by Alex Hughes
As the recording suddenly went silent, I ventured, “If you’re looking for Cherabino, I can—”
“No.” A man’s voice cut me off. “No, I’m looking for you. This is Adam?”
“That’s right.” I paused suspiciously.
“Well, I work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I assume you’ve heard of us?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“I’m Special Agent Louis Jarrod. I’m calling to let you know we’ll be monitoring you for the next few weeks for an administrative matter.”
I backed up, looked at the phone, put it back to my ear. “Hold on. What?”
“I’m afraid I can’t give you details, but we’ll be calling a few of your coworkers and friends.”
My stomach went into free fall. “Okay, seriously. What’s going on? Am I in trouble?”
“It’s a routine inquiry, given your background and current opportunities. This call is a matter of respect, since it’s possible one of your associates will tell you we called, and I’d rather inform you myself.”
“My background? Why the hell would the FBI care about my background? I’ve been working here . . . Did Clark call you?”
“Watch your language, please. Let’s just say there aren’t many independent telepaths anymore, and leave it at that. I didn’t have to call you.” And he hung up.
I stared at the phone currently giving me the dial tone. What the crap? If someone had called to complain about me to the FBI, I was going to be really pissed. I mean, I didn’t have anything I could get in trouble for—assuming nobody searched my apartment with a voltage meter—but it was the principle of the thing.
I debated pulling Clark aside and starting a fistfight or worse, but with my luck it would just start more trouble. And Paulsen wasn’t going to like me complaining to her about somebody else being underhanded; she’d made that more than clear. And I didn’t want to lose my job for bringing it up—the FBI monitoring me made me look guilty as hell.
I wished I could believe this was just about the layoffs. I really did. But since the Guild stepped up at the end of the Tech Wars—and got really scary to do it, in public—the normals didn’t trust telepaths. Paulsen had four guys a month in her office wanting me gone. And I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. I wasn’t Guild, not anymore, but to certain people, I was still a telepath—still tarred and feathered with the same brush.
Hell, I’d just have to ride it out. I grabbed my pack of cigarettes and the lighter and went back out to the smoking porch in the drizzly rain, while my hands shook and I promised myself it would be okay.
It wouldn’t. Not if I couldn’t keep this job. And Emily—well, this was just one more reason for me to find the guy who’d killed her. I owed her for it. And maybe now my job—and whatever the hell the FBI was looking into—depended on me solving this case. Depended on me proving myself. But no pressure or anything.
I looked at my watch and realized I was late—very late—to the interview rooms.
* * *
Bellury was sitting in the interview room, half sandwich in hand, while across the table from him a pretty woman held the other half and laughed. A handful of magazines were spread out over the table, another empty chair pulled up to it, a neon sign that I should have been there. Probably that was my sandwich, my lunch.
The woman looked up as I came into the room, the sandwich half in her hands, a small pad of paper and a pencil in front of her. I curved my back, my body language small and unassuming, and did my best to look apologetic.
She looked up, and all the cheer drained out of her face like I’d pulled the drain from a tub. Her scowl was specific, directed at me, and the hostility I could feel coming off her in Mindspace was tangible. It was early afternoon, my lunch hour, and apparently not late enough yet for the telepathy to leave the building.
“I’ve been waiting. For. Two hours,” she enunciated, syllables precise and full of anger.
“Apologies for that,” I responded out of rote. I was so late I hadn’t even looked at the file, and I felt off my game.
The woman shifted in her chair.
Time to regain control of the room. I straightened my spine and sat down in the chair, hand on the table, legs spread as if I hadn’t a care in the world. “I need to ask you a few questions and then you can be on your way.”
“Did you not have the time in your busy day to see me on time?”
The words hit me like a yellow jacket sting, and only practice kept me from saying something nasty. Instead, I opened the folder and glanced through things. Crap. This was Emily’s sister, a Linda something, and I’d already made a bad impression. If she shared genes with her sister—genes for Ability—it also explained why I could read her so late in the day.
“We’re investigating a murder. Your sister, in fact. Do you want to sit here and argue about timing or do you want to help me catch whoever did this?” I modulated my tone at the end to try to soften it. I couldn’t screw this up. I just couldn’t.
She thought for a minute, furious flies stirring around her brain. “I don’t like you.”
“I can see that.”
Bellury stood up and gave me a look. “Let me take your sandwich wrapper,” he told Linda with a small calm smile. He bundled the leftovers into his cheap paper sack and crinkled it up loudly into a little ball. By the time he was done, she had been distracted. And I was down a sandwich for lunch.
Bellury settled quietly into the observer’s chair at the corner of the room. “I just have a few questions for you,” I told the woman across from me.
She leaned forward, and said something about her daughter and a friend’s house. “The friend isn’t good with supervision.”
“Okay.” I pushed the pad of paper to the side. They’d be recording all of this anyway, and I was having a hard time concentrating with split attention. I opened up my telepathic senses wider. And suppressed a wince as I pushed too hard; finally I could tell it was getting later in the day.
