Eleven days into her medical leave had Chris climbing the walls of her apartment. She hated the thought of being desk bound, but she would have preferred that to this torture. Goddess she was bored! She had tried wheedling Cappy into letting her come into Central and work her desk, but he wouldn’t let her, pointing to the regs. She had tried blackmail and promises, no joy there either. She’d been reduced to begging in the end. She hated begging! He’d just laughed her offers off as if she were joking. She hadn’t been, not at all. Her offer to run errands and do reports for the guys, though a horrifying thought to her a few short weeks ago, was looking like a damn fine deal about now.
“I hate this!” she snarled to the empty apartment.
She missed the bustle of a busy department, and she missed the guys. She felt cut off from everything, and no one had time to talk when she called them on her link. She knew how that was. They were busy with their cases while she languished unable even to work her inactive files. Her active cases were an even bigger frustration to her; they had been reassigned. At least John had taken them on with Raz’s help. That was better than giving them to someone who knew nothing about them. John knew as much as she did being her partner, but still. She couldn’t help thinking that only she could handle them exactly right; arrogant to think so. No one was indispensable, but that’s the way she felt.
The regs were screwing her over, and Doctor Carey had not helped with his assessments of her mental stability. As if he knew what stable was. She snorted. No cop she knew could pass his definition of stable! They would all have to be clerics or psychs like him to pass some of his stupid tests.
The medics had been more reasonable. Her heavily scarred neck was still tender under the bandaging, but it was healing well. They said she could undertake light work no problem at all. She considered her desk and maybe interviewing suspects as light. No actual pursuits of course. Chasing bad guys would be bad for her stitches... probably, but interviews and paperwork would have been fine in her opinion.
Carey had vetoed the idea. He said traumatic experiences such as hers mandated eight weeks minimum leave, followed by psyche sessions to evaluate performance once back on the job. Eight flaming weeks! She was barely into her second week and already climbing the walls. On pay or not, it was bloody ridiculous and she was determined upon another opinion. Getting the term cut in half was her minimum goal.
Thwack thwack!
Chris brightened. A visitor... or the mailman. Hopefully a visitor with a distraction. Goddess she needed something to take her mind off her situation, and that was a fact. She answered the door, to find a tussle-haired Baxter in the hall.
“Well well, look what the cat dragged to my door. Road kill.” Baxter grinned at her. He had a manila envelope in his hand but there was no doughnut box in sight. “No sugar?”
“I can give you some sugar,” he said making a kissy face.
She snorted. “I’m going to tell Mary Pat on you.”
“She knows I’m a lech.”
Chris chuckled. “Don’t stand there like a lump. Come in.”
“I was waiting for the invite,” he said entering the apartment and looking around. “You’re a slob, you know that?”
She looked about blankly and then flushed. She hadn’t tidied in a while, and there were clothes from washday piled on the sofa. Her face reddened when she noticed her panties on display. She grumbled under her breath as she snatched them up to hide them, and Baxter chuckled. She scooped everything up and entered the bedroom. She didn’t bother putting it all away in drawers. She dumped it all on the bed and closed the door firmly. There. She looked about again, and started picking up dirty plates and cups. Baxter helped take them into the kitchen.
“Beer?” she asked as she stuffed everything into the washer.
“Empire?”
“Of course Empire, what else? You’re not in some dive on 104th street now.” The uppity Brits might be a pain in the arse, but they knew how to brew good beer. “Check the refrigerator. Get me one too.”
Baxter collected two bottles of brew and set them down on the island. She handed him the opener and he popped the tops off both. They took up a bottle each and clinked them together before taking a long pull of the nectar. Baxter sat beside her on one of her stools, drinking his beer in silence.
Chris eyed the envelope hungrily where it lay atop the island, but said nothing about it. He hadn’t offered it to her, but he wouldn’t have brought it with him if it didn’t contain something interesting he wanted her to see. Finally, he finished his beer and slid the envelope closer.
