Marked

by Alex Hughes

  “Are you listening?” Johanna asked me.

  I checked—yes, I’d been shielding hard. The mix-up with Meyers’s ex-wife had taught me at least that much. I shielded a little harder and adjusted my body language to project sadness. “Yes,” I said. “Go on.”

  “He complained of being manipulated. He sounded like one of those paranoid people on television. He told me he couldn’t trust anybody but me. And then he got angry with me—for absolutely no reason—and wouldn’t see me anymore. John—his assistant—was told not to let me come around anymore. It was very hurtful.” She paused, looking at me.

  Something felt off. But I had to speak anyway. I told myself the lie first, told myself to believe it, then did, as much as possible. “How sad it is that a man in his position would treat you so badly,” I said. “He must have indeed been going crazy.”

  A little anger flashed across Mindspace then, but she pulled it in. “I’m only sorry I didn’t report him sooner. Maybe John would still be alive if I had.” She put her hands over her face, and breathed. “I can’t believe John killed himself. Or Meyers. This is all my fault.”

  “This is not your fault,” I said habitually. If I had a nickel every time I’d said that in the interview rooms, I could be retired in Bora-Bora by now. “Can you tell me anything else about Meyers?”

  She pulled her hands down and stared at them. “I’m sorry he’s dead,” she said. “He was a good guy.”

  “Were you sleeping with him?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “No, nothing like that.”

  But there was no surprise either in Mindspace or on her face at the question. She was a good liar, but she was hiding something.

  Stone glanced over at me, saw that I had nothing, and told her, “You did a good thing by reporting him to Mental Health. It escalated the situation to the proper authorities and it’s likely saving lives right now. We may be in and out asking a lot of questions of a lot of people in the next few days. Don’t let that stop you from coming forward if you think of anything else.”

  “I understand,” she said. But she looked at me carefully.

  Probably she wanted to know if I’d guessed about the affair. None of my business either way, I supposed. Made me think less of Meyers, though. I forced a smile and some joviality. “I appreciate you spending the time answering the questions. I have one more.”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you know about the Guild’s electrical shielding system?” I asked.

  A note of surprise and worry entered the air. “It works by creating a moving electromagnetic field at the right frequency to resonate with Mindspace and prevent mental waves from being propagated across the intersection line of the field because of a modified fractional quantum Hall effect.”

  It was nearly a word-for-word quote of the Guild’s physics and Ability textbook. I was impressed. More impressive was the concepts folding out in her mind as she quoted the words. No dummy, this one.

  “Did you kill Del Meyers?” I asked.

  “No,” she said firmly. I believed her. Just the affair, then, huh?

  “That’s it?” she asked, after a moment.

  “That’s it. You have a nice day,” Stone said, and held the door until I followed him out. “What was that about?” he asked me in the hall when the doorway shut.

  “Collecting information,” I said. “Is there a phone here where I can check in with the police?”

  “I’ll be listening,” he said cautiously.

  I paused, thought about what I intended to say. “Just don’t record, okay?”

  He nodded.

  • • •

  Stone showed me a small alcove with a phone in one of the adjoining rooms. He left the door open and settled outside, to give me the illusion but not the actual presence of privacy. I’d have to be careful what I said. I was planning to anyway, seeing as this was the Guild, and the Guild’s thoughts about privacy were loose enough to allow random monitoring. But even so.

  I dialed Cherabino’s office phone. With her working—what, five? six? eight?—cases right now, I had absolutely no doubt she’d be there on a Saturday catching up. Unless there was another murder to have her out in the field.

  I wondered what Swartz was thinking when he’d asked me to ask her out. Would that really—

  “This is Detective Cherabino,” her voice came over the phone.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “If you have the time, I need help on updating murder books,” she said. “I’ll buy you Mexican. Michael’s got a family thing.”

  “I’m tempted,” I said. “Unfortunately I’ve got a commitment this weekend. But I found some information you might find useful.”

  “Oh?”

  “I got a copy of the information Wright disseminated. Don’t ask how I got it.”

  “I have no intention of asking,” Cherabino said. “What is it?”

  I caught her up on what little I’d understood from the document I’d partially read, and what Bob had said about the soldier project, only without using his name and while trying to keep all references as vague and unhelpful to the Guild as possible. “I’m thinking the two are linked, but I don’t have a lot of information about either to make a decision with. You might talk to somebody over at Electronic Crimes,” I said. Oh, what the hell. “Specifically, Bob, if you can.”

  She sighed. “I’ve got meetings most of the afternoon for the task force. We’re close, Adam. We’re so close to getting that bastard for good, him and half of his whole damn crime organization. The DA just has to sign off on it and we can move, and Ruffins says the TCO can bring in some extra firepower.”

  “Congrats!” I said. “You’ve been working on that case for years. It’ll be great when it’s over.”

  “How important do you think the file is to the Wright case?” she finally asked.

  “Considering they wouldn’t let us into the research portion of the lab, pretty critical.”

