by Timothy Zahn
The puppetmaster scenario was bad enough. What made it worse was the fact that the walkers themselves were completely unaware that they'd been drafted into the Modhri's little war of conquest. Most of the time a polyp colony lay quietly, controlling its host with subtle mental suggestions that the host would usually obey, coming up with the most bizarrely convoluted rationalizations afterward for his or her behavior. Under more extreme conditions, though, the colony could push the host's own mind and consciousness aside and take direct control of the body.
The Modhri hadn't infiltrated the Terran Confederation nearly as extensively as he had most of the other governments and cultures around us, but I knew he had a few walkers down here keeping an eye on things. It was a good bet that Lorelei had somehow wandered into his sights and been eliminated.
But why? The Modhri didn't kill just for the sick fun of it. Had Lorelei known something the Modhri didn't want getting out? Had she been another Spider agent like me, someone the Spiders had neglected to tell me about?
Or was it something to do with her sister? The sister on New Tigris, the girl Lorelei had said bad people were trying to find?
"Well?" Kylowski prompted.
"Well what?" I countered, stalling for time while I tried to think. To me, what had happened here was now obvious. Lorelei had shot and killed the first walker, but had been nailed with snoozers before she could take out his companion. The Modhri, rightly guessing that her gunshot wouldn't go unnoticed or uninvestigated, had had the second walker obliterate the dead man's polyp colony, lest an autopsy discover it. He'd then created the same damage to Lorelei's head to make it look like ritual murder or a psycho killer.
But knowing the truth was one thing. Talking about it was something else. The galaxy at large was unaware of the Modhri's existence, let alone his plans and ambitions and techniques, and for the moment those of us in the know wanted to keep it that way. "Okay, so maybe friend was too strong a word," I added. "Either way, there was a third person on the scene."
"Obviously," Kylowski said. "That still leaves us with the question of why he took the time to do all this. Especially since multiple thudwumper shots draw a lot more attention than just one or two."
"I can't answer that," I said, which was perfectly true if slightly misleading.
"Yeah," he said. "You always load your guns with thudwumpers?"
"I load them with snoozers, like my permit specifies," I said. "It doesn't take a criminal mastermind to change clips."
"Assuming he or she can find a supply of thudwumpers for that new clip."
"Finding thudwumper rounds doesn't take a criminal mastermind, either," I said. "I presume some other gun fired the snoozers into Ms. Beach?"
"Small-caliber Colt," Kylowski confirmed. "So her name was Lorelei Beach?"
"That's the name she gave me, anyway," I said. "By the way, did any of your people remove anything from either body?"
"No," Kylowski said. "Why, is something missing?"
"She had a silver necklace when she was at my apartment," I said. "It's not there now."
He made a note on his reader. "Why was she at your apartment?"
I shrugged, running a quick edit on the brief conversation Lorelei and I had had. The fact that her attackers had been walkers changed everything. "Like I said, she told me she was in danger and wanted my help," I said. "That's all."
"And instead of helping you sent her out." He nodded back toward her body. "Into this."
"If I'd known this would happen, I wouldn't have done that," I said stiffly.
"Obviously," he said. "Any idea what she might have been doing this far from your place?"
I shook my head. "None."
"Heading for Central Park, maybe?" he persisted. "Or to see some friend who lived uptown?"
"I said I don't know."
He pursed his lips. "Okay. What did you do after she left?"
"I double-locked the door and went to bed."
"Any way to prove that?"
I grimaced. Here was where it was going to hit the fan. "Not unless we had a cat burglar working the neighborhood who looked in my window."
"Yeah," Kylowski rumbled. "See, here's my problem. Four problems, actually. First, by your own admission you met with one of the vics a few hours before her death. Second, you have no alibi for the time of the murder."
"You must be joking," I said. "Cops and vampires aside, precious few people have alibis for this hour of the morning."
"True enough." Kylowski raised his eyebrows. "Problem number three is that the murder weapon hasn't been recovered."
I frowned. "I thought you said it was my gun."
"Oh, it was," he assured me. "We were able to do a micro-groove analysis on a couple of the slugs. Most people don't even know we can do that."
"I know it," I said. "So what would be my reason for taking the gun away?"
"Because you also know that the chances of recovering a slug in good enough shape for a positive groove ID are pretty small," he said. "The point is that in my experience there's only one reason why a murderer risks getting caught with the murder weapon on him. Namely, if he knows it can be traced to him."
"I already told you Ms. Beach stole it."
"Did you report the theft?"
"I didn't know it was gone until your buddies came knocking on my door an hour ago."
"Uh-huh," he said. "And that brings us to problem number four. The witness who called it in also reported a man of your general height and build running from the scene."
I sighed. "Is there any point mentioning how many people in Manhattan match my general height and build?"
"Not really," Kylowski said. Half turning, he gestured to a pair of nearby uniforms. "Frank Compton, you're under arrest. For murder."
TWO :
The last place I wanted to go was a little three-by-three holding cell at four in the morning, where all was quiet and private and where I had zero maneuvering room in case of trouble. In fact, I wanted to go there so little that if there'd been fewer cops on the scene I just might have tried to make a run for it.
