Critical Space

by Greg Rucka

  "I can't help you."

  "Meaning you won't?"

  "Meaning I haven't heard from her, Chris. Leave it at that."

  She turned away from the wall, studying me at my desk. "She hasn't been in touch with you?"

  "You sound like the Feds. No."

  Her frown was brief, gone again when she asked, "Can you tell me how to contact her?"

  "I already said..."

  "That's not what I mean, I'm talking about like, if I wanted to hire her, you know? How would I do that?"

  I gave her a stare that was hopefully more eloquent than everything she'd been ignoring out of my mouth. She met it with a stare of her own, then shrugged and moved back to the couch, gathering up her book-bag.

  "I can figure it out, you know," she said. "Asking you was just the quick way."

  "Chris," I said. "You really don't want to do this. You start trolling for one of The Ten, they'll investigate before they even begin to make contact, and they'll find out who you are. This time, they'll know about the first book, and they'll see you coming a mile away. You'll be lucky if they simply ignore you."

  With her right hand, she adjusted the leather strap on her shoulder, giving me a smile. "Fear is not a reason to not do something."

  "Maybe you ought to examine the source of the fear. Self-preservation is a valid motive."

  "You don't get it, Atticus," Chris Havel said, heading for my door.

  "Chris..." I tried once more.

  "The name of the game is publish or perish," she said as she went out.

  "The nut file," I said, dropping the folder on Bridgett Logan's desk.

  "What does that look like to you?" she asked.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  Bridgett sighed and pointed up. We were in her office at Agra & Donnovan Investigations, and she was slumped in her chair behind her desk, ignoring me and focused on the light fixture that hung above. I followed the direction of her index finger, saw the bowl of frosted glass attached to the ceiling. A tarnished brass bolt secured the fixture in place.

  "A light fixture," I said.

  "Yeah, but what does it look like?"

  "Is this a trick question? It looks like a light fixture."

  "You have no imagination," she said.

  I pushed the file forward across her desk until it was even with her keyboard. It wasn't the thickest nut file I'd ever handled, but it had meat on its bones, and when I pushed it, pages slid out the way playing cards slide from a newly opened deck. "Courtesy New Scotland Yard," I said. "By way of Robert Moore."

  "And how is that SAS bastard?"

  "Ex-SAS."

  "And how is that ex-SAS bastard?"

  "Counting on us to make certain his principal doesn't take harm in our fair city. I need you to start on this right away."

  "We're on the clock?"

  "Lady, I'm here as the man who is subcontracting your services to assist our protective effort, not as the man who is pleasuring you nightly."

  "You think mighty highly of yourself, don't you?" She sat up in her chair, flipping the folder open and beginning to scan the pages. "These have been vetted?"

  I nodded and took the seat across from her. "Moore or one of his detail screens the mail. They don't like what they read, they forward it to the police and the cops take it from there. That's a copy of the official file, with Moore's notations."

  Bridgett kept scanning the pages. "Notes are remarkably free of anti-Irish sentiment so far. You've reviewed this already, I assume."

  "I have."

  "Any in particular you want me to pay attention to?"

  "I flagged the letters that got me twitchy."

  She found the pages I'd marked, removing them from the folder and spreading them out to view side by side, then resting her elbows on the desktop and her chin in her hands. She read carefully. There were four that I'd noted as worthy of a closer examination. Three were sexual, two of them signed and from the same author. Both letters were couched in romantic phrasing until degrading into more disturbing fantasy when the author described what he wanted to do with Lady Ainsley-Hunter. While his descriptions weren't explicitly violent, the tone as each progressed became more aggressive and bitter. The third was written anonymously, a graphically detailed rape-murder fantasy. Scotland Yard didn't think the author of the first two and the author of the third were the same.

  The fourth letter was a vitriolic death threat, in which the writer stated that he had been "close enough to do it" on more than one occasion. That letter also referenced the Jeppeson attempt, saying that, "you can't be protected all the time."

  Bridgett's mouth tightened to a line.

