Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  I knelt down, my knees hurting, to be more on her level. “What truth are you supposed to tell?” I asked quietly. The others were close enough to hear but not close enough to interfere or feel like they were standing over us.

  “I hate you,” she said, tears starting to pool in her eyes. “I hate you, you understand? I hate you.”

  She meant it, but it wasn’t the worst thing that had happened to me in the last few days, not by far. “I know,” I said, and, as much as it hurt to apologize, “I’m sorry. If there’s anything you’re holding back, now’s the time.”

  Parson laughed, a bitter, bitter laugh. “After all of that? Really? And you still haven’t guessed. Fucking terrible telepath if you ask me.”

  I suppressed any reaction the same way I would in the interview room. Strong emotion meant I was doing something correctly.

  I waited, because it seemed like she wanted to talk.

  She looked down at her hands and laughed that horrible laugh again. “After all of that, all of that.”

  “What did you do?” I pressed, seeing the beginning shapes of it emerge in her mind, surprising and disturbing.

  She looked up at me. “The death threats were real. The death threats were real, do you understand? But I got bodyguards for Tommy and me and I rode them out. I’m a good judge. I play by the rules.”

  “What did they want you to do?”

  She took in a breath of air. “First they wanted me to recuse myself from the case. I wasn’t going to play that game. Like I said, I got the bodyguards, and I let the local police know. It was manageable.”

  “Then what?” I prompted, when she seemed like she wanted to go silent again.

  She glanced up at the other agents behind me.

  “I’m a telepath. I know already,” I said, a standard lie to get suspects to confess in the interview rooms.

  She laughed again. “No, no, you don’t. After all of that, God help me, but you don’t.”

  I waited. She was confusing the hell out of me. Finally: “What did their demands change to?”

  “They wanted me to throw out the testimony of the licensed prostitute, the one who actually saw him beat the woman. And disallow certain evidence that was collected by the police that doesn’t have a perfect chain of evidence.” The last was accompanied by a sense of deep shame and anger, so intense she shied away from it, refusing to spend any time there.

  “Why was that a big deal?”

  “The prosecution’s entire case turned on those two facts: the hair in the hotel room belonging to Pappadakis, and the testimony of the lady of the night. Everything else was circumstantial.” That intense sense of shame again. “But then . . .”

  Flashes of images I couldn’t quite make sense of, including evidence bags, a cop’s face, other things that made no sense. And that shame, that shame and anger and disgust that had driven her to the impossible.

  Behind me, Jarrod said, “But you told them no, right?”

  She shook her head, pushing all those images away.

  Shut up or leave the room. She’s on the verge of shutting down. If you want information, you get really quiet right now, please, I told Jarrod specifically mind-to-mind, and repeated the warning for the others in the room, one by one. I know what I’m doing.

  “I never should have trusted you people,” she said. But it was a lie, because she’d not trusted us to begin with. In fact, she’d done the opposite. “You screwed everything up! How was I supposed to fix it? How with you people here?”

  “What did you do?” I asked, wanting to back up. I knew that mix of emotions. It was what came out in the interview room when someone had murdered, or worse. When someone had crossed every moral boundary she’d ever had. “What did you do?”

  “There was a murderer for hire up on parole. He’d been one of my convictions. I told him I’d get the parole approved if he’d connect me to someone who could do the job. And then I set up the attack. The original one. On the way to Tommy’s school, not the attack outside the courthouse. That one was all him, all the man who was blackmailing me.”

  I had to physically restrain myself from reacting. “You set up the original attack on your son?” I kept my voice as flat as I could, but some of my shock and horror must have leaked through, because she looked up.

  Behind me, every agent in the room reacted, a storm in Mindspace. One gasp. I repeated my warnings to be still and quiet or leave.

  She looked at them and thought about being silent then, about clamming up and getting a lawyer. She’d said more than enough. But there was that picture . . .

  “Tell me,” I said, to bring her attention back to me.

  “They were just supposed to make it look good. Credible. No one was supposed to get hurt.” That laugh again, a sound grating on my nerves like a cockroach skittering across the floor. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”

  Now the images were coming freely. Her shock and dismay when the court lawyer’s call had the FBI showing up at exactly the wrong time. Her plans to take herself and her son out of state in fear for their lives and as a way to remove themselves from the threat. Her determination to keep her secret no matter what it took. Her pride and horror when I hadn’t had a clue, despite everything. She’d been avoiding me, yes, been so uncomfortable around me, but I hadn’t even noticed. Her son was a better telepath than I had been, and he was ten.

  She’d been genuinely horrified when Tommy was taken. She didn’t love him, not the way a mother was supposed to love a son, and she regretted this. But he was hers, her responsibility, and he was in danger. He had been taken by the man who had first threatened her, in retaliation for changing the game.

  “Garrett Fiske,” I said. She hadn’t known his name, but I knew the voice who’d called her. I knew the inflections of the man who’d talked to her on the phone at the location the letters had told her to go. And I knew the twisted sense of humor that would imperil the very boy that she’d used as her getaway card.

