Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel

by Alex Hughes

  I slammed the door open with a bang against the inside wall. Dirt from the old ceiling fell in a flurry, but I ignored it, doing my best angry-badass walk to the table. I was a good enough telepath to project at low levels even to the “deaf” non-Able like Joey—I did it then, nothing illegal, nothing coercive, just the kind of menacing anger that raised the hairs on your spine.

  The other officer in the room—my official observer this round, though Joey wouldn’t know the difference—blinked twice, but then settled back complacently in his chair to the right. Bellury was an old cop, uniformed, had never really risen through the ranks but hadn’t wanted to either; he was past retirement but didn’t want to quit. We worked well together. He even sometimes gave me some pointers on the best way to legally threaten a suspect.

  Joey looked a little disconcerted at the anger in the air. When I slammed the repro files on the table in front of him, he shifted back. I pulled the chair out, hard—it screeched. I reversed it and sat down, my hands crossed over the top. I leaned forward.

  “You’ve been a very bad boy, Joey,” I said, with menace. I checked his mind—no recognition. He had no idea who I was. Good.

  I opened the top file, the jumbled-up one with ink too light to be read upside down. “Manslaughter, arson, grand theft auto, assault and battery…” I went on for another few seconds, making it about halfway down the randomized list of crimes considered felonies in the state of Georgia. I stopped, abruptly, and gave him a look. It was the same look my father had given me over the vidphone when he’d found out about my poison—mingled horror, disappointment, and damning wrath.

  Joey sat back in the chair, crossed his arms, tapped his foot. “Didn’t do it.” I didn’t need telepathy to tell he was lying, but it certainly didn’t hurt my act to get a confirmation. He was guilty of something on the list—being a beta, probably several somethings—and we both knew it. The trouble was, I had to get him to admit to guilt out loud.

  “Didn’t do what?” I said. Maybe I’d get lucky; he’d think about something too hard.

  He looked at me. “Nothing on that list. I’m a fucking model citizen.”

  I pretended to study the paper in front of me. “Really? That’s not what the file says,” I responded. And if he hadn’t been caught red-handed on something, the cops just weren’t doing their jobs.

  Silence reigned in the room. I could feel him thinking, the wheels turning. A careful assessment of risk and reward. Finally Joey asked, “What do you want?”

  “I want you to start talking.” With nothing more than a note, I was fishing anyway. I wanted him to dwell on one of the flashes I’d seen in his head—let me see the violence a little closer, let me get him to admit to it. Or something. I was bored, and Paulsen was watching.

  I felt a decision and Joey opened his mouth. I thought for a second I had him. But no.

  “What am I supposed to talk about, exactly, then? I ain’t a mind reader.”

  “No, that’s me, Joey,” I said, and his eyebrows drew together. “Level Eight telepath, in case you’re wondering. I’m required to tell you if you ask.”

  “A teep? Silver spoon in your mouth fucking teep. What’re you doing at a police station?”

  “I’m a consultant,” I returned evenly. “I’m consulting.”

  After a pointless staring contest during which he imagined at least three ways to hurt me, I got bored and decided to switch tactics. Maybe he knew something about the multiples case. He was from the right territory.

  “What I’m asking today has to do with the six dead bodies found on your block, not a mark on them. Word on the street is it’s your block, that you arranged the hits yourself.”

  “The ones in the paper?” The side of his mouth crooked. “That’s what this is about?”

  “Those are the ones. Why? You know anything about them I should know?”

  “Sure, there’s a lot of things you should know.” He crossed his arms. “But I don’t have anything to say.”

  I cranked up the low-level anger projection and smiled my best evil smile. “Oh, you have plenty to say. I’d hate to have to call in an outstanding mind-warrant to pull it out of you myself.”

  Bellury next to me suppressed a snort. Yeah, I knew, the odds of me getting a warrant of any kind weren’t good—ex-felon, after all—and for a mind-warrant, it was just asking for trouble. As ridiculous as saying the pope was my homie. But the suspect didn’t know the difference.

