It was a good story. Almost too good. There were always rumors about the people on Guns and Gangs, and how their version of the law was just a little different than that of other cops. But now was not the time to start second-guessing Hernandez. Her story might satisfy the brass, except for one little detail. “And why am I here?” I asked.
“Because you pussies in Homicide never get to do any real work anymore. You were bored and lonely and wanted something to do. So I let you tag along.” She shot another evil grin over her shoulder.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 22
Dealing with the aftermath at the docks took hours. We had backup on scene within a few minutes, but that was only the beginning. It took time to secure the area, especially when Hernandez suggested that the murderer might yet be hiding among the containers. I didn’t think it likely, but alert cops were careful cops, and neither of us wanted them taking any chances—not after what we’d been through.
Fitzpatrick arrived about a half hour in, and we escorted him to the body. There wasn’t much for him to do. Cause of death was clear, even if we didn’t let him know that the actual murder had been witnessed by two cops. He did his thing with time of death and a cursory examination, and then had the corpse bustled onto a gurney to be taken back to his lab. An autopsy would be done—unlike with the synthetics, it was required by law in the event of a violent death. But I was pretty confident that it wouldn’t find anything beyond the obvious. Our adversary, the esteemed Mr. Fowler or those who employed him, were far too careful for that.
Captain Harris arrived at the hour-and-a-half mark. She wasn’t happy. She was never happy. But she liked Hernandez a hell of a lot more than she did me, so I tried to fade into the background while Hernandez spun her web of bullshit. Harris didn’t like it—I could see that much from where I leaned against a cruiser. There was a lot of hand waving and angry expressions, but in the end, Hernandez gave a brisk salute and turned away. She flashed a wink at me and I knew that her story had held.
I was Homicide, and even though I was technically off duty, I was the guy on the scene. The brass might not like the idea of different units working together without their express permission, but that wink told me that the case could continue as a joint venture between Guns and Gangs and Homicide. Between Hernandez and me.
That was a small victory in a night that was, otherwise, full of defeats. The forensics teams didn’t find anything near the murder site that was of any use. They did find the pool of blood where the man I’d cuffed escaped, but other than taking samples, there wasn’t much to go on. Hernandez and I played dumb with respect to the blood—cuffing a perp and leaving him while going after another wasn’t, strictly speaking, against policy, but when that suspect cut off his hand to escape, administrative punishment was the least of your worries.
We returned to Translantic Shipping, to find it gone. Just...gone. The building remained, of course, and most of the furniture was still within, but the screens, all the files, anything that might have stored a shred of usable data had vanished. They had probably started closing it down ten minutes after we left. By now, the company had likely been sold off or dissolved outright, with any traces leading back to Walton Biogenics long since purged. Another dead end. Another lead gone.
Hernandez and I were the last on the scene, standing by her cruiser as the last of the uniforms piled back in their vehicles and drove away. There were no crowds. Not at this hour. Not at this place. There were probably workers—synthetic workers—around somewhere, but for the moment, we were alone.
“What now?” Hernandez asked.
“I honestly don’t have a fucking clue,” I said, hating the bitterness that tinged my voice, but unable to keep it out. “All I have—all I’ve ever had—is a list of names. Victims and their possible killers. Fowler was the only lead. Fowler to Manny. Manny to Translantic. Translantic to a trap.” I shook my head and cursed again. “The real pisser is, they could have covered their tracks. There was no reason to bring Manny into the loop. If Fowler—whoever the fucker really is—had his ID made at Walton instead of a known gang contact, we wouldn’t even have that much.”
“They did it on purpose,” Hernandez agreed. “To find out if anyone tumbled onto them. So that they could silence any investigation before it had any chance to gain real traction.”
“And we walked right into it. We knew it was a trap, and we walked in anyway.”
“And lived,” Hernandez pointed out. “Don’t forget that part, hermano. We walked into their little trap, and we took it down. They had to flee. They left behind at least one corpse. Do you think that was what they intended? No. They aren’t invincible. They aren’t infallible. And, you know something, Campbell? I bet they’re scared shitless right now.”
She said the last bit with such satisfaction that I felt a slight chuckle escape my lips. There were stereotypes about Latinas and passion going back a long way—in Hernandez that passion seemed to have settled into a nice little vindictive streak. But Walton Biogenics, one of the richest corporations in the world, scared? It didn’t seem too likely. “They know us, now, Melinda,” I said softly. “Not just me. Both of us. If they set up the trap at Manny’s, then they had to be monitoring it. And monitoring the Translantic office, too. We didn’t just walk into their trap. We identified ourselves by name. How long will it take them to find out more about us? Sure, the department has extra security measures in place for our personal information, but how long will those walls hold up? They’re almost certain to come after us.”
Hernandez’s face twisted in anger and contempt—not directed at me, I knew, but rather at the people who would “come after us.” For a moment, I thought she was going to spit out an appropriately tough line, like “Let them try.” But then her face suddenly went deathly pale. “Arlene,” she said in a near whisper.
