by Therin Knite
He doesn’t even say goodbye.
The tape Williams has used over the past decade to cover the cracks in her sanity starts to tear at the force of her repressed fury. She marches into the kitchen and pours her entire mug of coffee down the drain. She is well aware that Lionel has every right to be angry with her for seeing someone on the side, but he has no business whatsoever threatening to out her lover to the press. Lionel is a tall man with a short fuse, and he has a funny habit of refusing to look at the most important details until he’s already burned a situation to the ground.
If he goes to the press with this, he’s going to end up blacklisted from all the major corporations in the world, not to mention government agencies. He’s already gotten himself kicked off four boards in the past two years, and he’s been brewing ill will with the two start-ups he managed to latch onto the year before last.
Damaging the reputation of someone with more power than he can imagine is the equivalent of lifting the whole world over his head and not realizing it’s too heavy until it’s too late to let go. Crack. Crunch. Splatter.
She intends to attempt to reignite their discussion and talk some sense into him when he returns home. If he returns home. If he doesn’t, the next time she hears his name will be on the eight o’clock news: Local Businessman Kicked to Curb. Williams knows this will have consequences on her social life as well. She’ll be jeered at by her wealthy peers for breaking her union vows and exalted by the lower-class masses for finally getting out from underneath Lionel’s boring, loveless thumb.
Williams reclaims her seat at the end of the table, gaze lingering on the crumbs of Lionel’s eggs and toast while she tries to eat her own. Was Lionel’s meal as tasteless and dry? Or has she finally lost her mind?
Then again, what does her mental state matter? In the long run, she would’ve gone crazy anyway. Lionel’s ever-increasing distance assured that. Her pledge as a Leonite—union once forever; divorce never—assured that. She spent adolescence hung up on that upper-class moral code bullshit. It worked out for her parents, and her young, idealistic stupidity kept her wrapped in the sheet of belief too long. If she breaks it off with Lionel now, not a single one of her family members or childhood friends will speak to her again.
Either their relationship crashes and burns, or she does.
There’s little point in trying to prevent the inevitable.
But she’ll do it anyway, for both their sakes.
After her awful breakfast, she reclines on the leather sofa watching soap opera reruns until her mood improves from hopelessly numb to simmering with rage. She swipes her Ocom from the coffee table and messages her lover, who replies to her request with a sincerely remorseful rejection. His job has him out of the city again, and he won’t be able to catch a train back until Saturday at the earliest. So sorry, love. Promise a special date when I get back. There’s a new club opening downtown next week. I’ll get us a VIP room.
Disappointed, she retreats to the master bedroom and downs five of the strongest sleeping pills she can find. Half an hour later, she’s lost in the dense fog of dreams: visions of Lionel finally reclaiming some of that lost passion from their dating days, her lover pecking her on the cheek as they join arms during a moonlight stroll, her body floating in the shallow end of the pool, a funeral. Seven hours slip by in the haze, and she doesn’t stir until her brain registers the sound of a briefcase slamming against the countertop.
Lionel is home.
She presents herself sluggishly, hair tousled, eyes drooping, in the doorway of their bedroom. When Lionel locates her, his cheeks puff out and his chest puffs up in the manner of a disgruntled peacock. “Napping. You have got to be kidding me. I work all damn day and you…Did you do anything today? Clean? Cook? Set the lawnmower to autocut the grass?”
“We have people who clean and cook and set the lawnmower to autocut the grass. And last time I checked, you don’t have to work because you inherited a fortune. You work because you want to work, Lionel. Or so you told me.” She leans against the doorframe, speculating about his openly aggressive behavior. His face is red. His eyes are bloodshot. Is he drunk? High on something?
Without warning, Lionel line drives his briefcase across the dining room. It hits the table’s centerpiece, shattering a priceless glass sculpture into fifty worthless chunks. The man reddens and reddens until he’s ready to erupt, and then he does. He grabs a heavy angel statuette from the nearest hallway table and heaves it at her faster than she can react. It strikes her in the side of the head, and her body folds like it’s come unplugged from its energy source.
