Axiomatic (10 page)

‘perversely modelled on the artist’s sister, with whose beauty he was constantly obsessed’.

Unsure for the moment just how, if at all, I ought to pursue this strand of the investigation, I sat at my desk for several minutes, wondering (but not inclined to check) if every one of the leopard’s spots shown in the painting had been reproduced faithfully
in vivo.
I wanted to do something tangible, set something in motion, before I put
The Caress
aside and returned to more routine lines of inquiry.

So I made one more blow-up of the painting, this time using the copier’s editing facilities to surround the man’s head and shoulders with a uniform dark background. I took it down to communications, and handed it to Steve Birbeck (the man I knew had leaked my helmet log to the media).

I said, ‘Put out an alert on this guy. Wanted for questioning in connection with the Macklenburg murder.’

* * * *

I found nothing else of interest in the ARIA print-out, so I picked up where I’d left off the night before, phoning companies that had made use of Freda Macklenburg’s services.

The work she had done had no specific connection with embryology. Her advice and assistance seemed to have been sought for a wide range of unconnected problems in a dozen fields — tissue culture work, the use of retroviruses as gene-therapy vectors, cell membrane electrochemistry, protein purification, and still other areas where the vocabulary meant nothing to me at all.

‘And did Dr Macklenburg solve this problem?’

‘Absolutely. She knew a perfect way around the stumbling block that had been holding us up for months.’

‘How did you find out about her?’

‘There’s a register of consultants, indexed by speciality.’

There was indeed. She was in it in fifty-nine places. Either she somehow knew the detailed specifics of all these areas, better than many people who were actually working in them full-time, or she had access to world-class experts who could put the right words into her mouth.

Her sponsor’s method of funding her work? Paying her not in money, but in expertise she could then sell as her own? Who would have so many biological scientists on tap?

The Lindhquist empire?

(So much for escaping
The Caress.)

Her phone bills showed no long-distance calls, but that meant nothing; the local Lindhquist branch would have had its own private international network.

I looked up Lindhquist’s son Gustave in
Who’s Who.
It was a very sketchy entry. Born to a surrogate mother. Donor ovum anonymous. Educated by tutors. As yet unmarried at twenty-nine. Reclusive. Apparently immersed in his business concerns. Not a word about artistic pretentions, but nobody tells everything to
Who’s Who.

The preliminary forensic report arrived, with nothing very useful. No evidence of a protracted struggle —

no bruising, no skin or blood found under Macklenburg’s fingernails. Apparently she’d been taken entirely by surprise. The throat wound had been made by a thin, straight, razor-sharp blade, with a single powerful stroke.

There were five genotypes, besides Macklenburg’s and the chimera’s, present in hairs and flakes of dead skin found in the house. Precise dating isn’t possible, but all showed a broad range in the age of shedding, which meant regular visitors, friends, not strangers. All five had been in the kitchen at one time or another. Only Macklenburg and the chimera showed up in the basement in amounts that could not be accounted for by drift and second-party transport, while the chimera seemed to have rarely left her special room. One prevalent male had been in most of the rest of the house, including the bedroom, but not the bed — or at least not since the sheets had last been changed. All of this was unlikely to have a direct bearing on the murder; the best assassins either leave no biological detritus at all, or plant material belonging to someone else.

The interviewers’ report came in soon after, and that was even less helpful. Macklenburg’s next of kin was a cousin, with whom she had not been in touch, and who knew even less about the dead woman than I did. Her neighbours were all much too respectful of privacy to have known or cared who her friends had been, and none would admit to having noticed anything unusual on the day of the murder.

I sat and stared at
The Caress.

Some lunatic with a great deal of money — perhaps connected to Lindhquist, perhaps not — had commissioned Freda Macklenburg to create the chimera to match the sphinx in the painting. But who would want to fake a burglary, murder Macklenburg, and endanger the chimera’s life, without making the effort to actually kill it?

The phone rang. It was Muriel. The chimera was awake.