But there were all those cops, and arriving in my three-by-three in a great deal of pain would leave me even more vulnerable if the Modhri decided to take a crack at me. In the end, I went quietly.
The police booking ritual hadn't changed much in the last century, though the level of technology associated with it had certainly improved. They took my fingerprints, my biometrics, my DNA, several photos, and one of the new seven-layer physio scans that had done so much over the past few years to ruin the once-booming criminal plastic surgery industry
The arraignment judge was sympathetic, or else recognized the wobbliness of Kylowski's case. Over the DA rep's protests, she went ahead and set bail instead of remanding me to immediate custody.
Of course, the fact that she set the bail at half a million dollars might have implied not so much sympathy but a macabre sense of humor. She would have had my financials on the screen in front of her, and would have known I couldn't possibly raise that kind of cash.
Fortunately for me, I had a friend in New York who could.
He was there within the hour, arriving by autocab and no doubt striding in like he owned the place. Dressed in a severe dark blue business suit, his currently long hair link-curled in a tight conservative knot at the back of his collar, and with a set of enhancement glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, he would have looked like just another defense attorney pulling the night beat.
He was anything but. Bruce McMicking, a human chameleon who changed his appearance like most people changed music providers, was ex-Marine, ex-bounty hunter, and currently the top troubleshooter for multitrillionaire industrialist Larry Cecil Hardin.
He wasn't nearly as happy to see me as I was to see him. "I trust you realize how far I've stuck my neck out on this one," he said coldly as we walked down the precinct steps. "If Mr. Hardin gets even a whiff of this, there will be six counties of hell to pay."
"I know, and I'm sorry," I
apologized. "But I didn't have anyone else to call."
"You need to make friends with a few more trillionaires."
"Oddly enough, I do know one besides Mr. Hardin," I told him. "But he's only a potential trillionaire at the moment. Probate's likely to take a while."
"Doesn't it always." He flagged down a passing autocab and ushered me inside. "This had better be good."
I waited until we were rolling, and then gave him a rundown of my evening. "Interesting," he commented thoughtfully when I'd finished. "What's your read?"
"The male vic was a walker, with at least one other walker present," I said. "They jumped Lorelei, but she got off the first shot and managed to plug one of them in the forehead. They got her with snoozers—"
"Which implies they wanted her alive," he put in.
"Right," I said. "After which—"
"So why did they then turn around and kill her?"
I frowned. With my brain still fatigue-fogged that question hadn't even occurred to me. "Maybe the Modhri realized that one walker couldn't get her away fast enough once her shot woke up the neighborhood," I said. "So he went for the draw instead and killed her."
McMicking shook his head. "I pulled the police report while they were processing you out. The witness said the incident started with a single shot—"
"Presumably Lorelei nailing the first walker."
"—but then that shot was followed by only a few seconds of silence before the barrage started."
I scratched my chin. A few seconds wasn't nearly enough time for a pair of snoozer rounds, an attempt to pick her up, the realization that that wasn't going to work, and settling for murder as Plan B. "How sure is the witness about the timing?"
"Very sure," McMicking said. "He was getting something out of the micro when the first shot sounded, and hadn't even gotten it to the table when he heard five or six more."
"The walker getting his polyp colony shredded."
"But again, the next gap wasn't very long," McMicking said. "No longer than it took him to set down his meal and hit the cop-call button on his comm. Another barrage, again consisting of five or six shots, and it was over."
Just long enough, in other words, for the second walker to turn around and mutilate Lorelei the same way. But not enough time for much of anything else. "Okay, so there was no time for an interrogation," I said. "But there might have been enough time for a quick theft."
"That was my read," McMicking said. "Only I'm guessing it was the walkers who shot first, with the snoozers, and that the woman then managed to get off her thudwumper round before she went under."
"I don't know," I said. "A pair of snoozers are going to take down a woman of her size awfully fast. She'd have been lucky to even get the gun out, let alone aim and fire."
"Unless she was like the man who died outside the New Pallas Towers eleven months ago when this whole thing started," McMicking said. "He had three snoozers and three thudwumpers in him and still managed to follow you there."
I gnawed at my lip. Earlier, I'd speculated that Lorelei might have been someone like me whom the Spiders had coopted into their war. It hadn't occurred to me that she might have been an even rarer avis, someone like my partner Bayta.
Especially since neither Bayta nor the Chahwyn had ever mentioned there being any more like her roaming the galaxy. "If she was, she could have saved herself a lot of grief if she'd just identified herself to me," I said.
"Maybe she wasn't allowed to," McMicking said. "Given all I don't know about this game, I do know the Spiders like to play their cards really close."
"No kidding," I said sourly.
"Speaking of Spiders and playing cards close, where's Bayta?"
"She's off riding the Quadrails somewhere," I told him. "On our last mission we ran into a large shipment of coral allegedly headed for Cimman space. She and the Spiders are trying to find out where it actually ended up."
McMicking grunted. "Good luck to them." He inclined his head microscopically toward the street behind our autocab. "So you think our tail is a friend of Lorelei's? Or have we found our missing walker?"
