Odd Girl Out q-3

by Timothy Zahn

  "Of course, we'll also have to deal with Customs once we reach the transfer station," McMicking warned. "They'll certainly have been alerted to the coral theft by the time we get there."

  "I'm sure you already have a plan for that part," I said.

  McMicking shrugged. "Any suggestions as to how I go about finding the rest of Veldrick's coral?"

  "There are a couple of options," I said. "How are your computer hacking skills these days?"

  "Adequate."

  "Good," I said. "Option one: hack into the Crown Rosette computer system. See who Veldrick's been doing business with since the Hardin rep noticed his coral three months ago."

  "Paying special attention to the non-Humans on the list," McMicking said, nodding his understanding.

  "Exactly," I said. "That should give you the most likely recipients. Once you've got that, hack into the city's utilities system and find out which of them had their water bills shoot up recently."

  McMicking frowned. "Their water bills?"

  "Modhran coral does best with cold water flowing around it," Bayta told him.

  "Right," I said. "For anything long-term you'd normally hook up a closed system to cool and recycle the same water. But I doubt Veldrick's buddies had such gadgetry available."

  "And even if they put something together later, there should still be a temporary spike in their water usage," McMicking said. "Sounds promising."

  "Option two is we break in on Veldrick and beat the snot out of him until he gives us names and addresses," I said. 'We should probably keep that one in reserve."

  "Probably," McMicking agreed. "Sounds like a plan. Are you going to need anything from me before I head back to the hotel and get started?"

  "Just your comm number," I said. "We'll want to keep in touch on each other's progress." I cocked my head. "I presume you already have my number?"

  "Of course," he said, and gave me his. "You might also need this," he added, shifting slightly in his seat.

  Something hard settled onto my lap under the table. I reached down and found myself touching a small handgun. "I might, indeed," I said. "Thanks."

  "No problem," he said. "Dual clip; left side is snoozers." Pushing back his chair, he stood up. "Good hunting."

  "And to you," I said, slipping the gun into my holster. "I take it I'm paying for dinner?"

  "Of course." He gave me a faint smile. "You ever hear of a lawyer who picked up his client's tab? Good hunting to you."

  "And to you," I said.

  He left. I paid with one of my cash sticks, and then Bayta and I also headed out into the streets. "Is this sudden-danger thing connected with how you knew where she was?" I asked her as we walked.

  She shook her head. "I don't know."

  "Just a hunch, then?"

  She bristled. "You have hunches all the time."

  She had me there. "Fine," I said, looking around. Night had fallen with a resounding crash while we'd been eating, leaving the sky a star-freckled black above us. But the streetlights were going strong, wrapping Imani City in a deceptively nice homey glow. "Any other thoughts or speculations you'd like to share with the rest of the class?"

  A shiver ran through her. "Only that there's something wrong here," she said, her voice graveyard dark. "The Modhri truce—Mr. Veldrick—the coral. It doesn't add up."

  "I know," I said grimly. "Let's just hope we can figure it out before we're up to our necks in trouble."

  "Or even deeper?"

  "Or even deeper," I said. I hated it when she came up with mental images like that. "Come on, let's find an autocab."

  EIGHT :

  This time we had no problem flagging down an autocab. Apparently, they did most of their grid-roving after dark.

  With Veldrick's habit of sifting through autocab records in mind, I directed the vehicle to an address in Makarr District, one district over from Zumurrud. When we arrived, I paid the tab, then doubled the amount and sent the autocab back to the Hanging Gardens.

  It disappeared around the corner, and Bayta and I headed off on foot for Zumurrud District and Karim's bar.

  Makarr, which seemed to be mostly residential, was pretty quiet tonight. Zumurrud, in contrast, was hopping. The populace was out in force, most of them young, most of them angry or frustrated-looking, nearly all of them drinking. Judging by the buzz of conversation leaking out their open doors, the taverns and gaming rooms were doing a brisk business. So were the street corners and doorways where we'd seen the kids congregating earlier in the day.

