Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (21 page)

“What can I do for the police?” Evans asked, his hands folded in front of him politely. “I trust Delaney offered you refreshments?”

“She offered,” I said.

Cherabino quelled me with a look. “We’re here to talk to you about Ultrate artificial glands.” She offered him a piece of paper. “Specifically, the glands in these eight people.”

He took a look at the list before setting it down. “While this is very interesting to me—particularly as I’ve taken time out of my day to meet with you—I’m afraid I can’t discuss specific glands without their owners’ consents. Besides,” he said, and laughed sincerely, “I hardly keep those kinds of names in my head.
We sell two thousand thyroid glands a quarter, for example, and that’s just through our US affiliates.”

I shrugged. “Their owners are dead. I hardly think they’ll mind you giving out information that may lead us to their killer.”

“And we think those eight glands were sold directly through this office,” Cherabino told him. “We’d like the records. Now.”

Evans picked up the phone. “Delaney, would you get on the phone and set up a meeting with the records department for this afternoon? Also, please check out the credentials of”—he looked at us, and repeated our names and Cherabino’s serial number—“with the DeKalb police, please. Feel free to go up the chain of command. Thank you.” He hung up.

I shifted in my chair. I respected him more for being suspicious, but we couldn’t wait forever.

“I’m very sorry to hear that some of our customers are dead,” Evans replied to us directly, “but I fail to see how our records can possibly be of use to you.”

“Didn’t you just talk to your records department?” I asked.

“I like to know what’s going on in my unit,” Evans replied. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up proprietary information without a warrant, particularly before I’m certain that you are who you say you are.”

Cherabino nodded. “Fair enough. While your associate is confirming our credentials, let’s talk about the glands. All eight people on that list have glands from your company—who would have access to your customer lists?”

“I hope you’re not implying some kind of wrongdoing on our part,” Evans said. “Naturally we’re as upset as you are to find out about these deaths, but our
product is tested and approved, much safer than a comparable natural transplant in every case. We’ve been independently—”

“Calm down,” I said, amused. “We’re not here to talk about product safety. We mentioned it earlier. These people were murdered.”

He sat back. “Murdered? I’m very sorry to hear that. It’s…oh, I take it we’re discussing the Mystery Death Killer? The one all over the papers?”

I nodded.

“Who would have access to your customer records?” Cherabino repeated. “We’re looking at common threads between the victims as a routine part of the investigation.”

He exhaled sharply. “Yes, of course. That kind of information isn’t easy to get. Our records system is highly secure. Our matching protocols are fastidious, and in any case they are handled by several teams of people. The odds of any one having all of those customers are very slight, though I promise you I will look into it.”

“What about your Tuners?” I asked.

“Tuners?” Cherabino frowned.

Evans ran his hand through his hair. “Our Tuners are highly trained, calibrated, recommended highly by the Guild, and extremely professional. In fifty years we’ve never had a problem.”

“Um, what’s a Tuner?” she repeated, annoyed.

I glanced at Evans. It was his job; he could explain it.

He leaned forward, the very picture of interesting professionalism. “You know that your heart contains small numbers of brain cells on the organ itself? They’re there to help your system regulate how fast it beats, the proper opening and closing of valves, and so
forth. Like the mechanical pacemakers they used to implant. Well, artificial organs have similar nerve cells built in, preset with the correct dosage, interactions, and so forth with the rest of the body. But the organ can’t go ‘live,’ so to speak, without the nervous system accepting those cells as part of the grid. A trained telepath is needed to tune the cells to the body’s neural net and turn the organ on, so to speak. If it turns out your dosage needs an adjustment later—and your body doesn’t take care of the change on its own—we’ll bring a Tuner back to make the adjustment painlessly. It’s faster and more consistent than external medication in almost every case.”

“Who’s in charge of your matching protocol?” I asked him. “Is there any way that someone is earmarking certain glands to specific kinds of people?”

“The kind of access they would need would limit—”

“Wait.” Cherabino held up a hand. “Let’s go back to these Tuner characters. They’re Guild, right?” When I nodded, she continued. “Well, you keep saying our killer is Guild. Would a Tuner have the kind of training he’d need to do what we talked about?”

