Where All Paths Meet, page 5
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“For fuck’s sake.” I rubbed my eyes. “So, you hid that stuff in my room. Again.”
“I believed it had been a successful hiding spot before,” Holmes said. “If I’d known about my father’s visit, I would have altered my plans.”
“No, don’t try to pin this on me. Ok, you got the package in November. Then you hid the family tree and the letter and the portable safe in my room. And then—” I stopped. “Maggie was behind all of that stuff in December? Sending Paxton to distract us, having someone to search the cottage—that was her?”
Holmes nodded.
“How?”
“Hm?”
“After—” I almost said, After you left. Instead, I said, “After everything calmed down, I started to wonder: how did anybody even know you had something worth stealing?”
Holmes gave me that look he usually reserved for when we were doing chemistry and I’d flubbed a particularly easy problem set.
Then it hit me. The Walker School was a prison. It was fancy, and it cost a lot of money, and nobody would call it that, not out loud, but that’s what it was. That was the whole reason, Holmes had told me when we first met, he’d been sent there. The staff were regularly paid—by Blackfriar and presumably by other people, people like Maggie Moriarty—for information on Holmes and other students. Mr. Taylor, Dad’s boss, had even tried to squeeze information about Holmes out of me once.
So, of course, somebody was opening student mail.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But, like, all your mail?”
“Jack,” he said, and it was chemistry all over again.
“Ok, ok.” I thought for a moment. “How’d you figure it out?”
“I tracked the operative who tried to meet Paxton at the bus station. The process was…circuitous, but it led me back to Maggie.” It was hard to tell in the dark, but I thought he blushed. “Paxton confirmed information I had acquired.”
“Jesus. Ok, and then what? You waited for the perfect opportunity for your heist?”
“The anniversary party was ideal. It would be held in Scorpio, so I would have easy access to Maggie’s office, and security would be stretched to its limits keeping track of the guests.”
I stared at him. “And that was your disguise?”
He touched one of the buckles again. “What?”
“What are you supposed to—oh my God.”
“We’re getting off track.”
“A plumber?”
“The point, Jack—”
“In the first place, you copied my idea.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Second, you don’t even have a toolbox.”
“I did have equipment—”
“I mean, Jesus, H, the obvious disguise for every fancy party ever, in the history of fancy parties, is catering staff.”
“Yes, well, I did not have your expert opinion,” he said, “so I did my best.”
“Ok, well, aside from the dumbest disguise ever—well, except for that Junior FBI one you tried to use last year—what went wrong? Oh damn. Someone beat you to it.”
“A third party had already accessed Maggie’s office when I arrived. They were in the process of opening the safe when I engaged them.”
“And they handed you your ass.”
“They tased me,” he said, his voice heating, and he touched his side. “Fifty thousand volts renders any question of competence or ability moot.”
“They handed you your ass,” I repeated. And then I remembered. “Holy shit, H. That’s who I ran into in the hall; she went right past me—I thought she was a tech or staff or something, freaking out because of the power outage. Wait, was the power outage you?”
“Of course. What do you mean you saw her?”
“I saw her. She ran right past me.” Memory struck, and I added, “She was carrying something.”
Holmes shifted in his seat. “Yes, Watson’s portable safe. It had been removed from Maggie’s vault. Jack, I need you to think very carefully: would you recognize her if you saw her again?”
I made my thinking face. I scratched my noggin. I hemmed.
“Jack!”
“Yes, dumbass. ‘Think very carefully.’ Jesus Christ, I don’t need to recognize her. She was wearing her ID badge. I saw her name.”
It was one of the few times I’d left Holmes speechless. I wanted to buff my nails or something.
Instead, I added, “That’s why it’s going to be so easy for me to track her down.”
“What do you mean—Jack, you can’t!”
I leveled a look at him.
In the night’s ambient light, Holmes’s blush was the color of cinders, but he forged ahead. “Please, Jack. You—you mustn’t.” His words tumbled out, more of the English slipping into them. “I promise you that I will bring you the safe. I promise you I will give you everything. But you must trust me—”
“Oh, yeah, but here’s the thing about that: I don’t. I hate you, remember?”
He breathed hard for several long moments, and then he bit his lip so savagely that beads of blood rose when he opened his mouth again. They glistened like black mercury. “You do not understand the magnitude—”
“I don’t care. Watson—I mean, Sarah—wanted me to have this stuff, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“And it’s about my mom, right?”
“We don’t know that. We have no idea what Sarah sent in that package. The message about your mother, the invitation to the party tonight, they could have been nothing more than bait to lure you into a trap. Correction: someone is definitely luring you into a trap.”
“Then why did the instructions in Watson’s package say for me to open the safe?”
“I don’t know. Jack, you’re not listening—”
“Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to find Sarah’s portable safe, or whatever it is. I’m going to open it. And I’m going to do it whether you like it or not. But because I’m such a nice guy, I’m going to let you tag along. How does that sound?”
