Crooked Halos Read online

  Dr. Korpanty shook her head. “No. Only a few samples of the virus even exist, and only two samples of the catalyst. One of each must have been used on Mr. Timmons.”

  “Okay, so we don’t necessarily need to call in the CDC just yet, but you still haven’t told me what the virus does,” I reminded the good doctor.

  “It’s pretty straightforward. The virus acts as a booster to genetic modifications. Let’s say you were gen-modded for, oh, a gorilla’s strength. The virus would amplify the effect, making you at least twice as strong as the original gen-mod.”

  I whistled. “Any downsides?”

  Dr. Korpanty nodded. “Yes, a lot of them. The biggest problem was exposure to the catalyst tended to damage higher brain function. It rendered the exposed gen-mod either catatonic or feral, like Mr. Timmons. It’s why we discontinued our research on the project.”

  “But someone in Shurburg remembered it and decided to try it out on Tuba,” I said, stroking my chin thoughtfully. “Or gave it to someone else outside of the company. Either way, it’s a concern. If someone with the right background and equipment got ahold of the virus and the catalyst, they could theoretically create more.”

  “Yes, but it’s highly unlikely,” Dr. Korpanty said. “The compounds they would need, the equipment…a lot of it is proprietary to Shurburg. You can’t buy it, even on the black market, and the stuff that is available isn’t cheap or available in large quantities.”

  “Okay, so, how do we reverse it?” I asked. “We can’t send a rabid gangster to Pratchett Correctional.”

  “That’s the thing—we can’t reverse it,” Dr. Korpanty said. “Once you’ve been exposed to the catalyst, the changes are irreversible. His mental state will continue to deteriorate quite rapidly, until even his cerebellar functions shut down. He’ll be a vegetable for a short while, until even his lizard hindbrain finally shuts down and his heart stops.”

  I shuddered. That was a terrible fate, even for the Tuba. “What do we do with him, then?” I asked. I could have Kimiko kill him—she’d be quick and merciful, which was probably more than he deserved—but ordering a cold-blooded murder wasn’t really my style.

  Dr. Korpanty gave me a pained expression. “I can do things to keep him sedated and calm, and to ease his pain, but he probably only has a couple of weeks left to live at most.”

  I stood up and walked over to where we’d secured Tuba. We’d chained him up to a metal frame bolted into the wall, so I was fairly confident it would hold him for the time being, even if he woke up. Here in the warehouse, he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone, and no one would hear him if he woke up and started hollering and carrying on. “Do what you can for him,” I said, not taking my eyes off the gangster. “And see if you can help me figure out who might’ve done the gen-mod on him.”

  V.

  My next problem was Dresden Crowder.

  “Are you sure it was him?” Miss Typewell asked. I was back in the office, bringing her and Miss Janovich up to date on capturing Tuba and spotting Crowder.

  “Pretty damn sure,” I replied. “I mean, it looked exactly like him, aside from the whole walking thing.”

  “Well, Ms. Pratt told you he was coming to town to kill her,” Miss Typewell said. “Is it really a surprise you saw him?”

  “I just…wasn’t expecting it,” I said. “Not yet. I thought I’d have at least a day or two to get myself prepared for it.”

  “Well, it’s no use sitting around feeling sorry for yourself,” Miss Typewell said. “You can’t freeze up. There’s too much to do.”

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “Of course I am. I’m always right,” Miss Typewell replied triumphantly. “Now, what are you going to do?”

  “First, I’m going to have Kimiko put a shadow on him,” I said. I pulled up a vid window and scrolled through the dossier Kimiko had created for me that detailed the skills of all of her ninja. “Looks like Yoshi is the best tracker,” I mused. I tapped a few buttons and sent a message to Kimiko asking her to send him out after Crowder and appended a description and photo of him. Knowing Kimiko, she’d have Yoshi on him within an hour.

  “I still can’t believe he’s back in town,” Miss Typewell said.

  “And looking to commit murder, don’t forget that part,” I added.

