Duplicate Effort Part 10

"What is this?" Gumiela asked.

"Is this link secure?" Van Alen asked.

"Secure enough," Gumiela said.

"I have a man in my office who claims that he was a bodyguard to Ki Bowles, and that she and another bodyguard were killed in the forest of the Hunting Club today. I a.s.sume he's telling the truth?" "I can't comment," Gumiela said in her flattest tone. But her eyes had widened ever so slightly. That was a confirmation of sorts.

"He also claims to be the one who found her, and let some street officers know. He is the one who originally found Roshdi Whitford dead, but he never called that in, either."

Gumiela raised her chin. She didn't say anything. She couldn't.

"He makes me nervous," Van Alen said, "and he's not a client of mine. I have a hunch you're going to want to question him. If his stories check out, he's probably an important witness for you. Or a suspect."

Gumiela was smooth. She didn't confirm or deny any of this. "Why did he come to you?" "He knew that Ki Bowles spent some time in this office recently," Van Alen said, just as smoothly. "As a client?"

"You know I can't tell you why most people come here, Andrea," Van Alen said.

"Yet you're giving up this man. What's his name?"

"Pelham Monteith. He says he works for Whitford Securities."

"What don't you like?" Gumiela asked. She didn't finish the question, probably purposefully leaving it open-ended so that Van Alen could choose how she was going to answer.

"If he's telling me the truth," Van Alen said, "then he found three dead people and didn't remain at any of the scenes. As an officer of the court, I'm duty bound to make this information known."

"It's interesting how you pick and choose what is your duty, Ms. Van Alen," Gumiela said. Van Alen smiled. "I'm not the only one," she said, and signed off. Then she leaned back in her chair. What a mess.

She had expected Bowles to get threats the moment the first story appeared. She even expected Justinian Wagner to try something-and maybe succeed.

Flint and Bowles and Van Alen were under no illusions. They all knew that Bowles was risking her life with this series of stories.

Bowles had found it exciting. Flint thought the risks could be minimized. Truth be told, Van Alen thought the same thing or she never would have been connected to it.

She also thought Justinian Wagner was a cautious man who turned to murder as a last resort. He had a lot of legal means of stopping Bowles before he tried something illegal.

And even then, Van Alen expected threats first. She rubbed a hand across her forehead. Her little finger caught on the half-gla.s.ses and she flicked them off her nose in disgust.

She had started to admire Bowles. The woman had a relentlessness that Van Alen could identify with, and a ruthlessness that Van Alen shared.

Flint had been right when he had chosen Bowles, although Van Alen hadn't been certain of that in the beginning.

But this whole scheme had backfired too quickly. Van Alen was frightened for the first time in years. She took a deep breath and got a grip on herself. Fear was counterproductive. It always had been. It caused people to make mistakes instead of solve them.

She needed to solve this one, and she had to act quickly. She'd done the right thing in contacting Gumiela. Now Van Alen had to protect herself and her firm. She stood, accessing one of her secure personal links. She needed to get a hold of Miles Flint-and she had to do it fast.

13.

Even though he left the door to the viewing room open, Nyquist felt as if he were surrounded by Ki Bowles. The illusion drove him slightly crazy.

She seemed to be sitting at the table inside the main studio, just a few meters from him. Her black, silver, and red hair was perfectly coiffed and she wore some kind of matching outfit that served to accent her tattoos.

Her voice filled the room, but the story she told seemed too vague to be important-at least to him. It was all innuendo and hearsay, nothing that would hold up in court, although she promised hard evidence in future pieces.

Nyquist knew that news had different standards of proof than the law did-witness how many people were found guilty in the press and never made it into a court of law-but he found himself wishing she had shown him more.

Making him wish for more was probably what the story had been designed to do. But he didn't see anything that would kill her, not even in the tidbits that the story presented. They were too small, and he felt like he'd heard a few of them before.

Maybe something that Bowles hinted at in this story or something that she mentioned in pa.s.sing had more significance than Nyquist realized.