“The feds are still sniffing around,” he said without glancing her way. “They’re not satisfied with Ghost being dead.”
“They’re not satisfied! Well screw them, I’m not satisfied! They lost my perp’s body! Where the hell do they get off not being satisfied?”
Baxter shrugged. “Barrows was pissed, yeah, but he’s lucky he didn’t lose anyone. We nearly lost you, Chris. We were all lucky that night.”
She shifted uncomfortably at the emotion she heard in Baxter’s voice, but she was still fuming at Barrows’ incompetence. How did it happen that after all her team’s work they lose the body? More to the point, what was special about it to make someone steal the damn thing? O’Neal had simply been a run of the mill vamp like any other hadn’t he? She wondered if Barrows knew why, if not who was behind it? He couldn’t know who had snatched it. He would have been after him already if he did, not bugging the guys at Central.
She finished her beer. “Another?”
Baxter nodded.
She fetched them, popped the tops, and handed one of the bottles over. She didn’t sit this time, but leaned back against the island facing the opposite way to Baxter in order to see his face.
“So, apart from my excellent taste in beer, what brings you to my door?”
He gestured at the envelope. “That.”
“And that is?”
“Something I’m not supposed to have.”
She raised an eyebrow and reached for it tentatively. He nodded and she snatched the envelope up quickly in case he changed his mind. Inside she found a disk and some papers. She emptied everything onto the island, but ignored the disk for the hard copy. There were half a dozen still photographs, obviously frames isolated and printed from a security network. She recognised them as coming from the morgue. She would have been hard pressed not to recognise the location. She had been in there a depressing number of times. She paged through them, studying each one. Baxter had obviously tried to get the best angles, but none of them was very enlightening. Oh, she could tell what they were supposed to be showing her. It was the raid on the morgue. She knew some of the details already. How an unknown group had posed at EMTs logging in a body, and had stunned the guards and gassed the feds. She would have laughed if it hadn’t been her body they were stealing.
She glared at the photos. “These are useless. I can’t see faces.”
“You think so?”
Okay, now he was being coy. What was she missing? She frowned and studied each photo side-by-side, staring hard at each one. No faces, so she looked for other tells. Reflections? No, none. The weapons? K6 stunners they should not have had or been able to procure, but no surprise they had managed it. The gas? She peered closer, but it was a simple aerosol canister with a long lever-like trigger. She didn’t know the agent used to knock out the fed, but it must have been potent and quick dispersing. None of the fake EMTs wore gas-masks. Maybe a tailored nerve agent then? The users could take the antidote orally before using it. Pop a pill and you were good to go. Mil-spec stuff that was, but everything was available on the streets for a price. Bounty hunters used it quite effectively on shifters she’d heard. It didn’t keep them down long, but even a minute was enough time to get the runecuffs on if you were good and on the ball.
“What’s on the disk?”
“The recording of that night. DD hacked in for me to get it.”
Chris whistled. “How much did it cost you?”
Baxter grimaced. “Two.”
“Two? That’s not too bad—”
“In the dugout,” he said sourly.
“Oh man!” she said in commiseration. “That sucks. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah well, you owe her one of them.”
She spluttered.
Baxter grinned and prodded one of the photos. “You’re not seeing it, are you?”
She eyed the picture, still smarting about the ticket to the ball game. They weren’t cheap dammit, and she didn’t see how what Baxter had bought was worth the cost. The photo he’d chosen was of one of the thieves carrying Ghost’s body from the freezer to the emergency door. She still didn’t get it. She said so.
“That’s Flex,” Baxter said without hesitation. “I know it’s him.”
She looked up in surprise, already shaking her head.
“It is,” he said without a trace of a doubt.
She tried to see why he thought so, but apart from height and general build, there was nothing else to go on. “I’m not seeing it. The build is right, but what else are you basing it on? There must be thousands like him.”
