And Sometimes I Wonder About You

15

From the hole end of the long aisle I could see that my office door was closed, the way I’d left it earlier that evening; there was no way to tell if it was still locked. I walked down there, checking the cubicles as I went. Twill’s space wasn’t visibly desecrated. Only the cubicle that held the office computer system seemed to be out of the normal. There were papers on the floor and one of our heavy-duty USB memory devices connected to its side.

Before checking out the mainframe specially built for me by Bug Bateman, I went to test my office door. It was still locked but somebody had used some kind of lever, probably a crowbar, trying to pop the mechanism there. My personal door was almost as tough as the one they circumnavigated getting into the inner sanctum, and they’d most likely used all the explosives — or maybe they were trying to make a space for more fireworks.

Looking back down the aisle at the captain and his pickup army of cops, I imagined the chain of events. Men, most likely three or four of them, came and blew out the front door to the suite then went right to work on the wall. Two or three of them came through, leaving one standing guard, probably just inside the hole they made. One of the men went to the computer and the others went to work on my office door. But Hector was on his rounds. Maybe he heard the explosion or the pounding; maybe Seko did their job right and called Rich Berenson after alerting me. When Hector walked in, the guardian shot him, yelled for his accomplices, and then they all ran.

Maybe they went down the stairs or hijacked the freight elevator.

“Let’s see what happened,” Kit said to me.

For a moment I thought he wanted to look inside my head but then I remembered.

It took me and Sergeant Dalton to pull the warped office door open. We all got behind my desk and I turned on the monitor system in the bottom drawer of my desk. Whenever someone enters the front door of the reception area three cameras come on for ninety seconds. The first few frames were smoke-filled but then the three intruders appeared through the haze. They wore face masks, of course, and gloves. Before the minute and a half was up they’d started beating on the wall with two oversized sledgehammers.

“They knew what they were doing,” Kit said. “They knew you pretty good, LT.”

I didn’t reply because whatever I said would have only been redundant.

“What did they want?” Dalton asked.

“Information,” Kit and I said together.

“They tried to download the computer files.” I was gesturing at the big memory stick they’d attached to my Bug-special computer.

“Is that your device?” Kit asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. Hector probably came in and the sentry shot him. The office door was givin’ ’em problems and the system wouldn’t cooperate. They knew a lot but they didn’t know that my files are downloaded every night, erasing whatever was held in the temporary files. They realized it was useless and just ran, just ran.”

“Who was it?” Kit asked me.

“You saw ’em, man. They had masks and shit. How’m I gonna know who it was?” I was that taciturn teenager living on the street again.

“What are you working on?”

“I don’t have a job right now.”

“You still say that wasn’t you smashing Alexander Lett’s head into that wall?” Kit suggested.

“It ain’t him.”

“He checked himself out of the hospital.”

I looked Kit in the eye so that his wetware lie detector had full access.

I said very clearly, “It ain’t him.”

“What about Twill?” Kit asked.

“He’s out workin’ with some girl he knew in high school. Her boyfriend changed his phone number and he’s lookin’ for the new one,” I said but I was wondering about Twill too.

“It’s a murder,” Kit told me. “We’ve got to do this by the numbers.”

“I know.”

My father and I got to the Tesla just after midnight. It was 4:00 in the morning before the police finished their questions. They didn’t take me down to some precinct because I hadn’t witnessed the crime firsthand. I answered their battery of questions four or five times, all the while Kit staring at me, searching for the lie. But I passed and the coroner’s men came. Hector was taken to the morgue and Rich Berenson was saddled with the unenviable task of calling the young man’s wife. Better him than the cops.

While all of this was happening the forensics team came through dusting and vacuuming, photographing, crawling through, and in other ways examining the crime scene.

They left admonishing me not to touch anything before forensics came in later.

After that I lifted the front door and wedged it into the hole, went down to my office, and sat.

When the phone rang I knew it was Aura.

“Are you all right?” she asked me.

“Fine.”

“Do you need me to come down?”

“No.”

“Are you okay, Leonid?”

“Not quite right yet but I intend to be.”

—

It wasn’t until about 6:00 that I signed on to my personal computer. The first thing I looked up was the inmate list for the supermax Indiana prison where my brother was slated to spend the greater portion of the rest of his life. Most systems couldn’t get that kind of information but Bug had hacked every important database in the United States and then some. He let me use his access because I was the man, with Iran Shelfly’s help, who had turned him from a blob into an Adonis.

My father said that Nikita was no longer in prison. My computer couldn’t tell me who decided to break down my doors but at least I could see where my brother had gone.

But there I failed too.

There was no record of Nikita McGill ever being incarcerated there or anywhere else in the federal system of prisons. When I looked deeply enough I found a death certificate that was issued a year before the last time my brother and I had talked. He died in Columbus, Ohio, the obituary said.

A homeless man identified as Nikita Angus McGill died of coronary complications at Sutter Street Homeless Center leaving no family.

“Coincidence” is a word that had been removed from the detective’s lexicon. Maybe Marella was just a lucky happenstance. Maybe my father ringing the doorbell when I was on the phone with her was a mere fluke. But when a convicted criminal disappears from prison records and a dead man decorates my front hall — that had to mean something, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what that something was.

It wasn’t until after 7:00, after Mardi called on my cell phone and I went out to reception to let her in, it wasn’t until then that I remembered Hiram Stent.