Mirrors, p.5
Mirrors, page 5
Greyson smiled. Not even reinstated, and he had already made the world a better place.
What could he do with a badge and a gun?
“Fresh start,” Greyson echoed the woman, adding the appropriate nod she had apparently been expecting before she continued.
“We’re not sure who the new captain of the Hunter Bureau in this district will be,” Her Honor continued. “I’m given to understand you just might walk right back out the door if I offered it to you.”
“That would be correct, Metropolitan Upkins,” Greyson said. “Politics and paperwork are the two things I hate most in this life.”
“Would you stay around?” she asked.
He presumed she meant after he caught the rogue Phrenic, freak as most of the cops around here would call the creature.
Greyson shrugged loosely inside his big longcoat. Expansively, even.
“Depends on the situation around the building, I’d guess,” he offered. “Did fine when I was a cop. Did fine when I wasn’t.”
He left it at that. The three people in the room with him, not counting Redhawk, were possibly the most powerful, dangerous politicians north of Cape Fear and east of the Mississippi River.
Greyson really didn’t care what they did in the privacy of their own homes, as long as their little swindles didn’t hurt other people who couldn’t protect themselves with a badge. Every cop has a limit. His was just shorter than most of the others.
Her Honor seemed to appreciate that about him.
He still had no idea why she was involved in this. Easier to issue orders, so you had a fall guy. Unless your Chief Commissioner refused, and you had to do things yourself. That was the only play that made any sense.
Sweep the entire Police Commission clear and start over? Must be one hell of a something, back there in the shadows thrown by a rogue Phrenic killer.
Greyson wasn’t sure if he wanted to look or not. Maybe he’d sic Asher on it, tomorrow. Give the kid something to do to make her look good for the London folks. After all, getting your political superiors arrested for graft and corruption would certainly make a splash, as long as it didn’t make you completely unemployable tomorrow.
“Will you come back to duty, Leigh?” Upkins asked in a simple, honest tone. “Be reinstated? Pretend that none of this happened and you’ve just been assigned the next hunt?”
He could make that promise.
Didn’t cover Asher, so if she went off and did things?
Hey, kid’s ambitious. How’m I supposed to stop her?
“As long as I don’t have Zielinski breathing over my shoulder,” Greyson acknowledged, before he turned back to Owens with a hard face. “Or others who might not understand how many cooks the kitchen can hold comfortably.”
He turned back to Metropolitan Upkins just fast enough to catch a ghost of a grin on her face. Like Greyson Leigh was going to be doing her other favors as he took down a serial killer. Maybe setting up all of her Police Commission to take a fall, too?
“Edgar, you will prepare the necessary paperwork and backdate it so Leigh continued to accrue seniority and union membership benefits from that unfortunate date,” she glanced back at her lethal shadow and got a nod. “Buford, you will sign it. Am I clear?”
“You are,” Commissioner Owens said, the first sound he had made since Greyson had walked in, other than silk swishing as he moved.
“Good, all of you out now,” she ordered. “I wish to talk to Detective/Hunter Leigh privately.”
At least as privately as this office might manage, given the number of recording and transmitting devices Greyson expected were within range.
So his jaw nearly hit the carpet, after they were alone and the door closed, when she pulled a…device from the pocket of her blazer and set it on the desk between them. She pushed a button on the top and Greyson heard barks of squelch and saw motes of smoke appear in a few places around the walls.
She smiled like a cat with the best cream. Greyson didn’t find it comforting. She probably knew that.
“Do you know what a stalking horse is, Leigh?” Her Honor asked with that same smile.
“Target you use when hunting big cats,” he answered. “Stake it to the ground out there to get killed, figuring you can shoot the killer when it comes. Nobody ever worries too much about the horse.”
“I’m not that worried about you, Greyson,” she nodded. “They said you were still the best, so I went and got you. And I’m tying you to a stake for some big kitty cats to stalk. There’s probably not much I can do to protect you from them, other than avenge you later, but I also wouldn’t mind if that horse kicked a few times before he went down. Clear?”
