Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (26 page)

Swartz sipped from his cup. “It will have to be. You don’t have a grateful bone in your body today, boy, do you?”

I leaned forward to pour more awful coffee for myself, trying to decide how offended I could really afford to be. About the time I’d decided, not really, he moved on to the question I’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask.

“How are you?”

I knew if I gave him an obvious answer he’d be pissed. I leaned back in the booth, my arms going to both sides in an effort not to look any more defensive than I could help. “I’m crappy. How are you?”

“Doing better. Only one craving this week, hardly a hiccup. Even giving up smoking hasn’t been that big of a thing. Now, you.”

I snorted. “I’ll never give up smoking. Not in a hundred thousand years.”

Swartz gave me a
look
.

I gave up and crossed my arms. “Cherabino and I are fighting. There’s a trail of dead bodies all over the city that may or may not belong to some guy who’s going to attack us in a warehouse in a week or so—a
guy we
can’t find
—and Paulsen has cut me out of the conversation with the Guild. Me! When I was the only reason they’d talk to the police in the first place. I choked through talking to Kara…for what? Nobody’s listening to me!”

“We’ll get back to Paulsen. Why are you fighting with Cherabino?” Swartz took another sip of the coffee.

“She’s fighting with me!”

“What did you do?”

I picked the cup up and put it down several times. He kept looking at me, calmly, until I had to tell him the truth, the whole truth, just to get that patient, knowing look out of his eyes.

“She threw herself at me last night,” I admitted to the cup. “Very forcefully. And imbecile that I am, I turned her down. Flat. What an idiot, right—Cherabino, stacked up to here—” Swartz cut me off with a gesture. I took a deep breath and finally looked up. “It wasn’t
me
. She didn’t even
want
just me. She wanted the anger to stop, for her husband not to be dead, she wanted a hundred things, and, fucking a’, not a single one of those was
me
and you can’t lie to a telepath. Not like that.” I glared at him. “Frankly it’s a real wilter.”

Swartz sat back, for all the world looking like a proud papa trying not to smile.

“It’s not funny, okay?” I said, about ready to hit him or attack him with an imaginary spider or
something
, anything, to get the smirk off his face.

The owner of the coffee bar arrived just then, with another huge ugly pot of the nasty licorice. He set it down in front of us without commenting on anything he’d overheard; we’d been meeting here too long for him to blink at anything I had to say. “Enjoy,” he commanded, then left, heading back to the empty bar.

I took a deep breath and looked up, meeting Swartz’s
eyes directly. “Look. You’re going to say something, right? So say it.”

He leaned forward, putting his hand on top of mine. “I’m proud of you.”

I yanked my hand back like it was on fire. “
What?
What in the hell right do you have to say that to
me
?”

“You had integrity,” Swartz said. “You didn’t let a woman you respect turn you into an object. You made
her
respect you. Even though your balls were screaming at you to do a horizontal limbo. You said no. That makes you a man.”

“But—”

Swartz looked me in the eye. “I’m not saying in different circumstances you should do the same thing. I’m just saying, you did good. Here. Now, you drink your coffee. It’s getting cold.”

And, in the next half hour, as we talked about the deal with Paulsen and how I could fight for my respect back, I slowly felt something inside me relax a little. Swartz said I did good. And he sounded like he’d meant it.

I wondered how I could get him to keep meaning it. And I wondered how in hell I was going to keep Cherabino safe from Bradley with her hating me so badly I couldn’t get near her.

That morning I sat at the bus stop for an endless time, the bus late and getting later. I used the pay phone to call the department and let them know I was going to be late.

“There’s a Kara on the other line,” Bellury said. “Claims she needs to talk to you.”

I made a disgusted sound and the defeated commuters around me looked up, going back to their magazines when I shot them a look. I didn’t think they
knew I was a telepath, or they would have been a lot more hostile.

“Go ahead and connect us,” I told Bellury. A couple clicks came over the line.

“Hello?” I asked.

“It’s Kara.”

“Oh,” I said eloquently.

A long, awkward pause.

