Highborn

by Yvonne Navarro

  Ramiro patted his sister’s hand awkwardly. “I can help.”

  “With what?” Abrienda demanded. “You barely make enough anymore to keep the restaurant open.” Her gaze flicked to Brynna and she sat up straighter, as if deciding they were getting a little too personal in front of someone who wasn’t family. “We’ll manage,” she said shortly. “One way or another.”

  “I’m no expert, but Mireva’s work seemed to be really good,” Brynna put in. “She’s extremely smart, and she knows what she’s doing with it.”

  “Yes, she is very smart,” Ramiro said. “She has a good, level head.”

  Brynna hesitated. “There’s a boy—”

  “The one in the hallway!” Abrienda’s chair scraped backward as she pushed abruptly to her feet. “I knew it!”

  “There’s nothing going on between them,” Brynna said quickly, but she was afraid it was already too late. She should have found a different way to bring up the subject of Gavino, or waited for a time when the mood was better—the heat was intense and nearly overpowering, magnifying every emotion, and not at all in a good way.

  “Pah,” Abrienda nearly spat. “There is always something with the boys. She is too young for boys, too innocent.” Her eyes darkened. “I won’t have her throw everything away for a boy or make the same mistakes that I did. She will have better than me.” Without asking her silent brother if he was finished, she swept up both dishes and carried them to the kitchenette. When she scraped the leavings into the trash, her movements were almost savage. “There is plenty of time for boys, but not now. She will have a good life, babies if that’s what she wants, a husband who will be there for her. But some other day, not now.”

  Brynna leaned against the wall and said nothing. She didn’t need to ask questions to know the history. It had been the same thing for thousands of years. An innocent woman, almost always a virgin, courted and swept off her feet—an archaic term, but the meaning would always be the same—by a celestial being, an angel masquerading as a human man. One night, two at the most, and then he was gone forever; seven months later, never more than that, and a child was born. Full-weight and healthy, long of limb, and always with something about it that made it irresistible to the mother and wiped away any notion of giving up the child for adoption.

  It should have made for the ideal home life, but humans being what they were—freedom of choice and all that—sometimes, okay, a lot of the time, things didn’t always turn out so well. Through the ages Brynna had seen all the facets of nephilim mothers: bitterness at their own gullibility, hatred toward men because of the abandonment, resentment toward the child for trapping the woman in a life she hated but inexplicably couldn’t surrender, protectiveness to the point of paranoia, a thousand other emotions and most of them not good. Brynna couldn’t help but wonder if things would change in this more enlightened age where a woman who bore and raised a child alone might still, if she fought for it, have a chance at a good life. Maybe … probably.

  But not today, here in this apartment. And not in Abrienda Cocinero’s life.

  Thirteen

  “Look here,” Bello Onani said. He was a tall and gangly African guy with a complexion the color of wet leather and almost no body fat. Right now he was hunched over a keyboard—one of four currently snaking out of his sprawling workstation—and jabbing a long finger at one of the monitors in front of him. “This screen shows the raw data I extracted from the jewelry store computer. Dude has some heavy-duty encryption going on. I wasn’t getting anywhere without a password. I tried some of the obvious stuff—his birthday, family birthdays, shit like that—but no go. Then I moved on to a basic dictionary attack, even though I figured the guy was too smart for that. I worked up to a precomputation hash combined with a custom parsing algorithm to compensate for salts and memoization—”

  “I don’t mean to be impatient, but can we skip the geekspeak and go straight to the English part?” Redmond gestured at the hardware fragments, screws, and wires that were layered like driftwood in every available space. “I do okay with e-mail, the Internet, and the department’s system, but beyond that I start sweating.”

  “Yeah, sure. So I finally get into the data, right? And I start going through the files, sorting them into categories.”

  Redmond saw Sathi’s face brighten. Organization they could understand. “Such as?”

  “Dull, duller, and most boring, mainly.” Onani was zipping his cursor around the screen at no less than manic speed. “Lots of documents and e-mails about financial crap that might or might not be of interest to the IRS.”

  “Is this the list you mentioned?” Redmond asked. “You could just send that stuff over to fraud.”

  “I will, sure. But first I figured you guys would want to see what else I found.” The display on the main monitor flashed a couple of times as he went back and forth between a couple of open folders. “In fact, I’m thinking you’d damned well shoot me if I sat on this.”

  Redmond raised one eyebrow. “What the hell’s so hot that it might move me to bodily harm?”

  Onani twisted his head and gave the two detectives a grin filled with crooked but brilliantly white teeth. “This,” he said simply, “is the hit list I told you about.” The screen was filled with short lines of text and he used the button on his mouse to scroll it up and down for effect.

  Sathi scowled at the monitor, then at Onani. “Why do you call it that?”

  “Stop,” Redmond said abruptly. “I see it.” Onani’s movements with the mouse froze, then he lifted his hand and let Redmond take over. The detective went up a couple of lines and let the cursor hover over a name on the screen.

  Sathi leaned over their shoulders, trying to see. “What?”

  “Matthew Dann. Sound familiar?” Redmond’s voice rose. “And here—Dorothy Southard.”

