S Huang - Zero Sum Game

I needn’t have bothered. Cabinet after cabinet revealed rows of hanging file folders, telling me some paper trail had been here, but every one of them swung empty—even the paper tabs labeling the folders had been pulled. The desk drawers mocked me with more of the same. I tried the computers next—when the first one refused to start, I crawled around to the back to find the hard drive missing, the connectors still dangling. I took the time to check around the back of every computer in the place, but they were all gutted. The private offices showed much the same story except sans corpses; apparently everyone important had been in the conference room.

Bits of paper from a shredder littered the floor here and there as I moved through the suite. I eventually found the shredder in question, an industrial-strength behemoth, but the bin beneath it had been cleared out. I figured out why when I found the office kitchen.

A large metal filing cabinet had been turned on its side against the doorway, with plastic garbage bags duct taped across it to create a seal, and the impromptu levee held back a pulpy white goop that drowned the entire kitchenette to the level of my waist. The caustic odor of chemicals assaulted my senses, and I coughed and hugged one arm across my nose, blinking watering eyes. Though the tap was no longer running, rags in the sink drain showed how the place had been so easily flooded, and then some sort of mad chemical mixture had been thrown in along with…shredded paper.

Someone had wanted to be very, very, very sure no one reconstituted the data from this office. Hell, it wasn’t like most people could piece back together shredded documents in the first place; certainly no one could do it easily—except me, that is, but it seemed both egotistical and too coincidental to assume this destruction was for my benefit. Why would anyone go to so much extra trouble?

“Hey, Russell,” Tresting called.

I carefully avoided the corpses in the outer office and wound my way back to the torture chamber of a conference room. Tresting stood at the far end, examining an empty chair. “Look at this,” he said, and I stepped around to oblige him. Sprays of blood crossed the edges of the chair in multiple places, but the seat and back were clean.

“Someone was sitting here,” I said.

“Haven’t seen Dawna Polk anywhere. Could be her?”

I narrowed my eyes at the chair seat, trying to remember the measurements of Dawna’s hips. I hadn’t been paying too much attention, but I estimated, measuring in my memory. “No. This is too wide. I’m guessing a man. Or a large woman.” I squinted at the blood spatter surrounding the empty chair, the numbers spiraling to find their sources in midair, a person-shaped outline of shimmering red. “Whoever it was got tortured, too.”

“How can you tell?”

“The spray,” I answered, not wanting to go into it.

“Think our perps turned kidnappers,” said Tresting. “They wanted information—forced the vics to talk, most like while their coworkers got tortured or killed.” He reached over to the nearest woman and lifted the side of the cloth gag with a gloved finger. “Take a look.”

He was right. Blood stained the skin underneath the cloth, and nowhere near any of her own wounds. The smearing made it harder to judge, but from the angle I guessed it had come from the man across from her.

Maybe this investigative stuff was worth something after all.

I told Tresting what I’d found in the rest of the office suite. “Unless they have data on an outside server somewhere, it’s cleaned out.”

“Think we better head, then,” he said grimly. “We can keep an eye on the police investigation.”

“When do you think they’ll find it?”

“Right after we leave, when I call in a tip.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Can it, Russell,” Tresting growled. “This is too big.”

He had a point. Of course, considering what we knew of Pithica, this was probably too big for the cops, too.

We drove in silence almost all the way back. When Tresting found a space on the street a few blocks away from his office, he yanked the truck over into it, shifting gears so hard my teeth rattled. As he turned off the engine I reached for the door handle, but Tresting’s voice stopped me.

“Russell.”

“Yeah?”

He made no move to get out. “Been thinking. This wasn’t Pithica. Not their style. And they wouldn’t do this to their own.”

“New player, then?” I thought of Anton’s garage, of the men in dark suits at Courtney’s place. I saw the massacre in the office building again, my mind skittering away from the details. Maybe this mess had reached the point where I should throw in with Tresting for real, share everything. I opened my mouth.

Tresting slammed the heels of his hands against the steering wheel. “ Dammit, Russell!”

I bit back on my other intel. “What?”

The look he shot me was positively poisonous, for no reason I could fathom.

“ What?” I repeated.

“You told him, didn’t you.”

“Told what to whom?” Where did Tresting get off thinking he had a say in my business? It wasn’t as if I had a whole lot of friends to blab information to anyway; the only person I’d been in touch with at all was—oh. Oh. “Wait—you think Rio did this?”

He gave me a long, level stare, his jaw clenched, his eyes mirroring the pain and anger of the victims in the office building.

I swallowed. Had it been Rio? And so what if it was? Stumbling upon that kind of…work…I would be lying if I claimed it had been pleasant, but it wasn’t news to me what Rio was capable of. I was well aware of his methods. And if anyone deserves them, it’s Pithica. Isn’t it?

Tresting was still staring at me as if I’d betrayed him. I tried to ignore the squirming sensation in my stomach that felt remarkably like guilt.

Of course I had to tell Rio we were going in, I insisted to myself. He was tracking Dawna; if we ran into each other working at cross purposes…that’s how people get killed! I started to bridle under Tresting’s judgment. He did not have the high ground here, I told myself. He didn’t. “I told you,” I said. “You work with me, you work with the people I trust. I don’t know if Rio had something to do with this, but—”

“Get out.”

“We can still work toge—”

“Get out of my truck.”

I did. Tresting got down from the other side and slammed his door with much more force than necessary.

I decided to try for professional. “I’ll call him,” I volunteered. “If he did go in, I’ll see if he got any information out of the office. I’ll let you know.”

The tension in Tresting’s posture cracked, and he whipped his arm around, bringing a fist down on the hood of his truck so hard he dented it. “How can you stand there and say—after what we saw—” He shook his head over and over, as if warding off the devil. “No. No. Don’t call me, Russell. Just don’t. We’ll solve this without you or not at all.” He cleared his throat. “It ain’t worth it.”

Something stung inside my chest, a sharp and unfamiliar pain. It wasn’t only Rio he thought a monster. “I understand,” I said. My lips felt strangely stiff. “I won’t bother you again.”

Tresting’s condemnation washed over me as he turned away, disgust and contempt and horror simmering in his wake. He strode off.

The stinging feeling got worse. I took a deep breath and told myself it didn’t matter.

I waited for Tresting to disappear down the street and then followed in the direction of his office, looking for the sports car I had driven here the night before, but someone had jacked it. Not surprising, considering it was way too nice a car for the area and I had already done half the job for any aspiring car thief, but still, talk about an annoying end to a rotten morning. I briefly and pettily considered taking Tresting’s truck, but that was beneath even me.