Karma Patrol (19 page)

“Let’s go out on karma patrol together,” he proposed, drawing a smile from her at his choice of words. “I’m at loose ends now that the FBI has taken over the shooter investigation.” That wasn’t exactly true, since they were still investigating the shootings under the table, but Aaron had agreed to cover for him, and it wasn’t like he’d never done the same for Aaron. “It sounds like you’ve got plenty of work to do. Show me how you do it.”

She took a long moment to consider his proposal, but eventually she nodded.

“We have to be careful talking about what we’re doing. Normals aren’t supposed to have any idea how things really work. The only reason I can tell you is because there’s a special dispensation for soulmates of Fate Divisions employees.”

“I can keep a secret,” he informed her. “Besides, if anyone overheard us, they’d never believe us.”

“Perk of the job,” she replied with a smile.

He gestured for her to precede him back out onto the sidewalk, and as she did he realized belatedly that she’d been checking him out. She blushed when he caught her staring but didn’t look away, and he felt himself starting to smile.

“Let’s get to work.”

“How was trash duty?”

Kalindi flipped Aaron the bird, but the gesture was halfhearted at best.

“Do you know how much trash gets thrown away in a building like that every day? It’s enough to make me start recycling.”

On Kalindi’s third canvass through the office building the shooter had used as his perch for the most recent killings, a secretary remembered seeing an unfamiliar man walk through the lobby carrying a backpack. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was the best lead they’d come across so far. Several hours of running through surveillance tapes turned up a grainy image of the man. The resolution wasn’t good enough for a zoom and enhance on his face, but they’d used the building’s cameras to follow his path, and although they’d lost him as he exited through one of the side doors, they’d caught him dropping something small into one of the trash cans as he left. That resulted in Kalindi and a couple of uniforms spending their morning sifting through the trash bags in the dumpster behind the building, fingerprinting anything that looked to be about the same size as the object he’d thrown away.

“How many prints did you pull?”

“Over a thousand.” Her tone was grim. “By the time they’re done running those, this guy will have died of old age. That’s also assuming that the guy we saw on the camera was the shooter, and not just some random guy who happened to be carrying a backpack.”

Aaron leaned back in his chair, studying the bulletin board again. Unfortunately, Kalindi had a point. Just because the secretary hadn’t recognized him and he’d been wearing a backpack, it didn’t necessarily follow that he was their shooter. They were grasping at straws.

“I never thought I’d say this, but I hope the FBI is having better luck than we are.”

“I doubt it, since I spotted two of their agents in the lobby today talking to that same secretary.”

“Did they see you?” he asked, wondering if they were all about to get busted by the brass for interfering in a federal investigation, but she shook her head.

“No, but it’s only a matter of time before they realize we haven’t let this go.”

“If they would hurry the hell up and solve it, I’d be glad to let it go.”

“Where’s Jackson?” Kalindi asked, glancing around the room as though he might appear from under a desk.

“He’s taking some personal time. I said I’d cover for him with Hawkes.”

“Is he finally cracking under the pressure?” she asked, torn between concern and resignation. “I always knew he’d be the first of us to lose it. He’s way too high-strung.”

“I’m not sure,” Aaron replied honestly. “Hopefully, taking a day off will give him a little perspective.”

“He wouldn’t know perspective if it bit him on the ass,” she opined, frowning at the file in front of her. “What happened to the crime scene photos?”

“For which shooting?”

“For all of the shootings.”

“They’re sorted by crime scene and filed in the case boxes,” he replied, just barely managing to keep from finishing his response with some variation of ‘duh.’

“No, not those. I want the pictures the crime scene unit takes of the crowds at the crime scenes.”

He frowned. “They should be in the same place. They aren’t there?”

A brief search turned up several envelopes full of photos, which had been filed incorrectly with ballistics results rather than with the rest of the evidence from the crime scene unit.

“You want to check out who was watching,” Aaron realized, and Kalindi nodded.

“If the shooter is doing this to cause chaos, he’s going to want to see the effects of what he’s done. He’s probably somewhere in the crowd.”

They walked down Fifty-Fourth Street toward Eleventh Avenue, past yet another one of Hell’s Kitchen’s hundreds of little theaters. Jade watched the pedestrians, her gaze fixing on each person for a few seconds and then sliding to the next one when she was satisfied they weren’t in danger of karmic disruption. Luke watched Jade, memorizing the tilt of her head and the way her blonde curls bounced when she walked, and did his best to ignore the rising tightness in his chest that told him his ability to fall in love wasn’t quite as repressed as he’d thought it was.

It was more than how she looked, although he couldn’t deny that she was attractive. It was in the way she looked at other people, the way she interacted with them. When Jade stopped a cute co-ed, her hand on the girl’s shoulder as she asked where she’d bought her skirt in a ploy to delay her until some karmic snag resolved itself, she was bright and personable. By the time they parted ways, the co-ed really believed Jade cared about her and her skirt.

It was the same way with the group of teenage boys she stopped, trading pleasantries veiled as sarcastic insults that had the entire group laughing. He’d initially been concerned about her stopping them, wondering if they might be dangerous. She wasn’t in any danger with him there, of course, but she was usually on the streets doing this alone. By the time she’d chatted with them for a few minutes, though, he was confident that not only were they not a threat to Jade, they would have gone out of their way to protect her from anyone who did threaten her, just because she was sweet and funny and treated them like people instead of hoodlums.

