The Cold Between (20 page)

H
e had hoped that it would be Stoya. Stoya would be professional about it. He knew what Trey was, knew Trey's true crime. He would hurt Trey only enough to make the interrogation look legitimate, and Trey did not think he would enjoy it. In the end, he would finish it as quickly and as cleanly as he could. There would be no way for him to make it painless, of course; but he would do it with respect, and even a measure of mercy.

Instead it was Luvidovich, and Trey learned quickly how restrained the boy had been that morning.

He chained Trey first, hauling his arms over his head and running the chain through a hook in the ceiling so his toes barely touched the ground. Trey studied that hook, its incongruous shine, the hairline cracks in the tile where it was fixed into the ceiling. This was the purpose of such a hook: torture, or hanging. They had planned for this, the designers of this bright, modern building. They had known their affluent utopia would be killing people in the name of justice.

Luvidovich stared him down as he pulled out a knife, turning it over in his hands. It was just the two of them in the room, no
other officers, no recording devices. Luvidovich could compose any confession he liked, arrange the evidence however he wanted.

Trey was powerless.
But Elena is free.

He thought of her, steady and fierce, her gun pointed squarely at Stoya's head. She had been terrifying. She had been astonishing. There was a moment when it seemed that the sheer force of her will might have taken down Stoya's men, but not even she was immune to the laws of physics. He hoped she had gone to Katya to warn her, or had someone from her ship come to look after them. He wondered if Katya would leave the city for a while. He smiled to himself as he pictured Katya's reaction to the suggestion that she ought to leave her restaurant. His sister was not a soldier, but she had grown into a warrior all the same.

He wondered if she would miss him, and he thought she would not. Most of her life they had been apart. All she knew of him was that he was a killer . . . and a cook. Sarah would forget him as well, eventually; but he thought she had been fond of him, at least a little. He found that some comfort.

He realized belatedly that Luvidovich had been speaking to him. “I am sorry, Janek,” he said apologetically. “I was not listening.”

Luvidovich smiled—that strange, stiff smile that never reached his eyes. He was like an animal who had learned to smile through mimicry, yet seemed to have no real sense of what the expression was for. “I was giving you the chance to confess,” he said, “but I would prefer that you not take it. I have been looking forward to finishing our discussion.”

“I see.” Trey watched the young man turning the knife, over and over, the serrated edge scraping against his dry palm. “And what is it you wish me to confess this time?”

“It is a shame,” Luvidovich said, “that you bear this alone, while your accomplice walks free.”

“Ah.” He was almost disappointed at the predictability. “Which is an interesting point, isn't it, Janek? Why isn't she here as well?”

Luvidovich frowned. “She has Central Corps protection,” he said. “We could not touch her.”

Trey had seen enough to be suspicious of any protection Central might have offered her. He thought it far more likely Stoya didn't want her around reminding Luvidovich that he had never believed Trey was guilty in the first place. “And who was it that told you that, I wonder?” he asked.

Luvidovich's lips tightened, and a look of annoyance crossed his face. He turned away, and after a moment he stood, composed again. The knife still spun in his palm. He wandered up to Trey and stopped, as if he were looking into a shop window.

“So she
was
your accomplice,” he said.

“You are a fool.”

Luvidovich reached back and swung the hand holding the knife against Trey's face. Trey felt the hard hilt connect with his jaw, and a wire-thin burning as the blade caught his lip. A trickle of blood traced down his chin.

A slow beginning, then.

“Has it not occurred to you,” Trey said conversationally, “that if she had wanted that man dead, she had many more tools at her disposal on board her starship?”

“She would have implicated herself,” Luvidovich said, and Trey thought it a small victory that the man was responding to his questions.

“You have never traveled on a starship, have you, Janek?” he said. “There are a thousand accidents that can happen every day. He could have vanished without a trace, and she would have been implicated no more than you.”

“Perhaps she found this method more entertaining.”

“You would, wouldn't you, Janek?”

A slap from the other direction, without the knife, but harder and sharper. Trey felt a jolt of pain up his cheekbone and into his eye socket. “If you tell me how you did it,” Luvidovich said, retaining his temper, “I may leave you an eye.”

Trey shook his head. “You are a miserable liar, you know. I have known enough sadists to know what you will do with me.”

Luvidovich moved closer until his face was millimeters from Trey's. Trey could smell coffee on his breath, and something sour; the remains of his dinner, or perhaps the beginnings of another drunken binge. “When I am finished with you,” he said, his breath clammy against Trey's skin, “I will find your whore, and I will hang her from these chains, and I will rape her at my leisure. Perhaps even after she is dead. Why don't you keep that image in your mind for a while?”

