Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  Santino put his glasses back on and turned back to the computer. Rachel rested a hand on his shoulder in sympathy and then walked back to her files. Poor guy, she thought. She didn’t know if this was good or bad timing on Fate’s part, as he had been days away from dragging Rachel with him to help him pick out a ring. Maggie made him happy, and Rachel had liked her those few times Santino had dragged them both to dinner.

  But Santino—practical, logical Santino, who no doubt believed every word he had said to the core of his very soul—had nonetheless been lying when he said there was no such thing as love at first sight.

  (And Rachel, whose only furnished room enshrined that ideal in books she could no longer read, wrapped herself in the unexpected joy at how, for those few lucky people, there might actually be some real magic left in the world.)

  There was a quiet knock on the door and Rachel looked up to see Charley Brazee struggle with the knob, arms full of banker’s boxes. His colors were off, his friendly blue-gray core hidden under purples and grays locked in mortal combat. She jumped up to help and he gratefully dropped the uppermost box into her arms.

  “Jeez, Charley, is there gold in these?” Rachel’s sore knees throbbed under the new weight.

  “Maybe. If they help you, then yes. These are some of our notes on the court proceedings where the MPD has processed video evidence over the last six months. Edwards had me go through them all last night and pick out the ones that might be relevant.”

  “Oh, Charley,” Rachel said, wincing. “We’ve got a full team doing that same thing here.”

  His colors didn’t change but he rounded his shoulders and started rubbing his hands together. Stress, Rachel noted, the kinesthetic message unmistakable.

  “I knew it,” he sighed. “Edwards has me doing busywork. I’m so behind on everything…” He pulled himself straight, as if he had made a difficult decision. “Can you help me get another box out of my car?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, and kept the conversation light and fluffy as they walked to the parking garage. It didn’t seem to help; Charley went deeper into his shell until even prattling on about OACET couldn’t draw him out.

  The city had decided the solution to First MPD’s perennial parking shortage was an adjacent garage, but they hadn’t quite understood the problem when they approved the project. Zoning prevented the garage from being taller than the building itself, and the available surface area was smaller than the lot of a small car dealership. The result was a narrow concrete iceberg, with six floors of the garage hidden beneath the ground and the uppermost two cresting to merge with the back of the school.

  A total of two doors connected the old building to the new garage; First District Station was a protected space, and access was tightly controlled. She took Charley on the least-traveled of those two routes, past the break room and down a hallway with paired rooms used for interrogations. This corridor had been designed to facilitate for prisoner transport and ended in a small room with steel doors and bulletproof windows on both sides, a rodeo chute to secure the felons before entering or leaving the building. Both the interior and exterior doors swung open for them as Rachel and Charley walked down the hall: in Rachel’s opinion, one of the major perks of being a cyborg was never having to dither with the digital locks.

  Charley, who usually loved it when she showed off for him, didn’t so much as crack a smile. Rachel was unable to get a clean read from him. His movements were tight and he spent too much time picking what he wanted to say, looking at everything from the fluorescent lights to the scuffs on the glossy floor to avoid meeting her eyes. His conversational colors were a swirling blend of happy purples and the gray of stress: the man was his own house divided.

  He had parked three floors down. Rachel didn’t like tight city spaces, especially at night, and Charley kept crowding her towards the cars. She kept the center of the garage on her left as they descended, and every few steps she’d take a breath to remind herself that the void between the levels let in the relative coolness of the August night air.

  There was one box on the passenger’s seat of his car. It was the size of a shoebox, much smaller than the two he had lugged into her temporary office. Rachel knew a setup when she saw one. “What’s on your mind, Charley?”

  He paused and leaned against the car, but his happy purple popped. “If I give you some information,” he said, “can you promise it won’t get back to me?”

  She reached out to the OACET community server and began recording.

  “I don’t know how that would work,” she said, glancing up at First District Station. “I think you need to talk to an officer. Let me get Santino out here.”

