Payoff

by Alex Hughes

  I sat there for a long moment, trying to tell if they were telling the truth. They seemed open enough, honest enough, but I hadn’t really put in all that much pressure. The missing telepathy was changing everything about how I had to interact with these guys, especially since they weren’t getting as squirmy as most suspects did about me being a telepath. So, back up. Take another tactic. I had all the time in the world to figure this out. “Why would he send the pictures to the judge?” I asked. “I’ll need to verify your alibi, you realize that.”

  “Provided these pictures don’t end up in the public record for a morals scandal,” Oden said, “I have nothing to hide. She really is nineteen, and she really was paid very well for her services. Legally.”

  I led the senator and his man on a merry chase of question and answer for maybe another half hour. Their stories stayed consistent, and they didn’t add extraneous details. I was beginning to hate Mantega, but I was no closer to any lies than I had been at the beginning.

  Finally, exhaustion hit me like a lead weight, and I blinked hard. “I’m going to step out for a minute. Bellury here will make sure you have what you need—another cup of coffee, perhaps—and I’m going to verify your story.”

  I went to get a cigarette on the smoking porch.

  * * *

  I was on my second cigarette. The door opened and closed. I assumed it was Bellury, since it was his job to follow me around like a misbehaving child. Cherabino was on the other side of my brain and still blocking me hard, and that was making me feel even more blind.

  “I don’t get it,” I told Bellury, as I watched the sun make its way down to the top of the buildings across the scorched courtyard. The department didn’t have the money for bioengineered grass or water past the drought allotment, and it had been a hot dry summer. What few clumps of grass that had survived clung in stubborn mounds to the red earth, a bright green from all the recent rain. “I really don’t understand. I mean, if he paid him, why kill him? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I agree.” Cherabino’s voice came from behind me.

  I turned, startled. My heart was beating way too fast. This lack of telepathy thing was not working out for me—it was making me blind and deaf and dumb, making as many assumptions as the normals.

  I put the cigarette out, suddenly, oddly, hopeful. “Um, hi.”

  “Hi,” she said. Her body language was folded in on herself and she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, wary.

  “I’ve been reassigned.”

  “What? Where are you going?” Visions of her moving—to South DeKalb, out of state—danced through my head.

  Maybe she saw it through the Link. She looked up, too quick. “No, nothing like that. It’s just—Bransen has reassigned me, okay? He says I have too many other cases right now to deal with the Raymond Datini case, so I can’t work on it anymore. You’re on your own. I’m sorry. Paulsen said you can use Bellury. He was very firm with me—it’s the way it is. I’m sorry.”

  “I . . .”

  “What?” She squirmed.

  “I’m not a detective,” I finally settled for. My telepathy wasn’t even working. “Aren’t there legal implications?”

  “They say not in this case. I’m sure you’ll figure this out.”

  “Can I keep the senator here?” I asked. Her faith in me suddenly registered, too late, after the fact. Should I have said thank you?

  She frowned. “Do you have enough to charge him yet?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then turn him loose and get the evidence. Unless you really think you can sweat out a confession from him tonight.”

  I took an internal stock; even this conversation was pushing the limits of my capabilities right now, and the world was starting to fade in and out again. I was pushing far too hard; I needed to sleep again, and soon.

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “You’ll get the evidence later,” Cherabino said. “You will.” She squirmed again, vague guilt finally escaping over the Link. “Listen, my grandmother’s having a lunch this weekend, and she wants to meet you. It’s good food if you want to come along.”

  I stared at her. She wanted me to actually meet her family? That had always been a firm no before. . . .

  “Um, sure, I’d love to,” I said.

  “It’s good food,” she said again, uncomfortably, and left.

  * * *

  I let the senator go, got Bellury to drive me home, and fell asleep in the middle of doing word searches designed to help heal my brain. I didn’t even wake up enough to turn on the brain-wave canceler.

  I woke up fourteen hours later, fuzzier than I should have been, and struggled through my morning exercises. I took the bus to meet Swartz, looking at all the people around me I couldn’t feel. Mindspace was far away and nearly transparent; I felt alone, and empty, and under far, far too much pressure. A week, Cherabino had said. A week to solve a major case before the judge gave up on me. A week. By myself. How was I going to solve this in time to keep the judge from throwing me back in jail?

  Start with the beginning, Cherabino always said. That and see where the evidence takes you. If the blackmail thing was true, maybe Raymond had been killed for the money.

  I needed to talk to Kubrick again.

  * * *

  The undercovers were scheduled to be in the office today for reports and a team meeting this morning, according to the dispatcher. Cherabino was in court. And I was on my own with a ticking clock and a judge to keep appeased enough for me to be a free man.

  So I did the only wise thing to do at that point. I swallowed my pride and went downstairs, to the locker rooms. The senior cops who didn’t spend much time in the office still spent time there, and the timing seemed right.

  I found Kubrick, clean and groomed, chatting up another cop in a free-spirited debate on sports. He laughed, and I felt nothing. Literally nothing; the lack of telepathy was driving me nuts today, like seeing a dialogue-heavy movie with the sound turned off, almost able to read the lips and figure out what was going on, but not quite. You missed the most important parts when the camera panned to another direction.

