Chameleon's Challenge (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 3)

by BR Kingsolver

  Local police had certain areas of jurisdiction and expertise, but the large corporations all had their own security forces. Above all other security organizations was that of the International Chamber of Commerce. The first reference on my list was Wilbur Wilberforce, the Deputy Director of security operations for the North American Chamber of Commerce. Nothing like being able to drop names. Another name was Simon Wellington, Chairman of the Board of Hudson Bay Exploration and a member of the local Chamber’s board of directors. The Chamber appointed the Mayor and the Chief of Police.

  He read the list, then gave me a sour look.

  “Inspector,” I said, trying to look very earnest and sincere, “I promise not to get in the way. But if you brief me, I can help to hold down the number of people pestering you for updates.” I gave him what I hoped was a conspiratorial smile. “Or do you still have me on your suspect list?”

  Donofrio thought about it. “Okay. Come on.”

  He took me back to a conference room that had a murder board set up. One side held pictures of Olga and some notes. I saw my name there under the heading “witnesses.” Half of the board had pictures that I assumed were of Weeks’s family and their home. Then pictures of a man lying on a sidewalk in a pool of blood. The pictures in the middle stopped me. A woman hung on a door, just as Olga had. The other pictures were of two girls. One might have been in high school, the other was younger than Glenda. Both had been brutalized in the same fashion as their mother.

  Thankfully, we walked by all the pictures into an office. Donofrio motioned to a chair and sat behind a desk.

  “So, what do you want to know?”

  “I understand that Carleton Weeks was murdered this morning. After what happened to his family, I’m curious as to what you’ve figured out.”

  Donofrio snorted, then said, “Not a whole hell of a lot. His family was butchered the same way Miss Raskalova was, which sort of cements that the cases are related.”

  “I understand there were others in the house, as well as security personnel.”

  He nodded. “Two security guards on duty, and three domestic servants. All of them were shot with a handgun, very possibly the same gun that killed Weeks this morning. We’re waiting on ballistics.”

  “A pistol? Were there any witnesses?”

  “Yes, and no.” He pursed his mouth into that sour expression again. “Weeks had a security detail with him, and there were guards at the front door of the building. There were also other people on the street, but no one saw anything.”

  “Security cameras?”

  “Yes, and all they show is a blur in one corner of the frame at the moment Weeks was shot.”

  “So, the shooter was outside the camera’s view,” I concluded.

  “There were powder burns on Weeks’s clothes.” He raised his eyebrows. “Just like there were on the security guards at the Weeks’ mansion.”

  I digested that. Luckily, no one knew I was a chameleon, or I’d be a prime suspect. I’d never met another one, and I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but that was the first thing that occurred to me.

  “Frankly, Miss Nelson, I’m a person who prefers to deal in hard, cold facts. It pains me to think that I might be dealing with a homicidal maniac who has some kind of invisibility mutation.”

  I shook my head. “How would that even work? Can I see the security footage?”

  “Sure.” He typed on his keyboard, then turned the monitor so I could see it. The camera showed a limo pulling up in front of the building. Two men got out and looked around, each with one hand inside his suit coat. One of them spoke, then another man got out of the car. Even with the grainy, poorly-focused security camera, his gray hair and the cut of his suit set him apart.

  I saw the image blur along the side closest to the building, then the man I assumed was Weeks jerked. Once, twice, and then he stumbled back against the car and fell forward on his face. The blur disappeared.

  “He was shot twice?” I asked.

  “Three times. Twice in the chest, and once just below the breastbone.” Donofrio reached to turn the monitor back toward himself.

  “Does the vid continue?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s watch some more of it.”

  We watched for an hour as people on the screen hurried around, a doctor rushed out of the building, and then the police and an ambulance appeared. Donofrio spent as much time watching me as he did watching the screen.

  Forty-five minutes after Weeks was shot, I saw the edge of the screen blur again, then clear.

  “Do you have a camera angle from the other side?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He pulled up another vid.

  “Go to forty-four minutes after the shooting.”

  The camera was situated on the other side of the front door from the first one. After Weeks was shot, most of what it showed were the backs of people clustered around him. But that wasn’t where I focused. At forty-five minutes, a slight blur appeared against the wall of the building and moved away from the scene. If an observer wasn’t looking for it, they’d probably never notice it. It took several minutes, but the blur slowly crept toward the corner of the building, then disappeared.

  I looked up to find Donofrio staring at me.

  “What’s so interesting?” he asked.

  At first, I wasn’t sure what to say. The existence of human chameleons was suspected, but not scientifically proven. According to my dad, that was because we were all criminals. It was an obvious career choice. Another explanation was that we chameleons preferred to stay far away from scientific study. In the late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries, scientists had done some terrible things to mutants.

  “Run the vid back a couple of minutes,” I said. When he did, I pointed to the blur. “I was looking at that. I think it’s just a flaw in the lens, or a dirty spot. Either that, or your invisible man.”

