Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  “Are you even paying attention?” Mendez asked. She was kinda touchy, but honestly, after Cherabino that was just making me feel at home.

  “Yes, mostly.”

  “You need to talk to Jarrod for any other briefing,” she said. “It’s not my job, but honestly, it’s all over the news.”

  “Thanks,” I said, a little awkwardly. “If I understand, I’m here to Mind, to mental bodyguard. I may need to get familiar with your mind so I can rule you out. Coordinate if anything happens.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” She took a step forward, still watching the surroundings behind me. Then she met my eyes. “You do what you have to do, you monitor whatever, but if you say one word about what I’m thinking—ever—even to me—we’re going to have a problem. Understand?”

  “Perfectly.” I stood up under her glare the way she was expecting.

  She thought I was a loose-lipped bastard and probably incompetent.

  I smiled.

  She flashed a strong sexual image of herself and someone else. A female someone.

  I blinked, lost the smile, but after a second regained my aplomb. Women didn’t usually play that particular card, at least not that quickly. Still, clearly a test. “How long will Jarrod take to get here?” I asked.

  After a moment, she nodded. I’d earned a “possibly trustworthy” label in her head.

  Just then the door opened, and the man I presumed to be Special Agent Jarrod walked through. He was a man of average height, swarthy, with craggy features, in a very well-fitting suit with a thin tie in a perfect knot, an American flag tiepin holding the tie to his starched white shirt. His thinning hair was cut in a perfect copy of the G-men haircut of the FBI under Hoover, like a blast from the buttoned-up scary past. While he was at least fifty, he had the feel of a man just beginning the prime of his career, confident and decisive, ready to take over the world.

  “Ward,” he said, greeting me.

  “Sir,” I said automatically. For some reason he reminded me of my father, who was a distant man in my childhood, a buttoned-up lawyer, and a man who hadn’t spoken with me in over a decade. I could see that this would be a problem if I let it be; I’d have to aggressively fight against this first impression if I wanted to do a good job. So I took the initiative. “I’m here by deadline. What do you need?”

  Jarrod took a few steps forward, blinking. Probably surprised to see me in a suit. Heck, I was surprised to see me in a suit. “Good. I need you to go interview the guard who fought off the attack—make sure you get any details you can possibly get from her—and then meet up with the boy. You’ll be Minding him—the judge too, if you can manage her, but she has court security and the boy is your focus. He’s Tommy, age ten, and he likes boats. I’d recommend you start with that. After you interview the bodyguard. I need a second opinion there.”

  “Um, normally people give me more information than that.” I glanced at Mendez, next to me, who was eavesdropping on the conversation without shame. Another mind was coming up around the side of the porch, but the mood didn’t seem threatening, so I let it go with some monitoring. “What happened exactly?” I asked. “Who are the major players? What’s the bodyguard’s background? What exactly am I trying to learn here?”

  Jarrod frowned. “I realize you’re coming from a background in interrogation, Ward, but our priority is the boy’s safety. I want anything and everything we can get about the situation as it relates to that.” His mind told me that he expected me to realize this already.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Specifically what kind of Ability threat do I need to focus on? Teleportation, for example, is a hell of a lot different from telepathy.”

  Jarrod’s mind spiked with irritation, and he said, “Let’s take this aside for a moment.” He looked at Mendez, who shrugged and went back through the door into the house. The guy coming around the house paused, turning around with a clear “oh, look, I have an errand” attitude.

  It said a lot about Jarrod that his people would move so quickly over something so trivial. Either he was a badass, or his people really respected him.

  “Ward, I realize you’re new here, so let me explain how things are going to go. As a rule we’re going to do things my way. I like questions. I like input. I like somebody who thinks. At a certain point, though, I’ve hired you because you solve problems for me. In a crisis situation, you take orders, just like the police officers you’ve worked with before. You bring up problems, fine, but I want solutions too, or at the very minimum the beginnings of them. And if I tell you to do something, you do it. Your job is to handle the mental gymnastics. I don’t want to be bothered with those details unless something unusual has happened.”

