The Tau Ceti Transmutation (Amazon) (9 page)

I turned to Fran. “I’m sorry for wasting your time, Professor. You were as helpful as you could’ve been given the circumstances.”

“Oh, it wasn’t a waste of time at all, Detective,” she said. “Honestly, you’re the most interesting thing that’s walked through my door in weeks. A real live private investigator—very cool. Feel free to contact me via Brain if you need anything going forward.”

“Really? Anything?” I asked as I stood. “That’s a pretty blank card. What if I need help with a homework assignment?”

Fran lifted an eyebrow and a smile tickled the corner of her lips.
“Anything,
Investigator. Though that wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

It took me a moment, but the gears in my head finally caught.
“Oh.
Um, excellent. I’ll keep that in mind, and, um…maybe we’ll talk later?”

“I’d love to,” said Fran. “But not for a couple days, ok? I’ve got this grant stuff to finish, after all.”

I left the professor’s office in a bit of a haze, wondering how I’d managed to make such a solid impression on the woman after bumbling my way through our conversation. I was sure I’d proven myself to be completely ignorant of her field of study as well as incompetent at my own job.

Despite his reminder about my long lady drought during our climber ride, Carl apparently decided I needed to get my head out of the clouds and back to our maddening case. “So, what now?”

“Now?” I said. “Now we call Valerie and see what the heck is going on, because there’s definitely something fishy about this operation we’ve gotten ourselves sucked into. Paige?”

The trilling in my head started again.

“You think she’s involved in this somehow?” said Carl.

“I don’t know, but someone knows something we don’t, and I’m running out of ideas. Paige, anything?”

Nope,
she said.
In fact—yup, she just blocked you.

The ringing stopped.

“Wait…” I said. “Valerie blocked me from calling her? Are you sure you pinged the right Brain?”

Of course I’m sure,
said Paige.
She must still be busy, although I don’t know why she wouldn’t simply decline the call again.

Carl and I glanced at each other.

Maybe you were right earlier,
said Paige.

“About what?”

Maybe someone
did
want to get us out of the way for a while,
said Paige.
Maybe it was Valerie herself.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “As you said, if she didn’t want us involved in her personal business she never would’ve come calling in the first place. No, there must be something else going on.”

I shook my head. Despite my best efforts and the lingering euphoria related to Fran’s interest, I couldn’t stop the knight in shining armor inside of me from thinking the beautiful, busty Valerie Meeks might be in trouble.

“Let’s head back to Val’s place,” I suggested. “If we can’t call her, maybe we can track her down the old-fashioned way.”

Nobody else had any better suggestions, so we exited the building and caught a cab to the tube station.

9

Our car dropped us off in front of Valerie’s glossy, steel high-rise, and we took the lift back to the fifth floor. During the ride from downtown, I’d had Paige give Valerie’s Brain another try, but our call had immediately been declined. Despite having just met the strawberry blonde earlier in the day, and despite the fact that I felt she was somehow yanking my chain, I couldn’t help but feel a strange attraction to her—an attraction which, at the moment, manifested itself as concern.

I approached her door and had Paige ring the chimes. As I waited for a response, I stared into the frosted glass and suffered a vision of the future: Valerie and I arguing furiously, me over her lackadaisical approach to her own safety, her over my lack of progress on her case, both of us yelling and pointing fingers and feeling our blood rush and boil before ultimately falling into each others arms’ and kissing passionately.

Carl crashed my daydream party. “Hey, Rich?”

I blinked the fog away from my eyes. “Huh?”

“We need to reevaluate our plan.”

“Oh, right, right,” I said. “You want to try the old good cop, bad cop routine? Or I could pose as the gallant savior and you could pose as the third wheel that gets lost.”

Carl gave me a furrowed eyebrow sort of look. “Um…that’s not what I meant. The door’s ajar.”

I followed Carl’s finger to where the frame met the door. A slight gap peered through to the other side. While in the throes of my passionate reverie, I’d totally missed it.

Paige wasn’t happy about the slight.
Sometimes I wish I had my own sensory inputs.