The teens departed and Jade let them go, clearly finished with whatever redirecting she’d needed to do. Luke, who’d stood a little bit apart while Jade interacted with the group, moved back to her side. She smiled absently up at him and then glanced down the street, still alert for the next possible problem. He reached over and took her hand in his.

That appeared to distract her in a way nothing else had managed to. She looked up at him again, her expression torn between surprise and delight. He returned her smile as he laced his fingers through hers, his stomach twisting agreeably when she squeezed his hand.

“You’re good at this,” he told her, feeling like a geeky high school kid flirting with the head cheerleader, and was rewarded with another bright smile.

“I’ve been doing it for a long time,” she pointed out.

“I know cops who’ve been doing their jobs for twenty years who aren’t as good at getting people to talk to them as you are,” he rebutted. “You’ve got a gift for it. People like you.”

“Half of it is just making myself look harmless,” she replied as they meandered down the street, their hands still linked together. “Everyone in this city is always a little bit on guard, looking for the next threat to cross their path. When they see me, they relax.”

“Which is not a talent generally encouraged in cops,” he admitted. “We don’t really want people looking at us and thinking, ‘Gee, he’s not much of a threat.’”

“Interesting point,” she told him, using her free hand to poke lightly at his arm. “Although I don’t think your average citizen is still using the word ‘gee.’”

He laughed despite himself, poking her in return. “Everyone’s a critic,” he informed her. “Want to stop for a pretzel?”

“I’d love to. I haven’t had much to eat today.”

“Too busy running around saving New Yorkers from themselves,” he agreed as the two of them made their way to the pretzel cart on the sidewalk. He hadn’t realized he was hungry until the scent of salt and baking dough reached his nose, but now his stomach was reminding him that his last meal had been nearly twenty-four hours ago. He ordered two pretzels and paid for both of them, ignoring Jade’s abortive movement toward the purse that hung diagonally across her body. If this was technically their first date, the least he could do was pay three bucks for her salted pretzel.

“Thank you,” she told him when he handed her the pretzel, and he fought the urge to blush at her smile.

He hadn’t blushed at flattery from a girl since the seventh grade. He wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that she could affect him this way.

“I’ve been watching you work, looking for patterns in what you’re doing,” he said, redirecting her to the conversation they’d been having before they’d stopped for snacks. “It seems like you stop a lot more locals than tourists. Is your work mostly focused on New Yorkers, or do the tourists factor in too?”

“It depends on the kind of work,” she replied, taking a bite of pretzel before elaborating. “Mmm, this is delicious. What was I saying?”

“New Yorkers and tourists,” he reminded her patiently, and she nodded.

“Right. Most of the enforcement I do tends to be for New Yorkers, but a lot of the path blocks I have to fix are caused by tourists. Most people, when they’re in their regular place and going through the motions of their regular routine, don’t use a whole lot of free will. When they do make different choices, it’s little things, like taking a new route home from the subway station or choosing an extra pizza topping at a restaurant. Tourists are a whole other animal. They’re out of their element and making a bunch of consecutive random decisions. Think about it like—well, do you live around here?”

“I live a couple of blocks from your building,” he replied, and she nodded, looking unsurprised. It wasn’t unusual for New Yorkers to meet and then realize they were practically neighbors—such was the setup of a gigantic city where you couldn’t possibly know everyone who lived in your building, let alone on your block—but he wondered if her lack of surprise was due more to the fact that they were destined to be soulmates. Maybe they would have met regardless of the shooter case. Maybe the universe had put their apartment buildings in the same neighborhood for the specific purpose of making sure they would eventually share a subway car or bump into each other on the sidewalk.

“Think about it like restaurants,” Jade continued, not realizing he was lost in thought. “How many places in Midtown do you tend to go to when you feel like going out to eat?”

“Probably just the same three or four restaurants,” he conceded, and she nodded.

“But if you’re a tourist in Midtown and you’re here for a week, odds are you’re going to try to burn through every place on Restaurant Row, even if it means eating out for two or three meals a day for the entire week. Depending on which restaurant a tourist happens to choose on which day, they can make a big impact on other people’s intended plans.”

He’d finished his pretzel while she was talking, and he reached out and swiped hers from her hand before she realized he was going to make a play for it.

“Hey!” she protested, laughing. “Leggo my Eggo!”

“You’re adorable,” he told her, and the words came out with more sincerity than he’d intended them to. It earned him another one of those bright smiles, though, and he decided it was probably in his best interest to keep complimenting her if it meant she would keep looking at him like that. “If I give it back, do you promise to eat it instead of just waving it around while you talk?”

“If you didn’t keep asking me questions, I wouldn’t keep talking,” she retorted, but when she took back the pretzel she seemed to dedicate herself to the cause of actually eating it instead of using it as a prop for her explanations.

“What was going to happen to the teenagers?” he asked, once she’d managed to finish the pretzel. She glanced around to check for anyone who might be close enough to overhear them. Luke put his arm around her waist, giving her plenty of time to pull away before he tightened his hold on her, and she looked surprised but leaned into the embrace.