Depth

by Rosen, Lev AC

  Outside, it was colder than it had been when she’d gone inside. How long had she been staring at the body? It hadn’t felt long, but it must have been an hour, at least. The night was brittle, and the fog rose up like steel walls.

  She went over suspects who would put the body in her office. This wasn’t about someone trying to frame her; it wasn’t calculated enough for that. It was a warning. Whoever had done this was telling her they were willing to kill—and worse—for the painting, and leaving Linnea in her office meant, “find the painting, or you’re next.” But find it for whom?

  Simone sighed as she realized who had done this. No one else made sense; it had to be him. Charming Dash Ormond. Linnea was just another of those dead bodies that always seemed to end his cases. But Simone didn’t know who’d hired him. She could call and ask, but Dash would just deny the whole thing. And there wouldn’t be a shred of evidence on the body pointing to him, either. Cold, beautiful Dash would be clean about it. He must have been cleaning off the blood when he went to “wash up” during her visit. She must have really scared him, waiting like that when he’d just gotten back from leaving a body in her office. She wouldn’t be sending him any more drinks at the bar, she thought. Maybe she’d send him a bottle of something wherever he ended up, though.

  She got to the battlefield first. It wasn’t too far from the office. It wasn’t really a battlefield, either. That was just what Simone and Peter had called the Douglass Farm Building as kids, when they played with their army figures, laying out strategies and maps for taking over hostile territory. The corn was usually the hostile territory. They attacked from the potatoes.

  There were a lot of farms around the city. Most produce was grown in the ocean as algae before being turned into paste for 3D printers, or in the crystal floating houses that bobbed on light plastic, hovering on the waves, built for this environment. But there were a couple of farm boats and a few dozen farm buildings. Not all buildings broke the water’s surface at the twenty-first floor. That was just a generalization. New York had had an upward slope once. The Douglass Farm was a building that, because of the height of the floors, had a partially submerged top story—a foot or two of water at the bottom and nothing to stand on above. No one had known exactly what to do with buildings like this—rooftops on the ocean, with nothing livable beneath them. Then someone got the bright idea to open up the rooftop, leaving the rest of the building in place. They coated the inside with thick, insulating layers of desalination filters, and then covered the rest up with soil: a seaside farm with constant freshwater underneath, and if the waves started looking high, just put up a big tent for a while. The vegetables grown on them always tasted saltier and windier, somehow, but they were cheap compared to the stuff from the mainland or other countries.

  The farms were strangely beautiful, too. The desalination filters—so many of them together—resulted in the walls of the buildings being crusted over in salt, making them look like the tip of an iceberg sticking out of the sea, leveled into a plateau and patterned in rows of plants. When she was little and they’d scaled the fences to sneak in, like she did now, Simone had thought it something from a fairy tale. Tonight it looked like a mountain of bone. Beyond the fence, the farm was still laid out as it had been back then. She headed for the borderline, where the potatoes met the corn, and squatted down to touch the dirt. Then she stood, lit a cigarette, and waited.

  Peter showed up when the cigarette was half gone, eleven minutes after they’d hung up, even though he lived much farther away.

  “Hey,” he said, when he was still far enough away to just be a shadow in the fog.

  “Hey,” she said back. He came closer. He was wearing a plaid shirt, open more than he would normally wear it. She stared at the gap in the fabric where his skin and chest hair showed through. He glanced down at where she was looking and buttoned the extra button. She took another drag on her cigarette.

  “What did you want to meet about?” She looked up into his eyes. “You sounded upset.”

  “There’s a dead body in my office,” she said. He narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t put it there.”

  “I didn’t say you did,” he said, taking a step back.

  “I just didn’t want you to have to ask. It’s Linnea St. Michel. She’s been beat up pretty bad. Cuts, burns . . . someone wanted something from her.”