  “Have a second?” I asked Kubrick. The other cop turned, and I realized it was Clark, my nemesis in the interrogation department, the one guy who asked Paulsen to fire me at least once a month. For once I was happy I couldn’t read his hatred.

  He scowled at me, I’m sure putting together a tirade on how I hadn’t been in the interview room enough lately.

  I cut him off before he got started; apologies didn’t go anywhere with Clark, and I wasn’t in the mood anyway. “Kubrick, I need your opinion on the case we talked about earlier.”

  Kubrick shrugged and rebuttoned a loose button on his shirt. He grabbed his bag. “Fine, you can talk to me while I eat.”

  I followed him onto the elevator; he was probably headed to the tiny break room upstairs in the senior cops’ floor of cubicles, where the only microwave in the place—outside of the senior brass—shared space with the world’s smallest table. For now, as he mashed the worn button for the elevator, I kept my peace.

  “What do you need to know?” he asked as the doors screeched closed.

  “You’ve been there a lot,” I said. “You’ve been listening to the gossip. It looks like Raymond had just come into a lot of money. Is there anybody who’d kill him for that on the drug side? I mean, I know it’s not very common and he’s well connected, but money does crazy things to this kind of group. If somebody in that crowd killed him, who would you lay money on?”

  He thought. And thought, while the ancient elevator moved up slowly. “Well, Laughlinn’s a hothead, but Dick has a habit of giving a speech to the new guys, trying to scare the shit out of them. He likes control, and if he thought Raymond was getting off his control . . . I don’t know, maybe he’d do something stupid to prove a point. But like I said, so far as I know they had Raymond right where they wanted him. No reason to kill him if t
hey’re getting what they want. Unless he was dumb enough to go flashing the money or try to pay it off too quickly.”

  That seemed dumb, especially for a judge’s relative, but stupider things had been known to happen. Although he had gotten the payment from the senator. . . . I filed that one away for later. “What’s the speech?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard it a couple of times now. He has several variations. Let’s see. . . . If they step out of line he’ll take them out to the woods and shoot them dead, dead, dead and leave the body out for the bioengineered wolves to tear to pieces, or he’ll drag them out to the campus compost heap and suffocate them in garbage—or my personal favorite, shoot them dead in a container sitting at the train depot and let the train move them out of town while they rot like the dogs they are, for crossing him as the alpha dog, ruff ruff. I think there’s a variation with a construction site container as well but by then I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  The elevator reached its floor and the doors opened. “Did the construction site story have a dumpster in it?” I asked him, trotting along as he headed for the break room.

  “Might have been.”

  “What’s this guy’s name again?” I asked. “Is there any way I can talk to him?” If only the telepathy was working, I could prove he’d done it.

  Kubrick stopped in the middle of the walkway, cubicles lined up to our right, doorways to private offices—and the break room—in a row along the wall to our left. “Listen, Adam, I understand you’re working a murder case all by your lonesome, and there’s a judge involved. I get it. I do. But I’ve been putting in blood, sweat, and tears on this undercover job for four months.” He looked around and lowered his voice, leaning in. “One more solid piece of evidence or another witness willing to testify and I’m done. We’ve got these guys redhanded on endangering college kids en masse and trafficking in several levels of controlled and illegals substances, the worst of which will probably get them executed. I’ve got most of the players involved connected to gang wars and murders galore already. We don’t need another murder charge, and I don’t need you spooking these guys any worse than you already are. Do me a favor, okay? Leave these guys alone for another week or two. I’ll line up the last of it, and you can take a run at Dick Harkness then. I’ll even back you up in court—I’ll testify, if that needs to be how it is for you to get him cold. Okay? Just leave it alone until then. Back off, okay?”

  I put my hands in my pockets. He was even being reasonable, and he hadn’t mentioned Cherabino once. But I had a judge I owed big waiting on an answer and jail looming. “I don’t have a week or two.”

  Kubrick pulled me aside, and said, even quieter, his voice nearly in my ear. “Look. There’s a major deal going down, and another in four days. Give me until they both clear. I’ll even help you. Just back the hell off until then, and things won’t have to get ugly.”

  I turned around and walked away.

  * * *

  I walked to the building across the street and took the old creaky elevator down to the morgue, currently in a basement of a government tax building, as the Decatur Hospital basement used to flood too much.

  The long, concrete-floored hallway had stainless steel doors on either side, and walking down it felt like I’d been passed into some alien spacecraft. This was the first time I’d been down here by myself, and the acoustics were eerie, every footfall turning into a ripply echo that put the hairs up in the back of my spine.

  I entered the correct door, the smell of formaldehyde and decay and metal hitting me in the face like a tangible thing. The cold came next, along with a curious absence of the usual buzzing I felt in Mindspace from the quantum stasis generators. Those shelves, the long rows of doors set into the far wall twenty feet away, would hold bodies in a state of suspension until whatever the medical examiners needed was done and the bodies could be released to families or funeral homes or the state. Normally the interactions the fields made in Mindspace were distracting and a little upsetting, like a constant buzzing of a wasp two inches from your ear. But today, even early in the morning, I felt nothing. I had to fight down panic at the thought I might not ever feel anything again.

