Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel

by Alex Hughes

  Twenty minutes later, the car pulled up a long, wooded hill, and Mindspace stopped. Well, not stopped, but the constant low-level presence of city minds faded and faded until we were all alone. Until there was no Mindspace at all but Cherabino and me, completely alone. It was then we rounded the corner and saw the sign: wooded oaks cemetery. And a chill ran up the back of my spine.

  Her sadness intensified like a cloak falling on me as we passed through the open gate. She pulled into a tiny parking lot, turned off the car, and stared ahead.

  “Shut up,” she said out of nowhere, and got out of the car.

  “I didn’t—,” I protested as the car door slammed.

  She opened the rear door and carefully lifted the third bouquet. “Hand me the others,” she demanded. I handed them over. Then she said, “You’re waiting in the car.”

  “It’s August,” I said, trying for matter-of-fact. “It’ll be an oven in here.”

  She didn’t meet my eyes. “Fine. Just don’t follow me.”

  I watched her walk up a long grassy hill, toward the first row of tombstones, the strength of her sadness diminishing with distance. Only, I thought as the temperature in the car started to ease upward, her presence didn’t get weak enough, not nearly weak enough. That bond she didn’t know about yet was getting stronger. And I wasn’t sure how to tell her, or even if I should.

  At the top of the hill—still well within sight—she stopped, and knelt before a grave. I looked away, trying to give her what privacy I could. As completely dead as this space was, I’d know a mind-attack well before she’d realize it was happening. And dead was the right word—despite all tales to the contrary, cemeteries rarely had even the trace of a ghost. No one died in a cemetery; it was a place for relatives and mourners, not the shock of Mindspace memories left behind.

  When her shoulders started shaking—she was crying!—I had to get all the way out of the car, torn between wanting to run toward her and wanting to run away. With neither an option, I felt pulled in too many directions, and I wanted my poison. I wanted it badly. I wanted Cherabino to stop crying, and I wanted the world to disappear in that shimmering rush and go away—I just wanted. I wanted!

  I opened up the car door, sat down, and breathed, in and out, over and over. I had to call Swartz. I was starting down the slippery slope where I couldn’t talk myself down. But where was I going to find a pay phone here in the middle of nowhere? Before I could figure it out, the radio buzzed with our car number.

  With shaking hands, I picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

  “Is this Cherabino?” the dispatcher asked, amid static.

  “I can take a message.”

  A frustrated sound and more static. “Let her know her sister called, said she’s here if she needs anything.” After a pause: “We all are.”

  I took a breath and replied, “I will tell her.”

  I looked to my left, through the car window at Cherabino. Her shoulders weren’t shaking anymore, but her body language still looked defeated, crumpled in on herself like an old paper doll.

  More than an hour later, with the sun at its hottest point of the day, I walked up quietly, dreading seeing her with tears but not able to wait any longer. Cherabino wasn’t the kind of person who cried. The grave she was kneeling by was small, with a modest tombstone and a small central vase for flowers.

  I stopped about three steps behind Cherabino’s back. “Your sister called the station, says she’s here for you. Dispatcher too.”

  Cherabino didn’t turn around, running her fingers over the lilies in the central vase instead. When she had arranged the last petal to the exact place she wanted it, she pulled her hands back and pressed a small push button in the base of the vase. A bubble formed around the lilies. I recognized the gadget by the hum in Mindspace, like a deep buzzing that set my teeth on edge. It was a miniature stasis field, rare, pricey, but it would keep the flowers in perfect freshness for months.

  Cherabino arranged the other two bunches of flowers on either side, less gently, and sat back on her heels. The text on the tombstone popped out then: Peter Russell Alexander, only thirty years old when he died. The date of death was six years ago today. Why hadn’t I known about this before? I mean, we didn’t work together all the time, but you would have thought…Maybe I hadn’t wanted to know. Maybe she’d shied away from thinking it. She couldn’t shy away now.

