The front door opened and Matheson looked up, half-expecting Jora and Halfennig.
Minje was walking to meet the small, chattering group that had entered the café—Central tourists, not Dreihleen. Older women, up early and bored silly enough to brave the Dreihleat alone, but keeping to the main roads, because although they were foolish, they weren’t stupid. Good. They’d make his presence less obvious.
“I was told Robesh and Leran weren’t friends,” he objected.
“Who’s say so?”
“A boy.”
Aya gave a slow, one-shouldered shrug. It reminded Matheson of Dillal and he frowned before he asked, “Did you know any of the victims?”
She nodded, sipped, then ran her fingers around the rim of her tea cup as she replied. “Loni Tonitol was teach me to bake.”
“Loni?” Matheson had difficulty imagining a bouncer working in a kitchen.
“Used to buy pastry from Tina Anza, but cost dear. When Stocha’s too young, Loni’s help out. He’s learned to bake, taught me.” Her voice grew a little tighter as she clenched her jaw harder. “Z’a kind man. Not clever.” The creases around her eyes deepened and she turned her face down.
“Did you know the Initols?”
“Neighbors,” she said and sipped more tea.
“Any of the others?”
She turned her head just enough to frown at him for a second or two. Any hint of flirtation had died out. “Only customers. Dodi Zashto and Balandor Tchin, they’re bought coffee, said good morning, but no more. Near the park’s busy. Perhaps others are come, go, is not in my mind.” She stopped looking at Matheson from the corner of her eye and turned her attention to the chattering ladies now seated near the door. Minje was bowing over them and they were noisily charmed. A few Dreihleen had paused on the sidewalk, as if weighing the advisability of coming inside.
Aya shifted, blocking his view out the window as she reached for her tray. “I’ve work. And no more for you now.”
“I can ask you later?” She piqued his curiosity. Minje just seemed chatty, but Aya he couldn’t figure and he thought he might like to.
She tilted her head and gave him a measuring, Dreihle-wise glance. “How you’re one who’s chase this? Is not work for patrol walkers.”
“Just got stuck with it. The inspector needed an assistant and I happened to be standing still.”
“You’re not care how’s done?”
“I care very much. Which is why I didn’t say ‘no’ to the job.”
She made a faint noise in her throat. Then she picked up the tray with its pot and her cup and walked back to the kitchen.
Matheson puzzled about her and stared out the window. One of the Dreihleen came in but the rest—one unusually broad-shouldered—had turned and walked on. Matheson finished his breakfast, paid, and left, thinking about the Velas, Venn Robesh, and Denny Leran. The connection wasn’t solid enough yet.
Matheson had looked, but seen no sign of the first shift, and he’d gotten about a meter past the alley behind the coffeehouse when Jora caught him by the elbow. Halfennig body-checked him so he pivoted and swung into the filthy backstreet wall, sending a flurry of scampering motion through the shadows. Jora let go at the last minute and Matheson managed to turn and get his shoulder to the surface instead of his face.
“You have a hearing problem, rookie?” Halfennig asked and smacked Matheson’s outside shoulder, turning him and jolting him into the plaster.
A rough patch scraped across the bridge of Matheson’s nose as a stiffened hand jabbed into his right kidney. He sagged against the wall, gasping in pain, and knocked his forehead against gritty plaster that crumbled away from rough blocks of pale blue stone. He hooked his fingertips into the uneven surface, holding himself up and away by millimeters so he could suck in more air than moldy plaster dust and dirt sour with garbage.
“You ought to watch where you’re going, Fishbait,” Jora said. “You could get hurt, wandering around where you shouldn’t be. Smart guy like you should be able to stay out of other people’s way. Didn’t appreciate what you did back on Canoe.”
Merry hell . . . “It’s a murder investigation,” Matheson snapped, and caught a mouthful of dust that made him cough.
Halfennig gave him a quick rap on the back of the head. Matheson’s left eyebrow split open against the pitted wall and he could feel blood start to flow. It stung and he covered his mouth until he stopped coughing.
“Yeah, but you ain’t with I-Office, are you?” Halfennig asked.
