Gray nodded. “Right, I’ll bring her in – but doesn’t this now fall within the purview of Human Relations?”
Carter waved his hand. “HR doesn’t have an investigative arm, you know that. We’ll be operating as a proxy. Now don’t misunderstand me – whoever actually killed Anderson, I want their ass. But we’re gonna have to work out this thing first.”
His words were a surprise to Gray, who up until then had never heard Carter talk like a company man before. “I’m surprised,” he said, spreading his hands. “I’d figured you’d tell me to keep on the murder angle first and foremost. We’re Homicide, after all.”
There was a pause of a few seconds between the two men. Carter leaned back in his chair again, looking down his cheeks at Gray. The big man studied his younger counterpart, his eyes unreadable. Gray shifted a bit. “Ultimately,” Carter said at last, “One will lead to the other. And as you say…things change.”
“Right,” Gray said. “I’ll…get on it. Sir.” Despite the disdain he’d sometimes felt toward his mentor, it was the first time that Carter had actually sounded disappointed in him. He was surprised at how much that bothered him.
The return to the Hilton was entirely without incident; nobody reported violence, and the satellite that the company had tasked to check in on her from time to time hadn’t registered any activity that would read as suspicious. There were six company-owned Walleye satellites in geosynchronous orbit over Seattle, each one able to track various citizens throughout the city. Satellite time was costly, especially in the case of advanced miniature sats like those, so tracking a stripper’s whereabouts wasn’t exactly the way money would usually be spent. Given what she was mixed up in, however, Administration wasn’t fucking around. According to their watchful eyes, Angie had simply gone home, slept, and come back to work – or at least, that’s what the conglomeration of their watch-windows had read. There was always room to miss something when you only looked in every hour or so.
Arriving at the Autumn Heights, Gray had put on his game face and bellied up to the bar. The bartender was there, the same guy from before – only this time, the fear that he’d wore the first time he’d seen Gray had been replaced with a species of defiance. “Angie ain’t here, Detective,” he said before Gray could get a word out. “Why don’t you go head back downstairs?”
“I got a satellite read that says she is,” Gray replied, his narrow brows knitting together. “You’re not trying to put one over on me, are you, Citizen? That would be unwise.”
The bartender’s jaw set, thin like a triangle. “If you don’t have a warrant, you need to vacate.” When Gray simply stared at him, he clarified. “That is, get the fuck out.”
“I could do that,” replied Gray with a nod. “You’re perfectly within your rights to eject me, Citizen. But if I have to come back, I’m coming back with Bud Moody.”
If there was such a thing as the Devil in the land of Vice, it would be Bud Moody. Big as a house and solid as concrete, Moody was a senior detective in Vice Management. He was a Tier V, the old monster of the department, and there was a reason for it: he never lost a case. If you were put on his radar, you had either done something really bad, really stupid, or pissed someone off in ways you most likely couldn’t imagine. If Moody thought – or was moved to think – that you were up to something, he didn’t rest until he found something. The fact that there actually might not be anything to find wouldn’t matter; by the time he was done, you’d find yourself on charges. Most likely every family secret you ever had would also be aired, and many lives ruined in the process. You didn’t mention Moody’s name so much as you invoked him.
Such unholy invocations had not yet lost their power, it seemed, as the bartender’s face froze as Gray spoke. “Hey, all right,” the bartender finally said, the blood having all but drained from his face. “All right. Jesus. What do you want this time?”
“That’s between Miss Velasquez and myself,” Gray said, giving the bartender a satisfied smile. “Direct me.”
Gray found her in the VIP room. She was naked and grinding on the lap of some asshole suit, who was clearly straining against the club’s no-touching rule. When Gray appeared the suit sat up, as if he were about to bark something angry, but the production of Gray’s Shield shut him up.
“Out, Citizen,” Gray barked. “Police business.”
