Johnny Cash stared out at us through the space-time window of two moderately sized posters. An acoustic guitar hung by its neck on a hook on the wall next to a vinyl collection and sound system that looked more expensive than anything else in the flat. Notably, there was no television in the living room. There was a smaller TV in the bedroom mounted too high, but from the dust on the buttons and a complete absence of remote controls, I got the sense he didn't spend much time watching it.
The entire apartment had that cozy level of clutter that's effortless for some and impossible for others. My own spaces were a binary. When I had time they'd always be fastidiously clean, the sort of clean that makes people look at you funny. On the rare occasions they weren't, the accumulated mess always struck me as horrifically messy, with very little in-between.
Miles seemed completely comfortable occupying that space. There was a used plate and World's Best Dad coffee mug in the sink, but the counters were polished to a dull sheen. The books on his shelves were arranged alphabetically, but there were gaps, the missing books strewn around on the corner nook's table or in the bedroom. The books appeared to be in excellent condition—covers treated well and their spines intact—but open a page and you'd be assailed by a barrage of colorful highlights, with fragmented, borderline indecipherable thoughts scribbled in the margins.
Jackson had been working overtime since the moment we stepped through the door. He swept the room with an electronic device mounted on a dark pole, green-to-red readout never showing more than green. He told me later that he was less worried about audio than he was about cameras. Motion detecting cameras were a real issue, as obstructive as they were common, and in the old days a single motion activated pet camera connected to the internet was more dangerous to a would-be trespasser than a thousand other more complex safeguards.
Thankfully, we lived in a time where the internet—and the overwhelming swathe of digital architecture that relied on it—was obsolete. If there were cameras, they'd either be completely reliant on internal memory or recording to SD cards, which, according to Chuck, made the footage child's play to manipulate.
The odd thing was, there wasn't any. Footage, cameras, or bugs.
It made me feel uneasy, somehow. And I wasn't the only one.
Jackson redoubled his efforts, scowl only growing as he prowled the apartment's perimeter. His thing, apparently, involved taking countless pictures, making sure everything remained exactly as it was.
"Can we talk now?" Chuck asked silently, over-enunciating.
Jackson's mouth tightened before he nodded. "It's weird." He turned to me. "You sure this guy's a fed?""One-hundred percent," I confirmed.
"He sloppy?"
"Not even a little."
Jackson swore and returned to the duffel he left near the entrance, swapping the photography camera's lens for a shorter, wider variant. "Okay. Possibilities." He screwed in the lens. "He doesn't actually live here, and you got played, he's got bad work-life balance, or he's the sort of anal-retentive motherfucker confident in his ability to spot an out-of-place anything in this mess. What sounds more likely?"
"Column C. Though there's probably some column B in there as well."
"You're sure he lives here?" Jackson reiterated.
Of course I was. I'd only seen snippets of it directly from Miles' point of view, but unless he'd been acting completely performatively over the last month on the off-chance he was being watched—which would require a level of neuroticism almost impossible to imagine—this was his home.
"Completely."
"Fine." Jackson relented, though he clearly wasn't happy about the answers. "Either way, done with the first sweep. I'll clean up after, but in the meantime, look with your eyes first, brain second, and hands third—or preferably, not at all."
"And how am I supposed to use the computer without touching it?" Chuck needled. His mood plummeted after Jackson pulled out the booties and hairnets, and had yet to recover. ℞ΆΝÒᛒËś
"Check if he has a dictionary. Turn to P, look for 'preference,' and see if you can work that one out," Jackson replied, watching as the other man scoffed and approached the desk by the balcony window. "Nuh-uh. Don't sit in his chair. Move it out and grab a chair from the table instead."
"Look man," Chuck smirked a little. "I get it. It's probably your first time getting paid this much for a job and you wanna show off for the client. Just dial it back a bit."
"Excuse me?" Jackson paused, glancing towards me for a moment then back at Chuck, as if he needed time to parse what he was hearing. "Do you have a computer chair at home, Mr. Security Expert?"
"Herman Miller all the way sweetheart," Chuck replied, continually smug.
"Nice. Heard about those. Got the knobs and levers dialed in, just how you like it?"
"Yessir."
