Babylon 5 12 - Psi Corps 03 - Final Reckoning - The Fate Of Bester (Keyes, Gregory)

by The Fate Of Bester (Keyes, Gregory)

  He shook his head again when he realized he had missed what the doctor had just said.

  "I'm sorry. What?"

  "I said it looks pretty professional. Small - caliber slugs, so there are no exit wounds. I think the killer put a bag over his head, too - there is a faint ring of capillary damage around the throat, here."

  He pointed to what, for Girard, was an invisible line, but if the examiner said it was there, it was. The man was a necromancer, a wizard of the dead, and Girard had come to respect him deeply.

  "The muzzle was placed right against the skull, too, so the killer was close."

  "Was he bound?"

  "No sign of it. No abrasions of any sort on the hands or feet, no odd muscle positions."

  Girard had a sudden flash. Two men talk to one another, like old friends. One casually pulls a pistol, as though he's taking out a cigarette lighter. The other doesn't notice, until the steel touches his head, and now he's puzzled. His puzzlement deepens as he feels a thump, and everything goes strange, as if he is very drunk, and he forgets where he is, what he s doing, and there is another thump, and another...

  Girard had these flashes. He had wondered, often, if he might not be some sort of telepath, but all the tests came back negative. No, he was merely damned to have that sort of imagination that put things together without consulting his intellect, a brain that dreamed while it was awake. It made him a good detective, but he didn't like it. Sometimes, when he was wrong, when his flashes proved incorrect, he was actually more relieved than when he was right.

  It didn't happen often that he was wrong.

  "Have you identified him yet?"

  "That's the puzzling part. Considering how professional the execution was, you would think the killer would have tried harder to get rid of the body. Dissolve it in acid, or some - such. Cut off the fingertips, knock out the teeth."

  "The killer was working alone," Girard said.

  "If this were a syndicate hit of some sort, there would have been no body, as you say. And I'm guessing that not only is this poor fellow's DNA registered someplace, but the killer knew it. So. Since he didn't have the means, or the time, to entirely destroy the body, he did the next best thing. He disposed of it in an entirely conventional way, hoping we wouldn't notice him in the piles of bodies we fish from the river every day."

  "Or perhaps it really was just a robbery-murder, by someone with a professional technique."

  "Perhaps."

  He paced around the corpse. His personal troubles began to fade, overwhelmed by the puzzle.

  "His DNA was on file, yes?"

  The examiner tapped a small display.

  "Let's see. Yes, you're right. He..."

  "No, don't tell me who he was, yet."

  "As you wish, Inspector."

  "The killer killed him near the water, so he wouldn't have to carry the body."

  "That could be. He soiled himself when he died, but the pattern of absorption by his clothes suggests he was immersed almost immediately."

  He tried to picture it another way. A tourist out for a stroll, an out-of-luck, unemployed hit man looking for his next meal. He walks up, asks for a match or something, and when his victim looks down, kisses his head with the end of his pistol.

  No. Why the bag? The killer had wanted his victim dead, fast and certainly. And the way the victim was dressed in no way suggested a rich man. This was never a robbery. He couldn't make that scene come alive in his head.

  "If his DNA was on file, he was probably either a convicted felon, in the military, or a telepath. Which one?"

  "A telepath."

  Well, that opened up a lot of possibilities. A hate crime? A lot of people hated telepaths for a lot of reasons. That might explain the execution-style slaying. The killer saw himself as a cleansing force, out to make the world safe for those without unholy powers.

  Or it might have been an old grudge, yes? There must be plenty of grudges after the telepath war.

  Two telepaths, once friends, on opposite sides of the conflict. A pretense of reconciliation - that would explain why the victim wouldn't notice murder coming up to him, didn't even flinch as his bloody- minded companion drew his weapon with cold, certain intent. Except it couldn't have been that cold. There were mistakes here, and a lack of planning that suggested panic...

  No, wait-where had he gotten panic? A panicked man didn't calmly place a gun against someone's head and pull the trigger, then produce a plastic bag. Ah, but people didn't always know they were panicking, did they? When Marie told him of her pregnancy, he had believed himself to still be in control. He had fooled himself, suppressed the fear, told himself that all he needed to do was act calmly and everything would be all right.

  But there was nothing logical about adultery, about ruining a marriage of thirty years, the humiliation of his own children realizing what he had done to their mother. No, he hadn't acknowledged his panic. He had swallowed it, and it had poisoned him. It had made him stupid even as he convinced himself he was clever. The mind worked like that. This wasn't the first time he had seen it.

  So what did he have? Someone who wanted to kill a telepath, probably a telepath himself. Someone who thought he was doing the murder for all the right reasons and with all the proper precautions, while at the same time he was frightened at the most fundamental level possible. Maybe the victim had learned something he shouldn't have, yes? Telepaths had a way of doing that. Maybe the meeting was at the victim's behest, an overture to blackmail. And the killer saw, with terrible lucidity, that the way out of the trap was to destroy the trap itself. Enough.

  "Who was he?"

  The examiner, who had become busy examining the man's stomach contents, didn't bother looking at the video display. The faint gleam on the narrow goggles he wore suggested the information was scrolling there.

