Sharp

by Alex Hughes

  “Migraine?” I asked gently.

  “Yes.”

  “Want me to come back?”

  She forced herself up, her eyes narrowed to slits. “What’s the problem?”

  “I think Sibley forced Tamika to help him find and kill Emily. Maybe for those missing blueprints. The trouble is, the Guild can’t find her.”

  “Who’s Tamika?” Cherabino asked cautiously.

  I caught her up, and it was like a light went on inside her, the driving force that pushed her on.

  “Call Michael back in from the scene I sent him on. We’re going to find out about these blueprints, you’re finally going to tell me everything you know about Emily Hamilton, and we are going to call every damn hospital and morgue until we find your missing woman. Or we’re going to find her some other way.”

  “Are you good for this?” I asked quietly.

  “I’m still here, aren’t I? If I’m at work, I need to work.”

  I paused for a long time, then sat down next to her. “I’m not working for the Guild.” And my drug test came back clean. It wasn’t a drug dealer, I added silently. Nobody around here would sell me anything anyway. I’d tried.

  “I know,” she said, still staring at her desk, fighting through the haze of pain. “I called Kara this morning. She told me what was going on.”

  She winced as Michael walked into the cubicle and knocked on the wall far too loudly.

  Michael paused, sack of donuts from the corner deli in hand. “I brought you food,” he told Cherabino.

  “Whisper,” I said, quietly, as another pulse of migraine pain made it through my shields.

  Cherabino was already unpacking the donuts.

  “I borrowed the chemical file on kerosene from Dotty like you asked,” Michael told me, handing me a laminated card.

  “Oh, good,” I said, eyeing a powdered donut Cherabino was already claiming for herself.

  “Tamika first,” Cherabino put in, mumbling around the donut.

  I opened one of the side drawers on her desk and pulled out a small bottle of migraine pills, handing it to her. “Meds first. Then we figure this out together.”

  She took the pills, and Michael found a chair.

  CHAPTER 22

  After a long meeting where we all hit our heads against the metaphorical wall, I snuck away before the next block of interviews and called Kara one more time.

  “I can’t do anything about Stone,” she said. “I’m sorry, Adam, I can’t.”

  “I didn’t figure you could. That’s not why I’m calling.”

  “Why are you calling?”

  “Have you seen Tamika? Has anyone else?”

  “No, no, she hasn’t been back to work. We sent somebody to check her apartment, but she wasn’t there either. Did you make her mad? Should we be looking for her? With what happened, I feel an obligation to—”

  “That’s not what this is about.” I cleared my throat. “Listen, I believe Tamika has been threatened by a hired killer named Sibley to give up sensitive Guild information about courier routes. We think that’s why the hijackings lately. Did she seem off to you lately? Can you find her? She could be in danger. Emily is dead, Kara. This isn’t a trivial concern. And Guild courier information—well, I don’t need to tell you what a train wreck that could be. We’re finding biological Tech, Kara, and I’m pretty sure it belongs to you.”

  “Wow. Well, officially, the Guild neither owns nor has any interest in any technology forbidden by the Koshna Accords. Biologicals seem a bit crazy, though, don’t you think?”

  “They were under the seal,” I said, as much as I dared say over the open phone line. “I think she’s caught up in all of this, and besides the security implications, I really think she could be in danger. Can you find her, please?

  “She works inside the Guild. She lives on Guild property. There’s no way anyone got close enough to threaten her without us knowing about it. And seriously, Adam, I would have known about anything like that.”

  “I’m sure Emily’s sister is thinking the same thing about her sister. And now she’s dead. I’m asking you as a favor, Kara. This is Tamika, and I feel like I have to do something. And that Tech . . . could you at least look into it?”

  Kara sighed. “I’ll rearrange my schedule and take care of it this morning.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  * * *

  She called me back two hours later, after lunch, when Cherabino was in court and Michael unavailable. I transferred it to the phone outside the coffee closet so Bellury wouldn’t listen in.

  “Are you certain Tamika is under duress?” Kara asked me, voice all too serious.

  “I’m not certain of anything right now.”

  “I ask because—well, a number of her things are packed up. Neatly. She’s not at the courier office, she’s not at her apartment, and a significant percentage of her things are missing, along with her. According to the security guard, she left the campus yesterday under her own power. She even smiled at him. And as near as I could tell, the truck you’re referring to—it was her order, Adam. No one else requested it.”

  “Courier office.” Suddenly it all clicked together. “Tamika has been working for the courier office. In logistics. Shipping things.”

  “I told you that.”

  I took a breath. “What if she’s in this on her own volition? I have a witness linking her to Emily before she was killed. And she works in the courier office. The courier office, Kara! She can order whatever she wants!”

  “Where are you going with this?” Her tone was scared more than anything. “Are you saying—”

  “We’ve been looking in the wrong direction. The hijackings, the murder, that’s why she was at the funeral.”

  “Adam—”

  “Find me where the next courier load is being delivered. Find me the information so we can intercept these guys. So we can catch them in the act.”

