Red Shadows

by Mitchel Scanlon

  "That's right," William said. "I was eating a munce burger at a foodstand and I must not have been concentrating on what I was doing. You know how slippery those burgers can get when they put all the sauces on them. My hand must have just slipped, and I ended up biting it instead of the burger. It was a freak accident."

  "A freak accident," the doctor nodded in agreement. His eyes lingered for a moment on the small scratch marks on William's neck. "Your hand slipped. Yes, I can see how that could happen." Pulling a sani-wipe from a nearby dispenser to clean his hands, the doctor turned to the comp-terminal beside his treatment table. "Now, I notice you didn't give your name or medical number to my nurse. If you could just give me a few details so I can update my files..."

  "No," William told him. "You don't need my name, or my number. And I want you to delete every record of me and my injury from your files."

  "Delete the records?" Turning back to face him, the doctor stared at him blankly, "But if I do that, the Medical Services Department won't pay me for treating you."

  "The money doesn't matter," William told him, more forcefully this time. "You became a doctor to help people. You will help me now. You will delete my records and forget I was ever here. If anyone asks, you never treated a bite wound tonight. Do you understand me?"

  "Of course." The doctor's eyes glazed over briefly. "I became a doctor to help people. The money doesn't matter." Shaking his head as though to clear it, he returned his attention to the comp-terminal and pressed a button, and the printer beside it came to life and printed out a prescription. The doctor typed something into the keyboard and pressed another button. "There. I've erased your case from the files." Ripping the completed prescription from the printer, he handed it to William. "The sutures I used to close the wound will dissolve in a couple of weeks or so once the wound has healed. I've prescribed a course of gene-modified viral anti-bacterials to help deal with any lingering infection. There's a pharmacy around the corner. You will be able to fill this there."

  "Thank you, doctor," William said, retrieving his overcoat as he stood up. "You've been a great deal of help."

  "Think nothing of it," the doctor smiled more broadly. "I'm a doctor. That's what I'm here for." As William opened the door to step from the treatment room into the corridor outside, he heard the doctor call past him to the line of patients waiting tiredly in plasteen chairs all along the hallway.

  "Next!"

  "You were right," Anderson said afterwards, as she stood alone with Noland in the kitchen, once she had completed the psi-scan on the body of Velma Sharn. "She bit him, and scratched him. He used the same method to gain entrance to the apartment as before. He claimed to be a delivery man. Again, his appearance was different: average height, dirty brown hair, and a face you'd forget about three seconds after seeing it. If Weller is right and the victims are just remembering scenes from movies they've seen, there was no way this guy was the romantic lead. And he had the same hint of an accent. I couldn't swear to it, but I'd almost say it had a transatlantic twang to it, Brit-Cit, maybe? And another thing, earlier, you said it was unusual that he had managed to kill two of the victims with a single slash wound to the throat while they were facing him. It was as though he had immobilised them in some way?"

  "It was a theory," the Med-Judge said. "But there's no direct physical evidence to support it. The tox-screens on both Bibbs and Maddens came up clean. Nor were there any ligature marks on the victims to suggest their bodies had been bound in any way."

  "Yet, for some reason, they both just stood there watching him when he pulled out the knife." Gazing at the gruesome display of the victim's organs in jars around the kitchen, Anderson suppressed a shudder. "But Velma Sharn didn't. She put up a fight. She injured him, and that made him angry. Angry enough for him to do all this to her body after he'd killed her." She paused as though trying to read some portent around her in the dead woman's entrails.

  "Rage," Noland said. "It's what we talked about before. He takes his rage out on the bodies of his victims, and with the Sharn woman, the rage was worse. You said it yourself: she hurt him. That's what provoked him to go so spectacularly over the top this time."

  "Yeah, rage. You're right, of course. But..." Sensing the first stirrings of an idea pricking distantly at her mind, Anderson paused again. She could feel a tingling at the back of her scalp as though her intuition was trying to tell her something. It was a sensation she knew of old. Her unconscious mind had made some breakthrough that her conscious mind had not yet become aware of. Sometimes, intuition was a Psi-Judge's most important ally. Falling silent, she waited, hoping the intuition would make itself plain to her. But, as long seconds passed, it became clear that she was waiting in vain. Whatever her unconscious mind was trying to tell her, she would have to fathom out the message on her own.