The suit blanched, but left. Angie stood there by the velvet-covered sofa where he had been, hands on hips, resplendent in her beauty. No shyness in her lovely eyes, only muted fury. “God damn it, Detective,” she hissed, lips drawn back in anger to show neat rows of white teeth. “Do you know how much that asshole tips when he comes in here?”
“I’m sure he’s very generous,” Gray drawled flatly.
“He works for Acene Electric,” Angie said between clenched teeth. “He’s an executive.”
Gray’s nose wrinkled. “I doubt an executive is going to spend his time at a strip club at the Hilton, Miss Velasquez. This isn’t the Night Dome or the Fleurs du Mal.”
Angie stared at him a moment, as if perhaps she might be considering the drawbacks to pouncing on him and clawing out his eyes with her manicured nails. Ultimately, however, she folded her arms over her chest and dropped onto the couch. “Whatever,” she said, crossing her legs. “What the hell do you want now?”
“I need you to get dressed.” Gray jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ve been ordered to take you downtown.”
Angie’s brows arched. “Am I under arrest, Detective?”
“No.” Gray gave her a thin smile. “But we have things we need to talk about. Come on, there’s a good girl.”
With a snort Angie rose, giving him a look. “I’ve never been any such thing, Detective,” she said, her voice dipping in a way that elicited the faintest of shivers down Gray’s spine. “But all right. I can leave after, yeah?”
“Unless you pique our interest further,” Gray replied with a nod.
“Then I’ll try to be as uninteresting as possible,” Angie said as she passed him, heading for the door.
Not going to happen, Gray thought as he watched her go. Not by a damned sight.
Angie emerged from the club’s dressing room wearing a surprisingly conservative outfit: blue blouse with cap sleeves, gray pencil skirt with heels. Long gray coat for the weather, which had gone through a bit of a cold snap that evening. “Here I am,” she declared, and she said nothing else as she followed Gray down to the car and returned with him to Central. She said nothing, in fact, until they took the lift up to the interview rooms, where he conducted her into Unit Twenty. When he opened the door he found Carter on the other side, standing there with his hands behind his back.
“Welcome back, Detective,” said Carter, giving Gray a light nod. This was his game face, the genial, handsome older fellow where Gray was made of ice. Not necessarily the Good Cop/Bad Cop, but it had a similar dynamic. “And good evening to you, Miss Velasquez.”
Angie look at Carter for a moment from Gray’s side before nodding. “Evening,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. No sass for Carter, apparently, much to Gray’s irritation.
“I’m Detective Carter,” said the older man, who now stepped back to clear the entryway; beyond the room was a sterile gray void, much as Evidence was, with nothing but a plain steel table and chairs bolted on the floor. “Please come in.”
Her green eyes swept toward Gray, who found that despite his attempt at remaining glacial he could not help but give Angie a nod. “I’m sure we’ll speak again later,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Angie, fixing her eyes back on Carter and the room beyond. “Sure.” She acted like a spooked deer in the presence of Carter, something that Gray both admired and found even more irritating. When Angie entered the interrogation room, Carter held back; he came out into the hall and let the door seal behind him.
Gray clucked his tongue. “Well,” he said, “I guess it’s your show now.”
“That it is.” Carter leaned
back against the door, hands tucked into the pockets of his slacks. Gray realized that Carter’s suit was no longer rumpled; it was smooth, sharp, the same as before but without the lines. It made him look a new man. Seeing Gray’s expression, Carter looked down at himself and smirked. “You never know when you need to make a bad impression, right?”
With a grunt Gray nodded, eyeing Carter a bit. “Riiiight.” Gray had never seen this part of the man; normally Carter’s interrogation style allowed Gray to be his expensive-looking self, while Carter played the rumpled, kindly veteran. Sympathetic. Not now. Now he was both of them together. Well, that’s what thirty years on the job will get you, Gray thought. Lots of tricks. Irritation and admiration rose in equal measures.
“Now listen, Dan,“ said Carter, “Got some news for you.”
“All right. What’s up?”