  "Just read the bit about the meat cleaver and the drill, huh?" I asked.

  She nodded and kept reading, moving one hand to open her desk drawer. I thought she might be going for a Hi-Liter or a pen, but she produced a tin of cinnamon Altoids and popped three in her mouth. The tin stayed open on her desk.

  When she had finished reading she separated the two that had been signed. "These worry me the most."

  "Those are the ones postmarked out of Connecticut?"

  "Hartford, yes. Signed, 'Love always, Joseph Keith.' Not Joe, Joseph. We know who the hell Joseph Keith is? Anything on him in here?"

  "No. That's why I'm hiring you."

  She crunched the Altoids in her mouth. "When does Lady Ainsley-Hunter get in?"

  "Monday."

  "Five days."

  "Yeah."

  "Okay, I'll get on this immediately. Have you talked to Special Agent Dude?"

  "Fowler said he'd be happy to take a ride to Hartford with you."

  "I'll call him now," she said, reaching for the phone. "If I head to Hartford, I'll be out of town for a couple days. I'll need you to go by my place and bring in the mail, water the plants. You guys backed up?"

  "It's always like this the closer we get to a deadline. The details begin unraveling."

  She stopped dialing long enough to let me come around the side of her desk and kiss her on the cheek.

  "I should have started on this Keith guy a couple weeks ago," she scolded me.

  "We didn't get the file until this morning. Moore had some trouble getting the copy released to us."

  "It's not enough time, Atticus."

  "It's all we've got."

  "I'm sure that'll be a consolation to Her Ladyship when the shit hits the fan," Bridgett said.

  Chapter 6

  "So where is he, then?" Moore asked.

  "That's the problem," I said. "We don't know."

  There was a slight crackle from the speakerphone as Moore, across the Atlantic, considered what Natalie and I had been telling him. It was the middle of a Sunday afternoon, the day before Lady Ainsley-Hunter would arrive, and Natalie and I were spending it in the office making certain our end of things was in order. In Queens, Dale and Corry were giving the vehicles their final once-overs, and checking that the rest of our gear was ready for action.

  "I thought the FBI was assisting with this," Moore said. "Can't they find him?"

  "They're looking."

  "And?"

  "And they're looking, Robert," I said. "Bridgett Logan and Scott Fowler went to Hartford. They found his apartment, but he wasn't there, and so far the word is that he hasn't been back."

  "Christ."

  There was another silence. I reached for my coffee cup and found the contents ice cold. I drank it anyway.

  "All right," Moore said. "I have to ask, are we just being paranoid?"

  "Hard to say," Natalie said. "Logan did some interviews with the neighbors. Keith was at his residence until sometime early last week. Bridgett went to his place of employment -- he worked for a temp agency, white-collar, secretarial -- and they told her Keith picked up his last check the Friday before last, at which point he told the service he'd be out of town for a couple of weeks."

  "Christ," Moore said again. "Next you'll tell me he owns a rifle."

  "If he does, it's an illegally ac
quired weapon," I said. "According to the FBI, Keith doesn't own a firearm."

  "Good news, I suppose. There more?"

  "Yeah, but you're not going to like it. Bridgett got a look at his apartment..."

  "Legally?"

  "I'm sketchy on the details. He had a lot of literature on Together Now and Her Ladyship. Not a shrine, Bridgett was very clear on that, but a substantial collection."

  "Like what?"

  Natalie consulted her notepad. "Pictures, magazine articles, clippings. Copies of articles written by Lady Ainsley-Hunter. Some of it was recent, including the press release about her appointment from the United Nations."

  The groan that floated from the speakerphone made Moore sound like a disgruntled ghost. "How is that not a shrine?"

  "No incense," I said.

  Natalie gave me a proxy of what Moore's glare must have looked like.

  "Bridgett got a picture of Joseph Keith," I said. "Confirmed it with the neighbors. We've had copies made and the FBI is handling distribution to the local authorities."

  "Is that all?"

