Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  A strip of something white hung out of the edge of the closed trunk. Bernal forced himself to go closer to it. It was fabric.

  It was the edge of the white jacket Patricia had thrown on after they had made love.

  “Patricia? Is that—?”

  He was rewarded by an enthusiastic kick from inside.

  Once again he had to unlock something stubborn and physical. This time, heedless of damage to himself or the car, he levered up under the lock with a breaker bar, complete with scored grip handle, that he’d found leaned against the tool case. He put all his weight into it, and the lock ripped right out of the trunk’s metal.

  Patricia lay inside, bound with nylon straps, her mouth closed with duct tape. As gently as he could, he pulled the tape loose.

  “Behind you,” she said. “In the tool case. Box cutter.”

  Sure enough, a few moment’s investigation brought up an orange box cutter. Working carefully, he cut the nylon between her hands, then between her legs.

  He took a packing pad and folded it into a makeshift bed. Then he lifted her out and laid her down. She was shockingly light. Her skin was red and creased where the nylon straps had cut in.

  He kissed her forehead, sweat-sticky and plastered with hair. “Don’t worry,” he said.

  She turned her head away from him. “What happened?” Her voice, unlike her body, was strong. “What happened to Ignacio?”

  “He tried to shoot us.”

  She sat up. “Where is he? Did he escape? Is he gone?”

  “He’s dead. A cart crashed into a stack of parts, and a transaxle fell on his head.”

  She stared at him for a moment, her pale eyes wide. Then she fell back and started to cry.

  40

  Charis had proved surprisingly willing to come over to Ungaro’s lab to talk things over, but he guessed that it was because she no longer thought any of it mattered.

  It was two days after Ignacio’s death. Bernal had undergone another round of questioning, but the satisfaction of identifying Ignacio as the killer had led the police to not press that connection too hard.

  “I communicated with Muriel,” Bernal said. “I know it was Muriel.”

  “If you say so,” Charis said.

  “You think it was Ignacio, sitting at a keyboard in his trailer, chuckling to himself as I walked right into his trap.”

  “I don’t know what to think. All I know is you shouldn’t be sitting here by yourself.”

  “I got nowhere else to sit and no one else to sit with.” Bernal had not meant it to sound as bitter as it came out.

  “I had Muneer to take care of me,” Charis said. “He held on to me and let me cry on him. I’m a slobbery cryer, Bernal, so it’s even more of an achievement than it sounds. My sinuses clog right up, snot—”

  “I get the picture.” Though he really didn’t. He imagined her tears as some kind of disastrous natural event, like a hurricane.

  “And he cooked for me. He’s one of those guests-over show-off type cooks, I pick stuff up for the day-to-day, but he can put out some real food when he needs to. You wouldn’t think you could improve a big plate of nachos, but his are definitely the best. It’s probably the lard. That’s usually the secret. Even his brownies are the best.”

  “Lard?” Bernal said.

  “I don’t ask. But there was one thing he didn’t make me, and it looks like you could use it.”

  “What?”

  “A pizza.”

  “A—don’t you mean, what you need?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve been out of the house all morning, and I am getting hungry. What do you take on it?”

  “Mushrooms and green peppers.”

  “What, you think there’s really a healthy version of pizza 0r something? Pepperoni?”

  “If you want.”

  “I want, Bernal. Believe me, I want.” Pizza delivery was on her phone’s speed dial.

  The light coming through from the loading dock, and the memory of the first time he had met Patricia Foote, reminded him that he hadn’t yet seen her. Physically, he knew, she was pretty okay. Having a couple of other people to kill had distracted Ignacio, and he’d done a slapdash job of beating her up. She’d been in much worse shape that first day he met her, when she’d come here to tow Charis’s Hummer. He remembered her almost falling out of her tow truck, all bruised up from some earlier discussion with her boss.

  Patricia was sequestered somewhere, and Charis either didn’t know where or had been instructed not to tell him. He knew Patricia had some small house, out of town. He presumed she was holed up there. At some point he would go and see her.

