M. McTavish added, “I keep abreast of world and national politics. Otherwise, I agree with Thoreau. Repetitive stuff, the news. Boring as hades.”
“No, I disagree with you a little, sir,” said Peter. “The news of science, finance, and culture is the important and interesting data, not the news of politics.”
“Well, you’re still young,” said M. McTavish. “You’ll learn. Just remember, my boy, I never said politics wasn’t as boring as all the rest of it. I only like to cast an educated vote now and again, that’s all.”
“I follow sports,” said M. Damascene, sitting forward in almost the same posture as M. Lestrade’s. Michael Adams Damascene was a very handsome man. Much handsomer, really, than Peter. M. Damascene looked exactly like the hero of a good romantic story—just this side of thirty or possibly a few years older, olive complexion, glossy black hair, magnificent black brows over eyes that were startlingly blue in their clear, mother-of-pearl whiteness, proud nose, and strong yet sensitive lips. Poor Peter had blue eyes, too, but for the rest, much as I liked him from the very beginning, I’m afraid he looked just a very little bit washed out and blubbery.
By now everyone else had spoken and they were watching me for my answer. I said, “The last thing I heard about was the strike in the Asteroid Colonies. I haven’t heard or read any news at all this weekend, of course, because of the conference.”
“Five people, and not one voice of interest in sensational and criminal news.” M. Lestrade nodded again. “Modern times. In other eras, people like Jack the Ripper, the unknown Borden ax murderer, Mad Dr. Macumber, and so on, didn’t just make police history, they made household news. I call the modern attitude a lot healthier. On the other hand ...”
As she paused, Peter said excitedly, “Wait a nanosecond, M. Lestrade! Wouldn’t ‘the Borden ax murderer’ be Lizzie? Why call her ‘unknown’?”
“The jury found Lizzie Borden ‘not guilty,’ M. ...” The policewoman leaned in his direction to read his UNAGA name badge. “M. Heilemann. I think contemporary opinion framed her afterward because people found it’s more comfortable to believe a murderer is known and had a specific motive against specific victims, than it is to worry about an unknown homicidal maniac on the loose. But I probably shouldn’t say. Historical crimes aren’t my concern. Just current ones. The point I started to make was that if we were like our ancestors, even our grandparents, all I’d have had to say would have been ‘the Blue Thread Killer,’ and you’d have known instantly what I was talking about.”
M. Damascene puckered his brow and said, “The Blue Thread Killer ...” as if it chimed a faint bell. The rest of us looked blank.
M. Lestrade drank more of her coffee and said, “I think I’m going to tell you people a little more than you could net for yourselves from the public news channels, if you wanted to. Not much more, just a little.”
She swallowed more coffee before going on: “The first identifiable Blue Thread murder happened on or about August eighteenth, Twenty Seventy-six, a little more than two years ago, in New Greenwich, New York. The victim was Lady Candace Williams Fitzharding. A young woman of twenty-six, pretty, intelligent, marginally fancy class with a perception score of seventy-three over twenty-seven. Plenty of family fortune, but she was trying to make her own place as an artist. A friend found her body in her apartment. No signs of a struggle anywhere but on the daybed, where she had apparently been strangled with a cowboy neckerchief that was still knotted around her neck, and then stripped otherwise naked. Whatever garments she had been wearing immediately before death had been removed from the premises.
“What eventually made this identifiable as the first known Blue Thread killing was that several X’s were stitched into her skin with bright blue thread. The news channels report them as being on the backs of her hands. I won’t tell you where they really are, or exactly how many there always are. We have to keep that secret in case of copycat killings.
“From the first it looked like the start of a series, but that wasn’t sure until October twenty-fourth, Twenty Seventy-six, when the body of Marquis Henri Skeemer Dupleix was found floating in a park pond in Dallas, Texas. Again, the cowboy neckerchief knotted around the throat. Again, the blue thread X’s stitched on the naked body, in all the same places. Milord Dupleix had lived fifty-six years and made a name for himself by scattering his family fortune around to poor children and indigent workers. He was thoroughly fancy class, last perception score thirteen over eighty-seven, and that had been back in ’Sixty-one. Lived in a world of noblesse scatters largesse.