He leaned back in the small chair that sat in the center of the room and stared at Bowles as she recited the names of the people she had spoken to.

He would have to retrace her steps on all of this, see if these people as well as this so-called deep background that she had had explosive information in it, the kind that would make Justinian Wagner careless, the kind that would get him to kill before he explored other options.

Of course, if Wagner was behind the death, then that meant that Bowles's killer was a hired a.s.sa.s.sin. Wagner would never do the work himself.

And Wagner would need time-from the moment he learned of Bowles's stories and how harmful or inflammatory they would be to the moment of Bowles's death-to hire the best in business.

Nyquist put Bowles's report on loop-he wanted the words to become second nature to him-and then he stood. His knees cracked as they had done every day since the rebuild. The sound still startled him, and reminded him he wasn't quite the same man as he had been just a year before.

He stepped back into the studio. One of the techs was pulling the shelves closed.

"Find anything new?" Nyquist asked.

"Just Bowles's fingerprints," the tech said. "I'm not sure anyone else knew about this thing until you came along."

"What makes you say that?" Nyquist asked.

"Her fingerprints are on everything from the back of the shelves to the plastic tabs holding the screen in place. I think she put it up, and we might be able to find that in the studio's security system, especially if it recorded what was going on in here as a matter of course. We're going to need some computer techs to dig into this."

Nyquist wasn't surprised that Bowles wouldn't trust anyone else with her secret information. "Were you able to back up those files she had behind the shelves?"

"What we could access," the tech said.

"You think there's more?" Nyquist asked.

"We don't know," the tech said. "There could be. But there might not be. Do you know how tech savvy she was?"

"She used to work for InterDome as an investigative reporter. I know she did a lot of her own on-screen work. Does that make her tech savvy?"

The tech shrugged. "I'm not a specialist in media systems. That's why we're going to send someone else down here."

"Well, can I poke around back there and see what she was working on?"

"I suppose," the tech said in a tone that meant he really didn't care.

"I mean, will I destroy anything by doing so?"

"I have no idea. I might have destroyed a few things myself in looking through the files. But that would require a level of sophistication that didn't seem evident in the setup."

"Meaning what?" Nyquist asked.

"Meaning if she knew how to hide information within her own systems, would she have set up the shelf units?"

"Good question." Nyquist wasn't sure of the answer to that, either, although he was inclined to say no.

"What I kept telling myself as I looked around in there," the tech said, "was that most everything in any computer system is retained, even when it's deleted, and the best techs can always retrieve deleted information."

Nyquist glanced at the screen over the tech's shoulder. "Do we have techs that are that good?" "We have a few."

"Can you make sure one of them works on this case?"

"Absolutely," the tech said. "We're going to need our best team on it, anyway, given the level of scrutiny we'll all go through."

"Because it's a media case," Nyquist said.

"Yeah." The tech picked up his kit. "I've only worked one other media case, and I vowed I'd never take lead on another one."

"Is that why you're handing over the computer to a different tech?" Nyquist asked.

The tech shook his head. "I'm not lead on this for our department. Leidmann and Owen are splitting it. They hope that with two of them one will avoid the inevitable firing."

And then he let himself out the main door.

Nyquist watched him go. The inevitable firing. He hadn't thought of that until now. People always lost their jobs in a media case. What was standard operating procedure often became "sloppy police work" under the eye of some inept reporter.

The problem was that the department didn't dare defend "sloppy police work," even if the work wasn't sloppy. They had to get rid of the offender to rea.s.sure the public that the department was doing everything that it could.

Maybe that was why Gumiela had put him on this case. She had needed a potentially expendable officer and he was the one. She had also known that it wouldn't hurt his pension or his medical benefits. He stared at the door for a moment, not sure how he felt about that. Then he realized he couldn't worry about it.

He'd worked high-profile cases before and survived them. He would survive this one. And if not, then he would offer to resign.

He pushed the shelves aside and stared at the diagram on the screen. It was clearly the family tree of a conglomerate. Somewhere in the middle of Bowles's report, he had found himself wondering whether that diagram had belonged to Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor.

