Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel (20 page)

She closed her hand, and the screen shrank, then disappeared, with the movement.

Deshin looked around the room as if he were seeing the storefront for the first time. He wasn’t, of course, but she didn’t know that.

“Do you need help shutting this down?” he asked, deliberately making assumptions for her.

She raised her chin. “I’m not shutting this down.”

“Well, you can’t run it alone,” Deshin said.

She crossed her arms. “Do you think I’m not capable?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

She opened her mouth in shock. Clearly, no one had confronted her like this before.

“It’s too complicated and too dangerous. The things you don’t know can get you killed. Even your father died doing this work, and he was one of the most careful men I ever knew—

“You have no right to speak of my father,” she snapped.

“I have every right.” Deshin took a step toward her.

Sir, stay close,
Jakande sent.

Deshin ignored that. He had only taken one step toward her. What Jakande didn’t know was that one step, taken that way, was more than enough to intimidate someone like the girl.

“I knew your father before you were born. I’ve done business with your father repeatedly over the years, and I know how hard he worked, and the risks he took, risks he shielded you from. I could have come in here and killed you before you even saw my face.”

“You didn’t know my father was dead,” she said, but her voice shook a little.

Deshin shrugged one shoulder. “So? I could have killed whoever was behind that counter. You’re not protected here.”

“And you’re going to protect me.” Sarcasm, the weapon of the weak.

He didn’t say that to her. “It’s not my job to protect you. It is, however, in my interest to keep this business alive. I propose a trade.”

“Money for my father’s life work?” The sarcasm gave her voice a strength that her body belied.

“Training, for access to all of your father’s records and the security footage from the moment your father opened this store until right now.”

She blinked. An errant tear fell down the side of her face, but this time, she didn’t brush at it.

“Training?” she asked. “The business would still be mine?”

For the time being
, Deshin thought but didn’t say. “The business would still be yours.”

She let out a snort. “What’s in my father’s records?”

“I don’t know,” Deshin said. “But I’m willing to send some of my people to work with you in order to find out.”

She stared at him for a long moment, then slowly shook her head. He repressed a sigh. She was stupid after all, if she turned down this offer.

The head-shake grew stronger, and then she laughed. Just once.

“I thought you’d try to steal the business. Or you’d ask for discounts or something. I didn’t expect this,” she said.

He smiled. “I forgot about the discounts. Add those in as part of the price of training.”

She placed both hands on the countertop as if it could hold her up. “You’re serious.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You’d train me? In how to—what? Be a bad guy?”

She was trying to bait him now.

He’d been called much worse. “In dealing with the unsavory characters who make up eighty percent of your father’s business.”

“You don’t want merchandise or anything?”

“Just the information, and the records, and the discounts,” Deshin said. “Provided, of course, that you want to continue running this business. If not, we can negotiate a price.”

She glanced at Jakande. Deshin couldn’t see Jakande’s face to see if there was any reaction at all, but Deshin would have wagered there wasn’t.

“Would you help me avenge my father?” she asked.

“Against whom?” Deshin asked. “The man who killed him is dead.”

“The
clone
who killed him is dead. Clones are owned by people. I want to find out who killed him.”

“You know who killed him,” Deshin said. “If you’re keeping the business for revenge, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. Better to take some of the things your father sold, store them, and then hire a mercenary to do your dirty work for you.”

“You say that so calmly,” she said.

He nodded. “In this business, everyone speaks calmly about a lot of horrible things.”

She continued to stare at him, as if she hadn’t considered any of this. Maybe she hadn’t. In the past month, her entire world had ruptured, and she clearly had no idea how to reassemble it.

Even if she didn’t sell Deshin the business, he predicted silently to himself that he would own the business within the year.

“Deal,” she said. She started to reach out her hand, and then stopped. “You don’t mind if I refuse to shake on it?”

He smiled. “I don’t mind at all,” he said.

TWENTY-FIVE

THEY SENT GOUDKINS to the morgue.

It was actually located in a tiny dome just outside Tycho Crater. Early in its history, Tycho Crater had suffered a contagion that went from the aausme through nanobots that were cleaning up human corpses, and then somehow infected human beings. The contagion’s source wasn’t known immediately, and everything became very Earth medieval, with the dead being stored outside of the dome.

Courageous doctors had worked on the corpses outside the dome, unable to come back in until they knew the source of the disease and its cure.

Their names were on the roads leading through the tunnel that took Goudkins to the morgue, and the name of the organization was on a virtual plaque outside the morgue’s building.

While she traveled, Goudkins got the entire history, whether she wanted it or not.

Normally she did, which was why her links activated when she noted unusual architecture or something not generally done in human Earth Alliance cultures. She had forgotten to shut off that feature, and it hadn’t activated until now. She was on the Moon, after all, and a lot of what was considered normal for humans had developed here and on Earth.

Apparently, a morgue isolated from a dome wasn’t considered normal.

Nothing in her day was considered normal. She shut down the links, flagging her system to remind her, when she reached Armstrong’s port, to reactivate that feature.

The morgue itself was all cool lines and windows that had a close-in view of the Moonscape. Jagged rocks crowded against the tiny dome, making it feel as if the morgue were on some distant planet, and she was an early colonizer.

The air had no smell at all, which told her that the environmental systems constantly scrubbed everything to such a high degree that nothing organic could breed here, even if someone wanted it to.

Five minutes after Goudkins entered the morgue, a man emerged from a door in one of the steel-blue center walls.

“Officer Goudkins?” He was short and a little dumpy, the kind of dumpy that would get him kicked out of any Earth Alliance position for being out of shape.

“I’m not on duty here,” she said. “Call me Wilma.”

He inclined his head toward her. “Wilma. I’m Alfonso.”

