful again. "I want the case, Rick."

His eyes rested on hers for a moment, and then he smiled. "I told him you'd say that. Okay, girl. If you want it, the Little Rock case is still your baby." He raised a hand and pointed at her, mock serious. "But you do your civic responsibility. Take care of that New York case tomorrow. Maybe by the time you get back I'll have a minute to breathe." He started to turn away, then looked back at her. "You sure you don't want something for lunch?"

"No," she said. "I'm fine."

He shrugged. "Suit yourself." Half an hour later he brought her back a turkey sandwich. It sat cooling on her desk while she spent the afternoon eavesdropping on Linson's private life. She went back four days, peeking in on private calls, business conversations, Hathor requests. Nothing seemed out of place. The young woman was having money problems, but nothing exciting—just the sort of problems college girls always have. Her brother's wife was pregnant, and if it was a girl they were going to name it after her, and that tidbit had covered most of conversations for the time period. The company was doing well, but not quite well enough to keep a Junior Administrative Officer busy for eight hours a day. It was a quiet little life.

And then, all of a sudden, it was over. Nothing Katie could find made that any clearer. It all seemed surreal. Usually, once she had a murder victim, she could look in the database and find a big red arrow pointing at a suspect. Then, from there, she could follow the glowing lines between the murderer and the victim, seeing (usually from days out) the intersecting paths that would end in the victim's death. Tragic though it might be, there was an air of destiny about it all that made the crime almost mechanical.

A bug, certainly. A flaw in the system that had to be fixed. But not...random. Oh, sure, in the first moments after a murder, it always seemed random, but Hathor had cleared all that up. Almost always, the crime was set in motion long, long before it actually occurred.

She stopped the playback, freezing Ms. Linson in the middle of a call to her best friend from high school, who had just gotten a job at Disneyland and called to gloat about it. Katie shook her head. For no reason whatsoever, this girl was about to die.

Then she saw the clock on her desktop: after six already. Her day had burned up like a candle, listening to real-time audio streams. She put together a request to compile and transcribe the rest of the victim's voice audio for the previous week, then closed down her desktop and headed for the door. She could skim through that faster, anyway.

Katie stayed home Tuesday night and watched a movie, but she missed most of the details. Curled up on her loveseat, she spent the whole evening scrolling through chat transcripts on her handheld. At a quarter past ten, she glanced up and realized the TV screen was black, had been for an hour. She shook her head with a chuckle, put away her handheld, and headed to bed.

An hour passed, her mind buzzing here and there, and finally she grabbed the headset from her nightstand and hooked it over her ear. "Hathor, connect me to Dad," she said. She left him a forty-minute message, laying out her day for him, bit by bit, and as she talked it through the pieces fell into place. She had to fight a yawn when she finally said, "Goodbye," and she fell asleep with the headset still on.

Wednesday she woke up early, dressed in her most authoritative outfit, and had a bowl of dry cereal before she started her day. Then she checked her watch and checked her schedule again. "Hathor, get me travel details to the supreme court in Brooklyn, now."

The long-familiar voice of Hathor said in her ear, "From home to Supreme Court, Brooklyn, New York, now, by private car, will take two hours, twenty-one minutes. Conditions are optimal. Weather in Brooklyn, New York—"

Katie shook her head, confused, and interrupted. "Hathor, stop. Details to my handheld." The voice fell silent while Katie darted over to her loveseat and tossed aside throw pillows until she found her handheld. Her travel itinerary waited on the screen. She'd set it up last night, booking a seat on the train at eight o'clock. Now, the reservation showed as canceled, replaced by an order for a private car to pick her up at her apartment. She pulled up details on the reservation, and found it paid on the Bureau's account.

She rolled her eyes as her headset buzzed. Rick's voice boomed, "Pratt."

"Yeah," she said. "Connect him."

"Hey, kid," Rick said, and she could hear his grin. "Did you get my present?"

"You don't have to do that. The state of New York is happy to pay for my travel. The chief just wanted me to express his gratitude to you for giving me the day off—"

"Oh, forget that," Rick said. "Due diligence and all, I checked on your court date. You didn't tell me it was one of those piss-ant confidence appeals. I
hate
 that stuff. The whole Jurisprudence Project was set up to avoid exactly that sort of wasteful motion."

"Well, yeah—"

"So I amended your credentials on the court docket. You're testifying as a Federal Specialist now. Tell your chief he can keep his gratitude. Just show the defense attorney for the clown he is, would you?"

"Umm...thank you, sir?"

