by Blaze Ward
Rachel supposed they might qualify as a form of jacketed softnose, but that just meant that shooting someone would cause it to expand like a flower as it went through their body.
The plates and kevlar she had under her shirt would save her from anything but a nasty bruise, assuming someone didn’t shoot her in the face or the ass.
Didn’t prove that Zielinski had been the one behind the hit, but it did sink his sorry ass in a ripe pool of shit. That guy in Boston had been shooting with a ghost revolver, rather than a sliding semi-auto, but just possession of an illegal gun in the hands of a civilian like Zielinski was a good enough charge, regardless of what else they found in the files.
The only thing they hadn’t found on a quick skim of the place had been evidence of the Synth Chip that the perp had been using.
Did that mean that Zielinski had hired it out? Blackmailed someone for it? Or was there a safety deposit box somewhere else with more evidence?
The latter didn’t feel right to Rachel. Captain Zielinski had been the kind of guy who would want it all where he could see it and touch it at all times.
Control freak.
The front door was closed but not locked. Enough to keep civilians out of this crime scene while she watched the files and Greyson hauled things.
Rachel stood in the exact center of the room and looked around.
Where would I hide something?
It would be in here. The front and the bathroom had been anonymous places. Zielinski didn’t live there. He just slept and bathed.
Whatever it was would be in this room.
Desk. Chair. Table. File cabinet. Stove that didn’t look used. Microwave overhead. Refrigerator. Couple of bookshelves with curios, but nothing personal. Crap you picked up as a memento of a trip because you’d stuffed it in the suitcase when you were packing to go home, and never gotten around to throwing it in the trash.
She looked inside a couple of the books, mindful that the file cabinet key had been hidden under the cigar ashes. Nothing in the books. No notes tucked in or centers of pages chopped out.
Too much like a spy thriller anyway. Zielinski was a spider at the center of a web. Hide it in plain sight because he’s smarter than everyone else and putting one over on them.
Except that he’s dealing with Greyson Leigh and Rachel Asher now. We’re smarter than he is, right?
She moved to the refrigerator, thinking back to her first case as Greyson’s partner. The blond with the big tits that the Phrenic had used as a vector to get into Dominguez’s apartment.
Her refrigerator had been similarly empty, because she had takeout delivered regularly, instead of cooking.
Cooking.
Rachel turned to the stove and opened the oven door to peek inside. Old and gnarly, but with dust, not grime.
How the hell does a stove get dusty?
Unless it was never used.
Something clicked in the back of her head and she turned back to the freezer section of the refrigerator. Opened the door and peered at the boxes of dinners stashed in there. Four of them. The top one looked fine. Salisbury steak, potatoes, and an apple pie thing in an aluminum tray.
Not something you can nuke, with all that metal, so you have to cook it in the oven.
But you never cook.
Rachel slid it to one side and noted that the other three had some serious ice build up going. She checked expiration dates and noted that the middle one was supposedly bad three years ago.
Three years?
Zielinski had only been here for a little under seven months now. Who wouldn’t have emptied the junk out of the freezer before he moved in?
She pulled it out of the pile and realized how much heavier it was than the others.
Rachel felt her mouth go dry as she walked back to the table, closing the freezer door behind her. She put the TV dinner box down and saw where the edge that had been on the back side when it was in the freezer was taped shut with the invisible stuff you used on presents.
She reached into a pocket and came out with a knife that she flipped open, slicing the taped edge and hoping her pounding heart wouldn’t cause her to flinch and cut herself.
Last thing she needed was to bleed all over the crime scene and have the punks from Forensics give her crap. Even podunks like this county would have on staff.
But then, were they really going to call in the local authorities? Greyson had been talking to Edgar Redhawk before they broke in here. And had stopped.
They were removing all this evidence and putting it in the car. Was Greyson about to suddenly drive back to Boston in the rental?
How fucking weird was this case about to get?
Weirder? Was that grammatically allowed?
Something. She’d ask an English major next time she saw one, if she remembered.
The back of the box was open. She put the knife down instead of trying to close the folding blade. That was just asking to bleed.
Instead, she reached for the flap and pulled it open. The box was heavy, so she tipped it and dumped a pile of heavy pages into her hand.
Rachel gasped when she saw what they were.
25
Chain of Evidence
Greyson heard Rachel gasping as he opened the door. She was looking at something on the table over the file cabinets.
He closed the door behind him and locked it. For good measure, he chirped the car locks again, because it felt like something big had just happened.
“You okay?” he called as he walked to the back of the apartment.
“No,” Rachel replied in a flat, hard voice.
No pain in her voice, so he wasn’t reaching for his comm to call for an ambulance or a pistol to shoot someone.
She sounded mad as hell. Rachel didn’t get there very often. When she did, smart people ran for the hills.
Greyson walked close enough to look over her shoulder.
Yeah, that would probably do it.
“How many?” he asked, reaching out a hand and picking up the top bearer instrument off a stack of them.