  "There's not much more that can be done. Keith hasn't committed a crime, and until he does we can't get a full law enforcement press. Bridgett's been chasing down background on him, but she hasn't found anything in her interviews that sheds more light on what he's up to. We have to work with what we have."

  "You trust Logan?"

  "If there's something to find, I trust her to find it, Robert."

  There was another pause, this one so long that I wondered if we hadn't been cut off.

  "Right, then," Moore said softly. "Professional opinions, if you please. Do we cancel?"

  Natalie's look was pained, and I nodded slightly in agreement. We didn't need to talk about it; each of us knew the other's mind on the subject.

  "Will Her Ladyship accept a recommendation to cancel?" Natalie asked Moore.

  "Not unless we're absolutely certain. Unless we tell her we have definite fears for her safety, she'll insist it's still on. I can pass on our concerns, but all that will serve to do is make her nervous, if not outright frightened. It won't keep her from making the trip."

  "So this is going to be our decision?" I asked.

  "No, for this one, I'm being a bastard," Moore replied. "It's your decision, the two of you. I'm asking you: What's your gut saying?"

  What my gut was saying was that I shouldn't have finished the cold coffee, and I felt myself getting cranky. Whoever the hell Joseph Keith was, he suddenly had the power to dictate not only the lives of me and my colleagues, but of the people who had hired us. I'd wanted this job, wanted to do it and to do it well, and now we were looking at leaving it half-finished all because a possibly crazy man had a crush on a young woman he'd never met, and that maybe that possibly crazy man now wanted to do that same woman harm for reasons known only to him and whatever demons had taken up residence in his brain. We had a handful of circumstantial evidence hinting that Keith was up to something, nothing more than that.

  Natalie was waiting for my answer.

  "We'll see Her Ladyship tomorrow," I said.

  From the phone came the sound of Moore's low chuckle. "She'll be happy to hear it."

  "Are you going to tell her?" I asked.

  "It would be an unnecessary burden at this point," Moore said. "Wish us a safe trip, mate."

  Moore cut the connection on his end and I reached over and switched the speaker off. Natalie finished jotting her last notes on her pad, then set both pen and pad down and stretched in her chair, twisting her torso once to each side with her arms extended high over her head, and finally settling back with a sigh.

  "For a moment, I thought you were going to tell him to bag it," she said.

  "For a moment, I was."

  "And then?"

  "And then I remembered that this is what we're paid to do. If Lady Antonia Ainsley-Hunter wants to come to the Big Apple and see the sights and do good works, our job is to allow her to do that with the least risk possible."

  "It'd be so much easier if the principal would just pay us to lock them in a room and guard them twenty-four hours a day."

  "I favor encasing them in Lucite."

  "Then the principal would suffocate," Natalie pointed out as the phone on my desk started ringing.

  "Yes, but they'd be perfectly preserved." I picked up the phone. "Who is this and why are you calling my office on a Sunday afternoon?"

  Scott Fowler said, "I'm at your door. It is locked. Please unlock it and step outside."

  "And why should I do such a thing?"

  "Your presence has been requested downtown."

  Natalie arched an eyebrow. I told Fowler, "I'm kind of busy."

  "I appreciate that. This is urgent."

  "Urgent how?"

  "Urgent enough that I'm not going to say anything more to you while I talk on a cellular phone, Atticus," Scott said, and his tone had altered, and I heard the change, and suddenly I was really regretting having finished the cold coffee.

  "I'll be right there," I said.

  * * *

  The lights in the conference room had already been dimmed, and at the head of the table, in the acid glow of a laptop's screen, I could see the shapes of two men. The laptop rested beside a small LCD projector, and as we entered, the image of a blue sky with white cumulus clouds appeared on the wall to my side.

  The man working the laptop and projector said, "Mr. Kodiak, please take a seat." His voice was soft but rushed, nearly breathless.

  "What's going on?"

  "You'll figure it out," the other one said. His voice was louder and deeper. "Take a seat."

