Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (29 page)

“I’m impressed already,” I blustered. “Now get to the point.”

He turned his neck and cracked it, then turned back to me, suddenly
more
dangerous for his lack of education. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. You and me going to work out a deal. I give you the Frankies’ warehouse—good intel, the kind you need to wipe ’em out, worse than Marge—and you do it. You take ’em off my blocks.”

“A warehouse?” That was tripping alarm bells in my head, if not Paulsen’s. “Is the younger one there now?” In other words, “Do you know where he is?”

He nodded. “He’s there.”

“Then what?”

He looked me straight in the eye, did Joey. “You don’t tell nobody where you got the intel. Not one paper, get it? And not me nor anybody else workin’ for me ever sells you shit again. And you go someplace else with your vendetta.”

“Vendetta?” It seemed like an awfully big word for him.

“The revenge thing you got going,” he explained, patiently. “I ain’t got no part in it.”

Paulsen spoke up. “The department doesn’t deal.”

“I ain’t askin’ the department,” Joey returned evenly. “I ain’t got no beef with you. We got this game all on our own. I’m asking the Avenger over here.” He stood up and regarded me. “Marge is out, man. Marge and Harry both. Ain’t nobody left who brought you down in those days.”

With the sun beating down on me like I was the bug under somebody’s magnifying glass, I swallowed a laugh. Not only was Joey going to give us Bradley’s location—with any luck, his actual location—but he was offering something the sane me couldn’t possibly turn down. A guarantee—guarantee—that the supply for my poison would dry up. That I wouldn’t ever get another shot at it. And as much as I hated myself even now for even thinking how to box myself in, part of me was ready to twist the knife. And I wanted this information. I wanted Bradley to go down. I leaned forward and held out my hand.

He folded my hand carefully in his, and shook. I got
an impression of a quick and wily mind; then the contact was over.

“Start talking,” I said.

“Anybody asks, this conversation never happened. I never told you nothing.”

“I understand.”

About the middle of April, the Darkness leaders had approached Joey’s boss, Maloy, about helping a third party—the Frankies—make people disappear. People from a list, addresses given. Maloy was supposed to help them end up at a warehouse in an industrial section of College Park. Then, a few days later, he was told to show up again and help some “stiffs” end up properly buried. (Joey was cynical, and here he would only talk about hypotheticals and only about Maloy.)

In the beginning, it was maybe one a month and easy pickings—good money, and nobody anyone would miss, good victims with no real family, no close friends.

But the schedule moved up—one a week, people going in and out of the warehouse. Now the Frankies wanted introductions to other crime groups, and Maloy raised his fees. He raised them three separate times, as the names from the list got more and more connected to people who would mind them missing. It was getting dangerous. Maloy finally said he wouldn’t do business. But a few weeks later, the Southeast Darkness Council called.

Maloy went to the council, arguments in hand, intending to shut down the trade for good. “It’s bad business,” Maloy was going to argue. “It attracts too much attention. They ain’t paying us nearly enough for this.”

But Maloy never came back. And now the big bosses
were telling Joey he had to play; the Frankies were selling something far too valuable to stop over a little body disposal. “But they won’t tell me what,” Joey explained to me, dead serious. “And then these bodies show up dumped in my territory, dumped without even the courtesy of a burial at all. Unhygienic. Terrible. Left where any kid can see. But Maloy says I can’t do nothing while he’s gone, and the big bosses don’t want me to touch ’em.”

I blinked, searched for something to say. “That must have bothered you.”

“Damn right it bothered me. I don’t like them Frankies, not at all. I want them out.” Joey leaned forward.

He told me everything he knew about the operation, the central warehouse where they’d set up shop. The strange technical supplies they’d asked for. The escalating numbers of orders of missing persons. Then the older guy who didn’t show up anymore.

“When did he stop showing up?” I asked.

Joey shrugged. “I’ve got a guy on the warehouse says maybe a couple days? They had a big fight earlier in the week. Didn’t look good.”

I watched as Jason Bradley’s image floated to the top of Joey’s brain along with Neil’s.

Wow. I pulled out of his head—and kept asking questions. Kept things out loud where Paulsen could hear them. I think we’d just hit the mother lode.

