“I know the perfect place,” Megan said pleasantly. “C’mon.”
The ‘perfect place’ ended up being the Cerico, which they piled into under the pretense of going to…wherever. As they pulled out of the traffic tube and onto the street away from Central, she reached over and fiddled with the console. The status display beneath the holographic projector now read ‘DIAGNOSTIC MODE’ where it had said ‘READY’.
Gray looked at it, then looked at her. “Why are you putting the computer into a diagnostic cycle?”
Megan held up her hand to silence him, then took a small device out of her pocket. She turned it on, waited a moment, and read its small display before putting it away again. “Because I don’t like eavesdroppers,” she finally said, “And I know where this car came from. You’re working with Marowitz, right?”
This was unexpected. Gray stared ahead. He couldn’t set the car to autodrive with the console running a diagnostic, so he kept his eyes on the road. He wanted to look at Megan, to read her expression – but perhaps this was better for the moment. “And what would you know about that?”
He could hear the smirk in her voice. “I’m a coroner, Detective,” she said. “I see bullshit cover orders get passed across my desk all the time. Jack and I have been paying close attention to this whole thing since you got started, and especially since they up and fired him.”
Gray merged the Cerico into the flow of post-workday traffic. The river of cars trudged slowly through the downtown blocks with the slow certainty of decay. He leaned back in his seat somewhat, but said nothing.
“I also saw that you were going over the files on that case as well,” Megan continued. “What did Maya Frail call it? The ‘Spine Thief Murders’? She’s got a dramatic streak in her, doesn’t she?”
He frowned a little bit, and shrugged. “She’s actually pretty flat,” he said. “Very…professional.” Being interviewed by Maya Frail, he remembered, had been like being interviewed by an extremely personable machine. “Anyway, what’s this all about? My checking into case files doesn’t mean anything.”
“Maybe not to Administration,” she said with a shrug, “But as I said, Jack and I have been talking about this one since it kicked off. I know you talked to him yesterday.”
“I might have.” He kept his eyes on the slow-moving river that was post-workday traffic. The cars gleamed dully in the fading light that still penetrated the gray skies overhead, mixing with the budding glow of the city. There was never really darkness in this part of town; a persistent low-grade brightness maintained itself through every passing hour. “So what does this have to do with either situation?”
“Well-ll-ll.” Megan leaned back in her seat. “That’s a good question. You saw the evidence files; was there anything that you might have considered strange?”
Gray neatly slid the Cerico through a narrow gap in traffic. “There’s no tox results for Anderson,” he said. “But there was clean tox for everyone else, so that really doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?” She was looking out the passenger side window now, so that he saw her in profile when he glanced at her next. Megan’s sharp jaw and high cheekbones gave her a singularly imperious appearance, but also made her pretty in a way that surgery could never conjure. It was like something that Cuaron might have put together. “Well I can tell you something about those tox results, Detective. They were clean, sure, but only because we screened the blood. I went back afterward and took a closer look at the other tissues.”
“Why’d you do that?” he asked, surprised.
“It was the way you found them all,” said Megan, who watched a battery of storefronts pass before she looked back to him. “I mean their positioning. No way that could have been done postmortem, and you saw that little girl. How the hell was someone like Anderson going to let her order them to sit down and let her cut them open?”
Gray shrugged. “You’d be amazed at that,” he said, “But you’ve got a point.”
Megan shook her head. “I don’t understand this case,” she said. “Nobody’s asking questions – everyone’s very happy to just shut it all down like a bad dream and make it go away. “
“That’s how it happens sometimes, I guess.” Gray frowned at the windshield and the traffic outside. “So look, what did you find?”
Megan turned a bit in her seat toward him. “I don’t know,” she said.
A smirk tugged at Gray’s lips despite himself. “You don’t know?”
“No,” Megan replied, and there was an edge to her voice. “Don’t be an ass. I mean ‘I don’t know’ as in ‘I found an unknown compound in their nervous tissue.”
