“I'd rather not say.”
She took my left hand in hers and folded my fingers into a fist. She studied my misshapen knuckles, running her finger over countless scars. “That's okay. I think I can guess.”
My hand went tingly at her touch. I was alive. At that moment, Niki was erased from my mind. I looked over at Ian, who was deep in conversation with Horst. He didn't seem to care that his girlfriend was flirting with another man so, I decided it was just fine to flirt back. I took hold of one of her hands from underneath and dropped my splinted hand overtop—a cool move that went wrong when I had to wince at a sharp pain coming from my pinky.
“Let me see that,” she said.
I protested unconvincingly as she started pulling the wrappings free. With each layer of bandage peeling off, my mood turned increasingly sour as I remembered all the times Niki had nursed these hands, all the times she cleaned off the blood and sanitized the wounds. How I'd sit on the toilet and lean my head on her hip as she worked over the sink, or when there was too much blood, how she'd sit on the tub and hold my hand close to the faucet. All cleaned up, we'd go to bed, and she'd nurse my soul, telling me that I was doing the right thing. Paul Chang and I were running KOP, using our power to shape the city into a place that would attract offworld tourists and bring offworld money into our crippled economy. And even after Paul and I had lost our way and become nothing more than common thugs, concerned only with extending our own power and wealth, she never accused me of being such. She was my wife, and she supported me no matter what. No matter how misguided I'd become.
Liz had all the wrappings off and piled like spaghetti. Three of my fingers had stayed properly splinted while my pinky had sprung loose, unnaturally poking out to the side.
“This one's causing all the trouble,” she said as she caressed it gently.
“Yeah. I'll have to get it set again.”
Suddenly, lightning quick, she grabbed hold of it and snapped it back in place.
I yelped and jerked back in my seat. “What the fuck!”
Liz gave me a coy smile, and I felt her foot in my crotch. I felt dizzy as the pain washed over me. I just about blacked out while her toes probed my privates.
“What the fuck?” I repeated.
Liz just smiled at me. Then she made a show of dropping a hand down under the table. She rolled her shoulder, making it clear that she was touching herself. She let out a small moan. I wanted to reach down, grab her foot, and twist her toes until the pain equaled mine. I was furious … and confused … and repulsed. …
But I was also hardening.
“You'll have to come by my place sometime,” she said. A second later, her foot was gone and a second after that, she was gone, walking back to the autopsy table and tickling both Ian and Horst's ears before taking a seat between them.
I took my time with the bandages, winding them back up, giving my erection time to do the opposite.
By the time I finished, Ian was back. “The files are decrypting as we speak.”
“Good.”
twelve
A LOOK at my watch told me the sun wouldn't be up for a few hours yet. I was at Maggie's with a glass of Orzo's oak-aged in my hand, and I'd just finished settling things with my offworld coconspirator. I had the satellite company's engineer take my share of the money and apply it directly to Niki's medical bills. It was more cost effective that way. If I'd had him deposit the money into my account, I would've been charged two percent to convert the offworld dollars into pesos, and then another two percent to convert it back when I paid the medical bills.
I still wasn't sure what I'd tell Ian when I got the files back. I'd intended on telling Ian that it would take a week to get the files decypted, which would've given me plenty of time to make some bogus files to give him or maybe just some primo lies to tell him. But instead, I'd been stupid. Somewhere between Ian's intimidation and my drinking, I'd lost track of that particular lie and told him the truth. Thirty hours. I tried not to worry about it. Considering all the things that could've gone wrong at that meeting, I'd gotten off pretty cleanly.
I brought up the case files on Maggie's home system—the barge murders, all thirteen of them. Before I dug in, I decided to organize my own thoughts. Using the phone system, I called up holo-heads of Ian, Yuri, Adela Juarez, her dead parents, and her boyfriend, Raj. I realized I didn't know Liz's full name, so I had the system provide a blank holo-head that looked like an egg with the word Liz written where her eyes would be. I was even able to access Horst Jeffers's holo. I didn't know much about Horst besides his name, but Maggie would report back soon. She was pulling an all-nighter at KOP station, catching up on her paperwork and tracking down background information on him.
