Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Electrocution,” she said.

  “Gimme a break, Nance. They know how but not what?”

  She nodded as she stirred artificial creamer and artificial sweetener into the suspect coffee. “Remember the marks? Like bullet holes, only no bullets? Coroner’s report comes up and says they’ve both been corn-fried, but they don’t know how. You shoulda seen some of the faces in the room.”

  “I’ll bet. Any theories abounding?”

  “Theories, sure. I dunno about the abounding. The prevailing wisdom is that they were shot with some kind of charged organic particles, maybe a gelatin that hit the body

  hard enough to penetrate. The holes weren’t real deep, remember. High voltage would explain the instant cauterization and lack of bleeding. But it doesn’t explain why two shots, and the same distance apart on both bodies. Unless some kind of double-barreled weapon was involved.” Moody cracked his box of cookies. “Maybe one capsule carried a positive charge and the other a negative, and they only reacted lethally on contact.”

  Welles’s expression brightened. “That’s one I haven’t heard yet. I bet Coroners hasn’t even thought of it.” She eyed him admiringly.

  “Just an idea,” he mumbled deferentially. “Preventing a discharge until contact seems the sensible way to design a weapon like that.”

  “Why wouldn’t the charge jump within the gun?”

  “Insulated barrels, maybe. Hell, I don’t know. I don’t know anybody who’d kill two folks for the privilege of destroying a piece of art, either.”

  “People are saying maybe it was some kind of fanatical collector,” Welles informed him softly. “The kind of person who wants exclusive possession of something, who wants to be able to say he has the only one of its kind in existence. Even if it’s a copy. A painting mounted on a chunk of wood six feet square would be pretty hard to wrestle out on a maglide car. A holo wouldn’t. Think about it. I gotta get back to my desk.”

  Moody did think about it, without satisfaction. The hypothetical weapon made more sense than the hypothetical motive. No bullets to trace to a certain caliber gun, no poisons to track to a pharmacologist, no messy sharp blades. An electric charge left no calling card.

  He didn’t care much for the Chief. While Moody liked working with machines, he also enjoyed the company of other human beings. Feldstein didn’t. If given a choice, there was no doubt in Moody’s mind that the Chief would all. Just wall screens and mollyboards and memos and directives.

  The science of law enforcement having yet to advance to that point, however, he was still compelled to make use of human beings. That included the likes of Vernon Moody, with whom the New York-educated Feldstein had little in common. Moody was sure the man had never handled a red wriggler or a nightcrawler in his life.

  It didn’t help that he was the shortest member of the department, with the exception of two of the female officers. In spite of his handicap he had risen to become chief of the largest police department in the state of Florida. The detectives often wondered how that had come about. Accidents of nature were frequently invoked.

  Moody didn’t think about it as much as some of his friends, because he had next to no contact with the Chief’s office. Nor did Feldstein actively seek the company of his officers, preferring the seclusion of his office with its mollyboards and vorec circuits. They responded promptly and obediently to his requests and commands, unlike his often obstreperous subordinates.

  Not that Feldstein was hostile. He was friendly enough when encountered in the hall or the commissary. Had he been unwilling to work with others, he never would have lived through his years as a patrolman and detective. He knew what it was like to work a beat, knew how to joke and bullshit on the street. It wasn’t that he was incapable of sharing with others. It was just that he chose not to do so.

  Moody turned a comer on his way to the Chief’s sanctum. Maybe Feldstein thought it wasn’t a good idea to get too close to people who might be found floating in the Bay the next morning. That Moody could understand. If he were Chief, maybe he’d feel similarly. Not that he ever would be. It didn’t bother him. He was quite comfortable with the level he had achieved.

  Security passed him through an admin checkpoint and on to Feldstein’s office. It was not spacious, though it did command a nice view of the Bay. Molly and chip storage lined all the walls, warring with Feldstein for living space. Feldstein’s intellect was all that kept the mutating files at bay, like a napalm-armed skier caught in a Colorado avalanche. Each time the files were reduced, western Florida’s antisocial population inevitably restored them to their former dimensions. Try as he might, Feldstein would never be able to shrink them down to manageable size, nor would they overwhelm him. It was a perpetual stalemate.