Kara spoke first, with a brash tone that grated on my nerves. “I’m calling for two reasons. One, to let you know we still haven’t found Bradley. We will tear this city apart on our end, but any help you can give us is appreciated. I’ve gotten permission to do whatever it takes, which includes waving jurisdiction. If you need something…”

I tightened my grip on the metal pay phone divider. Finally. “I need the full list of teleporters/telepaths. Also the list of telepaths who might also have any talent—any talent at all—for telekinesis,” I told her.

The old man sitting on the hard bus stop gave me a look and moved to the opposite end. I smiled at him broadly. Nothing here to see but us telepaths. Now he was watching me like he thought I was going to steal his wallet. Great. I turned my back.

On the phone, Kara paused. “Why?”

“Do I have to explain everything? There’s no hard proof against Bradley for anything right now, up to possibly an assault on me if they allow the vision as evidence—unlikely. I need to be able to exclude the other possibilities by hand if we’re going to get any traction. Him running looks suspicious—but I want him going down for murder, not evasion, when he’s caught. I want to be able to prove it, Kara. Work with me here.”

“Why telekinesis?”

“Somebody held me down in the vision using it. Bradley was right in front of me, but there’s no guarantee it was him actually using it, I suppose. Neil’s throat was crushed. Maybe it was a heavy brick, but I don’t think so. If we can find another associate who’ll talk, another connection, maybe we can find Bradley. Maybe we can put the son of a bitch away for good.”

She sighed. “If you swear to me the list will stay in your department and not go anywhere else—even to the water cooler—I’ll courier it to DeKalb police headquarters this morning.” Hell of a lot of politics to get that released to an ex-Guild guy; Kara must be more of a heavyweight than I’d realized. And she was actually throwing that weight around for me.

“Thank you,” I said. “It will stay quiet—Homicide and my boss only.”

“You don’t work for Homicide?”

“Long story. You said there was something else?”

She was quiet for a long moment. “Yes. I thought you would want to know I set the wheels in motion long before your lieutenant made the call to my boss. She’s started a great deal of political pressure on the higher-ups, and I’m getting caught in the middle. I would
appreciate
it if you would actually trust me going forward—I can take care of it my own—”

“Look, Kara, not my—”

“And the
least
your lieutenant could have done is talk to me herself before she started going up the line. I could have done a lot more good for you, but you had to go and—”

“Go and
what
, Kara? What—”

She blew out a hard stream of air into the phone. “I’ve got to go.”

“What are you—”

“You’re an idiot,” she summed up, and disconnected.

I stared at the phone, seriously considering pounding it against the booth in front of me until it broke into a hundred thousand pieces. And I stopped. Cold.

It had started raining, fat merciless raindrops in a steady stream. The whole air suddenly smelled of wet dirty trees, mildew, and overly humidified humanity. The old man had pulled out a sheet of battered plastic, was huddled under it, still staring at me suspiciously.

Droplets hitting me in the head despite the dubious protection of the booth, I put the public pay phone back. Carefully. Kara sounded like she was wading through some pretty deep politics over there. That could be good for me, or bad—hard to know. No one had told me anything about the politics directly; I hadn’t cared. Now maybe it was time to snoop around in people’s heads. I huddled deeper under the awning, trying to avoid as much of the pollution-soaked rain as possible.

Finally the bus arrived, and wet and in a foul mood, I climbed on board with the other passengers. The old man sat across the aisle and stared, his mind thinking I might do anything. No one else sat anywhere near me either. I looked away.

As the bus pulled away from the curb with a lurch, I braced myself a little better in the uncomfortable seat. The rain intensified, deep, wet, torrential rainfall hitting the top of the bus stop like a waterfall. We were on West Ponce heading toward Decatur, and the tiny, shifty lanes were too small for the bus in the best of weather. After a block or two of wobbling, the driver slowed down and grounded fully, counting on the mass of the bus on the asphalt to get us through the puddles better than the gravity-assist.

The trees directly on the right side of the bus—most
were directly next to the lanes and historic, having survived the Tech Wars and a couple hundred years—were right up against the lanes and ruined any chance at decent drainage. Within minutes, the small, Southern road—no business being in the big city, but no one had asked—was flooding. The bus slowed further, a hippo in a white-water river, making slow, unhappy progress.