“The next one was the Marchesa Ottavina Sandatore di Napoli. Eighty-seven years old, regarded as a local character in the neighborhood of Boise, Idaho. Her fortune was about used up, and she’d been living more or less as a recluse for more than twenty years. She’d been dead for at least four days when her bi-weekly cleaning woman found the body in the sixty-year-old, fifty-room palazzo that was already crumbling for lack of upkeep. The Marchesa had been lucky in one way. This time the killer used a quick and relatively gentle poison. Chances are, she just dozed off quietly into death without guessing she was being murdered. But the body was naked and the blue stitches were there, all of them, identically placed.
“The Marchesa di Napoli died in late December Twenty Seventy-six or early January Twenty Seventy-seven. The next victim was Laird Robert Douglas Stewart, bludgeoned and then strangled in Durham, North Carolina, March Twelfth, Twenty Seventy-seven. But there isn’t much point in going on with the catalog detail by detail. In all, to date there have been at least eighteen Blue Thread murders.” M. Lestrade paused to finish her coffee.
M. Damascene cocked his left eyebrow and said, “Should we understand that you’ve been hard at work on all eighteen, Sergeant Lestrade?” He was close enough to read the rank on her police badge. “For more than two years?” he went on. “Ever since the first such finding?”
She shook her head. “I got involved last Tuesday. The latest known Blue Thread killing happened in Vincennes, Indiana. The Grafin Hilda Grunewald von Drachenfels, age ninety-seven. Except that she still had a sizable fortune, lived more like a grandma duck than an old recluse, and was discovered within a day after dying, it was more or less a rerun of the Marchesa di Napoli murder. Fast poison.”
“And you’re a Vincennes officer!” Mrs. Peacock said triumphantly. “I thought I heard Indiana in your voice!”
“Not Vincennes. Ahbeenahbee. Close enough. More than half the victims have been fancy class or borderline fancy class, including Grafin von Drachenfels, and down in Southern Indiana they like assigning me to fancy-class cases. Officially, I’m investigating only the Vincennes murder, but in a workline like ours we do all the networking and datasharing we can.”
Peter said, “But if you’re investigating only the Indiana case, why come all the way here to Salt Lake? And ask for Lady Warwick, who comes from Upper California?”
“And not only me,” I hurried to remind them all. “A lot of other UNAGA Conference attendees, too, that her partner is looking up.”
“Salt Lake City,” the policewoman replied, “because of its genealogical resources. So many of the older microtexts still waiting to be entered in the National Databank. Lady Warwick because of coincidence. As far as I can see at this point, it’s more or less coincidence that your United North American Genealogical Association is holding its annual conference so soon after Grafin von Drachenfels was murdered, but as long as you’re here ... Just between us, I’m moonlighting. Contacting certain of your members on my own time.”
“But why?” said Mrs. Peacock. “Oh, is this the ‘against your guidelines’ part? Well, you see, now you’ve simply got to tell us anyway. It would be cruel not to!”
Sergeant Lestrade looked at Mrs. Peacock. Then she checked her coffee cup, saw it was empty, and put it down on the coffee table. “I’ll tell you this much,” she said slowly. “The clearest thing I can find
the victims to have had in common is that all of them had registered personal names and titles of nobility to which they had ... let’s say, hereditary claims that could possibly be called into question.”
“All of them?” said M. Damascene.
“All of them except Freddie Harrison Jones. He didn’t sport any title and never claimed any pedigree longer than a summer night. But I think he was the victim of a copycat killer. He had blue X’s on the backs of his hands, nowhere else, and it was a different shade of blue. On the other hand, I suspect that two earlier murders in Twenty Seventy-six were both the work of our Blue Thread Killer, before he or she started using the needle and thread. Both victims wore titles and final names they may not have had any hereditary right to register, and both were strangled, though not with cowboy kerchiefs, and then stripped naked.”
“How can you tell?” said Peter. “That is—I mean the color? Does—doesn’t the thread get…bloody?”
