State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  —and then, like a balloon hit with a pin, his angry reds vanished into scraps, and all that was left was sympathy. “We’re done,” Zockinski said.

  “No, we’re not,” she said as she turned to face him. “Go ahead. You don’t want any secrets? Ask.”

  Zockinski didn’t hesitate. “Are you blind?”

  It had the weight of words that had waited to be said, but Zockinski couldn’t look at her.

  She didn’t need to answer him.

  “Waste of a question,” Hill said. “Rachel’s the best marksman I’ve ever seen.”

  Rachel checked Hill’s colors, disbelieving—Eleven words? The man doth protest too much, methinks—and then she smiled to herself. She couldn’t help it. She loved Mako all that much more to learn that he had told his cousin the collective’s secrets, but he hadn’t told Hill hers.

  Hill caught her smiling. Electric shock raced through his colors as he fit pieces from the last twelve months together. “Oh!” he said. Then, more quietly, “Oh.”

  “Yes.” She almost wasn’t aware she had said it.

  “And you knew?” Zockinski asked Santino.

  “I’m her roommate,” Santino replied. “She never turns on the lights.”

  It was something of an evasion, as Santino had guessed not too long after they had started working together. But it helped; Zockinski was thoroughly sad grays and rich wines.

  “You coulda told us,” Zockinski said.

  Rachel turned off emotions so she wouldn’t have to see Zockinski’s sympathy turn to guilt. “No, I couldn’t,” she said. “Not after those first six months I worked at the MPD.”

  She focused all of her attention on a spider plant dangling just above her head, and left the rest unsaid. Because even if your male coworkers saw you run down a murderer (in heels), or beat eight men unconscious with a scrap of rebar (while wearing a fancy dinner dress), you couldn’t cry about how they had been mean to you, not while expecting to still be treated like their equal after the tears were done.

  Instead, she went over to the door, and kicked it hard enough to dent the metal.

  “You tell anybody, she’s gone,” Santino said, as she limped back to her desk.

  “Especially now that the trauma’s public knowledge,” Rachel added. “They learn I’m—” Her mind and tongue both tripped over the idea of speaking freely around Zockinski and Hill, and she had to steady herself before she pushed on. “If they learn I’m blind now, they’ll throw me out of the MPD.”

  She gave them a moment to process that information, and then flipped on the emotional spectrum.

  Damn, she thought, Rachel would have liked to have seen some denial in their colors. A hint of uncertainty, maybe. Anything other than Southwestern turquoise and the grays of sad resignation.

  “So, that’s where we are,” she said. “If you aren’t okay with keeping secrets, let’s get Sturtevant up here. I won’t hold it against you if you want to tell him now, but if you decide to roll on me later…”

  She trailed off as she watched their colors. Hill’s were steady and strong, confident reds buttressing up her turquoise. Zockinski’s fluttered slightly, and Sturtevant’s core of burnished gold was weighed against Southwestern turquoise, but she also caught the bronze of his wife and the rough pastels of his twin daughters within the mix. He’s got a family, she reminded herself. You’re not his first priority.

  After an uncomfortable minute, Zockinski nodded. “If you get caught, I never knew,” he said.

  “I can live with that,” she replied. Relief, cool and liberating, washed her headache away.

  Hill pointed at his injured arm.

  “Are you asking if how I perceive my environment will put you in danger?”

  “Yes.”

  “That happened before I got behind the wheel,” she reminded him. “And I told everybody that I shouldn’t drive.”

  He chuckled. “True.”

  “Speaking of Sturtevant,” she said, and tilted her head towards the door to their office.

  It opened easily (Rachel was slightly miffed at that; based on the throbbing in her foot, she thought she had at least knocked it off of its alignment), and the Chief of Detectives walked in. Edward Sturtevant was somewhat like a tall fireplug—round, solid, and usually running red. Today, his conversational colors were no different, but at least his anger wasn’t aimed at Rachel. “Don’t talk to anyone,” he told her. “No formal statements. I’ve got reporters crawling all over me.”

  “Should I go home?” she asked. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to spend the rest of the day in hiding, or just power through until bedtime. Both options had their appeal.

  “No. Do something useful.”

  Her heart began to sink. The last time Sturtevant had wanted them to “do something useful,” it had been traffic duty. “Like what?” she asked.

  “The White House robbery,” he said. “Remember that?”

  “Yes, but Alimoren hasn’t—” Santino began, but Sturtevant had already slammed the door on them.

  “You were saying?” Zockinski asked Santino.

  “Just that the Secret Service seems to have cut us out.” Santino said. “Has anyone heard from Alimoren since the car chase?”

  Nobody had. “Toldja we should have taken the credit, Peng,” Zockinski said. “The Secret Service doesn’t need us anymore.”

  “Eh,” she said with a shrug. “It might be me. He might have heard that the news about OACET was going to break, and wanted to sever ties before that happened.”

  “Does he know about the…” Zockinski didn’t finish, choosing instead to wave a hand in the general direction of his eyes.

  “Nope. I can count the number of people outside of OACET who know that I’m blind on one hand,” she said, before realizing that was no longer true. “Well. Two hands, now. Even Becca doesn’t know.”

