by Mel Odom
However, if he went down on something bad, Shelly had told me that the commissioner would help bury Blaine in the deepest hole she could find.
Blaine was almost two meters tall, a big man with greying hair and brown eyes. He was broad-shouldered and overweight, but he didn’t look soft. He looked hard all over. He was dressed in plainclothes, but I saw the outline of a protective vest beneath his jacket. I also detected the gleam of moonlight on the carbosteel of a pistol in the passenger seat only centimeters from his hand.
He focused on me. “You know who I am?”
I could hear him through the transplas. I nodded.
“We need to talk.”
“You need to pull your vehicle out of that lane. You’re creating a danger to other drivers.”
Blaine looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Then he rubbed his stubbled chin with a big hand and pointed to the next alley.
“Meet me there.” He drove off before I could respond.
I walked toward the alley and watched him park his hopper in the shadows. A small cluster of low-end prostitutes growled curses at him, made gestures, and wandered off toward the next alley.
Blaine ignored them, watching me the whole time. He climbed out of the hopper and leaned a hip against the nose of his vehicle. They were a match, both of them big and solid.
I stood about two meters away from him, well out of range for him to grab me or to feel threatened. It was curious standing across from him like that, thinking of those probabilities and weighing them.
“What do you think you’re doing?” His voice was more of a growl, like a bear unwilling to come out of its cave.
“I’m working a case.”
“You’re off the team. Ormond yanked your tin.”
“I go back in two weeks. I don’t want to go back behind.”
Blaine grinned and nodded grudgingly. “You opened the Rachel Giacomin investigation.”
That told me a lot. The Giacomin case was closed. There was no reason for anyone to flag new activity in it. That was how I’d been certain Ormond wouldn’t notice I was poking around in it.
“I didn’t open it.”
“I found your fingerprints all over it.”
He was referring to the digital imprints I’d left on the file. If I’d been concerned about someone discovering I was looking into it, I might have been able to do it without leaving a digital signature. That would have been harder, but I felt certain I could have done it.
“Why were you digging around in that file?”
“I turned up some information on another investigation. There was an overlap.”
“What overlap?”
I didn’t hesitate. I decided to hit him with what I knew right off the bat and see which way he bounced. “Malcolm Gardener was still alive until a few days ago. Only his name wasn’t Malcolm Gardener. It was Dwight Taylor.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do. And I can prove that Malcolm Gardener wasn’t dead the night you supposedly found him.”
Blaine took in a deep breath and let it out. His hand dropped briefly to his hip, only centimeters from the gun holstered there.
I wasn’t concerned. I knew that the sidearm he carried wasn’t capable of bringing me down. However, ricochets could harm passersby or cars out on the street. That did bother me.
“Okay, I don’t know what you’re talking about. When I found Malcolm Gardener, he was dead.”
“Why are you lying about this case? Who are you protecting?”
“Back off, Drake. You haven’t earned the right to question me.”
“I lost my partner.” My voice echoed in the alley and the words sounded flat and distant to me. “If anybody has a right to investigate what happened to her, it’s me.”
Blaine’s eyebrows rose a little in surprise. He gazed at me with more interest, and I thought perhaps I saw some concern there as well. He was afraid, but I didn’t think he was afraid of me. I could question the case, maybe, but no one would care. Rachel Giacomin’s murder had been satisfactorily resolved, and no one worth listening to had complained about her getting murdered anyway. She and her family had had no political or economic clout to bring to bear on the NAPD.
“This isn’t something that should concern you.”
“It does.”
“This isn’t any of your business.”
“I’m making it my business.” I gazed at him. “Did you know where Dwight Taylor was?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Were you one of the people that killed him?” I brought up the images I’d saved of the men that had shot Dwight Taylor and me. They looked familiar, but that may have only been because I had been looking at them a lot since I’d recovered. I thought Blaine could have been one of the attackers, but I couldn’t be sure.
“No. I had nothing to do with Dwight Taylor.” Blaine was quiet for a moment. “What put you onto Dwight Taylor?”
“The tattoo he wore.” I tapped the side of my neck. “The chimera tattoo. It was worn by one of the men that killed my partner.”
Blaine’s eyes never flickered, but I was certain I’d surprised him.
“You didn’t know about the tattoo?”
“I still don’t know anything about any tattoo.” Blaine nodded at all the dark buildings and alleyways around us. Hoppers passed out on the street and overhead. “That’s what you’re out here looking for? Tattoos?” He chuckled, but he had to work at it to get it to come out. “It’s going to be a long night if you’re out looking for tattoos.”
“The chimera tattoo belongs to a mercenary group that saw action on Mars. Too many people have turned up with it for it not to be part of this investigation.”
“Have you talked to the lieutenant about this?” Blaine’s voice was suddenly quiet and more serious.
“I have.”
“What does he say about it?”
“He’s not interested in pursuing it.”
“But you are.”
