Cassandra had read the case file, and Cervantez was not exaggerating the strength of evidence against Ammie. The girl faced a felony murder charge for stabbing a man to death in his car while parked in a weedy lot behind a boarded-up muffler and tire shop on the west side. It was a burned-out area with few security cameras and where police drones rarely flew, so dealers and prostitutes favored it. Investigators found her blood on the passenger seat, her left shoe outside the vehicle, and she admitted the man had picked her up on a corner she worked.
Ammie stared into her lap, picking at her palm.
“You’ve got to give me something to work with, Ammie,” said Cervantez. “You told the police he started slapping you and that you were able to get away and run off. But if you tell me that you weren’t able to get away, then I can argue self-defense. You see?”
Ammie considered Cervantez. She darted her eyes over Cassandra.
Cassandra saw haunted fear in the young girl’s face. She knew from the case file that Ammie had run away from an abusive, alcoholic father at sixteen and had been on the streets ever since. It could not have been an easy life, and the look in her eyes made it clear it had been a life lacking warmth, love, value, or security, all of which Cassandra had known. The girl had been routed for rough days and a bad end.
“You a lawyer?” Ammie asked.
“No,” said Cassandra. “I’m a psychologist.”
“I thought of being a psychologist back when I was little,” said Ammie. She smiled briefly at the memory. “Didn’t quite work out, though. You think you can help me?”
“We’d like to,” said Cassandra. “But you need to tell Mr. Cervantez what really happened. You don’t have to be scared.”
Ammie chewed her lip and rubbed her arms. She looked down. “What if it was C-Jack who done it?”
“Who’s C-Jack?” asked Cervantez.
“My boyfriend. He looks out for me.”
“You mean your pimp,” said Cervantez. “Okay, I’m listening.”
Ammie hesitated and then let the story out in a rush. “The guy goes off like I said, slapping me and yelling that he was going to kill me, and suddenly the door jerked open and C-Jack was pulling me out and the next thing I know he’s in the car stabbing the guy and so I just took off. I didn’t look back either. Not once.”
“Ammie,” said Cervantez, his voice registering bewilderment, “why didn’t you tell this to the police?”
“I was scared C-Jack’d kill me if I told.”
The girl’s tone of trauma and timidity gripped Cassandra. “No one’s going to hurt you,” she said, surprised by the vehemence in her voice.
Cervantez scrambled for his note recorder. “This is good,” he said. “This is a proper defense.”
Cassandra exited the detention center a half hour later. Cervantez had other clients to see. They’d agreed to meet the next day for her to show him the complete Surrogate system. The setting sun reflected in orange rays from the windows of the surrounding buildings as she walked to the corner to hail an autocab home.
“Hey, Cassie,” a voice called from behind her. She turned to see Forrest jogging to catch up with her. “I forgot how fast a walker you are.”
“One of the benefits of being tall,” said Cassandra.
“How’d it go today?”
“Better than I expected.”
He searched her face to gauge the level of truth behind her words, a habit she found unsettling and annoying.
“Great,” he said. “I want to hear all about it. Let’s get a drink.”
“I can’t,” said Cassandra. “I need to get home. My dad’s waiting.”
“One drink,” said Forrest. He blasted her with his strongest smile. “Please?”
Cassandra laughed. “You think that smile can get you anywhere, don’t you?”
Forrest shrugged. “It has so far. I’m told it’s the dimples.”
“I believe it,” said Cassandra. “I, however, am immune to their appeal.”
“And I believe that,” said Forrest. “It’s probably why I find you so inscrutable.”
“Inscrutable? I’m hardly inscrutable.”
“Oh, but you are,” said Forrest, searching her face again. “Cassandra Howard. One big mystery. Unfathomable. Elusive and remote.”
“Are you done?”
“For now,” said Forrest. “Hey, has Powell called you yet?”
“No,” said Cassandra. “I’m sending him my status report tonight. Why?”
“No reason. I just know he’s wound up for this to go smoothly.”
“Powell is always wound up,” said Cassandra, who had once described the project head of the Surrogate system at Real Thought Analytics as the Dr. Frankenstein of the artificial intelligence industry.
“I know,” said Forrest. “He’s just worried we’re going to screw something up.”
“I’m not going to screw anything up,” said Cassandra. She waved for an autocab. “Are you?”
“That is not my plan,” said Forrest, and he grinned.
The streetlights were on when Cassandra arrived home. The house where she grew up was a brick American Foursquare near Holbrook and Woodward, walking distance from the Little Rock Baptist Church, where as a child she had worshipped on Sunday mornings with her father. She climbed the cement steps to the pillared front porch that spanned the front of the house where when she was little she had dressed dolls and built cities of connecting plastic blocks on cool autumn evenings while her father rocked on the porch swing, grading papers. She raised her hand to where the doorbell used to be so that the home security eye could scan her I-AM chip.
“Welcome home, Cassandra,” intoned the system as it unlocked the door.
Inside, she thanked the hospice nurse for staying late and went to check on her sleeping father. The monitors beside the hospital bed flickered green and red in the shadowed room. She checked the cat’s bowl before making a dinner of acorn squash, tofu, and sautéed collard greens. She checked e-mails and reviewed project updates while she ate. It was quiet enough for her to hear the subtle creaks and groans the boards of the house made as they struggled with age. After she cleaned up, she returned upstairs to her father’s room.
Jarius Howard had been diagnosed with advanced colon cancer in April. Doctors told him he would likely be dead before the year was out. He had two months to go to beat their prognosis, but his energy and determination to show them up had dropped off sharply in recent weeks and he had grown less interested in living simply to prove fools wrong.
“Did you feed Baedeker?” he asked Cassandra when she came in.
“Yes, Daddy, I fed Baedeker. Your beloved cat is not losing any weight.”
“Unlike me, you mean.” He chuckled and coughed.
“Stop that,” said Cassandra. She sat beside the bed and took her Apple iGlass from her bag and rested it in her lap. She took her father’s emaciated wrist and scanned his I-AM bracelet to check his vitals.
“Everything looks pretty good,” she said.
“Must be why I feel so energetic,” he said with a weak smile.
Her father had been a professor of philosophy at Wayne State University for thirty years and had raised Cassandra alone after her mother died, when she was ten. He had often taken her to the university to sit in on his lectures when he couldn’t find someone to watch her, and she had sat in the back of the class listening to his strong, confident voice while she drew picture after picture of her mother.
Cassandra put on a pair of wireless connec-specs and blinked twice to open her father’s identity folder on the iGlass.
“More questions?” asked her father.
“Only a few.”
“What are you going to do with all this information you’ve been gathering, anyway?”