Marked

by Alex Hughes

  That’s right, the weekly delivery of groceries hadn’t come. I had money now, but no job and no grocery service. If they killed me it wouldn’t matter.

  I caught myself halfway down a really intense pity moment and replayed one of Swartz’s pep talks in my head while I visited the bathroom. It helped. Some.

  Standing in the middle of my living room in my pajama pants, watching a grumpy Cherabino complaining loudly about the state of my kitchen, helped a lot more.

  She’d found a toaster I didn’t know I’d had, and bread from somewhere, and was coaxing the microwave to cook some kind of egg-and-cheese thing I didn’t know I’d had the ingredients for. All of this apparently required an ongoing litany of abuse against the tools and complaints about the early-morning hour. She was really cute.

  I smiled. None of that was out loud, was it? I should have backed out of her head a little then, but why?

  Ding went the microwave, interrupting both our trains of thought.

  She fished out the bowl, cursing at the heat, and plopped it on the counter. Triangles of toast were added to the edge, and then she found a towel to carry it to the coffee table in front of the couch; I didn’t have a regular table.

  “What are you doing? Get us some juice,” she demanded.

  I complied, smiling.

  Cherabino practically inhaled her food, which I didn’t mind, since she was wearing one of my shirts and not much else. The view was nice. The haste, perhaps, was not.

  “You’re going into work today, I take it,” I said.

  She nodded, still chewing. Cases to solve and people to see. I didn’t think she realized she’d said this over the Link. Have to leave in twenty minutes, tops, and I still need a shower. She looked at me critically, like she thought I was going to be an obstacle to said shower, an obstacle she was going to overcome.

  “Shower’s all yours,” I said, hoping I might get a glimpse of a less-clad Cherabino at some point in that process.

  She got the edge of that thought. Down, boy. We don’t have time. Don’t you . . . ?

  I could almost feel the knowledge of what I’d told her last night hit her.

  She nodded, to herself. Then looked back up. “We’ll find a way to fight this. The Guild isn’t everything. Bransen—well, we’ll go ask him what he thinks we can do. He’s sneaky with the law stuff, more than Peter ever was. We’ll figure this out,” she said again, with real heat behind her words. If she was mentioning her dead husband, this was serious.

  “Who are you trying to convince, you or me?” I asked.

  “We’re going to fight,” she said, meeting my eyes. “You’re going to fight.” Then she looked at the clock behind me again. “We have fourteen minutes. We’d better hustle.” She pushed the dishes at my hands, and I took them as she darted back toward the bathroom.

  Her breasts bounced in a delightful way during the whole process. Perhaps the dishes waited a little longer than they should have.

  • • •

  Sergeant Bransen was the quintessential man in a suit, a fortysomething white man with overstyled hair and an air of perpetual confidence I found off-putting. In previous meetings, he’d made it all too clear he found me off-putting as well, so I wasn’t looking forward to this meeting.

  It was early, almost too early, before the main press of day-shift cops started coming in to demand things from Bransen, but he still looked tired. I wondered how much of Paulsen’s crusade against the budget he was playing the knight for. Looked like no one was getting sleep these days.

  Bransen’s office was smaller than Paulsen’s, with a very battered desk and single desk chair. His door was open, and Cherabino’s knock on its frame made him look up.

  “Isabella,” he said, with a genuine smile, which dampened when he saw me. “Ward.”

  Cherabino pushed me toward the chair.

  I stood too, since Bransen was standing. “Sir—”

  “I told you, I wasn’t going to give you an answer for a few days. I needed to think about it,” he said to Cherabino and only Cherabino.

  Her lips pursed. “That’s not exactly—”

  “What is it, then?” This was as impatient as I’d ever seen Bransen in person, his habitual smile completely gone. “Paulsen has already told me what happened, and if you think working for the Guild is going to make me—”

  “Sir,” Cherabino interrupted. “That’s what we’re here to talk about.” She looked at me significantly.

  I coughed. “Yes. I—”

  “The Guild is threatening him with execution tomorrow,” Cherabino interrupted again.

  Now I had Bransen’s attention.

  That’s not the way I would have said that, I complained to her.

  She didn’t react.

  I sighed.

  “Are you two sleeping together?” Bransen asked.

  “No,” I said at the same time she said, “Yes.”

  I glanced at her; she shrugged.

  Bransen sat down then, shaking his head. He looked at me, and this was the moment with Paulsen that would have saved me or damned me, based on the words I said next. I didn’t know Bransen as well, but the damning was likely forthcoming.

  I did what Swartz would have told me to do. I faced the problem square-on. “The Guild had a murder investigation they wanted an outsider to investigate. I was the only outsider with the right experience who they thought they could intimidate into staying quiet about whatever I saw. I made a bad call, and now they’re following through on the threats. With Koshna, they have full rights to do it. I’m not sure why Cherabino is so determined to get you involved.”

  Bransen blinked, and I could practically hear the wheels turning. “Don’t do anything halfway, do you, Isabella?” He laced his fingers and set them on the desk. We all waited.

