The room was quiet, the Agents occupying the other four beds still asleep. She flipped the emotional spectrum on. Shawn’s silver minnows were swimming in a red sea; she ran the diagnostic script on him to learn where he had been hurt, but the script came back clean. Rachel traced the source of the red through his colors and found it was flooding into him through their clasped hands, and realized that for the first time since Howard Rothbauer had kicked her, she felt no pain.
“Oh, Shawn, I’m sorry,” she said, as she tried to pull away. “You don’t have to do that for me.”
He wouldn’t let her take her hand back. “Rachel?” he said, with all of the seriousness of a five-year-old about to deliver the punchline to a joke.
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
She grinned; there was a stripe of Josh’s core of tattoo blue within Shawn’s conversational colors. She wondered how long it had taken Josh to coach Shawn before he got the timing right.
“Rachel?” Shawn said again. He was inspecting their joined hands as if they held secrets. “I never forgot what pain felt like. Is it good?”
“Sometimes. It can keep us from making decisions that might hurt us.”
Either Shawn had asked the wrong question, or she had given the wrong answer; his colors tipped over themselves like pills in a bottle. She was saved from additional Shawn-management by a quiet knock on the divider separating the ICU from the rest of the medical suite.
“Hey, Jenny,” she sent to the woman on the other side of the divider. “You and Santino can come on in.”
Her partner entered, with Jenny in tow. He was carrying a manila folder.
Rachel ran a scan through it; not text, a photograph… Oh. “You get any sleep?” she asked him in a low voice, pointing at the folder.
“No,” he replied. “I’ll sleep when this is over. You ready to go?”
“What?” Jenny whispered, her mood twisting and turning stabbing-sharp. “No. She needs to stay here for one day, minimum, and then I might let you take her home.”
“A man died for me, Jenny. I’m going to see this through to the end.” Rachel gestured for Santino to pass her a nearby bathrobe; he did not need to see her stagger to the community bathroom with her ass hanging out of a hospital gown. “I’ll come right back as soon as it’s over, and you can finally chain me to the bed.”
“We’re just going to First District Station,” Santino promised Jenny.
Jenny’s colors glazed in resignation. “Police station, then right back here,” she said. “No vest, no gun, no movement faster than a walk.”
“Agreed,” Rachel promised. She wrestled her good hand away from Shawn’s, and gasped as the full weight of her pain settled back in her ribs. Jenny didn’t have to worry about her running through the halls; she could barely stand up.
When she returned from the bathroom, her hair wet from a soapless shower, and wearing someone else’s emergency suit and shoes, Jenny and Shawn had gone. Santino was waiting, a plastic grocery bag dangling from an arm. He helped her into the sling, and they left the warmth of the medical lab behind them.
They took the route through the mansion with the fewest stairs, and Santino passed her the grocery bag while he went to get the car. She opened it and found a bottle of water, a cold tuna sandwich, and a small slip of folded paper containing two codeine pills. “Bless you, Jenny Davies,” Rachel muttered, ripping apart the cellophane wrapping. By the time Santino drove up, the sandwich and the pills were gone, and Rachel was feeling nearly near-human again.
The drive back to the city was like a dream; nobody was on the roads. “Tell me what happened,” she said.
“I don’t remember much of the riot,” he admitted. “Everything seemed fine, at the beginning. We were talking, they were listening… Then someone broke a window and they completely flipped their shit. The only reason they didn’t trample us flat is because last night? The MPD were the good guys. I never want to be in that situation when the MPD are the bad guys.”
Rachel nodded. “Amen.”
“Once we got backup, we were fine. The uniforms started to funnel the crowd into parks, try to keep them off of the street… Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.”
“Fire hoses?”
“Yeah.” Santino winced. “Along with pepper spray and rubber bullets. Didn’t you read the reports?”
She had browsed the news feeds while she was in the shower, but it was somehow more authentic to hear it from Santino. “Sixteen dead, hundreds injured.”
“And the fires, and so much property damage it’ll take days to add up… Did you hear that the blackout was caused by teenagers?”
“What?”
“Bunch of stupid-ass kids figured out a way to blow transformers. They managed to coordinate the blowouts across the city. It’ll be days before the grid is stable again. Once we round them up, the DA wants to charge them with multiple counts of constructive manslaughter and try them as adults.”
“Good,” she said, and meant it. She pointed at the manila folder on the dashboard. “How did you find this?”
“We checked the local support groups. All of the community centers were open late, in case people needed shelter from the riots. Howard Rothbauer moved from Arizona to Maryland about three years ago, to be closer to his son, and we knew when the canisters were installed, so that gave us a timeline. The rest of it was just a bunch of volunteers going through old security footage.
“It’s ironic,” he said, a little bit of humor sneaking into his grays. “We never would have found proof this fast, if it weren’t for the riots.”
“How did you know?”
“That woman? Grace LaPonsie? She stuck around while we went through Rothbauer’s office. Good thing, too… She was surprised to learn Rothbauer paid his rent biweekly, when she and everyone she knew in the building paid each quarter.”
“Oh, now that’s clever.”
“Right? So, how did you know?”