You ran into them from time to time. Mostly when people wanted a legal way to move money around in an era when banks had to report anything with that many zeroes to an artificial intelligence system that would look for suggestions of a crime.
Anonymous. Allowed the bearer to present it at any point and convert the document in hand to a number of shares of stock in a corporation or a stack of bonds. Presumably, ones that had been dumping interest or dividends into a bank account somewhere that still didn’t like playing well with banking regulators.
It had been island nations in the Caribbean when Greyson was young. Now there were several countries that dealt directly with the aliens and happily told the blustering politicians in North America or Europe to piss off.
Greyson recognized the company named on the top document as he slipped it to one side. Major software manufacturer. The one under it made cars. Several pages dealing with government and municipal bonds. Transportation companies.
Greyson whistled when he assembled the whole into an image in his head. Maybe thirty or forty million loonies worth of value here, depending on the market. Mark that down a little for the bribes you’d have to pay to cash them in without raising a fuss.
Still a shit ton of money. Especially for a retired cop from Chicago.
From the chicken fried steak dinner box on the table, they’d been stored in the freezer. Another trick like putting the key in the ash tray.
Rachel turned a pale face up at him now.
“Honest cops?” she asked in a timid, withdrawn voice.
He studied her eyes, dilated about as far as they could go in this light.
“Mostly,” he replied. “If the population can’t trust us to do the job, they have other troubles. Why?”
“This is fuck-you-money, Greyson,” she said. “Evidence of crimes on a scale I don’t think I can imagine, even after the classes I’ve been taking. What have we stepped into and how do w
e get it off our boots?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he offered her.
It was at least an honest assessment of things. He’d come down here looking for clues that would lead him to a fabrication plant. The black kind that had made an illegal Synth Chip that turned everyday people into assassins. The threads connecting the shooter to Olek had been tenuous, but held up each time he tugged at them in his mind.
“Not sure yet?” she asked, covering her mouth in shock at how loud she’d suddenly gotten.
He gestured to the stack in the box.
“We already knew he was bent, Rachel,” Greyson said. “Hell, my investigations that happened to start pointing in his direction on a completely unrelated case is what got me ousted the first time. Nobody could ever make anything stick, because he could lean on the people who might have otherwise decided to prosecute the man.”
Zielinski could destroy lives with the sorts of things Greyson had seen in the files he’d stashed in the sedan’s trunk.
But what could Zielinski do if he didn’t have those files?
And was the world a better place with them public or destroyed?
That was the genesis of Rachel’s question.
Burn it or unleash it?
The moral and legal answer involved calling Redhawk right now and having him scramble a team of bloodthirsty beavers to wade through the forest of evidence.
On the other hand, the bearer instruments were just that: entitlements to the bearer of the document to cash or equivalent value on presentation. None of them had names, either. Just issuance numbers for tracking purposes, so you couldn’t easily forge them or make duplicate copies.
He or Rachel could retire to a life of debaucherous luxury with what was in his hand. Like Dominguez and that closet full of bespoke suits when he’d been killed.
“I’m finally nervous,” Rachel admitted as Greyson did all the calculus in his head.
“Me, too,” he admitted as well. “This isn’t an assassination anymore. This is something huge, and we just happened to avoid being collateral damage at the outset.”
“Zielinski clearing the decks?” she asked. “Get rid of us before he goes after Upkins and whoever else was in his way or owed him for the pain you put him through?”
“Don’t know,” Greyson replied. “Won’t without a confession. Not sure I could actually get him to admit it on tape.”
“How would you even try?” Rachel asked, surprised.
Greyson smiled as a plan took shape in his head.
“They say in vino veritas,” Greyson told her. “In wine you find truth. A drunk man will no longer shade what he thinks or how he feels.”
“You’re going to get Captain Zielinski drunk?” she gasped.
Greyson smiled at his partner.
“It works just as well when you make someone very, very angry.”
26
Timebomb
Greyson wondered if those files were a form of infectious disease. Once you had them, you were unwilling to ever let them out of your sight again, like that character in the fable with the pile of gold coins.
Greyson and Rachel had loaded all the evidence into the trunk of the rental, then swept the place one more time for any last surprises and to make sure that they hadn’t left any fingerprints behind. The chicken fried steak had felt like the last bomb in Zielinski’s arsenal. Everything else could be stored in a bank’s safety deposit box against need. False identify cards, spare bundles of cash, whatever. The sorts of things you put in a bug-out bag for the end of the world.
Whether it was the whole world or just yours when the cops suddenly started closing in and you had to run for the hills. Or someplace that didn’t like Americans that much and might not honor an extradition request.
Greyson couldn’t let the car out of his sight. He knew that. Rachel didn’t understand, but she didn’t have the history of crap with Zielinski that Greyson had been forced to wade through over the years, either.