  And waited.

  The decision crystallized just as I was starting to get nervous.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to help me anyway.”

  “Damn it, don’t interrupt me!” Bransen said. His mind echoed that I hadn’t earned the right or the respect to do half that.

  I was quiet. And confused. Very confused.

  “Humph. Well. First, before all of this I was planning to allow you to work with Cherabino under provisional unpaid status as a test. We’ll go ahead and do that, though God help me, you’d better realize I don’t do a tenth of the handholding Paulsen does. If you need my attention more than once a month, twice in an emergency—maybe—you’re fired. I don’t have time for that crap—I don’t care what your close rate is. You play by my rules. You cause trouble, you’re out. You fail to impress me with results, you’re out. You sneeze one too many times and annoy me more than you’re worth, you’re out.”

  “Understood,” I said, still confused. If they were going to kill me anyway, what difference—

  “What—” Cherabino started.

  He held up a hand.

  She subsided.

  “I don’t have jack-shit jurisdiction over the Guild or anything the Guild decides it wants to do if it doesn’t affect citizens. You, Boy Wonder, are not a citizen.” He held up a hand again to forestall any additional objections from the peanut gallery in the person of Cherabino. “However, despite this jurisdiction issue, I don’t have a problem telling said Guild it’s awfully unfriendly to go threatening my provisional employees. I will make that phone call today. I may ask a politician to do the same if I have the time and if they are free to take the phone call.”

  He leaned forward. “I wish you luck and the kind of golden talking that keeps getting you rehired in this damn place in the middle of layoff season. If you make it back alive, I expect a report. Promptly, understand? Even from the hospital. If you don’t, I will promise you several phone calls to prominent reporters to set them on your case. We’ll make a stink such as the
Guild hasn’t seen in decades.” He paused. “Plus give you a decent funeral, if they’ll let go of the body. Seems decent.”

  Cherabino was gearing up for a righteous lecture. “Sir, you can’t possibly—”

  He waved that hand again, and she shut up. Cold.

  I stared. Even in the middle of my storm of emotions, I’d never seen her stopped from a full anger lecture before.

  “That is all I can or will do in this situation, and you’d better be grateful for that, Isabella. It’s your word—and yours alone—that’s making me do half of it. I’m already late for a meeting with the captain. You’ll see yourself out.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, turned, and left, suppressed anger vibrating every fiber of her body. I stood and left too, numb and afraid.

  Hearing him tell me what they’d do if I died made it that much more real. No one—no one—could help me now.

  Except, well, except maybe me. There was always a way out, always. I just had to figure it out.

  CHAPTER 18

  I smoked half a pack, one cigarette after the other, on the cold gray wet smoking porch, looking out on the half-dead yellow grass stubs in the courtyard, the back of my mind telling me that I shouldn’t be here. A suspect had gotten killed here in front of me by a sniper, and no matter how many times I reminded myself the killer was locked up, it still felt dangerous.

  Today, dangerous was okay. Dangerous was good. Meant I was alive. And the wind wasn’t even that bad today.

  I felt the mind approach before I heard the door open.

  “Hi, Michael,” I said without turning around.

  “Cherabino says you’re working with us on the Wright case again?” He stopped then, half-formed questions about the rumors of my firing swirling in his head. He decided not to ask about any of them. Decided he wouldn’t have liked someone asking.

  It was a painful effort not to respond to the thoughts. The Guild would have considered them public space, as clear and obvious as yelling into an empty room, and just as fair to hear.

  “Wright case?” Michael prompted.

  “Yeah,” I said, and stubbed out the cigarette. Might as well do something useful while I waited for the back of my head to deliver the miracle. I’d already called Swartz’s house and heard from Selah why he couldn’t be disturbed. I didn’t have time for a meeting, nor did I think it was advisable to go back to my apartment. I needed to keep moving while I figured this out.

  “Isn’t the Wright case closed? That supervisor woman, with the odd mind?”

  He looked at me, wondering if I was all right. Of course, he was a cop and cops couldn’t ask that.

  I adjusted my coat down to cover my cold hand. I hadn’t wanted to get ash on the gloves. “I’m fine. Did the interview not confirm her as the killer?”

  “The interview cleared her of all wrongdoing. She was with a boyfriend during the entire window of the murder.”

  “Wait. She didn’t . . .” I trailed off. “Then who would have killed that guy with an ax? And the parts missing? Were they under a couch or something?”

  Michael shook his head. “Cherabino and Ruffins are talking about it in one of the conference rooms. I thought you’d want to be there.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  • • •

  It was surreal walking in on a meeting, in a conference room, at a place I almost didn’t work, on possibly my last day on earth. But the program said keep yourself distracted, keep yourself moving, keep doing something useful, and this was that. If nothing else, this was that.

  I’d figure this out. Or I’d run, far and fast and wide, and roll the dice and pretend I could stay free for a week or two. Until they caught me.

  I wondered if they’d have Stone torture me, as punishment for him and me both. More likely, send one of the students as a final project, with a mentor trailing, of course, to ensure that it was done correctly. It’s what I would have done, if I’d been a professor in Enforcement training.

