Mirrors, p.8
Mirrors, page 8
He took a long look around the rest of the space he could see from here and sighed a little. It would be so easy to tell the roommate that she could come back. There was nothing left here that he needed to know. It had just been another link in a chain that would lead him to the killer.
But that would give too much away to people that had a vested interest in what one Detective/Hunter Greyson Leigh was up to. Things he didn’t want revealed.
Not yet.
Rachel followed him to the front door in silence. Tense silence, but she had figured out that he was up to something and didn’t want to tell her yet. A most bright woman.
Down they went to the car. As she pulled into the late night traffic, Greyson studied her profile. Young, but dangerously smart. Raw, but she’d be a better cop than him in another decade.
“Here’s the other piece, Rachel,” he said in a low voice, once they were alone.
She didn’t look, but her ears would have rotated at him like radar antenna, were she a cat.
“If they could get to Dominguez so easily, the killer had to have had help somewhere,” Greyson said. “Leak, spy, something. Maybe one of the people Dominguez was leaning on for protection money decided they wanted the man dead. Nobody was going to bring me back, at least until Metropolitan Upkins got involved and stepped on a lot of toes to do it.”
Rachel glanced over under hooded brows, but kept silent. Absorbing his copness, probably, which would just make her better.
“So I got enemies at the station,” he continued. “We all do, but I don’t know who all of mine are just yet. Hopefully, you aren’t on that list, because I’d like to see you teach those limeys how to be better cops, and I’m pretty sure Upkins is expecting some of the people out there to be too dumb to pass up the chance to take a shot at me. She’s the one that will be shooting back, not me.”
Again the pause, watching her process it all. It was a gamble, but she had hopefully only been learning from Dominguez how to be a cop, and not a corrupt one.
“Stalking horse,” she more or less whispered.
Greyson nodded.
“I think we’ve made a big jump in maybe solving this case,” he said.
“But if we only ask the system for missing persons who worked as delivery drivers and such, then somebody might tell somebody, and then maybe our Phrenic catches word,” she said with a nod he could only classify as methodical.
Working out the pieces to the jigsaw.
“And then he vanishes on us,” Greyson said.
He turned back to watch the traffic out the windshield for a bit.
“I’d really like this to be a surprise,” he whispered.
9
Night
Greyson hadn’t even bothered to get ready for sleep. He was Hunting now, and knew that his body had already shifted to another mode, where he only needed about three or four hours of sleep to get by. At least for several weeks.
The Army had pounded that into him. Or maybe he’d always had it and they were just the ones that found it. Polished it. Honed it to a fine, killing edge.
His clock read a little after one. The city was quiet, but not silent. Greyson was at his table, folded down from the Murphy bed, thinking about tomorrow.
There was already a stack of papers most likely waiting patiently in the middle of Rachel’s desk for her to come retrieve them in the morning. It would have been nice to review the interior security tapes from tonight, just to see who happened along and took a look at the query across the top.
Idle curiosity, you know. Rachel’s partnered with the great Greyson Leigh. I thought that maybe I could learn something about how to be a better cop.
It would even sound plausible, however full of shit the person talking would be.
Didn’t matter at this point. Greyson knew there would be enemies, on Four as well as on Six. Or maybe the folks on Four taking quiet orders from the ones upstairs, orders that never seemed to make it into a log or database. Honest mistakes.
He grinned and watched the night drift by out the window. Boston never slept, since it was part of the Eastern Metroplex these days. Forty-odd million people crammed together in towers and transit tunnels. You could get all the way to DC itself, down at the south end and even into the place that had once been called Virginia, without ever emerging into sunlight.
Or night.
As he had told Rachel just before she dropped him off, most criminals are lazy. They’d rather cut corners than follow the rules, or they wouldn’t be criminals in the first place. You just had to look for those spots and trace them forward and backward until you had all the pieces and could predict where to set your trap.
Greyson knew he was playing a hunch, but it felt right, going back over all the years he had hunted other people to death, with or without a badge to hide behind. His gut told him that there would be a nobody who worked part time as a delivery driver for one of the local restaurants or networks. Man had just disappeared about ten days or so ago and a girlfriend or a parent or maybe wife would file a report, but wasn’t important enough that anyone had done anything beyond making next of kin file a report into the system, along with relevant personal information. Maybe he had just walked. Maybe he had even come back. That was what the paper was to check.
Greyson knew, if he wanted to check that there would be another body before that, or perhaps not. Maybe the killer had come to Earth in a good enough disguise, and the driver was his first kill in Boston. Maybe not.
Again, didn’t really matter. When dealing with a Phrenic, you had a chain of bodies and missing persons that you tracked, until either you cornered the bastard, or he caught a whiff of cop and ran like hell for the off-world.
Right now, Greyson was holding the last glass of synth whiskey before he took the bottle in, and working a case where a skinwalker, to use Zielinski’s slur, had killed Carlos Dominguez, but been interrupted trying to absorb him.
Rachel had believed she had chased the monster off, at least until Greyson had explained to her just how lucky she had gotten.
