Pack of Lies psi-2

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” I said to Ben. “You’ve trained us to react, to defend ourselves. She didn’t have that advantage. Not sure the perps would, either.” Like I’d said earlier, not everyone got trained by the Big Dogs.

  Venec nodded an apology at Nick, then turned back to me. “You would have reacted differently, before?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought to lock it down,” Pietr said. “But I would have shoved, instinctively.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” I admitted, and Nifty nodded. Only Sharon didn’t chime in, but sat there with an odd look on her face. Nick, at the other end of the table, had already gone back to working over the netbook. There were strange spirals of current circling around it, and I was suddenly very glad I couldn’t actually see the screen. The one time I’d helped Nick with his tech-magic, even in a very secondary role, it had given me a serious headache.

  “I wouldn’t have done anything,” Sharon said finally, in response to Venec’s question. “Or, I might have, but I would have tried to pull it back in, immediately. My mentor was part of the Reasonable Limits school, and I guess I absorbed a lot of that. I tried to pass. As a Null, I mean.”

  “The what school?” Nifty asked, before I could.

  “Reasonable Limits. It’s…what it sounds like, I guess. That current isn’t something to use instinctively, but only after deliberate thought and only if nothing else is appropriate to the task. It grew out of the Old Magic, during the burning years, when even the hint of magic could get you killed, and merged with emerging environmentalist philosophies in the 1900s, and…” Her voice trailed off, trying to explain it to us.

  “That’s insane.” Nifty sounded horrified. “Not using current isn’t the answer to people being scared of us.”

  “Different ways of approaching the problem,” Venec said calmly, cutting off what might have become another argument. “The fear was real, generations of it, and I know you all have enough education to know how quickly suspicion can turn to fear can turn to violence.

  “But I think we can agree that even if the girl had Sharon’s kind of training during mentorship, some sort of instinctive current-use would have been a normal reaction to violent physical threat, if there were any. And we sure as hell would have found trace of a violent emotion in the original site, especially if she then pulled it back into herself, rather than letting it disperse naturally. I’m assuming that someone checked on that, at least?”

  Bastard. “Someone” meaning me, since I was the gleaner of record. “Yeah, I did. I didn’t find anything that could be identified as from Mercy, who had the most reason to feel emotion. Never met the dead guy, or the other perp, so had no basis. But everything was pretty much overlaid by the black goop by then. I’m not good enough to strip that away without destroying the scene. Maybe you or Ian?”

  Back in your lap, boss, I thought with justifiable viciousness, still not meeting his gaze. I was pretty sure he heard that, too.

  “By the time I got there, too many people had been on-site,” he said. “And Ian…”

  Ian Stosser was many things, including brilliant, persuasive, and charming, but he left the hands-on gruntwork to us.

  “So what little we have, the fact that she didn’t feel a strong emotion, and didn’t use current to defend herself, that points to the guy’s claim being true, that they weren’t threatening her?” Pietr asked.

  “No,” Venec said, and I could hear the frustration in his voice, no weird linky-link needed.

  I felt my brain fold over on itself, trying to figure out where he was going with that. “Why not?”

  There was a hissing, staticky noise from the other end of the table. I forced myself not to look, and could tell everyone else was doing the same. The skin on my arms and neck was all goose-bumped, though. Nick was doing something at a level none of us could match; not better, not lesser, just using skills that we didn’t have, and personally I didn’t want. Hackers could and did overrush faster and harder than anyone else, and when they did, every network in the region went, to use the technical term, blooey.

  Venec went on with the discussion, pretending there was nothing at all happening down there, nope, nothing at all. “Because they didn’t use current to defend themselves, either. A Talent being attacked by another human, maybe they’ll keep it on the down-low, try not to escalate things, especially if they don’t know the others’ power level.”

  Kids played at that, games like snap-dragon and push-tag, to see who was stronger. Adults played different games, more subtle, but we played them.