  “Understood,” I said.

  “Bodyguard first. You’ll want to get up to speed on the judge’s high-profile case as well, but only after you meet Tommy and get your Minding magic set up. I’m afraid we’re a day late and a dollar short right now, and you’re coming in late, but we need to catch up. I’ll start bringing you personnel to get familiar with later today.”

  “Okay,” I said, for lack of anything better. I was starting to get the impression their old telepath worked with the team very, very well. Trying to jump in on no notice, on something that wasn’t my specialty . . . well, it could get very bad very quickly. And Jarrod didn’t seem patient with a learning curve.

  “The guard is in the front parlor,” Jarrod supplied. “Near the kitchen. Send Loyola out here please.”

  I took that as a dismissal, and worried though I was, after a quick glance to identify another suited agent behind me where the extra mind had been, I went forward into the house.

  CHAPTER 5

  The inside had been renovated in surprisingly modern colors and furniture. Ugly, in my opinion. The entryway opened into two rooms to the left and right, with another longer hall farther on. To be honest, I hated the house immediately from the inside; it was all art and artistic texture in contrasting colors like a designer had been allowed to work freely. Even the furniture was in unconventional, odd shapes. The couch in the right room looked like a praying mantis hunched over. It had to be custom, and expensive, but it just looked strange. The old wooden floors and the ancient crown molding were the only parts of the room I liked at all; the rest was a riot of texture and color and planning that just seemed . . . busy. Like it was trying too hard. Pretentious, but not in an interesting way.

  In the center of the rightward room was the man I’d met first, the ex-military guy who’d asked me if I was a telepath. He stood about four feet from a woman perched precariously on a chair shaped like a tilted cereal bowl. She was at least thirty, with pretty microbraids, practical but professional clothes, and a statement necklace I suspected held a hidden weapon. Her arm was in a makeshift sling, and she sat, slumped a little, with a cloud of frustration and grief hanging over her in Mindspace. For all that her appearance was not what I was expecting, this was clearly the bodyguard.

  “What’s your name, one more time?” I asked the ex-military guy as I got closer.

  “Special Agent Loyola.”

  “Like the saint?”

  “That’s right,” he said in a tone that dared me to make something of it.

  “I didn’t think the FBI normally did protection duty,” I said, the detail suddenly bothering me.

  “We do a hell of a lot of weird stuff in this unit,” he said. He was thinking that some of it was because, unlike a lot of people in the FBI, they didn’t mind working with telepaths and other unusual talent.

  “Um, Jarrod wants you at the porch,” I said.

  Loyola nodded and moved back out through the front door. It closed behind him.

  I went back to the front parlor, where a vase perched on a coffee table, a flat slab of what had probably once been an industrial sign of some kind. It seemed the most normal sitting surface in the room, and with the sun
light pouring in through the large window behind me, its metal surface was warm and inviting. This was probably a lie—the only surface and the only moment in the whole experience that was the least bit inviting. I shouldn’t take it seriously. But it did seem the only flat surface, so I sat down.

  I introduced myself to the bodyguard, who I could see now that I was closer, was clearly fighting off guilt. I decided to treat this like any other interrogation, a gentle one, aimed at a witness and not an immediate suspect, but an interrogation all the same.

  The vision and my urgency were pulling at me to find the kid, to meet the kid. I had a chance to make that vision not happen and I needed to take it. I also needed to call Cherabino, make sure she was okay, and make a good impression here and now, and figure out a way to survive as a Minder on old lessons over the next few days.

  But not now. Now I needed to focus on the bodyguard. I took a breath, and then another, forcing calm. I’d had plenty of time to settle in the car on the way over here, I reminded myself. Plenty of time. Now I had to handle this, another interrogation. I was good at interrogations.

