Elizabeth Bonesteel - The Cold Between

She knew she was deliberately provoking Luvidovich, but she was utterly unprepared for his response to the remark. His face went purple, and his hands were shaking, but he was not looking at her anymore. He was staring over her shoulder at Stoya, and she thought what she saw in his eyes was desperation.

For the first time that day, since Greg had told her of Danny’s death, everything came abruptly into focus. She thought of Zajec’s bloodied face, of the look of resignation in his eyes, of Luvidovich mentioning Danny only where Stoya would not overhear. Something hot and sharp began to grow in her stomach. “You’re not going to investigate this at all, are you?”

Luvidovich turned to her and opened his mouth to retort, but she shook her head. “No, that’s why you didn’t ask me about Danny in the interrogation. None of this is about him at all. This is about someone you don’t like. ” She turned to Stoya; his stony expression had not changed. A wave of revulsion overcame her, and suddenly she didn’t care that the press was there, that the whole conversation would get back to Greg, who would almost certainly yell at her again. “What kind of people are you?”

“Let me assure you, Commander Shaw,” Stoya said with infuriating calm, “we have no intention of abandoning our investigation.”

“You are a liar, Stoya.” Behind her she heard the reporters murmuring, but she was done with tact. “You’ve got an off-worlder corpse and an off-worlder suspect, and the only reason anyone is focusing on your manufactured case instead of an incompetent off-worlder police chief is that PSI makes an easy target. What in the hell is wrong with this place?”

Stoya stood back, his expression stoic, but Luvidovich was furious. “Chief Stoya has done more for Volhynia than you and your useless soldiers have done in five hundred years!” he shouted. “Who do you think you are, coming to our world and accusing an honest man?”

“You started it,” she snapped.

At that Luvidovich lunged, but before he could reach her, Stoya held out an arm, and the younger officer stumbled against it. She had not even had time to flinch. “It is Stoya who has been fighting for this city, for this world,” Luvidovich continued, fists still clenched. “ You are the one who is letting a murderer go free!”

“Perhaps we should all calm down,” Stoya said. He fixed his cold gaze on Elena, still holding off Luvidovich. “As far as our case against Captain Zajec is concerned, there is still the possibility of conspiracy—”

“Oh, bullshit,” she said. “If you had anything on him, you wouldn’t have cared what I had to say. He’s innocent, and you know it, and all of those people”—she gestured toward the reporters—“know it, too. While you’re idly persecuting an innocent man, there’s a killer wandering around. Is that your way of ‘fighting for this city’? Do you really think Central Corps is going to sit on their hands while you waste time fucking this up?”

It was a baseless threat, and she suspected Stoya knew it. At the same time … whatever her arguments with Greg, however angry he would be with her for losing her temper, she could not believe he would sit by and watch the police do nothing. Greg had been Danny’s captain. In the end, Danny had belonged to Greg more than he had to her.

Stoya raised his eyebrows at her mention of Central. “The citizens here chose me,” he said. “They have not chosen Central. What kind of goodwill do you suppose you would gain by trying to take over?”

Goodwill. She almost laughed. “I rather imagine the Corps will take justice over goodwill, especially when it comes to the death of one of their own. Are you going to release Captain Zajec, or not?”

He stared at her a moment without moving: one last gesture of control. But in the end he shrugged, and nodded. “There is no need for a Central invasion, Commander Shaw,” he said. “We will release Captain Zajec. Our investigation will continue.”

She didn’t believe him. Danny meant nothing to him. The murderer meant nothing to him. She didn’t know why, but Stoya was hell-bent on pinning the crime on Zajec. And Luvidovich, for all his doubts, couldn’t get far enough past his own biases to listen to his instincts. If she were not angry enough to choke the pair of them, she might have felt sorry for the young man.

Stoya, on the other hand, could go straight to hell.

With some effort, she controlled her temper. That she no longer believed that Zajec’s innocence would make a difference to the police did not change the fact that she needed to get him out of prison. As far as justice for Danny was concerned … it seemed possible, she had to admit, that Stoya’s insistence on framing the PSI captain was not coincidence. Greg was wrong about what Captain Zajec had wanted from her, but she was beginning to share his fear that PSI was a piece of this somehow.

“Excellent,” was all she said aloud. “I look forward to the successful resolution of this case.” Her eyes flicked dismissively to Luvidovich, still vibrating with anger; despite herself, she could not resist a parting shot. “But you may want to call off your dog before somebody puts him down.”

She turned away from the two men, ignoring the silent stares of the press and the open-mouthed gape of the desk officer. Her comm chimed insistently as she headed up the stairs.

She did not answer it.

It was only when he began to see lights before his eyes that Trey realized there was something unusual going on.

In the six months since he had returned to Volhynia he had been arrested a handful of times, albeit on charges far less serious than suspicion of murder. Each time the interrogations had been carefully restrained, designed more to intimidate and demoralize than cause injury. Luvidovich, who could not have known Trey’s experiences as a child, seemed to believe Trey ought to be learning a lesson, and Trey was always surprised at how quickly his stoicism crawled under the officer’s skin. It was petty, but he took a grim pleasure in that small, useless act of defiance.

This interrogation was different, though, and Trey began to wonder if his innocence mattered at all.

Trey had been escorted to one of the dark basement interview rooms and shoved into a hard chair. Luvidovich had spent the first hour of the interrogation doing nothing but hitting Trey, who knew enough of Volhynia’s authoritarian rules to refrain from hitting back, even when his vision tunneled and he began to feel nauseated. The questions, when they finally arrived, included predefined answers, and Trey realized Luvidovich was dictating his confession. After attempting to assert the truth—no, he did not know the victim; yes, he had been home all night—he had stopped answering and started to listen. His head was alarmingly foggy, but even so he could see how thin the story was: Luvidovich was suggesting that he had, for unknown reasons, followed the soldier into the alley behind his own workplace and killed him for an unknown sum of money that had not been found.

“Do you know,” Trey said at last, unable to restrain himself, “that is a remarkably foolish story. If you have the need to frame me, you had best come up with something more substantive. Not even the courts in Novanadyr would believe this nonsense.”

That had earned him a further beating, but he had minded less.

When Luvidovich finally left, Trey seriously considered putting his head down on the table and surrendering to unconsciousness. He tried and failed to remember anything about Volhynian criminal law. He might be entitled to a lawyer, and a trial, but he was not sure. Certainly the court of public opinion would not be on his side. Most of them believed he was an off-worlder, and after forty-four years, he was in all meaningful ways. They would desperately want to believe that this had nothing to do with their friends and neighbors. He would likely be railroaded, with or without a trial, and no one would ever find out what had really happened to that poor boy.