Gemini Series Boxset

by Ty Patterson

  Meghan stood rooted for a split second, not believing her eyes.

  The fifteen feet separating her from the oncoming vehicle became ten.

  Move!

  To her right was empty space. To her left were more parking spaces. Behind her was the SUV.

  She lunged to the right, stumbled, the lamps blinding her, the roar filling her ears, and then she felt something slam into her.

  Beth!

  She went flying, landed several feet behind the SUV, just as the car rammed into their ride.

  Metal tore and ground, the SUV’s alarm went off, the car’s engine stuttered and then died. Meghan rolled over and rose to her feet. A quick look at Beth, she was rising too, apparently unhurt.

  People came rushing out of the apartment complex, voices raised in urgency. A door slammed

  The car door.

  She took a mental inventory of herself as she watched a lean man stumble out of the car. He fell once, rose, looked to his left, and then to his right.

  His eyes met Meghan’s and for a second he seemed to freeze; the next instant, he bolted.

  Meghan moved without conscious thought. She gave chase, ignoring the yells of the approaching students.

  The man shouldered through students, shoving them away roughly, leaping over a hunched girl.

  Meghan followed. The man was fast. Very fast. Uncaring about who he pushed away. Meghan was fueled by anger.

  She ignored the throbbing in her shoulder. She put behind the thoughts of Beth. She willed her legs to pump faster and started running in the smooth, fluid way Zeb had taught them.

  Glide in the air. Don’t cut through it.

  The man glanced back once and under the dim light of a streetlamp, she saw he was Chinese. Scared.

  Or angry.

  The runner swerved suddenly, crossed the street and headed to a wrought iron fence. Beyond it was a yard with several exits.

  If he leaps over, he’ll gain time and can disappear.

  Meghan’s stride lengthened. She was pleased her breathing was smooth. She and Beth ran ten miles every day, Zeb joining them occasionally. A sprint such as this was no sweat.

  She gauged the distance between the two of them.

  Just over seven feet. A similar distance separated the man from the fence.

  She landed on her left foot. Shot out her right. Powered it down, and levered off it.

  She dove at the man’s legs, slapped his left one with a hand, grabbed his right thigh and brought him down.

  The man wriggled and twisted like an eel. A hand shot out towards Meghan’s throat. She ducked just in time and caught it and twisted it behind his back. He didn’t allow her to apply the hold.

  He heaved off the concrete and reared his head back. She met his head with a pointed elbow. Hard bone against hard bone. A rear thrust against a downward one.

  The man groaned and tried to turn sideways. His legs flailed in an attempt to kick her.

  She evaded them, twisted his hand further, applied a knee, and secured him.

  ‘Don’t kill him,’ Beth panted as she came running. ‘We need him alive.’

  ‘Wasn’t planning to,’ Meghan replied drily and winked at her sister when the man went rigid at Beth’s words.

  Beth would’ve twisted his scrawny neck. She plays hardball.

  She cuffed his hands with plastic ties they always carried and hauled him upright.

  Beth and she studied him without uttering a word. Beth went around him inspecting him from top to bottom as if she were in the market for buying an animal.

  ‘Who’re you, buddy?’ Meghan asked him.

  The man didn’t reply. He didn’t meet her eyes.

  He had Chinese features, was clean shaven, short haired, and dark eyed. No tats marked his skin. His eyes were nervous, scared, as he looked from Meghan and turned sideways to look at Beth.

  She shoved him forward.

  ‘Face front, eyes forward,’ she snarled.

  ‘That was a poor job, if killing us was his intention.’ She directed her words at Meghan. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Let’s break his neck just for being such an amateur.’

  ‘What about the cops?’ Meghan frowned, catching on to Beth’s tactics.

  ‘Self defense. There aren’t any witnesses. The dude’s scrawny. Betcha I can snap his neck like a twig. Remember that gangbanger I killed? He was heavier than this lightweight and I finished him in a minute.’

  Meghan looked around. There wasn’t anyone about. A bunch of students were grouped in front of the entrance to the apartment building, but they were a distance away.