  There was usually something I’d say in the beginning, something that would make the interviewee feel comfortable and want to open up. I couldn’t quite find what to say, and I finally settled on “I’m here to help the family figure out what happened so it doesn’t happen again.”

  She nodded, almost too sharply, and that guilt-sense intensified. Not that it proved anything at this point; she’d be a lousy bodyguard if she didn’t feel it when bad things happened on her watch. Her arm was also hurting her, a lot; it felt like a gunshot wound only partially patched up, and she’d likely need a doctor soon. Her gut also hurt, what felt like bad bruising. It said a lot about her that she sat here waiting anyway. Either that same false guilt was driving her to make sure the boy—and the family—were okay, or real guilt was preventing her from leaving the scene. Too early to tell. But I needed to decide. Soon.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, gently, in case it was the former possibility. “How long have you been employed by the judge?”

  “I’m Tanya,” she said, very slow. “It’s been about six months now.”

  “What happened to make the judge decide to hire you?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t there. What I was told when she hired Jason and me—”

  “Jason?” I interrupted. I hadn’t expected the judge to be female, so that much was news to me, though I probably should have read it off Mendez. The bigger news was a partner who wasn’t present—they’d mentioned, I thought, that he was in bad shape somewhere.

  She nodded, jerkily, and the grief-sense intensified. “We’re partners with a private security firm. The sheriff’s department hired us to supplement after she started getting threats. Jason . . . he got shot, bad. He’s out of surgery in the critical care unit. They’re not allowing visitors, not unless you’re biologically related. I couldn’t just . . . I couldn’t sit there, doing nothing. So I came back here as soon as they’d let me go. Sooner, probably.” She met my eyes. “I want to help. I need to do something.”

  “I understand,” I said, the old mainstay in interrogations, but in this case, I actually did understand. I had that feeling eating at me too, especially right now.

  “The hospital has this number if anything changes,” she said hurriedly, without prompting.

  “I’m sure they’ll let you know the second you can do something there,” I said in as kind a voice as I could manage. “Right now you can help me understand what happened. Let’s go back to the judge. What did she say when she hired you and Jason?”

  She took a breath and settled, getting that focus I associated with cops on duty. “She said she’d been getting death threats for years, but usually the threats were generic and handwritten. But the new ones were very specific, cut out of newspaper like an old movie, and threatened her son. And she had the case on her docket in a month. The media was already going crazy. So she hired us, but we’re getting paid through the sheriff’s department.”

  Interesting. There were no images attached to her description of the letters. “Have you seen the newspaper letter threats?” I asked.

  “No, and I didn’t ask.”

  I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I made a mental note. “Have there been any incidents prior to today?”

  She took a breath and looked up, like consulting a reel of mental footage. “Nothing . . . nothing I would have called significant until today. A few minor scuffles, one disturbed man who charged our car—we called the police on him—and a small, badly made explosive we caught and disarmed at the courthouse. A few yelled threats. Amateur stuff. I’m not sure the explosive would even have gone off; when they analyzed it, the chemical makeup was missing an ingredient. Someone was angry, but that someone didn’t have the knowledge or the resources to really make good on that anger. Plus, he left his fingerprints on the casing.”

  She paused, thinking hard for a moment.

  I had a policy that if an interviewee was talking freely with good detail, I didn’t interrupt the inevitable pauses unless the person was clearly assembling a lie. Even then, I might guide the talk into more details rather than stop him. Over time, anyone who’s talking freely long enough will give you something you can use. But the time was eating at me here. Staying quiet was hard. Staying quiet and focused was very hard.

  “I did notice someone tailing us on the way to Tommy’s school a few times,” she said. “Or I thought I did. Tommy is at Savannah Christian, across the city, and I tried to vary the route just in case. Jason wasn’t there that morning—usually one of us goes with the judge and one with Tommy—but I’m better at countersurveillance than he is. It was only the same car twice, and then different cars. I changed our route and it seemed to stop, though . . .”