I sat before the array of holo-heads and started drawing lines between them. Familial lines between Adela and her parents. A boyfried-girlfriend line between Adela and Raj, and another between Ian and Liz. I connected both Raj and Yuri's heads to Hector Juarez, their boss at Lagarto Libre. More lines between dinner mates Ian, Horst, and cameraman Yuri.
I called up a miniholo of a barge and ran a line between it and cameraman Yuri. Another line from the barge to Ian, who hung out in a club where the floor show featured a lase-bladed axe that was a perfect fit as the head-chopping murder weapon. One more line connecting the barge to Horst, an offworlder with the money to buy gene eaters. I decided to stop there, my 3-D diagram already looking like some incestuous family tree.
I stared at the diagram for long minutes, my mind scattering in every direction. I shrank the diagram down and tossed it to the side. I'd try to come back to it later.
I menued into barge murder number one. A moment later, I was in a small cabin with rusted walls. Three fold-down bunks hung from one wall, and on the opposite wall was a mold-covered nautical map. On the floor was a familiar looking block of wood, complete with a scooped-out hollow, bloodstains, and scorch marks on top. Other than the cabin itself, the scene looked identical to the thirteenth, the one I'd visited in person. There was even a collection of gene-eaten lizards on the floor. I knelt down over the holographic block of wood, dropping my chin into the hollow, imagining what it would feel like with that axe dropping down on the back of my neck. At least it would be quick … Not like Niki. The knot in my stomach constricted. I chided myself for thinking that thought. Niki wasn't dying. She was recovering nicely.
I jumped ahead a couple weeks to the second crime scene, which was altogether different. No block of wood this time. Instead, there was a table surrounded by thick ropes piled on the metallic floor. The table's surface was slick with gene-eaten blood. On the table sat a cockeyed metal bowl. I mimed picking it up, and the bowl's image moved along with my hands. I three-sixtied it, finding bloodstains on the rim only. When I looked at the bowl's underside, I could see the reason the bowl wouldn't lay flat. There were a half dozen eye rings welded on and they were lined up in two rows. Even stranger was the fact that the bowl's bottom was covered with wax drippings. What the hell was that about?
I pulled up Maggie's case notes to see if she'd come up with any theories. The cabin walls disappeared, replaced by walls of text. I skimmed through her notes, pulling out the most significant sentences and stacking them to the side, until I'd built a minitower of holo-texts:
“The bowl was of standard manufacture, except it had been modified with a series of rings welded onto the bottom.”
“The underside of the bowl was spattered with wax drippings that suggest the bowl was heated by candle.”
“Rope fibers on two of the eye rings prove that the rope was run through the rings to hold the bowl in place.”
“Only the bowl's rim was bloodstained, indicating that it was placed facedown onto the victim.”
“Lining the inside of the bowl was a brown-black substance identified as lizard excrement. The bowl's interior was also marked by a large number of short scratches likely caused by lizards that were at one time caged in the bowl.”
“Eleven gen
e-eaten lizards were recovered from the scene. An analysis of their stomach contents revealed what appears to be chemically consistent with human flesh. Positive identification through DNA was rendered impossible due to treatment with gene eaters.”
I tried to puzzle through the information, reach my own conclusions, but I gave up quickly and navigated into Maggie's summation with that same mild guilty feeling you get when you skip to the final page of a mystery. My eyes went straight for a sketch nested inside the text. One look at that sketch and there was no need to read what Maggie had written. The medieval pencil drawing said it all.
There was a woman chained faceup to a heavy wooden table. Strapped tight across her stomach was an overturned bowl. Standing alongside was a man with a candle in each hand, holding the flames close to the bowl, heating it up, driving the mice inside into a panicked insanity from which the only escape was to start eating.
