Blood Avatar
Page 13
“We’ll probably start talking again.”
“Is that so bad?”
He thought about that. “No.”
* * *
And they did start talking again, tentatively, Amanda asking questions about his family. “So your brothers go off to brilliant military careers, and you studied criminal justice and then . . . ?”
“The militia, like I said. MP. Military police.”
“Did you see a lot of action somewhere?”
He stopped and looked toward her. They were far enough south that the restaurant was just a dim glow and he couldn’t read her expression. Her face was like the sun during an eclipse but without a corona. Just a sense of a shape. “Why do you ask?”
“Your hands, and your face. You’ve got some old scars and some new ones.”
“I like to fight. When I was in the military, I boxed.”
He felt her surprise. “Like, in a ring?”
“Yeah. All military outfits, they all have teams for basketball, football. I decided on boxing. Don’t really know why, but maybe because I don’t play so well with other kids, and I like to be in charge. So I boxed. Never got my nose broken boxing, though. Just a lot of other times. The first time was the worst. Broke it pitching little league. He slugged the ball, and I didn’t duck fast enough. Second time, I flipped my bike. Third time was in basic. Some drunks hitting on this woman in a bar, and everyone just standing around, letting it happen. Anyway, they landed in the emergency room and then the stockade. The fourth time, I let a doctor do it. I got tired of having a nose that looked like a squashed tomato and I couldn’t breathe.”
“And all those scars are from boxing?”
“There aren’t that many,” he said, a little defensively.
“But that bruise on your left cheek, the cut, they’re new.”
“Yeah, well . . . I’ve had some free time lately. I was getting restless. Figured I’d go get a couple workouts. Before you know it, I’m at the gym seven, eight hours a day, lifting weights, working the bag, sparring. The cutman didn’t do a good job, that’s all.”
She did not, as he expected, ask him what a cutman was or did. She was silent a moment and then, out of the darkness, he felt her fingers over his face. They were tentative, as if she were a blind woman reading his features. He stood and let her touch him, and then her fingers lingered over a moon-shaped divot just beneath his right cheek.
“That’s not from boxing,” she said. “It’s different. How did you get it?”
She’d picked it right out. He felt something in his chest loosen, and he wanted to touch her—take her hands in his. But he stood absolutely motionless, aware of just how close she was. Aware, too, of a kind of hunger for much, much more.
“Teeth,” he said.
24
Teeth?
Amanda was too keyed up to sleep. Pushing back in her chair, she tossed her noteputer onto her desk and turned to stare out the window of her study, but all she saw was her ghostly reflection floating in a rectangle of inky black.
Teeth. What had Ramsey meant? He hadn’t said, and she hadn’t pressed. After that, they’d walked in silence. But the silence had been comfortable. Like dinner—two people sharing a meal and conversation as if they’d been doing it for years.
Things were moving too fast. Her last relationship had been a disaster: a surgeon with bedroom eyes and a body to die for. Their affair lasted three months, and she was thinking marriage, kids. That is, until the surgeon’s wife—a businesswoman who’d been off-world—gave her a jingle. Another reason she’d moved here.
She swiveled back to her computer, typed in a search, and ran it. The information was in the third news segment, a broadcast delivered by a breathless redhead:
“Jack Crawford Ramsey, a homicide detective with the New Bonn Police Department, was placed on indefinite administrative leave today, as an internal investigation continues regarding the detective’s conduct in the case of Quentin Marc McFaine in December of last year. You may remember that McFaine was the serial pedophile whose five-month spree claimed eleven victims, all young boys. The case reached its climax when McFaine abducted Ramsey’s eight-year-old son . . .”
“Oh, my God,” Amanda said. The report ended with a clip of an interview done in McFaine’s hospital room. McFaine lay, inert, in a nest of tubes and wires. The combination of a bedside ventilator and trach made McFaine sound like a robot, though:
“I understand why Jack feels this way. Jack really is an acquired taste and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get him where we could . . .”
