Chicago Blue: A Red Riley Adventure Page 3

  Marty turned on the electric razor and got down to business, trimming all the hair off one side of my head down, to about an eighth of an inch.

  “Woah!” I exclaimed, raising my hand to stop him.

  “Shh. Trust me!”

  “Did you just shush me?” I grimaced, but lowered my hand and gripped the sink. I had come to realize over the last few days that I was way, way out of my depth. Marty was no criminal mastermind, but he wasn’t bogged down by all the bureaucratic nonsense that I had lived with day to day for the last decade. Being a cop meant following orders. It meant routine. You did the job, and you did it exactly as you were trained to do it. I had been itching to break out of that mold, but becoming a fugitive from justice hadn’t been what I had in mind. It was hard to get out of that law enforcement mindset, and that mindset only showed me one resolution to this problem: turning myself in. And I didn’t see how that could possibly end well.

  “I can’t believe I’m having my hair done by someone who looks like he hasn’t combed his own hair in a month.”

  “That’s on purpose,” said Martin. The hurt look on his face only lasted a moment before being replaced by a lively smile behind his scruffy, five-day beard. “It’s the style! Now hold still…”

  Eight

  Later that day I was walking across the campus of Wilbur Wright College, led by Marty, who was talking nonstop in his animated way. Sometimes he reminded me strongly of a Muppet. A Muppet with serious computer skills.

  “It’s not very famous, but there’s lots of good tech going on here, and more importantly, I happen to have a key to an empty student apartment. It will be perfect!”

  I followed him past the campus buildings to a ring of apartment buildings surrounding a swimming pool. Nobody was in the pool, it was still only April, but there were some students lounging outside looking at their laptops or even reading an actual textbook. Made of actual paper.

  I was wearing a pair of ragged jeans tucked into Doc Marten boots, and a leather jacket over a black t-shirt. My hair was shaved tight on both sides, but a long swoop of magenta fell over to the right, hiding my stiches and falling in my face every three seconds. I have to admit, Marty was absolutely right: nobody would ever find me here, dressed like this, looking like a student. I was still in the city but miles from my precinct. It was perfect, for now.

  We entered one of the buildings and climbed the stairs to a door on the second floor. Marty pulled some keys from his pocket and let us into a miniscule small studio apartment. Just looking around made me feel old. This was probably somebody’s idea of freedom—away from Mom and Dad, future ahead of them. It made my moderately sized one bedroom look like a palace.

  “Who’s place is this?” I asked. It obviously belonged to a woman, because it was fairly orderly and there was even a box of tissues on the table beside the sofa/bed. However there was also three computers set up on a worktable, a bookcase full of mass market sci-fi paperbacks, and what appeared to be a real broadsword leaning in the corner. I walked over and ran my finger along the blade of the sword. It was amazingly sharp.

  “It belongs to an acquaintance of mine. We met at a gaming conference last year. She’s crazy good at Vainglory.”

  “And where is she now?”

  “Brazil, all semester.” He handed me the key, which I put into my jeans pocket while I took a quick look around. On the counter Marty laid a student ID with the name Margot Parker. No picture. “This will get you into the library, where you can use the computers. Probably better if you don’t use these ones,” he added, gesturing at the computers in the room.

  Just then someone knocked on the door to the apartment. I gave an involuntary yelp and then clamped my hand to my mouth, looking around for a place to hide, but Marty was nonchalantly opening the door.

  It was Ruby.

  She stumped in, supporting herself with a black wooden cane, and set a bag of groceries on the counter, along with her oversized handbag.

  “Did I hear someone scream?”

  “No,” I stammered. “Just caught me a little off-guard.”

  “You are one to talk, Miss Fugitive From Justice!” she exclaimed in her Czech accent. She limped into the room and looked around. “Not much to write home about, eh?”

  “It’s perfect. I’ll be safe here. Martin did a fantastic job.”

  Marty beamed, setting down another bag of groceries.