I tapped on the Pseudaglas, and a faint clinking rattle sounded from the base.

“Sounds like the actuators are broken,” said Carl. “I’d wager someone forced the door.”

I tried to jam my fingers into the crack at the side, but they wouldn’t fit. Carl, with his slimmer hands, managed to dig his fingernails into the crevice and slide the door to the side. It gave with an unpleasant grating rasp.

“Um, Valerie? Are you here?” I asked as I stepped into the apartment.

I was willing to guess she wasn’t. The place had been tossed. Cushions from Valerie’s sofas lay discarded haphazardly on her thick, fuzzy rug, exposing the internal ribbing of the chairs. Vases and decorations on her shelves had been pushed to the sides, twisted and turned and upended. The kitchen, however, had seen the worst of it. Pots, pans, and utensils partied on the floor and spilled into the living room like sweaty, drunken revelers on the eve of the Perihelian Festival. A poor dishbot who’d probably been set to work in Valerie’s absence rotated back and forth, overwhelmed by the mess, trying to decipher what needed to be stored and where.

“Well, this isn’t good,” I said.

Really?
said Paige.
That’s your first thought? No wonder you’ve struggled in this business.

Carl must’ve received the jab, too. “To be fair, we’ve solved every case that’s come our way. Volume’s been the problem.”

I steamed a little at Paige’s insult, but years of practice dodging her jabs helped me brush it off. “Alright. Here’s an insight for you. Looks like we were right about there being more people involved in this mess than we originally thought. No way the first intruder, the one who went out of his or her way to leave this apartment spotless after breaking and entering, is responsible for this disorderly mess.”

“You’re most likely correct,” said Carl. “Why don’t I inspect the kitchen while you return to the bedroom? Perhaps the newest intruders left clues the previous ones didn’t.”

I nodded and headed toward Valerie’s private quarters. I whistled upon spotting her monument to clothing—her expandable closet. Whoever had trespassed this time clearly didn’t hold fashion in the same regard that Val did. The racks had been stripped bare, and her clothes churned over the floor like the waters of a turbulent, parti-colored sea.

Miss Meeks is not going to be happy,
said Paige.

“No kidding,” I said. “You want to give her another call?”

I’ll try,
she said, and then a moment later,
No dice. Still blocked.

I suffered another pang of worry.

But the call
is
going through,
Paige said.
She’s just refusing to answer it. I’m sure she’s fine.

I stomped over to the dresser drawer, which I found in a similar state of disarray as the floor. Every pair of socks had been pulled apart and tossed back into the drawer with blatant disregard for Valerie’s preferred color- and fabric-based organizational metrics. I sifted through the loose stockings, not entirely sure what I was looking for but certain I hadn’t found it.

I heard the patter of Carl’s feet and then his voice drifting over from the entrance to the bedroom. “Find anything unusual?”

“No more arcade tokens, if that’s what you mean,” I said as Carl joined me at my side. “And I doubt we’ll find any more of those. This seems like your traditional toss and snatch job. Whoever was here was looking for something. No clue on whether or not they found it, though.” I snapped my fingers as I suffered a thought. “Wait…do you think whoever was here was after the token?”

“It’s a distinct possibility,” said Carl.

I twisted my lips and grunted.

“What?” asked Carl.

“Well, I already put that dang thing in the vintage arcade cabinet,” I said. “If this turns into some sort of token ransom situation, I may have screwed the pooch.”

“I doubt anyone was after that particular token,” said Carl. “As you already mentioned, there wasn’t anything special about it. I ran every diagnostic I could, given the circumstances. If the intruders who caused this mess—” Carl waved about. “—were after the token, chances are they were after the same string of clues we already found.”

“Ok, but why?” I asked as I scratched my head. “All we found on our goose chase was a pair of socks, a potentially sexually available professor, and another boatload of questions.”

“Despite my superior computational power, I’d have to say your guess is as good as mine at this point,” said Carl.

“I know as much about something as you do?” I said. “I’ll have to file that away for future gloating purposes.”

