“Here are the facts,” Rachel continued, and counted the points off on her fingers. “One: last night, a certain Grammy-winning pop star performed a private concert for the President and several influential donors. Two: pop stars don’t travel without an entourage. Three: her usual makeup artist was in a suspiciously-timed car accident, so a certain Joanna Reed was picked as a replacement. Four: Reed may have been vetted by the Secret Service, but Reed’s body was found in the trunk of a locked car a few hours ago, so whoever visited the White House wasn’t her.”
She took a breath. “And five? Members of an entourage aren’t allowed to move about the White House. They stay in a reception area in the basement, sit around until the show ends, and then pack up and leave.”
Santino wasn’t slow. “So if Joanna Reed was killed before… Our mystery woman needed access to the White House’s basement.”
“Bingo.” Rachel grinned at him. “Now, guess what they keep in the White House. Beside the President and his family.”
“Gifts given to the President, special collections… Mostly stuff that’s been donated and needs to be stored, but not displayed.”
“Aw,” she said. “You spoiled the surprise.” Rachel made sure to throw some sarcasm in there. Santino had an encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything that existed. Or had existed. Or might possibly exist in the future. Like most of her partner’s traits, Rachel found this to be simultaneously marvelous and annoying.
“What did she steal?”
Rachel shook her head. “The Secret Service doesn’t know. Most likely something from the same room where they found the victim’s body. He was left in a locked room, of course.”
“Of course. Probably one without security cameras.”
“Of course. There were cameras up and down every corridor. The storerooms were kept locked except for personnel with special access, and their keycards are logged each time they’re used. Plus, you know, it was in the White House, so nobody would be in the basement who hadn’t received access to the building in the first place. As far as security went, they thought they were protected.”
“Except when a pretty lady charms a staff member into giving her a tour.”
“Yup. As always, the weakest link in the security chain is the people involved,” Rachel said before she took a long pull off of her beer. The lager lacked the tingle of champagne, and felt somewhat lifeless as she swallowed. She made herself chug half of the bottle; there was no way she could afford a hundred-dollar-a-glass champagne habit, so she might as well forget the taste as quickly as she could.
“How did he die?” Santino asked, sliding the image around the tablet. “I don’t see any blood.”
“Poison. Strong poison. They’re not sure what kind, but it shut him down within seconds. There’s a copy of the preliminary autopsy findings in the file.”
“Makes sense. Easier to sneak poison into the White House than a gun. How’d she get away?”
“Same way she got in,” Rachel said. “She rejoined the entourage and left with them after the concert was done.”
“Kill someone in the White House and then wait it out?” Her partner gave a low whistle. “Mystery Woman has ice water for blood.”
“Yup.”
“So,” Santino said, tossing her the bottle opener. “I assume the MPD and the Secret Service are investigating the murder. Where do we come in? Um… I’m assuming this isn’t just an OACET thing.”
“Yup,” Rachel said again, as she opened a fresh bottle. “You and me and the guys? We’re good to go. Technically, we’re not investigating the murder. We’re tracking down the object.”
“Hm,” he grunted. “Seems as though that means we are looking into it, what with theft being the probable motive for the murder.”
“Technicalities and legalities, then. Our private clue club has a great closure rate on important cases, and we fall into that blind spot between departments, so we can do more with less oversight. The Secret Service came to Sturtevant and asked him to turn us loose.”
“Heh,” Santino chuckled, his colors brightening. “It’s nice to be noticed.”
“Not so nice, maybe.” Rachel pointed at the tablet, and he glanced down to find the image had changed to one of a large room full of shelves, boxes covering every inch of the space from floor to ceiling. “We have to find out what was taken before we can track it down.”
Santino blinked at the tablet, his conversational colors slowing with mild shock. “Oh no,” he said.
“Oh yes. And it gets better.”
“Of course it does. Lemme guess: more than one of these boxes is empty?”
“Nailed it.” Rachel grinned at him. “Plus, Mystery Woman moved the contents around as much as she could before she ran off. She swapped items that were in boxes of the same size, and put the boxes back in their usual places on the shelves.
“And she dumped a bunch of boxes on the floor,” she added. “And they’re not sure if she took more than one object, or even took anything at all.”
“So…”
“So the Secret Service is doing a full inventory, and they want us to sit in,” she told him. “Go upstairs and change.”
Getting onto the White House grounds after midnight was surprisingly easy. A private car came to pick them up. A man who spoke a total of five words (“Let me see your IDs.”) took them straight from her driveway to a side door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The other two members of their team had beaten them to the scene, and were waiting for them just inside the security alcove. Rachel and Santino had changed into their best suits—stiff, horrid things better suited for funerals than a late-night crime scene—but Santino still burst out laughing when he saw Jacob Zockinski. Rachel flipped frequencies to find the older detective in a black three-piece tuxedo.
She blinked at him.
“Go ahead,” Zockinski said in purple-gray resignation.
“I can’t,” she said. “My mouth’s clogged. All of the jokes want to come out at the same time.”