  She sighed. “Fine. Is there a copy of the report somewhere I can look at tonight?”

  “There’s one in my apartment,” I said. “I have a spare key in the junk drawer in your office. It’s labeled Cat.”

  “I’d wondered about that. I haven’t had a cat in years.”

  I had needed a backup, and considering her mess, it had seemed the safest storage. “Yeah, well. I probably won’t be back there tonight, but you’re welcome to grab the file. When are you going to move on Fiske again?” I asked, without meaning to. Crap, I should not have asked that over a phone line at the Guild. Damn it.

  “There’s no need to rush,” she said, but she said it in her Official Answer voice. She wasn’t offended—good. “Why aren’t you going to be at your apartment tonight?”

  “I may not,” I said, trying to decide what to tell her. Finally I settled on “I’m taking care of something for Kara. It’s on the up-and-up, just not something I’m comfortable talking about yet.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She paused. “Does Swartz know?”

  “Not yet, but he’s got doctors’ appointments today with Selah. I will tell him, I promise.” I was a little resentful about all the checking up on me, but I understood it. “Listen, what’s Ruffins doing with the murder victim? What kind of information was he feeding him?”

  “Ah,” Cherabino said obliquely. “That’s an excellent point. We’ll have to look into that more later.”

  “He’s sitting nearby, isn’t he? Waiting around for the task force meeting. That’s why you needed help with the murder books. He’s taking up your time.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you’re not going to discuss details in front of him?”

  “That’s correct,” she said, and nothing else.

  I sighed. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “You do that,” she said, and hung up.
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  I went back out of the tiny room. “Satisfied?” I asked Stone, who was carefully not paying attention two feet from the door.

  “Perfectly,” he said.

  • • •

  “You should know something,” Stone said as we waited for the elevator again.

  “More revelations?” I asked, tired. “Fine, tell me what’s going on.”

  “Well, two things. The first is that Ms. Chenoa is under house arrest and will not be allowed to have visitors. That includes you. They didn’t disconnect her phone, which in retrospect was a mistake; she’s been talking nonstop to her family and hindering our efforts.”

  “Okay.”

  But there was madness in the Guild and, knowing what I knew, panic too. “They’re taking her actions as evidence she’s been exposed to the madness as well, right? Where is the major cluster of cases, by the way? You know, so we can be somewhere else.”

  “The major cases are in the luxury section of the apartments, and we’ll have to go there to look at the scene,” Stone said. “As for judgments, I have no idea what ‘they’ are doing, but Nelson says not to let her out of house arrest. Ironically, she and Hawk Chenoa have demanded that I appear—with you, I assume—for a progress report tonight. The notification just came through. I may or may not go.”

  “Why would you need to answer to them? Isn’t it better to be impartial, especially if they think she’s contagious?”

  He sighed. “I’m new to the case; I think I was perhaps the eighth person suggested to the family, and the only one they would accept. Well, after they’d made a stink about the original investigator. Hawk Chenoa liked my work in the Barksdale AFB scandals. To be honest, I think it’s the only reason they put me in here. I’m not qualified, not like the others. But I also can’t be seen to be partial.”

  “That’s right. You’re not an investigator?”

  “I’m a Watcher,” he said, too firmly, and with more than a little heat. “I watch. I determine the truth. I get inside people’s heads and follow them back to the truth. It’s my job. I haven’t done this kind of investigation work—where the main witnesses were dead—since my practicum.”

  “Oh,” I said. Seeing Stone out of his depth was at once terrifying and liberating. No wonder he’d browbeat me before letting me over here into the Guild. He’d wanted to know he could trust me to be the expert. Not that that wasn’t a scary thought.

  I looked at him. “Nelson, the Chenoas, Rex, and I bet Health and Human Services are all breathing down your neck right now, aren’t they? You’re between a rock and a hard place.”

  His jaw set and he was silent. Finally his mind supplied What must be done must be done. We process the suicide, you back me up with the family so they’ll allow public health measures, Nelson gets the information he needs, and everybody lets us do what needs to be done to stop the outbreak. There is no other way. There is no other possible way. Not for the Guild as a whole to survive without fracturing. Not for the Guild as a whole to survive the madness.

  Not for his family to survive.

  “I know you want a quick answer,” I said. “And I can see how a quick answer can benefit the Guild. But quick doesn’t mean true. Quick doesn’t mean right.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Stone said, grieved a little by the implication. “A quick answer may still save all of us.”

  “What’s the other thing you think I should know?”

  “They found a suicide note from Meyers in some of his office papers a few hours ago,” Stone said. “Well, sort of.”

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “He was a precognitive, and the note records a series of visions he has in which he takes his own life. A notable one was with knives.”

  “Which he then threw out,” I said. Suddenly it made sense, but what a horrible thing to see. I’d come face-to-face with danger in a vision, but never anything like that.

  “And then a vision of hanging, after which he threw out sheets, towels, belts, and ties.”

  “He didn’t want to kill himself,” I said. “Or he wouldn’t have gone to such extreme measures.”

