Fluid

by Alex C. Hughes

  I chewed that over for a minute, reminding myself that her first impressions weren’t necessarily indicative of what had happened, but her read seemed good. “You didn’t touch anything?” I confirmed.

  She shook her head, then added verbally, “No. It didn’t seem like a good idea, and with the tub cold and him not breathing there didn’t seem like there was a reason to do it.” She considered absently whether she would have risked it if he’d been alive, and wondered. She didn’t know him well, and he’d been an alcoholic, and he had brought the alcohol to the pool . . .

  That last bit was all I needed to know. Only honest, innocent people asked themselves the kind of hard moral questions she was asking herself now. The guilty folks tended to shy away, and certainly not to question such things in front of cops (or consultants to the cops, in my case). I was nearly certain then that she hadn’t had anything to do with the death, even by omission or influence.

  “You did the right thing,” I told her, and added, “Especially with an electrical hazard. You called the experts, and you kept anybody else from getting hurt. Then you stuck around to answer questions.”

  She met my eyes and nodded, accepting the words. “Thanks.”

  “I have just another couple of questions, and then you can go,” I said, in a more businesslike tone.

  “Shoot.”

  “You said you didn’t know Jeffries well.”

  “Or his wife. Second wife, I think. There was something about a divorce attorney in one of the letters that I got a year ago, and then the new woman arrived.” She frowned, looking up, thinking through what she knew. “That’s about all I know. They don’t come to the block parties, I just know him because of the reputation and the mail. And the occasional rumor, but it was all stupid vague stuff about the divorce.”

  “Did you know anything about what Jeffries did for a living?”

  She thought about it, frowning. Finally she offered, “His wife now is a nurse, or something like that. I’ve seen her in scrubs a few times. Probably not a doctor because she always wears the ring on her hand, at least as many times as I’ve seen her.”

  “Doctors don’t wear rings?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you noticed? The ones who work in hospitals don’t wear jewelry because it harbors germs, and the ones who don’t always seem to be having affairs.”

  That was an interesting theory. “You notice a lot of details, don’t you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “People are interesting.”

  I tried to think of another question and came up blank. I thought she had told me everything she knew. “Well, call the station if you think of anything else,” I said, the standard closing. I gave her Freeman’s number and explained that I would come out to see her if she left a message.

  She paused, like she was listening to a faraway sound. Then her eyes focused on me again. “I need to call my hubby just to make sure he’s got things under control,” she said, and picked up her gym bag, toggling off the anti-grav switch before setting it on her shoulder.

  “You’re free to go,” I replied, and forced another smile.

  As I watched her go, though, the smile fell. From what I’d seen even second-hand, this was going to be an unpleasant crime scene.

  The smooth marble floor of the lobby turned to large square tiles and then to smaller rectangular tiles in front of a large double door of beveled glass, currently open. On the other side was a floor of poured patterned concrete transitioning into the formed side of an Olympic-sized pool, filled with the teal colored water of the truly high-end non-chlorine pools. A huge, domed skylight shone sunlight onto the water. It was a gorgeous pool area, indicative of real money in this building, I thought.

  Halfway down the brick side wall was a large, raised hot tub, its sides tiled. At least half a dozen police personnel grouped around that hot tub, talking in low tones that echoed strangely in the space. Mindspace seemed to follow the trend, low-level thoughts like waves dashing over one another, strange echoes like the waves in the pool in front of me.

  I walked down to the group, their thoughts getting louder as I went. I realized that I had dropped my guard while talking with Molly, and cautiously rebuilt my separations with the outside world, like the screen door I had taught my students to create—a transparent separation you could open or close at will.

  Freeman was with the group, in charge by the body language and the deferral of the others. He saw me and nodded. “We’ll need to clear the area now,” he said, in a loud voice that echoed.

  The others turned and saw me. Jamal, one of the techs I kept running into at scenes, made a face, but he, like the others, stepped back to give me room.

  I immediately wished they hadn’t, as I saw the body for the first time.

  There was something viscerally wrong about seeing a person underneath the waterline, unmoving, something that bothered me far more than the circumstances probably should have. The face was puffy, waterlogged, out of shape. No bubbles came out of that open mouth, and the eyes were red and open. His long arms floated, his upper body half in, half out of the water, his head lolled to the side and underneath it. The skin was heavily wrinkled, almost pulling away from the body, and there was a visible difference in color between the darker, normal warm brown skin of his ear and side-head above the waterline and the wrinkled, lighter stuff of the face below, almost gray, like the color of a long-hidden mushroom.

  The waterline of the hot tub was still, completely still, the jets long since turned off or burned out. As Ms. Smith had said, there was a smell of burning around the area, a smell that felt wrong too. Everything about this one felt wrong, gave me the heebie-jeebies in a way I couldn’t explain.

  My eyes fell away from the body, unable to keep up the focus on it—on him, I told myself. On Jeffries. He was a person, he’d been a person, and he deserved that respect even if the face under the water made my stomach churn and my body feel light-headed. He’d been a journalist, somebody who brought things to light. He deserved respect.

