Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (5 page)

Chapter 11

Cooper leaned back at his cramped desk. Bored. Pencils were stuck in the soft acoustic tile over his head. He flicked another one up, and it embedded itself point first in the drop ceiling, near all the others. Even with his Brilliant skills, he couldn’t see any pattern there, no matter how hard he tried.

Because it was Thursday, he
had stayed late, waiting, dreading, sure the call would come soon—but he didn’t want to risk getting occupied with something else. He knew it was only a matter of minutes or hours before a report came in from Denver, announcing the next murder. He was ready to call Director Peters at home, to wake him with a grim “I told you so,” and get clearance to go out to Colorado.

H
e stared up at the pencils and, as if embarrassed, one of them dropped back out. Cooper caught it midair.

“Come on, come on . . .”
Leaning forward in his chair, he picked up the datapad, scrolled through the Western western-Region region crime databases, incident reports, emergency lists, alert for anything.

Nothing yet.

It
made him feel cold and calculating, just to wait for someone—some Brilliant—to be murdered. If he had gone out to Denver after the previous Thursday-night killing, maybe he could have seen a pattern, solved the case by now—that was optimism, not arrogance—and saved another victim.

B
ut Director Peters hadn’t given him any other real choice.
Wait and see.

Sometimes, caution was jus
t
. .
.
reckless.

H
e touched his fingers to his lips and placed them against the framed photograph of Natalie and Todd. With a sigh, he stood and wandered over to the filing cabinets at the side of his cramped office. Another pencil dropped out of the ceiling.

A clunky contraption rested
on top of the file cabinet. A piece of masking tape labeled it
Dr. Frankenstein’s coffeemaker
,
the Frankenmaker.
The actual brand logo had worn off with time, and the cream finish was now stained tan from repeated usage.

A can of coffee
grounds, the brand of which changed weekly depending on whatever was on sale, sat beside the Frankenmaker. The clerical staff on the building’s main floor had decommissioned the coffeemaker, but instead of throwing it out, they had donated it to the budget-starved Equitable Services upstairs. Probably more as a joke than as a gesture of kindness.

The coffee always tasted terrible, and he didn’t even want a cup
right now, but he had nothing else to do. He grabbed one of the occasionally washed mugs and poured out the viscous black nectar, trying to remember—or not remember—when he had brewed it.

The ES offices were empty this late at night, and e
veryone else had left at a reasonable time of 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. It was almost midnight now. Ten o’clock in Denver . . . still probably too early to hear any reports.

B
y his best estimate, the coffee was six hours old. Minimum. He stared at the cup he had poured, aware that he was taking his life into his own hands. But he was one of the few, one of the proud, one of the brave. He sipped, grimaced, swallowed, sipped again—and pretended it was perfect.

Waiting.

He could have been home with his family. Todd would already be in bed. In fact, he and Natalie might already be in bed, and he could have been curled up next to his wife, dozing, maybe even fooling around. They had always thought about having another child—and babies didn’t happen without practice. Lots of practice.

Yes, he could have been
home, but instead he chose to wait in his cramped office, drinking bad coffee, hoping but not hoping to receive a report of a brutal killing almost two thousand miles away.

You have to do something about making better choices in life, Cooper
, he said to himself.

Rolling his shoulders to relax the muscles, he
twisted his head to the left and then the right, popping his neck. Then he went back to the desk, sat down, propped his feet on the corner of the desk.

He tossed another pencil at the ceiling, but it
took him three tries to impale the acoustic tile again. His hand patted around the top of the desk, looking for another pencil to throw.

The
datapad chirped, interrupting him, and that brought him more awake and alert than any amount of coffee, fresh or stale. This was it. He knew it. Pulling his feet off the desk, he sat upright and swiveled around to pick up the datapad.

As he had feared and expected.
Victim four had just been found at 10:15, Mountain mountain Timetime. Female, mid-twenties. Throat slashed with broken glass, a jagged bottle found at the scene. Name: Chloe Eccles. No one would have an idea yet whether or not she was a Brilliant—it wouldn’t even occur to the investigating officers.

Yet, without looking,
Cooper knew.

Nevertheless, he
cross-checked with the DAR’s mountain-region master list, found her name easily, and was not surprised. Chloe Eccles was only a tier-five talent, but still a Brilliant. She had also served briefly in the military, Air Force cadet, but had dropped out. The Denver detectives would see that as the only tenuous thread that bound all four victims.

