Sharp: A Mindspace Investigations Novel

by Alex Hughes

  So it was up to me. Hamilton had to know something. I opened the door and made myself smile, made my body language friendly and open, when what I really wanted to do was beat him within an inch of his life.

  Hamilton was a large man, scuzzy looking right now, dirty and unshaven. He was leaning forward in the chair, leaning against the table, and his right foot was fidgeting, moving back and forth in a twitchy motion I recognized. He was harder up for a cigarette than expected, hungry and angry, and his head hurt.

  Oddly, this didn’t give me any sympathy for the son of a bitch.

  “Mr. Hamilton,” I said. “Thank you for waiting. I assume we’ve read you your rights?” I met Bellury’s eyes across the room, and he nodded, slightly.

  I had a small bag full of files with me, and I made a show of unpacking all over the table, stuff strewn everywhere, most of it far too much in Hamilton’s space for comfort.

  As expected, after about the third thing he pushed it all, forcefully, away. “You can’t hold me like this. I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

  “You ran from a police investigation.” That wasn’t a crime, or at least not anything major, but it looked bad, and most suspects realized that. Innocent people didn’t run—or at least, that’s what the cops believed. “You ran from us when we tried to bring you in for questioning.” I paused in the middle of my unpacking, making a show of thinking. “Oh yes, and there’s the matter of your wife’s body being found in your home. Your wife’s murdered body.” Entirely too long ago—Emily deserved justice faster than this.

  “I didn’t kill her.” Hamilton sat back and glowered. Went back to fidgeting.

  “You don’t seem surprised to hear she’s dead.”

  “I don’t know what happened, okay? I came home late—real late—and there she was. I’d had a little too much to drink. It took me a minute to figure out what had happened.”

  I took a seat. “And you ran.”

  He looked tired then, suddenly very tired. “That wasn’t somebody breaking into the house. It was just luck I wasn’t there for them to kill me.”

  I leaned forward. “You think they were there to kill you and murdered Emily, say, by mistake?” Even the thought made me angry. “Why the hell would you think that? You owe too much to the bookie?”

  Now he was angry too; he leaned forward also, until we were far too close over the table. I didn’t back down.

  Finally the tension broke and he leaned back and started fidgeting again, his eyes going to the lighter in my front shirt pocket. “You give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “You tell me all about it and I’ll give you a cigarette.”

  He frowned, hard, the anger rising.

  I waited.

  “I’ll tell you some, but you give me the cigarette now.”

  “You can’t smoke it indoors.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” I pulled out one of my blue smokes and passed it over the table. He grabbed it like it was a lifeline, just smelling the thing. I saw a shadow of myself in that moment and hated him all the more. “Who would want to kill you?” I asked, but it came out sarcastic and bitter.

  “Other than Emily?” Dan said. He shook his head. “When you’ve got the kind of talent I’ve got, you make plenty of enemies.”

  “Like the bookie?”

  He sat up. “I paid the damn bookie off. Did he tell you I didn’t? My trade was worth fifty thousand ROCs, easy. If he says otherwise, he’s lying.”

  And suddenly it all came together in my head. “You traded the blueprints—those blueprints you stole from your work—to pay your gambling debts. You realize that’s a felony Tech violation.”

  “And that worm Edelman had the balls to threaten me about it. Never thought he’d actually follow through, though. And for Emily . . .” He trailed off then, like he actually felt something for her, like she was a person and a punching bag both. He played with the cigarette. “Well, it was time to get lost for a while. I assume you caught him and he told you about the prints? Well, I’ve got him red-handed on the threats. You want to make a deal, I’ll testify against him, you get a murderer for free. The prints weren’t all that great and you can’t prove I took them anyways.”

  He looked up. “You want to hear about the whole shebang, you gotta let me smoke.”

  * * *

  I had to swallow my anger again as I took him outside, grabbing one of the beat cops with a gun to act as guard. I lit up my own smoke while he did his, to try to seem companionable. To get him to try to trust me. Emily’s sister had said he was a braggart, and I was starting to see that.

  We were standing behind the main bulk of the Headquarters building, facing a bedraggled courtyard in between office buildings, a courtyard that never did seem to grow grass, despite the fact that one of the office buildings facing us had a low roof that sparkled in the sun. Sun. With all the rain lately, even with the awning above me I was soaking up as many rays as I could in self-defense. I needed to absorb more vitamin D; we all did, with that much rain going.

  Hamilton smoked all the way through a cigarette before he would talk. Finally he reached for a second—and I gave it, with a question.

  “Why are you so sure it’s Edelman? You guys don’t get along, I understand that, but it’s a hell of a jump from that to murder.”

  He took a big, long, obsessive drag on the cigarette, then blew the smoke out of his nose like a belligerent bull. “Edelman never liked me. Was always jealous of my talent. That’s why he was always riding me, trying to get me to slip up. You know how it is. It got so bad I had to go blow off steam now and again. So maybe I spent too much with the poker and the picks. Bastard drove me to it.”