Matheson turned and glared at them as blood ran into his eye.
“Find a dreck to take the fall and get back to your own job,” said Jora. “Hell, we almost caught one for you, till you fucked that up.”
“That kid? He hadn’t—”
“You’re not hearing me,” Jora cut in. He reached to rap Matheson on the forehead.
Fuck it. It was easy to snatch the shorter man’s hand aside and shove him around, twisting Jora’s forearm up behind his back. “I don’t want to fight with you or the rest of S-Office about it, but I’m going to do the job I’m assigned, whether you like it or not.”
He shoved Jora toward Halfennig, who stepped out of the way and came forward swinging. Matheson dodged, but with Jora turning on his other side, he didn’t have much room and took the blow at the edge of his ribs. It hurt, but it was glancing and wouldn’t stick. Jora came in on the other side and hooked a fist toward his kidney. Matheson turned, deflecting Jora’s hand, and landed a blow on the smaller man’s sternum.
Jora staggered back, his blank expression narrowing toward real anger. Shit. Startled, Matheson didn’t turn to counter Halfennig and the other man hammered him into the wall. Matheson put his arms up to protect his injured face and got served a couple of quick blows at his lower back. He gasped. One of the men swept his legs from the side and gave a shove. Matheson went to his knees and huddled to the wall. It’s not personal—better to swallow pride than teeth.
The two SOs blocked him in again, but didn’t strike. He could feel Jora looming over him. Must be a rare treat for the little bastard. “Just trying to help you, Fishbait. Nobody but Dillal gives a crap about this case and nobody gives a crap about him. So, find your way out of I-Office before he goes down and takes you with him.”
Matheson held his tongue and kept his head down until he heard them walking away. Fighting them had been stupid. They were already chatting and laughing as if nothing had happened. Matheson was sore, but he got to his feet and turned to watch them go.
“Merry hell.” He swiped the trickle of blood out of his eye and winced at the renewed sting. A few curious bystanders glanced at him and then aside, and even the oiled geckos clinging to the wall scrambled farther away.
He brushed himself off. In a fair fight, he might have stood a chance, but it wasn’t a fight: it was a warning, telling him where the boundaries lay. He hated losing, but he didn’t need the whole of S-Office on his back, and it wasn’t something to be settled with fencing foils or target pistols.
He found a half-clean washroom at the edge of the park and took out his annoyance on his injuries. Once he’d scrubbed, and splashed enough cold water on his face, the cuts stopped bleeding. The bruises were mild—just enough to serve as reminders. The graze on his nose was trivial and the cut on his forehead didn’t show too much through his thick, black eyebrows—they were the only feature that stopped his face from verging on pretty. Maybe I’d look more interesting with a scar . . .
His family was artificially perfect, gene-managed, and carefully bred. Like champion dogs. The result was unpleasantly uniform—every child tall and slim, same blue eyes, same hair, same skin—and it didn’t help that he looked like the scruffy, male version of Callista. Someone’ll probably fix that for me if I stay here long enough.
Bruises or not, he had work to do. The connection was spotty in the Dreihleat—even the Peerless had occasional trouble due to the low microtransmitter density—but public washrooms had automate
d systems that required a datalink. Crouching in the privacy of the stall between cleaning cycles, he teased his MDD into the GISA database stream and formulated the best query he could for Gil Dohan and any connection to the Julian Company. He’d keep working on Leran and Robesh himself. And Santos.
CHAPTER TEN
Day 2: Afternoon
Starna hovered at the edge of the autopsy field, restlessly shifting while Dillal and Dr. Andreus conferred over one of the bodies. They’d been engaged without respite since the early hours and Dillal continued to ignore the med/legal technician while they finished up.
The doctor stripped off her gloves as she talked and removed the base coat of spray seal on her hands. “The variation in the fatal wounds is interesting. Some are very neat, efficient—one or two shots to the head and it’s done. Others look like the shooter was unsteady or scared. Then there’s the plasma burns—also very messy, but they’d take some nerve, since they required contact for ten to fifteen seconds. The four victims from the bar room were all gunshot, but the gambling room victims are a mix of plasma and bullets. Wouldn’t even call it a slaughter—that would have been cleaner. I don’t see much else that’s relevant to your investigation.”