“True, but pair him up with a chiquita like this, and who do you immediately think of?” He slid one of the other photos her way.
Chris picked them both up. Separately the people shown could be any one, but yes, put together they matched the builds of Angel and Flex. The problem was they also matched her and Baxter, or any number of people! This was a stretch, a serious stretch, like a rubber band stretched from one end of Manhattan Island to the other kind of stretch. They couldn’t move on this! It was utter crap. Just one man’s hunch... but Baxter’s hunches had served her well recently.
She bit her lip in thought. Why would Angel be mixed up in this? She couldn’t think of any profit for her or her gang in stealing a body out of the morgue, and she couldn’t think of any other reason she would want to do it. Body snatching was so... outdated now. Magic traditions had moved on a lot and most didn’t go in for the truly black arts anymore; the cost was too high, and besides, Angel wasn’t gifted in necromancy as far as she knew. Her magic was a form of compulsion that she used to employ on marks in her petty street cons.
“Did DD do anything with the disk? Any enhancements?”
“No, it was all I could do to get her to hack the servers in the first place. The feds have everyone feeling a little spooked. She did the printouts, took her fee, and threw me out of her cubicle. She was kinda scared, Chris, so I left it at that. I think Barrows has been at her.”
“Bastard,” she snarled. DD was harmless, a really quiet and nice analyst sort. She wasn’t tough or able to fight back if the feds got nasty. “What was he after, do you know?”
“Same as us I bet.”
“Probably.”
She glared at the photos again and sighed. “These are nothing, Dave. I know you think they are, and maybe they even are something, but Cappy won’t move on this. The case is closed... it is still closed?”
“It’s closed,” he agreed.
“Getting it reopened will take more than this, more than we can possibly get. I don’t see it happening at all. The Mayor must have sighed in relief when the Chief told him we got the Ghost.”
“Oh yeah, he was real happy to go to the media with the good news.”
“He’ll want this to stay dead and buried then.”
“But we don’t... or do we?”
She grimaced. “I don’t mind if it stays buried as such, but for my own information I would like to know what in the nine hells is going on! I admit it, this entire thing smells.”
“Yeah, it does. It stinks of federal cover-up on massive scale to me, and I would love to stick it to Barrows.”
“Hmmm. As long as we’re the stickers and not the stickees. Okay, leave this with me. You can’t do much more. I’m grounded for another six weeks. I’m working to halve that time, but anyway, I need something to do. I’ll see if I can coax DD into a little work for hire on the side, and I’ll look into Angel and her gang.”
Baxter looked doubtful, his eyes resting on the bandaging wrapping her throat. “You be careful. Call for backup, do not apprehend, yada yada.”
She grinned and saluted. “Scouts honour.”
He rolled his eyes and pushed to his feet. “Seriously, Chris. Something is whacked about all this. Barrows was seriously freaked that night when he lost the body, and he said something to me while you were in the emergency room that’s had me thinking.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I dismissed it then as threats, but now I’m not so sure. He warned me not to dig. He said there were some people who wouldn’t care who I was or that I was a cop, and that they would take steps to maintain secrecy. Like I said, I shrugged it off back then, but then I got to thinking about the other day when Barrows followed us. He said the guy they were after had a body count of over eighty, remember?”
“Yeah so?”
“So how come no one heard about that? Eighty kills and no bulletins, no news media—how does that happen without serious pull high up? Like higher than FBI high, more like military.”
“Acronyms,” she sighed. “I hate those acronym guys.”
“I didn’t say CIA... oops, I just did. Could be homeland too I guess, or something even darker. You know the Council has more than enough pull for this without the need for acronyms. You know that, right?”
She shivered; she knew all right. If the White Council was involved they were seriously screwed, but she wouldn’t assume it. There were many reasons not to; one of which was the futility of trying to fight against anything the Council chose to do. If it was involved and wanted this mess to go away, it would go away along with anyone connected to it with no evidence left behind. The fact there was evidence lying around to be found was the greatest indication that this wasn’t connected to the Council. She saw nothing that pointed to anyone but her department and Barrows being involved as yet. She would keep assuming and preserve her peace of mind.
