Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel

by Alex Hughes

Even with extra interviewers from Vice, the perps from the raid took all morning to process. Clark gave me all his difficult ones, the pushers, the senior guys who knew better than to talk, while he got the kids caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. I managed, head pounding from stress and strain, teeth gritted to get through the junior pushers high on drugs—they made me want my own fix, too much for comfort. Between everything, I got one confession and two solid leads out of the morning’s work. Not too bad, considering.

  The last interview of the day was a normal case, a standard investigation. But what happened in it was anything but normal.

  The suspect was a minor perp, a minor player in a minor crime the detective in charge was investigating more out of sense of fairness than any real caring on her part. I think the man was accused of stealing something. That was not the important part.

  What was important happened about the point I’d convinced the guy talking was a better idea than keeping silent.

  My sight cut out. I could hear him continue to speak for a moment, but that faded too, as my lately dramatic precognition flared up with a full vision. I had no input over the process—the precog did what it wanted, when it wanted. And this time it wanted three perfect dimensions, full stereotropic sound, and eerily real physical touch.

  I was caught up in a choke hold against a wall a foot off the ground, staring into my attacker’s eyes. He was a skinny guy, really, one of those pasty-geek types complete with old-fashioned glasses, and under normal conditions I would have put money against him being able to lift me even against a wall. Despite this, he was holding me up, all the way off the floor, without apparent effort. That was the first clue. I went to punch him and couldn’t move the hand from the wall—and it wasn’t tied down—and then I knew. He was a telekinetic, and suddenly I knew he could teleport too, that he was the bad guy I’d told Cherabino we were looking for.

  He was strangling me with such heavy force, I couldn’t breathe, and my sight was starting to go gray around the edges. He stepped back and removed the hands, but the choke pressure on my neck only got worse. Even though this was a vision—not real, not yet—I was starting to get worried. If my body was convinced enough it couldn’t breathe, I could suffocate in the real world—and really die. And frankly, I’d rather the guy actually kill me, face-to-face, you know, so someone, somewhere could prosecute him for it, rather than me just dropping dead in an interview room with no one knowing what had happened. So I started fighting against the vision rather than going with it; sometimes I can “wake myself up.”

  I was still in it enough to register the angry expression on his face as he backed away. But then I saw in the back corner of the gray warehouse we were in—I saw Cherabino. Tied up, unconscious—but breathing, thank God!—and dirty, like she’d been there for days, collapsed in the corner like a puppet with its strings cut. She was covered in bruises and cuts, one of her legs bent wrong, and her torn clothes said she’d been assaulted. The way she was staring blankly at the wall told me that whatever made her her had long since checked out.

  I pulled hard—against the invisible chains, not the vision, I had to stay in the vision to find out how to save Cherabino, or at least how to kill whoever’d done this to her—but the bonds just stretched and tightened down hard, and the gray was closing off my sight.

  The nerdy son of a bitch in front of me was talking. I started listening. Any info I could get to string him up for murder and worse, I’d take, and run with it. He deserved whatever he got, he and whoever’d helped him extinguish the fire from her eyes.

  “Thought you were so smart, didn’t you?” he said. “Thought you knew what was going on, sending sniffing cops all around my apartment, trying me out, thinking I’d slip and leave some evidence there. Even sending the girl cop, thinking about you like a billboard. Like I’d let that go. But I was smarter than you, stronger than you, took her right out from under your nose. Who’s laughing now, Golden Boy? Who’s weak now? You’re going to die, and I’m going to be rich.”

  Did I know this guy? He sure seemed to know me. What was going on?

  He started watching my face, waiting for me to pass out and then to die. “I told Neil at the beginning this was a messy business, but he couldn’t take it. Had to go and clean up the victims—stupid. Stupid. More than stupid. It’s his fault the cops are onto us in the first place. Well, he paid for it—paid in full. And I’ll be gone before anybody else can find me. And he wanted me to stop. They always want me to stop. Well, I won’t. And you’ll be rotting garbage while I’m rich. Respected. While I have whatever I want. I want you to know that, as you die. I want you to remember.”