Joey cracked his knuckles, and I pushed him to say more.

Frankie Junior always seemed off. But he got worse and worse with time.
Felt
different, you know? And the people they—and the other guys—disappeared right out of their beds, the people turned up dead. Got sloppy. Left ’em where they’d be found in my territory.
Then the police were onto it. Then the papers were onto it. It’s bad for business, I say it again and again. The big bosses don’t listen. And Frankie Junior gets worse.

And Joey looked at me and said point-blank, “It’s time to talk to you. And when you don’t catch ’em, well, it’s maybe time to give you a push.”

I digested that for a second. “Paulsen, do you have a piece of paper?”

She found one in a pocket and handed it to me along with a pen.

“Draw me a picture of the warehouse layout, front, back doors, that sort of thing,” I said to Joey, handing him the paper and pen. “I swear it won’t ever be linked back to you.”

Joey shrugged, took the pen and paper, sat down on the folding chair, and started drawing.

Maybe a half hour later, I’d gotten as much information out of Joey as I knew how to get. Paulsen was smug, smiling like a cat presented with a bowl of fresh cream milk, and I could feel that Joey was getting impatient.

He yawned and stretched. “We done yet?”

Lieutenant Paulsen and I looked at each other.

“Let me put that different. We’re done now. It’s hot out here, and I got someplace to be tonight.” He stood up and retrieved his jacket from the ground. His lackey got his chair—with the flair one usually reserves for serving a foreign prince—and followed Joey as he started walking away.

Paulsen shrugged and waved me forward, to catch up with Joey.

I tried, huffing; cigarettes were crap on the lungs. And I caught up just before they entered the tunnel.

Joey stopped, turning back to me. He stood there, threateningly, mind blank for a long moment.

“You look good,” he said, meeting my eyes with his, “But it don’t have to stay that way. You keep the bargain, I got no problem with you. You break it, well…” He trailed off, looking at his fingernails. His words were mild, but the determination coming off him in Mindspace was certain, confident, and as dangerous as a cornered possum.

“Okay,” I said, caught between fear, respect, and a sense of ridiculousness that just wouldn’t leave. “Understood.”

I let him go, halfway through the tunnel and more. I yelled after him, “You did a good thing.”

He turned all the way around and snorted. “I hope the hell not.” Then he hit the side of the tunnel—hard—and went off about his way, his lackey following with the chair, for all the world like he was the king of some unknown world.

I watched him go, still not sure exactly what had happened. Not sure what had made this ridiculous, dirty, influential street man come in to break our case—other than the obvious. Was that really it? He just didn’t like Jason and whoever the other guy was? Or was there more to it? Did he actually object to what those guys were doing? Could Joey have
morals
, however weak?

As he walked out of the tunnel on the other side, ridiculous, faux-fur fan-denim jacket on in a-hundred-degree heat, I frowned.

On the way back to the car
, Paulsen’s portable radio made a steady stream of noise. She picked it up and held it to her ear. I was lagging back—cigarettes, remember?—and so missed most of the conversation.

“Bad news,” she said, turning the volume down with her thumb. Her voice was uncharacteristically grim, even for her.

“What?” I huffed.

“There’s a Hailey Caplin found dead about twenty minutes ago in East Atlanta. She works for the Guild. And a second woman, a Tina Novachavich, is missing.”

It took a long moment—while my brain processed—before I could even understand what she had said. “Dead?” What the hell? “They’re secretaries in Research, practically mind-deaf. There’s no reason for them to be—oh.”

“What?”

“Bradley leads the research department. Who wants to guess he’s tying up loose ends before he teleports out of here?”

Paulsen unlocked the car, looking at me over the top of it. “You think he’s going to run?”

“If he hasn’t already, yeah. We’re onto him, and he has an easy way out. Why wouldn’t he run?” I asked as
Tina’s face flashed back at me. She’d been a mousy quiet woman who liked her coffee black and her pencils sharpened. I hadn’t known Hailey well, but…“Where was she found? How long ago?”

“In a dumpster. On the east side. Not a mark on her—as near as we can tell, just like the others. Not long.”

“A dumpster. She was thrown away,” I said.

