I Can Transform You

by Maurice Broaddus

  “That’s no way to grow up.”

  “Tell me about it. Probably why she got into the family business.”

  “Same old story: trying to earn a parent’s approval.” With fidgety energy, Ade held the glass of water up to his eyes, as if marveling at it. “A fool’s errand. Besides, kids have to find their own way not live in their fathers’ shadows.”

  “So you know how it goes?”

  Ade paused as if debating how to respond to him. “She threw herself into the job?”

  “Took her mother’s maiden name and joined the force. Didn’t want any special consideration for being Ronald Kemper’s daughter.”

  “Kemper is a big name to live up to. You should know.”

  “Yeah. On the one hand, she wanted the old man to see what she could do on her own.”

  “On the other hand?” Ade asked.

  “She wanted him to know that she was her own woman and he couldn’t take credit for anything she did.”

  “I’m really starting to like this woman.”

  “Yeah, she has that effect on folks.”

  Ade repositioned himself, sitting straighter on the bench. He tried to catch a waitress’s attention to no avail. “So when did you two meet?”

  “I was her training officer. Man, if you’d have known her then. She was your type.”

  “My type?”

  “Oh yeah. All rules and regulations. ‘The rules are there for a reason. Without the law, there’d be chaos. The law is what separates us from the animals.’ She was always quoting that.”

  “It’s from an argument. Massiah versus Indiana.”

  “You know the law?” Mac asked.

  “I’m a cop.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know the lawyer. Melvin Walters. He said it.” Ade quickly moved the conversation back to focus on Kiersten. “So she was a real by-the-books sort of person.”

  “Like you said, she disclosed our relationship while I thought I was being all clever hiding it from the bosses.”

  “So how’d you two get involved?”

  “You ever have a partner?”

  “No. People choose to not partner with me. That’s their choice, not mine. I don’t take that Spookbot stuff to heart.”

  “I was her training officer. You didn’t have to be around her more than a few minutes to realize she was special. Beautiful. Smart. Tough. She took shit from no one; she didn’t care who you were. And she kind of looked up to me. A real eager student, the kind a teacher could pour themselves into.”

  “Literally.”

  “Not like that.” Mac hated the implication of how it sounded, turning his very real emotions—what they'd had—into something tawdry. “I mean, when you have someone you know can take what you teach them and take it to a whole other level. Like the chance to coach a Jordan, LeBron, or Mikatsu.”

  “So, as her elder, superior, and instructor, you didn’t see it as an abuse of power to get involved with her?”

  “Fuck you.” It was Mac’s turn to adjust, not quite rearing up, but meeting Ade’s steady, probing gaze with his own. The two waited in silence, neither backing down.

  Ade broke loose with a wan grin to ease the tension. “What was her assignment with the Carmillon?”

  “Way I heard it, she went undercover to monitor their activities.”

  “Vice?”

  “No, narcotics plucked her. Hollander assigned her personally.”

  “One last question: how’d it end?”

  Mac remained silent for a time. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t regret the mess he’d made of both of their lives. They were both on the job. He was her training officer for a time. They got involved, dated for over a year without the brass knowing. He was transferred to robbery homicide once it came out. Tried to change some of his old ways and tame some of his demons. But, eventually, he fucked things up good. First letting the job get to him with that Ritenour mess, then letting the drinking and Stim use drive her away. Until one day she tired of his act and left. “It ended the way all things end: badly.”

  “Harbor any resentments?”

  “Am I a suspect?”

  “Honestly? Not really. Just doing my due diligence.”

  “No resentments. Only regrets.”

  “What kind of regrets?” Ade pressed.

  “What are you, my shrink now?”

  “I’m just trying to get the fullest picture possible of the woman she was and the man you are. So…regrets?”

  “I…a person like Kiersten deserves a good man. Anyone around her wants to…be better. To be worthy of…shit.” Mac hated to come across like half a douche: not having the words to put to his feelings, but having just enough to make a real tool of himself trying to sound like a fool-in-love poet. “I’m a fuck-up. That’s what I do, and that’s who I am. I just didn’t want to take her down when I crashed and burned. She deserved better.”

