by L. A. Graf
She fell silent, so still against him that Sikes feared for her. “And you think somebody saved some of these during the crash somehow?”
“Oh, Matt, don’t you see?” She disentangled herself somewhat, and twisted to look up at him with pale desperation. “It has to be attached to a kleezantsun—it has to have a master somewhere.”
“But, Cathy,” George said softly from behind Sikes, “the only kleezantsun anywhere near Pittsburgh was Ross Vegas.”
She nodded, eyes glistening with horrified tears. “And it’s his, George, it has to be! I don’t know where he got the embryo, but he had everything he needed to grow it—This is Ross and Lydia’s unborn child!”
They finally called an ambulance, but it didn’t come for Sikes. He stood crammed into a glassed-in alcove near the revolving lobby doors, watching a mini crowd gather beyond the waiting vehicle and hating them all for their morbid fascination.
He’d left Cathy upstairs with George and Susan. Jordan had let him into his ruined hotel room long enough to gather an armful of clothes. He’d found a pair of once-worn blue jeans, the underwear discarded from last night’s lovemaking, and the LAPD sweatshirt he’d been letting Cathy wear to bed ever since they got to Pittsburgh. He had to make do with his own soggy tennis shoes and a pair of Cathy’s socks. With as much of her scent on him as he could contrive, he’d come down here to be alone while George and Susan did everything they could to purge Cathy of her own smell until the ambulance came.
They knew not to let anyone touch her and not to let Cathy touch anything while they transported her from place to place. Then came a shower in Emma Bovary’s room, with the water running right up to the moment the medics with the isolation suit arrived. She touched nothing in the model’s room, and the water would wash all scent of her down the drain so that any odor she left behind would be little more than the perfume of passing by. It would have been better to bathe her in her own room, or the Frees’, or even Ann Arbor’s. But all those were locked off by the FBI, and they were the last people Sikes wanted to know about what was going on.
So, even now as Sikes waited, somewhere above him medics were transferring Cathy, wet and naked, into a hermetically sealed environment, ending her scent trail in a hotel room that she would never see again, leaving the levpa only one strong remnant of her trail to follow when it returned to the hotel in search of her.
Sikes. With Cathy’s socks, and Cathy’s sweatshirt, and the bitter smell of Cathy’s musk still fresh upon his skin. He was warmer now, if still chilled deep inside, and a trip to the hospital would just lead the levpa into a crowd of people who wouldn’t know how to protect themselves from an alien monster. It wasn’t the first time he’d been half frozen—he’d be fine if he just kept moving, and he’d have to keep moving if he wanted to survive the night.
Still, he wished with burning desperation for a gun.
The elevators across the lobby chimed, and a flurry of nervous FBI agents flocked out ahead of the medics. Cathy followed between them, her steps slow and clumsy in the over-large protective suit, her arms raised just a little to either side as if searching somewhere out there for balance. They’d told the convention organizers that she’d developed some sort of infection. They didn’t know what, and it seemed best to keep her in isolation until it could be verified that it wasn’t something the humans could contract. She’d be kept in an airtight room away from strangers, protected from the levpa’s nose by every obstacle modern science could throw between them. Sikes hoped it was enough and had to beat down a rising swarm of guilt because he couldn’t think of anything better.
She looked up at him just as the party reached the exit. Her eyes had darkened back to moonlight green, trusting him, believing him when he told her he’d do everything in God’s power to keep this thing away from her. Sikes wanted to smile and reassure her, but he could only watch in helpless fear as George hurried ahead to lever open the handicapped access doors to help her to the outside.
I love you, she mouthed, reaching out to him as she went by.
Sikes blinked back tears and didn’t move. To come close to her, to touch her, would contaminate her with his deadly scent. And that would kill her. “I love you, too,” he whispered in reply. But he didn’t think she heard him.