“Leave it with me,” she said. “I’m the only one with time on my hands anyway.” She followed Baxter toward the door. “What’s Cappy got John working on now?”
“Stanton.”
“Oh really? Damn, I’d like to take a shot at him myself.”
“Wouldn’t we all?” Baxter said stepping out into the hall. He turned back as if to say something more, but then shook his head leaving it unsaid. “See you around.”
“See you,” Chris closed the door and hurried to fetch the disk. She wanted to watch the full video before deciding how much to let DD extort from her.
Chris arrived at Central the next morning determined to enlist DD’s aid, and she wasn’t above guilt tripping her friend to get what she wanted. Baxter had succeeded in planting seeds of doubt about Angel and the possibility that she was in some kind of trouble. Angel didn’t consider herself a friend of hers anymore, but Chris still thought of the girl as one of her kids. The gangly kid she’d known was older now, and had her own gang, but she remembered her as just another of the unwanted kids running wild in the district she had patrolled in her uniform days.
Angel had left the Tiny Rascals behind, but the gang was still active in Monster Central and Chris kept in touch with some of its members. They gave her information sometimes, and she tried to keep them out of trouble. She helped out with a little cash now and then too, and had given each of them a second-hand link so they could keep in touch with her. They were a good investment, but that wasn’t why she kept an eye on them. They weren’t just weasels to her. They were her kids, hers to protect, even from themselves. It didn’t matter if Angel blamed her for things or hated her for what had happened years ago. If the girl was mixed up in vamp business, she needed help. Chris would get her out of whatever it was.
She headed up to the Cyber Analysis Division on the second floor of Central where all the geeks hung out. DD was one of the Cads, one type of techno geek that inhabited the place. Cads, named after their division, spent all their time taking computers and robots apart to analyse their guts and memories for evidence. There were other kinds of geek on the same floor, like the Cats (Cyber Action Teams) who investigated comp fraud and Infonet security breaches. They were DD’s suppliers in a way. They collected the evidence in the first place and once analysed, acted upon the results.
She stepped out of the elevator but didn’t head for DD’s cubicle right away. She knew her friend would not be happy to see her, especially when she heard why. A small gratuity was in order to soften her up. Normally coffee would do, but this might take a high calorie injection of chocolaty goodness. She needed to disguise the taste of helping her out this time around because DD wasn’t an Angel fan. In fact, DD wasn’t a fan of much outside of baseball and ice hockey, but she had a serious crush on the LA King’s current star player. Jarret Fraser played centre position and wouldn’t know DD if he tripped over her, but that didn’t quiet her enthusiasm. Such a rabid sports fan had weaknesses and might be persuaded to overlook her dislike of Angel this once if certain things were offered to her. What worried Chris wasn’t giving her friend a couple of tickets for a bribe. They often went to games together anyway. She considered such things a gift not bribery. It was Barrows scaring her. If DD was still freaked out about the feds, she might refuse to help at all.
She checked out the selection at vending and chose DD’s favourites. If two bars of instant diabetic coma didn’t work, she didn’t know what would. She bought a coffee for herself while she had the chance, and then headed for DD’s cubicle.
Donna Delgado was a trim young woman of twenty-five and was pretty in a geeky sort of way despite having the dress sense of a demented elf. She was wearing a bright orange shirt with leafy patterns worked into it. The colour was vomit inducing. She wore it untucked, but then she had to. It was so short it left her midriff bare and revealed her piercing. The white belt with its chrome buckle did more than hold her pants up. It drew attention to her ultra-flat belly and sharp hipbones. It made Chris want to suck in her gut.