That made him sit up a little straighter in his seat. “Were they doping, or what?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” she said. “I’m not trying to be funny, either; whatever it is, it’s some kind of psychoactive substance. I didn’t see an injection site, but it’s possible they were drugged sometime before they were killed.”
“You think Yin might have slipped them something?” He thought about the thin little woman, the victorious insanity branded on her face as she stood there in her murder room. “Something that didn’t show up in tox?”
Megan shrugged. She crossed her legs in the Cerico’s spacious passenger seat, laying her hands on her knee. “I don’t know, honestly. I think that it must be likely.”
“What about the other bodies? The ones…you know, Lin’s other victims?”
She made a grim face at that. “Couldn’t check,” she replied. “I wasn’t involved in their examination – Pender, the other coroner, has been doing that. It would surprise me though. See, I think this is what Vice is looking for. Moody’s always been a greedy bastard; he knows all about that place your girl Velasquez dances at. He’s got a man there, after all. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d been watching Anderson for a good while, you know? Company man messing around with a stripper in a place he has an informant in? I guarantee that Moody would have known about that little blackmail ring or whatever it was they were putting together, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he knew about him selling company information on the side. No, see, Jack and I think that he’s sniffed out something, something fairly large, and he wants in on it. We want to show him up, once and for all, and break him.”
“Break him,” Gray repeated, more to himself than anything. It wouldn’t surprise him to find a Vice officer of Moody’s caliber attached to the rackets he was supposed to be shutting down. But why did Cinders and Marowitz have such a flaming hate on for Moody? It was possible that she might just have that rare thing these days that was an active conscience, or perhaps even heroism – but he put this aside as fanciful. Something else was ticking in the back of her head, Gray could feel it. “Easier said than done.”
She nodded. “That’s why we want you to talk to your girl.”
“She’s not ‘my girl’,” he replied.
“Yeah, right.” Megan snorted. “You aren’t going to convince anybody with that line. Jack told me how you reacted when he gave you those pictures yesterday.” She looked at him. “How are you doing with that, anyway?”
Gray felt himself knot up inside. Did everyone know about those fucking pictures? “It was from before I met her,” he said, the words sounding something like a mantra. “Besides, if those pictures are real at all, then Anderson must have had her roped in.”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “The point is, like you said. Before you met her. I don’t judge, this isn’t part of any crime to which we’re attached anymore. You have the only copy as far as Jack had told me, and I doubt he’d fuck around with you. It’s not like it’d hold up in a court of law if they were real, now, so why worry about it? The case is closed and buried.”
Because that would mean she was fucking people for purposes of blackmail, a voice inside him said. Why the hell haven’t you faced her on that? He closed his eyes and pushed the thought to the back of his head, not wanting to fight that battle again so soon. “So t
his substance you found on the bodies. What can you tell me about it?”
“I’ve got a friend of mine at the university that was analyzing it,” she says. “We’re still working on it, but it appears to have psychoactive properties. Definitely synthetic.”
Gray nodded as they turned a corner as they drove inexorably toward the Sound. Beyond the hills and office towers it could be seen framed there, shining dully and studded with the glassy islands of arcologies and with the black whales of freighters coming in from the Pacific Channel. “Could it be related to Shard, chemically speaking? Maybe that’s why Moody thought it was a crystal ring.”
“…Maybe.” Megan pursed her lips, looking very thoughtful indeed. “Here, drop me off up ahead. I need to make some phone calls.”
He looked at where she was pointing. A Lucky Swan sat on the corner, the holographic cartoon bird that was its mascot pulsing over the door with its ridiculous smile. It crackled as the sky began to lose its usual mist. “It’s going to be wet,” he said.
“It’s Seattle, Dan,” Megan said. “It’s always wet. It’s always wet, it’s always cool, and everyone’s some species of asshole.”
“Spoken like a true scientist.”
