Vacant (7 page)

“Oh,” I said. People weren't usually this open with me. Even homicide detectives in the DeKalb Police Department weren't this open with me after they'd known me for a while.

“Sibley is dangerous. If he's involved at all . . .” I trailed off.

I thought about the machine, the small cube Sibley had carried the last time I'd run into him. With that cube in hand, any mind around him was highly suggestible. But it was an illegal thing, a thing based on Guild technology, and I didn't know what would happen—to them or to me—if the normals discovered such things were possible.

“I'm familiar with the file. I'll get more information.”

Jarrod looked at me. This talk about visions made him nervous, and the situation was a great deal worse if Fiske was involved, if that was credible. Still, whether or not it was, he needed a telepath.

“Why do you think the attack is related to the Pappadakis case?” I asked him. “Since you've been investigating other cases as well?”

“It's the most current, the most high-profile in the media, and the threats escalated during the weeks of the indictment and so on. I'm hoping that if there is a connection, we'll find
it and build a much less circumstantial case than the one being tried now. I'd like to cut the head off this trade. Thanks.”

“Is the illegal Tech trade so bad?” I asked, and then realized that I'd run into a large section of it earlier in the year, with some items involved that had scared even me.

Jarrod nodded. It would be even better if the threads here would lead back to somebody senior, like Fiske, but he was here for what he could get. “How bad is the situation with the boy?” he asked me.

A long pause.

“Well, it's not good,” I said.

“Walk me through exactly what he saw and what the consequences are. Give me a solution.”

I replied, carefully, going back through the vision in a bit more detail, and then—reluctantly—emphasized that we'd made some kind of strange connection. All the while his body language, his feel in Mindspace was getting more and more closed, more and more tense and steady.

I ended with “I can probably downplay the memory the next time I interact with him, assuming he'll let me once he's calmed down sufficiently. He's a prototelepath, though, which makes things trickier. I think I can fix this.” I had to fix this. I had to be here, to ward off the vision.

He was silent so long I thought he'd caught a message from outer space or something. Finally: “I expect you to do just that. You need to get him comfortable with you.”

“Understood,” I said. I was worried, but . . . I had to tell him, right? He was my current boss. “There are complications now that you need to know about.”

He shook his head. “I need more complications like I need a kick in the head, but fine. Walk me through the bottom line and what you're going to do about it.”

“I . . . I don't think I can leave him, not more than a
couple hundred feet away, not without screwing up the Minding for a good while. I'd rather stay within a hundred feet. If I go outside the distance, it'll hurt him, likely, or at least me, and I may not be able to get a good connection after this one is broken. I've never run into this situation before and I've only read about it once, in a book. If we stay within that distance, everything should be fine for now. If anything, I'll have an advantage in monitoring him. Should. A lot of this is new to me, like I told you when you called.”

He thought about that. “You don't have a supervisor you can call for advice—is that right?”

I nodded reluctantly. “That's part of the deal when you get someone not-Guild.”

It bothered me that I'd screwed up with Tommy, and it bothered me more that now I couldn't leave him. I felt overwhelmed, and worried about what would happen to Cherabino now. Would she be okay? I was getting more and more committed to this by the moment, and while I wanted to save Tommy's life if I could—I had to—I felt torn. A part of me felt like I should be in Atlanta, with her. If she lost her job, I was pretty sure she'd do something stupid, like leave town with no forwarding address, or beat someone up badly. She already had the mark on her record, after all.

Jarrod frowned, and my attention returned to him. “Well, then. You're going to have to figure it out. I expect a report on the situation—with, again, bottom lines in a bulleted list—by the end of the day. With solutions, and whatever you've already implemented. Whatever we need to implement.”

I was over my head and I knew it. “I'm supposed to tell you what to do?”

“Make recommendations, Ward. You're the closest thing I've got to an expert, and I expect to use that expertise. I
also expect to keep the Parsons safe and stable, and I'll work with you on methods if we remain at that goal.”

It all felt big, in that moment, big and overwhelming. A kid's life—and some good agents' lives—might depend on me if Sibley came calling. And Jarrod was just . . . just trusting I'd get it done. Just taking me on as part of the team, no hostility, no yelling, no dismay at what had happened. I didn't know what to do with that. Finally I settled on usefulness, the one thing that had kept me employed in Atlanta, and prayed it would be enough. “Understood. You'll have some version of that before tomorrow morning. Also, I'm willing to help with the investigation,” I said. “That's far more my specialty than Minding anyway.” That I could do. Hopefully.

“Your specialty is interrogations.”

“And crime scenes in Mindspace. You get emotions, context, and the occasional case breaker that way.”

He didn't know how he'd get me to the crime scene if I couldn't be more than a hundred feet from Tommy Parson, he was thinking.

