by Alex Hughes
“Think about that, sir. Garrett Fiske has the kinds of lawyers who are more than willing to drag all of us through the dirt on the slightest excuse. Cherabino and I just talked to him. I think it’s likely he knows that Ruffins committed this crime. Cherabino says all of the critical evidence for the task force was obtained through him.”
“The case is dead in the water either way,” Bransen said. He seemed composed outwardly, but internally he was burning angry at having Fiske slip out of his hands.
Paulsen looked at Bransen. Bransen looked at Paulsen.
“Fiske will wait,” Paulsen said, but her mind felt heavy all of a sudden, like she stood up under impossible pressure.
A spike of mixed emotions from Cherabino, quickly controlled.
“He’s waited this long already. He’ll wait a little longer until we get our house in order,” Paulsen said. “I’ll find the budget somehow.”
Bransen stood.
Paulsen followed suit, as did the rest of us. She looked at me, specifically. “Adam, good luck tomorrow. We’re . . . Well, good luck.”
I read her then, mentally, even though most of the time I didn’t feel comfortable doing so. I read her and found determination, and regret. The largest regret was that, even if there had been something she could have done for me now, she wouldn’t. She liked me, and regretted, but I had made other choices.
I turned and left.
The vision . . . in the little downtime I’d had, I kept thinking about that vision, that boy. Was it Jacob? I didn’t know. I couldn’t see him.
It might not matter anyway, not if the Guild took me out tomorrow despite my best efforts.
• • •
I did Cherabino’s paperwork with Michael while I waited for the arrest to go through. An hour into it, her phone rang.
I picked up the phone.
The dispatcher’s voice came through: “Adam Ward?”
“That’s me.”
A clicking sound, and one, droning line of the public service announcement that was the hold music.
Then: “Don’t hang up, Adam.” It was Kara, sounding torn up.
“I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you back?”
“The flyer crashed. The private long-distance flyer—the one carrying the Council members back from the international conference. There’s some evidence against . . . They’re saying Charlie did the sabotage, Adam.”
My old classmate turned Councilman. “That’s impossible. Charlie’s the straightest shooter I’ve ever met.” I looked at the clock. “Does this mean my hearing is rescheduled?” I had a moment of corrected priorities. “I assume everyone got out?” With teleportation the norm, it seemed unlikely that—
“They all died, Adam. Every last one.” She took a shuddery breath. “We haven’t had this many Council members die at the same time in the entire history of the Guild. We’ll have to promote people, find people, do an emergency election, and even then I don’t know—”
I had a sudden, horrible thought. “What political group were they in?” I looked at Michael, who had looked up and was now, carefully, studying paperwork.
“Oh, look, I need coffee,” he said, and left. I let him go.
Kara was still saying nothing.
“What political group were they in?” I asked. “Guild Firsters? Cooperists? Family groups? Independents? Who, Kara?”
“They were all Cooperists but one. And she was no fan of Guild First.”
I took a breath. “So, in one fell swoop, the entirety of the Council is favorable to Thaddeus Rex.”
“Diaz isn’t.”
“What is his health like?” I asked.
She was silent.
“The only other one standing up is who, Charlie?” I looked into the face of the abyss that was Guild politics. “Doesn’t it seem coincidental that he’s accused now?”
Again, a long silence.
Finally Kara spoke. “This isn’t a secure line. I wasn’t—”
“Give my regards to Gustolf,” I said, to make sure I understood what she was going to do.
“Oh, I will,” she said in the low, quiet voice that meant danger. “I will.” Good. Her family would get involved, and her family was a significant force to be reckoned with. With her at the helm, they might make all the difference.
I tried to figure out how to ask if I should run, get out of the country, show up in Dublin or Moscow and trade information for protection from the local Guild. Hope the chaos here kept them from coming after me. “The hearing?” I finally settled for.
Kara paused long enough that I knew she understood what I was asking. “It’s still being held tomorrow morning, early. Gustolf and I will be there.”
I asked the critical question. “Will you support me?”
A long pause. Then she said, “No one is dying on my watch for asking a reasonable question. Martin Cooper wouldn’t have let that happen. Besides, you’ve shown up for me plenty of times.”
A small sense of relief—and comfort. But Kara was playing her own game now, a game I was no longer sure had anything at all to do with her uncle.
I looked at my options—all of which involved me leaving everything I’d built for myself and all my systems of sobriety—and threw the dice in one critical direction.
Someone had to accuse Rex, right?
And I was the only one who really could. If anything, my idea would only strengthen that power. Rex, the man who’d twisted me into knots for stupid reasons, who’d threatened me over and over and over again, would face his peers over the truth.
“I’ll be there,” I said. “But, Kara?”
“What?”
“No matter how this turns out, you owe Isabella Cherabino a favor. A big favor. Anything she asks.”
“Agreed.”