  “I’d rather you handle it,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this and… If I don’t do it, people could get hurt. I have to do this.

  “But I can’t lose my job, Rachel,” he said in a rush. “It’s a bad economy, and if I’m burned as a law clerk, I’m too old to start all over again.”

  Lie, she noted as the dimples emerged. That’s not what’s bothering you.

  “Charley, are you in trouble?”

  The dimples disappeared and reappeared as he spoke, truth and lies blended together. “No, not right now. But if things keep going the way they are… Listen,” he said, fumbling inside of his suit, “Please. Your case? This was in Edwards’ office. I need you to handle it, or people could get hurt.”

  He handed her a wrinkled sheet of paper. Rachel flipped her implant to reading mode and made out the name of a bank and the first few digits of a routing number before she hastily crumpled it up.

  Charley went red. “Hey!”

  “It’s okay, I’ll keep it safe,” she said, digging around in her purse for a plastic evidence bag. “But I can’t look at it until I have a warrant.” She wasn’t one of those Agents who found themselves performing unconscious data retrieval searches, but there was a first time for everything. She didn’t want to read Charley’s note and suddenly find herself squirreled up in a bank’s database, her grubby little synapse-fingers ripping through its files.

  He looked towards the stationhouse. “Don’t get a warrant, even if you use a different judge. Edwards will be watching… He says he’s scared of OACET.” Charley pointed to the crumpled wad in its little plastic baggie. “I’ve seen your suspect. And that account? It’s a payoff from…” Charley’s voice trailed off as he noticed the security cameras above his head.

  “Tell me about the money, Charley.” Shades of early Shawn, she thought as she worked with calm words and stressed Charley’s name to ground him. “If it’s so important, tell me. Then I’ll find a way to do this legally, okay?”

  He tried to pull her into the shadow of a minivan, but she stood firm. “I don’t know if you can. There’s someone high up in the government involved in this,” he said, relenting. Before, the dimples in his colors came and went as he spoke; now, they were gone. Charley was finally telling the absolute truth. “But that’s all I’ll—“

  “Senator Hanlon,” she cut him off. “It’s Senator Hanlon.”

  Charley went white in shock, then replaced it with a happy yellow. “How did you know?” he whispered.

  “Get out here now,” she sent to Phil and Jason.

  “Come back inside with me. Fill out a report with Santino,” she said, knowing it was a lost cause. “You’ll be treated as a whistleblower, you’ll be protected. You have my word,” she lied. She felt terrible about misleading him but there was no such thing as a confidential informant. Like chupacabras, they existed purely in fiction and in human interest stories on the evening news.

  He was shaking his head before she had finished. “You know that never works,” he said, and pushed himself off of the minivan. “I need to go. Don’t tell anybody I gave you that, okay? Promise me you’ll look into it yourself.”

  “You realize you’re asking me to break the law,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, nodding nervously. “Check out those numbers and you’l
l see why. But you didn’t get them from me, remember? Anywhere else. Just not from me.”

  “Charley…” Rachel closed her eyes tight, but he still stared at her, pleading. “I can’t. And I won’t. You have to file a report or give me something I can use to get a warrant.”

  “Listen to me!” He grabbed her lower arm with a doughy hand, then looked past her to where Phil and Jason were sprinting down the pavement towards them. “Forget it,” he said, dropping her arm as though it had burned him. “I tried.”

  “Charley,” she said, dodging his car door as he slid into the driver’s seat, “if it’s important, you know you have to talk to me. That’s why you came here tonight!”

  “Lots of things are important, Rachel,” he said. “Right now, it’s important I don’t get caught with you.”

  He threw the shoebox at her and ended with a hard: “Good luck.” He pulled out into the travel lane as the other Agents arrived, shading his face with his hand to hide his profile from two men he saw as strangers.

  “Who’s that?” Phil asked.