  Joey frowned. “You wouldn’t.”

  I sat back, still smiling evilly. “I would.” Not that I was exactly eager to roll around in the particular pile of waste that was Joey’s mind; even across the table, his mental presence felt as sour as his smell. But I would if I had to.

  He was looking at the table, at his hands, very intently. He was also thinking, hard, in scattered pieces I couldn’t follow without tipping him off to my probe.

  Joey, sprawled out in the chair, put a hand on the table. His mental scales of risk and reward had settled on him talking. “Not a single mark on ’em, scared to death like dog-caged rats? Those’re the ones?” I nodded, and he continued. “You never found ’em all. ’Bout three? Four? A month since May. Nobody from around here, just turned up dead here.”

  “Why haven’t we found the other dozen bodies? Seems unlikely we’d just suddenly start finding them. Tell me the truth, Joey.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe I heard somebody made a deal with somebody else to hide the bodies, and, say, stopped later when up the line the boss gets angry.” Meaning him and his immediate superior Maloy—well, in the beginning anyway. But I had to get him to say it out loud for the recorders.

  “Your boss?” I asked to confirm.

  “Maybe we’re saying farther up,” Joey said. “Not sure who exactly. But the word came down. Nobody deals with the Frankies anymore. Frankies can hide their own fucking bodies.”

  Who the hell were the Frankies? He wasn’t even picturing them, but he was sure as hell angry at them. An opportunity. Any time there was a falling-out, there was a weakness to exploit.

  “So who do you figure hid the bodies, Joey?” I asked. “You dumped them in the alleys what, early morning?” Behind me I could feel Paulsen get very, very interested.

  “Wasn’t me, and I don’t know nothing,” Joey said pointedly. “But maybe we’re saying bodies before that.”

  “Before that?”

  “Could be,” Joey said.

  “Okay, where are the bodies hidden, then?” Was he just making this stuff up? Didn’t feel like it from his thoughts, but there was a lot he wasn’t thinking about on purpose.

  He just looked at me.

  Different angle. Pretend to know what’s going on even if I don’t. “Who are the Frankies, then? Germans?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Why would you think that?”

  I made myself stop tapping on the table—just in case—just in case. “Tell me what the Frankies are. Who they are.”

  He was suspicious of me now, but he had decided to talk and wasn’t going to go back on that quickly. “Frankies are guys from the north side, rich guys. Wouldn’t give their names. Boss-man says we gotta call them something.”

  “So why Frankies?” I asked. “Sounds like a stupid name to me.”

  He shrugged. “Boss-man, he says they’re messing in stuff they don’t need to be messing in. He’s the boss-man, you know? If he calls them the Easter Bunny, I go find eggs.”

  Okay. I took a moment to get that image out of my head. “Tell me about the Frankies. What do they look like?”

  “I told you. White guys, young one, old one—not too old, fifty maybe. The young one talks more, yells a lot. Old one has a purple patch on his jacket he keeps covering up like he thinks we can’t see. He’s always worried.”

  A Guild patch—he was picturing something like a Guild patch. I knew they were involved somehow! The brain damage alone…

  But it wasn’t any good if I didn’t confirm it for the recorder. I took a second
to sketch out the Guild telepath patch on a piece of paper and do another couple wrong ones, the Ruten space shuttle service patch and one I made up on the spot. I pushed the paper over to Joey. “Anything look like what you saw?”

  He pointed to the Guild’s, and I handed him the pencil so he could circle it. He did, and I gloated internally for a long second before getting back to work.

  “So how do you know so much about the Frankies?” I asked him after he was done. “You see them kill those people?”

  Joey shut down like I’d flipped a switch. “Didn’t see anything,” he said. Huh. First time he’d shut down. Could mean nothing but…

  “Your boss dealing with the Frankies directly, Joey, cutting you out of the deal? Must be worth a lot of money, a bit of body disposal like that.”

