I stared across the counter, mesmerized by all the bins filled with things to put in Blizzards. We were on the phone, so I couldn’t stare in amazement at his face. “I didn’t even know we had a serial killing prostitutes!”
“I’m leaving Emma Jan with Gallo; you mind heading back to BOFFO and finding out what Rain Man’s pulled out of his sleeve? I wanna nail Sussudio, but I’m not above letting HOAP.2 do all the work. We gotta check this out. Maybe we’ll get Sue even quicker.”
“Sounds good. See you in ten.” I realized I’d have to cancel on Patrick. Then I realized I felt guilty because I didn’t feel guilty. Is this what it’s like to be George? I had to admit, it was oddly freeing.
That made me feel guilty, too.
So: not what it’s like to be George.
chapter thirty-nine
I made it back to the BOFFO building in a few minutes, chewing madly on my Blizzard (some of those banana chunks were partially frozen) and practically thrumming in the elevator. I’d had waffles for breakfast, nothing for lunch, and a Blizzard for supper. Jeepers, why did I get headaches all the time? Oh. Right.
chapter forty
I have long endured the hell of being an athlete who lives in the body of a woman with the nutritional acumen of an eight-year-old boy gorging in front of Saturday morning cartoons.
chapter forty-one
Shut up, Shiro! I mentally stuck my tongue out at her.
She always had something to bitch about: Cadence, you shouldn’t have Blizzards for supper. Cadence, you shouldn’t have marshmallow kebabs for breakfast. Cadence, do you have any idea what you’re doing to our blood sugar? Snore. Our blood sugar was fine. And if it ever wasn’t, that’s why they made insulin.
The elevator dinged at me, and I stepped out onto our floor. Now what had I been—ah, yes, the dreamy Patrick and the equally dreamy and for some reason more compelling Max. I wondered what kind of a kisser he was. Was he a face-swallower or a butterfly guy? Patrick could be both—we hadn’t slept together yet, but we’d had some pretty heavy make-out sessions, the kind that ended with Patrick walking into a wall on the way to a cold shower.
Argh!
Why am I doing this? Do I have a fourth personality, an inner slut who’s been slavering to get out for years and years, who has seized on the unsuspecting Max Gallo as her prey and is ready to pummel through my relationship with Patrick to rape Max? Or worse, have I been good and faithful and … you know, a virgin … all this time purely out of lack of options? Was all this proof that I was as shallow as George?
“Ha! Toldja I was contagious. And how is being good out of lack of options worse than being possessed by your inner skank?”
“This is going to be a real problem pretty soon,” I muttered.
“Your inner-monologue-coming-out thing? Nobody listens to a word you say, you dim bim, so calm down.”
Oddly, I did.
“You won’t believe this shit.” George was practically bouncing like Tigger as we walked down the hall to Michaela’s office. “You know how Rain Man—ow!” He rubbed the back of his head and glared. “Jesus, I didn’t even see your hand move. Do not stay sanctimonious while getting Shiro’s reflexes or I’ll kill myself. Unless that means Shiro’s gonna lose her reflexes. I’d like a cage match with that bitch if she didn’t use any of her black belts on me. Or her guns. Or her knives. Okay, so anyway, you know how Paul reads newspapers all the time? He’s been feeding stats into HOAP and figured out that a couple women who turned up dead were killed by the same guy.”
“Okaaaaay…”
“Look, the cops didn’t even know they were both pros, but HOAP did. They weren’t killed the same way, but HOAP figured out the same guy did it. And a few hours ago he did it again! The cops picked him up a couple of hours ago! I’m telling you, BOFFO losing funding is not gonna matter; there’s not a cop on the planet who’s gonna have to work ever again.”
“I didn’t even— I—” Thoughts whirled through my inadequate brain. We hadn’t known another serial was in the Cities. The thought was nearly incomprehensible. Serial killers weren’t the needles in haystacks people in the real world thought they were, nor were they as prolific as TV and books made them out to be. Still, three in the Twin Cities in eight weeks? Unheard of.