  A moment passed between them. Ade respected the silence and the man enough to leave it be. Privacy was something no one could afford anymore, so it had to be given. Ade turned away, pretending to be distracted by something outside, and gave Mac room to lick his emotional scars or else grieve in his own way. And Mac appreciated it.

  “Now, I’m fucking starved. We’re here in one of Easton’s finer all-night dives. What you say me and you grab some coffee and donuts,” Mac said.

  “You cannot resist being a walking cliché.”

  “Fine, you can have one of those puke-green protein shakes or whatever it is you muscle boys like to eat.”

  Ade revealed a mouth full of gleaming white teeth. A crooked, painful approximation of a smile broke against the metal in his unyielding face. “Now you’re talking.”

  One of the Jenxie’s Diner owners brought out Mac’s order: a plate of biscuits topped with sausage gravy, topped with two eggs sunny side up. Ade glanced over with mild disgust.

  “Not too many Forcers got one of those.” Mac pointed his fork—laden with a bit of gravy-dipped biscuit and the yolk of an egg dripping from it—at Ade’s cybernetic implant. “Way I see it, anyone who can afford that kind of tech is already above a chief’s pay grade. You’re like Chike, slumming with us poor folks.”

  “I’m nothing like Chike.” Ade raised his hands as if pushing away from the table and settled into his half-slouch of reading the news Stream. “We’ve run down Harley. Little more than a two-bit hitter, suspected in three homicides. Most we’ve ever managed to pin on him was a few assaults.”

  “Yeah. Ran across his crew a few times. Vicious little pricks, the kind who’d slit his own momma’s throat for a few moments’ buzz. Just tussled with one of them last night. I don’t know why Kiersten would ever get tangled up with him. Any of them. You saw them. I doubt any of them could take a toss without coming up holding. Still, they seem like harmless enough recreational users. More the ‘live and let live’ type.”

  “Sounds about right. Still, that’s the story they gave her to give us. And…”

  “…the truth is somewhere in the other direction,” Mac said.

  “You know, back in the 1960s and 1970s, police were assigned to infiltrate groups suspected of being revolutionaries. They’d get in bed with the groups, go with them on their little criminal activities, but inform if they were planning something huge. Real.” Mac tapped his finger on his empty glass, indicating the need for a refill, wishing he had something harder than the carbonated pabulum he swallowed. As if finally accepting a truth, he whispered, “Kiersten’s gone…”

  “When was the last time you heard from her?” Ade asked in a gentle tone.

  “Two days ago.” Mac recognized the tone—one he often used with relatives of victims—and snapped back from the melancholy vortex that waited for him. “Just to talk about the old days. Her place. Part of me thought it was an invitation, but I didn’t take her up on it.”

  “That get you worried?”

  “Just thought it weird, her reaching out to me in
the first place. Being undercover, she could go weeks without checking in. That was just the way it worked. Protocols had it that she had to check in with Hollander every day, though.”

  “I’ve only had the case three hours. With no body, it’ll be tough to establish a time line. With no body, we can’t check for drugs, can’t check for sexual—” Ade stopped himself. “Sorry, man.”

  “It’s the job. I know.” Mac fired up another Redi-Smoke. “What about that?”

  “About what?”

  “What you said earlier about what’s not there?”

  “The body?” Ade asked.

  “Think there’s a reason they wanted to splatter Kiersten across the city?”

  Ade returned to his state of brooding silence. A hint of a grin upturned the corner of his mouth as he searched: the semi-vacant, glassy-eyed stare of a junky in the throes of getting high.

  “You get a phone dump?” Mac asked.

  “Still waiting on it. Some sort of hold is on her records. I’m also waiting on her full background: financial, criminal, and public. My next stop is to go over to her place and see what she was getting into.”

  “Good plan. I’ll go with you.”

  “Former Detective Peterson, you are dangerously close to shitting on my investigation.”