My stomach lurched as I let the sketch sink in. I didn't know where Maggie had found that sketch, but substitute lizards for mice, and the killer had imitated it to a T. I had to put my drink down, the very smell of it suddenly making me nauseous. Even as the full weight of the horror came down on me, I had to pause to appreciate the inspired leap Maggie had made from the limited evidence, from nothing more than some rope and a bloody bowl to this, this … abomination.
And there were still eleven more case files. …
I cycled through Maggie's summations, which read like a how-to book of medieval torture. Burned at the stake. Sawn in half—vertically. Flayed alive, strip by strip, the floor littered with gelatinous gene-eaten people-jerky. I went through them one by one, each one more and more revolting. Death by impaling. Death by pendulum.
I turned it all off, the gory truth, the gruesome brutality. I just sat there with my agitated nerves and my disturbed thoughts. My mind kept imagining Horst, his creepy face in the glow of a lase-axe. Could I be wrong about him? No. The circumstantial evidence was piling up: Start with the fact that we knew the serial was an offworlder with the funds to buy gene eaters. Then think about how Horst went to the restaurant to meet Yuri and Ian—Yuri who filmed the murders, and Ian, who helped Yuri cover for his clumsiness by switching vids. Then there was the way Horst greeted me at the club. He practically welcomed me to the team, telling me Ian said I'd be useful. And don't forget the fact that he was willing to foot the bill to get the vid files decrypted. Why would he have done that if he wasn't running the show?
I thought about how Horst had toasted me with his smile full of charm. Who was this animal, this offworld monster who thought my home was his perverse playground? Who was this offworld coward of a serial killer who picked on nameless Lagartan victims rather than carrying out his sicko fantasies on his own kind?
I closed the case files and went back to the diagram I'd made and enlarged it, the interconnected holo-heads beginning to look like a molecule with heads for atoms. I called up thirteen blank holo-heads, the faceless victims of the most twisted shit I'd ever seen. Thirteen victims … no, fourteen when you included the unlucky Officer Ramos.
Fourteen. And those were just the ones we knew about. Who knew how many more crime scenes still hadn't been found on all those abandoned barges?
Looking at this molecule composed of human elements, I sought out the weak bonds. Bonds I could break, atoms I could co-opt.
There was Yuri. The guy always looked like he was going to wet himself. His type was easy to break. A little intimidation and he'd start singing.
And there was Liz, Ian's less than faithful girlfriend, whose pillow talk could tear the whole thing apart.
Another possibility was Adela's boyfriend, Raj. He was her alibi the night her parents were murdered, but he didn't back her up under questioning. If I assumed Maggie was right about Adela being innocent, then Raj was a liar. He said she went home early, but if she had gone home around midnight as he said, she would've been there when her parents got whipped at two AM. She would've called KOP that night, not the next morning. Or more likely still, she would've gotten fricasseed along with her parents. I hated to admit it, but the notion that Hector and Margarita Juarez were lase-whipped to death by their daughter was looking more tenuous by the minute, confession or no confession. God, how was I going to forgive myself if Adela turned out to be innocent? I'd made the poor girl cry.
Raj. The kid was a big piece of the puzzle. I could lean on him, see who put him up to stabbing his girlfriend in the back.
But bracing Raj was too risky. He'd seen me at Yuri's. I couldn't brace him without risking Ian finding out. I had to keep Ian thinking I was on his side. And if I continued that same reasoning, I couldn't brace Yuri or Liz, either. I had to take it slow. If I did this right, I could keep squeezing money out of Ian indefinitely, money I needed. And it wasn't just the money. It was the offworlder. The deeper I got into Ian's circle, the more I could learn about him. That warped bastard had to be stopped.
