Mirrors, p.10
Mirrors, page 10
So they had parted.
Denise hadn’t remarried, but maintained a different life now, dating famous people at a light-enough, arms-length kind of level, at least until she retired and could look out for herself and not just her career. Greyson had interviewed Emelina as part of a hunt that never got that close to the woman, but she had sought him out later. Just like Denise had.
Hunting the hunter.
Greyson nodded and looked at Rachel with searching eyes. Finding the truth at the core of her soul, which was one of the things that made hunters able to see a Phrenic in human guise.
“The entire case hinges on that, Rachel,” he said simply, in that quiet, methodical voice that penetrated stone like water finding any gap. “There isn’t anybody else in the Bureau I trust not to fuck it all up, so stay clean.”
The waitress returned before Rachel could reply. He might have timed it that way, though he would never admit it to anyone. Just smiled at her as realization dawned.
Greyson ordered heavy. Enough calories that he might have needed a nap later, but he didn’t think they would get a chance at lunch or dinner unless the case was already screwed. Rachel listened and did the same.
He had an image in his mind’s eye. The scent of heavy, greasy breakfast and morning bodies in the restaurant around them just reinforced that expectation of a delivery driver knocking on the woman’s door with bags of food and smiling at her as she opened it.
She really had been a gorgeous woman from the pictures he’d seen, just as shallow as a pane of glass and about as transparent. Skinny like a volleyball player, but without any of the muscles or hunger that burned in those women. Chirpy laugh, big tits bolted on later, and a barely-leashed libido.
Yeah, she might have been perfect for a guy like Dominguez to keep on the payroll, along with the other mistresses Greyson presumed. Zielinski had certainly had one for every day of the week, back in the day.
But she was dead now. Gone. An empty husk kept in an underground lair by a trapdoor spider that emerged into the fading afternoon to hunt.
Except Greyson had no idea how he knew that. It was almost like he could see that place in the sewers, an old blocked off set of steam tunnels that had once connected buildings around a business campus.
The place the hunter went when he needed to sleep. Where he kept his bodies.
Greyson shook his head to clear it, but the image wouldn’t go away. He almost felt like he had been in those tunnels at some point, perhaps even recently, a walking nightmare comparable to the one that have driven him from his apartment earlier.
Rachel had lapsed into silence, sipping her coffee and eyeing that manila folder on the table between them like it contained a bomb, or a poisonous spider. Greyson reached out and pulled it closer, flipping it open and pulling out the stack.
“Cop just walked in,” Rachel said clearly without moving her jaw.
Greyson didn’t flinch. Didn’t look up. Just kept his face bent over and let his peripheral vision find the shadow by the front door.
“One?” he asked quietly.
“So far, yes,” she said. “Don’t recognize him.”
“Don’t stare,” Greyson ordered her. “Let go of the man and just mark where she seats him.”
She turned towards him now and sipped her coffee.
“Do we all look so obvious?” she asked after a second.
He looked up and grinned at her.
“Cop has a walk, Rachel,” he said. “That’s why so few can make it undercover for long. Or be hunters. You have to blend in and all those years of hiding behind that badge make you stand out.”
“Invulnerability,” she noted. “That’s what it is. Nothing can touch me, because I have a gun and a badge.”
“Yup,” Greyson grinned. “Problem is, some of them begin to believe that, and so they start to bend. Little decisions to cut a few corners. They add up. Bad ones decide after a while that the world owes them something extra for putting up with all the shit the job brings. For the bodies that have to be mopped up after taking a concrete dive, or when someone pulls a weapon and makes you kill them. After a while, all those little things start to turn into big things.”
“Closets full of silk suits,” she grimaced.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “Dominguez was an end-case example of why you need Internal Affairs watching everyone and hating all cops, or they’ll get bent too and then everything goes to hell because the police stop doing that protect and serve bit, and start protecting their own from the laws. People on the streets can smell that, so they start hating cops and it becomes a vicious cycle.”
“How do we break it, Greyson?” she got thoughtful now.
“If it was up to me, I’d make everyone be a cop for about five years, and then make them move on,” he said. “Long enough to learn and pass on the information. Not so long that your corruption can stand. It’s that or just burn down each department every once in a while and start over. Buy some device from the Guild that can detect corrupt cops and publish the results of every interview so the bad ones can’t protect their friends.”
“I can see why you weren’t popular with the folks back at the office,” her voice had a mirthful, teasing edge now. “When did you become such a cynical bastard?”
“One of my previous lifetimes,” his grin grew wider. “Working off all that karma by trying to remember that the point of police is to protect the world from predators, not to become the predators that protect politicians. People forget that. It’s why the world sucks so much.”
“Can it be salvaged?” she asked, eyes growing more serious now.
He shrugged and drank some coffee as he watched that cop get seated at a table across the way. They both listened to another man at a nearby table trying to explain the bond market troubles to someone on a cell phone.