  “All you can see are the cheeks of my pasty white ass. I have not yet begun to shit. If I had intentions of doing so, I wouldn’t have given you the heads-up. Besides, it’s not the crime scene, and I have a key.”

  “Western Investigator Twenty-One to base. Left Fourth and Transom with informant. Heading to Easton apartments of undercover investigator Kiersten Wybrow,” Ade said into his cop-net. Mac knew Ade documented as much as he could in order to give the appearance of an investigation by the book.

  “Base to Western Twenty-One. Time is oh three forty-five.”

  Though Kiersten kept a cover apartment on the outskirts of the Easton section of Old Town, she lived in another tower in Waverton, not too far from the one where she was found. He hated the façade of Waverton. A gleaming city whose dwellers had the dispirited expressions of those who lived in war zones: desperate, without hope, eyes devoid of life. Shuffling about in steps drained of vitality. Mac didn’t know how people could stand living in a tower. When he stared at their strange geometry for too long, especially under the glare of the lanterns, nausea overwhelmed him. Each of the tower’s original occupants carved out their own space for their apartment, paying for each square foot. Thus the spaces were not uniform, each floor plan was unique, and the rooms were carved out like natural hollows. The city had used code violations to seize the property under eminent domain and had the towers refurbished. In Kiersten’s case, the city had repossessed this space after a Stim bust—a home lab that refined the police stimulant to its more potent street form—so it made for a perfect cover.

  Standing in front of the locked door, Mac shifted awkwardly, suddenly feeling like he was chasing the ghost of someone he never knew. Not that he was going to admit that he may have exaggerated his access to their place. He knew where she stayed in case of an emergency, and he wasn’t supposed to know that for the sake of her cover. He certainly hadn’t been there before. Unlike her (real) place, there was no palm lock that responded to his print. Kiersten was old-school at heart. He reached above the archway and checked under the mat. He found what he was looking for under a fake rock. A mechanical bolt slid free as he turned a key. Funny how he thought of their life together as real and this world he and Ade traipsed in as no more than a façade.

  Mac searched for anything familiar, anything of the Kiersten he knew in the spartan space. He couldn’t shake the sensation that he was intruding into the wrong person’s life. Seeing the cloying undertones of flowers in vases, which gave every room the feel of a funeral home, he almost missed how Kiersten had decorated her place. He had always hated her aesthetic taste, as it made her seem like a frumpy old woman. A bowl of candy rested on the table next to the door. Mac grabbed a few pieces.

  “Not what you expected?” Ade asked.

  “It’s not like I kept my stained underwear in her panty drawer.”

  Ade’s mouth had begun to creep into a mild grin when it froze, and his smile evaporated. Ade held up a hand commanding Mac to pipe down, first pointing to his ear and then to the shut bedroom door. Mac looked over the tops of his sunglasses and then reached into the folds of his dampening jacket and removed his Cougar PT-10. Ade’s arms crisscrossed and pulled out two semiautomatic crowd-control machine guns. Mac twisted the knob, but it had been locked. Ade brushed him aside, kicked the door once, and when it splintered open, stepped first into the unknown, unwelcoming darkness.

  Two figures wrestled in the dark. The murk of the room obscured the figures, and they were entangled too closely to draw a bead on either.

  “Security Force. Hold it right there,” Ade commanded.

  The figures ceased their dance. Then one shoved the other toward the detectives and bounded out the window. Mac dashed after the figure.

  “Mac, wait,” Ade yelled too late.

  The window, like the rest of the windows along the tower, was neither square nor smooth nor spaced with any regularity. The rooflines shifted like rock slides. Shelves had been cut into the walls and the windows opened onto a terrace. From their second-floor vantage point, the figure dropped to the ground as if boneless, landing with the grace of a leopard then bounding farther into the recesses of the tower’s outcropping. Almost like cliff dwellings, the tower itself was a seamless piece of masonry, with no cracks, like river-cut stone created as one sheaf. Gibbous and grayish, the towers disoriented him. Geometric and beautiful, a math equation of art, he had the sense that he was too close to it to see the whole pattern. However, the angles and placement seemed too intentional, guided by an intelligence behind its order.

