The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (17 page)

“I gathered.” I stared after
Beau. He was antisocial at YuriCorp and barely human on site, but asking
customers what the hell they were doing in their own place of business was
bizarre, even for him. “Nice to meet you, Jojo.”

I shook the dog’s paw while John
cuddled her. I was a bona fide cat person, and Dan had always been a cat
person. Jojo looked kind of feline, if cats had muzzles like thumbs and hair
like dust mops. Her short legs pistoned in midair when John handed her to
Gladys.

“If you’ll excuse us, we have to
finish some paperwork so we can grab lunch,” I said. “See you tomorrow,
Gladys.”

“Jojo should be all better by
then. I don’t know what got into her today. She’s normally my quiet mouse.”
Gladys kissed the dog on top of the head. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?”

Jojo grinned a doggy grin.

As soon as Gladys left, I closed
the conference room door.

“Beau is freaking me out,” I
said. A misgiving that had been nagging me like a tiny plastic thread in your seam
poked itself into my mouth. “Why do we all have headaches? Pavarti had a
headache the day she burned out.”

“Mine came on with the cold.”
John returned to his seat and took a sandwich out of our private cooler. “It’s
probably allergies. Atlanta has different geography than Nashville, and I’ve
heard quite a few Wyse employees complaining about the pollen count.”

“I don’t have allergies. Of
course my headache’s not that bad.” Maybe we’d all swapped a cold virus, the
unexciting way. “Did you know Beau spied on my interview yesterday?”

“Did he?” John bit into the
sandwich and chewed. “He seems to want to spend a lot of time with you.”

That’s what John found noteworthy
about Beau’s activities? “John, he lied to me. He told me chameleons can’t go
invisible, especially not with other chameleons, but he was right there and I
didn’t know it.”

“If you weren’t specifically
trying to spot him, it’s no surprise you overlooked him.” John pursed his lips
as if tasting something sour. I was pretty sure it wasn’t his cheese and tomato
sandwich. “He’s that good.”

I hated the thoughts of Beau
being that good, too, so I argued. “I was three feet from him. I looked right
at him. He accused me of not being a chameleon.”

“Technically, you’re not. You’re
still in training.” John’s sour expression lingered. “He’s skilled enough to
hold a fade in motion. He can also fade the area around him, including
furniture and people. One of the few who can. He could have been anywhere in
the room.”

Lou had finished training me to
use the Registry last month, inasmuch as the common supra is allowed. As soon
as her back had been turned, I’d looked up Beau. The Registry had ejected me
for attempting to download classified information.

Hacker, I was not.

Beau’s skill level seemed to give
John heartburn. It had given me a heart attack, so the parallel was evident.
“Is proto-invisibility his secret talent?”

“No, that’s simply a high-level
chameleon skill.” John wrapped half his sandwich in cellophane. “We know he has
a concealed ability, but that’s it. He signed papers to the effect it would
never be used to the detriment of YuriCorp.” He squeezed the nape of his neck.

“Don’t you think it’s
suspicious?” I asked. Beau had looked way too comfortable sprawled in that
chair yesterday. I’d almost shoved my feet into his lap. “Yesterday he does
this invisible thing, and today you two have killer headaches. I asked if he
knew anything about Pavarti and Adam and he said no, but what if he’s a leak,
not a saboteur? I’m not convinced we’re dealing with just one person here. The information
swiper wouldn’t have time to chase us from site to site.”

“You think the mole and the
saboteur aren’t connected?” John’s eyes even seemed pinkish with the presumed
allergy headache. “That means the mole isn’t responsible for people getting
hurt.”

Normally John wouldn’t discuss
the mole with me, but I guess even he knew the clock was ticking. And we did
have aural privacy. The front half of the conference room was protected by a
travel blanket as part of the new security protocol, which we switched on as needed—but
not enough to give us headaches. Any fleas and rats in the vicinity had better
look out.

 “Whether or not they’re working
together, the mole’s still responsible.” I pushed John’s box of antimicrobial
tissues toward him. “People shouldn’t steal other people’s information.”

