Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel

by Alex Hughes

  “Well, yes. But—”

  “How many Tuners do you employ on a regular basis?” Cherabino asked Evans.

  “Maybe six, perhaps eight in a good quarter. We like to use the same professionals quarter by quarter if we can—provides a sense of continuity to surgeons and the patients.”

  “How many of them have you met personally?” she pushed.

  “Cherabino, he couldn’t possibly—”

  Evans cut me off. “Most of them, actually. I oversaw the implantation department until my promotion last year.” He smiled at my disconcertment. “You didn’t think Delaney was my choice for assistant, did you?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that—obviously I had. “Where are you going with this, Cherabino?”

  She fished out another piece of paper and offered it to Evans—I saw a glimpse of our sketch. “You may not have—”

  “Neil Henderson,” Evans said decisively. He looked back at her. “It’s a good likeness.”

  Like a key turning in a lock, the name linked to the feelings from the crime scene and the scarf. “Neil Henderson, used to work in Research?” I’d met him maybe five times ten years ago, but it all clicked. I still wasn’t sure about the punk nerdy guy who may or may not be Bradley, the guy who’d supposedly taken over Dane’s office, the bastard, but old Neil was always barging in on Dane and me on our way to lunch, trying to get himself invited. If he hadn’t been so crazy into practical jokes, we might have brought him along, but a joker is a dangerous friend. There was one time he brought in this live chicken…. “You’re talking about crazy Neil?” I repeated.

  The corner of Evans’s mouth quirked up. “I haven’t heard that nickname in a long time. He’s a good Tuner, steady, responsible. Good with the patients. Is he in any danger?” He looked at the two of us.

  “I don’t imagine so,” Cherabino said smoothly as she put the sketch away. “Just a few more routine questions, if you don’t mind.”

  Evans shrugged. “I have another few minutes.”

  The phone rang next to him—he picked it up and spoke. “Wonderful. That’s what I expected. Yes, go ahead and set up the conference room for the meeting with Telecorp. Yes, thank you.”

  He turned back to the two of us. “What else can I do for DeKalb’s Finest?”

  We walked down the street, me a little worried about making it into the station on time for interviews. “You realize that he didn’t give us anything useful?” I asked Cherabino.

  “He identified the picture. That’s more than we had.”

  “But the records…He said all the right things and gave us shit.”

  She shrugged. “Corporate guys are like that.”

  “Hold on,” I said, seeing a pay phone. “I need to call Kara.”

  Cherabino shrugged and put her hands in her pockets, clearly willing to wait.

  I fished out change and dialed Kara. We needed to talk to Henderson, which meant she would need to set it up.

  “You realize it’s less than halfway through the workday,” Kara said. “You don’t have to call me twice a day, I will get back to you, you know.”

  “We have a lead.”

  Her tone brightened. “Oh, good. Hard evidence would really help.”

  “Um, it’s not super hard,” I said, then realized what that sounded like. “I mean, it’s just that we have a couple of witnesses who can identify one of your guys in the area where he shouldn’t be, carrying something suspiciously like a body in a trash bag. We got someone to identify the picture. It’s Neil Henderson.”

  “I thought you were going after Bradley?” Kara asked, after a moment to process.

  “I’m going where the evidence leads me.”

  Next to me, Cherabino snorted. It was one of her catchphrases, so what?

  “That’s still not definitive,” Kara noted. “But it’s better than what we had. Who identified Henderson?”

  “Jonathon Evans, head of the gland unit of Ultrate Bioproducts. He’s respectable.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  I was insulted. “The first time I’ve ever met him is today. What the crap, Kara? I’m not a liar and I resent being called one.”

  “I’m not calling you a liar. I’m just making sure I have the information to defend you if it comes up.”

  “Oh.” Well, maybe she wasn’t blowing me off after all.

