by Tad Williams
Stan was already on his first dessert, and for a moment, as he speared and chewed, she thought he had not been listening. "It's interesting, Skouros," he said at last. "And there may be some truth to it, but I've got a couple of problems right up front. First, he hated his mother—you heard that Doctor Danney guy. If she'd lived, he would have killed her himself. Why should he take up some crusade on her part?"
"But that's what I think happened! I think his mother raised him to be this . . . woolagaroo, this killing monster, but what she mostly made him do was hate her."
"So where does our victim come into this?"
"Maybe she tried to be his friend, and was just too close to something dangerously damaged. Worse, maybe in the way girls do sometimes, she tried to take care of him. Maybe . . . maybe she tried to be his mother."
Stan slowed down as he started on his second dessert, as though taking the word "ruminate" literally, and did not speak for almost a minute. "Yeah, I see what you're saying," he finally said. "I'm not sure about it, but it's interesting. I'm not certain it helps us forward any, though, and I sure as hell don't see what it has to do with grave posts."
Calliope shrugged, then reached out her fork and pilfered a corner off Stan's piece of pie. He raised his eyebrows but said nothing—it was an old dance of theirs. "I can't tell you. I just have a feeling that this Aboriginal myth stuff isn't simply window-dressing. He didn't mutilate that girl just to make some mocking point about his cultural heritage. No, it's more like . . . like he was trying to liberate himself from it, somehow. Turn it back on his mother, tell her, 'This is what I think of your plans.' But she was gone, already dead. He had to find someone else to act all that anger out on."
Stan pushed back a little way from the table so he could cross his legs. The slanting sunlight through the high windows, the green of the trees in the Botanical Garden, the shrill voices of children as they skidded along the food-service aisle, all made Polly Merapanui's death seem almost fantastically remote. But that's the point, isn't it? Calliope thought. We do what we do so that people can feel that the bad stuff is in boxes, kept separate—that when someone does something horrible, people like us are right behind them, ready to take them off the streets.
"I've been doing some thinking of my own," Stan announced suddenly. "But first, I have a question. Tell me again why exactly they threw this case out of the 'Sang' killer investigation—or the 'Real' killer, or whatever the hell they're calling it this week . . . the 'Sang-Real-Good' killer, maybe—why did they throw Merapanui back out again?"
"The only reason the task force picked it up in the first place was because the weapon was the same—their killer uses one of those big Zeissing meat-choppers too. Oh, and some of the wound-pattern stuff was slightly similar, mostly because of the size and shape of the knife, probably. That and lack of forensic data. But everything else is different. The Real Killer—they only called him that because his first victim's name was Real, and because he never shows up on surveillance footage—goes after well-to-do white women, usually youngish, but certainly not girls like Polly. The mutilations on his victims are a lot less bizarre than with Merapanui, too. Why?"
"Because something's been bothering me about the information in this case, and . . . well, it's just strange the way the records have been erased."
"People hack into systems all the time, Stan, even our system. Don't you remember that multiple-murder on Bronte Beach, where the guy's girlfriend. . . ."
"That's not what I'm talking about," her partner said impatiently. "I'm not surprised someone hacked into the system and jiggered this guy's records, what's suprising is the way they did it. I know about this stuff, Skouros—I did an academy refresher in it just a couple of years ago. It usually goes two ways. Either they work and work at it until they manage to get into one system, but don't realize how many parallel systems there are, and leave all the cross-referencing, or they do a sensible, professional job once they're in and drop a dataphage."
"Some of that data-eating gear."
"Yeah. Which will systematically follow the name or whatever from system to system until everything's gone—everything, including stuff about people with the same name! You can buy the service from any black market hackshop. But what our boy's done—if it was him—is somewhere in between. He's left little bits of information lying around all over the place. Kind of sloppy, in fact. It's like he managed to do stuff no normal gear-jockey can do, in terms of getting into lots of different systems without being detected, but didn't know enough basic stuff to get a data-eater and do the job right."
Calliope wasn't sure where this was going, "So?"
"So it just made me wonder about the Real Killer and his weird luck at staying off surveillance systems, camera drones, you name it. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it."
"That seems like a real stretch, Stan. Besides, if the task force didn't find any hard connection between our murder and all of theirs, we'd probably be spinning our wheels worrying about it. Let's face it—we've got a small-time case and we should just get used to it."
Stan nodded. "Maybe, but you haven't heard the rest of what I'm thinking about, and some of what you've said today, your theory, just makes me wonder about it more. Let's assume that what you've said is true, right? This kid was raised in a brutal environment, with a mother and a succession of boyfriends we know abused him—that much isn't speculation. But let's go with your idea, that his mother systematically tortured him, trying to turn him into some kind of human terrorist weapon. Filled him full of monster stories, religious mania, all but put the knife into his hands and told him 'kill, kill, kill!' Okay. The profile fits—he's been in trouble since he was little, there are suspicious deaths all through the record, as well as what we know are a few actual murders, whether or not you buy into the polite fiction of temporary insanity. Then he goes into Feverbrook Hospital and scares the bejesus out of everyone with how smart and quick and evil he is—old Doctor Danney comes up about a fingernail short of calling him the Antichrist—where he meets Polly Merapanui. Then, a short time later, our Johnny Dark aka John Dread, he suddenly dies. But we don't believe that now, do we? In any case, all his records are buggered, so it's hard to know what's really going on. A few months after our boy's so-called death, Polly Merapanui dies, brutally mutilated, a real psycho number. All this sound more or less right?"
