Black Man (18 page)

“Toni Montes. Age forty-four, mother of two.” The images flipped up in sequence on the conference room wall-screen as Norton talked. Vaguely handsome Hispanic woman, identity card shot, a strong-boned face fleshing out a little with age, henna-red hair cut short and stylish.
flip
. Body a graceless tangle in disarrayed skirt and blouse, limned in crime scene white on a polished wood floor. “Shot to death in her home in the Angeline Freeport this evening.”
flip
. Close-up morgue shot. Face bruised at the mouth, makeup smeared, eyes blown black by the pressure of the head shot that had killed her. The entry wound sat in her forehead like a crater.
flip
. “Children were out at a swimming class with the father.

The house is smart, wired into a securisoft neighborhood net and upgrade-paid for the next three years.

Either Merrin broke in with some very sophisticated intrusion gear, or Toni let him in.”
flip
. Body detail, one mottled flank and the sexless sag of a breast. “There was a fight, he knocked her around, put her on the floor more than once. A couple of her ribs were broken, there’s substantial bruising pretty much everywhere. You saw the face. Blood traces everywhere, too; CSI got it off the couch in the other room, the walls, too, in a couple of places.”
flip
. Red smears on stucco cream. “Most of it’s hers. Seems like he really went to town.”

“Did he rape her?” Carl asked.

flip.

“No. No detectable sexual assault.”

“Same as the others,” said Sevgi quietly. “Baltimore, Topeka, that shithole little town in Oklahoma. Loam Springs? Whenever he’s killed a woman, it’s been the same thing. Whatever this is about, it isn’t sex.”

flip.

“Siloam Springs,” Norton supplied. “Shithole little town in Arkansas in fact, Sev. Just over the state line, remember?”

“No, I don’t remember.” Ertekin seemed to regret the retort almost immediately. She gestured. The edge dropped out of her voice. “We wired in, Tom. It’s not like there was much chance to get to know the place.”

Norton shrugged. “Time enough to decide it was a shithole, though, right?”

“Oh shut up. It’s all Jesusland, isn’t it?” Ertekin rubbed at an eye and nodded at the projection wall.

“Why’d they flag this one up?”

The sequence of images had frozen on another section of pale cream wall, Rorschach-blotched with blood and tissue. A tiny red triangle pulsed on and off in the corner of the screen.

“Yeah, Angeline PD couldn’t work this one out.” Norton prodded the dataslate on the table. On the screen, a block of forensic data floated down onto the picture. “When Merrin finally killed this woman, he shot her standing upright in the next room. High-velocity electromag round; it went right through her head and into the wall behind. The angle suggests he was standing right in front of her. That’s what doesn’t fit. Dying on her knees when she’s finally got no more fight in her, yeah, that I can see. But standing up and just taking it, after the struggle she put up. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Yeah, it does.” Carl paused for a moment, testing the intuition, the lines of force it flowed along. He knew the shape of it the way his hand knew the butt of the Haag gun. “She gave up before she was done, because he threatened her with something worse.”

“Worse than beating her to death?” There was an icy anger in the rims of Norton’s eyes as he spoke.

Carl couldn’t tell if it extended to him as well as Merrin. “You want to tell me what that would be, exactly?”

“The children,” said Ertekin quietly.

He nodded. “Yeah. Probably the husband as well, but it’s the children that would have clinched it. Playing to her genetic wiring. He told her he’d wait until the children came home.”

“You can’t know that,” said Norton, still angry.

“No, of course not. But it’s the obvious explanation. He got in through the house defenses. Either Montes knew him and let him in, or he gutted the software, in which case he’d been scoping the house well enough to know the systems, so he certainly would have known that there were children, that they’d be back soon. That was his leverage, that was what he used.”

He saw the way a look went between them.

“It works, up to a point,” Ertekin said, more to herself than anyone else. “But all it does is turn the question around. If he was prepared to use a threat like that, why not use it from scratch? Why bother dancing around the furniture in the first place?”

Carl shook his head. “I don’t know. But to me, the shot looks like an execution. The fight must have been something else.”

“Interrogation? You think this was about extracting a confession?”

Carl thought about it for a moment, staring into the border of glare and gloom where the side of the screen edged out on the wall. Recollection coiled loose like snakes—this woman seemed to dislodge memory in him practically every time she opened her fucking mouth. Back in the jail—
did you ever think that?
—it was the passageways of the
Felipe Souza
and the cold inevitability of his thoughts as he waited out the rescue. Now she had him again. The hot, tiny room in a nameless Tehran backstreet. Blocks of sunlight etched into the floor, the shadow of a single barred window. Stale sweat and the faint aroma of scorched flesh. Discordant screaming from down the hall. Blood on his fist.

“I don’t think so. There are smarter ways of getting information.”

“Then what?” pushed Norton. “Just straight sadism? Or is this some kind of
übermensch
thing? Brutalism by genetic right.”

Carl met the other man’s eyes for a moment, just to let him know. Norton held his gaze.

