Fluid

by Alex C. Hughes

  Fluid

  A Mindspace Investigations

  Novella

  Alex Hughes

  Fluid: A Mindspace Investigations Novella

  Alex Hughes

  Copyright © 2015 by Alexandra Hughes

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” through the contact form at the web address below.

  http://www.ahugheswriter.com/contact-me

  Or, email the author directly at alex@ahugheswriter.com.

  Hughes, Alex C.

  Fluid: a Mindspace Investigations Novella / Alex Hughes

  ISBN: (ebook edition) 978-0-9916429-3-9

  ISBN: (print edition) 978-0-9916429-4-6

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author wishes to acknowledge the following professionals for their services during the production of this book, with great gratitude:

  Developmental Editor: Jesse Feldman

  Cover Designer: Scarlett Rugers, www.scarlettrugers.com

  Formatter: Polgarus Studio, www.polgarusstudio.com

  It was eight a.m. on a normal Monday at the Mindspace Investigations P.I. office, which meant neither my partner, Isabella Cherabino, nor I had a case. In fact, cases had been all too rare, and we were running disastrously short on money. I supposed it wasn’t surprising the phones weren’t ringing off the hook, what with a distrusted telepath and a publically disgraced detective running the business. But we needed this to turn around quickly. The bills had to be paid.

  Lately, the normally-volatile Cherabino had gone cold and quiet, nothing at all like her usual anger. That worried me.

  The phone rang—or more accurately, all three phones rang, the one in the front and the other two at our individual desks.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, and dashed to the closest one on my desk. “Hello?” I said after I’d picked up the receiver. “Oh. Mindspace Investigations, Adam Ward speaking.”

  “That’s a terrible name, you know.” A man’s voice sounded on the other end of the line. His tone was calm and detached.

  I was stung. I’d picked out the name myself. “Hello, Sergeant.” Branen was Cherabino’s boss, or since she’d been fired from the department on that brutality charge, her former boss, back when she’d been a homicide detective. I still worked part-time for him. If he’d gotten more hours approved for me, that was a very good thing. Even if he did criticize the name of my new firm.

  “It’s Lieutenant now, actually,” he said. “You’re going to scare off normals with that kind of reference to Guild telepaths.”

  “I’m not affiliated with the Telepath’s Guild at all,” I said. They’d kicked me out for a drug habit that wasn’t strictly my fault over ten years ago. “You know that.”

  “Yes, but, the public doesn’t. Anyway, I have another set of consulting hours approved for you, and a case. I’d like you to come in and work with Detective Freeman.”

  “Who is it?” Cherabino whispered very quietly, almost too quietly for me to have heard with my ears. The telepathy helped with that. I was a Level Eight telepath, or thereabouts, and Cherabino and I had a weak telepathic bond.

  “Branen,” I mouthed at her. I could have spoken to her mind-to-mind, but she didn’t like that. To the phone, I said, “Happy to help, Lieutenant. And congratulations on the recent promotion.”

  “He’s a lieutenant now?” Cherabino asked under her breath. She was feeling. . . left out, then cold, again, in Mindspace.

  “Thanks for the congratulations,” Branen said, after a second. Apparently I’d actually surprised him with the courtesy. Why did everyone assume I didn’t know courtesy? “Can you be here in ten minutes?”

  “I need twenty, but I can meet Freeman at the scene.”

  “I’ll transfer you to Kalb, my assistant, for the address,” he said, and I heard the sound of elevator music.

  “Today’s a bad day for you to go in. We have work,” Cherabino said again, almost too quietly.

  I put my hand over the receiver, just in case. “What work? We don’t have any work, that’s the problem. We need the money.”

  She shook her head, and I felt that coldness, that sadness from her again.

  I paused. “Why are you so against this?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  The music ended abruptly, and a younger man’s voice came over the line. “Ward?”

  “That’s me.”

  He read an address out to me.

  I repeated it back to him and then said, “Do you have any details about the scene or what I’m expected to do?”

  “None whatsoever, I’m afraid.”

  “Peachy.” I sighed. “Well, get the dispatcher to radio out and tell Freeman I’ll meet him in front of the building in maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “Will do,” the assistant said, and hung up.

  I turned around slowly.

  Cherabino’s face was set in that careful blankness I called her cop face.

  “Are you—” I started.

  She cut me off. “Just go.”

  I shook my head, grabbed my coat from the back of my chair, and started walking towards the door. “We need the money, and Freeman’s going to be pissed if I’m late,” I said, walking faster.

  “Adam,” she whispered.

  I turned around. I could see the emotions rolling over her in Mindspace for one long second, frustration and hurt and deep, deep anger all at once. Then they were all gone, and that cold was back, that too-cold, too-sharp control. That hurt.

  “I can’t give you back your job,” I said. “I wish I could. I do. But I can’t. And we really need the money right now.” She’d been set up by a criminal with a grudge against her; but she didn’t know she was set up, and I hadn’t figured out how to tell her. To her, it felt like her whole world had been taken away unjustly.

  I expected anger, anger like a tsunami, when I mentioned her lost job; but instead she sat down, pulling into herself with apparent defeat. Her hurt also hurt me, but there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing.