  At that point, my vision contracted all the way and I passed out. But rather than slide into unconsciousness, I dropped right back into my body in the interview room, my lungs expanding desperately for air.

  “Whoa,” I said, my eyes snapping back into focus, looking straight at the current suspect’s face back in the interview room.

  I don’t know what the suspect saw on my face, but he started backpedaling like a marathon biker. “Get the freak out! Out of the room! I’ll tell you anything you want to know—just get the freak the hell out of my space.”

  Bellury, frowning at me, still had enough presence of mind to respond. “You ain’t telling us anything, and he’s staying.”

  “No, really! I’ll tell you everything! I’ll tell you how I killed him! Just get the freak out of here!”

  Since the guy was wanted for stealing, I hightailed it out of there. Any way we could get a murder charge for free was worth doing. And as he confessed to the murder of his brother right then, right there, I moved even out of the observation room.

  I wanted my poison, I wanted Paulsen’s trust back, but more than anything, I wanted an explanation—and an identification.

  “Hey, Bob,” I said with false cheer.

  Bob looked up. He was an overweight, balding caricature of a fifty-something cop—he even liked donuts—and he couldn’t chase down a suspect on foot if his life depended on it. But he never had to; Bob did something else completely.

  He frowned again when he saw me. “Hello.” It wasn’t a greeting. I must have interrupted something, but I didn’t care. The urgency of the vision was still riding me, the pain and the desperate need to head it off, to make it not happen. I wasn’t supposed to talk to Bob without authorization—wasn’t supposed to be taking up his valuable time, wasn’t even supposed to be in the protected section—but right now I didn’t care. I’d deal with the consequences later.

  I pulled a piece of paper from my back pocket and unfolded it, laying it across the front of his cubicle. There they were, my five names I’d spent an hour pulling out from hundreds of pages of data. All strong telepath/teleporters, all within two hundred miles of Atlanta (the largest range I knew of for a teleporter). I was hoping—hoping—by some miracle one of the ones on this list would match the guy in my vision. The odds were against it, but I had to try.

  Bob took the paper and smoothed the edges down. I could see his fingers flex absently as he started processing, and the monitor behind him flashed a steady stream of images I couldn’t understand. Tower, egg, golden retriever, sixteen houses in a row, then data in long solid lines. After a few seconds, Bob remembered me and looked up again. I could almost see the lines of data swimming behind his eyes.

  “Could you get me pictures?” I asked, uncomfortable but determined. I had to have information, and quickly.

  Bob nodded, then turned back to the monitor. The next four and a half minutes crept by as he sorted through the entirety of Earth’s WorldNet. I’d never seen him take this long before, not for anything. Either what I’d asked for was harder than it sounded, or he was checking Station records too. Not Mars and Calista, not the Belt; those Webs took twelve hours minimum for free access; even I knew that. But the Station was faster.

  What Bob was doing now would have taken me three days. Not for the search itself; most of that was automated. But
to sort through the three million hits to find the ones I wanted, to chase down a hundred false leads that looked good—it took a while. Or would, with all the Electronic Crimes safeguards. But Bob…Bob had an implant, one of those cybernetic wonders that let him sort as fast as he could think. Faster than he could think, if he was good. He was.

  Implants were vanishingly rare, since nearly half a million people died with the Wetware Virus in the early two-seventies, right at the beginning of the Tech Wars. No one wants to take the risk of frying the brain—and worse, people are afraid of anyone who does. Bob had gotten his implant late, five years beyond the curve; he was still the youngest person I’d ever met with one, and he’d been ostracized his whole life for it.

