Karma Patrol (4 page)

Jade sipped her coffee as she meandered through the flow of humanity on the sidewalk, deciding she would be best served by doing a preliminary circuit of her catchment area before nailing down her plan of attack. Most catchment areas fluctuated by a few hundredths of a point on a regular basis, but the overall yearly average was all that mattered to the Powers That Be, so it was customary to let the little fluctuations happen without worrying about them. If she was going to keep her area’s karmic balance consistently low between now and the time the selections for promotion were made, though, she would have to control those fluctuations, which meant she would have to expend a lot of extra effort.

She started off down Seventh Avenue, planning to sweep its length down to the south end of her territory. If she walked each avenue, including Broadway, for the full length of her catchment area, it would take her about two and a half hours. That was assuming she didn’t run into any trouble spots that required her intervention, of course. Sometimes righting a tangled karmic path was as easy as her deception with Interrupted Path Guy and Expensive Suit Guy, but she’d worked other path interruptions that had taken hours to resolve.

Even worse were the ones she couldn’t resolve, either because she wasn’t there to see it happening, or because she didn’t move fast enough to prevent the interruption from severing the path. When a karmic path was severed, the subject’s plan would reset, selecting a new karmic consequence for the person in question and adjusting the degree of severity to make allowances for whatever the interruption had been. If a person whose wallet was supposed to be stolen by a certain street thug wasn’t standing in the right place at the right time, a hapless stranger’s wallet would get stolen instead, and that created further imbalances for both the thief and the hapless stranger in addition to the continued negative balance of the person whose karma had created the need for the theft in the first place.

Jade did her best not to think about the tangled karmic webs spun by the people around her, who bustled from place to place unaware of the threads that tied them all together. The big picture, the so-called Grand Plan, was too complex for any regular human being to wrap their brain around, and she didn’t want to become one of the account enforcers who went insane trying to figure it out. It was enough for her that it worked, and she was perfectly happy to go on enforcing the status quo without knowing how or why.

She was crossing Fiftieth Street when she spotted the telltale bright pink aura of someone from Interpersonal Relations, and she quickened her pace to catch up with Shannon Carter before the other woman reached the transit station.

“Shannon!” she called, raising her voice to be heard above the crowd of tourists.

The raven-haired beauty turned, looking surprised, but her expression changed to delight when she realized who was behind her. She slowed down so Jade could catch her and then pulled the smaller blonde into a tight hug.

“Jade! I’m so happy to see you!”

“We saw each other yesterday,” Jade laughed, extricating herself from the hug carefully to avoid spilling her coffee. No matter how recently they’d spent time together, Shannon was always gratifyingly thrilled to see her. “How did your annual review turn out?”

“Oh, fine.” Shannon waved an airy hand. The Interpersonal Relations Division didn’t care nearly as much about numbers as Karma Division did, and from what Shannon had told her in years past, her annual reviews tended to focus more on the quality of her work instead of the quantity. There was no question that Shannon would do well in those reviews. While it typically took her as long to complete one job as it did for Jade to correct twenty karmic plan disruptions, the couples she brought together tended to stay together. She was one of the best Cupids in New York. “Jeff told me to keep up the good work. I had two successful soulmate pairings and nearly a hundred weddings this year, you know.”

“I know,” Jade agreed fondly.

Shannon was the best friend she had in Manhattan, and a large part of why she liked the other woman so much was Shannon’s devotion to other people’s happiness. Jade did her job because she loved the balance of it, the absoluteness of right and wrong and the way the punishment always fit the crime. Shannon did hers because she wanted to help people find love, whether they deserved the happiness it would bring them or not. Jade couldn’t say that she understood Shannon, but she respected her tremendously.

“Did you beat Mark?” Shannon asked, in yet another example of her investment in other people’s happiness. Shannon had less than no interest in Karma Division’s intradepartmental rivalries. The Cupids from Interpersonal Relations all got along famously, lauding one another’s successes and supporting one another through their failures. She knew the rivalry was important to Jade, though, so she always made a point of asking. “I’m sure you did. You’re the best enforcer they have.”

“Apparently, you’re right,” Jade said, still not sure she believed it herself. “I’m in first place, Shannon. Midtown West is the closest catchment area to a zero balance in the entire city.”

“Oh, Jade!”

That earned her another tight hug, this one coming perilously close to knocking the coffee cup out of her hand. She kept a tight grip on it, knowing none of the half-dozen other Starbucks in Midtown West had a prayer of making her drink order as perfectly as Tony had.

“I’m so proud of you! Congratulations!”

“Thanks.”

Shannon loosened her grip enough to step back and meet Jade’s gaze, grinning. “Now if I could just find your soulmate, everything would be perfect.”

“I’ve told you a million times, I’m not worried about it.” That was a bald-faced lie and both women knew it, but Jade hated being confronted about her absent soulmate. She loved the idea of having one, but she would’ve been perfectly happy not knowing he existed until he actually showed up.

Only a tiny percentage of the population actually had designated soulmates, even among the special population that made up the ranks of Fate Divisions employees like Shannon and Jade. She could have lived her entire life unaware that her perfect man was out there somewhere, but since the day she’d turned sixteen, every Cupid she’d ever come across had made a point of telling her they could see the golden glint of her aura that indicated the presence of a soulmate somewhere in the world, and wasn’t she lucky to have one!