  “According to the note, he thought he was losing the battle.”

  I digested that. “What a horrible feeling.”

  Stone nodded, then sighed. “Let’s move on. I’m going to have to report in before too long.”

  “Okay,” I said, still wondering what it would be like to have a vision of your own suicide.

  • • •

  The Guild’s Sinclair Building, their residential and meeting skyscraper, had a hollow central elevator, floors opening around it like the ribs from a spine of some great animal. You looked up and up, a hundred floors or more, all the way to the great skylight all the way at the top of the building. It was a beautiful sight, and the extra open space worked with the strong-shielding fields to ensure total privacy inside the living quarters.

  “Why are we waiting for the elevators up to the living quarters?” I asked, trying for calm but not really succeeding. “I thought we were going to talk to the man who processed the iron.”

  The woman who processed the iron works for a mechanical subsection of Research, Stone replied. Working on a project for Guild First, a project you would be better off not knowing about. And the iron is at the scene, where it was being processed when the family kicked us out. We’re going to see the scene now. It’s easier.

  They kicked you out of the scene? I asked. I rechecked my shields. This was the building with all the madness contagion, correct? Even so, it seemed strange to lock Stone out of the scene. “New quarantine measures?” I asked.

  After a pause, Stone said out loud, “The family, actually. They haven’t wanted anyone official near the scene. Or the body, for that matter, but there’s a limit to what she can do with him already in the morgue. I’m hoping your connection to her will get you past the door.”

  The elevator arrived with a ding and we entered. The car was clear glass all the way around except for a handrail; I swallowed against vertigo as it started going up at a very fast rate, the main floor shrinking below us at a fast clip as I fought my stomach and my fear of what I might be exposed to in the next few minutes.

  “Meyers was in the penthouse, I assume?” I asked, to distract myself. The elite of the Guild stayed in the top two floors, well above the peons I used to be one of.

  He shrugged.

  I waited, but he let nothing seep into his public mind, and I wasn’t willing to look any deeper. That’s how I ended up in a cell to begin with, and I’d been lucky—and more than lucky—not to end up mad from it. Finally I asked, in the most public way possible in Mindspace, Well, what did the expert say? About the iron?

  “It’s an iron,” he said out loud. “And the electrical system was jimmied; the thermostat should have shut the electrical flow down when it got too high, but it didn’t. Our expert didn’t get a good look, because she was fixing the wall wiring. She had us shut down the electricity to the whole section. I was there holding the flashlight while she cursed at the wires. Apparently someone cross-connected the shielding system into the outlets, which pulled in a great deal of power that was never designed to go in those circuits. She says it’s a miracle all the breakers tripped in time to prevent a larger issue with the whole apartment block. She fixed it, but she said there was no way it was an accident. Perhaps Meyers set it up before the suicide to make sure it wouldn’t harm anyone else. He had the knowledge.”

  I thought about that. “But it wasn’t on the note. No fingerprints anywhere?”

  “We weren’t there long enough to tell. But with the heat it’s unlikely anything biologic survived on the wires, which is all we care about. And no, it wasn’t on the note, but the note seemed a week old at least.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Stone guided me through the maze of hallways. We ended up
in the luxury block, where the elite leadership and the highest earners of the Guild lived. Even the carpet was lush and quiet underfoot, and both the soundproofing and the Mindspace shielding were exceptional; all I heard, all I felt, as I walked down that hallway was a quiet sense of preparedness. Well, that and the beating of my heart. Was I really going to do this? Walk into possibly the worst contagion zone?

  Apparently I was.

  One of Kara’s cousins stood in front of a door along the hallway. Specifically, one of her large Swedish cousins I’d met maybe three or four times during family reunions. He was tan with very blond hair that might have been dyed, and had the physique of someone who spent a lot of time at a gym. This was a very unusual physique for Guild members outside of military service, even more so for strong telepaths, as the time and energy involved in mental training tended to make you unphysical, thin in terms of calories burned and muscles not used. I blinked at him one more time on meeting. Yep, he was at least six feet tall, well trained, and . . . still into extreme sports, clearly.

  He was a very good choice to slow down the bureaucrats. I racked my brain and still couldn’t come up with his name.

  “Adam! Long time!” the man said warmly. He was genuinely pleased to see me and wasn’t ashamed to say so in Mindspace, which only made it worse.

  “How’s the snowboarding coming?” I asked, keeping the conversation out loud. “You still into tournaments?”

  “I placed third in the All-Swede Finals this year,” he said, his accent very light. His English was fluent, but Swedish was still the first language. What was this guy’s name? Cousin on Kara’s mother’s side maybe?

  It’s Gustolf, he sent through Mindspace. My name.

  “Congratulations,” I said, as warmly as I could manage back, trying not to be twitchy about the mind-to-mind. I’d either get exposed to the bug or I wouldn’t. Thanks, Gustolf. It’s been a while. “Do you mind if we take a look at the room?”