Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “I’m sure that I haven’t heard the end of this discussion.”

  “I sincerely doubt it,” Izzie answered.

  “Yeah, we’ll pick this back up as soon as we find the time,” Patrick said, tossing his empty coffee cup into a nearby bin. “It feels like we’re getting close to something.”

  “Close to what, though?” Joyce quirked an eyebrow.

  “I’ll let you know the second I figure it out, Dr. Ghoul,” Patrick said with a grin.

  She rolled her eyes at him and headed off.

  “Come on, loverboy,” Izzie said, nudging his shoulder. “Let’s get moving.”

  Ten minutes later, as they drove west out of the Financial District towards the Kiev neighborhood, the comment was clearly still gnawing at him.

  “‘Loverboy’?” Patrick glanced at Izzie beside him in the passenger seat, his hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. “What was that crack about?”

  “Seriously?” Izzie turned in her seat to look back at him. “You flirt with her constantly. Not that she minds, obviously.”

  A look of genuine bafflement settled onto his features. “I do not!”

  “And again, seriously?” Izzie said. “Do you not hear yourself when you speak?”

  “I joke around with her, so what? I do that with lots of people.” He signaled a turn. “Janet, for instance. Same thing, and I know she’s not interested.”

  “Yes, because (a) she’s married, and (b) she’s gay. But even then, it’s different. With Janet, it’s like you’re joking around with one of the guys. But with Joyce … There’s this different look in your eye, a different tone in your voice.”

  “No, there isn’t.” His eyes darted to Izzie, a sheepish expression on his face. “Is there?” He looked back to the road. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I have a rule that I don’t date coworkers, and that includes anyone that I work with, cops or otherwise.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got that same rule.” Izzie’s tone was a little wistful.

  “What was that?” They’d stopped at a red light, and Patrick turned in his seat, fixing her with a hard stare. “That air of … I don’t know. Disappointment in your voice? Is there … ?”

  “Light’s green,” Izzie interrupted, nodding at the road ahead.

  Patrick turned to face ahead and pressed the accelerator. “Is there someone that you’d be interested in … you know … if you didn’t have that rule?”

  She looked out the window, and sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Oh, god, is it me?”

  Izzie’s bark of laughter was the only response that Patrick needed to hear, it seemed, as he hunched his shoulders and glowered at the road. But she felt like his question could not pass without comment.

  “Oh, Patrick. You poor thing. Adulting must be very difficult for you.” She reached over and patted his shoulder, a consoling gesture. “You are a damned fine detective and a really good cop, but I think you might have a blind spot where this kind of thing is concerned.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When Patrick backed the car into a parallel spot on Odessa Avenue, Izzie was sure that he must have gotten turned around somewhere. The address that he’d said they were going to was in the Kiev, in the northwest corner of Recondito. She’d spent a fair amount of time in the neighborhood five years before, since the task force had operated out of the 12th Precinct station house there. But the streets around them didn’t look anything like she remembered.

  “This can’t be right,” she said, as Patrick turned off the car and started to climb out.

  “What?” He ducked down and looked at her through the open door, already standing on the pavement. “Come on, they’re waiting.”

  He closed the door and walked around the car to the curb. Exasperated, Izzie unbuckled and got out.

  “I said, this can’t be right.” She gestured at the characterless condos and apartment blocks around them. “I thought you said we were going to the Kiev.”

  “Yeah?” He put his hands on his hips. “And?”

  Izzie turned in place, looking first one way down the street and then the other.

  “Where are all the secondhand shops? The vintage record stores? The cute little houses with the pitched roofs, and the cafés, and the Russian tea room? That store that just sold model trains?” She gasped. “Where’s the bakery that made that amazing pirozhki?!”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Patrick shook his head, sighing. “I guess a lot has changed since you were last here.”

  “But …” Izzie did another turn. Aside from the featureless apartment buildings, there was hardly anything of note on these streets, with the only business being a chain grocery store specializing in overpriced organic food. “What happened?”

