“Yeah, sure. March 25th.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, it was my friend’s birthday. That was why I’d agreed to go out for a drink after work.”
Jack’s mind was racing. “Have you seen him again? In the city?”
“No. When I came home that night, I couldn’t stop shaking. Henry wanted me to report it to the police.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I guessed you’d have better things to do.” Her eyes were welling up. “I can’t believe he’s dead. What am I going to tell Charlie?”
Henry came in then and saw his wife fighting the tears. He had the pills in his hand that he’d been to fetch and passed them to Burnfield. Jack and Burnfield excused themselves and left the house.
They were getting into the car when Henry hurried up to them. Burnfield wound his window down.
“Listen, she’s been through a lot,” he said, addressing Jack. “I’m sorry if she was tough on you.”
“It’s OK,” Jack replied.
“He’s dangerous. That’s why I paid for the teep trap. We were meant to be moving house next month. I’d finally sorted out the office move and the relocation and everything. I guess now that he’s dead there’s no need for us to do that.”
“What do you think was wrong with him?” Burnfield said.
“I’ve no idea. I’m just glad that she’s going to be able to sleep again.”
Henry went back inside and Burnfield pulled away. At the end of the road Burnfield asked Jack what he thought about their meeting.
Jack didn’t know what to think—his head was still throbbing from the trap she’d used against him.
“I’ve heard of people doing what Helen described. Feeding off thoughts,” Jack said.
“Jesus, that’s a thing?”
“From everything else Helen was saying, it seems he’d had a breakdown, or maybe the evaluation was wrong at his testing. He might have been unsuitable to be a teep.”
“This doesn’t help explain why he was killed in an alley and forced to remove his eyes.”
“No. Who’d want the eyes from a broken telepath?” Jack asked, then closed his eyes and tried to erase the image of Booth Maguire’s body lying dead amongst the rubbish, hollow eyes staring up accusingly. Whoever killed him, knew exactly what they were doing.
12:55 PM
The operations room was empty when they got back from seeing Helen Coleman. Jack had spent the car journey considering what Booth’s widow had told them, trying to piece together the unusual behaviour of the telepath and match it with his own understanding of how telepaths can act when under stress.
“I’ve got something else to show you,” Burnfield said as they walked into the operations room. He headed for the far corner which housed the grid-patterned room of the simulacrum. He held his HALO to the panel beside the door, scrolled through a series of options, flicking his way through menus until he was satisfied with his choice.
They stepped inside the room and the grid came to life, sending light across the space, building up images and surroundings. Wooden floors, sparsely furnished. The simulation finished constructing and Jack found himself standing in the middle of a living room, a single wooden chair alongside him. Painted walls around him, and a single picture taking up about a third of the wall facing him. The pattern was familiar.
“Where is this?” Jack said cautiously.
The detective wasn’t looking at the picture. “This is where Booth Maguire has been living these last few weeks. Possibly since his wife kicked him out, possibly even before then. I came here with Chloe this morning and thought you should see it. What do you make of it?”
Jack looked around and was amazed at how lifelike the simulacrum engine had made the surroundings. He’d been inside one before at OsMiTech, but that had been years ago and he didn’t think the fidelity had been as good as this. After a moment, Jack turned and forced himself to stare at the pattern on the wall.
Burnfield was staring at him. “What is it? Do you recognise this?” When Jack didn’t reply, Burnfield took him by the shoulders and pulled him away from the picture. “What is it, Jack?”
“The picture is a fractal inductor. It’s used to reinforce suggestion. You’re dealing with adjusters.”
“Adjusters?”
“Telepaths. But, not your usual kind. These are different.”
“But they’re at OsMiTech? You know who they are?”
Jack shook his head. “No one knows who they are. OsMiTech don’t officially acknowledge they exist.”
“But you recognise this pattern?”
“They’re not exclusively used by adjusters. Some telepath therapies make use of them, but never on the scale of what adjusters attempt.”
“And why isn’t this another one of those therapies?”
Jack gestured around the room. “You don’t get these outside OsMiTech. The chair staring straight ahead of the fractal. This isn’t some short-lived treatment. It’s part of something bigger.”
“Adjusters,” Burnfield sounded the word as if getting a feel for the idea. “And they work for OsMiTech?”
Jack shrugged. “I hope so.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I hope people capable of conditioning people, to the degree the adjusters are rumoured to be able to, have some framework to work within. God only knows what trouble they’d cause if they had no boundaries.”
“And you know all of this because?”
“Because telepaths talk. The patterns are part of their conditioning. If this was in Booth’s house, then he was being controlled. The adjusters have done something to him, changed his memory, played with his identity.”
“His identity?”
“We’ve heard how Maguire’s wife said she was around them. How she saw him walking the streets not recognising her.”
“Damn.”
“What are you thinking?” Jack asked.
“I need to speak to Meadows. Get into OsMiTech and find out who these adjusters are.”
“Nobody speaks to the adjusters. No one even knows who they are. OsMiTech won’t talk to you. They won’t admit to their existence.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“If adjusters are involved—”
“—wait, don’t backtrack. You said they were.”