  “How could someone do that?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve read about security experiments with light-bending technologies. But to be honest, I’ve no idea. I’m with you, Inspector. If someone has an explanation for how Weeks was shot, I’m all ears.”

  I left the police station shaken to the core of my being. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that I might be dealing with another chameleon.

  When I’m confused, I tend to seek out a sounding board, and the two best ones created me. I rode over to Dad’s house.

  “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company this morning?” Dad asked. “Are you hungry?”

  People seemed to ask me that a lot. I checked my memory and realized I hadn’t eaten yet.

  “I missed breakfast,” I said, and followed him into the kitchen.

  He poured me a glass of orange juice, and I watched him whip up a couple of omelets and fry some bacon as the coffee brewed.

  “There’s a sadistic mass murderer loose in Toronto,” I told him. He gave me a raised-eyebrow look. “He took out Carleton Weeks—Richard O’Malley’s boss—and his family.”

  “His family? All at once? Home invasion?”

  “Mistress first. She lived across the hall from Nellie. Then a home invasion and he butchered the family while Weeks was out of town. Then he assassinated Mr. Weeks this morning in broad daylight.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “A bunch. He had a security team with him, along with a chauffeur, and maybe half a dozen other people on the street. It was right in front of Entertaincorp’s offices.”

  “And they didn’t catch him? Well, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. I know they have security cameras.”

  “You would think so, but the cameras don’t show anything. None of the witnesses saw anything. I think the guy’s a chameleon.”

  Dad turned and stared at me. “That would be interesting.”

  “You have such a talent for understatement. I saw what this guy did to Nellie’s neighbor. He’s really sick. The cops told me he did the same thing to Weeks’s wife and teena
ged daughters. Hours of torture.”

  “And you’re involved in this because of Nellie?”

  “Yeah. Richard hired me to ensure her safety. I brought Mike on board to help. I’d rather just take her and go on vacation, but I guess that’s not an option.”

  “Does your mother know about this?”

  “I told her, and told Amanda Rollins. I don’t know how much vigilance will help if the guy is a chameleon, though.”

  Dad turned back to his cooking. When the omelets were ready, he set a plate for each of us on the table.

  “I don’t think you need to worry about the orphanage. Walter doesn’t see with his eyes.” Walter was one of Amanda’s orphans and a powerful telepath.

  “I’ll go over to Lilith’s and do a security check,” Dad continued. “I think her systems are up-to-date, but it can’t hurt.” He poured me some coffee. “It sounds as though it was personal. Why does O’Malley think Nellie needs protection?”

  “Evidently Entertaincorp security thinks all their execs need protection. Their security chief here in town told me that they were in defensive mode enterprise-wide. He said they think a former employee did it. Did you ever run into a situation like that?”

  He swallowed a mouthful of eggs and cheese. “I’ve seen unhappy employees go after specific managers or coworkers. Every few years you hear about someone showing up at work with a gun and shoot up the place. That’s why most corporate installations have security screening. I can’t remember someone going after an executive’s family.”

  “Dad, if you had to catch me, how would you go about it?”

  “I’d probably bait a trap with chocolate.”

  I threw my napkin at him. I wanted to throw my fork. “Can you be serious?”

  He chuckled and sat back, a faraway look on his face. Pretty soon, he said, “I’d bait a trap with Nellie, but that’s not what you’re asking, is it? You mean, how would I trap a chameleon? Bright light and open space. A water canon would show his location because he’s still solid in chameleon mode. A pit trap, because he still weighs the same. You get the idea.”

  “Remember when my abilities first began to manifest?” Dad had hooked me up to metabolic monitors and brain scans, and tried to figure out how I turned invisible, and then later how I managed to morph into an illusion of another being. “The tests you ran to try and figure out how I do what I do?”

  He nodded. “Your ability with electricity, both yours and your mother’s, is a physical phenomenon. There are scientific papers dealing with the different manifestations of electrogenesis. But we never did figure out your chameleon abilities. It has to be psychic. Even if we had a brain scan, though, I don’t know if we could interpret it.”

  “Yeah, well, but you never explained why cameras can’t see me either. When Mike and I were in Chicago, he had a theory. He wondered if it was a combination of the two mutations, the electrogenesis and the chameleon ability. I looked it up, and there’s a difference between electrogenesis and electrokinesis. But suppose I do both?”

  Dad looked thoughtful. “You know, we always tried to monitor you, your physiological processes, to see if anything changed when you cast your illusion, or whatever it is you do. I never tried to see if anything changed in the environment.”

  We went downstairs to his laboratory, where he set up several pieces of equipment. I watched him for about half an hour, then he turned to me.

  “Okay, do that blend-into-the-background thing.”

  I blurred my image and heard a soft burp from his computer, then a soft hum.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Do it again,” he ordered.

  I let myself become visible and the hum stopped. Then I blurred my image again, heard the little burp, and the hum.

  “What are you seeing?” I asked as I walked behind him to look at the computer screen. He had a dozen windows with different graphs displayed. Some of them didn’t show any activity, most showed static, but a couple of them showed they were recording something.