  "I get the feeling there's something else here," she began again. "Something we're missing." In search of inspiration, her eyes roamed around the kitchen: Velma Sharn's body, the blood staining the floor and counter tops, the pickling jars with their obscene collection of human organs. "When I scanned the bodies of Eunice Bibbs and Brenda Maddens, I thought it was fear that had paralysed them, but, thinking about it, there's no way the killer could have expected them to act that way. Yet, each time, he pulled out his knife and cut their throats while they stood facing him. It was like he knew he could do anything he wanted to them, like he knew they wouldn't move. And then, Velma Sharn broke the pattern. Instead of simply allowing him to slash open her throat, she fought back. It must have surprised him. Surprise, maybe that's part of what we're missing. By fighting back, she surprised her killer. She refused to make things easy for him. She didn't do what he wanted. I think that was what made him so angry. It was the fact that she disobeyed him as much as the fact that she hurt him. She was disobedient, and so he punished her."

  "Okay." Hearing Anderson fall silent once more, Noland took up the thread of the conversation. "Let's say we accept that. I don't see what difference it makes. We've already established that he mutilates his victims out of rage. At the risk of sounding like a Street Judge, I don't see how the specific motive behind any particular set of mutilations helps us. Maybe he mutilated Velma Sharn because she hurt him, maybe because she disobeyed him. Maybe it was for some completely different reason. It's clear the perp is seriously disturbed. There may not even be any real logic behind his actions. Ultimately, he's a psycho. For all we know, maybe he hears the pixies whispering to him and he just does what they tell him to do."

  "No." Anderson shook her head. "He's disturbed, yes, but he's not dysfunctional. He plans ahead. He buys clothes made from Stay Kleen to make sure there aren't any blood stains on his clothing to give him away. He picks victims who live in blocks without internal surveillance cameras. His social skills are sufficiently polished that he's managed to persuade five people to open their doors to him. No, he may well be psychotic, but that doesn't mean there isn't some kind of logic to his actions. Granted, it is probably not a logic anyone sane might recognise, but it's there all the same. It may well be the biggest clichÈ in the How To Hunt Serial Killers handbook, but I think the only way we're going to catch him is by learning to think like he does."

  "Hmm, rather you than me, Anderson." Now, it was Noland's turn to suppress a shiver. "I have to ask the same question again, though. Even if we assume you are right, and the reason that he carved Velma Sharn up so completely is because she disobeyed him, how does that help us?"

  "Don't you see? It means he expected her to obey him," Anderson told him. "He thought he could cut Velma Sharn's throat and she would simply stand by and let him do it. Okay, so he was wrong about that, but why would he think he could kill her that way to begin with? You said it yourself, it's a difficult method to pull off. And, sure, so Velma Sharn fought back, but Eunice Bibbs and Brenda Maddens didn't. How could he have known that? How could he have hoped to keep them immobilised without using drugs or bindings? It's almost like he's got some way of controllin
g them that doesn't leave behind any physical trace of its presence."

  Anderson paused once more. The tingling at the back of her scalp had grown more pronounced.

  "No physical traces," she said. A theory was slowly forming inside her mind, but as yet she could not see its shape well enough to speak it aloud. "I wonder..."

  It had gone well with the doctor. Putting the prescription paper in the pocket of his overcoat, William decided to forego the short walk around the block to the pharmacy that the doctor had mentioned. He would fill the prescription later. In searching for medical treatment for the bite wound in his hand, William had wasted too much time already. He had visited three clinics in turn, rejecting them one after another because they were each staffed by a robo-doc. At the fourth clinic he had finally achieved his objective, finding a human doctor in attendance. Now, his wound having been treated, it was time for William to return to his work.