Greyson smiled at her.
“Asher my partner?” he asked.
“She is,” Her Honor smiled back, warmer this time. “Another stone killer like you, who also happens to be a good cop.”
“Kill them all, and make God sort them out?” Greyson cocked his head at the woman.
“If I’m the only survivor, I get to write the after-action reports, soldier.”
6
Lunch
Greyson had directed Rachel to a spot down on the old South Side. The neighborhood had been ugly, gentrified, fallen down again, and was fighting another round of gentrification tooth and nail, but it would lose this one as well.
Money was more important than culture. Especially the old traces of Southie nobody but the grumpy old locals wanted to preserve.
Tommy had opened his burger joint not long before the Guild had broken the sky open. He still served the best fries Greyson had ever found in his years with a gun. The burgers weren’t all that bad, either.
Since he might have back pay coming, Greyson splurged and got a double order of french fries today, home cut and fried in peanut oil and Tommy’s special seasoning mix. Rachel had finished hers and was sneaking the odd one off his plate, probably unconsciously.
“She really said that?” the young woman was aghast.
Whether it was the Metropolitan admitting those things, or just the weirdness of the situation wasn’t all that clear, but Greyson didn’t have much better of an idea himself.
“She did,” Greyson replied, taking the second-to-last bite of his burger and swishing it down with some cola.
“And you’re okay with that, Greyson?” Rachel asked.
“Figured something like that was coming when Zielinski walked out of the rain yesterday to bend my ear,” he grabbed some more fries and stuffed them in his mouth before she got them all. “Those folks don’t play nice.”
“Yeah, that’s for certain,” Rachel finished her drink and leaned back. “And Owens is not necessarily on our side?”
“None of them are on our side, kid,” he laughed. “Just make sure they don’t ruin your career when they get around to destroying mine.”
“Aren’t we all supposed to be on the same side here?” she leaned forward again and snagged some more of those addicting fries.
“No,” Greyson countered with a harsh laugh. “We’re all cops. Not even remotely the same thing. They don’t want me back, and it was bad enough that both Commissioners had to have gotten overridden by Upkins. There will be bad blood later over this, but I’m pretty sure she’s counting on you heading to London at some point, and me leaving when I’m ready. That lets her take all the credit, and annihilate the fools who made her get involved.”
“Jesus,” she whistled.
“Yeah, but right now everybody has to play nice with us,” Greyson said. “At least until we bring them back a body for the news to spend a couple of days frothing about.”
“London won’t take me without a degree, Greyson,” Rachel pointed out. “That’s two years from now.”
“Kid, we make Her Honor look good on this one, and I’m pretty sure that she’ll put in a personal call to the Mayor of London,” Greyson said.
“That bad?”
Her eyes had probably not opened that much since she was six, but Greyson figured it was better she go through this with him, now, at the beginning, than have to do it later, when things got fast and hairy.
“She made Zielinski leave town, Rachel,” Greyson said. “Owens looks to be on a very short leash, or noose, depending. I was close to taking down a lot of folks when they hauled me in and fired me. That hasn’t gone away, just because they need you and me to hunt down a shapeshifting killer.”
“That’s the part about the horse kicking,” Rachel guessed.
“That’s right,” he agreed.
“And you’re just going to take it?” she asked.
“Oh, no, kid. We’re not going to take anything from those people.”
7
Been There Before
Déjà vu.
Greyson looked around Dominguez’s tattered apartment and seemed to see it through two or three sets of eyes, which almost made him wobbly enough to lean on the door jamb, but they managed to hold it together.
They?
Weird.
Because he worked better at night, Greyson had taken Rachel back to the office after lunch to finally pick up his new badge and be officially issued both a palmstunner and a nerve scrambler.