“No.” He rested his head in his
hands, but I didn’t think it was due to me. I hoped it wasn’t due to me.

Would he freak out if I offered
to rub his shoulders? I didn’t have Roxanne’s magic touch, but I wouldn’t mind
getting my hands on him and letting him know what he was missing. “I should
question Beau further.”

“You should give it a break.”
John’s tone was as dry as his nose was not. “You weren’t especially smooth,
asking outright about Pavarti and Adam. He’s not stupid, Cleo. He knows there’s
something up with your DNA. He knows Yuri favors you. He knows YuriCorp is
under attack. Now you’re asking questions.”

“Everyone’s worried about the
company, and a lot of people are asking questions.” I wondered if my friend
Sheila had been sending them tsk tsk notes as well.

“If you don’t trust Beau, why do
you keep asking to bring him in?”

“I don’t personally want him in
the inner circle.” I wanted him to know I was good at something so he’d have to
eat a few of his nastier words. “It would just be easier if he knew.”

John sighed and finger combed his
hair into place since his rubbing had disheveled it. “Beau Walker has been with
us for years. Yuri chose not to bring him in when we started having problems a
year ago, and he has his reasons.”

“Probably because nobody good can
have that bad of a personality.”

“You can’t point fingers because
you dislike people, Cleo.”

“He behaved in a suspicious
manner. Sneaking around like that.” I crossed my arms. “Can I help it if I’m
not James Bond?”

“No, you’re not.” John tossed me
my sandwich.

I’d always considered myself
clever. Able to pry the truth out of people with minimal effort. That was
before I was being paid to pry the truth out of people. Maybe it had something
to do with how much more important it was to find these particular truths. And
maybe the only part of me that was clever was my ability.

“He’s hiding something. I can
feel it.” The more I insisted it was true, the more convinced I was. Despite
the fact Beau hadn’t intended to hurt me yesterday, he knew more than he was
telling—more than I’d been able to read. I’d ruled him out early and hadn’t
quizzed him further.

That would change.

“We’ll discuss this later,” John
said in a tone that left no doubt he’d prefer to never discuss it again. He
revolved his chair away from me and started shuffling papers.

I unwrapped my sandwich. We made
them out of the supplies in the locked cooler at the hotel, where we’d
installed alarm systems that would alert God and everyone if a person entered
the room without the proper code. No maids allowed, that was for sure. All part
of Al’s new security protocols to make sure we weren’t hit by obvious sabotage
like amp. Or Ex-Lax.

Which made me wonder—if the bad
guys wanted to take out YuriCorp, why were they only hitting us on assignment?
We’d be easier prey, more vulnerable, in our home towns. If Beau had anything
to do with it, he was right there, working with us every day, aware of our
addresses and blood types.

“I’m next?” John asked suddenly.

I swallowed a mouthful of bread
and ham. “What?”

He held up a sheet of yellow
paper with the words “You’re next” scrawled in bold black handwriting. “Did you
write this?”

“No.” If I’d sent John a note, it
would have had lip prints on it. Okay, not really. It would have been a text.
“Wait, I saw that in Nashville. Remember when I knocked the personnel files
over? We had it then. What do you think it means?”

John flipped the paper over,
inspecting the back. “The downtownies prepared most of our files. They don’t
use legal paper. Several researchers have issues with the color yellow.”

I opened my mouth to ask what
supra power prevented one from using yellow paper when his cell phone buzzed in
his hip holster.

“Arlin,” he said into the
mouthpiece. “What? You’re kidding! You’re not kidding. We’ll be right there.”

I didn’t like how pale he’d
turned. “What is it?”

“It’s Beau. He’s been burned
out.”

Chapter 15

Do You Like Your
Bacon Crispy or Chewy?

When we found him, Beau was
sprawled in the back seat of the company car, his legs sticking out the door.

“Walker!” John nudged his foot.
“Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer. John whipped
out his phone and gestured at me. “Cleo, check his pulse. See if he’s
unconscious. I need to call this in.”

I’d known this was a possibility,
but Beau? Of all people, I’d never imagined him as anybody’s victim. If the
saboteur could get him, he could get anybody.