  A long pause. “You really think Tamika killed Emily?”

  “Yeah, I do. Unfortunately I do.” I owed Tamika. I had to make restitution. But I had to find Emily’s killer, and if they were one and the same . . . Cherabino said we owed the victims justice. That justice was the most important thing we could possibly give them.

  “Adam?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll send you the information by courier in the next hour. If . . .” Her voice broke. “If I was wrong and set up that woman to take advantage of the Guild, to kill someone we should have been taking care of . . .”

  “Kara, it’s not your fault,” I said. It was mine. Mine for getting distracted, mine for not putting it together.

  And then she was back, her voice matter-of-fact, too matter-of-fact. “I’ll get you the time and place by courier in the next hour.”

  “Thank you.”

  She took a breath. “You should know. We went through her work papers. There’s a . . . well, a sketch. A highly technical sketch for a, shall we say, box to influence brain waves. Our technical people in the research department say it’s sound, and that it’s developed enough to work in the real world. They claim they haven’t seen it before.”

  I paused. If the Guild—if Kara—was sharing this, there was reason to be concerned. “Okay. Well, she worked for Dane. She had access to his research just like I did.”

  “And there’s some parts missing from the Guild research labs.”

  “Great,” I said. “Just great.” This was turning into the perfect storm.

  * * *

  I found Morris in front of the public coffee table upstairs in the detectives’ cubicle area, her standing impatiently while the closet coffeepot spat air and hot water, steam and a sour, almost-coffee-beans smell across the area. Upstairs in the detectives’ cubicle area felt deserted, fewer people here than there used to be. I told myself they were ju
st out on cases, but I knew some of them—most, probably—had been laid off.

  “There’s a stash over the microwave in the food closet. They’re real coffee beans.”

  Morris scowled, her Valkyrie-like features fierce. If I hadn’t been so used to Cherabino, I might have stepped back. I should have felt her intentions along with it, but now, midafternoon, I had to concentrate to pick up anything from a normal. “All I could find was the fake stuff. The pot they had on had been sitting all day. It looked like a hockey puck.”

  “Probably similar.”

  As the mechanism finished its brew cycle, she darted in to fix a cup of it anyway. She must have needed the caffeine pretty badly; the circles under her eyes were deep and she moved like she’d been up far too many hours. I spent the effort to read her and found her exhaustion was deep and wide. Maybe she hadn’t slept at all.

  “I need your help,” I said. “I have information about where the hijackers are dropping their goods this afternoon. We have a couple of hours before it happens.”

  She blinked. “The hijackers who took out a high-security silicon chips shipment last night? Those hijackers? Where did you get this information?”

  “I only got it a little while ago,” I said. “And . . . let’s just say it’ll be inadmissible in court and you probably don’t want me to give you the details.” Since Cherabino was gone, I didn’t have an easy way to introduce Kara’s information unless I went through Paulsen—which seemed bad for my job security. And the clock was ticking. I was hoping Morris would take the information without a lot of questions.

  A slow, dangerous smile spread across her face. “Let me finish the coffee and we’ll pack up.”

  * * *

  I knew the area, or I had known it, years ago and high as a kite. Things looked different now, in full daylight, after the city had started a reclamation project on the old industrial complexes, now apartments for yuppies. Aircar garages on the roofs, the ground-level entrances locked up tighter than the police holding cells, local businesses in the area still sporting heavy iron bars. The only people walking carried small packages and wore jackets just large enough to conceal firearms, even in the middle of summer, and the streets two blocks down from the apartments still never seemed to get clean.

  The abandoned school building was still there, though, smaller and shabbier than I remembered it, bricks falling down into the alley. It was surrounded on all sides with dirt and squatters, a veritable haven for shady deals of all types. This used to be Marge’s territory, back when I still knew all the players.

  We sat on the crumbling top floor of the building across the way, looking down into the now-empty alleyway in back of the school. A tattered awning and piles of dirty boxes were its only decoration. There were unmarked police cars and uniforms on foot sequestered in various hiding places around the area, and plenty more sat waiting and ready to move when the hijackers finally arrived.

  The trouble was, they had been due to arrive half an hour ago. Morris, crouching next to me on the gritty floor, shifted. She was getting restless; I could see it in her body language and in occasional flashes of impatience darting through the fog of Mindspace like minnows through a cloudy lake.

  “What’s the time?” she whispered, maybe the twelfth round of the same question.

  I told her.

  She shifted again, her legs getting tired, as the radio on her hip sputtered faintly, almost white noise.

  “Give it another minute,” I said for the dozenth time, but it was falling flat, even to my ears.

  Morris glanced back at me, then pulled her radio from her belt and turned up the volume. “Units in Tango Charlie, this is a Ten Fifty-Nine. Repeat, Tango Charlie, this is a false alarm. Let’s go home, folks.”

  Through the broken window in front of us, I could see a couple of uniforms round a corner, rifles held loosely pointed to the ground. Not too far away I could hear the high-pitched humming sound of a fusion engine warming up as a police aircar went from idle and cold to ready to fly.

