Alien Taste

by Wen Spencer

  Ukiah glanced at Max.

  “Don’t give me that look.” Max made a rude noise. “Okay, okay. But we aren’t doing this for free.”

  “You will be paid. What are your rates?”

  “If I read this right, this is a tracking job,” Max explained. “We charge a flat rate of one thousand dollars a day on normal tracking jobs. Since this case has proved to be unquestionably dangerous, we’ll want two thousand dollars a day.”

  Agent Zheng tilted her head slightly. “That seems high.”

  Max snorted. “If you wanted us to do a background check on a guy before dating him seriously,”—her records had listed her as single—“it would be one hundred dollars an hour plus expenses. It would take a couple of days. We’d present you with a detailed report of exactly who you were about to sleep with and a bill for easily over one thousand dollars.”

  Her eyes jumped to Ukiah. She shifted slightly in the chair as if uneasy and then relaxed, gaining her center again. “I see you’ve been doing your homework.”

  “We like to know who we’re dealing with, Agent Zheng.” Max flashed her a roguishly pleased smile. “Tracking is a different ball game with a different rate chart. It’s quick, it’s dirty, it’s dangerous, and we’re the best in the business. Much as we like to help people, this is a business. Because of yesterday, our insurance rates went up another notch, and we’ll need a lawyer to make sure that, in all this chaos, Mr. Oregon isn’t charged with Janet Haze’s death just to neaten things up.”

  She nodded slowly. “I can authorize your fee.”

  Max reached into his desk drawer and pulled out their standard tracking contract. He wrote FBI in the client’s blank and noted the danger rate of $2000. He signed the bottom and pushed it across to Agent Zheng.

  She signed in a controlled neat cursive. “You’ll start immediately and I’ll be coming with you.”

  Max shrugged, sliding over to the copier to make her a copy. “I’m curious, though, Agent Zheng. I got the impression yesterday that you didn’t trust us.”

  “I didn’t.” There was no apology in her gaze. “You were complete unknowns acting in a suspicious manner. Since then I have had a chance to do a background check.”

  “And?” Max looked up with intense interest.

  “Your highest praise was—‘If my kid was missing, I’d want them on the case.” ’

  “And the lowest?” Ukiah asked, getting a scowl from Max.

  She looked at him for a silent minute before answering. “ ‘The kid is creepy to work with, but he’s always right.” ’

  She wanted to ride with them in the Hummer. Max motioned Ukiah into the back so she could sit in the front, away from all the gear Max had in the back. Not for the first time, Ukiah wondered if all the military hardware Max had was totally legal.

  Ukiah leaned forward and noticed that her hair was scented with honeysuckle. Her one long bang swept down to the white curve of her neck. She noticed that he was staring at her and turned to meet his gaze. He expected her to say something, but she merely looked back at him silently. Her eyes were somber and still, moonstones of gray.

  Max noticed her turn in her seat, then glanced at Ukiah in the rearview mirror. “When Ukiah looks at you, you stay looked at.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  Max glanced again in the rearview mirror and turned onto Janet Haze’s street.

  “What was that all about, kid?”

  “What was what?” Ukiah checked his .45 and slipped it into his kidney holster. The day was hot and the flak jacket uncomfortable, but he knew Max was too edgy to let him go without.

  “The looking.” Max snapped shut the chamber of his gun and put it into his shoulder holster.

  Ukiah shrugged and slipped on his headcam. “I don’t know. I was just looking at her and she looked back.”

  “You—I understand.” Max shook his head. He flicked on his handheld tracking system and checked the signal. “I’ve got you.” He slipped the tracking system into his pocket. “I’ll leave the deck on the Hummer. I mean, you look at people. That’s what I remember most about the first time I met you—the look.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kid, you’ve got a look that—like I said—one stays looked at. That first day, I came up the tree-house ladder and was eye to eye with your look. Pow, straight to the core. I almost climbed back down and dropped the case.”

