Matheson turned to look at the man—Norenin?—keeping his hands still at his sides, and remaining as calm as he could when what he wanted was to grab Aya and run like hell. “I have, but my own people did this to me, not yours.”
The man looked cautiously intrigued. “Dehkas’re beat you? Why?”
“They don’t like what I’m doing or who I’m working for.”
The man paused, his eyes narrowing in thought, then jerked his head toward Aya. “You’re make her bring you?”
“Yes. I need to speak with Osolin Tchintaka or Hoda Banzet.”
“Not here.”
“Just to be clear—you won’t let me speak to them here, or they aren’t here to begin with?” Matheson asked.
The man looked smug. “We’re not help you take Oso for this.”
“For this?” Matheson glanced around the room, pointedly observing the wounded before he returned his gaze to the man in front of him. “Tchintaka’s politics aren’t why I’m here. Unless they turn out to be why he may have been at the Paz da Sorte with Denny Leran.”
“Denny’s victim, like the rest.”
Matheson couldn’t hold back his own bitter smile, but he kept his eyes level and his body still. “Denny was part of the crew. He killed Venn Robesh because she didn’t want to be his girl. You know what he was like. Petty and mean and too quick to blame someone else for everything that went wrong in his life.”
The man cut his gaze aside, staring at the dusty floor and breathing harshly to hold onto his temper.
“You think I’m wrong? You think Denny wasn’t like that? That he wouldn’t have killed her in a rage? That he thought she’d provoked him just by being happy without him? Furious that she was with Gil Dohan? Or wearing a pretty dress and getting the hell out of the Dreihleat? You don’t think that’s how mean Denny was?”
The man snapped his glare back to Matheson’s face. “He’s all that. How’re you know Denny’s kill Venn?”
“Evidence.” Dillal hadn’t confirmed it and he wasn’t certain Starna had either—the tech’s statements hadn’t made sense—but Matheson was sure enough, now, of what the material had been on Leran’s hands. All his confusion, his guilt, his horror, drained to cold, still fury. “Dillal found it—Denny had Venn’s blood and brains on his hands. She had his skin under her nails. She slapped him. He killed her. And it was a terrible way to die—boiled her brains like soup.” He didn’t look at Aya—he hadn’t told her these things and he didn’t want to see how she was taking it.
“Then who’s killed Denny?” the man asked, narrowing his eyes.
“Whoever was in charge of the robbery shot him in the head for killing Venn.”
The man didn’t ask how he knew, he only looked mortified, all color draining from his face. “Robbery?”
If the man didn’t know Tchintaka had been involved in the plan to rob the Paz da Sorte, he at least suspected it might be true, but he wasn’t going to grass on his leader—at least not yet.
“We don’t believe they meant to harm anyone,” Matheson said, forcing his tone softer, covering his own growing certainty. “It just went wrong. But Denny was part of the gang and we must find the other men who were with him. I know Tchintaka and Banzet were his friends. That doesn’t mean they did anything, but I need to ask them what they know. We have to find the men who betrayed your community and killed your people.”
“Why you’re care, dehka?” the man snarled.
“Because they are human beings who were killed just for knowing the wrong thing, for being in the way. The same way Dreihleen were hurt—and killed—today. It’s unjust—the same kind of injustice that Tchintaka urges you to fight against. If he knows anything about who did this, I must speak to him. I have to find the rest of the crew or things are only going to get worse here.”
“Is true,” Aya murmured. “You’re know today’s only make the corporation more hateful.”
The man looked at Aya, his expression twisted with confusion. “You’re believe too that Oso’s do such a thing?”
“I’m not want to. But he’s know who’re do’t. He’s friend to Denny . . . and Hoda. Ledrew a mant, Norenin.”
“You’re say . . . this’s get worse?” Norenin asked, hesitating, and looking to Matheson.
“Yes,” Matheson replied. “We’ve been urged since the beginning to simply close the case and move on. Just find the right type of person to blame, not to bother looking for the truth.”