“But I shot him, Leigh,” she had insisted.
“With a palmstunner, Asher,” he had countered. “You’re lucky the damned thing panicked and ran.”
“Why?”
The compact anger that fueled the woman had been visible underneath at that point.
“A Phrenic is strong enough that it had already killed Dominguez,” Greyson had noted. “Broke his neck with its bare hands, Rachel. Palmstunner just gave him a jolt, but he could have just as easily come off the ceiling at you as gone the other way trying to escape.”
“Oh.”
Maybe she had finally discovered her own mortality at that moment. If so, it would just make her a better cop long term, because good Hunters needed to sneak up on their prey, rather than being able to rely on kicking in a door and arresting everyone in the room.
That’s what separated them from the other cops. What made them hunters.
And why he had a nerve scrambler in his holster, resting next to the empty bottle of whiskey on the table. Had he not been so surprised when Zielinski showed up, he might have been more careful a few hours later, when Emmy knocked. But he hadn’t started assembling the case at that point.
She could have been the rogue Phrenic, walking right up to his door and knocking, but someone would have had to read a most complete file on the life of Greyson Leigh to put all those pieces together and know how to get him like that.
So why had the Phrenic not killed Rachel? As he had said, turning right instead of left and it could have landed atop her like a pouncing mountain lion so fast she never got a second shot off.
Posit: Not a hardened psychopathic killer, like so many of the worst of their kind turned into. This felt more like an amateur play, thinking they could outsmart the cops and infiltrate the Bureau.
That was exactly the sort of thing someone had designed the species for. The US Army had once done the same to a punk kid named Greyson Leigh. Become your enemy in thought. Outthink him and get inside his decision curves so you can predict his reaction to your attack and drive him where you needed him to be.
No, they weren’t all that different, once you got deep enough.
So the guy panics. Goes out the window and down the fire escape.
Then what?
He’s been blown. People have seen Kelly with Carlos, and the news will broadcast her image everywhere within a few hours with Warning: Armed and Lethal across the bottom.
Where does he go?
Option One: he grabs someone at random, just to kill them for a face to hide behind.
Greyson hadn’t mentioned that piece to Rachel yet, but that was why they had the whole printout, without any filters. For a town like this, it was probably nearly one hundred pages long, covering two months to the present. While she was looking for drivers, he’d be looking for random murders that looked like muggings gone wrong in the vicinity of Dominguez’s death. The body would still be there afterwards, but now maybe you had mirror images, one walking around and one dead.
Not finding something close and sticking out like a sore thumb would lead him and Rachel to Option Two, which felt more likely right now. He reverts to his delivery driver and continues to look for more prey.
No body has been found, because that blows your cover, just like Kelly Anne is still officially missing, presumed dead, body To Be Recovered, maybe. So maybe the Missing Persons has been canceled when the guy walks back into his life and claims it was a bender, or a surprise trip to London Metroplex or maybe Florida Metroplex.
They aren’t vampires, Rachel. They’re spiders. Haul the corpses to their lair and keep them handy so they can swap shapes back and forth if they need to. Maybe another bimbo with big tits, if that’s what it takes to seduce someone like Greyson Leigh, now that he’s on the case and doesn’t know about Kelly. Except he would, so they’d have to find someone else and replace her.
But that delivery driver is probably the next corpse over, drained dry like a desert mummy and sitting on a rack as insurance.
Greyson took a sip and contemplated what kind of a lair a Phrenic spider might need.
10
Nightmares
Ethen dreamed, but now he was trapped inside the body of Greyson, and the man had broken free of his control.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. You absorbed them, DNA and memories, when you sucked out all that fluid. A Phrenic could reshape itself then, imprinting a new life over the old one, like putting on a cloak.
But Greyson Leigh had been too much to control. Still waters running so deep that Ethen had accidentally drowned in them, unable to make it back to shore.
Now he was in dark, cold water, splashing about and feeling wet fingers claw at his legs.
Zaborra was there, standing on a nearby cliff just a little out of reach, up at the side of the pool where Ethen couldn’t climb out. Looking down from safe ground. The son of a bitch was standing there laughing. Looked like a young Russian guy, but Ethen wasn’t fooled.
Around him, something else was swimming with deliberate strokes. Circling at a distance. Playing with him by just making these wide, lazy loops, scrolling slowly inward like an ancient vinyl LP album record playing the first notes of something that would end up with Ethen being chomped at the end.
Music started. Greyson Leigh hummed the ominous theme to a shark movie, like a brass heartbeat, coming ever closer. Ethen tried to swim away, but every direction he turned he saw that triangular fin cutting the water, cutting off his escape.
Zaborra laughed.
The fin vanished into the water.
Ethen turned right and left trying to find it. Rachel was standing up there next to Zaborra, holding a nerve scrambler, but she wasn’t going to shoot either of them. Just watch. She put on a bobby hat and smiled wickedly down at him.
“Cheerio, Governor,” she called with a merry laugh.