  I’d met this guy—or men just like him—in rehab. I couldn’t say I was any more impressed with it in the real world. Swartz said blaming everybody else for your screwups was how you kept screwing up. “How’d you find the blueprints?”

  “I’m not saying I took the blueprints,” he said, but he was thinking about them, and it was early in the morning on a day I was feeling spry. I got all the details I wanted, clear pictures of strange diagrams that had biologicals on them. Not just computers, but the semisentient computers that had nearly crashed the world. Powerful, forbidden diagrams and he’d had them for two weeks before he even thought to sell them. Having that much power, that forbidden knowledge in his hands, had just gotten him off.

  “Did your bookie take a look at them? Is that why he let you off the debt?” I asked. “We’re not being recorded here.” Then I saw something in his mind—“What was that extra diagram of anyway?”

  “I talked to a guy about it. It’s a wireless networking setup designed to work with—”

  One sudden gunshot cracked over the courtyard. My concentration broke and I was back in my own head.

  My eyes searched for where the sound had come from—there, at the top of that office building. That shiny something I’d seen earlier reflected the sun again.

  Next to me, Hamilton’s mind spat pain—then grew faint.

  I turned; he was on the hard concrete slab, collapsed. Blood poured from his throat in heavy spurts, arterial blood.

  Crap, he was— I yanked off my long-sleeved shirt, buttons flying in my haste, wrapped it around his throat. The beat cop was already gone, on the way for help.

  “EMT!” I screamed, all I could do. “EMT!” My mind echoed the call as loud as I could make it, with all the power of a Level Eight telepath pitched to be heard by even normals. I called again, “EMT! Help!” louder and louder as my hands grew sticky with Hamilton’s blood, pouring out all over my hands as I tried to hold pressure to the wound.

  The scars on my arms mocked me as I crouched, helpless, while Hamilton died.

  A near army of help arrived, but far too late.

  CHAPTER 24

  Cherabino showed up with the EMTs, her hands full of a nasty rifle.

  “Where did he go?” she asked me.

  I still had my ha
nds on Hamilton’s neck, but they’d gone slack. I’d felt the void when his mind had gone . . . wherever minds went when you died. There was no pretense now, but I hadn’t moved from my crouch.

  “Hey!” Cherabino said, poking at me mentally. “Where did he go?”

  “Where did who go?” The answer leaked through before I even finished the question. “The shooter. He was on the roof across the way, but—”

  She was off and running before I had a chance to think. And then—I was after her, my lungs laboring with every painful stride. I couldn’t let her go alone. I couldn’t. Not her. Not if I had to run a million billion miles.

  Cherabino was across the courtyard and in the front door of the building I’d indicated within a few seconds. I got in somewhat later, just in time to see the stair door slam shut in the lobby.

  With a sigh, I pushed through—only to be knocked down by her coming the other way.

  “Damn illegal floaters,” Cherabino spat at me. “He’s headed to Decatur Square.”

  An old lady in the lobby gaped at us as Cherabino pushed past her, hard. I made it back to my feet, lungs laboring—damn cigarettes—and tried desperately to at least keep her within sight. In the courtyard, my shoes squelched in the mud, feeling a million pounds heavy.

  I could see the floater in the sky as Cherabino paused at the street, her gun pointed up. But she didn’t take the shot, and the floater got smaller. The hooded figure riding the small, less-than-three-foot anti-gravity platform, wobbled briefly in midair; but he corrected, pulling on the small cords that were all that gave him balance. Floaters were like surfboards for the sky—small, nimble, quick. But instead of surfing over water and sand, you floated over buildings and unforgiving concrete. One misstep and you died. There were reasons these things were illegal.

  Cherabino holstered the gun and started running again, a steady stream of curses echoing through my mind.

  She ran for over a mile, every stride hitting pavement painfully in department-mandated shoes, sweat dripping down her face, determination and cussed anger driving her on. I fell farther and farther back, finally dropping to a walk as I felt her frustration intensify. Even at a walk, I was getting suspicious glances from passersby—the blood on my hands tipping them off to something. The department would get more than a few calls about this.

  I walked, panting, trying to let my heart and lungs catch on to the fact that I wasn’t dying, then pushed back to a painful run. By this time other cops had passed me in pursuit, but I still wasn’t going to leave.

  By the time I caught up to Cherabino, we were on Church Street, near the public transport hub—and Cherabino was standing, panting, in the middle of the street.

  Cars honked at her, and she flashed them a badge and a finger and didn’t move. One of the other cops, with a sigh, started directing traffic by the library.

  Cherabino was standing, frustrated. She was looking at the entrance to the underground tram, and beyond it, the bus station and taxi circle. All areas without so much as a single camera after the latest Privacy Accords ruling. All very well and good to say the public deserved not to be recorded, but it made a cop’s life living hell.

  “You got a good look, right?”

  “No.” She seriously considered punching me out of sheer frustration. “How could you take him to the smoking porch? That’s like a kill box at the back there, and he was connected to our murder. Our murder with connections to Them.” To the Darkness, she meant, the massive organized crime group to which Fiske was supposed to be connected.

