Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (5 page)

“How are you?” I asked, hoping to delay the inevitable question for another few minutes.

“I’m okay,” he said. “School starts in a couple of weeks and we go back a week before the kids do. I’m putting together some lesson plans, looking for some new stories to get their attention.” Swartz taught history at a poor high school south of Decatur, and spent the summers reading. I’d heard some of his stories—all based in real history, apparently—and wished I’d had him as a teacher at some point.

“Think I might quit smoking,” he added.

“That’s crazy talk,” I told him. “What will you do when you get a craving?”

His bushy gray eyebrows went up a little. “Pray. Go to a meeting. Call and talk to someone who
understands—same thing we do now. You are still doing those things.” He made it a statement, looking directly at me.

I sighed. “Maybe not the praying so much.” I also hadn’t called Swartz yesterday, which he wasn’t mentioning but I knew he’d noted. I was supposed to call him every day. Twice a day, four times a day, more, if needed. The only time I couldn’t get him was when he was at school, and he’d call me back at the very next class break. It was a rule.

He sat back as the owner arrived with an ugly squat brown coffeepot and two uglier cups. The man set both cups down then filled them with the coffee. “Be careful; it’s hot,” he said, and went back to the bar.

I was antsy today, ready to jump out of my skin, but I pulled the coffee cup over to my side of the table. I’d get through this, and then go to work. I would.

Swartz took a sip of his coffee. “You’re letting Step Seven go, son. Asking God to remove your shortcomings is the only way this is going to work long-term. We’re coming up on three years now, that’s good, that’s wonderful. But you let the humility go, you let it all go. You can’t handle this by yourself. If we could, we wouldn’t be sitting here.” His mind echoed a weak picture of me at that first meeting, then the knowledge of his own struggle. “We need the system, we need God, we need each other.”

“The Higher Power,” I corrected.

He pierced me with those sharp eyes. “Is calling him some vague title going to change anything for you? He’s God either way.”

“Aren’t we going to talk about my three things for the week?” I asked him, to change the subject.

“We can,” he said, but I knew he wasn’t done. I’d get an earful of the God-talk later.

“Air conditioning, good coffee, and…” I made something up on the spot. “The fact that Cherabino called me out on a case again. One I can actually help with.”

“You’ve used coffee before. Twice.”

“This is good Jamaican coffee, not the swill at the police station but the good blue stuff Cherabino’s neighbor brings in.”

He let me get away with it. “Okay. Tell me about Cherabino, then.”

“She’s okay. Overloaded. Deep in the case, worried, angry, not happy at me, but—other than a migraine Tuesday—okay.”

“You said she invited you to a case?” Swartz put his hand on the back of the leather booth.

I told him the nonclassified parts, holding back the number of victims and the cause of death, and finished with the probable connection to the Guild. “That’s the thing, though. I’m not sure I can ethically not tell them. I mean, delay, yeah, everybody delays, but if we get to the end of this thing and I haven’t told them, it’s going to be bad for me.” I hated the Guild sometimes, for what they’d done to me. But I couldn’t rip out their training so easily.

He took another swallow. “You’ve been blacklisted for years. What else can they do?”

The Koshna Accords didn’t mean a thing to the normals, except for the occasional political power play like the cops were planning. A play I wasn’t entirely certain I should support.

“Well, they could rescind my employment papers, for one. They can lock me up in Guild holding indefinitely. I’m still a telepath, a Level Eight. All they have to do is declare me a danger to myself or to society and that’s it.” My worst nightmare was waking up in a Guild facility scheduled for a mindwipe. And the
thing was, it was all too possible. To someone like me, the treaty was a red line in the sand that gave the Guild any power they wanted.

When the Tech Wars ripped the world apart, the Guild stepped up to save it. But they had to get scary to do it—real scary. They’d won the right to govern themselves, to have political independence, sure. But they’d lost the casual trust of most of the normals along the way. When your pit bull saves you from the robber about to kill you, you’re grateful. But when the pit bull tears the guy apart in little bloody ribbons, you never look at the thing the same way again.

“I’m a telepath, Swartz. A Level Eight. For all intents and purposes that means the Guild owns me, even now. No normal court of law in the world is going to stand up to the Guild, to the treaty. Not for me.”