  Ukiah shook his head, giving Max a grin. “Max, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course not. People don’t do it back to you. Check it out sometime, though—you make a lot of people damn nervous by it, especially the guilty ones.”

  “She wasn’t nervous. She just looked back.”

  “Which has me damn nervous.”

  Max slotted a new disk into the Hummer’s deck. “Max VOX test. Testing. Testing.” He tapped the colored signal strength bar on the monitor. “I’m coming through loud and clear. Give me a test.”

  “Ukiah VOX test. Test 1–2–3–4.”

  “That’s lousy—you’re barely in the yellow.” Max reached up and tugged on Ukiah’s headset. “Try it again.”

  “Ukiah VOX test.” Ukiah grinned. “Hey diddle diddle, Max jumped over the moon.”

  Max shook his head, laughing slightly. “You’re in the green. Let’s go.”

  Max slammed the Hummer’s door and locked it by his remote. Together they went up the steps to join Agent Zheng by the door. She had unsecured the police barrier tape and pushed open the broken door.

  As she stepped cautiously inside, Max caught Ukiah by the shoulder. “Just because Agent Zheng is with us, that doesn’t make her an automatic good guy, kid. Remember that. Don’t rely on her, don’t expect her to cover your back.”

  Ukiah nodded. “Okay, Max.” A thought occurred to him and he smiled. “Not one of the good guys? Max, haven’t you noticed? Agent Zheng is a girl.”

  Max cuffed him on the shoulder and went on into the house.

  The bodies had been removed. The bloodstains remained. Ukiah crouched in the threshold as he remembered doing the day before. Slowly he scanned the entry. His memory skipped back and forth between his normally laser-etched recall and his slightly fuzzy regained memory. “Lots of people been in here since the day before yesterday, things are shifted around, not by much, but enough.”

  “Like what?” Agent Zheng asked, pulling out a PDA to take notes.

  “That piece of carpet.” It was a two- by three-foot carpet sample used to catch dirt at the front entrance. It was stained a rust color by blood. “It had been under the one girl when I first arrived. It’s over there beside the stairs now.”

  He tilted his head sniffing, suddenly aware of a draft and a familiar smell.

  “What is it?” Max asked.

  He stepped inside and swung the door shut. Behind it was an obvious basement door. He cracked it slightly and the strong odor of animal musk swept up from the basement.

  “You weren’t in the basement,” Agent Zheng commented behind him.

  Ukiah glanced back at her. “They kept mink in the basement?”

  “Ferrets.” Agent Zheng scrolled her PDA file backward and read. “There were three ferrets found in cages in the basement, one male and two females. According to friends, they belong to Janet Haze, and normally she kept them in the attic with her. A day prior to the murders, she asked her roommates if she could move them to the basement, complaining that they made too much noise. The ferrets were removed the evening of the murders by the Allegheny Animal Control Department and taken to the humane shelter on the North Side.”

  “And they’re still there?” Max tried to sound casual while he gave Ukiah “the look.”

  “I checked on them yesterday afternoon,” Agent Zheng admitted.

  Ukiah shut the door uneasily. “Too much noise? She seemed really bothered by noise.”

  Agent Zheng nodded. “It’s been found that in psychotic individuals there is an inability to filter out background noi
se. It’s theorized that it’s a chemical imbalance that literally drives the person insane by overloading their senses. In your recording, Janet Haze repeatedly asked you how one stopped listening.”

  Max caught his eyes and shook his head, as if warning Ukiah not to say anything.

  Haze had been asking the wrong person, Ukiah thought instead of saying. When they had first started working together, Max asked him often if he was listening. It had puzzled Ukiah since he didn’t go around with his fingers jammed into his ears. Slowly he had learned that other people couldn’t recall things they hadn’t paid attention to, while Max had learned that Ukiah always listened.

  Ukiah glanced about the entry hall. Other than the basement, there was the living room and the stairs leading out of the hall. “Where first?”

  Agent Zheng indicated upstairs. “Since the bodies were on the first floor, it’s the most disturbed. It probably would be best if you start with her room.”