  "Justin Ackerman. Born in North America, in Toronto. Sixty-three years of age. He was a telepath, a P7. A war criminal, as a matter of fact. He had just finished serving his sentence and was out on parole. Applied for a work visa two months ago, rented an apartment near the Rue de Paris. He worked part time as a night guard at the club Pugeot."

  "Have you informed Psi Corps yet?"

  "No, Inspector. But we're supposed to inform them within twenty-four hours."

  "We still have ten, then, yes?"

  He walked toward the door, snagged his jacket from the skeleton - coat-rack that held it on an outstretched arm.

  "Hold off as long as you can. I want to talk to his landlord and his employer, before the EABI shows up and takes this one away from me."

  Though why he should care, he couldn't say. Wouldn't he be better off without one more case? But he had a longstanding dislike for the Metasensory Division of the EABI. In the old days when they had been MetaPol, they had swept in like birds of prey, arrogant, dismissive, heavy-handed. He didn't like having them in his city. Oh, they were better on the surface now, but the arrogance remained. And perhaps he was envious of their abilities-sure, they claimed not to use them, but he knew better. Who wouldn't? He had never been able to escape the feeling that it was unfair, cops who could read minds, as often as he wondered if he himself didn't have a touch of their power.

  No, this was his city, not th eirs. His murder, his murderer.

  And, he thought cynically, another thing to keep his mind off how his life was slowly disintegrating around him.

  * * *

  "He didn't have any friends. At least none that I saw."

  Margarite de Cheney might have been attractive once, before life had scrubbed her face red and bruised her eyes with disappointments. Girard wondered looking at her, if she ever felt joy in anything anymore. He wondered if she could kill. If one's own life was gone, it was easier to take another's, yes?

  He wondered wryly if that meant murder was next on his agenda. Would his life be easier if he had killed Marie? No, because he would have been caught. Everyone got caught, sooner or later.

  Besides, he did love her,
in his way. And the thought of another child, while immensely complicating, was not without appeal.

  "No one came or went?"

  "You'd have to ask the doorman. I never saw anyone, but then I don't spy on my guests. Is he in some kind of trouble?"

  "He's dead."

  He watched her reaction-this was the moment when a lot of them blew it. They always imagined they should act surprised, shocked. Real reactions were slower than that. Death was something people spent their whole lives pretending couldn't be real. When confronted with it, there was usually a comprehension gap, a moment searching through the words they had just heard, trying to see if there was some other way to interpret them.

  "Dead? You mean..."

  "Dead," he repeated, disappointed.

  But then, he hadn't really thought she was guilty.

  "Murdered."

  "Here?"

  That scared her.

  "Maybe," he lied.

  "We found his body in the river, but he could have been killed anywhere. Which is why it's so important that you recall everything you can."

  "There are two doormen, one for night, the other for day. I'll give you their names and addresses, but Etienne is here already. You want to talk to him?"

  "Of course. But first, I would like to see Mr. Ackerman's room."

  "Oh, yes. This way."

  They went upstairs to room 12. De Cheney exhaled into the cheap chemical lock and the door sighed open. There wasn't much to the place. A couch and two chairs that looked like they belonged there. Some clothes in the closet, a night guard's uniform and one new suit, undoubtedly the one he had received on release from prison.

  The forensic team would be here soon, and he was loath to spend much time inside, for fear of contaminating the place, of erasing the trace elements and bits of hair, the physical clues that sometimes led nowhere and sometimes everywhere.

  He just wanted to see it, to picture where the man had spent his last days. If Justin Ackerman had been killed for being Justin Ackerman, then knowing the victim would help him know the killer. If he had been killed simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, it wouldn't help much at all. But it couldn't hurt.

  "Was he noisy? Did anyone complain about him?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "The rooms next to his-are they occupied?"

  "That one is. A Mademoiselle Carter."

  She pointed to the door on the right. Girard knocked. After a few moments, a young woman answered. She was blond, perhaps twenty years old, a bit disheveled looking, pale but not unattractive.

  "Oui? " she said.

  Her accent was terrible. An American.

  "Mademoiselle Carter, my name is Raphael Girard," he said in English.

  "I'm a police inspector. I wonder if I can have a few words with you about your next-door neighbor?"

  "Sure."

  She stood in the door frame and folded her arms, her eyes suddenly lively, interested.

  "You've lived here for how long?"

  "About a month, since the school year started. I'm studying antiquities at the Sorbonne."

  "A graduate student?"

  "Yes."

  "I've always been fascinated by history. What period do you specialize in?"

  "The early Roman period in Gaul, actually."

  "Oh. Asterix, eh?"

  She smiled, openly and genuinely.

  "Very good," she said.

  "I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of Asterix."

  "My father was a professor of twentieth-century literature. He was responsible for the reprinting in the sixties." "Well, thank him for me," she said.

  "I collected those, as a child." She smiled again.

  "Now that you've put me at ease, Inspector, what did you want to know about my neighbor? I'm afraid I can't tell you much."

  "Well, did he ever have visitors? A girlfriend, anything like that?"

