Vacant (26 page)

Now I was afraid. I'd been worried for Cherabino, sure, but with all that had been going on I hadn't even stopped to consider that I might lose my last hours of work at the department as well. I wished she hadn't brought that up. Now I was worried for me too.

Suddenly she said in a rush, “I know it's late, I know you're on a job, I know there're all sorts of reasons why you can't, but could you come here? At least be here when they tell me?”

“I thought you didn't want me in the building even,” I said, my heart sinking.

“I . . . I know I said that.” She took another breath. “Look, forget I asked, okay? It's just . . . it's just really . . .”

“I wish I could be there right now, I really do, but I can't,” I said quietly, and opened up the Link as far as it would go. It wasn't the total presence from earlier, but I could feel her, and I thought she could feel me.

I pictured wrapping her up in my arms and whispering compliments in her ear, I pictured all the warmth and comfort I had in me, and then made some up. I sent it all, all I had, and my fear and heartbreak for her went too.

She sniffled over the phone and gave a little sigh. Just a little one, like maybe it had done some good.

She relaxed in my mental arms, put her head on my chest, and held on. I hung up the phone, gently, and held on too. It was an incredible amount of mental energy to keep up the contact over such a long distance, and it probably strengthened the Link. Right now I didn't care. She wasn't alone either, and she needed to know that.

I held her like that, mind-to-mind, for at least half an hour, until she fell asleep. And then I let it go. My head pounded dully, and what little rest I'd gotten had just been obliterated.

I got up, pulled on my pants, and sat in the office chair, the light from the lamp spilling over on the other side of the room sparring with the red reflected-neon-sign light coming through the blinds. I sat there and thought, my feet getting cold, my back getting cold.

Could I really save Tommy? And if I couldn't, did I have any business at all staying here, when I could go back to Atlanta, back to Cherabino? Showing up for Cherabino was different from the drug, I told myself, but I didn't believe it.

I would be a coward and a failure one way or the other: a kid's life or Cherabino's real need when her world was disintegrating. I tried, rubbing my bleary eyes, to figure out what Swartz would want me to do.

I felt torn, unthinkably torn. It was too early to call Swartz, probably. Five a.m. In another hour, maybe.

There was a knock on the door. It was Jarrod's mind, and it was as buttoned-up and overcontrolled as I'd ever seen it.

I answered the door, still in my undershirt and the wrinkled pants from last night. “What is it?” I asked.

He passed me a photograph, grainy and on thin paper
like it had been photocopied. In it, Tommy sat on a chair, purpling bruise on his face, mouth split, holding up a copy of a newspaper dated this morning.

TELL
THE
TRUTH
OR
HE
DIES
, a note said, cut from newspaper letters, also photocopied.

“Where did you
get this?” I asked Jarrod. I felt like I was in free fall, helpless. Oddly, though, there was some relief mixed in with everything else.

Tommy looked bad, looked scared and dehydrated and poorly cared for. My heart broke. He was still alive, though. He was still alive, though his eyes looked dead. Whoever had him could have done anything.

And I might have left him for the drug, or for Cherabino. I might have failed him yet again. The certainty felt like a two-edged sword. I had no choice. He was alive, and there was that vision. Cherabino would have to wait, whatever it cost her, whatever it cost us, me. Because somewhere—maybe—Tommy was alive, and maybe I could save him.

So why did I feel like the world had just turned into confetti? Why did I feel like such an aching failure?

“Wh-wh-where did you get this?” I repeated to Jarrod.

“Sridarin saw a teenager delivering it at the judge's house half an hour ago.” His eyes were sympathetic.

“I thought we were all supposed to leave,” I said. My hands still shook from the emotions, the overwhelming emotions. I struggled to think.

“Sridarin takes his responsibility on protection duty very seriously,” Jarrod said. “He stayed behind on stakeout, just in case, and it's a good thing he did. We have the
teenager in custody, but he's not talking. Can you take the location from his mind like you did the other?”

I paused, brain literally stuck for a moment. “Um, yeah.” I held open the door. “Come in while I get a shirt on.”

He did and my brain finally turned on.

“Can I have an opinion?” I said.

“Of course.”

I took a breath, wanted a cigarette, wanted Satin, wanted to be anywhere—anywhere—but stuck between these choices. But I was finally thinking. “To be honest, I think we need to lean on the judge. Whatever is going on, she's at the center of it. That's what the note tells me. I know interrogations. I think she cracks first.”

Jarrod nodded and stepped in, the door closing behind him. Judging from the deep circles under his eyes, he hadn't slept much more than I had. “I still need a location for where the teenager got the photocopy.”

“I have nowhere else to be at this moment,” I said. I pulled on a clean shirt, buttoning it. “We'll do what we need to do.”