  “Though what?” I asked. “What else did you see?”

  “Jason thought we were jumping to conclusions, maybe, but even when he was there he saw a woman and then a man in front of the school a few times who didn’t look like teachers to him. So we doubled up on security for Tommy and brought in the sheriff’s department more formally for a day or two, just in case. We were just being paranoid,” she said, then looked green. “Obviously not that paranoid.”

  According to the police I usually worked with, the trouble with good situational awareness was that you often read details as suspicious when they weren’t necessarily. With so many false positives, if you were in a neighborhood you didn’t patrol regularly, sometimes you made mistakes. In this case, though, obviously she hadn’t.

  “Let’s move to this morning. Tell me what happened, slowly,” I said. “From the beginning. Any detail you can remember might help us prevent another attempt from succeeding.”

  “We got up at the usual time—for the family, that’s about seven, but I’m up at four so we have some coverage overnight. Jason’s up late,” she explained. “With two of us in a nonemergency situation, we don’t do the whole night, and even so we have to nap during the day sometimes, but it’s something. I keep telling Marissa to get a dog, but she says she works too much.”

  “Marissa?” I asked.

  She gave me a strange look. “The judge. Marissa Parson. She’s a superior court judge for Chatham County. We travel with her these days to the courthouse. Sometimes Tommy comes too, to keep his schedule as unpredictable as possible. Marissa got him a tutor and special permission to take his tests outside school if he misses. It’s what I told her when she hired us, that she’d get the most bang for her buck if we had one target instead of two, and if that target was moving in as unpredictable a schedule as we could manage. But he’s got to go to school sometimes.”

  “That morning,” I prompted.

  “Yes. That morning. The family got up. Tommy had forgotten to tell his mother she was supposed to bake cupcakes, which with the nanny gone would mean I was supposed to bake cupcakes,
so there was some discussion about stopping at a local bakery before the judge decided Tommy should have to tell his class himself why he was empty-handed. Um, let’s see—the police escort came about eight, and then Marissa left first. Tommy’s cupcakes battle meant we were running late.”

  “The nanny is gone?” I asked.

  “Um, yes. For about four weeks now. Marissa didn’t like to discuss it, but I got the impression that she and the nanny had had a strong disagreement over Tommy that couldn’t be resolved. Marissa has strong opinions. I know she was annoyed with the woman, and probably she fired her rather than the nanny quitting. I wasn’t there, though. With Jason and me as extra adults in the household, Marissa hasn’t felt a pressing need to hire another nanny. She’s interviewed a few but hasn’t found one she was happy with. Like I said, Marissa has strong opinions.”

  “I assume you drove Tommy to school that morning?” I asked, after I’d had a chance to process that information. “When did the kidnapping attempt begin?”

  Her demeanor changed then, and her shoulders tensed. As I’d suspected, she’d been avoiding the topic, sliding away from it subconsciously, and didn’t like the reminder of the flight. Her grief returned, along with that guilt. “Jason drove,” she began, and paused. Then, more slowly: “Jason drove, and I sat in the back with Tommy. He was talkative that morning, and I had to split my attention between what he was saying and the road.”

  She shifted in the chair. “Well, this van comes out of nowhere, around some corner behind us, coming way too fast. We’re stopped at the railroad tracks, the blinkers going like nuts, and there’s nowhere to go ’cause we don’t know how tall the train’s going to be or how fast it’ll go.”

  I nodded, seeing a flash of the scene in her mind. Anti-grav-assisted trains on dedicated tracks could carry up to two extra stories, several tons each, and at speeds that made the air currents around them dangerous for a vehicle in the air anywhere near. They weren’t exactly safe even for a grounded vehicle, but they’d been well enough back and in the air shadow of a couple of brick buildings. The van had come around one of the buildings behind them while they were pinned against the barrier of the tracks. It sounded preplanned to me.