Marked

by Alex Hughes

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  Turner glanced over. Poisoned five other members of his work group, one of which killed herself, before we shut him down. We tried to let him out, once. That will never happen again. She sent a subtext of grave violence and chaos they’d barely shut down in time.

  How long has he been here? I asked, disturbed. I’d never been this far in the basement before.

  Seven years, Turner replied. I was a rookie at the time. I’m told he’s currently on a hunger strike. He may die. No one’s willing to go in there to make him eat.

  We walked on.

  • • •

  Turner took me to a small break room two floors above where we’d been. Small paper cuts of turkeys and pilgrims were taped onto the cabinets. How . . . festive.

  I washed my hands—getting clean an almost obscene pleasure—and drank five cups of tap water from a soy-paper disposable cup. I’d chosen a cup at random from the middle of the stack to be safe.

  She stood well enough back to give herself room and watched me very carefully. She could watch me drink water; I’d had people watch me do far more personal things with far more interest. I had a sixth cup of water, balled the cup up, and threw it in the garbage. Then I pushed the Guild stuff into a pocket.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now you take me to the police station.”

  She shook her head. “Now you talk to Meyers’s ex-wife. Then I take you to the police station. Assuming we get Rex’s permission.”

  I sighed. “Look, I agreed to this. Sort of. I’ll do my part.” I didn’t see any other practical way, and Meyers had been a good guy, at least I could tell myself that. “But I’ve got a real job that got me the expertise Rex wants in the first place. I need that job.” I did, damn it. Routine and support kept you on the wagon, or so my sponsor said. That and getting plenty of sleep. I’d had no sleep at all and here I was already late to work. I was not falling off the wagon today. “You want me sane, you’ll take me to that job.”

  Turner looked at me, no sense of humor.

  “He didn’t say I couldn’t go back,” I said. “It’s Friday, right?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll come back tonight. You can park me in a cell for a nap and then we can get to work,” I said.

  “You still need to interview Cindy Ballon,” she said. But I had her.

  “Meyers’s ex-wife?”

  She nodded.

  Time to give in on my end, cement this negotiation. “I’ll talk to her. Fifteen minutes, okay? If I can’t get the information from her in that amount of time, it’s going to take a few hours anyway. How far is this away?”

  “She’s already waiting in the interrogation rooms down the hall,” Turner said.

  “Obviously the guards haven’t slipped in expediency.”

  “We try.”

  I pinned on the badge. It felt weird, after all these years.

  • • •

  Cindy Ballon (formerly Meyers) was a square woman with a square jaw, plain with straw yellow hair and a body like a linebacker’s. Then she looked up and smiled, and my whole impression changed; the jaw, the nose that had seemed so harsh now just seemed striking. Her personality filled her up, the strength of character she carried with her into Mindspace and the mannerisms she displayed making it all work somehow, so that you forgot your first impression completely.

  She was also sad, almost unbearably sad, and not hiding it.

  “Hello,” I said, nodding the significant nod that was a greeting between telepaths. I introduced myself quickly mind-to-mind. Have we met? I asked, giving the contextual information about Kara’s and my engagement and the years in question.

  She thought. No, I was stuck in D.C. with a government Minding job most of that time period. Del went on vacations by himself. Regret tinged her mental voice. “Hello to you too,” she said out loud, more out of habit than anything else I was betting. Minding—mental bodyguarding—usually required you to hold two conversations and/or two thoughts at once on a regular basis, so she’d be used to it.

  I sat down at the plain table. Turner watched from a few feet behind me. If this was meant to intimidate me, she was out of luck.

  “Let’s do this out loud,” I said. I glanced at the clock. Fourteen minutes would be . . . okay. I could do this.

  “That’s fine,” she said. She took a breath, sadness leaking out. “Del and I divorced in August. It wasn’t—he didn’t want to end it. He begged me to stay. But . . . well, I’d met someone else.” In D.C., her mind echoed, along with a face and a subtle sexual overtone. “It didn’t seem fair to anyone to prolong the pain.”

