by Alex Hughes
I introduced myself to Laney, assuming that the older woman wasn’t going to give me the time of day unless I had a good reason. “I heard you just got out of school.” This was Emily’s little girl, and I would be kind to her no matter what it cost me.
“That’s right. It’s a half day. The teachers have to be there the whole time, but we get to leave early.” Laney was a thin kid, with long limbs, dirty blond hair that fell pin-straight to her shoulders, and a pair of glasses that made her look a lot like an owl. She was too young for corrective procedures, I assumed. She had an air about her of awkwardness, all angles, and, as I’d suspected in the crime scene earlier, she had a low-level Ability—and was controlled for that age. With her father, probably she’d had to be.
“What grade are you in?” I asked.
“Fifth. I’m on a team with some sixth graders, in soccer, though.”
“You must be pretty good at soccer, then, huh?”
She frowned at me and pushed up the glasses. “When are you going to ask me about my mom?”
“What?”
“That’s why I’m here, right? Because my mom is dead and you want to know if I know anything that might help you catch the guy who did it and find my dad.”
“That’s right,” I said, and looked at Mrs. Powell, who shrugged. I radically revised my strategy for the conversation. Clearly this girl was the more-information, better-information type. “We’re trying to figure out why it happened so we can keep this guy from doing it again.”
The girl nodded and took a breath. “I’ve been thinking about it. A lot of people don’t like my dad, but my mom has a lot of work friends and people who like her. You want to know about enemies, right?”
“If you think something happened with those enemies recently. Yes, please, but friends too, if they had fights recently.”
Laney then proceeded with a surprisingly coherent fifteen-minute rundown of most of her dad’s associates and began on her mom’s.
“Hold on,” I said.
She stopped midsentence and sniffed. I could feel the emotions she was holding back at talking about her parents, sadness like a hurricane on the other side of those owllike glasses. I wished there was something I could do for her.
“We don’t have to do this now if you’re sad.” I glanced at Mrs. Powell for support.
“Yes, honey. You’ve already done a lot. Nobody would fault you for needing some time, would they?”
I could take a cue. “That’s right.”
She sniffed again and then lifted her chin. “I need to help. I want to help, okay?”
“Okay.” I understood needing something to do. The trouble was getting the useful information out of her rather than the dross. How to phrase it? “I guess what would be most helpful is anything that changed in the last few months. Anything unusual.”
“He hit her less,” Laney said. Mrs. Powell turned her head in shock.
Laney was being so matter-of-fact about it, I couldn’t do any less. “How often?” I asked.
“Hardly once a week. Sometimes even less. The last few months he’s been calmer. Mom seems calmer too.”
Mrs. Powell looked terribly uncomfortable, as if a terrible secret were being aired in public. I’d met her kind before and had no use for them. The facts were what mattered, and hiding these kinds of secrets only made them worse.
“Anything else that changed in that time?”
“A few months ago Emily was complaining of money troubles,” Mrs. Powell said. “Lately they seem to be doing better.”
I gestured at her to settle down. Then to Laney: “Do you know what the money trouble was about?”
She nodded, looking down. “I overheard them talking. I was at the top of the stairs where they couldn’t see me. I’m not supposed to listen.”
“What did you hear?”
“Dad got a pay cut at work—a big one—and I think it was his fault. He said it wasn’t a lot. And he got mad and yelled, and said if Mom was making her commissions they’d be fine. She kept saying something back, but I didn’t hear it. She didn’t yell so much.”
I nodded encouragement. “What else?”
“A while ago, they had this fight. Mom said something about taking care of the money, but he was yelling about needing more money. He lost some, somehow. Probably gambled it,” she said, in that too-adult voice. “He loses a lot that way. Then he started hitting her again, a lot. She had a black eye she tried to cover with makeup, but you could still see it. That’s when she started leaving me alone.”
“She left you alone?” Mrs. Powell said.
I gestured for her to be quiet. “Laney, tell me about that. Anything you can remember.”
The girl looked back and forth between us and finally at the table. She pushed up her glasses again. “She told me I had to be good and not to tell Dad she was going. This was poker night,” she explained, as if that explained everything. Maybe in her world it did. “She rented me a movie and ordered pizza, and then said not to leave the house and be good. She said I couldn’t have Dora over either, which I thought was mean.”
“When did she leave? When did she get back?”
“She left about eight, right after the pizza came. I watched the movie and then I went to bed like I was supposed to. It was a school night.”
“Did your mom look tired the next morning when she took you to school?”
She nodded. “She had like three cups of coffee. But Dad had a hangover and stayed in bed, so he didn’t know.”
“I see.”
“Once I watched two movies instead of one, and I fell asleep on the couch,” Laney added. “When Mom came home, she woke me up and she was really mad.”
Mrs. Powell put her hand on her niece’s shoulder. “Where did she go, Laney?”
“There was mud on her jeans and she had to clean her shoes, and the floor. I don’t think she went to the grocery store or the movies or anything. But when I asked her, she said not to worry about it. Adults are always telling me not to worry, and then bad things happen.” The emotion was welling up again in a flood.
