Death Blows

by DD Barant

  “And then?”

  He shrugs. “It’s got to be really close to any trace to detect it. She apparently leapt from this tree to another one, and so on. I’m not really trained for that sort of thing.”

  I consider trying to follow her, and reject it. She’s undoubtedly moving fast; going tree-to-tree will be painstakingly slow, and we’ll lose the trail more than once. Besides, I know better than to take on the Queen of the Jungle on her own turf. At this point, our best option is to let her go, hope she’s actually going after the thief and wish her the best.

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  He indicates the hole in the ground. “This site was mystically as well protected as the storage locker. It was dug up with a pair of shovels.”

  “Wait—a pair of shovels? How can you tell?”

  “Well, normal forensics wouldn’t be able to—dirt is usually too crumbly to hold a good tool mark, and most shovels wouldn’t leave anything distinctive anyway. But I found a couple of roots that had been damaged, and they remembered being damaged simultaneously. Two digging implements were being used at the same time.”

  “So we’ve got another suspect.”

  “There’s something else. I found footprints, too—big ones. I took casts.” He kneels and pries up a large white patch of plaster to one side of the hole. “See?”

  “Those have to be at least a size eighteen,” I say. “Looks like some kind of work boot. They’re deep, too—the guy must weigh over three hundred pounds.”

  “They go all the way back to the path. There’s no security camera where he ducked into the underbrush, but a guy this big has to stand out—plus, he’d be carrying two shovels.”

  “There’s nobody like that in any of the footage,” I say. “He would have been as obvious as a nudist at the North Pole. How about his companion?”

  “I only found the one set. What do you think it means?”

  I sigh. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? We’re looking for the ghost of Bigfoot. And his invisible friend…”

  Cassius arranges transport for our prisoner, and all of us head back to Seattle. It’s a frustrating trip; Cassius insists he knows nothing about invisible giants, and won’t put out a BOLO on Shaka due to her delicate diplomatic status. I’m angry at myself for letting her out of my sight, angry at Cassius for loyalty I can’t blame him for, and slightly annoyed at Charlie for how well he’s taking all this.

  We take all the security footage with us—maybe Gretch’s team can give us a better analysis, spot something we missed—and I get a pleasant surprise when I walk into the intel division: Gretchen herself is there, maneuvering carefully from desk to desk like the Queen Elizabeth 2 negotiating a path between islands. She’s wearing a billowy black frock that’s severe and managerial while using enough fabric for a small tent. She smiles when she notices me and says, “Hello, Jace.”

  “Hi. You look…”

  “Enormous?”

  “I was going to say great.”

  “The original meaning of which was ‘enormous.’ ”

  “Okay, you got me. I was cleverly trying to hide my insult inside an etymological riddle, but I couldn’t find any way to work in the word zeppelin. How are you doing?”

  “Zeppelin is an apt metaphor. I am generating a great deal of gas, my blood pressure is elevated, and my mood is prone to abrupt explosions. Earlier today I nearly invaded Poland on a whim.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You shouldn’t be working,” Cassius says from behind me. “In your condition—”

  “Excuse me,” she says sweetly, and I get out of her way. Which is good, because a second later she has a knife to Cassius’s throat. The room gets very quiet. “I’m still fit enough to do this,” she says, in an eminently reasonable tone. “Which should lay to rest any fears about my physical capabilities. As to my mental state, I’ll let you decide after the meeting.”

  Cassius gives her a smile with only a little nervousness in it. “The weekly global synopsis? I thought you might have delegated that—”

  “I haven’t. My office in ten minutes?” The knife vanishes as quickly as it appeared. “As you wish. But first, Jace has some new information for you.” I give her the recordings on a flash drive and a brief rundown on the situation. She nods, asks a few curt questions, then takes the drive. “I’ll have Mahmoud check it. He’s particularly good with video work.”

  “Okay. The other thing I want to talk to you about is Dr. Pete.”