"So if some flat-assed dipstick with a shit attitude came into your home, sat in your chair, and adjusted the height so his squat-skippin legs touched the ground, think you'd notice the difference?"
Chuck's smugness dissipated as he glanced down at the seat, one hand still resting on the back. "Wasn't going to adjust it."
"Course you weren't. But that's not what we're talking about, because that ain't some bougie-ass Herman Miller. The mesh net is worn, and the base is made of badly cut plastic. It's bargain bin, well-used, and falling apart. And I don't expect you to remember this, posh posterior hailing from the gilded throne of HM and all, but shit chairs have shit cylinders. Good chance it'll sink. And you can guesstimate, try to raise it back up to where it was, but unless you get it perfect, the difference will be exactly the sort of minor detail an anal-retentive motherfucker takes to heart."
"You know what?" Chuck exclaimed sarcastically, pulling the chair out and shoving it aside with more force than was strictly necessary. "I am paid enough to deal with this." He re-centered the kitchen chair and collapsed into it, facing Jackson with an exasperated look. "Happy?"
"Delighted."
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Beyond sharp glances and occasionally charged eye-contact, the exchange left them both mostly non-verbal. Judging from expertise and professionalism, Jackson was the exact sort of recruit I was hoping for. Chuck, unfortunately, wasn't, and I couldn't help but wonder how he'd passed the supposedly hellish evaluation. Maybe he was just an asshole who was remarkably good at his job, but technical know-how and field-specific expertise alone wouldn't suffice. Maybe Kinsley had trouble finding someone who was more of a team player with his skill-set.
Miles' password was nine digits. He didn't use it much in the late evenings—typically when I had time to check on him—but I lucked out one night and saw him enter it. Like any modern system the characters were obfuscated as they appeared, and he didn't look down at the keys while he typed, but supposedly, just knowing the number of characters made the password infinitely easier to engineer.
Chuck hooked up an external laptop to one of several empty USB slots on Miles' desktop, along with an auxiliary piece of equipment I didn't recognize. There was a dark screen as the computer rebooted in desktop mode.
When I lingered at his shoulder, he turned up and looked at me in barely cloaked irritation. "This is gonna take a while."
Message Received.
I walked away, checking the carpet beneath my immediate steps for lasting imprints. Part of me had already accepted we wouldn't find a smoking gun. Even if he had successfully walled the flat off from every other aspect of his life, Miles was too smart to keep any real skeletons in his closet here. But if this excursion gave me a glimpse into his mind, his headspace, even the faintest impression of a possible point of leverage, it would be worth it.
And if you're trying to get into someone's headspace, there's no better place to start than their bookshelf.
Miles had several to choose from. He'd struck me as an avid reader, and his selection did not disappoint. From Classic Lit—Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, and so on. He had the complete works of Jane Austen, which surprised me, especially placed next to Cormac McCarthy. Further down the shelf, Lord of the Rings was prominently placed, Fellowship of the Ring's cover facing outward. Below that, the door-stopping tomes of Sanderson, Rice, King. Philip K. Dick had a collection snuggled in next to King, giving the impression Miles wasn't partial to science fiction. Fyodor Dostoevsky had a rack all his own—and unsurprisingly, Crime and Punishment had seen the most wear.
At the bottom, the philosophers sat as a cornerstone. Most of them I'd read. Some, I hadn't. Estimating by volumes alone, Miles seemed to favor Hobbes. But Hobbes also wrote a lot, so maybe he was just being thorough.
The second shelf was dedicated primarily to crime, fictional and otherwise.
Bret Easton Ellis, Palahniuk, Harlan Coben, Michael Connolly, Craig Clevenger, and Raymond Chandler all warred for prominence on the top half of the shelf. The bottom half was comparatively less interesting, filled with non-fiction.
But to the right of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I found an odd number of books pertaining to addiction and trauma processing. Cops and their admins tended to give out Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement like Mormons hawk Bible tracts in Utah, so its presence wasn't shocking. I was pretty sure we still had a copy somewhere. Its immediate neighbors were less expected. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Beautiful Boy, Dreamland, A Grief Observed, and The Year of Magical Thinking were all heavy fucking reads. I had to wonder if Miles had read them to better counsel others, friends and colleagues maybe, or if he'd read them for himself, seeking comfort.
Why?
