The Fighter

by Elin Peer

  The thirty minutes I had waited for her had given me a chance to think it over: this case could be my chance to show Raven that I respected her. My chance to reach whatever “maybe” meant.

  “Did you hear me, Leo?” Raven stepped closer. “Why do you want to know what I found out? You’re just going to ask me to forget about it anyway.”

  “I was considering helping you.”

  She narrowed her eyes in suspicion.

  “For practice, Raven. We’ll work on this case without telling anyone and I’ll help you solve it. It’ll give me a chance to educate you on my methods, but whatever we discover will stay between us.”

  “That’s not fair,” she protested. “I want everyone to know that I’ve solved the case, and that’s why I want to do it alone.”

  Leaning forward, I spoke in a non-negotiable tone. “I’m not letting you jeopardize the safety of our country. This is a high-profile case. What makes you think that people desperate enough to kill the daughter and son-in-law of the ruler won’t do the same to you or me if we begin asking questions?”

  “So, you think they were murdered too?”

  Inhaling deeply, I let my chest rise and fall. “The first rule of investigating is to never rule out anything.”

  For the next few moments, Raven and I stood in her room not speaking any words but still communicating.

  “Yes or no, Raven.”

  “I didn’t invite you to be part of this investigation.”

  “When I leave your room, we will have reached one of two possible decisions. Either we do this together, or I’ll report you for not following an order.”

  “So now you’re blackmailing me?”

  I shrugged. “At least I’m giving you a choice.”

  Raven’s head fell forward and her hands clamped into fists. “Fine!”

  “Good. Then take me over what you’ve learned so far.” I lifted pictures of what looked like logbooks. “What are these?”

  “Dina had a crush on a guard. I’ve been searching through old logs to find him and it turns out he still works at the Manor.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes.” She explained about every suspect and clue and I listened. “So, you see, I’m curious to see what I can find in Marcus’ box.”

  “All right, then let’s open it, but I’m warning you. It’s not like you’ll find a diary with a list of all the people he murdered and the reasons why. Small girls write diaries, but not Nmen.”

  Picking up a pair of scissors, she began breaking through the sealing of the box. “You don’t know that. Maybe there are some who do it. Hmm, I wonder what you would write in your diary.”

  “That you have to be the slowest person to open that box. How about you give me the scissors?”

  Raven kept cutting the box open with her right hand while pushing away my hand with her left. “I’ve got this.”

  When she finally opened the flaps, we almost banged our heads together to see what was in the box.

  Mostly, it was things that I guessed had been in his office once. A framed picture of Marcus, Erika, Khan, Magni, and two dogs. Another with his friend Mr. Zobel.

  I picked up a heavy marble bust of Marcus Aurelius. He looked as serious as he had in every picture I’d ever seen of the man.

  Some old electronic products came out of the box and I took one of them from Raven, who asked, “What is this?”

  “That’s a burner.”

  It was the length of my underarm and the width of my wrist. “This will print out anything you need by burning the letters or symbols on the paper.”

  “Oh, I have a burner, but it looks different.”

  I turned the burner around in the air. “This one is at least twenty years old.”

  “So is this, I think.” Raven gave me a wristband and when I checked the model number online it turned out to be from 2414.

  “This is thirty-four years old.” I chuckled. “The rumors were true then. Old Marcus was a technophobe.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he died in 2433, Raven.”

  Raven bit her lip like she still didn’t understand.

  I held up the wristband. “In 2433 this wristband was nineteen years old? That’s crazy.”

  “Oh, now I understand. I’ve never been good at math, so I didn’t catch that part.” She shrugged. “It’s unusual, but not everyone wants the newest gadgets.”

  “No.” I was quiet and thoughtful. “But maybe his phobia about new technology can be helpful to us. If we can get access to the information on it, that is?”

  Raven pointed to the burner. “Maybe there’s a log on the last printed papers.”

  “Wow, you’re really serious about being bad at math, aren’t you?” I gave her a smile. “Marcus died eighteen years after Dina. I doubt this burner existed in 2415, around the time of her death.”

  “Ahh, but what if one of his last printed papers was a confession of what he did to her?” Raven tapped her temple with a sly smile. “The first rule of investigation, boss, never rule anything out.”

  She was so bloody cute at that moment that I had to get my brain to stop thinking about all the things I wanted to do with her.

  Raven kept looking through the box while I worked on the burner and the wristband.

  “I’m sorry, Raven, but I think we’ll need an expert to access this. It’s completely dead and I’m not getting anything.”

  “Give it to me.” Raven reached for the wristband and placed it around her wrist. “Maybe it needs heat or movement.”

  “It’s an oldie, so yeah, probably.”

  Raven sat back against the bed tapping on the wristband, but it remained dead. “Well, this is disappointing.”

  “I warned you not to expect too much.”

  She shrugged but kept her eyes on the wristband. “It would have been nice if he had left a confession letter.”

