Chameleon's Challenge (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 3) Read online

  Nellie erupted in laughter, falling over in the booth and kicking her feet like a little kid. I had trouble hearing Donofrio’s reply, but I finally figured out that he said, “I’ll meet you at the hospital in an hour.”

  We dropped by the house and picked up Mike, then drove to the hospital. Donofrio met us in the hall, and I noticed he had a constable stationed outside Lady Vivien’s room.

  “She’s in a lot of pain, so the doctors have her on drugs,” Donofrio said. “I’ve tried to talk with her, but she’s not giving me much. We gave her a tablet, but she refuses to answer my questions.”

  I walked over to the nursing station and asked, “Do you have a pen, paper, and a clipboard?”

  The nurse quickly put those items together and handed them to me. Donofrio looked at the clipboard with a wrinkled brow.

  “Most people in the ghettos don’t know how to type,” Nellie said. “No electricity. In my school, we did all our lessons with pencil and paper. We only had three computers for the whole school.”

  Both Donofrio and Mike stared at her. I knew how to write because Nellie had taught me. I hadn’t learned it in school.

  Lady Vivien, or Penelope, was staring out the window when I entered the room. Her eyes flickered toward me, then back to the window.

  “You might not remember me, but I stopped Peter Grenier from killing you yesterday,” I said.

  She turned her whole head and gave me her full attention. I put the clipboard down on top of the covers near her hands.

  “I was also the person who put that bullet in him. I came to your place because Miz Amanda and Telly both suggested I should talk to you.” I figured name dropping couldn’t hurt. Vivien jerked her head in a short nod.

  “You knew him before, didn’t you?” I asked.

  She stared at me. I motioned to the clipboard. “Can you write? I’m really hoping you can help me catch this guy.”

  Picking up the clipboard, she wrote, “Cop?”

  “No, I’m not a cop. Indie security. I’ve been hired to protect someone he might target. You know, he’s going after the women and children connected to some corporate executives. Innocents.”

  “came to see me last year,” she wrote. “broken hand. punched a wall. didn’t want boss to know.”

  “So, you knew he was corporate?”

  Vivien nodded.

  “That’s why you charged him so much.”

  I could tell that I surprised her. “I found his payment card on the floor at your shop,” I said. “Ten grand is a lot of creds. Is that why he beat you up? Mad because of the money?”

  Her eyes looked at everything in the room but me.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone. The money’s yours to keep.”

  She studied my face, then nodded.

  “Do you know where he’s living? Where I can find him?”

  She wrote quite a bit, and when she turned the clipboard to me, there was an address plus directions to a place in the enclave. The last place was way beyond the enclave, out on the edge of wilderness.

  “Thanks. We locked your place before we left,” I said and dropped her key ring on the bedside table. “I told the lycan kids hanging around outside that I’d give them each a new skateboard if no one broke in and stole anything before you got home.” I put my card next to her keys. “Let me know if they did their job. I always pay my debts. Is there anyone I should contact to let them know where you are and how you’re doing?”

  She wrote a man’s name and directions. “I’ll get word to him.”

  Outside in the hall, Donofrio said, “You were in there quite a while. Did you get anything?”

  I showed him the paper. “This address is something you should check out. He was staying there, but who knows? Do you have any teams with experience capturing invisible men? No? Well, I wondered how we’d do that, and someone I respect suggested bright lights and water cannons.”

  “I’m sure nuclear bombs would work, also,” Mike said, “but they’re so messy.”

  “What are those other directions?” Donofrio asked.

  “Places to look in the enclave. Do you have any undercover people comfortable operating there?”

  “I can put a few men together.”

  That surprised me. “Well, the sooner we get after him, the better our chances. He’s hurt, and probably not going to be moving very easily.”

  Nellie and Mike planned to go back to my house and then on to The Pinnacle. I rode down to the police station with Donofrio. He and other cops I had never been introduced to discussed and argued about what to do. In the end, they decided to stake out the house and put together a rapid-response assault force in case Grenier showed up.

  Donofrio dropped me off at my dad’s. From there, I walked the mile home, running a variety of possibilities around my mind.

  When I got home, I dressed in my cat burglar outfit and put some specialized equipment in my bag. Then I took my cycle and drove over to the address Vivien had given me.

  It turned out to be a low-end working-class neighborhood. The residents were at the bottom of the corporate ladder—those who cleaned the buildings, dug the ditches, and hauled the garbage. The people who lived there didn’t have much, but their station in life was miles above those in the enclave. The corporations they worked for provided all electricity, clean running water, health care, and education. Socially, they stood one rung above Nellie’s family, who were indies who paid for those things out of their own pockets.

  Theoretically, the people in that neighborhood were of a higher social class than I was. One of the reasons I lived in a house my father owned was the contribution I indirectly received from MegaTech. While I lived in a corporate neighborhood, I didn’t work for a corporation, and if I owned the house, I would have to pay for my power, water, and other utilities. I would even be assessed a street-maintenance fee.

  I parked my cycle in an alley a couple of blocks from the address, hiding it as much as I could behind some garbage bins. Blurring my image, I kept to the alleys until I reached the address where Grenier was supposedly staying. Keeping to the shadows, I snuck up to the house.