Still ruminating, I stepped away, searching for the book missing from the center of the non-fiction section. The gap was wide, indicating whatever was there was displayed prominently, cover out—as Lord of the Rings had been—and I was curious what sort of non-fiction title filled it.
I found my answer, splayed open on the cushioned reading chair near the window.
No Beast so Fierce
The title itself was familiar enough to tie it to Shakespeare, though it was a partial quote, and I couldn't quite remember the entire thing.
As soon as I picked it up, careful to tuck my index finger between the pages before it could close, losing the marked spot, it was obvious that Miles had read the book a lot over the years. There wasn't a single page with less than three highlights, and he'd placed several sticky notes.
At first glance I couldn't say why. Despite the title, it had little to do with Shakespeare. From the back-matter and a few skimmed paragraphs, the book was a personal account from a convict, relaying his life, imprisonment, and subsequent release.
But, if it was important to Miles, it was important to me. From the way it was falling apart he'd read this thing countless times over the years, and reading it could give key insights into his psychology.
I made a mental note to source a copy and moved on from the shelves to the hallway.
There were more pictures than I'd realized. Miles occasionally glanced at them while he ambled around the flat after a long day, decompressing, but apparently some more than others. There was a collage that—when I was observing, anyway—he'd never so much as looked at. In the pieced together pictures, Miles looked young, far younger than I'd imagined. But he looked even younger in the other pictures. Going off what I was seeing, he'd married straight out of high school, divorced, married again, divorced, married again, all in his twenties. This was his third family, then, much further in the rearview than he'd let on. In a moment of vulnerability, Miles admitted his third wife was in AA—implying she had a substance abuse issue. I'd assumed alcoholism at the time, but in retrospect that was short-sighted. There were plenty of people with various addictions that preferred the warmth of AA to the comparatively dour, uncomfortable setting of narcotics groups.
Even if it was just alcoholism, I couldn't see it.
The wife was pretty. Fair skin, dark eyes, prominent smile. Telltale signs of addiction would have hit her like a truck, similar to how they hit my mother. Yet as the collage spanned years, there was a lack of sudden shift, no trending pallor to her skin, an absence of sunken eyes. Just typical crow's feet and the growing sense of dejection appropriate to a future divorcee.
If he'd lied to me, fair play.
But it was a puzzling thing to lie about.
Especially when, in the earlier moments of the collage, they both looked genuinely happy. Miles had hinted that the reason his relationships fell apart was due to the old cop cliche of being married to the job, but again I wasn't seeing it. There were pictures of the two of them eating at a cafe in what looked like Venice, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Pictures from Christmas, pictures from birthdays. It was impossible to tell for sure. As social media has taught us, when you're looking at snapshots of someone's life it's trivially easy to show off the good parts while obscuring the bad. But it genuinely gave the impression Miles had learned from his mistakes, rather than repeating them. He'd even been scrubbed up in the operating room when—
Hold on. Where are the rest?
There should have been more. I did a double-take, going over the collage again, focus shifting to their son. Him in Miles' arms post delivery, eyes still closed, mouth wide in a frozen natal wail as Miles cradled him gently. A few over, he'd grown to adolescence, dark hair and features that took after his mother. The boy's stern mouth was pulled downward in a comedic frown, fending off panic as Miles pushed him along on a light blue bike with training wheels. Towards the center, both Miles and the boy had their feet up on what looked to be a living room table. The boy's hair had grown in but he'd kept the dour expression into his pre-teens or early teens.
And... that was it. After that, the boy disappeared from both the foreground and background of the rest of the images.
"Mr. Client?" Jackson called from the other room.
"Find something?" I asked, forcing myself to look away from the collage.
"Depends." There was a pause. "What's your tolerance level for conjecture?"
"Moderate."
I stuck my head in the bedroom door. Jackson had stopped photographing and started searching. He'd removed several lock boxes from Miles' closet and opened them, stacks of paper and documents divided into orderly piles. He leaned back on his knees and looked at me curiously. "Ever hear anything about career troubles? A black mark on his record?"
"No." I shrugged. "If anything, it's the opposite. Everyone seems to love him, and anyone who works with him is staunchly loyal."
Jackson cracked his knuckles in satisfaction. "Then he's dirty. That's the only thing that makes sense."
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