Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  The photos flashed by too quickly to see. A minute or so of suspense later, Checker sighed. “No matches, kids. We’ll go national. This might take a minute.”

  “Somehow I’m doubting she’s a licensed driver at all,” Tresting said.

  I slouched in my chair. “So we’re back to square one.”

  “Not so fast, Cas Russell,” Checker crowed. “You gave me a photo! Do you have any idea what I can do with a photo? If she doesn’t show up in a DMV photo, or a passport photo, or on a private security ID or a student ID or in a high school yearbook photo—well, it doesn’t matter, because as we speak I am tracking her from your meet.” He gave me another manic grin. “See? You can never disappear from me!” And then, God help me, he threw back his head and gave a textbook evil laugh.

  “You’re a maniac,” Tresting said with affection.

  “Really?” Checker was still grinning. “What gave it away?”

  To be honest, I was getting slightly uncomfortable with the knowledge the little hacker had my photograph and voiceprint now, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I tried to stay focused on the case. “Okay. What can we do in the meantime?”

  Tresting stretched, yawning. “Wait and get some sleep? Unless you know of anything else we can pursue.”

  I thought of Dawna’s humiliating ability to get into my head. I thought of the men in dark suits at Courtney Polk’s house. I thought of Anton’s workshop erupting into flames, the heat searing my skin.

  I thought about how much I still didn’t know about Arthur Tresting and his information guy.

  “Nothing else comes to mind,” I said.

  The headache continued to pound away behind my eyes.

  Chapter 10

  “Wait,” I said, as Tresting moved to sever the connection. “I still want to see your data, remember? Whatever led you two to believe in the whole Pithica conspiracy in the first place.”

  Checker laughed. When I only stared at him stonily, he said, “Wait, really?”

  “Yes, really. Is that funny?”

  He waved his hands limply. “It’s just, you know, there’s a lot of it.”

  “So?”

  He glanced at Tresting. “Okay.”

  “And I want to see your algorithms, too.”

  He crossed his arms. “Those are my intellectual property.”

  “Then show me on Tresting’s machine now,” I said. “I don’t have a photographic memory.”

  “They’re not very understandable, you know,” he shot back. “I refuse to document my code.”

  “I’m very smart.”

  Checker’s jaw jutted out, and I thought he was going to argue further, but instead he broke eye contact and stabbed at his computer keys. “Fine. Knock yourself out.”

  The other monitor filled with dense programming code. I scrolled, letting my brain relax into it, my headache finally dissipating as the mathematics rose in ghostly shadows, the edges of the algorithms sharpening and focusing into the barest outlines of a skeleton. The code wasn’t a language I recognized—possibly it was one Checker had invented himself—but the structure was familiar; it filtered through my senses and solidified, the commands looping and interlocking through layer after layer of abstraction, the elegant constructions jigsawing deep into the program.

  Checker was watching me closely. I ignored him and kept scrolling.

  “Well, I’m going to get some sleep,” said Tresting to no one in particular. “You kids have fun.” He meandered over to a couch against one wall of the office and stretched out, sagging to unconsciousness right away.

  Checker was still watching me through his screen. I pretended to be too absorbed to notice. After a few minutes he turned his attention back to his own machines and began working on something on a monitor out of frame, but he left the video link open and kept glancing over at the camera. I refused to give him the satisfaction of asking any questions.

  Checker didn’t say anything else, but other windows eventually popped up on my screen with notes on the murder they were pinning on Courtney, followed by file after file of data tables. The numbers sorted themselves in my head and fell into place, matching up with variables in the algorithms until the statistical analysis unfolded before me. Yet another document appeared a short time later, this one tracking instances of the “Pithica” reference.

  Tresting and Checker had started with the journalist’s research. Reginald Kingsley had been considered top-notch in the journalism community, Pulitzer Prize and all. He’d had his fingers in a lot of different stories, and at some point he’d started keeping a log of mysteries that didn’t quite add up, events that didn’t jive or were short a solid explanation. He had been in Los Angeles researching an article when he reportedly decided life just wasn’t worth it anymore.