She didn’t feel lucky. Oh, at sixteen she’d been thrilled, but by twenty she’d started to tire of waiting for her Prince Charming to show up. By twenty-five, as all of her friends got married and started having children, she’d begun to resent the hypothetical man whose continued absence from her life kept her from reaching those same milestones. Now that she was nearly thirty, she imagined she would have some harsh words to say to him about his tardiness if he ever did show up.

Shannon was giving her the sympathetic look that she absolutely hated, and she shrugged off the mention of her absent soulmate with a forced smile. “I’d settle for getting that promotion to account specialist,” she informed Shannon, taking a sip of her coffee, “but in order to do that, I have to keep this area as close to null as possible until the selections are made.”

“You know I’ll do anything I can to help,” Shannon promised, and Jade’s smile became a little less forced.

“That’s sweet of you, but I’ll be all right. Just don’t go tearing through here destroying karmic plans left and right in order to find someone’s perfect match until after I make specialist!”

Shannon laughed. “If it has to happen, I’ll make sure to bring them over to Mark’s territory to do it,” she promised, and Jade grinned.

“Talk about karmic payback,” she agreed. “Thanks, Shannon. I’d love to stay and chat, but I need to get back to work if I’m going to get home on time tonight.”

“Is there something good on TV, or do you have a hot date with your Shakespeare collection?”

“Neither,” Jade replied with a rueful smile at the reminder of her nonexistent social life. “I want to get my laundry done before I run out of clean clothes. Exciting, huh?”

“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day,” Shannon informed her, hiking the strap of her crocheted purse a little higher on her shoulder as she turned back toward the transit station entrance. “As if you could ever run out of clothes!”

The lighting in the homicide squad room was dim, and the janitor had turned off the main bank of overhead lights when he’d left for the night about twenty minutes ago. Kalindi Patel had returned from the courthouse around six, and she and Aaron headed out together shortly after that.

Luke was fine with being left alone. Sanford and Patel were both good detectives, but neither of them shared his single-minded dedication to the job. When he was focused on what they referred to as one of his ‘conspiracy theories,’ their constant doubting comments irritated the hell out of him. It would have been one thing if he were the kind of cop who was prone to making wild leaps of logic, but his instincts were almost always right.

In this particular case, Luke was certain there was something more to it than a simple blackmail scheme gone wrong. It was the reason he was still sitting in front of his computer, reviewing Bridget Hanlon’s DMV records for any clues as to why he recognized her picture. He’d found nothing so far, and he was about to close the file he was reading when a name at the bottom of the page caught his eye.

“Son of a bitch,” he breathed, the pieces falling together in an instant. He grabbed for his phone. Aaron answered on the second ring.

“Luke! Did you change your mind about coming out with us?”

“She’s Bridget
Hanlon
,” he replied, ignoring the question. “Jeremiah Hanlon’s daughter.”

“Jeremiah Hanlon… what, the Bible thumper?”

“Yeah, the Bible thumper,” Luke agreed. “But he didn’t start out life as a televangelist. In the eighties, he was a low-level enforcer for the Westies.”

“You’re kidding me. America’s favorite preacher is mobbed up?”

“Well, if you believe his PR manager, he left the gang when he found Jesus in the early nineties. I watched the documentary last week.”

“And our victim was shot in the back of the head—”

“Just like a mob hit,” Luke finished. “We originally ruled that out because he didn’t have ties to organized crime, but Bridget Hanlon does. Remember that case we worked last month with Prescott from the gang unit? I recognized Bridget’s picture because she was in one of the surveillance photos he brought us of that Westie bar. I didn’t put it together until I saw her father’s name listed as her emergency contact in her DMV record and realized who he was.”

“Your memory for faces terrifies me,” Aaron informed him. “And you have awful taste in television, but I’m willing to let that go because it cracked the case for us. Are you going to pick up Jeremiah Hanlon?”

“I’m not convinced it was him,” Luke said slowly, still trying to reason through that part of the scenario. “I don’t think he’d be stupid enough to jeopardize his multimillion-dollar evangelical empire to kill the guy blackmailing his daughter. He’d be more likely to just pay him. The untraceable bank account that made the first blackmail payment? I think that might belong to him, but I don’t see him throwing away his life to shoot this guy. On the other hand, if Bridget Hanlon was drinking in that bar surrounded by Westies, maybe there’s more to her involvement in the gang than just her father’s past.”

Aaron’s sigh was clearly audible over the phone. “I’m not gonna get to finish my beer, am I?”

“Not a chance. You and Patel need to get back in here. I’ll call Prescott and ask him to meet us in the squad room.”

“Killjoy,” Aaron informed him.

Luke grinned, secure in the knowledge that his partner couldn’t see the expression. He would never have admitted it out loud, but he took a perverse enjoyment in ruining his colleagues’ fun. He shied away from socializing with the other detectives, not wanting to form an attachment to anyone, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t occasionally jealous of the friendships the others shared.

“If you’d believed my crazy conspiracy theory from the beginning, we could’ve found this connection hours ago and the case would already be solved.”

“Don’t be a jerk, Jackson,” Aaron groused. “We’ll be there in fifteen.”

“See you then.”