* * * *

The two officers outside had had a busy shift so far; one psycho with a knife, two photographers disguised as doctors, and a religious fanatic with a mail-order exorcism kit. The news reports hadn’t mentioned the name of the hospital, but there were only a dozen plausible candidates, and the staff could not be sworn to secrecy or immunised against the effect of bribes. In a day or two, the chimera’s location would be common knowledge. If things didn’t quieten down, I’d have to consider trying to arrange for a room in a prison infirmary, or a military hospital.

‘You saved my life.’

The chimera’s voice was deep and quiet and calm, and she looked right at me as she spoke. I’d expected her to be painfully shy, amongst strangers for perhaps the first time ever. She lay curled on her side on the bed, not covered by a sheet but with her head resting on a clean, white pillow. The smell was noticeable, but not unpleasant. Her tail, as thick as my wrist and longer than my arm, hung over the edge of the bed, restlessly swinging.

‘Dr Beatty saved your life.’ Muriel stood at the foot of the bed, glancing regularly at a blank sheet of paper on a clipboard. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions.’ The chimera said nothing to that, but her eyes stayed on me. ‘Could you tell me your name, please?’

‘Catherine.’

‘Do you have another name? A surname?’

‘No.’

‘How old are you, Catherine?’ Primed or not, I couldn’t help feeling a slight giddiness, a sense of surreal inanity to be asking routine questions of a sphinx plucked from a nineteenth-century oil painting.

‘Seventeen.’

‘You know that Freda Macklenburg is dead?’

‘Yes.’ Quieter, but still calm.

‘What was your relationship with her?’

She frowned slightly, then gave an answer which sounded rehearsed but sincere, as if she had long expected to be asked this. ‘She was everything. She was my mother and my teacher and my friend.’

Misery and loss came and went on her face, a flicker, a twitch.

‘Tell me what you heard, the day the power went off.’

‘Someone came to visit Freda. I heard the car, and the doorbell. It was a man. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I could hear the sound of his voice.’

‘Was it a voice you’d heard before?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘How did they sound? Were they shouting? Arguing?’

‘No. They sounded friendly. Then they stopped, it was quiet. A little while after that, the power went off. Then I heard a truck pull up, and a whole lot of noise — footsteps, things being shifted about. But no more talking. There were two or three people moving all around the house for about half an hour. Then the truck and the car drove away. I kept waiting for Freda to come down and tell me what it had all been about.’

I’d been thinking a while how to phrase the next question, but finally gave up trying to make it polite.

‘Did Freda ever discuss with you why you’re different from other people?’

‘Yes.’ Not a hint of pain, or embarrassment. Instead, her face glowed with pride, and for a moment she looked so much like the painting that the giddiness hit me again. ‘She made me this way. She made me special. She made me beautiful.’

‘Why?’

That seemed to baffle her, as if I had to be teasing. She was special. She was beautiful. No further explanation was required.

I heard a faint grunt from just outside the door, followed by a tiny thud against the wall. I signalled to Muriel to drop to the floor, and to Catherine to keep silent, then — quietly as I could, but with an unavoidable squeaking of metal — I climbed on to the top of a wardrobe that stood in the corner to the left of the door.

We were lucky. What came through the door when it opened a crack was not a grenade of any kind, but a hand bearing a fan laser. A spinning mirror sweeps the beam across a wide arc — this one was set to one hundred and eighty degrees, horizontally. Held at shoulder height, it filled the room with a lethal plane about a metre above the bed. I was tempted to simply kick the door shut on the hand the moment it appeared, but that would have been too risky; the gun might have tilted down before the beam cut off. For the same reason, I couldn’t simply burn a hole in the man’s head as he stepped into the room, or even aim at the gun itself — it was shielded, and would have borne several seconds’ fire before suffering any internal damage. Paint on the walls was scorched and the curtains had split into two burning halves; in an instant he would lower the beam on to Catherine. I kicked him hard in the face, knocking him backwards and tipping the fan of laser light up towards the ceiling. Then I jumped down and put my gun to his temple. He switched off the beam and let me take the weapon from him. He was dressed in an orderly’s uniform, but the fabric was implausibly stiff, probably containing a shielding layer of aluminium-coated asbestos (with the potential for reflections, it’s unwise to operate a fan laser with any less protection).