Calliope had been hungry, but she did not feel like finishing her salad now. "Yes. More or less right."
"You see where this is going, don't you?" Stan put his feet on the floor and leaned in, his eyes intent. "Little Johnny Dread has been shaped from birth to inflict pain and suffering. He's gotten away with everything so far. He's an intelligent, cruel, sociopathic bastard—maybe he is the Antichrist, for all we know." His grin was without humor. "So . . . why would he stop killing? He's like an adult in a world of children, as far as he's concerned. He can get away with anything. Why would he stop killing?"
Calliope sat back and closed her eyes for a moment. "He wouldn't, of course."
Stan nodded. "That's what I think. So he's either gone—way gone, America, maybe Europe—or he's here. Could even still be in Sydney. Right under our noses. And he's still murdering people."
As the sun went behind a cloud, a shadow passed across the tall windows of the museum restaurant. It might have been Calliope's imagination, but for that single moment everyone in the wide, echoing room seemed to fall silent.
They stopped to get out and stretch their legs along the motorway. The Drakensberg stretched above them, sharp and forbidding. The dim late afternoon sun had already begun to drop behind the peaks; shadows blanketed the mountainside and the patches of high snow seemed weirdly luminous.
"This . . . I haven't been here before." A puff of Del Ray's vaporous breath swirled in the crisp, cold air as he squinted up at the line of jagged peaks. "It's impressive, I guess. I can't say it looks like a very nice place to spend a lot of time."
"You are just ignorant, man," Long Jo
seph said cheerfully. He had been here before, only a few weeks earlier, and felt a certain expansive possessiveness about the place. Besides, it was always good to one-up a young know-all like Renie's ex-boyfriend. "This is your heritage. It is . . . it is part of history, you see? Those little people, those Bushmen, they used to live all up around here. Before the white man came and shot them all."
"Some heritage." Del Ray clapped his hands together. "Come on. I don't want to be looking for this base in the dark, and God knows how far we'd have to go to find a place to stay for the night."
"No, you don't want to be running 'round here in the dark," Long Joseph said. "Very tricky."
The ride up had been long and tedious, but once Joseph had established his right to play the radio and occasionally sing along—a right granted in return for a promise that he would keep his feet off the dashboard, whether he thought the leg space was too cramped or not—he and Del Ray had worked out a reasonably practical arrangement. The tenor of the day had further improved when Joseph found a handful of coins wedged in the crack of the seat, and made Del Ray pull over at a combination store-and-she-been along the motorway, a place too small to have a hologram, or even a neon sign, but whose painted advertising carried the only words that mattered—"COLD DRINKS." Despite a few desultory protests from Del Ray that the money by rights belonged to his brother Gilbert, since it was his car, Joseph spent his windfall on four bottles of Mountain Rose. He drank half of one before they were out of the muddy parking lot, but then, remembering that there would be no alcohol at the Wasp's Nest base, put the cap back on, and congratulated himself on his restraint.
While Del Ray drove, Joseph gifted him with some of his philosophies and thoughts, and handled the map when the situation called for it, since the trip-reader in the old car had long since given up the ghost. To Del Ray's astonishment, Joseph proved useful with Elephant's map, and he even congratulated the older man once when he guided them through a particularly tricky set of back roads successfully.
Joseph, in his turn, would not have gone so far as to say he liked the young man, but he had managed to get past some of his prejudices, both acknowledged and unacknowledged—the former being his distrust of anyone who wore suits and spoke netcaster-style English, the latter being Joseph's dislike of anyone who would break off with his daughter. Long Joseph might think Renie was a bit of a nag and a know-all, but that was his privilege. For anyone else to disapprove of her—well, that seemed little different than disapproving of Joseph himself. She was his daughter, wasn't she? Everything she was, she owed to his hard work and thoughtful care.
So the thaw had been slow, but it had been a thaw nevertheless, and as they wound their way up the mountain roads, the car rocking on inadequate springs, Joseph found himself thinking that perhaps there was hope for this young man after all. Poke a hole in some of his college-boy ideas, rub a little dirt on him—although that part seemed to have happened already—and maybe he and Renie would make a match after all. This fellow was broken up with his wife, and when all this virtual, military-base nonsense was done with, he would be able to get a new suit and a nice new job, wouldn't he? That university degree had to be good for something besides making a man talk funny.
Joseph could not help thinking that it would be nice to see Renie settled. After all, a woman without a man—she couldn't really be happy, could she? She was certainly going to find it hard to give her father proper attention in his declining years if she had to be working all the hours of the day.
"Is this the road?" Del Ray asked, breaking into a sunny reverie in which Joseph was enthroned on the couch of his expensive new flat, with a big Krittapong wallscreen always on, entertaining his grandchildren with stories of how contrary and difficult their mother had been. "It's hardly a road at all."