If what Bowles had said was true, then she had probably done the same kind of diagram for WSX. Which firms branched off from it, which ones became hidden a.s.sets, which ones were publicly known affiliates.

The diagram in front of him could be for the Ultre Corporation, which she had mentioned in her report. Or for Gramming Inc. or Environmental Systems Inc. or anyone of a dozen other clients of WSX. Or for a conglomerate not a.s.sociated with WSX at all.

He had no real idea what other work Bowles had been doing. All he knew was that InterDome had fired her six months ago, and then she reappeared with this rented studio and a several-part story on the Moon's largest law firm.

He didn't know whether she was working on other stories. He didn't know who paid her salary. He didn't know anything about her personal life.

He had to be careful not to get too focused on WSX. Otherwise he would be guilty of sloppy police work.

Rather than poke around in the information on that screen, he decided to look through the studio one more time, while he waited for the high-end computer techs. Let them find the files and hidden information.

Then he would compile it and see if it related to his case. Or if he just wanted it to.

14.

So far, Flint wasn't finding any evidence of anyone piggybacking onto the work that Talia had done. No one, it seemed, appeared to be looking for the other five cloned children.

He couldn't be certain, of course. He was only using the files that Talia had created, and he was only about an hour into his work.

Talia had moved her chair beside his so that she could watch what he was doing. He hadn't let her see how to log in to his systems, but he was explaining to her how he worked without creating yet another trail.

Any normal thirteen-year-old would have lost interest within fifteen minutes. But Talia appeared to be fascinated-and not just because she was watching him use the forbidden computer system.

She had a knack for this work, and an interest in it that hadn't been tapped-at least, not by him, and certainly not by Rhonda. From everything he could gather, his ex-wife had discouraged her daughter's interest in computers, patterns, and systems, probably because it all reminded Rhonda too much of Flint.

Or maybe he was giving himself too much credit. Maybe Talia's growing expertise in hunting out information had terrified her mother. Since Rhonda had lied about everything, she probably had been afraid that her daughter would uncover some kind of anomaly, and then start asking the wrong questions.

Now Talia was asking the questions of Flint. And he really didn't have a lot of answers. So it felt good to explain how to dig without leaving a trail.

He was about to switch to a new screen, going into the history files for the Havos family, when one of his links cheeped.

He stopped and shrouded the screen in front of him.

"Sorry, Talia," he said. "I'm getting a personal communication."

She glared at him, then stood and walked across the room. He didn't move the contact onto one of his screens. Instead he instructed the link to place the image in front of his vision. He would use the privacy function.

He expected to hear from a potential client. That was usually how these messages found their way into his office.

Instead, Van Alen appeared across his vision.

She was wearing all black except for a very ugly pair of half-gla.s.ses that were supposed to be some kind of accessory. They made her face seem too round.

She leaned too close to the screen she was using to communicate with him.

"Miles, we have a serious problem." She wasn't using a personal link. She was actually talking to him through a screen somewhere. He could see a wall and artwork behind her. She was using the system at her a.s.sistant's desk.

"Brace yourself," she said. "Ki Bowles is dead."

What? He almost spoke out loud. He must have made a noise because Talia looked over her shoulder at him. He smiled at her and turned slightly in his chair. He almost spoke out loud. He must have made a noise because Talia looked over her shoulder at him. He smiled at her and turned slightly in his chair. How do you know this? How do you know this?

"It's complicated," Van Alen said. "Get down here. The police will be here shortly." I'm not talking to the police I'm not talking to the police, Flint sent.

Van Alen looked over her shoulder, as if she was worried that someone was watching. Then she glanced at him again. "You won't have to unless you want to. You're going to be coming in as one of my clients, and I'll have to take the meeting. I've already put you on the books." Maybe I should wait Maybe I should wait, he sent. "I don't think so. The news hasn't been released yet. When it is, our hands might be tied. So get down here. Now."

She winked out of his vision. He blinked a few times. He wasn't used to being told what to do by anyone. That hadn't happened since he quit the force years ago.