Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (17 page)

“Did Zia and Jason have a thing?”
Rachel asked Phil, who was so mortified he was blushing pink from head to toe.

“Not recently,”
he answered.
“Maybe back in the early days, but who knows? Can you remember everyone you were with those first couple of months?”

She couldn’t. It had been a carnal madhouse. They had all agreed to forgive, forget, and dig up the past only if the tests failed to come back clean.

“Agent Atran, right?” Santino extended his right hand. It hung out in space until the Agent shook it to make it go away. “I thought so. You’ve got something of a reputation.

“But I have to be honest, man,” Santino said as he sighed and shook his head. “This interview is not going well.”

Jason blinked. “What?”

“You probably heard? Someone’s murdering people out there. We’re putting together a team to help catch him, and your name kept coming up as a top pick. It’d be me, Rachel, two MPD officers, and two other Agents. We thought one of them would be you, but you come in here insulting Agent Hallahan?”

“Technically, that was a compliment,” Jason said with a thin, angry smirk.

“Technically, I don’t care,” Santino said. “It was rude and unprofessional. You really think I want someone who is rude or unprofessional on my team?” He was furious but smiling kindly, bubbles of cheery springtime yellow moving in and out of his reds. Rachel saw traces of Zia’s violet core within the yellow: he was defending Zia and was happy to do it, she realized, and Rachel was suddenly fiercely proud of her friend.

“Your team?” Jason was building momentum when Santino held up his injured arm. He wasn’t done shutting Jason down. 

“Mine and Rachel’s. It’s our call who joins, and I’m sure as hell not working with someone who doesn’t have any respect for his teammates. Or…” and Santino let the word hang long enough for Jason to fill in the void with whatever word he wanted before he added: “co-workers.

“So,” Santino continued, and she saw he had borrowed this particular smile from her own toolkit, “we’ll go, and you’ll stay here and do… What is it you do again?”

Jason didn’t answer, so Phil chimed in. “Data entry.”

“Oh,” Santino said, rounding the word with scorn. “Exciting. Well, we’re about to head back over to First District Station. Be sure to let me know how data entry works out for you.” He clapped Jason on the shoulder and turned away, stalling to grab one last sandwich for the road.

“What do you want, an apology?” Jason was running gray, his best opportunity to get back in the field snatched out of his grasp.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Santino said. “Or,”—and he was suddenly much, much taller. Rachel was envious; she lacked the physical presence to loom—“You recognize the next time you go after Zia, I’ll have to do something about it.”

“I want her to marry him and have beautiful nerdbabies,”
Phil said.

“He didn’t know she was alive an hour ago,”
she replied.
“Give them some time to get around to the nerdbabies.”

Jason relented. “Fine.”

“You done here?” Rachel asked. “Because the odds of me making a good alpha male joke are low.”

“Oh, you’d do the best you could,” Phil said. “You can’t help that you have no sense of humor.”

NINE

“This is sick,” Phil whispered.

The cameraman was in his late thirties and running gray; Rachel had read him as clinically depressed. She and Santino would have to break out the whiskey and that damned notebook of his to pin down the ethics of interrogation via the emotional spectrum, but, Phil’s opinion aside, this new technique seemed to fit comfortably in her old bag of tricks.

On the other side of one-way mirror, two men strutted and postured around a third. Zockinski had taken Jason into the interrogation room, saying that if they had to keep the freaks around, they might as well get some use out of them. The detective had tapped Jason for the chore because, in Zockinski’s words, “he looks like he should look,” but Jason also acted like he should act, and the two of them were slowly stripping the real story from the cameraman’s bones. 

“Tell me about the money,” Jason said. He leaned forward as the older man pushed his chair away, their movements so perfectly aligned they might as well have been choreographed. 

“I already told you, they offered me money. I didn’t take it!” Chris Burman couldn’t take his eyes off of the Agent, who was so happy to be back in action and tormenting another human being that he practically glowed.

“Is he lying?”
Jason asked.

“Yes,”
Rachel replied. Lies were easy to spot; skittish dimples puckered the surface colors of the speaker across their shoulders. Santino had exaggerated; he was almost unfailingly honest and lied to her maybe a dozen times a day, tops.

“And if I go through your accounts?” Jason dropped his voice conspiratorially. “Are you sure I won’t find anything?”

“Do you have a warrant? You can’t do that without a warrant!” The cameraman jumped, then threw a panicked look at Zockinski. “Can he do that?”

Zockinski spread his hands wide. “Buddy, you’ve heard about them. They can do anything.”

“Phenomenal,” Phil growled into his milkshake. “They’re doing Good Cop, Cyborg Cop. I’ve always wanted to visit the Supreme Court.” He was no longer complaining to her through the link; Phil needed some sort of public record, even if it would only exist among the four observers.

“Don’t worry about it,” Hill said from the other end of the room. He was pressed up against the mirror while he watched his partner work. “We do this with racists.”

“What?” 

“You play off of their hate. They don’t think as quick, as clean, when they’re talking to someone they hate.”

“I can’t believe you let yourself get used like that,” Phil muttered.

Hill laughed without humor. “Nine times out of ten, Zockinski’s the bad guy. You wouldn’t believe the hate that’s out there for white cops. Everybody already thinks Zockinski’s there to put them away, doesn’t matter whether they’re innocent or not.”

“But we’re not threatening that guy in there with loss of due process,” Phil snapped. “You’re basically waving technological witchcraft at him like a loaded gun!” The small Agent had been with Special Operations and knew eight ways to blow up the room with a bag of potato chips, but his job stopped when the cuffs went on the suspect. He had never been part of an active interrogation and was disgusted to learn where the others drew the line. For them, an interrogation with a third-tier suspect like Burman was usually a waste of time, so they had to find ways to keep themselves engaged (Creativity was key. Rachel had once started an interview with a coulrophobe by reading him the first three chapters of Stephen King’s
IT
. Poor little George, swept beneath the street… Her suspect had broken like a twig.).