  “Isabella?” I said softly.

  She stood up, slowly. Tear tracks ran down her cheeks, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She did, however, start walking to the car. I followed, grateful to get away from that Mindspace hum—and her tears.

  When we got back down the hill, I opened my car door first, getting inside to try to set the trend. She followed, folding herself into the car. The door shut hard. And there we were. Her face was completely blank, disturbing shapes moving like eels under the surface of her mind. We sat there several minutes, as she gripped the steering wheel and stared ahead.

  A heartbeat before I would have spoken, she exhaled in a rush.

  “He was assistant DA to the city, just promoted. We’d decided to keep my maiden name on purpose, to keep anyone from connecting us, back when it was my work that was too dangerous. But it wasn’t me that day—it was him. His work. They gunned him down in a shopping mall, right in front of me—and I didn’t have my gun. He hated my gun. He’d made me leave it at home that day. Just that day. And there they were, some punk kids he’d put up on drug charges—with automatic weapons. He threw me down—me!—and took three bullets to the chest. In one damn second, just a second and it was over. It was a shopping mall, and I didn’t have my gun. The kids were gone because I wouldn’t leave him. I wouldn’t leave him. He bled out before the paramedics arrived—he died telling me he loved me.” She looked up, her eyes empty. “We were trying to get pregnant. It took me ten months to find them. Ten months!”

  She started the car abruptly and moved us out of the lot.

  So that was why she was so driven, why every case was so personal. For the next twenty minutes, as we drove back to her house, what was not said filled the car until I could barely breathe.

  Halfway back to her place, Branen called. Cherabino shut down her emotions like throwing a light switch, pulled over on the side of the road, and answered. Whatever her boss said—and I couldn’t quite hear—it was serious. I was shielding my nuts off, trying to get away from the sadness at any cost, so I couldn’t overhear that way.

  When she hung up, I asked, “What’s going on?”

  “There’s been an incident at the station.”

  I blinked. “Um, what kind of incident?” It had to be bad if they were calling her back on her day off. On this day—if everyone else had known what I somehow hadn’t. Did they?

  She looked up. “They won’t tell me.”

  “What?”

  “They want you there, unbiased, apparently—and they think you’ll read it off my mind.” She looked at me critically. “I hope that’s not true.”

  I dodged the question and suggested we turn around.

  Sun blazing, the station still somehow managed to look dark. And ominous. The front windows, always dingy, had somehow been taken over completely by the dirt, and the long crack in the cement on the front stoop gaped like a missing tooth. As Cherabino pulled the car into the empty front space, I half registered a few guys on the roof—they had been working on the top air conditioner all summer, and I assumed this was more of the same. They seemed quiet, but at a hundred and ten degrees in the shade I wasn’t criticizing.

  There was Grateful Thing Number Three this week for Swartz—not having to work on the rooftops for a living under the hot sun. One was Cherabino falling asleep in my arms, and Two was her cooking me dinner. Awesome. I had my three things for the week a whole day early. I shielded harder against Cherabino and tried to concentrate on those.

  “You coming?” Cherabino’s voice snapped. She was all the way out of the car, her head stuck back in, staring at me. I was
frozen halfway through unbuckling my seat belt.

  “Sure, yeah, I’m coming.” I finished the seat belt and opened the door. By the time I’d gotten out, she was all the way to the station door. She didn’t hold it open for me; I had to catch it just shy of pinching my fingers.

  “For a man who won’t leave, you do a crappy job of keeping up,” she said. It was the tone of voice that said she was having a bad day, it was my fault, and I should take it personally.

  I ignored her and pushed ahead.

  The foyer was dominated by a long counter behind which should have sat Nemo, the chronically bored booking officer on Thursday day shift. Instead, leaning against the counter were three guys who normally worked witness protection, big guys with martial arts belts and marksman ribbons practically tattooed across their foreheads. They looked distracted, and a little angry, but not at me.