  “They found Aurora Lipsius’s head frozen in an operational medical freezer buried under a stack of antique radiators,” Charis said. “Bunch of other stuff in that freezer as well, including a slab of sushi-grade hamachi yellowtail. Got to hand it to Ignacio, there wasn’t any kind of business he wouldn’t get into. But hers was the only head in there. It had been frozen fast. No decay, nothing. ME says it must have gotten chilled within a few minutes of decapitation. Don’t get too excited by that.”

  “By what?”

  “By the freezing.”

  “I’m not excited. There’s a hell of a lot of difference between a medical freezer and a cryogenic suspension. It’s amazing how Hesketh worked out its way of taking heads. Step by step, establishing the lure, the slicing method, means of preservation . . . and I’ll bet a few of those heads were just decoys, regular murders, so no one would get on the scent of a homicidal AI. Which reminds me . . .”

  “What?”

  “Anyone find that thing I saw in the back of the Ziggy Sigma van? The . . . headtaker, or whatever it was.”

  “It wasn’t in Ignacio’s yard. Patricia Foote saw something that resembled it—a welded box with an attached compressor—but then it disappeared, shipped off through one of Ignacio’s channels. No one knows where it went.”

  To find that Prelate and Vervain were just some kind of junk-recovery service, and worked for Ignacio like everyone else, was a disappointment. He’d hoped to find the headtaker, and examine it, and prove ... he didn’t know what. That Muriel had once been inside it, maybe.

  “With Lipsius’s head, that means everything’s pretty well accounted for, right?” Bernal said. “Except for two things.”

  “One is Muriel’s head. What’s the other?”

  “Madeline.” There was no sign of Madeline Ungaro. There were hints in the lab that she’d been planning a camping trip, so campgrounds and backcountry areas across the country had been scoured, thus far without success. To Bernal, she seemed frictionless. She had slid right out of the situation and vanished.

  “You’re not worried about Madeline. You’re just mentioning her so you don’t seem callous.”

  “Um . . . jeez, Charis. I’m doing my best here.”

  “They’ll find her. One way or another. At any rate, she hasn’t been a piece on our board here. But, right, everything else is accounted for. The samurai sword that fell off the mantelpiece and knocked me down was the sword that beheaded Christopher Gambino, the third victim. Still had dried blood cells on it, and the edges matched. And among all that kitchen gear, they found the cleaver that did Damon Fry. Nice carbon steel one, and it was Chinese. Looks like he used it at least one more time, the ME thinks for disjointing a chicken. But it left enough signs to link it up. Ignacio Kuepner was the Bowler. He killed Christopher Gambino, Aurora Lipsius, Warren St Amant, and Damon Fry. And, it looks like, Muriel Inglis.”

  “What’s the evidence that he killed Muriel?”

  “Circumstantial, thus far. In popular thought ‘circumstantial’ means ‘lame,’ but it’s the most common foundation of a case. Muriel clearly had an interest in his place. Part of her own little investigation. She was seen around Ignacio’s yard a couple of times. And you told me someone saw him at her house that night.”

  “I did. It might be hard to get him to testify.”

  “Not so impor
tant. They’re not trying to bring a case against Ignacio. He’s dead. They’re just trying to put all the pieces together.”

  “And do they fit?”

  “Better than you might think. Christopher Gambino, for one. Worked with Hess Tech, like I told you. Responsible for picking up some repurposed parts from Ignacio’s Devices & Desires. During the course of that, it seems, from what your gal Patricia says, that he got interested in her. Not too odd, she’s pretty cute.” She gave him a look which he refused to acknowledge. “He got worried about her, what was going on with her. Natural, when her skin is the kind that shows bruises so well. He started hanging around, trying to get her away, to get her free. Kind of an obsession with him, sounds like. He must have pissed Ignacio off.”

