Touch of the White Tiger

by Julie Beard

  Who it was nearly stopped my heart. “Oh, my God!”

  It was Victor Alvarez, the seventeen-year-old son of the Chicago mayor. I’d met Victor briefly when I’d done a top secret retribution job for his father. This was a disaster of monstrous proportions. What the hell had happened here? Had Roy and Victor been in a shoot-out?

  “Angel,” came Roy’s weak cry.

  I ran the thirty feet back to his side and my eyes widened when I saw how white he was. He looked at me with terror shimmering in his eyes.

  “Angel, I’m dying.” He started to convulse, gasping desperately for air.

  I knelt and took him in my arms, but he shook so violently his hand socked me in the temple and I nearly blacked out. When I regained my composure, he was still, his eyes wide open.

  “No!” I shouted and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I fought to keep the cold of death out of my lungs while I stubbornly forced the warmth of life into his, one breath at a time.

  By the time emergency technicians arrived, I was sweating and frantic, pumping at Roy’s chest, willing him to live. Strong hands gripped my upper arms and lifted me away.

  “Hold it, ma’am,” said a brawny EMT, pulling me around. His round, ebony face was serious and soothing. “We have it under control now. You can stop. We’ll take over from here.”

  I took in a hitching breath and nodded, as an EMT took over working on Roy. I looked around and realized the once-empty courtyard was now teaming with detectives, special forces and beat cops. When I looked back at Roy, the technician was pulling a white sheet over him.

  “That’s it?” I shouted. “Why did you stop? Can’t you take him to the hospital?”

  The big guy who had pulled me aside said, “We did a brain scan. There’s no activity.”

  I nodded, finally admitting what I’d known from the beginning. Roy was gone. As devastating as this fact was, I could not cry for him. Not here. I had to know first who killed him. As always, I trusted my own ability to find out more than the cops.

  “Angel Baker?” a voice intoned over my shoulder.

  “That’s me,” I muttered, still staring at the white sheet.

  “My name is Lieutenant William Townsend, director of Q.E.D.”

  I tore my gaze from Roy’s body and focused on a man who towered above me a good six inches. Gray-haired and quietly arrogant, he regarded me assessingly.

  “How did you know who I am?” I asked, refusing to be cowed.

  “Detective Marco briefed me when I arrived,” he answered in an upper-crust British accent. He was apparently a UK immigrant who’d tenaciously clung to his distinguished way of speaking.

  “Marco?” The word was like a bad dream suddenly remembered in the light of day. I glanced over and saw Marco talking to a bevy of crime scene techs and investigators.

  “What time is it?” I hissed.

  Arching one brow in surprise, Lieutenant Townsend replied, “Four-fifty.”

  The proverbial clock had struck midnight. In Marco’s eyes, I was now officially a pumpkin. I’d failed our agreement. I rubbed my eyes with both hands and sighed.

  “I need to see your license,” Townsend said in a clipped manner.

  Without enthusiasm, I handed over my certification card and studied him as he held it by the edges with his uncallused, manicured fingers, as if I had cooties. I’d always been curious about Q.E.D., which was short for the Latin term quad erat demonstrandum, “that which is to be demonstrated.” I’d never met a Q.E.D. officer before but I’d heard the group jokingly referred to as the Quad Squad.

  An elite group, it consisted of about ten cops who had elected to undergo psychosurgery to limit their capacity to feel emotions. After surgery, the officers took the latest bio-meds to spur connections in the logical, left side of the brain, which would then take over functions that had been surgically freed up in the right, or emotional, side of the brain. The idea being that a more logical cop could better solve crimes and would be less inclined to abuse criminals in a fit of anger.

  “Are you carrying a weapon, Ms. Baker?” Townsend inquired, handing me back my ID.

  “A knife and a whip. No gun.”

  He fixed me with cold, gray eyes that fronted a brain working apparently with computer-like precision. In fact, he stared down his aquiline nose at me for so long with so little emotion that I began to wonder if he considered me a suspect.