  Sathi’s dark eyes widened. “Wait, those are—”

  Redmond zipped the cursor down to a third name. On the surface it seemed random until he read it aloud. “Tobias Gallagher.”

  “These are all shooting victims,” Sathi said. “What possible reason can there be for a jewelry store owner in Andersonville to have these names on his computer? Especially when one of these people is a fourteen-year-old boy from the other side of the city?”

  “Now that is the question, isn’t it?” Onani sounded almost gleeful.

  “I think,” Redmond said slowly, “that if we were to check, we might find all of the victims’ names, right here in this file.”

  Onani picked up a small sheaf of papers and snapped them smartly against one palm. “And so, here is a printout for you to check exactly that. We do, of course, have to wonder about something else.”

  Redmond took the list from the younger man. “Which is?”

  “What was he going to do with the rest of the names?”

  REDMOND AND SATHI STOPPED at the entrance to the cell block, unholstered their weapons to leave them with the guard, and went inside after signing in. The jewelry store owner’s son, Kwan Seung—or the more modernized Seung Kwan, as his driver’s license read—had already been taken out of his cell and put into one of the consultation rooms with his lawyer. The attorney was a slender man about the same height as Redmond, maybe ten years older. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache and slightly curly hair above stylish glasses that probably cost more than one of Redmond’s paychecks. Both men looked up in surprise when Redmond and Sathi opened the door.

  “Afternoon,” Redmond said as he shut the door behind them. “I’m Detective Redmond and this is Detective Sathi.” He inclined his head toward the Asian man on the other side of the table before giving the older man his full attention. “I’m sure your client has told you that we’ve already met.”

  The attorney rose slightly and offered his hand, eyeing them warily. “James Tarina,” he said. “I wasn’t made aware that we would be having a conference—”

  “Call it a spur-of-the-moment decision,” Sathi said.

  Tarina’s brow fur
rowed slightly but he didn’t protest as he settled back onto his chair. “Sometimes those are the best kind.”

  Redmond gave him a vague smile as he and Sathi pulled up chairs of their own. “Sometimes.” He placed the manila folder he’d brought with him on the table and folded his hands on top of it. “So you have quite the dilemma here, Mr. Kwan. It seems the charges against you are racking up like symbols on a slot machine.” When neither of the men across the table said anything, Redmond continued. “Kidnapping is only the beginning here, I think. Assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, torture—there’s one we only see once in awhile.”

  “As I understand it, the alleged victim doesn’t recall any of the crimes you mention,” Tarina put in. “The burden of proof becomes substantially more difficult without a direct witness.”

  Sathi stared at him. “From what I saw when I walked into that basement, it was pretty obvious the girl was being held against her will, drugged, and tortured.”

  “Circumstantial at best. Did you ever consider that the girl was a willing participant? That she wanted whatever drugs might—and note that I’m not admitting to anything on behalf of my client—have been in her system.”

  Redmond wasn’t moved by the claims. “Then perhaps Mr. Kwan would like to explain how Miss Kim actually came to be in the basement of his father’s jewelry store to begin with. We’d love to hear the details.”

  Seung Kwan smirked. “You cops wouldn’t understand. You’re not Korean. And you’re in way over your head.”

  Sathi sat forward. “Then enlighten us.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  Redmond studied him for a moment. “As I’m sure you expected, the computer in the store’s office was seized. In the course of the investigation, we discovered that you’re quite the computer whiz, Mr. Kwan. You have more than a passing familiarity with software and programming.”

  Kwan shrugged. “Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  Sathi’s dark eyes glittered. “An interesting statement, considering the items we found on the … what would you call it? Altar. Yes, that would be appropriate. The altar that was in the basement with Cho Kim.”

  The prisoner said nothing.

  “Our tech found some interesting items on the computer, things that would seem to indicate your father was a little less than forthcoming to the IRS about his financial status.” Redmond flipped open the manila folder but thumbed past the first couple of pages. “Kind of interesting, but really, not my department. But this—” Suddenly he thumped his forefinger hard against a stapled set of papers. “—this made for some really captivating reading.”

  “May I see that, please?”

  Tarina reached for the document but the detective pulled it out of reach. “Not just yet.” Redmond eyed Kwan. “The way things stand now, I think we could squeeze a good ten to fifteen years out of a jury.” Tarina started to say something but Redmond waved off his words. “And that’s just on the circumstances. But this little list of yours, Mr. Kwan, really ups the ante on that verdict slot machine.”

  “What list is that?” Kwan’s voice had dropped a little and gone slightly hoarse.

  Tarina was openly scowling. “Don’t talk to him, Seung. Not until we see exactly what’s on that document.”

  “In fact,” Redmond continued as if neither man had spoken, “I think we might even be headed for the death-penalty jackpot.”

  “That’s absurd,” Tarina snapped. “And I’m not going to continue this conversation unless I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

  “We’re talking about a hit list, Mr. Tarina,” Sathi said. His face was grim as Redmond pushed it toward the attorney, who snatched it up and began flipping through the papers. “Four single-spaced pages of names, including the names of every single person shot over the last several weeks.”