  “Well, I know more than I did before, but I still don’t understand it,” he said.

  “Will you answer my question? What is that?” I pointed at the screen, then realized my image was still blurred and he couldn’t see me. I unblurred, and he jumped. “What? You heard my voice, you knew I was here.”

  “It’s still a little unnerving when you just appear out of nothing like that.”

  I looked at the computer screen and the graph that had gone blank, like most of the others. I pointed at it. “What’s that one?”

  “Electromagnetic activity. That’s why most of the sensors,” he waved a finger at the different monitor screens, “showed only static interference.” He shrugged. “It still doesn’t explain how you disappear, or appear to change shape, but it would explain why a camera doesn’t see you.”

  “Dad, the guy who’s doing all the killing, he didn’t show on a security camera. He blew Carleton Weeks away in broad daylight, in front of witnesses. Two cameras aimed right at him only showed a slight distortion. Do you think he can project an image like I can?” It worried me that if the guy could walk around in disguise, he would be close to uncatchable.

  “I don’t know. Rumors of chameleons have been around for a long time. And, of course, legends of shape changers are ancient.”

  “But those are just fairy tales.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Are they?”

  “Daaad. That’s not funny. All those old stories depend on magic.”

  “And what’s the difference between magic and what you do?”

  I stared at him.

  “Magic is manipulation of the physical world using some sort of energy,” he said. “Using radio waves to transmit sound does the same thing. Clark’s Law. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  “But I’m not using any technology.”

  “I think the same principle applies. We don’t have the science to explain it, so it might as well be magic.”

  Chapter 4

  Two days later, I got a call from Pong. “One of my men was killed this morning at the university,” he said. “Can you go over there and connect with Inspector Donofrio?”

  “Okay. What makes you think it’s related to the other murders?”

  “He was assigned to one of Vice President Ruiz’s daughters, and she’s missing.”

  I processed that. “Is she a student?”

  “Victoria, age twenty. She’s a third-year.” He gave me the location.

  “Director Pong? Out of curiosity, why the sudden confidence in me?” Not that I was complaining, but it seemed like a major shift in his attitude from our first meeting.

  “I checked your references. Deputy Director Wilberforce at the CC recommended you very highly. And to be honest, Miss Nelson, I don’t have very many personnel with any experience dealing with the enclave.”

  “You think the killer is a mutant.”

  “Inspector Donofrio does.”

  Leaving a note for Nellie and Mike, I grabbed my bike and rode over to the university. Spotting the scene of the crime wasn’t hard. It must have been a slow morning, because at least a dozen cop cars—both city and university—were parked at the location Pong had given me, and twice that many cops were milling around trying to look like they were doing something important.

  It took a few minutes to find a detective who agreed to take me to Donofrio and the body. A large, burly man in a nice suit lay face down. The blood trail showed that he’d been dragged into the alley.

  Donofrio walked over. “Shot once in the back of the head. Very close range.”

  “And the girl?” I asked.

  He led me out of the alley to a woman’s shoulder bag lying on the sidewalk.

  “Have you searched it?”

  The inspector shook his head. “I’m waiting on a female constable. Department policy.”

  I figured out that staring at him with my mouth open probably wasn’t very productive. Sh
utting my mouth, I dug a pair of surgical gloves out of my own bag, knelt down, and started going through the purse. Wallet with picture ID. Victoria Ruiz, age twenty, pretty, with brown hair, olive skin and dark eyes. Phone. Makeup. Several other things, including a small bag of weed, a pipe, and condoms. Her tablet.

  “How long?”

  “We got the report about an hour ago. ME says the guy’s been dead for about two hours.”

  “So, she could be anywhere.”

  “Yeah. We have people searching the area.”

  At least forty people were at the scene—forensics, the medical examiner, detectives, uniformed cops. Most of the cops were talking to each other, leaning on their cars, smoking and drinking coffee.

  “You know, I’m not a trained professional like you guys,” I said, “but it’s fairly obvious she isn’t here. Don’t you think you should widen your search area?”

  Donofrio opened his mouth, then seemed to take in the scene. He called a detective over and said, “Spencer, tell those men to get off their asses and start canvassing the area. We have a murder and a missing girl.”

  Detective Spencer hurried over to the coffee klatch, and men scattered.

  “I’m glad I came along,” I said. “I assume everyone was waiting for a woman to show up and display some common sense, in addition to searching the purse.”

  The inspector gave me a look, but didn’t say anything.

  I checked the ID again, and saw the girl’s address was a fancy area in the suburbs northwest of the city. I pulled out my phone and called Pong.

  “We haven’t found Victoria. Did she live at home?”

  “No, an apartment near the university.” He gave me the address, which was only three blocks from the campus.

  Turning to Donofrio, I said, “I think someone should check her apartment. I doubt he’s carving her up in one of the campus washrooms.”

  He nodded, looked around, then said, “Let’s go. I don’t think I can add anything here. We can take my car.”

  “I have my motorcycle, and I don’t want to leave it,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”