  The Kiev was a half-dozen or so square blocks that had been home to Russian immigrants starting in the early years of the twentieth century, and had retained a great deal of that flavor in the decades that followed. By the 1960s, it had become a kind of bohemian enclave, where artists and musicians took advantage of cheap rents and low costs of living to pursue their passions without worrying much about paying the next month’s bill. And when Izzie first came to the city, all of that history was still in plain sight. The Slavic street names, the little old ladies in the tea room with their samovars, the old men in the bars with their vodkas, all spoke to the neighborhood’s immigrant past, while the aging hippies, vintage clothing stores, and record shops were testament to it being a counter-culture oasis that had weathered the passage of years. But now, all of that seemed to have vanished.

  “Come on.” Patrick motioned her to follow as he headed across the street. “The short answer is, money happened. The buildings in the Kiev were never in the best shape, even when they were first built. Cheaply made, and cheaply maintained. That was one of the reasons it was always so inexpensive to live here. But as more and more people started moving to town, space was in greater and greater demand. It was just a matter of time before that hit the Kiev.”

  “Okay, gentrification, I get that.” They had crossed the street, and were angling towards the entrance of one of the apartment blocks. “But why tear down all the buildings?”

  “Like I said, the buildings were cheaply made. And all of those single-family homes with those big backyards … It wasn’t the most efficient use of space, or so the developers argued.” There was a uniformed officer waiting inside the glass door of the entry way, and he opened the locked door to let them in. Patrick nodded a thanks to the officer as they walked through, and then continued as he and Izzie approached the elevator. “And there was a fire, which took out the Russian tea room and a few other buildings…. Arson was ruled out, but the locals still cried foul. But that sped things along considerably. Then an equity firm bought up entire blocks, and started bulldozing. Within less than a couple of years …” He gestured around them as they stepped onto the elevator. “It’s still the Kiev, technically, but pretty much in name only.”

  “That’s such a shame,” Izzie said as Patrick punched the button for the third floor. “The Oceanview didn’t seem to have changed much, so I’m surprised the Kiev has.”

  Patrick scowled. “Well, I’m hoping that Oceanview is spared that kind of thing, but it might be overly optimistic to say it could never happen.” He shook his head, and shrugged. “I’d hate to have to move.”

  “You know, I don’t think you’ve ever said where it is that you live in town,” Izzie said.

  “Maybe,” Patrick said, glancing over at her with a grin. “But I don’t think you’ve ever asked.”

  The elevator doors slid open with a ding, and they stepped out to find a couple of uniformed officers standing near an open apartment door a few dozen feet down the hall. Izzie recognized one of them from the drug raid the day before.

  “Lieutenant,” one of them said with a nod towards Patrick as they approached. “You can go on in, sir. Chavez is expecting you.”

  Yellow barricade tape with “police line do not cross”
printed on it crisscrossed the open doorway, and they had to duck their heads to crabwalk through.

  “Tevake,” the detective said, glancing up from where he bent over a laptop that lay open on a table on the far side of the room. “Anything interesting from the M.E.?”

  “She thinks that you’re a cutie,” Patrick answered, “but other than that, not much.”

  “As if.” Chavez snorted. “That chick has only got eyes for you, my man.”

  “What … ?” Patrick began to object, but the detective raised a hand to motion for silence. He was wearing blue nitrile gloves, so as not to contaminate the evidence.

  “Here, come take a look at this,” Chavez went on.

  As Patrick crossed the room to join him, Izzie looked around. It was definitely the apartment of a bachelor, and one who was new in town, at that. A few bits of flat-pack furniture inexpertly assembled, a laundry bin filled with several weeks’ worth of dirty clothes, a stack of junk mail and takeout menus on the counter in the kitchenette. There were a few partially-unpacked moving boxes lining the wall beneath the bay window, and on the floor beside them a set of dumbells that were gathering dust.

