Bonds of Justice (9 page)

Sophia was more than ready to exit the car by the time Max brought it to a stop in front of a mid-rise building not far from Golden Gate Park—the site of Kenneth Vale’s apartment, the location of his suicide. Sophia had never suffered from a psychological issue that made her vulnerable to claustrophobia, but being in that car with a quietly brooding Max had been . . . unsettling.

He took up more space than he should, the heat of his body inescapable in the confines of the vehicle. She’d felt as if he was touching her with each wave of that starkly masculine heat—and for a woman who hadn’t been touched in years, it had been an experience that left her scrambling for escape.

“Entry codes?” Max asked as they walked up the steps, his voice rubbing against her skin like sandpaper.

Again, it was touch without a touch, something she had no ability to avoid, to process. “I have them here.” She let them into the building and headed toward the elevator security console, her gloved fingers slipping off the pad once before she collected herself.

Trembling, Max thought, Sophia was trembling.

“This is a very exclusive building.” A calm voice, that betraying hand dropping to her side as the elevator headed down to them. “Vale’s position with Councilor Duncan enabled him to secure his privacy to this extent.”

“Why bother?” Max folded his arms to keep from sliding his hand under her hair, to the soft warmth of her neck so he could tug her to him, so he could apologize for pushing her too hard, too soon, with a slow, sweet kiss—no matter that they’d been strangers only a day ago.

“Before these deaths,” he said, forcing himself to maintain a white-knuckled hold on a need that refused to obey the rules of civilized behavior, “I’m guessing being Nikita’s business advisor wasn’t exactly a high-risk position, so why the security?”

“Humans,” she said, “and the occasional nonpredatory changeling, have a way of expecting things from Psy they shouldn’t.” A meaningful glance out of those vivid, impossible eyes. “Vale was, in all probability, protecting himself from those who wanted to pitch to him in person.”

The elevator opened at that moment. A woman entered the lobby at almost the same instant, swiping a card where Sophia had entered Vale’s access code. “Please hold the elevator.”

Max did so, conscious of Sophia all but disappearing into a corner.

“Thanks.” The woman’s ruby red smile betrayed her humanity. “Are you moving in? I haven’t seen you before.”

Max saw the stranger give him the once-over, recognized it for what it was. Women had been making him offers since before he was legal. And he’d learned to turn them down without hurting their feelings—because in spite of the actions of the woman who’d shaped him, he’d never hated her or those of her sex. Part of him had always wanted to protect her—even as a child, he’d known that no matter what she did to him, her pain was deeper, older, a vicious animal that tore her to pieces from the inside out.

So today, he gave this woman a small smile. “Just checking the place out.”

“Well,” she said as the elevator opened on her floor, “if you want to ask any questions about the area, call me.” Passing over a card, she exited, her musky perfume a lingering reminder of her presence.

Sophia stirred. “She was playing a mating game with you.”

Max had been about to drop the card into the small wrought iron recycling bin in the corner, but now slid it into his pocket. If it took jealousy to rouse the real Sophia to the surface, he’d use it without any guilt whatsoever—when a man got kicked this hard in the guts by a woman, anything was fair.

And the unique individual behind the mask of the perfect J, the one who’d told him Bonner’s victims shouldn’t have to spend eternity in the cold dark—that’s who he wanted to know. “It’s called flirting.” He shot her a slow, deliberately provocative smile. “I’m sure you must’ve seen humans do it before.”

“Is that the physical type that attracts you?” Aware she should back off, but unable to stop pushing for an answer, Sophia stepped out of the elevator on Vale’s floor. “Tall, slender, with a fashionable-dress preference?”

Max gestured to the left of the quiet, carpeted corridor. “That’s his place.” Letting her pass him so she could input the code that would disengage the locks, he pushed open the door. “And,” he said in a voice that made the tiny hairs on the back of her nape rise in warning as she walked in ahead of him, “the answer to your question is no. That woman didn’t do it for me.” He pushed the door shut behind them. “Now a small woman with dangerous curves . . . I could bite into her.”

