Painkiller (14 page)

“Yeah,” I said, pursing my lips as another thought occurred to me. “You don’t think Graves has that thing I do, do you?”

“Like he’s an incubus?” Reed gave me a hard look. “Or that he’s got a hair-trigger temper for people who piss him off?”

“Mine’s not a ‘hair trigger,’” I said, a little offended. “It’s, uh … like at least a ten-pound pull.”

“Sure it is,” he said, looking out at Lake Michigan’s churning waters, the sky darkening as the sun sank behind the buildings on the western horizon.

“Whatever,” I said, looking out my own window at the Gold Coast skyline. “I’ve got two assassins plus a murderer to deal with on my own. Whoopee.”

“Hey,” he said, snapping his head around and sounding like one of my souls.

“Oh, right, I forgot you and your ‘mad skeelz.’” That one drew a smile out of him as our cab continued up Lake Shore Drive for the umpteenth time that day, with what felt like no more answers than when we’d started this investigation.

Veronika was flat on her back in a hotel room off the Loop, a situation she cared for almost as little as she cared for television, which was playing in the background as a distraction from the pain that surged through her shoulder. She had been lucky inasmuch as she knew Nealon was a pretty damned good marksman, and the hit she’d suffered had been less than twelve inches from being fatal. Veronika had pulled the bullet out with no anesthesia save for the prattle of the evening news.

The bullet hadn’t come out easily, but it had gone as well as it could considering she was performing surgery on herself. Now she was just lying there, waiting for her powerful healing to work. She’d estimated it’d take a little less than six hours for her shoulder to heal. She was in hour two, and it was still a steady, throbbing agony that reminded her she’d been digging a bullet out of her shoulder with her own fingers only an hour earlier.

Her phone rang, another welcome distraction, and a far better one than the early evening sitcom rerun that was yammering painfully on the edges of her consciousness. She didn’t even own a TV—she found them aggravating at the best of times—but her phone was her link to the world. She picked it up with her unwounded hand, pressing it to her ear. “Hello?” She’d taken the hard breath, the gasping one to get out the pain, before she answered.

“Ms. Acheron?” came the polite voice at the other end. She hadn’t thought to check the caller ID, she’d been so grateful for a distraction. “This is Sunny Hills Nursing Facility and we’re calling about your mother—”

“Yes,” she said, sitting up and then remembering suddenly why she’d been lying down as the pain lanced through the muscles and tissue on her right side. She grimaced but did not cry out. “I’m sorry, yes, what’s wrong?”

“Your mother seems to have taken a little bit of a downturn today,” the woman on the other end of the line informed her.

“What are you talking about?” Veronika spoke slowly, in order to keep from screaming pain and aggravation into the phone. “I was just there a few hours ago and she was fine—”

“She seems to have contracted an infection,” the woman said, clinically, as calm as if she were delivering news about a payment going missing. No, she would be more upset about that, Veronika decided. “Her temperature has spiked to 102.”

“Okay,” Veronika said, concentrating hard, tuning out the stupid TV. “So … what are you doing about it?”

“The doctor caught the infection on his rounds this afternoon,” the woman said. “He’s prescribed her an antibiotic, and she’s being monitored closely. If the fever continues to rise, however, she’ll need to be admitted to the hospital.”

“Dammit.” Veronika shut her eyes, the phone pressed against her ear.

“Ma’am, this is just a courtesy call …”

“Yes,” Veronika said, opening her eyes again. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And … please …”

“We’ll be in touch if anything else changes,” the woman’s mechanical voice informed her. The sound of a click followed a few seconds later, and Veronika sagged back to the bed, clutching a bloody sheet and pressing it against her chest.

“I should be there,” she said, to herself, breathless as she pulled what had been a clean section of the sheet only seconds earlier away from her shoulder. It was stained with crimson in a pattern roughly the size of a coffee cup bottom. She took in a breath of the hotel room’s sterile air, with its hint of perfume that smelled like sandalwood, and looked at the clock.

Four hours to go until she was healed.

Then she needed to find Sienna Nealon, hopefully before Phinneus tracked her down again and collected on this contract. It wouldn’t make her feel any better about not being there when her mother was sick, but adding the money to her account would at least help offset the medical bills that were as inevitable as blood on the sheet she’d put to her wound.