Carl shrugged. “Maybe it was rage,” he said. “For whatever reasons, maybe this Merrin just lost control.”

Ertekin frowned. “All right. But then he just, what? Just calmed down and executed her?”

“Maybe.”

“That still doesn’t make much sense to me,” said Norton.

Carl shrugged again, this time dismissive. “Why should it?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, Norton, that at a basic biochemical level, you’re not like Merrin. None of you are. Down in the limbic system where it counts, across the amygdalae and up into the orbitofrontal cortex, Merrin has about a thousand biochemical processes going on that you don’t have.” Carl had meant to come across calm and detached—social aptitude routines had his body language and speech locked away from confrontational. But outside it all, the weariness in his own voice astounded him. He finished abruptly. “Of course it doesn’t make sense to you. You don’t have a map for where this guy is right now.”

Quiet in the softly lit conference room. He could feel Ertekin’s gaze on him like a touch. He looked at his hands.

“You said he’s killed twenty others apart from this one.”

Norton fielded it. “Seventeen confirmed, genetic trace material recovered at the scene. There are another four we’re not so sure about. That’s not including the people he murdered and ate aboard
Horkan’s Pride
.”

“Yeah. You got this stuff mapped out? Where he’s been?”

He didn’t look up, but he felt the glance run between them again.

“Sure,” said Norton.

He worked the dataslate deck and the image of Toni Montes’s blood went away. In its place, continental North America glowed to life, stitched with highways and slashed red along the excision lines of the Rim States and the Union. The map was punched through with seventeen black squares and four gray, each checked against a thumbnail victim photo. Carl got up and went to the wall for a closer look. The Angeline Freeport marker showed a laughing Toni Montes, hair styled up for some party and an off-the-shoulder gown. He touched it gently, and detailed data scrolled down beneath. Mother, wife, real estate feed host. Corpse.

He looked at the other images pockmarking the map. They were mostly similar, careless snapshots, lives caught in the living. In a couple of cases, the image was an ID holoprint, but mostly it was smiles and squints for the camera, close-cropped to cut family members or friends from the frame. The faces looking down were a mix of races and a range of ages, midthirties all the way up to one old man in his late sixties.

Married, single, with children, without. Work ranging from datasystems specialties to manual labor.

They had nothing in common but the continent they lived on and the fact they were dead.

He moved back to the West Coast. Norton did something to the dataslate, and a Bay Area blowup slid out on top of the main map. The
Horkan’s Pride
splashdown was marked in a not-to-scale box just off the coast, eleven faces and names stacked on top of one another beside it. Then three more red squares, all clustered around San Francisco and Oakland. Carl stared at the grouping for a moment, aware, at some level, that something didn’t gel. He frowned, touched and read the scroll-down data.

Saw the dates.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Ertekin moved up behind him. Abruptly, he could smell her. “He came back. Two kills, same day
Horkan’s Pride
hits the water. Then he’s gone, across the frontier into the Republic. Next stop Van Horn, Texas, June 19. Eddie Tanaka, shot to death outside a cathouse on Interstate 10. And then he’s back in the Bay Area again, nearly four months later, October 2, killing this Jasper Whitlock.

What does that suggest to you?”

“He forgot his wallet?”

“There you go. I knew there was some reason we hired you.”

Carl twisted and gave her a reproachful look. Something happened in the line of her mouth. He breathed in lightly, trying for her scent again. “He’s working off partial data. However he came up with this hit list, he didn’t have all the names at the start. Why cross into Jesusland in June when he’s got to come all the way back and do this guy, uh, Whitlock, later. And now we’ve got Montes, she’s down in the Angeline Freeport. That’s a short run down from the bay, and no frontier checks. He’s making this up as he goes along.”

“Right. What we figured, too.” Ertekin backed off a little, ended up close to where Norton was sitting. “If Jasper Whitlock had been another Eddie Tanaka type, you could maybe have sold me on Merrin not finding him first time around, needing to go back. But Whitlock was a medical services broker. All aboveboard, upright citizen, pillar of the community, ran his own business. Not the sort of guy that’s too hard to find. Merrin shot him sitting behind the desk in his own office. So it’s got to be, Merrin didn’t know he had to kill this guy back in June. He found out later.”

“Question is where from?” Carl stared at the continental map, the scattered black flags. “He crosses the border to ice Tanaka, goes all the way to Texas. Any sign that he was after information there?”

“No. Tanaka was strictly a small-time scumbag. Drugs, illicit abortions. The odd smuggled-organ deal.”

Norton looked up from the dataslate, face deadpan. “In fact, the Jesusland version of a medical services broker.”

“Well…”

Ertekin scowled. “We already chased that connection,” she told Carl. “Tanaka’s got no official medical standing, in the Republic or anywhere else. He was a biohazard engineer by trade—”

“Rat catcher,” supplied Norton.