I turned him over and cuffed him in the standard way — wrists and ankles all brought together behind the back, in bracelets with a sharpened inner edge that discourages (some) attempts to burst the chains. I sprayed sedative on his face for a few seconds, and he acted like it had worked, but then I pulled open one eye and knew it hadn’t. Every cop uses a sedative with a slightly different tracer effect; my usual turns the whites of the eyes pale blue. He must have had a barrier layer on his skin. While I was preparing an IV jab, he turned his head towards me and opened his mouth. A blade flew out from under his tongue and nicked my ear as it whistled past. That was something I’d never seen before. I forced his jaw open and had a look; the launching mechanism was anchored to his teeth with wires and pins. There was a second blade in there; I put my gun to his head again and advised him to eject it on to the floor. Then I punched him in the face and started searching for an easy vein.

He gave a short cry, and began vomiting steaming-hot blood. Possibly his own choice, but more likely his employers had decided to cut their losses. The body started smoking, so I dragged it out into the corridor.

The officers who’d been on guard were unconscious, not dead. A matter of pragmatism; chemically knocking someone senseless is usually quieter, less messy and less risky to the assailant than killing them. Also, dead cops have been known to trigger an extra impetus in many investigations, so it’s worthwhile taking the trouble to avoid them. I phoned someone I knew in Toxicology to come and take a look at them, then radioed for replacements. Organising the move to somewhere more secure would take twenty-four hours at least.

Catherine was hysterical, and Muriel, pretty shaken herself, insisted on sedating her and ending the interview.

Muriel said, ‘I’ve read about it, but I’ve never seen it with my own eyes before. What does it feel like?’

‘What?’

She emitted a burst of nervous laughter. She was shivering. I held on to her shoulders until she calmed down a little. ‘Being like that.’ Her teeth chattered. ‘Someone just tried to
kill us all,
and you’re carrying on like nothing special happened. Like someone out of a comic book. What does it feel like?’

I laughed myself. We have a standard answer.

‘It doesn’t feel like anything at all.’

* * * *

Marion lay with her head on my chest. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. I knew she was still listening to me. She always tenses up a certain way when I’m raving.

‘How could anyone
do
that? How could anyone sit down and coldbloodedly
plan
to create a deformed human being with no chance of living a normal life? All for some insane “artist” somewhere who’s keeping alive a dead billionaire’s crazy theories. Shit, what do they think people are? Sculptures?
Things
they can mess around with any way they like?’

I wanted to sleep, it was late, but I couldn’t shut up. I hadn’t even realised how angry I was until I’d started on the topic, but then my disgust had grown more intense with every word I’d uttered.

An hour before, trying to make love, I’d found myself impotent. I’d resorted to using my tongue, and Marion had come, but it still depressed me. Was it psychological? The case I was on? Or a side effect of the priming drugs? So suddenly, after all these years? There were rumours and jokes about the drugs causing almost everything imaginable: sterility, malformed babies, cancer, psychoses; but I’d never believed any of that. The union would have found out and raised hell, the department would never have been allowed to get away with it. It was the chimera case that was screwing me up, it had to be. So I talked about it.

‘And the worst thing is, she doesn’t even understand what’s been done to her. She’s been lied to from birth. Macklenburg told her she was
beautiful,
and she
believes
that crap, because she doesn’t know any better.’

Marion shifted slightly, and sighed. ‘What’s going to happen to her? How’s she going to live when she’s out of hospital?’

‘I don’t know. I guess she could sell her story for quite a packet. Enough to hire someone to look after her for the rest of her life.’ I closed my eyes. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not fair, keeping you awake half the night with this.’

I heard a faint hissing sound, and Marion suddenly relaxed. For what seemed like several seconds, but can’t have been, I wondered what was wrong with me, why I hadn’t leapt to my feet, why I hadn’t even raised my head to look across the dark room to find out who or what was there.