Reed and I decided to start at the bottom, with our “dear friend,” Dr. Art Gustafson, who had pledged to help us with his good pal Dr. Jacobs’s murder. We ushered ourselves into his office to find the good doctor sitting behind his desk, eyebrows furrowed, working on a computer as we entered. He brightened almost as soon as we were in the door, looking up in mild surprise. “Oh, good, you’re here,” he said before I could angrily slap him with our new info, and he beckoned us to sit down in the padded chairs in front of his messy-as-hell desk.

Reed and exchanged a look that told each of us that the other planned to take the passive approach in this conversation. It seemed like a smarter move, because we could always switch to the aggressive approach later if we didn’t like what Gustafson had to say. In fact, I was likely to switch to it even if I did like what Gustafson had to say, because, duh, it’s me.

I dropped into my chair and draped my arms across the rests, staring at the doctor, who was back to paying attention to his screen. This was going to get old.

Reed cleared his throat. “Doctor, we’ve got some questions for you.”

“Of course, of course,” Gustafson said, holding up a single finger. “Just … one …” He tapped the keyboard quickly a few times, and then turned his monitor sideways, knocking fifteen stacks of paperwork askew as he did so. “Okay, so I’ve got this for you.”

I looked at the long, rectangular screen, which contained … gibberish. “That’s … not going to help me.” I looked at Reed, and he shook his head. Nope.

“Oh,” Gustafson said, clearly deflated. “Damn. I spent the whole day on this, trying to boil down the key points of his research—”

“Maybe you could just explain it,” I said. “You know … for the laypeople we are.”

“Well, that’s what I was trying to do,” Gustafson said, still looking a little dismayed. “So … it starts with genetic markers, the things that make us who we are. Jacobs was examining a lot of different aspects of DNA and, uh …” He seemed to lose himself for a moment. “Well, he looked into a lot of things. That’s what separated him from the more … specific … no … specialist … scientists. Anyway, one of the things he’d been focusing on of late were the … well, the differences between humans and metahumans at the genetic level.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this earlier today, when we came here and told you that Dr. Jacobs was murdered by a meta?” Reed asked, perfectly reasonable.

Gustafson blinked. “Well, to be fair … Jacobs didn’t just work on metahuman DNA. It’s not like it was even his specific focus, it was just a … a side avenue that’s come up since the curtain was yanked up on your people a few years ago.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Beg pardon?”

“It’s not his specialty,” Gustafson said, looking at us earnestly. “It’s something he included in his research because it’s very topical and sexy, and he’s a—well, he was a lightning rod for funding and attention for the university. Studying genetics, DNA, all that … the things he does don’t have immediate practical application, so he … well, he played the game to spruce it up.” Gustafson looked a little embarrassed.

“‘Played the game’?” Reed asked, sounding a little more reasonable than I felt. “This is, he took advantage of the … what, the media attention on metas, the political interest?”

“All the above,” Gustafson said, face a little red. “An entire race of people that we didn’t even know about in the wider scientific community until just a few short years ago? Talk about an embarrassment.”

“Well, it was actively covered up,” I said, not unsympathetic—unlike Andrew Phillips. “There were scientists studying the phenomenon, but it wasn’t like they could publish in journals—”

“Right,” Gustafson said, nodding, “like for example, this Dr. Ron Sessions, who I believe worked with you a few years ago …”

I felt a tingle of surprise like someone had just run fingers lightly up the skin on my back, as if they’d hovered them just a few microns above my skin. “You know about Dr. Sessions?”

“Ah, yes,” Gustafson said, nodding, adjusting his glasses as he did so. “I actually went to school with him, oh-so-many years ago.” He smiled tightly.

“Not a friend, I hope?” I asked, watching his reaction.

“No, just an acquaintance at best.” Gustafson shook his head. “He sort of fell off the earth after graduation. I had no idea what he was even working on until a few years ago, after the news broke, and some of the data from your, uh … Directorate? After that came out in the FOIA requests.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. I didn’t know that anything about the old Directorate had been made public. “What are you talking about?”

“Some of Dr. Sessions’ research was made available to the scientific community,” Gustafson said, as though it were no big deal. “Nothing terribly groundbreaking, I’m afraid, but enough to give those of us who wished to study metahumans further—as Dr. Jacobs did—something of a foundation to work with.”

