Duplicate Effort Part 23

In one notable case, Bowles had told the judge: If you don't do something-imprison this guy or ask him to leave Armstrong-he'll kill me. He'll find me in some public park or some place and go after me and there won't be anything I can do about it. If you don't do something-imprison this guy or ask him to leave Armstrong-he'll kill me. He'll find me in some public park or some place and go after me and there won't be anything I can do about it.

Flint downloaded that information as well. Then he went into the deeper tier of court cases. The defamation cases, the plagiarism cases, the breach-of-contract suits. They revealed an interesting pattern: InterDome settled the defamation cases, apparently as part of its cost of doing business. It defended Bowles in the plagiarism cases, and always won.

It initiated the breach-of-contract suits itself against Bowles. She never answered in court, and the cases were dropped.

Flint would have to investigate to see if those were simply negotiation tactics for a new contract or if they were something else entirely.

"G.o.d," Talia said after their fourth plate of spaghetti-the last three having left the table untouched, "she lived a really messy life."

"Most people do," Flint said.

Although most people's lives weren't this messy. He was finding this wealth of legal information on Bowles rea.s.suring. It meant that there were so many possible causes of her death that he didn't worry quite as much about his own case anymore.

But he wasn't going to relax. Not yet.

He didn't want to let down his guard and have something awful happen to Talia.

"It seems every time we look at this stuff, there's more," Talia said.

"And we've only been looking at criminal and business cases," Flint said. "There's nothing personal yet." "I thought there wouldn't be," Talia said.

"Divorce decrees are legal doc.u.ments. So are marriage certificates, if they were issued here in Armstrong."

"Do you want me to look for those?" she asked.

He liked that better than having her dig through the history of a stalker. "Yeah. Look for any marriages, divorces, domestic partnerships, or birth records with her name on them. Then let's get a sense of her family."

"You think that's more important than some stalker?" He looked across the table at his daughter. He didn't want to tell her that most murders were simple things, caused by some trauma within the family.

"I think they could be as important as some stalker," he said. "And more than that, I think the more we know about Ki Bowles, the better off we all are."

Too bad he hadn't thought of that when he hired her.

Too bad he'd hired her at all.

34.

Maxine Van Alen was prepping her closing arguments for a child custody case involving the daughter of a Disappeared when the lights in her office flickered-and went out.

Her computer network remained up, however, giving dim light to the rest of the room. The office network was on a secondary grid, one that had pa.s.swords and locks and all kinds of protections, things for which she once thought she paid too much and now knew she hadn't paid enough.

She reached for her desk, meaning to feel her way out of the room, when the lights came back up. She stood, her hand on the desk and her heart pounding.

The lights had done that same thing two years ago when an explosion had blown a hole in the dome. But she had heard the concussion-and worse, she had felt it. It had knocked her to the ground, even though it was nowhere near her offices.

This silent flickering somehow bothered her more.

Before she called her a.s.sistant, she checked the screen that was connected to her office network. Nothing seemed different than it had before.

Which bothered her. Shouldn't it have been different? Shouldn't something have shown up when the backup system kicked in?

She pressed a chip on her wrist. Her interoffice link flared to life, chirruping as it did.

"Find me the best tech we have in the office at the moment," she said.

Then she signed off before her a.s.sistant had time to say anything.

Van Alen walked around her office, checking for other problems. Her hands were shaking, which bothered her. Usually nothing rattled her.

But this had.

She looked at the nonnetworked computers, where Flint often did his research. They remained off. She wasn't about to turn them on, not yet. Then she went to the window, and peered out at the street below.

People continued to walk by as if nothing had gone wrong. She heard no horns or sirens or screams, like she had that day the explosion had rocked the dome.

She heard nothing at all, and she should have, if other places suffered something similar. That uneasiness grew. Was this power loss unique to her building? She touched her chip again. "And send me the office manager as well as someone from maintenance. Someone human."