But this was Paul Torn. If such things were possible, his was the mind that could not just spot it, but corral it, cage it—make things safer for all of us.
“I don’t get it,” I admitted, trotting to keep up with George’s Tiggering.
“Me neither. So let’s get the boss on board, and the genius can enlighten us.” He burst into Michaela’s other office and found them both there. Michaela was vertically slicing long skinny eggplants, and Paul was snapping his fingers in a complex rhythm only he could make sense of.
He brightened when he saw us. “Hello Cadence-not-Shiro. Now HOAP.3 can smell blue and orange at the same time!”
“Best news I’ve heard all week, Paul old buddy.” George threw his arms around the startled mastermind and warmly added, “I take back at least half the shitty things I said about you. No! Two thirds! I’ll never call you Rain Man again unless it’s out of deepest respect! Give us a kiss, dahling.”
“Pinkman.” Michaela’s knife was a blur. “Shut up and listen.”
Paul extricated himself, shoved his glasses up his nose with a distracted poke, and showed us the thick file he’d been holding. “While we were we were getting Sussudio, I was watching the news. Two women, two suburbs, two CODs, two ladies of the black, same man, same man had to kill them, had to change their colors. But it wasn’t enough.”
Paul looked at us expectantly, and George and I traded I got nothin’ looks. There wasn’t a sound except the thud-thud-thud of Michaela’s knife. George cleared his throat. “I can almost follow that, Paul. So go on … two murders weren’t enough? Because the third one happened this morning.”
“Yes, HOAP.2 smelled black and showed him black and then he killed her again, he keeps killing the ladies of the black, and now we catch him, now we have him and we lock him up. Because once is an accident and twice is a coincidence but three times three times three times is an enemy action and we only had a coincidence we only had two and we needed three.”
I was starting to get a nasty feeling. And I didn’t like the way Michaela wouldn’t look up. Not at all.
“You needed three,” I prompted.
“So HOAP.3 pulled the data the killer looks for he put the trigger in his hand and if it was an enemy action we would have the three and it was and we did.”
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud.
No. Oh no. I was wrong. That was all; I was wrong. I was misunderstanding what Paul was telling us because I couldn’t smell blue or whatever the hell. Because what I was thinking wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true.
George threw up his hands. “I’m not seeing the problem. You needed three to know his signature, you only had two so you couldn’t do anything—we get that, that’s where we were twenty-four hours ago. We got our three—”
“Yes!”
“—and now you got your three.”
“HOAP set up a pross, put her in the killer’s path,” Michaela said quietly. She still wouldn’t look up from the cutting board, the knife. “He went for her, and Paul had his number three.”
“Yes!” Paul smiled and pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “HOAP gave him the gun but he decided he decided he decided to shoot. And now he’ll go to jail.”
George and I stared at each other in perfect, blank horror. I was going to faint. Or puke. Or faint then puke. Ooh, I hoped I didn’t faint then puke. I really hoped it would be the other way ar
chapter forty-two
“Oh, Paul.” Rarely had I felt such despair. The worst of it was, he would never, never understand. “This thing you did—this thing you programmed HOAP.2 to do … it is wrong.”
“No. It’s black.”
“You cannot put … obstacles”—I silently apologized to the de
ad women—“in someone’s way to wait and see if they will be killed, and then arrest the one you set up to kill them.”
“Oh, fuck me,” George groaned. “Michaela, give me a knife, please. I gotta decide whether to use it on him or me.”
“No chance,” she muttered down at her eggplant. She went to the fridge, withdrew a bundle of drumstick pods, and began chopping them in perfect two-inch sections. “If anyone knifes anyone, it’ll be me.”