“I have to try, Rachel,” Greyson finally said. “If I can’t make the city a better place, why the hell am I wearing this badge? Why are you? Why are any of us, if the alternative just makes us a better-placed gang than any of the others?”
“Is the whole Bureau made up of bad apples?” she asked in a tiny voice.
“I’m hoping that there’s at least one honest cop left,” he fixed his gaze upon her and let the implications color her face a pretty pink.
Silence engulfed them like a flash flood running down the canyon. Greyson pulled at the stack of papers, making almost a production of flipping to a point about halfway deep until he found the right date.
He didn’t know why it was the right date, but he did. Five days before Kelly Anne had seduced and killed Carlos Dominguez. Greyson flipped a couple of pages slowly before he found the one he wanted. A day when a man was reported missing by his girlfriend when he didn’t come home from work one night.
Valdis Pandev. Baltic immigrant. Pain in the ass that had been arrested a few times, but never had anything stick.
Contacted the police three days later with a cock and bull story about a huge fight with his girlfriend that had caused him to move out and never go back. Police had marked the case closed at that point, without telling the woman.
End of story.
That was one of the reasons he had made Rachel run a full query, without filtering it in any way. Open cases wouldn’t have shown this bastard, and Greyson didn’t want to tell others what he was looking for. What subtle cues might lead him to his killer.
Got to preserve that mystique of being a hunter. He could filter the whole stack of names down fast enough.
Greyson checked the vital information again. Delivery driver for one of the local networks, like a taxi service for food. Disappeared and returned from the dead three days later like Jesus risen.
Blond hair. Strong jaw. Pretty blue eyes. List of tattoos on arms, legs, and back, but nothing visible when the man wore pants and long-sleeves.
Greyson had a pretty good idea the man could squat for hours without any pain. You had to learn that trick in a Russian prison, where there were too many people sharing too small a space without benches, and frequently piss running on the floor because the jailers didn’t care that much about cleaning things.
He’d be happy to apologize to the man if Valdis didn’t end up being Siberian Mafia, but Greyson doubted that the odds were stacked too far against them on this one.
“Is that him?” Rachel asked quietly, eyes looking but no part of her body reacting.
Greyson started a bit internally, remembering that he had company and an audience today. Too many breakfasts in this joint alone with his thoughts, he occasionally forgot that the rest of the human species existed as more than obstacles on the sidewalk and noise machines to ignore.
“Working theory,” Greyson replied, carefully flipping to the next page as an excuse to mislead anyone else watching.
“How do you do that?” she asked, hiding her mouth behind the coffee mug as she went for another sip.
“Cop magic,” Greyson grinned sideways.
He couldn’t explain it any better than that. Nor could the Army recruiters who had pulled him out of Advanced Training and offered him something better than a rifleman’s job. The folks at the police academy had made calls before he even emerged from the far end with his certification, and Greyson had walked right into Hunter Training when everyone else was just learning how to walk a beat.
Ethen nodded. Still waters that were deep enough to drown even a Phrenic. He’d been ordered to become Greyson Leigh as an insurance policy against the cops finding anyone else good enough to hunt Zaborra with Dominguez no longer an option. He certainly wasn’t supposed to fall in love with the man and want to live with him.
As him, if he could.
If Greyson Leigh could even be corralled by a Phrenic infiltrator, and not take them both Deathwalker at some point.
More pictures. More names. More lives lost, but as far as Ethen knew, Zaborra was still happy with that Lithuanian bastard, although he hadn’t checked in for more than a week as he went deep cover. Zaborra might have just gotten bored and gone shopping for more suits to wear.
Fucker was like that.
Greyson finally found Kelly’s picture. Reread the bits her roommate had put into the system when the flouncy blond didn’t come home or go to work for a few days. About the same time Carlos Dominguez got what he might have had coming, depending on how kind and loving God really was.
Mean streets of Boston didn’t put Greyson into a particularly religious frame of mind. Unless Satan had already won. There was always that.
“So how do I absorb your cop magic, Greyson?” Rachel asked. “Short of being a Phrenic myself and sucking your damned brains out of your eye sockets.”
He had another jolt of déjà vu so hard that he nearly spilled his coffee.
“Hey, you okay?” she asked, face turning concerned.
Greyson remembered to breathe.
“Sorry, bad image went too deep,” he offered weakly. “That was why she killed Carlos. To be able to get inside the investigation and derail it.”
Another deep breath.
The waitress saved him by returning with plates: ham, eggs, browns, and bread; and then immediately refilling coffee with a smile, as if she had decided maybe this was a date after all and he and Rachel were working things out.
“You don’t learn cop magic,” Greyson finally said around a bite of English muffin. “You’re born with it. Hunters are, at least. They saw the spark inside you when you came along. The key is to understand that you have it, and then learn to harness it, like saddling a horse so you can ride it. From there, my job is to show you how to bubble it up from your subconscious into a tool you can hold in your hand. Things like standing in that apartment and looking inside their oven and their fridge. Asking odd questions because something just doesn’t sound right at the surface. Like: who could walk up to her door without anybody noticing?”