“I just don’t believe that, kid,” Swartz said. “Think about it. You really think Paulsen and Cherabino will let you disappear without a fight? You’ve earned yourself friends in the system, kid.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “People are different under pressure, especially around telepaths. Plus I cause them a lot of headaches.”

“You’re selling yourself short. The department kept you on after the last fall off the wagon. That means quite a bit.” Swartz shrugged. “They’re not exactly helpless. I wouldn’t worry about the Guild too much.”

“Sure,” I said, to stop the conversation. I didn’t really want to have the cheer-me-up moment right now. But the Guild did mostly keep to its own ethics. Mostly. If I kept to the same I might have a chance. And that old lady’s scarf was bothering me.

“You’re awfully quiet.”

“Just thinking.” I shrugged. We sipped our too-hot coffee, enjoyed the air conditioning.

“How are you?” Swartz prompted.

I stared at my hands, decided what to say. Maybe the truth this time. “A tough week, a very tough week.”

“Why is that?”

“The interview room has been hell. Two crazies yesterday, in a bad way. I’ve wanted Satin pretty much every day. As great as another case is, this one’s a lot of pressure—the case is weird, I know too much, and there’s a lot of pressure. I’m ex-Guild, not a detective. That’s Cherabino’s job….” After a pause, I looked up. “But everybody’s looking at me for that rabbit, that sudden push out of the hat, and the precog’s not cooperating. It’s a lot of pressure. Screwing up. Coming up with the rabbit. A
lot
of pressure. Plus whatever I end up having to do with the Guild.”

Swartz sipped his coffee. “How are you handling it?”

I sighed. He wasn’t going to take less than the truth. “Not great. Want to fall off the world for a while. I’ve thought about the craving way too much today, thinking, what if I gave in?” It would be the easy way out.

Swartz gave me the most disapproving look I had ever received, and that—considering he’d been my sponsor for six years—was really saying something. “That’s dangerous. You can’t afford to think like that, ever. And even if you do,
not
out loud. I’ll say it again, kid. Satin is your
enemy
. Your poison. Your worst enemy. Responsibility is something you need to be embracing, not running from. I’ll tell you as many times as I need to.”

I set my jaw. “You want truth, you get it.”

Swartz let the statement hang, and I sipped the cooling coffee. The taste of the licorice filled my whole mouth, my nose, my throat. I wanted to spit it up, have done with it, but instead I choked the taste down. I was
going to do it today, I thought. Today I was going to choke it up and stay on the wagon, let the vials stay where they were. Today I was going to try.

“Now,” Swartz said, pulling out the Big Book. “Let’s take a look at the steps again.”

At the station,
Cherabino led the way back through the sea of open desks downstairs, nodding to junior cops as she went. Damn it. We were going to walk, weren’t we? Ninety-two degrees in the shade at eleven o’clock in the morning, and we were going to walk.

“How far to the morgue?” I asked her, hustling to keep up.

“Just three blocks down West Ponce,” she said cheerily, and didn’t even pause as she headed out the back door and into the punishing heat. I followed, cursing under my breath while I still could, sweat already breaking out on my neck.

I had my department ID on with the jeans and the button-up shirt. Cherabino’s white shirt, black slacks was the same standard cop-wear as anyone else’s in the department. Same as she’d been wearing for days.

We crossed over the office building’s courtyard and through a walkway to the street. West Ponce was a windy road in spots, but here it was three-story buildings on either side, mostly government buildings. We’d probably end up in one of those if I didn’t pass out from the heat first.

Our shoes padded silently, and the portable radio on Cherabino’s hip sputtered occasionally. I was
breathing heavy from the cigarettes and the pollution. Not so bad as it used to be, though; she’d been dragging me walking enough that my wind was starting to come back. Even if I did feel like I was melting. Above us, cars and the occasional city bus whisked by in the sky lanes. I carefully did not look at Cherabino walking briskly down the street.

“So,” I started. “How does this morgue thing work?”

She slowed down, a graceful change. “You know, dead bodies in drawers, quantum stasis, autopsies, lots of chemicals. Weird smells. Don’t you watch television?”

“Don’t own one,” I told her. “Waste of time.” The truth was, I’d sold it my second time off the wagon for drug money and had never been able to replace it. The only way the department would take me back afterward—even with Cherabino putting her job on the line—was if I didn’t handle my own paycheck, and if I didn’t keep anything worth anything in trade. But if my rent was paid on time, groceries appeared every week, and Bellury took me out for clothes occasionally, I figured that was good enough. I had four pairs of shoes, none of them with any holes. It wasn’t too long ago I couldn’t say that.

Cherabino climbed the worn, chipping steps of a particularly boxy building and led the way inside. Blessed air conditioning, I thought, as I followed her down an old hallway and into a large, smelly freight elevator. She hit the worn button for the basement. After making sure she wasn’t looking, I fanned my shirt surreptitiously, trying to get as much air conditioning in the thing as possible.

“Why is the morgue in the tax office?” I asked Cherabino, having noted the signs on the way in.

She shrugged. “Decatur Hospital’s basement kept flooding, and the city had the extra room.”

The freight elevator moved very, very slowly, with creaking sounds I’d rather not have heard.

She took pity on me and started explaining. “They’re understaffed, just like everybody else these days, so be nice because we jumped the line to get here. They’ll have cleaned up the guy since the crime scene and done an autopsy—so he’ll be without clothes with a Y cut, cooled down some, and they’ll have taken care of the bugs. If you can’t handle what you’re looking at, stare at the floor on the other side of the gurney and try to breathe through your mouth, shallowly. You’re here because the bodies are the only real clues we have right now, and I want you to hear what the coroner has to say about cause of death.”

I thought about protesting that of course I could handle it—handle what exactly?—but the freight elevator chose that moment to come to a screeching stop.

The stainless steel doors opened up to a concrete-floored hallway with doorways on either side. Cherabino led the way to the first one on the left and I followed, nervous. What could be so much worse than the crime scene that she felt she had to warn me?

The first thing I noticed was the smell: decay and formaldehyde and metal. It was cold in here, even for me, and the faint Mindspace buzzing on the far wall was distracting.

The large room was painfully bright with fluorescent bulbs, the old-style artificial light combining with cold steel tables to assault the eyes. After I forced myself to focus, I wished I hadn’t. The three bodies out in the open lacked even the dignity of a towel, their splotched forms too still, too…absent. They lacked any form in
Mindspace, even the decaying ghost of a last emotion, now well gone. The rows of steel drawers lining the back wall only made it seem more inhuman. I was betting the buzzing came from there, probably an activated quantum stasis generator disrupting the flow of Mindspace, but it didn’t help that the drawers looked like what they were—steel boxes to store corpses.

“Cherabino,” a woman’s voice greeted her from the far side of the room. “Thanks for coming.” Her accent had a hint of a lilt to it, maybe Jamaican.

Cherabino made her way past the bodies on the tables as if they meant nothing. I breathed shallowly, through my mouth, and followed her.

“Where’s Petie?” she asked the woman.

“Out sick. It’s just me as usual.” The coroner was dark skinned with her hair done in many tiny long braids, and had a beautiful smile which somehow seemed inappropriate while standing over a fourth body, this one from the crime scene, or so I thought. I didn’t look closely.

She gave me a bright smile. “I see you brought a friend.”

I thought about objecting to the title, but I didn’t have a better one. “You have information on the case?”

The coroner led the way to the far side of the table and picked up a clipboard. “Black male, thirty-five, identified via AO serial number as Tom Turner, a businessman from the west side.” I carefully didn’t look at the body, sliced up and empty.

“Reported missing?” Cherabino asked. The coroner must have called down to the county records office, or have a copy of the database or something, but wasn’t it Cherabino’s job to do that? Seemed odd, but what did I know?

“Yes, the wife reported it Tuesday morning after he didn’t come home Monday night.”

“I’ll see if the uniforms have talked to her yet,” Cherabino said, making herself a note.

The coroner waited for her to finish, then continued. “I’m putting time of death as Monday between eleven a.m. and three p.m. He didn’t have anything in his stomach and the heat accelerated decay, so that time is approximate. Hopefully when the entomology tests come back we’ll have a precise window.” She pointed out a few of the more disturbing features of decay, including the insect damage on the man’s face. At that, I had to look away or throw up. I took Cherabino’s advice and stared at the floor on the other side of the steel table, shielding against empty Mindspace.