“What’d you do, nutcake? You hacked his e-mail or his phone or whatever the fuck, you hacked it and stuffed it with the data that his type, either a woman in his stable or what HOAP figured he wouldn’t be able to resist, you found a way to tell him the perfect victim was gonna cross his path. And you found a way to watch. What’d you do—follow him? Hack into the nearest security cam? I guess it doesn’t matter. You put her in his way, you waited until you knew number three was dead, and then you called the cops.”
“Yes yes I did.” Paul’s puzzlement broke my heart. “He would have kept putting down the women of the black.”
Women of the black. I had heard that before today. I had heard it yesterday, in fact. I’ve almost caught the man disappearing all the ladies of the black. If I hadn’t been wondering how Dr. Gallo’s mouth tasted, I might have picked up on it.
Ah … no. Though it was in both our natures to self-flagellate, I don’t know that anyone in the world could have followed Paul’s thought process.
Pity knowing that did not make me feel better.
“He wouldn’t have wouldn’t have stopped until we stopped him until HOAP.2 stopped him. Now he’s stopped.”
“So’s number three,” George said hoarsely. Cadence might have mistaken his tone for horror and sorrow for the third victim. I knew George was watching his cushy retirement fly away on lazy black wings. “Let me break it down for you, Brain Man. You’ve heard of entrapment, right? It’s a legal term, and every once in a while it’s used by someone in law enforcement? Okay, so: in the real world—where we all have to live, Paul—in the real world, we couldn’t entrap a john about to get a blow job and have a prayer of convicting him. Because it’s entrapment. So the killer o’ three your system made?”
“It only predicted—”
“Made. Your wonky program entrapped him into killing number three, and guess what? We can’t prosecute him for that one! We have to hope and pray—good luck, cuz God’s on vacation—there’s enough evidence to tie him to the first two.”
Paul stood perfectly still for perhaps twenty seconds. Then he began to shake; if it was a seizure, it was like none I had ever seen. He trembled from head to foot. His face was blank with horror. His glasses fell off his face and I reached out and snatched them before they hit the floor.
“Look out!” George cried, ushering me behind the counter with Michaela. “He’s gonna blow!”
He certainly was. Some or all of what George had said had made it into the part of Paul’s brain that grasped information the way our brains did. He understood what HOAP.2 had done. What he had done. What he had made happen. Yes. He understood just fine.
chapter forty-three
“Paul. Paul!” I stepped out from behind the counter, grabbed him by the shirt front, and shook him like a maraca. “Your invention is wonderful.”
The shaking slowed a bit. His, not mine.
“It is! It is. You’ve done a great thing with HOAP and HOAP.1,” I soothed. “It’s terrific.” Yep. Terrific. Staggering. Terrifying. “But the world isn’t ready for it yet, okay? Just like the world wasn’t ready for George’s blond phase two years ago, remember?”
“Hey! I rocked that do.”
“Pay no attention to the man cowering behind the counter, Paul. You’ll just have to fix it, is all. You’ll have to make it better. You’re used to that.” Hell, the poor guy was driven to it. “So you’ll figure out what went wrong…” You’ll reprogram HOAP.2 so it won’t goad unstable people into killing people. “You’ll fix it. It’s just, for now, it’s gotta go back to the drawing board.” And how. “Law enforcement isn’t ready for it the way it is now. Sometime in the future, it will save lives. More lives,” I corrected myself. “Once you’ve gotten the bugs out. In the future, there won’t be cops. In the future, HOAP will do it all and they’ll catch a serial on his first or second murder, not his third.” Charles Albright. “Or his eleventh.” Charles Starkweather. “Or his eightieth.” Carl Eugene Watts.
“A shattered, dystopian, fascist future,” George added, clutching his head. Despite how dreadful the situation was, it gave me mean pleasure to see him rubbing his forehead the way I often did when faced with his nonsense.
“Well, yes.” Anything that gave George cause for alarm was Armageddon-esque. “But that’s a worry for another day.”