  “Better than he did on your head!”

  Martin scowled. “It’s all part of the plan, Auntie. She looks just like a college student.”

  “That hair! So red! It will attract unwanted attention.”

  “No,” insisted Marty. “Just the opposite. She looks nothing like Kay Riley.”

  Ruby gave up arguing, and sat down heavily on the sofa. “Right, to business. Martin, my handbag.”

  He brought the bag to her and she plopped it on the floor with a thunk, unzipped it and drew out a manila folder. She was only in her early fifties, but Ruby always acted as if moving through the day was a struggle, with many exasperated sighs and a lot of huffing. Maybe she picked up these habits during her long and painful knee rehabilitation and never lost them. Anyway, she always reminded me of a cranky grandmother, though you will never hear me say that out loud. The fact that she was here to help, with no questions asked, what that meant to me, I can’t put in to words.

  “As you probably know,” Ruby began, “this second explosion, the one at Illcom, it nearly killed Arthur Vincente. He’s in hospital, very critical.” She handed me a photo of Vincente, likely from the company website. He was an older black man with Desmund Tutu hair and glasses.

  “He’s chair of the board,” Ruby continued. “He took over as CEO after Blalock blew up in your face. It is of course suspected that Farnham is retaliating for the earlier bomb, but the whole thing is a bit crazy, a bit too James Bond for real life. This other board member, Frances something, saved Vincente’s life somehow—they haven’t given out too many details. As you might expect, the cops have been crawling all over the Farnham Building all week, but they are starting to wind things up. Not finding any of the smoking guns, as you say.”

  Ruby paused for breath and looked again around the little apartment, her eyebrows rising as she noticed the sword. “I really think you should turn yourself in. This is craziness.”

  “I know, Ruby, I really know it’s crazy, but why am I a suspect? I know I was in the same room with Blalock, but it’s not like I went there with a bomb. It’s all a blur, I really only remember a few little bits, and then waking up in the hospital. And I wasn’t anywhere near Illcom when this second bomb went off. What if someone on the force is trying to frame me?”

  Ruby gave a dismissive grunt.

  “Too much drama. Dirty cops, they steal some evidence, they shake down some drug dealers. They don’t mastermind frameups on the fly after a high-profile bombing. Trust me, I know cops.”

  “Still, I’m going to lay low for a while and see what I can find out. Plus, I’ve already gone ahead and changed my hairstyle.”

  “Is that what you call that?” Ruby pushed herself to her feet, and handed me the manila folder. “I had a feeling you would say that.” She reached into her voluminous handbag and removed a small press pot and pound of ground coffee.

  “Oh, Ruby,” I grinned, “you’re the best.”

  She looked around the tiny kitchen. “Is there even a teakettle?”

  “There’s a microwave,” I assured her, “this is great.”

  Ruby looked at the microwave and shuttered with disdain. She reached into her bag again, and pulled out a white envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “Some cash,” she said, waving off my objection. “Until you can get things straightened out.” She tapped her finger on the manila folder, which was lying on the countertop. “Here’s everything I could scrape up on the Farnham case. I won’t be able to get my hands on anything about Illcom for a couple days.” She made her way to the door. “Marti
n,” she said imperiously. “I don’t approve of you being involved in this.”

  “But—“ Marty broke in.

  “But,” Ruby continued, “it’s better than that shady thing with the Bitcoin.”

  “That wasn’t shady, Auntie!” Marty drew himself up indignantly. “That was an excellent business opportunity, and you made your investment back plus twenty percent.”

  They continued arguing out the door and down the hall. I swung the door shut behind them and threw the deadbolt. I moved to the kitchenette and started to put the groceries in the tiny little fridge.

  What a strange world, I thought to myself. Two weeks ago I’m normal old Kay Riley, today I’m a wanted fugitive.

  And tomorrow? Tomorrow I become a private investigator. A private investigator with only one case. I should get business cards anyway. ‘Cause I’ve always wanted them.