  Mac followed the suspect, his knees popping and groaning in protest. He had to let his equilibrium reassert itself. He pursued the figure as it bounded along the towers. It leaped onto an overhang and pulled itself up and over onto another terrace, barely breaking stride. Mac did his best to keep pace. In a chase, especially now that he was old and out of shape, his goal was to just keep the perp in sight. He ran smart, not fast, allowing his targets to exhaust themselves, because most people couldn’t go full tilt for very long. Mac jogged along at his half trot, watching as the figure climbed and bounded. He matched its path if not its acrobatics.

  The artificial hue of the lanterns bobbing in the midnight sky above the tower deepened the shadows. Mac trailed the figure into a dead end where the towers met. Sound traveled differently in this network, dampening the noise, creating a sacred space. That was the word that sprang to Mac’s mind: sacred. He leaned against a bare wall, with its unnatural smoothness and no signs of erosion or wear. A lavender fragrance suffused the surrounding area, but underneath the smell was something old and moldy, like rotted cabbage. Treelike plants cloistered the intersection. A woman emerged from a tangle of branches. There was a moment when reality shifted, like a child’s kaleidoscope turning. Mac threw up. He didn’t take his eyes from her as he wiped his mouth with the cuff of his sleeve.

  “Elia, what the hell?”

  “This isn’t what you think,” she said.

  “I think I’m hauling your ass in.”

  “The man back there, he knows. He’s a part of this.”

  “Who is he?” Mac hesitated. He needed to get back to Ade, but he couldn’t just let Elia walk. “Never mind, you need to come in with me.”

  “I can’t, Detective. I must see this through. For my people’s sake, as well as yours.”

  A moment passed between them. When she closed her eyes, her eyeballs moved around like disjointed marbles beneath the fragile membranes of her lids. He knew her full measure now.

  Elia charged at him without a word, without a sound. The swing of her staff swooshed over his head. He hadn’t realized he’d ducked as instinct had taken over. She reversed the arc of he
r attack in one fluid movement, catching him in his ribs. The coat absorbed most of the blow, but it caused him to drop his gun. He wrapped his arms around her staff. With the flourish of a pirouette, she released her staff, spun away from him, then came at him with her hands poised like daggers. Three times she struck him, and then each spot went numb. In a desperate bid, he jacked his knee up, which caught her in her side and threw her off balance. He locked arms with her and pushed her into the wall. With a graceful turn, she entangled him in a hold before slamming him into an adjacent wall. His glasses shattered into jagged bits that clawed his face. Blood trailed from his smashed nose. His breath came in jagged gulps. His shoulder wrenched out of place. His body reacted on instinct, desperate to stay conscious. His elbow crashed into her neck. He followed up with an awkwardly thrown punch. Trapped in close quarters, they exchanged a flurry of punches, with none landing especially hard as each of them began to tire, though Mac more than she. Mac scrabbled about, his hand searching for anything he could use as a weapon. Finding a branch, he jammed it into her neck. Blood spurted. Enraged, she lifted him and flipped him onto the ground. He kicked madly as she leaped on him, catching her twice, but neither blow had much power. Her hands wrapped around the soft folds of his neck. Head-butting her, he staved her off as she released her grip. He clambered for his weapon as she lunged for her staff. He fired twice. He hit her center mass, just as he was trained. He had to have hit her. She fell into the shadows. He raised his gun level and trained it on where she had fallen. He took measured half steps, easing into his approach. He neared where her body had dropped. He clutched his side and daubed his face as slick pools of blood trickled from him. When he reached the spot, she was gone.

  Mac returned to Kiersten’s place. His breath still coming in ragged hitches as years of Redi-Smokes overrode his military training. He remembered his time in the service as clean, a simple time of young idiots still searching for the people they were meant to grow into. It was a time when he had learned duty, responsibility, and the horseshit that was chain of command. Getting an other-than-honorable discharge for punching his commanding officer—no matter how correct Mac had proved himself to be—had left him as sore as he felt now.