  “Doesn’t that strike you as a little out of character for him?” Ellen asked.

  “Dresden Crowder framed me for harassing and then beating a suspect half to death and cost me my job as a police officer, Ellen. No, I don’t think premeditated murder is out of character for him.”

  Maya, who’d spent the entire exchange lost in her own world, looked up then. “Um, who’s Dresden Crowder?” she asked.

  “He’s Eddie’s archnemsis,” Miss Typewell replied. “Well, one of them,” she corrected.

  “Hey, I can have more than one! There’s a plural for nemesis, after all,” I said defensively. “Anyway, he’s a decorated, venerated former APD detective,” I said, “and the guy who got me kicked off the force.”

  Maya gave me a quizzical look. “How do those two things fit together?”

  “Hey, people can be contradictory. We contain multitudes,” I snapped.

  Miss Typewell sighed. “You should probably just tell the whole story,” she said.

  I groaned. “I hate telling the story. Can’t you do it?”

  “No,” Miss Typewell replied. “It’s your personal tragedy, not mine.”

  “Fine,” I said, “but I’m going to need something stronger than coffee to do this.” I dug a bottle of cheap scotch out of the bottom drawer of my desk, took a long pull straight from said bottle, and sighed semi-contentedly. “No interruptions, okay? I only want to have to say all this crap once.”

  VI.

  “I first met Crowder when I was a rookie pretty much fresh out of the academy,” I said. “I’d been walking a beat for about six months—just walking Old Town, learning to chase off the drug dealers and the lowlifes who hung around on street corners. I’d shown some aptitude for detective work, though, and the Chief of Police—an old guy named Carmelo Jones—decided to start up a program where rookie beat cops were paired with veteran detectives to learn the ropes and jumpstart their careers with the force. Sophia Esperanza was my captain at the 4th Precinct back then, and she accepted me into the program and paired me with Crowder.

  “The guy was already a legend by then. His record for most collars still hasn’t been beaten, and probably won’t ever be. He was charming, well-spoken, and cleverer than everyone else in the room. He was the most all-American guy you could care to meet.

  “I should probably describe him, since you’ve never seen him, Maya. He was tall—six foot two, six foot three, somewhere in there—and built like a brick wall had an illicit affair with a supermodel. Handsome was too inadequate a word to describe him. He had a square jaw, a bright smile, and eyes that you could get lost in. He could’ve had his pick of anyone, guy or girl, and he knew how to use his charm like a tool. Sometimes that tool was a sledgehammer, battering down his target’s defenses, and sometimes it was the most delicate lockpick, disarming and subtle.

  “And he was kind. He helped the helpless, gave hope to the hopeless, and would’ve given you the proverbial shirt off his back if he had to. He was truly selfless.” I paused and lit a cigarette.

  “Except he wasn’t,” I continued. “It was all an act. Underneath that Poster Child for Truth, Justice, and Mom’s Apple Pie façade was something dark and sinister. Of course, I didn’t figure that out at first. No, I was a wide-eyed neophyte with delusions of grandeur. I mean, I ironed my uniform at night. I polished my badge. I memorized two-thirds of the Statutes and Ordinances of the City of Arcadia and could recite it verbatim. I was the goodiest of two shoes, and I fell for his act. Hard.”

  “Wait,” Miss Typewell interrupted. “I’ve heard the story before, but something’s always bugged me. How could a guy as rotten as Crowder fool everyone? I mean, even now, most folks thin
k of him as a hero and a martyr.”

  I shrugged. “What can I say? He was good at hiding his true self. Most sociopaths are.”

  “How do you know he was a, um, sociopath?” Maya asked.

  “There were signs. There always are. Sociopaths are often really good at pretending to have emotions and empathy, and that was definitely Crowder. But if you paid attention for long enough, you could feel that something was just…off about him. There was something disingenuous about the man. If you caught him when he wasn’t looking, there was this vacant look in his eyes that told you everything was an act.