“Why you’re not?”
He let all his own troubled conviction out. “Because that’s not justice. It’s not right.”
Norenin cut his eyes to Aya. She met them cooly. “He’s believe. And I.”
Norenin grunted. “And . . . the met?”
Aya dropped her gaze to the ground, her face tight. “I’m may have . . . misjudge him.”
Norenin turned narrowed eyes back to Matheson. “What you’re think?”
“Of Inspector Dillal? I think he does what’s important to him. He’s certainly not doing anything because anyone else wants it that way. Including Pritchet.”
“Pritchet? Director Pritchet?” Norenin checked.
Matheson nodded. “I think he expected something different—sure as merry hell not what he got with Dillal.”
Norenin chuckled. “The snake’s bite itself.”
“Whatever he is, he’s arguing with Pritchet right now to keep troops out of the Dreihleat and Ohbata.”
Norenin scowled and tapped a knuckle against his tightly drawn mouth. The room was exceptionally quiet, except for the sounds of suffering too great to turn aside.
The back of Matheson’s neck felt cold and he cast a nervous glance around the room. Every Dreihle who could raise eyes watched. The girl with the shock box had moved around, keeping all three of them in her field of fire, though she’d let the weapon drop to her side. Her expression was tense, focused now on Norenin.
Norenin humphed and Matheson’s attention snapped back to him. “I’m send you t’Hoda. I’m not give up Oso.” He shifted his gaze to the girl, but spoke to Matheson. “You’re not convince me against him yet.”
Matheson heard the girl’s feet shift on the ground, but he didn’t dare try to see what she was doing. Norenin shook his head, his eyes still narrowed in a warning scowl. After a moment, he seemed satisfied that the girl wasn’t going to do anything untoward, and shifted his gaze to Aya. “East tunnel. Goes far as you can. Then you’re find him, or you’re not.”
Dillal didn’t go straight to Pritchet’s office, but strode toward ForTech through the flux of personnel rotating through to cover for the riot patrols and take over as various teams returned. News of the downed transport had reached the offices ahead of the inspector and he received a mix of stares, mutters, and half-hearted approbation. He responded to none of it.
Beside his office, the morgue door was standing open. He stopped short.
An IO stepped through into the hall and twitched back a half-step as he saw the hard gleam of the prosthesis frame peeping from the torn spray skin on the inspector’s face. Then he turned his head and called over his shoulder into the morgue, “Sir, he’s here.”
The IO put out his hand as if he meant to grab Dillal’s arm, but turned at the last second and made it into an “after you” gesture. “Detive Neme wants to see you. Sir.” His expression wavered between distaste and nausea.
Dillal narrowed his eyes at the IO. “I haven’t time to speak with her.”
“You’ll make time,” Neme snapped, jogging up behind the IO’s shoulder as he stood in the doorway.
“I’m meeting with Director Pritchet,” Dillal told her, starting to turn away.
Neme pushed past the IO and stopped in front of Dillal, her lip curling. “I don’t give a sollet’s crap, and you can ask all you want, but Pritchet won’t see you until you can explain to me why your primary med/legal tech is bleeding out on the floor in here.”
Dillal was startled. “Starna?”
“That’
s what his ID says.”
“What’s happened?”
Neme stared hard at him, tilting her head slowly to the side as if she could see what Dillal knew if she just got the angle right. “Tried to kill himself.”
Dillal shoved past her into the morgue.
The room was disarrayed in front of the section that had been screened away for the Paz da Sorte victims, but it appeared that latter part of the room was untouched. The air stank of blood and vomit. A red stain flowed unevenly across the floor, spreading over the cold barrier, liquid on the warm side and gelid on the other. Blood had been tracked and smeared in wide swaths and a bright spatter painted an arc up the service wall. An empty body bag lay in a crumpled heap at the edge of the largest bloodstain. Three med/legal techs in crimson-blotted coats stood against the farthest wall. Just in front of them Woskyat, covered with blood and bile, sat huddled on a gurney, averting her face and retching. A female IO stood guard over her, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder every time Woskyat heaved. The doctor shuddered away from the IO’s touch. IAD Istvalk stood near the lab door, keeping a few curious techs and med/legals out, but not blocking the view much.