“I understand that Tommy is my primary responsibility, though,” I said into the silence.

“That's right.”

There was a long pause.

“I suppose you're waiting to make that touchstone on my mind. Ruth did it in the first hour. Go ahead.”

I hadn't heard the word “touchstone” before, but it made sense. In a stressful situation, as a Minder I'd be communication and protection for the group, so I needed to be able to keep track of the group members. I forced calm. “You don't have any telepathy I should know about, do you?”

He shook his head, irony leaking from him. “Not a bit. I think I test negative on the scale.” He paused, then added slowly, “Ruth said she had to scream at me if I'm not paying attention.”

I nodded. I reached out, breathed in the feel and shape of his mind—indeed, mind-deaf as a doorpost—and placed a small, light tag that would fade out over the next week or so. I'd be able to find him with it. There had to be better ways to do that, but I wasn't a Minder and had said so repeatedly. This would work, which was all that mattered.

I disengaged, and the tag reacted exactly like I expected. No odd connections. Nothing. Maybe I could do this.

“Done?” Jarrod asked, attention already returning to his board of technology.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Get going, then. And fix things with Parson's kid. I need you on good terms with him.”

“Yes, sir.”

*   *   *

Back into the main front room, right and left. The bodyguard was slumped over some papers, her body language defeated, a slow sense of guilt and pain coming from her. I kept moving, feeling like a fire was lit under me.

In the hallway, Loyola was standing outside the kid's door.

“You going to tell me what happened earlier?” he asked me.

“Later,” I said. “Right now I have orders from Jarrod.”

Oddly enough, he accepted that.

What would Cherabino do in this situation? I didn't know, but in the interrogation rooms, if you couldn't get a kid to talk, you talked to the parent. I asked Jarrod, “Where is the kid's mother? I need her help.”

He looked at me. “She's working. She's been very adamant that we're not to disturb her and that you're not to upset her son again. That isn't normal operating procedure for you, is it?” He was trying to be generous, but right now I seemed very incompetent.

Well, it looked like I was going to have to tell him as it was. “He's a prototelepath. The kid. He's a lot more powerful
than expected, and his mind's not stable. He got a look at a vision of the future I had . . . and, well, he's in danger in it. Would scare the living shit out of me if I saw that and wasn't used to visions.” I felt . . . itchy, impatient, under too much pressure.

“A vision?” He lifted an eyebrow. Clearly he didn't believe in such things.

“Yeah, well, it was a scary image,” I said. “You going to tell me where the mother is?”

He regarded me, and I didn't know what he saw right then. Finally he said, “Last door on the right, all the way down. Looks like a linen closet.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I knocked on
the door firmly. It did indeed look like an ancient linen closet door, native to the building of the old house.

“Come in,” Marissa's voice said.

I took my courage in my hands and opened the door. I walked through a narrow space of about two feet, entering into a full-sized room with a slanting low ceiling and a large window on the left. I hunched, even though my frame at a few inches shy of six feet wouldn't actually brush the ceiling at this point. It felt like it would.

Marissa sat at an antique wooden desk, turned toward the wall. One side of the desk was covered in piles of legal-sized folders, legitimately three feet deep at one point. A child's-painted ceramic jug held pens to the right, and legal pads and notes fanned out around her on the right of the desk. “One minute,” she said, writing something to finish her thought, then closing the file open in front of her. A typewriter perched on a smaller table to the right, with typed pages scattered beneath it, and a large lamp illuminated everything.

She rotated in her modern office chair to look at me. Irritation came from her mind when she saw it was me.

“I'm working,” she said. “I've already had to put off
three hearings. Some of these cases have been on the docket for months. Is this urgent?”

I was surprised. “No. Don't you want to be involved in the decisions about your son's safety?”

She closed a file and sighed. I noticed then how tired she felt, how frazzled. “I don't really want to be involved in the decisions about my safety.”

“Didn't you call the FBI?” I asked, just to fill in a hole. I wasn't not sure how Jarrod knew about her case.

“That was the staff attorney. I made the mistake of showing her the threatening note I was worried about, and she called the FBI. She thought, for some reason, the threat against my son was their jurisdiction. She reads too many crime novels. Then the attack . . . happened, and they had you here within the day.” Her emotions were mixed, worry and self-consciousness and fear and irritation and things I couldn't quite name. “I'd rather none of this had happened.”

“Marissa—”

She held up a hand. “Judge Parson.” Her voice was gentle but firm.

Fine. “Judge Parson, where is the staff attorney now?”

