Vacant (14 page)

“Telepathic expert,” I corrected.

“Teep,” he said.

Tommy looked back and forth between us, but his panic had faded.

“Fine, teep,” I said, just to keep that panic out of his eyes.

But my own heart beat too fast, and I jumped at every change in air pressure, waiting for the threat to hit.

*   *   *

Tommy sprawled out on the floor, pencil in hand while he did his homework against the floor. Math, judging from the rows of numbers and letters. He had a set of headphones on, listening to the radio; pricey things, those, to be so small and yet properly analog and therefore not Tech-law-restricted. His head bopped in time with a beat I couldn't hear as his pencil slowly leaked numbers and formulas onto the page. Algebra, of course; I had no idea whether that was advanced or behind in the normal world for his age. It didn't really matter, I guessed. I had no similar work, and I was still strung tighter than an overtuned guitar.

Loyola was on a chair not far from him, checking a previous page of work for progress. I noticed his gun was out, set on a low table within easy arm's reach with the gun pointed toward the door. His body language was relaxed, but it was a sham; he was seated forward, at the edge of the
chair. For all of his slumping, he could be up and moving within a few seconds. I was about the same in Mindspace.

I sat back in the armchair, trying to read an FBI procedures manual and not having a lot of luck. I'd need the information eventually, but right now it was too dry. Every time someone walked past in the hall outside I'd look up. But I couldn't just worry either; I didn't want Tommy getting any more scared than necessary, and considering our strange connection, that meant I needed to be legitimately calm, not just acting like it. I had to.

I looked up. Someone was walking down the hallway in our direction again. This time they had a sense of specific purpose, if I could trust my senses. I didn't recognize the mind from earlier in the day. It wasn't Sibley, I didn't think, but at this point that didn't mean anything to me.

“Heads up,” I said.

Loyola was on his feet, gun ready, and I was moving toward Tommy, my own attention on the door as the mind got closer and closer.

Tommy got to his feet and said, “That's Dad again,” with the kind of dismissive attitude only a kid could really pull off. “Don't shoot him.”

I reluctantly let go of the defense I'd been building for us both and pulled more of my attention into the real world.

Tommy opened the door, and we saw the bruised face and classic pre–Tech Wars haircut of Quentin Parrish, who had his hands in the air and his mind pulled into as small a profile as he could make it. He had a hat in hand.

Loyola lowered the gun, slowly, but did not put it up.

“Apologies for startling you, gentlemen,” Quentin said. Then when he saw the words had registered, he smiled the large smile of a man who was used to charming his way into anything he wanted. “Not that I don't appreciate you watching my son with that kind of hair trigger, but what do
you say I lower my hands, you lower your gun and mind, and we have a nice conversation, huh?”

“Fine.” I took a deep breath, intentionally trying to lower my adrenaline level and heart rate, and eased away from Tommy in Mindspace.

Tommy glanced back at me, I nodded, and he threw himself at his dad, who caught him up in a bone-crushing hug.

“Excellent to see you, boy,” Quentin said. “You been doing your homework?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, and pulled away.

“You realize you just walked into a building full of lawyers and cops,” I said to Quentin. “And then into a judge's private chambers without so much as a by-your-leave.”

“Oh, they know me here,” Quentin said.

“You're a con man and you're showing up to a courthouse, where they know you,” I said, slowly, trying to get my head around the concept.

“And why shouldn't they?” he asked me. “I'm not guilty of anything at the moment.”

I paused. Really?

“Tanya died,” Tommy put in, and then I noticed that low-level sense of grief that had just intensified. “And Adam saw the bad man across the street.”

Both my and Quentin's attention immediately turned to Tommy.

“Who is the bad man?” Quentin asked me then.

I debated how much to tell him.

After I said nothing, he turned back to Tommy. “Tanya was the woman taking care of you?” Quentin asked.

Tommy nodded. “The guard. She was nice.”

“I see.” He dropped his bag on the floor and took his son in his arms. His mind was moving with questions, but he didn't ask them. Instead he said, “We're going to figure this out, nugget. You stay close to the new guards, okay?”

Tommy broke down then and cried for a moment before just holding on. After his tears slowed to sniffs, Quentin looked back at me.

Complications from the attack,
I mouthed.

He nodded and pulled Tommy over to the oversized chair. He knelt down on the floor next to it, leaning toward his son. He seemed . . . more present today. Less here for a show.

Tommy sniffed again and rubbed at his face. I gave him a handful of tissues, which he took with a little bit of irritation, but he blew his nose.

