Fluid

by Alex C. Hughes

  I knew what had happened. I knew it. But I couldn’t prove it, and I was nearly out of time for the day.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Freeman said, after he’d pulled me over to the side of the scene near the tiled wall while the crime scene techs started the vacuum cleaner for the water.

  “You were thinking this was an accident, right?” I started.

  He nodded. With the journalist having published several articles lambasting police corruption, though, he’d make sure every forensic i was dotted and t was crossed. Even if the man was just an alcoholic.

  I winced at that one, internally, literally having to bite my tongue to keep from commenting. I’d been an addict once. This guy had done some things . . . some really important things, journalist-wise. He wasn’t “just” an addict any more than I was. Even if, in the hot tub, he’d been stupid and irresponsible.

  “Spit it out,” Freeman said. “We are on the clock here.”

  I shook my head and pushed my anger aside. “He was afraid. Not the kind of panic you feel when you’ve drifted under the water after drinking—not a quiet biological wind-down while drunk. Trust me, he saw his death coming, and he was afraid of somebody killing him. No way this was an accident.”

  “Hmm,” Freeman said. “You said that before. Is there any physical proof?”

  “I assume you’re going to do an autopsy,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Look for perimortem bruising around the neck and shoulders,” I said. “That wouldn’t be there if he drowned from the alcohol alone, and I had a strong impression of pressure on him, and struggle. There was no way this was an accident,” I said again, some of the anger leaking into my voice. We needed to take this seriously. Alcoholic or not, stupid or not, this guy had been murdered. He deserved justice.

  “I heard you,” Freeman said. “He had at least four drinks though, judging from the scene. Could it have been a hallucination?”

  I took a breath. It was a fair question, and deserved a fair answer. “Neighbor said he was a drinker. His tolerance was likely pretty high. I don’t know. I don’t think so, not at that stage. He felt with it, just slow.”

  He made a noncommittal noise. “Did you get a time of death?”

  I reached out, sampled Mindspace again, to get a feel for how quickly my own mental signature was fading from the space, and compared it to the older ghosts of emotion. Then I looked at my cheap watch and counted backwards. “I’d say about eleven o’clock, maybe a little later. Mindspace tends to fade in a predictable pattern, and that seems about right for the fade level.”

  “Eleven, eleven-thirty last night then,” he said, and nodded. Then he looked at his own watch. “You’re here for another half hour?”

  I nodded.

  “Why don’t you go fill out a written report with the scene officer then. I’ll see you tomorrow when you come in again, assuming Branen assigns you back to this case.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  He grunted. “Murder case priorities constantly shift. Until the ME report comes back with bruising or whatever else, this one still looks like an accident. Plus he’s an alcoholic drowned in the hot tub. Except for the journalist angle, this one is an open-and-shut. There will be higher priority cases.”

  “It’s not an accident!” I barked at him. “I’m telling you it’s not an accident!”

  “Yes, but can you prove it?” Freeman asked me evenly. I could feel his irritation.

  “He deserves justice just like every-damn-body else,” I said. By this point, Cherabino would have taken my word at face value.

  Freeman just looked at me. “Anything else you need to tell me?”

  “No.” Other than the fact that he shouldn’t just dismiss a victim like this. Especially somebody who’d made a career out of exposing wrongdoing. He’d saved hundreds of kids from those sweatshops. That had to matter, right? And exposing corruption and worse? Drugs or no, alcohol or no, that had to matter. “No, I guess,” I said, but I was pissed and sure he could tell.

  “Then go fill out the report. We’ll need to make sure all our details line up for this one if it gets back-burnered. In case we need to pick it back up.”

  “Fine.” I did what I was told, but there was no way this one was getting dropped. No way.

  Freeman was just being an ass.

  That night, I brought Mexican food back to the PI office. Mine, two bean and tofu burritos with every conceivable topping known to man. For Cherabino, a plain soy-chicken quesadilla, with a capped side of salsa in case she felt adventurous. It was cold outside in February, but I’d wrapped the takeout boxes in a blanket from my locker at the department to keep them warm inside the bag while I’d walked

  I turned on the overhead light when I came in the front door. The industrial lights popped, turning on in a line from the empty reception desk to the back office area to the closed-off bathroom all the way in the back. The large picture-windows—the bane of our heating bills this time of year—turned reflective with the now-brighter light. Cherabino sat behind her desk, staring at paperwork under a small office lamp, having apparently not moved in hours.

  I walked over to her, pulling out her box of food from the bag. “I have food,” I said. I was still frustrated over Freeman and everybody else’s dismissive attitude, but I’d been paid a paycheck by the department and we could actually afford takeout.

  She looked up at me, exhaustion in every line of her body. “Leave it on the desk,” she said, and went back to her reference book and paperwork.

  Now I was pissed. I put the food on the corner though, and waited. I even put a bamboo-disposable fork on the top. Then I waited some more. My own food was getting cold.

  “What is it, Adam?” she finally asked me. She was cold, cold as the Great White North.

  “You’re not okay, are you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She put her pen down then, and like it was a chore, pulled the food towards her. She opened the top, saw it was a quesadilla, and was visibly disappointed. “Thanks for bringing me something.” Her tone was unconvincing.

