Vigilantes (16 page)

A man, slender to the point of gaunt, appeared human-sized where the screen had been. He wore a gray suit, with black highlights that set off his close-cropped black hair and accented the hollowness of his cheekbones.

“Rafael Salehi,” he said curtly. “You wanted to speak to me.”

Seng’s mouth went dry. She licked her lips and almost made herself smile before she remembered that a smile was inappropriate. His manner made her nervous.

Of course it did. He was the head of one of the biggest law firms in the entire Alliance.

“Melcia Seng,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I didn’t know where else to turn.”

He tilted his head slightly, as if urging her to continue.

“Mr. Zhu is dead,” she said. “He was murdered only a couple of hours ago, and we’ve been running into trouble….”

Salehi’s dusky skin grew darker. A frown formed between his eyes. “Murdered?”

“Yes,” she said. “Right outside this building. And it’s awful, Mr. Salehi. He said that you would be here tomorrow, but we need something today—”

“Murdered by whom?” Salehi’s voice was calm, but his eyes weren’t. They had grown almost black.

“I can send you the security footage,” she said. “It might get hacked along the way, but I can try.”

“Try,” he said. “Use the connection we have now.”

She sent the security vid, knowing he wouldn’t even get it for a few minutes, let alone have a chance to see it.

She lowered her voice, even though she doubted anyone else was able to hear. “It was the police,” she said. “They beat him and left him for dead, and then no one responded to our distress calls. The coroner says that if someone had showed up on time, Mr. Zhu would still be alive.”

Salehi’s chin went up. It was as if the mourning posture he’d had a moment ago faded away, and he became a high powered lawyer, all in one movement.

“The
coroner
said?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I recorded it and so did two of the other new hires. They’re downstairs recording everything. I made them. I figured if the police are at fault, then we need a record, but I don’t know what to do from there, sir. I didn’t know Mr. Zhu well, but I can’t think what he did to deserve this.”

“And you received no hints from the security footage?” Salehi asked.

“The coroner said that Mr. Zhu was hated for the injunctions. The coroner made it sound like it had something to do with the Peyti clones, but Mr. Zhu told me he’s from the Moon, and I don’t want to jump to any conclusions—”

“Don’t worry,” Salehi said. “You won’t have to jump. I’ll take care of that.”

He sounded grim.

“When will you be here, sir? Because I’m not sure what to do next.”

His gaze met hers. His eyes were so dark that she couldn’t see any light reflected in them at all. She wondered if that was a trick of the projection or if his eyes really were like that.

“I’ll be there tomorrow at the latest,” he said. “Will you still be at the office?”

In other words, he was asking her if she was going to stay with S
3
.

“I don’t know about the others,” she said, “but I’m staying. I’m pretty mad about this, sir. They shouldn’t have treated him like that. Not just the beating—y’know, rogue cops. That stuff has happened throughout time—but it seems like the whole system conspired to let Mr. Zhu bleed out on the pavement.”

“You didn’t notice him right away?” Salehi asked.

Interesting question at that point. He wanted to know if she was part of the bleed out.

“I—he—I—he sent a message, sir, and it took me a minute to understand he was sending for help. So I searched for him. I found him downstairs ten minutes after I received that message. My colleagues went down with me, and they tell me he was already dead, but the coroner says he could have been revived if an ambulance had arrived on time.”

“How long did it take for an ambulance to arrive?”

She shrugged. She hadn’t checked the exact time stamp. “I have it all recorded. Every moment of it. We can document it, minute by minute, and add the coroner’s comments. I believe him, sir. I think that something’s really wrong here.”

“Torkild Zhu,” Salehi said, his tone soft. “How was he before this? Scared?”

She wasn’t prepared for the shift in tone. She frowned. “I just met him yesterday, sir, but he seemed…overworked, a little scattered, glad that a team of us had come on board. We had a lot to do and we were going to get to it this morning, and I have no idea what to do next, sir, I really don’t.”

Salehi straightened his shoulders as if he were seeing her for the first time.

“Keep recording, keep documenting,” he said. “I’ll take care of the rest when I get there. Don’t give out any materials, even if the police ask for them, and if you have someone who can set up protections on the building’s security feeds, have them do so immediately. We don’t want any information to disappear, do you understand me?”

She did. He was afraid all evidence of this crime would get covered up before he arrived.

“What are you going to do when you get here?” she asked.

His eyes glinted. He looked dangerous to her, and she almost took a step back.

“I’m going to get justice for Torkild,” Salehi said. “No matter what it takes.”

NINETEEN

SURPRISINGLY, HIS GOOD mood was holding.

Nyquist bounced on his heels as he waited for the elevator to reach the top floor of the United Domes of the Moon Security Office. He wasn’t quite smiling—he wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to smile these days—but he wasn’t frowning either.

The doors slid open and he stepped into the main area, waggled his fingers at Rudra Popova, who seemed startled, and nodded toward DeRicci’s door.

“She in?” he asked.

“Yes, but—”

He didn’t wait for DeRicci to finish whatever it was that she was doing. He opened the door, stepped inside, and stopped, as startled by the mess as he had been every single time he had come here since the Peyti Crisis.

DeRicci’s office covered most of the top floor of the Security building. Dome Daylight poured in the floor-to-ceiling windows, which would have made the room exceptionally bright and comfortable if it weren’t for the mess that surrounded everything else.