“Now. You going to tell me what happened yesterday morning?” Quentin asked the kid gently. “The only thing I know is what I heard on the news.” And from the questions he'd asked his criminal contacts, his mind supplied. But nothing near enough to understand fully what had happened. And he didn't like that I was spotting somebody close by. If something was going down, he should have heard about it.

“Mom says talking about bad things doesn't make it better,” Tommy said reluctantly.

“Your mother thinks things will go away if she ignores them. It doesn't work like that. Why don't you tell us what happened? I'll pinkie-swear not to tell your mother you told me.”

Tommy stopped, thoughts dripping across his mind like a faucet turned far too low. He was tired, and I felt like I could say something, but from what I could tell Quentin was plenty strong enough to tell this himself.

He started, “They pulled over the car and Tanya pushed me to the floor like we practiced. There were a lot of loud bangs, and Jason got hurt—like really bad. It was—a lot of things happened really fast, and it was a lot in my head.” His thoughts replayed the day, a more jumbled and colorful version of what I'd heard from the bodyguard earlier, with
the intense sensory overload of intense emotions to a telepath. “The bad guys . . . they got closer and there were these bangs on the car. I got burned on the floor, but Tanya was so worried I didn't say anything and then she wanted us to run. We almost got hit by a train.” His memories spiraled backward, to the beginning, through the picture he'd gotten of the criminals behind him in the brief moment before they ran, a guilt-anger thing from the criminal, and a panic feeling when they crossed the train tracks. He hadn't liked leaving the other bodyguard behind in the front of the car. He'd lost a shoe on the walk afterward, and Tanya was hurt too. The sole of his foot had gotten a piece of glass in it and she'd taken it out for him. How could she be . . . dead? How could she not be okay?

And Tommy descended back into grief.

I realized that Tommy was more mentally open around his father, and his father around him, than either was on his own. Whatever Quentin had done or not done, it was a hell of a lot more warmth than I'd seen from the judge.

Quentin patted his shoulder. “That's a hard thing, nugget. Thanks for telling me.”

He turned to me and very, very quietly and awkwardly asked me mind-to-mind,
Did you get that?

What?
I asked, confused. Also, how in the hell had the Guild missed Quentin? This was not one but two strong telepaths who'd apparently escaped being recruited. It made me nervous.

A pause, like he had to remember how to speak mind-to-mind all over again.
You're a hell of a lot stronger than anyone I've seen in this mind thing. I assume you got a picture of his memories? See if there's anything we can use. Right now I'm hearing only rumors on the street, and none of them agree.
His mental tone was flat, intentional, with none of the bravado I associated with his outside
presence. This internal feeling was actually similar to the judge's.

Tommy sniffed, and Quentin pulled him back up for a hug. The tears intensified, but they seemed healing. Having his father here was making a difference, which I hadn't expected.

I backed up, taking a seat in the chair behind the desk and thinking. Quentin was a con man, sure, but he might have a point. And telepathy. And he was clearly willing to use his own connections to track down what was going on. That guilt-anger feeling from the criminal . . . it was the guy who'd approached the car. Perhaps a low-level telepath himself, as their brains tended to leak a louder signal in Mindspace for Tommy's prototelepath brain to pick up under pressure. The odd thing was, the guilt-anger wasn't directed at anyone in Tommy's vicinity; it was a reaction to something related to someone behind him, one of the other bad guys.

I wished I could go back to the scene and see the residue from the guy's mind directly, maybe get a feel for who he was in Mindspace. Jarrod had said that he'd take me there later, but thus far nothing had seemed to go as planned.

I was trying to figure out how to make that trip happen when the door opened again, and Marissa, the judge, came through the door.

I blinked, and suppressed a too-extreme reaction. I was going to have to get a lot better at reaction times and monitoring if this Minding thing was going to work.

Loyola, now standing, lowered his gun. “Once again,” he said in a too-controlled voice. “People need to
knock
.”

“It's my chambers. I'll walk into my own chambers without knocking. Thank you,” Parson said. I
felt
more than saw the second when she saw her ex-husband. “Quentin,” she said. “What in hell are you doing here?”

He got to his feet. “Darling. So good to see you. As you can observe with your own eyes, I'm spending time with my son. He's had a wretched day. Several of them, in fact.”

“Our son,” she said in a biting tone.

“Certainly. He is your son too.”

