A dying clue would have been better left on paper. An electrical blip between M. Pargeter’s death and their finding her body would have blanked out the letters on her screen. But she might not have felt able to handle a pencil. And she might have intended to printout a hardcopy. Too bad she hadn’t gotten far enough to tab “save,” “print,” or “direct personal communication.”
Who could even say for sure that she understood she’d be dead within moments? Who could ever prove how clearly or fuzzily her brain had been functioning?
If it was a dying clue, or the beginning of a “why did you do it?”—which would amount to the same thing—at least it was simple and direct. No mental confusion there, by that interpretation. Just a little motor confusion with tabbing the keys. It was the call for counseling theory that required the victim to have been suffering from some mental confusion.
But which was more natural in a state of shock and fatal trauma? A clear brain or a confused one?
Maybe the best thing Lestrade could do would be try to follow Lieutenant Carter’s advice and take a few offduty hours for herself.
She might have made it, if she’d had different screens for entertainment and computer functions. But both her screens—the one in the living room and the one in the bedroom—were all-purpose. She sat at the living-room screen and tabbed up the evening’s broadcast menu, stared for an indeterminate number of minutes at the first screenful of live sports events, blanked the function and started calling up public biographical data files.
Dah Smythe had graduated from West Central High School, Indianapolis, in 2063. That fit the initials on Lucy’s class ring, so Lestrade could pretty safely guess that they had gone to the same learning factory. She called up the yearbook and found five Lucies in the class of ’63. She got a printout for each of them and started running their names through the Indianapolis obituaries and news indexes for 2063.
Lucy Bhargava Swensdatter was the only one who had died that year. Beneath the wheels of a hit-and-run Sanyosi Smoothcruiser, license plate ZIPFLAK. The car turned out to have been driven by one Smoky Henderson Cutlass-Supreme. The accident had happened while M. Swensdatter was out walking with classmate Andrew “Andy” Dimaggio Smythe. Just as he had told them.
What Smythe hadn’t told them was that Cutlass-Supreme claimed the boy had deliberately pushed the girl onto the road in front of the oncoming vehicle when it was too late for the driver to react with any good effect, and that it was the shock of this that made him drive on instead of stopping and waiting to be arrested.
That byte of data hadn’t gotten into the public news coverage. Lestrade was almost surprised it hadn’t been stricken from the court record on the objection of the prosecuting attorney. The court must have understood that leaving it in would do the defendant more harm than good. After all, between a grief-stricken young basketball star and a fancy-class hit-and-run driver with a record of speeding and DWI, which one was the jury going to believe? Why ask? The hit-and-run violation alone, regardless of any mitigating circumstances, would have cost Cutlass-Supreme the right to a motor vehicle operator’s license for the rest of his life. And a good thing, considering his record. Why not just find him also guilty of killing a fellow human being while going 20 kph or more over the speed limit while mildly intoxicated? Which in these Reformed States counted as murder and carried the same price label.
All that had been five years ago. There was no public databanks record of Cutlass-Supreme appealing his sentence, but he and his lawyers might still be working on it. From prison, he had reregistered his first and final names as Pippin Micawber, which looked like a step in the direction of tugging at the jury’s heartstrings next time. He’d need all the strategy he could muster. They’d have to go on some kind of perceptional plea: what his eyes had seen and his brain interpreted as a push had actually been the girl stumbling and the boy trying to catch her before she fell onto the roadway, making it an unavoidable mishap all around. Might work, if they could also convince the new jury that the 85 kph his speedometer recorder showed between 16:21 and 16:23 hours on the fatal day had resulted, as he claimed, from his reaction to the accident. That would put his car clock out of synch with Smythe’s watch, but where could you find any two timepieces in actual perfect agreement? The fastest his recorder showed until 16:21 that afternoon had been 72 kph from 16:04 to 16:09. At 16:20 it had clocked at 60, a mere five kph above the posted limit for that stretch. And his blood alcohol content had been nil when he finally surrendered, three hours after the accident, claiming he was just on the way to turn himself in.