“Laney,” I said, with just enough punch to distract her. I held up a hand to keep Mrs. Powell from interrupting.
“What?”
“Anything else? Anything new?”
She frowned, and thought, the wheels turning and focusing the emotion into something useful. “Well. It’s not important. But Mom had a new friend over. She said they knew each other at the Guild.”
I had a sinking feeling. “What was her name? What did she look like?”
Laney frowned. “I don’t know her name. She wasn’t very nice to me. She was a black lady with long hair and not much makeup and she wore flat shoes with work clothes. Mom says if you don’t wear high heels to work, it looks like you don’t care. Once there was a bald guy there. I didn’t like him at all. He looked at me funny. I went to my room.”
Tamika was there? And now she was missing.
“Do you remember what he looks like?” Mrs. Powell asked when I didn’t. “The bald man.”
“Could you draw a picture?” I added. Maybe the bald man was the missing telepath or Sibley.
“I can’t draw.”
“Can you describe him?”
She thought about that, the tears held at bay for a moment anyway. She finally shook her head. “He was bald. I didn’t like him, but Mom said he was important to her plan. She said she was almost ready to tell me about it.”
“Her plan?” Mrs. Powell asked.
Laney looked up and nodded. “She wouldn’t talk about it, but last week she asked me. If she and Dad got a divorce, would I choose her?”
“And what did you say?” Mrs. Powell was almost foaming at the mouth to know.
“She’s dead now! What does it matter?” And Laney started tearing up again.
“Laney. Laney, I’m sorry. Just one more thing. It could help.”
She sniffed. “And what is that?” Tension was like the blade of a knife in the room.
“Do you know what a telepath is?”
“Yes.” She took a breath. A tear ran down her cheek. “They came and tested us. If you can read minds or do stuff, they take you off to live at the Guild. Or they give you lessons. I guess you have to get your parents’ permission or something. I kept hoping they’d pick me so I could live at the Guild, but it didn’t happen.”
Poor girl, when the Guild test was her best chance at another life. On the other hand, my own story wasn’t all that different. “I’m a telepath, a Level Eight if you know what that means.”
Mrs. Powell grabbed her arm then, but Bellury was abruptly there and Laney pulled away, leaning forward.
“Can you read my mind and stuff?”
“Not without your permission. If you’ll let me, though, I’d like to borrow your memory. I’d like to figure out who those two people are.”
The girl sat back, thinking.
Bellury kept a tight watch on Mrs. Powell. “It’s her decision,” he murmured.
“Will it help?” Laney asked.
“It might.”
“Okay.”
“Really? That’s it?”
“Well, you’re not going to hurt me, are you?” Now her eyes narrowed.
“I promise I won’t.”
“Okay, then. But if you do I’ll scream and you’ll be in trouble.”
“I understand,” I said gravely. “I promised, though.”
Five minutes later, the girl and her aunt were leaving, and I stopped Mrs. Powell at the door.
I handed her a card, my card. “If there’s ever anything I can do . . . ,” I told her.
She hesitated before tucking it into her purse.
Afterward I sat, trying to recover from the challenging read. Blocking out a migraine via Link while reading a twitchy fifth grader whose mind kept wandering was not a task for sissies. Especially while keeping my promise to her.
My head pounding, right now my nose was full of the smell of kerosene, the heavy-sharp, bright smell I hadn’t smelled in ages. But Laney had, all over her mother, the last night she’d described, when her mother had come in late.
A few days before, Tamika—it was indeed Tamika—had visited, with a bald man in tow. A bald man who walked with the controlled power of high-level military training.
Tamika in the memory had seemed nervous, and had kept glancing at him, then back at Emily. She’d tried to get Laney away from the conversation, and quickly. Was Sibley threatening Tamika? Had he used her to scout out the house?
I spent the rest of the day in the interview rooms, interview after interview while I tried to figure out how this had happened. On my break, when I had a minute, I pulled the casebook from Cherabino’s empty cubicle. She was in court, or working from home, or something. In the back of my head, she still had the migraine pounding.
I searched through every one of the inventory entries for the house. The blueprints were absent. Either they were hidden well or—I sat down in Cherabino’s chair—or Sibley had gone there to steal those blueprints. Those blueprints of Tech. Maybe Fiske was using them to assemble a Tech supercomputer from the blueprints with all the parts that had gone missing.
And he’d used Tamika to do it.
* * *
I visited Cherabino’s cubicle, the lights in the area turned down, all of the lights directly over her cubicle all the way off. A kind of hush had fallen over the area.
“We have a problem,” I said quietly as I entered.
She was facing away from me, her head cradled in her hands, eyes closed. She mumbled, sounds that meant “Could you talk quieter?”
“Migraine?” I asked gently.
“Yes.”
“Want me to come back?”
She forced herself up, her eyes narrowed to slits. “What’s the problem?”
“I think Sibley forced Tamika to help him find and kill Emily. Maybe for those missing blueprints. The trouble is, the Guild can’t find her.”
