Blood Avatar

by Ilsa J. Bick

  So, instead, Ramsey spent his time eyeing Amanda. She’d ordered the body removed from the car, a process hampered by bits and pieces of the body flaking off, which then had to be gathered, bagged, and tagged. The mountain rescue people had rigged a traverse stretcher to haul up the body bag, but the going was slow, with the stretcher bumping against the wall, showering scree down the slope.

  When the body was on level ground again, the ME crew climbed up. Ramsey watched as Amanda pulled her way up the side of the gorge. He liked the way she moved. She’d shucked the orange coverall to reveal jeans, a light denim shirt rolled up to the elbows, and a hunter-green insulated vest that highlighted her sable-colored hair. She had long legs, corded muscles in her forearms, and moved with the grace of a large cat. She caught him looking, flashed a quick smile, then moved to give instructions to the transport techs taking the body to the hospital morgue. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she was very . . . handsome. Strong body matched by chiseled features. Early thirties, probably.

  Someone called his name, and he turned. A deputy named John Boaz and an older jowly man who everyone else called Bobby and didn’t seem to have a last name duckwalked over with a load of thermoses, cups, pastry boxes and white paper sacks spotted with grease. Ramsey helped them arrange everything on the trunk lid of one of the cruisers then drew a cup—black and strong—and started rooting around the bags.

  “Ida heard what was going on, and she set her man back to the ovens,” Boaz said. He had a laconic drawl, a lumpy face, and large ears. Each ear came to a curious point right at the top of each helix. He looked a little bit like an alien from a popular science fiction holodrama, except his eyes were very small and gray, like lead pellets. “All these news people, she’s tickled pink. Murder’s good for business.”

  Ramsey was inspecting a bag of crullers. The crullers were still warm, and smelled of yeast and oily sugar. “Who said anything about murder?”

  Boaz blinked. “Well, I did, I guess,” he said around a doughnut. He chewed, swallowed, chased the doughnut with coffee then gave a slow, reluctant smile, the kind a dog makes when it’s crapped on the carpet. “What I mean is, well, car blown to heck and back, guy with a bullet hole in his head, that’s got to be a murder.”

  “Who’s talking murder?” They turned as Ketchum strode up. His parka was open, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. Boaz repeated his story, and Ramsey watched as color edged up the sheriff’s grizzled neck. When Boaz was finished, Ketchum said, “Who heard you?”

  Boaz thought. “Well, it was early yet, not a lot of people in. So it was me and Bobby, Ida, her counter girl, a couple of fellas from Monk’s place. I think that’s it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Ketchum did a slow simmer, his mouth working. “Okay, John, Bobby, here’s how it goes. You boys keep a lid on this murder talk until I make a formal announcement. I’ll do that once the body’s out of here. But you go around dropping details that we might want to keep back, like that bullet hole, and you’re going to make this harder than it already is. You understand?”

  Coloring, Boaz gave a jerky nod. The other deputy, Bobby, simply said, “Okay, Hank,” fished out a doughnut, bit, swiped jelly from his upper lip with his tongue.

  Ramsey waited until Ketchum had drawn a cup and chosen a cinnamon roll, and then the two men stepped away. When they were out of earshot, Ramsey said, “Your people could be trouble.”

  “Yeah,” said Ketchum. Scowling, he took a huge bite of roll, heaved a sigh, chewed. “Most of them are pretty good. Boaz, he’s okay but kind of stupid.”

  “You’re going to have to do some damage control with the press, too.”

  “I know it.” Ketchum’s scowl deepened. “Like a bunch of big black crows over roadkill.”

  “They have their place. Got to know how to play them is all.”

  Ketchum opened his mouth to say something else, but the mountain rescue people ambled over for coffee and got Ketchum involved in signing off on their time. Ramsey slowly edged away, stood at the lip of the gorge, looking down at orange suits still picking over rocks. The ambulance had pulled away, lights flashing but no siren. Ramsey looked up as Boaz sidled over. Ramsey nodded and Boaz said, “Sheriff had no call to say that.”

  “Yeah, he did. Murder investigations are easy to mess up. Three things you got to do.” Ramsey ticked them off on his fingers. “Control your people. Control the press. Control the evidence. After that, everything else is luck and hard work.”