“Unemployed anyway for the last two years, living mostly off a string of women out of El Paso and points east. Before that, Houston, similar profile. Best guess is that’s how he got into the abortion provision in the first place. There’s a lot more money in it than—”

“Catching rats.” Carl nodded slowly. “Right. So I’m looking at this map, we’ve got southeastern Texas, northern Texas, western Oklahoma, then two in Colorado, one suspected in Iowa, Kansas one suspected one dead cert, Ohio, Michigan, two in Illinois, South Carolina suspected, Maryland suspected, Louisiana, Georgia, and northern Florida. Have you got
any
ties between any of these victims? Anything that gels at all?”

The look on Ertekin’s face was answer enough. She was staring at the map, too, and the scattered faces of the dead.

“He could be getting them out of the phone book for all we know,” said Norton soberly.

The sounds of shouting dragged her awake.

For a confused moment, she thought it was a theft or some excessive haggling down in the market. Then the rhythmic element in the voices made it through the wrap of sleep and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply in the narrow barrack room bed. The inside of her head felt grimy with the lack of syn. On the other side of the room, dawn was seeping through at the edges of the moth-eaten varipolara curtain; pearl-gray light lay across the ceiling and down the far wall in blurred stripes. She looked at her watch and groaned. The chanting outside was too muffled to make sense of, but she didn’t need to hear the words.

On the table beside the bed, her phone rang.

“Yeah?”

Norton’s voice filtered into her ear. “Hear the fans?”

“I’m awake, aren’t I?”

“Good call, Sev. If we’d stayed in town, we’d be fucked. That nasty cop mind of yours saves the day again.”

“So.” She flapped back the sheet, swung her legs out of bed to the floor. The skin on her thighs goosefleshed in the cool air. “Parris has friends in Tallahassee after all.”

“Better than that.” There was a sour grin in Norton’s voice. “He went to the media feeds. We’re all over
Good Morning South
.”

“Ah,
fuck
.” Groping around on the floor with her free hand for clothes. “You think we can still get out of here okay?”

“Well, not by suborb, that’s for sure. Whatever was keeping the lid on Marsalis’s genetic secrets at South Florida State is long gone now. He’s blown. Either Parris talked, or somebody leaked higher up.”

“Got to be Parris.”

“Yeah, well, in any case, now you got Jesuslanders fifty-deep outside both gates and backing up down the access road for a couple of klicks at least. Real Die-for-the-Lord types by the look of it. I just got off the phone to our press liaison in Miami and she tells me there are bible thumpers lining up for airtime from here to Alaska.” She could hear him grinning again. “We’re not just trying to evade Republican justice anymore, Sev. We’re harboring an abomination before the Lord.”

“Great. So what do we do?” Sevgi stuck an arm into a shirtsleeve. “Fly home the old-fashioned way?

COLIN’s got to have a couple of flatline Lears down here, right? For short-hop VIPs.”

“I would think so, yes.”

“And they’re not going to shoot us out of the sky when we hit Republic airspace, are they?”

Norton said nothing. Sevgi remembered her profiler cups halfway through seaming her shirt shut. She split the seam back open, peered around on the floor.

“Come
on,
Tom. You can’t seriously think—”

“Okay, no, they probably won’t shoot us down. But they might force the pilot back to a landing at Miami International and take us off the plane there. We’re not popular in these parts, Sev.”

“Not fucking popular anywhere,” she muttered. She caught the translucent gleam of a p-cup at the foot of the bed. She fished it up between two fingers and pressed it up under the weight of her right breast. “All right, Tom. What do you want to do?”

“Let me talk to Nicholson.” He rode out her snort. “Sev, he may be an asshole, but he’s still responsible for operations. It doesn’t look any better for him than for us if we end up slammed in some Miami jail.”

Sevgi prowled the darkened room looking for the other p-cup. “Nicholson won’t get in a fight at state legislature level, Tom, and you know it. He’s too much of a political animal to upset people with that much clout. If Tallahassee gets in line behind this thing, we’re going to be left twisting in the wind down here.”

Another hesitation. Outside, the sounds of the crowd surged like distant surf. Sevgi found the cup under the bed, dug it out, and fitted it awkwardly, left-handed, under her left breast. She sat on the edge of the bed and started seaming her shirt shut again.

“Tell me I’m wrong, Tom.”

“I think you are wrong, Sev. Nicholson is going to see this as interference with his COLIN Security authority, and at a minimum it’s going to make him look bad. Even if he doesn’t take on Tallahassee directly himself, he’ll kick it upstairs with an urgent-action label attached.”

“And meanwhile, what? We sit tight here?”

“There are more unpleasant places to be stranded, Sev.” He sighed. “Look. Worst-case scenario, you get to spend the day on the beach with your new pal.”

“
My
new…” Sevgi took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. The little screen was an innocent matte gray. Norton hadn’t enabled the v-feed. “Fuck you, Tom.”

“It was a
joke,
Sev.”

“Yeah? Well, next time you’re down on Fifth Avenue, get yourself a new fucking sense of humor.”

She killed the call.