  “Jace, I told you I can’t discuss his past—”

  “I know. I just wanted to know if he’s all right.”

  She pauses. “He’s fine—still at the safe house. I’m meeting him later; you can come along if you’d like.”

  I don’t know if like is the right word, but there are things the Doc and I have to discuss. “Yeah, fine. Let me know when you’re leaving.”

  I make some phone calls. Xandra tells me Galahad has been behaving, and wants to know how many more nights she’s going to have to cover for me. I tell her I should be able to get him off her hands tonight, then try Dr. Pete’s cell. I get a message saying the number is currently “not available,” which could mean the safe house has some kind of jamming station—spooks are fond of them, they’re good for disabling remote bombs—or maybe he took off in such a hurry he forgot to pay his phone bill. Doesn’t really matter; I’ll be seeing him soon anyway, and then he can deal with Galahad. I’ve got enough problems of my own without worrying about a hyperactive anthrocanine, though I will kind of miss the big lug—his coffee-making abilities in particular.

  Charlie’s hanging around my office, reading a magazine. He doesn’t look up when I come in, but says, “I gotta take off today. Got a thing.”

  “Yeah? What kind of thing?”

  “Recertification. Lems have to do it annually.”

  I take a closer look at the magazine: Swingdance Monthly. “Yeah, I can see you’re really boning up for that.”

  “It’s nothing. Couple hours and some paperwork, I’m done for the year.”

  It makes sense—most cops have to go through something similar when it comes to firearms. Since an enforcement lem is basically a walking, talking gun, I guess they need periodic checkups. “So what’s that entail? Have to get your pitching arm realigned?”

  “Full physical. Test all my seams, top up the topsoil. Make sure nothing’s leaking, cracked, or punctured.” He hesitates, then says, “And I gotta take a psych test.”

  “Yeah, the Bureau did the same kind of thing. Want to know how you’re handling job stress, that kind of stuff.”

  “That’s not what it’s for.”

  I lean up against my desk, cross my arms. “What do you mean?”

  “Enforcement lems aren’t like others. We have a certain… failure rate.”

  “Oh? And what happens when one of you fail? You explode or something? Should I be worried?”

  My tone is light, but his face isn’t. “No. I’ll be fine.” He gets to his feet, tosses the magazine on the chair, turns to leave. “Hey,” I say as he opens the door. “What happens if you don’t pass?”

  “If I fail,” he says, “I won’t be coming back.” He shuts the door in my astonished face.

  FIFTEEN

  I rip the door open a second later. “Now hold on just a goddamn minute!” Once again, everybody in earshot goes quiet. Charlie stops in his tracks. “You think you can drop a bombshell like that on me and just walk away? Get back here, now!” He turns and does so, without a word. As I close the door, I hear someone in the office say, “What’s a bomb-shell?”

  “Explain,” I say firmly. “It’s very simple. Enforcement lems are animated by predators; that means that although we don’t eat, we still have the instinctual drive to hunt and kill. If those instincts ever get out of control, we become a danger to the ones we’re supposed to protect. That can’t happen.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘out of control’? How can they tell?”

  “Th
ey have tests.”

  “Tests? So if you see the wrong thing in a Rorschach blot, they execute you?”

  “It’s a reasonable precaution.”

  “The hell it is! You put your life on the line as a public servant, and they treat you like a piece of faulty equipment?”

  “Jace.” His voice is firm. “To a certain degree, I am a piece of equipment. I was built, not born. I have a natural affinity for killing, and that affinity has to be monitored. I’ll be fine. I’ve gone through this many times, and never had any problems. Honestly, it’s the animates based on mammals that tend to go off the rails.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Us cold-blooded types are much more level-headed.”

  I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not. All I know is that I really don’t want him to walk out that door. “If you’re putting me on about this,” I say, “I will carve a hole in your chest and lock you in a room with a dozen cats and a box of laxative-laced catnip.”

  “That sounds unpleasant.”

  I take a deep breath to make my snappy comeback, but nothing comes out. We just look at each other for a moment, and don’t say anything.