George spoke to her a moment as they helped her into the ambulance, then he shooed the gathered reporters away. Sikes stayed willfully separate inside the hotel, his hands pressed against the frost-patterned glass. His breath left no marks to be seen on the window, but his scent swelled all around him on the air, settling onto the plants that hung above him, soaking like blood into the carpeting below.
C H A P T E R 1 8
“THERE YOU ARE?” Kathleen Westbeld pounced on George as soon as he turned away from the revolving glass door, before Cathy’s ambulance had even disappeared from view. He took a step back, startled by the vengeful fury in the television producer’s face. She held a clipboard across her chest, but the way her rigid hands clenched on it suggested she would prefer to use it as a weapon rather than a shield.
George blinked at her, feeling distinctly underdressed in his sweater and slacks next to her severely tailored wool suit. “Is there something I can do for you, Ms. Westbeld?”
“You could have done something for me forty-five minutes ago, Mr. Francisco,” she snapped at him. “You could have shown up for your talk.”
“My talk!” George felt the sickening jolt of adrenal hormone hit his blood as he realized he’d missed the most important engagement of his life. Oddly enough, the first thing he thought of wasn’t the criticism of the Newcomer community or the affront to the human symposium organizers. It was the disappointment that Emily and Buck must have felt, waiting proudly at home to watch their father on television and never seeing him.
Sikes cleared his throat beside him. “Sorry, George,” he said uncomfortably. “I guess that means you’re not going to get elected Newcomer of the Month again.”
“No, it means my children probably think I’m dead.” George looked around the marble-encrusted hotel lobby for a phone in vain. Such prosaic necessities were probably hidden away in alcoves to keep from clashing with the decor. “I’d better go up to my room and call them right away.”
Westbeld caught at his arm, not looking quite so angry anymore. “Hey, wait—we’re not morons here, all right? The only thing we said on TV was that we’d rearranged the schedule to accommodate your work with the Pittsburgh police on the Free murder case.”
“Thank you.” George took a deep, relieved breath, feeling as if his reputation had just been handed back to him. “That was very magnanimous of you.”
Westbeld shrugged. “Don’t thank me. Nancy Thompson suggested it. She said she saw you handling some kind of emergency during the coffee break.” The producer’s level eyebrows pulled together into a frown. “It would have been nice if you’d called and told us you couldn’t make it.”
“Hey, he was so busy he didn’t even remember to call an ambulance for me,” Sikes informed her. Westbeld gave him a baffled look, and he sighed. “Never mind. Come on, George. We have to go find Lydia Vegas.”
“I’ve got you tentatively scheduled for tomorrow at three forty-five,” Westbeld called after them as they moved toward the marble stairs. “I’m warning you now, Mr. Francisco, that’s the last talk of the symposium. If you miss it, I won’t be able to do anything for you.”
George glanced back at her, remembering the rose pink smear of blood and flesh that had been Sandi Free. “If I miss it,” he said soberly, “nobody will be able to do anything for me.”
“And now, turning to the dialectic of kidney transplants and the ethical dilemma of cloning antirejection drugs from Tenctonese DNA—”
Under the whirring of the slide projectors, Sikes’s whisper sounded horrified. “Jeez, George, have all the talks been like this?”
George paused in his scan of the crowded ballroom to frown at his partner. The dim light didn’t hide the human’
s sincere disgust. “You should know the answer to that, Matthew. You did attend the first morning session of the symposium.”
“Yeah, but I managed to sleep through all those talks.” Sikes fiddled absently with the coffee cup he’d grabbed as they crossed the balcony lobby. Torn paper strips lay in a ragged semicircle around the corner in which they stood. “You see Lydia yet?”
“No.” George went back to scanning the crowded ballroom, forcing his eyes to widen despite the bluish beam from the slide projector. Up on stage, the elderly Tenctonese philosophy professor began another digression into the moral question of hair emplacement surgery for Newcomers. As far as George could tell, he hadn’t advanced beyond his first slide.