Matt Hill, the other detective from the MPD, was slumped against the wall, as if he had already laughed himself to the point of exhaustion. He nodded at Rachel, and said, “Tomorrow was supposed to be his day off.”
It took Rachel a moment to wedge the context of the comment into the conversation. “Everything’s at the dry cleaners?”
“Yeah,” Zockinski sighed. “And you don’t come to the White House in a sweatshirt and jeans.”
“This,” she said to Santino, “is why I always keep an emergency suit ready.”
The insults had begun to flow when Mitch Alimoren pushed open the interior door to let them into the White House proper. He was carrying a nylon garment bag, which he handed to a grateful Zockinski.
“There’s a bathroom you can use to change,” Alimoren said to Zockinski. “And then I’ll take you to the East Room. You won’t be allowed to go anywhere unescorted—we’re all on edge, and security’s as high as we can get it.”
It wasn’t Rachel’s first time in the White House, but the men from the MPD had the iron-jawed stiffness of people trying not to stare. She understood. When her boss had taken her to meet the President, she had set her scans as tight as she could to keep from tripping her way down the halls. An image of the White House had already existed in her imagination, a composite of rooms made up from stills and televised press conferences. In reality, it was both smaller and grander than she had expected. When it was built, the White House had been a massive structure, on par with the palaces of kings. These days, the larger McMansions had roughly the same square footage. The scope had shrunk to commonplace.
But there was something else there, some other quality that defied description. If the term “character” didn’t evoke heavily scuffed floors and crooked windows, Rachel might be tempted to use it, but it was more than that. The building had its own sense of purpose. It simply was. Visiting the White House was like walking through a cathedral. The purpose—the meaning—of the
place had sunk into the wood and stone.
Rachel wondered if that sense of purpose existed apart from the White House itself. If this building burned to the ground, if the ghost of Dolly Madison failed to carry off the art, would what came after feel the same?
She rather thought it would. It might take a couple of decades for the patina to soak in, but any building that served as such a home to power would become…more.
They reached the bathroom. As Zockinski changed, Alimoren briefed them on their progress. “The archivists have moved the items in the storeroom upstairs to the East Room. It’s the only space we have available where everything can be laid out at once,” he said. “They’re still opening boxes and sorting items. It’ll be a few hours before they can do a full inventory.”
“You let them into the scene?” Santino said a little too sharply.
“The murder occurred last night,” Alimoren said. There was defensive orange within his conversational colors. This ran from his head down to his knees, the shape vaguely reminiscent of armor. “Homicide from First MPD cleared the room this morning.”
Hill crossed his arms, and Rachel kept herself from sighing. The Agents were still so new that Rachel was rarely called to a scene until after it had been processed. It drove her team crazy: she found more at cold scenes than Forensics did when the bodies were still warm.
“Can we see it?” she asked. Unlikely that she’d pick up anything, not after the scene had been trampled by the foot traffic required to move a treasure trove, but it was worth trying.
Alimoren nodded, and when Zockinski finally emerged from the bathroom in an expensive dark navy suit, he led them downstairs. Security got lighter the deeper they went: someone had had the brilliant idea that the murder might have been a ploy designed to draw the Secret Service into the basement, and had made sure they were posted in force along the ground floor. There were guards stationed at every intersection, each of them wearing the grays and oranges of stress and frustration, and too focused on proving they could do their jobs. Rachel quickly grew tired of flashing her credentials.
Alimoren noticed as her attention moved from the Secret Service on the ground to the security cameras overhead. His colors fluttered towards a deeper uncertain orange, but he said nothing.
“Habit,” Rachel assured him. “I can tell where the cameras are without looking.” She could tell where the Secret Service agents were stationed, too, but Santino was the only member of the team who knew her eyes no longer worked. Well, Zockinski had been dropping hints, and Hill might know because his cousin was an Agent… No. Zockinski was just guessing, and Mako Hill would never let her secret slip.
She pointed out several hidden cameras for Alimoren, just to put his mind at ease.
Odd, that. A year ago, when the Agents had first gone public, locating cameras by their frequencies would have frightened someone like Alimoren. Now, this too-simple trick helped her prove her value.
“We figure we’ve got maybe three more days before the story breaks,” Alimoren told the group as he took them past one final checkpoint. “And then everybody in the country is going to turn into an armchair security specialist. We already know we’re going to catch the worst of it,” he said, a nearby Secret Service agent nodding in agreement. “It’ll look good if we’ve made some progress on either the murder or the robbery before then.”
“We’ll help where we can,” Zockinski said. As the oldest member of their team, and the one who met the universal expectations of what a high-ranking cop should look like, Zockinski usually ran point during interactions with those outside of the MPD. The four of them had decided it was easier that way. Not better. Just easier, especially when they were working a case.
“Appreciated.” Alimoren stopped by a battered white metal door. He slid a passkey through a lock, punched a code on the keypad, and let them inside.
It was anticlimactic. There was no blood, no mess, no taped-off area to indicate where the body had been found. The room was about the size of a large kitchen and was close to empty. In the far corner, a woman with a pale pink core loaded the last few white boxes onto a pushcart. The metal shelves, some against the walls, some freestanding in rows down the middle of the room, were almost completely bare.