  “I didn’t do it, Lieutenant. But perhaps I can help you find out who did.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” He gave me a perfunctory smile, perhaps one remembered from presurgery days. He motioned above my head and soon another detective joined us. My skin began to tingle ominously in this new presence and I turned to see who it was.

  Marco. His jaded eyes that so recently glittered at me with desire now shone with reproof.

  “Detective Marco,” Townsend said, “I’m arresting Angel Baker in connection with this double homicide. Would you be so kind as to read her her Miranda rights?”

  Townsend walked away without waiting for a reply. Marco put his hands on his hips and sighed heavily. Our gazes met again. “You just couldn’t wait, could you?” he said accusingly. “What? Another hour was it?”

  “Marco, I—”

  “You have the right to remain silent,” he said in a monotone voice, cutting me off. “You have the right to an attorney….”

  Chapter 3

  Nothing but the Truth

  To say I was stunned by the turn of events would be a gross understatement. I was nearly in shock. I rode calmly in the police aerocar, as if out for a Sunday drive. This is all a mistake, I kept thinking. They have to let me go. When you step in serious doo-doo, you usually don’t realize what a mess you’re in until the action settles and your olfactory senses kick into high gear.

  I got a powerful whiff of it when I walked into Police Substation #1. Fondly known as the Crypt, P.S. #1 was a highly secure concrete fortress built underground so that mobs couldn’t blow it up whenever one of their leaders went there for a pit stop in crime’s never-ending rat race. It was hard to get into and out of without a police escort. Not that I planned on trying to escape. I was innocent, after all. I simply had to prove it, right? It was amazing how someone as hard-bitten as I am could be so naive.

  Still handcuffed, I rode down a concrete corridor lined with twenty glass prison cells on either side. My chauffeur was a beat cop who transported me in the back of an aerocart-type vehicle you see at O’Hare Airport that carry disabled passengers and beep obnoxiously at able-bodied passengers in the way.

  Slowly accepting the fact that I was a criminal suspect and not a tourist, I hunkered down in the back seat and watched the parade of prisoners with growing dismay and increasing alarm over my predicament. My eyes popped when I saw a tall, shirtless body builder in one of the clear cells. His skin was covered with so many body piercings that he looked like a human pin cushion. He glanced at me sullenly as I passed.

  The next cell contained a Skinny—a prostitute who wore no clothes. Ever. Except for the facsimile of clothing permanently tattooed on her body—in this case red short-shorts and a white short-sleeve top. Since it was too painful to tattoo nipples, they remained intact, pink and perpetually protruding from her white “blouse.” Skinnies didn’t like to waste time undressing. Time was money, after all.

  And just when I thought I’d seen it all, we drove past a person I’d hoped I’d never see again as long as I lived.

  “Cyclops!” I exclaimed without thinking.

  The pudgy, red-haired cop in the front looked back and sneered. “He a friend of yours?”

  “Not exactly.” More like enemies. Cy ran his own underground prison in Emerald City, the homeless community that dwelled in the abandoned underground subway system.

  Unlike the previous jailbirds I’d just seen, Cy wore a green city-issued jumpsuit with a hood, which he’d pulled over his hairless head. He’d been badly burned in an underground gas fire when he was young. Blinded in o
ne eye, enraged and twisted by the incident, both physically and mentally, he’d been nicknamed Cyclops after the one-eyed monster in Greek mythology.

  “How did you guys catch him?” I asked. Cops as a rule stayed clear of Emerald City.

  “From what I hear, it wasn’t hard,” the officer replied. “He’s blind.”

  “Blind?” I sat up for a closer look as we drove out of sight, so to speak. Hunched over and scowling, he looked not unlike Shakespeare’s Richard III, whom he was fond of quoting. “I thought he had one good eye.”

  “Yeah,” the cop said, “some chicks wandered down in Emerald City and poked his eye out. Ain’t that a bite?”