“Less than you might expect,” the policewoman answered. “Sometimes the killer pushes the needle through only the top layer or two of skin. Sometimes he or she apparently waits around with the body until the blood congeals. The purpose is obviously post-mortem symbology, not torture. In any case, the labs can get blood out well enough for a fairly reliable identification with manufacturers’ samples.”
“All this,” said M. Damascene, “and yet your police labs cannot identify the actual killer? Neither by fingerprint nor hair sample nor, say, blood and tissue beneath the fingernails of any target who may have fought back at the end?”
M. Lestrade sighed. “Amazing as it may sound, we’re dealing with a maniac who’s watched the docutexts and knows how to clean up afterward. Apparently always gets the victim’s confidence first, so as to leave a minimum of entry evidence. The main reason for stripping the bodies may be not so much symbolism as making sure not to leave any of the killer’s own personal traces. Even manicures the victims’ nails, apparently when necessary. The blue X’s are pure symbolism, of course. Even if it’s mixed-up symbolism.”
M. Damascene’s frown deepened. “Mixed-up? Do you mean confused? In what way?”
“As I read it, it must have to do with ‘blue blood.’ But the killer’s whole point seems to be that the victims were pretending to blue blood they couldn’t rightly claim. So why not use plain red thread?”
Peter suggested, “Or ... maybe just let the stitches get bloody?”
Mrs. Peacock said, “Oh, dear, oh! Who would like refills?”
Nobody answered her.
Sergeant Lestrade said, “I don’t know. I should be an expert on the psychomystiques of homicidal maniacs. I’m not.”
M. Damascene asked, “And is this what you have come to warn ‘Lady’ Echo Warwick about?”
I knew it was, as surely as I heard him make the little pauses around my title. The reason I’d joined UNAGA and come to this conference was to check the old family joke about my mother’s descent from titled British people.
But M. Lestrade looked at me and said in a very matter-of-fact voice, “Of course not. My business with Lady Warwick is something else entirely.” That was a lie, and under the circumstances it was cheating and unsporting, because they had sniffed out her purpose. But I secretly blessed her and felt a little better about pollies.
“Be that as it may,” said M. Damascene, “I’m still bothered by your reference to the stitches as bad symbolism. Thread is not blood. In being stitched above veins, it might be called false blood. And lying on the surface would symbolize the shallowness of the pretender’s claims.”
Sergeant Lestrade looked at him and cleared her throat. “Maybe,” she said. “But in any case, the killer’s research isn’t always perfect. At least one of the victims really was blue-blooded.”
“What?” In the act of lighting a mock cigarette, M. Damascene’s hand seemed to tremble a little. “What makes you say that?”
“The vital documents were lost in Europe last century during the Last Great War. But the living tradition was too strong for the family and friends to doubt it. In the old country, Hilda von Drachenfels would have been a genuine grafin.”
“What!?” M. Damascene exclaimed.
At his tone, we went stiff. For an instant the whole room seemed frozen around him and the policewoman sitting forward in their facing armchairs staring at each other.
Then he leaped up and tried to dash for the door. M. Lestrade seemed to be up in the same instant, diving across the coffee table to tackle him by one leg. As they fell over between chairs and onto the floor, Peter and M. McTavish hurried forward to help the policewoman. Mrs. Peacock stood for a moment with her hands at her mouth, and then grabbed the flower vase from the autoserve table and stood ready to bash it down on M. Damascene’s head if she had to. I started looking around for something I could use as a weapon, but by then it was over.
Kneeling on M. Damascene’s back, Sergeant Lestrade had whipped out a pair of those thin plastisteel handcuffs that look so fragile and are supposed to be so painful if the person should try to get out of them. She got them on him at the same time she was reciting the old “You have the right ...” formula. Then she stood up and put on a pair of plastisilk gloves, while Peter and M. McTavish sort of half helped and half dropped M. Damascene back into the armchair.
The policewoman bent over and frisked his pockets. After a moment she found a little sewing foldover. She took it to the autoserve table and opened it out, while the rest of us crowded around to watch. She held her sample to the thread from M. Damascene’s foldover. The color was a perfect match.