“I am. Someone killed my partner, Blaine. I intend to find out who that was and bring them in to be prosecuted.”
He stood silent for a moment. “I’m going to give you some advice, Drake, and you better believe it’s some of the best advice you’re ever going to get.”
I didn’t respond.
“Stay out of this. Forget about your partner. She’s dead. There’s nothing you can do to change that. If you keep digging into this thing, you’re going to run into more trouble than you’re prepared to deal with.”
“Who are you protecting?”
Blaine stared at me for a moment, then he shook his head and climbed back into the hopper. He powered it up, changed the nose’s transplas back to solid black so no one could see in, and levitated straight up out of the alley.
I stood there and watched him go, unable to do anything else. Then I turned back toward Cayambe and kept moving. I checked the reflective surfaces along the way. The three guys tailing me had dropped out of rotation and halted on the other side of the street. I thought maybe I should have mentioned them.
I didn’t know if Blaine was operating independently or if he was with them. Maybe he’d noticed them too and that was why he’d taken off.
*
I spent the next eighteen hours floating through the Base de Cayambe district, going back again and again to Owney’s and Red Line. The waitstaff there knew me now, and they avoided me like I was carrying the plague.
The three men following me had grown in number. There were now five men and three women that I had identified. I hadn’t been able to place any of them with the facial recognition database. I would simply have to wait for them to approach me to find out what they were up to.
I was observant and persistent. Shelly had trained me to be those things. I had excelled at them, but not through any effort on my own. She’d been pleased that I could deal with everything in a manner like that, but sometimes it had vexed her. She’d told me that see
ing me operate so smoothly reminded her of how much better she could be at her job.
While I walked the streets and surveyed the bars and businesses, looking for those chimera tattoos, I thought about her a lot. If she had been with me, I felt certain we’d have developed more leads by now.
But this was all I had. Too many people were lying. Too many people had vested interests they were covering.
While I was walking, I didn’t have any more of the episodes from Mars.
I didn’t know why that was. I thought perhaps it was because I wasn’t encountering the proper stimulus to trigger those events, and that made me wonder what the proper stimulus was.
The investigation had something to do with the events in my episodes. Dwight Taylor’s presence in them confirmed that. But, I’d had my first episode before Shelly and I had caught the squeal to go to the L’Engle Hotel.
There was something else that I was missing. But I had no clue what it was.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
My tails finally made contact in the Red Line.
The Red Line was a place to find people. Individuals and corps paid good cred for people they could keep off their accounts and hire to do illegal jobs. If you had someone you wanted killed, there were people willing to do that. If there was someone you wanted snatched from another country or from another corp, there were people who would do that. If you wanted data stolen, there were people who could do it over the Net or by breaking into physical places.
Shelly and I had worked some of those when homicides had been part of the package.
The regulars at the Red Line knew who and what I was by now, and they stayed back from me. I scanned them and kept moving. That was when the people following me decided to confront me.
The tail this time was an athletic woman with close-cropped black hair and cybered eyes that gleamed in the dark bar. She approached me while I stood at the bar waiting to speak to the bartender. She stayed out of reach and kept a stool between us.
“I heard you’ve been asking about a tattoo.”
I looked at her and wondered how she was going to play the encounter. I knew I was exposed and vulnerable. I’d never been in a situation like this with Shelly. We’d always had each other, and NAPD support had always been moments away.
I captured her image and ran her through the Net. I didn’t get any hits on her features, but her face was average, nothing outstanding about it, and I suspected she’d had work done to make it that way.
“I have been.” I started to lift my hand to bring up a 3D of the image.
“Like this one?” She turned her head slightly to reveal the chimera tattoo on the side of her neck. It was old, but it showed proudly.
“Yes, exactly like that one.”
“Why are you looking for it?”
“Do you know a man named Brock Thurman? Or another man named Dwight Taylor?”
Her face grew sterner. She didn’t answer for a moment, and I was convinced that she was talking to someone over an internal comm. “I need you to come with me.”
“Where?”
She smiled at me. “Do you want to know about that tattoo?”
“I do.”
“Then, I don’t suppose it matters where we go, does it?” She turned and left me standing there as she headed to the back of the bar.
I knew that at least two of the tails I’d spotted earlier were in the bar with me, seated at tables only a short distance away. In the end, though, I didn’t have a choice about following her.
I walked through the tables and noticed that the men behind me didn’t move. I guessed that they were there as lookouts to see if anyone else was following me.
When I stepped through the back door after the woman, another woman and a man emerged from the shadows with weapons pointed at me.
The woman with the tattoo pulled her own gun. “No sudden moves and we don’t destroy you. That’s the best deal you’re going to get.”
I held up my hands.
She spoke briefly, and a cargo hopper rolled into the alley a moment later. When the back doors opened, she motioned me inside with her weapon.
Inside was Sergeant Louis Blaine. He sat with his hands bound in front of him. His face looked distressed, but his heart rate—as I noticed at the hollow of his throat—was normal.