• • •
I went to find the television in the break room and turned it on to the news station. News of corruption in county politics, a murder on the subway train system, illegal Tech smuggling, the usual. I was just about to leave when the screen changed.
“In breaking news,” the news announcer said gravely. Her face, frozen with age treatments, hardly moved. “Our station has recently heard of a major flyer crash near the Chattahoochee River. Nine passengers on board, all dead including the pilot. Three homes destroyed. We bring you live coverage of the scene.”
I turned the sound off as the footage began. A long, long furrow from the edge of the river, trees scattered in every direction, raw red dirt exposed like flesh. At the end of it, the reporter stood a hundred feet away from a twisted mass of wreckage and metal slammed into a wooden house, now splintered boards. Darker splotches fell into the furrow, what might have been seats or people or plastic, impossible to tell at this distance. The silence made the wreckage cold, and unfeeling.
I turned it off. Nobody could have survived that.
The powder keg that was the Guild’s political system was about to erupt, and this was the match.
But I had a job to do here at the police station.
• • •
Ten minutes later, I was sitting at an interview table by special permission from Bransen, ash and gall all I could taste. Outside, Cherabino read Special Agent Ruffins his rights while inside, a babysitter sat there, ready to report back to Bransen.
The door opened. A look of abject hatred came at me from across the room. The emotion in Mindspace was more of the same.
Ruffins shook his head. “I’m not going to be interviewed by a teep.”
Today, as in so many other days in this interview room, I swallowed the insult and—barely—forced a smile. “I’m all you have available today.”
Ruffins turned, but Cherabino stood in his way, very unfriendly. Behind her, some of the special tactics guys waited for an excuse. Nobody liked a dirty cop.
“Sit down,” Cherabino said.
“I want my phone call,” Ruffins said.
“You’ll have it after you talk to Adam. But don’t think about calling your supervisor. He’s been fully briefed. You’ve been read your rights.”
After a long, hate-filled moment, Ruffins sat.
Cherabino went to the corner—Bellury’s corner—and sat in the babysitter’s chair. That was different. That—well, it threw me off. I stared at her.
Don’t screw this up, I heard in my brain over the Link.
I turned back to Ruffins. He was holding his hand over his tattoo, nervous. Below that, the soft subtle smell of . . . fear. I felt fear in Mindspace, real fear, the kind of fear a recovering arachnophobe felt when seeing a tarantula through glass. Strict control, strict thought, but underlying terror, fear much bigger than any average normal felt when faced with a telepath.
And suddenly I knew how to handle this.
“Special Agent Ruffins,” I said.
He just looked at me. Silence was his best bet, and he knew it.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “That meter on your arm—you can feel it when I read you, is that right?”
He looked down at the multicolored band of his tattoo. Likely so, his brain supplied.
“We can test the theory if you—”
“No!” He took a breath, and returned to silent waiting punctuated by angry fear. It wasn’t illegal for me to read his surface thoughts if I told him I was a telepath, and he likely knew it.
I sat back in the chair, a slightly less threatening posture. “We can do this the easy way if you like. You tell me the truth and I won’t do an active read.”
I had his attention.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what that means. I’ll tell you. I’ll still be sitting here and I’ll still monitor Mindspace around you. That means if you have a strong emotion, I’ll get a whiff of it, like cologne. If you lie to me I’ll spot it. But I won’t get thoughts. I won’t get a view of the inside of your head at all. I stay over here, and you stay over there.”
“Why would you do that?” he asked, wary, still rubbing his arm.
“I don’t have a dog in this pony fight. Cherabino, over there, cares. She wins something if you’re guilty, but she wins something if you’re not. She has a preference for which it is. Me, on the other hand, I get the same pay either way. I only care about the truth. You give me the truth, the real truth, with no fudging or corrections or half lies, and I don’t have any need to read you.”
“You’d do that?” Ruffins asked, a feeling of contempt, anger and a note of relief coming off him.
“Ask Cherabino over there if I keep my promises.”
We looked. She, reluctantly, nodded.
In Mindspace: Not about the drug, her mind echoed.
I never made you a single promise about Satin, I left in her mind. And there’s a reason for that.
She shifted uncomfortably in the chair, but I was already onto Ruffins.
“Do we have a deal? The truth in exchange for keeping my mind to myself?”
“If I lie?”
“You know the answer to that,” I said, injecting as much certainty and doom into the statement as possible. His imagination would be far, far worse than anything I could say to him.
He considered it and then nodded, cautiously.
Line on a hook, I had him. The way I had primed him, any half-truth or fudging would now carry a burst of that same fear.
“Let’s begin,” I said, with a smile. I asked him where he was the day of the murder, the usual softening-up question.
“I killed him,” Ruffins said quickly. “It wasn’t intentional, or, well, it wasn’t planned. It just . . .” He trailed off.
“Start from the beginning of the conversation with Wright and tell me what happened,” I said, in my most neutral interviewer voice. Wow, that had been easier than expected.