  That got a pop of bright surprise from Zockinski and Hill. They liked Becca.

  “Thanks, by the way,” Rachel said, pointing towards the dented door. “I like it here.”

  A wave of rich, red belonging came from them, carrying her Southwestern turquoise within it. It lasted long enough that Zockinski felt obliged to cut the emotion in the room with a joke, which turned into a minor insult war. By the end of it, Rachel felt worlds lighter.

  “If Alimoren has cut us out, it’s because of the bad press,” Santino said, once they had settled down enough to do some real work. “They came down on him hard. He’s high enough in the Secret Service that he’ll probably lose his job over this.”

  “Poor scapegoats,” Rachel sighed.

  “You sure he’s a scapegoat?” Zockinski said. “You weren’t there when Santino and I talked to him about the chance there’s a mole in the Secret Service. He got real defensive, real fast.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Hill asked him.

  “Wait,” Rachel said, remembering the creeping suspicion that had come over her when Alimoren visited her in the hospital. “Let’s chase that one,” she said. “Say Alimoren is the information leak, and he’s responsible for helping Noura break into the White House. It would explain why he let Noura out of the holding cell, and how the hitters knew where she’d be.”

  Santino fell into his usual role of devil’s advocate. “Letting Noura out was a calculated risk,” he argued.

  “Yeah, but why would he agree to it that quickly?” Zockinski asked. “Seems like he should have gone in and pushed her a little more, see what else he could get from her in exchange for that package.”

  “It was a solid lead, and he wanted to move on it,” Santino said. “He knew he had a limited amount of time before the story would break, and he wanted to get ahead of the news cycle. It’d look good for the Secret Service if they not only had the thief in custody, but were also making progress on who hired her.”

  Hill pointed at Santino.

  “Would twenty minutes have made that much difference?” Rachel asked her partner.

  “With someone like
Noura? No, but only because Alimoren knew she wasn’t going to crack. She had set her terms, and Alimoren knew that trying to negotiate would just delay the inevitable.”

  “Damn,” Zockinski muttered.

  Round One goes to Santino. Rachel winked at her partner.

  “How about the package?” Zockinski asked. “Anybody know what was in it? We were supposed to get an itemized list from the Secret Service.”

  “Never showed up,” Hill said.

  “I scanned the package when we took it in,” Rachel said. “Except for the watch, there was nothing in that package but printouts.”

  “Printouts come from somewhere,” Santino said. “We didn’t find a set of keys or any personal information on her, but she had to be staying somewhere in town. Somewhere she stashed her phone and her computer.”

  “Did Alimoren put a dead-drop notice out to the local hotels?” Zockinski asked.

  “Probably,” Santino said. “But if Noura is in a do-not-clean suite and if she paid through the end of the month, it’ll be weeks before they call him and tell him they found her stuff… I don’t know. Seems as though a woman like Noura would have had a contingency plan in case something happened to her.”

  That thought slammed into both Rachel and Hill like rocks to their heads. They both launched to their feet. She craned her neck to look up at the tall man, and his brilliant white smile lit the air around him.

  “Them,” Rachel said, and Hill nodded.

  “What?” Zockinski asked.

  “Them!” Rachel nearly shouted. “Back at the mail drop, Noura said she packed them herself! The crazy thief shipped off more than one package!”

  “You didn’t think of this before now?” More orange caught within Zockinski as his irritation built within him.

  “Things got busy,” Hill said, running his good hand across his injured shoulder.

  “How do we find it?” she asked the men, but mostly Santino. “Noura didn’t ship both packages to the same location, obviously. Alimoren’s team searched that mail drop, and they would have found a second package by now.”

  “If we had the original package, we could track its source and see if she mailed out more than one during that same trip,” Zockinski said.

  Santino’s colors lit up before he managed to temper them within orange-yellow doubt. “Wouldn’t Alimoren have his team check the site where Noura mailed the packages?” Santino asked.

  “It’s a lead,” Rachel said, and Zockinski agreed, both of them eager to pretend things were normal between them. “He’s been busy with the fallout from the car chase and Noura’s murder. I say we assume he didn’t, until we learn he did.”

  Her partner gave a silent purple-gray sigh. “All right,” he said. “Tell me you recorded the drop.”

  She had: she did her best to remember that she was her own police body camera, and she tried to maintain an active recording while interacting with suspects. Rachel called up the file and passed her new tablet to Santino so he could zoom around for a clear image of the package, but she had been flipping scans as usual and nothing was legible.

  Zockinski watched the mess on the screen, shaking his head in perplexed yellows and oranges. “Why didn’t you just tell us you were blind?” he said to Rachel. “It’d have explained these godawful videos of yours.”

  “Fuck you very much,” Rachel said, and felt another wave of relief that he could turn her blindness into a throwaway comment. “Call Alimoren? I don’t know where the Secret Service stores their evidence, but he can get us the information from the package.”

  Alimoren didn’t answer. His office did, but they told the team from the MPD that Alimoren was in press conferences all day, and wouldn’t be able to return their call until later in the week. When Zockinski said that all they wanted was a photograph of a packing number, he was told that someone would get back to him shortly.

