Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  But as I lay her still body down on the floor to the sound of the Louisiana State Police breaking down the ice floe blocking the hall outside, I didn’t have any answers.

  83.

  Sifting through the mess of what happened wasn’t a short process. When the state police made it inside and pulled Warrington out, everything started to follow the usual procedure after that: witness statements from me, Corcoran and Warrington (though he was pulled into a different room, probably under the assumption that keeping him away from all threats, including me, was safest).

  Once they had those, I didn’t even bother asking if I could leave, because I knew I couldn’t. I just sat there, watching the morgue techs packing up Brianna Glover’s body, wondering if I’d made the right choice.

  Burkitt shouldered his way into the hotel room shortly thereafter, Holloway behind him. Burkitt’s eyes were lidded with concern, but Holloway was just taking in the mess, scanning the room as they both crossed over to where I stood against the windows, watching the remaining ice slide off as it melted, a little at a time. I could almost see New Orleans through it now.

  “Heard you saved the governor,” Burkitt said, looking at the black body bag on the gurney. It was already closed and zipped, Brianna Glover’s earthly remains probably set for just about the same end as her sister’s—if Warrington’s pet monkey had the gumption to claim them so the sisters could be buried together when Emily went back into the earth.

  “Yep,” I said without a single ounce of enthusiasm. It was hard to be excited over killing a would-be assassin who had a pretty good grievance against the person she was trying to kill.

  “That’s good work, Nealon,” Holloway said, and, if possible, he sounded even less excited about it than I did.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “You climbed a crane and jumped into a hotel to save the governor after he’d totally snubbed you,” Burkitt said, nodding along. “You saved his life after he’d gotten you kicked off the case. That’s dedication. Right, Holloway?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah,” Holloway said, still lacking enthusiasm. “You done good.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding along, “I killed a woman who hadn’t killed anyone and saved the life of a man who confessed to sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old right in front of me.” I puckered my lips, feeling sour. “Yeah, I’m a real hero today. Someone give me a medal for my awesome work, because I totally deserve it.”

  Burkitt sagged. “I’m sure it doesn’t feel that way, but we have a system for a reason. You know what happens when you let injustice answer injustice. I know it sucks, but…” He shrugged. “Maybe we can get Warrington on something else. Legitimately.”

  I looked over at Jenna Corcoran, who had been sitting on the bed quietly for the last half hour or so, once her statement was wrapped up, and was now looking at me, saying not a damned thing.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “I heard his confession,” Corcoran said, and for the first time since I’d met her, she didn’t sound stiff.

  She sounded…haunted.

  “Yeah,” I said, almost whispering. I had a feeling this was going somewhere.

  “I heard,” she said, voice rising, her eyes squinted, some new fire burning in them. “Look, I’ve worked in politics a long time. I’ve seen some dirty things. Graft, people enriching themselves. But I’ve never heard of something like this.” She shook her head. “You want him?” She swallowed, throat moving visibly. “I know a way you can get him. I’ll give you…” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “I’ll give you everything you need to put him away. Just…get me out of here.”

  I looked at Burkitt, whose eyes were wide, then Holloway, who was just a little cooler about it, then back to Corcoran.

  “Okay,” I said, rising. I reached in my pocket for my phone. “Come on. Let’s find a room and we’ll take your statement.” I drew a breath as I looked at the black body bag one last time. “We’ll get the ball rolling on this.” I looked away. “Justice.”

  84.

  Olivia

  “Wowee,” Augustus Coleman said, sauntering up to me at the scene of the capture, his brother only a couple steps behind him. I’d watched their car show up; the LVPD officer let them cross the police tape. “Looks like somebody had some fun.”

  I tried to decide if he meant me. “Uhm, no,” I said. “There was no fun.”

  Jamal, quieter, took a look around for himself. “Well, it sure looks like someone got the job done. This was Veronika?”

  The old me would have stuttered, would have blushed, would have made some apologetic statement of how I had been the one to actually—

  No. Wait.