Food containers were piled high on a desk near the door. Fortunately, the containers had self-cleaning nanolining so they didn’t smell (that badly). Behind them, the weapons cabinet that he insisted she have remained closed. He wondered if she had ever opened it. She could still get to it, despite the mess.

A pile of clothing rose like a mountain from behind DeRicci’s desk, explaining why she never seemed to have anything to wear anymore. Desks and computers and chairs were scattered haphazardly around the large plants that had once been decoratively placed, back in the days when an office could be a showroom and a workspace.

But DeRicci spent most of her waking hours here, and since she rarely slept more than four hours per night, this had become her actual home.

He had forgotten to bring her food—something he’d been doing on a regular basis. The moment he realized it, he sent a message through his links to Popova:

If you order us all lunch, I’ll pay for it.

She sent back,
Already done, Detective, when I realized you arrived without your customary bag of goodies.

He wasn’t quite sure how to take that, so he smiled and let it pass over him. He was still scanning for DeRicci when she crawled out from under a desk.

“Got it,” she muttered.

“Got what?” he asked, and she jumped.

“God, Bartholomew,” she said. “You could have warned me.”

“And you should have heard your door open and close,” he said. “What did you get?”

She held up something between her thumb and forefinger, something so small that he couldn’t tell what it was.

“I lost this earring on Anniversary Day,” she said. “I finally found it, embedded in the carpet.”

So it had been six months at least since this place was properly cleaned. He could believe that. It had a slightly funky locker room smell, despite the abundant nanocleaners that were probably working overtime to keep this place as clean as possible.

DeRicci herself looked as ragged as the office. When he’d met her, she’d been slightly heavier than she probably should have been. She’d had “soft edges,” he liked to call it, and now she was all edge. She was so thin that he could see her bones. They were particularly prominent in her shoulders and neck. He had grown used to the sharp contours of her cheeks; they made her eyes seem even bigger.

“I take it you’re done with Uzvaan?” she asked.

“For today,” he said. “I hope to get back there tomorrow.”

It felt like most of the day had gone by, but he realized it was barely noon.

“I got good information,” he said. “I think I’ll get more tomorrow.”

“Why couldn’t you stay?” she asked.

“Because,” he said, “there seems to be some kind of time limit that the android guards are enforcing.”

Besides, it bothered him to be there. But he had already complained about it, and the complaining had embarrassed him, especially given everything that DeRicci had been doing.

She stuck the earring in her pocket. He had a hunch she would lose it again before the day was out. He wanted to run a hand through her hair, guide her to the couch toward the back of the office, and hold her until she fell asleep.

But she wouldn’t sleep in the middle of the day. She felt like every minute that she missed was a minute that could cost them.

“Uzvaan gave me the name of the firm that paid his way through law school. He translated it too. I’ll work with Popova on that, and maybe you can get Jin Rastigan to do some work as well,” he said.

DeRicci nodded, then grabbed a nearby chair. She leaned on it, holding it as it slid slightly across the floor.

“Flint’s also looking into it,” Nyquist said. “I spoke to him briefly.”

And Nyquist didn’t tell her about the masks. He didn’t want the chance that anyone from this office would investigate those. He was worried about
Legal Fiction
as well, but he figured that would be less of an issue than the masks.

DeRicci nodded. He wasn’t even sure she cared that Flint was doing the work on the law schools.

“I have one thing that you or your pet Earth Alliance investigators need to look for,” he said.

DeRicci blinked and then rubbed her eyes. She was working to focus. He might have to force her to nap. She was even more exhausted than usual.

“Uzvaan told me he had a mentor in the Impossibles. A human woman named Mavis Zorn. I think we should find her—or someone should—and find out what she knows. And if she’s not alive any longer or if she’s moved on from the Impossibles, we should see who else she supervised.”

“Human?” DeRicci said. “Not Peyti?”

“No,” he said, “not Peyti. She protected him from failure, made sure he was second chair on a lot of cases, and kept him out of the courtroom entirely in most instances. I think she was in on it, but that might be my interpretation.”

“Human,” DeRicci said again. “I didn’t expect that.”

“Neither did I,” Nyquist said. “I asked him to clarify. He did. She was human and she helped him, and he implied that she knew what was going on.”

DeRicci shook her head. “How could we have missed all of this going on under our noses?”

He knew she meant the Alliance missing everything, but he understood it. There was some kind of underground, planning nefarious things for reasons he didn’t understand, planning those things for
decades
, and it got missed.

“Maybe it didn’t get missed,” he said. “Maybe the vastness of the scale is what got missed.”

DeRicci frowned and didn’t say any more. She moved away from the chair, seemingly stronger.

“I’ll talk to the Earth Alliance investigators about this Mavis Zorn. And I’ll see what else we can track down,” she said.

“One last thing,” he said. “What happened to the Peyti clones that weren’t on the Moon when the Peyti Crisis occurred? Has anyone gotten back to you on that?”

Her cheeks flushed quickly. He saw a flash of temper, wondered if it was directed at him, and then realized she was angry at herself. Before she even answered, he knew what she was going to say.

“I forgot to check,” she said, and in her tone was an incredulousness, a
how could I forget something that important?

“They weren’t here,” he said. “We have other things to worry about.”

She nodded, but he could tell she didn’t like that excuse.

“I’ll find out,” she said, “because we don’t want another attack somewhere.”

“For all we know, it could have already happened.”

She shook her head. “I’m sure we would have heard. The Alliance itself seems to be on alert right now.”