Critical Point Read online

  Tabitha tossed her head. “When I want to be.”

  Her brother elbowed her.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and scrubbed my hands through my hair. Food. I did need food.

  “Coffee,” I said. “Black and as strong as you can make it, for Rio and me both. And something high in protein.” What Checker didn’t know about me eating over his computers wouldn’t hurt him. He might even give it a pass, considering the circumstances.

  Tabitha and Juwon almost tripped over each other in their rush back into the kitchen, as if what I’d asked them for was a matter of life and death. The smell of coffee and the sizzle of breakfast frying followed a few minutes later, in between bangs and a loud argument over whether they should bother me again to find out how I wanted my eggs and whether there was a possibility I was vegetarian.

  I let them get on with it and concentrated on the computer.

  Checker reported that he’d finally gotten his hands on the police reports for both the bombing at my place and the smaller explosives at Arthur’s office, and both, he relayed with some resignation, had sported D.J.’s signature. Apparently, even bombers who were as mercurial about their explosives materials as D.J. could be tracked through the way they crimped wires, strung components, or wrapped electrical tape—law enforcement could even match tool marks and soldering style. Taken together, it was almost as unique as a written signature.

  D.J.’s involvement definitely wasn’t theoretical anymore. But law enforcement had no more intelligence than we did on his whereabouts, so Teplova’s more secret files were still far more promising for granting us some actual progress. Checker and Pilar had been steamrolling through the doctor’s hidden research with the force of a crusade.

  it’s clear someone else’s paws were all up in here, Checker scribbled in the chat window. WG agrees, not ET’s style at all, this is what we want. do ur thing

  The minute I started working my way down the directories, I could see exactly what he meant. In the easier parts of the system to access, Eva Teplova’s style had been meticulous, bordering on strict. All her research had been dated and categorized, all her file names prefixed and suffixed according to topic and chronology, with nary a text document out of place.

  The more hidden records were … not that. The structure was the ghost of the same system, but then it was as if someone had trampled through with a keyboard throwing a coked-out party all over her organizational tidiness.

  These changes, I wrote to Checker. All in the past six months?

  yuppppppppp, he responded.

  So this was not only what D.J. and any of his cohorts had been after, but they’d worked within Eva Teplova’s own computer system while they’d kept her under their thumb. Forcing her to surgically modify animals and people and then eventually murdering her.

  Maybe she’d figured out how to fight back. Maybe she’d finally been about to get the upper hand, but they’d gotten to her first.

  In any case, Checker was right. Our enemies had left muddy digital tracks through all of this. It was the best lead we had.

  Anger against Willow Grace surged in me again. She could have put us on this path hours ago.

  I shoved down the emotions and concentrated on what I knew Checker wanted from me. My math abilities made me capable of becoming a human cross-referencing machine, mentally rewriting regex on the fly as I processed the data for every new criterion. I worked sequentially, feeding in each directory and trusting my instant pattern-matching skills to do their work on the inputs. Appropriate regular expressions popped out at me from the chaos and practically yelled their usefulness. I slotted them right in and kept going.

  Checker hadn’t had instructions for Rio, other than, “Tell him what everyone else is doing and sic him on the data in whatever way he thinks he can be most helpful.” Rio had come down to join me in the interim, and I relayed the message and pointed a laptop in his direction. I had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t looking at the Teplova data pull at all, but digging into the Halberd angle, no matter how long ago Simon had said that connection might be.

  I didn’t ask.

  “Thanks for this,” I said a little awkwardly. “Looking for one guy, I know it’s not your usual beat.”

  “Arthur Tresting is a good man,” Rio said, pronouncing the word good in a way that sounded abstractly philosophical. “We walk in the light of God in seeking him.”

  In other words, as long as this case went in the direction Rio’s principles generally pointed, it made no difference to him to go along with me instead of working a different case. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

  “However, I admit to grave concern that this incident has some connection to Halberd and Pithica,” Rio went on, confirming my dread. “If this doctor involved you at their behest … one man’s life may turn out to be the smallest of our concerns.”