  The old me wouldn’t have beaten the bad guy.

  “I did it,” I said, and it came out somewhere between whispered and proud. “I beat her, uh, ass.”

  Augustus’s eyebrows went up. Way up. “You did? Well done, Olivia.”

  “Yeah.” Veronika’s voice came from a little ways behind them as she ducked under police tape held up by another officer. Her face was still bandaged. “I wasn’t even here for this, so don’t go trying to give me credit.” She sauntered past the Coleman brothers and over to me, glancing at the crater before smiling. “Looks like somebody had a coming-out party for her badass self.”

  I didn’t know quite what to say to that. “Uhh…sort of…?”

  “I think Veronika just means, in her own, inimitable way,” Jamal said, “congrats on leveling up.” He glanced at the crater. “Beating a speedster is big-league stuff. They’re way up on the power scale.” He eyed me. “Then again, I always figured maybe you were, too, if you could channel it right.”

  “I think I figured out how to do that,” I said, flexing a hand. A few motes of desert sand had settled on my sleeve, and I puffed them off with a momentum surge.

  The three of them watched, and Augustus nodded. “Well, all right then. Crossing up in my territory, I see how it is.”

  “Is Reed following you guys?” I asked. They’d already hauled off Sylvia, and I heard Crumley was being released even now, with the apologies of the LVPD. “He said he was on his way when I talked to him before.”

  “Nah, he turned back,” Jamal said, “when he heard everything was wrapped up here. Vegas PD called him themselves to offer their thanks on the big collar. Though they weren’t real clear on how it all came down. You probably should have called him yourself to let him know.”

  “I would have, but I kinda left my cell phone and wallet in the desert,” I said, rubbing my shoulders. It wasn’t cold anymore, but something about it felt reassuring. I smiled. “I’ve been kinda busy.”

  Veronika took another look around. In the distance, toward the Strip, I could see the top of the Bellagio, and its flame-scorched towers. She took it all in with a glance, and did a little nodding of her own. “You really have, kiddo.” She smiled. “You really have been.”

  85.

  Sienna

  “Is there anything else?” I asked, sitting across from Jenna Corcoran in an empty hotel room, Burkitt and Holloway right over my shoulder. They were acting as witnesses, but we were all recording the whole thing on our phones. Mine was set up to do a streaming upload to the cloud, putting the entire thing on the FBI servers as the story left her lips.

  She’d laid it all out for us, the school bill corruption project. It was a tangled web, one that involved construction rackets, contractors bidding on massive projects funded by state and federal money in exchange for kickbacks to Warrington and a dozen others—all under the guise of improving education for the poor.

  And the sonofabitch I had just saved was making sure that he and his cronies got twenty percent off the top.

  “I think that’s everything,” Corcoran said. She looked tired, but she’d been strong throughout.

  “Good God,” Holloway whispered behind me.

  It wasn’t quite my sentiments, which ran more in the direction of cursing the name of Ivan Warrington, but I didn’t obje
ct. “This is a good start,” I said, clicking off my recorder and pulling it from the table.

  “Yeah,” Burkitt said, pulling his and Holloway’s from the table as well. “This will light a stick of dynamite under Warrington.”

  I glanced back at him. “You’re not stuck here for questioning. Mind getting that back to your office and start the ball rolling on it?”

  Burkitt nodded, handing Holloway’s phone back to him. “I’ll get right on it.” He had a glint in his eyes. “It may take a while to unravel all this, but once it does…” He smiled. “Warrington will see the inside of a cell.”

  “Good,” I said. But I didn’t meet his gaze.

  “I oughta go call Willis and tell him what we just found out,” Holloway said, staring down at his phone like he held a bomb. He kind of did, really, with the recording on it. “He’ll want to pass it up the chain.”

  “Yep,” I said, stirring to look at him. “You do that. Tell him I’ll call him as soon as the troopers clear me to…well, do anything.”