  “A law clerk in Edward’s office. He’s sort of a friend. He gave me this,” she said, and held up the baggie. “He claims it’s information that incriminates Edwards, and…”

  She paused and crushed the paper tight in her fist. “And he told me that Senator Hanlon is involved.”

  The two men dropped into reds and blacks. Jason grabbed at her, but she saw it coming and his hand closed on empty air.

  “Give it to me.”

  “I need your lighter,” she told him.

  “Rachel, wait,” Phil said. “Think about this.”

  She pressed the wad tight between both hands. “No. If I do, I’ll talk myself into doing something we’ll all regret. This isn’t evidence, it’s hearsay.”

  Jason came straight at her like a prizefighter. “Give it to me.”

  “He was lying, Jason. Our entire conversation, right up until I mentioned Hanlon, he was lying.”

  “What did he say?” Phil asked, putting a hand on Jason’s shoulder. Jason shrugged it off and started pacing.

  “Here,” she said, and passed them the location of the file. “I taped it.”

  The rule was that emotions couldn’t be captured on film; the exception was when she was the one doing the filming. As they watched the video, she talked them through Charley’s moods, how he shifted between truth and lie. “He was showing a lot of stress, and most of his lines seemed scripted,” she explained. “My best guess is that he was coerced to try and set me up. Whoever’s twisting his arm wants me to incriminate myself.

  “And Jason?” Rachel pointed up to where the security camera tracked them from its chickenwire nest. “You don’t pull a Woodward in a police station parking garage.”

  He handed her his lighter.

  They watched Charley’s note, now forever unread, burn down to a slurry of plastic and ash beneath the watchful glass eye of First MPD.

  As they walked back towards the station, they were joined by two very confused officers who were sent to learn why the cyborgs were setting fires in the parking garage. Phil told them he had lost a bar bet with a local law clerk, and offered to treat them to vending machine cuisine to make up for their inconvenience.

  “The bank account. Do you think that was real?” Jason said to her as they ripped into stale cupcakes. Across the table, Phil was entertaining the officers with the saga of the bomb scare at Glazer’s apartment. Like every good fish story, the bombs had grown in size and threat; they were lucky the city was still standing.

  The calories hit her bloodstream and her body twitched itself awake. “Yeah, I do,” she replied. The cupcakes were gone in two bites each and she tossed the wrappers in the bin to keep herself from licking the frosting off of them. “And probably at least one large cash transaction went through it. Deposit or payment, doesn’t matter. It’ll lead straight back to Edwards in some way.”

  “Is the judge involved?

  She shrugged across the link before she realized it. “Sorry,” she said as he flinched. “I don’t know. If you asked me that an hour ago, I’d have said yes.”

  “And now?” Phil asked. He had been relieved of storytelling duties and was nodding in the right places as an officer told one of her own.

  “My gut says Edwards is being set up as a sacrifice. He could be innocent, he could be complicit, but I don’t think he’s the brains behind this. He’s too…” Rachel thought back to Edwards during that morning’s press conference, how he had shimmered with energy on the podium. She leaned forward and rested her chin on the lid of Charley’s shoebox. “He’s too eager. He’s a little kid who wants to be famous, but I don’t think he’d set up a murder.”

  “Hanlon would,” Jason said, and started to pick up reds. “We already know that for a fact. If Hanlon was the one getting his hands dirty, would Edwards help him?”

  “If Hanlon lied to him to bring him on his team? Yes, Edwards would definitely help him. Edwards would get to run for office with the support of a beloved Senator. It’d be his dream come true.”

  Rachel paused, then added: “But if Hanlon was honest with him? I just don’t know.”

  Phil bid goodnight to the officers and got up to leave, and Rachel and Jason followed him out of the room. “Why be honest with someone if you’re setting him up? Rachel…” Phil paused and looked at her. “Your friend, Charley? What if he wasn’t lying, and Hanlon and Edwards are working together?”

  She said, very quietly so they wouldn’t feel her anger: “Then we put another name on the list.”