Carter chuckled. “Well, I didn’t give you enough time to ask or think about it before, but when we tossed the vic’s place I found a little memory core behind a wall panel. The compartment wasn’’t terribly well-shielded, but he’d tried his best.”
Gray’s brows arched. “I see. And you took it down to get analyzed?”
“Right. I want you to go down and talk to Jack Marowitz first thing in the morning, all right? He called me a few minutes ago and told me he’d have his analysis finished by then. You go get some sleep while I talk to this sweet little bumba about that loaded bill we found in Anderson’s wallet. I want to make sure she doesn’t know more than what she’s saying.”
More irritation flooded into Gray, nearly overflowing the banks of good sense. He frowned flatly at Carter. He was the one who’d talked to Angie; shouldn’t he be there for the interview as well? Still, though, this was a good gig, a special gig, and he didn’t want to fuck it up by running his mouth. “Fine,” he said instead, swallowing the protest that was itching to come out. “I’ll be back in the morning. Are you coming in late?”
Carter shrugged. “Probably,” he said, a mean little smile marring his beneficent image. “I imagine I’ll be grilling this one well into the night.”
Double entendres aside, the fact was that Carter probably would be grilling Angie for a good long time, and he had just come off a good long sleep break when Gray had picked him up for the evening’s runabout. It’s not like strippers usually had lawyers on hand, after all, unless the management was going to pick one up for her. It was possible, but it was unlikely to happen at that hour, if it was going to happen at all. Exhausted and angry, Gray poured himself into the Vectra, keying in his home address and turning on the autodrive. He let his eyes hood, peering at the largely empty streets beneath the nets of his pale lashes as the car made its way along this most familiar route. Lights flared and passed, cloudy in the ever-tightening space between his eyelids. The car drove on.
Chapter Five
Angie was on his lap, arms around his shoulders, smiling down at him like she did those other stooges around her little stage. She was a lithe thing, flexible and delicate in the way she moved – he really liked that, how she never seemed to waste any motion. But though she was smiling, her blue eyes glittered with tears; she ground herself into him, mascara slowly drawing black trails down over her cheeks, her small breasts heaving with swiftly dwindling eroticism. And then she was crying in earnest as she gave him his lap-dance, her body shivering, skin reddening beneath its caramel sheen, and he felt something hot and barbed wind up like a snake from somewhere in his gut. He wanted to love it, love the closeness, love the way she smelled – but the shame that reared up from inside him stung like barbed wire.
Gray woke up with the realization that he was feeling guilt not because she was sad, but because he had made her so. He hadn’t been delicate with her at all; he’d wanted to get the information. Gray remembered what his father, who had not been a police officer but had owned a bar frequented by them, used to say to him. ‘Leave those girls alone; they’ve got it hard enough most times. If you’re gonna make a stripper cry, let it be because you stuffed your wallet in her thong. Don’t be an asshole.’ He’d usually say something else, too, but Gray couldn’t remember what it was at that moment. So there he was, lying in bed, drenched in sweat and staring at the clean white ceiling of his bedroom, knowing that he’d given her a harder time than he’d wanted. Congratulations, he told himself, you made a stripper cry. His father would have been pissed.
In the dark, Gray reached for the pack of Anoraks he usually left on the bedside table when nightmares came calling. He found the tip and crushed it in his fingers, saw the cherry glow as the igniter sparked. “Good thing he’s not around to see me now,” he muttered to himself, and took a long drag off the smokeless cigarette. The bloom of nicotine banished a portion of his guilty feeling, but not by much.
There was a picture on the pack of cigarettes, which he saw once he had reached for the lamp on the bedside table and turned it on. Printed in semi-holo under the brand was the image of Mt. Rainier as it had been in purer days, when the gray malaise of the polluted sky still broke to show the blue above the cloud layer. Rare were those days now, and Gray looked at the pack with a sigh before he sat up. His place was small by the standards of his fellows – a small bedroom crammed with a queen-sized platform bed and a large closet, the living room outside, kitchenette, bathroom with shower. The walls and ceiling were white, the carpet a thickly cushioned beige pile. Very plain. He liked it that way. Less maintenance.