I had this urge to run screaming
back into Wyse Money, but the idiot who ran away from the murder scene was
always the next to go in the movies. How could this have happened?

“I don’t know how to take a
pulse,” I admitted.

“Start by seeing if he’s
breathing.” John paced the car’s perimeter in a tight march, eyes darting back
and forth, and hit speed dial on his phone. His nostrils flared as he tested
for scents.

The door near Beau’s head was
locked. Shaky with anxiety, I clambered onto his prostrate body from his feet.
He had to have been conscious long enough to call John. Had he dragged himself
into the car or had somebody shoved him here? I’d have picked a trunk to hide a
body, not a back seat.

“Beau, are you all right?” My
voice cracked. As much as I disliked him, the thought of him in a coma, in
pain, really upset me. “Hey. Hey, wake up.” I patted his cheek, his dark skin
surprisingly soft to the touch. “Come on, Beau. Please be okay.”

He cracked open a single, bleary
eye. “Get off me. You weigh a ton.”  

“Asshole.” My stomach flopped.
“How do you feel?”

“Cleo, it’s too hot for you to
get friendly.” He closed his eye and grimaced.

Way to greet his rescuers. I
wasn’t as careful with my knees and fists when I backed out of the car. He
grunted after a well-placed elbow.

“He’s alive,” I told John. “Maybe
faking.”

“I need air,” Beau croaked. He
rolled sideways, tried to grab the seat, and failed. I kicked his ankle, but he
didn’t seem to have full use of his limbs.

“Don’t lay there like a lump,
somebody will notice.” I tried to block the view of the car’s interior with my
body. “Did you see anybody in the parking lot with you?”

“No.”

Maybe seeing, or not seeing,
people wasn’t the issue, considering what Beau could do. “Are you sure nobody
touched you?”

“Quit gloating and get me in the
car.”

I stuffed his noodly legs into
the back, reached forward to unlock the front passenger door, and hopped in.
John slipped in the driver’s seat and turned on the motor. God I hoped this
wasn’t a stroke. I stared at Beau as if the strength of my brain could prevent
it.

Beau groaned. “Stop staring.”

I didn’t.

“What happened?” John asked. “My
senses are hampered by these allergies. I don’t smell anyone besides us.”

“Don’t know exactly,” Beau
rasped. His face was turned away from me, so I couldn’t see if he was lying.
“The headache just...crushed me. I blacked out.”

“I told you!” I yelled. “Not
allergies.” I fanned myself with a folder from the floor, considered fanning
Beau, and decided against it.

Beau groaned. “Cleo, if you yell
again, I will kill you.”

“Sorry.” I stared out the
windows, my eyes wide to take in every detail. Was the bad guy watching us? Was
he going to get us all?

Would I even see him coming?

“I’m taking you to the closest
emergency room.” John activated the car’s GPS.

“No,” Beau said. “It’s not a
stroke. No numbness, no confusion, no blurred vision. The weakness in my arms
and legs is evenly distributed.”

“You have a headache and loss of
coordination.” I swallowed a lump in my throat. We’d been well-versed in the
signs. This was no time to get emotional—no time for Beau to act tough. Normal
doctors could help when a burnout resulted in a stroke. “I’m really worried.”

“I’m touched,” Beau said,
sounding less and less like a victim. “Crank the a/c, Arlin.”

“Where were you when they got
you?” I asked. “That might help us figure out what happened.”

“I don’t know. Depends on if it
was a one-time event or cumulative.”

Cumulative—that was insidious and
scary, since the running theory was that the burnouts had one-time stimuli.
“Are you going to get better?”

“I don’t know. Jesus, just get me
out of here! My fucking skull is going to split open.”

“If we aren’t taking you to the
hospital, Cleo and I have to return to work.” John drove out of the parking
lot. “Did anybody approach you? Maybe a chameleon?”

“Cleo already asked that,” he
said. “I didn’t see anybody.”

Had he just masked in the rear
view mirror? I couldn’t tell, so I turned around to face him. “Did you take
aspirin from a stranger? How about candy?”