  Morris’s hand with the radio was halfway back to her belt when a string of numbers and urgent calls for backup hit the airwaves. “Hijackers!” the broadcaster finally said in the department’s preferred plain-language call. “Repeat, multiple fatalities and restricted materials missing from Al’s Secure Computer Depot, Clairmont Road, next to the Veterans Hospital. All units available, backup. Back-up immediately. Black industrial flyer heading north through restricted airspace, no tags. All units. All units, pursue.”

  Adrenaline soaked the air as every cop in the area stopped everything—but we were at least thirty miles out of the way. We’d been caught with our pants down.

  Morris stared me directly in the eye. “I swear to you by all that is holy, if you’re working for them, if you set this up so that area would be empty—”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “—I will find out, and I will bury you.”

  “I didn’t—”

  But she was already down the stairs, leaving me to catch up as best I could.

  CHAPTER 23

  By the time I got back to the department, it was almost quitting time. Morris was at the computer store, going through evidence. And I—well, I’d been left on the side of the road like so much baggage.

  I looked up from my borrowed desk at the sound of running shoes across the hard tile of the main walkway, maybe fifteen feet away. It was Michael, running. Where was he running to? What was going on?

  “Stop running!” the dispatch officer called out.

  “Sorry.” Michael dropped into a trot.

  With the advantage of angles, I headed him off at the front door, arriving out of breath. “Is Cherabino okay?” I panted. I thought I’d probably know through the Link, but I hadn’t felt much from her for hours and now he was running. . . .

  “She’s fine. Murder scene, priority, across the city,” Michael said. “I just located Hamilton.”

  “The husband we couldn’t find? Can I come?” If I sat at that desk any longer, I’d probably do something stupid. Like force myself onto the team interrogating the witnesses to the hijacking—not the thing to do if anyone was suspecting me of aiding them. And Kara had forbidden me to call her again for at least another hour.

  “You can come, but we need to move. Now.”

  “You got it.” I was tired; it was late. But I wasn’t that tired.

  He held the door for me. “Cherabino’s not in on this one. This is a rough bar.”

  It took me a second to figure out what he was asking. “I’ll be able to handle myself. I have battle training.”

  A small nod. “We’ve got a patrol car requisitioned.”

  A second later he was halfway down the front steps of the building. I had to hustle to catch up, lungs panting in the polluted afternoon air.

  * * *

  Michael parked in the middle of a seedy-looking parking lot in a run-down strip mall south of Decatur. The front of the lot was dominated by the remains of what once had been an air-traffic routing station for computer-controlled aircars, dismantled in the aftermath of the Tech Wars, all the parts yanked out and the empty rusting shell left. It said a lot about the area of town we were in that no one had bothered to take it down; an empty molding mattress took up most of the inside, while the outside was graffiti upon graffiti, but it still stood. Even the red kudzu climbing over the concrete walls looked dull, its color fading as its bioengineered cells began to lose the battle against the pollution it was supposed to be clearing.

  Most of the shops in the strip mall were closed for good, another having an Out of Business sale, and a title pawn and the bar anchored the rest of the rotting building. The parking lot was cracked and unpainted, and cars parked at odd angles. More than a few vans left the lot right after the police car pulled in. It was that kind of neighborhood.

  Michael put the car in gear and hes
itated.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well . . .”

  I waited, trying to open up enough to understand what the hesitation was about. Michael wasn’t particularly loud in Mindspace, so I didn’t get a whole lot from him unless I meant to. I strained, reaching out, and found he was thinking I wasn’t a cop. It didn’t give me an idea of what the holdup was. I made myself wait him out, and watched one very dim and transient flash of light spark on my right side. For this late in the day, even that was a great sign. I was healing, and steadily.

  “Okay,” Michael said, seeming to come to a decision. “You don’t have a badge, so I can’t send you in by yourself. And the whole back of the place seems to butt up against the interstate; I don’t think he’s going to get anywhere else quickly. So we’ll both go in the front door and see what there is to see. If we have to run him down, we’ll run him down.”

  “Do we have to run?” My lungs didn’t like anything over a walk.

  “Probably. This guy’s been hiding. I don’t think he’s going to come along quietly.”

  “I’ll keep up,” I promised, but vowed to myself that I wouldn’t be running.

  The sign at the bar said PEG LEGS, with a faded drawing of a pirate with a disturbing smile. The windows were too dirty to see into, and there was an extremely large cockroach with mottled blue spots on its blackish carapace working at a bit of rotten food on the sidewalk. It skittered away as we approached. Another bioengineered cleaning creature, maybe. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the interior of the bar. To the left was a rotting wooden bar, black spots near the floor, metal bar stools spotted with rust, and to the left a small lake of beat-up tables. The place smelled strongly of old sour beer, urine, and dirt. Not the good clean smell of dirt freshly turned in a garden, but the old, nasty, speckled smell of a back alleyway covered in old filth. The patrons, who looked as dirty as the surroundings, stared at us. None of them was Hamilton.

  “Nice place,” I said to Michael.