  TWELVE

  The sun wasn’t up but Mulcahy was waiting for her just outside of her front door. She looked around for a classic muscle car and came up empty.

  “I’m walking you to work,” he said.

  Rachel assumed he meant First District Station. OACET headquarters was twenty miles away, and they both had busy days ahead of them. “Okie-dokie.”

  She went back inside and taped a note to the coffee pot to let Santino know she had left early but would be running late. Sometime after two in the morning, her partner had shown up on her doorstep with a hockey duffle stuffed with clothes. He had gone straight to the inflatable air mattress she had set up in one of the empty rooms without saying a word. Rachel saw that he had come back downstairs and used the kitchen countertop as his dumping ground for his workday debris: his badge, belt, wallet, and Taser were strewn out between the sink and the fridge, and when she took a quick peek in the freezer she found his gun hidden behind the ice tray.

  Buy a gun safe, she added to her mental list of things to do. She kept hers in the nightstand beside her bed, but the guest room didn’t have a stick of furniture. A few nights in the freezer wouldn’t corrode Santino’s service weapon, but it looked as though her partner might be staying with her for longer than that.

  It stopped her cold, realizing this would be the first time in years she would share her private space with anyone for longer than a night. Rachel looked towards the staircase and caught herself before she scanned her own house to see if Santino was up and moving. She rubbed the stress from her hands and made herself walk away from the imprint he had already left on her kitchen, the jacket he had tossed over the newel post on his way up to bed, his shoes on the mat by the door.

  She darted outside to find Mrs. Wagner stalking across their conjoined front lawns towards Rachel’s front porch, golf club held parallel to the ground like a samurai sword.

  Mulcahy, bemused in golds and purples, asked: “Does she do nothing but watch your house?”

  “I think she sleeps when I’m at work. Come on.” Rachel took off in the other direction, the morning dew on the grass soaking her pant cuffs as the large man followed in her wake. Behind them, Mrs. Wagner went red with rage as her targets escaped at the speed of a brisk walk.

  She and Mulcahy passed the first few blocks in small talk. She needled him with questions about his upcoming nuptials to see if she could get his colors to shift, but h
e seemed genuinely enthusiastic about his starring role in a wedding that would rival any held at Westminster Abbey. He was not, however, familiar with organza; with a perfectly straight face, she told him he should call the flower shop as quickly as possible to set up the order while it was still in season.

  They detoured through a small public park which catered to soccer moms by day and junkies by night; with dawn barely touching the bottom of the clouds, they had the place to themselves. Mulcahy steered them towards a footbridge which passed over a puddle and a clump of weeds, the rain from yesterday’s storms already drained from the channel. He stopped in the middle of the bridge and leaned on the railing.

  “How many surveillance devices are on us?” he asked.

  “Right now? Is this a test?”

  He shook his head. “This is a meeting.”

  She flipped to frequencies which let her pick out audio, then video, and mostly for giggles she ran a few to cover some of the less common spectra (she didn’t expect to find anything in those but Mulcahy loved to throw ringers).

  “Fourteen,” she answered. It was a pittance; fourteen signals aimed directly at the park was practically nothing. They were within spitting distance of Pennsylvania Avenue, and there was so much electronic chatter the hairs on her arms twitched.

  “You’re tracking them?” Mulcahy asked. When she nodded, he grinned. “Watch this.”

  He lifted his chin and closed his eyes. Rachel had no idea what he was doing until the signals started to fade and a gray fog rose up around them. The signals waved in and out, like losing a favorite radio station as your car drove out of range, then vanished entirely.

  “Here,” Mulcahy said, and she looked up to see him kneeling beside her and holding a pack of tissues. She didn’t remember sitting down. Or crying; her face was wet.

  “Shit,” she said, wiping her eyes with the flat of her hand, careful to avoid smearing her makeup. “Sorry. I thought I was done with the blackouts.”