Case of the Claw

by Keith DeCandido

  Kristin Milewski hadn't known Peter MacAvoy all that long, but there were several things she had learned in their short acquaintance. He was an unpleasant, foul-mouthed, boorish ass. He smoked too much on duty and drank too much off it. He was, much as she hated to admit it, good police and knew what he was doing. He also knew he was good police and liked to rub her nose in it as much as he possibly could.

  And he also never, ever chewed out other cops. That just wasn't done.

  So to see him ripping into Paulie Fiorello right now had her very confused.

  They were sitting in the video room. Anybody who'd ever watched a TV show knew about the one-way glass that acted as a mirror in interrogation rooms. SCPD, therefore, like many other metropolitan police forces, dispensed with the subterfuge and just installed video cameras. All five of them fed to a monitor in the video room, which had a battered leather couch, two easy chairs that were scratched and ripped, and a rocking chair that squeaked loud enough to wake the dead.

  Fiorello and his perfect hair were seated in one of the easy chairs, with Milewski on one of the couches. MacAvoy, though, was pacing back and forth, gesticulating like crazy. It was a side of MacAvoy she'd never seen, and—like most of his sides, truth be known—one she would've been just as happy never to have seen.

  "Mac," she started, "maybe—"

  "Shut up, rook," he snapped, not even doing her the courtesy of looking at her. "Paul, you know what I've been doing the past day and a half?"

  "Uh—" Fiorello started, but MacAvoy was on a roll.

  "I've been gathering evidence. My partner and I—"

  Gee, how nice of him to acknowledge me, Milewski thought, annoyed.

  "—we've been pounding the pavement, talking to people, checking over lab reports, and gathering a fuck-ton of evidence. All of it tells us something that the Post-It on the victims' foreheads told us in the first place, that the Claw's the one who killed these people. But everything I've been doing has been to build a case so that the Claw can be properly tried by one of the suits in the chief prosecutor's office. There's just one thing we don't have. You know what that is?"

  "Uh—" Fiorello looked helplessly at Milewski, who just shook her head.

  "We need the fucking Claw, Fiorello! And you had him! There were four of you in an enclosed alley! And then that fucknut shows up, and you lose him!"

  MacAvoy was pointing at the monitor, which had the rather nebbishy form of Englebert Valentine—sans Knight Dude armor—sitting alone clutching a can of Superior Orange Soda for dear life.

  Fiorello blurted out, "The guy was a menace, Mac! He—"

  "I don't wanna hear it!" MacAvoy took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. "Get the hell outta here."

  Leaping up from the ripped easy chair, Fiorello bolted.

  Milewski regarded her partner. "What the hell was that?"

  "What the hell was what?" MacAvoy asked as he replaced his glasses.

  "You think those four didn't feel bad enough as it is? No, you have to call each one in here and read them the riot act? Well, three of them anyhow. Please for Christ's sake tell me you're not gonna bring Trevor in here next and tell him about how he fucked up dealing with costumes."

  Letting out a long, raspy breath, MacAvoy said, "No." Even he wasn't so much of an asshole that he'd do that to Baptiste.

  Milewski wasn't entirely sure that letting Baptiste stay on the street was such a hot idea, either, given what he was going through with his lawsuit, but that was Sergeant Taylor's call.

  MacAvoy continued: "But I needed to get that off my chest, and those three needed to get yelled at."

  Every time Milewski thought her respect for her partner couldn't bottom out any further, he went and lowered the bar. "Seriously?"

  "You got a problem?"

  Several, but talking to you won't help. "So what now? Do we question Bert?"

  Now, finally, MacAvoy looked at her, and it was a goggle-eyed expression. "'Bert'? You're actually on a first-name basis with that hump?"

  Shuddering, Milewski said, "Not willingly. When he first showed up in that ridiculous suit of armor, he was trying to clean up BesterPark. I must've brought him in a dozen times when I was in Narcotics."

  "Lucky you." MacAvoy shook his head. "I don't much see the point. From what the unis said—"

  "On those rare occasions when you let them get a word in."