His hands tightened into fists at his side, opened, tightened again. He chewed the corner of his lip. A part of me wanted to tell him it was going to be ok, wanted to find a way to remind him to breathe, wanted to hold his hands while he struggled with whatever was scaring him so badly. But that part of me had gotten fucked over five months ago, so I watched.
“Please.” The word sounded broken. “I know I have no right to ask this of you—”
“No,” I said. “You don’t.”
For a moment, he looked like he was going to start crying. But, as usual, his tremendous control won out. His breathing flattened into an artificial rhythm. His long, pale fingers uncurled. He sat up straighter, wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, and nodded, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. “Very well.”
“Great,” I said as I started the truck. “See how easy that was?”
Chapter 6
Popcorn Sock
Her name—at least, according to the ID badge she’d been stupid enough to wear—was Lynnissa Baca, and Holmes found her address in about thirty seconds.
“Do you have all the Zodiac employee information on your phone or something?” I asked as we drove north on I-15. Traffic had died down—as much as it ever did on this particular highway—and we swam through the night in loose schools of red taillights and the occasional lonely semi.
“Of course not,” Holmes said absently, still scrolling on his phone. “My father would never give me that kind of access.”
“Would he give it to Noneley?”
Holmes barked a laugh. Then his head came up and something like horror rimmed his eyes.
“Oh yeah, buddy. I met the whole fam.”
It took him a long time to say, “I see.”
“Your mom particularly seemed to like me.”
“Mother is…wary.”
I let him dangle.
We made it around Point of the Mountain, and the dark glitter of the Salt Lake Valley was opening up ahead of us when Holmes asked, “Did you…say anything?”
I smirked at him. I even gave him the eyebrows.
It took a moment, and then he huffed one of those little amused sounds. “I suppose I deserve that.”
After a laugh, I shook my head. “I stared at them like JoJo the Idiot Circus Boy, H. I didn’t know I was going to meet them. I definitely had no idea what to say.”
“Noneley likes you,” he said as he went back to his phone.
“She told you that? When?”
“She’s been spying on you for ages.”
“Jesus Christ.”
It might have been the light from the dash, but I thought the little shit looked way too pleased with himself.
“To answer your question,” Holmes said a few minutes later, “I pay for a subscription to a private investigator database. Well, a collection of databases, actually. It simplifies things.”
“Like finding out where someone lives.”
“Among other things.”
“Such as?”
“Well, Lynnissa Baca has been employed by Zodiac for two years. She’s got a PhD in computer science from CALTECH, and her work there involved machine learning.”
“So, AI. Like Moriarty.”
“Precisely.”
“Which is why she’d have access to that floor of the Scorpio building.”
“Yes.”
“But it doesn’t explain why she’d be stupid enough to wear her badge.”
“She’s not a professional thief, Jack. Besides, she might have thought the ID badge would actually make her less noticeable; remember, on an ordinary day, choosing not to wear the badge would have drawn security’s attention, and she likely would have been stopped.”
“Ok, well, why is she stealing from Maggie Moriarty? Does she have a death wish?”
Holmes made that little amused noise again. “She is, apparently, tremendously in debt.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“Yes.”
“What else can you turn up on those databases?”
“I don’t know. Someone keeps interrupting me.”
Grinning in spite of myself, I said, “Hot damn, everybody. He’s a live one.”
“Stop talking now.”
“It’s more fun when you say it the other way.”
Holmes bent over his phone.
“Like a cartoon villain,” I prompted.
Holmes rubbed his head.
“I could sing to you while you work,” I offered.
“Silence,” Holmes snapped. “Will you please leave me alone?”
I did. After I ruffled his hair once.
Baca lived in a condo building that had been squeezed onto a block of north Salt Lake. It was a mixture of brick and white vinyl siding, and it looked relatively new—ten, fifteen years, tops. Each unit had a covered deck that bristled out over the sidewalk, and many of the units were warm with yellow light. At Holmes’s direction, I parked another street over, and we walked back.
The condo building’s main entrance was protected by a locked vestibule. Eyeing the intercom panel, I said, “Want to be a plumber again?”
“No,” Holmes said as he continued walking down the block. “I want to see if her vehicle is here.”
“Oh, maybe you can be a mechanic. Mechanics wear overalls.”
“I don’t understand why you find this disguise so amusing.”
“Where to start—”
“Silence,” Holmes said and walked faster.
We accessed the parking garage by following a ramp down from the street. It had one of those barrier arms that go up and down if you have the right fob or remote; we ducked under it. The smell of cold concrete and motor oil and piss rose up to meet us. This was close enough to downtown Salt Lake that they probably still had to deal with some of the city’s massive homeless population.
Holmes’s database had given him the vehicle information for Baca: a white Subaru, which we found on the garage’s lower level in a spot marked 4B. Holmes used the flashlight of his phone to look through the windows. It was pretty clean—a Maverick fountain drink cup in the cup holder, some bonus ketchup packets in the change tray, a few wadded receipts in the passenger footwell. The back seat held plastic shopping bags: Target, Home Goods, Anthropologie. The lady liked to spend.
