S Huang - Zero Sum Game

“Unhinged?”

“It’s been a trying case,” he said.

“She’s very…dedicated,” I offered.

“That ain’t a tenth of it. You know, we both started getting death threats, anonymous, after this whole thing started—not sure if I should be insulted no one’s tried to follow through, by the by—and she always laughed. Said if someone killed her, they might start taking her husband’s death seriously.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Some guy even threatened her son once. She got him a bodyguard and didn’t look back.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” Tresting leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “She’s a trip. Can’t even say she’s the craziest client I ever had, neither, though this is by far the craziest case. Glamorous life of a private eye, huh?”

“Speaking of, what does a PI license let you do?” I asked, curious.

“Huh? Well…loiter.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

I felt a strong urge to snicker.

“Though sometimes people see the license and think they have to answer questions,” Tresting amended. “Authority figure and all that.”

“That’s why I have a fake one,” I said.

“I didn’t hear that.”

I went to use the washroom, and took the time to splash water on my face and rinse out my mouth. When I returned, Tresting’s monitors were back on and he was talking to Checker. “Good timing, Russell,” he said.

“I think I’ve narrowed down your search,” Checker told me. “It fronts as a travel agency, which makes a good cover for tons of international calls. But the security on their intranets is ridiculously intense. It’s—”

“Did you crack it?” I interrupted.

He twitched. “I will. A little more time—”

“We know it’s the right office, though?”

“Statistically, the suspicious activity—”

“Yes,” said Tresting, over Checker’s annoyed squawk at being interrupted again. “That’s his way of saying yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

“I feel appreciated,” grumped Checker.

“Thank you,” I said to him with sweet sarcasm, and turned back to Tresting. “Now let’s go.”

Checker gave us a hearty middle finger and cut the connection.

“He’ll be standing by for when we get in,” Tresting assured me. “In case we can get him remote access. Shall we?”

“Can you get him to cut the security cameras for us first?” I wasn’t likely to forget how easily Checker had been able to find Dawna and me on the Santa Monica footage.

“Asked already. For some reason the building security system is down today. Been down for the last few hours.”

I studied his grim face. “You think they have something going down?”

“Only one way to find out. Mind giving me my gun back?”

Tresting drove; I sat in the passenger seat and tried to keep from fidgeting. I’d never gone into a place with someone else. It felt odd, itchy, like a variable I had no control over. I tamped down both that and my headache, which had reappeared with a dull throb as we drove—this wasn’t the time to be distracted. Fortunately, I’d had enough practice with hangovers to ignore headaches pretty easily.

Once we hit the right block, Tresting parked his badass truck on the street in favor of not being locked in a nine-dollar-per-hour garage, and we walked in the front door of the office building. An attendant in the lobby nodded at us with a mild frown—probably because we both looked like we either belonged to the same fight club or made a habit of walking into doors together—but Tresting nodded back in a friendly sort of way and went up to the directory as if he belonged there, and the attendant went back to his crossword.

We took the elevator up to the third floor, neither of us speaking, and found our way down a carpeted hallway of anonymous doors to suite 3B. I raised my eyebrows at Tresting and put a hand under my coat. We split to either side of the door and he reached out to open it.

The door handle refused to yield under his fingers. Locked.

We looked at each other. Clearly the travel agency wasn’t an active front, if potential clients couldn’t walk in. Tresting gestured for me to stay on my side of the doorway and raised a fist to knock loudly. “Building maintenance,” he called.

Nothing.

He tried again. Still nothing. I didn’t hear even a rustle of movement from inside.

I mimed kicking in the door. I’m excellent at kicking in doors. Tresting, however, held up a hand to stop me and pulled out a set of lockpicks. His way was less conspicuous, I’d give him that.

I stayed ready in case the occupants of the office could hear us and were quietly preparing. Tresting picked the lock with astonishing speed, almost as if he were inserting a key instead of some squiggly pieces of metal, and raised his eyes to nod at me. I nodded back, and he twisted the handle and pushed the door open.

My gun leapt into my hand, but I had nothing to aim it at. We stared numbly.

Someone who looked like she’d played the role of receptionist was sprawled just inside the door, her throat slit so deeply she was almost decapitated. Blood saturated the carpet in a massive, soggy pool around her.

Tresting had his weapon out, too, and we stepped into the room, covering every angle and carefully avoiding the soaked carpeting. Tresting elbowed the door shut behind him, and we crept into the office suite.

My stomach folded in on itself as we passed down the row of desks. A young, sandy-haired man at a computer had been disemboweled. The women in the next two cubicles looked like they’d tried to run. One had fallen on her front, but her head was twisted all the way around so her sightless eyes stared up at the ceiling in frozen horror.

We turned the corner and found the conference room. The blood had turned it into a grotesque modern art painting.

The men and women seated around the conference table had been older, well-dressed corporate types. All except one were tied to their chairs, cloth gags choking their corpses, the lone exception a middle-aged man with a .22-inch diameter hole in his forehead. He’d had a better fate than the rest. The mathematics arranged itself in brilliant arcing lines of red, the spatter patterns showing me exactly how they had all suffered.

I’m not squeamish, but I closed my eyes briefly.

“Here,” said Tresting’s voice, and he handed me a pair of latex gloves he pulled from a pocket. He’d found some plastic bags in a bin somewhere, too; he shook bits of shredded paper off them and put them over his boots, handing two more to me. “Forensics are good. Rather not go down for this.”

I tucked the plastic mechanically into the tops of my boots, and we cautiously approached the scene. I tried to deduce something useful from the carnage, but my mind drew a blank; I could only see parabolas of blood fountaining to end in gruesome trigonometry, infinite repetition from too many points of convergence—angles of impact, speed of slashes, over and over and over again…

I could see everything. It meant nothing.

Tresting hooked a Bluetooth over his ear. It wasn’t hard to figure out whom he was calling. He succinctly described the scene and started carefully pulling wallets from those around the conference table, reading off their IDs.

I forced myself to detach, to observe, running my eyes over the unhappy victims and trying like hell to ignore the mathematical replay, but nothing could make this scene better. I saw limbs bent in unholy directions, shallow cuts carving lurid designs in skin…one woman had been partially flayed. The stench in the heavy air clogged my nostrils, gagging me.

The brute horror here wouldn’t tell me anything useful. I escaped back into the outer offices, doing my best to avoid looking at the bodies, and attacked the cubicles, dragging open desk drawers and filing cabinets.