Killer Karma

Cole walked out with her and up the hallway to Gina’s desk…where she included herself in the instructions — “Notify both Mr. Flaxx and me.”

Now where? She headed back down toward Flaxx’s office, but turned at the side hallway leading to the emergency exit. Cole knew where she had to be headed. Now the stepchild office made sense. Flaxx created a job for her and shoe-horned in an office where he could.

“Where he could,” Cole found on following Irah into Asset Management, looked like a converted storeroom…windowless, steel shelving along one wall, neutral walls, utilitarian carpet, stock office chairs, and a steel-and-laminate desk like those in Bookkeeping. A few certificates and photos hung on the walls. A stepchild office indeed. What did Flaxx expect his asset manager to do in here?

While Irah sat down at her desk, Cole checked out magazine file boxes and stacks of brochures on the shelving. A buzz ran through him. The visible brochures were all for security systems. One of the magazine files had security equipment catalogs. The rest held six years’ issues of Security Management. Flaxx had her doing something with security. Well, well.

He glanced toward her. “So I bet you have a key to-”

Then the magazine dates registered. Six years. He stared around in disbelief. She lived in this cell of an office for six years?

She might be resigned to it now. There had been no sign of irritation or discontent when she came in. She even smiled as she swivelled to her computer. Ignoring the keyboard, she picked up a game control. A punch of a button resumed a game that Flaxx’s call must have interrupted. She began blasting her way through city streets filled with thugs.

Maybe she was just happy to have a job, he reflected as he looked over the certificates. She had no high school or college diploma. These were all certifications that Irah Lorraine Carrasco had completed courses in race driving, survival, marksmanship, and self-defense. And, surprisingly, the SFPD’s Citizens’ Police Academy seven years ago.

Cole grunted. “That must have thrilled big brother.” He glanced back at her. “Is it when you started going to cop bars?”

She thumbed her controls. “Die, rat breath,” she spat, and grinned at an explosion.

Or maybe she just wanted a place to play games and, despite what she said to Flaxx, avoid growing up. While he read the certificates, she had been feverishly working the game controls and talking back to threats muttered by the thugs. She must play this game often, enough to know the various villains’ dialog. Her exchanges with them sounded almost like real conversations.

That never-never-land attitude went with the largest of the photographs. Poster-sized, it showed a teen-age Irah on a beach with a slightly older male…their arms around each other and surf boards, dental floss bikinis showing off beautiful tans, sun-bleached hair blowing in the wind. Golden children with no cares except perfecting the tan and catching a good wave.

The male must be her waiter. He had a rules are for suckers look in his eyes that raised Cole’s hackles. If anyone like that came sniffing around Renee he would-

Cole caught himself and grimaced bitterly. He would do nothing, of course…because he was not going to be there. Don’t think about it, man. Brooding over what could happen without him would just drive him crazy. He had to trust Sherrie to protect the girls. She ought to do fine, since, thank God, she would be seeing their boyfriends through the shadow of Eddie Trask.

He concentrated on the rest of the photographs to force his mind away from the subject. The line of 8 by 10's all showed Irah at play…bungee jumping, clinging like a spider to a sheer rock face, working a half-pipe on a skate board, riding a bucking bull, showing off a target with the shots all in the ten circle.

The hair rose on his neck. He stared at the photograph. Not at the target demonstrating her marksmanship but her other hand, the left one. It still held the target pistol, her thin fingers wrapped around the grip in an echo of an image burned into his memory — the shooter with his hand partially backed out of the plastic bag to display his gun.

“Son of a bitch!”

An jolt of astonishment and anger spun him toward the desk. Amid that roar, images from the shooting played in his head in machine-gun flashes. He circled the desk, comparing them to Irah. Height and weight looked right. Ditto the hands. The shooter had longer, dark hair, though, and a different voice…male…adolescent. Cole stopped behind the computer to look her in the face. It was amazing how killers, if she were one, rarely looked like monsters. He needed to see her ears. The shooter’s had no lobes. But disk earrings covered Ira’s lobe area. Maybe he could tell something from behind.

He started around for the other end of the desk…jerking to a halt as the raspy voice he recognized as one of the game character’s came out of her mouth. While he watched, she answered in her own voice, then without a hiccup, went back to the raspy voice.

Cole mentally kicked himself. The game characters had not been talking; she was. And if you’d been paying attention, numbnuts, instead of getting your back up over the boyfriend and checking out her photos, you’d have figured that out fifteen minutes ago. Being shot in the head had indeed blown his brains out.

She did voices. The three words reverberated through him to his toes and hands. He raced through the desk to behind Irah’s chair and crouched to peer at the back of her ears. When he called Sara…who answered? Someone who accused Gao of catching her. Someone who begged him to come after her but insisted he wait in the garage rather come up for her.

The posts coming through her ears barely cleared the lower edge of the cartilage. If she had lobes, they were minimal.

A jammed tape, it occurred to him, not only prevented a record of when someone left, but how many left… and in what condition.

Terror hung down in the garage.

Ice slid along Cole’s spine and surged into his gut in a new, sharper burst of fear for Sara. If he were right about Irah, there was no reason to think she would stop at killing just him. Despair and fury at himself seared him. Was he too late to save Sara from the mess he created? Had he screwed up not just by encouraging her on Monday and by missing her phone calls Wednesday but failed her by now never being able to put things right?

14

Cole slammed a fist down on the desk, but the frustration of the silence and marshmallow feel only made him angrier. Shit, shit, shit. He scowled at the back of Irah’s neck. If he was too late to save Sara, he reflected savagely, at least he could make Irah pay. What would happen if he put his hand through her spinal cord? He affected electrical current. Would that short-circuit nerves…stop Irah’s heart?

The thought jerked him up short. He recoiled from it, appalled at himself. Killing Irah was no answer. Besides being murder, making him as cold-blooded as she was, it denied Sara justice. If he could do nothing else, he owed her that…cleared of being his killer, her own killer arrested-

Cole caught at himself again. “Hey…whoa, man!” He was letting an emotional rush to judgement trample what brains he had left. “You need to step back and take a breath.”

Despite his gut feeling and the circumstantial evidence, Sara might not be dead. Alone or accompanied, whatever her general condition, she had to leave the office under her own power. With a good fifteen pounds on Irah, she could not have been carried out. Certainly not carried without attracting attention. She must have been walked out. For the terror in the garage to be hers, she had to reach there alive. And she went home.

Not necessarily, came a thought. Irah could have been there to make it appear that Sara fled.

He circled through the desk and around behind her computer. Leaning his forearms on the monitor, he frowned down at her. “Was it you?”

The voice mail message for Gao made more sense if Irah left it. He did not see absence excuses even