Love on the Run

by Katharine Kerr

  “She can’t just make that here?” Ari said.

  “I asked. The answer was no. I think HQ want to have her go to the office for a further look around, as it were, but they couldn’t quite come out and admit that. At any rate, they’d like it done as soon as possible. We should be able to get Danvers-Jones if you can travel today. How soon can you reach my office?”

  “In an hour,” Ari said. “Let’s get it done.”

  Since we were anticipating a quick trip into Six and then out again, we took our car down to the office. We picked up Willa, drove to McLaren Park, and found a safe place to leave the car on a side street. As we hiked up the hill to the overlap area, we received our first sign of trouble coming. Willa abruptly stopped dead on the sidewalk and stared across Shelley Drive.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “I’m not feeling the overlap yet.”

  “Isn’t it right over there?” I pointed to the slope of the knoll.

  “It should be. O’Grady, run a couple of scans, will you? See if there’s someone waiting for us who shouldn’t be there.”

  I did and picked up no trace of danger whatsoever.

  “Damn,” Willa said. “That’s worse. If no one’s suppressing the overlap, it could be fading on its own. Bad news.”

  Willa left the sidewalk and jogged across the street with the two of us trailing after. When we reached the other side, she led us at a quick march into the trees where we’d found the overlap before. All at once she smiled.

  “Here it is!” Willa said. “Having a world-walker step on them is good for overlaps now and then. Still, I don’t like this much. O’Grady, you’ve got a transport orb to get you back home, right?”

  “Two of them.” I patted my shoulder bag. “Spare14 handed me another one this morning.”

  “Good.” She paused to rummage in her mesh bag of cloth scraps. “Let’s see if my focus orb here will take us. Without any extra help, I mean.”

  It didn’t. I was so used to seeing Willa hold up an orb and shift us into another world without any seeming effort that it took me a minute to realize what had happened: nothing, that’s what. We were still on Terra Four.

  “Not good at all,” she said. “Okay, I’ve got a transporter for Six.” She paused to fish a second bright yellow-green sphere, somewhat larger than the focus version, out of her bag. She handed it to Ari. “Now let me see … ah, there’s a nice flat rock. Nathan, you throw this one onto the rock and break it while I concentrate on the permanent version here in my hand. Then we run into the smoke. Got that? Good. On the count of one, two, three!”

  Ari threw, we all dashed, and sure enough, we stumbled out of the cloud to find ourselves standing on the weed-cracked concrete slab that marked the overlap on Terra Six. Willa made a slight retching sound.

  “God in heaven,” she said. “This place is spinning and tilting. Good luck. I’m going home.”

  She buried the yellow-green focus orb in her bag and brought out a violet replacement. While we watched, she took one step forward and disappeared. Ari shuddered.

  “I have to admit,” he said, “that I find this business of orbs a bit unnerving.”

  “Only a bit? I find it unnerving as all hell. Especially the transport kind.”

  We shared an ironic smile and headed downhill. I could feel the Pull, the overlap from members of a family that had to be doppelgängers to my own. I managed to cut them off and block the Pull by wielding the mental image of the flaming torch to seal my aura.

  When we walked into the dour gray building that housed the TWIXT office, we found a security checkpoint, manned by two guards from the third floor firm, in front of the elevators. For all anyone knew, the terrorists might try again. Ari showed them his ID and vouched for me. One of the guards made quite a show of looking down a list of persons approved for entry. He had us initial the spaces beside our names.

  As we took the elevator up to the second floor, I ran scans. Being inside a metal box made them difficult to read, but I received a couple of muddled warnings.

  “Ari,” I said, “something’s really wrong.”

  He reached under his jacket and loosened the Beretta in its holster. As soon as we stepped out of the elevator, I knew that an important person had died. I had just time to say as much to Ari before we walked through a pair of swinging doors into the office. Under fluorescent lights I saw a spread of six desks and a bank of blue computer boxes wired to CRT monitors. Beyond them two doors led into smaller rooms. A skinny young man with sandy-brown hair stood at the computer station, but he turned when we arrived and walked down an aisle toward us. Agent de Vere got up from his desk and acknowledged our presence with a nod and a raised hand.