I took another look around at the chaos.

Carl caught the look in my eyes. “Formulating a plan?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I do want to talk to Valerie now more than ever. There has to be more to this case than she’s letting on.”

“Well, then we should probably head to the bakery,” said Carl.

Something tickled the back of my brain. “She did say that’s where she was going to be, didn’t she?”

Carl nodded.

“Damn it, Carl, why didn’t you say something before we trekked back here?” I asked. “Not that it turned out to be a bad idea, but still.”

Carl shrugged. “I assumed you had an ulterior motive. Like a desire to rifle through Miss Meeks’ unmentionables without her knowing.”

I sputtered.
“What?
No. It was just socks. Really. But don’t tell her.”

Carl smiled, and Paige snickered.

“Wait…that was a joke?” I said.
“You.
This firmware upgrade of yours is definitely going to take some getting used to.”

I turned tail and headed toward the door.

10

I stared out the cab window watching civilization zip past me in all its shiny and transparent glory—a portrait of humanity painted in metallic silver and clearcoat and wiped into a blur, not by the speed of the car but by the degree of defocus of my own eyeballs.

“Are you ok?”

I peeled my face off the window and turned to Carl. “Huh?”

He sat on the bench seat across from me, his hands clasped lightly in his lap. “I said, are you ok?”

I knit my brows together, trying to get the gist of Carl’s comment, but my brain seemed to be functioning at a fraction of the rate of the images blurring across the cab window. “What? Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You remind me of a forlorn puppy trapped inside during a rainstorm,” said Carl as he intertwined his fingers.

I snorted and turned back to the window.

“You want to talk about it?” asked Carl.

I shrugged and ignored him for a moment, but eventually I responded. “I can’t help but shake a feeling Valerie’s in trouble.”

“Ah. So your vacant stare is a result of emotional pangs.”

I turned back to Carl. “Are you making light of the situation? Because Valerie could be in a serious bind.”

“I wasn’t,” said Carl. “Although I do tend to agree with Paige on this one. It would appear Valerie’s voluntarily severed communications for the time being. That alone doesn’t indicate anything unseemly occurred.”

“And what about her apartment? The break-in?” I asked. “That didn’t change your mind?”

“It didn’t indicate a kidnapping occurred, if that’s your concern,” said Carl.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m overreacting…”

Carl tilted his head. “But?”

“But what?” I asked.

“I assumed you were leaving something unsaid.”

“Maybe I was.”

Carl lifted an eyebrow.

I sighed. “Fine. Maybe you were right. Maybe…I’m not cut out for this gig.”

Carl untangled his fingers and placed them at his sides. “Why would you say that?”

“A number of reasons,” I said. “I keep getting frustrated with the lack of evidence, for one thing. I feel like I haven’t made any tangible discoveries or added any crucial insights, either. And there’s my budding relationship with Valerie.”

“Budding relationship?”
said Carl.

“Ok, maybe that’s a stretch,” I said. “Perhaps infatuation would be a better word. But regardless, it’s not a good thing. Rule number one: never get emotionally attached to the client. I read that somewhere. Probably one of those old P.I. novels. Seems true enough, though it should probably be rule number two. Rule one should be make sure you get paid upfront. Not sure I’ve done particularly well on either count.”

“While I can’t argue with you about that last part,” said Carl, “I wouldn’t make the connection that your current emotional state makes you unfit for investigation. You’ve never suffered the same problem before, even if the root cause of your problem has always existed.”

“Huh? You mean in the cat cases? What root problem?”

“You’ve never fallen for a client before,” said Carl. “Look, you’re a kind hearted individual. You care for others, which can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on the situation. In most cases it’s a boon. It draws you to others, but it also draws them to you.”

I looked at Carl askance.

He looked back. “What?”

“I’m processing that,” I said. “With all your snarkiness today, I’m trying to figure out if that was sarcasm or not.”

“I’m being nothing but honest,” said Carl. “Your personality infects most everyone it touches. Take Professor Castaneva.”