by Diane Duane
“No problem at all,” Lee said, looking Hagen over nonjudicially for a second as he sat on the front of his desk. It had been six months now since the end of the Xainacom antitrust trials, and Hagen looked a little less harried, had put on a little weight—though it didn’t show that much on his big-boned six foot two.
He was well turned out as always, in a fashionable one piece suit that nonetheless betrayed its off-the-rack origins and its wearer’s too-busy-for-fittings attitude, looking as if someone had applied it to Hagen with a shovel. The dark shaggy hair and the little, close-set, thoughtful eyes in the man’s blunt face always made Lee wonder if Hagen had any Midgarthr blood in him, and whether the human seeming might be a courtesy-covering over something more basic, a formal suit allowed to fall away for short periods when the Moon was right.
“It’s been a little while,” Hagen said. “You two been all right?”
“Busy,” Gelert said.
Hagen grinned, and again Lee saw bear, and had to put the image aside. “Here, too,” Hagen said.
Lee nodded. At the end of a legal case lasting years, Xainacom had been forced into a massive corporate divestiture in the Earth universe. The truth was that the defeat for the company was a minor one—the market in Earth’s universe being nothing like the size of those in Xainese home space, spread across thousands of planets—and when the appeals process was exhausted, the “home office” hadn’t considered the affair worth going to war over. Xainacom Earth had been fractured into a number of still-huge communications and media-related companies, and those of its competitors who had spent vast sums of money assisting with the prosecution were now circling the staggering survivors with an eye to either absorption or destruction. Of all the competitors, ExTel was by far the biggest, and it was wasting no time assuring itself of the best pickings among the divestitures. Lee could believe that Hagen, as the company’s CEO for extracontinual affairs, had been a lot more than “busy.”
“We got a call from Matt Carathen just now,” Lee said. “He suggested that you had asked for our services.”
“That’s right. Omren dil’Sorden is one of my local people. I don’t have time for some anonymous flunky at Parker to fiddle around with it and maybe get a result, maybe not—I want this thing cleaned up before it gets high-profile enough to make the company’s PR people have to start spinning God knows what to the national press. We have enough going on around here at the moment. So right now, I need Parker’s best, and right now, that looks like you.”
Lee smiled gently at the flattery, while thinking that “cleaned up” was a strange way to put it, but she supposed she could see his point. “What was dil’Sorden’s position, exactly?” she said.
“R&D,” Hagen said. “He was working on network development, especially intercontinually gatewayed links—you’ll have to check his personnel records for the details; the technologies he was working on were still pretty theoretical. They could have been very important, though, and I want whoever did this identified and locked up.”
“Do you have any suspicions?” Gelert said.
The irony in his tone caught Hagen just short enough to make him laugh. “You mean Xainacom?” he said.
“I doubt they’d be so obvious. No, they’re being good enough losers…insofar as they’ve actually lost anything but face. It’s the other companies hereabouts I’d wonder about. We’re the biggest target left standing, and if you check dil’Sorden’s intelligence file, you’ll see references to a couple of failed headhunts in the last few months—ConAmalgam and Vmax, I think. There might have been people working there who thought the man better off dead than alive and happy to be working for us, though I wish I didn’t find it so easy to believe.”
“Well, if the evidence suggests anything of the sort, we’ll certainly have our minds open to the possibility,” Lee said.
Gelert stretched a little on his pad. “There’s one thing I’d like to clear up,” he said. “That ExTel’s impending acquisition of Maermen GmbH, which was Xainacom Europe until about five weeks ago, doesn’t have anything to do with your urgency about this murder investigation.”
Hagen said nothing for an entire second, smiling all the while like a still image. “Nothing whatsoever,” he said. “The markets are always full of rumors, Gelert; if half of them were worth half what they were supposed to be, we’d all be rich.”
“Of course,” Gelert said.