Joseph peered out the dusty window. When he saw the brush-choked cut in the road, he didn't need to look at the map. "That is it," he said. "Looks like we clear it out a bit when we brought that car of Jeremiah's through—it was more tangled up before. But that is the road."
Del Ray swung onto the narrow track; within moments it widened into a well-maintained road which angled up the mountain in a series of steep switchbacks, hidden from below by the tall brush and trees. The sun was gone now, although the sky was still a thin, pale blue; the mountain's flank was mostly shades of purple and gray, the vegetation more shadow than anything else.
"One thing or two I have to tell you about this place," Joseph said. "It is very big. And it is a military place, so you don't go touching anything I don't tell you to touch. Whatever your Elephant friend say, it is a secret, and we are going to keep it that way."
Del Ray made a noise that almost sounded impatient. "Right."
"The other thing I have to let you know, this man Jeremiah Dako?" Joseph pointed up the mountain in the general direction of the base. "The man who is staying there, helping me with things? Well, he is a homosexual man." He nodded. He had done his duty.
"And?" said Del Ray after a moment,
"And what?" Joseph raised his hands. "There is no 'and,' man. I am just telling you, so you don't do something foolish. You have no cause to insult him—he has never done anything to you."
"Why on Earth would I want to insult him—I haven't even met him!"
"That's fine, then. He and I, we had to work things out. I mean, I had to make him understand how things were. But he is a human being, you see. He has feelings. So I don't want you to say anything foolish—besides, I don't think you his type. He likes mature men. That is why we had to have some conversation, he and I, so I could let him know for certain that I am not that way."
Del Ray began to laugh.
"What?" Joseph scowled. "You think it is a joke, what I'm telling you?"
"No, no." Del Ray shook his head, dabbing at the corner of his eye like it itched. "No, I was just thinking that you are a piece of work, Long Joseph Sulaweyo. You should be on the net. You should have your own show."
"I don't think you mean that for real." Joseph was displeased. "Think it's supposed to be a joke on me. I'm going to have to stop paying attention to you, you act like that. Leave you on your own, make all the mistakes you want."
"I'll try to muddle through," Del Ray said, then: "Jesus!" He stomped on the brake and the car skidded a bit on the gravel. Del Ray flicked up the high beams. "I almost didn't see it."
"That is the gate," Joseph pointed out, willing to bend his new rule of silence at this crucial juncture.
Del Ray pushed open his door, then leaned back in and set the parking brake. Joseph got out and walked with him to the chain-link fence. "It's locked. I thought you said you had to break it open before."
"We did. I made Jeremiah step on the gas even though he was frightened, we went through just like that fellow in Zulu 942, where they have the armored car. Boom!" He clapped his hands together. The sound died quickly in the thick, damp brush that hemmed the road. "We just knocked it open."
"Well, it's locked now." Del Ray shot him an irritated sideways glance. "We're going to have to climb over the top. Let me go turn off the engine, and you go find me a stick to push up the razor wire so we can squeeze underneath without getting our skin peeled off."
Joseph, although annoyed to be given the go-fetch part of the job, found a piece of broken branch that seemed adequate, then remembered the precious cargo he had left in the car. He put a bottle of Mountain Rose in each of his pants pockets, then the two remaining containers in his shirt.
Del Ray had just slid the toe of his scuffed, once-stylish boot into the wire of the gate, preparing to climb, when Joseph suddenly put a hand on his shoulder.
"What?"
"Just . . . I am just thinking." He stared at the shiny chain that joined the two halves of the gate, the very formidable-looking lock. "Who put this chain here?"
Del Ray put his foot back on the ground. "I assumed it was your friend Jeremiah."
"I told you, he isn't my friend, he's just a man who is in the mountain
, and I was in the mountain, too." Joseph shook his head. "But Jeremiah didn't put no lock here, I don't think. Isn't no easy way to get out of that base—it took us most of a day to get in, and we had help from that old man and that French woman." He rubbed at his beard stubble. "I don't know. Maybe I am thinking too much, but I don't make sense of there being a chain on this gate—it being all locked up tight like this."
Del Ray looked around. "Maybe there are . . . I don't know, park rangers or something. Isn't this part of one of the nature preserves?"
"Maybe." Joseph could not help seeing in his mind's eye that shiny black van and its dark windows. He felt a glimmer of regret he had not mentioned it to Del Ray before. "Maybe, but I don't like to see it."
"Well, if you didn't come out this way, how did you get out?" Del Ray took the stick from Long Joseph and poked at the chain. It made a very solid clink.
"One of those, what do you call them, air shafts." He pointed. "It come out on the far side of the hill, round over there."
Del Ray sighed, but he looked troubled. "So you think—what? That there could be someone who came in after you and Renie did? Who could that be?"
Long Joseph Sulaweyo knew that this was the time to mention the van. but couldn't think of any way to do it that wouldn't give Del Ray the right to yammer at him about what an old fool he was, "I don't know," he said finally. "But I don't like to see it."