“I didn’t. Not until you showed up with the photo.” She pressed her hand against her taped ribs, testing if the codeine was still going strong. It was, and she chanced a deep breath before adding, “I just couldn’t bring myself to think the guy who let himself take a bullet for me was a hundred percent evil.”
Santino let her out at the main door of First District Station. The front steps still clung to their heritage as an elementary school; she felt as though she were skipping class as she waited for Santino to find a parking space.
When he rejoined her, they walked through halls filled with officers shining in bright, cheery yellow. The dark mood that had hung over the building was gone: Gayle Street had been solved—not just closed, but solved!—by their own people. She and Santino all but got a standing ovation as they made their way towards the meeting rooms.
“What exactly did you boys do after I went to the mansion?” she whispered.
“Once Jason called us, we ripped apart everything Howard Rothbauer owned. We couldn’t find anything to tie him to the bombings, but we did find a pair of gloves with McElroy’s blood on them,” he whispered back. “It’s circumstantial at best, but…”
She sighed. “But it’s not like you have to convince a jury.”
“Yeah.” He paused, and she caught some mild orange irritation seeping into his conversational colors. “You should have told me about Rothbauer before you left.”
“I wasn’t sure until I saw his son,” she told him. “And after I did, I wasn’t sure how to handle it.”
Santino blinked down at her: she saw her own turquoise core, along with Zia’s violet, Phil’s silver-light, and all the others, moving and twisting within his conversational colors, and all of which existed on a separate plane from the professional blues of the MPD.
She nodded.
“I don’t like that,” he told her, feigning a smile as he waved to a passing friend.
“Please let me know when my options get easy,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll be able t
o recognize that if it happens.”
They reached the Annex, a room furnished with several chairs, a stainless-steel table, and a television mounted next to a small one-way mirror set in the wall. On the other side of the one-way mirror was a deliciously posh meeting room, a comfortable space designed for four people to relax with fresh coffee in the leather club chairs. The meeting room had deep pile carpeting, mahogany wainscoting, and low bookshelves nestled under antique oil paintings. There was even a cappuccino machine in the corner.
Santino assured her that Washington’s elite expected such treatment, but she wasn’t convinced; even if she weren’t a cop, she would have heard the trap snap shut the instant she stepped into that room.
She and Santino were the first to arrive, and she headed straight for a chair in the corner. Codeine or not, she had reached her limit on standing upright.
A few minutes later, they were joined by Zockinski. He was dressed in his nicest suit, his colors popping in happy purples and bright yellows. There was a strong streak of gray exhaustion underneath those; he hadn’t slept and was running on caffeine. “Nice job last night, Peng,” he said, as he hung his suit coat by the door. “C’mere so I can give you a hug.”
She shot him a one-fingered salute with her good hand.
“Really, how’re you doing?” Zockinski sat across from her, spread out across the metal table.
“Broken ribs, broken wrist, broken... whatever the bones inside the hands are called.”
“Metacarpals.”
“Thank you, Santino. Broken those.”
Zockinski snorted. “I believe it. When we showed up, you had a serious Valkyrie thing going. The EMTs took eight men to the hospital because of you.”
“No, they took eight men went to the hospital because those men wanted to hurt me,” she said. “Clear cause-and-effect relationship, in my opinion.”
“No argument here. Hey…” Zockinski said, “you know how you wanted to be there when we notified Howard Rothbauer’s next of kin?” When she nodded, he said, “There isn’t any. That wife he mentioned? She committed suicide not long before he moved to Maryland.”
“God, this keeps getting sadder,” she said. “He was talking about her as if she was still alive.”
“The people we’ve been able to locate—his coworkers, old neighbors—they all mentioned he had a breakdown after his wife died. What happened to his son was bad enough, but he couldn’t take losing both of them. So, yeah, the last few years? His life was misery.”
“What’s the final death toll for Gayle Street?” she asked.
“Fifty-eight,” Santino said. “About triple that in injuries.”
“Right,” she said, slumping over to rest her chin on her good hand. “Good luck reconciling those two tragedies. I know I can’t do it.”
The door opened again, and a reporter who was friendly with OACET entered, followed by Jonathan Dunstan and Josh Glassman. Dunstan’s colors were mainly gray and had been whipped flat, while Josh’s were light and gleeful; the Agent had taken Dunstan aside for a friendly pre-meeting chat.
“Morning, folks,” Josh said. “This is Kathleen Patterson, from the Washington Post, and you all know Dunstan. They’re up-to-date on the events of last night, and are eager to start writing, but I’ve managed to convince them that a brief tour of First District Station will be worth their time.”
Nice, Rachel thought. It wasn’t exactly illegal for the MPD to invite the media to watch an interview, but the liability skyrocketed. Josh, on the other hand, was neither MPD nor affiliated with the Gayle Street investigation, and everyone could pretend he just happened to bring the reporters to the right place at the right time.
Patterson’s conversational colors were churning. Whatever Josh had promised Patterson had gotten her worked up in the worst way, and… and Rachel decided to leave the rest of that thought alone.