  “Yours, maybe,” I said. “Not mine. And the doctor didn’t involve us. She was dead when we got there.”

  Rio paused for a moment, then said, “There is no such thing as coincidence. Not when it comes to Pithica’s operations.”

  “Simon said this isn’t them. They made a deal with us, remember? Besides, Arthur was looking into D.J., not them.” I almost repeated what I’d claimed to Checker about selection bias justifying the coincidence, but something in me didn’t want to hear what Rio thought of that claim.

  As it was, his hands paused on the keyboard, and he turned slightly to face me. “I have already discovered evidence that Teplova’s current name is nothing more than a backstopped identity. I am attempting to discern when she first appeared in this role.”

  The information wasn’t unexpected. But it still made me go cold.

  I didn’t want to know who Teplova was. Of course, I couldn’t very well object under these circumstances. Just because I didn’t think that angle was our most promising approach didn’t mean it would yield nothing.

  “It is possible Pithica is attempting to make a play that is far enough unconnected to them to maintain plausible deniability,” Rio continued. “I have been investigating that possibility, and will continue to. But, Cas, regardless—tread lightly. We don’t know yet what this doctor may have left behind, and we have already encountered three creations of hers that may be beyond what you are ordinarily prepared to fight.”

  “Three?” I could only think of the panic-inducers. The dogs and their master.

  “The Australian you left with Simon,” Rio reminded me. “The one who is so forgettable. That may not seem like a threat, but I am in agreement with you that someone made him that way.”

  “The Australian,” I repeated, trying to drill his existence into my head. He also had to be the work of Teplova—beauty, trustworthiness, fear, and forgettability. She must have altered his face too, but why? “That’s two, then. And number three?”

  “This reporter you are working with, and any others like her.”

  I waved that one off. “She’s beautiful. That doesn’t seem like much of a threat either.”

  “Perhaps not. I wonder.”

  “I still seem to be able to get pissed at her just fine.” Her beauty was affecting, but not mind-altering.

  Or was it all part of the same spectrum? I rubbed my eyes. But no, I’d read enough of Teplova’s research to feel sure Willow Grace’s aesthetics were on a completely different axis, the optima chosen and pinpointed in a way that wasn’t at all correlative with what the doctor had been doing in the hidden, more dangerous records. Although … Teplova’s genius was different enough from mine—applied enough—that as easily as I could follow it, I didn’t nearly have a handle on the leaps she’d made. How she structured her matrices, the reasoning behind the estimates that smoothed her functions, why she pinned the changes to which critical points the way she had …

  I blinked on the man’s face from the wellness center—clean-cut, military haircut, even reasonably handsome. And he had induced screaming panic in me.

  Attractiveness had to
be orthogonal to the rest of it.

  Still, I suddenly wanted to introduce Rio to Willow Grace. But even when we knew we were talking to a full-strength telepath, he couldn’t always tell when their influence was in play, could he? He was immune himself, but unless I started acting wildly out of character, would he be able to give me anything more than innuendo and suspicion? And a niggling thought joined the first—how much did I still always agree with his assessments of a situation?

  In the past, I’d trusted Rio’s judgment one hundred percent. I still trusted him, but I was also no longer sure that disagreeing with him would be a sign I was compromised. The time he’d pulled a gun on Pilar …

  I didn’t like to think about it.

  Evidence. I had to follow the evidence. And that pointed toward Willow Grace being exactly who she said she was—a complicated, driven, and overly selfish person who was a mostly ethical newscaster and had been friends with Eva Teplova. Her motivations didn’t all match ours, but her enemies were our enemies, and right now, I wasn’t in a position to be choosy.