“Let’s go,” I said at once. Christ. They wouldn’t just come after us. Not now that they had tried and failed. They’d come after our families. Hernandez’s daughter. My parents. Fuck.
We got into the car and Hernandez immediately switched it to manual drive, bypassing the integrated safety features. She barked a sharp command and the light bar emerged from its recessed port atop the cruiser, blazing to life. She didn’t bother with the siren—the lights would trigger a signal that would be broadcast to any nearby traffic, communicating with their navigation systems to ensure a clear path for the emergency vehicle. She’d have to report it later, justify its use, but that didn’t matter at the moment.
She tore out of the parking lot, tires screeching and leaving a long line of black on the pavement behind us. As she did, she tore her screen from her pocket. “Call home,” she snapped. We waited in silence as the screen rang. And rang. And rang. No answer. As she hit End, Hernandez didn’t say anything, and neither did I, but her white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel spoke volumes. She concentrated on the driving, taking turns at speeds that had me bracing myself against the frame. I couldn’t see the speedometer, but I guessed that on the straightaways we were climbing upwards of a hundred miles an hour.
I wasn’t sure where Hernandez lived. We were work friends. She liked to keep her family separated from the job. And I had learned with Annabelle the dangers of letting anyone get too close. So I had no idea how far out we were when she started talking. “We gave them plenty of time,” she said between clenched teeth. “We sat there while forensics swept the area; we sat there while the coroner took care of the body; we waited for the fucking uniforms to leave. We gave them hours to find out where I live. To find my daughter. To find out how to hurt me.”
“No corporation ever made a decision in a couple of hours, Hernandez,” I replied. “Whatever they decide to do about us, it’s going to have to go through a committee or a project manager or at least a damn meeting. And it’s not going to happen at one in the morning. It will be all right.” I said the words, but
I wasn’t entirely sure that I believed them. Should I call my parents? Wake them up? Tell them to get out, now? To go somewhere, anywhere, and to do it without leaving a trail?
I chewed at the thought as Hernandez continued to drive. She didn’t speak again, and didn’t seem mollified. Maybe corporations did need time to make decisions, but it was entirely possible that Fowler was freelance. A contractor empowered to do whatever he had to to get the job done. Or maybe Walton Biogenics had contingency plans in case their little ambush went south. Whatever the case, it was clear Hernandez didn’t put much stock in my words. I wasn’t sure I did, either.
A few minutes later we came to a screeching halt in front of a little Cape Cod–style house. The yard was neatly kept, with a little wrought iron fence, no more than two and a half feet high, bordering it. The porch light was still on.
And the door was wide open.
“No.” It was part whisper, part plea, part prayer. It was, perhaps, the single most heartbreaking word I had ever heard.
Hernandez didn’t let her fear slow her. After that first whisper, she was out of the car, pistol in hand. I was right behind her, my weapon at the low ready. She retained enough presence of mind, or perhaps just enough training and experience, to not rush headlong through that open door. We entered in tandem, clearing sight lines and watching each other’s back. I wasn’t sure I could have kept the same composure had our positions been reversed.
The lights were on, though I didn’t have much time for looking around. I got a sense, an impression, of a well-kept space furnished with that indefinably feminine edge that seemed to make a house feel homey and that had eluded me for so many years. The house was small: entryway, stairs leading up, kitchen visible across an open floor plan, living room.
Occupied living room.
A woman sat on the couch, her face calm. She was older, perhaps in her early forties, but still attractive in a stately way. She had honey-blond hair and wore simple khaki slacks with a button-down blouse. It had the sense of a uniform, somehow.
“Where is she?” Hernandez demanded the second she caught sight of the woman. She did not, I noted, move her pistol to cover her, obviously not considering her a threat. The nanny, then. The synthetic nanny. “Where is Arlene?”
“Gone,” the woman replied in a low contralto. “Taken by a man in a nice suit.”
“You didn’t stop him?” she demanded.
The woman smiled, and in that smile I saw a depth of bitterness that bespoke a nightmarish existence far beyond my banal experiences of war and murder. That smile pierced me to my very soul—not, I was ashamed to admit, because it implied dark and dangerous things about our world, but because in it, I could see Annabelle. An Annabelle that had lived her life as a synthetic, subject to an eternity of torment until, at the end, there was nothing left but a soulless hulk. Until the constant cycle of pain and subjugation finally turned synthetics into that which we already claimed they were: something less than human.
The thoughts flashed through my head in an instant, but my concentration was still on the room, still on my surroundings. Still on Hernandez. The barrel of her pistol was coming up, taking bead on the center of the nanny’s chest. “Melinda, no!” I barked sharply, moving quickly to interpose my body between the two.
“Why not?” To my surprise, the words were not Melinda’s, but rather those of her nanny. “I’ve been dead for years. I wish I could end it myself, but I can’t. So go ahead. I’ll make it easy. I hope they do to your little girl all the things that have been done to me. All the dirty little secrets no one wants to talk about.” She kept smiling.