On the other side of the one-way glass, Sturtevant and Hill had entered the executives’ meeting room. Hill carefully positioned a manila folder that was a twin to Santino’s on the coffee table. Then the two of them began to fluff and dust; the meeting room was kept under lock and key until it was needed, the brass well aware that the beat cops and detectives would turn it into a lounge the first chance they got. Rachel watched through the wall as Hill got the cappuccino machine heated up, and took some porcelain mugs out of a storage cupboard.
The mugs matched.
Rachel shook her head in disbelief. If she ever walked into a room in a police station and saw a matching set of coffee mugs, she would never stop running.
“Okay, people,” Josh said. “Here we go.”
The television flared to life as Terry Templeton and a second man entered the meeting room. The hidden microphones picked up Sturtevant’s warm welcome, but that didn’t go past his skin; to Rachel, Sturtevant showed the same reds and blacks that he had worn that first day on Gayle Street.
The monotony of the first ten minutes of the interview was to be expected, as Sturtevant and Hill asked the right questions to put Templeton and his lawyer at ease. Of course Templeton had to come down to the station, and provide some information about Howard Rothbauer. Of course they all knew this was a waste of time. Of course they knew that Templeton had never met Howard Rothbauer, ever. It was all bad luck and coincidence, and they all just needed to clear the air.
Oh, and one more thing…
Hill casually moved his hand from his porcelain mug to the manila folder, and flipped the cover open.
Rachel watched as Templeton instinctively glanced down at the photograph. His conversational colors closed in on themselves, as though he had shut his eyes.
“The support group was supposed to be confidential,” he said.
“The group was,” Hill said. “The community center where it was held? Not so much.”
“It was years ago. I didn’t think they’d still have the footage.” Templeton’s colors were shifting towards purple, as if there were humor in the situation. Beside him, his lawyer was open-mouthed in shock as he realized what the photograph might mean.
Terry Templeton and Howard Rothbauer, standing together. Talking.
Hill slid the first photograph to the side, and there was another beneath it, nearly identical to the first save for the men’s winter clothes.
“Digital storage,” Sturtevant said. “Cheap and plentiful. There’s no good reason to delete security files any more. Seems like the kind of thing someone like you should know.”
Templeton sighed, and his colors locked themselves down. It was a common enough visual phenomenon within the MPD’s Interrogation wing, where those who knew they were caught stopped talking. “Please direct all questions to Mr. Hunter,” he said, gesturing towards his lawyer.
“I need to call my office.” The lawyer’s voice was almost a squeak.
Hill smiled like a viper. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Your client thinks he already knows how this’ll end. He’s sure that Rothbauer left nothing to incriminate him, since there’s nothing to tie the two of them together except some old photographs and some rent checks.
“Good move on the rent checks, by the way,” Hill said to Templeton. “Rothbauer drops his check in the building’s mail slot every other week, and you slide his receipt under his door. No cell phones, no email, nothing to connect you to each other. Hell, you even cut out the post office, just in case.”
On the other side of the wall, Rachel stifled a chuckle. She loved watching Hill work.
“So, rent checks and receipts to exchange notes,” Hill said. “You probably destroyed the notes and the envelopes, but we found all of Rothbauer’s receipts in a file. Taxes, you know. Nobody wants an audit. Forensics has those, in case you were wondering. They’re testing those to see if there was any transfer left behind from the notes.
“There’s close to forty receipts in that file,” Hill said, leaning towards Templeton. “Are you a betting man? ‘Cause the odds aren’t good for you, but you never know. You might still
get out of this.”
“We’re done here,” the attorney said, standing. He had recovered from the shock of learning Templeton was involved in Gayle Street, and his instincts had kicked in. Fight or flight? Yes, please.
“No,” Sturtevant said. “We’re not. Did you know your client has been trying to branch into defense contracting?”
Templeton’s colors bleached white.
Rachel sighed and slumped back in her chair as the final piece of the puzzle dropped into place. Rage and money, she thought. It’s always rage or money, or both. And two men, but each of them was acting alone...
How did we manage to get it all right and wrong at the same time?
The attorney sat back down, revulsion clear within his colors. That same sickly orange-green was reflected in the colors of every other person within the two rooms, save Templeton’s.
“This is what we think went down,” Hill said. “Your son is killed in Iraq. You’re mourning, you bump into Rothbauer at the support group, and for a while you’re just two angry dads. Then one of you—probably Rothbauer, since he’s got no closure—starts talking about payback. No, not just payback. He wants payback with a purpose. And you? You’re a smart guy, and you’ve just filed a patent for one of your makers, and since Rothbauer’s in construction, you’ve got this idea that’s so crazy it Just. Might. Work.
“At the beginning, it was all talk, right?” Hill said, watching Templeton for signs he was hitting close to home. Templeton didn’t so much as twitch, but Rachel saw his fear, his stress and anxiety... There was even a large measure of shame, and this grew as Hill kept moving through his version of events. “The thing about this bomb you built? It never had to go off. For a while, it was the ultimate form of walk-and-talk therapy. The two of you did something secret. Something empowering. And once it was done? You could forget it existed and get on with your lives.”
Maker Space Page 35