Tommy stood up on shaking feet, squared his chin, and said, “Mom, don't fight. Dad will leave in just a minute.” He looked at his dad, who sighed and nodded.

“Of course, nugget. You call me if you need anything. I'll check the answering service several times a day. Don't hesitate to call, all right?”

“Could I have a copy of that number?” I asked, not sure why I asked but figuring it wouldn't hurt.

He looked at me, surprised. Behind him, Parson tapped her foot impatiently. Like, literally tapped her foot. I hadn't seen anyone actually tap their foot in impatience in years.

Quentin wrote down the number for me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don't mention it.” And then Quentin got his hat. His charming exterior broke, and I saw clearly the irritated, worried guy underneath. I watched him carefully as he left.

“I suppose if you people are going to overreact every time I walk in the door I'll stay in another set of chambers this afternoon—Judge Darwin is off today, I believe.” Parson looked at me in particular there. Again, I got the distinct impression she was avoiding me. The question was whether she hated telepaths, or just me. I might never get the answer to that one.

“There's room here,” I said. I had questions I wanted to ask her anyway.

“I have twenty minutes to eat lunch and gather my thoughts before the case continues. I'll go elsewhere. Thank you.”

“It's no trouble for us to move, ma'am,” Loyola said, but I could feel his disquiet too.

“No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

She turned and left, and I worried again. I wanted my poison, my drug, at least until Tommy looked at me. Then I made myself go back to the FBI procedures manual. It was boring, but it was something that wouldn't hurt him to overhear.

Despite this, I spent most of my mental energy monitoring for danger.

An hour later,
Loyola had gone out to coordinate with Jarrod, and I was reluctantly chewing on a meal bar: one of my least favorite things in the world. I much preferred rehydrated dehydrated vegetable noodles to this crap; at least the noodle stuff was warm, and you could add red pepper things for taste. The bar was just a heavy block of might-be food. But I was hungry, and I'd need fuel to be able to stay at a high alert. I also wanted Satin, and a cigarette, and not to be here, but I'd have to settle for the food.

I worried about Cherabino again, and Sibley. I worried about a lot of things as I finished the meal bar.

The sound of the old doorknob came then, a
click
from across the room. I looked up. Tommy had just left.

I cursed. I yelled at him mentally to come back here, but it was like yelling at the wind.

I dropped the wrapper in the trash can and took off after him, huffing and puffing after just a few steps (cigarettes are not good for the lungs), and finally caught up to him in the hallway. He hadn't even been moving that fast.

I caught his shoulder. “Hold up. Where are you going?”

“I'm bored,” Tommy said. “I want to see the murder trial. We're surrounded by the good guys. I won't be in any trouble.” He turned around, shrugged off the hand casually as
Mendez behind me stopped just in the hallway, mind alert. “Look, you can come with me.”

And he started walking.

I followed him, uncertain. Relieved, though, that he was intending to stay in the building. Not sure what to do. “It's a murder trial,” I told him. “It's likely to be pretty violent.” I'd dealt with enough dead bodies in the course of the job that I wasn't likely to throw up anymore, but that didn't mean I liked it. Even pictures weren't very appropriate for a kid.

“Oh, Mom lets me look at crime scene pictures all the time,” Tommy said, deadpan, and oddly I couldn't tell if he was lying or telling the truth. I wasn't used to an out-loud conversation that skipped ahead either. “I'm bored,” he said. “And if that trial is what everyone's worried about, I want to see it.”

To be honest, I wanted to see it too.

He smiled. “Let's get a good seat in the back.”

I didn't fight as much as I should have. Mendez followed us.

“You know this isn't a good idea,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” Court security was everywhere, I told myself. I couldn't stay in that small room and not think about certain things for much longer. The courtroom might be safer, or not safer, but at least it would be different. I needed different right now.

*   *   *

The courtroom was smaller than I expected, the judge's raised seat and witness stand looking out onto the jury box to the right, currently filled with twelve serious-looking citizens whose major emotion was boredom and overwhelming responsibility, like a set of cops doing critical paperwork.

The back of the room, where we sat, had three ancient wooden pews that reminded me of Cherabino's family's church. The darkly stained wood was worn blond in the
centers of the benches with the pressure of a thousand seated butts, the backs rubbed lighter from a thousand nervous hands.

A row of media sat impatiently in the second row, pads of paper and pens out, not a camera in sight. Immediately in front of the front bench was a low wall and then two tables for defendant and lawyer and assistant district attorney and her police detective helper. All in all, a quiet, cramped day in mayhem with Judge Parson sitting over all of it like a forbidding crow.