After a moment she replied, “Yes.”

That didn’t bode well for Tina’s chances. “Are we going to look for the missing girl?”

“There’s a case file open and an investigator assigned as of twenty minutes ago,” Paulsen returned. “I’ll share what info we have with him, but it doesn’t look good.”

With a frown, she folded into the car. She started up the hydrogen engine, me holding my breath, and when we didn’t die I put on my seat belt. I wondered how angry Cherabino still was at me.

I looked at Paulsen. “Cherabino talk to you today?”

Paulsen shrugged. “She’s working from home today. Said something about checking out a lead this morning. She’s not mine, so I don’t know details.”

“She’s not taking my phone calls. We need to make sure she’s okay.”

“We don’t need to do anything of the sort.” She gave me a dumb-shit look. “You do know she’s pissed at you. We need to verify the information and put in the paperwork to raid that warehouse, quickly, and try to catch Bradley while he’s still here. If you’re right and he’s planning to leave town, we can’t afford to wait. This information won’t be good forever, assuming it’s even good in the first place.”

“We need to go to her house,” I put in stubbornly, “It’s a half hour tops. And Joey was telling the truth; I
could read it off his mind. Maybe not the whole truth, but he was. We can do the detour to Cherabino’s, move on the information at the same time.”

She shook her head. “Informants lie. Especially where he is, if he has half the social capital Narcs thinks he does. If he’s using us to take out the competition, doesn’t matter too much to him whether it solves our case or not. This is a case cracker here.”

“I have a bad feeling,” I said, the back of my head urging me to push it harder, despite a replay of Tina’s face, of Hailey’s, of the bodies in the alley, on the roof, behind the Thai restaurant. “Can you at least call her yourself when we get back?”

Paulsen sighed. “It is her case. If it’s coming to a head, she deserves to know.” She pulled the car out, air conditioning blasting. “I’ll call when we get back to the station.”

For no reason, my heart sped up and every goose bump on my body engaged. My bad feeling got very, very intense. I breathed through it. “As soon as you get back?” I asked Paulsen.

“I’ll call her. Get on the radio, if you want. But we’ve got a first-priority case here with an emerging SWAT situation—realistically, with only hours before our information gets cold. It’s her case; she has a right to be there as much as she did on searching Bradley’s apartment. But I am not going to waste our information—or have to tell the captain we lost Bradley—because you and she had a fight, or because she’s chasing another lead without a radio. We need to move
now
.”

“What if—”

Her disapproval of my protests leaked through and I shut up. I’d been worrying about protecting Cherabino for almost a week, frantic since she’d refused to let me follow her any longer. Could this just be a more
extreme version? Shutting down Bradley would protect her just as effectively as me being there—and we were doing that, right?

As we shifted into one of the sky lanes, Paulsen handed me her radio. “Could you switch this to the private channel? Setting five.” While I was figuring it out, she added, “Obviously, you can’t talk about anything you overhear.”

“I know,” I said. For crying out loud, I could keep a secret. You couldn’t be a telepath without being able to keep a secret—well, not and not end up with a lynch mob after you. I decided Cherabino would probably be okay, at least for a little. I could get Bellury to drive me to her house this afternoon. Hopefully.

I worked the switch while Paulsen drove. She found Sergeant Branen and filled him in on what had happened. “Certainly SWAT. We’re pulling a double tonight, easily. This is your department—did you want point? It’s Cherabino’s case.”

“I have to be at court in an hour,” Branen said, and made a frustrated sound. “Then a press conference and the senior detective interviews. She’s supposed to be sweeping the neighborhood this morning, but no one’s heard from her. There’s no way I can get away. If you could run with all of this I would appreciate it. I’ll be in and out of touch, but ducking out of the press conference will make us look even worse than we already do. Call the courthouse if there’s a hiccup; somebody will find me, and I’ll do what I can on my end.”

“You got it,” Paulsen said, and asked to talk to his assistant. She made the poor man walk up and down the senior bigwigs hall with the radio, one conversation after another, all the way back to the station. By the time we arrived, my hand hurt from repeatedly
hitting the switch. And she’d gotten an impressive amount of work done in a short drive.