I hated coincidences, but the fact was that with our entire race of metas reduced to a population of five hundred or so, crossover was a thing that happened frequently. Still, the idea that this doctor, this random murder victim killed by one of my people had been both killed by a meta and studying them?

Something about this reeked, and I didn’t care for the smell of mystery.

“This is weird,” I said, voicing my concerns.

“Yeah, something about this isn’t tying off,” Reed said, shaking his head.

“I guess I could understand if perhaps Carlton had been involved in any sort of active experimentation,” Gustafson said, with his own aura of mystery, specifically in the befuddled look on his face, “but he was doing nothing, really, of any consequence. As I said, he threw the meta concept in mostly for show. Even his arguments with Dr. Stanley were more about the nature of human genetics in general than anything to do with metas in specific.”

I frowned. I felt a compelling need to talk to this Dr. Stanley, especially since her name had come up several times in this investigation of Dr. Jacobs’s career. “Where does Dr. Stanley work?” I asked.

“I just can’t see Marabella having anything to do with this,” Dr. Gustafson said, shaking his head. He looked at me with earnest eyes. “Are you sure this didn’t have anything to do with Carlton’s gambling?”

I exchanged a look with Reed. “We’re examining all the possibilities,” I said.

Gustafson shook his head and grabbed a sticky note pad. He wrote in scrawled handwriting across the top, something not terribly dissimilar from the chicken scratch I’d seen in Jacobs’s apartment from his own hand. “She works for a competing university in the western suburbs.”

“A little cross-town rivalry, huh?” Reed asked.

“Something like that,” Gustafson said, pulling the top note off with a sucking sound of adhesive peeling away. He offered it to us between two ink-stained fingers. “I’ll keep working on this, then.” He looked at his computer and sighed.

“What’s the matter, doc?” Reed asked, picking up the snarky stick for once. “All this translation stuff getting you down?”

“Like I said before,” Gustafson looked at us over his glasses, one lens stained with a fingerprint, “I’ll do what I can to help, whatever it takes.” He sighed again, looking back at the computer monitor. “Some of this, though … it’s a little beyond me.” He gave hint of a shrug and turned his attention back to the computer. “Check in with me later, if you haven’t solved this thing by then. Hopefully I’ll have some more boring technical detail for you by then.” And he settled back down to go to work.

“Cheer up,” I said, taking the snark torch for myself, “you’re an educator, after all.” He looked up at me curiously until I delivered my punch line. “And what nobler calling could you imagine for yourself than educating a couple of knucklehead federal agents on the finer details of DNA science?”

Gustafson actually snickered with good humor as Reed and I headed out, off to try and figure out how to put together this puzzle that seemed about five hundred pieces short of completion.

I’d been in a lot of cities, but Chicago’s traffic was easily the worst I could recall. Of course, part of that might have been that I was seeing it from the backseat of the cab, but I’d recently experienced LA traffic and this seemed at least comparable if not worse. It made me glad we hadn’t gotten a rental car, because Reed probably would have been swearing profusely after the last hour spent in gridlock on the west-bound freeway.

“This is ridiculous,” Reed muttered, glancing up from his smartphone to look at the gridlock in front of us.

“You’ve been here before,” I said, keeping myself from nervously tapping a finger against the hand rest next to me. “Shouldn’t you be used to this?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as getting used to this. I mean, we’re not even over the river yet. I don’t even think 290 starts for another mile or so.” The cabbie shook his head, which I took to mean was him saying Reed was wrong, but my brother didn’t notice and I didn’t bother to point it out.

My phone rang, a welcome interruption from staring at the myriad cars locked in a holding pattern around me. I didn’t think we’d moved in minutes, and I wasn’t holding out hope that this situation was going to change anytime soon. I was so annoyed with the FAA right now. Not only was I presently costing the US government a fortune in cab fares, but I was stuck in traffic and wasting my precious time. I mean, for crying out loud, you’d think they’d be cool with the tradeoff—they don’t have to pay for my plane tickets or ground transport, all they have to do is pick up a Chipotle burrito to replenish the calories I lose by flying myself (it’s seriously a hard burn).