He nodded and sat a little taller, his voice taking on that official confidence I’d seen in him already so many times. “Noah Wright was a valuable asset into the workings of Fiske’s crime organization. He’d already sold information to the man through an intermediary and was poised to meet some of the organization directly. When he lost his job, I applied subsequent financial pressure to get him to agree to infiltrate the higher-up portions of Fiske’s enterprises on my behalf. I gave him information, a good mix of accurate and false approved by my superiors, and set him loose. He was doing well.” He took a breath.
“And then what?” I prompted.
“He started getting cold feet. Saying that this wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to sell some of his inventions. Or, really, with that insane Free Data mantra of his, he wanted to release them as widely as possible. He started talking about giving away that medical device he was so obsessed with. I thought I talked him down. I thought . . . ” Ruffins was looking at the back wall of the interview room, no longer at me, no longer at anything. Telling the story. “The day before, I’d checked his accounts to make sure he’d been reporting all of Fiske’s payments correctly. And I found the other payments. Payments even my superiors had trouble tracing.”
No fear anymore, not any. His emotions had the even keel of someone telling a true story from recent events.
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, I went over there and confronted him about the payments. He told me it was the Chinese. He’d sold them the Galen device! Like it didn’t even matter! The US military was already under contract. I pushed him, why would he do that? National security trumps freedom. We could all die in a slip. And then—”
“And then what?”
“And then he said he hadn’t sent all the data yet. I lost it. The ax was just sitting there, just sitting there.” Disgust filled the air. “I swung it and I swung it until he couldn’t get up. Until he’d never sell anything again. He’d never destroy anything again. And then I took out the prototype in his head.” He looked up, meeting my eyes. “I took it and all its parts to the shed in my backyard and I burned it. Once with wood and once with a blowtorch and once with lighter fluid. No one’s going to use that DNA now. Not the Chinese, not anybody.”
“You burned it?” I prompted, when he was silent for a minute.
“I protected the American people. You would have done the same.” He paused. “You really haven’t read me, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
He nodded. “Respect. Respect was all I was really looking for.”
And there was the truth. He could have turned the man into the authorities, arrested him, locked him up, allowed his information to be used to benefit everyone. But instead the disrespect of his own informant turning against him had made him turn violent, ax murder violent. It had made him act to control Wright at any cost. This was not a heroic man, for all he protested otherwise. This was not a heroic act.
I tidied up the last few lingering details gently and then ended the interview.
Cherabino and I stood in the hall, totally silent, as the special tactics bruisers escorted him downstairs to the holding cells. He never struggled.
And I wondered. Had we done the right thing? He’d done wrong, very, very wrong, but so had Fiske. It didn’t seem fair that his wrongdoing should buy Fiske freedom—but I didn’t know what else we could have done.
And maybe that—that—was why Fiske was in charge of one of the largest criminal organizations in the Southeast. He was a puppet master, and I couldn’t help feeling like I’d had my strings pulled.
But Ruffins had killed a man.
I’d caught a killer. But this was not a happy day for me, not at all.
CHAPTER 21
When the dim hallway was empty, interview rooms lit on each side, I sighed. “You realize we’ve been played, right?”
Cherabino nodded. “Fiske? Yeah. We were. But Ruffi
ns should not have done what he did. One bad apple and all that. What else could we do?”
We stood there for a moment. She was right. She was.
“Then why do I feel . . . so . . . ?”
“Unsettled?” Cherabino said. “Sometimes it’s like that. We do this for the justice, and to bring resolution to the families. We’re doing that here. It’s the right thing to do, no matter what the consequences are.”
Then I added, “Fiske didn’t have a reason to keep track of Wright, did he? Not more than usual.”
She turned to look at me. “Unless he knew he was working for the feds. Yeah, I know. I’m betting somebody put the ax there, even. Doesn’t make it right. You don’t go axing your informants. You just don’t.”
“He did kill Wright,” I said.
“Yeah, he did.” She waited, to see if I was going to need to talk this through more.
I said nothing.
“Like I said, Adam, sometimes it’s like this. Sometimes not everything gets resolved the way we want it to. We do the job anyway.”
And in that moment, I believed. I believed we’d done what we could. I believed . . . well, mostly I believed in Cherabino.
We did the job anyway.
The moment passed, and I saw the time. “Listen, I have one more stop to make before we leave. Meet you up front in half an hour?”
She frowned at me, but giving Cherabino a chance for more work was like giving me access to my poison. “Sure.”
• • •
I knocked on Captain Harris’s door.
“Come in,” came a gruff voice.
I opened the door cautiously and closed it just as cautiously behind me. “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” I said. I was only ten minutes late.
Harris nodded and set down his pen, gesturing me forward to the desk chair. I went.
He was a gray man with gray hair and a perpetually tired look, several pounds overweight, and he had enough power and creative problem-solving to manage most of the DeKalb County Police Force and get funding from half a dozen additional sources. In addition to arbitration outside the department.