She would have found another fifteen minutes if it weren’t for Gumiela’s apologetic message on her links.
I’m going to have to put another lead on your case. Seems your case might be tied to another, and he’s already well underway in that investigation. Please brief him when he arrives at the scene.
Not only was the message vague, it was cowardly. Gumiela could have contacted Romey directly. Instead, she chose to leave the message—without the name of the new lead detective on the case. Now anyone could come in and claim Romey’s case and she would have no say in it.
She had saved the message and scurried back to the scene, fortunately arriving before the new lead detective had.
The techs still weren’t finished. Before Romey left, they had established that Whitford’s was the only dead body in the house. No one knew yet whether Whitford lived alone or had family.
She had planned to run an information feed on him while she ate and listened to her sons’ tales of school, but she hadn’t had time for that. And she didn’t want the feed still running when she got back to the crime scene.
Tech vehicles littered the long drive leading to the Whitford estate. A few street cops guarded the scene, mostly shooing gogglers and the occasional reporter away from the area.
She got out of her own aircar and trudged down the long path that twisted and turned its way into the estate. She already had the techs check out the path, knowing that everyone who visited this place would have to use it.
One squad, parked near the front gate, had a person in it. The employee who had let the techs inside. She felt a lurch in her stomach. In her haste to get home to the boys, she had forgotten her only witness.
And she wanted to interview this employee before the new lead detective came on the scene.
She opened the door on the front passenger side and sat down. A see-through screen rose between her and the witness, a young man with frightened eyes and blotchy skin.
“My links don’t work in here,” he said somewhat tearfully, which surprised her. “Can I at least let my boss know where I am so I don’t get fired?”
He didn’t just look young, he was young. Romey almost smiled. But she didn’t dare. She didn’t want to lose control of this interview before it really started.
“I thought that was your boss inside the house,” she said.
“Technically.” The boy—she couldn’t quite think of him as a man, even though he probably had ten years on her fourteen-year-old—sniffled. “I mean, he’s the boss of the whole company, but I’ve never met him before.”
He ran a hand over his nose. At that moment, she decided to play this one motherly. She reached into her pocket and removed some tissue. Then she shut off the screen for just a moment and handed the tissue across.
He took it without touching her or reaching through the screen. That almost convinced her to keep the screen down.
Almost.
“What’s your name, son?” she asked.
He sniffled again. “Parthalán Gimble.”
She almost smiled again. The name was too much for such a sorry creature. “And what do they call you, Parthalán?”
“Lán,” he said.
Of course. Maybe he was as hapless as he seemed. “Okay, Lán. Tell me why you’re here.”
“They put me in the squad and told me to wait. I’ve been here at least ninety minutes and no one’s even checked up on me—”
“I know,” she said soothingly. “I’m sorry. We’ve been dealing with the crime scene. We should have talked with you earlier. Do you need some food or a bathroom?”
He shook his head, but his cheeks flushed at the very idea of someone asking him those questions. He was an interesting choice for an employee of a security firm.
“When I asked why you’re here,” she said, “I meant why did Whitford Security send you here?”
“Oh.” He wiped at his nose again with the tissue. “They needed a body on-site to see if the system was working.”
Then his flush deepened.
“I mean, you know, a real person. I mean, like someone alive. I mean, oh God…” He buried his face in his hands.
Romey permitted herself a small smile, mostly because she couldn’t help it. She hoped her sons would never behave like this in a crisis. She hoped she’d trained them better.
“Who sent you?” she asked gently.
“Mr. Lautenberg.” Lán raised his head. The blush had faded, leaving his skin even blotchier.
“Who is Mr. Lautenberg?” Romey asked.
“My boss.”
“What does he do?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Lán said.
Of course he didn’t. “I mean, what’s his job title?”
“Deputy head of operations, but the head of operations wasn’t there and neither was anyone else of importance so Mr. Lautenberg, he had to make some decisions on his own, which he didn’t like doing, but he felt it was necessary, so he was yelling at people; then he pointed at me, and I thought, you know, that was it. I was fired. But he didn’t fire me. He sent me here. Which was a trick because there’s no public transportation within two kilometers and I don’t have my own car and I wasn’t sure how to get here and I didn’t have money for a taxi.”
He took a breath, and so did Romey. “I take it Mr. Lautenberg doesn’t talk to you very often.”
“He’s never talked to me.” Lán’s voice rose in panic. “That’s why I have to let him know that I’m all right. I’ll get fired, and this is the best job I’ve ever had. The pay—”
“I understand,” Romey said, “and I’m sure he will, too. By now everyone at your company probably knows that Mr. Whitford is dead.”
“That was Mr. Whitford?” Lán’s voice rose even more, and then it cracked. Maybe he was younger than she thought. Maybe he only had five years on her eldest son.
“Roshdi Whitford,” she said. “You didn’t know?”