  The one in the lead—Grant, I think—stood up from the counter. “You’re the teep, right?”

  “I’m the telepathic expert, yes,” I said, with emphasis.

  He ignored the reference. “Well, they want you on the roof.”

  Well, crap—that ruined Grateful Thing Number Three.

  “The roof?” Cherabino said behind me. “What the hell is going on? No one would tell me.”

  Grant just stared at her.

  “Um, guys,” I started tentatively, not wanting to get involved in a pissing contest. Cherabino did those on her own. But I needed to know. “Where is the roof exactly?” Then I realized how stupid that sounded and added: “How do you get there from here, I mean.”

  We got directions; there was a small ladder right on the other side of the back door. Cherabino, curious and sad and furious by turns, pushed through first, and I was treated to a nice view of her backside climbing the ladder on the side of the sagging gray building. I did follow, more slowly, taking my time.

  The wind changed, and as I stood on the top—as Cherabino left the ladder—the smell hit me, the faint smell of corpse. I swallowed hurriedly to kill the gag reflex.

  Then I swallowed again—we were on the department’s roof. Some perp had done it here, over our heads. I pictured blood seeping through the leaks in the roof, blood instead of water going drip, drip on the old station carpet below. I turned around carefully, pulling myself over the lip of the building while my feet found the roof.

  I stood, and wiped my hands off on my jeans. The ladder had been filthy, covered with things better left unnamed. This had the happy side effect of insulating my hands from the hot metal. It was easily a hundred degrees on the roof—probably far over—and the sun beat down hard enough that the air shimmered and danced, making interesting patterns in pollution. Already I could feel the beads of sweat congealing on my forehead.

  I looked over to Cherabino, who was talking to the captain. Next to him, covered in sweat, irritable and uncomfortable, Lieutenant Paulsen appeared almost human. When she saw me, she gestured angrily.

  I went.

  Four feet away from the lieutenant’s left shoe was a body, partially obscured by the medical tech kneeling above it. When he moved, I finally could get a good look.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “That’s Henderson,” Cherabino said, her voice absolutely dead.

  It was Crazy Neil all right, ten years older and matching the sketch perfectly. There was no blood around the body—but the throat was crushed too deep to have been done by hands.

  “Who is Henderson?” Lieutenant Paulsen folded her arms. I was still shielding heavily, but by her look, she was brittle with anger.

  “Henderson is—was—our best suspect for the multiples case,” I put in when Cherabino didn’t. “We had an associate identify a sketch of the man—he was outside a crime scene with a lumpy garbage bag big enough to hide a body. Kara was supposed to talk to him this morning.”

  “Kara is the Guild attaché,” Cherabino put in.

  The lieutenant pinched the bridge of her nose. “Confirm that didn’t happen, please. Do we have any other suspects?”

  “Bradley—,” I started.

  Cherabino cut me off. “None with any evidence behind them,” she said.

  Paulsen blew out a long line of air. “Obviously you’ll need to talk to Branen when he gets back from the courthouse. In the meantime, I need to know everything there is to know about this case.”

  She pulled Cherabino to the side. When I followed, she held up a hand. “Not you. You need to scan this roof. Now.”

  I thought about protesting I wasn’t some tricorder she could just point and shoot—but thought better of it when I saw her face. If I was standing at the mouth of hell, the sergeant was clearly one of the hellhounds ready to drag me in. She was not happy. This was a high-stakes, nasty situation—a messy territorial kill, left to leave a message to the police. I was betting it was Bradley, done to warn us off just as we were getting close, but proof—well, we had still to get that.

  So I stopped, braced my legs farther apart, and did something very stupid. I dropped totally into Mindspace, from a cold start, with no one’s mind to ground me outside. Cherabino was too upset and too far away to add stability right now, and there was no one else on the roof I trusted enough to even try.