“Mr. Hagen,” Lee said, working on how to phrase this. “ExTel employs enough Alfen across its facilities that you know better than most what kind of problems a party can run into when looking for even very basic personal information about them, at least from sources in Alfheim.”
Hagen’s expression went sour. “Tell me about it.”
“Naturally you’ll be passing on your corporate profile on dil’Sorden to us. But we may need to call on you during the course of this investigation for information that might be…more difficult to access.”
Hagen looked uncomfortable, and held that still-image look again for a moment or two. In shadowy blue, a line of stick-and-curl Palmerrand characters ran across the bottom of Lee’s field of vision, transcribing the words Gelert was subvocalizing right now: Let’s see how high he blows.
“I take your meaning,” Hagen said. “If it comes to that, we’ll talk. Meanwhile, I’ll see to it that his personnel file is on your desk in a few minutes.”
“That’s fine,” Lee said. “Thanks for the assistance. We’ll be in touch.”
She waved the link dead, then looked over at Gelert. “Did you think he was going to say ‘no’ right then?” Gelert said. “Because I did.”
“I was wondering, myself,” Lee said. “And in the unsubtlety department, you’re certainly batting strong today. What was that business about Maermen?”
“He tried to blow it off as a rumor,” Gelert said, and grinned. “Not that he thought I bought it, either. He knows my sources are better than that. Lee, Hagen’s boss, the president of ExTel, is on a rampage right now! After eleven years of frustration, he’s finally got the biggest shopping cart in the world, given him by the UN&ME itself, and he’s running up and down the aisles grabbing every available chunk of Xainacom that’s got ‘50% OFF!’ marked on it. So the word has gone down the line to his minions…especially Hagen. His cash liquidity is stretched to the limit, and he does not want anything in the news right now, anything, that could make his company look even slightly bad and impair his credit rating. Especially not a murder.”
Lee got up and stretched again, then started kneading at her back. “Why especially?”
“It’s too personal. Portfolio managers and stock analysts are timid creatures.” Gelert smiled, showing teeth. “Show them a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, and they see a thunderstorm and dump all their wheat futures. Show them blood and they faint, then sell everything short when they come to. The publicity surrounding a highprofile murder can start all kinds of paranoia working in the people who do the valuation on your company’s stock, and if there’s anything Hagen’s boss doesn’t need right this minute, it’s a slump in his share price. The asset managers will be praying for a quick fix or a crime passionelle.” Gelert got up from his pad and stretched fore and aft. “And you know what you should be looking for? A new mattress.”
Lee stopped rubbing her back. “Fatherhood is turning you into a real pain,” she said. “Let me go change into my flats, and we’ll go sniff us a murder.”
*
The black-and-whites were dotted around the intersection of Eighteenth and Melrose when they got there, the yellow tapes in place stretched between palm tree and parking meter and mailbox and anti-ram stanchion, screaming POLICE! DO NOT CROSS! in various major languages of Earth and the Worlds. The street itself was absolutely typical of this part of Ellay—blacktop four cars wide, patched halfheartedly a couple of years ago and shimmering in Mondrian gray/black/gray down the length of it toward Santa Monica Boulevard; short green curbside lawn already going brown, in place
s, in this too-arid spring; wide white sidewalks, half the slabs cracked; bungalow houses in white stucco with red or brown tile roofs, ornamental palms and cacti bristling here and there, interspersed with poinsettia trailing splashes of dilapidated red; doorways gated and locked against the thugs from the next neighborhood over. Over everything the hot blue sky arched, the white sun in it standing lunchtime-high, and the erstwhile inhabitants of the black-and-whites stood around in the meager shadow of the royal palms nearest the corner and tried to look as if they were doing something. Near them, half across a driveway, was a white tarp, and under that, a blue one.
