Zero Sum Game (16 page)

He hung up the phone and I punched him.

“What the
hell!”
cried Finch. His nose was fountaining blood. It was getting all over his suit.

“That’s for calling me ‘missy,’” I said. “Now, clearly you have some super string-pulling powers, so I’m not actually that worried about those police anymore. Like you said, that’s your mess now, with my thanks. What I
am
worried about is you thinking this is your game to run. It’s not. So I’ll thank you to talk to me like the heavily armed person I am.”

Finch glared at me, trying to staunch his bleeding nose.

Tresting touched my arm. “This gets us nowhere,” he murmured.

“Maybe,” I said. “But it felt really good.”

Tresting shook his head at me slightly, warning me back, and I felt a flare of resentment. He had no call to tell me how I ought to conduct myself. This wasn’t
his
game to run, either.

“Everybody calm down,” Tresting said to the room. “One crisis at a time. Let’s find out what’s going on.” He pulled out his phone and hit a button; as soon as someone picked up, he said, “We’re at Kingsley’s place. Everything’s under control, but I’d like some intel.” There was a slight pause, and then the person on the other end swore copiously and creatively, loudly enough for all of us to hear over the speaker. Tresting winced and held the phone away from his ear a little. “I said everything’s under control,” he tried to insist over Checker’s tirade. He looked at the rest of us. “Be right back.”

He headed through the foyer and into Leena’s kitchen, trying to get a word in edgewise. He didn’t close the door, however, instead leaning against the counter still in sight of the living room. I wondered if he was keeping an eye on me to make sure I didn’t punch anyone else.

The rest of us stood uncomfortably. I tried not to think about Dawna Polk and what she might have done to Leena Kingsley.

What she might have done to me.

Fuck. My head pounded like someone had driven an ice pick through the back of it.

Finch was still bleeding on Kingsley’s carpeting. “Can I get him a towel?” she asked hesitantly.

“No,” I said.

Dr. Kingsley went over to the window and peeked around the blinds. “It looks like the police are leaving.”

I studied her. She was walking and talking and functioning like a normal human being. But then, I had been, too. “Are you going to call them back after we leave?” I asked.

She shook her head, not meeting my eyes. “Just don’t bother me again. I want to be done with this.”

Pithica never wants an investigation,
I remembered.

Leena Kingsley couldn’t be threatened into submission. Killing her to keep her quiet might have made people look more closely at her husband’s death. So someone had done something else to silence her. Something that had made it seem like she’d changed her mind on her own.

Something that Dawna Polk had also done to me in the coffee shop, when she’d asked me where I would be.

Drugs? Hypnosis? Was I still under her influence? I had a feeling Finch knew, and he was going to tell me or I would beat it out of him.

The fact that Pithica had acted now scared the shit out of me. Kingsley had been on this crusade for months, and today they had suddenly decided to kill the PI she’d hired and convince her to give it all up? Sure, maybe Tresting’s investigation had started to close in on something important, but Tresting was right: this was all happening right after they had hooked up with me. Dawna had targeted me to go in after Courtney and had targeted me on the road to Camarito, and I was a fool if I didn’t assume she was targeting me now. I just didn’t know why.

Tresting came back into the room, hanging up his mobile and tossing a roll of paper towels at Finch, who caught it clumsily and started mopping up his face.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Trouble.” Tresting hesitated and glanced at Finch before continuing, but probably decided that this guy had enough connections to find out everything on his own anyway. “Turns out the neighbors ain’t seen our hostage dance. The cops who was here earlier got back to the station and saw composites of two people suspected in a brutal multiple homicide at an office building. Happened they recalled noticing two suspicious characters who looked mighty similar to the sketches in a truck outside an address they just reported to. Told you not to flinch,” he added to me.

“Wait, so this is
my
fault, Mr. Let’s Report Everything to the Proper Authorities?”

He shot me an expression of thinly veiled disgust. “Good news is they ain’t ID’d us, just got composites from the lobby guy at the building.” He turned to Leena. “Doc…”

“I told your new friend already, I won’t tell anyone anything.” She sounded exhausted. “Just make this go away, please.”