It might have been nice of Smythe to cover by saying that Lucy had stumbled and he’d put out his arms to catch her, rather than by denying Cutlass-Supreme’s story blank out.
Lestrade jabbed off the computer function, blipped around at random in the arts channels until she caught the Aspen Summer Opera House’s new production of Reagan’s Third Term, with a youthful tenor who looked like Caruso Estronzo, and let Act II make a background for her thoughts.
She didn’t scry. She couldn’t scry. Her mother had never been able to scry. Nor had her maternal grandparents. Grandmother Carmichael had even used to say there was no more use in that talent than there was in the Christians’ speaking in tongues, until Grandpa Carmichael’s mother-in-law scried the mob in Valparaiso and forewarned Grandpa Carmichael to stay away. Then Grandmother C. changed her mind about scrying, while Grandpa took to complaining that if he hadn’t been warned, he could have been on hand to help Starwalker Silverstairs or die with him.
During the worst week of Rosemary’s childhood, that time in fourth grade when she stood accused of stealing Candy Goulandris Ivanhoe’s ugly locket, and everyone outside her own family and their closest friends seemed sure she’d really done it, her mother had come to her room one night and given her the same crystal ball, about the size of a cherry, in which Great-Grandmother had foreseen the Valparaiso mob. “If you ever do scry, Rosie mine, I’d guess it’ll be in this.”
Sorry, Mother, it wasn’t. Not that week, not ever. I still have it somewhere, but I stopped looking into it years ago.
And all right, Starwalker Silverstairs the Great, if you didn’t see fit to help that little nine-year-old girl clear her name by showing her what really happened to Candy’s blasted necklace, then why did your so-called Scrying Mug work for me today?
Of course, Great-Grandmother’s crystal hadn’t been made by Silverstairs. It had supposedly come down from ancient Egypt, though who could ever test that?
If it really had been the dratted mug, and not some late-blossoming power of her own, fine. Rosemary Lestrade had no desire at all for scrying or any other of those powers Mama Windcrystal called “gifts.” Just extra contraband she’d have a headache keeping hidden. Yes, true, in a number of states pollies were accepting help from parapsychics. Even sometimes letting them onto the volunteer list. The volunteer list. As unpaid consultants whose opinions the salaried regulars were free to take or laugh at.
Not her, thank you! She hadn’t devoted her life and ambition ever since fourth grade to getting where she was now, in order to throw it away for a crystal ball and part-time volunteer consultant’s shared desk in some state where they accepted magist consultants as volunteers. She’d chosen her final name and she was sticking with it, by the Lady God! Another plodding, by-the-guidelines polly, getting crimes solved by the slow, careful, uninspired drudgework method. Good-by, Holmes, you razzmatazzler, interested in the problems and not the people ...
Could it have been hypnotism? Windcrystal had a touch of that ability. But hypnotism had been overrated. Even doubters, when they succumbed, succumbed because, somewhere where they didn’t recognize it, deep down they wanted to try the sensation. Lestrade had never been susceptible, even when her conscious mind had seemed willing. Today at Windcrystal’s apartment she guessed she had been, if anything, even less willing to succumb to the magist’s hypnotic m
agnetism than Holmes Harvard himself could have been.
Actually, the convention delegate’s Arapaho costume and the state outline on her badge had been about the most impressive bytes of Windcrystal’s test scrying, not the flaws Harvard called them. Unless, of course, Windcrystal had been watching the screencast of the Egalitarian Convention up until the time they came chiming at her door, and knew about where it had gotten. The Egalitarians polled the states geographically, didn’t they? Wasn’t it the Republicrats who did it alphabetically?
And then, of course, it could have been a kind of subconscious self-hypnosis on Lestrade’s part, seeing a man smash Debbi Pargeter’s head. Statistically, more a man’s kind of m.o. than a woman’s, even a strong-armed woman’s who chose her clothing to enhance the pudgy momma effect and used silver wash on her hair. She wasn’t as tall as Smythe, but Harvard and the prosecuting attorneys could argue that M. Pargeter had been sitting or kneeling on something, or otherwise trick the angles of infliction, both vase and knife wounds, to come out to their own preference. Plenty of courts had condemned people on evidence that should logically have cleared them.