  Fortunately, none of the simmering anger beneath the hard drinking seemed directed specifically at the two strangers walking through their midst. Still, we collected our share of curious glances and suspicious glares. Occasionally, I saw one of the youths who'd seen us that afternoon nudge one of his buddies and mutter something under his breath.

  Twice, outside the entrances of particularly boisterous taverns, a group of thrill-seekers looked as if they were considering stepping into our path. Both times, I slipped my hand quietly but pointedly beneath my jacket and got a grip on the Beretta that McMicking had given me. The would-be toughs spotted the gun, got the message, and backed off.

  The street with Karim's bar was as busy as the rest of the district. Unlike the rest of the neighborhood, though, this particular block came equipped with quiet sentries. The four teens I'd had my brief run-in with had now become two pairs, one set standing casual guard at either end of the block.

  The closer pair spotted us as we approached. One of the teens was Oved, the boy I'd had the staged tussle with earlier. He gave us a microscopic nod of acknowledgment as we approached while his partner wandered off toward a quiet alleyway, comm in hand, presumably to call Karim with the news of our arrival.

  Behind Oved's grim expression, I noted as we passed, his eyes showed the slight puffiness of recent tears. Karim must have told him Lorelei was dead.

  The bar was doing brisk business tonight. I spotted Karim in the back by the bar, pretending to watch the bartender making the drinks. He caught my eye as we came in and nodded sideways toward the office door.

  I glanced over the clientele as Bayta and I headed back. They were for the most part older men, most of them displaying the same simmering frustration that I'd seen in the more teen-intensive parts of the district.

  I wondered if there were any police informants among them.

  The office was dark except for a small writing light that didn't illuminate much beyond the center of the desk. I closed and locked the door behind us and headed for the hidden trapdoor. "Shouldn't we wait for Mr. Karim?" Bayta asked as I pushed the desk chair out of the way.

  "Why?" I asked. "We know how to get in."

  "Rebekah might be more comfortable if he came in with us," she said, a little crossly.

  I looked up at her. "Would she?" I asked.

  Bayta's lips compressed briefly. "I don't know. I just thought …" She trailed off.

  Another hunch? "Okay, fine," I said, straightening up. "We wait for Karim."

  I was only going to give the man two minutes to show before I headed down without him. Fortunately, less than half that time elapsed before there was the click of a disengaging lock and Karim slipped into the office.

  "Were you followed?" he asked as he relocked the door behind him.

  "Ask your sentries," I said. "They're the ones who know who belongs here and who doesn't."

  He grunted as he stepped past me and stooped down to tackle the hidden door. "Anyway, I'm glad you're here," he said. "I think something's happened. Rebekah is frightened. Really frightened."

  "Did you ask her why?"

  "She wouldn't tell me." He looked pointedly up at me. "But she wasn't like this until after you left this afternoon."

  "A lot of things happen in a city this size over the course of a few hours," I reminded him. "Not all of them have anything to do with us."

  "True," he agreed. But his eyes lingered on my face another moment before he returned his attention to the t
rapdoor.

  A few seconds later, he had it open. "I'll go first," he said.

  "No, you'll stay here," I told him. "If there's trouble, we'll need someone to lock down the door."

  He snorted. "A futile gesture," he scoffed. "Others will have seen you come in here."

  "And tearing the place up while they look for the rabbit hole will take time," I countered. "Time is always a good thing to have."

  Again, his eyes searched my face. "As you wish," he said. Stepping away from the shaft, he gestured me toward it.

  "Thank you." I gestured in turn to Bayta. "After you."

  Silently, she got her feet on the ladder and started down. With one final look at Karim, I followed.

  We passed through the curtain and into the hidden room. Rebekah was again sitting cross-legged on the bed, just as she'd been the last time I was here.

  Karim was right. In the past few hours something had definitely happened to the girl. Her face was drawn and even paler than it had been earlier. Her shoulders were hunched, and her throat was tight. "Hello, Rebekah," I greeted her cautiously.