“I guess she’s home,” I said.
Holmes made a noncommittal noise.
“Do you want to break into her car?”
“Not without a Tyvek suit,” he said.
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. “H, it’s not that bad.”
“Remind me: what is the acceptable number of toaster pastries for a desk drawer.”
“Hey, sometimes I get hungry when I’m studying!”
“I found popcorn inside a sock one time, Jack. Inside the sock. How does one even manage that?”
“One is bored and one is playing popcorn sock all by himself and one is really fucking good at popcorn sock.” I crossed my arms. “You want to ask me what popcorn sock is, don’t you?”
“I cannot,” he said to himself, with what might have been panic tinging his voice as he turned toward the door that connected the garage with the condo building proper. “I cannot do this.”
He needed a win, so I didn’t even say anything about how cute his butt looked when he bent over to inspect the lock.
“Camera.” I pointed above us as we waited for the elevator.
Holmes nodded; he didn’t even look.
When we got into the elevator, I pointed overhead. “Camera.”
“Yes, Jack.”
When we got out on the fourth floor, I pointed again.
“We have nothing to worry about,” Holmes said. “We’ve not committed any crimes.”
“Yet. Well, technically you did by picking that lock. And maybe me too? I guess this is trespass.”
Holmes shrugged, and we made our way to 4B in silence. He knocked.
“Why are we knocking?”
“What is the alternative? Do you want to surprise her in the bath?”
“No, but shouldn’t we have a plan?”
“Yes. You’ll restrain her while I search her condo.”
“Uh.”
“She’s a thief, Jack. She won’t report this to the police.”
“That’s not the part I’m worried about. Not the only part, I guess.”
Holmes hammered on the door.
We waited a minute. Then another. Still nothing.
“Maybe she’s asleep.”
“That seems unlikely.”
The way he said it, what lay behind the words, made my arms break out in goose bumps. “Maybe she took a sleeping pill because she’s, you know, amped up from tonight.”
He picked this lock too.
I couldn’t help myself this time; the words had a nervous edge I couldn’t totally smooth out. “You still have a cute butt.”
“Jack.”
“What? I haven’t seen you in five months. It might have gone flat or something.”
Holmes let out a few strangled words that were totally indecipherable but sounded like a prayer. The door popped free from the jamb, and Holmes straightened. “Remain in the hallway until I have cleared the condo.”
I licked my lips. “Right.”
Then I followed him inside.
He turned and gave me a furious look, but I nudged him forward, and then we both stopped.
We were standing in an open space at the front of the condo, a combination of living and dining areas, and the light off the deck, filtering through the vanes of the vertical blinds, left the room black and white, everything surreal and inverted like a photographic negative. Farther back, I was aware of the kitchen, and then a hallway. But most of my attention was on Lynnissa Baca, the woman who had run past me in the hallway. She was slumped in a chair at the table, an empty glass in front of her, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t breathing.
Chapter 7
You and Mainframes
Holmes stared at Baca for a moment, his breathing steady and controlled. Then he turned on the light and moved across the room toward her. He produced a pair of disposable gloves from those ridiculous overalls, pulled them on, and took her head in his hands. He checked her pulse. After a moment, he stood and shook his head.
“We should call an ambulance,” I said. I swallowed. “We should call the police.”
“In a moment. Shut the door, Jack.”
“What if she needs help—”
“Shut the door, Jack.”
He sounded calm. Even, strangely, kind.
I guess it worked because I shut the door.
“She—” I began.
“She’s dead,” Holmes said, and he turned to face me. “The body is in primary flaccidity, before rigor ensues. Perhaps an hour. Not yet two. Is this the woman you saw running from Maggie’s office?”
I swallowed again. Now, mixed with the faint perfume of an air freshener, I could smell urine again and made out the dark, inverted Y staining the chair between Baca’s legs.
“Jack.” Again, almost gently.
She had glossy dark hair in a bob, and her skin was brown with reddish undertones. Her eyes were partially open, but I couldn’t look at them. She was short, solid trending toward heavy, and she wore silver and turquoise everywhere she could: hanging from her ears, around her neck on a dragonfly pendant, rings on every finger, even the concho chain belt.
I nodded.
“Step out into the hallway and make sure no one surprises us,” Holmes said with that same quiet, assured authority.
But I shook my head. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead body. It wouldn’t be the last. But it was the shock of it, I told myself. After a night of shocks. After finding Holmes again, and the havoc that had done to my well-calibrated system of giving no fucks. After seeing him hurt, worrying he might be—
“Jack—”
“I’m fine.”
The words came out rougher than I would have liked, but they must have sounded convincing because Holmes studied me for another moment and nodded. He produced a second set of disposable gloves and said, “Begin in the bedroom.”
