You and I, Me and You (9 page)

“I'll help you. And I've found some special people for you to talk to,” she continued gently. “I think they can help you with your work.”

“Well then! ‘Straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near,' Agent Thyme. I knew you'd want to hear the good news straight from me.” He glanced at George and me. “Oh, but I'm being rude! Hello. You work with Agent Thyme? I notice you're not wearing white coats and carrying hypos.” He turned back to her. “I know what ‘special people' is code for, Agent Thyme. I'm not crazy, but it's okay if you think I am. ‘The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers.'”

“‘Above all, keep loving one another earnestly,'” George added, “‘since love covers a multitude of sins.'” He met my gape with a glare. “What? I read.”

“I—I—I—”
Shiro's gonna be so furious to have missed this!
“I— George, you—?”

“Oh, shut up, Cadence.”

“Now, now,” Jesus scolded. “Love your neighbor as yourself. Right now, young man.”

“Young man” was interesting; Jesus didn't look to be even ten years older than we were, maybe mid-thirties?
Wasn't Jesus thirty-three when he died on the cross? Uh-oh.

Emma Jan had been mentioning the case to us for the last few days; she didn't know how old he was because he had no birth certificate on file. No nothing on file. Jesus was off the grid.

He had blond hair but almond-shaped eyes. His skin was a beautiful golden brown, and his hair tried to fluff itself into an Afro though it grew past his collar. He was a glorious mix of races, and obviously pretty intelligent. In the right environment, with the right—or wrong—brain chemistry, I could see how he could come to believe he was Jesus returned. I always figured Jesus would get his own reality show in order to put the good word out to the masses, but this was an interesting way to go, too. False statements on purpose? Deliberately bringing down federal heat? Was he trying for federal lockup without the murder, theft, and/or terrorism that usually led to such accommodations?

Who are you?

“I am a thief,” he replied, startling me since I was 90 percent sure I hadn't said that out loud. “I'm a liar. I am … an inveterate troublemaker. I'm all of those and none of those. You know, like Mudd on
Star Trek.
He never told the truth, so when he said he was lying, the android had a nervous breakdown.”

“I don't know what
inveterate
means,” I confessed.

“Chronic. Incurable.”

“Like epilepsy?”

“Like diabetes.”

“Oh. I didn't say ‘Who are you' out loud, right? Right.”

He smiled at me; I could not recall ever seeing a kinder expression on a human face. “‘A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed,' my daughter. And you have many hearts. Don't you?”

“Um, okay,” I replied. If not for the smile, I would have decided to get extremely terrified. “Thanks, I guess.”

“Fear not for me, my child. My father watcheth over me.” He held out his arms (Christ-like! All he needed was a cross.) and slowly turned until his back was to us.

“Whoa.”

His entire back, from the nape of his neck all the way to the waist of his pants, was covered with a tattoo of a stern-yet-loving God, complete with long white robe, long white hair and beard, and kind yet stern eyes.

“God!” I exclaimed, as weirded out as I was dazzled. It was a
beautiful
tattoo. And … were God's eyes following me? It seemed like they were following me. “That's … God.”

“Yup.”

“He's got your back?” George guessed.

“He's absolutely got my back.”

“So what's it like, being insane?”

“It's working for me,” Jesus replied comfortably.

“You're one to talk,” I muttered, but George only shrugged, dazzled.

After that there wasn't much to do but read Jesus his rights and arrest him. He gave us no trouble, as we'd guessed; Jesus was delighted to be persecuted. “Now I can get on with my work.” He sighed happily as the cuffs clicked home.

Once the son of God had been safety tucked into the system, George was so exuberant he hugged me, which was as loathsome as I always imagined it would be. “We have the fucking greatest jobs ever!”

I wrenched free. “Michaela has to find a way to save BOFFO. No way can I do something ordinary after arresting Jesus.”

“I think we're all agreed on that. And George, points to you. You were remarkably restrained. Wait'll I tell Shiro,” Emma Jan teased. “She won't believe it.”

