CHAPTER 26: THE PHONE CALL
[Meat Cute, Back Office / Liv's Apartment — Early May 2015, 4:47 PM]
"I saw you kill a teenager."
No preamble. No introduction. The first sentence out of Liv Moore's mouth was a blade, and she'd chosen to lead with it.
Her voice was controlled — the medical professional's register, the one that delivered difficult information without letting the delivery contaminate the content. But underneath the control, a tremor. The specific vibration of someone who'd rehearsed this sentence and found that the performance was harder than the practice.
"In a vision," she continued. "Eddie Torres. I saw your face. I saw the knife. I saw him die."
The office was dark. I'd turned off the overhead when the phone rang — instinct, the security brain's protocol for conversations that required concentration without distraction. The only light came from the phone screen, casting the desk in pale blue.
"Eddie Torres," I said. "Yes."
Silence. Three seconds. Four.
"You're confirming it."
"I'm confirming the name. Eddie Torres was killed in this building, approximately six weeks ago, by the previous operator of this business." The lawyer's brain selected every word with the precision of testimony — truthful, specific, and structured to reveal exactly enough without exposing the underlying architecture. "I was not the person who killed him. But the operation that produced his death was mine to inherit, and I inherited it."
"The previous operator?" Her voice sharpened. "You are the operator. Blaine DeBeers. The man I saw in my vision holding a knife."
"The man you saw in your vision and the man you're speaking to are not the same person."
A dangerous sentence. True in ways she couldn't understand — the transmigration, the replacement, the fundamental discontinuity between the body that had committed the murder and the consciousness currently inhabiting it. But delivered without context, it sounded like dissociation, or delusion, or the specific kind of denial that guilty men deployed when the evidence was irrefutable.
"That's not how identity works," Liv said.
"No. It's not." I let the admission land. The lawyer's instinct: concede the weak point, then redirect. "Ms. Moore. The killings stopped in mid-March. The operation changed. Nobody has died since. That's a testable claim."
"A testable claim."
"Check the missing persons reports. Pull the dates. See if anyone disappeared from Capitol Hill after mid-March. If my claim is false, you'll find evidence. If it's true, you'll find silence."
The line was quiet. Not the silence of disbelief — the silence of a scientist evaluating a hypothesis. Liv Moore was many things: grieving ex-fiancée, reluctant zombie, homicide consultant. But underneath all of those, she was methodical. She tested claims. She followed evidence. And the claim I'd just made was the kind she couldn't resist checking because proving it wrong would confirm what she already believed and proving it right would destroy the narrative she'd been building for weeks.
"Why should I believe anything you say?"
"You shouldn't. That's why I'm giving you something verifiable instead of asking for faith."
Another silence. Longer this time — ten seconds, fifteen. The sounds of her apartment leaked through: traffic outside the window, the hum of a refrigerator, the particular acoustic signature of a woman standing alone in a room making a decision.
"I'll check," she said.
"That's all I'm asking."
"This doesn't make you innocent."
"No. It doesn't."
The line went dead. No goodbye. The phone screen dimmed and the office went dark and the cured-meat smell of the shop settled around me like a familiar coat.
I set the phone on the desk. My hands were steady — Webb's composure, Goss's calm, the cumulative effect of eight brains' worth of emotional regulation maintaining a surface that the conversation underneath had been trying to crack. The surface held. The crack was internal, running through the foundation of the gambit I'd just played.
Check the missing persons reports. See if anyone disappeared after mid-March.
A testable claim. A provable prediction. And a prediction with a hole in it that the lawyer's brain was already identifying with the cold precision of opposing counsel spotting a weakness in a deposition.
Chief had been fired in mid-April. Jerome had died in late April. Both events postdated mid-March. Both events involved brain extraction — "my method," as Lowell had put it. If Liv pulled the records and found Jerome's death — and she would find it, because Jerome's body was in the system and the autopsy report would land on the medical examiner's desk if it hadn't already — then the claim collapsed.
Nobody has died since mid-March.
The claim was true for my operation. For the supply chain I'd built, the ethical sourcing, the hospital and funeral home channels. Zero deaths attributable to the reformed Meat Cute operation.
But Chief's kills happened on my watch. Chief was my employee — fired, yes, but mine. His methods were learned from this operation. His victims died because the machine I'd inherited had produced a component I'd removed without neutralizing. The distinction between my kills and his kills was a legal argument, not a moral one. And Liv Moore wasn't running a courtroom. She was running an investigation.
The hunger was a steady ache. Three days overdue — the virus's demand had been suppressed by adrenaline and caffeine, but the suppression was chemical trickery and the underlying deficit was growing. My focus was starting to drift at the edges, the way a camera lens softened when the autofocus lost its target. I needed to eat. Soon.
But first, the math.
I pulled the timeline from memory. The accountant's brain, the chemist's precision, the lawyer's chronological rigor — three skill sets applied to a single question: When did Chief's victims die?
Chief was fired mid-April. He'd confessed to two kills before Jerome. If those kills happened between his firing and Jerome's death — a window of roughly two weeks — then the earliest possible death was mid-April. Jerome died late April. All of it after mid-March. All of it inside the window I'd told Liv was clean.
The phone sat on the desk, screen dark. Somewhere across the city, Liv Moore was opening a database.
I sat in the dark and listened to the shop settle around me — the walk-in compressor, the plumbing, the distant sound of Don E restocking the front — and the specific weight of a half-truth sat in my chest like a stone that was still sinking.
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