  MacAvoy ignored the dig. "—shit-for-brains in there barrelled in from the other side of the alley saying he heard their call for help."

  Milewski nodded. "He's got a police radio."

  "Of course he does. So he heard the signal 10 and tried to 'help.' Probably got the signal codes off the Internet." He sighed. "Let Schiazza and Bannon talk to him just in case he saw something the other four missed. We've got better things to do."

  "Like yell at unis?"

  "To use your favorite phrase, rook, bite me entirely." With that, MacAvoy left the video room.

  With a sigh of her own, she rose from the couch—and almost fell right back onto it as a wave of dizziness washed over her.

  Reaching out to the wall with her left hand to steady herself, Milewski tried to remember the last time she ate anything. The fact that she couldn't clearly recall such a time was in itself a danger sign, as was her swimming brain.

  She followed MacAvoy out the door—and almost crashed into him, as he hadn't moved past the threshold.

  Standing on her tip-toes, she glanced over his shoulder to see what he was staring at rather than moving down the hall: Lieutenant Zimmerman.

  Great, now I get a chewing out of my very own. Milewski had been studiously avoiding Zimmerman all day, but there was no way that was going to last forever with her on the red-ball.

  "Y'know, Mac," the lieutenant said, not even looking at Milewski, which came to the detective as something of a relief, "I seem to recall you going to the Superior Six blimp with the express purpose of getting their files on the Claw, and instead I find you in the video room yelling at unis."

  "The unis needed to get yelled at, and the Six still aren't playing well with others."

  Zimmerman's face hardened. "What?"

  MacAvoy lowered his voice to an approximation of Spectacular Man's stentorian tones. "'I'm afraid that there's nothing we can share, Detectives.' That's a direct quote from Spectacular Douche. Aside from being able to tell the grandkids I'll never have that I rode in a teleporter once, the trip was a total waste of time."

  Shaking her head, Zimmerman said, "I'll put a call in to Marc. This is ridiculous."

  With that, Zimmerman stormed off and Milewski finally let out the breath she hadn't even realized she was holding.

  MacAvoy turned to grin at her. "Expecting her to tear you a new one?"

  "Something like that." She closed her eyes. Her head started to swim again. "I'm headed to the vending machines, you want anything?"

  "A break in the case?"

  Milewski smirked. "Gonna need more change…"

  Therese Zimmerman wasn't sure why she was so aggravated at the fact that the Superior Six were stonewalling them. It was precisely the response she'd expected, what she and Javier and MacAvoy all believed would be the end result of Mac and Milewski's trip up to their dirigible of doom.

  Yet actually hearing Mac tell her that the expected result was the same as the actual result, she grew livid. Maybe it was because of the abortive argument she and Marc had had at Emmanuelli's last night; maybe it was because they had to kick two more suspects this morning because they were brought in by costumes with no other witnesses around; maybe it was the fact that their best shot at bringing the Claw in was ruined by a lame-ass wannabe.

  So it was with high dudgeon that she strode into her office, sat at her desk, and poked angrily the speed dial button and then hit "3."

  Recalling that her boyfriend didn't answer his own phone, she tamped the aggravation down just in time for Beth to answer.

  "Marc McLean's office."

  "Hi, Beth, it's Ther
ese—is he there?"

  "He's in a meeting—"

  Therese let out a breath through her teeth in frustration.

  "—but it's one of those meetings he wants an excuse to get out of." Beth's voice indicated a conspiratorial smile. "Hang on."

  Knowing it would take a minute or two for Marc to make his excuses before coming on the line, she hit the speaker button and placed the phone on her desk. A Muzak rendition of a Beatles song wafted tinnily over the phone's small speaker. And heaven forfend the McLean Foundation use hold music that doesn't make my teeth hurt.

  She shuffled through the papers on her desk, trying to figure out which of the thousands of bits of paperwork she hadn't gotten to yet was most urgent, when she saw Billinghurst walk by.

  Bart Billinghurst had always impressed Therese with his near-perfect posture. Sometimes, during interrogations, he would sit next to the suspect, pretending to be friendly but towering over them even while seated, thanks to that posture.