  "Hello, Mr. Compton," she said. Speaking to me, but with her eyes locked on Bayta.

  I looked at Bayta. Her eyes were locked just as tightly on Rebekah. "This is Bayta," I said, looking back at Rebekah. "You asked about her earlier."

  "Yes," Rebekah said, an odd breathiness in her voice. "I'm …honored …Ms. Bayta."

  "Just Bayta," Bayta told her. She had some of Rebekah's same breathiness in her voice, too. "We've come to get you out of here."

  To my surprise, a pair of tears trickled down Rebekah's cheeks. "It's too late," she whispered. "I can't go."

  "Of course you can," I said, taking a step toward her. "If you're too weak to handle the ladder—"

  "Don't touch me!" she snapped with sudden fire.

  I braked to an abrupt halt. For a second there a real live scared ten-year-old had peeked out through all that unnatural maturity I'd seen in her earlier. "Sure," I soothed, searching her face for some clue to her reaction. "Do you need me to carry you out?" I asked.

  "No," she said. "I told you, I can't go. I can't move. If I do, he'll know where I am."

  An unpleasant tingle went up my back. "You mean the Modhri?"

  She closed her eyes. "Yes."

  I touched Bayta's arm, nodded back over my shoulder. Together, we backed out of the room into the passageway, stopping at the curtain. "Okay, I give up," I murmured. "What the hell is going on?"

  "I don't know," Bayta said, her eyes focused on something about five-sixths of the way to infinity. "But I think she's telling the truth."

  "I'm so glad to hear it," I growled. "Are you saying the Modhri's developed his own psychic radar now?"

  "It's not radar," Bayta said. "I don't know what it is. But she is in danger, Frank."

  "Why?" I demanded. "What can possibly be so important about a lone ten-year-old girl? I mean, this isn't—"

  "It isn't what?" Bayta asked.

  "Never mind," I growled. I'd been about to tell her this simply wasn't how the Modhri did things.

  But how the hell did I know how the Modhri did things? I didn't even understand how this whole group mind thing worked, let alone what kind of alien thoughts or motivations he might have.

  I took a deep breath. Fine. Western Alliance Intelligence had trained me to be a detective. It was about time I did some detecting.

  Assume Karim was right, that something new and critical had happened sometime in the past four hours. What could that something be?

  Bayta and I had visited Rebekah. We'd been hauled away for a visit to Veldrick. We'd run across McMicking and had dinner with him. Veldrick had tried to have me thrown into jail for a few hours, possibly because he was trying to move more of his coral.

  Trying to move more of his coral …

  "Bayta, we were talking at dinner about telepathic overlap between the Modhri and Humans," I said. "Presumably, Humans can't sense the Modhri—or vice versa—any better than you and the Spiders can. Right?"

  "I assume so, yes," she said. "There's certainly never been a case I've heard of where the Modhri and any species had that kind of communication."

  "Okay," I said. "But what if the Human in question was herself telepathic?"

  Bayta's eyes flicked back toward the room. "Rebekah?"

  "Why not?" I said. "You seem able to sense her, at least well enough to know when she's four meters under your feet. And it's starting to sound like she and the Modhri can sense each other, too."

  "Except that Humans aren't telepathic," she said tartly. "I'm not aware of a single documented exception."

  "Okay, so that's a soft spot in the theory," I conceded. "But there's a first time for everything. Maybe there's something in the air or water here that switched on a gene."

  She shook her head. "There must be a more reasonable explanation."

  "Like what?" I asked. "She's afraid the Modhri will detect her if she moves. He's not seeing, hearing, or smelling her." I cocked an eyebrow. "For that matter, neither were you earlier today."

  Her lip twitched. "Let's assume you're right," she said. "What do we do about it?"

  "I'll show you." I pulled out my comm and punched in McMicking's number. "It's me," I said when he answered. "How's the analysis going?"

  "I've got a list of Veldrick's alien contacts," he said. "The hacker program's still working on the city's utilities records."