  “Being attacked by a fatae? An obvious fatae?” Venec drummed his hand against the table, a gesture I hadn’t seen him use before. Irritation? Anger? Frustration? Maybe all of the above. It made my fingers itch in sympathy, and I refolded them carefully in my lap. There was a time to mirror the boss, and a time not to. This was a not-time.

  “Being attacked by a ki-rin, those toughs should have been shitting themselves, and hauling out the hard power. They didn’t. Is that damning enough, though?” I asked.

  “They may not have had time to,” Nifty said. “I saw the autopsy reports.” He and Pietr got that job, mainly because I puked all over myself the first and only time they had me read medical stuff, and Sharon and Nick just out-and-out refused. “It was over so fast, I bet the guy never realized what was happening.”

  Pietr shook his head. “The first guy, maybe. But the other guy did. He saw the first attack happen, was far enough away that he had time to know what was happening, which, Bonnie’s right, would have made me shit myself, no matter how much a hard-ass I was.”

  “He fought back—the ki-rin had bruises.” I hadn’t gotten close to the fatae, but even at that distance the dark marks on its chest and neck had stood out against the nearly luminescent skin, enough to be noticed, so at odds with its perfection otherwise. “A human wouldn’t be able to hit that hard physically, especially once he was down, so they had to be current-strikes. But not enough to be fatal. And not enough to leave any lingering signature that we could pick up or, I guess, that the Council suits who took it away would have picked up?” I heard the question in my voice, but didn’t think I’d get an answer. They might have, and they wouldn’t think to tell us. Why should they? They were convinced it was a justified kill, whatever else had happened, and they had no further interest beyond that. God, I hated amateurs.

  From the look on Venec’s face, he was having the same bitter thought.

  “We can ask, but I bet they didn’t even notice,” Nifty said. “I’m not sure it matters. The available evidence—the fact that there was no trace, and only limited bruising—suggests that the second perp wasn’t strong enough to hurt the ki-rin significantly.” He shrugged, his broad shoulders lifting in an almost operatic gesture, telegraphing both frustration and resignation. “This guy is not one of life’s better results. Just because the average Talent could do it…well, half of everyone is below average, right?”

  “Average or mean? Never mind.” Pietr waved off his own question as irrelevant. “You’re right, we made a logical assumption that current was not used in the attack or defense, because we didn’t find any lingering traces at the site. And Bonnie says that there was no fear, not the kind he should have felt, fighting for his life—just the way there was no fear from Mercy. That’s what we should be focusing on, not the defensive blows. Why weren’t we picking up any emotion in the signatures, especially once we were specifically looking for it?”

  “Bonnie’s right, we may not be good enough to pick it up, especially with how many other people were on the scene so fast,” Sharon said bluntly. “And yeah, Ian and Ben might have had better luck but…emotions? Come on, people, let’s not give ourselves demigod status just yet.”

  Brutal, but true. Hell, the fact that we could identify signature so clearly was a major leap for most of us from what the general Talent could do. I could see everyone let themselves relax a little from the self-questioning that we were all doing, even—m
aybe especially—Venec.

  “So is this a dead end,” Pietr asked, “or evidence we have to look at differently?”

  “Dead end,” Sharon said. I had to agree. Magic, for once, wasn’t helping us solve this case.

  “So we have a lot of…nothing.” Venec got up, stretching his hands over his head to the ceiling, and we all heard his back crack. My spine whimpered a little at the noise. He seemed to feel better, though. “Come on, people, we can do better than that. What are we overlooking?”

  “Money.”

  It was almost a relief to let my head turn and finally look to the far end of the table. Nick was shutting down his netbook, closing the lid with the air of someone with a stupendously fantabulous secret. He got up from his chair, and staggered a little, putting a hand on the back of his chair to steady himself. Current-wear. He’d probably just burned five-six hundred calories, with that kind of tight-focus work.

  “We already thought about that,” Nifty objected. “We couldn’t figure any way it would make sense.”