  I looked at Scott, saw the reflection of the clouds flaring from the lenses of his glasses. He motioned me forward with an almost apologetic look, and I could see from his expression he hadn't expected this treatment, and that he didn't much care for it either. We made for the chairs midway down the conference table and I was pulling out mine when the first voice piped up again.

  "Thank you, Agent Fowler. Please wait outside."

  Scott stopped, wincing into the light, and the shadow from his frown made it appear even deeper. "I'm under orders to baby-sit Kodiak whenever he's in these offices," he said.

  "Please wait outside, Agent Fowler," the second voice said. When he said Scott's last name I caught the edge of a Boston accent. "You're not cleared for this briefing."

  For a second longer Scott seemed willing to argue, then he shook his head slightly and patted my shoulder once. "I'll be outside."

  I stayed standing until he had left and the door was shut.

  "Take a seat, Mr. Kodiak," the second voice said.

  "This is very Tom Clancy," I said. "I'm impressed. Why don't you turn on the lights?"

  "Not yet," the first voice said. "Sit."

  I contemplated staging a minor protest, a stand-in, then realized that would accomplish nothing other than to eventually hurt my feet, and so I finished pulling out the chair and did as ordered. As soon as I was down, there was a soft chirp from the laptop and the clouds and sky disappeared, replaced with a crisp color image of what appeared to be the exterior of some sort of storage facility. The containers were large, painted dark orange, in some sort of compound. The center container had its doors open, and a lot of bright light was shining on the entrance. In the background, above the line of tops of the containers, the sky was the color of an overripe plum.

  "This was taken last night in Dallas," the first voice said. "A rental company called Total Storage. The photograph was taken by the Dallas Police Department."

  There was another chirp; the exterior photograph was replaced by an interior of the container. The colors were vivid but dark, in the way that all crime scene photographs seem under- and overexposed at the same time. The container was large, filled to perhaps half capacity with boxes and crates of varying size. On some of the boxes were brand names I recognized -- Toshiba, Sony, Zenith -- but most were unlabeled. It didn't matter. The boxes weren't the focus o
f the photograph.

  The bodies were.

  There were three of them, men. They looked to be roughly in the same age group, between late twenties and mid-thirties, and all were similarly dressed in the Texas casual I'd seen so much of when I'd been in El Paso. Cowboy boots, jeans, T-shirts. One of them wore a denim jacket. All had been shot.

  The floor was raked slightly on all sides surrounding a small drain set at the center of the container, designed to keep any water that might leak in from pooling near stored objects. The lights shining on the scene made the blood that had flowed to the drain look like tar.

  From behind the projector one of the two coughed, and the laptop chirped again, and the projector put up a new picture, a close-up of a Hispanic man. He had been shot in the head, from the side, and most of the top of his scalp was missing. It looked like he'd taken the bullet at close range, perhaps even point-blank.

  "Joaquin Esteban Alesandro," the second voice said.

  Another chirp, and the Caucasian man was now painted on the wall. Best as I could tell, he'd been shot four times, a tracking line that ran from the sternum up to the center of the face. The grayish white of bone was visible where a couple of rounds had stripped flesh and gore away. A discarded revolver was on the ground near his right hand.

  "Richard Montrose," the second voice said. "And no, he didn't get a shot off."

  The image changed; the last victim appeared on the wall. Unlike the other two, he lay facedown. The exposure was a little dark, but it appeared he had taken a bullet to the base of his skull. Probably while he had been on his knees.

  "Michael Ortez," the second voice said.

  The laptop chirped; the image dissolved into the Hallmark blue sky and white clouds once again.

  "Never heard of any of them," I said.

  "We doubted you had," the first voice said. Each time he spoke it sounded like he'd just run up a flight of stairs. "The murder weapon was recovered at the scene. A Smith and Wesson Model ninety-nine, nine millimeter. No prints."

  "All three men were suspected by the Dallas PD in a string of burglaries over the last couple of years," the second voice said. "Electronics, vehicles, jewelry, guns -- anything they could sell, but no narcotics, no drugs. Nonviolent offenders, as far as that goes. You following?"