For now, Maggie and I had to keep working on the fringes, digging deep, but not so deep that we blew ourselves up by striking a gas line. Make no mistake, Ian would eventually find out I was screwing him. The trick was to string that finger-cracking, tube-pinching, 'roid-popping son of a boy-o bitch along for as long as I could, all the way until Maggie and I were ready to bring the whole operation down.
thirteen
I MADE the trip home and emptied the arsenal I kept under the bed, dumping the full complement into a duffel bag I had to dig out of Niki's closet. I gave the duffel a final once-over: Three lase-blades with a range of ten centimeters all the way out to a full meter. One broad-beam lase-pistol. Two showerhead lasers, one set to spray, the other on pulse. One lase-rifle with remote targeting. Four charge packs. One trail-cam. One flycam. One AV recorder. A couple penlights.
I rolled my pant leg down over the ankle blade and strapped my holster on backward to make it lefty. It didn't feel right, so I dumped the holster and tucked my piece into my belt instead and headed out with the bag draped over my shoulder.
The rain had stopped, so I made for Tenttown on foot. Lights were coming on behind windows, telling me it was morning. I sloshed through flooded intersections whose drains were clogged with jungle. I left my neighborhood behind, not knowing when I'd be back. Those barge murders had me plenty spooked, and if everything went to shit, I didn't plan on being easy to find.
Maggie called. “I got the scoop on the offworlder.”
“Good.”
Maggie sounded tired, but her holo looked chipper as it skimmed alongside. “Horst Jeffers is a travel agent.”
“A travel agent?”
“Well, actually he's more of a tour operator. His company is called Jungle Expeditions. They have an office on the Old Town Square.”
“Do they cater to the Orbital or the mines?”
“Both. They have an office on the Orbital, but their main office is on Asteroid B3, which is where he's from.”
It made sense that he was from the belts. He was always wearing traditional-looking clothes, albeit with a vampire flair. Miners usually dressed a bit more conservative than the offworlders from the Orbital.
Maggie's feet disappeared below the water as I splashed through another ankle-deep intersection. “Are they on the up-and-up?” I asked.
“They appear to be. Their specialty is organizing deep jungle adventure.”
“What does that mean?”
“I assume it means monitor hunts, fishing, that kind of thing. The guy's a successful businessman and by all accounts a personable one at that. Not exactly a loner, Juno.”
“What are you saying?”
“Serials are usually loners.”
“We can't be sure he isn't a loner. His bubbly personality could be nothing more than a digital implant.”
“True,” she admitted, “but it occurred to me that the killer could be one of his clients.”
Horst Jeffers: Tour Guide for the Discerning Serial. Maggie could be right. “Is there a way we can get our hands on a list of
his clients?”
“Not without walking into their office and demanding one. I thought that was a little too bold for us right now.”
“I agree.” Stay on the fringes.
“The only other thing I could think of was to talk to somebody at the Koba Office of Customs. Offworld visitors have to write in their tour operator's name on customs forms, so I thought they could compile a list for me. I must've talked to a dozen people before I got somebody who said she could get me the information in two or three days.”
“Days? All they have to do is query the database.”
“I know. But she needs to get approval.”
Typical government bullshit. “Anything else to report?”
“No. Just that Ian's making it tough at work.”
“How so?”
“Nobody will talk to me. I mean nobody. Not even Lieutenant Rusedski. They all ignore me like I'm not there.”
“Just stay out in the field.”
“I'll do that as much as I can, but there's always going to be a meeting or two that I have to attend.”
“I say skip them.”
She gave me an annoyed exhalation. “That wouldn't look very good on my record.”
She'd never change. Career first. I was already in the outskirts of Tenttown. No more roads, just footpaths that wound their way through haphazardly placed tents. “Listen, I gotta go. I'll see you after you get off work.”
To keep out of the mud, I walked across a series of planks laid end to end. At one point, I had to step off to the side in order to make room for a series of men with rickety wheelbarrows loaded down with sacks of rice. Once the sweat-stained group had passed, I almost tipped over trying to yank my feet out of the suctioning mud. The tents were getting denser as I penetrated deeper into Tenttown, each one now a mere meter from the next.
I took a set of rock steps down toward the canal, the smell of sewage coming through strong. I found a nice new-looking tent with the renter's red rag tied to the corner post. I popped my head in. “Got any openings?”
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