I thought about it. Other than the fact that Bradley was definitely
not
a Tuner—he was in Research, as I recalled from the articles—there wasn’t a good reason to say a Tuner couldn’t have done it. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with those guys, but anyone who interacted with the nervous system every day could probably figure out anything he needed to know. The machine I’d mentioned to Kara would be an easy shortcut.

“Well, yes. But—”

“How many Tuners do you employ on a regular basis?” Cherabino asked Evans.

“Maybe six, perhaps eight in a good quarter. We like
to use the same professionals quarter by quarter if we can—provides a sense of continuity to surgeons and the patients.”

“How many of them have you met personally?” she pushed.

“Cherabino, he couldn’t possibly—”

Evans cut me off. “Most of them, actually. I oversaw the implantation department until my promotion last year.” He smiled at my disconcertment. “You didn’t think Delaney was my choice for assistant, did you?”

I didn’t know what to say to that—obviously I had. “Where are you going with this, Cherabino?”

She fished out another piece of paper and offered it to Evans—I saw a glimpse of our sketch. “You may not have—”

“Neil Henderson,” Evans said decisively. He looked back at her. “It’s a good likeness.”

Like a key turning in a lock, the name linked to the feelings from the crime scene and the scarf. “Neil Henderson, used to work in Research?” I’d met him maybe five times ten years ago, but it all clicked. I still wasn’t sure about the punk nerdy guy who may or may not be Bradley, the guy who’d supposedly taken over Dane’s office, the bastard, but old Neil was always barging in on Dane and me on our way to lunch, trying to get himself invited. If he hadn’t been so crazy into practical jokes, we might have brought him along, but a joker is a dangerous friend. There was one time he brought in this live chicken…. “You’re talking about crazy Neil?” I repeated.

The corner of Evans’s mouth quirked up. “I haven’t heard that nickname in a long time. He’s a good Tuner, steady, responsible. Good with the patients. Is he in any danger?” He looked at the two of us.

“I don’t imagine so,” Cherabino said smoothly as
she put the sketch away. “Just a few more routine questions, if you don’t mind.”

Evans shrugged. “I have another few minutes.”

The phone rang next to him—he picked it up and spoke. “Wonderful. That’s what I expected. Yes, go ahead and set up the conference room for the meeting with Telecorp. Yes, thank you.”

He turned back to the two of us. “What else can I do for DeKalb’s Finest?”

We walked down the street, me a little worried about making it into the station on time for interviews. “You realize that he didn’t give us anything useful?” I asked Cherabino.

“He identified the picture. That’s more than we had.”

“But the records…He said all the right things and gave us shit.”

She shrugged. “Corporate guys are like that.”

“Hold on,” I said, seeing a pay phone. “I need to call Kara.”

Cherabino shrugged and put her hands in her pockets, clearly willing to wait.

I fished out change and dialed Kara. We needed to talk to Henderson, which meant she would need to set it up.

“You realize it’s less than halfway through the workday,” Kara said. “You don’t have to call me twice a day, I will get back to you, you know.”

“We have a lead.”

Her tone brightened. “Oh, good. Hard evidence would really help.”

“Um, it’s not super hard,” I said, then realized what that sounded like. “I mean, it’s just that we have a couple of witnesses who can identify one of your guys in
the area where he shouldn’t be, carrying something suspiciously like a body in a trash bag. We got someone to identify the picture. It’s Neil Henderson.”

“I thought you were going after Bradley?” Kara asked, after a moment to process.

“I’m going where the evidence leads me.”

Next to me, Cherabino snorted. It was one of her catchphrases, so what?

“That’s still not definitive,” Kara noted. “But it’s better than what we had. Who identified Henderson?”

“Jonathon Evans, head of the gland unit of Ultrate Bioproducts. He’s respectable.”

“A friend of yours?”

I was insulted. “The first time I’ve ever met him is today. What the crap, Kara? I’m not a liar and I resent being called one.”

“I’m not calling you a liar. I’m just making sure I have the information to defend you if it comes up.”