Dillal halted at the edge of the cold barrier, narrowing his eyes, the left clicking slightly and sending a few drops of pinkish liquid down his cheek as he studied the scene. He took a short, sharp breath, grimaced slightly, and pivoted back to face Neme, who’d stopped just behind him. “Where is he?” Dillal demanded in a low voice, glaring at her with his teeth clenched and the muscles in his neck and shoulders gone tight.
Neme raised an eyebrow very slightly. “Public Health.”
“You said ‘is bleeding.’”
Neme shrugged. “I lied. So send me up on charges—you’ve always wanted to.”
“He survived?”
“So far. Thanks to Dr. Woskyat over there—who went jumpwise as soon as someone else took over.” Neme coughed up a laugh. “Apparently she doesn’t like blood.”
Dillal let out a breath and his tension dropped suddenly away. He closed his eyes for a second, then tilted his head to meet Neme’s gaze sideways. “Suicide is not a crime and as Starna is still alive, I don’t see what you want of me.”
Neme’s voice was no louder, and no warmer, than his. “Most people don’t address their suicide notes to their whip, Dear Inspector, and I’m not the only person who’s noticed this is suicide number two for you today. You’ve been such a busy little man.”
“Santos’s death had nothing to do with me.”
“So you got your pet surgeon to certify death rather than taint yourself—”
“Procedure required that I step away from a case in which I might be an interested party.” Still his voice didn’t rise, but it was sharp and icy.
“That’s right—because you’re supposed to be our shield against the shadow of evidentiary misconduct—”
“About which I certainly learned all I needed when I worked with you.”
“Don’t come up sanctimonious with me, you twisty little patchwork bastard.” Neme closed the distance between them abruptly, forcing Dillal to tilt his head back to look up at her. Her voice snapped like the thunder of heat lightning in the room that had gone silent but for the whisk and whirr of machines and the sound of Woskyat’s retching. “You’re not my moral better because your hands look cleaner in the glare of procedure. You may have sold your soul—if you fucking well have one—to vault the ladder, and you might actually have nothing to do with Santos taking the jump, but that doesn’t clear your ass of responsibility. A man doesn’t put a knife in his own throat for the sake of evidentiary procedure! You’re in this up to your balls and I’m going to find out how!”
The right corner of Dillal’s mouth quirked and he took a step away from Neme that looked less like retreat than it looked like the gracious acknowledgment of someone else’s defeat. “Then tell me exactly what happened and perhaps I can help you put my balls in a vise—if there’s reason.”
Neme looked askance at him as he settled his weight against the edge of a work table and watched her. His hair was matted on the right, his suit was dirty and still damp in places, and the odor of the canal clung to him, but he seemed to take no notice, any more than he acknowledged the raw patch below his mechanical eye or the fluid that gathered at the corner of the torn spray skin. A tiny shudder escaped her before she spoke again.
“Woskyat’s story is that she was working in the lab and heard a sound in here. She’d assumed the room was empty, but she thought it might be you or Starna—she said you’d been looking for him—so she came in and found Starna there,” Neme said, pointing over his shoulder toward the bloodstained floor at the cold barrier.
Dillal neither blinked nor turned his head. “Go on.”
Neme scowled. “See for yourself.” She walked to the nearest information terminal and swiped around for a minute until the monitor log for the lab came up on the display. She flicked it back to an incident hashmark and set it to playback.
On the display, Starna entered the room through the hall door, locking it behind himself. His bleached hair was slightly damp, his clothes very crisp and lightly water spotted on the shoulders as if he’d just come from a shower. He moved around the room with purpose, but little effect, moving objects, adjusting controls, checking information and tests that the monitor stream made note of in a sidebar.