  “Do you think he killed himself?” With an iron? my own mental voice added. Might as well go straight to the heart of this.

  Her public mind recoiled from the thought. “I . . .” She trailed off, looked at her hands, then back at me. “I honestly don’t know. He seemed okay, after a couple of months. I checked on him occasionally. I had friends check on him. I still cared.”

  She should have thought of that before she cheated, my mind supplied.

  Cindy winced like I’d slapped her.

  I realized she’d read me, and rebuilt my shields. Amateur move. I had been interrogating normals far, far too long.

  She pulled herself up, but some of that personality had dimmed. “I do know he was acting very strangely a few weeks before he died. One of my friends . . .” She trailed off again.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, mutual friends. He went over for dinner and they ate off paper plates with disposable silverware. He asked for a real knife when his broke in half trying to cut the meat—and Del said he didn’t have any. That he’d thrown them all out. He gave some stupid excuse.”

  “He threw away the knives?” I asked.

  Cindy looked away. “That’s what he said. I looked up his trash allowance. . . . He’d thrown away three times the amount of nonrecyclables his plan allowed. They actually fined him. And Del paid the fine—the first time, with no arguing. Del would argue about anything, and he’d walk through fire to save a buck on what he considered a ‘nonessential.’ The Del I knew . . .” She paused here, swallowing back tears and disgust. “The Del I knew would spread out the extra trash over several weeks just to avoid the fine. Even then he’d argue about it.” She looked at me. I was a horrible man for the cheating comment, her mind supplied.

  I said nothing. In this case I agreed with her.

  Behind me, Turner shifted. “He’s the best hope you have of getting real answers to Meyers’s death, Ms. Ballon. I’d answer his questions.”

  She looked at me, vulnerable and unhappy. “What do you need to know?”

  I racked my brain. “Did he seem sad? Depressed?”

  “Not particularly. He called me up, out of the blue, on Sunday. He said he was tired of storing all of his stuff, and he wanted me to have his grandfather’s old Shaker cabinet. That was one of his most cherished possessions; it’s the master project from a carpenter in the nineteenth century, and it’s been in the family for centuries.” She took a breath. “I told him no, of course, but he wouldn’t let it go. I finally said if it meant so much to him, I’d take it. It should have gone to our children, if we’d had any, he’d said.” That had really hurt, her mind filled in. She’d thought that was maybe why he’d done it, knowing she wouldn’t be able to throw it away or give it away, looking at it every day and thinking she’d cost Meyers his chance at children. A fitting punishment perhaps. And so she’d taken it. Penance.

  “Do you think he was crazy, at the end?” I asked her as gently as I could, not that it would matter at this point. I’d probably already offended her as much as it was possible for one human being to offend another. But giving away prized possessions was classic suicide behavior, though that was not in itself what the Guild deemed crazy.

  “C
razy?” she asked, and shook her head slightly. “He seemed perfectly sane at the time. A little too sane. Sad, you know? But together. I’m told that it’s possible to carry madness for a long time without developing symptoms, though.” She shivered. “The professionals are putting me under house arrest for another week just in case. At least I should be able to catch up on my reading.” A slight twinge of fear entered the room.

  That same fear, the fear of what I’d seen in that basement cell, what I’d felt trying to burrow into my brain, resonated with me. I was unlikely to develop madness from being in a room with her secondhand for fifteen minutes, I told myself. But the back of my head didn’t believe.

  The clock said fifteen minutes had gone by. “Thank you for answering my questions, Ms. Ballon.”

  I stood, but she didn’t, her mind saying she was waiting for me to leave. Now.

  I left, Turner walking a little behind me so I didn’t attack passersby. Helpful of her.