  “Just come back,” I finally say.

  He nods. This time when he leaves, I let him.

  Damn it.

  Eisfanger finds me in the bar.

  It’s a little hole-in-the-wall I found, a few blocks north of the NSA offices. Both thropes and pires drink here, so it’s open pretty much all the time. It’s lit mainly by neon beer signs and a fluorescent over the pool table, but the bar is long and oak and they keep a decent nonmagicked scotch on hand. I think I’m the only human who drinks here, but the other customers assume I’m a thrope and leave me alone. I picked it mainly because of the jukebox, which is an old-fashioned monstrosity the size of a fridge that plays actual records. It contains exactly two selections that I listen to.

  He slides onto the bar stool next to mine, looking around as he does so. “Hey. You, uh, sure about this place?”

  I take a sip of my scotch. “No. Right now, quite frankly, I’m not sure about any place. Where I come from we can do surveillance from orbit, and this world seems to have almost all the technology we do plus magic. So if we’re being bugged by an invisible enchanted flea with a cybernetic uplink, it wouldn’t really come as that much of a surprise.”

  “But—you picked the place.”

  I sigh. “You wanted a private meeting. Not at the office. This is what I came up with. What’s going on?”

  “First, the lava sample you gave me is a match to the one found at the storage locker.”

  About what I’d suspected, and not really that helpful. “What else?”

  “Lucy Barbarossa’s corpse de-bronzed. Aquitaine’s bones reverted yesterday, but I didn’t learn anything new from them. Barbarossa, though—that was a different story.” He leans toward me, the kind of excitement in his face that only a truly bizarre detail can produce in a professional forensics tech. “Jace, Barbarossa was killed first.”

  I try to figure it out for myself. “Being turned into metal would have stopped any decomp or animal predation, so she could have been there a few days—but what about the brain segments? Did you find signs of a preservative or refrigeration?”

  “No, no. I told you, it was the body itself that tipped me off. It was out of sync with the neural tissue.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “One of the things forensic animism can do very accurately is measure age—even in a corpse—and when I compared the residual energy of the body and the brain, they weren’t the same.”

  “Which one was older?”

  “The brain. By two days.” I took a second to process that. “So Barbarossa was killed three days ago… but her body had been dead for five?”

  “That’s what you’d think. But I’m not talking about age in terms of how long something’s been alive—I’m talking about how long something’s existed.” I take another sip of scotch. “I’m not sure I’m following. You’re saying the brain’s existed for two days longer than the body. How is that possible?” He settles back on his seat, looking smug. “Chronistic displacement.”

  “Chron—oh.” I sit up a little straighter. “Time travel. The Midnight Sword.”

  “Yeah. We don’t have any technical specs for what it can do, but one of its abilities is supposedly to affect time. If the killer used it to send her brain back in time two days after he removed it, it would result in the body having existed for two days less than the brain. I figure he killed her, turned the body into bronze to preserve it, then took the brain home to do his little dissection and mummification project. When he was finished, he used the sword to tear open a rift in time so he could return the individually wrapped slices to the crime.”

  “But why?” He looks at me blankly. “I have no idea. Isn’t that your department?” I think for a moment. “There’s a number of reasons the killer might have done it that way. Ease of transport, more privacy, lets him control when the body is discovered… but the vic was discovered in a fairly secluded place, with an actual submarine parked a few feet away. I don’t think privacy or transport was an issue.”

  “Then what?” I finish my drink, set the glass down on the bar, and throw some bills down after it. “Only one reason I can thinkof…”

  The sun’s almost ready to rise as I step out of the bar, pink and orange lighting up the eastern edge of the city. The air is cold and damp, steam rising from a grate on the sidewalk. Eisfanger doesn’t follow me—he no doubt thinks he should wait a few minutes so we won’t be seen together, though I don’t much care either way. For the first time in this case, I feel like I’ve managed to snag the thread that’s going to unravel the whole thing; I don’t know what it’s connected to or if it’ll break if I tug too hard, but I know it’s important. By the time I get back to the office, I’ve got a wide smile on my face—it is, I think, going to be a good day.