She froze, certain she was misreading the comment, but suddenly very conscious of the way her lower body filled out her jeans. “Detective Shannon,” she said, turning to face him, “you’re being highly inappropriate.”

His lips kicked up at the corners. “You started it.”

She wanted to trace the shape of those lips, wanted it so badly her fingers cramped as she fisted them. Her Silence had been fragmenting for years—an inevitable side effect of her work as a J, and one for which the J Corps had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. So long as the medics didn’t find any evidence, the J Corps Management Board wouldn’t turn in a fractured J. It was partly an economic decision in order to retain the number of active Js . . . and partly because everyone in the Corps had looked into the chasm of madness at some point in their lives.

Though Sophia hadn’t allowed herself to think about the truth even within her own mind, conscious of how deep M-Psy could dig, her conditioning had broken close to completely earlier this year, her mind twined with strange, dark tendrils that rebuffed Silence; and the reconditioning she’d undergone only the previous day had already been sloughed off like so much dead skin. But in spite of it all, she’d been able to hold up the facade, the pretense of being the perfect Psy. Until now.

“Breathe, Sophia.” A husky order, and to her surprise, he took a step back, began to walk around Vale’s living area. “This room is set up for entertaining—or maybe meetings, since I’m guessing Psy don’t do parties?”

She forced her brain to function, to provide him with the answers. “Actually,” she said, the words coming sluggishly as she fought the confusion created by his mere presence, “cocktail parties are held when there are human or changeling clients. It’s all about putting the other side at ease.”

Some Psy could even manage a glacial kind of charm—Councilor Kaleb Krychek had an unusual number of admirers in the non-Psy population. She couldn’t understand why. Yes, aesthetically speaking, he was the epitome of a cold male beauty. But he was also, she was certain, quite capable of snapping his admirers’ necks without the least pause should the occasion call for it.

“Do you know if Vale received business clients in here outside of any social events?” Max’s expression was all cop when she dared meet his gaze again. Yet, embers continued to burn in the depths of those near-black eyes. He made no effort to hide them, no effort to pretend that things were as they should’ve been between an Enforcement detective and a Silent J.

“It’s possible.” Could Max share that warmth, she wondered, thaw the frost in her soul, frost that had begun to form when she’d been a traumatized eight-year-old strapped helpless to a hospital bed?
Could he fix her?
“Some humans don’t like to be seen consorting with Psy.” It was a question—vital, necessary, powerful—couched as a statement.

Max peeled off his Windbreaker, bunching the black material in his hand. “I don’t like the Psy,” he said with blunt honesty. “I don’t like how they mess with human minds and pervert justice so the Council can get what it wants.”

She’d known that, of course she’d known that. But she hadn’t wanted to know.

“But Sophie”—what had he called her?—“I’m no bigot. And you’re a J. Cops and Js have always gone together.” He held her gaze until she looked away, scrambling to find her footing by reciting the minutiae of the case in her mind. Because what he’d just offered, it was something she wanted so badly that if she dared reach for it and he drew back his hand, it would push her the final step into an irrevocable insanity.

“Sophie.” A quiet demand.

She shook her head. “There’s not much left inside me, Max.” Sometimes, all she heard were echoes. “I don’t know how to play the games that woman was playing with you.”

Max sucked in a breath, blindsided by Sophia’s stark honesty. It stripped away the sophisticated rituals of the dance between male and female, allowing no room for illusions and half-truths. He could’ve pulled back, but he’d made his choice—to follow this strange, powerful attraction through to the end. “No games,” he said, holding her gaze. “Not between us.”

She took a long breath. “I’m Psy, Max.” Not a rejection . . . a reminder.

“You’re a J.” Turning away, he dropped his Windbreaker on the back of a nearby sofa before crouching to examine the small glass cabinet below the comm console. Several data crystals lay neatly within. “Might be something here.”

He saw Sophia tug at her gloves to ensure every inch of her skin was covered before she extended her hand to accept the crystals. Reading the tense line of her body, the desolate simplicity of her earlier words still circling in his head, he dropped them into her palm with care, avoiding physical contact. “Not likely to be entertainment,” he said, rising to his feet. “News footage?”