  The walls were bare and unadorned, and there were only a handful of framed photos in a small grouping atop the bureau in the single bedroom. The same young man was featured in all of them, sometimes alone, sometimes with small groups of friends, doing the sorts of things that young single people often wanted photos of themselves doing—scuba diving, skiing, rock climbing, singing karaoke. But glancing around the room, Izzie had the strong suspicion that those smiling moments in the sun were the exception, rather than the rule, and that Ibrahim Fayed had spent far more time on his own in this drab little apartment than he did out having adventures with friends. But then, who wanted framed photos of themselves eating dinner alone in their kitchenettes, or sitting on their couches watching reruns in the small hours of the night?

  Izzie knew she was hardly one to judge. If a profiler were given the keys to her apartment while she was away, would the assessment of her social life have been any less bleak?

  “Excuse me.” A CSI photographer stood behind her in the door to the bedroom, an impatient look on her face. “I need to finish up in here.”

  Mouthing an apology, Izzie slipped past the photographer and back into the small living area of the apartment, where Patrick was pulling on a pair of blue nitrile gloves as he sat down in a chair at the kitchenette table. Chavez was standing beside him, leaning over and tapping the keys of the laptop keyboard.

  “Guy left his laptop plugged in and turned on when he left,” Chavez was saying, “which was thoughtful of him.”

  “I’ll be sure to thank him when we get back to the station.” Patrick laced his fingers together to pull the gloves into place. “So what am I looking at here?”

  “Well, it seems that our boy Ibrahim was showing up for work a little more recently than the HR department at Parasol thinks. Or more recently than they lead us to believe, anyway.” He tabbed over to an open browser window, displaying a web-based email inbox. “This is logged in to his work account. There are emails in his Sent items from as recently as four days ago, with replies from other members of his team.”

  “What about?” Izzie asked, leaning over Patrick’s other shoulder to look.

  Chavez shrugged. “It’s all in tech speak, so it’s Greek to me. But it seems to be about some kind of new app that they’ve got in development. Fayed is one of the team leads, or was up until just a few days ago, anyway.” He pointed to a particular threaded discussion in the inbox. “Some of the other team members reference our guy being at a meeting in the office last week, but Parasol HR says he stopped showing up to work almost a month ago.”

  “A mix up in payroll, perhaps?” Patrick suggested. “Or maybe he, I don’t know, forgot to clock in or something?”

  “Maybe he’s got a twin brother, and they take turns showing up to work, Parent Trap–style.” Izzie thought it was funny, but from the looks the two detectives shot her way, neither of them agreed.

  “Okay, so that’s a little weird,” Patrick said. “But I’m not sure it merited dragging me all the way across town to see it. You could have just sent me a text.”

  “Right,” Chavez answered. “But that’s not what I wanted you to see.” He tapped a few more keys and brought up another browser window. “This is his personal email account,” he explained. “Looks like a lot of the same names from his team at work, but using their personal accounts instead of their work email addresses. And then there’s this thread.” He pointed to one thread of emails.

  Patrick clicked the link to enlarge the thread.

  “Third response down, sent by our guy four days ago.”

  Izzie leaned in as Patrick read aloud. “‘TC was supposed to find us a new host, but didn’t make the meeting. Got banged up, I think. Marissa and I are going to meet with MP to arrange a new supply source in a few days.”’

  “Marissa is Marissa Keizer, obviously,” Chavez said. “The other one we arrested in Price’s place yesterday.”

  “And ‘MP’ could be Malcolm Price, then?” Patrick turned to look at the detective.

  “That’s our guess,” Chavez answered. “And TC …”

  “Tyler Campbell?” Patrick nodded. “But what does he mean, ‘banged up’? Like, in a car accident or something? Or beat up?”

  “He’s originally from the UK, right?” Izzie asked. “Over there it means ‘arrested.’”

  Patrick turned back to the laptop screen, and then nodded. “That checks out. This was sent the night that we brought Campbell in for questioning.”