  ‘Do it,’ Meghan looked past him at her sister. ‘The cops will be here soon.’

  A cruiser’s siren sounded a couple of blocks away, as if in response. ‘I’ll shield you from the students’ eyes.’

  Meghan crowded the man, blocking him from the students’ line of vision, as Beth went closer to him.

  ‘Hey, hold up,’ the man yelled out loudly. ‘I lost control of my vehicle.’

  American accent, Meghan thought. Native New Yorker.

  ‘So why did you run? Why didn’t you honk in warning?’ Beth’s voice sounded mean.

  ‘It happened too fast,’ he protested. ‘I tried to steer into a vacant space, but my car was going too fast.’

  Headlights brightened the streets and red and blue flashes filled the night sky as patrol cars poured in and pulled to a stop.

  ‘We should’ve just gone and done it,’ Beth sighed regretfully. ‘Now it’s too late.’

  Their captive moved suddenly, hopping towards the approaching officers.

  ‘Take me,’ he shouted. ‘They’re planning to kill me.’

  It was one am when the twins reached their office in Columbus Avenue.

  The police hadn’t got anything useful from the captive. He stuck to his story stubbornly and a quick inspection of his vehicle revealed he had a flat.

  A breathalyzer showed he was over the limit. ID checks confirmed he had several priors for DUI.

  ‘Looks like he lost control of his vehicle,’ an officer told them as he chewed gum and eyed them with interest. ‘He says you threatened to snap his neck.’

  ‘Do we look like we’re capable of that?’ Beth’s voice dripped with honey and sweetness.

  The officer grinned, ‘Ma’am, we know all about you. Mark’s a good friend of mine. I’ve seen you both several times in One PP with the Commissioner. The guy was lucky. He got off light.’

  ‘You’ll look into him?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘You think it was a coincidence?’ Beth asked Meghan as they took the elevator to their apartments.

  ‘Yeah,’ Meghan replied slowly. ‘Been thinking of that. I can’t see how anyone could’ve arranged a hit, if that’s what it was, at such short notice. And why would they?’

  ‘That was no hit. In any case we’ve got his ID. We’ll run him through Werner.’

  Their investigation into Cali’s disappearance started the next day, twenty-four hours after the man died on the crosswalk.

  Meghan was the first in the office, an enormous space done up in vibrant colors. It has couches and sofas strewn all over, a basketball hoop, baseball bats and mittens, and a thin golfing strip.

  The twins had decorated the office and had been determined to do away with a typical corporate look.

  Meghan went into the kitchen, brewed herself a coffee, and went to the floor-to-ceiling window. Columbus Avenue was bathed in the sun’s golden light as it filtered through high-rises and trees and lightened the day.

  She closed her eyes when the first sip of Jamaican Blue Mountain went down her throat. Meghan was utterly convinced the planet too, was fueled by coffee. How else could it keep spinning and revolving?

  A sound caught her attention and she turned to see her twin go to the kitchen and brew herself a drink. Beth stood by the window, her mug in her hand, vapor enveloping her like a light halo. A ray of light caught her hair and turned it to gold and turn
ed her green eyes to liquid emeralds . No wonder Mark’s fallen for her, hard.

  ‘What do we do today, sis?’ Beth acknowledged her look with a quirked eyebrow.

  ‘We work on Werner. You go through Cali’s movements as far back as you can. Dig out everything about her on social media. Her friends, coworkers, bosses, everyone. Run them through the machine. I’ll look up our hitman from yesterday, and also check out the Minters.’

  Werner was a proprietary artificial intelligence software program that resided in a supercomputer in their office. Werner had been developed by a couple of Stanford graduates and its superior capabilities had attracted the NSA and the DIA’s attention.

  Zeb and Broker had outbid the agencies and had acquired the software. Broker and the twins kept enhancing its capabilities to such an extent that the NSA had a standing offer on it and upped their price every year.

  The program talked to numerous national and international databases and the NYPD frequently used its capabilities when they came up against bureaucratic brick walls.

