Critical Point Read online

  “Leave the crimes to the cops. This is a pea-brained enough concept for everyone else in this fucking world to get, but no, the way you teach your kids is to run around hiring PIs, making trouble. So here’s how this works. I smell any one of you near this case—and that includes you and you”—he pointed a blunt finger at Tabitha and then at me—“and I drop the hammer on every fucking one of you. And we all know some of you can’t afford another nasty little mark.”

  He settled back, weight on his heels, and let his words sink in, taking the time to pull a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.

  “Please don’t smoke in here,” Diego said.

  Sikorsky didn’t pause, lighting up and puffing out a few breaths at the ceiling. Then he walked over to Diego and stood very close, so his cigarette ash dusted the other man’s socks. “It’s hard being a single parent,” he said. “You can’t keep track of them all the time, can you? Especially with so many of the darling little monkeys.”

  Diego didn’t react.

  “Your youngest two are still under eighteen, aren’t they? It would be a shame if Child Protective Services felt the need to step in.”

  There was a muffled squeal and shuffle as Tabitha tried to say something and the twins held her back.

  “Keep a leash on ’em,” Sikorsky ordered flatly. He lumbered past them, back to the door, and then turned to stab his cigarette at the whole family. “I’ll be watching. Any of you puts a toe out of line, you’ll regret it.”

  Then he slammed the door behind him so hard that the frame rattled and one of the pictures fell off the wall.

  “You—you twitterpated imbecile!” Tabitha shouted after him. I didn’t think she knew what all of those words meant.

  Juwon was crying silently, his face half-turned away as though embarrassed.

  “I’m not going to let that man harm any of you,” Diego said, with icy calm. He twitched his head at the twins, toward Tabitha, and went to put an arm around Juwon. “Come with me, son.” The two of them left the room.

  Matti knelt on the couch so he was more on eye level with Tabitha. “Hey, sis. Ain’t no way that, uh, that twitterpated birdbrain will hurt this family, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Roy said. “I don’t care if he’s a cop. It’s all hot air. Matti and I are ’mancipated anyway, so what’s he gonna do, say you have to live with us instead of Papá? Big deal. We’d let you have ice cream every night and no curfew.”

  “Cops can do things,” Tabitha said. “You know they can. And he’s trying to keep Dad missing, and he’s going to arrest us if we try to look, and I hate feeling so helpless!” She punched the arm of the couch.

  The twins were probably trying to comfort her, but she was more right than they were.

  “I’m not going to let Arthur stay missing,” I said. I meant the words to be factual, but they came out like I wanted to crush them into gravel.

  They all looked over at me.

  “Sikorsky can come after me all he wants. I don’t care. I’ll come after him right back.” The last thing I needed here was another fucking complication. If Sikorsky and his sadistic melodrama got in my way, well, I had a couple of choice solutions for that.

  Rio reappeared in the room. “He is gone.”

  The tension in the house softened, but only slightly. Anxiety still blanketed the kids. Matti was rubbing Tabitha’s back in slow circles while she avoided his eyes.

  “Police can be shitty,” I said to them, trying to make it a comforting declaration. “But, look. Sikorsky doesn’t suspect any of you, not for real. Tabitha’s right—if he really intended to throw down against your family, he could’ve done a lot worse. The good news is, he didn’t. He’s either got other suspects or he’s not looking to solve the case, and I’d bet on the latter. Stay out of his way, leave it to us, and we’ll bring your dad home safe.”

  Tabitha gave me a forced nod, her head down and her hands still closed into fists.

  My mobile buzzed.

  I didn’t recognize the number. I took a steadying breath and picked up, trying to backtrack who knew this phone. It was the one out of Pilar’s car, so unless she’d given someone the number in advance, that limited it only to—

  “Ms. Wells, it’s Willow,” said Willow Grace’s voice. “The police have taken your friends into custody.”

  fifteen

  “WE’RE OKAY, we’re okay,” Pilar kept assuring me over the phone, so many times it didn’t seem likely at all. “They’re just investigating, right? They asked me some questions and checked my alibis, but they didn’t try to railroad me or anything…”

  “Don’t be so naïve,” I snapped. She had far too much faith in the system. “What about Checker?”