I noticed that Pappadakis sat back, body language relaxed like he hadn't a care in the world. His lawyer was back as if I'd never seen him outside, but the man was both nervous and resolute. They were planning something.

Parson said, “Court is now in session,” and hit her desk with the little judge mallet thing. The crack of it echoed through the courtroom as all assembled went quiet. The jury's attention focused like a light on a lens.

The DA stood. “Your Honor, thank you for the recess. We'd like to call our next witness, Mrs. Marcia Josepha Garces, domestic employee for the defendant.”

The judge nodded, and a small woman in a long coat stood up from the front row of benches, a woman whose nerves were getting ever larger as she made the few steps up to the witness stand. She was pretty at first glance, in that classic Hollywood Cuban way, with just enough wrinkles and silver hairs to make her seem authentic at mid-fifties without taking away from the prettiness. But on second glance you could see her life hadn't been easy. She stooped, moving slowly from too many heavy loads, and her hands were rough and older than the rest of her. She'd still styled her hair, though, and worn pearls to the courtroom along with practical shoes.

Garces was sworn in, hand on a battered Bible, and took
her seat carefully. She clasped her purse in her lap, knuckles going white from their pressure around the purse's straps.

“Mrs. Garces,” the DA said.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Garces, explain your relationship to the defendant.”

“Mr. Pappadakis? I am his housekeeper. I clean and cook simple things and manage the other employees. There's a part-time fancy cook and a landscaper and other people sometimes when he throws parties. Mr. Pappadakis likes the house perfect so that his guests will be impressed.” She looked down, as if ashamed of something, and her nerves increased.

The DA went back over to his table and brought up a large picture that he placed on an easel, a picture of a thirtysomething woman with a face beautiful enough for sculpture and a smile that spoke of sex. “You knew this woman, Lolly Gilman?”

Mrs. Garces nodded. “She and Mr. Pappadakis . . . they are lovers. She is often at the house when his wife is gone.”

I looked around the courtroom, but I didn't see a wife here. I could be missing her in the crowd, I supposed, but if she really wasn't here, that didn't spell good things for whatever relationship they had left after all of the cheating.

“You okay?” I asked Tommy.

“Yep.” He leaned forward, apparently fascinated by the trial so far. I sat back and got comfortable.

The assistant district attorney had left the picture up, as if by accident, but I'd been to enough of my father's trials as a teenager that I knew very little in a courtroom was truly by accident. He was paused, halfway back to the witness stand, at the angle best suited to show his handsome profile to the jury. He had the kind of physique that lifters worked hard on but never looked right in a suit—except, of
course, that he'd spent the money to have his suits custom-tailored to show the bulk of his shoulders to best advantage.

After a moment to let his reluctance to ask the question fully sink into the jury, the ADA said, “But she was not the only woman Mr. Pappadakis had at the house when his wife is gone, was that correct?”

Mrs. Garces nodded, still looking down. “He has paid to put my children through college,” she said finally. “It is not right to say bad things about a man who does such things.”

The ADA paused. “You've sworn to tell the whole truth, Mrs. Garces. How often did your employer have women other than his mistress and his wife over to the house?”

“I try not to see,” Mrs. Garces said. “I go to the little house he gives me and I try not to come out. But there is always a mess in the morning, and I must clean. Often they are still there. There are many.”

“How many, would you say, over the last year?”

“Many,” she said, her quiet voice seeming to echo through the whole courtyard. “Many, many. They are prostitutes, many of them. Some show me their license so I will help them get the payment they were promised. Some just want to leave. Lolly, she is there most often, but never when one of the others is there.”

“Were there any unlicensed prostitutes?” the ADA asked.

Next to me, Tommy squirmed a bit and I wondered if the content was going to get too intense for him. I was hooked into the interrogation, wanting to see where this was going, but I also knew I had a responsibility to make sure he was okay. I had no idea what was appropriate or inappropriate for his age when it came to court cases.

“We need to leave?” I whispered to him quietly.

“Nope,” he said.

“It's no big deal if you want to go back to the chambers.”

“No way. I want to see what happens.” He was thinking
that if Pappadakis was really the guy who'd sent the bad men, he wanted to know why.

In a way I thought he had a right to know, so we stayed.

Up at the front of the room, the lawyer asked again, “Any unlicensed prostitutes?”

She nodded, still looking down as if ashamed. “These try to leave before I am up, but sometimes they do not. They . . .” She trailed off and shook her head again.