  But as for me, even if I’d wanted an implant—and been willing to take that kind of risk with my wetware, willing to be different and feared even more than I was—I couldn’t get one. Strong Abilities and implants didn’t mesh; the competing energy fields tore each other apart, and you were lucky to end up in a coma—lucky. So I was stuck doing a hunt-and-peck with the rest of the world through Quarantined data or asking help from someone like Bob. He wouldn’t ask a lot of questions, just get me the information. Even if he didn’t like me much.

  His body language changed abruptly, and my attention came right back to him. His hands gestured wildly and then settled. The screen came up with seven pictures, arranged in a neat row.

  Bob sat back, pleased with himself.

  “There are seven pictures there, Bob. The list had five names.” I wasn’t even looking at the photos, I was so distracted by the long line of people. The last, a random woman with gray hair, looked vaguely familiar.

  “You want to tell me how to do my job?” Bob smirked, arrogant. It didn’t sit well on his too-friendly face, as if he looked too harmless to ever hold the cards that he did.

  “I asked for five pictures,” I returned, putting a full hand of fingers up. “Five.” It was important that none of this got screwed up, that it all got done right the first time. We didn’t have time to make mistakes.

  “No, you asked for pictures from the global list of people with some very odd things in common. All Guild members with high-enough ratings that Guild membership is compulsory—and also on the Guild Spook Watch list. They all have current wills and three traffic tickets or more. Four out of the five had an aunt or great-aunt named Edna…”

  “It was a popular name.” I also had an aunt named Edna, and I didn’t see what that had to do with anything.

  “…the last with a second cousin of the same name, all advanced speakers of a second or third language with a current passport and no children. You thought you had me with the Edna thing, didn’t you? And leaving the last two names off the list—that was devious. But those many things in common, it wasn’t hard to find them.” He reached forward and hit the print button. Then he turned back. “Have another puzzle for me?”

  “Not right now,” I said, all bravado and desperation. “But I’ll be back.”

  “Um-hmm,” Bob said, engrossed in the computer again.

  I took the printout from the pile next to the printer—Bob had helpfully labeled it with my name and “seven pictures”—and took my first good look at the faces of the people.

  The second row, first column, staring out from next to the faces of random strangers. That was him—the perp from the vision—and suddenly the urgency rode me like a horse, spurs against my side, and I knew what I had to do next.

  I looked at the line of text underneath the picture. Jason Bradley, age thirty-one, resident of Atlanta, was not going to get away with it. I was going to stop him before he ever got the chance to strangle me, to turn Cherabino into something that stared blankly at a wall. That future couldn’t happen. At any cost, it couldn’t happen. Especially since the son of a bitch seemed to know me,

  I went directly to the captain, straight into his huge corner office—without knocking. He was on the phone. I’m sure the look on my face mirrored my state of mind: I needed to talk right now, and I wasn’t taking no for an answer. Even if it got me fired.

  “Can I call you back?” the captain said evenly to whoever was on the other side of the phone. He nodded, and then hung up. “What’s your problem now? Don’t think I won’t—”

  “I know who it is,” I said.

  “Who who is?” the captain asked. Annoyed was a mild word for the emotion coming off him; he was having to field meetings about me, and now here I was, making his life worse. I didn’t care.

  “The serial killer responsible for all the deaths in East Atlanta. Remember those?”

  “Look, first, we’re not using the word ‘serial.’ Then—boy, you’re here on my sufferance, take a hell of a big step—” The captain blinked, and his eyes narrowed. “The ‘Mystery Death’ killer? You figured this out in, what, a week? Your tea leaves happened to line up?”

  “I had a vision,” I said through my teeth.

  “A vision?” The captain snorted and sat back in his oversized chair. “Well, that makes it so much better. I’ll get on the phone and tell the mayor we’ve solved the case. If God himself is giving you names now, odds are we don’t even have to bother with a warrant.”

  I took a deep breath and refused to back down. “It’s not that kind of vision.”

  “Really? Then what kind is it, genius?” From the gleam in his eye, the next thing I said would save me or damn me, no waiting.