She tabbed her wristphone, waited for its response, and said into it, “All right, Tracy, get yourself down here and help me with an ‘alleged suspect.’ Hilmar Private Lounge Eleven-B, the Smith Room.” Tabbing the phone off, she went on to us, “He’ll be right over. There’s nothing Junior Sergeant Tracy likes better than making arrests.”
“Not M. Harrison Jones,” said M. Damascene. “I am not responsible for Freddie Harrison Jones.”
The policewoman looked at him very sadly. “I didn’t think so.”
He added, “And your Hoosier baubletree was the rankest pretender of them all.”
She shook her head. “There I disagree. One of her great-grandchildren is a lab polly in Ahbeenahbee City. The grafin’s claim was as valid as anybody’s can be whose family was caught in the disruption of the Last Great War.”
“Winds and rumors,” said Michael Adams Damascene. Then he fell silent, shut his eyes, and sat with his hair hanging down his magnificent high forehead. I collapsed into Peter’s arms and clung to him, shaking. Mrs. Peacock stifled a sob and said, “Michael? Oh ... no ... Michael.”
“All that care,” was the last thing he said before they came to take him away. “All that study and painstaking care, to be ... I should not have leaped up. You had nothing until then, nothing I could not have explained away.”
“Everyone slips up sometimes,” the policewoman told him. And, strangely, her voice sounded almost kind. “It wasn’t spur of the moment, cleaning up after yourself. You could always give yourself plenty of time for that.”
M. McTavish asked Sergeant Lestrade, “How did you know?”
“I didn’t. I had no idea. No, that isn’t quite true. The Blue Thread Killer had to know genealogy and its methods. That made it likely whoever it was belonged to a genealogists’ organization and attended their meetings. But of all the hundreds of attendees you’ve got here this weekend ... No, we just came to do our own digging in the Salt Lake City records and warn as many titled and pseudo-titled people as we could. It was pure coincidence that he happened to be in your little subgroup.”
Mrs. Peacock said, “It was Divine Intervention!”
Sergeant Lestrade looked at her and said, “Then why didn’t the Lady God intervene in time to save a few more of the victims?”
Peter said nothi
ng, but by the way he held me, I knew that he agreed with Mrs. Peacock.
Only, neither of us thought to ask for Sergeant Lestrade’s first name, and the news accounts never listed anything except her initial, “R.” Even at the courthouse we never saw her again, because they scheduled our testimony on completely different days. And “Lestrade” isn’t a name that any parents should register to any child, not with the “Three Funny Inspectors” comic strip so popular. I suppose we could have requested the data from the Central Police Computer, but there’s still that old shyness about police.
So Peter and I registered our firstborn as “Lester.” I hope that she’ll like it after all, when she gets old enough to know and understand the whole story.
* * * *
Another clue for anyone interested in chronological arrangement is Lestrade’s junior partner being a “Tracy” this time. Tracy could, however, be a temporary junior while Dave Click is on vacation or something.
MURDER WITH AN ARTIST’S RAG
(First published in Space & Time, Winter [1988]-1989)
Materially, I’m better off as a sentenced accessory after the fact than when I was one of the honest unemployables. I live completely on parole, work my enforced thirty hours a week for the Transworld Twenty-First Century Holovision Corp., and even at standard wages for convict labor—about two-thirds the minimum for honest—there are usually a few tridols left after food, rent, and my compensatory pay installments to Kelly’s family. Besides the occasional independent sale of a panel or canvas.
As a penal system, it’s gaping to abuse; but M. Lestrade says that in my case it’s worked out well enough. That’s not why I became Arnold Benedict’s accessory, though.
I must have moved around sometimes that day, paced my room-and-a-half, popped open a can or two of food, maybe even dozed in pure exhaustion; but all I remember is sitting stunned for about twenty hours straight, from the time Arnold came to make me his confessor until late the following night, watching things daylight and darken again on the other side of my scratched plastiglass window and thinking that Kelly was dead and I had never even seen a photo to know what she really looked like.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 55