And then she remembered what Ramsey said: Teeth.
There was more, some about McFaine, but also about Ramsey. One psychiatrist observed, trenchantly: “Oh, I think Jack Ramsey knew exactly what he was doing. Ramsey was a military man, a trained fighter. He knew precisely where to apply pressure. Completely understandable considering that his son . . .”
“Oh, my God,” she said again.
* * *
Jesus. Teeth. Why had he told her?
His hotel room smelled of soap and chlorine. Ramsey had taken a long shower, brushed his teeth and then switched out all the lights and tumbled, naked and still a little moist, on top of the quilt. His body was exhausted, but his mind was still going.
He was an idiot. What was he thinking? But it had been a long time since he’d liked anyone. And the counseling . . . what a disaster. He’d read Brannigan’s horror at that moment when her eyes turned inward and he knew her thoughts: Thank Christ, that didn’t happen to my kid. He’d read pity. Pity was the worst.
Easier to go beat up a bag and let others beat him because, deep down, he knew no punishment would ever be enough. Ever. Some things, you only got one chance. After that? Out of luck, buddy.
But, maybe, this was a roundabout way of . . . what? Warning her? Because Amanda would do a search, and then she’d figure how to keep her distance.
Better to think about Limyanovich, Schroeder’s autopsy. He already knew what didn’t make sense to him, but how did the two cases connect? Because he didn’t buy coincidence. The town was too small for these cases not to be connected in some way.
“Because everyone knows everyone,” he mumbled, and yawned again. He was beat. But his mind was going . . . McFaine, that damned McFaine . . . he was so . . .
* * *
The room’s link screamed. He crawled back to consciousness, cold because he’d fallen asleep on the quilt. Groggy, he called for light, got pissed when nothing happened, then fumbled for the switch. Was about to punch in when he remembered that he was still naked and jabbed up audio instead. His mouth was gummy with sleep. “Yeah?”
“Jack? Jack, you okay?”
“Amanda? Yeah, uh, sure, I’m fine. I was asleep. What . . . ?”
She cut him off. “We have to talk. I think I found something.”
“Limyanovich?”
“No.” A pause. “Isaiah Schroeder. Jack, I think you’re right. I think Isaiah Schroeder was murdered.”
25
Sunday, 15 April 3136
0145 hours
After the appy, the hospital quieted down. The evening shift cleared out, the graveyard people came on, and the hospital ratcheted into low gear: nurses on their rounds, doing vitals, getting a pain med. But, mostly, the hospital slept.
Except Gabriel. His sneakers went scree-scree as he slipped along the basement corridor to the morgue. The hall was so silent the sound was like nails on blackboard and set his teeth on edge.
Things were not going well. First, the boys: they nagged like a bad toothache. Then the sheriff’s people had backtracked the car and knew that Limyanovich was from Slovakia, that he’d been out to Cameron Island. On the other hand, the Handler said the car fire had worked. Someone had taken notice. The legate was sending a representative, maybe someone they could deal with.
But he hadn’t found the crystal, or crystals, if Limyanovich had brought both as the coded message they’d sent said
he should. So, maybe, he’d overlooked something with the body. If he could check Amanda’s files . . .
Amanda’s computer wasn’t passcode protected and he was in her files almost immediately. He scanned her autopsy findings and discovered two things. They knew who Youssef really was. But the autopsy wasn’t complete yet. Excellent. That meant the body would still be available. What was she waiting on? He scrolled . . . ah. DNA and toxicology. But had she found anything in the body?
He almost missed it and when he found the detail, he read it twice. The remains of a capsule melted in a false tooth. Hunh. Gabriel sat, twisting his lower lip between his finger and thumb, thinking. Limyanovich had been prepared to kill himself.
“But you wouldn’t do that unless you thought you might be captured, maybe tortured.” His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness. “So if you hid a poison capsule in a tooth, would you hide something else in the same place?”