Dazed, she rolls over and sits up, blood running down her face. Lionel is storming toward her. Whatever he’s on has overridden all his controls, and what’s left is the rage he’s always been too composed to unleash on her. She scrambles up and slams the bedroom door shut, jamming a side table under the knob. The lock on the door was broken when they moved in. She never thought it needed fixing.
Her Ocom is sitting on the bed, but before she can reach it, Lionel bursts through the door, breaking all four legs of the table at once. Screaming, Williams leaps out of his path, and he plows face first into the mattress. Her back slams into her vanity, and she spins around, searching for something to use as a weapon. The only thing she finds is her Hi-Hazel stash, carefully stowed away in a nondescript jewelry box.
The biggest autosyringe in the box contains a lethal dose.
A…end.
Lionel rolls off the bed and rises, his limbs trembling. Whatever drug he indulged in is taking its toll. But he’s still twice her size. He can break her neck easily. And her last round of bone restructure mods was only a month ago—her bones are more brittle than usual.
“Lionel,” she says, “listen to me. You are high on something. It’s messing with your head. You’re a distant asshole, but you are not an abuser. You are not a killer. You are not going to kill me. If you try, I will stop you.”
Ad…mend.
A half-choked laugh works its way out of his throat, along with a spray of spittle. “You cheated on me, you bitch. You stood in front of that judge at the fucking courthouse and swore you’d be faithful to me, yet here you are, whoring yourself out to some asshole who thinks he’s immune to punishment. You did whatever the hell you wanted to me. You betrayed me. Now I get to return the favor.”
Adamend.
He lunges for her. She tries to evade him, but he catches the edge of her blouse and throws her to the floor. Her head whips back against the thin carpet, and her vision fizzles out. When it returns a moment later, Lionel is on top of her, hands around her neck. He squeezes so hard something crumples in her throat, and she can’t breathe, can’t escape, can’t think. She hits him with her free hand, over and over, but even when she splits his skin with her nails, he doesn’t respond. He’s impervious to pain.
So she plunges the autosyringe into his thigh.
Adamend!
Then she passes out.
Chapter Thirteen
“Adamend? Adamend! Can you hear me?”
Grant Acres is cool and damp in the early hours of the morning. The sky is clear, stars visible in one half of the sky but obscured in the other by the residual glow of Washington’s light. This place is the rich picturesque—close enough to the city to allow its inhabitants to see, smell, and taste the urban life they desire and far enough away to shield them from the grime and crime of lower-class neighborhoods. It’s clean. It’s lavish.
It’s lonely.
“Adamend!”
In the half hour since the dragon kidnapped Williams, not a soul has passed by on the well-swept sidewalks or driven into any of the fancy garages or even let a pet outside to stretch its legs. All the houses remain silent. Some are slept in during the day by those who club hop through the night. Some are empty most of the year, maintained weekly by gardeners and cleaners, until the owners decide to drop in for a weekend in August on the migration path down to Miami. What bastards the rich are,
buying all these priceless ghosts while the average Joe comes home to a cramped inner-city apartment every day.
“Adamend!”
Someone shakes me roughly, a wave of pain resonating through my half-healed shoulder. I bat the hand away, moaning. “What do you want?” Is it the only rich fuck currently in Grant Acres, having stumbled out of his hot tub to see what all the long-gone commotion was about?
The man crouches next to me, and in the dim morning light, it takes me a second to make out his features. A tall, bulky, dark-skinned man with a pinched, serious expression. Briggs.
“Adamend,” he says, “what happened?”
Another person glides by him—Ric Weiss—and picks up Martin Rickman’s Ocom where it fell out of my coat as I crawled from the ditch. The voice I’ve been hazily ignoring for the past thirty minutes belonged to Briggs. He answered my call after thirty-nine rings, but by then, Williams and the dragon were a dot on the horizon, and there was no longer a point in asking him for help. He came anyway, using GPS to track me down.