She shook her head. “You show me evidence to the contrary and I’ll revise my theory,” said Megan, reaching for the door. “Until then, there’s some science for you to take home.” The Cerico’s door swept open as he pulled over to the curb, flinging a thin blade of moisture up into the swan sign, which crackled once again.
“Well, call me when you hear something,” Gray said. She got out of the car and waved to him, letting the Cerico close its door on its own, and disappeared inside the Lucky Swan. He stared at the door for a moment before he turned back into traffic and joined the throng once more. He had a lot to think about.
He started driving again with no real location in mind. By this time the console’s diagnostic cycle had reset, and it conjured the default display of the company’s stock ticker as he crawled through the outlying edge of the Waters. The commercial district had its own rhythm, a beat that defied that of the rain or the traffic or the people choking its streets – it was a beat that the ticker seemed to reflect, periodic shifts in global stock activity making the thin line rise and fall like an EKG. And maybe that’s what it was – the beat of the company’s life, the life of his own career. Maybe it was also the beat of his own life, though more and more he wondered if life and career could not be separated.
Why did that matter? Up until a week ago he was happy to throw himself at the job. Before Anderson had been killed he was practically waiting for Carter to drop so that he could take a shot at his job, and yet now he had his own equal spot. Looking at this case again was like looking back at a long sewer tunnel and just how much shit you’d been trudging through.
Angie, Moody, Marowitz, now Megan Cinders – dealing with these people had put him in a place from which he could not easily extricate himself. He could have left Angie to her fate, could have ignored Marowitz. Could have not looked at the case records. Could have left Megan the hell alone. But no, he didn’t. It wasn’t right to blame anyone else; he was the one who lifted up this rock, he was the one who wanted to see where the worms were. He just didn’t expect for there to be a corpse’s worth of maggots boiling beneath it, didn’t expect for things to rear their head.
Maybe that was foolish, though. He had been begging the world to send him a truly sexy case, but he’d forgotten what comes with cases of that magnitude – he had been moving along on a raft of everyday killings, easily solved. This was different. This had real benefits. Real consequences. He just hadn’t thought of what might happen to him afterward should things actually succeed.
More fool him, then. Aggression and avarice tended to eat you alive in the end.
Gray took a deep breath and started to turn toward home. Angie was working tonight. He’d have the house to himself. He needed the house to himself. But he knew that the moment he’d lay down he would smell her on the pillow, that wonderful scent of cinnamon and musk, and he’d have to remember her part in this. He wondered if he’d care by then. He never seemed to. And that bothered him more than anything else.
The next few days passed without incident. He didn’t talk to Megan about anything but professional matters – she was so good at acting like nothing had happened that he almost wondered himself – and he hadn’t heard from Marowitz, either. Nor did he see much of Angie save for a few phone calls from the club. She hadn’t confirmed anything, of course, and they didn’t talk about it, but Gray got the distinct feeling that Moody’s investigation was in operation: Angie was quiet, furtive. She clearly didn’t want anyone to know that her current beau was Civil Protection. He understood, even though he most certainly didn’t like it, and she took great pains to assure him that she was safe and that things were okay. He just told her to talk to him later, to be safe and look out for herself, and put on a brave face for her even though his heart swelled with worry every time he thought about the situation.
He had a lot of time with be with his thoughts. Gray spent his time at the office doing the job, still relegated to desk duty, then going home and dreaming of all manner of horrors. He felt that they should be getting worse, these nightmares, but the constant presence of Angie in the back of his head seemed to combat the wall of darkness. After all, she was what he was doing this for, in a way. Once Moody was either appeased or destroyed, she would be safe.