He returned to the report. Amanda’s report mentioned dental posts and at least seven false teeth, and her decision to let the New Bonn forensic odontologist examine the body. But if he could get to Limyanovich’s teeth first . . .
His mind raced. He would have to study the 3-Ds, maybe make a full-scale holographic reconstruction of the skull so he’d know where to go first because there were no second chances. Then, if he found something, he’d have to alter the 3-Ds and Amanda’s report. That was a lot to do and much to hide, but he had Sunday off. Monday, he could work on Limyanovich.
He thought briefly about switching out jobs: doing the one he’d set in his mind for tomorrow on Monday. Sundays at the hospital were usually slow, and Amanda wouldn’t be in either. But, no, the longer he waited, the greater the chance one of those kids—or both—was going to talk. He had to move on at least one of the kids tomorrow.
“So let’s start with you,” he said, bringing up another hospital program, inputting a name. He read the information very carefully, and then—just as carefully—made a few changes. Nothing drastic. Just alter a date, save and then close.
He made copies of all the pertinent files on Amanda’s computer then dumped them to a remote, untraceable virtual address. Then he went out on Amanda’s web, retrieved a program from his home computer and dumped the program into the guts of Amanda’s desktop. He was proud of this program: custom-made, designed to lurk in the background, monitoring files, programs, or certain documents and intercept, if necessary. The program would detect when files were accessed, determine changes and then zip off a copy of the document and its modifications to a remote site. He’d stay on top of things. Whatever Amanda found, he’d know, and he could alter Amanda’s final report—expunge certain evidence, insert a false lead if necessary—even though Amanda would believe she’d sent the report to the New Bonn medical examiner’s office.
A few keystrokes, and he set the program to monitor the autopsy report and, in an afterthought, any file with John Doe, Maximilian Youssef, or Frederic Limyanovich.
He killed the computer then carefully wiped it down, thinking as he did so. Job one was to slow down Amanda, but how? The answer came a split second later: the DNA. That was the only test still outstanding that she did in-house: in her lab right next door.
The PCR machine was singularly unimpressive: a fancy-schmancy hot plate, really. The base of the machine contained all the programming hardware necessary to run discrete, pre-programmed steps. Along the base were two separate digital displays that counted off cycle, step, and time remaining. Below the displays were two sets of push-buttons: Run, Stop, Prog, Data. To the right were more push-buttons for numbers (zero-ten), a push-button that allowed for a decimal, and a button marked Clr.
The general principle behind PCR was simple because all a PCR machine did was run solutions at different temperatures. So if he bumped the temp a few times and buried the snafu, the DNA would be ruined. Amanda would start over, but she’d do controls to check the machine, and that would buy time for him to get at the body.
It took him a little under three minutes to ruin the DNA. On an afterthought, he hit Data and wiped the accumulated data from the machine’s memory.
His pager picked that moment to brrr. The sudden vibration jolted his heart like an electric shock. He checked the number, clicked off. Definitely out of time now.
Taking the stairs again, he thought about Schroeder. Gabriel had coddled the Schroeder case from start to finish, been careful to plant all the evidence just so. For crying out loud, he caught the coffee thing and poured out half the thermos. Maybe if he retrieved the Schroeder files from archives, he’d spot what this Ramsey had.
His pager vibrated again but he ignored it. Glancing toward the ER and seeing no one in the hall, he pivoted left, went past the entrance to the stairs and pushed his way through a door marked Archives. The room was empty, not a surprise. No one came here except to review scanned records that couldn’t be accessed from an office computer, or a case in which all the records were hard copy. Accessing the computer, Gabriel found Schroeder’s files, scanned them, and then cursed. Part of the record was available in the computer but another part containing the films—the X-rays though not the 3-Ds—were hard copy. Those films were stored in the next room.