I couldn’t get Paul to smile, but I was able to get him to stop shaking. That was the closest to a win I figured we would get that weekend.
chapter forty-four
We’d coaxed Paul into lying down for a while and got one of the on-site therapists to sit with him. We called Emma Jan, let her know about the disaster du jour, and sent her to the local hoosegow to find out what was up with the killer HOAP.2 lured, then trapped. We were all hoping that the good Paul had done—finding the links between the first two victims—would at least keep the killer locked up.
“What does this mean for BOFFO’s lost funding?” I asked.
Michaela’s short, sharp bark of laughter was answer enough. George rested his forehead on a section of the counter not covered in eggplant and drumstick pods.
“You had a plan for HOAP.2, didn’t you?” I didn’t even realize it until I was watching Shiro try to bring home to Paul what he’d done. “That’s why you were so careful to tell us to be careful what we told him. You didn’t want him freaking out.”
“And now you see what good that did.”
“Will you cut the shit and look at me, please?”
I wasn’t sure if it was my tone, or “shit,” but at last she did. And what I saw shocked me.
chapter forty-five
A lone tear tracked down her cheek.
“Why, Michaela,” I said, surprised. “What is it?”
“I’ve failed you. I’ve been a vain, stupid woman and I’ve screwed up your lives.”
Cadence had not fled. Had not even stepped back. She’d pushed me forward, gently but firmly. She knew something, had guessed something. She knew what Michaela was about to say, and she wanted me to be front and center for it.
And I was afraid, I was very afraid.
“What do you mean?” I asked, so softly it was more a whisper.
“The royalties from Paul’s other software have kept BOFFO in the black for a long time. But the economy is shit. And you’re expensive. You’re all expensive, but—”
“But?”
“Worth it. Always worth it. You’re all so—so gifted and so troubled and you just needed a safe place and people who wouldn’t judge or be afraid and I wanted that for you, for all of you, and at first there was money in the trust and then Paul’s software royalties, and I’ve known the well was drying for months but I also knew HOAP was humming along but now—now—” She dropped the knife from trembling fingers. “A woman is dead! And she is dead only because I got complacent, because I thought brilliance equated understanding. She’s dead because I forgot that BOFFO’s primary function was to keep you safe from the world, but also to keep the world safe from you. I got caught up in the fantasy, the law enforcement, and two dead pros are three dead pros.”
“And the killer was—”
“I do not give two shits for the killer,” she corrected me sharply, and I reminded myself whom I was talking to.
I saw him, I knew him … I stuck a screwdriver in Mr. Lavik’s ear.… I could barely choke down that four-course meal later.
“BOFFO did not lose funding. There … there never was a BOFFO, was there?”
“No, of course not.”
“Wow, I’m right yet
again.” George was lifting his head and gently knocking it against the countertop. “And yet it’s never felt shittier.”
“Must you always marinate in the plastic bowl of your ignorance?” I snapped.
“I don’t know what else to marinate in.”
I turned back to Michaela. “Please continue.”
“Continue what? I just told you everything. You, the one person I promised myself I’d—” She shook her head angrily, but I did not know if she was angry with me or with herself. “You’re not FBI agents. BOFFO isn’t a government agency.”
I could hardly hear her over the roaring in my ears. I did not know how to feel. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to hurt myself. I wanted to seize George’s head and really smack it on the counter. “Why?”
“How else to keep the lot of you in line, unless you thought you worked for the government, for the side of law and order? How else to protect you except to impress on all of you that there are rules at ‘BOFFO’? If you knew you could do as you liked with few consequences, that we have—had—an absurd amount of funding and several high-ups bribed to look the other way, you would be even more unmanageable than you are!”
“So it was—ow—all about—ow—managing us?”
“Only the ones like you, Pinkman, and stop smacking your filthy head on my clean counter. For the others, it was about protecting them, helping them, and then showing them how to use what they are and what they have to help others. We aren’t FBI, but most of our ‘busts’ have been good. The killers we’ve caught are in jail or dead.” Michaela brightened a little at the thought of the dead ones. “We are licensed private investigators, among other things, and thus our investigations are admissible in court.”