She bent to place the crystals on the small beveled coffee table in the center of the room. “He may have kept business documents within easy reach”—the words were cool, Psy, but he’d seen the mask fall, wasn’t fooled—“things that weren’t sensitive. They were probably left behind to help the psychologists create a full mental profile.” She gestured down the corridor. “He took his life in the bedroom.”

Nodding, Max walked to the room where Kenneth Vale had spent his last minutes on this earth, slowly, painfully choking to death. “You should look at this,” he said to Sophia, “the image in the file doesn’t really convey the impact.”

Moving to stand beside Max in the doorway, confident that for all his relentless will, he wouldn’t touch her without invitation, Sophia looked up and to the gleaming meat hook that hung from the bedroom ceiling. “The fact that he went to the trouble of screwing it into the ceiling was tabled as evidence of his disturbed state.” Her thoughts flashed to another crime scene photo—Vale’s face contorted, his tongue grotesquely swollen. He’d evacuated his bowels, his expensive wool trousers stained with death.

“I didn’t have a chance to read the full report on the plane,” Max said, his gaze still on the brutal shine of the meat hook. “How did the investigators explain the fact that there were scratches around his neck?”

“That he realized the irreversible nature of his actions when it was too late.” Death was forever. She’d learned that truth young and had never been given a chance to forget.

“He was a fairly decent telepath, right?” At her nod, tiny lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes. “Then someone must’ve heard him cry out for help.”

“They identified Jax in his bloodstream,” Sophia said. “The general consensus is that he was disoriented by a drug haze, couldn’t find the door out of his own mind.”

“You’re my Psy expert—tell me if that’s possible.”

“Yes, it is.” Mental pathways could twist, could turn, could shatter . . . especially if you were a hunted child, terrified and screaming. “However, Vale had no indicators of any prior drug use—and it seems to me that if he was going to take drugs to dull the edge, he would’ve simply suicided by that method, using far more effective agents.”

Making a
hmming
sound low in his throat, Max went to the naked white of the floor below where Vale had taken his life, the carpet having been cut away. “Plus, it just doesn’t fit the profile PsyMed had of him before he died.” Looking around, he grabbed a chair sitting in one corner of the room and brought it to that barren patch of floor. “The fact that everyone was so ready to believe the suicide verdict in spite of all that tells me the Psy are in more trouble than anyone knows.”

She watched him stand on the chair, her fingers gripping the doorjamb at the sudden transposition of his body with Vale’s. “Max?” His name spilled out, the broken girl inside of her scared, so scared. He was too close to the evil. What if it touched him, this man with his unexpected smiles and his eyes that
saw
her?

Max tugged on the hook, his biceps defined as he placed his weight on the ugly object. “Strong, but it had to be—he was hanging here for at least an hour or two before he was found, wasn’t he?”

She forced herself to think. “Time of death suggests that.” Years of experience sparked her neurons to life, notwithstanding the chill of terror. “However, he wasn’t seen for two days beforehand.”

Max’s eyes met hers. “Good girl.”

Disconcerted by the moment of perfect understanding outside of any psychic connection, she vocalized her conclusions. “You believe someone was holding him drugged and hostage during the time it took to install the hook.”

“Maybe not the whole time, but part of it, yeah.” Jumping off the chair, he returned it to its previous position. “The whole thing smells like a setup—theater for the public.”

“Councilor Duncan was able to keep a lid on the details.”

Max raised an eyebrow. “You telling me no one whispered about it on your PsyNet? According to what I’ve heard, it’s a clearinghouse for pretty much every scrap of data known to Psy around the world.”

She rarely entered the Net these days. There was too much there, too many voices, too many thoughts—it was akin to being battered in a storm-tossed sea, each stray whisper, each murmur, a body blow. “Yes, you’re probably correct,” she said, suddenly realizing that Max had a tiny scar high up on his left cheekbone. The tips of her fingers tingled, wanting to touch, to trace, to learn.