  Now, though, the detective was slump-shouldered as he trudged past her open office door. That was never a good sign.

  "Hey, Bart!"

  Billinghurst turned and gave Therese a haunted look.

  Therese gave him a half-smile. "I'd ask how the Clone Master case is going, but the look on your face pretty much answers it."

  "Oh no." Billinghurst held up a hand. "You don't know the half of it. See, not only have we gone through the usual crime-scene nonsense, not only have the crime scene nerds gathered up a ton of evidence for a trial that will never happen because the victim's gonna turn up alive again, not only is there a scheduled autopsy—which, given the backlog at the morgue, won't happen until a month after the new clone turns up—but King and I just finished interviewing our star witness!"

  Therese's eyes widened. "There was a witness?" Amethyst had a tendency to use the gem that he took his name from to fuzz out the visuals of his fights. He never gave a reason for this—some assumed it was to protect innocent bystanders, others to protect himself—but there were rarely useful observations of his fights.

  Billinghurst went on, now standing in Therese's doorway. "It was an old lady who was standing in the lobby of the building next to where they fought. She was down getting the mail, because today was when her settlement check was supposed to come, except it didn't. Apparently, her husband worked in the ConwayBuilding. That got her going for ten minutes about the insurance company and what schmucks they are before she finally got around to telling us that she was staring out the little window in the front door to see the fight. I dunno, maybe Amethyst's gem was on the fritz, or maybe he just didn't know she was there, but she provided a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the fight."

  "Really?"

  "Yup. Second by second, she told us every fucking detail of the fight. And whenever we interrupted her for a clarification, she got all confused, and had to start all over again." Billinghurst's eyes widened. "Oh! And she took pictures with her Zap, and she promised to e-mail them to us as soon as she gets her grand-daughter to tell her how to do that, because she never used the camera function or the e-mail function on the Zap before. We offered to download them for her, but the battery died, and she left the charger at her friend Zelda's apartment, and she was going there tomorrow night for movie night, and then she'd get it back and charge it right up and get it to her grand-daughter."

  "Uh-huh." Therese was trying very hard not to giggle.

  "But then the fight took them around the corner, and she couldn't see anything anymore. So she can't tell us anything useful about the part of the fight that mattered, which was Clone-Master dying." The detective stepped forward and put his hands flat on her desk, his eyes wide and slightly crazy. "I'm begging you, Zim, please. Let us just drop this. It's gonna be an open case under our names anyhow, so why put us through this?"

  Before she could respond, the desecration of Lennon and McCartney ceased and Marc's filtered voice sounded through the phone. "Hello, sweetness."

  Hastily, Therese grabbed the phone and stabbed a finger at the speaker button to deactivate it. "Hi, Marc."

  Looking up at Billinghurst, she saw that he was now standing straight, smiling, and mouthing, Sweetness?

  With a mild snarl, she shoo'd him out of the office with a gesture. Billinghurst just grinned and even was kind enough to close the door behind him.

  But even through the closed door, she could hear a rejuvenated Billinghurst cry out, "Hey, King, you gotta hear this!"

  "Sweetness, you there?"

  Therese shook her head, and said, "Yeah, Marc, sorry—I've got a bunch of things going on here."

  "I understand. Look, I'm sorry, but I have to cancel tomorrow night."

  Big surprise.

  But before she could comment, Marc went on: "Tonight's stockholder meeting had to be pushed a day."

  That brightened Therese. "Great—so we can go out tonight, then?"

  "Afraid not, I'm sorry—see, the reason I put off the stockholders is because I've got to meet with the Superior Six's legal team. Apparently, the manufacturers of Superior Soda don't want to keep paying Mercury because he isn't part of the group anymore, but they're still using his likeness to sell the root beer. It's a big mess, and they're talking lawsuit."

  Therese should have known better than to get her hopes up, but at least this presented her an opportunity to bring up the reason for her call. "That's actually handy, Marc, because I've got another item you can put on the agenda for that meeting tonight."

