by Alex Hughes
I followed, pulling myself in a little in Mindspace. The surroundings were rather grim, but I smelled a faint lemon-scented cleaner, which helped. “Where to after that?” I said. “I’ll need to talk to whoever reported Meyers as mad in the first place, and the last person to see him alive.”
“The last person to see him alive was Enforcement leader Tobias Nelson,” Stone said. “He, of course, is above reproach, and has interviewed with me to my satisfaction.” His mind added a full stop to that thought, and an unwillingness to discuss this truth any further. Stone pushed through a double set of doorways at the end of the hallway, and they swung, loudly.
• • •
On the other side was a plain room with rows of metal tables and easy-to-clean tile on both the floor and the walls. It looked like the morgue in DeKalb County except for the charts (Guild reading charts in blues and yellows) and the lack of buzzing in Mindspace. In the morgue, they used quantum status drawers to keep the corpses from deteriorating; here, of course, the way they affected Mindspace would be a constant low buzzing, which might change a measurement significantly.
The room was smaller than I was used to, and cold. Very cold.
There were two minds in the room, a bright, cheerful skittery-kinetic mind belonging to a short plain woman near the far table, and a deeper mind like a French horn playing into the darkness, stronger and subtler and more tinged with pain than the woman’s mind. He was closer to the doorway, and looked up when we entered.
He was a large man, late forties, muscled like someone who expected to fight on the front lines, with a haircut just as short. His eyes were odd, red with white striations, a central black pupil staring at us as he blinked too often. A network of fine scars encompassed his eye sockets, cutting through one of his eyebrows and halfway down a cheek; whatever had happened to him to require the artificial eyes had clearly been traumatic.
Stone had already moved forward to greet the man, and they were engaged in a conversation.
“This is Adam Ward,” he said.
“Nice to meet you,” I replied, making sure my mind reflected that and only that. I did the strong nod of greeting. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”
“Ruthgar,” the man said, in a voice like an ancient smoker’s. “I’m the necrokinetic on duty today. Sandra over there is my assistant. She’s micro, but remarkably talented.”
She waved hi from across the room, where she was currently pulling out one of the drawers to release a body onto the stretcher.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
Not here to be social, Stone’s mental voice told me again.
“Necrokinetics?” I asked.
Ruthgar smiled, a disturbing sight, although the mind behind it was genuinely pleased. “It’s a quiet specialty,” he said. “Not common, and we don’t get a lot of press. Necrokinetics specialize in dead tissue. We determine cause of death, as the MEs do in the civilian world, but we also deal with necrotic tissue or near-death patients. I was particularly good with isolating the effects of chemical weapons in soldiers; our unit had half the death rate as the average in Brazil during that period, although of course the injury rate was similar.”
“Of course,” I said, for lack of any other clue what to say.
“Well, you didn’t come here to listen to war stories. Shall we talk about what I found?” he asked.
I frowned, uncomfortable.
“Let’s see what there is to see,” Stone said.
With the help of a small antigravity plate in the bottom of the stretcher, Sandra had moved the body to the table. Well, it was “the body” until I moved closer; Meyers had always had a large birthmark, a red-purple splotch down the side of his neck, and seeing that now was like a calling card. Like a distinctive tattoo or a signed letter reminding me of who I was looking at. Seeing his face screwed up in what was obviously horrible pain was disturbing.
He’d deserved better than this, even if he had been crazy. He’d deserved care and help, not this ridiculous panic reaction from those around him.
Cherabino’s words about looking at the floor if it got too much, words that she’d said the first time she took me to the morgue in DeKalb, came back to me then. I fought through it, sitting on the emotion hard. It had been a long, long time, and it could as easily have been me on that slab.
“You knew him,” Ruthgar said to me, quietly.
I stared him in the eye. “It was a long time ago.”
“I hadn’t realized.” He went over to the front of the table, by Meyers’s head, and placed his hands on his face. A dull crawling sensation moved through Mindspace like a half-heard song.
“You don’t—” Stone started.
“It’s done,” Ruthgar said, still blinking too often. He stepped away.
The seized look of intense pain had disappeared from Meyers’s face, to be replaced by a look of peace, of sleep.
“Thank you,” I said, amazed. Even the best micro guy I’d ever met would have taken a lot longer to accomplish anything like that. And the skill with which he’d done it . . . Necros apparently were in a league of their own.
He blinked five or six times in a row. “It would have been done eventually anyway, for the funeral. Most investigators prefer to see the original circumstances first, and the Chenoa family has been very insistent that investigators be given full access.” He blinked again and moved away.
I noticed then that Meyers didn’t have a Y-cut; whatever they had done to determine cause of death hadn’t used knives. He was naked, of course, but that was the same in the police system.
Sometimes I wished that emotion and thoughts clung to a person’s body after death, not just the scene around him or her. But times like this, I didn’t. The emptiness of the room was comforting. There were no surprises here, just the sad waste of a good man whose life was over.