He didn’t buy the story that his old badge had been misplaced. Zielinski had probably melted it down as a paperweight trophy. Olek was that petty. Most likely they’d find it in Florida one of these days, if anybody cared that much.
Officially a cop again, he’d spent the rest of the day reading reports while the kid did homework and fielded the odd question from the old man across the desk in the filing room filled with evidence. Wasn’t much to go on, but there never were in cases like this, at least until your killer had already spent a year doing his deeds.
Hadn’t been that long, or that many victims, so at sunset they headed out to the most recent crime scene. Cop on duty assured him that nobody had bothered the Police tape across the front door. Place had been sealed up from the inside well enough and at least one uniform was on twenty-four/seven for a while.
Not many cops got killed in their own apartment.
Place had been stripped to the walls, so it wasn’t the dump Greyson had been expecting. He wondered if Zielinski had sent someone through ahead of time, to make sure nothing incriminating would be found in the course of innocent lab techs doing their job.
There’d been a struggle in the living room. He’d known that. All the furniture was gone now, but the Bureau had a nifty device the Guild had given them. Recreated a holographic image of the room as it had been when the techs arrived.
Greyson pulled out the projector and set it to hovering just inside the living room, next to the entry hall where the front bathroom was. He clicked a button and watched the machine turn itself on and map the space.
Rachel hadn’t said a word since she entered, but he wasn’t surprised. She’d be having her own flashbacks, but Greyson had been a cop long enough, so he figured walking her through it would be less traumatic now and more cathartic later.
“You were at the door?” Greyson checked back over the shoulder she barely cleared behind him.
“That’s right,” she replied, jaw a little tight and eyes a little wide. “Heard something just as I was about to knock. Didn’t sound right, so I kicked the door in. Figured I could always apologize later if there was somebody in bondage gear hanging from the ceiling.”
Greyson turned enough to really study the woman. Five foot two, in shoes, maybe. Not petite, but also not built like a colonial space marine you saw in the vids, either. She smiled up at him, as if she could read his mind, but if that were the case, she’d have already shot him, so he smiled back.
Still, either Dominguez had forgotten to set all his security, or Rachel Asher was stronger than she looked. Good to know, since she was the one that might have to save his ass later.
Greyson stood at the entryway, feet still on the cheap entry linoleum rather than the cheaper, taupe carpet, and let the machine display what Rachel had seen.
Sofa, already soiled because someone had cracked Dominguez’s face open to bleed on it. Coffee table flipped with those stupid picture books scattered everywhere. The ones the man never read and just used to impress women he had conned into coming back to his place.
Lamp in the corner had stayed upright through it all, so they had good light to see a projection of Dominguez’s body half on the couch and half off.
“Then what?” Greyson knelt to change his perspective on the scene and felt Rachel joining him.
Hopefully, she would learn better habits from him than she had from her former partner.
What if she figures us out? a voice echoed strangely.
Then we’re freshly cooked meat, another one answered. Made no sense, but crime scenes rarely did.
“It was standing over him, tentacles licking his face or something,” Rachel’s voice had gotten small and tight.
Cop voice, when the brain steps back far enough that you can try not to remember the smells of dying, or hear a man’s life rattle out of his lungs.
“Close enough,” Greyson said. “They feed on your mental energy by tasting the chemistry of your brain with fine cilia on those tentacles. Get your memories when they get your DNA so they can morph into you later.”
“Yeah,” she agreed vaguely. “Ugly thing was making a sound. Had the palmstunner in my hand, so I shot it. Didn’t work.”
No, it hadn’t, thank the ancient ones.
“Palmstunner won’t hurt a Phrenic, Rachel,” Greyson told her. “Well, it hurts them, but won’t drop one. That’s why you and I have them in ankle holsters as backup, and nerve scramblers under our arms. And you have to be at less than fifty meters to do more than just knock one down with a nerve scrambler. Outside that, they can still crawl away.”