  "Oh?" Marc sounded genuinely confused.

  "Ask them how it would look when the SCPD serves the Six with a subpoena for whatever files they might have relating to the Claw—the very files my detectives politely asked for, and were rudely refused by your pal Spectacular Man."

  "I doubt he was rude, Therese."

  Ignoring the comment, Therese continued: "In particular, ask your crack legal team how it would look when the mayor and the chief of police hold a press conference talking about how, if the Six doesn't accede to that subpoena, they'll get an arrest warrant for all half-dozen of your buddies for obstruction of justice."

  There was a pause before Marc said incredulously, "You're not serious."

  Therese was feeling pretty incredulous herself. She had started the conversation fully intending to ask Marc to see if the lawyers could convince the Six to actually cooperate with the SCPD. Somehow, between her brain and her mouth, it modulated into a threat. A wholly empty threat at that, since she had no idea if Sittler and Dellamonica would even consider giving such a press conference, and the likelihood of such an arrest warrant being served was somewhere between slim and none.

  "There's an easy way to find out—fail to convince the Six to actually share some fucking intel with us."

  With that, she hung up the phone.

  Idly, she wondered if she'd just ended a perfectly good relationship.

  Letting out a long breath, she realized that she probably hadn't. They'd had nastier arguments than this. Not that they were really arguments—it was always Therese ranting and Marc being maddeningly calm, totally confused as to why she was so upset, and understanding and sympathetic to her viewpoint. The phone calls ended like this one had. The ones in person either ended with him being called away for something or, if Therese was very very lucky, a passionate roll in the hay.

  The regular sex was great. The make-up sex was cosmically magnificent.

  She stared at the paperwork, and all the words on the pages started to meld into a mishmash of disjointed letters that made no sense.

  Another sigh, and she got up from her desk. She needed a drink. Failing that, she needed coffee.

  3.15pm

  "I swear to Christ, I'm going to kill him and then I'm going to resurrect him so I can kill him again."

  Trevor Baptiste had nothing to say to Mara Fontaine's outburst, too concerned as he was with holding onto the dashboard. While ranting and raving about Detective MacAvoy, Fontaine was also driving down 13th Street at a pace that
could kindly be called brisk.

  "Where the fuck does he get off ripping into us like that? He's not our boss, and it's not like our sole purpose in life is to make it easier for him to close his cases."

  "Uh, Mara," Baptiste started as he noticed their cruiser accelerating directly toward a Honda Civic that was double-parked in their lane.

  At the last second, Fontaine swerved the blue-and-white to the left to get around it. Baptiste felt his awful lunch lurch in his stomach.

  "And I'm telling you," Fontaine continued as if she hadn't just treated the cruiser like they were in a NASCAR race, "if he'd pulled that shit on you, I would've kicked his ass."

  "Well, he didn't, so could you perhaps focus on the road?"

  "I'm fine," she said.

  Baptiste was about to object strenuously to that particular characterization when the radio squawked.

  "Unit 2205, we have a signal 52 at 2547 Giacoia, 3D. Neighbors complained of strange noises."

  That caused Baptiste to wince. Every uni who'd patrolled SimonValley had taken at least one domestic call at that particular address.

  Grabbing the radio, Baptiste said, "Unit 2205, signal 4." Then he turned to Fontaine, who drove through Siegel. "So, you think Mrs. Bajrami will press charges this time?"

  Sounding much more subdued than when she was complaining about MacAvoy, Fontaine replied: "I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no."

  Every call to Apartment 3D in 2547 Giacoia was Edon Bajrami slapping around his wife Zamira. And every time, Zamira refused to press charges. Even on those rare occasions when they could justify slapping the bracelets on Edon and bringing him in, he was always back on the street within twenty-four hours, headed home to once again use Zamira as a punching bag.

  "I can never understand that."

  "Really?" Fontaine briefly glanced over at Baptiste. "C'mon, you see violence every day in this job. How can you not understand it?"

  "Yes, but your wife?" He shook his head. "Sylvia and I argued all the time—about everything, from cooking to remembering laundry to having kids."