  My laugh made her look up. “I agree. The criminals really ought to think of us poor detectives and make it a bit easier to solve their crimes.”

  Raven smiled back at me. “At least we agree on something.”

  “Come on.” I got up and reached out my hand to pull her up. “We’re going to the station to see what’s hidden on that thing.”

  As we stood by her bed, I couldn’t help a small complaint. “You know what bums me out, Raven?”

  “What?”

  “That all that talk about your bed being the reason you couldn’t invite me in was just an excuse, and so was what happened at my house.” I picked up a picture of the diary that was in my closet. “A part of me wanted to believe that you really came to see and that you enjoyed making out with me.”

  Raven’s eyes fell from my face to my shoulder and her voice was low when she answered, “I did.”

  I scoffed low.

  “Leo, it’s not what you think.”

  I held up a hand to stop her. “You’re an opportunist, Raven, and you worked with what you had. I’m not blaming you. I’m just sad that I got caught up in your net.”

  “What net? I thought you liked making out with me.”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I did or didn’t like. You took what you needed and left me with nothing.”

  Her eyebrows were close together and she bit her lip. “That was never my int…”

  Cutting her off, I moved to the door. “At least now that I know it was all just a hoax, I can focus on my job again.”

  Raven stood with her shoulders low and her arms hanging by her sides. She didn’t have her usual feisty energy, and I had to call out from the door. “Are you coming or what?”

  We hardly spoke on the way to the station and were disappointed to find that our gadget expert had already left for the day. I called him up and he explained how to unlock the wristband and where to find the extractor that we would need to do the job.

  “You’re going to love this.” I gave Raven a smile. “The extractor that we need is stored down in the archive.”
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br />   “Oh, you mean in my room?”

  “Uh-huh. If you want, I could make a purple sign for the door like the one you have at the Gray Manor.” I was trying to make a joke to ease the tension a bit, but Raven stayed serious.

  “Mila made me that sign.”

  “I know. She told me.”

  We were taking the stairs at a run.

  I almost wished that I hadn’t confronted Raven about being an opportunist, since things between us had become stiff and awkward.

  We worked together to extract the information on the wristband. She was cordial and polite, but her wicked humor that I’d come to appreciate was safely packed away. I hated how fast we’d become impersonal, but I didn’t know how to change it.

  “There it is.” The large screen showed a long list of messages, videos, and sound files.

  Raven’s eyes were darting around on the screen. “Can you search for activity around Dina’s death?”

  “When was that again?”

  “March 23rd, 2415.”

  I searched and a list of calls came up. “Looks like these are the unanswered, the outgoing, and the incoming.”

  “Wow, busy time for old Marcus, huh?” Raven was standing while I was sitting, and she let her finger run down the screen. I don’t think she noticed but as she leaned in, she supported herself with a hand on my shoulder. “There’s a lot of unanswered calls from Dina.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so let’s be systematic about this and look from her wedding day, which was March 18th.”

  The first two days there was nothing from Dina, but then there had been two incoming calls on the third day, followed by thirteen unanswered until the day of her death.

  “Did she leave any messages?” Raven asked.

  “If she did, they would have been received as transcribed text messages.”

  We searched but there was nothing.

  “Wait a minute. This wristband is ancient. Maybe the technology worked differently back then. Do you remember anything about this type of wristband?”

  I gave Raven an are-you-serious look. “How old do you think I am? I told you this wristband is thirty-four-years old. I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but I didn’t wear a wristband three years before I was born.”

  Raven rubbed her face. “Okay, let’s just keep searching. What about the videos?”

  We looked through videos on fast forward but except for a few videos of the family it was all from hunting trips where Marcus was filmed with his foot on the head of a large bear or elk that he had killed.

  “What about the sound files?”

  “There’s over three hundred.” I groaned. “I hope you brought some food.”

  “Let’s focus on the ones from the week where Dina got married and died.” Raven pulled a chair over and sat down next to me as I played the first file. The first five were low-quality recordings of meetings where a lot of people spoke at the same time. It was hard to make sense of any of it, except that they were angry and there was a theme of money.

  The sixth sound file had us both sit up straight as the sound of a woman crying came through loud and clear.

  “It’s me again. Why won’t you pick up? How can you do this to me? Am I worth so little to you? Call me, Dad.”

  Raven blinked. “That was her. That was Dina.”

  “I know.”

  “Play the next one.”

  I pressed play and again Dina came through with a brittle voice. “I’m begging you, Dad. Pay Henry the money you owe him. I don’t understand why you would steal it from him. He fought for me and he needs the money to get us out of this tiny apartment. It’s his money, Dad. Please, I’m begging you. Call me.”

  Tears welled up in Raven’s eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about Dina non-stop since I found her file and to hear her voice…” She brushed her hair back. “I don’t know, it’s just very powerful.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t get emotionally attached, Raven. We’re only working on this case for you to learn.”

  “I know that.”

  “Good, because no matter how well you do your job, Dina is still going to be dead.”