Little as she liked Windcrystal Crowley, Lestrade had still wanted the murderer to be somebody else. She had seen Pargeter’s apartment, Pargeter’s body ... she’d had all the raw material to manufacture a waking dream of the crime the way her own brain was theorizing it. What she’d seen didn’t even tally in all respects with what Windcrystal reported seeing. Lestrade had seen the concussion to the head, Windcrystal the stabbing. Compatible, but not identical.
By Craft reasoning, that could argue for the authenticity of both visions, as opposed to the theory that the younger woman had simply espered into some of the older one’s thoughtwaves. But by practical standards, it wasn’t evidence. Not only wasn’t it evidence, but to reveal it to anybody would cast immediate doubt on Lestrade’s reality-perceiving qualifications to be on the police payroll. Test scores notwithstanding.
As for the resemblance between Andy Dah Smythe and the man Lestrade had seen in Windcrystal’s mug, the policewoman’s opinion was worth no more than that of any other eyewitness would have been. The resemblance could too easily have been manufactured in her memories after she saw Windcrystal’s sketch. If she had seen the sketch first, then it would have inspired the way her mind pictured Pargeter’s killer. Or she could have already associated the name Andy on Pargeter’s date calendar with the city’s currently most famous Andy. The skeptics had you any way you turned.
What she had seen in the so-called Scrying Mug meant nothing. Worse than nothing.
But what about what she had just read in the public news morgues and trial records? What about a teenage woman dying beneath a moving car? A fancy-class man serving a life sentence for something that possibly wasn’t his fault, because society had its own preconceptions about whose word was reliable and whose wasn’t?
What about Starwalker Silverstairs dying like Hypatia at the hands of a small mob, and the cops of the 2020s hardly bothering to make even a token investigation?
Did Windcrystal Gorlock Crowley really deserve to become another martyr?
Lestrade was still shaking. Almost twenty-four years old, and couldn’t stop shaking tonight. Over the deaths of Lucy Swensdatter and Debbi Pargeter. She made herself a cup of tea. It didn’t help much.
She hadn’t done a personal ceremony since before her university years. She decided to try one tonight. Not for power or energy, just for a little bit of healing calm so she could get to sleep.
She tabbed off her screen, took a bubble bath, and put on a clean nightgown. Having no ritual equipment around, not even candle or incense, nothing but Great-Grandmother’s cherry-sized crystal around somewhere (but doggone if she’d dig that out tonight), she turned her biggest flat-bottomed mixing bowl upside down in the middle of the living-room shag carpet and draped a clean dinner napkin over it. On top of this improvised altar she put her plastiglass statuette of St. Brigid with its cordless lightstand. She tabbed on the light, setting the colordisk to rotate. She thought about using a butter knife or maybe her notecom stylus for an athame’, but decided against it. The aim was to get an infusion, not a focus.
She rolled or tabbed off all the lights except Brigid’s and paced her circle clockwise around the makeshift altar, imagining her steps leaving a line of white light. (Some fanciers claimed to be able to see their lines. It was all she could do to imagine hers.) She called on the four quarters, standing just inside her circle to its north, east, south, and west edges in turn and thinking invocations at them under the names of archangels: Michael, Gabriel, Azrael, and Israfel.
Then she sat teahouse style in front of the altar and thought about roots of light twining down from her spine through the intervening floors to anchor her in the earth, and branches of light growing up out of her head to connect her with the sky. Hoping that the people in the apartments below and above didn’t get tangled in all those invisible roots and branches, she stared at the statuette of the ancient goddess turned saint and then “defrocked” and returned to the reservoir of universal myth, until her eyes slowly closed. ...
When she became aware of herself again, she was swaying back and forth as though pushed from within, her arms were Y-ing forward above her head, and she was chanting, “Ka-li! Ka-li!” over and over, almost loud enough to threaten the sound-soak of the apartment building.