  A glass bottle of Jack Daniel’s, half empty, sat on the ledge behind the victim’s head, along with two glass beer bottles. A dark line, like a scar, was burnt into the plastic lip of the hot tub, maybe a foot away, near his shoulder. Where it met the water line was a wavy oval, even darker black on the side of the tub, and reaching out for maybe two inches in every direction, a starburst burn. On the victim, no burn that I could see.

  I asked the closest uniform, “Has someone moved him?”

  “Not since I’ve been here,” the guy said uncertainly, a rookie by the feel of him in Mindspace. “But I’ve only been here a little while.”

  “Why do you ask?” Freeman asked, looking at me and the rookie from ten feet away.

  “The witness said she found him with his head out of the water.” She’d also said she’d found him with three beer bottles and there were two here, but that kind of mistake was pretty common for eyewitness accounts. I took a breath, ignored the burned smell in the back of my throat, and tried to think more critically about the scene, past just the obvious.

  After a second, I asked, “Where’s the electrical cord?” After some thought I vaguely remembered Ms. Smith mentioning some kind of device in the water, but I didn’t see anything.

  “On the other side of the tub,” he said.

  “I took the box out after I disconnected the cord from the wall,” Jamal said. Another new tech I didn’t know opened his mouth to talk, but Jamal cut him off. “That’s what I did. It was better to take care of the electrical hazard. It was caught up in the guy’s legs and made him move. That’s all that happened.”

  Ah, that would explain it. Moving the body was a no-no, and he was understandably defensive about it.

  I took a step around the tub, so I could see what they were talking about. There it was, in a puddle of water, a plain foam-sided box with the metal shape of a compressor sticking out of one end. A broken beer bottle was next to it, having fallen out. Its cord was blackened start
ing a foot away from the box itself. An extension cord, also blackened, was disconnected from it, in a pile about three feet away. I was glad to see that its end, too, was disconnected from the wall near the door ahead.

  “It’s a cooler,” Jamal said.

  Something nagged at me, information I’d learned in a former case. “Don’t modern electronics have a kill switch so they don’t do this kind of thing when they hit the water?”

  The tech closest to me, a woman in baggy scene overalls, frowned thoughtfully. “They usually do,” she said. “I’ll take a look at this one and see how it failed.”

  The rookie cop shifted, not sure what to do.

  Freeman made an impatient sound. “Leave the processing to the rest of the crew. That’s their job. You take a look at the evidence in Mindspace, please, and don’t make the rest of them wait any longer than necessary.”

  At his words, the six folks, including the uniformed officer, took another few steps away from the tub. Freeman ran a tight ship, much tighter than Cherabino, something that was becoming more obvious with every case I worked with him.

  I took a breath and forced down my irritation. He was right; I was the one slowing things down at this stage, even if it was pretty rude to push the point.

  Freeman took a step forward, and said very, very quietly, “You look twitchy. Something I should know about?”

  I’d been clean for four years now, but my last dive off the wagon was pretty public and right in front of the cops, and since then there hadn’t been any secrets allowed. “No,” I forced myself to say evenly. “No, it’s just the scene.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, with that tone of mind you get in old cops, the pause where they waited for you to hang yourself or prove yourself.

  “It’s the scene,” I said, almost an echo, just to fill the silence.

  He frowned. “Seems a normal enough scene. Accidental electrocution. With the alcohol. If this wasn’t a high-profile journalist, we’d be done processing already. We’ve got a backlog today.”

  “High-profile?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “He hasn’t done much in the last few years, but the articles he published last month against the so-called ‘dirty cops’ got a lot of attention. Plus he called out some city officials. Branen says it’s wise to treat it like a high-profile murder until we prove accidental, and I agree. It’s why you’re here. We’ve done other cases. You’re not like this. What’s going on?”

  “It’s not . . .” I trailed off, trying to put my finger on what was so wrong. Now that my eyes were on the body, it wasn’t bad enough, shocking enough, to have this kind of instinctual response. What was wrong?

  A good question. The right question, I thought. I opened myself up to Mindspace, lowering my defenses just enough . . . and was hit in the face with strong emotion. “Fear,” I told Freeman. “Whatever happened here, he was afraid. Fear all over, seeping into the very walls.”

  “So it’s not an accident,” the detective said, in the tone of voice that said he neither believed nor disbelieved.

  “No,” I said.

  Freeman shook his head. “Well. You’re here, I’m here. Take a look at the mind scene—without making us all wait any longer—and we’ll go from there. I want you to talk to the victim’s wife if we can find her.”

  “Did the wife see him like this? Does he get drunk in hot tubs a lot?”

  Freeman made an impatient sound. He had a mental “hand” already held out, waiting.

  I sighed, and complied. It was dangerous for me to do a deep-dive into Mindspace alone, into the space where thoughts echoed, emotions lingered, and people’s minds propagated. All the more dangerous when a death was involved; here, I needed an anchor for a crime scene. That anchor used to be Cherabino, for a long time, Cherabino, and I missed her.