  Ukiah started up the steps and had almost reached the top when a thought hit him. Why did Agent Zheng check on the ferrets yesterday afternoon?

  He paused at the top of the steps and watched Agent Zheng follow him up. Should he ask her? What would he say if she asked why he was so interested in the ferrets? If Janet Haze’s ferrets were still at the humane society, then they weren’t the ferrets at the morgue. Assuming, of course, they hadn’t broken out, had a midnight feeding frenzy, and returned to their cages to look innocent. Unlikely, but so far everything about the morgue was unlikely.

  The window to Janet’s room was shut, and otherwise at first the room seemed unchanged. He stood at the center of the room and did a slow scan. To her credit, Agent Zheng stood patiently at the steps, without a hint of growing impatient. Max pulled out a cigar and chewed on its unlit end.

  When Ukiah found the first missing item, Max caught the change in Ukiah’s expression. “Found something?”

  Ukiah stepped forward to tap a crowded bookshelf. “There was a bottle between these two books, shoved the whole way back to the back wall. It was one of those small drug bottles. It had a label with the word ‘Imuran.” ’

  Agent Zheng and Max both pulled out their PDAs, and uplinked to the web. Max whistled as he found the information first.

  “Imuran, generic name azathioprine, manufacturer—hmm—Indication: organ rejection after liver transplantation; severe, active, otherwise unresponsive rheumatoid arthritis. It’s an immune-suppression drug.” He did a further search as Agent Zheng nodded in agreement. “Janet Haze hadn’t undergone organ replacement surgery anytime in her life. I wouldn’t think you’d put someone with severe rheumatoid arthritis in the attic bedroom.”

  Ukiah shook his head. “She didn’t have arthritis.”

  Agent Zheng tilted her head slightly. “Was she taking it, or giving it to someone else? Was any gone at all?”

  “The bottle was half full and there were needles beside it. One used, and about three still in sterile wrappers.” He cast his mind back to Janet Haze crouched in the shadows of the woods. ‘She had needle marks on her arms.”

  Agent Zheng made notes on her PDA, an infinitesimal frown touching her face. It was a slight crease between her black eyebrows and the hardening of her eyes. She glanced up to see Ukiah watching her, and the frown smoothed away.

  “Anything else?” Max asked.

  Ukiah shrugged. “All the books and papers have been shifted. It’s as if someone took down each book, one by one, and replaced them. They’re in the same order, but they’re staggered differently.” He held his hand over a piece of paper to indicate it without touching it. “This piece of paper was on top like this, but over here. As far as I can tell, at the moment, they are all here, but it’s harder with the paper.”

  Agent Zheng took out latex gloves and slid them on. “I’ll check through the books. If they needed to move every book, then maybe they didn’t find what they were looking for.”

  “Maybe your agent, Wil Trace, moved the books,” Max suggested.

  Agent Zheng nodded slowly. “It is possible but unlikely. I normally wouldn’t on a case involving the Pack. They usually limit their contact to in-person conversations and rare telephone calls. The searcher was probably looking for something written: a letter, prescription, a photograph, or something like that. I don’t think Wil Trace would have put in the effort either.”

  Max produced a pair of latex gloves and pulled them on. “Let’s split this bookcase up while Mr. Oregon finishes his search.”

  So they did, taking one book out at a time to flip through them. A half hour passed in silence.

  Max finished his half first, having flipped quicker through the books. He stretched and roamed the room. “Any luck, kid?”

  “I only saw the top layer of papers, so I can’t tell if anything from a lower layer is missing. There seems to be only one paper missing; a piece of legal tablet paper with the word ‘substitutions’ written across the top. I can recreate it, but it’s all ASCII to me.”

  “If you write it down, I’ll find someone who will understand it,” Agent Zheng said. “There’s something odd about these books. Janet read science fiction in her spare time; they account for all the worn paperbacks mixed in with the textbooks. But these other books she took out of the library. By the due date stamped inside, I think she borrowed them only a day or two before her first sick day at work. New Advances in Aging. Aging: Facts and Myths. Methuselah’s Children: New Age Treatments for Aging.”