“
I
don't believe it. We haven't seen the last of Jesus, tell you that right now. I've just met my new wingman. Once Michaela comes up with a plan to save all our asses, I wanna hire him. There's gotta be something at BOFFO for the son of God.”

“Because that's what it's all about, really,” I said. “Your happiness.”

“Yeah.” George beamed, unaware of (or not caring about) the sarcasm. And sometimes I wished we could change places. For George, everything was easy.

For Jesus and me, not so much.

Wait. Did I just make like the son of God and I had troubles in common? Yeesh. First the swearing, then the delusions of grandeur. George was contagious.

 

chapter twenty

Half an hour
later, the three of us were back at the crime scene in West St. Paul. Though it had been processed and the body run to the ME on Chicago Avenue, there were a few stragglers. The uniform let us past the tape, which, after what Greer had said to us the last time we were there, was a pleasant surprise.

I'd also called Dr. Gallo and asked if he could meet us there. We had to question him further anyway, he'd already contaminated the scene,

(Or made the scene. No, probably not, but what if?)

he had experience with this sort of thing after what had happened to his poor nephew, and he'd worked with Paul at a murder scene before. One of the things I liked about BOFFO was how we could bend the rules. Always provided there were results.

“We'd better get this guy quick,” George muttered as we passed the uniform in the hall. “BOFFO needs a win.”

“A save,” Emma Jan corrected.

They were both right. Now we didn't just want to catch him because he was killing random innocents and we wanted him to knock it off. Now BOFFO's rep and future hung in the balance. Did ‘lost our funding' mean we could never, ever get it back? If we caught him tomorrow, would that change anything?

I'd called Patrick to let him know it would be a while before I made it back to our (!) house. He commiserated and promised to have some red velvet cake waiting. The man was a god. Not a god like locked-up Jesus was a god. A culinary god. A god of pastry! And he was mine and we lived together because my life was

(almost normal. No, never normal.)

getting better.

I sighed happily, which was inappropriate to say the least. Luckily George was once again prowling the crime scene, mindful of the tape and fingerprint powder, raking his long fingers through his hair and muttering dark things, and Emma Jan had seen me behave in even more peculiar ways.

“Your boy better get used to that,” she said, nodding to my phone, which I was just tucking back into my bag. “A do-gooder's work is never done.”

“Yeah, good point. Still, it'd be nice if I didn't have to drive that point home on Moving Day.”

“That's how he knows straight up what to expect. No one to blame but himself if he doesn't like it.” Emma Jan sounded weirdly cheerful as she pointed that out. I realized I had no idea what her home life situation was: boyfriend, girlfriend? Divorced, single? This wasn't a job for cultivating warm and loving relationships.

“This isn't, this isn't, this isn't right at all,” Paul Torn said from the doorway. “Does anyone else taste blue?” He held up a copy of the
Star Trib.
“There's blue in here, in here, but also red and green and black.”

BOFFO's maddest mad scientist had arrived, vibrating in the doorway and lugging around a newspaper. An actual newspaper. Made of paper! Aw, Paul was so adorable. What looked like the random weather forecast, crime blotter, and classified ads from the nation's sixteenth largest metro area often resolved themselves into patterns only Paul Torn could see. I was once again struck by the ordinary exterior for the extraordinary mind clicking and whirring inside that big ol' skull.

Paul was a pacer, too. Egad, he and George would probably collide pretty soon. Was this something I wanted to prevent, or encourage?

Encourage? Of course not!

What was
wrong
with me lately?

“Hi, Paul. Sorry to wreck your Friday night.”

“He or she or they wrecked it, hi, Cadence, not you, you didn't wreck a thing, how are you, Cadence?”

“Um…” Fine? Tired? Pissed at Sussudio? Wondering if Gallo had had to cancel a date to get here? Hungry for my baker's red velvet cake? “Fine?” It seemed the safest answer.

“Hi, Paul.”

“Time like Thyme, Special Agent Emma Jan Thyme.” They shook hands. “I like how your skin is dark but red underneath. I like how it's two things even though it's one thing.”