  “If that’s his name. He told me yesterday that he didn’t usually involve families.” Her voice shook then; her hands shook. “But since I’d involved the boy first . . .”

  She’d played the card that got Tommy involved, I realized. Fiske’s stupid sense of honor. My stomach dropped, and I hated her. I hated her in that moment as much as any human being could hate another.

  “That’s not the worst of it, is it?” I asked. I forced myself to control my feelings against this woman, who had played a power game she’d thought she could control, and escalated things beyond any control.

  She’d gambled with Tommy’s life. If this went badly, she would have been the one who’d gotten him killed. Tommy, a smart kid, a patient kid—all he wanted in the world was to make his mom happy and to be a telepath. “How dare you endanger him?” I spat.

  “It was supposed to be for show! It was supposed to be my get-out-of-jail-free card. With that kind of attack, I could have a hiatus on my duties and come back to it with my career intact. With that kind of attack I could figure out how to take down the man for good. And Pappadakis would be somebody else’s problem. I had a plan, okay? I had a plan that would have fixed everything.”

  I took a breath and forced myself to be the interrogator now. I would get every scrap of information buried in this monster’s brain and then I would never speak to her again. “You thought that the next judge would probably give in to their commands,” I said flatly. “You thought that you were handing the next judge over for the same kind of death threats or worse. Maybe they were killed instead of you. Maybe there’s a mistrial. Or five. You didn’t care. You fucking didn’t care.”

  “I’m doing the best I can!” she yelled at me.

  “Tell me. Tell me what you’re hiding,” I said. There was more buried there, like a folding fan still half-closed.

  She shook her head, but the images were coming into
her head faster than she could push them away.

  “The evidence,” I prompted, the baggies coming back up along with the shame and anger and disgust, shame strong enough to drown in it. “The evidence. Tell me or I will take it from your brain.” It was unethical, it was a violation, and I wasn’t sure if I crossed that line a second time in two days I would ever be the same person, but right now I almost believed I could. I threatened it; I lied, hoped I was lying. I threatened like hell and hoped I didn’t actually have to make the choice.

  We waited on the knife’s edge, her shame and anger and contempt and disgust warring with my threat. She held my eyes, considering.

  I didn’t know what she saw in my face, but she must have believed me.

  Parson looked down. “I allowed tampered evidence into a trial. A different trial than this one. It was two years ago.” She met me in the eyes. “He was a pedophile. He liked little girls. He’d gotten off on three technicalities prior to this and the trial was going badly.” Overwhelming shame from her again, along with anger and a painfully strong sense of self-righteousness. “They couldn’t make it stick, so . . .”

  “The detective in charge of the case wanted to add evidence, and you knew it was falsified, and you let it happen anyway,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I closed my eyes to hide my contempt.

  “A pedophile went to jail for the rest of his life. I did the right thing,” she said. “But nobody could ever know about it. I don’t know how they knew about it.”

  “And now they want you to do the same thing for the Pappadakis trial.”

  “Yes.”

  I opened my eyes again, sat back on my heels. “You knew you’d lose your career if your previous misdeed came out, but you didn’t want to work for Fiske. You didn’t want to mess with the evidence in the Pappadakis trial. And you couldn’t report it, not either way. You were between a rock and a hard place.”

  She nodded, hands shaking again, but finally feeling that sense of freedom that comes from telling the truth. I’d seen suspects admit to things totally against their best interests, over and over again, for that cleansing feeling of telling the truth, finally telling the truth to someone who was listening.

  She nodded one more time; then she said, “If I wasn’t part of the case anymore, if I was in a different state, there was no reason to make the information public. They’d charge me money for blackmail, yes, but I’d pay it. Or they’d ask for something else, maybe something I could find a way to do without helping the criminals. And I had time to take them down. I have friends.”

  It was critical to her self-image that she was one of the good guys, against the criminals. Ah, how she’d fallen away from that self-image.

  “One last question,” I said. “The picture. Why take Tommy? And then why tell you if you didn’t tell the truth they’d kill him?”

  She laughed that bitter laugh. “He told me, if I didn’t do what he wanted, I’d lose the thing I cared about most. That’s why I needed to get out of the state. So this wouldn’t happen.”

  “Who is he?” I asked. She didn’t mean Tommy when she said the thing she cared about the most. She meant her career, as horrible as that was.

  “That friend of Pappadakis, the man on the phone. He’s a shark, but I didn’t think he’d like to play with his food quite so much. I should have just done what he said.” She looked at me with complete vulnerability then. “My career is over. No matter what else happens today, that’s the case. But Tommy—I couldn’t bear it if he died because I screwed up.”

  Her emotions were strong, terribly strong, but she was so controlled, like an iceberg holding all the things inside in a solid frozen mass. When she melted—and she would melt eventually—what she was holding back would damage, or destroy, her. Fiske had won all right. She would never be the same as a human being after this.

  She looked up, beyond me, at Jarrod. “You call the news agencies and you tell them. I don’t want to face people. But if he sees it on the news, maybe he lets Tommy go.” She stood up and looked down on me. “I still hate you.”

  I stood too. “The feeling is mutual.”