  Nine

  A deep, uncontrollable shudder ran through me as I stood in the elevator of the Farnham Building, my finger hovering over the button for the 24th floor. Two buttons down was 22, where less than two weeks ago I saw two men die right in front of me. I took a couple deep breaths, I had to get a grip!

  I got a grip and pushed the button for 24, smoothing my skirt and looking at myself in the mirrored wall. I’d rearranged my hair to cover the stitches, and perched a little straw hat on my head to tone done the red coloring, and hopefully to block my image on the security cameras. I looked ridiculous—nobody wears hats. Maybe a Cubs hat, but it didn’t seem to go with the rest of the image: blue skirt, blue blazer, shiny black shoes, all acquired from the Goodwill on Washington Boulevard. Hell, I should have a wicker basket in the crook of my elbow, filled with petunias.

  I had started singing, “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” the only line I know Oklahoma, when the elevator stopped on the 14th floor and the door opened.

  “There’s a bri… oh, hi,” I chirped to the man who walked briskly on. “Which fl—” I started to ask, in my friendliest Becky voice (I’d decided my name was definitely Becky. I was a total Becky), but he had punched the button for the 22nd floor before I got it out, and turned his back to me to watch the floor numbers light up as the car transported us higher and higher.

  He was a powerfully built man with a bald head and cauliflower ears. He had a neatly trimmed beard and mustache with just a little bit of grey in it. His suit was also grey, with thin white stripes, and he wore a silvery blue tie accessorized with a Bluetooth earpiece. His skin was a deep bluish black. He wasn’t talking, but the light on the earpiece kept flickering, making me think he might be listening to someone talk. Turned out I was right.

  “Okay,” he said, in a soft, deep voice. “I’m nearly there. Tell Mr. Farnham to meet me… No, in 2215, the other suite is still being worked on.” He had a beautiful voice, with a touch of dour seriousness that made you hope to never hear him raise it in anger. He was clearly ex-military, or ex-linebacker, maybe ex-husband. The kind of good-looking dangerous that indicated he maybe didn’t have a lot of wholesome arts and crafts hobbies.

  The elevator opened on 22, and he stepped off without ever a word or look of acknowledgement. This is exactly what you want when you’re undercover, though I couldn’t help feel slighted. It was always the same with me: I don’t want to be judged for my looks, unless the judge is giving high marks. It’s one of those things I know I shouldn’t worry about, yet it’s always in mind. You’d think becoming a police officer would dispel all those feelings of inadequacy, but it was just the opposite. Most of my colleagues were men, bigger than me and oozing bravado, at least on the outside.

  Through the closing elevator doors I could see construction workers in the hall, milling about. It was probably a big job to fix the damage that Carter Blalock had done.

  At the 24th floor, I got off the elevator, took a drink from the water fountain in the plushly appointed hall, and then entered the nearby stairwell. I didn’t want to enter the 25th floor, the executive and top floor, from the elevator.

  I had decided to start the investigation by looking into Farnham, just like the cops had done, to find out why Blalock would target him, and if Farnham was the type of guy to bomb someone in retaliation. And yes, the police seemed to be abandoning this line of inquiry, but I wasn’t police anymore, so clearly I was now smarter than the police. Or at least less hemmed in by so-called “rules” and “laws.” Impersonating a Becky, hacking into the Farnham computer system, these kind of tactics would have been frowned upon on the force. To be clear, Marty was trying to hack into Farnham, on my behalf. My computer skills were not great, to say the least. Not that Marty had succeeded, not yet, but he was likely to. In the meantime, I had done a little research on my own over the past week.

  Everyone knows that Illcom and Farnham are the Apple and Android of the telecommunications world—natural rivals—but it’s been that way for at least a decade. So what happened recently that would make one of them bring death and destruction on the other?