  “He—um—he’s being held. I mean, he kind of lost his temper when they said they were taking us in, because the delay and all, and—well, I think they might have suspected him already. But they’re not going to have any evidence, right?”

  “They what? How the hell is he a suspect?”

  “His history with the bomb guy is on the record. He almost went to prison for something D.J. did, Cas. As an accessory. It was like almost a decade ago. I—I didn’t know.”

  None of us had known. None of us had known because Checker hadn’t said a damn word about it. Neither had Diego, and he sure as hell knew.

  Now the authorities had at least two more explosive crime scenes that were both linked to Checker’s business partner’s disappearance. Both of them, as we ourselves had discovered, with D.J.’s signature.

  Of course they suspected Checker. How could they not? How had Checker not realized they would? How had he not told us?

  Someone touched my arm. Diego. He had a cell phone to his ear, and he reached out his hand for mine. I was surprised enough that I handed it to him without demanding to know why.

  “Mija, what station are you at?” he asked Pilar. After listening for a moment, he said, “No, no, no. That won’t happen. I’m calling Elisa. She’ll send someone in her firm till she can get here. Oh—Lisie?” he said into the other phone as someone picked up. “I’ll call if she needs more information,” he added to Pilar, and handed the phone back to me before moving away to continue the conversation with his eldest daughter. Elisa was the lawyer, I thought I remembered.

  “Cas?” Pilar said. “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah.” I felt numb.

  “Checker didn’t want us to call at all, because he didn’t want anything distracting you from Arthur. Diego’s right, though, that won’t happen because we’ll handle this legally. You and Willow Grace need to keep on with the search, and—and I do too. They haven’t filed any official charges yet—they’re just questioning him—Elisa will be able to protect him; I know she will. And at least he’s not in danger here.” She said it like she was trying to convince herself.

  She didn’t know Arthur had old police enemies still nursing grudges. I’d gathered from Sikorsky that most of the kids had trouble in their pasts—if Arthur had helped get Checker off the hook a decade ago, the fact that Checker had never legally become part of the family wasn’t going to stop a resentful cop from throwing the book at him.

  And short of breaking Checker out of prison, I couldn’t think of one single thing I could do about it. Fuck.

  Except—I could rescue Arthur. If we got Arthur back, safe and whole, that would go a long way toward getting Checker out of the crosshairs of the law.

  Christ, it would be so much easier if I could just break into the police station and bust him out. But unlike me, Checker had a life. I wasn’t sure he’d regard being rescued only to go off the grid as significantly better than prison.

  I had a life, shivered the dead woman in my head.

  “Cas,” Rio said by my ear.

  I shook myself. I couldn’t tell if he’d noticed the lapse. The last thing I needed was Rio dragging me back to Simon for brain help.

  “We need to focus,” I said.

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Pilar fr
om the phone, reminding me I was still on the line with her.

  I tried to gather my thoughts.

  “You and Willow Grace come here,” I said after a moment. I was guessing Checker’s machines were automatically locked now, and the cops might very well be coming to execute a search warrant on the place. Without the additional computing power—or our computing expert—it didn’t make sense for us to split locations.

  I tried not to feel like we were deserting Checker.

  I hung up the phone and turned to Rio to ask for a status report on his search, but someone tugged at my sleeve.

  Fucking Tabitha.

  “Is Checker okay?” she asked. She sounded like she was about to cry.

  “Go ask—I don’t know. Your dad or your sister,” I said shortly, waving a hand after Diego.

  Or your sister, chittered the voices in my head. Usually being a day late on my sessions with Simon wouldn’t have shoved me to teeter so far on the edge. But with old memories chipping at my psyche …

  I just needed to hold on. Long enough to get Arthur back. Then my brain could go to hell.