  I wondered if it would hurt more or less with a student. Probably more. The mentor would correct, over and over, until they got it right.

  “Adam?” Cherabino asked. I couldn’t quite feel her emotions without reaching out, which bothered me.

  “You didn’t say he was coming,” Ruffins said. The Tech Control Org agent didn’t seem happy to see me.

  “You’ll just have to put up with your detection tattoo screaming at you for a while,” I said, with no sympathy. “I’m a member of the team today, and you should have thought of that before you had the damn thing installed.”

  Ruffins scowled. “Left our manners at home, did we?”

  I sat. “It’s been a hell of a day. A hell of a week, really.”

  “Play nicely or I’ll kick you both out,” Cherabino said. Then, to me: “Ruffins is here because Wright was one of his informants for . . . well, another case. There are some legalities to the investigation, so it’s easier to just keep him in on.”

  I noticed then that Andrew, forensic accountant and Cherabino’s cube neighbor, was seated at the end of the table. He waved, a small half wave.

  I nodded back, and Michael sat.

  “Like I was saying, it doesn’t add up,” Andrew said.

  “Which part?” Cherabino asked.

  “Wright’s accounts have been supported by payments from the TCO for a while now, for informing. There’s been payments from Fiske’s organization, like Ruffins told me to look for.”

  Wait. Wright had been working for Fiske? And Ruffins had been the one to point this out? What had I missed?

  But Andrew continued without pausing. “The payments just stopped, the day of the murder. Both sets. One or the other organization should have had some delay, but there’s none. But a third set of payments—from another account—started appearing a week before the murder and hasn’t stopped. They’ve been increasing, actually.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ruffins said. “A mysterious third set of payments? Doesn’t it seem more plausible that the bank made some mistake?”

  “Who all was Wright working for?” I asked, finally tracking the conversation.

  Heads turned in my direction.

  “Well, he was working for Fiske, or at least selling him secrets. I assume largely because you asked him to?” I asked Ruffins.

  He looked uncomfortable, a little too uncomfortable for a man who was usually combative. If anybody else, I would have read him to find out why, but with his wrist tattoo, he’d know immediately.

  “Yes,” Cherabino said. “He was bait. Him no longer being living, testifying bait is a problem that we are currently working to solve.”

  Ruffins objected, “You shouldn’t be sharing task force information with this guy.”

  “This one’s not going to make any difference to anyone,” she replied. Then back to me: “Finish your thought.”

  “He was working for Fiske, he was working for the TCO, but all over that house I saw hobbies. Stuff that takes a lot of money. And he wasn’t just paying his bills. He was feeding those experiments, or projects, or what have you. Some of it looked recent. Obviously he was selling stuff—I’m betting some kind of invention that crossed the line into Tech territory, though who knows—but I’m also wondering if he had some kind of deal going with the company.”

  “The lab?” Michael asked. “We didn’t find any evidence of that at all, and we dug deep enough that we should have if it was going on.”

  Ruffins said with an odd tone, “Maybe they were paying him off the books, you know, on the higher levels.”

  “After firing Wright so forcefully?” Cherabino shook her head. “Besides, we talked to nearly everyone. And who is the higher levels? There’s always a person. Or several. But concrete, real people, and we talked to everyone there, I thought.”

  “Not the senior executives,” I said.

&n
bsp; Michael shifted. “Maybe he extorted them for money and threatened to take that thing in his head public if they didn’t pay up. Then they went over with an ax to remove the danger.”

  “But he’d already put so much up on data channels,” Andrew said. “How much more could there really be to leak?”

  I glanced at him.

  Andrew shrugged. “I’m curious. And you guys talk loudly one cubicle away. If it’s a case you’ve brought me in on, it seems fair game to listen. It’s also a slow week.”

  “You listened in on confidential case information?” Ruffins asked. He looked appalled.

  “Next time just come on over if you’ve got the time,” Cherabino told him, her mind very intentional. “I can always use another set of eyes on things.”

  “Thanks. When it’s slow, I’d appreciate something to do.”

  And I realized then why Cherabino had the highest close rate in the department. It wasn’t just that she obsessed over her cases’ details until she could quote them to you six months later with accuracy. It wasn’t just that she worked so many more hours than everybody else. It was this: that she asked for help in odd places and never, ever, turned down a second opinion.

  You got interesting things with help sometimes, it seemed. An idea started to pick up its head from the back of my mind, but when I reached for it, it spooked and ran away. It would be back.

  “The extortion tactic seems much more like Fiske anyway,” Ruffins said, with a suspicious glance to me. “As I said in the task force meeting, it seems easiest to lump this case in with the rest of his crimes and sort them out when we have him in custody.” He kept looking at me.

  Cherabino sighed. “And as I said in the meeting, I’m happy for you to be here if it makes you more comfortable, but I’m going to follow the evidence. We’re not going to have a killer go free because we just assume it was him. Fiske is not all powerful, and this one seems too sudden to be coordinated.”