  A woman looked up from the wall nearest me, where she was doing paperwork on a metal table with a green pen. She was tall and elegant with perfect posture, her long microbraids held back by an ornate clip in the shape of an Egyptian cat. She sat in the front of the room near a metal table, paperwork in front of her. A second medical examiner, a stocky guy with glasses and skin so pale you wondered if he ever saw the sun, rubbed shoulders with a scared-looking intern type at the far end of the room, with four metal examination tables between us. They were currently examining the abraded dermis of a naked body, without even the dubious dignity of a towel over the guy. The rest of the room was open space and lights, bright fluorescent lights that reflected off the steel tables and cabinets in a riot of brightness.

  “Adam,” the woman greeted me, her lilting accent reminding me of Jamaica. “What are you doing all the way down here?”

  “Cherabino said you’d be done this morning,” I said. “The Raymond Datini case?”

  “I’m still finishing up the paperwork. I can walk you through what we found.”

  “That would be great.” I pulled up one of the stools.

  Gayle was the medical examiner I’d seen a few times before with Cherabino—not the coroner, as I’d thought she was. Cherabino had given me a long lecture when I’d made the mistake in front of her, but to tell you the truth I still wasn’t sure what the difference was or why she’d gotten so huffy about it. Gayle was reasonably nice, though, and had been since the beginning. I liked her enough to use the correct term, whatever that was.

  She shuffled through file folders and finally came up with the correct one. She frowned as she read it again. “Ah, yes, I remember. I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, picturing any number of horrible things I’d have to tell the judge.

  “We weren’t able to identify him based on fingerprints; the skin was just too degraded. He doesn’t have any artificial organs. But we did finally get ahold of the dentist for the dental records.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  She set the folder down and turned to face me. “Whoever you’ve brought me, he’s not Raymond Datini.”

  I blinked. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. He’s about the right age and height, and the features that remain seem similar. I can see why you’d make the mistake. But Raymond Datini has two artificial teeth and a gold crown as of a year ago, and this man has virgin teeth, all natural, with not a single corrective procedure or cavity filling to his name. There’s no possibility—none—that this is Raymond Datini. I’m sorry.”

  I felt like the universe had just dropped out from under me.

  “I’m sorry, Adam. Was there something else you needed? I’ll get you the full report by the end of the day. Cherabino said you’re the primary on this now.”

  “That’s right,” I said automatically, and forced myself through the niceties before I left.

  Not Raymond? Who was in the morgue if it wasn’t Raymond?

  * * *

  I walked back in a haze. The air was particularly bad today, and I’d forgotten the protective mask, not that it’d do me much good with the cigarettes causing so much trouble anyway. So I coughed a lot more and walked more slowly. But Cherabino had gotten me too much in the habit of walking for me to give it up now.

  The drugs. The senator. The roommate talking about Raymond’s horrific course load and money troubles. Blackmail—blackmail that had succeeded, and yet the pictures had been sent to the judge anyway. And a speech from a drug dealer that sounded an awful lot like a description of what had really happened to the guy-who-was-not-Raymond, the guy in the dumpster.

  I’d been working on the assumption that Oden was behind all of this or that the drug dealers had done it to Raymond because he’d t
ried to pay them off or something. But if it wasn’t Raymond dead . . .

  * * *

  “Andrew,” I said, to Cherabino’s next-door cubicle neighbor.

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  “Could I possibly beg ten minutes’ help for a case?” I asked. “It really is, literally, ten minutes.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not supposed to help you unless you’re on the schedule.”

  I held up the dozen donuts I’d collected from the small shop down the street. “They’re powdered sugar and real cinnamon,” I said, coaxingly. Just for the cinnamon they’d cost me a fortune, but they were his favorite. “And it really is ten minutes.”

  His eyes lit up and he stood to take the box. “Just this once,” he said, and dove in. “What’s going on?” he mumbled around a mouthful of fried dough.

  “Could we get to the student database from your machine?” I asked. “George Babel’s information should be in there. He’s Raymond Datini’s roommate if that helps.” We got a new database every six months or so and George had been in the school long enough to show up.

  Andrew turned around and started typing on his computer; he was one of a short list of people—including Cherabino—who went through the twice-yearly deep background checks to have a personal machine, and even his usage was recorded, and his data Quarantined periodically. The world hadn’t crumbled in the Tech Wars sixty years ago just for everyone to be careless now.

  Andrew typed some more and turned around. “Sorry, Adam, I’m not going to be able to get to that info without a lot of hoops and a lot of waiting. Have you tried calling the registrar’s office? They might even be able to tell you if he banks at the university. Legally, because the state pays half the tuition even at private universities, the financial records are open to investigation with reasonable suspicion. And since the registrar handles tuition payments he’ll have access to that information.”