Starna walked to the supply room—the monitor stream jumped to follow—and removed a flat-folded body bag from one cupboard and a sealed package of scalpels from another. The stream switched back into the morgue where he set the bag and the scalpels on a cleared work space close inside the cold barrier before going to stand in front of one of the information terminals. He started a new document and worked on it for a while, deleting and re-writing several times before he wiped out the work completely and stepped back from the terminal, frowning. He ran his hands through his hair and looked around the room until he saw what he wanted. He smiled and went to write on a pad of flimsy. This time he didn’t seem to have any difficulty with what he wanted to say and wrote fluidly for several minutes, finally signing it with care. He left the pencil where it lay, but carried the pages with him as he returned once more to the terminal, checked the same list of tests and information, and logged out. His fingers lingered over the keyboard for a moment, as if he were considering logging back in, then he shook himself and turned away to walk back over the cold barrier.
He put his note down on top of the body bag and undressed, folding his clothes meticulously and placing them in a neat pile next to the scalpels. He left his shoes in strict alignment on the floor below. Then he picked up his letter, looked it over, and kissed the top page before laying the whole thing precisely in the center of his piled clothing.
He opened the packet of scalpels and set them aside again, then picked up the bag and flicked it open—it made a cracking noise in the air. Starna stepped into the bag, keeping behind the cold barrier, and raised it up to rest on his shoulders like a cloak. Then he slid his hands up the seal as far as his chest, holding the bag up with one hand as he reached for the scalpels with the other. He sat down, bringing the scalpels into the bag and struggling to close the seal over his head and shoulders.
Woskyat entered the room from the lab and paused at the door, looking around. “Starna,” she shouted and ran toward him. “What are you doing?”
Startled, Starna turned his head. Woskyat was no more than two steps away. Light slid like liquid off the scalpel blade as Starna raised his left hand to his right ear.
Woskyat grabbed him, knocking his left elbow upward as Starna started to pull the blade into his skin. Blood sprayed from the cut as the scalpel flipped into the air and clattered back down, spinning across the floor. Woskyat yelled and gagged as blood spurted into her face and Starna sobbed, struggling against her.
Then he collapsed backward to the floor. Woskyat fell on top of him, eyes squeezed shut, jamming her fingers into the gushing wound in his neck even as
she started screaming in hysterical, inarticulate bursts. The blood continued to leak, slower, but still thick and dark, from the wound that clung around her fingers. Then she rolled to the side, averting her eyes, her arm twisting strangely as she kept her hand in place by an extraordinary exertion of will. Starna lay limp in the slowly spreading blood.
Three techs burst in from the lab and scrambled to help. One of them snatched a can of spray seal and a pair of gloves off one of the work tables, shouting orders at the other two as he knelt down beside Woskyat and Starna. “You have to remove your hand from the wound,” he said.
“No,” Woskyat said, gagging. She turned her head and spit blood and bile onto the floor, clenching her eyes shut. “No . . . Spray and wrap.”
“What?”
“Ohhh . . . blight and blackness . . . it’s all over me . . .” She gagged again, her body convulsing as she fought her nausea and then slumping into stillness as she fainted.
The first tech snatched one of the other scalpels from the body bag and hacked a piece off one of the gloves.
The emergency alarm started wailing and lights flashed red. One of the other techs skittered up with an armload of supplies and threw himself down next to Starna’s head. The last med/legal arrived as they started to work on Starna. When the first two were ready, the third pulled Woskyat’s hand away. More blood squirted from the wound until the first two techs finished their seal. Then they started stanching the rest of the blood, keeping pressure on the wound in turns until Medical Intervention arrived to remove Starna.
An SO appeared on the monitor stream and Neme stopped the replay.
Dillal looked at the still frame that remained on the display. He closed his eyes a moment, then looked back at Neme. “Pathetic as it may be, this is clearly not my doing.”
“Explain the fucking note.”
Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel Page 31