But Cooper had another piece of the puzzle.

No doubt about it. The DAR had been formed to keep an eye on the advanced humans, making sure they posed no threat to society. Now it seemed that Brilliants were the ones being threatened.

Instead of experiencing a sense of triumph,
Cooper felt sick in the pit of his stomach. Sometimes he hated being right.

Picking up the phone, he dialed Director Peters.

Chapter
12

Silence bounced through Adam’s mind. There was no resistance, no thought. He was even more detached from the world than usual . . . out of grief, out of self-preservation. Trapped in his wheelchair without the use of most of his body, he had only his mind and his gift, and now he shut down even that.

Ingrid
, too, remained silent as she applied ointment to his damaged fingers. She worked her way over Adam’s hand, massaging. She remained silent, working, aware of his shock and trauma of what he had witnessed.

She must think it was some kind of
PTSD, that seeing the murder had reminded him of his own devastating injuries from his time in Special Ops. Yes, he had been hammered by watching his comrades killed in action during the covert Cuban mission, but that was a military operation. They had all been prepared to die.

But Chloe!
This was
Chloe
! She had been in her own apartment, relaxing, her guard down, enjoying a normal life, and Adam had been beside her, vicariously. She’d been slaughtered in her own doorway, left to bleed out in puddles on her own floor.

The bastard had killed Chloe!

He closed his eyes, ignoring Ingrid, ignoring the world, feeling the pain inside and paying no attention to the therapist’s ministrations.
Ingrid did not scold him; since he could use only one hand, he knew full well that he had to be particularly careful about that arm—he knew that, and Ingrid knew well enough not to scold him. Not now. As she tended his wounds, she chose not to press for answers.

From clawing himself across the floor,
hauling the dead weight of his entire body using only the fingertips, he had torn and shredded his nails, bruised his fingers, sprained his knuckles, hurt his wrist. He didn’t care, and he would do it all again.

But he would never have that chance. Chloe was dead.

After his frantic call to 9-1-1, he’d instructed his chair to call Ingrid. He had nobody else, and he’d been trapped, lying like discarded garbage on his floor. He had waited there forever, blind and deaf, isolated from what was happening over in Chloe’s apartment. He was cut off from his window, and when he heard the sirens they were distant, muffled, impotent—and surreal. His imagination could not paint any worse picture than what he knew was the truth.

When Ingrid
had finally arrived, she’d hammered on the door first, but already knew he was hurt. She used her own key to let herself in—no games this time—and she’d found him lying on his side next to his toppled wheelchair, long smears of blood from his fingers where he had dragged himself across the hardwood floor.

Upon arriving at the Lion’s Regency Apartments, she
had seen the police cars and ambulance and rushed up the seven flights of stairs. When she burst into his apartment, she was panting and flushed from the exertion. The emergency response vehicles were at a different building, but she must have guessed that he had had something to do with it.

After she
’d righted the chair and deftly wrestled his body, which was unhelpful in the best of situations, back into place, she used the first-aid kit in his bathroom to apply bandages to each fingertip. He didn’t speak to her the whole time, just shuddered.

Ingrid shared his silence, did not press,
let him know her concern and her support. She found a rag and some cleaning supplies in the kitchen and returned to clean up the blood on the floor near the window.

“Adam, I’m here for you. I know you saw something.”

He looked at her, struggled to find the words that were locked inside of him with greater security than any sealed Top Secret file. “She was murdered,” he finally said. “I was watching, but I couldn’t see enough . . . couldn’t
do
anything.”

She
bent closer to him. “Tell me about it.”

Someone knocked
at Adam’s door, brisk and authoritative, not friendly, not tentative. When he made no move to reply or operate the latch with his chair controls, Ingrid opened the door and faced the two men standing there. Both held out Denver PD badges, both wore street clothes. “Can I help you?” It came out more statement than question, an assertion that she was in charge here and ready to protect Adam.

T
he taller cop was a light-skinned Cuban with a shaved head and dark mustache, but the smaller man—brown hair, polite smile, hard blue eyes—seemed to be in charge. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Detective Jones and this is Detective Rodriguez. We received a 9-1-1 emergency call from this number, registered to a Mr. Adam Lee. He was reporting an . . . incident across the street.” He glanced over Ingrid’s shoulder into the apartment, spotted Adam there in his chair. “Is that Mr. Lee?”