  “We work hard.”

  “I didn’t say that you don’t. But rumors’ll kill you unless you’re the one to plant them.”

  Boaz gave him a narrow look. “You do that?” And when Ramsey nodded, Boaz said, “That’s lying.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes not.” Ramsey turned away to look in Amanda’s general direction. Definitely a better view. “Sometimes you got to make things happen. So you put a bug in someone’s ear.”

  Boaz said, “I can think of something else I’d like to put into someone, and it wouldn’t be her ear.” When Ramsey turned back, Boaz was smirking. “Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah?” Ramsey said. He didn’t mind cop talk. Part of the ritual, see who had bigger balls. But he didn’t like talk that put down women.

  Boaz was talking again. “Like I wouldn’t mind me a piece of that.” His tongue, pink and as pointed as his ears, flickered over his lower lip the way a snake tests the air. “I had me a wife once. Liked screwing fine until we had the kid, and then she let herself go. Just lay there. Like porking a Cartago bloodworm. Now, Amanda, she’s standoffish, but in my experience, those brainy women, you screw ’em hard, peg ’em in the right place, you know, and they screw you right back.”

  The talk made him uncomfortable. “Listen, this makes me uncomfortable,” Ramsey said. “Talking about women that way, it’s really not my thing and, honestly, it just makes you sound like a hick-jackass.” What he wanted to add was that a man like Boaz probably had a good right hand that saw a lot of action.

  “Yeah?” Boaz wasn’t smiling anymore, and for a minute, Ramsey wondered if the deputy was a mind reader. “So just what is your thing? Getting it on with guys like McFaine, that your kinda thing?”

  “Look,” Ramsey said but stopped when Ketchum wandered over with the arson specialist, Fletcher. Fletcher, a dry-looking man with steel-rimmed spectacles, carried a yellow and blue device about the size of a tool box.

  “We’ve taken our samples with the sniffer,” Fletcher said, primly adjusting his glasses. “We’ll have some kind of answer in the next few days, say”—he did a mental calculation, his lips working—“Monday evening.”

  “Sniffer?” Ketchum asked.

  Fletcher patted the box the way another man might a retriever. “A sniffer’s a photo-ionization detector that registers volatile hydrocarbons.”

  “So that tells you what caused the fire?”

  Fletcher’s pencil-thin eyebrows arched. “Oh, it might tell us much more. Certain explosives and accelerants contain taggants, inert materials added to distinguish where something might’ve been manufactured. Industries add a taggant to aid in enforcement and investigation. But I think this is homegrown. The scene just doesn’t have the feel of something very professional, or even military. This is farm country. Lots of fertilizer around, so your boy could’ve used ANFO, fuel oil mixed with fertilizer. Or the explosive might be commercial grade but untraceable.”

  “Then we’re shit out of luck,” Ramsey said.

  Fletcher nodded. “Yes. I think you would be.”

  * * *

  Fletcher and his team ran the news people gauntlet, were button-holed for fifteen minutes, and finally left. A little later, a knot of crime scene techs huffed up. One held up an evidence bag. “I got a wallet here. Found it about, oh, thirty meters to the right. Weird, actually, when you think about it. Shoulda been torched just like his clothes.”

  “Unless it wasn’t in his pockets when the car went up,” Ketchum observed.

  “That might explain it
.” Still gloved, the tech carefully unfolded the wallet. The wallet was a bifold and must originally have been brown but was charred so the edges looked moth-eaten. There was a slot for an ID card but the card was a molten glob and unreadable. There were slots for photographs, all empty. “No money,” the tech said.

  Boaz grunted. “So you got someone who shoots the guy, then robs him, then torches his car. Nice guy.”

  “Is there anything else?” Ramsey asked.

  “No,” the tech said, “I think . . . wait a sec.” He stopped, angled the wallet into the light. “There’s something here.”

  The something turned out to be what looked like a business card of some kind, mostly black but a tan color where the fire had melted the plastic, which then stuck to the card. The tech said, “I can’t make out much other than a word: Industries.”

  “Could be anything, anywhere,” Ketchum said.