  “And then they left her for you?” Simone shrugged. “Kluren isn’t going to like this. That’s why you called me, right? To report it. You didn’t want me to . . . help you hide it, did you? Pitch her in the water?”

  “No,” Simone said. “She deserves better than that. But Kluren is going to lock me up as soon as she sees the body.”

  “Yeah, but you’ll get out. Caroline can help with that.”

  “The body is a warning. Someone wants me to . . .” She turned around. She didn’t know how much Peter knew.

  “You kept digging, didn’t you?”

  Simone took a long drag on the cigarette. She could vaguely feel him stepping closer, a faint heat on her shoulders. “Yeah.”

  “So who is the body a warning from?”

  “Don’t know. I mean, I know the delivery man, but not the guy who sent it.”

  “Who’s the delivery man?”

  “You’re not going to find him, and if you do, he’s going to be cleaner than a bar of soap.”

  “So you’re not going to tell me.”

  “It’ll make things more complicated if he thinks cops are sniffing around him.”

  “You’re going to have to tell Kluren something.”

  “I’ll tell her the body was there when I came in. I don’t need to tell her my guess as to who put it there.” Peter was silent at that, but she heard him kicking the dirt behind her. She turned around and found him closer than she’d thought, almost face to face, except that he was looking down at the ground. She reached a hand out, half the distance between then, but then pulled it back. When he looked up, she focused on his eyes, and how they seemed almost colorless in the dark.

  “Okay, soldier. Show me this body.”

  HER OFFICE WAS A forensic circus within twenty minutes. Peter had walked back with her, both of them silent. When she unlocked the door and opened it for him, he didn’t say anything but laid a hand on her shoulder and tapped his earpiece. His hand stayed there, almost locking her in place as he talked to other officers on duty. The forensic team showed up with two uniforms who spoke directly to Peter, ignoring Simone, except to occasionally glare at her, as though the dead body was her fault. They took the place over pretty quickly, dusting and shining lights and examining the body while Peter and Simone waited in the hallway outside.

  When Kluren showed up, she had two more uniforms with her and was barking orders at them. Simone hoped for a moment she might not even see her, but after Kluren glanced in the room, she came back out, that same water-snake smile on her face.

  “Some fish you throw back, but they just don’t learn. They swim right onto the hook again.” She stared at Simone, the gold in her irises twinkling. “I was having a nice dinner, you know.”

  “You still could be,” Simone said. “I’m sure the restaurant is saving your table.”

  “I’m pretty sure I told you to drop this case.”

  “Sometimes, you throw something behind you, you find it on the bottom of your boot later.”

  “That would explain the smell.” Kluren looked back into the room. “We have a cause of death?” she called at the sea of blue around her.

  “Chief,” said one of the techs, deliberately putting himself with his back to Simone. “She didn’t die from the cuts. It was a heart attack, probably from stress and the drugs in her system. I’ll have to run some tests to confirm, but I’m fairly sure.”

  “We know what drugs?” Kluren asked.

  “Barb of some kind. We already did a quick blood test. I’m guessing on
e of the more upmarket truth serums. I’ll know more at the lab.”

  “Okay,” Kluren said with a nod. She looked back up, as if suddenly remembering Simone was there. “Weiss, cuff her, take her to Teddy. I’ll do the interview myself.”

  “Cuffs?” Simone asked. “You can’t think I did this.”

  “You’re a person of interest in two murders now. I don’t think you’re dumb enough to kill her and then keep the body in your office, but you know a hell of a lot more than you’re telling, and for some reason you seem to think that’s your right. It isn’t. I told you you were off the case, you didn’t listen. Now you get the cuffs. If I can make it stick, you’ll get some prison time, too, maybe a year if I’m lucky, and then maybe, just maybe, you’ll realize that we’re the professionals and you’re just the daughter of a dropout cop who left the force when things got tough. You don’t know better, Pierce. We do.”

  Simone bit her lower lip and inhaled. She put her hands behind her back and let Peter cuff her. Kluren stared at her, squinting for a moment. Simone wondered what her lenses told her.