He didn’t offer a last name or his hand. Maybe that was custom here, because of the history of contagion. She did not know.

“I understand you want to contribute DNA to identify a possible relative?” he asked.

“I’m a member of the Earth Alliance security team,” she said. “I’m only allowed to use my DNA under very controlled circumstances. I would need to run the comparisons myself.”

“With supervision, I hope,” he said.

They both knew how easy it would be for an unsupervised someone to mess with the database.

“Yes,” she said, “as long as we wipe my information when we’re done.”

“We can do that,” he said. “Follow me.”

They went through the door he had come out of, and down a flight of stairs. The temperature was lower here, and the air had a tang of chemicals that she didn’t recognize.

Most of the doors off the lower corridor were closed and labeled by the function inside. The stairs went down farther, and, according to the building map that had appeared in the corner of her left eye, led to storage pending notification.

In other words, if her sister were in this morgue, she’d be at least one more level down.

Goudkins glanced that way, then forced her brain away from contemplating what lay below.

Alfonso led her into a room in the back, which had a lot of equipment she couldn’t identify, and one thing she could. A quick-look DNA analyzer. The Investigative unit had dozens of those. The results from the analyzer always needed double-checking as it had a small error rate, but if it found a match, that match was usually positive. It was the negatives that sometimes got overturned.

She walked over to it, but didn’t touch it. “How do we keep my information separate?”

“We add this.” He took a small chip out of a package of chips. “Everything we do goes on that chip and you can take it with you.”

“Forgive me for being paranoid, but I’m required to ask: How do I know you’re not making extra copies?” Usually she didn’t apologize for asking that question, but she felt a little less powerful than usual since she wasn’t here on Earth Alliance business.

“I’ll let you check the system,” he said. “I assume you’re familiar with DNA analyzers.”

Good assumption and stupid decision. Normally, she would warn him about letting someone else tamper with their machines, but she wasn’t going to say anything on this day.

She sank into the chair and grabbed one of the swabs. He put the chip into the machine as she did so.

“Thank you for taking time out of your day to do this,” she said.

His gaze met hers. He had deep circles under his eyes.

“I’m not taking time,” he said. “Ever since last week, this sort of thing has been a crucial part of my day.”

She knew he didn’t mean keeping someone’s privacy, but helping locate bodies for family members.

“I greatly appreciate it,” she said softly.

“I know,” he said and ran a hand over his face. “Believe me, I know.”

TWENTY-SIX

BERHANE AND Ó BRÁDAIGH (“Call me Donal, please”) settled in a coffee shop a few blocks from the train station. Berhane had never been to this coffee shop before, which really wasn’t much of a surprise.

She hadn’t spent a lot of time in this part of Armstrong. Her father would probably lecture her severely if he found out where she was.

She sighed inwardly. She was a grown woman who worried about what her father would think about her whereabouts. She really had allowed other people to run her life.

She had just been starting to step into her own before her mother died. And then it had been as if Berhane had frozen in time.

“Is this okay?” Ó Brádaigh—
Donal
—asked. “I mean, we can go somewhere else if this place makes you uncomfortable.”

She looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant. Was he worried that this place was too cheap for her? That she was the kind of woman who wouldn’t be seen in a place like this?

That might’ve been unfair to him. He might have thought she just didn’t like the ambience.

But only a few weeks before, she
would
have worried about being seen in a place like this, because she doubted that her father or Torkild would approve.

She smiled at Ó Brádaigh—
Donal
. Donal. He wanted her to call him Donal.

“This is lovely, thank you.”

Lovely was probably an overstatement. The coffee shop was small, with dark wood walls and lovely plants that she couldn’t identify hanging from the ceiling. The plants had viney leaves that trailed to the floor, and they probably created a lot of oxygen.

Even so, the place smelled of coffee and chocolate, and because of that, seemed incredibly decadent. The smell probably made the patrons less likely to notice the worn booths or the chipped edges on the tables.

Berhane ordered a chocolate espresso, just because this place smelled so much like one, and Donal raised his dark eyebrows, looking amused.

“You’ll never sleep,” he said.

She shrugged. “It’s the middle of the day. I’m not worried.”

She didn’t want to tell him that she hadn’t slept well since Anniversary Day. It brought back all of the nightmares she’d had since her mother’s death.

A serving bot brought their drinks. Donal had ordered a raspberry latte. It arrived, an alarming shade of pink.

“My daughter got me hooked on these,” he said as he took his drink off the tray. “She ordered it because it’s pink.”

“But that’s not why you ordered it,” Berhane said with a smile.

“Certainly not,” he said. “I ordered it because it tastes good. Want a sip?”

She did. Normally she would have said no—such things just weren’t done. And the moment that thought crossed her mind, she said, “Sure.”

He offered her the glass, then took her espresso off the tray. The espresso was very black.

She took a small sip from the latte. It tasted of raspberries and rich cream and was probably one of the most decadent things she’d tasted in years.

“Wow, yum,” she said. “I’ll remember that.”

“It’s why I come here,” he said. “These things are deadly, but delicious. Everyone needs something like that in their life.”

He put his hand on top of the tray and the tray trilled. He had just paid for their drinks.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

“Oh, but I did,” he said. “I owe you. Fiona
loves
that ring. I have to pry it off her neck every night, and she isn’t allowed to wear it outside the house. She hates me for that.”

“So you owe me because I made your daughter hate you,” Berhane said with a smile.

He laughed. The sound was as deep and rich as the coffee.

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” His eyes twinkled. In that moment, she realized that he was one of the most handsome men she had ever seen. “I think you know what I mean.”

The shop was a little too warm. Or maybe she was.

“Yes,” she said. “I do know what you mean.”