  There weren’t any lights on inside, and I spent an hour listening on three sides without hearing anything. Eventually, I went around and tried all the windows, finding them all locked. A fence ten feet from the building placed the narrow side of the backyard completely in shadow, so I decided to go through a basement window on that side.

  The window was tight. Grenier would never make it through the opening. I used night-vision goggles and an infrared flashlight to look around. The basement was empty, just a dusty concrete room with a staircase leading up.

  Using my talent to feel for electricity, I felt all the way around the door at the top of the stairs. I decided that if the door was booby trapped, it used a manual trip wire. I couldn’t imagine why someone would trap a basement door, but Grenier was a total psycho, so I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I turned the knob and pushed the door open an inch, then sank to the floor and crawled through into the house’s kitchen. No one shot at me or tried to carve me up with a butcher knife.

  Searching the house, I discovered that the steel outer doors had three locks apiece, Grenier did his dishes regularly, and he had more food in his fridge than I had in mine. He was actually rather neat. The only rooms he seemed to use were the kitchen, bedroom, and the office in the second bedroom. The house wasn’t very large, only five rooms, but still had space for more furniture.

  I didn’t waste time hacking into the computer, I just pulled the main box and tucked it in my bag along with a tablet I found. Three file folders also went in my bag. I planted a couple of small cameras with microphones aimed at the front and back doors, then headed back to the basement. After crawling out the window, I pulled it closed and inched my way back toward the alley.

  A survey of the neighborhood didn’t reveal any chameleons hanging around. The car parked on the street several houses down from Grenier’s place w
as a lot newer than the other cars in the neighborhood. The two guys inside looked a lot like plain clothes cops, too. They probably made the whole neighborhood paranoid. If I could see that, Grenier probably could, too. I actually walked right up to the car. If a chameleon wanted to shoot them, it didn’t appear they would notice until it was too late.

  Chapter 10

  Mike and Nellie were still at The Pinnacle when I got home, so I took the opportunity for peace and quiet to get on the computer and check out a few things. First, I called Mom.

  “You said there were some large additions on that card you cracked for me. Can I get the dates and amounts for those?”

  She read them off for me and confirmed one of my suspicions.

  “Well?” Mom asked when she finished.

  “Those are the days of the murders, and the amounts are really odd.” The light went on. “Mom, I’ll bet he’s not only killing these women, he’s also looting their accounts.”

  “Interesting. I always thought psychopaths weren’t interested in money. Oh, well, that would be more your father’s field of expertise than mine. The only thing I know about psychopathic murderers is what I’ve seen in vids.”

  “Keep it that way. Thanks, Mom.”

  I logged onto the infonet, jumped through a few hoops, and entered the worldwide banking system through a backdoor that Mom created when I was still in diapers. Starting a few searches, I pulled out a keyboard and a monitor from my spares, hooked them up to Grenier’s box, and booted it up. It asked me for a password, and I shut it down.

  Opening the box, I pulled two chips out of the machine and replaced them with chips of mine. When I rebooted the computer, it didn’t ask for a password. I plugged a chip into the external slot and started a scan for viruses and other malware, then turned back to my own system.

  Sure enough, the amounts added to Grenier’s payment card matched the withdrawals from the Goldberg’s account, the dead mistresses’ accounts, and those of Weeks’s wife and daughters. The majority came from Weeks’s wife. It didn’t matter what kind of security you had on a card, if someone had your thumbprint, retina, and he tortured you for any needed codes, he could access your account.

  The puzzle was where the first hundred grand came from. Grenier’s accounts were basically empty, and they had never had that kind of money. His wife hadn’t even cleared that much from sale of their house. The guy was bankrupt, but had a hundred thousand credits to finance a killing spree. The initial one hundred thousand, Mom told me, was loaded the week Grenier’s divorce finalized.

  Out of curiosity, and to be thorough, I checked Carleton Weeks’s accounts. He had twenty-three million stashed in various accounts, not unusual for an executive of his level. His brokerage accounts were worth about as much. I checked on the other Entertaincorp SVPs and VPs based in Toronto, and the accounts of their mistresses, wives, and children. I noted a few interesting transactions in a couple of their accounts, not to mention a couple of very interesting accounts. If I were into blackmail, I could have been the most hated woman in Toronto.

  Grenier’s computer beeped, telling me my scan had cleared it of any malicious programs. Before I checked it out, I picked up his tablet and turned it on. The screen came on, showing me a recording of a young woman, a girl in her teens, being tortured. The background was that of an abandoned building. I realized she was a practice victim, probably killed someplace in the enclave.

  I turned it off and went downstairs to pour myself a large drink.

  I woke up before Nellie and Mike the following morning and called Richard O’Malley.

  “Richard, can you get me an appointment to speak with John Tremaine?”

  “Probably. What’s up?”

  “Sandra Jorgenson was attacked right after I met with you the other day. I wanted to talk with Tremaine about her.”

  A long silence followed. “She was? I hadn’t heard anything about it.” More silence. “So, Sandra’s dead, too.”