“What were you going to say?” the ADA prompted.

“They most often have bruises on their skin. Sometimes a black eye. They have no agency to call and complain.”

Tommy had a small burst of anger from next to me, and a picture of some kind of superhero fighting against the bruises. I only felt disgust at the kind of guy who could do that. It fit very well with the picture of a man accused of killing his mistress.

“Objection, speculation,” the defense lawyer said from the front.

“Sustained,” the judge said.

The ADA waited a moment for that to sink in with the jury anyway. “Did you ever see one of them get their bruises?”

She reluctantly said, “They have no bruises when they arrive. They have many when they leave. I do not hit them. Bron, the gardener, he does not hit them.”

The ADA glanced toward the judge, then back at her. “Have you ever seen your employer hit them?”

Mrs. Garces took in a shaky breath. “Yes, I see him hit them. I try not to see, but I see. It happens. But when they have visited, he no longer hits me or his wife. So I am grateful. Sometimes it is better when they come often.”

“He hits you?” the ADA asked.

She nodded and held on to the straps of her purse tightly. “It is good money. And it is not often.”

“So Mr. Pappadakis has a history of violence with
women,” the ADA said, pausing again with his good side toward the jury.

“Objection,” the defense lawyer said. Next to him, Pappadakis was getting angry—his body language hadn't changed much, but the anger was nearly pulsing off him in Mindspace.

“In your experience,” the ADA said to Mrs. Garces.

“I'll allow it,” the judge said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Garces said, very quietly, but it was like a bullet went off from a gun—Pappadakis's reaction was so big. “Yes, he has much history with violence to women.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Garces,” the ADA said, with a big smile for the jury. “No more questions.”

The defense lawyer, sweating a little, got up and asked a few obligatory questions about exactly when and where she'd seen evidence of things, trying to discredit her testimony in various ways. Unfortunately for him, Mrs. Garces stuck to her story and provided relevant details of enough different occasions that he ended up weakening his own case.

He ended with “But you did not see what happened on the night of December the fourth, the night in question, when Miss Gilman arrived?”

“No,” Mrs. Garces said in a clear voice. “No, I went to bed early with a sleeping pill. When I woke up the next morning, Bron had already found her. The gardener. She was dead. She had been beaten to death. They say to me she was beaten to death with a lamp. It is a horrible thing.”

Beaten to death with a lamp, huh? I hadn't liked Pappadakis on sight, but if he was the kind of guy who'd beat his mistress to death with a lamp, I liked him even less. Of course, he was on trial, not convicted, not yet.

“Please stick to your direct knowledge,” Judge Parson instructed her. “Did you see her get beaten?”

“No. No, I did not. As I said, I was asleep.”

“So you do not know if he was involved in the crime,” the defense lawyer said. “The gardener could already have covered up the crime by the time you arrived, and then asked you to corroborate his story.”

Mrs. Garces drew herself up to her short height and said clearly, “Bron Jones is a good man and very loyal to Mr. Pappadakis. He would never have hurt Ms. Gilman. Never. If anything, he would have defended her as he did us. He kept Lila, the cook—he defended her more than once. He did the same for me. That is the kind of man he is.”

Well, that didn't go as you'd planned,
I thought, watching the defense lawyer try to recover from that. A low blow to go after the hired help for potential killers to get your client off, but it wouldn't be the first time.

I wondered how bad the beating really was. We'd clearly missed most of the critical testimony about it, but they didn't have a clear connection to Pappadakis or they wouldn't have bothered to ask Mrs. Garces about his history. Looking over at him sitting in the defense stand, however, I had no problem whatsoever imagining him beating his mistress to death. His suit was nice, but he had that shark vibe and plenty of strength in his blunt hands.

And Fiske, with all he'd done and set up, wouldn't have a single problem getting this guy off from a murder like that. He'd probably been the one to make their one and only witness disappear.

It scared me, because if he had been willing to go that far, and maybe now help Pappadakis put pressure on the judge, what chance did I have?

Loyola's mind came toward mine down the hall behind us as the defense lawyer asked another few questions designed to put doubt on Bron, the landscaper, or Mrs. Garces. Apparently they'd already heard Bron's testimony
yesterday and he was trying hard to make it suspicious. I had no idea how it was coming off to the jury, but I could feel the lawyer's calculated lies from across the room; he was doing everything in his power to pull attention off his client. The ethical lawyer thing to do, of course, but it didn't make me like him all that much.