Sikes grunted. “Maybe she’s not down here.”
“She didn’t answer her room phone.” Up on stage, George could see Kathleen Westbeld and Nancy Thompson conferring with bent heads over a copy of the program schedule. He wondered if they would turn off the slide projector to stop the professor or just cut to a commercial. People were already starting to trickle out for the afternoon coffee break. As they did, a faintly scarred cheek caught George’s gaze on the far side of the room. He moved along the wall until parallax gave him a view of the rest of Lydia Vegas’s profile. “There she is, sitting beside that pillar.”
“Got her. I’ll go left, you go right.” Sikes strode across the front of the ballroom, his tall shadow darkening the screen momentarily as he cut through the projector beam. George circled more carefully around the back of the room, working his way through the stream of exiting guests. He reached Lydia Vegas two steps after Sikes, in time to see her flinch and gasp when the human touched her shoulder.
“What is it?” The Overseer’s wife stared up at him like a startled child. Even in the darkness, George could see the flicker of fear that paled her eyes. “What do you want?”
“We’d like to talk to you, Mrs. Vegas,” George said before Sikes could answer. “We’d rather not do it in public.”
“Oh.” Lydia rose obediently from her seat, a spike-thin shadow in the darkness. George spotted a side door that he knew didn’t lead to the lobby and headed for it. It opened onto an empty maintenance hall, lined with spare tables and metal carts and stacks of extra chairs. Lydia Vegas followed them in, then paused uncertainly on the threshold.
“Here, have a seat.” Sikes pulled a folding chair from the nearest stack and kicked it open for her. He threw another one at George, then leaned back against the wall in stony silence. Knowing which role his partner intended to play in this questioning, George arranged the chairs so one faced away from him, then sat in the other. “Well, are you coming?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Lydia Vegas stepped forward, letting the ballroom door sweep shut behind her. The sound of amplified voices hushed to a background rumble. “What did you want to talk about?” she asked, huddling her sweater around her as she sat. It was even colder in here than it had been in the ballroom.
“About the thefts we’ve been having in the hotel.” George tried to keep his voice unthreatening but firm. “Specifically, about your role in them.”
“My role?” To her credit, Lydia Vegas managed to sound surprised, if somewhat breathless. If he hadn’t known about her husband’s activities, George might have attributed her fear simply to her own insecure personality. It occurred to him for the first time that a timid person had some advantages in lying to authority.
“Yes.” He held her faltering gaze until she dropped it to her thin-boned hands. “I caught you with my wife’s purse yesterday, Mrs. Vegas. And Cathy Frankel knows she left her sweater in your hotel room last night. You told her this morning that it wasn’t there.”
“But that doesn’t mean—”
“It does to us,” George said. “And then there are Ann Arbor’s Olympic medals and the Frees’ book manuscript. We don’t have any evidence to link you to those thefts now, but I suspect that if we ask around—”
“Did you get them the same way?” Sikes interrupted, his voice harsh. “Just found them conveniently lying around?”
George thought she would continue to deny it, but her thin shoulders heaved in one great sigh. “Yes,” Lydia admitted, in a voice that shook with pent-up tension. “I shouldn’t have—but they were so easy to take. It was almost as if they were asking to be stolen.” She lifted her radiation-scarred face to look pleadingly at George. “Please don’t arrest me. It’s a psychological problem from the years on the ship when we never had enough food or water. When I see something lying unattended, I can’t stop myself from taking it. It’s something I’m being treated for.”
Sikes lifted an eyebrow behind her, wordlessly asking George if he believed that story. George shook his head and resumed the interrogation. “Mrs. Vegas, you say you steal things because you just can’t help it. Can you prove that?”
Lydia blinked at him. “Without my psychiatric records, I don’t see how—”
“People who steal compulsively also hoard the things they’ve stolen. If we examine your room, will we find all the stolen items there?”