Maintenance had a lot of androids and bots, as well as a few college students who worked in the nonlegal areas, approved through alien student visas. She never let the aliens upstairs. They had no keys and no real knowledge of what went on up here.

She hoped.

Obadiah Mankoff, Van Alen's office manager, peeked around the raised doors. He was slender to the point of gauntness and no matter how much Van Alen fed him, he never seemed to gain weight. His hair was thinning, too. It was as if he couldn't acquire any more substance than he already had.

"No," he said, "I don't know what caused it. Give me some time and I'll figure it out." "Nothing on the public news nets?" Van Alen asked.

"Nothing that I've found. It's only been about two minutes since we had the glitch, Maxine."

He could talk to her like that because he was the most efficient employee she'd ever had. He'd worked his way up from low-level maintenance where he started ten years ago to office manager just six months before-just after Flint went through his marathon sessions of research here in the office.

Mankoff had been one of the few upper-level employees who hadn't questioned Van Alen about the man she was keeping in her office.

She had liked that discretion. Mankoff treated everything Van Alen did as normal, even if it wasn't. "I'm wondering if this is isolated to us," Van Alen said.

"Why would that be?" Mankoff asked.

Van Alen wasn't going to tell him about Bowles or the research or Flint's fears for all of their safety. But she was going to make sure Mankoff took this little light flicker seriously.

"Send someone around the neighborhood to see if the other buildings had an issue," Van Alen said. "And make sure that tech gets here."

"Did something malfunction?" Mankoff asked.

"That's the point. Something didn't malfunction at all," Van Alen said. "Didn't you notice? The office network didn't go down at all."

"It's on a separate grid," Mankoff said.

"Within the building," Van Alen said. "If the power went out in the neighborhood, everything should have shifted-even momentarily-to backup energy."

Mankoff's mouth opened slightly. He clearly hadn't thought of that. He'd been dealing with other things-probably panicked employees who, like Van Alen, had flashed back on the dome explosion.

"That is odd," he said. "I'll see what I can find." "I want someone good with networks now," Van Alen said. "Our best went out to lunch before the glitch," Mankoff said. "Then send our second best and have our best come here when he gets back."

"All right." Mankoff slid out the door, hurrying away, obviously trying to get everything done as fast as Van Alen wanted it.

She went back to the window. Maybe she should contact Flint. But he had enough troubles with that daughter of his, and conducting what he thought was a necessary investigation of Bowles.

Still, Flint knew computers and networks and systems better than anyone Van Alen had ever met. And he did ask her to tell him if something went wrong.

She sat down behind her desk and used her personal link to contact Miles Flint.

35.

Nyquist pulled up outside Paloma's apartment building, using one of two emergency vehicle s.p.a.ces. He hit the car's police code, so that any pa.s.sing police vehicle knew he had the right to park here, and then he shut off the engine.

Once, the buildings in this exclusive section of Armstrong had violated city codes by b.u.t.ting up against the dome. But rich people like Paloma loved the view. The dome side of the apartments overlooked the Moonscape, as if they were part of the dome itself.

Nyquist had nearly died here.

This was the first time he had come back.

He leaned back in his seat, trying to ignore the twisting feeling in his stomach. Flint had brought him back here. Flint and his hints that Ki Bowles's murder was somehow related to the murders of Paloma and Charles Hawke, aka Claudius Wagner.

Nyquist's stomach twisted even more.

He tried not to think about those last hours in this building. Sometimes he dreamed about them, though.

He'd been interviewing Claudius Wagner. Wagner had been a tall, athletic man with a mane of silver hair. He had a patrician look, and he'd used it, staring down his hawklike nose at Nyquist. Nyquist had turned to go, and then he'd seen Wagner near the door, shaking his right arm as if it were on fire. The man didn't scream, even though the pain had to be intense.

For instead of skin, he had a Bixian a.s.sa.s.sin wrapped around the bone. Bixian a.s.sa.s.sins looked like a rope, except when they were killing. Then they turned into a whirling machine. Their scales flared, acting like individual knives, severing the skin and arteries with ease.