  “He needed to smoke.” You couldn’t smoke at the front of the building or in the parking lot.

  “Well, you may have cost us this investigation.” She sighed and walked away, knees aching, back in the general direction of the department.

  A car honked at me and I got back on the sidewalk, feeling failure crushing down on me like a falling piano.

  Bellury opened his car door. “Get in. We’re going to drive until you can tell me what you’re going to do next.”

  “Okay,” I said numbly.

  * * *

  We drove, around and around, until Bellury finally headed up Clairmont.

  I sighed and sat back in the passenger’s seat, the same passenger seat I’d been in on the way to the hijacked truck, the same seat that had taken me to the meeting with Swartz’s medic.

  I was certain now the hijacking case was connected to Emily’s murder. Otherwise, why kill Hamilton? Why bother, unless those blueprints, that stolen Tech, and Sibley’s order to kill Emily were inextricably connected? Tamika was clearly up to her ears in it all, and as much as it pained me, I couldn’t be thinking about her anymore as anything but a suspect. I owed her, yes. But I owed Emily too. And I owed my job, my present life, and Cherabino far more. I had this nagging feeling that all the pieces were on the board now—that if I could just see them clearly, I’d be able to solve this case.

  So I turned things over and over in my head, looking at everything from as many angles as I could, waiting for the puzzle pieces on the table to start fitting together.

  We passed a nice-looking senior center, an older gentleman in a small, staid floater-assist chair waiting to cross at the light, and I was still thinking.

  “If you had a large-scale criminal organization, what would you do with blueprints for Tech and Tech parts?” I asked Bellury. “Not just sell them, right? By the way, where are we going?”

  “My house. If you need to think long enough, I want some of the leftover lasagna from last night,” Bellury said evenly. “And it depends on how much money the final product will get me versus how much use I have for it myself. Are we talking about Fiske here?”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about him, actually. There’s apparently a complicated, delicate investigation in the works.”

  He shrugged. “Paulsen asks me for input. I’m already in the loop.”

  I turned all the way around in the seat to look at him, seat belt pulling at my shoulder. “What?”

  “I worked with the special organized crime force for ten years,” Bellury said, still in that flat, no-big-deal tone. “Rachel said we were getting too old for her to deal with the stress. So I found something less dangerous. Paulsen will still call me into meetings sometimes for background.”

  I stared at him.

  He glanced over. “If you don’t close your mouth, the flies will fly in. Now, Fiske? I guess we’re talking about the hijackings, since you’re involved in that case too. First thing you’d need, whatever you did, was someplace to put the stuff together. Atlanta—at least the east side—is too hot right now. Somebody would eventually catch on.”

  “Oh,” I said eloquently.

  “But like I said, mostly that’s above my pay grade these days. And criminals change tactics over time. That’s life.”

  “I see.”

  But my mind was going over and over this idea of needing a place, somewhere to take the Tech. Not too close—Bellury was right, that would be too risky for somebody as smart as Fiske was rumored to be—and not too far, because road transportation would be an issue with the increased police presence there.

  Well, if you couldn’t take it by road—Guild courier routes. I’d take it by Guild courier, obviously, but if you couldn’t . . . well, there was always the airport. Emily’s father apparently had a stake in the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. Maybe you could . . .

  Airport. Emily’s daughter had smelled kerosene on her. Kerosene, according to Michael’s handout, was also used as jet fuel. Jet fuel, airport, and then Emily ends up dead. Right after Tamika and Sibley visited her, and the blueprints changed hands.

  Everything fell together like a perfect puzzle. It all made sense.

  “You’re brooding,” Bellury said.

  “No, I’m thinking. Can I get you to take me on a quick side trip? I need to test a theory.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The airport was a monumentally huge open space, ground covered in wide strips of concret
e and grass, and the air smelled crisp, like fall, with the earthy scent of cut grass and dirt thrown in for good measure . . . with the faintest, lightest smell of kerosene wafting in the breeze. The sun beat down on my head as across the length of the field, two boxy hangars, wider than they were tall, anchored the airport. They looked small until I realized that the low shape to the right of them was another building, this one half as tall, with people like ants scurrying at its base.

  I folded myself back in the car and put on the seat belt. Bellury, with the windows cracked to enjoy the rare sunny day, drove closer on the ground-level little airport road until he reached an open area beside one of the hangars where other cars were parked. He pulled in and turned off the engine, then looked at me.

  “I want to look around,” I said in answer to his unspoken question.

  He nodded without comment. He was the only one, maybe, the only one in the department not to care how much I read his mind.

  He pulled his gun holster from the glove department and strapped it on. There were times Bellury sidelined me with how deep the cop instincts really went. A gun in your glove compartment? And he buckled the fastenings with the unconscious ease of a man who’d done this for years, over and over, until it became another habit, like breathing. Bellury might be old, might be perfectly happy to settle into light duty, but he was still a cop. Sometimes that caught me by surprise.