by Jolie Mason
At first, Jason's terrified face was the only thing in the shot. Just staring, frightened eyes looking back at her in a never ending close up. She felt nauseous as she watched his hands jerking in the struggle against his bonds, and his body moving side to side as he tried to fight the ropes holding him.
"Graaay," the killer singsonged from somewhere in the dark off camera. "Can you guess who this is?"
Then, he jumped into the shot with a maniacal laugh. "Boo, right?" Tanner just kept laughing.
Tanner Murphy had once been a handsome man, with a soldier's physique, tanned skin and rugged outdoorsman looks. Now, she only noticed the insanity that appeared to occupy his dark chocolate eyes on the screen. All she could see was a broken mind barely hanging on behind a boyishly handsome face.
On the screen, he just laughed and laughed like he'd told a joke, like it was the best joke he'd heard in his life. Hayden watched Tanner in helpless horror, but she slowly became aware of a hand linking with hers. Hayden looked down.
It was Gray's hand clutching hers desperately. He'd gone ghostly pale. She squeezed to let him know she was here, but she doubted anything would make this better, for either of them.
The reporter, Jason, made noises of fearful protest. Jerking away frantically, as Tanner approached him. "Look at your camera there, Jason. Say hi to Gray."
The difference in the two men was striking. Jason's frame was thinner, rangy. He worked a sedentary job chasing stories from place to place. Though he wasn't a weak man, there was a huge difference in the physical strength of the two men. Jason looked like he'd just walked off a military recruitment poster.
She winced as Tanner drove a knife blade through Jason's shoulder. "Now, Jason, don't you worry about that at all. That one will not kill ya. Might have a little trouble with that joint later, if you know what I mean, man, but it will not kill you."
He turned back to the camera. "You see Gray, I know that because of you. I have all this stuff up here in my head because of you. I know what's a fatal injury and what's not. I know about how long it takes to bleed out from an arterial trauma. For some reason, I know that if you set a stasis field just right, you can hold a subject still, unable to talk or to move. All the while, they slowly bleed out. Everything that was them just slowly bleeds away, and there's not a damn thing they can do about it. It's fascinating stuff, really."
Tanner raised his hands with the bloody knife clutched in his right, and he stared at them, transfixed. Hayden wondered what held him fascinated, the blood or the knife. "I know how to save those lives, and I know how to take them away. Just like you, Gray. Just like your Trust doctors did to me."
She covered her mouth with her left hand and held tightly to Gray. On screen, Tanner's face crumpled into an emotional mask of nothing but pain.
"I can remember who I was, man. I can, just barely before I was Romanov's monster. I can remember...," he said. Turning cold, dead eyes, back to the lens, he finished, "He's gone now. I wanted you to know that. Right? Tanner Murphy is gone and he's never coming back. So, you do your duty, Gray, like I did mine."
"Oh, God," she whispered and leaned into Gray's shoulder. He couldn't have been plainer. He wanted Gray to make sure he was stopped. He wanted his friend to kill him.
When she looked back at the screen, he marched over to the man hanging tied to a pole somewhere, and he coldly sliced his side, then triggered a stasis field and left the recording going.
It took twenty minutes for Jason Hernandez to die, but Gray never made it that long. He was in the bathroom throwing up after four.
Hayden stood outside the door waiting for him. Ace was taking watch for the moment. She almost let loose with her own tears when she heard him retch into the sink one last time.
"Gray?" she called.
"Just a minute."
The sound of running water suggested he was brushing his teeth. The water stopped and Gray stepped out wiping his face with a cloth.
"Gray," she said, but there were no other words for what she'd just seen. The man before her was as different from the man she'd met as night was from day. This man was lost. He wasn't well put together or cold as steel. He was broken by the last few weeks.
And, what he'd witnessed in there had been nearly impossible for her to sit through, yet for him it was far more personal. He felt responsible. Judging from the desolation on his face, it had gutted him.
She lifted her arms and wrapped them around him, pulling him into her shoulder. He just melted there, his own coming up to lock her into his arms. He picked her up and hid his face in her neck, taking the comfort she offered willingly.
"Oh, Gray, shh." He carried her to a nearby sofa and sat down with her on his lap.
Brokenly, he whispered, "I helped do that to him. We made him this way. I helped them."
She cupped his face in her hands. "You did not help them do this. Look, look at me." When he did, she continued, "He admitted to knowing Romanov. He can tell us how they did it. We take him alive, Gray. We get him on a stand, and we put Romanov and anyone else we can find in the deepest, darkest hole we can find. That's the new multi-step plan, Gray. Are you with me?"
He nodded and drew a deep breath.
Hayden wiped away a single tear tracking its way down his strong, masculine jaw, and thought that maybe this was the most intimate moment she'd ever had with any man, with or without clothes.
"What do you need? Ace is going to monitor the property. What can I do?"
He held on tighter, and pressed his face into her chest. "Just stay where you are a moment. I know this must seem weak to you, but I just need to hold you."
She shook her head. "You are a lot of things, Gray, but you never come off weak. In fact, you might be the single most secure man on the planet."