  Ramsey pointed. “There are numbers. Looks like part of a sat-link code . . . a prefix and then a couple numbers.” He recited the numbers, thought a minute, said, “I don’t recognize that prefix code. You?”

  Ketchum shook his head. “But give me a sec. Let me call dispatch.”

  While Ketchum was gone, Ramsey asked the tech, “You think your guys can separate the card from the plastic?”

  The tech wrinkled his nose. “I dunno. That stuff’s pretty hard. They can try separating it, but don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Slovakia,” Ketchum called, jogging back. “Dispatch says it’s a number in Slovakia, some business called Poly Tech Industries.”

  Ramsey blinked. “Slovakia? What would someone from Slovakia be doing way out here?”

  Ketchum dug at the back of his neck in a vigorous scratch. “A lot of folks here, they got family come from back there. Call it the old country. Wrong season for tourists, otherwise.”

  “You could get someone to call the spaceport and see how many Slovakian citizens came through in the last two weeks. See if any rented cars. But if this guy’s a Slovakian national, you’re going to have to call this into the DBI.”

  “The Bureau?” Ketchum screwed up his face like he’d sucked a lemon. “The last time I talked with one of those special agents—this was a drug case a year or two back, local boy—he made me feel like I put my shorts on backwards and pissed out my ass.”

  “Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe they’ll just say attaboy and leave you alone. On the other hand, if this is someone important, they’ll want to know.”

  “Or this might be just a lot of nothing,” said Ketchum.

  “But you have to cover your bases.”

  “I know it.” Ketchum took off his hat and finger-combed his straw-colored hair. “Truth is I’m in over my head. Most we ever deal with is someone’s tarise gets shot, or some fool goes out on the lake and gets in trouble, or hikers try to bushwhack to the river. Most of them split open their skulls on the rocks—that is, if they don’t fall off and drown. These walls are wicked slippery, and the stone’s rotten. Outside of a few drug things and a hunting accident couple years back that got a local killed, that’s as crazy as it gets here.”

  “So what are you saying, Hank?”

  “I’m saying that I could really use your help. Maybe run the show.”

  Ramsey felt his heart give a little kick, as if the muscle had jump-started. Still, he said, “I can’t do that without approval, Hank. You need someone to cross jurisdictions, you got to call in a knight, maybe, especially if it turns out to be a nationality thing, or Count Kampephos, the planetary legate. Or talk to the governor.”

  But Ketchum was shaking his head. “I don’t want a knight. Oh, I know we’re supposed to kowtow to the nobility and all, but . . .” He shook his head again.

  “Hank, that’s the way things are,” Ramsey said. He saw Amanda coming over, a cup of coffee in her hand and a smile on her face. Boaz leaned on his cruiser, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, his eyes tracking Amanda. When he caught Ramsey watching, the deputy threw him a wink and waggled his eyebrows.

  Ramsey turned back as Ketchum was saying, “Things here go the way I say.”

  “You don’t have that kind of discretion, Hank.”

  “The heck I don’t,” said Ketchum, looking almost fierce. “I don’t want a knight. Take a look around. You think anyone’s going to take to a knight snooping around?”

  “He’s got a point,” Amanda said. She’d sidled between the men, though she stood just a little closer to Ramsey.

  “And I’m a city cop with baggage. That’s not a problem?” Ramsey asked.

  There was a pause as Ramsey’s words hung there, like a bad smell. Amanda looked at Ketchum. Ketchum cleared his throat, ran his hands around the brim of his sheriff’s hat then settled the hat back into place.

  “I’m sheriff,” he said. “For right now, this is what I want. You let me make some calls, see what I can square up in terms of cooperation.”

  “Well . . .” But Ramsey’s mind was already leaping five steps ahead. Pearl would be thrilled. Lending Ramsey would take care of a lot of headaches, the number one problem being visibility. “Your call, Hank.”

  “Yes, it is,” Ketchum said and stalked off to make his calls.

  Amanda sipped coffee. “Well,” she said. “And don’t you look like the cat that ate the canary?”

  8

  Walking to her truck, Amanda caught Boaz leering, a look that made Amanda want to pop out his eyeballs with her thumbs. Idiot. She’d looked for Ramsey but didn’t spot him. So she left, feeling Boaz’s eyes lasering her butt.