  “Yeah,” I replied without enthusiasm. The chicks just so happened to be me and my mother. Lola had stabbed Cy in the face with a stick during our fight. It was the coup de grâce that enabled us to escape from his prison. It must have left him totally sightless. Somehow I felt bad about it. Roy always told me I was a sucker for the underdogs of the world.

  With a tug of guilt and the loss of Roy squeezing my heart, my numbness began to fade and I felt shaky by the time we arrived at the interrogation wing of the station. My chauffeur deposited me, still handcuffed, into a windowless rectangle and locked the door. If this tactic was meant to make me brood over the evening’s events, it worked.

  I would miss Roy terribly. And Victor had been cheated out of his future. I felt for his father’s loss all the more because Mayor Alvarez was a friend of Henry Bassett, my foster father. Both men would grieve, and it killed me that I had to be associated with Victor’s death in any way.

  And, as always, I felt abandoned. It was my natural reaction to everything. Marco could have come to my defense at the crime scene, but he hadn’t. I wasn’t even sure if he thought I was innocent. Now, that really hurt.

  I’d refused to let Lieutenant Townsend, not to mention Marco, see me cry, but now a tear escaped down my placid face. I cried silently, a trick I’d learned during a two-year stint in an abusive foster home before I’d been mercifully rescued by the Bassetts. It was a trick I hoped Lin would never have to learn. God, I had to get out of here and get back to her.

  The door opened with a brisk whoosh and a nerdy little man bearing an underarm full of electronic files, a coffee-stained tie and a suit he must have purchased at the local print shop. I could recognize the unnatural creases of a reconstituted paper suit a mile away. Was this a law student intern? I wondered as I surreptitiously wiped my face.

  “Miss Baker?” he inquired, flashing a row of neglected teeth with his overly exuberant smile.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m your lawyer.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer.”

  He nodded patronizingly as he dropped his load of files on the table. “I’ve heard that before, Miss Baker. And I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’re—”

  “Innocent. Damned straight.”

  He looked up, startled, I presume, by my lack of remorse for the crime he clearly thought I’d committed. “Innocent,” he repeated, clearly speculating on the credibility of my reply, adding doubtfully, “Okay.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Terrence Murray.”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Mr. Murray. I’ve already got one, and I don’t need another.”

  His eyes rounded and he pursed his wet lips. “Look here, Miss Baker, you’re lucky to have me. This is a busy place, as you may have noticed. Most people have to wait days for a chance to meet with a public defender.”

  “Lucky me.”

  He shook his head and opened the top file, muttering, “You’re awfully confident for someone who has caught the interest of Q.E.D.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked up from his papers. “Q.E.D. is the police department’s latest effort to reestablish law and order and polish its tarnished image. If the members of this elite force were willing to go under the knife just to increase their odds of nailing criminals, they won’t back down easily in a case involving a CRS. You’re the competition.”

  “But I’m innocent.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To represent you during your interrogation with Lieutenant Townsend.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk to that inhuman son of a bitch. I’m going to face the Diva.”

  Murray’s nondescript, pale features formed into a nebulous look of confusion. “Are you crazy? You’re better off with Townsend than with the Diva. If she finds fault with your story, you’ll be facing the maximum charges with no chance of a plea bargain. You’ll be stuck in the system for years.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Let me put it to you another way, Miss Baker. I know of serial killers who are walking the streets because there was no DNA evidence to keep them locked up for more than two years, in spite of solid convictions. If they’d faced the Diva when they were first brought up on charges, she would have detected their guilt. With no chance of bail, they would have spent longer in jail just waiting for a trial than the time they ended up serving for murder.”

  I just looked at him for a long moment. “That’s pathetic.”

  “That’s the system. That’s why you can’t face the Diva.”

  “I know you think you know what’s best for me, but I have a little girl waiting for me at home. If I don’t go back to her soon, she’ll think…” Why was I telling him this? He wouldn’t understand. “I have to go home. When I tell the Diva I’m innocent, they’ll let me go.”