Lee and Gelert had left their company hov parked on Wilshire. They walked around the corner and saw it all laid out for them, and as they did, one of the shapes standing in shadow looked up and saw them: the only one of the people standing there likely to get much good of the shadow, being nearly as skinny as a palm tree himself. Jim Blessington came stalking along toward them in the sun, head down, shoulders bent as if the light had weight, the blue LAPD coverall glancing the sunlight back from rank patches and the rolled-back hood. Only as he got close did he look up. “Mz. Enfield,” he said.
“Mr. Blessington,” Lee said. “How’s the family?”
“Doing well, thank you. Marta turned three last week.”
“I can’t believe it,” Lee said. “It seems like about half an hour ago that we flew Michelle over to Cedars. The boys all right?”
“As good as they can be with the Birthday Girl ruling the roost.” Blessington grinned a little, then nodded at Gelert: Gel tilted his head, flipped his ears forward. It was all the greeting they ever exchanged. Jim worked professionally enough with madrín but found it hard to socialize with them, and only his tremendous skill as a detective, and his “kill rate,” had kept this from becoming a disciplinary issue.
“So what have we got, Jim?” Lee said, as they walked toward the tarp.
“We’re hoping you’ll tell us. Body’s at LACC right now. As far as we can tell, the guy came around the corner from Melrose, walked down toward his car. Someone waited for him…” Jim made a “blooey” gesture with his hands. “Left the scene. On foot, we think…but your reading, we hope, will confirm.”
“We’ll see.”
Gelert paused. “Blessington,” he said, “you know that this is some damn political thing from Upstairs. We’re not needed here.”
“Damn well I know it,” Jim muttered. “Nice you know it, too. ”
“Wanted to make sure you knew we knew it.”
“Always said you were a gentleman,” Jim said, “as houn’ dogs go.”
Lee took no official notice of any of this. “Jim,” she said, “any sign of the murder weapon as yet? It would do us the most good.”
“We’re conducting a house-to-house. Don’t think we’re going to find it here, though. I’m betting it’s fifty miles away in a dry wash somewhere, or a lot farther off than that. Meanwhile, we’ve already been all over this area for physical forensics purposes: you don’t have to worry about fouling anything.”
The three of them paused by the spread-out tarp. The other uniforms, two men and a woman, nodded to Lee and Gelert as they paused by the tarp. ‘The samples have gone down to Parker?” Lee said.
“Yeah. You want me to move people back?” Blessington said.
Gelert gave him a very straight-faced look. “What are we, a kindergarten class? We can tell your people from the perps just fine. Maybe they want to get back in the shade, though. No reason for them to boil their brains.”
“Huh,” said Blessington, one of the seemingly null noises he made that Lee had learned to translate as approval. He waved a hand casually at them and headed back to the palm trees.
Lee stood there over the tarp for a moment, Gelert beside her, and closed her eyes. Madam, we’re on Your business now, she thought, as she executed the series of tiny jaw-clenches and neck movements that brought her implant online and started it recording. Be in what we see, for the innocent’s sake…
She waited a few seconds for the “aura” that came with the onset of judicial sight: a blurring around the edges, not quite a rainbowing as of visible light but a sense of multiple possibilities. Lee leaned over and pulled the tarp away.
The bloodstain had sunk deep into the cracked white cement of the sidewalk, running down the cracks and the joins between the slabs. Lee blinked, her eyes watering at the strength of the impression of what had happened here, still so recent. The body lay there already, drowning out everything else. No, she thought. Earlier.
The vision resisted her, lying there with limbs splayed, its chest shot away, seeping. Death in any given spot always impressed itself powerfully on the matter there, making it hard to perceive any life sharing the same spot in time and space: and it was life that Lee needed to see now. She did not turn her eyes away from the body, but held her gaze steady, waiting for the shift. Slowly it came, but not before she’d had to spend a good long while looking at the chiseled, classic beauty of Omren dil’Sorden’s face. It had been much easier, last night, seeing it in just a glimpse, on the news, before she knew his name.