  “But ‘host’?” Izzie straightened up, rubbing the back of her neck. “Like, hosting a party?”

  “Maybe.” Chavez shrugged. “Or maybe Campbell was running some kind of Ink lab, and when he was arrested they needed to find a new place to operate out of, so Price’s rental fit the bill. A different kind of party.”

  “No, that doesn’t work,” Patrick said, shaking his head. “Price had been in that place for months, doing whatever it was he was doing.” He was unable to suppress a shiver. “And those bodies in the basement …”

  “Anyway, it’s pretty clear that this discussion is about Ink, one way or another. And we’ve got at least five Parasol employees on the string, using their personal accounts.”

  “Again, still not seeing why I had to be here to see this in person.” Patrick leaned back in the chair, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Patience, grasshopper, patience,” Chavez chided. “The tech guys from CSI did a first level pass on the laptop. It was open and logged in when we got here, like I said, but it’s got some pretty heavy duty encryption on it. And even though he was logged in to all sorts of apps, too, they say the passwords for them aren’t stored on the system, and we don’t know what they are. So while we can get anything that we want off of the laptop now, unless we can convince Fayed to give up the passwords, as soon as we shut it down …”

  “You lose access to the apps.” Patrick nodded. “Okay, I get it. They could strip the hard drive and get to any data that’s stored locally, but we’d lose access to his online stuff. So what is it that we want to know?”

  “Well, these are the personal email addresses of his teammates at Parasol who, it seems, are also involved in the Ink trade one way or another, right?”

  Patrick and Izzie were silent for a moment, until it was clear that Chavez was waiting for some kind of response. “Right,” Patrick said while Izzie nodded.

  “And we’ve got access to his list of personal contacts.” Chavez pointed at the screen. “And Fayed was helpful enough to leave this handy dandy little beauty running in the background.”

  He toggled the windows, and brought up an application that was displaying a map of the city.

  “It’s one of those ‘find my friends’ apps,” Chavez explained.

  Izzie and Patrick exchanged a glance. They’d made extensive use of just such an applica
tion five years before, to coordinate their movements in their search for Nicholas Fuller’s last victim, Francis Zhao.

  “And those right there?” Chavez indicated a cluster of dots in the middle of the screen, concentrated in a tight bunch near the intersection of Gold Street and Northside Boulevard. “Those are Fayed’s friends.”

  “That’s the Pinnacle Tower,” Patrick said, studying the map.

  “Which means they’re all working at the Parasol offices at the moment, busy little beavers. But later …” Chavez smiled.

  “We can track their movements.” Patrick’s eyes narrowed, hungrily.

  “Bingo.” Chavez nodded. “They probably know by now that Fayed and Keizer got ‘banged up,’ but chances are they wouldn’t think that he’d be so sloppy as to leave his laptop up and running when he went out.”

  “Not exactly a seasoned criminal, this one,” Izzie said, looking around the room.

  “Hardly,” Chavez agreed. “But if the other people on this mail string are involved with Ink, there’s every reason to believe that they’ll be picking up where Fayed and Keizer left off, whatever it was they were up to. Which could include meeting with suppliers, making drops, who knows what else.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Patrick pushed back from the table. “Are we going to sit around in this crappy apartment watching this screen until they do something interesting?”

  “No, Tevake, because that would be stupid.” Chavez shook his head, chuckling. “Our own IT guys are bringing over an uninterruptable power supply to keep the laptop charged, and then they’re going to move it over to the 10th station house, taking great pains not to close the lid on the way. And they’ve got this idea about pointing a web camera at the screen and then streaming a live feed that we can all log in to on our phones, so we can see what’s going on with the map from wherever we are.”

  “That’s smart,” Izzie said.

  “Yeah,” Chavez said with a sigh. “Wish I could take credit for that one, but that was totally their idea.”

  “Well, at least we know it wasn’t Harrison’s.” Patrick stood up. “The only thing that he’d ever think to point at a laptop screen is his gun.”