  Moody did his best to pay attention. It wasn’t easy, because the silvery sheen of the Bay was clearly visible through the big window at the back of the office. It made him think of fishing, and that made it difficult to concentrate on his job. Don’t eye the Bay, went the conventional office wisdom, and don’t eye Corporal Laney in Processing, and a man might could get his work done.

  Feldstein was working at his desk when Moody entered. The detective had never seen him not working. He was a small dark man, son of a small dark man, grandson of a small dark man, continuing a lineage of successful small dark men who had arrived in Florida by way of New York, East Europe, and the Middle East, the end product of several thousand years’ worth of small dark men arising originally in Samaria, where—Moody did not doubt—Feldstein’s ancestor many dozen times removed had served as faithful policeman or tax collector or accountant in the service of Solomon—or some lesser light.

  “Morning, Chief.”

  Feldstein reluctantly looked up from one of the three screens that sprouted from his desk like flat-faced mushrooms.

  “Vernon.” That was his one concession to familiarity. The Chief knew everyone in the building, maybe everyone on the whole force, by their first name. Maybe the janitors

  who worked the night shift, too. “How long have you been on the Kettrick case?”

  “About three weeks now, sir.”

  “Got anything yet?”

  “As in ‘results’?” The Chief hadn’t invited him to sit down, which suited Moody fine. It meant this was going to be a short interview. “No more than what we had by the second day. We got a modus, a possible motive, and a good description of the prime suspect, but we haven’t been able to run him down yet. We will. APB’s are out all over the country, heightened in the Southwest.”

  Feldstein folded his hands on the desk. That was a bad sign. It meant the Chief had been thinking. “Having had to do it myself once or twice, I know how frustrating it is to try running an investigation twenty-five hundred miles from the likely territory of your prime suspect. That’s why I’m sending you to Arizona to work on it from there. We need someone on the scene.”

  An image congealed like stale milk in Moody’s head. A vision of endless horizons devoid of growth, of dry, enervating heat; of dust and cactus spines and venomous reptiles and insects. Not that Florida didn’t boast its share of the latter, but they stayed down in the Glades where they belonged.

  “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d rather not go.”

  Feldstein turned to one of his monitors, his tone as coolly correct as the information being displayed on the screen.

  “The local police will be doing most of the work. You’re going to serve as backup, information source, and to keep us up-to-date.” He glanced up from the glass. “Also because the media and city fathers are all over me to show some progress on this one. You can record five murders a day down in the harbor and nobody sneezes, but somebody like Kettrick gets deleted and important people get the

  shakes. You know the drill. Don’t look so glum. Think of it as a working vacation.”

  “Chief, I don’t like the desert. I like lowlands and open water. Lots of open water. There’s nothing out there but sand.”

  “Get used to the
idea. Think of it as a wide beach if it helps, but you’re going.”

  “Why not send somebody else?” The thought leapt unbidden to his lips. “Why not send that tall, good-looking young detective who’s so good at PR? What’s his name? Nackerman? Nickerson? He was on the scene before I was.”

  “We’re talking interjurisdictional cooperation, Vernon. Nickerson’s a little too aggressive for an assignment like this, a little too involved in promoting himself instead of tending to business. You have a way of working with people without threatening them.”

  Moody knew he had no chance of extricating himself unless he produced a much more substantial reason for not going, but try as he would, he couldn’t come up with one. Personal dislike was insufficient. Despite his distaste, he was flattered. Feldstein was sending him because he was the best man for the job. Or else because he thought the big detective wouldn’t be missed.

  “Isn’t there anyone else who can go, sir?” It was a lame last effort but he had to try.

  “Oh, there are other people I could send. There just aren’t others I want to send. You’re going, Vernon, because I know you’ll get along out there, and because I know you won’t miss anything, and because I know you won’t waste the department’s time and money gallivanting around at night.”