Her gray eyes paled again. “I—I don’t know. I don’t always remember what I do with them.”
Sikes leaned forward, planting both hands on the metal back of Lydia’s chair. The Tenctonese female jumped as she felt the impact. “Do you remember giving any of them to your husband?”
“My husband—” A visible shudder ran through Lydia. She caught herself with an effort, folding her hands tightly in her lap. “My husband has been kidnapped. For all I know, Mr. Sikes, he could be dead by now.”
“Dead, my ass!” Sikes slammed at the nearest metal cart and sent it crashing into the wall. “Don’t give me that dogshit! The only dead Newcomers around here are the ones Ross Vegas has had killed!”
“That,” said Lydia with dignity, “is ridiculous.”
Silence fell in the dimly lit corridor while George and Sikes traded stymied glances over her leopard-spotted head. The human spread his hands, silently asking whether to continue the verbal badgering. George considered the tense figure of the Overseer’s wife, then shook his head at his partner. It was time to try something different.
“Mrs. Vegas.” George drew his chair so close that their knees touched, then lowered his voice until she was forced to lean forward to hear him. The intimate stance wove an illusion of trust between them. “You told us that you lost a child last year, that your husband miscarried it. Is that right?”
“Yes.” A shadow of buried sorrow darkened Lydia’s eyes. “Yes, we did. But I don’t see what that has to do with this.”
“It has everything to do with this,” George said somberly. “Tell me, did you have problems with the pregnancy before you transferred the pod? An episode of premature labor, perhaps, early in the first few weeks?”
“How did you know about—” She bit her lip, stopping the flow of unguarded words, but George had heard enough to know he was on the right track.
“Your husband took you to the hospital when it happened,” he continued. “Probably the hospital attached to his biotechnology company.” Her soundless gasp told him he had guessed right again. “They had to put you to sleep to stop the labor, but when you woke up you were still pregnant. They told you everything was all right, but you never felt right after that, did you?” He reached out and caught her gaunt hands, feeling them knot convulsively inside his grip. “Did you?”
“No.” The Overseer’s wife took a long, almost-sobbing breath, then freed her hands with a jerk. “I don’t have to listen to this,” she said, suddenly frantic. “It has nothing to do with—”
“Oh, yes, it does.” Sikes shoved her back into the chair when she started to rise. George trapped her chin with his hand, forcing her to look up at him. He could feel tears catching in the corrugations of her scarred skin.
“Lydia, your husband lied when he told you he miscarried. You lost your child a long time before that, when you were put to sleep at that hospital. Ross Vegas took it
away and replaced it with something else.” Her eyes were almost silver now, the pupils huge with shock, George tried to think of more compassionate words, but found none. “Lydia, he used you to make a levpa.”
A visible shudder ran through the Overseer’s wife, and horror spasmed on her face as if a mask had cracked and fallen off. She doubled up with a gasp, then let out a thin, screeching cry that seemed to go on forever. Sikes scowled and turned away, looking uncomfortable. George merely waited. Lydia fell silent after a while, shuddering as she fought for breath and composure. She managed to straighten at last, staring at George through a ruined smear of makeup.
“That’s what’s been killing them, isn’t it?” she asked. “The levpa? It’s been tracking them down from the things I’ve stolen.”
“Yes.” George eyed her grimly. “You knew they were going to be murdered?”
“No. No, I didn’t, not at first.” Lydia took a deep, steadying breath. Now that she wasn’t lying for her husband, her voice had actually gotten stronger. “Ross told me he’d found a group of Purists here who wanted to help him send all of us back to quarantine. He said they needed the personal belongings for their religion. I thought they were the ones breaking into people’s rooms, getting crazy and killing them when they were only supposed to be scaring them away.” Lydia shivered, looking even smaller and more fragile now than she had before. “Purists hate us so much . . . that’s why we have to go back to the desert, you see. We’ll never be safe, living among humans.”
