Taking the Highway

ANDRE WALKED INTO HIS cubicle and snapped off the companel. It was a favorite prank among the custodians. Leave the companels in each office tuned to the same spinner. Today, it was Naked Jay. The last thing he needed was to see a grossly obese man in a skin suit pontificating about how foreign cars were to blame for yesterday’s pile-up. It was bad enough this morning, when Andre had taken one look at the huge knot of fourths at his stop, then turned around and fetched his car. Almost everyone was staying off 96 and the side roads were jammed. Just as he’d feared, in the wake of an Overdrive malfunction, everyone assumed the surface streets were safer. The mayor’s office was working double time on the positive PR, trotting out experts to explain every detail of the new, failsafe system, but it would be days, maybe weeks, before people fully trusted the highways.

Seeing Naked Jay reminded Andre that it had been awhile since he’d last scanned for smart tags. Not that he expected to find one. The spinners had all but given up trying to sneak recording equipment onto police officers. Any information they found wasn’t worth the inevitable lawsuits. But getting caught with a tag on you was worse for the police officer than for the spinner it led back to, so scanning was a must. Andre pulled a full-sized scanner out of his desk drawer. He’d never sprung for a newer, mini model, content with one the size and shape of a soup ladle. He held the handle and did a cursory wave over his body, letting it scan the most obvious parts.

He’d started scanning his shoes when he heard voices outside his cubicle. Voices he recognized. He looked left, right, but there was nowhere to hide and it was too late to run. He sighed and dropped the scanner into his drawer, then swung into his chair as Danny Cariatti escorted in a smartly-dressed, beautifully made-up, and very smug Sofia Gao.

“Here you go, Sergeant,” Danny said, sweeping one arm into the small cube. “Andre, you know you’re supposed to meet your appointments downstairs. Someone could wander around up here for hours.”

“We didn’t have an appointment.”

“I saw her looking for you. Nice lady like this, I had to help.”

“Thanks, Danny.” Andre smiled with his mouth while he killed Danny with his eyes. I will get you for this.

“Don’t mention it,” Danny said. “City and suburb, we have to cooperate with each other.”

“So true.” I will hunt you down and murder you in your sleep.

Danny leaned a shoulder on the door jam. “City cops have a reputation for being arrogant. Can you believe it?”

“We should do something about that,” Andre agreed. I will scatter your cremated remains to the four winds.

Sofia looked between them with a small twitch of the lips. “Thank you for the escort, Lieutenant. Your homicide department is bigger than I thought it would be.”

Andre rolled his eyes. Just what an outburb cop would think. Detroit either had the lowest murder rate in the country or one of the highest, depending on how you ran the numbers—with or without the zone.

“I appreciate it,” Sofia told Danny.

“No mention. If you need help finding your way out again—”

“I’ll find my way,” Sofia said.

Danny finally levered himself off the wall. “Then it’s back to work.”

Andre waited until Danny left, then waved a hand to show off his miniscule cubicle. “I’d offer you a chair, but this one is mine.”

“No problem. Since I’m taking everything else from you, the least I can do is let you keep your chair.”

Again? What was wrong with this woman? He admired her tenacity, but enough was enough. “You can’t take anything I don’t give.”

Sofia consulted her datapad. “I sent you a file. My dead guys? Homer Carcassi and Douglas Ming? Both newly arrived from Chicago. Both here for just a few weeks before they were killed.”

Andre deliberately kept his pad shut. “Half the fourths I know are from Chicago. The other half are from Toledo. So unless you’ve got something better—”

“They knew each other.”

Andre’s eyebrows shot up. “Here, or in Chicago?”

“Both.”

“Do you have anything to connect them with my two guys?”

“Not yet, but I will.”

Andre was beginning to regret not giving Sofia the chair. Standing, he’d have a height advantage. Now, she loomed over him, making her arguments seem better, even when they weren’t. “You mean I will,” he said. “These are still my cases.”

Sofia pointed at his datapad. “Are you going to read that or not?”

“Not.”

“I found another one.”

“What?”

“I ran the recent homicides again, revising my search with your parameters. Russell van Slater turned up floating in a Sycamore Hills pond six weeks ago.”

“Six weeks?” Andre flipped open his pad and stabbed at it until he found her file. “Don’t tell me. The VanGlitch.”

“We always call it the McError.”

“Doesn’t matter. They should have caught it.” I should have caught it. It had happened to him more than once, in reverse, as people insisted on adding a space between the two syllables of his surname. With Russell van Slater, the cops on the case had mashed the prefix and the surname together, and it had taken the AI this long to figure out van Slater was a fourth.

He paged through the details. The body had been floating less than a hundred meters from a country club bar wearing only garish boxers. Tagged a John Doe, van Slater was thought to have drowned, with alcohol a contributing factor. But the coroner’s report said that Mr. Doe hadn’t gone swimming voluntarily and he sure as hell hadn’t forgotten to come up for air on his own. Finger and retinal prints had given van Slater back his identity, however misspelled, but the investigators had pretty much dismissed it as an off-kilter mugging.

“Lazy,” Andre muttered.

“Tell me about it,” Sofia answered. “The detective who caught the case is ten years past caring and ten years early for retirement. When I told him I wanted this, he offered to kiss me.”

“Declined?”

“Declined with ewww. Once I sorted out that van Slater was a fourth, I realized he was probably the first of the set.”

“Highly collectible,” Andre agreed. He rubbed a hand across his chin. “For once, I wish conspiracy theories weren’t total bullshit.”

“Come again?”

“You know the stories; that cops are spying on fourths by tracking our badges.”

Sofia scoffed. “Wouldn’t that be nice. All of my cases—”

“All of your cases?” Andre interrupted. “Why should you get them? Van Slater was found in Bloomfield.” As far as he was concerned, they each still had two cases. Anything in the northern suburbs was up for grabs.

“Russell van Slater was the first.”

“And if we were on the playground, you would have dibs on the soccer ball. If I hadn’t figured out they were fourths, you wouldn’t have anything to connect them but simple mortality.”

She glared. “I know what you are. I know what you do. All fourthing does for you is makes you biased. Give this to more experienced detectives so we can—”

“More experienced, my taut buttocks! I’ve been sergeant grade years longer than you have.”

“I heard how you got pushed . . . your taut what?”

He leaned sideways. “Right there, detective. Right there.”

“Put your ass back where you can think with it.”

Andre didn’t move. Sofia glared. Andre matched her, enjoying a long look into those intense dark eyes. Was she blushing a little? He hoped so.

She slapped her datapad shut. “I’m going upstairs with this.”

“Late breaking spin. I already did.”

“I’ve gone higher.” She crossed her arms and tilted her head. “It’s already done. If you’d bother to read a single thing I sent you, you’d know that you’re due in the mayor’s office at four this afternoon. I just came here as a courtesy, to give you a head’s up.”

Andre settled down into his chair and mimed desk work. “I sincerely appreciate that.”

“My taut buttocks, you do.” She turned and walked out of the cubicle.

He watched her go and nodded his approval. “Nice.”