Thread: Blank Slate (Dane Stalling & Malicious Lullaby)

Pablo drove, fuming, through the melting slush. It was a bad night to be on the road. Not only was it New Year's Eve, patches of ice made driving treacherous, and there was no moon. One stretch of road had an entire length of street lights out, and his headlights bounced weirdly off the pavement. He focused a couple blocks ahead where the lights were working and trusted that there weren't any manholes open. Alice had found the breach at headquarters, the mousy tech could barely speak two words together when she was face to face with anyone, but she wrote clear, concise emails. Two weeks ago she had revealed that there was an advance persistent threat on the LAN. She described the vector, the initial infection from a porn site, how she was tracking outbound traffic that didn't follow typical patterns. She had warned everyone that nothing on the network was safe. They had been hacked and the hacker was skilled- machines seemed to reinfect themselves every time they turned on. Alice was working on it, but there were a thousand computers in the building and any one of them could reinfect the whole network. It would take time to fix. Pablo hadn't believed her. He acted on a tip, used the internal messaging system to organize a raid, and when he arrived at the target with four units, all he found was a printout of Penny's last mugshot, cheerfully flipping off the camera. He drove, that same mugshot taped to his dashboard alongside Danny's mug from a previous arrest, and Sueco's agency portrait. His partner had been his opposite. Agent Jon Larsson, or Sueco as he was universally known, was a big Swede, six foot four and two hundred sixty pounds of no nonsense Scandinavian muscle. He had been six inches taller than Pablo and a full foot taller than his wife, Marge. He had been a savvy agent, gentler than his size suggested, but he and Pablo had perfected a one-two punch in the field, Pablo's street smarts and Sueco's intimidating size made them a very good team. Danny had ended all that a year ago. Almost a year. January 14 would be the anniversary of the shooting. Danny's mugshot was a blank face. He had been busted a few times, never anything big. He hadn't seemed like a dangerous person at all until his big gun came out or they would have approached the whole arrest differently. Danny had some kind of protection from On High. Pablo wondered who- a gang or a mob? Someone in the police? He had never figured out how Danny had disappeared so completely. He wasn't dead- they could see echoes of him around town- rumors, people who claimed to have seen him at a rave or a car show. Unpredictable reports, but persistent. He couldn't have been doing it himself. He wasn't disciplined or resourceful in that way. His sister, though. She was the one that was getting to Pablo these days. That sassy picture traveled everywhere with him now, and he imagined seeing her everywhere- her red hair in a cosmetics ad on the side of a bus, those green eyes mocking him in a stranger's glance. He saw her in his dreams, sometimes snapping on the handcuffs, sometimes watching her walk out of the courtroom, convicted, in an orange jumpsuit. There were other dreams though, troubling and confusing where he dreamed that he woke up next to her, his hand on her breast, her middle finger tickling his chin. He would awaken aroused and angry at the same time. He started taking his showers cool, then cold. The FBI shrink told him to watch out for obsessive thoughts about Penny. She was different than other suspects. She could compromise his impartiality. He had convinced the psychologist that he was objective, that this was just like any other case. The wild joy he felt when he was allowed to take the lead on the case, he hid carefully. He had no idea what he would do when he caught her finally. If he caught her. She might not survive. He doubted that he would either. He parked across the street from the Wilson mansion. It was cold and late enough that the party was probably pretty chaotic. He sat and watched the big house through the giant iron gate at the front of the driveway. Nobody left for fifteen minutes, so he got out of his car and flashed his badge at the discreet guard house. He smelled cooling roast beef and champagne even before he opened the front door. He entered, and stood unnoticed in the foyer of the big house. An ancient Asian man was eating grapes from between a woman's breasts in the living room. Two women in black and white uniforms were covering another man's face in lipstick. One woman with a platter and a black bob was handing a straight whisky to a drunk older woman in a blue dress. He looked for Penny's copper hair, her bright green eyes. Nothing, but something felt wrong. He scanned the room again, letting the impressions wash over him, not analyzing, just experiencing. He felt her there, like in his dream, tickling him with her contempt.