“Eye of newt, toe of frog?” Rachel asked around her eggs.
“More truth than lies, Asher,” he replied.
Because he was in true danger of making a mess, Greyson put his fork down and carefully picked up the two stacks of paper, tapping it with one definitive finger in front of Rachel, God, and everyone else in here like he had found the person he wanted, and then slid the two stacks together, with the older stuff on the bottom and a set of nobodies on the page up.
Rather than stuff them back into their envelope like a smart cop, he just shifted the entire stack over to the far corner from where it had been, out of the way but open to whoever just happened to walk by.
If they understood what they were looking at.
At no point had he looked at the cop across the way longer than enough to fix a description in his mind for later. Didn’t mean he wasn’t tracking the man when the guy stood up not long after that and made his leisurely way to the restrooms in back. Greyson studiously focused his eyes on Rachel as soon as he saw the man move.
Peripheral vision was a lovely thing to develop.
The Army had taught him to shovel the food in like they would take the plate away after an unknown number of seconds, so he was done before Rachel was. Pulled out his handheld and checked messages and updates with his head down.
“Let me know when he comes back out,” Greyson muttered quietly under the noise of the other folks eating and chatting.
She took that as a cue and ate faster. Greyson felt a tap on his shin from her foot and saw her glance his way. He nodded minutely and went back to what he was reading in the latest issue of the Economist.
Every week, somebody interesting died and got the obit page. Those were always wildly interesting bits of history to learn.
A shadow loomed ever so briefly as Greyson nodded to some internal beat, and then it was gone.
“Are all narcs that obvious about it?” she muttered under her breath a few moments later.
Greyson looked up at her and put his handheld away.
“Hey, you’re too dense to realize you’ve had a tail all morning,” he said with a serious face. “And I’m a washed up has-been who shouldn’t be left alone with a gun, you know.”
The grin was back in her eyes.
“Cop magic,” she murmured.
“You got it, young lady,” he said. “They’re going to madly race off to look up poor Herbert Lam and think that they’ve stolen a march on us.”
“Because he happened to be the random second person on the random page you left the stack open to,” she said. “After making a production of pointing him out to the rookie who doesn’t understand anything about how you big, bad detectives work?”
Greyson just smiled at her.
“Narcs are where you end up when Vice is too much to handle,” he said with a hint of a sneer to his voice. “To say nothing of ever making it to Homicide Detective.”
“You are a bad man, Greyson Leigh,” she shook her head just a little, implying an eyeroll without actually committing one.
“Wait until you see what I’m like if they piss me off, Rachel,” he replied.
13
Hunters
Greyson knew he couldn’t rely on the computers at the station at this point. Every query would be logged automatically by the AI systems. Normally, that wasn’t a problem, but today that meant that someone else would most likely be following the investigation in almost real time if he was dumb enough to let them.
Maybe they thought he was. Greyson decided to play a joke on someone as they emerged from breakfast, ignored the Scout across the parking lot as they climbed into the Jouster.
“Okay, rookie,” he looked over as his seat belt snapped into place, chuckling as Rachel was having issues. Something about breasts, neck ties, and seat belts not wanting to cooperate this morning. “You call the station and have them run as much as they can find on Herbert Lam for us, to be printed and picked up later.”
“Why printed instead of just being sent to the handhelds or the unit in the car?” she asked, finally getting all the painful bits straightened out. “Seems less efficient.”
“Oh, it is,” he assured her. “But stuff on paper has a solidity that can’t be edited later.”
As she started the car, he put a hand on her arm and his other finger to his mouth for silence, tapping the microphone on the radio comm in the dash.
Chandler Jouster only looked a little like this internally, while the outside was a near flawless match. The government Skycruiser in disguise had several other sets of systems added in later. The Guild-supplied lift system that seemed to use something like anti-gravity to move the car in three dimensions when you needed speed and maneuverability. But that Buck Rogers stuff was mixed here with a radio unit at least as old as Greyson in design, if not more. Electricity, crystals, and antennae that let you talk to people miles away as if by magic to someone born in the Nineteenth Century.
At least it had been magic until the aliens had brought down real magic, or at least a technological equivalent thereof.
Rachel nodded as she understood. Every police car was keyed to the same set of teeth, so any cop’s keys could get into any other car in an emergency and drive it off without having to find the officer who had driven it before.
Made things better in a chase or getting someone to the hospital in a pinch, but it also meant that the Vice cop’s partner could have easily climbed into Rachel’s car and done things while everyone else was eating.
Worse, Greyson couldn’t find whatever it was and suppress it without letting them know that he’d seen them, so they had to act casual for now. Rachel was out in the street, driving with the folks running late to work, so traffic was on the back side of stupid right now.
“We’re going to need to do a lot of poking and walking today,” Greyson announced for her and the others. “Let’s find a place to park on the north side and we’ll go from there until we’re done and can come back for your wheels.”
Rachel eyed him sharply sidelong, but nodded.
“Parking ticket or cheap lot?” was all she asked.