  My research on Ferris Farnham showed him to be a wunderkind in his late forties who never really got over years of Bueller jokes in high school. An overachiever on every level, he not only developed cutting edge communication software, he was a yoga master and sat on the board of a humanitarian nonprofit he helped found. I assumed he sat on the board in the lotus position. In video clips of interviews, he struck me as one of those people who, just below his liberal veneer, was seething with rage and hubris.

  Farnham and Blalock had actually known each back in graduate school, at Northwestern, which is why it was no coincidence that both businesses are headquartered in Chicago rather than in Silicon Valley or New York. I was beginning to think that whatever had happened between them, it was maybe a personal war more than a business one. Why would Carter Blalock sacrifice his life over a business squabble? Why not hire some muscle to do it, unless you were deeply, personally involved? Unless you want to see it done with your own eyes to satisfy a personal vendetta.

  Hmm. Maybe. All I knew as I climbed the stairs to the 25th floor was that something about this whole situation was not quite right. I was missing something obvious, forgetting some crucial fact, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. It made my head hurt.

  Outside the door to the top floor I took a minute to compose myself and work through my plan. I jogged quickly up and down the last five steps until I was a little out of breath. Then I straightened the stupid straw hat on my head and barged through the door.

  “Oh, dear!” I said breathlessly, with just a hint of stagger in my step as I walked across the lobby and up to the reception desk. I held one hand to my chest and fanned my face with the other. The receptionist rose to her feet, unhappy with the interruption but also clearly concerned.

  “Are you okay?” she asked me. Her reading glasses swung from a chain around her neck. I love that. You just don’t see that anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped, in my best Becky voice. “I got turned around in the stairwell and sort of panicked. I was coming to meet my boyfriend for lunch, he’s a construction foreman, but I couldn’t find him, and then the fire, and well I ju-“

  “What fire?”

  “-st didn’t know what to do, so I headed for the-“

  “What fire!” the woman interrupted again.

  “There’s a big fire where my boyfriend is rebuilding the office that was bombed.” I suddenly widened my eyes in terror. “You don’t think there’s another bomb, do you?”

  The receptionist glanced quickly to her left, where large mahogany double doors stood shut. “Mr. Farnham’s down there!” she blurted with rising panic, and stepped around me and out the door to the stairs.

  Nicely done, Becky!

  I scoped the room quickly. It was beautiful and elegant, with the receptionist’s desk square in the middle, likely made of hand harvested rainforest bamboo, or something like that. One wall was covered in windows, the other two walls, facing each other, each featured heavy looking double doors and ex
pensive looking art. None of the doors were labeled, but the receptionist had given me the clue I needed, and I sprinted for the door she had glanced at.

  I slipped through the unlocked door and clicked it quietly shut behind me. The only light was from the late afternoon sun coming through the floor to ceiling windows. In addition to a large, clean desk, there was a conference table with half a dozen Herman Miller chairs around it. Bookshelves lined one wall, most filled with books, but some filled with pictures and various awards or mementos. The facing wall held three large, and I mean large, flat screens, maybe for video conferencing or maybe he was really into to playing Vainglory.

  My attention was caught by a Japanese screen in the corner. Behind it I found a small Buddha statue, a prayer rug, and other shriney type things that I didn’t understand. Interesting, but not what I was after.

  What was I after? Well, who knows? Isn’t this the part of the movie where some important detail is supposed to jump out at the main character? I examined the pictures on the shelf, in case one of them was of Ferris and the Unabomber. I looked through the desk drawers but found nothing unusual. The top of the desk held only a lamp, a keyboard, and a mouse. When I touched the keyboard one of the widescreens on the wall leapt to life, showing some spreadsheets.

  I was trying to make heads or tails of it when I heard voices in the lobby. Well, this was going to be awkward. I quickly hit the Escape button on the keyboard, but not much happened. I sprinted to the screen on the wall, looking for an off button, but there wasn’t one. On the other side of the door, the voices grew louder. I stared helplessly at the bright flat panel, paralyzed by panic, then ran behind the Japanese screen just as the door to the office opened.