Sandra lifted up Meyers’s right hand in her gloved ones, angling it so we could see the palm. “You’ll notice the entry point for the electrical arc was here.” A dark burn pattern covered most of the hand, moving up partially toward the wrist. Even two feet away, days after the fact, I could smell the burning flesh. My stomach roiled.
Ruthgar moved around me toward the feet. “Exit burn on the right heel, as the electricity left the body along the metal ironing board feet. Enough amps moved through the tissue to cook it, ensuring death in at least four ways, but the heart stopped likely in the first few seconds of contact. That’s what I’m calling the mechanism of death in this case, for the sake of simplicity. It wasn’t pretty, but it was quick.
“My sympathies for your loss,” he told me.
“I didn’t know him that well,” I said, looking at the burns again, overwhelmed with a sense of senseless waste. But now I was thinking too. Something Cherabino had said once about a case nagged at me. “Doesn’t household electricity not usually leave a mark? Or a really small one? I remember the police having trouble identifying cause of death in one of these cases. This looks obvious—maybe too obvious?”
Ruthgar blinked twice.
Sandra said, “This was household power?”
“The electricity was being pulled from the shielding system, not the household outlet,” Stone said.
“Is that normal?” I asked.
“No.”
“Shall I leave you two to discuss the case?” Ruthgar asked.
“We’re leaving now,” Stone said.
Sandra pulled a sheet up to cover Meyers’s face. It wrenched me then, all over again. Of the two of us, the one who should be on that slab was me; I’d done the risky drug behavior, lived on the street, dealt with the dangerous people. He’d worked his way up to Council. Been a decent guy. Done the right things.
He’d even thrown out his knives. Who died after throwing out their knives? Even if he was crazy, that told me he was actively avoiding violence. Consideri
ng what had happened at North Rim, it made me respect him more. He’d been avoiding violence, not embracing it.
And now he was dead.
• • •
Outside the morgue, I asked Stone, “Why was the electricity being pulled from the shielding system? I mean, it’s an iron.”
“I’ve already set up an interview with the woman who reported Meyers as disturbed,” Stone said. “We can go talk about the electricity and the expert’s findings afterward.”
“I’d like to do that now.”
“We’re doing it afterward.”
I paused, in the low light of the hallway. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
CHAPTER 10
“You realize it’s not efficient to have the interview rooms in a separate building from the Enforcement offices,” I told Stone once we’d crossed the chilly covered walkway back to the main spine of the Guild’s living quarters.
“The Sinclair Building has better shielding throughout because of anyonide fields in the living quarters stacked together,” Stone said. “The fields are built into the building, so it’s cheaper and easier to extend that system into its basements than to build a completely different system at twice the energy cost. Efficiency of time is not the only consideration.”
“And the shielding takes a considerable amount of power, I take it?” I was still thinking about the too-visible, severe burns on Meyers’s body. “How much power?”
“I have no idea. Orders of magnitude more than the household electrical system. The Guild has to contract with the city for special power grants. It adds up. That’s why most of the shielding is in this building. Easier to circulate the power than separate it.”
I waited, but he said nothing else. “How do you keep the electrical systems separate?” I finally prompted.
“I’m not an electrical engineer, Adam. It’s a custom design. They inspect twice a quarter.”
“When was the last inspection of Meyers’s apartment?”
“About three weeks ago.” He’d looked it up, his mind supplied. They had given the apartment a clean bill of health.
I waited. “Well, isn’t that a short amount of time for a short or whatever to develop?”
Stone nodded, reluctant for some reason. “That was the first reason I classified this one as nonaccidental. The second . . .”
“What?”
“The second was the madness report. We’re going to see the woman who made it now.”
“Okay.” I noticed all over again how empty the halls were. Even the main elevator shaft, the open air extending into the endless levels circled above, felt empty. I didn’t see a single person outside his room, even in the far-high floors. “They’ve really got the Guild shut down, don’t they?”
“Essential personnel and prescheduled events only,” Stone said. “If it weren’t for the Eleventh Hour testing today, the school would be on total lockdown as well.” Final testing for advanced Guild students took weeks to schedule and prepare for, and wouldn’t be easily moved. It was a good sign that they were continuing with it for now.
“Let’s say I believe we’re dealing with a full-blown madness situation. Are all these steps even enough?” I asked. “I mean, you don’t even know how it spread in the first place. Seems dumb to scare people if you can’t do anything about it.”
“Assuming the team is right, and it spreads only via repeated deep-mind contact, this should be more than sufficient to prevent an outbreak,” Stone said. His mind, usually so disciplined, let leak a thin trail of worry. They didn’t understand what this was. They didn’t understand how it transmitted. And waterborne or airborne illness was a trouble of an entirely different level. The Guild wasn’t set up to process either. Everything they were doing was just a hope, just a prayer, against this fear.
“I hope you’re right,” I said, but my mind was still dubious and I didn’t work too hard to hide the fact.
“It has to be enough,” he said, and I got that leak of fear and a picture of a boy’s face, a kid about ten years old, and a woman behind him.
Your family? I asked.