  “That’s because we weren’t thinking the right way,” Nick said. “We’ve been going about it all totally the wrong way.”

  I blinked at him, feeling myself get pissed. What did he mean, the wrong way? I’d chased down every single damn avenue I could think of….

  “What’s the one assumption that we’ve been making about this case, all of us, from the very beginning?”

  We stared at him, and he grinned; sweaty, ego-triumphant, and perfectly willing to wait until we bowed down before his greatness and begged for the answer.

  “If you don’t spill, I’m going to hold you upside down by your scrawny ankles and shake it out of you,” Nifty said, instead.

  “Spoilsport.” Nick sat down, folded his hands in front of him and leaned forward. “The assumption we’ve all been making was that this was a crime of passion—lust or hate or just sheer moment-of-opportunity violence. It wasn’t.”

  “A calculated attack?” You could hear the gears turning in Venec’s head, and Sharon was drawing lines and boxes in her notebook with quick strokes, muttering as she reworked whatever logic-equation she was using.

  “Maybe. More to the point, calculated by someone else. See, I got to thinking…none of it made sense, right? Like Sharon said, usually you doubt even the stuff you’re almost a hundred percent sure about. That’s just natural. Everyone being so rock-hard in their truth, that’s the kind of thing it takes a while to build up, and usually it needs, I don’t know, a trigger or something. Something or someone reinforcing their belief that it’s all hunky-dory, reassuring them. We’re all much more likely to believe someone else, someone with authority or enthusiasm, when they say it’s all golden, right?”

  “Point?” Venec asked, but he was alert, not doubting. He knew Nicky-boy was on to something. I was barely able to breathe, I was listening so hard. Nick had it, I could feel it, like all the puzzle pieces clicking in, even if I couldn’t see the final picture, yet.

  “My point is, people aren’t as smart as they like to think they are—there’s always trace when you try to meddle. Only we weren’t finding any trace at all—no guilt, no anger, no residue. So I thought…we’ve been considering the things that matter to the Cosa, Talent and fatae, either one. Why? What if this had nothing to do with the Cosa at all—what if it was just a human thing?”

  “None of the players were Null,” Sharon objected.

  “None that we knew about,” Nick corrected her. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  He didn’t stop to check our reactions this time, but lurched right into the explanation.

  “I went looking in the most likely places where our players could have ulterior motives—health and wealth. No medical records beyond the basic for our girl, nothing at all for the others. So someone might have been slipping them something to make them violent, or whatever…or maybe not. Moving on, I just did a deep read into their financial records, what they’ve been spending, what they’re investing, that kind of thing.”

  He paused, shaking his head. “Man, don’t ever use Trade-World for your brokerage house, they’re almost painfully easy to hack. Anyway, guess who got pretty little deposits into their bank accounts?”

  “The attackers?” Sharon said.

  “Our survivors,” Nick corrected her triumphantly. “All three of them—ki-rin, girl, and alleged attacker who didn’t get whacked.”

  “Ki-rin have bank accounts?” That surprised the hell out of me, although I don’t know why.

  “Ki-rin even have brokerage accounts, chica. It dabbles a bit here and there, although nothing major. But I don’t think that matters, although it’s damn interesting, because we’ve got a smoking gun right here in their checking accounts. Whoever it was sending them the money staggered times and sources to make it look random, but it came to the same total amount for all three of them. What are the odds on that, huh? And a sum of money like that? Can support a whole lot of certainty, even without the added fillip of magic.”

  “And the source?” Venec asked, impatient.

  “A little more digging, and I found the answer to all our questions.”

  He waited, trying to build suspense.

  “Your ankles are looking grabable,” Nifty warned, and while I usually had time for Nick’s games, even I was getting twitchy. I didn’t even look at Venec, knowing the thunderous expression that was probably glaring at Nick right now.

  “All right, fine. Turns out the dead guy? Had a serious insurance policy for an underemployed loser, made out to his best friend from back home. A million dollars payable on certification of death. Nice, huh?”