They sat in silence, and Hayden had to fight the urge to make this more intimate. It was so bewitching, this feeling of being needed. It wasn't something she was used to.
Aside from Randall and Mary Ace, she couldn't say she'd been wanted much, let alone needed.
Hayden told herself over and over that this meant nothing. It was just two people having a very bad day, and he wasn't her type. She could keep repeating all the reasons in her head why she shouldn't want this man to hold her like this on a regular basis. She could lie to herself about very convincingly, and then he'd brush a hand over her back or shift to hold her closer. That caused her mind to short circuit into a new train of thought, leading her to fantasies of the two of them in bed on a lazy Sunday, and other wholly inappropriate thoughts.
There was a reason you never got involved on a case. This was it. These thoughts were wrong, but they were and would only remain thoughts.
Hayden pushed all of those feelings far from her mind. This was human nature. There was a reason for this attraction. The answer was, of course, obvious. He was here, and they were in danger. That caused a false sense of intimacy. It happened, but it could cloud her judgment, break their focus, get her sanctioned. All of that and more would be the cost of following this impulse.
She could be his friend, and that's what he really needed right now.
"Better?" she asked him in his ear.
He nodded once, then sprawled back on the sofa taking her body effortlessly with him, and arranging her exactly where he wanted her.
She resisted a bit, then realized he wasn't really seeking anything else. He was like a kid, and she was just a comfort item. She grew warm and comfortable draped over his body on the sofa. Eventually, she heard his breathing settle into regular, felt his deep, gentle breaths in her hair, and she grew tired with him.
Drowsy thoughts drifted over her mind, and then she, too, was asleep and blocking out the rest of the world.
*
She'd made them both sandwiches from the stock Ace had left them and taken her own shower when Gray finished. The night passed relatively quietly with both of them exhausted and watching evening news on the holo.
Thursday spread out on one large sofa,
and Gray was sprawled across a big white chair. This is where they were when images of her vehicle being dragged from the water slid across the holovision for the tenth time of the week. It was a big mystery: missing detective, dragging the river, blah, blah.
"They killed your car. I'm sorry," he said.
She paused to think about the reality that someone had actively tried to kill her with her car. "Yeah, they did, but the bastards missed me. That will be their end. I'm spiteful like that."
She heard his body shift on the chair. "How can you be so casual and sure of yourself?"
"I don't say it casually. They've destroyed more lives than I can count right now. They have turned a good man into a monster, and I intend to make them pay for that. Plus, they killed my car."
Heaviness fell over the two of them, when he finally replied with, "You'd have to start right here. I played my part."
She arranged herself so she could look at him. "Did you have direct or indirect knowledge of what they were actually doing or did you think it was only your experiment running?"
"I thought we were gathering data on the kinder's long term viability and cloning applications toward human research, including the training enhancements. In other words, growing better organs that take a long time to degrade for transplant recipients, teaching soldiers a new language in days, making it possible to have versatile team members with downloaded skills. I never dreamed...."
"All right. Did you act as soon as you knew something was wrong?"
He nodded. "I came to you," he said with a deep rumble of sadness beneath a casual sentence.
"Gray, you did everything you could. Don't let this get in your way. It's not even close to over."
"I know," he answered. "I wish I had your confidence, that's all."
She laughed and laid back down against the sofa arm. "That's not confidence. It's bluster. I learned that from the best. In that arena, Ace is the champion. No one better. What I have is sheer determination." She laughed.
"You and Ace are close? Were you...?"
Confused, she threw a look over at him. "Were we?" she asked, then she realized what he meant. "Oh, seriously, were we... involved? Ew, No!"
She shuddered at the thought. "He's my partner! Plus, he's old. Really old." She moved closer to a floral arrangement in the center of a common room table sitting across from her. "Like he was around with combustion engines, maybe dinosaurs. He was there for the revolution."
Gray must have figured out her game because with an amused laugh, he asked, "Which Revolution?"
To which, she replied with no hesitation, "All of them."
They laughed like children for a bit. "So," Gray said finally. "I take it we have ears listening."
She nodded, but gave him a vulnerable smile. It was good to hear him laugh after the last few days. She wished she could do that again.
"It's a safety precaution. Seriously, Ace is more than a partner. When we were first paired, he was having a hard time. His partner of almost twenty years was killed in the line, and he hadn't gotten over it. Probably, still hasn't. Nobody does. Your partner relationship is one of the closest of your life."
"I was the young, starry eyed trainee thinking I'd save the world. He was the crotchety old veteran telling me how to be. We argued like cats and dogs, then a few years back, something happened."
"Something pretty bad, I'm guessing."
Her expression and body language must have told the story.
She gave a slow nod. "I did just what he hounded me not to. I went into a building without backup on scene, and I barely made it out alive. He was right. He's usually right. That day, I started listening."
"Why?" Gray asked her. "Why'd you go in without backup?"
She smiled mysteriously. "We had an informant in the building. Ace is married to her now. I couldn't stand there and watch her burn. Her family's smuggling enterprise was in that warehouse, and rather than let us find evidence, they tried to burn it all with her in it tied to a chair. Who does that to family?"
