Paloma

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “May I help you?” he asked.

  “I’m here to see Maxine Van Alen,” Flint said. “Colette Bannerman set up the appointment. I’m Miles Flint.”

  “Yes, Mr. Flint,” the young man said. “Ms. Van Alen is expecting you. You do realize you’re six minutes late.”

  Flint hadn’t realized an exact time had been established. He thought he was to get to the office as quickly as he could. But he didn’t say any of that to the young man. Instead, he allowed himself to be led through a nearly invisible door at the back of the room, and into a large, well-lit corridor, filled with moving pictures of attorneys in courtrooms.

  Flint assumed those attorneys were actual employees of the firm, and he suspected if he touched any of the images, he could hear the most masterful moments of the trials, trials that they had most likely won.

  The corridor ended in another wide space. Only this area had the hushed reverence of a library. The young man bowed to Flint, then stepped aside, letting Flint go in ahead of him.

  A tall woman with hair as blonde as Flint’s leaned against a desk. She wore a red silk dress that ended at midthigh. On her, it looked like business attire. Her legs were crossed at the ankle and her hands rested easily on the desk’s surface. Her skin was a dusky rose color, as false as the color of her hair. Only her eyes seemed unenhanced. They were black, almost fathomless, and looking into them made Flint feel momentarily lost.

  “Colette Bannerman says you have a proposition that will amuse me.” The woman’s voice was husky, as if she spent most of her time in minimal oxygen.

  “Does she?” Flint asked.

  The woman stood. She was taller than Flint, and broader, although she had no fat. She looked like she could take him and toss him through the nearby windows with minimal effort.

  She held out her hand. “Maxine Van Alen.”

  He took it. Her skin was hot and dry. “Miles Flint.”

  “You’re a Retrieval Artist.”

  “Last I checked.”

  “I represent disappearance companies.”

  “You also win cases against WSX, from what I hear.”

  Her smile was slow and easy, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I figure I have another year, maybe two, of winning cases against them.”

  “And after that?” Flint asked.

  “My answer to that question depends on how I feel at the moment.”

  “How do you feel at this moment?’

  “Divided.” She took her hand back and rested it on the desktop again. “Either WSX will buy every judge in Armstrong by then, or they will have figured out a way to destroy me. Or both.”

  “Do you think they’re that powerful?’

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you naïve, Mr. Flint, or are you testing me?”

  He shrugged. “Pretend I’m naïve.”

  “Every long-established city has a law firm like WSX. It’s just a testament to the corruptibility of public officials as to whether or not the power law firm invades the judiciary or city government. WSX has done both.”

  “I know we have some corrupt judges here,” Flint said. “I never thought all of them could be corrupted.”

  “See?” she said. “This is what gets people in trouble with lawyers like me. I said in a few years WSX will buy every judge in Armstrong. I didn’t say they had.”

  Flint nodded to her. “Good point.”

  She swept a hand around the room, as if she were inviting him to dance. “Find a chair.”

  He had a lot of choices. Most seemed functional—fake wood chairs that dated from one hundred years ago, when Earth items were valued but impossible to obtain. A few near the wall were actual wood and obviously never used. The rest were modern, heavily upholstered, and looked too comfortable for a business meeting.

  Flint sat on the arm of one of the upholstered chairs. He didn’t want to commit to a long conversation, and figured this was the best way to hint at his intentions.

  “Shy man,” Van Alen said.

  She had noticed, then, and wasn’t afraid to comment.

  “Cautious,” he said.

  Even though he sat, she leaned back against the desktop, extending those long legs. They were her best feature, and the most imposing.

  “So,” she said, “tell me what makes you believe you have a case against WSX.”

  Flint crossed his arms. “First I need to know if client confidentiality applies to this meeting.”

  “One hundred percent,” Van Alen said. “Every meeting I have in here is confidential. We don’t even have an active security system that records what’s happening here. You could toss a chair at me if you want, and no one will come running.”

  He was half-tempted to try it, just to test her.

  “You didn’t shut my links off,” he said.

  “That’s so crude,” she said, standing up and walking around her desk. Finally, she sat behind it, using the smooth surface as a prop for her elbows. “You’re the client. If you want to reveal what’s said in here, then that’s your prerogative. It’s just not mine.”

  “I’m not a client yet,” Flint said.

  “My philosophy is this,” she said. “Anyone who comes in here testing the waters is a client for the duration of the first meeting. Even if we decide not to bond.”

  Then she smiled. Slowly. As if she were making him some kind of proposition instead of talking about lawyer-client privilege.

  “Whatever you say to me, Miles Flint, will remain confidential. Even if you tell me you’ve committed mass murder, I will remain silent. I will agonize over it, wish I hadn’t heard it, and decide that I don’t like you, but I will not tell anyone, not even my pet cat.”

  She didn’t look like a woman who had a pet cat. She looked like someone who had no ties at all.

  Flint sighed. He’d come here to see if she’d assist him. Now he would find out. “Do you know of the Retrieval Artist named Paloma?”

  “Of course,” Van Alen said. “She found a few of my clients, people who didn’t want to be found. She was good at what she did. She retired a few years back, right?”