  “As in, never,” Zockinski said as he snapped his phone off.

  She shrugged. She had thought better of Alimoren. “Fine,” she said. “The hard way, then.”

  She called Alimoren’s office, introduced herself as the OACET Agent working the case with their boss, and said in her sweetest customer service voice that she appreciated how they were busy, so she would just go into their servers and look around until she found the files, and there prob-a-bly wouldn’t be any issues but if the entire computer system went down like the last few times she did this, she’d come right over to help get them back up again…

  A series of files began rolling into Zockinski’s phone before she had finished her last sentence.

  “I hate pulling rank,” she muttered as she hung up.

  “That’s not pulling rank as much as it’s social engineering,” Santino said, flipping through the images until he found the packing number. “Here we are.”

  From there, it was a short hop to the postal center where Noura had mailed the original package. The center was another private company, so Zockinski and Hill bullied their way through the bureaucracy until they got the poor kid behind the counter to admit that, yes, there had been another package. The second tracking number put them in a federal post office across town, and there they ran into a wall of a woman who showed them a package nearly identical in size to the first, but insisted on a warrant before she would release it to them.

  The woman slammed her window in Hill’s face. Rachel was impressed: not too many people had the guts to stand up to the detectives when they were in full-on cop mode.

  “Do you want to call Edwards?” Santino asked her.

  Rachel winced. She had something of a quid-pro-quo agreement with the judge, where she’d move to the head of his warrant queue as long as she’d fill in as his golfing buddy whenever he needed a fourth. Edwards’ golf game was…not very good. “Let’s try Alimoren first,” she said. “We shouldn’t cut him out.”

  As Zockinski went red, she added, “I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, just in case he really is tied up with the press all day.”

  More bureaucracy: they let Santino make the call, and Rachel found a quiet spot near the front door where she could watch the crowd. Zockinski and Hill wandered over to join her, and the three of them sat without talking while Santino waited.

  After a glacial age, Santino hung up. “Alimoren said he’ll get a warrant on his way down.”

  “He’s coming here?” Rachel hadn’t expected that: she had assumed their team would bring the package to him.

  “Yeah, he seemed really…” Santino was staring at his phone, his conversational colors churning slowly. “…I don’t know. He left an interview to meet up with us.”

  “Huh,” Zockinski said, his own colors beginning to match Santino’s in a slow, thoughtful turnover. “Anybody ever see what was in that first package?”

  “Bunch of papers,” Rachel said. “Another wristwatch.”

  “Yeah, but did you see it with your own—” Zockinski stopped, green guilt flaring.

  She blew a raspberry at him as she punched him in the knee.

  Nobody wanted to be the first one to suggest that if the contents of the first package had been spirited out of the hands of the MPD, there was a very good chance that this second one would vanish just as quickly once Alimoren arrived.

  “You know…” Santino said, turning towards the clerks’ windows. “We do have a warrant. We just don’t have it on us right this moment.”

  Rachel knew what he was implying. “It’s almost impossible to read a stack of papers when they’re lying on top of each other. I could maybe make out a photograph or an image. We wouldn’t get much that was useful out of it.”

  “What if it isn’t just papers?”

  “Fine,” she sighed, and sent her scans out.

  Santino was right. The second package might have looked the same as the first, but its contents were different. Rachel couldn’t help but jump to her feet as she found the motel key card.

  Bingo. I need to get over there, fast.

  “What?” H
ill asked.

  “Want to do one better than tracking down this package?” Rachel asked. “There’s still an outstanding warrant to search Noura’s hotel room once we find it, right?”

  Zockinski nodded, while Santino cracked a wide grin.

  She smiled back at him. “Let’s go remind Alimoren that he asked us to join him for a reason.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “In or out?” Zockinski asked.

  Rachel figured cheap motels grew like mushrooms, with underground colonies stretching for miles beneath airports and convention centers, occasionally shooting up a Ramada or DoubleTree for reproductive purposes. They were all identical to her, the same boxy hallways with rectangles of rooms on either side, cinderblock and firewalls throughout.

  The extended-stay motel where Noura had booked her suite was no different. Rachel had fed the data from the magnetic strip through an app on Santino’s phone, and they had abandoned the package in favor of the larger prize. Now, standing outside of what they presumed to be Noura’s motel room, they were mired in legalities.

  “It’d be nice to search the room before the crime scene techs trample over the evidence,” Santino said. “For once.”

  “It’s not procedure,” Hill replied.

  Zockinski backed up his partner. “What if the guys who shot her also came here to trash the place? We’d catch hell for going in first.”

  “Right,” Rachel said. She leaned against the wall, and slid down to rest her head on her knees.

  “Hey, um…” Santino made a move towards her purse to retrieve her tablet, but she waved him away.

  “Not today, dear. I’ve still got a headache. Let me focus on one thing at a time.”

  “All right,” he said, wearing a reluctant orange.

  Her team had seen this often enough to leave her alone. They assumed she was out-of-body on the other side of the wall, walking the scene in her green skin. Usually, she sent the live feed to her tablet so they could search the room along with her avatar.