  Tabitha still hadn’t moved, staring at me with glassily anxious eyes.

  “Beat it!” I yelled.

  She scrambled away and vanished.

  “Hey,” someone said.

  I turned. It was Matti, the Black twin with the dreads. “Don’t talk to our sister that way,” he said, poised on his toes like he wanted to fight me.

  “This is all shitty,” Roy said beside him. “It’s shitty for all of us. But we don’t stand for that sort of thing, you hear? Not ever.”

  I almost wanted to laugh in their faces. They were—what, standing up to me? What the hell kind of a thing was that?

  They continued to stare at me, balanced in defiance like they expected me to take a swing at them.

  Fight—I saw the man from the wellness center, with the mask of his old face, standing like a referee between me and a blurred opponent. An anticipatory grin slashed that face, and he brought his hand down between us with a shout. I felt myself surge forward—

  “Cas,” Rio said, blinking me back to a single reality.

  “Get out,” I ordered the twins. They glanced at each other, and Matti visibly swallowed, rocking back from me a few inches. “Now,” I said.

  They left.

  Finally alone with Rio, I slumped into one of the dining chairs and let my head hang down.

  You’re never alone, sang Valarmathi, from the depths of my brain where she’d been banished. Or you’re always alone. Whichever is the greater hell.

  “Cas.” Rio had pulled up a chair next to me. “Cas. Keep yourself here.”

  I took a deep breath. “They. Are fucking. Overwhelming.”

  “I can keep them away, if it aids you,” Rio said.

  Nobody can keep them away, added the dead woman. They’ll find you wherever you go.

  This was fucked up. I could face down armies, and couldn’t handle four kids and their dad without starting to crumble? I even liked children, usually. But this was … a lot of them. And right when I needed to have zero distractions, with Arthur still missing and kidnapped, and now Checker locked in an interrogation room and all the enemies in the shadows we still couldn’t track down—

  I squeezed my malfunctioning brain in a death grip and pushed myself up to standing.

  “Thanks,” I said to Rio. “Now, tell me where you’re at. We need to get Arthur back right fucking yesterday.”

  Then if Valarmathi wanted to take me down with her, she could have me.

  * * *

  PILAR, WILLOW Grace, Rio, and I had redoubled our efforts viciously against the four laptops on the dining table. I’d kept an eye on Rio when he met Willow, but he hadn’t seemed perturbed—not that he ever did. But he hadn’t said anything to me about her, which I took to mean that he agreed she was an unlikely threat.

  I tried to put that all out of my head and concentrate.

  Willow Grace did seem to be fully on board now. She’d made notes and lists for the rest of us regarding everyone she could think of who might have had any argument with Teplova. The list was long, and Pilar had taken over cross-referencing it against the doctor’s more hidden research files. Meanwhile, I’d stopped trying to direct my search and skimmed instead, trying to let my brain relax and find those patterns it was so good at. My fingers fiddled with some of the clutter the family had left on the table as I worked—pens, notepads, a 3-D puzzle that it took me three distracted seconds to fit together—and I did my best to run the data through my head plain, with no bias, inputs seeking a natural organization.

  This time, miraculously, only a few minutes after the other women had arrived and we’d all sat down, an anomaly blazed out of the data with the brightness of a wildfire.

  I stiffened in my chair, zeroing in on where the pattern matching had flared with its screaming mismatch. The directory I’d just opened … I went back up in the file tree. Went back down.

  “What is it, Cas?” Rio said.

  “Something changed.” My memory, sadly, was far from eidetic, but my brain had fit the directory structure into a numerical tree, and now … it was a different tree.

  But I couldn’t see how.

  “Rio,” I said. “Go into the directory labeled seventeen-dash-R-seven-three-N. Tell me what you see.”

  A second’s pause as he did what I asked. “You are correct, Cas. One more file is here than previously.”