  Melanie Arnwold, Apartment 26-C, twenty-first floor, Elizabeth Short Block. The names and addresses on the list that the Grey Man had made him memorise, burned inside his mind with undimmed fire.

  He was tired, so tired. Stifling a yawn as he crossed another of Mega-City One's innumerable plazas, William realised his endeavours of the night thus far had taken more out of him than he might have expected. After all his time in the institution, he was unused to such exertions. He was unaccustomed to murder, unaccustomed to injury, unaccustomed even to having to walk any great distance. Alone in his cell in the institution for all those years, there had simply been nowhere for him to walk to. His life had been a long drug-addled haze, only granted variation by the colours of the pills they had given him.

  Greens and yellows and pinks and blues. The blue ones were the worst. When they had given him the blue pills, he had lost his ability to see the soulshadows of the people around him. It had frightened him: after years spent studying the subtle shades of human auras, it had felt like he had been blinded. He had tried to explain it to the doctors. He had begged and pleaded for them to change his medication. Then, when they would not listen, he had taken the only option left open to him. He had played along with them, pretending they had cured him, doing his best to seem cheerful and well-adjusted, even though his brain felt like jellied munce. Gradually, it had worked. He had gained their trust. The doctors had allowed him out of his cell to attend group therapy and mix with the other inmates of the institution. Until, finally, the day had come when a new and inexperienced doctor had decided he no longer needed to wear the straitjacket. "This is a big day for you, William," the doctor had said to him. "I really feel like you've been making progress." William had smiled and told the doctor he was sure he was right. Then, when they had finally released the straps, he had picked up a chair and beaten the man's brains in.

  I never knew what colour his soulshadow was, William thought, remembering the shocked expression on the doctor's face and the blood spurting from his scalp as he had pounded his head with the chair over and over again. Even now, looking back, I don't know what his colour was. He remembered looking down at the doctor at his feet, even as the attendants had grabbed him, the life in the doctor's eyes slowly dying. William had never particularly liked the man. No matter what William said to him, the doctor had always favoured him with a condescending half-smile as though he was sure he knew better. I bet he was a Red, William thought with satisfaction. And if he was a Red, then he deserved to die.

  After that, they had taken him off the blue pills and replaced them with the pink ones. Or was it the yellows? He had been given so many different colours of pills in the institution that it was hard to remember what order they had come in. He realised it no longer mattered. Not tonight. Not now those days were behind him. I'm free now, he reminded himself. Free as a bird. Then he saw something in the sky ahead of him that brought him up short and caused him to pause in his journey.

  There were people flying in the air like birds.

  For an instant it felt as though the world had been listening to his thoughts and had rearranged itself accordingly. In the distance, he could see the small and fragile shapes of half a dozen human-sized flying figures as they swooped and dived, riding the thermals between two distant city blocks. Bat-gliders; the name came to him finally as he overcame his initial disbelief. Bat-gliders: that was what they were called. Casting his mind back, he remembered seeing a docu-vid about them in the institution during one of the brief periods when the doctors had granted him Tri-D privileges. In a city where hundreds of millions of people lived in perpetual joblessness, it was perhaps not surprising that some of them turned to unusual hobbies to alleviate their boredom.

  Outfitted with lo-grav units to prevent them falling to earth, and with two glider wings each, fixed to their arms to guide their flight, bat-gliding was simply yet another of the many strange crazes that flourished among those who lived in Mega-City One. Shaking his head in wonder, it once more occurred to William that the people who lived in the world outside were in many ways far crazier than anyone he had met in the institution. For all that, as he watched the soaring figures of the bat-gliders silhouetted against the lights of the buildings behind them, he quickly found that their hobby had a certain appeal. What he would give right now to be able to fly easily to his destination rather than have to trudge his way towards it step by wearying step.

  He yawned again, reluctantly turning his eyes away from the bat-gliders as he resumed his journey. He felt exhausted. Left to his own devices, William might well have decided to call it a night, but the thought of his agreement with the Grey Man spurred him on. There were fifteen names left on the list. Fifteen names, and the terms of their bargain would be completed. If he killed one more tonight, he would be a step closer to completing that bargain.

