Zero Sum Game

Chapter 11

Having seen enough of Checker’s data to give Tresting the benefit of the doubt on whether he was stark raving mad—not to mention feeling much more worried about this case and what I’d stumbled into—I elected to get a few hours’ sleep while we waited on Checker’s intel.

“I think I’ll take a turn on your couch,” I told Tresting. I wanted to be here for any updates.

“Sure thing,” said the PI. “I gotta make some calls anyway.”

“How were my programs?” asked Checker as I stood up, a hint of challenge in his voice. “Fun reads? I strive for elegance.”

I pretended he wasn’t provoking me. “Yeah, impressive. Markov chain Monte Carlo, smart way of doing it.”

Both men stared. Checker’s jaw had dropped open slightly. “Cas Russell, your hotness level just went up by about thirty percent,” he said finally.

Score one for Cas, I thought. “I read statistics papers in my spare time. Hey, Tresting, where’s your loo?”

He pointed, still speechless.

I used my moment of privacy to text Rio an abbreviated update, sending him the office park address Checker had tracked Dawna to and a quick heads up about our plan to go in. When I came back out, Checker and Tresting were deep in quiet conversation. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard them switch topics when I reentered the room, and I hoped they had been talking about me. It’s satisfying when I make people nervous.

I stretched out on Tresting’s couch, my hand under my jacket comfortably near my gun, and had a split-second to register that my headache had started to come back before I was asleep.

I woke to a shouting match.

Full daylight streamed around the office’s still-closed blinds. The monitors of Tresting’s computer were dark; instead, he was standing behind his desk having a vociferous argument with a short, stocky woman I’d never seen before. She had a round face I might have called cherubic if her eyes hadn’t been blazing with anger, and she was quite well-kept, with neatly styled dark hair, impeccable makeup, and a coat I recognized as “expensive.” I had a hard time guessing her age; I figured it as late-forties-but-looks-younger.

I sat up and rolled my neck, embarrassed I hadn’t woken when she’d come in—usually I’m a light sleeper. But then, usually I haven’t gone two days without rest.

“I pay you to keep me updated!” the woman was shouting.

“That’s what I’m doing now, Doc,” Tresting answered, obviously trying to keep his cool.

“You found her and then you lost her! You knew where she was and instead you go chasing off after—”

“That ain’t what—” Tresting tried to cut in.

“She killed my husband!” she cried.

Oh. Leena Kingsley. “I thought you were supposed to be a diplomat,” I said without thinking.

Kingsley spun to glare at me with the full weight of her attention, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t lurch back a few inches from the fury radiating off her. I remembered belatedly that she’d seen her whole Foreign Service career come tumbling down in flames. Oops.

Kingsley rounded back on Tresting. “And as for bringing in someone else—”

“She’s another professional who had information—”

Nice of him to put that spin on it.

“California law expressly prohibits a private investigator from sharing any information related to a case without prior consent of the client!” Kingsley snapped.

“California law also prohibits PIs from trespassing on private property, or drawing firearms on unarmed citizens, or pretending to be anything other than a PI to get information,” Tresting said, crossing his arms. “Don’t believe you’ve expressed any displeasure with me before.”

I hadn’t known those laws. Wow, Arthur Tresting was one naughty PI.

“They killed Reg,” Kingsley spat, her voice trembling with fury. “Try to remember that. It may not be personal for you, but finding out what happened is the single most important thing in the world to me. Have you ever loved anyone, Mr. Tresting? If so, try to put yourself in my shoes.”

She spun on her heel and stalked out of the office. Tresting slumped into his chair, his head sagging.

I thought Kingsley was being a bit hard on the poor man. It was obvious to me he’d been driving himself into the ground investigating this. “Good thing you didn’t tell her you spilled about her case while we were pointing guns at each other,” I said.

“Shouldn’t have at all, really,” he admitted. “Everything’s gone upside down and backwards. The doc, too. First time I met her, she was the soul of diplomacy, thought I’d never see anything disturb that poise. And now she’s…”

“Unhinged?”

“It’s been a trying case,” he said.

“She’s very…dedicated,” I offered.

“That ain’t a tenth of it. You know, we both started getting death threats, anonymous, after this whole thing started—not sure if I should be insulted no one’s tried to follow through, by the by—and she always laughed. Said if someone killed her, they might start taking her husband’s death seriously.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Some guy even threatened her son once. She got him a bodyguard and didn’t look back.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” Tresting leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “She’s a trip. Can’t even say she’s the craziest client I ever had, neither, though this is by far the craziest case. Glamorous life of a private eye, huh?”