Trey spat blood in his eye.

Luvidovich caught him in the abdomen with the hilt of the knife, and Trey felt his lungs abruptly empty. He fought the instinct to gasp for air, waiting for his body to recover, and found enough adrenaline to apply one knee sharply to Luvidovich's groin. The shot connected, but not directly enough; the officer was hurt, but not incapacitated. Luvidovich took half a step backward and punched Trey once in the jaw and once in the throat. He turned away long enough to wrench a chair away
from the wall, and in a few quick movements—before Trey's body had remembered how to breathe—he had cuffed Trey's ankles to opposite legs of the chair.

Trey found his lungs again, and took great, gaping breaths of air as Luvidovich stared at him, fury in his eyes. Trey forced himself to smile. “You have a problem with anger, Janek Luvidovich.”

“I have a problem,” Luvidovich snarled, his face blotchy with rage, “with killers who walk away.”

“Is that what you will do, when you are finished with me?”

The officer took a few deep breaths, attempting to calm himself. “Obtaining a confession is not murder.”

Trey shook his head. “You will not have noticed this,” he remarked, as Luvidovich walked behind him and began cutting off his shirt, “but I have found that the more affluent a society, the easier it is for them to dehumanize their criminals.” Instead of tearing the cloth, the boy was using the knife to saw through it, and every other cut nicked the skin around Trey's spine. “I find that an odd thing. You would think that those who have been shown kindness would be more likely to be civilized, not less. And yet you will be allowed to kill me, and as long as you tell the public it was in the name of safety, they will cheer you.” The tip of the knife nicked the base of his skull, and he winced.

“And why would I not let you live?” Luvidovich told him. “Believe me, this is much more enjoyable than presenting Chief Stoya with your corpse.”

“Is that what he has asked you to do?”

Luvidovich said nothing. He slid his thumbs methodically under the waistband of Trey's trousers, and yanked them to the floor, leaving them trapped in a heap around his chained feet.
Trey wondered, for a moment, if he would be left his shorts, but then he felt the steel blade slip against his thigh, and the stabbing and sawing began again.

Apparently not.
“Did he tell you he was the one who let Elena go?”

Trey thought there was a brief hesitation in Luvidovich's destruction of his clothes.

“I asked for his assurance that she would not be harmed, and he agreed. Whatever your fantasies about her, Janek, I think you will be thwarted.”

The point of the blade pressed against the small of his back. “You are a liar,” Luvidovich hissed.

“And you truly are a fool if you think I murdered that man.”

He felt the pressure of the knife increase, and the blade slip downward, the point resting against his coccyx. “There are other ways to rape, you know,” Luvidovich whispered to him.

He took a step back and walked around to face Trey again, giving him a leisurely, lascivious look up and down. Trey thought Luvidovich's weakness was not his use of psychology—he seemed to have a fairly decent repertoire at his fingertips—but his use of all of his tricks at once, without considering his audience.

He supposed, statistically, that scattershot methodology was most efficient.

Abruptly Luvidovich straightened and walked around the table, making himself comfortable again in the chair. “Now,” he said, “let us begin at the beginning. Where did you meet this woman?” He turned the knife against his palm, over and over, and waited for Trey to answer.

A
re you telling me,” Ancher greeted her as she jumped off the tram, “that nobody looked at you funny walking through the city with a rolling pin?”

Elena could see the camera mounted next to his ear, and she had no doubt he was recording, but he was carrying nothing else. Whatever else he might do to help, at least his hands would be free. “I suppose I don't look dangerous.”

“Your pants are too short.”

“Shut up, Ancher.” She peered across the street at the entrance to the station. “Do you have a scope on that thing?”

Ancher touched his ear and focused. “There's one guy standing near the entrance. Not moving much. He's slouching; seems kind of bored.”

Elena knew better than to take that for granted.

“So what's the plan, Chief?”

That was an excellent question. She had made it this far on instinct and adrenaline, but a stealth infiltration of a police station seemed to require more finesse. “Easy,” she lied. “You get me in unnoticed, and I break him out. Bonus points if I get a hand weapon out of it.”

He glanced down at her. “Where's your gun?”

“Confiscated.” She gestured at him with the rolling pin.

Slowly his face spread into a grin. “You're off-grid, aren't you, Chief?”

There was no harm, she supposed, in telling him. “The first the Corps is going to hear of this is when you air it.”

“What about Captain Foster?”

“What about him?”