  “Coincidence,” Tarina spat. He dropped the list on the table distastefully, as if he couldn’t believe he was wasting his time on this.

  “Interestingly enough, our tech picked up a pattern here,” Redmond said. “A strange one, but it’s definitely recognizable. Oh, and there are a number of people on the list who are also dead.” This time Redmond’s gaze fixed solidly on the attorney. “But not a single one of them died by natural causes.”

  Tarina blinked, then picked the document up again. “I’ll have to look this over—”

  Redmond plucked it out of his hand. “All in due time, Mr. Tarina. After all, it’ll be introduced as an exhibit in discovery once we get around to filing charges. Unless, of course, Mr. Kwan wants to talk about a quid pro quo.”

  “Bargaining does make the world go around,” Sathi put in.

  “And what would you be looking for?” Tarina asked carefully.

  “A name would be a good start.” Redmond turned his head so that he could stare hard at the young Korean man. “We know you wrote the program that generated these names, and we know how you used it. We know the search criteria you coded into it—once you feed it all into a computer and reverse it, the commonalities are strikingly apparent. You might be good, but the department’s cryptographers are better. Still, as scuzzy as you are, we’re not quite convinced you’ve been going around the city and shooting people.”

  “So we are presuming that someone paid you to generate this list,” Sathi put in. “Perhaps they paid you a lot, or offered you something else in return. What we don’t know is why, or who, and these are the things that we are obviously expecting to find out from you.”

  “Expecting,” Kwan said. “Isn’t that a lot like assuming?”

  Redmond tapped the table. “Your point?”

  Kwan’s answering grin was strained, but still just to the side of nasty. “Everyone knows the old saying about assuming. Ass and you. Need I say more?”

  Redmond slammed his fist on the table in front of the prisoner, making both Kwan and his lawyer jump. “You’d better say more, Mr. Kwan. You’d better say a lot more.”

  But Kwan only made a motion in the air, like he was waving away an annoying insect, and settled back. “Whatever.”

  “We were able to connect document generation dates and print times on your computer to more than two dozen deaths,” Sathi said bluntly. For the first time, Tarina looked visibly rattled. “And that’s just so far. What are we going to find as we go deeper into our files?”

  Tarina’s face had gone a couple of shades paler. “Perhaps we could come to an arrangement,” he began. “We—”

  “There’s no arrangement,” Kwan interrupted. He sent his attorney a withering look. “I don’t have any name to give up. And neither does my father.”

  “But you admit to generating the list for someone,” Redmond pressed. “If you won’t give up a name, then at least tell us why and how you passed the information.”

  Kwan’s mouth tightened. “I don’t think so. Why don’t you ask your girlfriend?”

  Redmond frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “That redheaded bitch who was in the basement with us. She claims she knows so much—ask her.”

  Damn, Redmond thought as his mind spun. It always came back to Brynna, didn’t it? No matter how much he tried not to think of her, to keep her out of his picture. “Other than having stumbled onto the place where you were keeping Cho Kim prisoner, she has nothing to do with this,” he said. He hoped he didn’t sound too stiff. No matter what kind of wild crap she’d tried to feed him on purpose, this was the best he could come up with on short notice.

  “Right.” Kwan’s smile was blatantly fake. “Like I said—whatever.”

  When he said nothing more, Tarina sighed. “I’ll talk to my client,” he finally told the two detectives. “We’ll work something out and I’ll get back to you.” He glanced sideways at the Asian man, but Kwan’s gaze had shifted up and to a spot vaguely near the ceiling, as if he’d just flipped a mental switch to the I-don’t-give-a-damn position.

  “You do that,” Redmond said. But the only thing that kept running through his
mind as he and Sathi made their way back to their office was that one, loaded question:

  Why don’t you ask your girlfriend?

  Fourteen

  Brynna had just settled onto the bus seat when she glanced to her left and saw the nephilim killer through the window.

  She was up and across the aisle in less than the time it took to inhale, but he was already out of sight. The hard-eyed driver, who was watching her in the rearview mirror, didn’t stop or slow down when Brynna lurched to the middle exit door and yanked frantically on the call line for a stop. Brynna reached for the emergency knob, but the slightly shrill voice of the driver stopped her.

  “You pull that knob, lady, and you will never ride my bus again!”

  “I have to get off,” Brynna snapped. “I have to go back!”

  “It’s not my fault you forgot your purse or your cell phone or whatever,” the driver shot back. “That knob is for emergencies only, and I don’t see any emergency happening right now on my bus.” The woman glanced at the road, then her gaze cut back to Brynna’s in the mirror. “Next stop is two blocks down. You can walk back like everyone else.”

  Brynna’s fingers hovered below the knob, then she let her hand fall back to her side as she craned her neck and tried to see if the nephilim killer had come back onto the street. The place where she had seen him was fading fast behind her. She rode this bus to work every morning that she had an early job, and while she was building a nice bit of savings, a car was still a long way off in her future. Did this prissy-faced little woman actually have the authority to forbid her from riding it? Brynna wasn’t sure but she couldn’t take the chance. It was infuriating, but she could endure it because it wasn’t fatal; the nephilim killer might be hanging around the building, but Mireva was long gone to school.