  He nodded and went out the door, leaving me alone with Jenna Corcoran, who had lapsed into silence, her eyes on the floor in quiet contemplation.

  “This isn’t going to be enough, is it?” I asked.

  She stirred, then shook her head. “Probably not. I mean, the investigators will do their thing, and maybe they’ll find enough actual evidence from Mitchell Werner’s files, but maybe not. They could flip him, I guess. I don’t know how your investigations work—”

  “They move slow,” I said. “And they’ll move slower in this case, because they’ll want to gather everything they can before tipping Warrington off that they’re after him.”

  She shook her head. “He’s already cleaning up all the messes after your conversation yesterday.” She ran fingers through her hair, pulling it back into a ponytail and then realizing she didn’t have anything to actually hold it with, so she turned it loose. “They’re already moving to cover their tracks.”

  I closed my eyes. Well done, Sienna. Haste makes waste of investigations, and I had maybe made a waste of this one before it had even started.

  That was okay. Or rather, it wasn’t, but I had an idea how to blunt its impact as related to Warrington. “Would you be willing to talk to a reporter about everything you just went through with me? And everything you heard in that room when Warrington confessed?”

  She looked me right in the eyes, and there was strength there. I didn’t know what it was, but something had happened to Jenna Corcoran or someone she loved, something in the vein of Emily Glover’s experience, and it had rung a loud bell in her head, one she didn’t know how to quiet. “Yes,” she said, without doubt.

  “You know who Whit Falkner is?” I asked. She nodded. “She was working on the Emily Glover story but could never get a second source to confirm.” I leaned in. “You heard the confession.”

  “So did you,” Corcoran said.

  I nodded. “But the FBI won’t let me talk to reporters. Officially, anyway.”

  “And you just go along with that?” There was a definite hint of skepticism in how she asked me that question.

  “For now,” I said. “But you—you could lay all this out for her. Emily Glover. The school scam. Whit could really turn up the heat on Warrington, on Mitchell Werner, get the public eye on them so it’d be a lot harder for him to hide or destroy evidence.”

  She chuckled. “I don’t think that’s how it works, but…yeah. Maybe it’d even do some good.” She looked down at her hands, kneading them together in her lap. She wiped them against her pant legs. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Good,” I said as my phone buzzed. It was just a text message, a single line from Chalke:

  Well done. You are cleared by the Louisiana State Police to leave and booked on the 8 pm to Laguardia. Return to base.

  I stared at the simple words, and shook my head. Directive from the boss, and I had to step to it. A trooper appeared at the door, and said, “Ma’am?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and looked down at Jenna Corcoran. “You got this?”

  She looked me dead in the eye. “I got this.”

  “Good,” I said, and followed the trooper out.

  86.

  “There’s a cab waiting for you downstairs,” the trooper told me once we got out in the hall. The remains of the ice walls Brianna had made were still melting away in the corridor, their wetness staining the paint and causing the carpet to squish as I stepped through. The air had a strange absence of humidity in here. Which maybe wasn’t so strange when I considered that Brianna had drawn it out to make those barriers both in here and outside.

  The troopers lining the halls gave me polite nods as I passed. We were on the same side again by their reckoning, and I was forgiven and bygones forgotten. That was fine with me; they were doing their jobs, even if they were stuck protecting a loathsome human tick who fed on society’s own blood. That wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t like Warrington had run on a platform of raping teenagers and stealing from poor kids.

  He didn’t show his face as I made my way to the elevator, which didn’t surprise me. It would have actually shocked me if he had, because I expected I’d never be put in a position to look him in the eye ever again, by his own demand.

  Or to touch him, which is what he probably feared more.

  The elevator ride down was quiet, and the lobby was full of troopers and no one else. Crowds waited out on the sidewalk surrounding the glass lobby, held back by police tape and human decency, the bounds of a society that was still functioning.