  “Anyway, we only worked one case together, a murder investigation. The victim was a guy named Sherman Lee. It was a locked room mystery—doors and windows all closed and locked from the inside, dead body lying in the floor of the living room but he hadn’t been murdered there. None of the neighbors heard anything, of course, and no one really knew him. ‘Kept to himself, quiet guy,’ stuff like that.” I paused for a moment and took a long pull from my bottle. “It’s been fifteen years, but the details are all still pretty clear to me. We liked one of the neighbors for the murder—a guy named Alex Caruthers—but didn’t have anything to bring him in on. This was when I first saw Crowder’s true face—he called in a bunch of favors with different cops and a judge to get us a warrant on a premise that was paper-thin—and we went into Caruthers’s place to look for evidence.”

  I took a long drag on my cigarette. “Caruthers had wiped the whole place clean with industrial cleaning agents. You could’ve performed surgery in his bathroom, the place was so spotless. It was suspicious as hell, but you can’t take someone in for questioning just because they’ve got OCD and germaphobia.

  “We got kinda lucky, though, because Sherman Lee had a pretty detailed security system set up at his place with pressure sensors and infrared cameras, the works. We got hold of some of the data from the system and found out someone else had been in the apartment who matched Caruthers’s size and build. Then, I went to the building super and pulled all the surveillance camera footage from the whole building for the night of the murder and saw Caruthers hauling a tarp out to the dumpster behind the building. We took another look at Lee’s apartment and figured out he’d been murdered in the bathtub, and Caruthers had put the tarp under him first to catch blood and brains and all that. Then, once the body had mostly stopped bleeding, he dragged Lee back out to the living room and disposed of the tarp and all the other incriminating evidence.”

  “But wait,” Maya said, a confused look on her face. “You said it was a locked room mystery. How did Caruthers get in and out?”

  “Through the air ducts,” I said. “The building was old and had these massive industrial ductworks throughout. Caruthers found out the ducting in his apartment connected to the ducting in Lee’s place, and just crawled up through the vent to catch the victim off-guard.

  “So, we had the how, but not the physical proof and the motive. I went after the tarp, which I eventually found after digging through God only knows what in the dumpster, and Crowder did an interrogation with Caruthers.

  “You ever been in the 4th Precinct?” Maya and Ellen both shook their heads. “The interrogation rooms are on the second floor against the back wall of the place. They’re on their own hallway, and there’s a security camera that covers most of the hallway and one in each interrogation room. Well, most of the interrogation rooms. There’s one where the camera is tilted off its axis pretty bad, so all you can see is the door. Captain O’Mally fixed it when he took over, but Esperanza looked the other way for years.

  “The point is, that’s the room Crowder took Caruthers in to for his interrogation. Crowder made me stay out of the room for my ‘own protection,’ he said.” I made air quotes with my fingers. “But I saw the aftermath. Caruthers looked like his face had been through a meat grinder, a belt sander, and a broken glass factory. His hands…well, he wasn’t ever gonna play the piano again, that was for sure. Crowder beat a confession out of that guy, and then threatened to have him killed if he ever told the truth about what happened.”

  “That’s horrible,” Miss Typewell said. She’d heard all this before, but it didn’t change the fact that Crowder had done things to Caruthers that no one should ever have to go through.

  I nodded and took another pull on my cigarette. “Yeah. That wasn’t everything, though. It gets worse, because of course it does.

  “We had a confession. Caruthers was a professional hitman working for some shadowy new figure in the criminal underworld known only as the Boss. Not the one you’re thinking, though. From what I can tell, Vera didn’t come around until a few years later. She took over for whoever that first Boss was.

  “Point is, Caruthers was a hitman for the Organization. Lee was an accountant for the Organization who was planning on turning state’s evidence, which is why the dumb bastard was killed. Together with the tarp I’d recovered—which had Lee’s DNA all over it, of course—we had enough to put Caruthers away for the rest of his days.

  “And then his lawyer showed up. High-powered kinda guy, the sort a low-life like Caruthers would never have been able to afford. It was another piece of the puzzle, though, more proof this guy was a hitman for the Organization. Not that it mattered, though. The lawyer got Caruthers released because of his treatment while in custody—the beating Crowder had given him.