  “Fuck me,” someone said softly, almost reverently, and suddenly all the parts started clicking together like prefab furniture. The colored chalk appeared again, and Nifty grabbed them off the table, wiping the old board clean and starting fresh.

  “Gimme the starting play,” he told Nick.

  “Financial transactions, starting seven months ago. Sums from between $2,000 to $5,000, deposited on seemingly random days, several times a month, to each player’s checking account, for a total of $25,000 each.”

  It seemed cheap to me, but I knew firsthand that people killed for less, without flinching or regret. $25,000 to some people was a year’s salary, a way out of debt, the salvation of a dream—was that the price for a scum-of-the-earth’s life?

  “A few were electronic transfer, a few were cashier’s checks, and a couple were cash, which must have been fun to process. Those were the smaller ones. I’m not a money guy, but it sounds like they were broken up to avoid any kind of pattern-trigger?”

  “Likely,” Venec said. “And that would suggest that whoever set this up knew what he was doing…or had watched enough television to think he knew what he was doing.”

  “Our best friend of the deceased is an MBA?”

  “Sadly, no. Mr. Harrison, Null, is a schoolteacher. Not even a math teacher, either. World history, pounding dry facts into ninth graders’ heads, out in Nashville.”

  “What the hell is a schoolteacher doing best friends forevering with a skeevy guy like our dead body?” Nifty asked.

  “Went to high school together, managed to keep it going.” Nick shrugged. “I’m not going to argue nature versus nurture with you. People hook up and stay friends for all sorts of weird reasons. All I know is this Steve Harrison and our very dead Paul Blake named each other in their life insurance policies about seven years ago, so it’s likely he knew about the Cosa, and, it seems, the less savory parts of it.”

  “So how did they know about the ki-rin, how to lure it into this?”

  “Don’t know. Unless we can get it to talk, odds are we’ll never know.”

  “’Scuse me,” I said, and got up. Venec and Pietr both watched me leave the room, which weirded me out a little; the others kept going on the play-by-play.

  I grabbed my bag from the closet, then walked down the hallway to Stosser’s office. The door was open, so Ian
had already left to do his political oil thing. I sat down at the desk, and pulled a card case out of my bag. Had I put it in there…I had! Picking up the phone, I dialed the number on the business card, and waited. Venec might have contacts in the police force, but I had friends in lower places than that.

  “Sylvan Investigations. How can we help you?”

  The voice was pleasant, mellow, and male.

  “Can’t afford a receptionist, huh?”

  “Bonnie?” The voice made an instant switch from smooth to raspy. Raspy sounded better on him. “How you doing? Why are you calling? Who died?”

  “Are you always that paranoid?”

  Danny made a rude noise. “Bonnie, when a Talent calls me on the phone, it’s never good news. Unless you’re calling to invite me over for breakfast?”

  “Not this time, sorry. I have a favor to ask you.”

  “I knew it. All right, Blondie, shoot.”

  “Can you dig up any dirt on a guy named Steven Harrison? He’s a history teacher out in Nashville. Yes, Tennessee, you know of another Nashville? He’s not a Talent, so my contacts would be useless. He doesn’t have a police record, far as we know—” if he did, Nick would have found that “—but I figure he’s probably going to have something off-color in someone’s file somewhere.” You didn’t be BFF with a loser like our dead guy without some trouble, somewhere. I trusted Nick’s talents, but there were some things that needed magic…and some that needed old-fashioned snooping.

  “This has to do with the case you’re working on?”

  “It could help us crack it.”

  “And you’ll owe me?”

  “PUPI will owe you.”

  There was a pause, the sound of papers being shuffled, and he laughed. “I’ll settle for that. How can I reach you?”

  I gave him the office number, and, after a second’s thought, my home number, too.

  “God, I wish you people could use email like the rest of us. At least you’re not demanding it all be couriered, because P.B.’s rates are getting crazy. I’m assuming that these are landlines?”