Ancher shook his head. “You weren't kidding about the story, were you?”

“Can you get me inside or can't you?”

“You look weird,” he objected. “And besides, they'll recognize you.”

“Can you distract him, then?”

Another grin. “Yeah, I can distract him.”

“Then you'll get your story.”

They walked up the block and crossed the street, Elena keeping Ancher between her and the early evening crowds on the sidewalk. The station windows were high, too high for her to see in. Too high for anyone to see out as well. When they approached the open foyer she hung back, fading into the building's shadow, just a woman out for an evening stroll. Ancher touched his ear again, and a flood of camera-friendly lighting splashed on the sidewalk before him. He strode up to the police station and turned in.

Elena heard him introduce himself to the desk officer. “I hear you guys have caught your killer,” he said. “That's something. Fast work. Not even a day. Were you in on that?”

Elena inched forward, still in the shadows, until she could see the edge of the scene: Ancher talking to the same arrogant kid
she had spoken to that morning. This time, though, the officer looked friendly, even eager: he was nodding at Ancher's words, returning his smile, falling for the thought of his face on the news. Elena hoped Ancher would find a way to use every second of that footage.

Ancher kept talking, and just as she was wondering whether he was expecting her to barge in and bash the kid on the head with her improvised weapon, she saw him gesture to one of the grand wooden office doors beside the massive staircase. The officer gave a quick glance around the lobby and nodded, and he led Ancher away from the desk. A moment later he was hidden by the stairway, and all she could see was Ancher's back, and the ambient light from his camera.

Elena edged into the foyer, moving with her back to the wall across the opposite floor. Ducking under the stairs, she crouched in shadow, but she was still horribly exposed; anyone emerging from one of the back offices would see her easily.

Ancher kept chatting up the officer—paying him compliments, eliciting specious details about Trey's arrest—but after a few minutes, the kid seemed to find his conscience. He told the reporter he needed to get back to the desk. “Of course,” Ancher said cheerfully, unflustered, and Elena was impressed at his equanimity. “I'll get a few shots of you there.” He followed the kid back, continuing his patter, before finally asking if he could look around. The officer hesitated only a moment.

“Stay on this floor,” he said. “If you want to go upstairs, let me know and I'll see if I can get someone to escort you. I can't promise, though—they're kind of busy tonight.”

Elena's stomach clenched, but she calmed herself.
If they're busy, Trey is still alive. Probably.

She waited with growing impatience as Ancher sauntered around the atrium, taking shots of the grand staircase, of the windowed ceiling, of the darkened door to the morgue. Eventually he ended up standing a few feet away from her, his camera on a nondescript door. At one point he fingered his earpiece, fiddling with the lighting, and caught her eye.

Elena gestured toward the back of the room, and pointed downward. Ancher nodded smoothly; an observer would have assumed he was still working his camera. He was not bad at this.

Staying in the shadows, she crept toward the rear of the building, back against the wall, keeping Ancher between her and the front desk. Eventually they were far enough from the entrance that she thought she could risk speaking to him.

“The door is on a voice lock,” she whispered. “Without my comm, hacking it is going to be a bitch. Any chance you could charm one of these nice officers into opening it for me?”

“And how does that work? ‘Hi, you want to be on vid helping an AWOL Corps soldier bust out the highest-profile prisoner you've ever had?'”

“How about ‘How would you like to prevent an unconscionable miscarriage of justice?'”

“You're cute when you're idealistic. You're going to have to crack the lock yourself, Chief.”

“Fine.” Elena sighed. “Just keep a lookout, will you?”

They made it to the steel door, and she got down on her knees to have a look at the mechanism. In what felt like her first stroke of luck, she found the lock was brand-new; the newer Ellis voice locks were lightweight and easy to install, but they were far less secure than the more complex models. The money would have been better spent upgrading their polygraphs. She slid a span
ner out of the toolkit strapped to her arm and dialed the tip to its narrowest setting, getting to work removing the sensitivity detector from the lock.

“Is this going to take a long time?”

“Shut up, Ancher.”

“It's just that there were footsteps on the stairs, and I didn't hear the front door open.”

“Don't lose your composure now, when you've been doing so well.” But she felt a bubble of panic, and frowned more closely at the lock. It had a tamper-resistant edge; she was going to have to try a narrower setting, and she was still going to risk tripping the alarm.
Focus,
she told herself, and blinked to clear her vision. Just a few minutes, if she was patient; just shift the shielding and then trip the mechanism—

“Please stop that.”

Elena froze. The voice was not Ancher's. She had run out of time after all.