“I thought Mr. Whitford had killed some guy who broke in, you know? I didn’t think it was him.”
“You’d never met him?”
“No.”
“Or seen a picture?”
“No.”
“There’s no image of the company’s founder in its primary building?” Romey asked.
“There’s no image of anything in there. It’s like a fortress. You’re not supposed to look at anything but your work. It’s weird. But it pays good.”
She got that. She was also relieved that she had ordered the Whitford Securities building locked down the moment she got wind of who had died.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me the events before you were sent here. You said this Mr. Lautenberg was yelling at people. Was this in the office or were you in a meeting?”
“They were in a meeting,” he said. “I just came in with the lunch tray. We don’t have bots, you know, because they can be tampered with. I guess no technology is really safe.”
“I guess not,” she said, deciding to wait to find out who “they” were.
“So there I was passing out the sandwiches and the special orders and he was yelling about how could this crisis happen and who let things get out of hand and where the hell were the two original guards and then he got some private message and he asked if anyone had seen Mr. Whitford today and no one had and then he frowned and he pointed at me and he told me to come here so that they could use their security system to track a real body. Those were his words. ‘A real body.’ I didn’t say it to be insensitive or anything.”
She nodded, trying to get a picture of what had really happened. “Do you think he knew something had happened to Mr. Whitford?”
“Why would he have sent me if he did? I mean, I’m the newest hire. There’s no reason to send me. I’m not trained in anything. Like I know there’s ways to go across the lawn here without activating too many cameras. It’s the prescribed company route, but no one taught it to me. They wanted someone to mimic a nonemployee’s route and I guess I’m the closest any employee
gets to a nonemployee.”
She almost smiled again, then caught herself. This poor boy. At least he was smart enough to know he’d been sent here because he was the least important employee in the firm.
“Let’s back up for a moment,” she said. “Was this a regular meeting that you brought sandwiches to?”
“No,” he said. “It was an emergency meeting. I usually bring everyone sandwiches at their desk. It was kinda hard to find who had what because I go by desk, not by person—”
“And,” she interrupted, not wanting to know the minutia of his work, “when was the meeting called?”
“An hour, maybe, before I had to go in there?” He shrugged. He clearly didn’t know.
“Do you know why it was called?”
“They got some ping.”
“Ping?” she asked.
“From someone who was supposed to be working who wasn’t? Or something. The higher up you go, the more regulated you get. If you’re supposed to be on a job, you walk past the building, so that your company identification logs in. If you don’t log in and you’re supposed to be on some shift somewhere, like some building we’re providing security at or something, the system pings the upper level.”
It sounded elaborate. Romey frowned. “They had a meeting because someone didn’t show up for work?”
“That happens,” he said. “It’s happened a few times since I got there. Usually the guy just gets fired, but this time, something went really wrong.”
She nodded. “Were they trying to track him down?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Everyone ran around for a few minutes, then Mr. Lautenberg called the meeting, and stuff went on in the meeting room that I didn’t know about. I do know that no one wanted Mr. Whitford to know until we all knew—or they all knew, really. The rest of us would find out whenever.”
“Right,” she said. “Who was missing?”
He shrugged.
“Do you know what he was supposed to be doing?”
“Guarding something,” Lán said. “I know that because they were really afraid. This could be big.”
“And they didn’t contact the company’s head over it?”
“Not right away,” Lán said. “But I got the sense that they were trying when I got in there, and then he wasn’t answering, and everyone said that was weird, and then they got weird hits on the security system, and that’s when they sent me.”
If he was telling the truth, then this poor kid had no idea what the company had done to him. They had sent him here as a decoy, not just to see if the security system was working, but also to see if whatever had gone wrong was in any way dangerous.
Since they didn’t use bots or other major tech, they had no choice but to send in lower-level employees. It was interesting that they had sent in a kid who had no training at all, probably because anyone with enough training would understand the dangers and behave accordingly.
“Did they think something had happened to Mr. Whitford?”
Lán shrugged. “I didn’t know anything had happened to him until you told me.”
“You called the police before you called your boss?” she asked.
He flushed again. “He was dead. I work for a security company. We’re not the police. We don’t investigate anything. I did the right thing, right?”
Probably not for the company. The poor kid would probably lose his job because he hadn’t followed company policy. But for her…
“You did the right thing,” she said. “You’re amazingly brave. You waited here with the body until the police arrived?”
“No,” he said, looking down. “I ran out into the yard. I didn’t want—you know—to be close to it.”
She nodded. If he ran around and the company’s security systems were working properly, then they had known that he had called the police. They also had known that something had scared the poor boy.
He probably wouldn’t get fired. He probably already was fired.
“Then when the police arrived, you let them in,” she said.
“They just looked in the house, like I did, and called for some techs or something like that. They made me wait. When the techs got here, they had me open the door.”