  • • •

  A man was waiting for me in the hallway. He had a dark complexion, dark, short natural hair, and the overly smooth skin and too-bright eyes of expensive Guild age treatments, only really available to the political elite of the Council and its advisers. He had the movement of a long-distance runner, smooth and minimalist, but he watched his surroundings like a cop. Something about his mind and the way he shielded made me think he was older than Jamie, though how much I couldn’t tell with the treatments.

  He was wearing a plain black jumpsuit that reminded me of Turner’s uniform without actually being a uniform. His Enforcement patch and rank insignia told me he was very highly ranked. And his stance when he saw me told me we were going to have trouble.

  “Tobias Nelson, I presume,” I said, making the first move in the confrontation. This was the man who’d threatened Meyers in open Council, the one Kara thought had killed him. And his job meant he could cover it up with impunity.

  I did the intense nod the Guild did instead of a handshake.

  He returned the greeting with a small, sharp nod. “You’re interfering in my cases.”

  “I’m looking into the suspicious death of a man who deserves the truth,” I said. As of the last half hour anyway. “You want me gone, I’d suggest you take it up with Rex.” I wasn’t given much choice, and I’ll try to stay out of your way, I told him, privately.

  “I’d rather turn you over to a mind-scanner.”

  I stared at him. Have someone ruffle haphazardly through my brain without my permission? For opposing his political position. Maybe he was corrupt as hell. “You’re certainly welcome to try,” I said. “But I will be missed, and I will object. Loudly, and often. Do you really want the scandal with the up-and-coming students?”

  His eyes narrowed then, and an almost-respect leaked out into Mindspace. “I could kill you,” he said. “I have the jurisdiction.”

  I sighed, and stepped forward. I was getting tired of people threatening me with death. I looked him straight in the eye. “You kill me without a reason and Rex will see to it that the Council takes your job,” I said, with the intense belief of a self-lie made truth. Then another mostly truth: “Then you’ll have the entire DeKalb County Police Department camped outside your headquarters. I am not that important to you. And I am not a threat. I just want to know what happened to Del Meyers. His family deserves the truth. Kara’s family is not going to go away.” I looked down briefly, then back at him, not an admission of weakness, but an acknowledgment of beta status. I hadn’t survived as long as I had on the street by trying to be alpha male, head of the pack; I’d rather talk my way out of a fight than take a punch any day. But neither could I back down. The weak got dead in that world. Time to talk my way to the right balance and do exactly what I wanted in the first place.

  The moment sat on the edge, him taking offense or letting it go, having felt he’d won.

  “I am not a threat to you,” I said again.

  Someone cleared her throat. We turned to look at Turner.

  In Mindspace, she was sending out vague waves of concern.

  “What is it, Turner?” Nelson asked.

  She was frowning. “Sir. It’s on the radio. . . . There’s . . .”

  “Well, spit it out.”

  “Another sixteen people checked themselves into Mental Health in the last hour.”

  Impatience from Nelson, and the feeling that this wasn’t a new trend.

  She stood a little straighter. “John Spirale has been reported dead. Looks like suicide.”

  “Meyers’s assistant?”

  Mental confirmation from Turner.

  Nelson winced, a visible thing. “How many people did he come into contact with yesterday after we let him out of house arrest?”

  “Unknown, sir. Several dozen.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, looking back and forth, not sure I was following all of this.

  Nelson turned to me. “We have a contagious madness situation that has now escalated into a second death. Rex is out of his mind if he wants you involved. You’re no psychologist.”

  I swallowed. “There’s still a chance this is a murder. Even in the normal world, you get copycat suicides. You get waves of the things. It hurts nothing to check it out.” But I was still worried, and still waiting for an opportunity not to do what I was being forced to do.

  Nelson frowned at me.

  “You’re a convicted felon,” he said. “You could infect my people with more than whatever Meyers had.”