“What’s-his-name, Jason?” Hill nodded towards the mirror. “Is he going to pull those accounts?”

“Nope,” Rachel said, working on the last dregs of her chocolate shake. “Not unless you get him a warrant.”

“Then we’ve got his back,” Hill said. 

“This isn’t about what you do,” Phil said, tapping a closed fist, slow but hard, against the cinderblocks beneath the glass. “It’s about what we do… This guy? This guy will never trust us. Never. And he’s gonna go home and tell all of his friends that an Agent threatened to wreck his financials, and his story will be blogged and Tweeted and…”

Phil trailed off, forehead pressed against the glass. Hill looked at the small Agent, really looked at him, and Hill’s wall of warm browns and golds softened around the edges with a gentle wine red. She had seen that hue at funerals and nowhere else. Sympathy? Pity? 

Who knew?

On the other side of the glass, Chris Burman was having a very bad day. He had been filming a local high school team’s football practice when he was hauled off of the field by two uniformed officers. During the early stages of the interview, he had described himself as a freelance cinematographer who picked up odd jobs wherever he could. He claimed he was friendly with a staff sergeant at First MPD who passed work his way; this staff sergeant had thrown his so-called buddy under the bus by saying he only requested Burman when his first choice in audio-visual guys couldn’t make it.

The cameraman was close to frantic. “Okay! Okay, listen,” Burman said, spreading his hands wide on the table and rubbing it with the balls of his hands. “I didn’t help anyone. I came in, shot some training videos, and got paid. That’s it.”

“He’s obsessive-compulsive,” Rachel said, following Burman’s movements.

Santino, sitting in the room’s only chair with his paper cup pressed against his injured arm to chill it, perked at this. Rachel had observed the same type of tactile grounding behavior in him when he wasn’t watching his own body language. He stood and crossed the room to watch Burman trace small spirals on the tabletop. “Yeah, he is. Tell them to put something on the table in front of him. Make it messy.”

Hill’s hand was moving towards the wire in his ear when Jason roughly shoved a stack of papers at Burman with the tough guy line of burying Burman under the evidence. The papers slid out of their pile and cascaded towards the cameraman, who restacked them and placed Jason’s pen at the top like a mint on a pillow.

“Perfect,” Santino said. “How much do you think a guy like this makes in a year?”

“I couldn’t say,” Rachel shrugged. “I’d be very surprised if he breaks forty-k.”

“Yeah…” her partner mused as Burman sheltered the stack of paper in a cradle of his arms, protecting it from Jason and Zockinski. “Control freak, probably broke or close to it... I’ll bet you the next round of drinks this guy made a one-time payment to a credit card around the same time he shot the video. Not a lot of money, probably a couple hundred bucks. He wouldn’t get more than that for a digital copy of the film and a weird camera angle.”

She smiled. There was no way Santino could have gotten that from hands laid on a desk. “You’re on,” she said, and sent Jason the bait over the link.

In the interview room, Jason leaned forward and whispered something about debt and money and suspiciously-timed payments to Burman, whose grays faded as his head slumped forward. Caught. Resigned. Done. 

“Aw, damn,” Rachel sighed. Santino would no doubt order something from a fancy bottle and request for it to be served in an unreasonably large and fancy tumbler.

Jason and Zockinski knew Burman was theirs. They stopped circling and sat down on the opposite side of the table, all cheery yellows and self-satisfied blues for a job well done.

The cameraman, broken, started to talk.

“A man came up to me a few weeks before I shot the video. He said his name was John Glazer.” Burman opened his wallet and slid a crisp white business card across the table to Zockinski. “He said he worked for Internal Affairs and he needed to get evidence against some cops on the force.”

The television mounted high on the wall in the interview room burst into life without warning. Zockinski had known it was coming and his colors barely shifted towards the reds at all, but Burman’s collapsed into terror as the screen froze on the face of the man who had sparred with Hill the day the original video had been taken. Jason leaned towards him and hissed: “Is that Glazer?”

Burman shut his eyes and nodded. Glazer was young and good-looking, but even from a distance it was obvious he had a savage edge to him.

“And you believed him when he said he was investigating corruption?” Zockinski asked.

“Yes.”

“Rachel?”

“He’s lying.”

Zockinski took the cue from the Agent and waited.

Burman’s chin dropped to his chest. “I might have thought something was up,” he admitted. “He told me he was after this one cop, Hill, and he said he’d pay for the tape of Hill beating him. But it had to be just right, no mistakes. I thought…”

His gray edges flushed red in shame.

Aw man,
Rachel thought.

Zockinski didn’t need her help. He caught on before the rest of them. “You thought he wanted porn.”

“Not porn, but…” Burman said with a hurried glance at the mirror, perhaps sensing Hill’s fury boiling behind the glass. “Everybody’s got kinks, you know?”

“How often did you work for him?”

“Just that one time.”

“Rachel?”

“True.”

“How did he pay you?”

“Cash. Two hundred bucks.”

Santino reached out and bumped her shoulder with an I-told-you-so fist. She rolled her eyes and pretended to pout.

“Did he say anything else?”

Burman cradled the stack of papers within his arms. “He said he might have some more work for me at the beginning of October. Um… October 7th. He was really specific about that date.”

“What kind of work?”

“He didn’t say. He told me to keep his card on me until then. He, uh, Glazer said his phone wasn’t listed and calling the number on his card was the only way I could reach him.”

Zockinski picked up the little white card and started to ask Burman something else when Jason leaned over and snatched it out of his hand.