Rabbit Trick: A Mindspace Investigations Novella (2 page)

A technician blocked my view of the driver’s side as he took photos. Flashes of light interrupted the night until he moved away.

The driver’s side window was dotted with blood, thrown onto the glass from the inside. Smears in the blood, in the window, even a crack in the safety glass, maybe from her elbow. She’d fought back.

“What was her name?” I asked.

“Audrey Peeler. Officer Peeler,” Cherabino’s voice said from behind me. “Hey!” she yelled. “You done with the photos already? We need the telepath to scout it.”

The photographer bitched but finally moved. Then I was close enough to see it. Her. Audrey. For the first time.
 

Tightly-braided hair crowned her head, freckled face thrown back, hands askew. Face twisted in shock, wrenched in anger, the whites of the eyes red with blood, dark spots around them. And a long, dark red, thick line bisecting her neck, spilling dried blood down onto her shirt in irregular splotches. A thin cord in the middle of it, as transparent as fishing line, draped over the backside of the driver’s seat. A key ring, a can of pepper spray lay on the floorboards, just barely out of reach. A strap thingie on the seatbelt on the passenger’s side, an adjuster of some kind, I noticed. Not currently in use.

I sniffed. Strong smell of urine, of drying blood, stomach acid, violence and death. No pepper spray.
 

Cherabino pushed me aside, not hard, and knelt to get a better look at the woman’s hands.
 

“Her fingers are cut to hell. Maybe got them under the cord before…” She straightened, adjusted her gloves. “Well, it wasn’t enough.”
 

Blood droplets covered the entire driver’s side window and part of the back window besides, lighter – a lot lighter – in the back. She must have struggled hard to send this much of her blood flying around. But a portion of the back left seat was clear of blood. And the front passenger seat was oddly clear as well, all except for that adjuster. I didn’t know much about blood splatter, but the back seat had to be where the killer was when he was strangling her. The front seat…?
 

“Can we get on with this?” Cherabino asked. “People are waiting.”

I realized the tech working on the back seat was leaving, and no one else was coming toward the car. Huh. Cherabino’s yelling must have done the trick, even if I didn’t strictly need them to desert the scene this time.

I slowly thinned my shields, easing into Mindspace. Cherabino held out a mental “hand” impatiently.
 

I held on, keeping my hands and mind to myself, and solidified my link back to the real world.

Then I dropped into Mindspace, the real world greying out as I went deeper, and deeper, my connection with Cherabino trailing out behind me like a bright yellow cord, yellow where no yellow could be. Mindspace was cloudy tonight, wrenched by wild and strong emotions, panic and blood. I rode out the panic, the suffocating panic, pain, and despair, letting them wash over me like water from a duck’s back, and took a closer look.

Like a black hole, a small spot in front of me was quietly swallowing space around it, slowly, slowly. If I wasn’t careful I could Fall In. Find myself trapped in whatever place minds went when they died, and die myself.
 

Above me, Cherabino murmured a question, the sounds flowing quietly like a stream.
 

“Six hours,” I guessed, hoping the question was what I thought it was. “The M.E. can tell you that, probably. And yes, it was a violent death, here. She was killed here, and the killer…” I went looking for his signature, for his feelings left over in Mindspace like thin ghosts. “Her panic is strong. She didn’t know her killer. And he… it’s definitely a he. He’s very quiet. Very calm, with a sharp… a sharp something to him. I’m not sure I would know him again if you put him in front of me. Her panic is just too strong.”

I moved around that center black hole, slowly, taking care not to disturb what I was looking at. I wanted a better look at the killer, I think.

But there, on the other side of the woman’s panicked emotion-ghosts, on the other side of her death, were the emotions of another mind, someone else who’d been here, in the car. A small, terrified person whose panic had mixed in with the cop’s so that I hadn’t seen him at first.

I squelched my strong, emotional reaction as too dangerous, too destructive in Mindspace. When I was calm, I surfaced.

I opened my eyes and saw the real world.

“There was a kid,” I told Cherabino. “A kid. Maybe four, five, six years old, and he ran away, fast. He might still be here.”