Jack ignored the interruption. “If adjusters are involved then Booth was of interest to them. They’ve gone to considerable effort to condition him and they will know that he’s dead. They’re going to be cleaning up this case. I’m surprised you even got to see inside his house. If we go asking OsMiTech for help with this you’ll hit a brick wall and worse, they might try and shut your investigation down before you get any closer to whatever it is they’re hiding.”
“Hiding?”
“They’re hiding something. Conditioning somebody a new life is a time-consuming process. They have their reasons and if they’re feeling cornered they’ll protect themselves. I’d suggest you don’t make them feel cornered. It’s the only way to solve Maguire’s murder.”
“What if these adjusters wanted to punish him? They could have had him killed.”
“If they had that much control over him, they could have found a better place to do it than in somebody’s back yard. Why not kill him in his home and take all the time they needed to dispose of the body?”
Burnfield fiddled with his simulacrum device and the house evaporated around them. A new light show slowly painted in the disturbingly confined brickwork of an alley and a row of terraced houses. The road surface was patchy broken tarmac. Litter clung to the crevices against the walls. Bin bags, some split where the cats and rats had got to them, spewed their contents out into the road. Above his head, the moon was shining a yellowing glow over the brick, picking out broken edges and whitewashed walls and making the environment look desperate and sallow. Behind them, a gate opened into a backyard and a man’s boots could be seen beyond the doorway. Burnfield stepped across the threshol
d and Jack followed, pulling his collar up against his neck as he went.
The man propped up against the wall was a broken puppet. Limbs splayed out like his strings had been cut, his bloodied face lolling onto his shoulder. The blood looked black like streaks of oil or cheap mascara. His hollow eyes were rough around the edges and as Jack bent in closer to look, he saw the rips in the flesh, and the fingernail scratches in the cheeks underneath. The black blood had trickled down his chin and dripped onto his jacket.
What a way to go.
“Someone made him do this?”
Burnfield nodded. “We’ve no other explanation.”
“Maybe he was high. Hallucinations can make you do crazy stuff.”
“Toxicology has come back negative. Besides a couple of units of alcohol, he was clean.”
“He’d been drinking?”
“We’re still trying to track down where. Steve’s been chasing around the closest pubs to where he was found, showing his picture. We’ll find it eventually.”
“Could he have been drinking at home?”
“Possible, but we didn’t find any alcohol in the house.”
“And you’ve not found his eyes?”
“No. We’ve searched the yard, and the neighbouring yards and the alley. Nothing.”
“A cat or something else?”
“Again, possible,” Burnfield said.
“Anna could have done this. It would have been child’s play to get her to persuade Booth to rip his own eyes out.”
Burnfield didn’t answer.
The door to the simulacrum opened and Steve came in, his face flushed with excitement. The datapad in his hand was thrust to his boss with an eagerness befitting a pupil handing in their best homework. “We found him. The Wellington. Ten minutes’ walk away from where the body was found.”
*
The team stood around the perception table in the operations room. Steve, still grinning like he’d just won a district lottery, flipped up a virtual interface and waved his hand through the air, bringing out images from the device and flinging them at the main view screen in front of them.
Alice tucked her stool closer under the desk. “What’ve you got?”
Behind them, Chloe and Phil came out from one of the offices, intrigued by the sudden flurry of activity. “What’s up?” Phil asked.
Steve didn’t look at his colleagues, instead arranging various images he’d pulled up from the pad. “I managed to find Booth Maguire on drone footage a few minutes walk away from where his body was found in that alley. Here he is leaving the Wellington. I’ve sent a photo of him to the landlord and he recognised him straight away.”
“I trust you showed him an image with his eyes still in his head,” Phil joked, but no one smiled.
“And tracking back a few minutes earlier I found her.” Steve was pointing at a woman waiting across the road from the pub’s entrance. As Booth started walking away towards his final resting place, the woman began to follow.
“What’s so interesting about her?” Chloe asked.
“The same drone was on a repeat circuit.” Steve’s hands danced over the perception table, flicking images aside and replacing them with new ones. “I found the same woman following Maguire into the pub only half an hour earlier.”
“Who is she?” Burnfield asked.
The angle wasn’t the best but Jack saw enough to recognise the Indian woman sitting beside Booth. “I’ve seen her before. She’s Frazier Growden’s canary.”
Silence. Steve stopped processing the images and instead he drew in on the woman, zooming until only her face filled the screen. The computer did what it could to add detail to her features, but the angle was such that the resultant image was skewed. Jack was sure it was her. “I saw her a few weeks ago, working outside Growden’s anti-telepath meeting at the Plaza.”
“She’s a canary?” Alice asked. “There’s no tattoo. She could have had it removed.”
Jack nodded. “I caught a fraction of her snooping around. She’s at least as strong as I am. Possibly higher.”
“Why would Frazier Growden, the man who hates telepaths, have any on his payroll?” Chloe asked.
“Kind of makes you wonder why he wants no one else to have them doesn’t it?” Jack said. “I think he’s just prepared to take whatever precautions he can to protect his interests.”
