eimarra | Serial: Bodyguard of Lies, episode 21: A Mysterious Death (Reply)

Bodyguard of Lies is a serialized science-fiction novel updating once a week on Tuesdays. If you missed last week’s episode, Divided Family, it can be found here. You can catch up on the entire serial on this page with a description of the story and links to all published episodes.

Bodyguard of Lies
Episode 21
A Mysterious Death

When Charly arrived in the morning, police were swarming over the arena. Flynn cornered her on her way to her office. “Don’t say anything about Sabra.”

Charly blinked. “Are they here because of her?”

She’d heard about the farm raid, and called Sabra, but Sabra hadn’t answered her calls. Maybe she’d found someone to take away the pain for a bit. For all that Sabra loved the fight, she hated the sight of death.

“Tiger’s dead,” he snapped.

Her mouth dropped open in shock. Tiger had been alive just last night when Charly had followed her. Slowly, she pieced that together with what Flynn had said, as if there were a connection between Sabra being away and Tiger’s death.
“Why would I mention Sabra?” Charly pushed past him into her office and fired up her terminal. She had work to do, and if there was a reason for Sabra to be concerned, Charly was going to let her know. The very instant Flynn left.

“Everyone knows they didn’t get along.”

Charly shrugged. “Look, if something had happened to Sabra, I could see the worry. If Lip had died from his wounds, sure. Maybe even if Grunt died, cause he sure wasn’t happy after her bout with Lip yesterday. But Tiger? That’s just bad luck.”

Yeah, her bad luck. She knew Tiger was mixed up in something, and it might well involve Sabra. Even if it didn’t, underhanded dealings were happening at the arena, and Tiger was in the middle. Now Charly didn’t have her as a lead. She frowned and tapped at the terminal.

“Bad luck?” Flynn’s apoplexy reminded her that he hadn’t left the room. “Slipping into a lift shaft at the wrong time is bad luck. Stepping in front of a lev train might be bad luck. But having your body cut into six pieces that are artfully arranged around your apartment — that’s not bad luck.”

“I’ll take it from here.” A disheveled cop stood in the doorway. “Don’t want you coaching the witnesses.”

“I wasn’t. I was just telling Charly here that you need her full cooperation.” Flynn’s smile was even smarmier than usual. Why had the higher ups hired him in the first place?

“Sure you were,” the cop said. “Now get.”

He got.

Charly stared at the cop. His clothes — off-the-shelf cheap polymer, not a crisp uniform — looked like he’d been sleeping in them for a week. His face showed that for a lie. He obviously hadn’t had any sleep in a couple days.

As he got closer, Charly leaned back. Sleep wasn’t the only thing he’d missed. She wrinkled her nose. He’d stand out even in the locker room after a bout, smelling like that.

He looked around the office. “So he telling you how to cook the books? I hear that’s your job here.”

“I don’t cook the books. I tally the receipts, deal with the paperwork, make sure bills and payroll get paid.” Charly breathed through her mouth and hoped she wasn’t obvious.

“That’s what I said.” He thrust his hand out at her. “Johansen.”

Nothing for it but to take his hand. It felt cleaner than it looked. That was some makeup job he had on. He nodded like she’d passed some kind of test. She’d come up through the orphanages, though, lived in Gray, worked her way out. She’d seen things that smelled a lot worse than him.

“I got some questions, and you probably got the answers.”

“Me?” He couldn’t know that she’d been tailing Tiger the previous night. Well, he could. There were cameras everywhere, and someone might have spotted her. Did he know? Well, if he didn’t she wasn’t going to tell him.

“Yeah, you, sweetheart.” He sat down on her desk. His hands might be clean, but his clothes weren’t. It was going to take some major solvents to clean after he left. “I heard your boss tell you one of them pretty lady fighters done died in a particularly gruesome manner.”

“Yeah.” What else was there to say?

“I’ve got cops combing the place, asking who’s got a grudge, that sort of thing. Of course, all her fights lately are being screened.”

“Bouts.”

“What?”

“They’re bouts, not fights. A fight is — ”

“Look, call it what you want,” he said. “Me, I just want to get my job done. I’d like to get it done with your cooperation. You don’t want to help, then I’m going to have to look for a reason to make you want to help. I’m sure you don’t want me to do that.”

In other words, he’d find something to use against her. It didn’t even have to be real. Charly rolled her eyes. Grunt was subtlety itself compared to this guy. She turned to her terminal. “All right, what do you want to know?”

“I want to know why the dead fem’s been getting paid double for the past six months. You shouldn’t need your computer to tell you that.”

Charly swiveled back toward him, her brow furrowed. “Why what?”

“You heard me, and since you are in charge of the books, it can’t exactly be news to you. She been pulling down double salary, and I want to know why.”

“No, she ain’t.”

Johansen flipped a chit at her. “Her bank records. That should jog your memory.”

She plugged the chit into her terminal and looked at the vid that came up. He wasn’t lying, unless the records had been faked. She was sure he could’ve done that, but she didn’t know why he would. Every month, like a stutter, Tiger’s cut had been paid to her twice.

Charly frowned and stared at the transaction numbers. The duplicates weren’t right — two of the digits should have been alphabetical codes. “These aren’t from our system.” She pointed to the numbers. “With a code like this, they have to have been transferred from outside the city.”

She tapped at her terminal, tracing the sender codes. It was a firewalled black box in the city Cinn had come from. But that wouldn’t be where it had originated. Those companies just existed so people could transfer funds without people knowing where they came from. She sat back in her chair.

“You have to have someone on police staff who could’ve checked this. Why’d you come here?”

Johansen shrugged. “Can’t prove you didn’t send it to the shell. Not without pulling your records. That’s why I’m here. After all, it’s the same amount every time. Got to have something to do with you here. And since you do the books, you gotta know.”

Great. Now she was a suspect in something she didn’t even know was going on. She called up her iris scanner and plopped her left eye in front of it. A second terminal rose off to one side.

“This is the payroll computer,” she said. “I can call up Tiger’s account here –” which she did “– and trace its route to her bank.”

She set a worm to trace the last payment to Tiger. A weird grid displayed on the vid, with a red line moving along from point to point. It paused and ponged back and forth between two lines. She halted the trace and zoomed in the grid.

“That’s the point where the duplication was made.” She read off the terminal number to Johansen. “You can track who it belongs to; I can’t.”

“I’ll call it in and have someone look at it.” He stood up and walked to the door.

Charly closed down the secure terminal and cleaned up the files she’d called. She still had work to do today. Pity she couldn’t do anything to increase the air circulation in here; the general fug was bad enough without Johansen’s additions to it.

His voice came from the doorway. “Oh, I almost forgot — I hear you were down in Yellow last night. You hang out down there often?”

Click here to continue reading with Episode 22, Meeting the Wife.

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Originally published at Erin M. Hartshorn. You can comment here or there.