  “Immortality: Myth and Legends,” Max added, slipping a book out from under a pillow. He sat on the edge of the bed to flip through it.

  Ukiah stretched muscles sore from leaning over the desk. “Why would a twenty-something be reading up on aging?”

  “You have to admit that it’s ironic that she’d be dead within a week,” Max commented, then made a sound of discovery. “What do you make of this?”

  Agent Zheng and Ukiah came to look over his shoulder at the worn photograph he held. It was a black-and-white photo, older than any Ukiah had ever seen, of a dark-haired man. He stood under a great arch that proclaimed “New York City’s World’s Fair.” While he was obviously the subject of the photo, a great number of people had been caught passing under the arch.

  Ukiah glanced at the photo and felt the hair on the back of his neck start to rise.

  Agent Zheng shook her head. “Anything on the back?”

  Max flipped the picture over but it was blank. “No.”

  “I doubt the searcher was looking for that.” Agent Zheng unfolded from the bed and returned to the bookcase. “It looks like it might be a family photograph, maybe Janet’s grandfather. Just in case, I’ll run it through the FBI labs and see what they can deduce.”

  While her back was still to them, Ukiah caught Max’s hand and flipped the photo back upright and then pointed to a face that sprang out of the crowd. In the mass of faces blurred by movement, one man alone was still, and thus clear. He stood a good thirty feet back, his face no larger than Ukiah’s pinkie tip in the photo. He stared toward the photo’s subject with crystalline hatred. It was Rennie Shaw.

  Max stared at the photograph and then glanced at Ukiah. “Is this who I think it is?” was plain on his face. Ukiah nodded to him. Max indicated Agent Zheng with his chin. Ukiah shrugged, unsure of what the special agent would make of the impossible appearance of the Pack leader.

  “I would be interested to know what the lab has to say about it.” Max handed the photograph to her. “Could you keep us apprised?”

  “You believe it’s more important than I think?” There was no indication that Agent Zheng was demeaning their opinion. It seemed like an honest question.

  “It’s the only out-of-place thing we’ve actually put our hands on,” Max pointed out.

  “This evidence by omission is hard to work with,” she admitted. She took a hand scanner from her purse, connected it to her PDA, and ran the photograph through it. The scanning complete, she put the scanner away and uploaded the scanned pho
to to some distant computer. “There, that will get them started.”

  Ukiah started to rise, putting out his hand to catch the bedpost. He stilled as his fingers ran over a patch of blood. He closed his eyes to pick through the information his senses were relaying to him on the smallest levels. Almost by reflex, he compared the new sensations to ones he learned by trial and error. Here was the marker for male. There was the indication of European white. The loosing strands hinted at middle age. Max told Ukiah often that what he did was impossible—and also not to try and explain his abilities to anyone in detail. People, Max said, could handle “Indian trackers,” and “psychic detectives,” but probably not be able to cope with—whatever he was. What would Agent Zheng say if he explained his talents to her?

  Until he talked to Max and made sure it was okay, he said instead, “There’s blood here.”

  Max came to eye the bedpost. “Oh damn, that’s not good.”

  Ukiah moved his hand slowly down the post. “The smear goes the whole way down. Someone has made an effort to wipe it up.” He ran his hands over the dark-painted hardwood floors. “There was blood on the floor, too, but not a lot. Some hair too. It seems like a head wound, blunt force to the head.” Crouched on the floor, he scanned the room. “If he was attacked in this room, and the attacker left the weapon behind, what was he hit with?”

  “Why do you think it got left behind?” Agent Zheng asked.

  “There’s nothing missing,” Max answered for him. “How about the classical heavy acrylic award?”

  Ukiah picked up the clear acrylic award but found it innocent of blood. “No.”

  Agent Zheng stood staring at the floor. “If the body fell here, the attacker would have stood here and”—she reached down to nudge a pair of roller blades tucked under the desk—“these would be close at hand.”