  “Right,” Flint said, and paused just slightly, like he would have done if he were the investigator on Paloma’s case. “She was murdered today.”

  All the expression left Van Alen’s face. For a moment, she seemed vulnerable, and those eyes seemed empty and lost. Then she swallowed hard and nodded, as if acknowledging what he said.

  “Murdered,” she said. “You’re certain?”

  Flint nodded. “I saw the crime scene.”

  “Because you’re…?”

  “A friend,” he said.

  “Police don’t let friends on scene,” Van Alen said.

  “They do when the friend is a former detective,” Flint said, stretching the truth a little. “It turns out that I stand to inherit most everything Paloma had.”

  “Congratulations,” Van Alen said dryly.

  “You won’t congratulate me when you hear my dilemma,” he said. “Her name before she took on the Paloma identity was Lucianna Stuart. Does that ring any bells?”

  The rose color had completely left Van Alen’s skin. “Of Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor, Limited? That Stuart?”

  Flint nodded.

  “But she’s the mother of—”

  “The Wagner brothers, I know,” Flint said.

  Van Alen cursed. “You want me to protect your inheritance against them? Are you kidding?”

  “No,” Flint said, “I’m not. There’s a reason Paloma picked me to keep everything, and I don’t think it has to do with money.”

  He explained that he had his own personal wealth. He also talked about the files he’d found when he’d taken over her office years ago, and the files that Paloma had been worried about before her death.

  “I thought you didn’t know you’d inherited until today,” Van Alen said when he finished.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “Paloma left me a holographic explanation.”

  “One of those disappear
ing kinds?” Van Alen asked with a bit of sarcasm.

  Flint nodded.

  “I hope you had the presence of mind to make a copy,” she said.

  “I have one,” he said. “I’d like to show it to you if you want to handle this case.”

  She let out a gusty sigh. “Let me think. Do I want to handle a civil case for the heir of the murdered and estranged mother of the Wagner boys, the most powerful attorneys in all of Armstrong? Do I want to delve into the private records of one of the most notorious Retrieval Artists of our time, with the caveat that I can use nothing in my good-deeds work for the Disappeared because this includes client confidentiality? Do I want to look at tangled records that might have their own confidentiality issues, not just from Paloma’s Retrieval Artist days, but also from the days when she was a member of that elite and powerful law firm?”

  “I guess that’s what I’m asking you,” Flint said. “And probably a lot more.”

  Van Alen leaned back in her chair, tapping her fingers against her chin. “I’ve taken on the Wagners before, which makes me unstable. Taking your case would make me suicidal.”

  Flint’s breath caught. She was going to turn him down. He wasn’t sure where else to turn.

  “I’ve always wanted to go down in a blaze of glory.” Van Alen stood and extended her hand over the desk. “I’d be happy to serve as your lawyer on this case, Mr. Flint, if you’ll have me.”

  He stood too and shook her hand. “Consider yourself hired,” he said.

  Twenty-one

  Nyquist cleaned the old coffee cups off his desk. He found a half-eaten donut behind a large mug, and removed both of those, as well. He was alternately too hot and too cold, which had nothing to do with his health or with the environmental systems in the Detective Division.

  He had felt like this as a boy on his first date. He’d felt like this when he first took out his ex-wife, and he’d felt like this when he tried the inevitable reunion.

  He was smitten, he knew it, and he hated it. He hated relationships. They never worked and they made him nervous.

  But he couldn’t change how he felt. Nor could he change how he reacted to DeRicci, no matter how much he wanted to. He’d decided not to pursue her, but her suggestion of dinner had changed that.

  Which made him even more nervous.

  He’d managed not to think about her arrival until five minutes ago. He had had a lot to do. First, he had gone to the forensics lab to find Khundred. She had stayed with most of the evidence and with the body, making certain nothing got missed as it went through the log-in procedures.

  He learned little from her and even less from Ethan Broduer, the coroner. Nyquist had always suspected that Broduer was a political appointment, but couldn’t prove it. The man seemed singularly uninterested in anything that caused people to die in the City of Armstrong.

  Even though Broduer had started his examination of Paloma’s body, he refused to speculate about the exact cause of death. He also had no theories, as of yet, as to what administered the horrible destruction that Paloma had suffered or whether she had been alive when the worst of the damage occurred.

  “Here’s the thing, Nyquist,” Broduer had snapped when Nyquist pressed him. “There are a lot of aliens out there, and this woman worked against most of them. I’m not familiar with all the weird forms of death that come into this city from faraway places. This woman was a Retrieval Artist, and I’m assuming she had friends and family. So her death could’ve been caused by anything—some alien ally I’d never heard of performing a legal ritual, or some angry spouse who decided to rip her from limb to limb. I just don’t know.”

  Which meant that Nyquist didn’t know, either. It also meant that he had nothing to go on, nothing that he hadn’t already seen for himself.

  Farther into the forensic unit, the techs had started analyzing that bloodstain—or whatever it was—that had been on the wall. No one would talk to him, afraid, apparently, that they’d be accused of causing a public outcry if they used the words biochemical and goo in the same sentence.