Zielinski was on Zaborra’s other side, holding a brass ashtray in one hand and a mighty Cuban cigar in the other. He puffed the coal of the cigar red hot and blew out a long stream of smoke that filled Ethen’s face and lungs.
Dominguez was there. Naked with that small dick sticking out like a thumb and a beaver pelt of fur on his chest, like some tall, skinny Homo Australopithecus with a set of gold chains rattling around his neck as the man capered.
The music got louder, but the fin was gone.
Ethen looked down and saw the monster emerging from the darkest of those still waters, a Megalodon shark so big that it could eat a bus. The mouth opened with a chilling smile as it came up into bright moonlight, and then the beast bit him in half, shaking the pieces from side to side like a terrier with a rat.
Greyson woke from a terrible nightmare and nearly leapt out of bed for his gun before he finally realized he was back in his studio. The clock read four thirty, and that was good enough. He’d be an hour just burning off enough energy to sleep, and it wasn’t worth trying.
Instead, he wiped his face and sat up, throwing the thin blanket to the bottom of the bed. Sweat drenched him and the bedding, so he stripped it as he stood up and left it in a pile on the floor.
The Murphy bed got folded up for now. He’d worry about putting new sheets on it tonight. Right now, he needed some coffee and some air, so he pulled the table down and slid the chair out from the corner where he stored it.
If Rachel wasn’t going to be here in a few hours, Greyson might have gone ahead and just started his day. Gotten dressed and walked to one of the local joints for the kind of hearty breakfast that would fuel him for the day.
He started to pull down his coffee altar, but realized his hands were still shaking too hard to make things work, so he put it right back up in the cupboard and went looking for his pants. The gun had been in his off hand almost since before he was awake, and it stayed there for reasons he couldn’t explain.
Just got dressed one-handed while keeping his eyes on the fire escape, as if there was a Phrenic killer out there, watching for his chance to slip into Greyson’s apartment and try to kill him in his sleep. From the nightmare, it might have succeeded.
Or something.
Shirt next, Greyson had to rest the nerve scrambler on the table long enough to button things, and then he picked it up again.
What the hell is wrong with you?
He couldn’t remember nightmares so vivid since he had left the army. Those were a good part of the reason he had gotten out, rather than staying on to make a thirty year pension.
A killer who can’t sleep through the night eventually cracks. Better to be a cop and let things settle down. You aren’t twenty-three any more, bulletproof and lethal. Let the kids do the stupid shit for a while.
About the time his hands wanted to tie a tie, Greyson found his center. He laughed as his mind and body automatically went to the rack in the closet that didn’t have any ties on it anymore.
All burned, just like yesterdays should be.
Shoes laced and ready for combat, he grabbed his longcoat and went out the front door of his studio and down the stairs. Five AM. Boston just waking up and maybe thinking about putting coffee on. Or maybe going to bed for a few hours so you could stagger to your desk only a little late and hope nobody called a surprise meeting at nine to share some great news.
Hunters didn’t punch clocks, but Rachel would be here in two hours for a master class in how to seduce a Phrenic murderer into dying at the hands of the police, instead of escaping to kill again.
He could get some coffee in him, and use that to calm himself to the point that he would look normal when she arrived. Nothing about the case should be making him this jumpy, but Greyson figured it was just the shock of returning to the old job.
All the old stuff being churned up from the dark depths where it has settled over the years. Being a cop again was like sticking a rake down there and mucking.
Bad stuff to plague his dreams, at least for a while.
Once that Phrenic was done, hopefully it would all go back to normal.
If there was such a thing.
11
Rachel
Greyson had spotted the car when he was walking back to his apartment. Late model Chandler Jouster, parked half a block past the doorway to his part of the tower. Rachel Asher would be behind the wheel with the doors locked, reading her homework or something.
HE looked around to see if there were any other suspicious-looking vehicles on the curb somewhere. Sun was far enough up that joggers had been a nuisance on the sidewalks coming back and people were starting to go to work.
Still, a Jouster stood out, mostly because most cars these days were smaller, built for two. Moms and Dads still drove big boxes that could haul kids around if they had that many, or small four-doors if they didn’t. Jousters were meant for four adults, and could haul six in a pinch. Usually, it was only three, with two cops up front and a handcuffed perp in back, silently glowering in a way that wouldn’t compromise the rights Greyson had previously explained to them if they had the sense God gave a goose.
There. Almost as good as clockwork. Smaller Chandler, maybe a Scout, but it was hard to tell them apart from this distance. Greyson had never been that much of a gearhead. It stuck out for being too clean in this neighborhood.
Greyson had occasionally checked a sneaker car out of the motor pool when he needed it for surveillance, but the first thing he always did with them was find an empty gravel lot somewhere and do donuts to kick up dust and throw muck and crap on the sides. Mechanics back at the office always bitched, but nobody ever looked twice at him on stakeout.
Greyson wondered who had followed Rachel this morning, and if she even knew they were there. Cop 101, but those folks had learned it as well as she had. Still, he checked his watch. Old-fashioned beast with gears driving each other from a battery that would probably outlive him, rather than the solid-state electronics most people preferred, if they even bothered.