  He set his jaw and thought nasty thoughts about me in specific, creatively nasty thoughts. “Didn’t see anything.”

  “How do you know so much about the Frankies, then, Joey, if you didn’t see anything?”

  He paused, looked at me suspiciously. “I hear plenty. Just about the time they tell you not to ask no more questions, people start asking ’em. I keep my ears open. Keep my eye on the business, you know? A lot of attention on the neighborhood for no reason. I don’t like the Frankies, nobody here does.”

  For the record, I said, “Because they killed a bunch of people and dumped them in your neighborhood after you made a deal to dump them somewhere else.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s insulting, you know? And even if I was inclined to look the other way, too much of that, it’s bad for business. Too much attention. And they’re cutting us out of the game. Bad for business. Somebody should cut them out of the game, you know, all the way out.”

  I ignored the veiled death threat. I needed more details, some actual hard facts I could use. I started tapping the table. “What kind of game we talking, Joey?”

  “The Frankie game,” Joey said with a bit of an attitude. “All the Dead, Dead, and the money.”

  “Where’s the money, Joey? What money?”

  He looked at me for a long moment. Apparently he was willing to help me only so far. He looked down at the table, at my tapping hand. I stopped as I felt him recognize the gesture and try to place it.

  Quickly. “The bodies found in your neighborhood, the ones killed without a mark?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re saying the Frankies killed those seven people?”

  “You said there were six. Paper said six too.”

  Bellury gestured significantly. We weren’t disclosing the last body. Crap. At least it would give me an excuse to distract Joey.

  I backpedaled like a marathon biker. “Six, then. Sorry. I have trouble with numbers sometimes.”

  “Dyslexia?”

  “Yes,” I gritted out.

  “You should go to some of them classes. Really helped a buddy of mine.”

  “I’ll look into it,” I lied. This was good, probably. He’d never believe the guy he’d known then would struggle with the words. Even high as a kite, I’d done crosswords. Well, when I’d been in touch with reality.

  Joey shifted in his chair. I think somewhere in his subconscious he did remember me, and that was probably the only reason he was being even this friendly. I hated it. I hated him and the whole former life of mine he stood for, but I couldn’t exactly stop him talking to prove it.

  Joey sat back in his chair. “You’re not really a telepath. You’re bluffing with me.”

  “That so? Well, I know that regardless of what’s on the file, you’ve stolen at least three cars personally. Before you started muscling for Marge. The first was a”—of course, now he was thinking about it—“bright yellow classic Camaro. Black stripe. Second was a Mercedes A-34400.”

  He looked very disconcerted. “There’s no way you could know that.”

  “Want me to tell you how you did it?” I asked. Parlor trick, but it would do the job.

  “What do you want?” he asked me in a dangerous tone.

  “I need to know how all of this relates. Something I can use.”

  “What can you use?”

  My eyes narrowed. “Dead bodies. Frankies. Your neighborhood. Why?”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.”

  I held his eyes with a small smile. I faced scarier things than him every day in the mirror.

  “The boss man doesn’t like the Frankies,” he said flat out. “He don’t care who knows that. They’re making a lot of trouble for the neighborhood, bad for business.”

  “Who’s the boss-man?”

  He snorted and leaned back. “You think I’m going to tell you that?”

  “I need a name.”

  “Maloy,” he spat out, with a good flash of the man’s face and the worry that something had happened with the man out of town. I had no idea what to do with the information.

  “And proof of the killings,” I said. “Something to connect them to the Frankies.”

  Joey shifted in his chair. He’d made a deal with the guys—or Maloy had anyway—and he was thinking he couldn’t break it, couldn’t turn the bastards into the cops. Maloy had forbidden it.

  I frowned. “I’ll get a police sketch artist in here so you at least can give us a picture of the Frankies. How do you know they’re the guys we’re looking for? I’d be very disappointed if you gave us the wrong ones.”