  “The trick, though? Caruthers didn’t finger Crowder for the beating. He said I did it.”

  “But you weren’t even in the room!” Maya yelped.

  I shrugged. “Didn’t matter. The camera in there didn’t see anything, remember? So it was his word against mine and Crowder’s, and Crowder threw me under the bus like I was a child’s soccer ball. They put me on administrative leave, pending investigation, and sent me home to think about what I’d done like some sort of naughty school child.

  “Then Crowder showed up at my door. He’d started investigating the Organization and wanted me to back him up when he went to blow the doors off the thing. Star-struck idiot that I was, I agreed to tag along. We went to the Warehouse District and hit this place that was more rundown than any single building I’d ever been in. And the kicker? The place was completely empty. There was nothing there except decay and tetanus. Well, and a sniper who shot Crowder in the spine and paralyzed him from the waist down. The whole thing had been a trap, because of course it was a trap, and Crowder got himself nearly killed for it.

  “That was the last straw for Captain Esperanza when it came to me. Not only had I beaten a suspect in custody, but now I was taking part in an operation while suspended from duty and got a superior officer wounded? That was it. Esperanza basically told me to get the hell out or I would be fired and then brought up on charges. I chose to go quietly of my own slightly-less-than-free will. A few months later, I met up with John Bodewell, who took me on as his protégé and set me on the path to the fantastic private investigator by whom you are now employed.” I spread my hands in a vague gesture implying I was done telling the story. “Any questions?”

  “What happened to Crowder after he was shot?” Maya asked.

  “He spent the better part of a year in rehab,” I said, somber. “Then he just…disappeared from Arcadia. Completely dropped off my radar until today.”

  “And you say he can walk again?” Ellen asked.

  I nodded. “I remember reading about some developments in medical science. Gene therapy. Cybernetics. The sort of stuff of science-fiction made real.” I went to take another drink from my whisky bottle, only to discover I’d emptied it already. “So, I guess he took advantage of those advancements, though who knows where he got the cash for it.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments before Miss Typewell spoke. “So, what’s next?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Dunno. We’ve got a couple of options, neither of them good. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  VII.

  I was still uncertain about the case when Genevieve Pratt sent me a m
essage two days later with her address and the details of her agreement with Dresden Crowder. She also included a detailed dossier on Crowder, one that rivaled the information I was able to gather through the Organization’s network of informants and data miners. Yoshi, my tracker, had followed Crowder’s movements as well as he could, but the guy was suddenly super slippery and difficult to tail. After twelve hours, Yoshi had to report he’d lost Crowder. But I didn’t worry about it too much. Between the two files I had on the guy, I had a good portrait of Crowder’s recent activities, known associates, and current whereabouts.

  I decided I needed to stake out Ms. Pratt’s residence. The address she’d given me was for a high-rise hotel building on the edge of Downtown called the Zimmerman. It was the sort of hotel that’s expensive but bland, the Platonic ideal of a mid-level chain hotel with inoffensive colors on the walls and unremarkable if expensive furniture scattered around the lobby. Each room probably contained a pastoral landscape painting duplicated from some Rococo or Impressionist master.

  I settled into a couch—done up in an unassuming, boring shade of beige—in the lobby and pulled up several vid windows. Most of them I set to opaque to provide me with some anonymity, but the two on either side of my peripheral vision and the one directly in front of me had the transparency ticked up a couple of notches above opaque so I could see through them. I didn’t necessarily expect Crowder to show up, but he might send a flunky to case the joint. I had no reason to assume Crowder knew I was working this case—despite the fact that seeing him while I was chasing the Tuba was too convenient for coincidence—or that he’d tell his people to keep an eye out for me if he did know, but it never hurt to be cautious. With all the vid windows, it would take anyone looking at me a few moments to recognize me, which might be all I needed to identify my target and get the hell out before bullets started flying in my direction.