  “They’ll open the vault for me this afternoon, and I’ll put in an official request to talk to Henderson as soon as we get off the phone. I’ll still talk to him regardless, but having it on the books will help us later if there’s really something going on. That kind of identification looks suspicious. That much I think we can all agree on.”

  “What about Bradley?”

  “I’ll see if I can link him to Henderson somehow. If I can’t, there’s nothing I can do unless there’s a theft. Get me something else to go on for Bradley—some hard evidence, even circumstantial at this point—and I’ll move. But if I go too early, there’s nothing I can do for you later.”

  “What if there’s a substantiating vision?” I asked, and told her about the phone call the captain had taken from Jamie Skelton, head of the Guild precog facility.

  “Did she see Bradley specifically?” Kara asked, always practical.

  “I don’t know—this is thirdhand at least.”

  “I’ll ask her myself,” she said. “Watch your back, though. With two visions, I’d say it’s a given you’re in danger.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  As soon as I hung up, Cherabino made me reprise every word of the conversation with Kara. “Do you really think she’s going to get us what we need?” she asked.

  “Actually, at this point, yes. She’s got her teeth in this one, it looks like, and she’s actually treating me seriously. If we can get her the lever to move the world, she will,” I said. “But she says there’s only one shot at this, and she doesn’t want to move too soon.” Actually, surprisingly, I think I trusted Kara’s instincts on this, assuming there wasn’t another agenda in play. She always had a good sense of the best time to move.

  But something inside me insisted this was taking too long. Henderson, Bradley, or both needed to be off the street, now. We walked back to the car, quiet, while I worried about what would happen if I screwed up. I couldn’t screw up, was all. Or someone else would die.

  I got to the interview room a little late and found Bellury reading a magazine. He looked up when I rushed in. “Perp waiting for you,” he said in that understated way of his. “And Clark wanted to know where you were.”

  “He’s not my boss,” I said, then sighed. At this rate the other interviewers might never talk to me. Some days that might be restful, I supposed, if they didn’t mutter in their thoughts too much. Guilt stabbed at me anyway. I asked, “What’s the perp accused of?”

  Bellury gave me the rundown of the case. “You going to be here awhile?” he asked, quietly.

  Great, now he was doubting me too. “I was with Cherabino all morning on the case,” I told him. “I’m supposed to check in with her this afternoon. Paulsen said the multiples case is high priority.”

  Bellury nodded, but I could feel him decide to check the story.

  I took the case file. I was here to work, I told myself.

  At Cherabino’s cubicle that afternoon, she fanned out the new pictures from the original crime scenes. In every one except the last, in some corner there was a crushed-earth circle from a bad anti-grav generator. The kid whose father was a mechanic had been right on; our white guy with the garbage bag had an aircar with one bad generator. Cherabino seemed pleased and had even loosened up a bit around me.

  Before long, though, we had to go back to our respective corners, she to other cases, me to the interview rooms.

  Late that evening, after everyone on day shift had already gone home, I was slouched in the single chair in the coffee closet, scrunched up between the counter and the wall. My head hurt like a mother from the last suspect, and the coffe
e wasn’t helping. He’d been certifiable, and I’d gladly testify in favor of an insane plea if it would get him locked up and away from me forever. People that crazy were a telepath’s worst nightmare. He believed himself so intensely that if reality didn’t match up, well, that was its problem. All too easy for a telepath to give in to that intensity and believe too.

  I’d escaped this time—thank you, Guild training—but it had hurt me and scared me and put me in a really rotten mood. The pounding pain in my head was just making things worse. What I wanted more than anything else in the world was to find a stash of my poison somewhere and fall off the face of the planet for a while.

  I indulged in that fantasy for about ten seconds, just long enough to realize it was already past quitting time, a very dangerous time to be fantasizing about my poison. I would have to go all the way to my apartment—or Cherabino’s house while she worked and bitched—and sit there, telling myself no for hours on end. Vials or no, Swartz or no, I was maybe sane enough to know I couldn’t handle that, not today. And I had a drug test tomorrow I had to pass.