  “I’m no good at the sketches,” Joey said. “You going to pull stuff out of my brain? Start something here? Or are you going to let me go?” I felt his decision not to buck Maloy no matter what happened—to hang in there until the man got back, even if it was in a holding cell.

  He set his mouth. Let me feel his contempt for rich telepaths born with the fuckin’ silver spoon. He wasn’t going to do anything else today.

  Standing up, I grabbed my repro files and waved Bellury with me into the hallway for a chat.

  “Can I arrest him? Or at least hold him for a while?”

  Bellury lifted an eyebrow. “Can you prove he’s committed a crime?”

  “Not unless you’ll take my word for it.”

  “Hard evidence. Something on the recorder?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then you can’t arrest him, can you?” He shrugged in a way only old cops can. “Why don’t you go on to Paulsen and I’ll take care of the guy, huh?”

  I sighed. “Okay.”

  In the interview observation room on the other side of the glass, Paulsen was seated in the only wobbly chair, alone, a paper in front of her. She’d obviously sent the recording tech away already.

  “Editor sent over a copy of tomorrow’s lead story.” She offered it to me. Her voice was more intense, her waves in Mindspace more angry than her actions would suggest.

  “‘Serial Killer Stalks East Atlanta,’” I read. Crap. “This is what the mayor wanted not to happen, right?”

  “That’s correct.” She stood, her hands going to her lower back as she looked at nothing in particular, her anger simmering under the surface. “When the mayor gets his morning coffee, Captain Harris is going to get a very unpleasant phone call. Branen is going to have an unpleasant morning apologizing. And I—well, I had a very long list of meetings before this happened, and I don’t imagine the list is getting any shorter.” Her eyes focused on me. “Good work in there. It’s a whole lot of nothing, but between that and the forensics from the last scene, at least we’ll have something to show.”

  “It’s not a whole lot of nothing. Remember the patches Joey identified? I’ve got his mark on it confirming. No mistaking what it was. Plus he’s saying there’s more bodies we haven’t found.”

  She shrugged. “Not important. His credibility is nonexistent.”

  I realized I hadn’t identified the patch out loud. Sloppy of me. “That’s the Guild patch. The Telepaths’ Guild? Remember them?”

  “I’ve had—”

  I barreled ahead. “At least one of the Frankies is Guild! I was suspecting two�
��”

  “Do not interrupt me. I have had a hell of a day and am about to have a hell of an evening.” She took a deep breath. “Whether Joey’s testimony means anything or not is something you and Branen will have to figure out.”

  “We need to go to the Guild,” I insisted. “For information if nothing else. The brain damage…”

  She stopped, listening now. “What brain damage?”

  “I thought you were up on this. The coroner yesterday.”

  “Don’t sass. You will treat me with respect. This is not my case. If it weren’t for the goodness of my heart, it wouldn’t be yours either. Now, tell me what it is you think is so important.” She looked at me critically, and I knew what I said in the next few minutes would determine whether she’d ever listen to me again.

  I sucked in air. “Every victim has brain damage in the parietal lobe, in the area controlling Mindspace processing. The victim’s brains were burned out from within.”

  “You mean a stroke?” She was listening, arms crossed while I could faintly feel an ache in her back.

  “No, a literal burn, an excess of energy. They were killed with the mind. I’d lay good money on it. I’m betting it’s those Frankies Joey was talking about—the ones with the Guild patch. Not easy to get if you’re not Guild.” And though it stuck in my throat to say it, I continued. “We need to call them, Lieutenant. I know we agreed we wouldn’t, but I’m finding more and more details that tell me we need to. As much as it’s the last thing I want to do. You want this guy—these guys—off the street, you want the murders to stop, we need to contact the Guild.” At minimum, I needed a list of names to cross-check with Joey’s description. I knew better than to trust the list they gave the cops.

  “It’s quite a can of jurisdiction worms you’re talking about, a can I don’t see any reason to open,” Paulsen said. “And I don’t know why you’re the one bringing this up. We’ve already made the decision.”