Shock, concern, disbelief radiated off her in waves, but I was already rushing around the car, dodging techs and cops, following the boy’s frightened mind-trace like a bloodhound.
 

The sound of squealing tires echoed behind me, along with yelling from the cops as some pedestrian tried to get in the garage. The dog still barked, somewhere out there. And one scared little boy, hours ago, had run as fast as his small feet could have taken him, falling twice, the pain and frustration of each fall blooming like terrified flowers in the fabric of Mindspace.

I ran, half blind to the real world, distantly noting that I would look like a fool to the cops and not entirely sure I cared right now.
 

Because the killer had been this way, too, or someone had, someone calm, sharp, and annoyed. And I had to find the boy before he did.

Away from the lights, the parking garage was a dark cavern of concrete, painted lines, and forgotten cars full of shadows and emotion-ghosts. With me skimming along the surface of Mindspace, I could see assignations, drug deals, moments of worry over lost cars layered upon layered in deep, textured dark. Months of memories. Months. Far more than usual. Mindspace here was deep, and eager to learn.

In the dark, surrounded by sharp memories and the sour taste of fear, the parking deck seemed like a deadly carnival ride, something I couldn’t step off of. I was here for a kid, I told myself. And I’d see the killer coming – I’d see his mind. There was nothing to fear.

But, as a shadow moved, I knew I was kidding myself. I had to push on anyway, my heart beating too fast, my body starting at every change. Concentrate on the kid’s trail, I told myself. The kid.

The taste of his fear wandered down the line of cars in a staggering path. Here, a level below where we had been, a level down the sloping concrete into the bowels of the earth, the kid slowed.
 

Mommy!
His thoughts echoed off the cold walls.
Mommy,
it choked. The boy was afraid. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of the monster he’s just seen do… something
bad.

And the killer, growing more annoyed by the moment, followed ever after.
 

Down another ramp, this one more deserted, I felt the kid’s trail stop, next to a tangle of pipes and a control box dominating one corner of the lot. In the barely-lit shadow, the nest of pipes looked impenetrable. The killer’s trail grew thicker here, like he had stopped for a moment, for a long moment full of impatient annoyance, before he went on, before he found the elevator and his trail disappeared.

Maybe I was supposed to follow the killer, to catch this guy at any cost. But I couldn’t leave the kid be.
 

I stood in front of the pipes, let the Mindspace there sink in, until it settled into my very bones, until I felt what the boy had felt. Until the thoughts he’d left behind became my thoughts. I was tired, overwhelming tired and scared, and I’d peed myself, not like a big boy. I was cold. And I was finally, finally sleeping. A little. I wanted my blankie. I wanted my Mommy.
 

With a gentle wrench, I pulled myself away – that wasn’t Mindspace. That was the boy himself. His consciousness, asleep but strong. In the real world, I shifted around to the back of the tangle of pipes. There, in a small niche between two large pipes, way in the back, I saw a foot. A small foot.
 

The clattering of Cherabino’s shoes came from above, from the curling concrete ramp above me. A radio sputtered on her hip.

Still crouched in front of the pipes, not wanting to wake the boy, I found Cherabino. Sent one, clear thought, flavored with my mind so she couldn’t mistake it:

I found the boy. He’s hiding.

“Stay out of my head,” she said, more out of habit than conviction. Her feet sped up, coming closer.

With apologies, I pulled away.

Cherabino cursed my ancestry, then spoke into the radio: “Small child, Level Five section Four-Dee, repeat Five section Four-Dee. We need a medic.” She glanced down, still thirty feet away from me. “Maybe a shrink,” she said.

I stood awkwardly to the side and smoked, the sinuous trail of it winding up the open heart of the curling parking lot, smoke drifting in a long stream up into the darkness. The cops were clustered around the kid, the elevator, anything else they could get. I was pushed out, away from the action, standing in the cold central parking deck, even my cigarette butts ignored.

Cherabino
didn’t get ignored. She was just as much a stranger as I was in this part of the county, but she got respect. I was the expert. They’d called me in specifically. Not that it meant anything.
 

My first kid at a crime scene – a living one, anyway – and no one would let me do anything. I made a face and lit another cigarette.