  “If you want to talk about it…,” I started, cautiously.

  She glanced up, then down again. “I’m fine, Adam, really. I’ve got some work to do for a new client, okay?” She took a determined bite of the quesadilla.

  “Who’s the new client?”

  “Just some guy who wants me to do some research for him. It’s not a big thing. You’ve got your own case to work now, don’t you?”

  I looked at her.

  She looked at me.

  “Yeah,” I said, and took my own food to my desk. I forced it down, tasting only ash.

  The next morning I arrived at the department bright and early. Michael Hwang was walking up the wide stone front steps right when I arrived. I could feel his attention grab onto me as he noticed I was there—like the feeling you get when someone is looking at you across a crowded room, hard to ignore.

  I turned around. “Michael,” I said.

  He paused, foot on the step, discomfort radiating from him. Finally he said, “How is she?”

  Cherabino had been a homicide detective—and Michael’s boss—until her firing from the force for police brutality charges. Those charges were unjust, but Michael didn’t know that, and it wasn’t my place to tell him.

  “She’s okay,” I told him, not knowing what else to say.

  He put his hands in his coat pockets, his breath fogging in the February air. “Is . . .” he trailed off.

  I was a telepath, and he was thinking very loudly, in a stop-and-start tug-of-war between his loyalty to Cherabino and care for her as a person and his utter contempt for brutality. If it were anyone else, he would have distanced himself long ago. He might still..

  “She’s settling into the private investigation agency with me,” I said, the part I knew was fine for public consumption. “She’s adjusting. The stress level might be better for her there.” If we could ever make any money, that was.
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br />   Michael met my eyes, frowned, and then looked away. “Well, good.” He started climbing the stairs again, moving on in more ways than one.

  I took the door he held open for me—courteous to a fault, was Michael—and knew that he wouldn’t be calling her, or me, any time soon.

  I sighed and moved on, further into the department building where I had work to do. Work that might be the only money we had coming in right now. Well, except for Cherabino’s mystery client.

  Freeman found me in the coffee closet, where I was doctoring a cup of bad coffee and considering a very stale donut.

  “Ward,” he barked, from just outside the door.

  “Yes?” I stuck my head out into the hallway.

  “Come here for a moment please,” he said. Another detective was walking away, clearly leaving a conversation with him.

  I went back, grabbed the hard-as-a-rock donut, and then went back to Freeman. “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  His face was scowling at me—but it might just have been the scar, because his mind was calm, ordered, working on a problem. “The medical examiner’s report came back on the Jeffries case, and you might be right.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said you were right. There was some evidence of weak manual strangulation on the victim, bruises mostly, though the cause of death was most likely arrhythmia. The victim’s blood alcohol level was a 1.2, a bit over the legal limit for intoxication, but the ME says there’s not enough water in the lungs to indicate drowning. That’s the trouble though.”

  “His head was underwater,” I said, after a glance around to make sure we wouldn’t be heard out of context. Not that it should have mattered in a police station, but even so. “No wait, the witness found him with his head out, and then it got moved by Jamal with the cord. Wouldn’t he get water in the lungs at that point?”

  “The ME says sometimes electrocution seizes muscles. The throat muscles were forced closed, which I suppose could have suffocated him. ME says there’s no way to be sure. No signs of vomit, though, which is the more typical method of death in an alcoholic, though usually it’s at a higher BAC.”

  Ha. I was right. “So it wasn’t an accident.”

  Freeman shook his head. “ME says bruising isn’t conclusive. Neither is the device we found—old cooler, apparently, with a nonfunctional safety switch. Intentional or accidental, impossible to say. And this guy was an alcoholic. I mean, there’s not a lot of reason to go much further than this one. We interview the wife, and we move on.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said. “We have a legitimate victim. We get justice for the victims. That’s what we do.”

  “He was an alcoholic. You know how that is.”

  “No,” I said. “No, I really don’t. Being an addict doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. He’s a journalist. He’s doing good work. Useful work! You can’t just walk away on this one. It’s not fair.”

  He took a moment to digest that, but chose not to comment on it. Instead he said, “Time of death was about midnight, the ME said. You weren’t far off.”

  I took a bite out of the donut more out of habit than anything else, and made a face at its staleness. I chewed the dry thing anyway, to buy myself time to calm down, and swallowed, like swallowing sawdust. “I still say it was earlier, but whatever. Accidental is still an option, you’re saying? And with the water that way, there’s no way they can get prints from the neck.”

  “Right.”

  “Look, all I’m saying is, this guy deserves justice as much as anybody else. And what about his work? Wouldn’t it look bad to his fellow reporters if we just dropped the case, get us in even more trouble? This kind of politics says to me we need more time solving this one, not less.” I was angry. Very angry, at the dismissive attitude now even Freeman was having. Did people think this way about me? Did my work not matter because of things I’d done in the past?

  Freeman paused. “There’s political pressure to drop this one quickly. Branen wants it gone. And it could be an accident. Legitimately. It could be an accident.”

  I stared at him.