  The ghost hit me like a physical blow, like a tidal wave of crushing power that stuck to my lungs and suffocated. My lungs were crushing, and my throat was stuck, it was gone, there was no—stop. Stop, I said. I’m fine. Breathe—or, well, no air in Mindspace but same idea. Grit your teeth, breathe, and don’t let it take you over. You’re not going to suffocate on a rooftop surrounded by cops, it’s just not a possibility. It’s not an option.

  I fought the overwhelming tidal wave three times, insisting I could breathe, thank you very much, and three times in a row I won. I held on, and on, and I won. Again. Then the ghost retreated into itself, panicking quietly without further struggle. And I took a deep breath. Henderson’s last moments had not been pleasant—and the Mindspace in this area was thick, and receptive, and eager to learn.

  My senses stabilized, and I had a moment when the whole rooftop snapped into place. Thirteen cops, most sick at heart, each a faint and compact presence in Mindspace. I filtered them out and sorted through the rest. There was a screwdriver in the corner, cast off—what had once been a workman’s favorite tool, worn to his hand over and over for years on end. Now forgotten, rusting. A long line of bird memories on the far ledge, layer upon layer of jittery hopping pigeons who’d rested for a night before moving on. The ledge was empty now, but it remembered.

  And in the center of the roof, like a pool of wasted blood, lay what once had been a man I’d avoided for his practical jokes—and now was only a fading memory of what might have been. Over him, starting already to wear away with the force of the cop’s thoughts around it, over the body like a chalk drawing hung a Pattern—organized shapes like a mathematical mural—shapes built like a child’s game to initiate Guild trainees. But this was no game.

  For behind the strangely uniform, oddly strong Pattern was a thought. A nasty, focused thought. Too weak, the killer sneered. Both of you.

  Too weak for what? And why—why—did I think he was talking to me?

  CHAPTER 19

  I gritted my teeth and decided Cherabino was probably okay inside the department walls. Whoever this was (Bradley?) had already made his point today, and she was surrounded by cops. Even so, I made her promise not to leave the group—or the building—without telling me. She was pissed, but she promised, and Cherabino kept her promises.

  I ducked into the men’s room to wash my hands free of whatever was coating the ladder. A man had to have standards.

  After turning off the water, I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time. It had been really, really stupid to just drop into Mindspace like that. Even for me. Really stupid. I’d known it was a crime scene; any idiot could see the guy had been killed right there.

  Any idiot could have seen there would have been a ghost, and probably a nasty ghost. Gu
ys had been killed doing much less stupid things in Mindspace, and I had used up as much luck as any guy got in a lifetime already. Swartz would be furious. If he understood. (Swartz was bright, but not a telepath. Sometimes he got it, sometimes he didn’t. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t kick my ass for it anyway.)

  I washed my hands again, even though the gunk was mostly off already. I needed time to think. I needed…something. The stakes were getting higher by the minute. Cherabino in danger, a body on the roof—talk about personal—and now this message, this message that kept playing in my head like a stuck record.

  What did Bradley have against me? If he was that nerdy guy from the Guild, we hadn’t even really worked together. I certainly hadn’t talked to him. I squinted at the mirror, trying to remember. Was there something about him applying to the deconstruction department? Maybe an assistant professor position or some such. It was very vague; this was in the middle of my addiction at the Guild before I got kicked out, I thought. A long time ago, and I was on some heavy doses of my drug.

  I tried to think. He’d applied to the department. I think I turned him down. Dane had said something…but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what. I hardly remembered this guy. Why was he leaving me messages? Assuming that one was even for me. Why was he going after Cherabino, after the police?

  I’d lost a lot of credibility this week, and the stakes were higher than ever. I had to produce that rabbit; I had to get this guy off the street. And I had to do it before something happened to Cherabino, me, or anybody on the force. Without much trust from anyone.

  Most of the time I was happy to be a contractor, not a cop. Cherabino was right; I’d never pass the physical—my lungs were trashed from the smoking, and I had no real interest in running five miles a day. Even under duress or for a million ROC money units or whatever the saying was. Just, no.