Just then I realized I hadn’t brought an umbrella. And the bus stop was two blocks from the station.

I arrived at the station soaked to the skin, like I’d stepped under a waterfall by accident and narrowly avoided getting swept over. I was pissed, tired, worried—and, in the first half hour of the storm, I’d probably been exposed to every kind of foul pollution, the raindrops full to bursting with cancer-causing pollution and worse. I needed a shower. Bad.

Bellury went to get me some of his clothes while I was trying to scrub off whatever nastiness had come in contact with my skin. The scientists said we were getting better, that it was more in the dirt and the concrete than in the air these days, but I didn’t trust them. Rainwater shouldn’t
smell
like that.

I dried off and got dressed in Bellury’s clothes. He was past retirement age but hadn’t gone too badly to fat, and we were the same height. If I belted the pants pretty heavily and tucked the shirt all the way in, I could make it work. It was summer, though, so his button-down shirt was short-sleeved, showing the tracks on my arms. I stood in front of the mirror in the empty locker room and looked for a long moment, feeling naked, trying to decide if I would go out like that. Finally I went to get my jacket. Better to sweat endlessly and die from the heat than advertise my
weakness to the cops, to the suspects, whoever. I just didn’t like strangers staring at my arms. Whatever they were actually thinking at the time, the back of my head was still convinced they were judging me.

Bellury had left the sports jacket in my locker but taken everything else. Again. He’d just tested me, but maybe they thought they’d find something in the clothes that wasn’t in the urine. He was welcome to it. The Old-People Conspiracy was keeping me far away from my poison, the bastards. Probably it would stay that way, and I would pass this time, next time, even the next. Swartz said nobody could stay clean forever, but you could do it today, just today, over and over again until you crossed the finish line. Right now that seemed maybe doable, at least for the moment.

Bellury was nice enough to take the clothes to the washer-box while he was at it, though. I would have clean, fresh clothes in my locker at the department again tomorrow. Clothes that smelled good. Not bad.

I wondered how Cherabino was, what had happened last…I happened to glance at the clock. Oh, crap.

I grabbed the jacket, slammed the locker door shut, and hustled out. I was late for my first interview, and I needed to make sure Bellury looked out for Kara’s courier.

After three rounds of interviews I had a break, and Kara’s courier had arrived. I borrowed a viewing tablet from Paulsen. Barely powerful enough to view the data, it would still scream like a banshee if I took it out of the area. But I wasn’t going to take it out of the area.

“Can I take a chair and a corner for an hour?” I asked Andrew. “I need to go through some data.”

He looked up from a stack of numbered sheets. “Oh
yes.” He looked around distractedly, cleared off his guest chair, looked at the little sliver of cubicle counter it sat against. “Um…”

“That’s fine,” I told him, holding up the tablet. “I appreciate it.”

I sat on the chair in the little sliver of counter and waited for the tablet to unpack Kara’s information. Cherabino was away from her desk for the moment, but I was sure she would be back soon. No need to get in her face about what had happened.

I spent a half hour going through lists, endless lists of data. My eye stopped on the tablet screen, slowly paging through a list from Kara’s file—and caught. Gretel Sandsburg. The name of our fourth victim.

I frowned at the file. How could our fourth victim be a telepath? Her family didn’t…Oh. Kara had sent me more than one list. This one was the fourth-grade testing results from the last twenty years, all the people the Guild had identified with Ability but hadn’t thought worth recruiting.

My fingers danced on the tablet. This had to be a—no. Three names. Four. Five.

All of our victims had low-level Ability. All of them. And all of them were listed as available for Atlanta Research.

That was the research department where Bradley worked. The same department that would have every name on this list—and worse—hundreds of other names. All the names of every Good Samaritan willing to be a test subject to advance the Guild’s knowledge. The names of these people in particular—all of whom lived in Atlanta.

I had found the connection.

Cherabino was back at her desk right now, her mood like an angry storm cloud over the vicinity. She should
probably know about the connection I’d found. Any other day I’d have marched right over there and told her. Maybe brought coffee.