  They worked as the sun moved across the blue sky and turned day into noon and then early evening.

  Werner didn’t flag anyone in Cali’s social or professional network. Jack Minter’s network took more time. His contacts were international and his work had brought him in contact with some horrific war criminals.

  Werner had to verify Jack Minter’s contacts, look up available records for their movements, and come up with probable threat vectors.

  The sun went down, shadows in their office lengthened, when Werner came back conclusively. There wasn’t anything in Jack Minter’s backstory that was connected to Cali’s disappearance.

  The Chinese hitman turned out to be a low level drug dealer who was known to the cops. He had no record of violent crime.

  ‘Coincidence,’ Meghan said aloud and stopped looking into him.

  Beth rose and stretched. It was just the two of them in the office. Zeb was in Washington DC with Clare. Broker was in DC too, with FBI Special Agent in Charge, Sarah Burke, his girlfriend.

  Bear and Chloe, and Bwana and Roger were in Texas, vacationing in Roger’s home. There were no ongoing Agency missions. It was downtime.

  ‘Looks like we’ll have to investigate the hard way.’ Beth suggested. ‘Let’s go for a run.’

  Meghan nodded and shut down her terminal. She stifled a yawn and checked her phone. No messages from Chang or Pizaka.

  They started out, when it rang.

  It was Chang.

  ‘Where are you?’

  The twins stopped when they heard something in his voice.

  ‘In our office,’ Meghan replied.

  ‘Can you come down?’

  ‘What’s up, Chang?’

  ‘We know who the man is. The man who died.’

  He paused a beat.

  ‘It’s Cain.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘Cain?’ Meghan repeated, dumbfounded.

  ‘Yeah. Get your butts over here.’

  ‘What? What’s this about Cain?’ Beth asked her.

  ‘The dead man is Cain.’

  ‘No one ever saw Cain.’ Pizaka paced the room as he explained when they had reached One PP forty-five minutes later.

  It was eight pm and they all had a long day, however, his tan suit had its knife-edged creases intact and not a hair of his was out of place.

  ‘We know that,’ Beth oozed sarcasm, wishing him to hurry.

  Pizaka wasn’t to be hurried. It was as if he was auditioning for a Hollywood role. He frowned at something and stopped.

  He’s thinking maybe there’s another book in all this, Beth thought snidely and put her game face on when Meghan glared at her.

  ‘No witnesses,’ Pizaka extended a well-manicured finger. ‘No victims left alive. No DNA traces. Nothing underneath the nails of the victims. No semen.’

  ‘The dead bodies are the only proof there’s a killer out there. Cain.’

  He looked at his captive audience. They seemed spellbound. The audition was going well.

  ‘There was one survivor, Caryl Bybee. She didn’t see Cain’s face either. Her description was generic.’

  Beth looked at Chang when Pizaka turned his back on them. Hurry him up for chrissakes, she mouthed.

  He’s on a roll, came the reply.

  ‘Bybee grappled with him for a brief moment and in that scuffle, Cain left behind a vital piece of evidence.’

  Pizaka went to the table and drew out a see-through baggie from a folder. He held it up reverently for a moment and passed it around.

  Beth got it first and as she looked at the single black thread, it came to her.

  ‘That matches what the dead man was wearing, right?’

  Pizaka smiled and leaned against a wall. ‘Yes. That thread matches the shirt and trousers John Doe, henceforth known as Cain, was wearing.’

  ‘Cain is dead.’ Pizaka didn’t go in for rubbing hands in glee, but he came close to it.

  ‘Who killed him though?’ Meghan asked absently as she fingered the baggie, her mind a million miles away.

  ‘Bennett and Johnson will figure that out. We informed them about the evidence.’

  Meghan nodded, still thinking of possibilities and probabilities, of angles and likelihoods.

  ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ Chang spoke for the first time, addressing her.

  Meghan brought her mind to the present and focused on him. ‘Cain killed Cali?’

  Chang nodded.