Gray lived in the Hanson Building up on Capitol Hill, which would have been massively expensive were it not exclusively company housing. It was basically a high-rise corporate dormitory, filled with Civil Protection employees and their families; the building’s floors were separated by marital status and family size, however, meaning that being single had him living closer to the top. Gray’s apartment was on the eighty-second floor, but as he had an internal unit there was no view. Instead he had a massive vidscreen on the wall, one that cycled through works of art and views from the building’s external camera feeds. Sometimes he had a computer-generated aquarium running, but the software was a little hinky; supposed to properly emulate the behavior of aquatic animals, Gray was nonetheless surprised at times to come out from sleep to find that the fish had killed each other. It didn’t matter that he often just had angelfish in the ‘tank’, they still managed to find some way to do it. As far as Gray was concerned, this was basically the best metaphor for human beings that he could find – civil, docile creatures in the best of environments, yet still completely happy to snap off and murder each other for the most mysterious and trivial of reasons. He wondered if it was supposed to be some sort of guerrilla art project a bored system designer put in to freak out consumers.
This morning there was just the news, which he called out for the vidscreen to play as he stumbled out of the bedroom and into the kitchenette. His feet found purchase on the white tile floor, cold and slightly roughened for grip, and he rummaged through the refrigerator as NewsNetNow’s new virgin goddess of modern doomsaying, Maya Frail, sang out the day’s events. The German Corporate State was seeing a resurgence after its ailing industrial sector had rallied, defeating a takeover. Anya Federova, the world’s first bionically augmented athlete, had turned sixty.
Except, really, what he saw on the screen as he looked over his shoulder wasn’t any kind of older lady; blonde, pert and youthful, Federova had her telomeres lengthened ten years ago and gone through comprehensive biogenetic reconstruction thanks to the ridiculous draws and purses she’d been pulling on the global competitive luftball circuit back in the thirties, a treatment that had brought her back to the playing field twenty years ago. Since then she looked and played like she did when she was nineteen, and if things keep going as they were, she’d be able to afford treatments long enough to keep her that young for as long as the money held out. Clinical immortality was entirely possible if you had the right amount of cash, it’s just that you needed an immense amount of it. “Which means I’m going to die an old man”,
Gray grumped to himself. He’d had to be Regional Administrator in order to pull that kind of money, not some plum-ass Tier III homicide dick.
Feeling slightly sorry for himself, he made himself some coffee while Maya kept on. She was very pretty, Maya Frail, with her big green eyes and skin as smooth and white as marble; the look wasn’t uncommon, of course, but the way she did it was something else. Of course, most girls who wore that kind of skinjob had it done in a surgical boutique – most folks who didn’t have a natural abundance of melanin were pale as hell out here anyway, and it wasn’t really new. Those girls, though, girls like Maya…they had the fairy princess thing going on, carved out of milk crystal and set upon the world. Maya’s dark hair was up in a neo-Sino do, jade hairpins and a big-ass platinum comb, though from the neck down she wore the same kind of elegant black suit that most professional ladies did. Strange girl. It worked on her.
But now she was saying something new, something that made his nose wrinkle. “Civil Protection has refused to comment on reports that a member of its administrative staff was found dead last night in the White Center region of the Seattle Metropolitan Complex. NewsNetNow has been given information that employee Ronald P. Anderson was found by Pacification Officers late last night after his medical accounting implant registered his death. Details on the nature of his death are few, but sources close to the matter have said that Anderson was found murdered in an extremely graphic and sadistic fashion. Attempts to contact Civil Protection for comment have so far yielded only silence, but we will bring to you more details as we get them. In fashion news…”
Gray stared up at the display for what felt like a geologic age, watching numbly as the newest Miri Bendis collection was paraded down a Tokyo runway. This was bad. Information of all kinds was leaking out of this matter, and Administration was going to want to plug it with all due prejudice.
Bone Wires Page 4