  Kingsley’s suicide had made a big splash in journalistic circles, the newsworthiness exaggerated by his wife Leena Kingsley’s insistence that it was one hundred percent definitely faked. Other than her sworn declaration her husband wouldn’t have taken his own life, she cited two grammatical mistakes in his supposed suicide note as her proof. The “mistakes” weren’t anything I would have recognized as wrong, and I understood why segments of the press had started to mock Dr. Kingsley’s adamant assertion that her husband never would have split an infinitive in a hundred billion years and this should be proof of a nefarious cover-up.

  It turned out the suicide (or murder) had happened almost six months ago now and had led to a lot more tragedy than a wife losing her husband. Dr. Kingsley, who had been a professor of Asian studies at Georgetown and had just been tapped as a Foreign Service Officer by the White House when the tragedy struck, developed a reputation as slightly mad, and her previously illustrious career fractured and tanked. She became obsessed with solving the mystery of her husband’s death, moving herself and her son out to Los Angeles permanently after losing her State Department commission and resigning her professorship. Once the LAPD threw her out as a distraught crackpot enough times, she hired multiple private investigators, but from the file, I gathered Tresting was the only one who had stuck it out and given her story any credence.

  Tresting had gone back through every story Kingsley-the-husband had been working on, systematically analyzing lists of possible enemies and one by one eliminating them all as suspects in his murder. And then, with Checker as his computing partner, he dove into evaluating Kingsley’s journal of inconsistencies.

  I skimmed the entries. A senator making an about-face decision on a key issue. The FBI discarding a star witness and screwing themselves out of a titanic RICO takedown. An entire notorious human trafficking ring simultaneously deciding to turn themselves in to the police. Tresting’s notes showed a massive amount of legwork—phone calls and meetings and tracking people down—but he had reached no conclusion other than that he had stumbled into the Twilight Zone.

  The strange cases went back years, and in a statistically significant percentage, Checker’s digging had found one common thread: the word “Pithica.” Scraps of memos, snatches of conversations, a whisper of a whisper with six degrees of separation from the actual event…but a connection.

  Checker had tried researching the word. Like Anton, he had discovered a few blink-and-you-miss-it references to a shadowy government project in scattered classified documents. Unlike Anton, however, he’d also found a few brushes with CIA paperwork, including a comparison to a covert ops project codenamed Black Gamma, which a notation in Checker’s colorful hyperbole explained was “well-known for collapsing spectacularly in the faces of its creators.” Pithica had been a failure, too, then? That didn’t seem to match up with the rest of the data, Pithica’s ghostly reach appearing to affect events from the local to the national to the global.

  I sat back and rubbed my eyes. Tresting’s wild conspiracy theories were becoming a lot harder to dismiss.

  Checker swore softly, interrupting my thoughts. “Arthur. Wake up,” he said.

  I turned to call to Tresting,
but the PI had woken at the sound of his name. He came back over to stand behind me. “What is it?”

  Checker reached out and smacked the side of a screen I couldn’t see. “The GPS tracker. We lost the signal.”

  Tresting cursed as well and dug into his pocket, pulling out the receiver to check for himself. He cursed again. “What happened?”

  “Dunno,” said Checker. “Could be a malfunction. Could be interference. Could be they went down in the Gulf of Mexico.” His attention was still on one of his other monitors, his fingers clicking so rapidly on a mouse that he resembled a telegraph operator. “Me, I’d bet on the cynical side. Even if our girl passed the tracker and it landed in a toilet, it still should’ve kept the signal on the plane for us.”

  Tresting sank into his office chair. “After all that, she disappears.”

  I wondered if my client was dead. I tried not to think about it.

  “They didn’t file a flight plan, but the great circle trajectory would have led over Colombia,” Checker said. “Just saying. It might be where they were headed.”