Burnfield shifted to a space on the perspective table and brought up an interface. Images flicked onto the table surface, layered on top of each other as he sorted through them. “The AI can work through his known associates, see if it can’t find a match for this woman.”
Seconds later, an image rose in front of the table and snapped alongside the image Steve had frozen from the security drone. The same woman. “Name’s Indira Sidhu. We have nothing else on her.”
“Nothing?” Chloe asked.
Burnfield lowered his head, peered at the datasheet the AI had prepared. “No. She’s been wiped.” He banged his fist on the table.
Jack looked quizzically at the detective. “I don’t understand.”
“We had a security breach last year. A redaction virus got into the system and wiped a lot of data. Whatever we had on her, it’s gone.”
“We need to find her,” Jack said. The others looked at him like he was stating the obvious.
Burnfield nodded. “Indira Sidhu is now our main suspect. I want you all to make her your top priority.” Burnfield addressed Steve, “What else did the landlord say? I don’t suppose they’ve got any surveillance inside?”
Steve nodded. “He remembers them both. He bought her a drink, thought they knew each other. I’ve arranged to go there and pick up a copy of his security footage. The guy’s old, he doesn’t understand how to send it over the network.”
“I’ll come with you,” Chloe suggested. Steve shrugged like he really wasn’t bothered either way.
“Good work, Steve. Excellent. This might be the break we need.” The team dispersed and Burnfield led Jack away to his office and closed the door. Remaining on his feet, he asked the question Jack had been expecting. “Is there anyone at OsMiTech you can speak to? See if they can give us more on this woman.”
“I don’t have a great relationship with them at the moment.”
“How about your handler?”
Jack thought to the young suit and wondered how likely he would be to help him. A teep killing another teep in mysterious circumstances. The possibility of adjusters being involved.
“I can try.” Jack kept his eyes ahead, beyond the detective to the window and the view of the town outside, afraid that if he were to look him in the eye, his lie would become apparent.
“Try, please. Anyone owe you any favours at OsMiTech?”
Jack shrugged. “What about you? What’s the protocol on this? If it’s a rogue do you take them or pass on to the DRT?”
“She’s linked to a crime; we’re taking her. I need to update DCI Meadows on what we’ve uncovered and then we’ll follow standard procedure and track her down.” He sighed, then sat down in his chair, spinning it around from side to side, feet planted firmly on the ground. Jack sensed the confusion in him, knocking his blocking pattern askew ever so slightly. If he’d wanted to, he could potentially pry a little deeper. But then Burnfield stared straight at him and Jack backed off, embarrassed.
“You want to know what I think?” Burnfield asked.
“You deal with a lot of rogue telepaths?”
“This department has captured over one hundred. Around half were so low on the teep scale that a retest at a testing centre would probably class them as humdrum. And then there are those in the mid-range, unhappy about the work they’ve been allocated to, or sometimes trying to escape from some abusive work relationship. Then there are the others. And today you tell me about a whole new branch of them that have kept suspiciously quiet. How come we’ve never heard of these adjusters?”
“If you knew about them, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs very well.”
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Jack sat with his hands in front of him, pressing the thumbs together until the ends went white. This assignment wasn’t going to be the easy ride he’d hoped it would be. Perhaps, he didn’t have the luxury of riding this out until he was recalled by Adam. Maybe now was the time to take risks. “I want to see Booth’s body.”
1:50 PM
Steve hurried back to his office to grab his jacket with a smile still on his face. It wasn’t every day he got praise from the boss in front of the team, and much as it didn’t suit his tough-guy image to care about that sort of thing he walked with a new found spring in his step.
“I’ll drive,” he said to Chloe when he met her back in the operations room.
“Yeah, fine. Let’s go.” But just as they were through the doors she hesitated and turned back. “Sorry, I’ve left my bag. Go on ahead. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
Steve tried not to scowl, but he found it difficult not to with Chloe. “OK,” he said and went down to the garage to pick out one of the pool cars. Despite Chloe being equivalent in rank to him, she talked to him like a superior. It niggled him no end but it wouldn’t do any good to speak to Burnfield about her. She was always the boss’s favourite, evidenced by this latest case. It was Chloe that was chosen to go out to the Maguire crime scene and later to his house, whilst Steve was relegated to babysitting Alice and Phil sifting through files and records.
He checked his HALO. Five minutes had passed. What the hell was she doing? He called her but her messaging service picked up instead. She was only meant to be grabbing her bag.
Steve hurried back up to the operations room and spotted her immediately inside her office. She was talking on her HALO, her back to the door. Steve felt the muscles in his jaw tighten but he resisted the urge to barge in without some warning. He knocked and pushed open the door.
“Chloe, we need to get going.”
She glared at him with a pointed stare and put her hand over her HALO. “Steve, I’m in the middle of something.”
“The landlord’s expecting us.”
“He can wait a few minutes. I’ll be down as soon as I’m done.” She walked to the door and gently closed it before resuming her private conversation.
The Remnant Vault (Tombs Rising Book 2) Page 11