  That’s me, he thought resignedly. Good ol’ boy Moody, the quintessential dull cop. Not necessarily the most brilliant, nor the most obvious, but ever the safest.

  “It won’t be so bad, Vernon.” Feldstein was trying to be sympathetic. “Everyone needs a change of scenery from time to time.”

  But I like this scenery, dammit. What he said was, “If y’all have made up your mind, sir, then I’m just killing time for the both of us by standing here.” He turned to go, hesitated at the door. “I get travel pay?”

  Feldstein smiled broadly. He had bright white teeth. On the rare occasions when he revealed them, they added an uncharacteristic glow to his usually dour expression. As if conscious of the atypical display, his lips abruptly tightened.

  “Full travel pay and time, but I want you out there pronto. No maglide connections. Take a shuttle.”

  “Fine with me, sir.” And it was. Moody had no desire to spend hours in a transcontinental maglide car. “What about a place to stay?”

  “Set up a per diem with Accounting and make your own arrangements. You’ve never been on assignment outside the Bay area before, have you?”

  “Shoot, I’ve never been out of the South before, sir. No reason to. I like it here. I’m not one of those guys who yearns for faraway places.”

  “It’ll be good for you,” Feldstein insisted unconvincingly. “Broaden your horizons.”

  Moody didn’t want his horizons broadened, but with the Chief exerting an unusual effort to be understanding, it would have been undiplomatic to say so.

  “Arizona, huh? Maybe there’s a lake somewhere.”

  “Not near where you’re going. And properly speaking, you’re not going to Arizona. You’re being assigned to the Navaho Department of Public Safety, of the Navaho Nation. Those are the people you’ll be working with. Not the Arizona police.”

  Shoot, Moody mused as he left the Chief’s office; cops were cops. Whether from the Hindu Kush or the Great Rift Valley, he’d manage to get along with any new colleagues so long as he could find one or two to share a beer with. If they followed the NFL scores, so much the better. His thoughts left him feeling slightly more sanguine about things, but not much.

  CHAPTER 4

  By the time the shuttle crossed the Texas-New Mexico border, the air had become impossibly transparent, the views absurdly extensive. It remained thus as the shuttle commenced its descent from seventy thousand feet, falling like an amputated arrowhead toward the red-brown frying pan that was Northern Arizona.

  Finally pausing in his reading long enough to glance out a window, Moody was appalled by what he saw. Gone was the fertile landscape of Florida, the reassuring tracts of homes and condos, the pale opalescent blue of the Gulf. Below lay earthtone gone amuck, reds and umbers and dirty pink and brown, sprawled from horizon to horizon like a Calcutta whore. In vain he searched for the signatory slash of the Grand Canyon, before realizing sheepishly it must lie too far to the northwest to be visible from his present position and altitude.

  The barren emptiness of the terrain compared to that of population-swollen Central Florida was numbing. Like a drowning man nearing land, he began to breathe a little easier only when the support structures surrounding Klagetoh International Airport came into view. Fastech and light-industry manufacturing facilities clung to both sides of Interstate-40 like aphids to a rose stem.

  It was a relief to leave the plane for the comforting bustle of the terminal, which was gratifyingly spacious and modem and full of color and life. Men and women from around the world swarmed like corpuscles through the corridors, bumping into each other while venturing apologetic phrases in half a dozen tongues.

  They were drawn to this formerly isolated chunk of North America by the explosion of hi-tech manufacturing which in the past hundred years had radically transformed the Navahopi Reservations. The Koreans had arrived first, looking to steal a march on the Japanese, who hadn’t been far behind in their never-ending quest for skilled labor and benign tax structures. After them had come, in a rush, the Taiwanese, the Malaysians, the Thais, and the Indians and the Brazilians and the South American Community. Slow to recognize the potential of the Rez, the EEC was now trying hard to catch up. The shuttle had been full of Germans, Italians, and Turks.