  ‘I still don’t think so,’ Meghan countered.

  She held a hand up to still the chorus of protests. ‘Hear me out. This is Cain. The most elusive killer the city has known. If he had killed Cali, why would he be carrying her photograph? He was trying to tell me something. His eyes…he was out to meet me.’

  ‘You are reaching,’ Pizaka waved a hand dismissively. ‘Cain was a serial killer. Serial killers often collect trophies. That photograph could be from his collection.’

  ‘You’re not convinced?’ Beth broke the short silence that followed.

  ‘Nope,’ Meghan replied. ‘However, let’s proceed with our investigation and see where it leads us.’

  She rose and stopped mid-motion. ‘We’ll have to tell the Minters.’

  They were back at the Minters’ the next morning, Chang and Pizaka along with them.

  The door swung open before Meghan knocked and a smiling Percy greeted them. Her smile faded when she saw the twins and the cops.

  ‘Who is it, Percy?’ Jack Minter called from the depths of the home. He came to the hallway and went pale when he saw their visitors. Grace Minter joined them in the living room and seemed to visibly shrink.

  ‘Have you…? Is Cali…?’ she whispered, unable to utter the words.

  ‘We don’t know, ma’am,’ Meghan admitted softly. She looked at Jack and then at the couch behind them.

  Jack Minter got the message and helped his wife to a couch and when they were settled, Meghan continued.

  ‘We’ve identified that man.’ She swallowed and wondered how she could put it to them.

  Just tell them.

  ‘That man was Cain.’

  A stunned silence followed and then Grace moaned and buried her face in her husband’s chest.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Jack asked softly.

  ‘As sure as we can be, sir,’ Chang replied and broke it down for them.

  A long hour later, Percy joined them at the sidewalk and waited with the twins while the cops departed.

  She turned to Meghan, a stubborn look on her face, her lower lip jutting out. ‘I don’t believe it. Find her body, and only then I’ll accept it.’

  ‘We aim to,’ Meghan answered.

  The twins’ first stop was Columbia University’s Department of Physics. They asked for Mark Letwoski and while waiting for him in his office, Meghan reviewed what they knew of him.

  Professor Mark Letwoski had been awarded the Nobel Prize for his research in theoretical physics, ten years
back. He now taught and tutored research students.

  Cali had been part of his research team, along with five other students, when she had disappeared.

  The NYPD had interviewed Letwoski and the other students and hadn’t uncovered anything of note.

  The NYPD isn’t us.

  She and Beth rose when the professor entered his office, and stood gaping.

  Mouth shut, Meghan!

  She brought a smile to her lips, got her senses back, and shook hands with the professor and introduced her sister.

  I would take up research in an instant, if he tutored me.

  Mark Letwoski was Hollywood handsome. He had blond curls, a clean-shaven face, and didn’t look his fifty-eight years. His blue eyes twinkled as if he knew what Meghan was thinking.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you. The unruly hair, beard, sports jacket look never appealed to me,’ he chuckled and gestured at a couple of chairs.

  He noticed Meghan’s eyes lingering on the award certificate hanging on a wall. ‘It’s not that big a deal,’ he smiled. ‘Research is just like any other job. We come in to work every day, make incremental progress, write our papers, submit them, and sometimes we get lucky.’

  Yeah, sheer, dumb, luck got you the Nobel!

  ‘You’re here about Cali?’

  ‘Yes, Professor.’

  ‘Mark. I know us profs are supposed to be old, and I am, but let’s not remind me of my age.’

  He listened in silence when Meghan outlined the purpose of their investigation and when she had finished, posed a question. ‘It’s been a long time now. You expect to be more successful than the NYPD?’

  ‘We’re better than them,’ Beth deadpanned and drew a chuckle from Letwoski.

  ‘What exactly were Cali, and your group, working on, sir?’ Meghan asked him. Sir is better. Calling a Nobel winner by his first name doesn’t feel right.

  ‘Our research was in subatomic particle behavior and human machine interaction.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘You mean like Ant Man?’ Beth queried.