“Can I walk around?” Rachel asked Alimoren. When he nodded, she dropped her purse, took a few long steps away from the men, and let her mind wander.
She heard Alimoren ask her team if they wanted to join her.
“No,” Santino said. “Agent Peng’s working.”
Her scans fell away, roaming across the floors, the walls, the ceiling, and beyond. She pushed her mind through the edges of things, deep into the thicks and thins and hollows of structures. There were no utilities other than electricity, no voids other than ventilation runs. No secret rooms, no hidden explosives attached to the gas lines… Fool me twice, she thought, expanding her scans to take in the rooms beyond, shame on me.
Nothing.
“What’s she doing?” Alimoren spoke in a low whisper.
“Scanning,” Rachel replied. “If I can ping it, or if it resonates on the EM spectrum, I can pick it up.” She tried to ignore how the archivist in the corner was turning yellow-orange with fear and uncertainty: the woman had just realized Rachel was an Agent.
“EM spectrum?”
“Just electromagnetic fields,” she answered, almost idly, “but there are a lot of them.” She tuned her scans to search for secretions. After a visit to a hospital a few months back, she had promised herself she would learn how to detect biological agents within small spaces, and had gotten remarkably good at it in a relatively short span of time. Oily fingerprints were one thing—fingerprints were everywhere, and she had learned early on how to detect them—but she had had no idea the world was encrusted with a thick skin of… Well. Skin, for one thing. Shed skin, cells dropped from human bodies with each caress, every time a comb was moved through hair. Little flakes, little flecks, tumbling around before they came to rest, and then devoured and pooped out in turn by those miniscule things whose singular purpose it was to eat and poop, and eat and poop…
She adjusted her scans again, and the room bloomed in filth.
Blood, snot, spit, and shit, she thought. Life is disgusting.
Some distance away, a tiny fleck of dead red layered over black on gold caught her attention.
“Hey…” she said, walking across the room and towards one of the empty freestanding shelves. The archivist shied away as she approached. “Somebody get me a pen and an evidence bag.”
Rachel flopped down on her belly, and waited until Santino shoved a pen and a small plastic baggie into her open hand. “Thanks.”
“Whatcha got?” he asked.
“This…” Rachel said, using the butt end of the pen to prod a nearly invisible piece of metal away from where it had come to rest against the leg of a shelf. She carefully jockeyed it into the evidence bag. Once it was in, she adjusted her scans for a tight visual. A gold object, much thicker than a pin but about as long, lay at the bottom of the bag.
She handed the baggie to Santino. “I think it’s a really bad idea to touch that with bare skin,” she warned him.
“We need an empty box,” Santino said to the archivist. “Something that can be covered.”
The archivist handed him a fancy white shoebox with the Presidential Seal on the lid.
“Can we come in?” Alimoren asked from the door. His voice was eager. Rachel reset her scans to normal, and saw the Secret Service agent was running yellow-white with excitement.
“Yeah,” she said, brushing the floor dust from her pants. “Did you find out what type of poison killed the victim?”
“Test results are still coming in. The best guess is a concentrated batrachotoxin.”
Rachel didn’t bother to try to search the term. She glanced at her partner, who whispered, “A neurotoxin extracted from tree frogs.”
“Any ideas on the delivery mechanism?” she asked, running a last scan
through the metal object in the box. It was hollow, with a spring resting beneath a protrusion at one end.
“Injection,” Alimoren said. He had closed the distance between them, and peered into the open shoebox. “The entry wound is too thick to have been caused by a syringe. Beyond that, they don’t know.”
“This might be it,” Rachel said. “It’s hollow, there’s blood on one end, and whatever was inside of it is organic.”
“This?” Alimoren picked up the baggie and held it up to the light. The narrow end of the metal tube was tapered to an edge along a single plane. The bulb at the other end was flat, its surface crumpled like a thick sheet of aluminum foil. There were grooves cut into the sides of the bulb, crushed and folded in on themselves by the same force that had ruined the shape of the bulb.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” Santino said. “Can’t quite place it, though.”
“Looks like part of a watch,” Hill said.
Zockinski’s conversational colors shifted to a more confident reddish-orange and clicked into place. “He’s right,” Zockinski said. “It’s the…ah…the part you turn to wind a watch.”
“Winding crown,” Santino offered, gingerly turning the end of the baggie towards him for a better view. “It’s too big to be one of those. A real winding crown is just a crank to turn the cogs. This is almost the size of a penny nail.”
“You’re assuming the watch needed to work,” Rachel said. “If it was just a storage system for the poison…”
Alimoren hissed. He let Santino reclaim the box and its contents, and started to tap on his phone.
“Check my purse,” Rachel said. “There’s a tablet you can use.”
The Secret Service agent was too preoccupied to realize she had been watching him call up the video footage of the crime scene. He hunted around Rachel’s purse until he located her tablet: the image of the suspect was waiting for him. The tablet was large enough for the team to cluster around and confirm Hill’s guess.
“Yes,” Alimoren said, his voice tight. “Look. She’s wearing a watch.”
State Machine Page 3