Ingrid put her hands on her hips.
“Yes, but I’m afraid he isn’t able to give a statement right now. Mr. Lee is a disabled veteran, and I am his therapist assigned by the VA.” She pulled a card out of her pocket and handed it to Jones. “I’m aware that he has made numerous reports in recent months, detectives. Sorry if he caused you any trouble.” Adam knew he had already made so many emergency calls, false alarms, wild-goose chases.

Detective
Rodriguez, clean cut and about six foot two, took half a step forward. “This time, I’m afraid he wasn’t crying wolf. Mr. Lee isn’t in any trouble. He called in a murder, and we really need to get a statement from him. He may be the only witness.”

Adam shuddered, and the images of Chloe on the floor kept playing like a loop in his mind. The shadow of the killer reflected and distorted from the pool of blood as the ripples of her fading heartbeat stirred the
liquid surface . . . the elevator doors closing, but no one emerging from the front of the apartment building. The killer must have slipped out after he had tipped over in his wheelchair.

“I didn’t see anything,” Adam moaned. “I didn’t see
enough
. I tried, but the angles weren’t right, the reflection on the blood couldn’t help me.” Tears streamed down his face, and he squeezed his eyes shut. He looked away from her and the detectives toward the window. “I used everything I could . . . but I didn’t see. It was all out of view.”

Detective Jones was pushy, stepped inside the apartment.
“Ma’am, we have received an average of three calls from Mr. Lee every week, going back approximately ten months. Mostly complaints and minor tip-offs that don’t even merit dispatches. We know what sort of person he is, what he does for a hobby.” He frowned at Adam, making him feel worthless and soiled.

Ingrid calmly met his gaze. “As I said, I am his therapist. Mr. Lee is dealing with some issues after his severe trauma.”

Jones looked around the apartment. “In his 9-1-1 call, he said that he witnessed the killing through the window. But he’s on the seventh floor and on the other side of the street. I don’t know how much he managed to see.”

Adam moved his wheelchair forward a foot, closer to his window. He didn’t like the detective intruding here.
“Yes, I was watching her apartment, but I went to the kitchen to get something to drink. I was only gone a minute, so I didn’t see the bastard.” He sobbed. “I couldn’t see!”

Detective
Rodriguez came close to Adam. “You must spend a lot of time watching out the window, Mr. Lee. A lot of things happening out there, while you’re stuck here.” He turned to Ingrid. “What can you tell us about his condition?”

Ingrid was rigid and defensive. “The details of his private file are between
himself and the physician staff at the VA. Mr. Lee cannot walk. He has the use of his left hand, but not much else. The automated chair lets him make phone calls.”

Jones pressed up against the window, looked out into the darkness, and scanned the street. He let out a sigh. “You don’t have a telescope do you, Mr. Lee? Maybe to get a better view of the neighbors?”

Adam was alarmed and disgusted.
“No! I don’t need that . . .”

“Mr. Lee does not have a telescope,” Ingrid said. “And he is not a voyeur.”

“Really? Depends on your definition.” He peered through the window again, squinted out into the darkness. “I’m surprised you managed to see anything at all.” He turned to Ingrid, as if Adam didn’t even exist, a habit some people had when they were awkward and uncomfortable around disabled people. “And how’s his eyesight? The distance involved—”

“His vision is perfect
,” she said, though he didn’t need her to defend him.

More than perfect
, Adam thought,
but it wasn’t good enough.

Jones shook his head, and his voice carried clear scorn. “Come on, Rodriguez.
They’d shred him on the witness stand, and they’d bring up all his false-alarm calls. He’s a bored cripple spying on his neighbors. After a hundred crank calls, I guess he got one right.”

Ingrid’s hackles
obviously went up at the detective’s rude insensitivity, but before she could say anything, Detective Rodriguez surprised them by snapping at his superior. “Hell, Jones, he’s not crippled, he’s
disabled
, and he got that way because of his military service. Don’t be such an ass. My brother’s a disabled vet, too.” Embarrassed, Rodriguez nodded to Adam and Ingrid. “We’re sorry. We’ll follow up if we need more details for a statement.” He turned to the detective. “Considering his physical condition, I believe we can take him off the suspect list. Right, Jones?”

“I suppose. No point in bringing him down to the station.”

Not unless you feel like carrying my wheelchair down seven flights of stairs
, Adam thought.

The detective
handed his card to Ingrid and, after a momentary hesitation, gave her a second one for Adam. “In case you think of anything that might be helpful.”