“At the courthouse, filling in at another judge's courtroom. Then she'll be doing research for me until I can get back.” She thought she should have cleared the schedule entirely and driven with Tommy to her mother's in Washington for the duration. It would have been easier if she could somehow make it happen. But with the FBI here that wasn't really an option. And the caseload was never-ending. “I missed four hours this morning that we had scheduled for the Pappadakis case, and a case hearing this afternoon. The longer things pile up, the harder it's going to be to get them sorted again.”

I recognized the thought patterns of a workaholic; Cherabino had given me plenty of experience with those. Parson was worried, not really facing what had almost happened to her son this morning. So I'd be gentle, let her have her bubble as long as she could.

“Was there a reason you came to see me?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were comfortable with me Minding Tommy for the next few days. I'm still happy to demonstrate the mental connection, or to walk you through what I do. Or answer questions. You're his mom. You need to be comfortable with this.”

“I'm not going to be comfortable with this,” she said to me. “I've got strangers coming into my home without an invitation or by-your-leave, and I'm not going to be comfortable with the need for protection against these threats. I really don't like it, and I'm not going to.”

“You're his mom, and I want you to be comfortable,” I repeated, forcing down irritation. I'd give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it was just me, for now. I had made her son go into hysterics. It was understandable.

“I trust that you will learn from your mistake earlier and
not
upset my son again. I do understand that this is the situation we've got and we're going to deal with it. What do you need?”

I needed the vision not to be true. I needed the responsibility of everything not to be falling on my shoulders like it was. I needed Cherabino to be okay, to keep her job and her sanity even without me there. But when it came to the judge? That was simpler. “I need you to back me up. I'm going to do whatever the hell you need me to do to be comfortable, and then we're going to go in and say hello to Tommy and you're going to tell him it's okay to trust me. I'll need you guys to listen to me when I say there's a threat,
and I need your permission to monitor his mind—and to a lesser degree—your mind.”

A frisson of nerves and drawing back came from her. I reminded myself she hated telepaths. Or maybe it was just me. A lot of people hated me, and at this point her feelings didn't really matter. The job did.

I continued. “I know you don't like this. But there's at least one known threat out there, and I can't do my job without your cooperation.”

What known threat?
her thoughts asked, all too strongly. That was right—whoever I thought had attacked her son. She stood, slowly, and breathed deeply. “I am a court judge for arguably the largest and most important media trial of a magnate that has ever happened in this city. I have at least a dozen other cases waiting for my office to schedule and adjudicate. I am getting death threats. I can't do your job for you.”

I reared back, forcing myself to stay calm. “If you want to stay alive, you'll make time for this. I need one touch point to your mind and I need you to stay reasonably close.”

She shook her head. There again was that nervousness.

“I can't make you accept any more monitoring than you'll allow,” I said finally. “But don't let your fear get in the way of your son's safety. The threat to his life is very real—as you saw this morning. Go in there with me now. Please.”

“I am
not
afraid,” she said with anger, but she was. After a moment, she said, “Fine. Take care of Tommy. I'll even introduce you. But let me work. Let me have this.”

“Thank you.”

“You upset him again like that and you won't like what happens,” she said, a real threat couched in flat words.

“I understand,” I said. Finally some emotion I understood.

Different people dealt with grief in different ways, and
her being detached and angry at me, specifically, was probably easier than facing the real situation about her son. I'd give her some more room, if she'd help me.

I paused. She should probably know, even if she wasn't likely to react well. “Your son is a prototelepath,” I said. “In a few years, he's going to be strong enough to need Guild training.”

A look of disgust passed over her face. “I know. I blame his father,” she said, and stood, clearly trying to move the conversation along. “Let's get this over with.”

*   *   *

Parson knocked on her son's door, gently. “It's your mother,” she called, and with no more ado she opened the door and walked in.

Tommy looked up from a comic book, his eyes red. He was startled and defensive, but he didn't want to show it. “What is it?” he asked, sitting up, leaving the comic book up, a picture of a woman in 1940s costume fighting a darkly shaded guy with gears on his arm.

“This is Adam Ward,” she said. “He's a telepathic bodyguard, like the other bodyguards. He's promised not to scare you again—and if he does, you come find me, okay? But otherwise you're to let him guard you, at least until this situation is over. I need to work now.”

Tommy's face went through dismay and fear before settling on something I couldn't quite read . . . his blank face perhaps. “Can't you just stay with me for a while?” he asked quietly.

“Not right now, honey. I need to work,” she said. Then, without any other explanation, she left.

Which left me and Tommy a few feet from each other, neither one of us precisely happy with the situation.

I didn't know how to handle this. I had been counting on
Parson to help me get on Tommy's good side. I had to get on Tommy's good side. The vision . . . well, it just couldn't happen.

Tommy looked back out the door, after his mother, and I felt his loneliness. I couldn't just keep standing here, so I tried the one thing in front of me.