“I thought you didn’t know how the security system worked,” she said.
“Every employee has a passkey into any Whitford Security System.”
“Any system?” she asked. That didn’t sound very secure.
“Initially, yeah. Then it gets modified by position. The higher up you are, the more places you can go. Like there are places even in the Whitford Security building that I can’t get into.”
“And if clients have a Whitford Security System?”
“I can’t get in. But some of my bosses can. And the operations guys and maintenance guys, they can. But they leave a trail so if something bad happens, then they’d get blamed, you know.”
It didn’t sound very efficient to her, but she wasn’t going to trust the probably-fired almost-nonemployee employee. She would have someone else explain the system to her.
“Yet you could open your boss’s front door?” she asked.
“He’s the one who sets the level of security at his house,” Lán said. “If he didn’t want someone like me in there, he would have had a tighter security system.”
She frowned. “You never told me how you did get here. You said you didn’t have a car and there was no nearby public transportation and you couldn’t afford a taxi.”
He pressed his lips together. He had clearly done something he wasn’t supposed to.
“I promise I won’t tell your bosses,” she said. And she wasn’t lying. She wouldn’t tell his bosses because his bosses wouldn’t care.
“I got a friend to drop me here.” He spoke quietly.
“And who is this friend?” she asked.
He still wasn’t looking at her. “Jude Andreeson.”
“Did Jude Andreeson come onto the property with you?’
“No!” Lán whirled his head toward her. “They might’ve been watching. I’d get fired.”
“All right,” she said, using her mother voice. Reasonable, yet demanding. “Where did he drop you off?”
“Up the street, far from here,” Lán said. “I made him turn around so he wouldn’t drive down the street.”
She nodded. “How were you planning to get back to work?”
“I thought maybe someone would come for me, but if they didn’t, I’d walk to the public transport.”
“You figured they were watching you when you got here?”
“That was the whole point,” he said. “They were afraid the system wasn’t working.”
“Do you know why?” she asked.
“Because they thought Mr. Whitford was here. There was no other place he’d be. Or maybe they tried to find him somewhere else or something. I’m not exactly sure. But they wanted—”
“A real body, I know,” she said more to herself than him. Was the missing word in that phrase live? A real live body. She almost asked Lán how the system worked, then decided not to. He probably didn’t know.
But if it wasn’t registering a glitch in the system and it wasn’t getting a reading of anyone alive here, wouldn’t they have sent someone more experienced?
She smiled at Lán, making sure the expression was reassuring. “I’m going to need you here for a few more minutes. I’ll send someone over to get your personal information and do a follow-up interview. Then you’ll be free to go.”
He nodded, even though he looked unhappier than he had before.
She got out of the car, closing the door, before she allowed herself a deep frown. The kid had raised a lot more problems than he had solved for her.
“Find the killer?”
Romey started. She should have noticed that a man was standing near the back of the squad, but she hadn’t. Part of the reason was because the man had somehow made himself blend into his surroundings.
He was taller than she was, which w
asn’t difficult to be, and he looked square, probably because the jacket he wore didn’t taper from his broad shoulders. His blue-black hair was thinning, and his face was oddly lined, as if he had started to develop wrinkles and then they moved to a different part of his skin.
He also looked tired.
It took her a moment to recognize him. Detective Bartholomew Nyquist, surly and temperamental, with one of the best closing rates in the department until he nearly died trying to thwart an assassin last year.
“I take it you’re the new lead on the investigation.” She tried not to sound disappointed, but she doubted she was successful.
“Sorry,” he said. “I hate taking over cases someone else has started, but it looks like your case and mine are related.”
“Related means that I stay lead on mine and you stay lead on yours.” Now she did sound bitter and she didn’t mean to. Or maybe she did. She’d caught this case because Gumiela said there was no one better, even though Romey needed a day off, some time with her family, and some sleep.
Now, apparently, there was someone better.
“Okay,” he said, “so I couched the language a bit. Our cases aren’t just related. I think they’re the same case. Which is why I’m here.”
“You think?” she asked. “The chief said it was her idea.”
“It was her idea after I explained the ties between the cases to her,” he said. “Let me explain them to you, and then you can catch me up on what’s going on here.”
He rounded the car and held out his hand.
“Let’s start, though, with a formal introduction. I know who you are, but you probably have no idea who I am.” The words didn’t sound fake. He truly thought she had no idea who he was. “I’m Bartholomew Nyquist.”
She took his hand and shook it. “Savita Romey.”
“You’ve done some great work,” he said, letting her hand go. “I’m going to try to stay out of your way on this. I just need the information that being part of the investigation yields.”
“All right,” she said, not sure if he was now trying to smooth things over.
“And of course, you’re going to have full access to my investigation as well.” He smiled at her, then glanced inside the car. “Witness or suspect?”
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