  A twenty-something woman in a dark gray business-cut skirt suit hurried over to greet us. She had short black hair, a tan complexion, and dark eyes narrow with worry. For some odd reason I noticed that she wore silver-and-turquoise earrings. Although she didn’t bother to smile, I could tell that she meant us no harm.

  “Agent Nathan?” she said. “I’m Lupe Parra y Cruz. I’m in charge here today. Temporarily, I hope.”

  “How do you do?” Ari said. “I take it that Spivey’s in Los Angeles.”

  “Yes, he left on a morning flight.” She hesitated, glancing my way. “Perhaps de Vere can fill you in while I take Miss O’Grady’s deposition.”

  I remembered that I had a cover story. So, apparently, did Ari. He looked around the office for a moment, then said, “You can be open in front of O’Grady. She’s actually another agent, an observer from a government bureau on Four.”

  “Oh.” Parra y Cruz allowed herself a tight smile. “I wish someone had told me that.”

  “There were reasons,” Ari said. “Can you contact Austin Spare on Four? He’ll explain.”

  “Yes, and I will. Thank you.”

  I took out my cross-agency ID and handed it her. Although the name of the agency meant nothing to her, it looked so official that she smiled, reassured, as she handed it back.

  “If you’re in charge,” I said, “Trotter isn’t here.”

  “No, he’s not, and no one knows why. We’ve called his home and his mobile. We’ve sent him e-mail. No answer to any of it.”

  I felt a stab of cold dread coupled with a profound surprise. I’d guarded myself against Trotter out of sheer suspicion, sure that he was a danger, not that he was in danger himself.

  “What is it, O’Grady?” Ari said. “You’ve gone quite pale.”

  “Trotter’s dead.” I turned to Parra y Cruz. “I’m a certified police psychic on my home world. Spare will vouch for that. You need to send someone to Trotter’s address. I should go with them to see if I can pick up traces.”

  Parra y Cruz laid a quick hand to her throat. The two men in the office both swore. No one doubted me. Under their very real shock I picked up an undertone of puzzlement but none of guilt. If someone in that room was the murderer, his or her psychic talents far outweighed mine.

  De Vere, he of the bald dome and the bushy eyebrows, volunteered to do the driving while Parra y Cruz made all the necessary communications to Spare14, Spivey, and HQ. The young clerk would hold down the front desk. Ari and I walked with de Vere out to his car, a small gray sedan with an “official business only” seal on the side. If, indeed, we found Trotter dead, de Vere told us, he’d call in the local police to handle the actual case.

  “Though, of course, Interpol would follow it closely,” de Vere said, “and give them full cooperation and access.”

  “I take it they know nothing about TWIXT,” Ari said.

  “Not a thing. They wouldn’t believe it anyway, even if we did tell them.”

  Trotter, who was single, lived in an apartment on Alemany Avenue, a very different street than the broad thoroughfare in our world. This Alemany ran as a mere two lanes, bordered on both sides by houses with decent-sized lawns planted with shade trees. Trotter’s building, a white stucco two-story, sat on a corner. The front door of the building was kept locked, which me
ant we’d need a key to get into the lobby, or so de Vere thought. Ari pulled a piece of wire out of his pants pocket and opened the door while de Vere was still trying to remember how to call the building manager. De Vere’s bushy eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  “He’s a handy sort of man to have around,” I said.

  “Apparently so,” de Vere said.

  Ari merely smiled and pocketed the wire.

  We walked into a tiny lobby, floored in black-and-white tile. Stairs carpeted in dark brown led up to the second floor. Trotter’s apartment stood on the right side of a narrow hall, which smelled moldy and doggy. As an undertone, though, I registered the scent of sour blood like an old meat package. Although the door was locked, Ari waited to open it.

  “Should we call the police directly if no one answers?” Ari said.

  “Probably,” de Vere said.