  “Colombia,” Tresting mumbled. “Right. Of course.”

  I tapped the screenful of data still in front of me. “I haven’t finished going through this. Did you find the connection between Pithica and the drug cartels?”

  Checker leaned back, for the first time looking tired. “Who knows? Sometimes they seem to want to shut the cartels down. Sometimes they keep them from getting shut down. I’m starting to think they’re just Chaotic Neutral.”

  “Doesn’t help us much now, anyway,” Tresting said softly. “A country’s an awful big place to find a few ghosts.” He raised his head to me. “Your gal killed Mr. Kingsley. Got no doubt on that. But me, I wanted whoever put her up to it.” He closed his eyes, his body slumping.

  “Hey, chin up, Detective,” said Checker. “Before you fly into a fit of despair, I might have another lead for you here in the City of Angels. While you have been snoozing, I have been managing, with an impressive degree of success, to track Dawna Polk.”

  Tresting and I both sat upright simultaneously. “What?” Tresting cried.

  “Yes, yes, you may worship me.” Checker affected a statuesque pose, one hand canted in the air. “The line for autographs starts on the right—”

  “Checker!” said Tresting.

  “You won’t even let me bask? You horrible man,” Checker scolded amiably. “I tracked her to an unregistered car, and tracked that car to a parking garage in an office park. Hitting your phone now, Arthur.”

  I waved my disposable at the screen. “What about me?”

  Checker gave me a penetrating stare as if sizing me up. I gazed evenly back. “Fine,” he said, stabbing a button. My phone buzzed in my hand with a new text message.

  I didn’t show how unsettled I was that he had the phone’s number already. After all, I’d called Tresting on this cell; it was the simplest explanation. Checker was not omniscient. He wasn’t.

  “I don’t know what office, but I will soon,” Checker said. “I still have a lot of security footage to fast-forward through, and all the leases and backgrounds of the businesses in the building. Give me a few hours and I’ll narrow it down for you.”

  “Atta boy!” Life flowed back into Tresting. He jumped up with entirely too much enthusiasm and gripped Checker’s screen with both hands. “You are brilliant. Brilliant!”

  “I know,” said Checker with a smile.

  Tresting whipped around to address me. “How you want to play this, then?”

  Part of me was surprised he wasn’t trying to keep me out of things. Not that he would have succeeded, but still. “I say we bust in, bash some heads, and find out what’s going on here.”

  Tresting’s eyebrows lifted. “You really ain’t a detective, are you.”

  “Nope,” I said. “That’s not my job. People tell me where something is, and I get it back for them, no detecting necessary.” It was almost true; every so often I had to do research for a case, but rarely much. Clients hired me for the extraction part.

  “I suppose brute force does have a certain elegance to it at times,” put in Checker. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

  “Why, what would you do?” I demanded of Tresting.

  “Usually? Stake it out first. Bug the place. Gather intel without getting seen, have Checker here hack into their systems. Go in undercover if I got to.”

  “Like the delicate approach you used with me,” I said pointedly.

  “Totally different. Lone woman spiriting away my target? Far as I knew, I had the upper hand on that one.”

  “Far as you knew,” I said.

  Tresting shrugged ruefully.

  “Dawna could still be in there,” I argued. “And so far, they’ve been ahead of us. Trying to kill me, taking Courtney, the GPS signal going out—we can’t play this thing safe and slow.” I thought of Anton’s death and the Dark Suits at Courtney’s house, and started to wonder if we should leave Tresting’s office for somewhere more secure.

  Tresting sucked a breath through clenched teeth. “Agreed. Soon as Checker’s milked all the intel he can, my vote is we walk in the front door.”

  “With guns,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Tresting. “With guns.”

  Chapter 11

  Having seen enough of Checker’s data to give Tresting the benefit of the doubt on whether he was stark raving mad—not to mention feeling much more worried about this case and what I’d stumbled into—I elected to get a few hours’ sleep while we waited on Checker’s intel.