  Bernal had an odd feeling, following in the footsteps of the earnest Christopher Gambino, who had also tried to help Patricia out of her terrible situation. He too had probably come into the yard late at night. Had he too had sex with her, there in Ignacio’s trailer? Maybe Charis was the only thing that had stopped Bernal from becoming another Bowler victim. Bernal tried to keep his mind on what they had to figure out. He could talk this all over with Patricia when he saw her.

  Or, perhaps, never ever bring it up.

  “And later, when she was investigating what Ungaro had been up to, Muriel must have tracked that back, linking Hesketh to the Bowler.” The more Bernal thought about it, the more sense it made. “She probably didn’t know about the drugs. I mean, Ignacio was smuggling drugs, wasn’t he?”

  “If that was going to be the only charge, he’d be clear. Not because he wasn’t doing it, but because no evidence survived. He had this high-volume emergency shower back there. That, and a little incinerator powered by some kind of arc furnace. They found some empty bags but nothing with enough on it to take to court.”

  “Let me get this straight. We’re heading toward where he has all of his souvenirs, the weapons he had used to kill various people, and he goes to take care of his drugs instead?”

  “You just won’t give up, will you?”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “He took care of the drugs first. Us second. We were in his house, where his souvenirs were. He couldn’t just pop in there and dispose of them, not until we were taken care of. And, if you’ve forgotten, he almost succeeded in doing that. He raised us off the ground, took care of the drugs, and came back for us. It was pretty close to being ‘us dead and disposed of, drugs and murder weapons gone.’ There will always be things we won’t be able to clear up.”

  There was a beep outside. Bernal followed Charis out into the sunlight. It was a warm day, the first day when the warmth seemed sincere rather than a smile pasted on a lurking winter. Charis collected the pizza from the kid behind the wheel. Fresh growth was starting to conceal the apartment parking lot across the stream, where Bernal had found the traces of Hesketh’s path just a little over a week before.

  Hesketh, which had been something real that had vanished that day and seemingly had never returned.

  “So it’s all settled,” he said.

  “They’ll find her.” Charis took a big bite of her own piece before pulling one out for Bernal. “Don’t worry. One way or another, they’ll find her. Here. I know these aren’t your kind of thing.”

  She plucked a couple of pieces of pepperoni from the piece she was about to hand him and placed them on her own. Bernal found himself irritated. He hadn’t ordered the pepperoni, but now he was anxious to feel its bite.

  “What are you going to do now?” he said.

  “You mean now that I have nothing but a busted anti-AI activist organization with only one staff member? I don’t know. Why?”

  “Well, you helped the police solve a major serial killer case, didn’t you? You thinking of going back into police work?”

  “Nah.” If she hesitated, it was barely noticeable. “Probably use that cred to pick up some regular PI work. I got a buddy, he does a lot of corporate malfeasance stuff. Faked trip reports, employees taking confidential information out on their flash drives, that kind of thing. Boring as hell, but it pays good, and might be a chance for some regular hours and some thinking about what I really want to spend my life doing. I’ll give up the lease on my office, sell the Hummer.”

  Something had been nagging at Bernal, and the discussion of her office brought it to the surface. “What happened to your fence that day, you remember?”

  “Hell, yes, I remember. Had endless trouble with the landlord. Had the nerve to complain about the footings we put in. When it was all his fault in the first place.” Bernal’s slice was growing cold and floppy in his hand. “How was it his fault?”

  “He’d had a contractor in to regrade. Place floods when it rains, he sometimes gets six inches right at the garage. I’ve complained about it, other renters have complained, he finally decided to do something about it. So he had this guy in, laid drainage pipe, all sorts of shit, seemed to work. Less water this spring, anyway. But some kids got in, looks like. Started up the Bobcat, got right through the security fence. I’d blamed cognitive activists, but it looks like, this time at least, I was unfair.”

  “They ever find the kids?”

  “Nah. When do they ever find the kids? They’ll either get picked up for something worse later, or they’ll straighten up and never enter the system. Doesn’t really matter. What’s your point?”