  “Just go,” she said.

  I took a breath, turned back, opened the door, and walked out. I couldn’t do this right now, and anyway there was a crime scene to get to.

  She’d go back to being her usual fiery self. Wouldn’t she?

  The apartment building was a tall brick-and-concrete monstrosity, like a squat troll sitting over its fellows in judgment. Not quite post-Tech-War architecture, with the reinforcements and easily defended entryways in vogue fifty years ago, but neither did the buildings have the lightness of recent architecture. In other words, there wasn’t much to recommend the place except its location: three blocks from the Square, the heart of Decatur, and the MARTA station with its access to public transportation around Atlanta. It was a fine day; a recent rain meant the usually-thick pollution was lighter than usual, hardly enough to make you cough. Traffic was a steady flow here, both on street level and in the skylanes, as the tail end of rush hour moved through the city.

  I met Freeman in front of the building. He was a tall guy in his late forties with a dark complexion and a scar on the right side of his face, and he always seemed tired no matter what else was going on. His boxy coat nearly swallowed
him, the fisherman’s hat putting shadows under his eyes.

  I used to think Freeman didn’t like me, and that was true so far as it went. But I’d since figured out that he didn’t like many people, and that a lot of the hostility I’d been attributing to him was simply his scar pulling his face out of shape. He was a good cop, a good cop to his core, and he was happy to work with whomever and do whatever it took to keep the public safe.

  I missed working police cases with Cherabino, who’d been a detective until she’d gotten fired a month ago. But I’d been called in to consult with Freeman a few times since then and it worked, even if he didn’t like me enough even to give me a card for my birthday.

  Freeman finished signing something with the uniformed officer in front of the building and then turned to me. “Floater in the apartment swimming area,” he said, and that was it.

  I read the rest off his mind, since he’d prefer not to talk given the choice. One of these days he was going to think about what it meant to have a telepath reading you. One of these days he was going to mind, I thought. But today wasn’t that day.

  A body had been found in the apartment complex’s swimming pool area about ninety minutes ago by another resident. It was a journalist named Isaiah Jeffries. The uniforms had knocked on doors and confirmed that no one else had been at the pool that evening, so no witnesses they could find.

  “Wait,” I said. “Isn’t Jeffries the guy who shut down the child sweatshop rings near Stone Mountain?”

  Freeman frowned. “He wrote the articles. Cops did the real work.”

  “Even so,” I said. Come to think of it, though, that was before I’d gotten kicked out of the Guild. A long time ago. “What has he been up to lately?”

  “Going after the department, mostly,” Freeman said. “Or trying to. He’s caught a few bad apples and assumes there’s more.”

  I blinked, not knowing quite how to take his tone of mind on that one.

  “We’ll investigate it by the book either way. How long do I have you for today?” he asked me, a valid question since I was part-time, dependent on department funding and Lieutenant Branen’s goodwill.

  “Just a couple of hours,” I told him.

  He thought about that for a second, apportioning his time accordingly. We both knew I would stay longer if I needed to, but too much untracked time made the department’s accountants angry.

  “I’ll have you talk to the woman who found him, and then you’ll meet me at the scene,” Freeman said. His face twisted in disgust, but his mind was thinking about the effects of waterlogging on a human body in a public swimming pool, not anything to do with me. He had some very vivid images of other waterlogged corpses in his brain, vivid enough—and loaded with smells—that I pulled back, my stomach roiling. There were some things I hated about this job, and the bodies were one of them. I fought down nausea and told myself I’d get through this. I was going to interview the woman first anyway.

  Freeman opened the heavy front door for me, and I walked in, the portcullis overhead making me feel slightly claustrophobic. The lobby inside was surprisingly light and luxurious—marble floors mixed with intricate faded wallpaper, delicate ceiling tiles, and a large wooden front desk—like an updated hotel in the style of the 1940s. It was still cramped, but I could see why the residents paid extra if the apartments had this kind of luxury feeling. It didn’t match the outside, that’s for sure. A leasing agent with a name tag sat behind the desk, nearly doubled up on herself as she shook her head over and over. A uniformed cop stood next to her, probably a rookie by the body language, not sure what to do. I saw Freeman note the two and move on.

  At the end of the lobby was a blonde woman in runner’s clothes, a gym bag floating next to her on pricey anti-gravs just above the marble floor. She tapped her foot, literally tapped her foot, seemingly full of energy but unable to use it to leave. She was maybe 5’3”, on the short end, stocky but strong, with a cherubic face and blunt bangs that framed blue eyes. The feeling I got from her in Mindspace was concern—and kindness. She had more than a trace Ability, I thought, but we’d get along just fine.

  She “heard” my attention and looked up, moving forward to meet us. “Are you the detectives in charge?” she asked. “I’m Molly. Molly Lenore McAlexander Smith, but everybody calls me Molly. I’m an architect. I’ve got to be at work this morning. My boss said I can be late for this, but I can’t be too late, if you know what I mean. We’ve got a project, and the deadline’s coming up.”