“Your name, for the record.”
“Linda Powell. Since we’re both married now, we have different last names.”
I didn’t know why she felt like she had to say something about it; it was a relatively common thing. I finally decided I hadn’t met her before; I would have remembered this prissy forcefulness. The realization didn’t decrease my guilt.
“Well?” she prompted.
“Where were you Monday evening between the hours of five and nine?” First question, since close relatives were often the perpetrators.
“At my daughter’s ballet recital,” she replied evenly.
“All four hours?”
“She had to be there early to have another parent do the buns. The recital has eighteen classes performing, including the seniors, who have a miniballet. Trust me, the thing was endless.”
“Can anyone verify you were there the whole time?”
“Other than my husband?” She gave me a list of other mothers who’d been there. She looked up and to the right, usually a sign of truthfulness in right-handers. More importantly, I could feel the edge of her mind echoing the information before she gave it, along with images I didn’t quite catch. She was certain. Not to say that couldn’t be a false positive if she was a very good liar, telepathic signals and all; the good liars lied to themselves first. But I believed her.
“Thank you,” I said. Politeness would get you everywhere, and I had a lot of ground to make up. “Do you know where your sister was during that time period?”
Sadness leaked from her. “Laney had the same recital, so I took her and she stayed over at our house. Dan was supposed to be out with friends, so Emily was planning to stay home with a bottle of wine, a bubble bath, and a season of soap operas. She deserved the break,” she added pointedly. “She was a good mom.”
“Did you know Dan beat her?” I let the question sit like a rotten fruit on the table.
She looked down. “I . . . I guess I suspected. Emily wouldn’t . . . she
wouldn’t hear of talking about it. But she always had bruises. I . . . Once I went to the trouble of looking up women’s shelters. I left the information in her sewing bag. But the next day her bruises were worse and she wouldn’t talk to me. I thought maybe I’d done the wrong thing.” She looked up. “Did he kill her?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? “We’re still trying to determine how and by whose hand she died,” I said, a variant on the standard no-information line we gave so many witnesses and suspects. This time it felt wrong, like she deserved more information. But I didn’t know the husband and the sharp man weren’t the same guy, and I didn’t know she wasn’t talking to him. Not for sure. “Did you have any reason to think he would kill her?”
“Other than the fact that he hit her?” She let the question play out, the word “hit” like a curse word. Her mind opened up then and I read her as clearly as a large-print book. She regretted that information, regretted it badly, and part of the regret was the fact that she’d honestly rather not have known. Would rather not have known about her own sister. “No. No reason. He was stressed, that was all. Bill—my husband—didn’t like him, especially not when he was near the end of a project.”
I kept pressing for information. “What kind of project?”
“I don’t know, something big. Dan was one of those high-stakes engineering/architect types. He’d brag he didn’t hardly work for weeks—but he’d get close to the deadline and he’d work like a madman. I never understood it; that kind of stress would drive me crazy. Especially on the kind of multimillion-ROC projects he was always bragging about. But he got . . . different . . . at the end of a project. Harsh. Cruel, sometimes. I worried about Emily. She always seemed to end up with more bruises then.”
“Did she work outside the home?” I asked, expecting the answer to be no since the neighbor had found her and no one at a job had reported her missing.
“Um, yes. She had the week off, though. She’d just hit her big sales quota.”
“Sales quota?” I asked, starting to feel like a parrot. But when in doubt, keep them talking.
“She had a sales job for this transport company, um, I think it’s called Dymani. Most of the money is commission based, so it’s rough sometimes, peaks and valleys, you know. But she’s good at it. Was.” She looked very small then, her voice quiet. “I can’t get used to this.”
“You’re doing just fine. What did she sell for them?”
“Contracts, mostly, to move materials. They specialized in big, hard-to-move items—you know, components for shuttles to the space station, huge panels and supports and such. It’s a lot of money, when it’s working. She’d just come off a real tough patch; she told me if she didn’t meet her quota soon there’d be hell to pay. Dan was yelling at her about money. She thought she might lose her job. But this was months ago. Lately, everything seemed okay.”
“You said the husband was under stress right now, though?”
“Well, I assumed, what with her bruises . . .”
“Just give me the information you have, Ms. Powell, and we’ll put it together with other people’s information to make a complete picture. Try not to assume anything, please.”
She sat up, back ramrod straight. “As if I’d lie to you. Seriously, it’s been over twenty-four hours. What have you people been doing to catch my sister’s killer other than talking to innocent people about trivial things?” She glanced at Bellury, as if for support. Sadly, I was telepath enough to know most of the anger was for effect. Inside, she was frustrated yes, but mostly tired, and sad. I knew how she felt.
“Was your sister involved in anything . . . shall we say, in the gray area of the law?” I asked. “Did she have any enemies? Any powerful friends?”
Ms. Powell sighed and looked down at the table. After a pause, she answered slowly, “Not that I know of, but lately she wasn’t really talking to me. She’d come and get Laney and kind of wave. She used to stop and talk. She used to care. But the last couple of months . . . well, it’s like we were strangers.”