Gray had thought a lot about what he would do when this was over. Stay in the department, certainly, but maybe he would ask her to stop worrying about the club and go to school. He could pay for it now, after all. They hadn’t been together for long, he knew, but strangely it just felt…right. He felt it down in his blood, in cells, a chemical certainty. He wanted to look after her, and she said she wanted to get out of the clubs, so what was the harm? It wasn’t like they were picking out curtains. If he could hand fifteen grand over to a street cop who’d gotten busted for breaking company policy, there was no reason why he couldn’t do more for the woman he loved.
Chapter Seventeen
The week passed, dimmed, and then Friday evening he stepped out of his office to find Carter leaning against the wall in the corridor outside. He looked at Gray with a combination of interest and something decidedly icier. “Hey there, Detective,” Carter said, running a hand through his thick mop of curls. “Got a minute?”
Not Dan, Gray noted. But Detective. “Yeah,” Gray said with a nod. “Come on in.” He stepped back into his office and moved to sit down behind his desk. Carter followed, piling himself into the same chair he’d filled the last time Gray had talked with him.
“So you look like you’ve been doing okay, all things considered.” Carter made himself comfortable, crossing his legs and lounging in the chair.
“Yeah,” Gray said. He stared at Carter, wondering what it was that he wanted. “I’m doing okay.”
Carter nodded. “How’re the nightmares?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The nightmares. Everybody gets ‘em, seeing a thing like that scene at the gallery. You able to deal?”
Gray shrugged. “Some nights I get more sleep than others,” he replied. “But it doesn’t affect the job.”
“Having the girl around helps, I’m sure.” Carter grinned at him and rifled in his pocket for a cigarette, a red-barreled, smokeless Cardinal Mild.
“I thought you liked Anoraks,” Gray said, nodding toward the cigarette.
Carter took a drag off the cigarette and exhaled, lifting a shoulder. The faint smell of cloves and ozone mingled in the air. “Nothing wrong with a change,” he said. “But you’re doing all right? I heard you passed on the psych eval. Can’t say as I blame you, of course, but you should watch it.”
Gray gave him a mild look. “Should I?”
“Uh-huh.” The red cig hung in Carter’s fingers like a wand, dipping and trailing the slightest line of vapor as he gestured. “Administration do
esn’t take kindly to unknown quantities. Make sure you get out more, be sociable. Word’ll get around to H.R. that you’re doing all right and they’ll stop worrying about it – which means they won’t be bugging me to check up on you anymore.”
That explained some things, at least. “They’re a real batch of caring folks, yeah,” Gray replied sourly.
“Can’t have the department’s most publicly-promoted detective in recent times fall apart under the strain,” Carter said, taking another drag. “Protection of investment, that’s all, basic corporate principal. Me, though, I’m just glad to see you’re not unraveling. Seen worse happen to Homicide boys before, and over less horrible things.”
“I can cope.” Gray said it, though it was more for his own benefit than for Carter’s. He could cope, it was clear. Aside from the night he first met Moody at the Cyclops Lounge, when he imagined for a moment that the room had been turned into a slaughterhouse, the nightmares had been constrained only to the realm of sleep. And yet there was the tiny worm of doubt, wriggling slowly into his brain even as he tried to affirm himself. Could you ever cope entirely? He wasn’t sure.
“I’m sure you can,” Carter said with a nod. “But just make sure you see a pysch if it gets worse, okay? In any case, you’re probably gonna be flying a desk for a while until they’re certain. Company policy. You shot somebody, you know?”
“Yeah.” Gray had a flash of Lindsay Yin from the coroner’s report, her pretty face now gray and perforated by the Hornisse’s rounds . He closed his eyes a moment. “Look, man,” he began, “I’m not unhappy to see you, but…”
“But you get the idea that I didn’t come just to check up on you,” Carter said with a chuckle. “I know.”
Gray inclined his head a bit. “So…?”
Carter grunted and took another draw from his Cardinal. There was no ash to flick, just the slowly atomizing barrel. Flameless chemical reactions at work. “So aside from being neighborly, I wanted to ask you about a little rumor I’d heard.”
Bone Wires Page 20