  I leaned my head back on the wall and tried to think. Work the problem as best I could around the headache. Finally I grabbed the phone outside the coffee closet, pulling the handset in with me and closing the door. I dialed Swartz’s number.

  When the message started, I hung up. Then I called back. Still no response.

  “Swartz. I…It’s a bad time. Call me back, man.” I hung up and waited. Then I checked my watch. He should call me back in less than five minutes. Then I looked again. My watch was cheap, but not cheap enough to be wrong. It was Wednesday. Wednesdays Swartz took his wife to the movies. It might be hours before he called me back.

  For a long minute I stared at the phone while my headache worsened.

  I had another number for Wednesdays, somebody Swartz knew. I’d met him only once, an old geezer at the Fourteenth Street meetings. I had called him just the one time, two days before my last fall, when things were so bad I hadn’t even gone to work. God only knew what he thought of me.

  The door rattled as somebody else came in the coffee closet.

  Frances the file clerk was humming loudly as she pushed in. She stopped when she saw me. “You look like shit,” she said, cheerfully enough. Apparently she didn’t keep up with rumors; she wasn’t even slightly mistrustful.

  “I feel worse,” I said.

  “Hmm. Anything I can do?” she asked. She poured herself coffee and doctored it, scooting around me companionably in the small space.

  “Your choice: shoot me now or get me an aspirin.”

  She smiled. “Any particular kind?”

  “Aspirin. The simple stuff. No bells and whistles.” I put the phone on the counter; I’d return it to the cradle in a minute.

  I had to be pretty desperate to even think of painkillers at all, but my head was pounding in time with my pulse, and it wasn’t getting better. If I couldn’t have my drug, maybe I could at least feel a little less like dying.

  “Well, you are in luck. I think I have one.” Frances plopped her purse on the countertop and started rummaging. Finally, she came up with a bubble pack, which she handed me. “Here you go, sweetie. Feel better.” Then she packed up her purse and her coffee and left the closet, toeing the door closed behind her.

  I examined the purported aspirin. The foil and the bubble seemed intact, even at angles to the light; I couldn’t detect any tears or holes. The paper on the foil was clearly stamped with a manufacturer’s seal—a manufacturer that did, indeed, produce aspirin. Even the lot number seemed reasonable. I was halfway through opening the package for the first taste-test before it hit me that this wasn’t normal behavior.

  Normal be damned, I thought, as I carefully stuck my tongue on the pressed pill. The last thing I needed was to get hooked on something new. When the sharp-bitter aspirin taste came back, I spat and reached for the coffee. I swallowed the pills, both of them, without further tests. Either a personal triumph or the stupidest thing I’d done all week.

  The medicine hit me as I was in the accountant’s office, in the last stage of getting a double shift approved. My headache went from excruciating to tolerable in about five minutes, and nothing else happened. I was grateful.

  Late second shift, I called Kara, expecting to leave a message. She picked up.

  “Aren’t you there a little late?” I asked her.

  “Aren’t you?” she responded automatically. “City liaison is more than a full-time job, as I’m sure you understand. I wish you would stop calling me every few hours, though. I’ve got the higher-ups breathing down my neck, and I don’t need you doing it too.”

  I was twitchy at the moment, and I had to know. “Any news on the boxes?” I couldn’t call them machines, not over an open phone line, but I had to know.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. They’re gone. But not the two you mentioned—the space scrubber, yeah, nothing but scuff marks where it used to be. The imploder’s still there, though. What’s missing are the boxes from Stewart’s tests ten years ago. Do you know anything about those?”