  “No one’s going to answer.” I could feel death like sea fog seeping under the door.

  Inside the apartment someone moaned as if they felt it, too.

  “He might still be alive,” Ari said. “Emergency procedure.”

  Without a word, De Vere stepped back and let him pick the lock. As Ari opened the door, a dog barked and staggered up to stand on three feet. It limped forward, a big golden Lab with one front paw slashed open. Blood clotted its neck fur because someone had cut off one of its ears. Behind it, we could see a male body stretched out on the floor, a man in his thirties, dark hair, not very tall but thickly built. He wore only a pair of unbelted khaki slacks. He looked oddly familiar from what I could see of him. The closed-up room stank of old blood.

  “Jesus God!” de Vere muttered. “The poor critter! He’s what moaned. His name’s Rodeo.”

  “Quite so,” Ari said. “You’d best call the police right now.”

  “Uh, hey,” I put in. “Is that Trotter?”

  “Sorry.” De Vere laughed with much too high and brittle a sound. “I forgot you wouldn’t know. Yeah, it is, all right, poor bastard!”

  The dog barked once more, then flopped back down by its master’s corpse. Trotter’s throat had been slashed almost from ear to ear, so deeply that I could see a knobbly neck bone. His hands and bare arms bore knife cuts, too, where he’d tried to shield himself from the knife-wielding attacker. And the blood, clotted everywhere—I turned away fast.

  “I bet they find a long blonde hair or two on the body somewhere,” I said to Ari. “Make sure Forensics knows it’s important.”

  The police in San Francisco Six wore dark green uniforms, which made them look like park rangers to me. They were efficient and fast, however, professional toward the two Interpol officers, tolerant of me in my guise of Ari’s assistant. As soon as the first two officers on the scene saw the corpse, they called in Homicide and Forensics. The team arrived with film cameras and flashbulbs, which reinforced my belief that the tech on this deviant level lagged behind even my own Terra Four, to say nothing of One. Their unit leader, a skinny Cal-African guy, got right to work.

  I stayed out of everyone’s way but took a good look around the sparsely furnished front room of the apartment. Although a pleasant green-and-blue carpet covered the floor, the white walls were utterly bare of pictures. A struggle had upended a couple of chairs and smashed a floor lamp. On a desk at one end of the room a bright blue computer lay in pieces—CRT monitor, keyboard, speakers, and on the floor, the opened-up box itself. Ari walked over to take a look.

  “Someone’s removed the hard drive,” he said to de Vere. “I suppose there was evidence of some sort on it.”

  “Good guess,” de Vere said. “Maybe he backed up on flex disks. They probably took those, too, though.”

  “If they had any brains at all, they did. I don’t suppose he had off-site storage?”

  “What?” de Vere blinked at him. “Somewhere else to keep the flexies?”

  “Maybe at the office. Or at a friend’s house?”

  “We’ll follow up on that. Good idea.”

  Although Parra y Cruz had mentioned e-mail, their version of the Internet apparently lacked some of the features of ours. Since de Vere knew we came from another world level, I asked him outright as soon as I could be sure that none of the cops could overhear.

  “Internet?” de Vere grinned at me. “I only wish! Lupe’s told me about it. Sounds great. Here, if you know where the right lists are, you can find stuff online, yeah, but there’s none of those links and hyper thingies.”

  As soon as the Forensics team had finished photographing the scene, de Vere fetched water for the wounded dog. He knelt down and put the bowl on the floor, then helped the dog stand and drink.

  “He’s got a bad contusion on his head behind his right ear or where the ear was,” de Vere said. “They must have hit him with something. He would have attacked to defend Trotter.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Ari said. “But why take the ear?”

  “I have no idea.” De Vere shuddered. “Fucking creepy!”

  When he offered to take the dog to the same vet who tended his own dogs, the police allowed him to do so. Although Rodeo knew and seemed to trust him, de Vere prudently wrapped its head in a towel before he picked it up to carry it out to the car. The dog whined and struggled, but it was so weak from losing blood that it went limp before they even reached the stairs.