  I swallowed. Why did it always come down to that? “Trust me, it doesn’t matter. If I know the Guild, you’re cracking down on all nonessential movement right now. People are going to be largely locked in their rooms anyway. Who am I going to infect at this point? And anyway, I’d be exposed thirdhand. There’s no way I’m contagious.”

  My brain caught up and I realized then that I was arguing to do what I’d just been threatened into. Blackmailed into. What was I thinking?

  But I could get rid of my debt, of the power the Guild had against me, by investigating the death of a man who deserved the truth. Maybe I did believe in this. Maybe enough to risk madness, if Nelson was standing in front of me covering it up.

  “What do you have to lose, Nelson?” I asked.

  He sighed, and told Turner, “Take him back to his police friends. I’ll see you tonight,” he told me then. “I expect you to stay out of my way and not cause trouble. Or I will cash in that chip, and you will end up dead.”

  “Understood,” I said. Oh, joy, I was caught in a power struggle of epic Guild proportions. For a dangerous cause I had nothing to do with. And, worse, I was late to work.

  CHAPTER 5

  Turner dropped me off in the Guild transport vehicle two blocks from the department. She opened up the car door in the back, gridded-off section. I got out, cautiously, feeling like a criminal in a way I hadn’t since my drug convictions.

  “Now, remember, I will pick you up tonight at five thirty,” she said. “I will have additional backup available. If you do not show on time, I will come and get you.”

  “I’ll be in the police station,” I said, huddling deeper in my coat against the wind. It seemed colder than usual today, colder than usual all month, actually.

  “I will get a teleporter,” she said. “I’m not playing. Pack an overnight bag. You may or may not end up back here for your job. Rex and Nelson were both very specific. Guild first.”

  “Yeah, that seems to be a theme these days,” I said, and started the hike to the department, feeling like something the cat dragged in.

  • • •

  I knocked on my boss’s doorframe, metaphorical hat in hand. Might as well head this off. Lieutenant Marla Paulsen didn’t like being interrupted for anything short of an asteroid barreling toward the earth—but neither would she accept silence when I was this late to work.

 
; “Have a minute?”

  She waved me in, pulling together a set of papers and putting them on top of an already overflowing stack. There were deep circles under her dark eyes, and the lines on her face had deepened, seemingly overnight. She was a young sixty-mumble black woman with high standards and endless energy, but today, she seemed older and somehow smaller. Judging from that and the general feel of exhaustion coming off her in Mindspace, I’d be shocked if she’d gotten any sleep at all last night. That made two of us.

  “We’ve got final budget arguments this afternoon, and so far it’s not going well,” she said. “I have ten minutes at most, and that only because of the stunt you pulled yesterday. You realize you were over an hour late to work today. After you left hours early yesterday, with no information.”

  “I left a message,” I said. “I’m here now.”

  “And trust me, that’s all that’s keeping you in the job right now. Clark is angrier than I think I’ve ever seen him. He had to pull a double shift on no notice. What’s going on?” She sat back in the chair, seemingly tired and kind, but I knew better. If I didn’t have a good reason, she would roast me over the coals. Slowly. “You look like hell.”

  “Kara called. There’s been a death in her family and she wanted me there,” I said, which was true but not the whole truth.

  “And Kara is . . . ?” Paulsen prompted.

  “Remember the Guild attaché who came down to help us with the Bradley case last August? We were engaged a long time ago. She’s helped the department more than once.”

  “Ah. Chenoa. I’m sorry to hear about that,” Paulsen said. She sighed. “It’s not family. You can’t take unplanned leave if it’s not family. Those are the rules. You owe Clark an apology and at least a couple of double shifts to make up for his time loss earlier. You also owe me some pay—I’ll dock for the entire week.”

  “What?” I protested. It’s not like I got to see the money—the department handled my finances for me—but a whole week? “That seems out of proportion.” I knew I’d have to bring up the Guild at some point, especially if I couldn’t do the double shifts, but I didn’t know how to do it.