  “You can take the cuffs off her once she’s in Teddy,” Kluren said, waving them off like they were children.

  Peter led Simone out of the building and took the cuffs off her. Simone nodded her thanks.

  “That went better than I thought it would,” he said.

  “Yeah?” Simone rubbed her wrists.

  “I thought she’d be a lot louder, maybe order all your stuff taken away for testing.” Peter walked next to her, his hands in his pockets. He was still out of uniform, and he smelled like leather.

  “She could still do that.”

  “Nah. She would’ve done it in front of you, hoping you’d throw a fit.”

  “I throw fits?”

  “I guess not.”

  It was a quiet night. The fog seemed to muffle other people’s footsteps and hide their shadows. Simone walked slowly beside Peter. They’d gone a few more blocks before he spoke again.

  “You know, you could escape.”

  “And do what? That won’t help my case.”

  “I have that boat.”

  “No, Peter.” She said it firmly enough that he just nodded and kept walking.

  “So what are you going to tell Kluren?”

  “I walked in, found a body, called you.”

  “And when she asks why it was left on your doorstep?”

  “I don’t know. I guess she hasn’t solved that case she said she was going to solve yet.” The words came out with a tang of nastiness that seemed to vibrate the fog. She took a deep breath. She had to keep cool.

  “That jab about your dad stung?” He asked. Simone fished out a cigarette and lit it, then inhaled deeply. “Your dad was a great cop. My dad always said so.”

  “Dad didn’t talk about life as a policeman,” Simone said, her voice low in the fog. “Or why he left the force. Just . . . work. How to think, investigate.” From the time her mom left, he was a detective, and she was his protégée. All he talked about was work. Never Mom, never their life before she was gone, never even what was right or wrong. Just how to be a detective, how to solve the case. She had a sudden memory of him, showing her how to load a gun when she was eight years old, pushing each bullet neatly into the row of the clip.

  “Good . . . carefully, though, don’t crowd them.” He’d had a low, gruff voice, and large, rough hands that cradled hers. “Then we push it into the gun here, till it clicks.” He had moved her hands so that she loaded the clip of the gun. “Good. Then we just point and shoot, like this.” He had knelt behind her and moved her arms forward. “Both hands . . . brace yourself, it’s going to knock you back pretty hard when you fire it. Remember, shoot them before they shoot you.”

  “How will I know if they’re going to shoot me?” Simone had asked.

  “You’ll know. And if you’re wrong, it won’t matter, as long as you shoot first.”

  “Well, he was a good cop,” Peter said, bringing her back to the present. “And he didn’t quit when it got tough. He and Kluren solved a really tough multiple homicide; once it was wrapped up, he quit. He waited until he wasn’t gonna mess anything up by leaving. A stand-up guy, my dad always said.”

  “Thanks.”

  They got to Teddy, and Peter led her onto the boat and down to the interrogation rooms. A few cops glanced up at them, but then went back to what they were doing. When the department had taken over the ship, they’d cleared out a number of small bunks to create the interrogation rooms, bolting a steel table to the floor and throwing in a few cheap tin chairs. The two-way mirrors, which took up almost an entire wall, didn’t match the old bolted bulkhead. They shone too sleekly, felt too clean. Simone sat down in the chair facing the mirror.

  “I’m going to need your weapons,” Peter said apologetically. She nodded and unzipped her boot, pulling her gun from it and placing it on the table. She didn’t zip the boot back up but instead unzipped the other, letting her legs breathe. “Thanks,” he said, taking the gun. “I’ll get us some coffee.” He left her alone, staring at her reflection. The overhead light was strong, and from where she sat she could see how it cast shadows in the hollows of her eyes. She leaned back and took off her hat and trench coat. Peter came back in, put a paper cup of coffee down in front of her, and sat down opposite. He had his own cup of coffee and blew on it, making the steam wave out like a gray flag.