“You’ve hunted one?” she asked breathlessly. “Killed one?”
“Yeah,” Greyson nodded. “Not too many ever try their luck on Earth, but they’re one of the reasons Hunter Bureau exists, for the most part. I might be the expert, among humans at least.”
And most other species, but Ethen didn’t even think that thought too loud. Yes, he knew his own kind as well as any, and had added the amazing database of knowledge and experience that was Greyson Leigh to it. Frightening, really, what they might be as a combined entity.
“So it ran?” Greyson prompted.
“Did,” Rachel agreed. “Damned thing bounced straight up like an armadillo, off the ceiling, then the wall by the kitchen, and back up the hallway to the bedroom. Never seen anything like it.”
Greyson found the spot on the ceiling, as if it had been his own hand. Then the one on the wall that had actually been his foot pushing off. He stood and brushed his hands down the front of his pants to dry them.
Nerves.
Just to get himself deeper into cop mode, he drew the newly-issued nerve scrambler and held it barrel-up in his right hand.
When he was a kid, there had been a huge burst of science fiction cinema, as the technology of imagination got good enough and cheap enough to show anything you could want on a green screen.
Nerve scrambler looked like an old Buck Rogers ray gun from the pulp days a century earlier, rather than the darker, militaristic stuff of his youth. Gold plated, with a thin layer of real gold as a non-reactive surface. Emitter at the far end with a double cone like an old fashioned television satellite dish, one sitting inside another. Even made a Buck Rogers kind of sound when you pulled the trigger.
Not as much recoil as a palmstunner, so it took some getting used to, or you’d end up shooting your target in his balls instead of his heart. Both hurt, but the one was a really embarrassing way to die.
Rachel drew hers as well, but Greyson couldn’t tell if she was mirroring him, or had gotten some of his inner nervousness. Probably both.
The little things that kept you alive as a cop. Hopefully, nobody was hiding in the bedroom, because Greyson was pretty sure his instincts would kill them before his brain processed who they were.
Another stupid way to die.
He stalked down the hallway, suddenly back in a jungle somewhere he couldn’t talk about, even twenty-three years later, moving in on someone who never saw it coming.
They never had in those days.
Body sideways to minimize silhouette. Quiet feet shuffling firmly across the carpet down the left edge of the space. Left hand out to stop a knife or grab a handful of clothing. Right hand back, making it hard for someone to get at his gun.
Rachel was left-handed, so she was his exact opposite, across the hallway and back a few steps.
Mirrors.
Empty kitchen and living room were behind them. Greyson glanced into the spare bedroom that was unused from the images. He hadn’t told the projector to stay put, so it was with them going down the hallway and recreating rooms for him as it did.
Greyson had lived in a two bedroom place like this once. The spare had been his library, filled with old books that he had eventually decided he could read electronically just as easily, so he had downsized to the studio and parted with almost everything except the coffee maker.
That was too important to leave to chance when you had a really good one.
Linen closet across from the spare bedroom was empty and smelled of fabric softener. Washer/dryer unit next to that in a cubbyhole.
Dominguez had always used a maid service, as far back as Greyson remembered, so presumably they stored things in here and did their work while he was out. Hopefully someone had let them know their contract had expired.
Master bedroom.
Plain walls until the projector got inside the door and lit it up with the extravagant definition of decadence by a man who didn’t know what a Lothario was. Bed big enough for four to sleep comfortably. Doorways to the master bathroom and walk-in closet that were behind the laundry space.
Dresser for leaving stuff. Projector showed Dominguez’s badge, gun, wallet, and pocket change. Handheld had been on his body when they found them.
Art on the walls was just past that edge of tasteful pornography that folks like Olivia and Nagel had managed so well, or going back to the classics: Gil Elvgren and Antonio Vargas. This was just trashy porn meant to look high-brow. Movie posters for bad shows you might stumble onto in the hours just before dawn. Or old Italian cinema.