  She nodded and gestured for me to play the next ones. There were nine sound files, with Dina growing more and more desperate – from her initial sad and begging tone to the seventh, where she was speaking in a harsh tone.

  “Dad, I know what you did and why you took that money. You are bankrupt! Mom told me, and I would help you, except you already stole my husband’s fortune so I can’t feel bad for you. You’re a thief and a liar. But here’s the thing. I also know that Khan isn’t your son. That’s right, I heard you and Mom talk about it years ago. Since you won’t answer my calls or do the right thing, I guess you leave me no choice than to play dirty too. If you don’t make sure to pay Henry his money, I’ll share that piece of information with anyone who will listen. Just pay what you owe us and I’ll never mention it again.”

  There were two more sound files of Dina making threats and in the last one she made a comment that had Raven and me exchanging a long look.

  “Khan has been trying to get in touch with me. Did you know that? Does he know that you’re not his father? So far, I haven’t picked up, but next time he calls I’m telling him everything unless we have the money.”

  “How old was Dina again?” I asked.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Wow, she is threatening the biggest psychopath in the country like she’s some kind of immortal warrior. What was she thinking?”

  Raven frowned. “Don’t call him that. Everyone has a back story, and you don’t know his.”

  “And you do?”

  Raven gave a sharp inhalation and nodded. “I spoke to Erika, who told me about Marcus and the things that made him a bloodthirsty cynic.”

  “Care to share?”

  Raven told what she had learned from Erika and it made me sit back with my mouth open. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Marcus to see his woman raped like that. If anyone touched yo…” I stopped before I finished that sentence and tried to cover up my slip. “…touched young women without consent, I would kill them.”

  Raven studied me. She had to know I had meant her, but she didn’t say anything. “But not if they touched an older woman?”

  “Yes. Of course. Any man who raped a woman would be dead if I came across him.”

  “Right.” She broke eye contact. “Anyway, all I’m saying is just that Marcus wasn’t always evil.”

  “Fair enough, but apparently he was broke and willing to rob his daughter and son-in-law for a fortune.”

  “According to Michael, who was Henry’s roommate, Marcus only paid one hundred thousand out of the million.”

  I whistled. “Poor Henry shouldn’t have signed up for that tournament. If he had just stayed home, he wouldn’t have had to go through hellish fights in a tournament, only to be cheated out of nine hundred thousand dollars, and shortly after, become a widower, before he was killed himself. Shit, that is a lot of bad luck for one man.”

  “At least, Dina was nice to him. She went against her father on Henry’s behalf.”

  “Yes, she was like a female version of Magni. Fearless.”

  “Do you think Dina and Henry consummated their marriage?”

  Raven’s question surprised me. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because she was so young and he was a stranger to her.”

  I ran my hands through my hair. “Raven, things were different back then. Men like Henry, they…” I trailed off, not sure how to say it.

  “They what?”

  “You’ve mostly been around men who grew up with you at the school, but those men are very different from the rest of us. I mean, I didn’t see a woman for the first time until I was an adult. For someone like Henry, a wife symbolized the unique chance to have a family, and he would have wanted to start it the moment he got Dina to himself.”
r />   “But she was a child.”

  “No, not in his eyes, Raven. Not in anyone’s eyes back then. She was a young woman able to give birth and that was what mattered.”

  “So, you’re admitting that to Nmen, we women are nothing but breeders.”

  I wanted to swallow my own tongue for being so clumsy with my words. “I don’t know if I can explain it right, but you women are the reason we get out of bed in the morning. You are what makes us strive for greatness, you make us push to be the best version of ourselves. You women are the ultimate reward for a warrior and we treasure you as a group and as individuals. A few are privileged to get close to you and those men are admired and envied by all of us.”

  While I spoke, Raven’s features softened. “So, tell me this: if you had won me in a tournament tonight, what would we be doing right now?”

  I licked my dry lips, not sure what she was up to. “You know what we would be doing.”

  Her breathing picked up and her eyes dilated. “How would I know? I’ve never been married.”

  My breathing picked up too, my heart racing as fast as my mind, which was frantically screaming not to touch her and warning about what had happened the last time.

  “Do you want to get married?”

  “Maybe. But it would help me if you could show me what to expect if I do. You are my mentor, after all.”

  I wanted to strip her naked and take her right here on the table, but I found a bit of self-control and looked deep into her eyes. “Not here. All rooms at the station have cameras and although I really don’t care if anyone sees my naked ass, I don’t want anyone to see yours.”

  I transferred everything we needed from the wristband for later use and closed down the system. “We’re going to my house.”

  “Oooh, how exciting.” Raven smiled at me. “Just remember your own advice.”

  “What was that?”

  “Don’t get emotionally attached. We’re only doing this to learn.”

  CHAPTER 17

  One on One

  Leo

  Raven flew with me and called up the security team at the Gray Manor to make sure they didn’t alert her father because of her absence. I didn’t say anything when she programmed her drone to fly over.