  Freeman asked her, “You were the first to find the man?”

  She looked at me again, frowning a bit, probably reading my Ability without realizing it. She wasn’t strong enough to be forced to be Guild, but other telepaths were much easier to read than normals, so she’d notice me.

  Hello, I said to her mind-to-mind, and, I’m Adam Ward. Freeman here is the detective in charge.

  “Okay,” she said, and moved on, probably not even realizing that I hadn’t said it out loud. “I can go through this again, I mean I know you’ve got paperwork and a job to do, but I really need to check in with my hubby and make sure he got the munchkin to school okay and then get into work.” She sighed. “I guess there’s no way a run is happening today, is there?”

  Freeman looked at me. “Well?” he asked me. Subtext was that his instincts were reading her as honest and overly helpful, definitely not the killer. If I’d confirm that for him, he had other tasks to take care of through the double doors to the right, where the pool was.

  “I’ve got it from here,” I told him, in answer to the unspoken question.

  Freeman moved forward through the double doors, went ahead, mentally preparing himself for what he was about to see. Ms. Smith’s head swiveled as she followed him with her gaze.

  “Thanks for staying and going through all the procedure,” I said, largely to draw her attention back to me. “I know it can be frustrating.”

  She shrugged, her mind open to me but still guarded enough for public space with a new acquaintance. She had good instincts, this one. “Don’t the TV shows say you have to eliminate the finder person first? I don’t mind helping you check a box, but like I said, I can’t stick around forever.”

  “Because of your project at work,” I said, and smiled, to make her like me. “Yes, I heard. I’ll go ahead and ask you my questions and then you can head out.”

  She frowned at me, probably picking up on the slight lie of the smile. Sharp one, for certain. “Sure. Go ahead and ask.”

  I took a breath and relaxed the smile into something more reasonable, deciding not to lie if I could help it. “You live in the building?” I asked.

  “Yep.” She gestured loosely in the upwards direction. “Fourth floor, 412, all the way at the end, right by the garbage chute. It gets noisy on that end. I’m four doors down from Jeffries and his wife. I think. It might be five. We’re not close, but I get their mail sometimes. They used to live in my apartment, I think. Not sure why they moved. Managers have been raising the rents on newbies for years, you’d have to be an idiot or spendthrift to move.”

  “Jeffries?” I asked.

  She frowned at me. “The guy in the hot tub I found this morning. Isaiah Jeffries. He’s dead,” she said. A clear subtext from her mind: Please try to keep up, I have to leave soon. Really soon. Like, get there way before the noon meeting. “I forgot to get my mail last night, and John didn’t get it. He never gets it. He’s a great guy, he just doesn’t get the mail.” She took a breath, and for the first time I understood that all the talking and helpfulness was her way of dealing with the body she’d found. It was upsetting to her. She hadn’t seen bodies outside of funeral homes, ever, but if she talked, if she helped, maybe it would all go away and settle into normal again. “So I went downstairs to get it a little earlier than usual, and I cut through the pool on the way to the gym for my morning run. And I saw him.”

  “Saw Jeffries?” I prompted, when she didn’t continue talking on her own.

  Her
eyes focused on me again, and she gave a small shake, like pushing the memory away. “Yes.” She took a breath. “Yes, he was in the hot tub like I said, with a half-full bottle of whiskey next to him with three beer bottles. Real glass, you understand. At the pool. It’s against the rules and stupid as all get-out to get drunk while you’re in the water, but he has a bit of a reputation around here, and—”

  That I cut her off for. “Reputation?”

  “He likes to drink, if you understand what I mean. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him completely sober. I guess that’s what happened to him, right? He fell asleep in the tub and knocked something over or something.” She pictured the scene again in her head, and I got the edge of it. She was disturbed, as she probably should be, but also had just a tinge of contempt that he’d done something so stupid in a public space. Alcoholic, she thought, in a tone of mind that stung me a little.

  Just because you were an addict didn’t make you stupid, I wanted to say. But instead I pushed it to the side and moved on.

  “How did you know it was him so quickly?” I asked.

  “Well, his head was sitting back against the back of the tub, funny angle but okay. I could see his face right away, but his eyes were open and . . .” she shuddered and looked away. “Well, it was obvious he wasn’t breathing anymore. The hot tub was off and cold, but it smelled funny, like something burned. Something electrical maybe. I was pretty sure I shouldn’t touch it even before I saw the sparks.”

  She’d felt the edge of an electrical field, perhaps. Mindspace and strong electromagnetic fields interacted in interesting ways, and some people were more sensitive than others.

  “Sparks?” I prompted.

  “He had some kind of thing—an electrical device next to him. I didn’t see clearly what it was, all I saw was the cord as it went in the hot tub and the sparks from there to the puddle on the floor. That kind of thing could—well, it did kill somebody, I guess. I called the super and I called the police, in that order, from the phone next to the pool bathroom, and then I stuck around so nobody’s child got close. I was glad I had rubber-soled shoes on, you know? I did have to call my own apartment to make sure John knew he needed to drive the munchkin to school this morning. The police took forever to arrive. Monday, I guess. The rest you know.”