“Hey, kid.” Blaine’s voice was flat. “Looks like you made the party.”
I stood frozen for just a moment, trying to take in all the implications of Blaine’s presence, as well as the restraints on his wrists. Then the woman shoved me forward and I stepped into the cargo hopper. A man slipped a pair of restraints onto my wrists and forced me into a sitting position on a small bench along the wall opposite Blaine. Eight other armed men and women sat in the back and stared at me. These wore armor in addition to carrying weapons.
The cargo hopper powered up and lifted straight up out of the alley.
“If you got this far, you must be pretty good at what you do.” Blaine leaned back against the cargo hopper wall. “The way people told it to me, Nolan was the brains between you two.”
“She was.”
Blaine gave me a slow smile devoid of mirth. “Gotta have a brain to get this far, kid. So, what have you figured out?”
“That these people killed Cartman Dawes and my partner. But I don’t know why.”
I was curious as to why the team guarding us was letting us talk.
“That’s too bad.”
I looked at him, but I knew I had the attention of every mercenary in the cargo hopper. “Cartman Dawes’s death has to do with some kind of software program Rachel Giacomin was working on for MirrorMorph, Inc. I know that, too.”
With cold dispassion, Blaine stared at me. “You’re getting in over your head here.”
“I’ve been in over my head since my partner was murdered. I’ve been working on digging out ever since.” Shelly had said something similar once when we’d been behind on an investigation.
“You keep digging, you’re going to get yourself killed.”
Maybe he’d forgotten I didn’t feel fear the way a human did. I stared at him a little while.
“Or maybe you don’t care.” Blaine sucked in a deep breath and let it out. “You lose a partner, sometimes you get to where you don’t care.”
I knew he was telling the truth, and I could see the bright pain in his eyes.
“You were involved in faking Taylor’s death when he was calling himself Malcolm Gardener.”
“Dwight Taylor never called himself Malcolm Gardener. That was just a name I made up to pin the murder on. I built Gardener’s backstory and inserted it into the NAPD database.”
“Not by yourself. You don’t have that kind of expertise.”
Blaine grinned, and this time there was humor in the expression. “You are good.”
If I’d been human, the praise might have gone to my head. Of course, if I’d been human, I’d have been panicked about my present situation.
“I paid off one of the tech guys at the NAPD.” Blaine shrugged. “Guy’s no longer with the department. Part of his payment was a better job at the corp that was involved. Police officers don’t make a lot of cred. Pay’s better at the corps.”
“If the tech could get a new job out of covering up the murder, why didn’t you?”
For a moment, Blaine was silent. When he spoke, his voice was smaller, quieter. “There was a job on the table for me, too.”
“You didn’t take it.”
He shook his head.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because, while all of this was getting sorted out, a police officer I came through training with was shot and killed in the field.” Blaine shrugged. “Senseless thing. Gang-related. Parker should have walked away. But he didn’t. He was trying to get two kids out of the neighborhood before they got hurt during a rival turf war.” He paused. “He was trying to do the right thing.”
I waited, knowing there was more.
“Parker was a good
friend. He was a good cop. I’m godfather to two of his kids.” Blaine’s gaze looked right through me. “I still see them from time to time. They don’t believe everything everybody says about me, but they know it’s being said. I can see it in their faces.” He shook his head, trying to put the memory away. “The offer was made, for what I did on the Giacomin investigation, and I turned it down.”
“Why?”
“Because when Parker died, I remembered the cop I wanted to be. I couldn’t take that deal because I knew I’d be giving up on everything that had made us friends. Everything that had led him to make me godfather of his kids. I couldn’t do that.” Blaine stared at me again. “There have been other times since then when I haven’t been so clear-cut in my morality. You get—” He caught himself. “Humans get burned out on this job. You go from one mess to the next. We see unrestricted savagery on a regular basis. A cop works in a war zone, and anyone that doesn’t know that is stupid.”
I thought Shelly would have stopped short of calling our job that, but I didn’t disagree. I returned to that murder investigation all those years ago. “Who wanted Giacomin dead?”
“Who do you think?”
I remembered the way Thomas Haas had invaded my flat and sicced his bodyguards on me. The corp was interested in me, and the director was looking into my investigation. “Haas-Bioroid?”
“Yeah.”
“I know the neural channeling program Giacomin was working on was subcontracted by Haas-Bioroid. Why would they kill her?”
“Because Giacomin wasn’t keeping the neural channeling research in-house. She was selling the programming to other corps. Haas-Bioroid’s sec people caught her with her hand in the cookie jar.”
“Why didn’t they take care of it themselves?” It wouldn’t have been the first time the corps had murdered an employee.
“They wanted this to go away without a ripple. Other people were involved.”
“Cartman Dawes?”
“I don’t know.”
I hadn’t been able to confirm that connection, either.