  “No, she survived. Grenier was interrupted, but he escaped. If his pattern follows that of his attacks on the Weeks family, I’d expect Tremaine’s family to be next.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  I remembered Donofrio’s comments, and how Sandra looked as the paramedics worked on her. “She’ll live, but I doubt she’ll ever be all right.”

  After another moment of silence, O’Malley said, “I’ll talk to him and give you a call.”

  Turning to Grenier’s computer, I wondered what he thought about running into another chameleon. If he scared me, did I scare him? I would think so, seeing as I’d shot him, but I didn’t know how psychopaths thought. Maybe I just pissed him off.

  He used a common habit of storing his emails locally, but he had several accounts with multiple email providers. After an hour, I zeroed in on a free anonymous account, the kind of email that wasn’t secure at all. Only a fool would use such an account for anything important. Or maybe a genius. It appeared that the only correspondent for that account was another free anonymous account, and all the traffic consisted of attachments of encrypted documents. I installed a couple of hacking tools and set them to work on the encryption.

  Richard still hadn’t called me back. In spite of my stomach growling, I forced myself to ignore it and started a search for Grenier’s ex-wife. I was curious that his rage seemed to be directed only at Entertaincorp and not at the woman who dumped him.

  Divorce proceedings among the corporate elite were often front-page news. Privacy and confidentiality were rare, and Grenier’s divorce wasn’t an exception. Even though no one had ever heard of him before his divorce, his wife’s allegations merited some minor coverage in the press. Personally, I would have a problem telling the world about my partner’s sexual perversions, but his wife didn’t seem to have such qualms. And her descriptions of his perversions were sensational.

  After the divorce, she took the kids, a girl and a boy, and moved back to her family in Montreal. News on her ceased. I found her bank accounts were all closed. I couldn’t find any information on her, no house rental or mortgage, and the kids weren’t registered for school. Additional searching convinced me that her family had helped her to disappear.

  Nellie woke up before Richard called me back, and I dragged her out for breakfast.

  “What happened to you last night?” Nellie asked.

  I gave her a brief sketch of my evening, then asked her, “How well do you know the other senior executives at Entertaincorp?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I know most of them, or I’ve at least met them. Sometimes I go places with Richard where he’s meeting with other execs.” She gave me a bright smile. “You know where he usually takes me to dinner? Lilith’s. Isn’t that a hoot?”

  “Tell me about John Tremaine.”

  “Not much to tell. Like I said, I didn’t get along with Sandra, and although Richard’s always very friendly with John, I sort of feel they aren’t really close.”

  “Who is Richard close to?”

  “He was close to Carleton Weeks. Their families do…did a lot of stuff together on the weekends.”

  Our breakfasts popped out of the autoserve chute, and I pushed the button to refill my coffee.

  “The couple we go out with most often,” Nellie continued around a mouthful of French toast, “is Henri Latour and Kandi, or sometimes Francois Renard and Chantelle.”

  “That’s Paul’s father, right?”

  “Yeah. Latour is another SVP. Kandi and Chantelle hang out a lot on the weekends.”

  “Back to John Tremaine,” I said.

  She glared at me, then said, “He’s a little younger than the others. A little more in a hurry, not as polite to people. Not as nice.” She stopped and wrinkled her nose, and gave me an exasperated look. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. He’s kind of irritating—one of those men who need to impress everyone with how they’re better than you are.”

  “You don’t like Sandra and you don’t like him,” I said.

>   Nellie leaned back in her chair and stared out the window. “Yeah. I don’t.”

  We stopped by a food store and bought a bunch of frozen microwave breakfast stuff and some more coffee. I wasn’t used to having another person in the house, let alone two. Mike also drank coffee, and what usually lasted me a month was gone in a week. I was charging for hazard pay, but I hadn’t seen the lack-of-coffee hazard coming.

  Richard finally called late in the afternoon. “Tremaine said he can make time for you at eight in the morning.”

  “At your office?” I asked.

  “Yes. Check in at the front desk.”

  I wanted to ask Vivien some more questions, so Mike took Nellie to work, and I rode my bike down to the hospital.

  The constable was still parked outside Vivien’s room, and she looked worse but more alert when I entered. The swelling and bruising made her look like some mutant from a bad vid.

  “I wanted to ask you about Grenier’s wound,” I said. “For someone who took a bullet, then had surgery, he seemed pretty spry when he was beating you. I don’t think I could have run away like that if I was hurt that bad.”

  She shook her head, then picked up the clipboard and started writing.

  “bullet cracked the shoulder blade, splintered part, no penetrate. lots of blood needed transfusion. but he mutant very tough. he was awake. light pain killer. ”

  “I know he’s a chameleon,” I said, “but are you saying he has other mutations?”

  “one parent not human,” she wrote. “dont know what.”

  The nurse came in and threw me out, but Vivien didn’t have any more to tell me anyway. As I was leaving, I stopped a doctor in the hall.

  “How long would it take for a broken shoulder blade to heal?”

  “Fractured scapula? You’d immobilize the shoulder for at least three to four weeks. Probably six weeks to completely heal if it wasn’t displaced too badly.”

  “That’s for a human, right?”

  He nodded.