  "Any of the alien data jumping out at you?"

  "One bit is, yes," he said. "A group of six Filiaelians showed up on New Tigris about six weeks ago. Since then, they've done some very impressive business with Veldrick."

  "How impressive?"

  "About ten times that of any other Crown Rosette customer," McMicking said.

  I chewed my lip. And Veldrick had rather bragged about how gifts of his coral had helped with his business contacts. "Forget everyone else for the moment," I told McMicking. "Concentrate on the Fillies."

  There was a short pause. "You once told me the Modhri hadn't penetrated the Filiaelian Assembly," he reminded me.

  "That was the information I was given," I confirmed. "It may turn out to have been incorrect. It could also turn out that the Fillies are innocent pawns in the Modhri's scheme."

  There was another pause, a longer one this time. "All right," he said at last. "If you're sure you want to start poking sticks that direction."

  It was an oddly squeamish comment for a man of McMicking's history and reputation. But I didn't really blame him. The Filiaelian Assembly filled a significant fraction of the far end of the galaxy, with colonized worlds and systems reputed to number in the thousands.

  That all by itself put them at the top of the social and economic food chain. Add to that their utter alienness, plus their habit of casual genetic manipulation of their own kind, and you had a group of horse-faced, satin-skinned people you did not want to irritate or offend. "We go where the trail leads," I said. "Right now, it's leading to those six Fillies."

  "All right," he said again. "But unless there's something solid—"

  "Hold it," I interrupted. The curtain beside me had rippled slightly, as if catching a puff of air from the other side.

  "Mr. Compton?" Karim's voice stage-whispered from the direction of the shaft. "Mr. Compton?"

  "I'll call you back," I murmured to McMicking, and broke the connection. "Stay here," I added to Bayta, pulling the kwi out of my pocket and pressing it into her hand. Drawing my Beretta, I slipped past the curtain into the passageway.

  I reached the shaft just as Karim made it to the bottom. "There you are," he said. Even in the dim light I could see that his face was pale. "Did you see any police officers on your way in here tonight?"

  "No," I said. "Are there police officers out there now?"

  He swallowed visibly. "Come and see."

  Oved was waiting on the walkway when Karim and I emerged from the tavern. His face was even paler than Karim's. "Over there," he said, pointing tow
ard a service alley leading away into the shadows on the opposite side of the street.

  I frowned as I peered down it. The alley itself was unlit, but there was enough backwash from the streetlights and storefronts that I could just make out the outline of a car halfway back facing my direction. It was hard to tell, but it looked like two men were sitting in the front seat.

  Sitting with unnatural stillness.

  I looked back at Oved. The boy was trembling slightly, I noticed now. Probably the first time he'd ever seen death up close. "Stay here," I told him and Karim, and headed across the street.

  No one attacked me as I approached the car. No one jumped from the shadows, either, yelling bloody murder and pointing accusing fingers in my direction. Whatever had happened here, the goal hadn't been to either lure me in or to frame me. I reached the car and looked in.

  The two cops were sprawled slightly in their seats. Not like men who'd been killed where they sat, but rather who'd been killed outside the vehicle and then shoved back in.

  There was a marked difference in their expressions, though. Sergeant Aksam looked almost serene, as if death had caught him completely unawares. Officer Lasari, in contrast, had a startled expression frozen on his face.

  The cause of death in both cases was probably connected to the wide bloodstains in the centers of their chests.

  I studied them from outside the car for a minute, taking in their expressions, positioning, and everything else I could see. Then, using a handkerchief to keep from smudging any fingerprints the killer might have left behind, I opened the driver's-side door.

  From the lack of any mention of shots, I had already concluded the bloodstains were the result of stab wounds. Gingerly opening Aksam's shirt, I found my assumption was correct. But it was an odd wound, triangular with smaller tears coming off two of the three corners.

  I frowned at the mark for a moment, my brain sifting through mental images as I tried to come up with something that could make a puncture like this.