I was facing the nanny, my back to Hernandez, but I could hear the ragged, rapid pant of her breathing. She was terrified and angry. “Puta,” Hernandez growled. “You shouldn’t even be able to think that, much less say it.” The anger in her voice was deep, visceral. I’d been in that state, more than once, and I knew that rage wanted a target, hungered for it. Something to take it out on. Something to hurt. To break.
And here was a synthetic, not protected by any laws and incapable of offering any real resistance. She had to know the suffering that Hernandez could legally visit upon her, and yet she smiled. You rarely saw old synthetics. Was this why? There was a time when suicide by cop was a thing, the depressed and mentally ill forcing a standoff with the police and taking aggressive enough action that the officers had no choice but to open fire on the suspect. Did the life of a synthetic wear upon them so greatly that suicide by owner became their only option?
It hung there, balanced on a razor’s edge, the cold, dead smile of the synthetic and the tension and anger and helplessness radiating off Hernandez in a palpable wave. I didn’t think she’d throw me out of the way just to pull the trigger, but I was standing in the worst possible place to prevent it if she did. I needed to defuse the situation. I needed to say something.
“Do you know Silas?” I had no real reason to think that she would know the strange synthetic who had started all this. But Silas had implied some sort of organization, some sort of cohesion...almost a resistance.
At the mention of Silas’s name, the frozen smile shattered.
“How do you know that name?” she demanded.
We didn’t have the time for explanations. Somewhere out there, a killer had Hernandez’s daughter. If he was smart, he wouldn’t hurt her. Damaged goods made poor bargaining chips, after all. But the sooner we tracked him down, the better our chances of getting Arlene back in one piece. So I went for the shortest possible answer. “I’m helping him.” She just stared at me blankly, as if she couldn’t possibly have heard me correctly. “Silas,” I said again. The name had an effect like an electric bolt upon her. She physically started every time I said it. “We are helping him, damn it. Did you see where they took Arlene? Do you know anything?”
I could still feel Hernandez’s rage boiling behind me, not the least bit tempered by the shock on her nanny’s face. “A car,” she said at last, voice flat. “A black sedan. Fancy. They left maybe fifteen minutes ago. Caucasian. Male. Mid thirties.” There was no malice in the words now, no hatred. No love or caring, either. Just an empty monotone that was, all at once, sad and terrifying.
“Call it in, Hernandez,” I said without turning. I didn’t want to give her a clear lane, even for the second it would take to turn. “Get the techies tracking that vehicle. Do it now, Melinda. It’s our best chance.”
“Bruja,” Hernandez spat. But I heard the scrape of metal and composite as she holstered her weapon and dug out her screen.
“You should have let her kill me,” the nanny said.
I sighed. “What’s your name?”
“The name they called me at ‘birth’ was Sinthyia,” she said, putting the emphasis on the Sin.
“What’s your name?” I asked again. “What do you call yourself?”
She glared at me, as if I’d asked her to strip naked. No. If I’d asked that, she’d probably have done it, as much on reflex as anything. She glared as if I were asking her to do something far more personal. A slight glimmer of outrage mixed with challenge flashed through her dead eyes. “Thea,” she almost growled. “My name is Thea.”
“Well, Thea, Hernandez is one of the good ones. She’s scared out of her mind at the moment, scared and angry and looking for a target.”
“Yeah. Been there. Done that.”
There was something in her voice that was both dismissive and defeatist and it made me want to scream. I couldn’t blame her for it, not after the life I assumed she had led. But was assuming that all non-synthetics were callous assholes who would use and throw away any synthetic that crossed their path any better than what people did to the synthetics? Well. Yes. OK. It was better. But it still wasn’t fair.
I almost snorted at that. Life was all kinds of things. Fair was seldom one of them.
“I know there was nothing you could do
to stop Fowler,” I said. “And I know why you hate us. I find it hard to believe that your hate extends so far that other little girls getting hurt would really make you feel better.”
She winced at my words, but the slight flinch was all the acknowledgment I’d get. “What happens to me now?” Thea asked.
The question surprised me, and I hated myself a little bit for that flash of surprise. Hated that I could still be surprised by the notion that synthetics had a sense of self-determination and worried about the future.
“What do you mean?” I fumbled.
She snorted. “I don’t think Ms. Hernandez is going to want me watching after little Arlene anymore. If she doesn’t kill me, then what? Sold again, I suppose.” The words were spoken pragmatically, almost stoically, but I could hear the worry in them, the fear.
Hernandez returned. “They’re working on it,” she said. “They’ll call us if they find anything. Uniforms are inbound to go over the scene.” The words were familiar—every detective had said them to colleagues, to the family of victims, or to the press hundreds of times. But the familiar words sounded different now, coming from Hernandez’s mouth.
She looked past me, at her nanny. “Get out.”
“What?” Thea asked.
“Get out,” Hernandez repeated. “I won’t sell you. Not with what I know now. But I’ll be damned if I let you around my daughter ever again. So get out.”
SINthetic Page 15