“Oh.” Well, maybe she wasn’t blowing me off after all.

“They’ll open the vault for me this afternoon, and I’ll put in an official request to talk to Henderson as soon as we get off the phone. I’ll still talk to him regardless, but having it on the books will help us later if there’s really something going on. That kind of identification looks suspicious. That much I think we can all agree on.”

“What about Bradley?”

“I’ll see if I can link him to Henderson somehow. If I can’t, there’s nothing I can do unless there’s a theft. Get me something else to go on for Bradley—some hard evidence, even circumstantial at this point—and I’ll move. But if I go too early, there’s nothing I can do for you later.”

“What if there’s a substantiating vision?” I asked,
and told her about the phone call the captain had taken from Jamie Skelton, head of the Guild precog facility.

“Did she see Bradley specifically?” Kara asked, always practical.

“I don’t know—this is thirdhand at least.”

“I’ll ask her myself,” she said. “Watch your back, though. With two visions, I’d say it’s a given you’re in danger.”

“I’ll be careful.”

As soon as I hung up, Cherabino made me reprise every word of the conversation with Kara. “Do you really think she’s going to get us what we need?” she asked.

“Actually, at this point, yes. She’s got her teeth in this one, it looks like, and she’s actually treating me seriously. If we can get her the lever to move the world, she will,” I said. “But she says there’s only one shot at this, and she doesn’t want to move too soon.” Actually, surprisingly, I think I trusted Kara’s instincts on this, assuming there wasn’t another agenda in play. She always had a good sense of the best time to move.

But something inside me insisted this was taking too long. Henderson, Bradley, or both needed to be off the street, now. We walked back to the car, quiet, while I worried about what would happen if I screwed up. I couldn’t screw up, was all. Or someone else would die.

I got to the interview room a little late and found Bellury reading a magazine. He looked up when I rushed in. “Perp waiting for you,” he said in that understated way of his. “And Clark wanted to know where you were.”

“He’s not my boss,” I said, then sighed. At this rate the other interviewers might never talk to me. Some days that might be restful, I supposed, if they didn’t
mutter in their thoughts too much. Guilt stabbed at me anyway. I asked, “What’s the perp accused of?”

Bellury gave me the rundown of the case. “You going to be here awhile?” he asked, quietly.

Great, now he was doubting me too. “I was with Cherabino all morning on the case,” I told him. “I’m supposed to check in with her this afternoon. Paulsen said the multiples case is high priority.”

Bellury nodded, but I could feel him decide to check the story.

I took the case file. I was here to work, I told myself.

At Cherabino’s cubicle that afternoon, she fanned out the new pictures from the original crime scenes. In every one except the last, in some corner there was a crushed-earth circle from a bad anti-grav generator. The kid whose father was a mechanic had been right on; our white guy with the garbage bag had an aircar with one bad generator. Cherabino seemed pleased and had even loosened up a bit around me.

Before long, though, we had to go back to our respective corners, she to other cases, me to the interview rooms.

Late that evening, after everyone on day shift had already gone home, I was slouched in the single chair in the coffee closet, scrunched up between the counter and the wall. My head hurt like a mother from the last suspect, and the coffee wasn’t helping. He’d been certifiable, and I’d gladly testify in favor of an insane plea if it would get him locked up and away from me forever. People that crazy were a telepath’s worst nightmare. He believed himself so intensely that if reality didn’t match up, well, that was its problem. All too easy for a telepath to give in to that intensity and believe too.

I’d escaped this time—thank you, Guild training—but it had hurt me and scared me and put me in a really rotten mood. The pounding pain in my head was just making things worse. What I wanted more than anything else in the world was to find a stash of my poison somewhere and fall off the face of the planet for a while.

I indulged in that fantasy for about ten seconds, just long enough to realize it was already past quitting time, a very dangerous time to be fantasizing about my poison. I would have to go all the way to my apartment—or Cherabino’s house while she worked and bitched—and sit there, telling myself no for hours on end. Vials or no, Swartz or no, I was maybe sane enough to know I couldn’t handle that, not today. And I had a drug test tomorrow I had to pass.