  She nodded and went upstairs to her room, hands wrapping her robe around her, mind shaking from intense emotions of every kind roiling around. Overall, a sense of frozen horror, frozen loss, the kind of loss I’d felt before when a couple had lost their small daughter. Her career—her career she did love like a child.

  CHAPTER 22

  After I’d gotten absolutely every detail out of the judge that I could think of, I sat down on the back porch steps and smoked. The others were doing police things, things that they could do without me. I was getting an itchy feeling, a bad feeling that wasn’t at all impacted by the cigarettes. Something that felt like the precog trying to wake up again.

  I reached out to Tommy—and actually connected. But he was asleep, or unconscious, and that connection between us was frail. Jarrod had said that they’d leak the judge’s confession to the media and maybe that would be enough, but I didn’t think so. Once Fiske started a play like this, he’d carry it through to some larger end. It wasn’t just about the judge anymore, I realized with a sinking feeling. It was partially about me. Me. And my connection to Tommy.

  Would he kill Tommy just to torture me? I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. It would be like Fiske, and he was angry with me.

  My hands shaking, I finished the cigarette. I couldn’t stay here and do nothing. Sure, I could make more phone calls. But as Jarrod had said, they had people to do that. It was up to me to do the things only I could do. And if Tommy died and I didn’t do every fucking thing in my power to stop it . . . well, even if I did, I wasn’t sure I could live with myself.

  Even if I had to cross another ethical line I’d never be able to undo. Even if it meant I couldn’t be there, wouldn’t be there for Cherabino. It hurt me, but that was my choice, I realized. I was sober for this, and I’d do the best damn job I could, no matter what it cost me. I stubbed out the cigarette. It might cost me a lot.

  I went back inside to tell Jarrod where I was going, and then got my rented car from the side street next to the judge’s house. I had an errand to run.

  * * *

  I parked across from the theater and walked in, scanning the world around me with a tired mind, hands jittery from nerves.

  The theater folks had protested long and loud they didn’t hurt anybody, and the more I’d thought about it, the more it seemed likely that they were connected with a larger organization. They’d even referenced a couple of key players in what I was betting was a lower level of the organized crime group Fiske at least in name controlled. You weren’t that sure you didn’t hurt people unless there were people you dealt with who kept the messy parts out of your way. Either that or you were an idiot, and these folks—though odd—didn’t seem like idiots.

  The morning was bright, a blue sky dotted with clouds barely gray with pollution, the air almost clean enough not to make me cough even at a quick trot. The cars on the ground cruising slowly through parks and streets, a beautiful old Jewish temple dominating the skyline a few blocks away, looking down on the rest of the street, including this ancient theater.

  I’d convince those guys to tell me how to get in touch with their contact in the organization, and then convince him to refer me to his boss, and his boss. Eventually someone would connect me with someone important. Eventually, like Mendez had recommended, I’d be able to ne-

  gotiate.

  I slowed down near the circular post in front of the theater, the green-and-white stone tile across its bottom glittering in the sunlight. I moved up and knocked on the door. It was locked, and the lights were off.

  Crap, what was I going to do now?

  Behind me, I felt a mind approach with purpose. I turned, on alert.

  A man in a suit and a hat nodded at me, walking slowly, something u
nder his arm.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Are you Adam Ward?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  He nodded, and slowly—slowly enough that even the most hair-trigger cop wouldn’t have pulled a gun—shifted the package under his arm until it was faceup. It was a puzzle box, I saw, as he stopped walking four feet away and gave me a good look at it. It was a puzzle box exactly like the one that Fiske had left in my hotel room, except half the size.

  “My employer has a gift for you,” he said.

  “Fiske?” I asked.

  He smiled. “He pays me well enough that I neither know nor care about his name.”

  “What is it?” I asked warily.

  He smiled again and said nothing, holding out the box. His hands were bare, so there was no contact poison there, probably. But if Fiske’s new gift was anything like his old one, there would be plenty of reason not to take that box.

  I sighed and took it.

  The man tipped his hat and turned around to leave.

  “What? Don’t you have anything else to say?” I asked.

  “My business here is done,” he called over his shoulder.

  The street felt empty, void of minds all around as I held the ominous box in my hands.

  I took two deep breaths and opened the box. It opened as simply and smoothly as the other one, its locking mechanism disengaged. Inside was a smaller space lined in red velvet, and a folded piece of paper. I picked up the paper, shook it to unfold it, and read.

  There was only a single number written on its surface.

  I have the information you seek, it said.

  * * *

  I found a pay phone in a park a block away, under a magnolia tree that smelled vaguely of powdery rot. A sentry plant glared at me from a few feet away, almost like an old man. The park itself was empty, all too empty.

  I took deep breaths, several in a row, trying to get the emotion to damp back down. I’d have to negotiate. I’d have to think to do this correctly.

  It started to rain. The rain was light, but it smelled terrible, like baked-in pollution of the most dangerous kind. It wasn’t the worst thing I could deal with today, but I winced as a droplet ran off my head and down the back of my neck. Cancer flushes were pricey, and even with the Guild’s part insurance, I didn’t have the money to be spending indiscriminately.