I grabbed him by the throat and hauled him out his front door and onto the balcony overlooking the parking lot.
“You do know that coercion is illegal, don’t you?” I asked, dangling his naked body out over three stories of air. His answer wasn’t intelligible. He just turned red and made strangling noises while pawing at my arm.
I pulled him back over the railing. “Son, if you ever try that on me again, you’ll be spending the next ten years in Gettysburg. Comprende? Now, where were you last Tuesday night between nine and ten o’clock?”
He stammered out something about playing pool at a bar near campus with half of the student body. I collected enough names to check it out, then left him lying there and went inside his apartment.
“You two,” I pointed at the girls. “Get dressed and get out.”
They didn’t argue and were gone in less than five minutes. I turned to Kurt’s roommate.
“Coercion is against the law. I’ll tell you the same thing I told your buddy. Ten years in the maximum-security prison in Gettysburg. The courts don’t show any leniency, and it doesn’t matter how much money your daddy has.”
I was angry, but on my way downstairs to get my bike, I crossed Kurt off my list. Coercion wouldn’t work on an empathic projector. Sarah would have laughed in his face if he tried that with her.
So far, all the friends and lovers I’d been pointed toward had turned out to be just kids like Sarah. I could see a jilted or manipulated lover killing her in a crime of passion, but her car probably would have turned up. Perfect murders by teenage masterminds weren’t very common. Geeks and stalkers seemed a lot more promising avenue to pursue.
The missing car bothered me a lot. Brand new fire-engine-red Italian sports cars didn’t just disappear, and despite what I told her father, probably wouldn’t be broken down for parts.
The other friend that both her parents had mentioned was Jerilyn Novak. I was avoiding her for a reason, but a quick check online showed me that Jerilyn was a cousin of Mychal’s and not a sister. I barely knew a lot of my cousins, and the Novak clan was at least as prolific as Findlay. I checked her school schedule and gave her a call at her lunchtime. Jerilyn told me that she didn’t have a last period that day, and we arranged to meet after she got out of school.
In the meantime, I did some more checking into Martin Johansson. Although I had an extensive education in computer systems, magiteks with certain enhancements didn’t need to interface with computers the way other people did. Normally, it was easier to use a monitor and a keyboard. And bank records didn’t lend themselves to normal methods of access.
I found an automated teller machine and disabled it by simply sending a jolt of magik into it and breaking the mechanism that fed the money out of the chute. An ‘out of order’ message immediately appeared on the screen.
Having taken care of any possible disruptions, I used my embedded enhancer to jack my consciousness into the datanet connection. Once inside the banking system matrix, I queried Johansson’s identification, and using that, queried his accounts. There were a ton of them—business accounts, personal accounts, accounts for his wife and daughter that he controlled, an account for his mistress, and then at least a dozen accounts that a forensic accountant would probably have a ball going through. It was readily apparent that some of his business interests wouldn’t withstand legal scrutiny.
There wasn’t any way I had the time to go through all of that. I noted the accounts that looked interesting, memorized the mistress’s address and phone number, and backed out of the system.
Did I mention that banking was one of the industries with rules against employing magiteks? Short-sighted, really. I’d rather have a tek handling my security instead of hacking it.
Chapter 10
Jerilyn, “call me Jeri,” met me a block from the school. Dark-haired and olive-complexioned like her cousin, she was pretty but not in Sarah Benning’s league. I mentally slapped myself. I needed to stop making that comparison. Sarah was in a class by herself, and her looks had probably put her on the missing-persons report.
“Cool bike! Yeah, better we meet here. Some old busybody would be sure to report that I was hanging out with a motorcycle gang.” She laughed. “It would be fun to have a rumor that I was in a lezzie relationship with a motorcycle mama, though.”
She climbed on the back of the bike and wrapped her arms around my waist like she knew what she was doing.
“Ready!”
I took us to a place near Johns Hopkins that had an extensive veggie menu, a good beer selection, fantastic milkshakes, and dynamite fish and chips as the only meat dish.
“You’re Mychal’s new partner, aren’t you?” she asked after we ordered. She grinned. “It’s the current family scandal. They have to have something to gossip about, you know?”
“I’m a topic of conversation in the Novak household?”
“I don’t know about the big house, but all of the siblings and cousins are getting a kick out of it.”
“I didn’t know I was so famous. Are you and Mychal close?”
“Naw. He’s twice my age, and our circumstances are a lot different. I’m the oldest daughter of the youngest son, while he’s the youngest son of the oldest son. I actually have a lot more prospects than he does. That’s why they made him a cop. Figured that having someone on the inside would pay dividends.”
The gate in the compu-menu opened to reveal our milkshakes. After taking a long pull on her straw, Jeri continued.
“Hasn’t worked the way they hoped. Mychal’s just not very ambitious. I mean, ten years on the force, and he’s still a sergeant. So, five years ago Uncle Frank