They’d gone as far as the hotel and checked right back out, suffering the cost of one night’s unused stay but Greyson didn’t care. That wasn’t going to break the bank and he could probably get it reimbursed anyway.
He’d looked at a map as they sat parked in front of one of those all-night diners. The greasy kind with a full wall of windows all the way across the front to let in light during the day and illuminate the parking lot at night. Greyson parked where he could watch the car from inside and then headed in, Rachel in tow.
The place had been a chain, once upon a time. Before the Illymus Merchant Guild came along from the night sky and messed up the entire planet by trying to make it a better place. Faster planes, faster trains, and electric robot cars meant that fewer folks had to stop regularly to stretch their legs on long trips, or add petroleum to an internal combustion engine to make it go.
A lot of roadside diners hadn’t survived. Or, like this one, had reinvented themselves as truly local dives. He’d checked the parking lot for license plates when he pulled in. Almost all local, or he’d have kept driving.
Fools from out of state might not know any better than to eat here, but if you had locals, the food had to be pretty good.
In honor of Olek Jan Zielinski, Greyson ordered the chicken fried steak breakfast, even this late in the evening, going on midnight. Eggs over easy. The really runny kind you mopped up with some sourdough toast. Hash browns extra crispy, until they were more like soggy potato chips than anything. And gravy made with an even mixture of pork sausage and bacon. Weird, but he’d already made a note to find a joint in Boston that did it that way, just based on the waitress’s description.
If it was any good, he’d have to find a recipe and ask one of the places back home to add it to menu.
Rachel had to watch out for her girlish, weight-lifter’s figure, so she’d gone with protein on a salad. Chicken Waldorf. The woman was probably as strong as he was, but she worked out with iron while Greyson focused on walking long distances and running up and down stairs instead.
They had both ordered a slice of fresh coffee and were sitting there contemplating the night.
What sorts of pheromones the two of them were giving off wasn’t something Greyson could understand, but just like on the train, the woman up front had taken one look at them and seated them off in a corner away from everyone else.
Like maybe they were on a date or something? Did people bring dates to this roadside dive?
Greyson had learned early on that you never took a date to dinner the first time you went out. Too easy to look like a dork or spill something on yourself embarrassingly. Take her to a movie. Or the park. Emmy had been seduced by a museum, but Greyson suspected that it wouldn’t have taken much, since she had come chasing after him.
Dinner was for after they knew you were secretly a nerd. Emmy had kept him around.
“So now what are we doing?” Rachel asked in a casual, off-hand kind of voice belied by the seriousness in her eyes. “Obviously, we’re not staying in Panama City. What kind of danger are we in?”
“Us?” Greyson blinked, returning to the present from all the deep and twisted things he had been contemplating. “None. This is all about the trouble we’re going to drop on other people.”
“That bad?” Her eyes lit up now with a little more fire. Like maybe she got off on that aspect of law enforcement. He hadn’t pried too deeply into the woman.
“It might be,” he temporized instead. “We haven’t looked through those files to really see all Zielinski’s victims, so I have no idea how many lives he might have been able to destroy if he wanted to. A bunch and badly is just a rough guess. Publicly, too. Plus, if we do dig, the kind of thing where you get warrants and take Olek’s entire life apart meticulously, I’m pretty sure we’d be able to trace all those bearer instruments back to the people who had been paying him, under the table either as blackmail or protection money against it. Again, more lives destroyed.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be the good
guys, Greyson?” Rachel grimaced.
“We are,” he agreed. “What’s good in this? Outing all those people for having their kinks as part of taking Zielinski down? Utterly shattering the entire bureaucratic structure of the Eastern Metroplex government by showing how deep the rot has gotten? Or letting those people know we have the files and forcing more and more of them to resign so that maybe folks can be promoted that aren’t compromised.”
“There are no good answers, are there?”
He watched her take another bite of coffee.
“I personally don’t care that Yulia Kwan seems to like it three or four on one,” Greyson said. “Or that she probably gets off on other people watching her when she does. We all have our kinks. The blackmail makes it impossible for her to continue in any office, anywhere. Owens was the same way.”
“He got anything on Upkins?” Rachel asked.
It sounded innocent, but to Greyson it was still a knife to the guts.
Did Zielinski have anything that might have compromised Denise? Wouldn’t he have used it to keep his old job? Or had Zielinski used it instead to ensure that she didn’t come after him when he had retired?
Greyson knew exactly how many years it had been since the two of the had been intimate, but he hadn’t really known the political side of her all that much then. Just the incredible mind housed in that amazing body, and where she liked to be kissed. And other things.
But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to look in that file yet. Just couldn’t do it.
Owens, like Kwan, had been compromised. Pills of so many different kinds and effects that Greyson wondered how the man hadn’t just accidentally undergone spontaneous human combustion at any point.
It must take a doctor using an AI just to keep him looking like he was intact.
And Redhawk had moved right up from being Owens’s right hand to being Denise’s. What did that say about the situation, except that power almost always corrupted?