  Nyquist was stuck on the technical side of the investigation, stuck and unable to move it forward. He gave an order to Khundred to get some results immediately, but he figured he had as much clout with her as he did with the forensic team.

  So he came back to his office and started through the cleaned-up security vids from Paloma’s apartment building. The entire system shut down shortly before she died—the building itself claiming an organic malfunction (was this the source of the biochemical-goo rumor?)—but he was able to get a bit of information off the screen.

  Paloma had arrived at the front door of the building midmorning, greeting some friends as she went through the full lobby, and headed toward the elevator. Two serving ‘bots trailed her, their saucerlike tops covered with packages.

  She had been shopping and she had come back with a lot of merchandise. He needed to check two things about those ‘bots: whether she had left with them in the morning (he would have to look at more security video for that) and whether they were the ‘bots that were crumpled near the kitchen door of her apartment.

  He also had no record of packages inside that apartment. If she had time to put them away, then she had been inside the place longer than he thought.

  Either that, or the ‘bots went blithely on, putting away her newly purchased items while she was being brutally murdered just a few meters away.

  The security vid ran for a few seconds after she got onto the elevator alone. No one had joined her at the last moment, no one was waiting for her when she got on.

  He would need security recordings from the other floors to see if, in those few seconds, the elevator had stopped at those floors and let someone else on.

  He still had quite a bit of searching to do, but he had stopped with the tedious moment-by-moment work to do a bit of research on Lucianna Stuart and her family, before eating with DeRicci.

  Which actually meant that he had been lying to himself. All along, he had been marking time until their dinner. He had planned his last two hours around it.

  He would be horribly disappointed (and, at the same time, relieved) if she didn’t show.

  He moved a chair closer to his desk, brought in one more chair so that it looked like his office was more welcoming than it usually was, and then he settled in his own chair, peering at the scratched screen on the desktop as if he could actually concentrate.

  He couldn’t. His nervousness had reached a high pitch. He silently cursed himself and his overactive imagination. He needed to focus on this crime (and the dozen or so other investigations he was running, all of which had been reduced in importance when he got assigned this one), and not on the schoolboy infatuation he had with the Moon’s Security Chief.

  Someone knocked on his half-open door, and he jumped, then silently cursed himself again. He’d been expecting a visitor. He was so on edge that he’d let his nervousness show.

  He looked up. DeRicci peered into the room. She looked smaller here, her curly hair pulled back as if she had tried to control it, her clothes a casual pair of pants with a dark shirt—something most plain clothes officers wore when they knew they were going to a crime scene.

  She was supposed to come with him to the Lost Seas.

  In her left hand, she held a large, grease-stained bag. It smelled of garlic and some hard-to-define spices.

  His stomach rumbled.

  “I thought we were going to eat on the fly,” he said, then realized how ungrateful that sounded. He hurried to make it sound better. “If I’d known you wanted to eat here, I’d’ve made sure we had something good.”

  As if what she brought wasn’t good. He was glad he no longer blushed. If he did, he would have blushed now.

  He hadn’t felt this awkward since he’d been a teenager.

  DeRicci grinned. “I’ll take that as a ‘come-in.’”

  She did. She set the bag on the corner of his desk like an old pro. Most nondetectives set anything they
brought in the middle of the desk—not used to the flat screens.

  “I brought some curried beef, garlic chicken, and an Ilidio dish that they swear doesn’t use vast quantities of beltle.”

  He raised his eyebrows. Beltle was an herb found only on Ilidio. Humans imported it under the Alliance’s Dangerous Substance Ordinance, but only in miniscule quantities and then with the understanding that it wouldn’t be eaten. It had some technical function for some of the equipment used in Moon-based farming—making plants grow quicker or something along those lines. He’d never learned the details, only that it made real food grown in the Growing Pits come to maturity quicker, as long as it was in the soil only.

  If it were ingested in any quantity, it caused a grotesque and rapid death in humans. Earth-grown plants did not absorb the harmful elements of Beltle, which was how it could be used in agriculture, but when it first got introduced into Moon culture, it became a favorite murder method for disgruntled agricultural workers.

  Ilidio restaurants had to have special permission to use beltle in any off-Ilidio location, although they often protested. Beltle was considered a delicacy on Ilidio; to ban it from Ilidio cuisine was like banning garlic from most Earth-made delicacies.

  “I would hope that there’s no beltle in that dish,” he said.

  Her smile widened. “Don’t worry. I’ve had this before. The Ilidio restaurant is next to the Chinese restaurant, so I brought both. You can be noncourageous and eat the Chinese food only. It’s probably sensible; in case the Ilidio dish does have some beltle, one of us will live to tell the tale.”

  “Why would you even try something that adventurous in the first place?” he asked.

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Now that the word security is in my title, I have to take a few risks now and then.”

  She opened the bag and pulled out chopsticks, containers of rice, and some wriggling noodles that had to be part of the Ilidio dish. Then she grabbed three other grease-stained containers, some plastic-wrapped cookies, and a large brown root.

  Nyquist tried not to grimace, but he doubted he was succeeding. He pulled some disposable plates from his top desk drawer—testimony to how many times he ate dinner here alone—and set them near the food.