“Thank you.” Emma Jan's polite smile got very big very quickly, and I saw her sizing him up with new appreciation.

After they shook hands, Paul remained in the doorway, snapping his fingers and shifting his weight from foot to foot. “It's not it's not right. In fact it's all wrong.”

“Just how we put it, except when we said it, it made sense. Will you get your freaky ass in here, please? I'm not having a conversation with you in the hallway.”

“George,” Paul confided to me as he reluctantly came forward, “smells black.”

“Like evil,” I agreed. Paul was close enough to tower over me; he was large enough to be a pro basketball player, with long gangly legs and arms, but was terribly far-sighted. His glasses were thick and right out of the fifties: he looked like an African-American Buddy Holly. I loved that he wore them, too. Because he looked weak and distracted and afraid, he was occasionally targeted for what would be called bullying if he were still in high school. What was bullying called when a thug who should know better picked on a skinny black genius who'd earned a black belt between doctorates?

Hilarious. That's what it was called.

“I guess I should say something corny,” a new voice said. “Like, ‘We should stop meeting like this.'” Max Gallo smiled at me from the doorway. “But it's always nice to see you again, Sag.”

Somehow George Pinkman will pay.

“Thanks for coming out,” I said, ignoring the compliment. Pretending to ignore it. Loving the compliment.
Oh, damn it.
“Sorry if we messed up your plans.”

“The
Game of Thrones
fanfic site isn't going anywhere.”

That earned laughter from George and Emma Jan, and a sour smile from me. Right. A gorgeous single doctor who gave off an aura of danger had nothing to do on a Friday night but hang out in chat rooms. I wasn't nearly as clever as Shiro, but that didn't mean I was a drooling idiot. Most of the time.

“It's Paul, right?” Gallo ambled into the living room and held out his hand for Paul to shake. “We met at the Mickelson crime scene.”

The Mickelson crime scene.
It sounded aloof, almost cold. Detached. I knew why Max Gallo had said it just that way. It was a way to keep the barriers up. Because if they ever fell, would they crush him and kill him? Or worse, would it just leave him mashed and bleeding? Why would he ever want to take that chance?

“Yes, it smelled blue but we couldn't figure out why and then we did, hello, how are you? It's Doctor Gallo; I can tell by the color.”

“It is.” They shook, and then Max looked around with bright eyes. “This is terrible to say out loud, but I can hardly wait to see what you guys are gonna spring on
this
killer.”

“Your faith gives us hope,” George said, clutching his heart (or where his heart would be, if he had one) with a sigh. “Also, you're not the killer, right?”

“Right.” When nobody said anything, he looked at all of us. “No, really. I'm not the guy. Pinkie swear.”

Paul shook his head so violently I was worried he'd pass out. “Dr. Gallo's the wrong color. It's not him, it's someone who smells orange but looks blue. That's what it is, that's the trick. Dr. Gallo smells red.”

“Okay.” George had a file and made a show of scanning papers and making a check mark. “Glad we got that settled. Next?”

“Excuse me, Paul. ‘Smells red'?” Max asked politely. He was in what I was starting to think of as his uniform—beat-up leather jacket, worn scrub pants, clean but faded T-shirt. The clothes should have hung on his lean frame, but he had a wiry muscularity that was surprising, even disarming. He was so comfortable in his worn clothes that they seemed a part of him. I knew that for what it really was: Max Gallo was a man comfortable in his own skin, and I envied that about him. Except for George and Patrick, I didn't really know anyone else who was.

George and Patrick: gah.

Max was still gently questioning Paul, who hadn't stopped snapping his fingers once; those long thin dark fingers were a total blur. “Do you mean numbers smell, or people, or both?”

Both? Whoa.
I caught Emma Jan's glance—she was impressed, too. Gallo knew what Paul was; he was just making sure.

“If you know if you ask are you?”

“No, I'm not a synesthete. If we'd gone to the same college I would have cheated off you for all my exams.”