  “If you think this is bad, you should see Phoenix. They have needed a new airport for fifty years.”

  Moody found himself eyeing a softly smiling man ten years his junior. He wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt and neatly pressed brown jeans. And cowboy boots, as if Moody needed any further proof he was no longer in Central Florida. Though probably in his thirties, he looked considerably younger. Slightly less than average height and slimly built, he tended to disappear alongside Moody. A lot of people did. His skin was as smooth and unblemished as that of a fashion model. The little half-smile—the comers of his mouth turned slightly upward, making the cheekbones even more prominent than they were naturally—seemed to be the only expression he had. He extended a hand.

  “Ya-tah-hey. I’m Sergeant Paul Ooljee, NDPS.”

  Moody shook the proffered hand. “Vernon Moody, Detective, Greater Tampa PD.”

  The sergeant held the handshake a long time. His small fingers were like steel and Moody was conscious of the pressure of the thumb against the back of his own wrist. No doubt that meant something. Moody hoped he wouldn’t have to hang around here long enough to learn the local customs.

  “I’ll tell you my theory if you’ll tell me yours.” The grin did not fade.

  “Haven’t got one yet. ” Moody walked beside the smaller man, letting him lead. “Title aside, what do I call you?”

  “Paul will do fine. I would give you my other name but I do not think you could pronounce it. If you have trouble with Ooljee, you can call me Moon, which is what it means. Or you can call me crazy, which is what some of my friends call me. Especially my mother-in-law. You can also say ‘my friend.’ That is what I will be calling you.”

  “We’ve just met.” Ooljee turned a comer and Moody lengthened his stride to keep pace. They were in a restricted corridor now, having left the airport crowds behind.

  “It is only proper. If you don’t tell someone your name and where you and your clan are from right away, then you mark yourself as a suspicious person. In Navaho it is more correct to ask, ‘What is this person?’ instead of ‘Who is this person?’ But since I can tell from the look on your face that everything I am saying is only confusing you, we can just call each other Ooljee and Moody for a while. If you do not object to the formality, my friend.” He looked thoughtful.

  “Of course, if you prefer the translation, that could be fun. People would be able to look at us and say, “There goes Moon and Moo
dy.’”

  “I can manage Ooljee all right.” Here he’d expected the local yokels to be quiet, even taciturn, and the first one he met wouldn’t shut up.

  They passed under the blower from a vid ad and his nostrils were awash for an instant in the tantalizing aroma of frangipani. He walked through it without taking the bait and turning to check out the ad.

  An elevator took them to ground level.

  “You know why I’m here or did y’all just come to pick me up and run me into town?”

  “I know why you are here. We will be working together. I have been on this case for several weeks and in daily contact with your office, though not with you personally. Tampa and Ganado have been molly dancing for many days and I am quite familiar with the unfortunate details of the murder.”

  “What were you working on before they put you on the Kettrick?”

  “A local killing. And I was not ‘put on’ the Kettrick case. I volunteered to work on it. Fascinating business.” The elevator slowed. “Here we are.”

  Moody followed him out into a covered parking structure. That’s when it hit him. The air. There was something not right about it. The lack of oxygen he’d expected and was prepared for. Klagetoh was nearly six thousand feet above sea level. But the dryness came as a shock. He was inhaling something cool and utterly devoid of moisture; oxynitro as pure as the symbology of a periodic table. Dizzy, he paused and tried to recover, convinced the potted plants lining the walkway were leaning hungrily toward him, about to puncture his moisture-rich form with hypodermic air-roots capable of sucking the water from his body.

  “Hey, Moody; you okay?” Ooljee eyed him with concern.

  “Just gimme a minute.” The detective straightened, breathing deeply. The dizziness went away.

  He picked up his luggage and resumed walking. Ooljee said nothing about the delay, but did slow his relentless pace.

  “I’m glad somebody finds the case interesting,” Moody wheezed. “Got everyone jittery back home. We haven’t made a whole helluva lot of progress lately.”