In his dreams, that whirling thing would detach from Wagner's arm and twirl toward Nyquist. And then he would force himself to wake up, his heart pounding.

His heart was pounding now.

But there was more than the dream. He needed to remember the case.

Once Nyquist became a victim of the same a.s.sa.s.sins that had killed Wagner, Gumiela had taken Nyquist off the case. At the time, he hadn't cared. He didn't want to think about it.

Instead, he wanted to concentrate on getting well.

So Gumiela had a.s.signed a junior detective to the case, and that fact alone proved to Nyquist that Gumiela didn't want to follow where the trail led-to the head of WSX.

Initially, he'd been called to this place to investigate Paloma's death. It had taken him some time to realize that what he and the techs thought was a biochemical goo was the remains of a Bixian a.s.sa.s.sin. At that point, he also didn't know that the a.s.sa.s.sins worked in pairs.

Paloma had managed to kill one of them before the other killed her.

He shuddered. He'd managed to kill the a.s.sa.s.sin that had been attacking Wagner.

DeRicci told him that he eventually killed the other as well.

He remembered the fight in flashes. His laser pistol, the a.s.sa.s.sin being smaller than he expected, the pain, the pain, the pain, and trying to think through it, realizing if he didn't think through it he would be dead, then thinking he was dead, and DeRicci leaning over him, promising he would be all right in that voice people used when they didn't believe what they were saying, and then the hospital and more pain. . . .

He took a breath. He hated thinking about this. But if he was going to follow the leads in the Bowles case, he had to.

Initially, he had suspected Flint in Paloma's death. Paloma had been Flint's mentor and she had left everything to him in her will. Including some incriminating files from Wagner, Stuart, and Xendor, Ltd. Justinian Wagner had come to Nyquist, pretending an interest in finding his mother's killer, when really he had wanted those files.

Bowles had been part of that investigation, too. She had talked to Flint the morning that Paloma had died. Nyquist had found that strange because he believed that Flint and Bowles hated each other. Had they been lying to Nyquist during the Paloma murder investigation? And if so, why? He rubbed his fingers across the bridge of his nose, feeling the raised tissue from the thin, almost invisible scars.

Justinian Wagner had wanted files. Flint had inherited them.

When Nyquist had awakened in the hospital, he had asked about the case, particularly Wagner. Gumiela had said there was no evidence tying Justinian Wagner to his parents' murder, although they would continue looking into it.

And Flint had said . . . Flint had said . . . What?

Nyquist frowned. He had trouble remembering this, like he couldn't remember the beginning of the attack.

Flint had said . . . That he had given the files to Justinian Wagner. That he hadn't even looked at them. And Nyquist, not willing to think about the case anymore, had taken Flint's words at face value. Even though Flint had lied to him before in other cases.

Now Ki Bowles was dead because she had confidential information. Flint had said he knew about that information.

Nyquist had understood during the conversation-even though it was all innuendo-that Flint had given Bowles the information that had jump-started her reporting, even hiring bodyguards to protect her. Was he protecting her from Justinian Wagner?

Nyquist's thumb traced the scars all over his face. They really weren't visible anymore. He'd gone through so many surgeries. But they were still there, small raised areas that the doctors a.s.sured him would disappear with a few more surgeries.

Surgeries that would have been completely unnecessary if Justinian Wagner hadn't led the Bixian a.s.sa.s.sins to his parents.

Something about that . . . Something about that day . . .

Nyquist made himself look at the building. Inside that building in one of the cheaper apartments, without a dome view, on a floor near Paloma's, he had nearly died.

But he'd been there for a reason, and that reason had not been to save Claudius Wagner's life. It had been to talk with Claudius Wagner.

About files?

About a.s.sa.s.sins?

About the reasons Paloma died?

What had he said?

Nyquist closed his eyes. His head hurt. He hadn't allowed himself to remember this before, and he needed to.