  “We’ll phone-fax our report to your office,” the Forensics team leader told Ari. “I’ll get right on that when we get back to the morgue. There was no sign of forced entry. Must have been someone he knew well enough to let in.”

  “Interesting,” Ari said. “Rigor?”

  “Well advanced. I can’t say more than this, but I’d bet he died sometime in the middle of the night. Two AM. Something like that.”

  “Did you happen to find any blonde hair on the body?”

  “You bet, just like you suggested. Caught around the fingers of the right hand. He must have grabbed the assailant’s hair at one point during the fight.” Forensics paused to look around the apartment. “It must have been a hell of a tussle. There’s blood splashed around, some on the wall, even.”

  “Surely the other tenants in the building heard something.”

  “Probably. That’s up to Homicide to find out.”

  “Quite so. I’ll be looking forward to your report.”

  Two uniformed officers brought up a stretcher and a shroud. They wrapped up Trotter’s corpse under Forensics’ direction and took it away. The cameraman stepped forward to snap photos of the blood on the floor. The homicide detective, a skinny little white guy named Edwards, allowed Ari to accompany him when he examined the apartment. I trailed along behind as they went into the bedroom—a double bed, a cheap wood dresser, no pictures on the wall, nothing else. The smell of urine hit me as soon as we walked in, a real stench. Empty beer cans sat by the left side of the bed.

  The blankets had been thrown to the floor at the foot of the bed to reveal a rubber sheet and a drying pool of the smelly substance in question. On the left pillow lay a couple of long black hairs. Edwards yelled for Forensics, who came trotting in with tweezers and a manila envelope.

  Forensics tweezed up the hairs and studied them for a moment. “I’ll have to put these under the scope,” he said, “but I’d guess they were from someone ethnically Asian.”

  I remembered Murphy saying, a Japanese girl grabbed the bag. I was only guessing, of course, that Ash had committed the murder, even though I registered dim traces of her presence throughout the apartment. She might have been present but not been the assailant. I reminded myself of that, even as I doubted that she was innocent. I’d never seen the other girl and thus could pick up nothing concerning her. I nearly gagged. Ari caught my elbow to steady me.

  “You might want to wait out in the hall,” he said. “I realize this must be hard on you.”

  “It’s not the smell,” I said, “it’s the vibes.”

  He quirked an eyebrow as if to ask what I meant, but Edwards turned to speak to him. As I lef
t the apartment, I passed the open door to a small bathroom—bare walls, a dirty white bathtub, a mirrored medicine cabinet above a filthy sink. On the closed toilet lid lay a peacock feather. A decoration gone awry? Not in that place!

  I went to the lobby and sat down on one of the lower steps. The police had propped open the front door, and the air smelled clean and fresh. Through the open door I could see squad cars parked outside. Across the narrow street a cluster of gawkers had gathered on a lawn in front of a pale green house—neighbors, wondering no doubt what in hell was going on, all the terrorist attacks and now a murder right in their own neighborhood.

  I ran a quick SAF, a scan of the aura field, then a Search Mode: Personnel. Both returned traces of Ash. I decided against zeroing in on the traces in case her talents could warn her about scans focused in her direction. I did receive a clear indication that she existed in this world level’s version of San Francisco. When I scanned for the Axeman, however, I picked up nothing. Wherever he was, he was out of my range. I wanted to do a Long Distance Remote Sensing, but I needed the proper equipment for it, my crayons and drawing paper, which I’d left behind.

  When I heard footsteps behind me on the stairs, I got up and moved out of the way into the lobby. The Forensics team came clattering down, laden with their equipment, and left the building. Ari followed more slowly.

  “Did you see the peacock feather?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. I pointed it out to Edwards, too.”

  “Good. What about the other tenants?”

  “The apartment directly under Trotter is empty. Edwards is interviewing the tenant across the hall right now.”

  “Will he send a report?”

  “Yes. When de Vere comes back, we’ll return to the office. I want them to open the safe and see if it still contains orbs.”

  “Trotter had the combination?”