  I shifted my stance. “His name is Jason Bradley—he’s going to choke me to death in an abandoned warehouse, choke me to death and attack Cherabino. Soon, before the summer heat is over, probably within the month. And—as you should know by now—my P-factor, when it comes to my personal safety, is above ninety-three percent. Whatever we’re doing now’s going to backfire.”

  The captain’s face sobered. “I will give you a hundred ROCs if you’ll tell me who it was I had on the phone when you walked in.” A hundred Re-Oriented Currency units were worth quite a bit.

  His mind was carefully blank, so there was no reading it off the surface of his mind without tipping him off. So I thought about it. Still far too early for Cherabino to have done anything, Paulsen was busy at the moment, and he was acting very serious all of a sudden. Political?

  “The governor,” I guessed. “The president?”

  A small note of relief entered the air, and his mouth relaxed. “No. Actually, that was my ex-wife. Perhaps you’ve heard of her—Jamie Skelton.”

  “No shit! Jamie Skelton is your ex-wife?” I stared at him. No way this old gray man had been married to the woman who’d run the Guild’s precog department for more than twenty years. Not him. I mean, she was hot, and he, well…

  “Yes,” the captain said, “And do you know what she told me?” I shook my head. “She told me not to let any of my people go into warehouses alone—or even in pairs—for oh, the next week or so. She said if we didn’t listen, a man and a woman from the department were going to die in a warehouse before the month is out.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in precog,” I protested, dazed. Maybe he hadn’t heard about this weekend….

  “I don’t. But I believe in my ex-wife. Jamie’s never been wrong about anything she’s ever told me. So, what now?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Bradley’s registered. So we have to talk the local Guild attaché into a premises warrant. That’s not going to be easy. And while we’re at it, we’re going to need the full list of telepath/teleporters within two hundred miles of them, confirm this the old-fashioned way. Otherwise we don’t have much to go on.”

  “Really?” the captain said drily. “We don’t have much to go on now.”

  I looked at him. “Well, yeah. But a vision should be…”

  “A vision’s not shit,” the captain said. “But Jamie’s word is. I’ll let you play this out with the Guild attaché—if you can get them to listen—and maybe even back you up. But right now the only thing you’ve got for sure is I’ve got a couple of people in danger,
one of them the cop with the highest close rate in the department. So we’ll need to find you a bodyguard. One for Cherabino too. Nip this in the bud.”

  “I don’t do bodyguards.”

  We stared each other down.

  “As I recall, Cherabino feels the same way. Suit yourself,” the captain said. “But no fieldwork for you until this is over. That goes double for her—I’ll tell Branen. Now go find this guy. Both of you.”

  I turned around to leave.

  “No warehouses.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, not turning around.

  “Now get the hell out my office,” he said as I was halfway out the door. “I don’t want to hear about you again for at least a week—from anybody, we clear?”

  I went for another cigarette, quick, before I saw Cherabino. Somehow I was going to have to convince her to trust me again. Let me keep her safe. I couldn’t let this go, not a vision this strong. I couldn’t.

  CHAPTER 12

  “You leaving?” I asked.

  Cherabino was in her cubicle, dumping a few paper files into a duffel while her notebook copied files from her unnetworked computer one by one. Scanning each one a hundred ways for electronic protozoa or worse; Electronic Crimes was a stickler, even for unnetworked computers, about anything coming into contact with data that had been on the Net. After the Tech Wars hijacked technology, nobody wanted to risk that kind of destruction again, not for any reason as stupid as a quick e-mail. Data was the enemy, especially the transmission of it to anyone else.

  “What?” Cherabino said, not bothering to look up.

  “You aren’t going home, are you?”

  “It’s seven o’clock. I can’t work late every night.” She zipped up the duffel and shouldered it. “I need to get to the grocery store before it closes. Don’t worry, I’ll probably be working from home again in a couple hours. You can call me if there’s a problem.” She paused. Cautiously, she asked, “Did you need a ride?”

  “That would be great. Give me a second. I’ll get my bag.”