  One more, he told himself. One more Red, and then I can rest. He thought of the list again.

  One more, and her name is Melanie Arnwold.

  "You want a city-wide advisory on bite wounds?" The voice of the Control dispatcher in his earpiece was strained to the point of exasperation. "Weller, do you realise what you're asking for? If we compile the records on every citizen who shows up at a med-centre looking to get treatment for a bite wound, the report could run to hundreds of pages. This is Mega-City One we're talking about: a city of four hundred million people. The chances are good that probably a couple of thousand of them will get bitten by something or other tonight, and that's not counting the kinks and freaks and weirdoes. At least let me filter out the robo-pet and animal bites. That way the report might come down to manageable proportions."

  "No." As he stood in the corridor of Mary Kelly Block talking quietly into his helmet mic, Weller's own voice was firm. "Could be our boy's smart enough to try and pass his injury off as a rat or dog vulture bite. I want the record of every bite wound, no matter what the reported cause of the injury. Also, check with med-bay at the Sector House and find out what drugs would normally be prescribed for treating a human bite. Next, send out an advisory to all pharmacies ordering them to report every sale of those drugs, beginning six hours ago and continuing until further notice. Then, I want the whole lot sent to MAC for analysis."

  "You want us to include pharmacies as well?" Control's voice was aghast. "Do you realise how much raw data that's going to generate? I mean, sure MAC can handle it, but it's a case of garbage in, garbage out. If you give MAC that much data without fixing any kind of parameters to the search, you'll end up with a list of possibles that it could take you weeks to trawl through."

  "I'm already way ahead of you," Weller told him. "I've asked Gunderson at PSU to analyse the surveillance footage. Once he's finished you can use his data to give you your search parameters, cross-referencing it with the info you get from the advisories to see if MAC can come up with any significant matches."

  "All right," Control sighed. "You do realise this is going to take time, though? Even assuming your perp does try to seek out treatment for his wound, there's no guarantee he's going to do it tonight. He c
ould visit the doc tomorrow, or the day after. Hell, for all we know, he may wait until he's got pus leaking from the wound and it's gone gangrenous before he decides to do anything about it. It could take days."

  "It takes as long as it takes," said Weller. "Oh, and Control, one more thing, if and when you get useable results back from MAC, I want you to make sure you contact me about it first. Nobody else, only me, you understand?"

  "You want me to leave Anderson out of the loop?" There was a note of protest. "But she's assigned to the case. Procedure says-"

  "Procedure says it's my decision," Weller cut him off. "I was the first Judge on the scene at the Maddens' apartment, and the Maddens' homicide was the case that made it clear we had a serial killer on our hands. Unless the sector chief decides otherwise, that makes me the primary on the entire investigation. Have you had any messages from Sector Chief Collins telling you I'm off the case?"

  "No. I-"

  "Good. In that case, you'll follow my instructions. You will contact me when you hear back from MAC, and you will leave it to my discretion whether or not to inform Anderson. Are we clear?"

  "Crystal. You want to get into a pissing contest with Psi Division, go right ahead. But, if you want my opinion, it sounds like you're digging your own grave."

  "If I want your opinion I'll ask for it, Control. Weller over and out."

  SEVEN

  WILD BLUE YONDER

  The sky was waiting for him. As he stepped out through the maintenance exit onto the deserted rooftop of his block, Lenny Kaspasian felt his heart quicken in exhilaration as he paused for a moment to admire the view. It was everything he could have wished for. The moon was round and full, the sky was clear and cloudless. He was standing two hundred storeys up with the night-time landscape of Mega-City One laid out before him like some perfect dream of what a city should look like. During the day you could see all the grime and dust, the cracked plascrete, the angry and restless traffic, the gaudy pastel shades with which the Housing Department insisted on painting its buildings. Come the fall of night though, things were different. Bathed in silver moonlight, the city seemed special. It seemed tranquil, yet somehow more alive. It was as though the dull humdrum world of the day had been transformed by some strange sorcery of the night into a magical kingdom where anything could happen.