  “You can tell that?” Willow Grace said. She looked disturbed by our abilities. I didn’t bother telling her that Rio’s, at least, was human, either genetic or trained.

  “Can you tell which one wasn’t there before?” I said.

  “I had not been through this part of the data yet, so I am unsure.”

  “Maybe your friend unlocked more hidden files,” Willow Grace said.

  “She could be right,” Pilar put in. Her fingers were moving on the keyboard almost as fast as Checker’s did. “Everything in this directory’s marked as not being touched since months ago. Maybe one was invisible and Checker did something—he’s done that a few times already. He might not even have realized.”

  With no way to ask him.

  “Everyone on this folder,” I said.

  Rio found the file we sought almost immediately. “Cas, I believe this document to be real estate holdings.”

  I switched to the one he was looking at. He must have recognized the format in some way, because the whole thing was in code—code that shifted and broke apart before my eyes, transforming itself. I pulled up a text editor and started typing a translation as fast as I could read it.

  “There,” Pilar said, pointing over my shoulder. The name listed on the holding by her finger was “Dick Jizzy.”

  D.J. did have an obscene sense of humor, I remembered.

  “I’ll map the address,” Pilar said, diving back to her own screen.

  So it was D.J. who’d been trampling through Teplova’s files. Confirmation that he was one of the people running this operation, not just a mercenary goon. The picture was starting to coalesce—somehow he had found out about Teplova’s thorniest thought experiments, and he’d violently stolen their magic for himself. Along with, eventually, the doctor’s life.

  Until Arthur got in his way.

  But a tightness in my chest eased, one I hadn’t even noticed building, and new energy pushed back my fatigue—because finally, we had an actual location I could storm with a gun. A solid lead.

  Or a trap. But traps could be leads too.

  “This is weird,” Pilar broke into my thoughts. “The address, it’s coming up as a mission.”

  “A mission to do what?” I said.

  “No, a mission, as in, the historical landmark building type. There are a whole bunch of missions around SoCal—most of them are tourist attractions. They’re from when people came out here to, um, be missionaries and stuff? I think we went to one on some school trip when I was a kid.”

  “Yo
u’re saying D.J. owns a historical landmark?” Or Teplova, or some shell corporation, depending on how D.J. had mixed things up.

  “The Internet says this particular one is closed to the public,” Pilar continued rapidly as she keyed up more information. “For renovations, or something, though it’s not clear whether they’re actually renovating it to reopen it or whether it’s closed permanently. But the Internet also seems to think all the California missions are owned by either the state or the Catholic Church, so I don’t know how…”

  “Unless this isn’t a site D.J. owns, only one he uses,” I said. “Either with or without permission—it’s not like there isn’t rampant corruption in either the government or the Catholic Chur—”

  I cut myself off with a sidelong glance at Rio.

  “A sin becomes all the graver when committed by those in the ministry,” he said.

  “Right.” I stood. “Well, we’re not taking on the Church or the government even if it turns out one of them’s involved. I’ll go in, check it out, pull Arthur if he’s there or find whatever clues I can if he isn’t. That’s it.” I pointed at Rio. “Much as I’d love to have backup, you’d better stay here.”

  Just in case D.J. came while I was gone.

  “Unless you think I’d be a liability, I’ll come,” Pilar said. She’d stood as well.

  I squinted at her. I could use an extra gun, but … “I don’t know how this is going to play out,” I said. “D.J. might collapse the place on top of us. This could be a suicide mission.”

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you.” She swallowed, and her eyes darted around to Rio before returning to me. She straightened as if bracing herself. “I told you before how I signed up for tactical training. I didn’t tell you I still went. I knew I was going to quit, so I paid for it myself, but I went. And I’ve kept training.”

  “So?” I’d already seen that Pilar could acquit herself well in the field; I didn’t care how she had gotten there.

  “So, I kept telling myself it was just in case. Just in case something happened. Well, this is … this is the thing happening. This is the just in case. If I can help, I can’t stay home.”