“Speaking of, what does a PI license let you do?” I asked, curious.

“Huh? Well…loiter.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

I felt a strong urge to snicker.

“Though sometimes people see the license and think they have to answer questions,” Tresting amended. “Authority figure and all that.”

“That’s why I have a fake one,” I said.

“I didn’t hear that.”

I went to use the washroom, and took the time to splash water on my face and rinse out my mouth. When I returned, Tresting’s monitors were back on and he was talking to Checker. “Good timing, Russell,” he said.

“I think I’ve narrowed down your search,” Checker told me. “It fronts as a travel agency, which makes a good cover for tons of international calls. But the security on their intranets is ridiculously intense. It’s—”

“Did you crack it?” I interrupted.

He twitched. “I will. A little more time—”

“We know it’s the right office, though?”

“Statistically, the suspicious activity—”

“Yes,” said Tresting, over Checker’s annoyed squawk at being interrupted again. “That’s his way of saying yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

“I feel appreciated,” grumped Checker.

“Thank you,” I said to him with sweet sarcasm, and turned back to Tresting. “Now let’s go.”

Checker gave us a hearty middle finger and cut the connection.

“He’ll be standing by for when we get in,” Tresting assured me. “In case we can get him remote access. Shall we?”

“Can you get him to cut the security cameras for us first?” I wasn’t likely to forget how easily Checker had been able to find Dawna and me on the Santa Monica footage.

“Asked already. For some reason the building security system is down today. Been down for the last few hours.”

I studied his grim face. “You think they have something going down?”

“Only one way to find out. Mind giving me my gun back?”

Tresting drove; I sat in the passenger seat and tried to keep from fidgeting. I’d never gone into a place with someone else. It felt odd, itchy, like a variable I had no control over. I tamped down both that and my headache, which had reappeared with a dull throb as we drove—this wasn’t the time to be distracted. Fortunately, I’d had enough practice with hangovers to ignore headaches pretty easily.

Once we hit the right block, Tresting parked his badass truck on the street in favor of not being locked in a nine-dollar-per-hour garage, and we walked in the front door of the office building. An attendant in the lobby nodded at us with a mild frown—probably because we both looked like we either belonged to the same fight club or made a habit of walking into doors together—but Tresting nodded back in a friendly sort of way and went up to the directory as if he belonged there, and the attendant went back to his crossword.

We took the elevator up to the third floor, neither of us speaking, and found our way down a carpeted hallway of anonymous doors to suite 3B. I raised my eyebrows at Tresting and put a hand under my coat. We split to either side of the door and he reached out to open it.

The door handle refused to yield under his fingers. Locked.

We looked at each other. Clearly the travel agency wasn’t an active front, if potential clients couldn’t walk in. Tresting gestured for me to stay on my side of the doorway and raised a fist to knock loudly. “Building maintenance,” he called.

Nothing.

He tried again. Still nothing. I didn’t hear even a rustle of movement from inside.

I mimed kicking in the door. I’m excellent at kicking in doors. Tresting, however, held up a hand to stop me and pulled out a set of lockpicks. His way was less conspicuous, I’d give him that.

I stayed ready in case the occupants of the office could hear us and were quietly preparing. Tresting picked the lock with astonishing speed, almost as if he were inserting a key instead of some squiggly pieces of metal, and raised his eyes to nod at me. I nodded back, and he twisted the handle and pushed the door open.

My gun leapt into my hand, but I had nothing to aim it at. We stared numbly.

Someone who looked like she’d played the role of receptionist was sprawled just inside the door, her throat slit so deeply she was almost decapitated. Blood saturated the carpet in a massive, soggy pool around her.

Tresting had his weapon out, too, and we stepped into the room, covering every angle and carefully avoiding the soaked carpeting. Tresting elbowed the door shut behind him, and we crept into the office suite.

My stomach folded in on itself as we passed down the row of desks. A young, sandy-haired man at a computer had been disemboweled. The women in the next two cubicles looked like they’d tried to run. One had fallen on her front, but her head was twisted all the way around so her sightless eyes stared up at the ceiling in frozen horror.

We turned the corner and found the conference room. The blood had turned it into a grotesque modern art painting.

The men and women seated around the conference table had been older, well-dressed corporate types. All except one were tied to their chairs, cloth gags choking their corpses, the lone exception a middle-aged man with a .22-inch diameter hole in his forehead. He’d had a better fate than the rest. The mathematics arranged itself in brilliant arcing lines of red, the spatter patterns showing me exactly how they had all suffered.

I’m not squeamish, but I closed my eyes briefly.

