Part 10 (1/2)

”What is this?” Gumiela asked.

”Is this link secure?” Van Alen asked.

”Secure enough,” Gumiela said.

”I have a man in my office who claims that he was a bodyguard to Ki Bowles, and that she and another bodyguard were killed in the forest of the Hunting Club today. I a.s.sume he's telling the truth?” ”I can't comment,” Gumiela said in her flattest tone. But her eyes had widened ever so slightly. That was a confirmation of sorts.

”He also claims to be the one who found her, and let some street officers know. He is the one who originally found Roshdi Whitford dead, but he never called that in, either.”

Gumiela raised her chin. She didn't say anything. She couldn't.

”He makes me nervous,” Van Alen said, ”and he's not a client of mine. I have a hunch you're going to want to question him. If his stories check out, he's probably an important witness for you. Or a suspect.”

Gumiela was smooth. She didn't confirm or deny any of this. ”Why did he come to you?” ”He knew that Ki Bowles spent some time in this office recently,” Van Alen said, just as smoothly. ”As a client?”

”You know I can't tell you why most people come here, Andrea,” Van Alen said.

”Yet you're giving up this man. What's his name?”

”Pelham Monteith. He says he works for Whitford Securities.”

”What don't you like?” Gumiela asked. She didn't finish the question, probably purposefully leaving it open-ended so that Van Alen could choose how she was going to answer.

”If he's telling me the truth,” Van Alen said, ”then he found three dead people and didn't remain at any of the scenes. As an officer of the court, I'm duty bound to make this information known.”

”It's interesting how you pick and choose what is your duty, Ms. Van Alen,” Gumiela said. Van Alen smiled. ”I'm not the only one,” she said, and signed off. Then she leaned back in her chair. What a mess.

She had expected Bowles to get threats the moment the first story appeared. She even expected Justinian Wagner to try something-and maybe succeed.

Flint and Bowles and Van Alen were under no illusions. They all knew that Bowles was risking her life with this series of stories.

Bowles had found it exciting. Flint thought the risks could be minimized. Truth be told, Van Alen thought the same thing or she never would have been connected to it.

She also thought Justinian Wagner was a cautious man who turned to murder as a last resort. He had a lot of legal means of stopping Bowles before he tried something illegal.

And even then, Van Alen expected threats first. She rubbed a hand across her forehead. Her little finger caught on the half-gla.s.ses and she flicked them off her nose in disgust.

She had started to admire Bowles. The woman had a relentlessness that Van Alen could identify with, and a ruthlessness that Van Alen shared.

Flint had been right when he had chosen Bowles, although Van Alen hadn't been certain of that in the beginning.

But this whole scheme had backfired too quickly. Van Alen was frightened for the first time in years. She took a deep breath and got a grip on herself. Fear was counterproductive. It always had been. It caused people to make mistakes instead of solve them.

She needed to solve this one, and she had to act quickly. She'd done the right thing in contacting Gumiela. Now Van Alen had to protect herself and her firm. She stood, accessing one of her secure personal links. She needed to get a hold of Miles Flint-and she had to do it fast.

13.

Even though he left the door to the viewing room open, Nyquist felt as if he were surrounded by Ki Bowles. The illusion drove him slightly crazy.

She seemed to be sitting at the table inside the main studio, just a few meters from him. Her black, silver, and red hair was perfectly coiffed and she wore some kind of matching outfit that served to accent her tattoos.

Her voice filled the room, but the story she told seemed too vague to be important-at least to him. It was all innuendo and hearsay, nothing that would hold up in court, although she promised hard evidence in future pieces.

Nyquist knew that news had different standards of proof than the law did-witness how many people were found guilty in the press and never made it into a court of law-but he found himself wis.h.i.+ng she had shown him more.

Making him wish for more was probably what the story had been designed to do. But he didn't see anything that would kill her, not even in the tidbits that the story presented. They were too small, and he felt like he'd heard a few of them before.

Maybe something that Bowles hinted at in this story or something that she mentioned in pa.s.sing had more significance than Nyquist realized.

He leaned back in the small chair that sat in the center of the room and stared at Bowles as she recited the names of the people she had spoken to.

He would have to retrace her steps on all of this, see if these people as well as this so-called deep background that she had had explosive information in it, the kind that would make Justinian Wagner careless, the kind that would get him to kill before he explored other options.

Of course, if Wagner was behind the death, then that meant that Bowles's killer was a hired a.s.sa.s.sin. Wagner would never do the work himself.

And Wagner would need time-from the moment he learned of Bowles's stories and how harmful or inflammatory they would be to the moment of Bowles's death-to hire the best in business.

Nyquist put Bowles's report on loop-he wanted the words to become second nature to him-and then he stood. His knees cracked as they had done every day since the rebuild. The sound still startled him, and reminded him he wasn't quite the same man as he had been just a year before.

He stepped back into the studio. One of the techs was pulling the shelves closed.

”Find anything new?” Nyquist asked.

”Just Bowles's fingerprints,” the tech said. ”I'm not sure anyone else knew about this thing until you came along.”

”What makes you say that?” Nyquist asked.

”Her fingerprints are on everything from the back of the shelves to the plastic tabs holding the screen in place. I think she put it up, and we might be able to find that in the studio's security system, especially if it recorded what was going on in here as a matter of course. We're going to need some computer techs to dig into this.”

Nyquist wasn't surprised that Bowles wouldn't trust anyone else with her secret information. ”Were you able to back up those files she had behind the shelves?”

”What we could access,” the tech said.

”You think there's more?” Nyquist asked.

”We don't know,” the tech said. ”There could be. But there might not be. Do you know how tech savvy she was?”

”She used to work for InterDome as an investigative reporter. I know she did a lot of her own on-screen work. Does that make her tech savvy?”

The tech shrugged. ”I'm not a specialist in media systems. That's why we're going to send someone else down here.”

”Well, can I poke around back there and see what she was working on?”

”I suppose,” the tech said in a tone that meant he really didn't care.

”I mean, will I destroy anything by doing so?”