His pager nagged again. What to do? Look at the films, or just dump these files to his remote site, retrieve them later and forget the films? The films were hard copy and couldn’t be altered. Of course, he could just take the films. But, no, that was too coincidental: first, the DNA getting screwed up, then the films gone.
He heard the sound of sneakers scuffing tile and he turned as a nurse pushed through into the archives room. She looked up, startled. “Oh!” Her hand went to her chest and then she gave a little laugh. “You scared me.”
He put on his most reassuring smile. “Sorry. I was just reviewing some files for a case.”
“Oh. Is there another emergency?”
“No, this is for tomorrow.”
The nurse frowned. “I thought you were off tomorrow.”
“Oh.” He feigned confusion. “Stupid me. Mind going. It’s for Monday. Anyway, I was just prepping.” His pager picked that moment to vibrate again, and this time, he looked down with relief. “Got to go,” he said, moving to close the Schroeder file before she could see. “Never rains but it pours.”
“No rest for the weary,” the nurse said as Gabriel tapped keys. “Work yourself to an early grave, you’re not careful.”
“I was born old.” He smiled again as he hit
And after that? The hospital pharmacy. For the other little job he had planned.
26
Sunday, 15 April 3136
1000 hours
“We’ll catch him at church,” Amanda had said. Ramsey had put her on visual as soon as he’d thrown on some clothes. “Hank always goes to ten o’clock Mass.”
“Church?”
“Don’t believe in God, Jack?”
“You kidding? I was raised New Avalon Catholic. You’re talking to a defrocked altar boy.”
“Altar boys can be defrocked?”
“When they drink the sacramental wine and throw up in the middle of Mass.”
“Oh, God.” She’d laughed. “Your parents must’ve just died.”
“My mother, yeah. I think she went to confession for me. And the priest, she was apoplectic, practically banned me from the church. Religion never did it for me, anyway. The whole thing between New Avalons and the Old Romans, I never understood.”
“Well, Lottie Ketchum’s told me all about those heathen New Avalons. The way she said it, Cardinal Kinsey de Medici was a power-hungry, devil-worshipping heretic.”
“I can see that. Think about it. About four hundred years ago, Stefan Amaris storms the Vatican. The pope freaks out, transfers authority over the Church to the joint authority of the cardinals on the capital worlds of the Five Houses. Except Cardinal de Medici of New
Avalon, he thinks the pope’s transferring all authority to him. If he was any kind of guy who played nice with other children, he’d have double-checked.”
“From what Lottie says, it sounds like de Medici changed everything: letting priests marry, women priests, abortion. The Old Romans still haven’t gotten over it. Weren’t the Vatican murders related? About two hundred, two hundred and fifty years after?”
“Two-fifty, yeah. During Hanse Davion’s and Melissa Steiner’s wedding, breakaway Swiss Guards tried to assassinate Cardinal Flynn.” Then, recalling that he hadn’t heard Ketchum curse even once: “Don’t tell me Hank’s into this whole religion thing.”
“No. He’s New Avalon, and they alternate: even-numbered days are Old Roman, odd New Avalon. No matter what he does, though, Lottie’s parents won’t come to the house. They didn’t even go to the wedding even though it was Old Roman.”
“That’s a lot of bad blood.”
“You can say that again. You don’t know the half of it.”
Now he was intrigued. “Oh? In what way?”
“Another time,” she said. “Right now, we both need some sleep. Think you can find your way to the church?”
“Give me the address,” he said, scribbling down the information on the back of a brochure for charter fishing trips. “Have breakfast with me.” And when she’d shaken her head: “How about coffee?”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
“It’s not what you think.”
“I don’t think anything,” he said, but he was hurt and he was thinking he’d probably freaked her out.
She sighed. “Honestly, Jack, not everything is about you.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Don’t be such a baby. I can’t because I’ll just have time to clean out my horses’ stalls and feed them before I meet you at the church. And no,” she said, moving to disconnect, “you can’t come help.”