Briggs eyes the Ocom in my lap and the one in Weiss’ hand, frowning. He takes my Ocom and slips it into my sling. Then he makes a circular motion with his index finger, and Weiss tucks the stolen tablet into a vest pocket. Out of sight, out of mind.
“Adamend, are you okay?” Briggs removes a small flashlight from his tool belt and shines it into my eyes. A moment later, he leans toward me and leafs through my wet hair with his gloved hand. “You’re soaking wet. Hypothermia might be setting in.”
Is it? Possibly, but my sluggishness and muted emotions can also be explained by a lack of sleep, too much physical exertion, and a sudden absence of adrenaline.
And then there’s my unwarranted reconstruction of Williams’ love affair gone wrong. Weighing on me. Punishing me. It left a strange and hollow feeling in my chest. I don’t know why I made it to begin with, why I forced myself to watch Williams get attacked by her partner, and I don’t know why it saddened me this way. It wasn’t even a legitimate reconstruction. I added so many embellishments, filled in so many unknowns, it may as well have been a fantasy. Gods, why did I do that?
“Sounds like the team is here, Ric,” says Briggs. “Go grab the medics. Tell them to bring a thermal blanket.”
Weiss complies without a word and jogs off around the vehicle collection in the yard, skirting the hedges where Williams and I managed to stay hidden from the dragon for not quite long enough. Blue and red blinking lights close in on our position. They reflect off the dark windows of every house in the cul-de-sac, creating the illusion that I am surrounded.
“Adamend.” Briggs tries me again, and I know I should respond. But a heavy buzz in my head has my tongue feeling like a lead weight, my throat like sandpaper. “Was it the dragon, Adamend? The one that killed Manson? Did it attack you?”
I manage to nod.
“Adem!” Someone sprints around the end of the hedge row and charges toward me. When he gets closer, he falters, taken aback by my appearance. “Good gods, Adem. What happened?”
It’s Brennian.
“Sir, I’ve got medics coming to look at him.” Briggs rises and starts making hand signals to a growing crowd of agents in the street.
“No need. I’ll take him to the hospital myself.”
“Sir?”
“I’m not waiting around for EDPA to get here and put their grubby hands on him again. They’re already en route.”
“Is it wise to forgo an initial examination?”
“Wiser than letting him sit in the dirt for another twenty minutes.”
Briggs has nothing to add to that.
“Get some of your agents to help him into my car,” Brennian says. “And leave him alone until I tell you otherwise. No calls. I’ll bring him around to headquarters for his mandatory interview sometime this afternoon, once he’s gotten some rest. And once I’ve had a chance to speak with him myself. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Briggs waves a couple men over and orders them to assist me. They each take a side and lift me up, following Brennian as he retreats toward his parked car a few houses down. My head lolls back and forth, and a few times, I spot Briggs staring at me with an expression of immense pity. It occurs to me that he has already received his god-tier smack down for involving me in the Manson case, and now it’s my turn.
I’m lowered into Brennian’s car, strapped in, and cut off from the cul-de-sac by the door slamming shut in my face. Brennian commands the autodrive AI to jack up the heat for me before selecting preset destination number sixteen from the car’s list. Then we’re off, the director whisking me away from the one type of place in the world where I’ve always felt useful. The one type of place where I have the drive to work. The one type of place where I have any motivation at all to keep walking forward in this world.
Solving cases is my hobby.
Crime scenes are my life.
Chapter Fourteen
My third car ride in twelve hours is just as painful as the other two. In place of bleeding onto leather seat cushions while Dynara tries to keep me breathing, in place of being overwhelmed by unwanted drugs, Brennian alternates between poking at my wet, bandaged shoulder and shooting me the sort of smoldering glare one would use on a cat who’s knocked a flowerpot off the kitchen windowsill. The sharp prickles in my reforming bones make me fidget all the more under observation by the man who controls my future.