"You do a lot of things through determination, don't you?"
She shared a sardonic look with him. "Ace would call it bullheadedness. But, from that day to this, Mary and Ace have been family, my family."
He shook his head. "So, even if you do something wrong, it's for the right reasons."
She nodded. "Just like you did. And on that subject, can you think of any place we should be looking for the audio file?"
He paused a moment, still as a statue. "Don't believe me?"
She sat forward with her elbows on her knees. "I believe you, but you knew Macy better than most. The team isn't finding them as easily as we'd hoped we would. Take some guesses. It's a big lot of files and we need this to go faster."
"Well, he had to know about it, so he'd have kept it where he had constant access, just in case. He was a planner. It's possible he ...." Gray stopped, his eyes losing focus.
"Wait. He adored redundancy. It was his mantra, Two copies of everything. There will be a copy in the cloud. I'd forgotten all about it.
"Oh my god, he and I uploaded everything to a private storage account for our own personal records. Synchrony, it's a data storage company. The password is Ghost4529."
She grinned at him, sensing already that he'd just handed them the day.
"You get that guys?" she asked the plant. "So, Ghost?"
"He was my dog."
"You aren't supposed to use a pet for a password. Let me guess, he was white," she chuckled.
"I was seven!" His false indignation made her laugh.
Her comm dinged on her wrist. She hit audio only. Ace said, "Very funny, Detective. I am not that old. We're in the storage service, but it's gonna take a lot of time to go through the Doctor's files."
"Do what you can. We'll be here in the meantime."
After a few more, light verbal jabs, she and Ace finished up, and Hayden told Gray, "You should get some sleep. Who knows how long the search is gonna take? If it's there, we'll have it in the next few hours."
"What if this audio file doesn't exist? What then?"
"Then, I think of something else."
He smiled sadly. "A bloody force of nature, aren't you?"
"That's me. Hurricane Hayden."
He nodded, then went to find the room she'd assigned to him earlier with no outside points of entry and near her own should she be here long enough to use it. She preferred to stay alert or remain in the room with eyes on the doors. However, chairs and sofas got old after a few days.
Hayden lay there a while in front of the droning holo, thinking about Dr. Gray Kerry. She felt unmistakable sympathy for him. He was obviously hurting, but he was more than that. She could sense it.
Beneath the original slightly cocky brilliance and his current humble disappointment in himself, there was a lot more Gray was capable of expressing. She doubted she'd ever be the one to inspire more in any man, this man in particular, but it was clear he was passionate and focused. Her mind drifted to all the ways he could be passionate and focused.
She shook her head at where those thoughts were going. She stood up and went in search of the gym. Best to be constructive and busy with the good Doctor under her watchful eyes.
*
It bothered her as she ran on a treadmill that folded out of a wall. Romanov had been on a government stipend. How did he afford the dignified house and robot security on government hush money? No one did.
She hit her comm.
A sleepy Ace answered, "Thursday, it's after midnight."
"What's going on with Romanov's financials? He is washing this money somehow."
Ace groaned and said, "He's invested in stock that's skyrocketing. In fact, he lives quite modestly for his means."
"What kind of stock?"
"I will have to look at the file, Hayden. Hotels, I think. Entertainment venues. Maybe a robotics business."
She clapped her hands. "Ooh, there! We need to know if they supply the hardware used by the Trus
t to implant the training packets of information."
"What?" Ace was clearly behind on the tech.
"The Parkway commands are a tertiary set of commands that Gray cannot explain. What if those commands were an override installed from the factory? What if the hardware Gray installed had hidden programing that could be tracked right back to Romanov?"
"Then we'd have him, Hayden," he said more alert now that he sensed a clue in the making. "I'll get on it first thing."
She said thanks and almost let him go, but she called to Ace one more time. "Hey, let's don't tell Gray unless it turns into something. He's been through a lot. I don't want to make it worse.
"You sure, Hayden?"
"Yeah."
He agreed, and Hayden did say goodnight and meant it this time. She could sleep now, since she'd found that clue that had lingered just outside her grasp. She could feel that it would turn into a connection. It was her superpower. Hayden could sense a clue like Mary could sniff out a fib.
In the case against Romanov, this would be the turning point, and she could then tell Gray that he wasn't going to get away with anything, that she'd found his weakness. It was simple. Connect him to the device and prove that device was the one that changed Tanner Murphy into a cold blooded killer. Problem solved.
CHAPTER FIVE
*
Two additional days locked in, and the house was tense.
They were going to have to move soon, if they couldn't find the files. It was taking longer than anticipated because Macy had a lot of audio files. He was a music fan apparently.
Bess, Risen's AI, wasn't having an easy time of it because they didn't know how the code would be stored, so they were looking for any code. Turns out that industry these days used entirely too much subliminal marketing code for Hayden's peace of mind. She might have to write her councilman.
Ace had commed her earlier with the new safe house location and news that Romanov was indeed connected to the robotics firm used by the lab through a series of shell companies. It was a matter now of finding out what the lab used from Romanov's company, and matching that with the one currently making a mess of Tanner Murphy's brain.