Finally a uniformed woman cop carried the kid up the ramp, every line of her body filled with relief. The kid held onto her tightly, and shook. Wiggles trailed behind them.

“For gods’ sake, put the cigarette out,” he told me. “He’s a kid.”

I sighed and snubbed out the blue cigarette under my shoe. At least the little guy seemed okay.

Wiggles kept moving, concern leaking out behind him in a long trail, and Cherabino walked up behind me. She was exhausted, now that the adrenaline had passed, and cranky.
 

She worried about her knees, which hurt from crouching on the concrete trying to get the boy to trust her. And of course in the end, he’d come out for the uniformed cop, not her. Maybe the woman had looked more like his mother. But her knees hurt and she was cranky anyway.

“You could have given me one,” she said, and I had to figure out what she was talking about.

I pulled out the half-empty pack of blue cigarettes and the lighter, handed them over.
 

“Give it a minute,” I said. “Until the kid’s gone.” With the kid gone, Wiggles could deal with the smoke.

She held the pack, sighed, but didn’t light up. “Tell me about the killer,” she said. “Not the path he took – you pointed that out to the techs, I’m sure they’ll do fine. About the killer, as a person. Give me something I can use to catch this guy.”

I looked over at the clump of North DeKalb cops talking to a secondary detective over on the other side of the deck. “I’m not a cop,” I said, “but shouldn’t we be over there? With them?”

Cherabino shrugged. “They don’t trust you.” She lit a cigarette, hands sure on the lighter as if this was a completely normal statement. Maybe to her it was.

“Telepath thing?” I asked. Since the Tech Wars, when the Telepath’s Guild had stepped up to save the world – and gotten real scary to do it – a lot of the normals didn’t trust telepaths. Even seventy years later. I hoped at least this time it wasn’t personal against me, drug problem, felon, or not. I mean, they didn’t know me well enough to hate me yet.
 

She nodded, shrugged. “You were telling me about the killer. Something I can use to lock him up.”

“This isn’t your case?”

“The killer,” she said, circles under her eyes seeming to grow even deeper.

I closed my eyes to recall what I’d seen in Mindspace. Tried to tease out details that would help her. “A man. Not old, not young. Confidant. Calm. He’s killed before – he’s killed that way before. No fumbling, no worry about details. I’m not sure he saw the kid. If he did, it didn’t break the calm. He chased after the boy – to take care of witnesses, perhaps? – annoyed when he had to go farther than he expected. I didn’t get a read of any purpose other than the killing itself, though with the woman’s panic—”

“Audrey,” Cherabino corrected. “Officer Peeler’s panic. At being strangled to death. While fighting back. Tell me something that will catch this guy. What he looks like, maybe. That’d be a good start.”

I shuffled through impressions, memories. The woman hadn’t seen her killer – she’d been strangled from the back and had other things on her mind other than looking calmly in the rearview mirror. The killer hadn’t sat around and thought emotion-drenched thoughts about what he looked like. And with all the adult emotion in the car, I’d hardly felt the kid there at all.
 

Apparently I was silent too long, because Cherabino said, “Well, you did what you could, I guess.”

“We can go back to the car,” I said defensively. “I’ll know better what I’m looking at this time. Maybe…”

Cherabino sighed. “They’ll be here for hours, going over every spot of physical evidence. Do you really think you’ll get something new?”

I paused. “Well, no.”

“Then we’re leaving,” she said. “I’ve got an early morning tomorrow, and I need at least a little sleep.”

“Don’t we have to…?”

“It’s not my case,” Cherabino said, pragmatically.

I spent the day firmly ensconced in the interview room, talking to guilty defensive suspects and stupid defensive witnesses with spotty memories. I’d had an early-morning meeting with my Narcotics Anonymous sponsor and no additional sleep. I felt like I was running on empty, past empty, until my internal gears scraped together.

I was supposed to be talking to a local drug pusher, but I got the call to go upstairs instead. I blinked at the messenger, hardly able to process the request. “Fine,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

Paulsen – my boss – was sitting at her desk, her office empty except for its usual snowstorm of papers. She was a young sixty-something Black woman with high standards. Standards, as she put it, that she expected to be met.