  "No, not usually. Though somebody came by a couple of nights ago. I remember noticing it just because he never had visitors. I was studying, and someone knocked on his door. I could hear them talking, but not what they said. I was sort of surprised, you know?"

  She scrunched up her face.

  "I think they left. I wasn't really paying attention. Something happened to him, didn't it?"

  "We found him murdered."

  "Oh."

  "You don't sound surprised."

  "I am - that he was murdered. I think... I think I expected him to die, though. When you asked me about him just now, I thought you had found him dead-in there."

  She gestured toward the room next door.

  "Suicide, you mean?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "He just seemed... sad. Worn out, or something. He spoke to me once, in the hall. You know that way that people act, when you speak to them, and you can tell they don't do it very often? The way they want to keep talking, even though all you meant to do was say hello? But I was pretty busy, and I was suddenly anxious. I need this place to study, and if I suddenly had this needy friend next door, always coming over..."

  She broke off and frowned.

  "So I sort of ignored him, after that, or just nodded at him and acted like I was in a hurry. I felt guilty about it, and I sort of worried - Well, but when he had a visitor, I remember thinking 'Oh, good, he has a friend."

  "But you didn't see this friend."

  "No. It was a man, though, I'm sure of that, from his voice. They spoke English, I'm pretty sure."

  "And this was about what time?"

  "Oh, midnight, maybe."

  Another flash. The same two men talk, but Ackerman knows how it's going to end. So there's no surprise when the gun touches his head. He knows running is useless. Maybe he doesn't care. Thump... Girard blinked rapidly. The girl was looking at him funny.

  "Does that help?" she asked, her tone suggesting that she was repeating herself.

  "Yes. That's very near the time of death."

  "Oh, my God. I heard the killer."

  "Yes."

  "Do you think I..."

  "I don't think you are in danger, but you should be careful. Take normal precautions. Don't answer the door unless you know who it is - that sort of thing. Let me give you my card..."

  He produced a slip that had his name and address written on it.

  "It has my phone code in it, prepaid. All you have to do is swipe it through a payment slot. If you need anything, I'm at your service. And I'll come by to check on you, if you want."

  She smiled, timidly.

  "That would be nice. But that isn't what I was going to say. I was wondering if there might have been anything I could have done, if I might have stopped him."

  Ah. Young Americans. They always imagined the world would be a better place if they, personally, took an interest in it. "Don't worry about that," he told her.

  "There was no way for you to know. Besides, if you had tried, I would be asking these questions about you, I fear, and that would be a most unpleasant task. I much prefer having met you this way."

  He started to say more, but stopped. Was he flirting again? This was how he had met Marie.

  "Once more, thank you, and good day," he said, and backed out, quickly.

  * * *

  The doorman didn't remember anyone, and looked uncomfortable about it.

  "Well, someone came in," Margarite said, a little shrilly.

  "What do I pay you for?"

  "Maybe it was another tenant," Etienne mumbled.

  "He might have just gone down the hall, for all we know."

  "That's true. But let us suppose, for a moment, that you were distracted..." say, by the inside of your eyelids "...or were away from your post, maybe in the toilet. Couldn't someone have come in and out without you knowing it?"

  "No, Inspector. The door records everyone who goes in and out, anyway. You're welcome to view the record, if you wish."

  "Let's see it."

  They searched for three hours eit
her side of midnight, but found no trace of anyone other than tenants coming in or out.

  "Monsieur Ackerman went out," Girard said.

  "Of that, there is simply no question. And yet, I do not see him here. How can that be? Is there another way?"

  "No."

  "A window?"

  "The windows are sealed," Margarite said.

  "The building is environment-controlled, and open windows muck that up."

  "We should check them, anyway. What is sealed can be unsealed. What about the recording device? Could it have been tampered with?"

  "I don't see how. It's AI-controlled. Nothing I could do to it, if you're implying that," Etienne said, defensively.

  "I'm not," Girard replied, suddenly recalling something.

  Hadn't there been something recently, in another part of town? Yes, an attempted robbery of a pharmacy, a nd even though one of the perpetrators had been found dead in the building, he hadn't shown up on the surveillance. The security company in question had claimed that the clumsy recovery techniques used by the police had badly damaged the circuits, but the experts he knew in the department had flatly denied the possibility. Still, nobody could figure out how the device might have been fooled, either. And since a guard and three policemen had died in the incident, there had been considerable effort in that direction.

  Wait a minute. Hadn't the guard at the pharmacy been a telepath?

  Could telepaths influence Als? He had never heard of such a thing, but then, if they could do it, it might be a pretty closely guarded secret. Hadn't there been some rumor that telepaths had been able to do something to alien ships, back during the Shadow War? And a telepath could easily have erased the doorman's memory, or fogged his mind, or whatever. Ackerman could have done it himself, for that matter.

  This was getting interesting. Very interesting. Something was going on here, something to do with telepaths, he could feel it in his bones. Which meant he had better use the hours remaining to him very wisely, before Metasensory showed up. Otherwise, he might never know what had happened here. When any division of the EABI showed up, cases sometimes just vanished, as if they had never been.