  His face twisted again, around the scar, his mind thoughtful. “The politics still don’t help. But maybe you’re not so wrong. I have some rope on this one. But it’s tricky.”

  “Tricky?” I prompted, but my tone wasn’t friendly.

  He’d been talked to twice today by department brass, his mind said. This morning. Already. “The brass thinks we’ll come out looking like a fool if we get too deep into this one. If we go through his old cases, his notes, and we find something against the department, it’s on public record.”

  “So?”

  Freeman’s face twisted a little around the scar; his mind was . . . thoughtful. “Look it up. He’s the anti-corruption reporter lately. Caught a politician, two Decatur city officials, and no less than four beat cops from the county taking bribes. Sometimes worse.”

  “What do you mean by worse, exactly?”

  “Do your homework,” he said, and even his mind didn’t give me much more. “We’ve got the wife waiting for you in the interview room. I’d like to get her excluded or read in today. Then we’ll see.”

  “Not a problem about the wife,” I said. “Listen, I don’t like this one being swept under the rug.” The more they said alcoholic and doesn’t matter, the more I wanted it to matter.

  He paused. “I’d prefer to finish what I start, given the choice. But it’s a political football. They say to drop it, you’re usually better off dropping it.”

  “You chickening out?” I asked.

  “I don’t chicken out,” he said, and walked away.

  I looked after him, not exactly sure what he wasn’t saying. There was subtext there, I knew, and it bothered me that I didn’t know what.

  Reading minds gave you more information, but it by no means made you understand.

  One thing I knew, though: Jeffries had to get justice. Right? He had to, just like everybody else. Otherwise, why did I get up this morning and come in here? Justice had to matter. It had to.

  Even for alcoholics and addicts. Even if they didn’t deserve it.

  I moved into the interview room—the first and nicest one—with a smooth gait, opening the door and closing it behind me gently. O’Hare, a younger cop I barely knew, was babysitting in the corner and nodded to me when I walked in. He’d already brought the suspect coffee, and from the delicious smell, it wasn’t sim coffee, but someone’s private stash.

  I forced a smile, which always felt awkward but I could usually pull it off, and greeted the suspect. “Mrs. Jeffries . . .”

  “Patricia. And the last name’s Arnold, actually. I kept my name.” Patricia was a plain thirty-something stocky woman, short at maybe five-two, with frizzy blonde hair, a crooked nose, and deep lines around her eyes. She was wearing scrubs, no makeup, and seemed tired. She also had a tension about her, a low-level worry combined with something else . . . something I couldn’t quite name. Combined with Freeman’s hidden meanings, I felt behind.

  But I had to do my job, and today’s tactic was honey instead of vinegar. I forced a smile again. “Patricia. Thank you for coming down to the station so we could use our files here. I know the basement isn’t the friendliest of places.”

  “It’s dirty,” she said, almost an add-on from my comment. “Heads would roll at the hospital if we let things get to this point.”

  I considered defending the department’s honor, but honestly, they let it get dirty with full intention. Supposedly it increased the rates of confession; I didn’t know. “You work at the hospital?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “DeKalb General. In the mother and baby ward. Labor,” she explained, when I looked blank. “It’s one of the smaller hospitals for labor right now in the area, so there are only six of us nurses to cover the floor. I love it. There’s nothing like seeing new life coming into the world.”

  I nodded and made a note not to ask questions about her actual duties. “Were
you working last night?” I asked.

  “No, I’m going in after this.” I caught a stray thought that she might have to change the scrubs before going in, because of the dirt.

  “You seem tired,” I said. It was odd she was going in after her husband was just found dead, but not suspiciously odd. Some people clung to normal routines.

  “I’m not sleeping well.” She looked at me. I looked at her.

  “Since the death?” I asked.

  She nodded, but didn’t engage.

  I looked down at the file. “It says here that you were at work on Sunday night from midnight to one a.m.?” Very soon after the time the ME—and my Mindspace estimate—had placed the victim’s death to occur.

  “That’s right,” she said, and I got a burst of almost-pride through Mindspace.

  “Anyone see you there?” I asked.

  “The mother I was called in for, Mrs. White, and her husband. The obstetrician—Dr. Jones—and the other nurses.” She gave me two other names. “I was called in at the last minute when the mother went into labor a little before midnight.”

  “We’ll check on that,” I said, but she didn’t blink when I said it, and I had no doubt that her story would check out. If it did, according to the ME’s timeline, she had a nearly unbreakable alibi and couldn’t have done the crime. I’d have to look up how long it took to get to the hospital from her apartment, but even I didn’t think she could have been called in during the murder of her husband and still been able to make it to work on time. Even if she’d had the extra half-hour my estimate had given her.

  “Tell me about your husband,” I said.

  “He was a reporter. He worked a lot of hours, and he made a lot of enemies,” she said. “The latest article got him a death threat. He was very happy about that; it meant he was coming back as a reporter, he said. Back to his glory days. He was obsessed with those.” She frowned. I got a stray thought that he’d been drinking heavier than usual lately, and been meaner. If it hadn’t been for his money, she’d have left long ago.