“Who shot you?” he asks when the car pulls to a halt at the next stoplight.
I consider lying to him, but at this point, it would do more harm than good. “Briggs. He was leading the SWAT team.”
No hint of surprise crosses Brennian’s face. He is well aware of the details of the situation, and whatever information EDPA was unwilling to give him about the Manson case he’s probably gleaned through a smidgen of intelligence and a bit of careful inference. “Did he even hesitate? You’re not supposed to shoot first.”
“I think that’s why he shot me in the shoulder. A step in between questioning and killing. You know Briggs.”
He traces the window reflection of a pink neon department store sign, considering how to best break it to me. “I don’t know what to tell you, Adem. You fucked up.”
“So, am I demoted, reassigned, or relocated?”
“I haven’t decided. Yet. But I can assure you that if you ever go gallivanting off into the night with EDPA again, I will have to consider the first option. The fact that you actually endangered yourself twice in a row last night is mindboggling to me. The fact that you ran from your own commander and ignored an interview summons, knowing both those actions give the Bureau the right to arrest you…I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Adem, but I’m sure as hell going to get it out.”
He sighs heavily, disappointed. “Eight months ago, I saw myself in you. Ambitious. Determined. Disciplined. A little immature, yes, but you can’t expect but so much from a boy. Now, I don’t even know what to think of you. It’s my fault, I’m sure, for not being around enough. You’re so smart, and I mistook that for wisdom. I thought it meant you didn’t need any guidance. That was naïve of me.”
Brennian stares at the passing cityscape as his sleek town car merges with early morning commuter traffic. I have no idea where he’s planning to take me after our hospital stop. The traffic is thick, and the car’s windows are tinted so black the overhanging directional signs are obscured.
Since this car ride will probably be the last taste of freedom I have for some time, I decide to make the best of it. I maneuver my Ocom out from underneath my useless arm, but keep it concealed in my sling. With Williams spirited away, the only tactic I have left to discover the identity of the Manson killer is to use Williams’ name to access her profile so I can leaf through her contacts and message history.
If I’m very lucky, the man will be a frequent contact whose identity as the Manson killer will strike me as obvious. If I’m less lucky, I’ll have to read through her messages, using the dates and content to figure out
who the most likely candidate is. If Lady Luck has flipped me the bird for all I pulled last night, then Williams’ profile will be inaccessible.
Pretending to scratch my injured arm, I pull up the IBI’s profile database and plug in Williams’ surname.
Forty-four. The IBI database has forty-four female entries on the name. There’s one single profile not listed under standard IBI access. It’s labeled “Williams, R. – Restricted.” No mention of her first name. No way for me to access her contacts or her past messages or her private images or anything else that would be useful in discovering who her murderous lover is. Yet again you fail me, IBI.
It’s odd though. Even with her upper-class connections, for someone like Williams to obtain such a high level of profile restriction is unheard of. No doubt it was a protective gift from her powerful mystery lover. One she used to the fullest extent: hiring a hitman with an untraceable call.
Fatigue and irritation start to erode my willpower to solve this case, but right as I feel ready to throw in the towel, a new idea strikes me. Williams’ hasn’t been seeing this man forever. And it’s highly unlikely he upgraded her profile restriction on the first date. Which means there must be pre-restriction call records with her name attached in the IBI’s call record database—records of calls between her and her lover. If I can get Williams’ full name, I can search through her old calls. I can narrow down the suspects to a handful of possibilities. And once I do, the right one should stick out like a sore thumb.
All I need is Williams’ first name. But how do I get it?
After a few minutes of deliberation—during which I double-check to make sure the director is still more interested in what’s outside the car than in it—I maneuver into the message app on my Ocom and click to pickup a thread of texts where I last left off. The contact is someone I’ve written to at least ten thousand times before but never in this way. I must write I’m sorry a dozen times. I throw in I should’ve told you, and I know better at both the opening and the close. And in the middle, I stick a request I’m sure will be denied by someone who has every right to deny it: