Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (40 page)

“Noted,” Rachel agreed.

There was an almost-timid knock on the door, and Santino poked his head in. “Hey, Rachel? Is everything okay?”

Her partner was already slightly yellow-orange, and this deepened when she said: “No.”

“Um…” Santino came inside and shut the door behind him. “What’s wrong? Because there’s a few people out there who are wondering about all of the yelling.”

Rachel shifted her focus from Mulcahy to the exterior of the room.  Dozens of officers lined the hallways, most brilliantly orange and trying to catch a glimpse of her through the blinds. She nudged Santino aside and stepped into the hallway to wave at the startled officers before slamming the door on them.

“Your congeniality is inspiring,” Santino said.

“Mulcahy’s here,” Rachel pointed to where her boss stood. The TV in the corner came to life with the image of OACET’s green seal, and Mulcahy’s voice boomed a greeting at Santino from the speakers. She rushed to turn down the volume.

“Should I leave?” Santino asked.

“No, you need to hear this.” Rachel sped through her conversation with Edwards and the discovery of the planted phone number, then replayed the phone call with Witcham through the TV. 

“Jesus.” Santino, wide-eyed, shook his head as the recording ended. “Mousy Charley Brazee’s a mad social scientist. Who would have guessed? Actually…” he paused, “are you positive he’s Witcham?”

Rachel and Mulcahy looked at each other. “Good question,” he said.

“No, we’re not,” she said to Santino. “He said he was Witcham, he gave the right details… Why would he lie about that?”

“Guess it doesn’t matter,” Santino shrugged. “Witcham’s as good a name for him as any. Get the card. We’ve got to brief Sturtevant.” 

Mulcahy left in a tiny flash of green.

Rachel and Santino rarely had cause to visit the Gold Coast, the wing of First District Station reserved for administrators and ranking officers. Rachel didn’t think she had come down since she had received the perfunctory welcoming handshakes several months before. There was real tile here, not linoleum, and wood trim throughout, but each office had been diced off by carving chunks out of the school’s wide hallways and stacking the extra space onto the depth of the classrooms. Long and narrow, each office was a fancy paneled tunnel lined with track lighting, broken up by drywall and doors into a smaller room with a secretary at the front who barred access to the official in the larger room at the rear.

The Chief of Detectives ignored his protesting receptionist and waved them in while he finished a conference call with a local reporter. Rachel took in a quick surface scan of the room while they waited. Her mind traveled over diplomas, service awards, the various trophies and photographs. Here was more evidence that Sturtevant did not play politics: only the occasional notable was nestled among the framed vacations and graduations. Behind her was a tall stack of media equipment, crowned by a ridiculously tiny monitor. A picture of a smiling young woman in a blue cap and gown was perched atop the DVD player.

Sturtevant was right-handed; she peeked in the lowest right-hand desk drawer and found the traditional bottle of cheap scotch.

He hung up the phone and opened that drawer, then slid two tumblers across his desk. A third tumbler and the bottle of scotch followed. 

“Sit,” he said. “You’ve got bad news. I don’t want to hear it.” 

“Sir,” Santino began.

“Oh, I will hear it,” Sturtevant said as he poured a thin finger of scotch in each tumbler. “There’s no doubt about that. But I’ve been having a fantastic day and I might as well consider it over.

“Cheers.” They raised their glasses and drank; the scotch was awful. 

Sturtevant tipped over his empty glass and pointed at Santino.

“We found Glazer’s accomplice,” Santino said.

“That should be good news,” Sturtevant said. “Why isn’t that good news?”

They told him. Rachel ran the phone call with Witcham through Sturtevant’s fancy audiovisual system. The Chief of Detectives listened to it twice, fingers drumming on his old leather desk blotter. “Agent Peng, anybody ever tell you that you’re more trouble than you’re worth?”

“Frequently, sir.”

“Well, prove them wrong,” Sturtevant said as he paged Zockinski and Hill. “You might as well get the other two Agents back here,” he said to Rachel. “I’ll call the FBI and let them know someone is still playing games.”

Rachel stepped out of Sturtevant’s office and reached through the link to Phil and Jason. Phil was in the secure rooms in First District Station’s basement, working with Sergeant Andrews and the bomb squad to dissect Glazer’s machines down to their nuts and bolts. Jason was a few miles away at the Hoover Building with the FBI’s tech squad, reviewing the videos for any sign of Glazer’s accomplice. She told them to head to the fishbowl at double time, and played them the recording of Witcham’s bragging confession as they ran.

“How did you miss this?”
Jason demanded.

She broke their link without answering.

Sturtevant’s receptionist was bright red as she caught him eavesdropping at the Chief’s inner door. Rachel pushed past him with a raised eyebrow and made sure her jacket was pushed back just enough to expose her ugly green badge; leaks to the press were all well and good, but she wouldn’t let it happen until they were closer to Witcham. Inside, Santino and Sturtevant were arguing legal process. She returned to her chair and listened to them hash out how the MPD should chase Witcham down.

“We know him as Charley Brazee,” Sturtevant said. “That’s the name that’ll go on the warrant.”

“But he confessed as Eric Witcham.”

“Irrelevant. It’s not the first time we’ve had a suspect use someone else’s name. And playing dead is rare but that’s happened, too. Once we get him, we’ll find out who he is.”

“No, we won’t,” Santino shook his head. “If DNA, dental, and fingerprints for the original Eric Witcham belong to a dead man, then we’re just left with this guy’s word. We might never know for sure.”

Rachel pushed a foot flat against the front of Sturtevant’s desk. It was Edward’s argument against the Forensics God all over again, and she was not in the mood to wade through the metaphysics of personal identity in the digital age. In her opinion, who he was would never be as important as what he had done, or what he was capable of doing. Charley... Witcham... (
whoever!
) had provided them with little evidence but an abundance of character, and Rachel was happy to let him call himself whatever he wanted as long as he did it from the inside of a prison cell.

Sturtevant ended the discussion with a call to a judge. Rachel couldn’t help herself; she listened in to the silent side of his conversation. Judge Richards shared the same floor as Edwards at the District Court, and he knew Charley Brazee by name. Richards’ shock carried through the phone, and Sturtevant’s conversational colors had fallen into irritated reds and yellows by the time he hung up.

“This had been such a good day.” Sturtevant slammed the desk phone down into its charger so hard she heard the plastic crack. “Out,” he told them, and set the example by pushing open his office door. His receptionist was lurking by the window and the door bounced off of his head. Sturtevant glared at the young man, then stalked through the tunnel and into the main hall.

“Are you okay?” Rachel asked the receptionist, who picked himself up off of the floor and pretended she wasn’t there.

Behind her, Santino’s conversational colors blurred to yellow as he ran his hands up the door jamb to Sturtevant’s office, his fingers prodding the small hole cut into the metal. He stepped into the office to stare at the mess of electronics, then back into the hallway. 

“Shit,” he whispered. He ran a hand over the top of Sturtevant’s television set, then went yellow-white with sudden realization.

“What?”

“Rachel?” The white had faded, replaced with a wary reddish orange. “Have you scanned this wall?”

“Why… Oh no.”

As Charley Brazee, Witcham had enjoyed limited access to First District Station. Glazer had been in the building at least once that they knew of. She scrubbed at the tension lines between her eyes, then sent herself into the building.

“Yeah,” she sighed as her mind brushed against a small metal device, no larger than a pack of cigarettes, hooked into the building’s power grid and with a tube aimed up towards a hole cut into the door jamb. “Yeah, same setup as before. They’ve been here.” 

They started clearing the media equipment away from Sturtevant’s inner wall. His receptionist peeked inside and squeaked; Santino was holding a clone of Phil’s wicked folding saw. 

“Where’d you get that?” Rachel asked as she scratched a cut line into the drywall with the hooked edge on her badge. Santino hadn’t been with them in Glazer’s apartment and it wasn’t the type of thing her partner normally carried.

“Phil gave me a spare,” he said, and dug the serrated blade into the wall. “Seemed like a useful thing to have.”

“You were supposed to follow me out,” Sturtevant said tightly. He watched, arms crossed, as Santino pulled apart his office. “What am I missing here?”

“You remember that RFID scanner from the raid on Glazer’s apartment? Looks like Witcham and Glazer were here during the renovations,” Santino said, and ripped the drywall away from the studs. The small silver box glinted under a layer of dust.

The Chief of Detectives took out his cell. “This really had been such a good day.”

NINETEEN

Glazer was absolutely still, and perhaps not quite by choice. He was handcuffed, a short thick chain running between the cuffs and binding him to a ring wielded to the metal table. Beneath the table, his feet were bound to an iron ring set in the floor. No chances.

The FBI has reluctantly granted temporary custody to the Metropolitan Police Department. Glazer was being held in a federal prison in Virginia prior to arraignment, but he hadn’t said a single word. Moving him to First District Station was a calculated risk: he and Witcham liked to play games, and this building was where it had all begun.

“If we don’t send someone in, then bringing him here was a waste of time.”

Rachel had assumed that Sturtevant was another man who liked to pace, but he was almost as motionless as the man on the other side of the glass. He was intent on Glazer, never shifting his attention even as he and Gallagher fought while pretending to discuss strategy. 

“It doesn’t matter who you send,” Gallagher said, shaking her head so slightly that only the tips of her hair moved. “We’ve questioned him for hours at a time. He won’t talk. He barely blinks.”

Glazer’s head swiveled towards the one-way mirror as if pulled by Gallagher’s comment. He stared at the mirror for one heartbeat, two, three, then turned back to center.

Hill leaned down towards Rachel and asked in a low voice: “Special Forces?”

“Definitely,” Rachel replied. Her technical specialty as a warrant officer had been in the Special Forces. Men and women like Glazer had been everything from her best friends to her lovers to her attempted murderers. Glazer was as familiar and as deadly as a favorite gun. “Any bets?”

“No tattoos,” he said. “Rules out the Marines, most of the Navy. I’d bet Army or Air Force.”

She agreed. They would never know for sure. If Witcham could erase his own fingerprints and DNA from the government databases, he could do the same for his protégé. At Rachel’s suggestion, Gallagher had resubmitted Glazer’s face to the military and had asked them to do an old-fashioned visual comparison instead of running it through a facial recognition program. Fingers crossed the man still had his original face.

The dry cleaning coupon with Witcham’s hidden message was on a table by the door, sealed in an evidence bag and resting beside a bin containing the three newly-discovered RFID devices. The one from Sturtevant’s office had been joined by two others cut from the walls of the Gold Coast. Rachel had found those. She and Phil would still be searching, but they had begged a break to watch Glazer’s interrogation. She was not looking forward to the next few days, how they were about to become the cyborg equivalent of drug dogs, forced to sniff up and down First District Station for anything suspicious. 

Sturtevant put his palm flat on the glass and appraised Glazer for a long moment, then pointed at Hill. The other man nodded, and scooped up the plastic bin and the evidence bag as he left the room.

“Where’s he going?” Jason started to ask, then stopped as he saw Hill push open the door to Interrogation. Glazer went ever so slightly yellow as he recognized the detective, but his wariness was tempered with dark professional blues as he prepared himself.

Glazer’s got a job to do,
Rachel thought.
Great.

“Hill’s the best interrogator we’ve got,” Zockinski replied.

“Him?” Jason’s scorn was an ugly orange. 

Zockinski smirked. “The man never talks unless he has to.”

On the other side of the mirror, Hill looked straight at Glazer as he placed the three devices on the table, one by one, pressing each down so it clicked as it left his fingers. Then Hill sat, slowly, his eyes never leaving the other man.