  The lawyer’s agitation turned to disdain. “Very well, Miss Baker, but he’s not going to like this one bit.”

  “Who?”

  He looked down at me with a superior smirk. “Detective Marco. Why he’d bother with someone as ungrateful as you, I have no clue.”

  “So he sent you to me?”

  “How else do you think you were lucky enough to see an attorney so quickly? Didn’t you see the gallery of rogues rotting away in glass booths waiting for a chance at representation? And people like you have the audacity to be ungrateful.”

  The thought of Marco throwing me this bone was too much to bear. “Did Detective Marco, by any chance, tell you that he and I are involved?”

  “Not in so many words. But I assumed so. Why else would he bother to call in a marker for this?” He looked at me smugly. “Do you think your relationship with Detective Marco will matter? It will buy you no mercy, Miss Baker.”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as a conflict of interest that one of the arresting detectives has been my lover?”

  “Yes. But it won’t matter to the judge if he’s low on convictions this month. But, of course, that’s why we have an appeals system.”

  “And that lame response is why we have retribution specialists,” I snapped, standing up. “This system is so fucked up it’s beyond repair.”

  “That’s why you need a lawyer.”

  I shook my head. “No. I want to see the Diva. The truth has to count for something in this shithole.”

  He shrugged. “Have it your way.”

  As he headed for the door, I suddenly remembered something Roy had said. “Before Roy Leibman died,” I called out, “he said ‘they’ had left. Someone was at the crime scene before I got there.”

  “Tell it to the Diva,” he said flippantly, adding with some modicum of sincerity, “Good luck, Miss Baker. You’re going to need it. But, as they say, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”

  After he shut the door, I muttered, “Let’s hope she’s got laryngitis tonight.”

  The Diva is a nickname for the Detection and Interrogation Visual Application System. Big words for a simple and beautifully administered lie detector test.

  The suspect sits strapped in a dentist-style chair and talks to a hologram. Behind the hologram projection there’s a camera that records the dilations and retractions of the suspect’s corneas. Based on eye movements, D.I.V.A.S. analysts, watching the interrogati
on and programming the Divas’s questions from behind a two-way mirror, claim they can distinguish between fact and fiction.

  The Diva looked like an oversized opera singer. The program’s designer thought it would be clever if “the Diva” looked liked Brunhilde. So she wore a winged Visigoth helmet and fully loaded breast plates. She was a “fat” lady, as the public defender had put it. I use the word advisedly because it’s against the law to call anyone fat. According to the Self Esteem Act of 2010, I should call her full-bodied, but I didn’t plan on discussing her weight. I was in enough trouble as it was.

  I felt confident that a session with the Diva would exonerate me. I began to have second thoughts, however, when I entered the interrogation chamber and caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Townsend behind the two-way mirror. He saw me and turned out the light in the observation booth, leaving me to stare at my own reflection.

  “It’s just you and me, kid,” I whispered to myself, as I had so many times before. Lord knows I’d gotten myself out of worse scrapes with nothing more than moxie and determination. And now I had the added advantage of my recently discovered psychic abilities. But I hadn’t yet learned to use them on cue. At least, not in a tense situation like this.

  The lights slowly dimmed, except for a white beam that encircled my chair. As I climbed into the hot seat, I silently reassured myself I’d made the right decision. Suspects who volunteer for a session with the Diva are generally given credit for believing in their own innocence, and that sits well with judges. However, if a D.I.V.A.S. session goes badly, the suspect is immediately charged for the crime in question, and no amount of fancy footwork by an attorney can get the charges dismissed after the fact. The case has to work its way through the courts.

  Suddenly the Diva appeared. Her long blond hair hung in braids. Red lipstick brightened a smile so welcoming that I found myself resisting the urge to smile back. I suspected the program had been designed to relax and disarm. That was doubtless another reason the programmer had used the image of a woman. I would have to stay on my guard.