He started. But he had let the thought slip into public space. Yes, he said finally. My family. They live here too. Anything that effects the Guild, that brings the contagion to the Guild as a whole, will affect them as well. With respect to Meyers, he made his choice. This should all have been shut down from the beginning, for the sake of the Guild. For the sake of his family, his mind added.
His fear bothered me. He was like Paulsen, like Cherabino; I’d seen him face real danger with no more than healthy respect. But when a cop—or an Enforcer—got truly afraid, it was time to run.
And I, like a fool, had agreed to go deeper into the belly of the beast.
I followed Stone through the basement elevators and back onto the floor with the basement-level interview rooms where I’d seen Meyers’s ex-wife. Oddly, I felt comforted; the industrially cold small hallway with two empty rooms and a monitoring station reminded me so strongly of the department basement where I spent most of my time. Plus everything was clean, something not true of the department.
“Johanna Wendell is waiting in the first interview room,” Stone said. “I’ll be monitoring over the video system.”
“I’m used to a babysitter by now, Stone. If you want to be in the room, be in the room.”
His presence in Mindspace was hardly there, he was shielding so hard. “That would be my preference, yes.”
“Fine. Any rules I need to know about?”
“Don’t kill her. And try not to rummage around in her mind if you don’t have to—Enforcement prefers to have that done by official readers anyway.”
I didn’t respond. “You have a file on her?”
“Not really,” he said. “At least nothing outside official Guild records. You and I don’t qualify. Reports go up, not down.”
“Fantastic.”
• • •
I opened the door, and went in, smiling. Stone followed, taking up a seat at the back of the room.
A pretty late-twenties brunette sat at the table, Johanna Wendell. She was thin, with an angular face and an elegance of carriage and the kind of professional office clothes that made me want to take her seriously. Her body language reflected impatience, and disgust, briefly.
Then she brought it under control; her presence in Mindspace flattened out immediately, and she smiled. The smile was perhaps a little fake, but I’d been there.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she responded, in a smooth voice. “I was told Enforcement wanted to speak with me?”
“This is about the madness report you submitted last week on Del Meyers,” Stone said.
“We want to ask you a few questions,” I put in, setting the folders I’d borrowed down on the table. “Would that be all right with you?”
“Of course,” Johanna said, and clasped her hands in front of her on the table. “How can I help?” She studied me.
I explained myself as an independent investigator consultant who’d been brought in by Enforcement yesterday. “Please feel like you can talk to me,” I said. “I’m here to find the truth through good old-fashioned evidence, not deep-reads.”
“I assume you want to know why I reported Meyers to Mental Health.”
I sat. “That would be a great start, yes.”
“He was acting very strangely, to begin with.” In Mindspace, there was an odd effect when she said that, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Her body language changed to more “open” and she seemed sincere. Then: “He had volunteered to help me study for my precognition recurrents, so I saw him rather more frequently than normal these last weeks.”
“You’re a precog?” I asked.
“Yes. I also have a low-level Four telepathy rating.” Just enough to speak with other telepaths if
they “spoke” loudly, but not enough to read normals or anyone else weaker.
Something about her felt off . . . felt wrong. But I didn’t know what.
“Meyers was also a precognitive,” she said. “His frequency was rather less than mine, but his visions typically foretold large-scale natural disasters. He’d started in Disaster Response. Originally, I’d thought he could help me turn my gift into something more . . . significant.”
“You wanted to increase your accuracy?” I guessed. “Oh, you wanted to be one of the Preferred Futurists. Do they still pay them so much better?”
She nodded. Then she looked down at the table. There was that odd fluctuation in Mindspace again.
“What do you mean by acting strangely? Was he having odd visions?”
“No, nothing like that,” she said very quickly and firmly. “No. It was . . . strange. He kept talking about chickens. He paced the hallway over and over. Then he canceled our meetings with no explanation.” She moved her head to one side and her body language changed subtly, to a more wistful, closed-off place. “I was concerned. When I asked him about it, he pretended nothing was wrong. When I dropped by, I caught him talking to thin air and he threw a heavy stapler at me. I still have the wound.” She touched the side of her head, under the hair, and I got a faint impression of pain, though I could see nothing.
“He threw a stapler at you?” I asked. “Why would he have a stapler at his desk? Isn’t that his assistant’s job?”
“It was on loan,” she said quickly. Then, slower: “He was putting together stacks of paper that didn’t make sense. Stapling them four times in the right corner. I didn’t understand. But what really worried me . . . ,” she went on, and I started to miss things.
I realized then that something about the way she talked, the way she held her head, reminded me strongly of someone I’d known a lifetime ago, on the street. She’d been a sometime drug pusher who turned the occasional trick for money until she’d found out she could convince charities to pay for her room and board with a good sob story. She’d been younger, rounder, and infinitely more cynical than Johanna was here, but there was a definite physical resemblance, especially in the way they moved. The resemblance was jangling at my instincts like a dinner bell pulled by a child, making me see things that might not otherwise be there, making me distrust Johanna.