  They sat in silence a long while. Simone drank all her coffee, burning her tongue on the first sip. Peter got her another, but this one she only held until it got cold. When Kluren finally showed up, she was a shadow in the doorway, looking down at both of them.

  “Weiss, out.” Kluren said. As he left, Peter shot Simone a look that was hard to read—pity? solidarity? Simone turned to Kluren, trying to keep her face level, unreadable. Kluren took her seat and leaned back, staring at Simone. Her gold irises seemed to twist, as if amused by Simone’s attempts to shut herself down.

  “Isn’t it unusual for the chief to be doing the interview?” Simone asked, still holding her coffee.

  Kluren put her hands behind her head, leaned back, and looked at the ceiling. “I can run my boat however I want.” She took her hands down and leveled her gaze at Simone. “Now why don’t you tell me about the case I told you to drop?”

  “You got everything off my server.”

  “I’m sure you’ve made some progress since then.”

  “I dropped it, just like you told me.”

  “Do you really think lying is somehow going to get you out of this mess? Your client was murdered and left in your office. I know you’re not dumb enough to do that, even if you act like it most of the time. And I know that whoever left it there staged it as a warning, not to frame you. I’m your life preserver, here, Simone. I’m being very nice.” She leaned forward, her arms making a triangle, pointing at Simone.

  “You said you wanted to throw me in prison.”

  “Would you prefer to end up like Linnea? ’Cause I don’t see this playing out any other way.”

  “You think I’m gonna let myself get sliced up?”

  “Let? I think you’re running towards it with open arms.” She leaned back, slapping the table. Simone stared at her, trying to decide if Kluren was angry that Simone was putting herself in danger, or just angry at Simone for continuing to exist.

  “I’m trying to solve a case.”

  “One I told you to drop.”

  Simone put down her coffee and folded her arms. “You’re not my boss.”

  “Which is a shame, ’cause you need a boss. You’re the sort who drowns because she doesn’t realize she’s underwater till it’s too late. Now tell me who sent you the warning.”

  “I don’t know.” Simone held eye contact with Kluren, daring her ForenSpecs to say she was lying.

  “Then you’re not doing a very good
job investigating, are you? Did you find out what the package was for, or who the blonde was?”

  Simone kept holding Kluren’s gaze but said nothing.

  “Cute, the silent thing. ’Cause if you answer a question, you think I can tell if you’re lying. Or maybe you’re hoping I’ll tell you what we know about the little art deal your client was working on.” Simone raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t think we knew about that? We know more. So just tell us who left you the body and we can get on with solving it. You might even get to go free, depending on how I feel in the morning.”

  “Did you really just say that?” The door had opened halfway without either of the women noticing, and now Caroline Khan pushed it the rest of the way open and gave Kluren a questioning look. “The mayor is trying to cut down on police corruption, Kluren. Let’s try not to say exciting and provocative things in front of the private detective, hm? Wouldn’t look good in the press.”

  Kluren stared warily at Caroline, but stood. “Does the mayor have an interest in this case?”

  “He will if I tell him he does,” Caroline said with a smile.

  “Now who’s saying provocative things in front of detectives?”

  Caroline folded her arms and nodded in Simone’s direction without looking at her. “She might be an untrustworthy bitch, but she also knows I’m here to get her out, so I think she’ll be good for a while.”

  “You can’t take away a suspect.”

  “She’s a person of interest, not a suspect, which means she can go if she wants. If you upgrade her to suspect then you have to arrest her, and then she gets a lawyer and you don’t get to talk to her again anyway, so why not just let her go and I’ll have a little chat with her and decide what’s best for the city? Right now, I’m going to be a lot scarier than you think you’re going to be.” She leaned back on one of her heels, arms still crossed.

  Simone stared hard at Caroline, but Caroline wouldn’t make eye contact. Kluren, on the other hand, was staring at Simone and smiling.