“Who’s Tamika?” Cherabino asked cautiously.
I caught her up, and it was like a light went on inside her, the driving force that pushed her on.
“Call Michael back in from the scene I sent him on. We’re going to find out about these blueprints, you’re finally going to tell me everything you know about Emily Hamilton, and we are going to call every damn hospital and morgue until we find your missing woman. Or we’re going to find her some other way.”
“Are you good for this?” I asked quietly.
“I’m still here, aren’t I? If I’m at work, I need to work.”
I paused for a long time, then sat down next to her. “I’m not working for the Guild.” And my drug test came back clean. It wasn’t a drug dealer, I added silently. Nobody around here would sell me anything anyway. I’d tried.
“I know,” she said, still staring at her desk, fighting through the haze of pain. “I called Kara this morning. She told me what was going on.”
She winced as Michael walked into the cubicle and knocked on the wall far too loudly.
Michael paused, sack of donuts from the corner deli in hand. “I brought you food,” he told Cherabino.
“Whisper,” I said, quietly, as another pulse of migraine pain made it through my shields.
Cherabino was already unpacking the donuts.
“I borrowed the chemical file on kerosene from Dotty like you asked,” Michael told me, handing me a laminated card.
“Oh, good,” I said, eyeing a powdered donut Cherabino was already claiming for herself.
“Tamika first,” Cherabino put in, mumbling around the donut.
I opened one of the side drawers on her desk and pulled out a small bottle of migraine pills, handing it to her. “Meds first. Then we figure this out together.”
She took the pills, and Michael found a chair.
CHAPTER 22
After a long meeting where we all hit our heads against the metaphorical wall, I snuck away before the next block of interviews and called Kara one more time.
“I can’t do anything about Stone,” she said. “I’m sorry, Adam, I can’t.”
“I didn’t figure you could. That’s not why I’m calling.”
“Why are you calling?”
“Have you seen Tamika? Has anyone else?”
“No, no, she hasn’t been back to work. We sent somebody to check her apartment, but she wasn’t there either. Did you make her mad? Should we be looking for her? With what happened, I feel an obligation to—”
“That’s not what this is about.” I cleared my throat. “Listen, I believe Tamika has been threatened by a hired killer named Sibley to give up sensitive Guild information about courier routes. We think that’s why the hijackings lately. Did she seem off to you lately? Can you find her? She could be in danger. Emily is dead, Kara. This isn’t a trivial concern. And Guild courier information—well, I don’t need to tell you what a train wreck that could be. We’re finding biological Tech, Kara, and I’m pretty sure it belongs to you.”
“Wow. Well, officially, the Guild neither owns nor has any interest in any technology forbidden by the Koshna Accords. Biologicals seem a bit crazy, though, don’t you think?”
“They were under the seal,” I said, as much as I dared say over the open phone line. “I think she’s caught up in all of this, and besides the security implications, I really think she could be in danger. Can you find her, please?
“She works inside the Guild. She lives on Guild property. There’s no way anyone got close enough to threaten her without us knowing about it. And seriously, Adam, I would have known about anything like that.”
“I’m sure Emily’s sister is thinking the same thing about her sister. And now she’s dead. I’m asking you as a favor, Kara. This is Tamika, and I feel like I have to do something. And that Tech . . . could you at least look into it?”
Kara sighed. “I’ll rearrange my schedule and take care of it this morning.”
“I appreciate it.”
* * *
“Are you certain Tamika is under duress?” Kara asked me, voice all too serious.
“I’m not certain of anything right now.”
“I ask because—well, a number of her things are packed up. Neatly. She’s not at the courier office, she’s not at her apartment, and a significant percentage of her things are missing, along with her. According to the security guard, she left the campus yesterday under her own power. She even smiled at him. And as near as I could tell, the truck you’re referring to—it was her order, Adam. No one else requested it.”
“Courier office.” Suddenly it all clicked together. “Tamika has been working for the courier office. In logistics. Shipping things.”
“I told you that.”
I took a breath. “What if she’s in this on her own volition? I have a witness linking her to Emily before she was killed. And she works in the courier office. The courier office, Kara! She can order whatever she wants!”
“Where are you going with this?” Her tone was scared more than anything. “Are you saying—”
“We’ve been looking in the wrong direction. The hijackings, the murder, that’s why she was at the funeral.”
“Adam—”
“Find me where the next courier load is being delivered. Find me the information so we can intercept these guys. So we can catch them in the act.”
A long pause. “You really think Tamika killed Emily?”
“Yeah, I do. Unfortunately I do.” I owed Tamika. I had to make restitution. But I had to find Emily’s killer, and if they were one and the same . . . Cherabino said we owed the victims justice. That justice was the most important thing we could possibly give them.
“Adam?”
“What?”
“I’ll send you the information by courier in the next hour. If . . .” Her voice broke. “If I was wrong and set up that woman to take advantage of the Guild, to kill someone we should have been taking care of . . .”