Mendez met us out front, a carrying case of coffees in her hand. For the first time, I felt fear from her, true fear.

In my experience, when the cop gets afraid, you should be terrified.

“Tommy's not going to live, is he?” I asked, once we were in the car.

A short silence while the two of them tried to figure out how to respond. Jarrod put on the anti-grav engine, floating up into traffic, and made a show of being very busy with that. Finally he said, “I have a hostage negotiator driving in from Atlanta. He'll be here in a few hours. If we can get them talking . . .”

“Have they called?” I asked. “Do we have any contact information from them at all?”

“Nothing but the phone call you picked up the other day,” Mendez said. “And we don't even have a recording of that one. If they're communicating with the judge some other way, we don't know about it. No letters, even, except the one we showed you.”

“So unless we get them talking, you think he dies.”

Resounding silence in the car. My heart broke.

A few minutes later, struggling to stay on topic, I said, “In the vision, I'm there with Tommy, at least mentally. And I'm talking to Fiske over the phone. If I get a chance to talk with him, what do I say?”

Mendez turned all the way around in her seat again. “You're sure you talked to Fiske? And Fiske has some influence on the man who took this child?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“You bargain,” Mendez said. “Hostage taking is never about the hostage. It's always about power, or respect, and or some third, difficult-to-obtain goal. If you can calm this guy down and negotiate with him, it's possible we all walk away from this.”

“What do I possibly have to offer Fiske?” I asked, thinking of the drug he'd left me. “He's not exactly a fan of mine.”

“Everybody wants something. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I'm far more interested in exactly where this man is. If we can get there rather than negotiate, it's better for everyone.”

“It's an abandoned barn in the vision, I told you that,” I said.

“There are countless abandoned barns within a hundred miles,” Jarrod said. “If you can keep him talking and get additional information about his location, we can send in a special unit to talk this out. The FBI has a hostage retrieval unit on standby—they have helicopters, and they're ready
to scramble. But there's no point until we know where he is. How soon do you talk to this guy?”

“I have no idea! It's not like I can call this stuff up out of the void.” I'd tried for another vision already and failed. At this point, though, I wouldn't want to get another vision. If all of this led to Tommy's death, led to the ending I saw in the vision, I didn't want to know. I had to believe I could change it. I had to. It was the only thing keeping me sane right now.

Jarrod let out a sigh, like he'd been wanting me to do just that, to call up mystical answers. He was going to be disappointed.

“We're all on edge,” Mendez said. “Let's see what the judge says.”

Jarrod changed skylanes, as cautiously and controlled as everything else he did. “Mendez, I want you to meet up with Sridarin and get a location out of that teenager. I don't care what you have to do. Then go there and see if there's evidence. You can have the car once we're at the house.”

“Don't you need backup with the judge?” Mendez asked.

“I will handle the judge with Ward here.”

She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

*   *   *

Sridarin was waiting for us on the sidewalk of the judge's house, in a long trench coat. Under the streetlight, his face was half in shadow, but from what I could feel in Mindspace, he was grim. “I have bad news.”

I stopped midstride.

“What's going on?” Jarrod asked.

“You remember the jury was held over the weekend because they couldn't come to a decision? Anyway, they all received envelopes under their hotel room doors this morning before anyone could waylay them. The security camera
we set up surreptitiously was disabled. We have no footage of the perpetrator.”

“What was in the envelopes?”

Sridarin shook his head. “It's the same picture the judge received, of her son in obvious distress. Helpfully labeled with who his mother is. The jury is panicking, and I suspect there will now be a mistrial.”

Whoa. It seemed impossible to believe that Fiske had won—and won so quickly. An overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility rode me, and rode me hard. I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere but here, dealing with this.

“Why a mistrial?” Mendez asked.

“With the sequestration, the pictures are going to seem like credible threats. It's all over. Jury tampering is a felony, but that doesn't mean that it won't give the perpetrators what they want in this case.”

“That's not our issue right now,” Jarrod said. He was overly controlled again, his emotions muffled like a tuning fork against a piece of velvet. “Is the judge awake?”

“She's awake—the light has been on for an hour—but she's not letting anyone in or answering the phone,” Sridarin said.

“Thanks for the update,” Jarrod said, and moved past him.

Sridarin just looked at the man, reacting to his rudeness.

“It's been a rough morning,” Mendez said. “Thanks for sharing. You going to be here for a while?”

“I'd like to actually be in the house if that's a possibility.” He still felt driven and a little guilty, but with the forward motion, better. I knew how he felt.

“Come with us,” Mendez said, and we followed.

*   *   *

Jarrod talked us into the house and gave the judge a copy of the photo.

I could feel the photo hit her like a blow to the head. She closed her eyes.