“Why don't you tell me about the comic book?”

“It's the tenth one in the series,” he said, like I was an idiot for not knowing. “
The Cat Avenger
.”

“Well, I've never read
The Cat Avengers
,” I said. “Is it good?”

“
The Cat Avenger
,” he repeated.

“Is it good?” I repeated.

He nodded, but I could feel his loneliness again. He really wanted his mom. It had been a terrible day and he wasn't sure it was over yet. He didn't know—and I didn't either—why she couldn't come sit with him.

I walled up my worries, all of them, into a small area in the back of my head. If I spent too much time thinking about them in front of Tommy, it wouldn't be good for either of us. I needed to be the guy he could trust if everything went wrong. That was what a Minder did, and that was what I needed to do now.

I sat down on a chair not too far from the bed, close enough to be there, far enough not to crowd him. “Look, I'm sorry about earlier.” I hated apologizing, but in this case, he deserved an apology. “I should have done a better job with that. I didn't mean for—well. You're going to be a telepath, in a few years, and that changes things. I should have been more careful.”

Now I had his attention. “I'm going to be a telepath?”

I nodded. “Your brain has already got the beginnings of a good Ability going. Give it a few years and you'll be Guild, probably.” I wasn't sure why they hadn't found him
through the school screenings already, but probably he'd been absent that day.

“Like on TV?”

“A little bit like on TV,” I said. “But real telepaths aren't the big guys you see on TV. They look like everybody else. But they can do cool things.”

Tommy thought about that. I moved in a little closer in Mindspace and found him surprisingly open, sharing his thoughts with no filter—at least for this moment. He was thinking about some movies he'd seen and the comic book character he was reading. It would be pretty cool to have powers like that. “If I'm Guild, I'll have lot of friends and people around all the time, right?” he asked.

“Most Guild people do,” I said. “But you have to be a friend to make a friend too. It's not guaranteed.”

“Oh,” he said.

He probably knew that from school already, but I didn't want to hand him a blank check. The bigger question was what he'd seen from my head. “You want to talk about what you saw?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said, and stared at me.

Okay. I tried it a different way. “Look, what you saw is just one possible future. I'm here to make sure it doesn't happen that way. We're all here to make sure it doesn't happen that way.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You want me to leave the room now, don't you?”

“Maybe.” He looked down.

I sighed. “I need to be within a hundred feet of you to make sure nothing bad happens, like your other bodyguard. If you want me to go into the hallway, I will, but if there's some kind of alarm I'll need to come back until the problem goes away.”

I expected him to tell me to go, but instead I got a sense
of fear and danger from him then, a wobbly memory of the morning. “You're really a bodyguard?” he said, very quietly.

“For your mind, yes. And there're three agents out there who'll jump in to help if I can't.” Four, maybe? Plus other minds around the house? I'd have to meet everybody eventually to sort them out.

“And you're really going to protect me?” Tommy asked.

“I am.” I meant it as a promise, a real promise, the kind you didn't break without bleeding.

He thought about that for a long while. “Okay,” he finally said.

“Okay?” I asked.

“You can stay around for now,” he said.

“Thanks.” It wasn't the rousing endorsement I'd expected, but it would work. As I sat there, I monitored the situation around me and tried not to watch the clock. I also worked—hard—not to worry about Cherabino or about the vision in front of Tommy. But it was work.

*   *   *

Half an hour and some talking later, Tommy had settled down with the next comic book in the series and I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to use the restroom, so I went outside into the hall.

I found Loyola outside waiting for me.

“How is Tommy holding up?” he asked.

I looked behind me, to make sure the old wooden bedroom door was closed behind me, and then lowered my voice anyway. How was I supposed to know? “I don't think the attack's hit him yet. I don't know if it will. His mom's not being very supportive.” And I had my own issues, which I was sure were communicating their own tension to Tommy.

“I've noticed that too,” Loyola said, and then visibly held back another sentence. I was curious, so I peeked. He
thought the judge treated her son more like a pet than a child, and violently disapproved. It wasn't his place to say anything, though.

His eyes narrowed, as he guessed I was looking at his mind. “Best thing you can do for Tommy is to be there and be consistent. As much as possible anyway. Neither one of us is his mom, but worst thing in the world is to be alone at a time like this.”

“Yeah,” I said. I was most concerned with his safety, and again, I had to pee. I needed to wrap this up.

“Tell me what happened. Earlier. When he freaked out.”

I pushed down irritation. I was still new, and I still had to explain myself. Hell, I always had to explain myself. “I made a mistake,” I said. I caught him up on roughly what I had told Jarrod. It wasn't a secret, exactly, though it didn't make me look good either. “You have questions?” I asked.