  Freeman’s mind was so . . . flat in comparison. Perfectly serviceable, like an old wallet, deep creases in spots, wear in spots, it did the job it needed to do promptly and without complaint, without bells and whistles.

  I reached out to “take” his mental hand, a strong thought only. He’d rush me, I knew this already. I’d learned this already on the times we’d worked together before.

  Right before I sank into Mindspace, I read something off the top of his mind and said it without thinking. “You’re the only one Branen trusts to find the truth no matter the politics,” I said, surprised, as I finally understood why Freeman had been tapped for the politically-charged journalist.

  Freeman smiled, a small smile that pulled at his scar. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. “Everybody here, from the top to the bottom of this crime scene, is handpicked.” Most of them by him, some by Branen. Freeman had gone to the academy with Branen and been through a lot of crap with the man. Freeman didn’t want to be the captain, didn’t want the responsibility of moving up the ladder, but he did want respect, and the responsibility of the hard cases, the special cases, and he got that. Freeman’s informal trust team had been quietly solving the touchy and the difficult cases for twenty years, without any fanfare. He expected me to do the same.

  “Cherabino never knew about this team,” I said, all of it hitting me.

  Freeman shook his head, impatient to get me to do the read and move on with the day. Cherabino didn’t move quickly; she worked too much, he was thinking. She also was a bit too unstable since her husband had died, and had never really settled. Proof of that was her conviction for police brutality weeks ago. Whether it was true or not, Freeman would never have gotten caught in a similar situation. I, in contrast, was only here because I’d finally proven that I was stable enough—for now—to add something. “I’ll say it again,” he remembered telling me. “You’re honest, you’re straightforward with me, we can deal with whatever you’ve got going on.” He meant another fall off the wagon, if that happened. I’d bounced back twice and seemed motivated. It happened, he’d deal with it and help me bounce back again. “But you lie, you cover it up, you’re going to be out.”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t have all day. Read the damn scene,” he said, now.

  I laughed, a hollow sound, settled back into my mental grounding. Maybe I was avoiding this. As fast as I dared, I sunk into Mindspace.

  The world opened up around me, thick and dark, a place utterly and completely without light, experienced through feel only, completely without the eyes, like the echoing of a bat through the night. I settled deeper, past the shallows where Freeman’s thoughts and the thoughts of the other techs sat, into the emotions left by the man in the hot tub at the time he died.

  Mindspace had settled towards the body, like water draining out of the space, some lost into . . . wherever minds went when they died. What was left was pulled like taffy, flavored with fear, with a feeling of suffocation, of breathing heavy water, of inevitability. Of seeing death coming and being unable to do anything against it. That feeling, that fear, was so strong in the air, in the space, that I was nearly overcome, literally choking on the emotion.

  I forced my mind to calm, forced my lungs, my throat to relax. I took a breath, then two, then three, pulling air through my body to help ground me back in the real world. I was not choking. I was not breathing water. See, I was free. I was breathing. I was fine.

  I eased into the space, looking for details. Looking for whatever he’d been afraid of. There, a frantic motion. There, a crack—the glass had fallen, the water splashed all over. Frantic, frantic, hold him under. He wasn’t dying. He was struggling. He needed to die already, quick, quicker, now.

  I pulled myself back from the killer’s thoughts. Who was he? If it was a he at all. Sometimes I didn’t get a strong gender, and this was one of those times. He for the sake of talking about it. Not very confident. A person very concerned about this, his first kill, his first murder. I felt the decision, like through a kaleidoscope, the decision to speed things up by pushing the cooler into the water. The rush of the electrical field through everything, a field in Mindspace that raised th
e hairs on my arm, the decision, the field, the decision, the field.

  “There was someone else here,” I told Freeman, up the faint line that connected me to him in the real world, a faint green line all the way up to his mind. “He . . . the killer meant to kill him, but the killer hasn’t killed before. Angry, and deliberate, and scared of what he was doing. But he felt compelled. He had to do it. He had to. If it was a he. I don’t know. I think he tried to hold him under the water, and when that didn’t work and the victim started struggling, he pushed the cooler in. The victim was too slow to get out before . . .”

  A question I couldn’t quite hear. Something about evidence Freeman could corroborate.

  “Give me a second,” I said, and moved around the space again. To the right, the smooth pull of swimmers swimming laps, over and over, repetitive forever. Beyond the wall into the next apartment, a long-standing marital quarrel repeated until it sunk into the distant walls. The thoughts of the police, ordered and irritated at delays, newest and most fleeting, up in the shallows.

  But above and drowning out everything else within reach, that fear. That fear would live in this place, over that hot tub, for a long time. Mindspace held onto emotions for days, sometimes, but I thought it might hold on to this fear for weeks, maybe longer.

  I surfaced slowly, attempting to shake off that terrible fear. I shook it off, finally, as I left Mindspace behind, and opened my eyes, feeling smaller and infinitely more vulnerable. The victim had been so, so afraid in the end.

  I saw Freeman was already motioning for the crime scene techs to come in and vacuum up the water for better photos of the body. They’d process the water, later, for evidence, but they didn’t need me for that.