  She headed east then swung south, the road edging the lake on her left. This was the time of morning she adored, with the sun, a Davion sunburst, hovering above water sparkling like sequins against cerulean velvet. She didn’t see this often. Usually she was in surgery, her day starting at 5:30 a.m. She got so she knew spring was coming when sunrise caught up to her, the night sky giving way and the few lone stars that were left winking out before the advance of another day.

  This morning, she felt good. Interesting case and Ramsey . . . very interesting guy. Her attitude about the case was, well, maybe a little sick. Murder was so interesting. She’d met MEs, cops who had this whole crusade thing going. But the really good cops were pretty weird. There was this detective on Towne, with whom she’d worked the Little Luthien killer. Now that cop was downright spooky, the way he talked about channeling the victim, stuff like that. But he was the only one who bought her argument about that government official. The rest of the killings were camouflage, so they should look at the official and work backward. No one liked that. The legate got pissed when she ended up splashed all over the news. That got her booted out of the assistant ME’s post, and smack-dab into Farway.

  Farway was weird: a town inhabiting a pocket out of time. No ’Mechs, no hovers. Farm land and, in the summer, a fading tourist haunt. Religion was big: Old Romans and New Avalon Catholics, a feud that went back a ways, with the Slovakians clinging to the old ways. (Personally, she was a good Jewish girl and didn’t care one way or t’other.)

  But she was determined to make the best of it. As soon as she landed the job, she bought a farm. Point-three square klicks of grazing land, on the lake, and pretty much sight unseen. Now she had her house, her horses, her work. Being ME for the county wasn’t really that bad, kind of a nifty second gig. A county coroner did the scut work, pronouncing at all the ninety-eight-year-old Aunt Bettie-Lous who keeled over from a heart attack, easy stuff like that. Anything else, they called her.

  The one drawback: no men. Well, no eligible men for her. Men like Boaz just made her angry, and she had nothing in common with the rest.

  Now Ramsey, he was a good-looking guy in a scary, dangerous way. All those scars made his face more interesting, not ugly, and she got a good look at his hands, too: big, capable. Muscled. The right ring finger looked like it had broken once and not been set right away. No ring on the left ring finger, but you never could tell with guys and now, come to think of it,
wasn’t he married, or had been? And what happened to McFaine? She’d do a search and . . .

  “Whoa, Nellie,” she said. “What are you thinking, girl?”

  * * *

  Our Lady of the Lake Hospital was small and based on threes: an emergency room with three bays; three floors; three wings; thirty beds; a nursery; and a three-bed ICU. (Someone said the three-thing was because of the Trinity. Whatever.) Highly complex cases were air-evaced to New Bonn by VTOL or tilt-wing from a helipad out front, though she’d only sent out three patients in the past four years. They had three PAs, one of whom did pediatrics, plus an intensivist, a pediatrician, two obgyns, a family practitioner and another surgeon. She held triple certification in surgery, internal medicine and forensic pathology. (So maybe there was something there with this three stuff.) There wasn’t much they couldn’t deal with.

  The emergency room was on the hospital’s north side, with its own breezeway, a bay for an ambulance, and a much-smaller, postage stamp of a parking lot where the doctors liked to park. She passed through a set of scrolling glass double doors into the ER lobby. Canned music silted through overhead speakers. There were four people in the waiting room: two regulars who slept off whatever they’d drunk the night before, and a harassed-looking brunette with a squalling two-year-old. (Amanda liked kids and had thought about becoming a pediatrician. Then she clerked in a pediatric ER. After two months of runny noses, projectile vomiting, diarrhea, a clientele whose repertoire of recounting symptoms was to cry or cry harder, and hysterical mothers, she decided that if she wanted patients who bit, kicked and howled—hell, she’d have been a vet.)

  The nurses’ station was behind the lobby, near admissions. When Amanda rolled in, she spotted two nurses—one with steely gray hair and a single brow—and a short man in green surgical scrubs and a surgical mask knotted loosely around his neck flipping through hard-copy patient charts and double-checking them against a noteputer.