Andreus studied Dillal for a minute before she added, “So unless something pops on your tox reports later, it’s just what you see. Eshprito’s is the first case of advanced PPL I’ve ever seen, in person. The Dreihleen pulmonary physiology and breathing habit is like yours, and that compensated for the decreased lung capacity and stiffening of the tissue, but he was in bad shape. If he hadn’t been shot, it would have been a race to see if the secondary effects got him before old age did. Maybe a bullet in the eye was a mercy.” She seemed to be waiting for something from the inspector, but he didn’t give it and she finally shook her head. “This planet breeds the most fascinating ways to destroy people. And all in the name of a good time.”
Dillal’s expression was unreadable. “Are you willing to sign these off?”
Andreus sighed. “As soon as the paperwork’s up. But it’s not going to help you much. Ballistics isn’t my field and plasma burns have no identifiable signature. You’ll have to look at the details and test materials yourself—as designed,” she added. “So far, this poor bunch of bastards present nothing beyond the stupefying obscenity of wholesale human slaughter. I’ve seen worse, but I thought I was done with that crap when I came to Gattis.”
“Let us hope that you are, now,” Dillal said.
Andreus gave him a sour look. “If the administration doesn’t turn some of its policies around, this place could get bloodier than Kora.”
“Kora’s was a civil war that broke along political lines. Wasn’t it?”
Andreus snorted. “Politics, genocide . . . It all looked the same from the med tent.” She peered at him. “I don’t like the look of that subcutaneous graft. Are you using the meds I prescribed?”
She started to reach for his face and Dillal flicked her hand aside. His mouth tightened and he gave her as much of a glare as half a face was capable of.
Andreus gave an annoyed huff and turned her back, saying, “You’d better talk your tech down before he makes the whole lab uneasy. He’s been glowering at us for twenty minutes.” She began cleaning up.
Dillal picked up a tray full of bloody bullets, each in its own dish and tagged with the ID of the body it had been removed from. He stared at the misshapen slugs for a moment, then carried the tray to where Starna was standing with his hands thrust into his lab coat pockets, shoulders forward, unconsciously rocking on his heels.
Dillal held out the tray. “Clean these and take samples for metallurgy. Hold any results until I tell you otherwise. Then send them for ballistic analyses and match tests against the bullets taken from the scene.”
Starna blinked at him, his gaze flitting from the tray to Dillal’s left eye. His scrawny throat worked as he swallowed. “Can’t you—?”
“No. Not every test runs in my head,” Dillal replied with a hint of scorn. “What else did you want to say?”
Starna frowned. “What?”
“You’ve been waiting impatiently—I assume for me and not for Dr. Andreus.”
“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir.” Starna’s hands erupted from his pockets as if he had no control of them. His eyes widened in annoyance. “Look, this request for shoe impressions is clogging my work queue. The scene techs have no problem—they do it all the time—but S-Office is being frisky.” He clasped his nervous hands together, ending their fluttering, as he clenched his teeth and raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“Frisky?” Dillal asked.
“Non-compliant in a deliberately semantic way.”
Dillal nodded. “Ah. They don’t like the nature and implications of my request.”
“No, sir, they don’t. I don’t understand why they’re being so obstructive—”
“Have they ever been responsive to such requests?”
“They’ve never had a problem in the past.” Starna dropped his gaze to the tray in Dillal’s hand. “The requests I sent seem to be faring better than yours.”
Dillal gave one of his fast-twitch smiles. “Then send mine again under your cover. You and I will have to work around it until the division comes to its collective senses. It’s more important to get the prints for clearance now, than to fight over the boundary of my authority. S-Office lost that battle before it began. Start on these and keep the results to yourself.”
Starna frowned and took the tray. “Yes, sir.”
The tech hurried away and Dillal turned to remove his own gloves and the spray seal from his hands before retiring to his office. Dr. Andreus lingered, scowling, and followed him after a quarter of an hour, when Starna and the rest of the busy lab techs and med/legals seemed to have forgotten her.