He hesitated, then nodded. I supposed there wasn’t much else he could do but trust her. “Guess we better get while the getting’s good,” he said to Finch and me. “They going to find out you’re not a real FBI agent and come back?”

It was Tresting’s turn to get a baleful glare.

“I’ll take that as a ‘maybe,’” the PI said, unperturbed. He reached out and touched Leena on the shoulder. “Doc. If you need anything, anything at all, or if anything starts to seem…I don’t know, strange, or something frightens you—you call me, okay?”

She appeared to pull herself together slightly. “I…thank you. For sticking with me as long as you did. Maybe you can relax now, too.”

Fat chance of that, I thought. Tresting was never going to give up this case, whether he had an active client or not. He looked like he wanted to say something else to Leena Kingsley, but finally he just nodded at her once before moving away. He checked out the window to make sure the coast was clear and then pulled open the front door.

“Okay, folks, let’s all walk all normal-like,” he murmured as we followed him out. Considering that we’d now
all
been punched in the face recently, we would have been a sight to see, but any gawking neighbors had gone back inside already. Tresting led the way, and I lagged behind, watching Finch for any sudden moves. He was busy shoving a clump of paper towels against his nose, however, and didn’t seem inclined to try anything.

“We’ll take my truck,” said Tresting.

“It’s two-hour parking,” Finch protested in a muffled voice. “Let me—”

“Oh, Lordy, a parking ticket. Won’t kill you,” said Tresting, officially making him my new favorite person. “Now get in.”

We crammed Finch and his blood-covered suit in between us. “Understand something,” I said to him as Tresting shoved the truck into gear. “You are to keep your hands in sight at all times. I am faster than you, I am stronger than you, and the hand you see under my coat is on a gun that is pointed at you. If you try anything—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get the message,” he groused.

“Good. As long as we’re all on the same page.”

Chapter 16

As we drove,
Tresting directed Finch to dial his superiors on the burner phone and put them on speaker. “I’ll do the talking,” the PI instructed, in a tone that brooked no argument.

The voice that emanated from the mobile was a calm, charismatic basso, and I recognized it immediately as Finch’s boss from the sack of Courtney’s place. “May I ask with whom I am speaking?” the voice inquired.

“No, you may not,” said Tresting, and he went on to give detailed directions to a picnic area in Griffith Park.

“It may take me some time to get there,” the man warned.

“Shame,” said Tresting, “seeing as we’ll only wait half an hour. See you soon.” He nodded at me, and I reached over and hit the button to end the call. We were turning onto the streets adjacent to the park by then, and Tresting pulled off and swung into a parking area. “Let’s walk from here.”

He led the way up a winding road into the park. Cheerful hikers and joggers passed us frequently, half of them with energetic dogs and most of them in the dreadfully fashionable athletic gear that seemed to be the uniform of choice for active Southern Californians. Our current state got a few double-takes, particularly Finch’s obvious nosebleed, but like true Angelenos, they all decided to mind their own business.

We reached a large picnic area with red stone tables, sparsely populated with only the odd family fighting over snacks and sandwiches. Tresting led the way to a table a ways away from anyone else and gestured for us to sit. Finch sat on the bench; I perched on the table to face the opposite way as Tresting and look out over their heads to scan the wooded area behind the picnic area, my hand under my jacket. The icepick in my head hadn’t gone away, but I forcefully ignored it.

About twenty minutes after we arrived, Finch cleared his throat. “There he is.”

I tried to keep my gaze as wide as possible while I turned to catch the guy in my peripheral vision. I wouldn’t have recognized him right away from my glimpse at Polk’s house—he had dressed casually in jeans and a sweatshirt this time, and didn’t seem at all out of place in the park. Combined with his appearance as a fifty-ish clean-cut white guy, in good shape but not attractive enough to turn anyone’s head, he was in all ways most emphatically someone who would go entirely unnoticed.

He kept his hands out of his pockets and slightly away from his body as he approached. Smart man. Tresting stood up as he reached the table.