That scared her. Not only had it never happened to her before, but Kali ... No matter how you might learn to appreciate that goddess intellectually ... rebirth as well as death, time in both its negative and positive aspects ... Kali had to remain one of the most frightening, unforgiving, gruesome of all the Lady’s masks. To a Western mind, anyway.
Shaken, she snapped off the light beneath St. Brigid and just remembered to shatter her light circle with one jerk of imagination and to mumble a good-by to Israfel, Azrael, Gabriel, and Michael. Legs prickling, she groped her way to bed.
She got to sleep sooner than she might have expected. But then, she’d forgotten to check the time. She might have been calling on Kali for a couple of seconds, or half the night.
* * * *
Drinking too much coffee, Stan Carter waited. Harvard got to work before 09:45 maybe four times a year; today, he clocked in at 08:58. The latest Lestrade had been since starting a few months ago was 09:25; most mornings, she got to the building before 08:30 and found computer checkwork to do, ignoring warnings about sneaking in more than her budgeted number of workhours, before she actually clocked in a few minutes after her senior partner. Today she didn’t reach the station house until almost ten hundred, as if aware that Harvard had already requested and been granted a new partner on a “temporary” basis.
It was 10:03 when she entered Stan’s office. “M. Tiompkins at the front desk said you wanted to see me, sir?”
“‘Stan’ is still just fine, Rose. Sit down.”
She sat down, hesitated a moment, then deliberately leaned back into the moldfoam chair before asking, “Is it mainly about Sergeant Harvard or the Pargeter case, Stan?”
“Both.” Was there something about her this morning? Something ... more so than usual? Well, it was to be expected. “Harvard filed for the arrest warrant last night, picked it up this morning, and went off half an hour ago with Palumbo to collect the magist.”
She nodded. “Harvard and Palumbo should hit it off together like Holmes and Watson. I’d like to show you some printchip copies I made this morning to save having to call them up again.”
“Regarding the death of Lucy Bhargava Swensdatter and conviction of Smoky Henderson Cutlass-Supreme?” It was his turn to nod. “I looked it up myself. Last night. It isn’t enough in itself ...”
“You may know more about this than I do,” she said. “I prefer to watch fullcourt game coverage. Does Dah Smythe really wear that class ring in his sweatband during games?”
“I’m not sure.
” Stan thought for a moment. “He wears a sweatband, all right, but I can’t remember ... Yes, there is some kind of decoration on it, but I think the announcer once or twice called it a ‘lucky patch.’ Or was that on Pete Pazlowski’s band?”
“Because it seems to me that wearing a class ring like that would be dangerous in a game. Even a woman’s size. It’s heavy enough to aggravate any chance blow to the head. Easier to lose in the heat of play, too. I think Smythe was just desperate not to let us borrow it, afraid of letting any dried blood we could dig out of it go to the lab. I’d also like to check that laundry where he took his jacket. If we can find it. Would he take it to his regular place?”
“If he was smart, he would,” said Carter. “It’d cause more comment somewhere else.”
“Maybe there are a few disadvantages to being a big local sports star, after all. His regular place is Li Clene’s. I checked that this morning, too. In the directory. It turned out that I didn’t need to look very far.” She clicked a printchip into her notecom, tabbed a few keys, and slid it across his desk with the page duplicated on the notescreen. Li Clene’s had a quarter-screen ad with the slogan across the top: “We Do Honorable Laundry of Andy. D. Smythe.”
He slid the notecom back to her and stood up. “We can check Li Clene’s on the way. I’m assuming you don’t mind having me instead of Harvard for a while.”
“Gladly. I’d just as soon never have to tag along with him again.”
“Don’t worry, Rosemary, it looks mutual.”
“Then I’ve gotten one fringe benefit out of this mess, anyway.” She stood up and pocketed her notecom.
“We’ll have to chart you a new permanent senior in a day or two. Meanwhile, one of the fringes of being ‘assistant deputy’ is that I still get to give myself a field assignment now and then.” He patted his pocket. “I also took the liberty of drawing us a warrant. In case we can find solid enough grounds to use it.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 53