“Here,” said Tresting’s voice, and he handed me a pair of latex gloves he pulled from a pocket. He’d found some plastic bags in a bin somewhere, too; he shook bits of shredded paper off them and put them over his boots, handing two more to me. “Forensics are good. Rather not go down for this.”

I tucked the plastic mechanically into the tops of my boots, and we cautiously approached the scene. I tried to deduce something useful from the carnage, but my mind drew a blank; I could only see parabolas of blood fountaining to end in gruesome trigonometry, infinite repetition from too many points of convergence—angles of impact, speed of slashes, over and over and over again…

I could see everything. It meant nothing.

Tresting hooked a Bluetooth over his ear. It wasn’t hard to figure out whom he was calling. He succinctly described the scene and started carefully pulling wallets from those around the conference table, reading off their IDs.

I forced myself to detach, to observe, running my eyes over the unhappy victims and trying like hell to ignore the mathematical replay, but nothing could make this scene better. I saw limbs bent in unholy directions, shallow cuts carving lurid designs in skin…one woman had been partially flayed. The stench in the heavy air clogged my nostrils, gagging me.

The brute horror here wouldn’t tell me anything useful. I escaped back into the outer offices, doing my best to avoid looking at the bodies, and attacked the cubicles, dragging open desk drawers and filing cabinets.

I needn’t have bothered. Cabinet after cabinet revealed rows of hanging file folders, telling me some paper trail had been here, but every one of them swung empty—even the paper tabs labeling the folders had been pulled. The desk drawers mocked me with more of the same. I tried the computers next—when the first one refused to start, I crawled around to the back to find the hard drive missing, the connectors still dangling. I took the time to check around the back of every computer in the place, but they were all gutted. The private offices showed much the same story except sans corpses; apparently everyone important had been in the conference room.

Bits of paper from a shredder littered the floor here and there as I moved through the suite. I eventually found the shredder in question, an industrial-strength behemoth, but the bin beneath it had been cleared out. I figured out why when I found the office kitchen.

A large metal filing cabinet had been turned on its side against the doorway, with plastic garbage bags duct taped across it to create a seal, and the impromptu levee held back a pulpy white goop that drowned the entire kitchenette to the level of my waist. The caustic odor of chemicals assaulted my senses, and I coughed and hugged one arm across my nose, blinking watering eyes. Though the tap was no longer running, rags in the sink drain showed how the place had been so easily flooded, and then some sort of mad chemical mixture had been thrown in along with…shredded paper.

Someone had wanted to be very, very, very sure no one reconstituted the data from this office. Hell, it wasn’t like most people could piece back together shredded documents in the first place; certainly no one could do it easily—except me, that is, but it seemed both egotistical and too coincidental to assume this destruction was for my benefit. Why would anyone go to so much extra trouble?

“Hey, Russell,” Tresting called.

I carefully avoided the corpses in the outer office and wound my way back to the torture chamber of a conference room. Tresting stood at the far end, examining an empty chair. “Look at this,” he said, and I stepped around to oblige him. Sprays of blood crossed the edges of the chair in multiple places, but the seat and back were clean.

“Someone was sitting here,” I said.

“Haven’t seen Dawna Polk anywhere. Could be her?”

I narrowed my eyes at the chair seat, trying to remember the measurements of Dawna’s hips. I hadn’t been paying too much attention, but I estimated, measuring in my memory. “No. This is too wide. I’m guessing a man. Or a large woman.” I squinted at the blood spatter surrounding the empty chair, the numbers spiraling to find their sources in midair, a person-shaped outline of shimmering red. “Whoever it was got tortured, too.”

“How can you tell?”

“The spray,” I answered, not wanting to go into it.

“Think our perps turned kidnappers,” said Tresting. “They wanted information—forced the vics to talk, most like while their coworkers got tortured or killed.” He reached over to the nearest woman and lifted the side of the cloth gag with a gloved finger. “Take a look.”

He was right. Blood stained the skin underneath the cloth, and nowhere near any of her own wounds. The smearing made it harder to judge, but from the angle I guessed it had come from the man across from her.

Maybe this investigative stuff was worth something after all.

I told Tresting what I’d found in the rest of the office suite. “Unless they have data on an outside server somewhere, it’s cleaned out.”

“Think we better head, then,” he said grimly. “We can keep an eye on the police investigation.”

“When do you think they’ll find it?”

“Right after we leave, when I call in a tip.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Can it, Russell,” Tresting growled. “This is too big.”

He had a point. Of course, considering what we knew of Pithica, this was probably too big for the cops, too.