  The man who introduced me to my drug? Yeah, I knew about his tests. “It’s not boxes, plural. He had one and a couple of hospital things to monitor responses, you know, medical stuff. It was very early stage, very experimental at that point. I can tell you what I was there for, but my understanding is he kept working a long time after that, with different drugs and procedures. He could have added another box; I don’t know. Dane had been working on charting the shape of the mind in Mindspace. Last I heard, Stewart was talking about incorporating that research somehow, but I don’t know what happened with that.”

  “Didn’t Stewart pioneer the work on boosting drugs?” she asked, distracted.

  “What’s a boosting drug?”

  “Pills they’re giving some of the midlevel telepaths to improve their numbers. They don’t seem to work for everybody, and you can’t use them for long. The Guild likes them for special ops, though.”

  “You supposed to talk about that kind of stuff on a phone line?”

  “Probably not.” She sighed. “The shape of the mind in Mindspace? What possible good could that do? And why the scrubber?”

  “I have no idea, but I’m worried. If this gets out—”

  She paused. “I know. The Guild knows too—we’ll turn over every rock, knock on every door. We’ll find who took them. We’ll get them back. Just give us a couple of days.”

  “I’m still pretty sure we’re looking for the same guy,” I told her. “Don’t capture somebody and not let us know—we need our case solved too.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she promised. “I’ve got an order out on Bradley. With this confirmation, the higher-ups are a lot more willing to count your vision as cause.”

  “So it’s convenient for them now?”

  “There’s no need to be snippy,” she returned. “I’ll get back to you tomorrow when I can.”

  “It’s midnight, Cherabino,” I told her tiredly. “Double shift is over.”

  She looked back, sadness crushing her like a vise, and stretched. She turned the computer off and turned back to me. “Is it really?”

  “It is.” I shielded hard, having enough of my own problems without adding her sadness to the mix. “Let’s get going. Tomorrow’s your day off, right?”

  “Yeah.” She grabbed her jacket, yawned.

  “Paulsen said I could have the day too, if I thought it would help.” I’d also called Swartz, just in case I couldn’t make the usual Thursday-night Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Whatever was going on with Cherabino seemed to be focused on tomorrow.

  “You’re still following me around, then?” She didn’t look happy about it.

  “I am. I need to make sure the vision doesn’t happen. I’ll stay out of your way.” If I could.

  “You do that.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Late the next morning, Cherabino cut the car off in the grocery store parking
lot. “I’m not going to get you to go away, am I?” Her face said she was angry, but the waves of her emotions carried far more sadness and fear.

  “Um, no.” I was confused. Wasn’t that what I had been saying for three days, fifty times a day? Was this a trick question?

  “Fine,” she said, too sharp, and got out of the car.

  Inside the store, instead of heading for the vegetables—Cherabino always went straight for the rabbit food in any grocery store—we turned left. Past the checkers, busy on a Thursday late morning, and through a long aisle of cereal. Cherabino didn’t even look at the cereal boxes and hardly noticed when I dropped back for one. When she failed to comment on the sugar content when I caught up to her, I knew something was very wrong.

  We turned into the flowers section. She slowed, browsed through the hundreds of flowers, and carefully hand-selected three bouquets of white lilies—real lilies, the old-fashioned kind, pure white from being grown in a greenhouse, sheltered from all pollution. She spent almost twenty minutes—and far, far too much money—on the purchase. In the end, she shoved two flower bunches at me. “Make yourself useful.” She kept the third, larger, bouquet in her hands.

  In the car, she laid that third bouquet gently across the backseat, putting the others not too far away while she eased into the front.

  She looked at the wheel for a long, long moment while the inside of an August-hot car baked my skin.

  I cleared my throat. “Are you—?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned the key and started the car. Hot air blew from the vents, and we pulled out into traffic.

  It didn’t seem right to be so quiet. But there was something boiling up on the inside of her, some strong thoughts and stronger emotions. The sadness was so strong I could feel it, but whatever else was there she was fighting. I got shapes, and shadows, but no definites. And past all of it, pain, mental, emotional. Just pain. I didn’t dare speak.