  I let that thought comfort me as the trooper led me into the portico, where a cab was waiting, alone, surrounded by local PD and Louisiana State Police cars. Another trooper was waiting with my suitcase, apparently packed for me. Hopefully they hadn’t forgotten anything important. He slung it into the back of the cab as I got in, then shut the trunk.

  The cabbie kept his back to me and rumbled off, passing a local cop in a yellow vest who waved us out into the back alley and on to Magazine Street. We passed the Ruby Slipper and the Bon Ton Cafe, where he slowed. He hadn’t said a word since I’d gotten in, and that was fine by me.

  Then he pulled into the curb right next to the Bon Ton, and I frowned. I opened my mouth to ask him what he was doing when someone walked up to the door and opened it, sliding it right next to me as I watched with a jaded eye.

  “Hey,” I said to Michelle as she wiped a little sheen of sweat off her forehead. “How was yoga class?”

  She exhaled swiftly. “Punishing. How was your final confrontation with Warrington?”

  I eyed the cabbie, who had yet to turn around or say anything.

  Michelle watched me looking at him. “Oh, don’t worry. I own the company. He’s one of mine.”

  “And he just happened to pick me up?” I gave her a little side-eye.

  “Of course not,” she said with a smile. “I volunteered our services to the police in this time of crisis. Anything we can do to help, you know. That’s the mark of a community-minded, going-legit company. So here you are, and my question remains—how’d it go?”

  “Warrington confessed,” I said. “In case you didn’t know.”

  “To Emily?” she asked, breath catching in her throat.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Jenna Corcoran heard, and it sent her over the edge. She’s going to talk to Whit Falkner.”

  Michelle looked straight ahead, smile fading. “Good. For whatever it’s worth…good. At least it’ll finally be out there.”

  “How much of a splash will it make, though?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Michelle said, looking out the window. “Depends on how much the local media wants to cover it. They like Warrington.”

  “Enough to cover up allegations of child rape?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked like she had to fight with that answer. “I hope not.”

  “What about in the realm of politics?” I asked.

  “I think he can count on some stinging
condemnation in the legislature,” she said. “He has enemies, and they won’t hesitate to bludgeon him with the allegations every chance they get. They’ll try to make hay of it, but whether it sticks has a lot to do with how much circulation any of Whit’s stories get. If she ends up being the lone voice, crying in the wilderness…” Michelle shrugged.

  “The story dies in silence,” I said, nodding along.

  “Is she going to talk about the school bill corruption?” Michelle asked.

  I warred with myself before answering, and finally decided saying nothing was maybe the best answer of all.

  Michelle just watched me for a second, then nodded. “Just as well.”

  I gave her another good eyeballing. “‘Just as well’? Didn’t you tell me you had a piece of that?”

  She shrugged. “Like I told you, I’m trying to take this thing legit. It’s a process, though. I don’t have much of the school thing, mostly on the construction side, and if it goes down, that sucks, but I’ll live. I’m not directly involved, and it’ll lop off a tentacle of my business I wasn’t sure what to do with anyway.” She smiled just a little. “And if I get hit, no one will think for a second I gave any of this to you, because why would I be that crazy?”

  “Good cover.”

  “Exactly,” she said as the cab slowed just before a freeway onramp. “Well, this is where I leave you, Nealon.”

  “Thanks, Michelle,” I said, mostly sure I meant it. “And about Corcoran—”

  “I’ll have people keeping an eye on her,” Michelle said, opening the door. “But I wouldn’t worry about Warrington going after her that way.” She stepped out onto the pavement. “It’s a lot more likely he’s going to come after her reputation, so that these stories have even less impact.” She held the door open and leaned down. “He doesn’t have to literally kill the messenger in order to silence her, after all. That’s Werner’s specialty. Character assassination. Muddy her up enough, no one wants to listen to what she has to say. And that…well, it’s something the media is more than open to participating in because it’s a much more interesting story than some intricate, arcane follow-the-money piece about school corruption.”