  Boy, am I wrong.

  Gretch is a very interesting woman, and I have no trouble imagining her being involved in any number of unusual situations: tracking Yetis in the Himalayas, yes; conducting espionage in a café in Belgium, yes; parachuting into a war zone an hour before dawn, yes.

  Shopping for baby clothes, no.

  “Thank you so much for joining us, Jace,” Gretch says. She’s in the middle, Dr. Pete on her left, me on her right. We’re strolling through the one of the many corridors of the Seattle City Underplex, or as I like to call it, the Batmall.

  Gretch walks like no pregnant woman I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if it’s the accelerated pregnancy, her vampire strength, or sheer determination, but she doesn’t waddle; she marches, her posture straight, her head high. You’d think she was smuggling a beach ball instead of a carrying a baby.

  And she’s remained firmly between Dr. Pete and myself, ever since he arrived to pick us up in his car. I suspect it has more to do with all the maternal hormones surging through her body than her stated commitment to professional privacy, though I could be wrong. In any case, if she thinks hauling me out in public and keeping a swollen belly between me and the Doc will keep my mouth shut, she’s wrong—I’m just waiting for the right moment, that’s all.

  I first stumbled on the Batmall a few weeks ago, when I was looking for a decent shoe store. A few hours later a security guard found me sprawled on an escalator, shoppers stepping over my prone body, moaning, “Natural light… natural light…”

  Okay, it’s not that bad, but the place does cater to pires—it’s completely underground, laid out in a maze that you’d need echolocation to make sense of. I’m not sure how many levels it goes down, but at least five—and some of it’s over a hundred years old.

  In 1889 the Great Seattle Fire leveled over thirty city blocks. The city decided to build over the ruins as a deterrent to flooding—which they’d also had a problem with—and effectively created a huge urban basement. Now, believe it or not, this is exactly the same thing that happened in my
world—only there the place was basically sealed off and forgotten about.

  Here, the sun-shy part of the population thought they could definitely do something with that much subterranean real estate. They expanded on it, dug even deeper, turned it into a huge shopping center. I think the reason the Pike Place Market here is so run-down is because it can’t compete with this place.

  And now here we are, God knows how deep beneath the earth, Gretch keeping up a steady stream of innocuous small talk while Dr. Pete sucks nervously on a Red Julius and won’t meet my eyes. Gretch spots another store, grabs both our arms, and marches us in. “This place looks like it has a nice selection. What do you think, Jace—bats or leeches?” She holds up a blood-red jumper with little cartoon versions of the latter on it. “I’m not crazy about the color, but I suppose it would hide stains… is that a good thing?” Suddenly she sounds a little anxious, and I realize I’m being arrogant in assuming the only reason she’s here is to provide a buffer between me and Dr. Pete.

  “It’s a good thing,” I assure her. “And personally, I’d go with the bats.”

  “I suppose…” I manage to sneak behind her and grab Dr. Pete by the arm. “You and I,” I say, “have something to discuss.”

  “I’m sorry, Jace, I just can’t—”

  “You need to take Galahad back.”

  “—uh, yes, of course. I’m sorry I dumped him on you, but—”

  “No buts. I’m still not sure if you asked me out of genuine concern for him or because you thought it would slow me down, but it was rude and ill conceived either way.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I know. Oddly, it’s not giving me a great deal of satisfaction.” He digs in his pocket and pulls out a plastic cassette case. “I know this doesn’t make up for anything, but here. I found this a while ago—I thought I’d give it to you when you needed a pick-me-up.”

  I take it, but put it in my pocket without looking at it. “Thanks, I’ll pull it out the next time I’m feeling low. Right now, though, I’m feeling angry—which makes this feel more like a bribe than an apology.” That shakes him a little. Why is it men think you have to accept an apology, just because one is offered?