Lee held her pity in check, waited. It was not pity she needed now, but paraperception, and slowly it came. The body was no longer lying in front of her, but falling to the ground past her left shoulder.
Through the silvery mist of uncertainties implied by the movement of the air molecules between her and the murdered man, Lee felt the wind and concussion of the second shotgun blast as it hit dil’Sorden. A second, faded perception overlaid her first: the last tattering impressions leaking from dil’Sorden’s sensorium as he fell. Lee took note of the perception, but didn’t expect much from it. Hydrostatic shock, nerve damage and blood loss, let alone the overriding disbelief and horror at what was happening, had left dil’Sorden’s own view of his last moments nothing much more than a terrible dark blur, with a long wet jagged bloom of brightness laid across it at the very end, the remnant of a last glimpse of the nearby streetlight as he went down.
Slowly, because the moment resisted quick movement and was likely to be denatured by it, Lee turned a little, looked over her shoulder. The fall was in process again, from a slightly earlier point in time. There were only so many of these reversals she could induce without draining that “site” or point of view dry: she had to see as much as possible in each of them. Here was the first shotgun blast, from a little farther down the sidewalk. Lee looked at the shape holding the gun, but from this “angle” could only see clearly what dil’Sorden had seen clearly; and that was little. Eyes, then the barrel of the gun. The shape itself was far more uncertain, a dark blur. Still, not a tall man: he barely came up to dil’Sorden’s shoulder. Stocky, perhaps a hundred kilograms, a head that looked almost rectangular. Turn a little, she willed him, but from this angle there was no profile, or not enough, the features all lost in darkness and blur.
The emotional context was starting to force its way through the merely physical. This was inevitable, but Lee resisted it for the moment and concentrated on seeing. What she saw was no longer a fall, but a run, the tall slender blur running around the corner, away from the light of Melrose, garish through the Heisenberg blur. The second shape, the stocky man, running after, bringing up the sawed-off shotgun.
Lee watched as they ran toward her, seeing the first blast again, and saw dil’Sorden’s arms fling up as if in surprise as he stumbled; but before the second blast, she turned away from the fall she knew was already beginning, and saw the second shape come around the corner.
But not all the way around. Close to the wall he stopped, watched, a shadow. He was in sharper focus than the others, the uncertainties about him less, though still present. Tall, taller even than dil’Sorden; a slender man, erect, very still. After a moment he slipped back around the corner, out of sight.
Lee knelt there and considered going after him. That had its dangers: pull too much energy out of the forensic “field” of the area right now and it could be exhauste
d for further investigation later. I have enough to go on with as a start, she thought: after we’ve pulled his profile and coordinated with physical forensics, I can have another run.
She closed her eyes, let the state of investigative vision lapse, and looked around her again, closing down the recording her implant was making and adding her digital “signature” to it as it closed. The sealed record would feed itself wirelessly into the city judicial-data system as soon as she got near a transponder: it might be doing so now if there was a ‘sponder in one of the black-and-whites, which seemed likely. Blessington was standing not too far away: as Lee replaced the tarp and got up, brushing herself off, he walked over.
“One triggerman,” she said. “Human. A hundred seventy centimeters or so, stocky, very square-built, say a hundred kilos. Wearing a business suit of some kind, to judge from the color and the contour of the artifact.”
“Good, that’s good,” Blessington said.
“But look for someone else, too,” Lee said. “Alfen. Tall, say two hundred ten centimeters. Thin. Not muscular. Another business-suit type, but more elegantly cut.”
“Aren’t they all,” Blessington said rather sourly.
Lee smiled slightly. “Maybe just a witness,” she said, “but somehow I don’t think so. I’d see if physical forensics finds any trace of his involvement on the body…fibers or whatever. They might give us a lead that would be useful.”
“That’s confirmed already,” Blessington said. “The guys at Parker have picked up some of that. And Gelert smelled him straight off.”