  “I think I’ll take a turn on your couch,” I told Tresting. I wanted to be here for any updates.

  “Sure thing,” said the PI. “I gotta make some calls anyway.”

  “How were my programs?” asked Checker as I stood up, a hint of challenge in his voice. “Fun reads? I strive for elegance.”

  I pretended he wasn’t provoking me. “Yeah, impressive. Markov chain Monte Carlo, smart way of doing it.”

  Both men stared. Checker’s jaw had dropped open slightly. “Cas Russell, your hotness level just went up by about thirty percent,” he said finally.

  Score one for Cas, I thought. “I read statistics papers in my spare time. Hey, Tresting, where’s your loo?”

  He pointed, still speechless.

  I used my moment of privacy to text Rio an abbreviated update, sending him the office park address Checker had tracked Dawna to and a quick heads up about our plan to go in. When I came back out, Checker and Tresting were deep in quiet conversation. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard them switch topics when I reentered the room, and I hoped they had been talking about me. It’s satisfying when I make people nervous.

  I stretched out on Tresting’s couch, my hand under my jacket comfortably near my gun, and had a split-second to register that my headache had started to come back before I was asleep.

  I woke to a shouting match.

  Full daylight streamed around the office’s still-closed blinds. The monitors of Tresting’s computer were dark; instead, he was standing behind his desk having a vociferous argument with a short, stocky woman I’d never seen before. She had a round face I might have called cherubic if her eyes hadn’t been blazing with anger, and she was quite well-kept, with neatly styled dark hair, impeccable makeup, and a coat I recognized as “expensive.” I had a hard time guessing her age; I figured it as late-forties-but-looks-younger.

  I sat up and rolled my neck, embarrassed I hadn’t woken when she’d come in—usually I’m a light sleeper. But then, usually I haven’t gone two days without rest.

  “I pay you to keep me updated!” the woman was shouting.

  “That’s what I’m doing now, Doc,” Tresting answered, obviously trying to keep his cool.

  “You found her and then you lost her! You knew where she was and instead you go chasing off after—”

  “That ain’t what—” Tresting tried to cut in.

  “She killed my husband!” she cried.
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  Oh. Leena Kingsley. “I thought you were supposed to be a diplomat,” I said without thinking.

  Kingsley spun to glare at me with the full weight of her attention, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t lurch back a few inches from the fury radiating off her. I remembered belatedly that she’d seen her whole Foreign Service career come tumbling down in flames. Oops.

  Kingsley rounded back on Tresting. “And as for bringing in someone else—”

  “She’s another professional who had information—”

  Nice of him to put that spin on it.

  “California law expressly prohibits a private investigator from sharing any information related to a case without prior consent of the client!” Kingsley snapped.

  “California law also prohibits PIs from trespassing on private property, or drawing firearms on unarmed citizens, or pretending to be anything other than a PI to get information,” Tresting said, crossing his arms. “Don’t believe you’ve expressed any displeasure with me before.”

  I hadn’t known those laws. Wow, Arthur Tresting was one naughty PI.

  “They killed Reg,” Kingsley spat, her voice trembling with fury. “Try to remember that. It may not be personal for you, but finding out what happened is the single most important thing in the world to me. Have you ever loved anyone, Mr. Tresting? If so, try to put yourself in my shoes.”

  She spun on her heel and stalked out of the office. Tresting slumped into his chair, his head sagging.

  I thought Kingsley was being a bit hard on the poor man. It was obvious to me he’d been driving himself into the ground investigating this. “Good thing you didn’t tell her you spilled about her case while we were pointing guns at each other,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t have at all, really,” he admitted. “Everything’s gone upside down and backwards. The doc, too. First time I met her, she was the soul of diplomacy, thought I’d never see anything disturb that poise. And now she’s…”