“I’m not stupid.”

Stupid looking. “Did you hear
anything? Smell anything? Get sprayed by anything, like a sprinkler? Walk
through any suspicious drafts of air?”

“Shut up, Cleo.” He squeezed his
eyes more tightly shut. “Let me die in peace.”

“I’m going through the list you
taught me.” In case there was need for it, I snagged a pen and took notes on a
folder. “What do you feel right now?”

“Headache.”

“Same headache you’ve had since
yesterday?”

“Was I incapacitated yesterday?
No, it’s not the same headache.”

I wrote down everything pertinent
he’d said so far, which amounted to “paralyzed, headache, bad attitude”. “Why
did you run away when Gladys showed up with the dog?”

“I hate dogs,” he lied.

He probably liked animals and
hated people. I tried to make eye contact with John to let him know our invalid
was fibbing, but he concentrated on the road. Lunch traffic flowed around us
like a heat wave.

“I find that hard to believe,” I
enunciated very clearly.

“Damn it, Cleo, what does it
matter if I hate dogs or not? My memory’s a little blurry right now. Didn’t
John send me for aspirin?”

John hadn’t sent him for meds,
just said we needed them. “Why did you cuss at Gladys?”

“I don’t want to talk. Leave me
alone.”

Man, I hated that line. It was
hardly ever a lie.

“John, how much does your head
hurt? If these headaches are connected, this could have been you. Doesn’t that
concern you?”

He could be next—or me. Why did that
ring a bell?

“My head’s getting better.” He
glanced in the rear view mirror at Beau. “Yuri’s going to have someone here to
take your place by the end of the day.”

It seemed callous, when Beau had
just been attacked, but the show did have to go on.

“Cleo will drive you home,” John
continued.

“Me? I’m on the job.” A job that
was a lot less appealing now that Beau had been jumped by the supra suckers.

“Yuri’s sending someone to take
your place, too.”

“Drive myself,” Beau muttered.

“Blurry vision, temporary amnesia
and loss of coordination can be side effects of burnout. A supra experiencing
this should not operate heavy machinery,” I quoted. Not that I relished five
hours in the car with Beau, but I didn’t want him to wreck and kill himself.

We parked at the hotel and slung
Beau between us, carting him in the side door so it would raise fewer eyebrows.
We had about thirty minutes before our next session at Wyse.

A woman holding a bouquet of
flowers entered the elevator with us and stood as close to the doors as
possible. Once we reached the room, we draped Beau across one of the beds and
John got him a glass of water for the nightstand.

“Are you going to be all right?”
he said. “I need Cleo until the others get here.”

“Fine.” Beau half-rolled onto his
side, cursed, and flopped back. “This stage should only last an hour. Turn out
the lights and shut the curtains.”

Normally, if one of my coworkers
had burned out, I’d have been one hundred percent sympathetic. Part of me
wanted to coddle him, but the other part, the part that had control of my
mouth, couldn’t help herself.

“Do you have to go to the
bathroom?” I used the hanging stick to slide the hotel’s thick curtains closed.
“We can set the ice bucket beside you.”

“Get out.” Beau’s shoulder
twitched and his arm flopped upwards, over his eyes.

“Is it okay for us to leave him?”
I asked John.

“We have a job to do. If we don’t
involve the paramedics, we can’t explain this particular hold-up to our
customers.” John turned out the lights. “We’re safe at Wyse.”

None of us acknowledged the
unspoken “now that they got someone else” addendum. Until I did. “It’s like
there’s a vampire going around eating supras.”

“What?” Beau and John said at the
same time.

“That would explain why it only
gets one. It gets full after it sucks a brain dry.”

“Psychic vampirism is not a
registered ability,” John said with more than a touch of asperity. “Or an
unregistered one. Or a scientifically possible one. Suprasenses don’t work that
way.”

“Erasers like Lou muck with the
brain.”

“Short term memory loss is a
hormonal and neural effect,” John said. “It’s a far cry from brain sucking.”

