A Friend in the Glass (An Auden & O’Callaghan Mystery #3)

Chapter Nine

They walked back to Forty-Fourth and Tenth, the wind slapping Sam in the face hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. The ache in his leg had gotten steadily worse once the adrenaline from the fight with Brady had worn off, but he barely felt it now as the cold dug into him. The day’s long shadows had thickened almost into night; the sun had dropped completely out of sight, and streetlights were popping on.

Cyber 44 didn’t look much better in the gloom. The neon sign shed a pink glow under the scaffolding, barely enough to make out the drooping Pride flag. A hobbitish man scurried out of the cybercafé, the shopkeeper’s bell jingling as the door swung shut on its closer. Sam kept his pace steady and hoped that Rufus hadn’t figured out yet where they were going.

“Oh, come the fuck on,” Rufus groaned as if on cue. “She almost beat me black-and-blue this morning. Let’s go somewhere else.”

Sam ignored him and, just to be safe, walked faster.

Inside, Cyber 44 smelled like Fuego Takis, farts, and old vinyl. The air was warm and stuffy. Kim sat behind a desk near the door. The computer monitor was angled so that Sam couldn’t see it, but judging by the number of full-sized Pokémon plushies posed against the blacked-out window behind her, he thought he had a pretty good guess of what she might be doing.

“I need to use a computer,” Sam said.

Kim glared at him. She was stitching up something that looked like a plush green radish, and the needle’s movement quickened into hard jabs. “He’s not allowed in here. He thinks this is a sex dungeon.”

“I do not,” Rufus interjected. “I said it was a phone sex hotline.”

“Twenty minutes,” Sam said, opening his wallet. He hesitated.

“Ten dollars,” Kim said. “For an hour.”

“I don’t need an hour.”

The plushie got a needle right through what was either an eye or an egg sac. “By the hour only.” She yanked the needle the rest of the way through and added, “Or you can buy forty hours for three-fifty.”

“I want twenty minutes,” Sam said. “Why the fuck would I buy forty hours?”

“It’s a better deal,” Kim said with a shrug.

He paid the ten dollars, and Kim waved them down to a machine at the end of the room. It was hotter down here, all the electronics putting off heat, the fans whirring to create an ocean of white noise. At this end of the room, only one other computer was occupied. The gamer smelled like unwashed hair and medicated powder, even at a distance, and he was playing something called REVERSE GAY HAREM - MAKE THEM DO WHAT YOU WANT. It looked like this guy was mostly picking out underwear for cartoon men with incredibly unrealistic body types—

“Can we have a different one?” Sam shouted to Kim.

Whatever she shouted back, it was definitely a no, although it wasn’t exactly words.

Sam pulled a seat over for Rufus, sat in another chair himself, and opened a browser. He typed in Shareed Baker.

DuckDuckGo returned a lot of results on Shareef Baker, which wasn’t exactly helpful. It also offered a fair amount of suggestions about shared bakers , which was apparently another millennial brain-fuck trend, and Shareed Bakkar, who operated a jet ski rental in Palm Beach.

“Great,” Sam muttered. “I knew this was going to be easy.”

“Try some kind of military keyword with her name,” Rufus suggested as he shrugged out of his jean jacket and unzipped his hoodie. “Army or Benning or something.”

Shareed Baker Army yielded even more confusing results, and nothing that seemed helpful. Shareed Baker Benning popped up with a white-page listing that suggested that someone named Shareed Baker had, indeed, lived in Columbus, Georgia, in 2017. But that was the closest they’d gotten, so Sam tried Shareed Baker Stonefish , which pointed him toward an exotic-fish-and-aquarium-supply store in Queens, and Shareed Baker Conasauga , which populated his results with information about bakeries in the Lake Conasauga area.

“They pay those pencil-necks millions of dollars for this fucking algorithm.”

“I’d love a muffin right about now,” Rufus said, sort of to himself, but also sort of not. “My blood sugar’s low. I think yours is too. It’s too bad about the health code rating here, huh? Oh, see if Shareed has a Facebook profile.”

“I thought nobody over the age of six had Facebook anymore,” Sam growled, but he opened a tab and typed in the address. He had an account—barely used—but when he searched for Shareed Baker, he got only two results: one was a grandmother in Minnetonka, and the other was encouraging Sam to SEE MY LIVE VIDEO AND ALL MY PICS - CLICK HERE - I’VE BEEN SO NAUGHTY!

Rufus put a hand on the back of Sam’s neck. He kneaded a little before leaning in close to whisper, “I’d like to take this moment to point out that your judgment loses some of its intensity when you, a man older than myself, are logged into an active Facebook account. But also, I’m going to remind you, in graphic detail, that I’m not six-years-old, by talking about my flaming red pubes.”

“I know,” Sam said, but he leaned into Rufus’s touch. “I’m still picking them out of my teeth. Now stop interrupting me.”

After a moment of staring at Shareed Baker’s profile—the naughty one—Sam closed the tab and opened a new one. He pulled up Garrison.

Hand still on Sam’s neck, Rufus stopped digging into the muscles, asking, “What’s this?”

“Military version of Facebook. Fewer thongs. More guns.” He signed in, ignored the demand that he pay twenty dollars a month to upgrade to a DELTA account, and typed in Shareed Baker.

Her profile was the first hit: Shareed Baker, Fort Benning CID Battalion, Criminal Investigations Special Agent (31D). The profile picture matched the woman they had found dead in the pod. When he clicked on the profile, he got a page that had been locked down. “Request Ally?” a box asked him. He clicked it, although he knew Shareed Baker would never respond, and then sat back with a sigh.