Even dead tired, I knew better than to spin around and peer out the rear window. "How long has he been there?" I asked.
"Since we left the precinct house," McMicking said. "Private car, Manhattan registry plate. There could be a second person in the car with him—hard to tell with the light and distance." He cocked an eyebrow. "The other interesting question would be which one of us they're following."
"My guess is it's you," I said. "I'm pretty much a known quantity. You're the mystery man." I cocked an eyebrow. "I mean, they know about Bruce McMicking, but they don't know about you, if you follow."
"Those official photos of me do tend to go out of date pretty fast," he agreed. "Of course, that assumes our friend is a walker and not some other unforgiving leftover from your past."
"Could be," I agreed. "Though I'm guessing you probably have as many of those leftovers as I do."
"Someday we'll sit down and compare notes," he said. "Any preference as to how we work this?"
I watched the streetlights flowing past. "Let's first try to find out which of us he's interested in."
Ten minutes later our autocab pulled to a halt by the curb in front of my apartment building. I hopped out, and as the vehicle pulled back into the sparse predawn traffic I strode quickly across the sidewalk and the thin sliver of open ground to my building's outer door.
No one opened fire before I made it inside, nor was there anyone lurking in the foyer. I skipped the elevator in favor of the stairs and headed up.
Midway up the first flight my comm vibrated in my pocket, and I pulled it out. "Compton."
"Looks like it's me," McMicking's voice came back. "The car didn't even slow down for you. Oh, and I got a clear look as we went around the corner. There are definitely two of them."
"Just doubles the fun of it all," I said. "Are they still following you?"
"Like the golden retriever I had as a kid."
"Good," I said, easing around the last corner of the final landing. There was no one lurking in the hall outside my apartment. "Give me ten minutes and then a two-buzz."
The first thing I did once I was inside was to retrieve my Glock and make sure its clip was loaded with snoozers. I tucked it into my belt, and then added a clip of thudwumpers too, just in case. Feeling marginally safer now that I was armed, I went to the kitchen.
Eggs would have worked best, but I'd come straight home from Sutherlin Skyport and hadn't had a chance yet to stock up on perishables. But I did have a pantry shelf full of canned soup. I decided New England clam chowder would work best, and emptied four cans into a plastic bag. Carefully gathering the top of the bag closed, I headed back out.
The street was momentarily deserted as I emerged again onto the sidewalk. I'd already settled on my spot: a somewhat overelaborate covered doorway a couple of doors down that stretched three meters closer to the street than my building's doorway did. I hurried to it and stepped inside, doing my best to melt into the decorative wrought iron.
In my pocket, my comm vibrated twice and then went still. Peering around the doorway, I saw a pair of headlights turn the corner onto my street two blocks away. It had covered the first half block toward me when a second pair of lights appeared and turned onto the street behind it. The first vehicle—an autocab—passed by my position, and I caught a glimpse of McMicking sitting half turned in his seat, one hand on the door handle and the other holding his gun. He continued on, and the car behind him rolled toward my doorway.
And as it started to pass me, I took a long step out of concealment and lobbed my bag of soup squarely into the center of its windshield.
The car's wipers went on instantly, of course. But they'd been designed for rain and sleet, not clam chowder. One sweep later the entire windshield was a solid layer of chunky white goo.
The occupants were up to the challenge. Even before the windshield was completely blocked, the man
in the passenger seat slid down his window and leaned his head out, the wind whipping through his hair as he peered around the side of the car toward the autocab still rolling on ahead.
Unfortunately for them, with the distraction of the soup bomb neither set of eyes had spotted McMicking's drop and roll out of the autocab door. He came up into a low crouch by the side of the street, and as the car passed he quick-fired a pair of snoozers into the passenger's exposed cheek and neck.
The man reacted instantly, jerking his head back inside. But it was too late. As the car sped up, I saw his sideways movement continue on, sagging his head against the driver's right shoulder.
With his partner's eyes suddenly of no use to him, the driver now had no choice but to open his window as well. I was ready, and uncorked a couple of shots at the back of his head as he stuck it out into the night breeze.
But snoozers were by design a low-speed, low-impact round, and the car already had too much distance on me. A few seconds later the vehicle careened around a corner and vanished into the night.
Gun still in hand, McMicking crossed the street to my doorway. "That was interesting," he said. "You reach any conclusions?"
"Did you hear the passenger calling any directions to the driver?" I asked.
McMicking shook his head. "I didn't see any hand signals or gestures, either."
"Neither did I," I said. "In which case, I'd have to say they were definitely walkers."
McMicking gazed down the street where the car had disappeared. "So what now?"
"We get you out of here before he can reacquire you," I said, looking around. Aside from the cars parked along the far side of the street, there were no other vehicles present. "I don't know whether it would be safer to get another autocab or call a friend to pick you up."
He gave me a lopsided smile. "You really think I know anyone I trust that far?" he asked. "But don't worry about me. I meant what about you?"
I thought about what Lorelei had said about her sister being in danger on New Tigris. I thought about the fact that her murder pretty well proved she hadn't been just blowing smoke. I though about the Modhri, and his obvious interest in whatever the hell was going on here.