Stop worrying about Julian. Matheson had too many distractions: if not the family, then Aya kept slipping into the front of his mind. Her cool self-possession teased him when he should have been concentrating on his job or staying off-scope of pissed-off SOs.
He’d crossed over to the far side of the Dreihleat to Dohan Sewing, his paranoia growing as he dodged his colleagues. He’d found only one unlocked door at the factory and the piecework manager had been the only person in the small office, hurriedly stacking packages and gathering his keys. “Factory’s closed,” he’d insisted over and over. Then he’d shrugged from further questions, leading Matheson outside so he could lock the door and run away with his head down. It was no good chasing the guy. Matheson followed up on the canvass reports for a while, but found no leads to anything useful, nor any connections between Leran and Robesh, or Dohan and the Julian Company. Julian. Damn them . . .
Frustrated, Matheson headed for Santos’s apartment in East Quay. He went on foot because exertion usually calmed him, but it wasn’t much of a tonic this time. He passed the elegant block of Corporation House, sitting on the landward side of the road as if observing the immaculate white expanse of expensive shops and hotels on the water side. Two silent rows of young errand runners sat on either flank of the side door—Ohba on the right, a smaller number of Dreihleen on the left. Their blue-and-gold jackets were folded over their arms or across their knees to keep the creases crisp in the rising humidity. Sweat settled on their faces, but the girls and boys—none older than twelve or thirteen—all sat as stoically as statues, watched over by a pair of door guards from the cool of the security gateway. Eyes shifted to watch him pass.
Matheson threaded through a stream of well-dressed shoppers outside Emporia. Julian will be in there or the White Hotel, if it’s anywhere. As he walked past, he saw some of the patrons were trailed, not by the expected automated package drones, but by older Ohba or Dreihleen runners, somber-faced in their sweat-inducing livery.
Ohba pushing whispering, long-nosed machines snuck out to erase the blue sand and shoe marks left on the white walkway, then disappeared again behind inconspicuous doors. No one but the eagle-eyed doormen seemed to notice
them. One Ohba woman, brown-red as a pomegranate’s rind, stooped to pick up a fallen e-credit chit. The nearest door guard darted forward and snatched it from her. Matheson watched the doorman return the chit to its owner. Whatever tip he received, he didn’t offer to share it with the cleaner, who had already retreated.
Matheson paused to look up and down the long white row of Cove Quay. There were no detainee work crews here. The whistles of doormen calling for skimmers or ground transport, and the chatter of the wealthy at play wound through the sound of water, genteel commerce, and the rail of seabirds against the electromagnetic repulser grids. It was the same in a hundred other places he’d been when he was one of the customers, instead of one of the cops. Except that here the overlooked workers—who didn’t talk or laugh, but waited in subdued and watchful rows beside the service doors—were Ohba or Dreihleen. The doormen, guards, desk clerks, and shop assistants weren’t. A few tall Dreihleen and striking young people of mixed race clung to the arms of obviously wealthy companions. When they spoke, their voices were brittle. They came and went through hotel doorways, passing their hands discreetly over the waiting palms of guards who offered no other acknowledgement or thanks as they pocketed whatever they’d been given and held the doors open only long enough.
Matheson watched it all for a minute. No one met his eye. Is it the uniform or the color of my skin? An unaccountable chill crawled up the back of his neck and he moved from the static, white walkway to the slideway, anxious to move faster.
He passed quickly into the middle- and working-class neighborhoods on the northeast. There were fewer people on the streets here at this time of day—maintenance was mostly automated and unemployment was low in East Quay—but his paranoia lingered. No one gave him grief, but he kept thinking that if he turned the wrong corner, the blank, disinterested expressions would become fierce. They wouldn’t, of course. This wasn’t the Ohbata or Centerrun, where kilometers of microtransmitters regularly went mysteriously silent and the evidence of crimes vanished as quickly as water into sand. I’m a cop. I’m perfectly safe here.
Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel Page 11