She watched DD bop and boogie her way around her cubicle, tapping commands into the various computers she had crammed into every available space. It was normal for her to be working on three or four things at once She was wearing earphones, big suckers not the tiny ear buds most used these days—DD was an aficionado of quality sound, or so she said—and wouldn’t be seen dead using anything but her own creation. She wasn’t just a wiz with software; she was into hardware in a big way. She often built her own gadgets and computers. She was a geek’s geek.
Chris stepped into the cubicle and DD stopped dancing. She smiled automatically in greeting, but a moment later the expression fled as she realised who had come calling. Chris cursed silently. Goddess damn Barrows to the ninth hell! It was obvious DD wasn’t happy to see her.
“Hey DD, how goes it?”
DD removed her earphones and switched off her music. “I can’t help you.”
“Sure you can.”
“No, I really can’t.”
“Yes, you really can. Look here,” she said and waved the ticket in the air. “Baxter says I owe you.”
DD shuffled her feet. “Sorta.”
“I always pay my debts, DD, and besides, we’re buds. Here, take it.”
DD stepped forward and took the ticket, barely glancing at it in her misery. “Thanks. Sorry, but I have work. I don’t have time to chat right now.”
Chris ignored her and took a seat on the edge of DD’s desk. “I heard that bastard Barrows came by. He can’t mess with you, DD. Just tell your Guild rep he’s hassling you and he’ll stop. He only gets away with it if people don’t push back. So push.”
“I’m not you, Chris, I can’t.”
“Sure you can, you’re stronger than you think, but if you don’t want to that’s okay. He doesn’t bother me, DD. I’ll fix him for you.”
“Really?” she said hopefully. “You’d do that for me?”
“Absolutely. Here, I got these for you.” She passed the candy over and DD’s eyes lit. She unwrapped one of the treats and bit in. “Good?”
“Hmmm,” DD said.
Chris grinned, she was getting somewhere. “So, I guess you know why I’m here. Baxter showed me your stuff, but I need some Delgado magic worked on it.”
DD swallowed and started on the second candy bar.
She would never understand how her friend could maintain her pixy-like stature with all the sugar she consumed. She must have the metabolism of a humming bird on crack.
“What do you need?” DD said after she finished eating.
“The stills you worked up? Can you enhance them?”
“Can I enhance them? Of course I can enhance them! Aren’t I the best miracle worker in the department?”
“You’re the best, DD.”
“Damn straight. Of course I can enhance them, but I told Dave that day it wouldn’t do you any good.”
“He never said. Why won’t it do any good?”
“Because the perps are wearing masks. I can enhance the imagery and bring out the individual threads in the masks if you want, but if I remember right they were just off the rack ski masks. That won’t get you anywhere.”
She scowled. “Will you do it anyway?”
DD shrugged. “Sure. You got the disk with you?”
She handed it over and DD got to work.
Chris supplied coffee and moral support as DD worked her magic. They chose the same scenes as Dave had asked for, but added a few more that Chris thought promising. She liked the gassing of the fed especially, and had DD spend some extra attention on it. A couple of hours later and they were done.
“You’re right,” Chris said. “This is bullshit. Cappy won’t move on this.”
DD shrugged. “I warned you.”
Baxter had been so sure, but there wasn’t anything here to prove it one way or the other. If it weren’t for his certainty she would never have brought this to DD; she didn’t believe in it herself, but there was one way to be certain. She could track Angel down and ask her straight out. Yeah right! Angel would laugh in her face unless she had some kind of leverage... she frowned as a glimmer of an idea came to her.
“I’m going to tell you something in confidence, DD. Baxter thinks these two,” she pointed to two of the perps in the photos. “Are Angel and Flex.”
“Flex?”
“Angel’s lieutenant.”
DD frowned at the pictures. “Right build for her, but I don’t know him.”
“It could be them, but it could be me and Baxter too.”
“Yeah.”
“How good are you really, DD?”
“You need to ask?”
Chris grinned. In her area, DD didn’t lack confidence. She explained her idea. DD’s eyes widened and she slowly began to smile.