  Besides, building a nearly decade-long reputation as a recognizable journalist would have been a hell of a long con. I wasn’t planning to trust her with my darkest secrets, but neither was I going to waste time dissecting her. After this, she could go do whatever the hell she wanted—and if Rio decided to keep being suspicious, well, he could do it on his own time.

  Tabitha and Juwon came back after half an hour, juggling a pot of hot coffee and platters with way too much food. They’d apparently solved their egg dilemma by making three different kinds, along with bacon and sausage and toast. Rio and I ate over the guns and computers while Tabitha and Juwon hovered in the entrance to the kitchen as if just waiting to be ordered to do something else.

  Rio surprised me, then, by looking up at the kids. “You wish to be a resource?”

  They surged forward, expressions simultaneously hopeful and terrified.

  I’d brought four laptops in case we needed to run anything in parallel; Rio reached for a third one and placed it in front of them. “You can contribute to this process by finding particular publicly available information and organizing it in a way that is accessible and clear.”

  They nodded like their heads were about to come off. From that point on, Rio began firing off absurdly specific requests every ten minutes or so—“the Saturday train schedule between Chatsworth and LAX for May of 2009”; “a list of stores that offer delivery of grocery items to zip code 90411”; “whether the company Ocean Star Taxi has ever released a public statement about insufficient safety standards in their vehicles.”

  If Rio were someone else, I might have thought he was trying to be nice by involving them, but this was Rio. He was simply, as he’d said, using them as an administrative resource to speed his own research.

  Tabitha and Juwon quickly appropriated the fourth computer as well and applied themselves to the work with single-minded focus, only occasionally whispering consultations to each other as they completed Rio’s tasks. They must have been doing a good job, because he didn’t tell them to redo anything.

  Diego came to the door of the kitchen and watched us for a few minutes, his arms folded, before vanishing again without a word. Tabitha and Juwon were concentrating so hard, I didn’t even think they noticed. Over the next few hours, the murmur of voices reached us every so often from the kitchen, and Matti came in twice to bring us fresh pots of coffee, but he didn’t say anything. The wide grin was gone, and his expression had gone drawn and flattened, dreads hanging over his eyes.

  Rio’s surveillance system beeped in the early afternoon.

  He and I were both instantly on alert. “The last kid isn’t due home till tomorrow, is she?”

  “No,” said Rio, at the same time Tabitha and Juwon both looked up and simultaneously made nervous noises in the negative. Rio had already reached into his pocket to pull out the security screen. I took it from him, squinting.

  A man built like a bulldog was hiking up the path to the door. He was in plain clothes, but the way he moved screamed cop.

  What the ever-living fuck.

  fourteen

  “POLICE. Hide the guns,” I said to Rio, reaching across to slap all the laptops shut. The firearms on the table had disappeared along with Rio before I’d finished speaking. I knew without asking that he’d gone to take up an invisible defensive position.

  Just in case.

  Diego materialized by my elbow. “What’s happening?”

  “Cops. Did you call it in?”

  “No. Not yet. It must have been someone else.”

  I hadn’t expected him to, not with the warning he’d given me the night before about Arthur’s former colleagues. Speaking of … I held up the screen.

  “This guy anyone you know?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t elaborate.

  “Who?”

  “His name is Sikorsky. He worked with Arthur.” Diego glanced toward Tabitha and Juwon, who were still sitting wide-eyed, and Matti and Roy, who had appeared in the kitchen doorway behind them. “Kids, upstairs, now.”

  His voice was quiet, but it was the type of intense, urgent tone a person would obey and then wonder why later. The children scampered.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I demanded as they went, keeping my voice low. “What’s the deal with this guy? Excessive force? Old grudge against Arthur? Talk fast.”

  Someone pounded on the door so hard, the wall shook.

  “I believe—I think he is a criminal,” Diego said equally low. “And that Arthur knew.”

  Great. A dirty cop who knew Arthur had been sitting on evidence against him would have every incentive not to see Arthur found after such a convenient disappearance.