She was so overwhelmingly sad in that moment. I tried to get more—and got a stab of pain. Flashes of light started drifting across the right side of my vision, and I rode it out.
After a second, I forced a smile, careful not to move my head. “Thank you for your help, Ms. Powell.”
She stood as well, glanced at Bellury, who was settled and calm in the corner. “You sure that’s all you needed? All you kept me waiting for so long?”
“I may have another few questions for you as the case develops, but most of the time we can do that over the phone or I can drive to you,” I said on autopilot. “I appreciate you coming down to the station.” I was gripping the pad of paper in front of me, the tactile sensation grounding.
“Catch this guy, okay? No screwups.”
“We’ll do our absolute best.”
“Do better.”
She got her umbrella from the corner of the room and left. Bellury pulled himself out of the chair and hurried after her.
I sat, and waited for the world to steady.
CHAPTER 6
“Let’s go over what we know about the Hamiltons,” Cherabino said. We were sitting in her cubicle near the end of the workday, going over the case, and I was doing my best to keep up, my attention—and the telepathy—long gone. Cherabino said something about the husband, Dan.
Michael nodded. “He works for a large architecture firm. He’s disliked by his coworkers, based on our interviews, and more than one of them suspected he’d stolen money—or slacked off—or done something similarly dishonest. None had proof.”
“He beat his wife,” I put in pointedly. “Likely his daughter too. He was an all-around asshole.”
Cherabino said something about him being missing from work. Then, “He hasn’t been seen at any bank or pawnshop in the area, so, assuming there’s no holds or checks on the bank accounts, he’s working under limited resources.”
Michael said something I didn’t catch.
She responded, “I want to find this guy. I want to know why we can’t find this guy.”
“Maybe he went farther out than our net would cover,” Michael added. “Too much outside DeKalb County or the metro counties, we have little we can do to track him. He gets outside Georgia . . .”
“And basically he disappears from our radar.” Cherabino nodded.
“Hold on,” I said, trying to follow all the new information. “Why are we assuming the accounts are clean? Don’t we know?”
“The credit union’s being difficult.”
Michael added, “They’ve turned over the recordings of the lobby, as they’re legally required to do under the loophole that lets them record in the first place. But they’re not letting us touch the accounts. All they’ll say is they can confirm that Daniel Hamilton and his wife, Emily, have accounts there. They’re lawyering up over the Privacy Accords and we’re likely to be stuck in a runaround for a while.”
I thought about that for a minute. “Maybe we can ask Andrew for help,” I suggested.
“Who’s Andrew?”
Cherabino sat up. “Good idea. Andrew is the forensics accountant assigned to our department. At least, the only one who has time for the normal rank and file. We’ll have to get approval for the time, but it’s a great idea. That man seems to pull out miracles. Maybe he can get at them from taxes or something.”
“Dan is still MIA,” Michael put in, almost too quickly. He continued. “None of the morgues in metro Atlanta have a John Doe matching that description, same for the hospitals and publically available housing. Major hotels say they don’t have a room under that name—”
“But they could be lying, be privacy advocates, or he could simply have checked in with cash and a different name. And it’s not like we can call all the smaller hotels and B and Bs. Let’s face it, if he really wants to disappear, he can.”
“I did finally find the car,” Michael said.
“The car?” I asked. I felt like
I was a step behind, maybe more.
“Where was it?” Cherabino asked, perking up.
“Parked in the lot of a major discount store, in the supermall in North DeKalb,” Michael said. “Four cars were reported stolen from that same lot that weekend, but that’s a normal number for that mall.”
“Track them down anyway,” Cherabino said, and then something about finding them abandoned. “If you can find them abandoned, maybe we can trace his movements.”
The two of them went off on a tangent I couldn’t follow. After a few moments, I interrupted. “Shouldn’t we be focusing on the crime scene we do have? I mean, for all we know he’s dead and we just haven’t found the body.”
Cherabino sighed, and nodded. A few thoughts of hers drifted in my direction, but I couldn’t catch any of them. “You still determined to leave at five?” she asked Michael out loud.
“Please,” Michael said, and smiled. “The wife and I have a dinner planned.”
“You want to work here, you have to put in the hours,” I said, because I was exhausted and wanted to go home myself. “Cherabino told you that in the beginning. We work late here.” As much as I wished we didn’t.
Cherabino looked at me, and I got a flash through the Link that she was irritated at me. “I’m tired myself, and one early night isn’t going to hurt anybody. We’ll go over the victimology tomorrow, track down that clear cord material, and plan our next steps.”
Suddenly my brain tried to throw up how I knew Emily—my guilt over keeping the secret. Worse, Cherabino turned her head all the way around as if she was trying to listen. I had to distract her.
“You’re a damn rookie,” I told Michael, knowing it was too much, but desperate. “You can’t twist Cherabino around your little finger like you’re something special.”
Michael frowned, uncertain. “All I said was—”
“If you need to go home, go home, then. Rookie.”