“I don’t know what CID means, but she was involved in military investigations.” Rufus lowered his hand as he looked at Sam. “That’s like—pretty hardcore, right?”

“She investigated soldiers on their own turf, and she was a black woman doing it. Hardcore sounds about right.”

Rufus checked on the Harem Gamer before scooting his chair closer to Sam’s. He asked quietly, “Did you ever have any contact with her—or whatever CID is, I guess—when you were in the Army? At Benning?”

Sam shook his head. Then he took out his phone and weighed it in one hand. “But somebody has to know something about her. Hold on.” He considered his options, the limited number of names in his contacts, the bridges he hadn’t burned even after Stonefish. He picked what he thought his best option was and raised the phone.

“Hey.” Rufus put a hand over the phone and met Sam’s eyes. “I just need you to know—we— you don’t have to do this. Not if you don’t want to. We can walk out of here right now, go home, and forget today ever happened. No matter what favors or strings I’ve got to pull to make sure no one finds you, I’ll do it.”

It was harder than it should have been to say, “Thank you.” Then Sam shook his head and placed the call on Speaker.

Colly picked up on the third ring. “Should I be flattered or worried?”

The guy building his REVERSE GAY HAREM—whatever the fuck that was—made an irritated noise. Sam glared at him, but he lowered the volume so that he and Rufus had to lower their heads over the phone.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked.

“You don’t write, you don’t call….” When the silence dragged, Colly said, “Ah. Same old Auden charm, I see.”

Rufus met Sam’s gaze, held up his hands, and made air quotes while mouthing “Auden charm.”

“I need a favor.”

“There it is.” She sighed. “What?”

“Do you know Shareed Baker? She’s CID, a special agent in the Benning battalion. Was.”

Colly’s voice sharpened with interest. “She’s dead?”

“As of this morning. You know her?”

“No, but dead CID doesn’t sound good.”

Sam laid out the day’s events as best he could without involving Colly too much. When he’d finished, he said, “Whatever you can find out about Shareed—”

“Give me five minutes. No, hold on, the bastard might have already gone home, and I’ll have to call him on his cell. Give me ten.”

She disconnected before Sam could respond.

“Who was that?” Rufus whispered. “Your Army wife?”

The grin surprised Sam. “Something like that. She’s an analyst; we worked together. Smarter than any of the dumbshits in command.”

The gamer with the unwashed hair turned in his seat and made another irritated noise, this time leveling up his stare to death ray.

“What the fuck are you going to do about it?” Sam asked. “Motherfucker, I just saw you spend five dollars for a digital pasty collection for your gay reverse harem.”

Apparently reverse gay harem time was over because the gamer scuttled to the door, the bell ringing behind him as the door wobbled shut.

“You’re running off my paying customers,” Kim shrieked.

“If she comes after you with that broom, I’m not helping,” Rufus told Sam. “You said it was like Animal Planet.”

Sam rubbed his forehead. “Ten fucking minutes of this.”

“I can go buy some rainbow pasties for my nips and entertain you.”

“Do that.”

The ten minutes dragged past, and then the phone vibrated in Sam’s hand. He answered on Speaker.

“She’s in hot water. Was, I guess.” Colly’s voice was troubled. “You’re sure she’s dead?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Well, she’s AWOL. Nobody knows where she is. Are you still in New York?”

“Should I answer that?”

“Probably not. My guy in CID said she’d bailed twice on her annual drug test, and rumors had already been floating around that she was using. She was erratic. Not doing her work. Pulling old cases from storage. I think they were hoping she’d fail the drug test and they could get rid of her.”

“Old cases? What old cases?”

Surprise laced Colly’s voice. “I don’t know. Do you want me to find out?”

“No. Thanks, Colly.”

“Save the thanks. Maybe sometime just call me when you don’t need something. How about that?”

Sam grunted. He reached for the End button. Then he stopped. “Did you know Lew Frazer is in New York City?”

“I knew you were still there. Are you with that guy? The cute one?”

Rufus choked and started coughing.

“Colly: Lew Frazer.”

Rufus smacked Sam’s bicep and whispered loudly, “Let her talk about me.”

Sam glared at him and turned up the volume slightly.

“Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong about what happened.” Colly’s voice was weary. “Yeah, that piece of shit probably made the call on Stonefish, and yeah, Went is the one who took it in the neck, and yeah, it still tears me up what Went did to himself. But you already threw away your career over this jerk. You’re in a better place now, right? Don’t let him get inside your head again.”

“You can find out where he’s staying.” The thought hadn’t occurred to Sam until now, but it hit him at sixty miles an hour. “He’s here in some sort of official capacity; he was in uniform. So you can find out where he’s staying.”

“I can’t—”

“Yeah, you can. You call the travel office, and you tell them you’ve got something you need to overnight him. You just need the hotel where he’s staying, the address and room number, that kind of thing.”

“Sam.”

“If they ask, tell them it’s classified, which they’ll buy because you’re intel—”

“Sam, the answer is no.”

“This isn’t—”

“Let it go, the thing with Lew. He’s as crazy about you as you are about him. I’m not putting the two of you on a collision course.”

“That son of a bitch murdered—”

“Call me sometime, Sam. Hell, call me even if it’s only for another favor, the Auden way. But not about this.”

She disconnected.

Sam stared at the phone. “What the ever-loving fuck?”