  The thumping knock came again, rattling the picture frames on the front wall. “Open up, Rosales. LAPD.”

  Disappearing into the shadows along with Rio probably would’ve been the smartest play for me, but a strong sense of foreboding made me decide Diego could use a visible witness. It wasn’t like even clean cops had a stellar record when it came to leaving them alone with brown men.

  I followed Diego into the foyer. He glanced behind him up the stairs to make sure all the kids were clear before settling his hand on the lock, taking a breath, and then pulling the door open.

  Sikorsky pushed inside, crowding Diego back toward the stairway. “About time, Rosales. I was this close to kicking it in, and that would be a costly fix for you, what with twenty little fosterlings or whatever you have these days.” He looked around the foyer. “Where are they? Unless after Tresting’s thuggery, you kicked them all out of the house.”

  A few muscles jumped under Diego’s skin, but he didn’t rise to a response.

  Sikorsky shoved past us into the living room, uninvited, picking up books and knickknacks and examining them with an expression of revulsion. “Guess not. More fool you. Who the hell are you?”

  He hadn’t looked around, but I was pretty sure the question was directed at me. “A friend,” I said. I pulled out the Cassie Wells ID. “I’m helping out.”

  Sikorsky swiped the fake PI license from me, read it, looked me up and down like I was a rotting piece of meat, and then tore the license in half and let the pieces flutter to the floor. “You interfere with the real cops, I’ll do a lot worse than this.”

  The threat was so theatrical, it was hard to take him seriously. “Okay.”

  “What do you want?” demanded Diego in a tight voice.

  Sikorsky spun back to face us, every movement that of a man who liked to literally throw his weight around. “I wasn’t kidding about the tykes. I know they’re here. Get them down here or I’ll start dragging them to the station.”

  “On what grounds?” Diego said.

  “On the grounds I said so, that’s what,” Sikorsky answered. “They’re growing up, ain’t they? No more getting off with wiped juvie records. Something’ll stick.”

  Diego moved subtly so he was between Sikorsky and the pat
h to the stairs.

  “What do you want with the kids?” I said.

  Sikorsky narrowed his eyes at me. Then he tossed the decorative mug he’d just picked up into the corner so it broke in two pieces and said to Diego, “Where was your youngest at approximately 3:00 p.m. yesterday?”

  My skin went cold. Tabitha had visited my erstwhile office at just about that time.

  “I’ve got witness reports,” Sikorsky said, “before you lie to me.”

  “I think I should call a lawyer,” Diego said.

  “You do that, this is a thing.” The words were a clear threat. “Don’t make it a thing, Rosales.”

  Diego folded his lips together.

  “Kids,” shouted Sikorsky, his voice a bullhorn. “Get out here or I’m arresting your father.”

  Something thumped upstairs. Sikorsky grinned, his lips peeling back from coffee-stained teeth. More thumps, and Tabitha squeezed into the room behind her dad, followed by her siblings. They stood silently.

  “Don’t answer any questions without a lawyer,” Diego said, without taking his eyes off Sikorsky. “You hear me, children? None.”

  “Hurtful, Rosales. I only want to talk to them.” Sikorsky shoved his hands in his pockets. “Here’s the deal, kids. I know one of you was at 725 Carmichael Street and then at Tresting’s cute little PI office yesterday. Crime scenes, both of ’em, which you didn’t report.”

  Nobody moved a muscle.

  “You know who the first people a cop suspects is? Family. Especially family who doesn’t report the crime. One of you cap your old man?”

  Tabitha made a high sound and then clapped a hand against her mouth.

  “You know they didn’t,” Diego said sharply. “What do you want?”

  “Why would I know that?” Sikorsky said, the words threaded with a taunt. “A leopard don’t change its stripes. But if they did have anything to do with this, I’ll find out. And in the meantime, stay the fuck out of my investigation.”

  He spat the words.