"Stop that," he said, a touch of his irritation still in his voice. "Call me Rick. Besides," he said after a moment, "Craig would've blocked access to half our services from public transport. If I put you in a private car, I can keep you on the clock."

"Ah ha," she said, laying on the sarcasm thick, for his sake. "Well, thanks a lot, Rick." He chuckled, but she really was grateful for his forethought. Hours on a train with nothing to do would have killed her.

Rick said, "Gotta go. Luck in court. See you bright and early. Out." The line went dead before she could answer.

Katie checked the itinerary again. She had another half hour before the car would arrive. She spent it all working on the Little Rock case, and she was still buried in her notes, standing curbside in a light drizzle and tapping on her touch-screen, when the car pulled up and called her name. She climbed right in and blacked the windows.

Half an hour down the road, she tore herself from her case and pulled up an old case file. Another homicide, but this one had been easy—seventy-seven percent out of Jurisprudence at the time of death, and eighty-nine percent before she'd slapped the cuffs on him the next morning. God bless him, he'd been a talker. Prints on the murder weapon had sealed the deal: ninety-two was enough, by law, to get a bench judgment against him, and the judge had handed down a sentence after twenty minutes of consideration, less than twenty-four hours after the crime.

She sat back in the seat and closed her eyes, recalling the details of the case. The appeals argument was a shallow one, a fallacious (and probably deliberately so) misstatement of the Jurisprudence numbers, and any judge with a functioning brain would understand that. Jurisprudence didn't make mistakes, after all. She grumbled, "Connecting the dots," and cleared the notes from her screen. A moment later, she pulled up the Little Rock file again.
That
 was a mystery.

The car deposited her at the courthouse fifteen minutes before she was scheduled to take the stand. She stepped out of the car, and back into her real life.

It was like a punch to the stomach, the intense familiarity. Like any day of the week, climbing out of a cab to make a court date. She knew both of the lawyers presenting their cases upstairs. Hell, she knew most of the lawyers in the building, and half the judges. She waved to the security guard at the door as he nodded her through. This was her town.

She got a voice memo in the elevator from Eva, the prosecutor. "Glad you could make it. We're meeting with the judge in quarters, office three-oh-two down the hall on your left. Running a couple minutes fast, but you'll be fine." She could hear Taylor making her specious case in the background, and she shook her head. Taylor knew how to sell it, but the judge on the case was still in his forties so Katie wasn't much worried.

She pushed open the door in time to hear Eva announce, "Your honor, I'd like to introduce Special Agent Katie Pratt, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and formerly of the Brooklyn PD. She's the arresting officer on the case, and came up from Washington this morning to lend her expertise."

Katie took the introduction in stride, nodded to the judge, and said, "Sorry I'm late, Your Honor. I thought this was a court hearing."

The judge was a wiry man with an academic look to him. He leaned back in his desk chair, almost lounging, and measured Katie with sharp gray eyes. After a moment he shrugged. "Seemed like a fairly routine appeal, I figured we could handle it here and leave the courtroom free for more pressing business."

Katie didn't show her frown. That was a win, right there, but they hardly needed her for that. She nodded to him, then looked uncertainly to Eva. "What can I help you with?"

The prosecutor smiled reassuringly. "Defense has argued the unfairness of a bench judgment against a criminal with a ninety-two percent confidence. Specifically, she suggests that treating a ninety-percent confidence as a guilty verdict implies one in ten of our convicts are, statistically speaking, innocent." In spite of the informal setting, Eva was addressing Katie as though she were on the witness stand, and that eased Katie's nerves. She knew how to respond to that. "Can you comment on this?"

"Of course." Katie turned to the judge. She hadn't been there for defense's speech, but she knew how it had gone. This was, as the judge had said, a routine argument. "A Jurisprudence confidence score is
not
 a raw assessment of guilt. Despite how it might sound, a ninety percent confidence against a suspect does not mean there's a ninety percent chance he's guilty."

She clasped her hands in front of her. It was easier to make the speech from the comfort of a chair. She felt like a professor lecturing, and that role had never suited her. "Rather, the Jurisprudence Project specifically compiles and analyzes available, definitive evidence against a suspect. The necessary and relevant criteria for individual crimes are...complex, but they are set in case- and trial-law. A one hundred percent confidence represents a theoretical, perfect preponderance of evidence against a victim—a case in which every possible incriminating record is available and positively identified, usually with an unbroken history of years. In fourteen years in law enforcement, I've never seen a perfect confidence. I am assured it's a technical impossibility."