  Without another word, Bernal went over to the control and raised the door to the loading dock. Sun roared in, and he had to blink against it for a moment before he could see anything.

  There, that set of parallel scratches through the stains on the concrete floor. He’d taken them for granted, but now they seemed to mean something. Mentally, he superimposed the image of the Hummer the day he had met Charis, the day the thing had stopped working and required a tow. He thought it had been right there, right beyond where the scrapes ended.

  He pulled out his phone and flipped through the pictures he had taken that day. The last one was of the loading dock. He’d been focused on the inside of the lab and never checked this one.

  He flipped it back and forth and what had changed was immediately obvious. The large cylinder that had been lying there, amid the paint cans and other trash, was gone.

  He’d thought it was an automatic transmission or something.

  It had been Hesketh.

  _______

  Bernal pulled the Hummer up on a couple of ramps borrowed from another business in the warehouse. Charis dangled legs on the loading dock and watched him. “Hey, Bernal. Mind if I finish this last piece?”

  She’d already had one more than him, but he didn’t feel like making an issue of it.

  He pushed himself underneath the vehicle. It only took him a moment to find what he was looking for. Two . .. four ... six circles, pressed into the crust that covered the underside of any car that had been driven off the showroom floor more than a couple of days ago.

  “Charis,” he said. “I think you better take a look at this.”

  She grumbled but eventually got on her back and pushed herself under the vehicle. There was a long moment of silence. “What does this mean?”

  “Think back to what happened that day.”

  “The magic day when you and I met?”

  “You pulled into the loading area here. You and I had some back and forth.”

  “You were a real dick, Bernal. I was quite impressed. It’s kind of a pity you turned out to be so undicklike when I got to know you better.”

  “Thanks. I think. Hesketh had come in from a run. Pushed its way in through the back door. Something was badly wrong. That wasn’t its usual way of returning. But there was no trace of any central processing unit for Hesketh when I looked.”

  “We’ve been through this. Because there wasn’t any real brain to the thing. It was just a fancy go-cart. Stick as close to facts as you can, and let me interpret on my own.”

  “Okay. Something had smashed into the lab. T
here was mud and stuff scattered all over. I looked around and, right, saw no sign of any kind of AI. You pulled in before I completed my search. When you got into your car, you heard some kind of thunk.”

  She pulled herself out from under the car, but just sat there, on the ground, leaning back against the fender. “Right.”

  “And then your car wouldn’t start. You got a tow from Patricia. Nothing was wrong with your car. Then, that night, a Bobcat goes crazy in the yard where your car was towed, smashes through a fence, and ends up in the ditch.”

  “Okay. Pretty straightforward. So what am I looking at under there?”

  “Evidence that something attached itself underneath the chassis of your Hummer.”

  “With what, suction cups?”

  “I don’t think so. My guess is electromagnets.”

  “Magnets?” Charis looked around the bay. “People have been machining crap in this space for decades. Seems like you should be able to ...” She walked over to the wall, scraped along its base with her fingers, and showed Bernal what she had managed to get: a sprinkling of iron filings.

  Together, they slid back under the car. While he held the flashlight, she let the slivers of metal sift off her fingers and onto the bottom of the car.

  Where they dangled, held up by a residual magnetic charge.

  _______

  “So you think Hesketh came in here that night, shucked its body, and, like some mutant limbless child from a horror movie, attached itself under my car and . . . and what? Why would it stop me from driving away? You were throwing me out, you might remember. I would have been right out of here.”

  “It might have been a mistake,” Bernal said. “Some electromagnetic field that knocked out some part of your starter. Who knows? It does seem to have the ability to control vehicles.”

  “Like that Bobcat, you mean? That’s a guess. You think it got some control of the damn thing, got dragged along until it smashed through the fence, and then lay there waiting for someone to pick it up. Who?”

  “My guess?” Bernal said. “Those Badger space enthusiasts. Enigmatic Ascent.”