“Mr. Tresting,” the man said in greeting.

I glanced sharply at Tresting, but he was already nodding to concede the name. “Thought you wouldn’t have trouble with that.”

“Your identity was easy enough to deduce. Your associate, however…” He extended a hand to me. “May I ask whom I have the pleasure of addressing?”

I snorted. “You can ask. And who are you?”

“Call me Steve.”

At least he was obvious about it being an alias. I jerked my head toward Tresting. “So, Steve. Now that you know who he is, are you going to make trouble for Arthur here?”

“Well, I suppose that depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether the two of you are determined to make trouble for me.” He sat, laying his hands against the top of the picnic table deliberately—and over-dramatically, in my opinion. “Let me be frank. I could not care less about any police trouble in which you two have ensnared yourselves. It would frankly be a waste of my time to become bogged down with aiding local law enforcement in their Gordian investigative practices; that is quite beneath my interest. I do, however, very much care about any involvement you may have with the organization known as Pithica.”

“Why?” said Tresting.

“Before I can answer that question, I must know how deeply you are involved with their agents.”

Tresting narrowed his eyes. “All right,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I got a niggly feeling you’re going to know all of this within the hour anyway, so I might as well tell you. I got hired by Dr. Leena Kingsley to look into her husband’s death. Fell down the rabbit hole, and here I am.”

Steve turned to me. “And you?”

“I’m helping him,” I said.

“I’m afraid that’s not good enough.”

“She’s the one who said she would call Dawna Polk,” said Finch; through his bloody nose her name sounded more like “dodda po.” “She used her to threaten me, Boss. She
knows.”

Knows what?

“I did glean something of the sort from your message,” Steve said to Finch. He turned to fix his attention on me in a way that made me want to turn and run. After shooting him first. “So. Either you are one of Pithica’s agents, or you truly have no idea what you are dealing with.”

I felt Tresting’s eyes shift to me. “I’m not working for Pithica,” I said, more for Tresting’s benefit than for our agency friends. “As a matter of fact, they tried to kill me.”

“Yet you somehow not only know the woman calling herself Dawna Polk, but know that she is dangerous—a combination of knowledge that makes you very, very…special.”

“Why?”

The man calling himself Steve hesitated very deliberately. I was starting to think that he practiced being deliberate in front of a mirror. “Because people who speak with Dawna Polk see only what she wishes them to.”

“Yeah, well, clearly I’m not the only one who figured it out. You and your little band seem to know exactly what her deal is.”

“Because I have not spoken to her.”

The light breeze in the park suddenly felt very cold.

“Neither has Mr. Finch,” Steve continued. “Neither, I pray to God, has anyone else who works with us, because if they have, we are already lost.”

“You don’t trust your own people?” I asked, my mouth dry.

“It is not a matter of trust,” he said. “Dawna Polk is…for lack of a better word, she is what one might call a telepath.”

There was a moment of silence. Then I snorted out a laugh. “You’re putting me on.”

“I assure you I am not.”

“That’s ridiculous. Telepathy doesn’t exist,” I informed him.

“Please explain,” said Tresting.

Steve opened his mouth, and the pounding in my head resurged—this time along with a visceral, shriveling dread. More than anything else in the world, I wanted him
not
to explain. I wanted to mock him and call him an idiot, because what he was saying didn’t make sense; it couldn’t make sense—my body tensed. I had to keep myself from launching over the table and knocking him flat before he could speak, or, failing that, putting my hands over my ears and humming very loudly, because
I didn’t want to know
—

“Some people are born into this world with certain talents,” said Steve, his baritone as calm and deliberate as ever. “People who are…one might call them emotional geniuses. Charismatic brilliance on the furthest edge of the bell curve. Under normal circumstances, some of them become the most successful of businessmen. Others are con artists. Others movie stars or cult leaders or the greatest politicians of their time. Believe me when I say that only a handful of people in a generation have this capacity on the level of which I am speaking.”

No. I wasn’t going to take this seriously. I didn’t care how emotionally adept someone was; she was still human. To assign her supernatural mental powers was an impossible fancy—