The science of suprasenses had
flown in one of my ears and out the other, but I’d latched onto one important
aspect. “There are still things we don’t understand. I could be right.”

“I don’t understand why you’re
still here,” Beau said.

“I keep coming back to the fact
we had headaches.” I held up my hand to forestall John. “It’s like you don’t
want to acknowledge the fact we had a warning and ignored it.”

I guess they couldn’t handle
illogic and vampires followed by logic and reason. Beau opened his eyes and
stared at John, and the two of them communed in some silent dude agreement that
the chick in the room was nuts.

Or worse—she was right.

“It’s possible something affected
us,” Beau finally said, “and they latched onto me because I’m more important.”

“They crisped you up like bacon
because you’re special?” I scoffed. “Superiority complex much?”

“Your imagery sucks.” Beau
wriggled his feet until he could toe off his shoes.

I didn’t agree his loss would
affect YuriCorp more than John’s. Jolene could do most anything in the lab Beau
could do, plus she was nicer. Beau didn’t go to many customer sites. I kept
hearing he was this great trainer and science genius, but I’d seen no evidence—considering
the evidence was me. It seemed more likely today had been a crime of
opportunity.

With Beau, it could just as
easily have been a crime of annoyance.

John frowned. “It doesn’t fit the
pattern. I get sent on more jobs. I’m not sure you’d be viewed as a greater
asset.”

“I thought there was no pattern.”
If Yuri had been in the room, I’d have shaken my finger at him. He’d told me
there was no pattern and... No, he’d told me there was no concentric map circle
leading to the hideout of the villain.

“Well,” John demurred, “there’s a
tendency for them to strike the higher strength supra and pass over the
chameleons. If they want to debilitate us as a company, that’s how to do it.”

Yuri hadn’t mentioned the bad
guys took out the ranking officers because it was common sense. Duh.

“It doesn’t help us find out how
it’s happening or prevent it from happening,” John finished.

We were perilously close to
discussing the mole in front of Beau. The fact YuriCorp was being targeted was common
knowledge outside YuriCorp as well as inside it. The fact we were actively
investigating was not common knowledge, but it would be stupid if we weren’t.
The part nobody suspected was that I was the secret weapon.

Some weapon I’d turned out to be.

“Someone should talk to Yuri and
Al about the migraine early alert system,” I said. “Pavarti had a headache the
day she burned out. Did any others have headaches?”

“I’ll mention it to Al tonight.”
John checked his watch. “Right now we have to go. Beau, Cleo will be back in
four hours to drive you to Nashville.”

“Never trust a woman driver,”
Beau said before I yanked the door shut.

He’d had been lying about women
drivers—he’d only said that to piss me off. How could I deny the poor, crispy man
the satisfaction of a loudly-slammed door?

~ * ~

Instead of telling anyone at Wyse
Beau had had a nervous breakdown, we pretended he and I had been recalled on a
work matter, which technically was true. A family matter wouldn’t explain us
both leaving.

But it did raise the question,
did Beau have a family or had he been spawned from primordial muck? Yuri had
scheduled a company picnic, but I’d never heard Beau talk about anyone, inside
or outside his head. I never heard rumors about him sleeping around. I never
heard about him, period. He was a testy hermit nobody liked.

Huh. I’d never thought about the
parallel, but that would have described me at most of the companies where I’d
worked before YuriCorp.

John and I agreed I shouldn’t
waltz around Wyse and ask people if they’d sucked Beau’s brain dry. I hadn’t
found anything at the company where Pavarti had been struck, and a quick phone
call to a troubled Yuri confirmed—I was to cart the A.S.S. home A.S.A.P. and
not take any additional risks.

The A.S.S. was mobile when I returned
to the hotel, his bags packed and his expression grim. He frowned all the way
to the car.

“So, no stroke,” I guessed, more
relieved that I let on. “That’s good, right?”

“I told you that already.” He
glared at me before he tossed his suitcase into the trunk of the company sedan.

“Is it permanent?” I asked.

“Too early to tell, but thank you
so much for the reminder.”

I placed my suitcase beside his
and my purse in front. “I meant the frown.”