Parson sat down on the closest chair, still ten feet away, the strange egg-shaped thing that I'd interviewed the bodyguard on. Her hands were shaking, her mind caught in some horrific processing loop.

I knelt down, my knees hurting, to be more on her level. “What truth are you supposed to tell?” I asked quietly. The others were close enough to hear but not close enough to interfere or feel like they were standing over us.

“I hate you,” she said, tears starting to pool in her eyes. “I hate you, you understand? I hate you.”

She meant it, but it wasn't the worst thing that had happened to me in the last few days, not by far. “I know,” I said, and, as much as it hurt to apologize, “I'm sorry. If there's anything you're holding back, now's the time.”

Parson laughed, a bitter, bitter laugh. “After all of that? Really? And you still haven't guessed. Fucking terrible telepath if you ask me.”

I suppressed any reaction the same way I would in the interview room. Strong emotion meant I was doing something correctly.

I waited, because it seemed like she wanted to talk.

She looked down at her hands and laughed that horrible laugh again. “After all of that, all of that.”

“What did you do?” I pressed, seeing the beginning shapes of it emerge in her mind, surprising and disturbing.

She looked up at me. “The death threats were real. The death threats were real, do you understand? But I got bodyguards for Tommy and me and I rode them out. I'm a good judge. I play by the rules.”

“What did they want you to do?”

She took in a breath of air. “First they wanted me to
recuse myself from the case. I wasn't going to play that game. Like I said, I got the bodyguards, and I let the local police know. It was manageable.”

“Then what?” I prompted, when she seemed like she wanted to go silent again.

She glanced up at the other agents behind me.

“I'm a telepath. I know already,” I said, a standard lie to get suspects to confess in the interview rooms.

She laughed again. “No, no, you don't. After all of that, God help me, but you don't.”

I waited. She was confusing the hell out of me. Finally: “What did their demands change to?”

“They wanted me to throw out the testimony of the licensed prostitute, the one who actually saw him beat the woman. And disallow certain evidence that was collected by the police that doesn't have a perfect chain of evidence.” The last was accompanied by a sense of deep shame and anger, so intense she shied away from it, refusing to spend any time there.

“Why was that a big deal?”

“The prosecution's entire case turned on those two facts: the hair in the hotel room belonging to Pappadakis, and the testimony of the lady of the night. Everything else was circumstantial.” That intense sense of shame again. “But then . . .”

Flashes of images I couldn't quite make sense of, including evidence bags, a cop's face, other things that made no sense. And that shame, that shame and anger and disgust that had driven her to the impossible.

Behind me, Jarrod said, “But you told them no, right?”

She shook her head, pushing all those images away.

Shut up or leave the room. She's on the verge of shutting down. If you want information, you get really quiet right now, please,
I told Jarrod specifically mind-to-mind,
and repeated the warning for the others in the room, one by one.
I know what I'm doing.

“I never should have trusted you people,” she said. But it was a lie, because she'd not trusted us to begin with. In fact, she'd done the opposite. “You screwed everything up! How was I supposed to fix it? How with you people here?”

“What did you do?” I asked, wanting to back up. I knew that mix of emotions. It was what came out in the interview room when someone had murdered, or worse. When someone had crossed every moral boundary she'd ever had. “What did you do?”

“There was a murderer for hire up on parole. He'd been one of my convictions. I told him I'd get the parole approved if he'd connect me to someone who could do the job. And then I set up the attack. The original one. On the way to Tommy's school, not the attack outside the courthouse. That one was all him, all the man who was blackmailing me.”

I had to physically restrain myself from reacting. “You set up the original attack on your son?” I kept my voice as flat as I could, but some of my shock and horror must have leaked through, because she looked up.

Behind me, every agent in the room reacted, a storm in Mindspace. One gasp. I repeated my warnings to be still and quiet or leave.

She looked at them and thought about being silent then, about clamming up and getting a lawyer. She'd said more than enough. But there was that picture . . .

“Tell me,” I said, to bring her attention back to me.

“They were just supposed to make it look good. Credible. No one was supposed to get hurt.” That laugh again, a sound grating on my nerves like a cockroach skittering across the floor. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”

Now the images were coming freely. Her shock and dismay when the court lawyer's call had the FBI showing up at
exactly the wrong time. Her plans to take herself and her son out of state in fear for their lives and as a way to remove themselves from the threat. Her determination to keep her secret no matter what it took. Her pride and horror when I hadn't had a clue, despite everything. She'd been avoiding me, yes, been so uncomfortable around me, but I hadn't even noticed. Her son was a better telepath than I had been, and he was ten.

She'd been genuinely horrified when Tommy was taken. She didn't love him, not the way a mother was supposed to love a son, and she regretted this. But he was hers, her responsibility, and he was in danger. He had been taken by the man who had first threatened her, in retaliation for changing the game.