Black Man (20 page)

“Hard to blame them.”

“Yeah, plus they were illegals. Apparently a lot of the casual labor up that way is. They see something, they’re not going to hang around and make witness statements. RimSec are looking, but they don’t hold out much hope.”

“Do they know what this is about?”

“RimSec do, but that’s as far as it’s gone. There’s no public knowledge, we can’t afford it, and neither can they. Things are bad enough between Jesusland and the Rim without word getting out that this guy’s treating their precious border security like a knee-high picket fence.”

“But the Rim cops know he’s killing in the Republic as well?”

“They’ve been apprised, yes.”

“Nice of them to keep quiet about it for you.”

“Well, like I said, there’s no love lost across the fencelines. And it looks bad if the high-powered high-tech Rim States couldn’t stop some psychotic killer crossing over and going on the rampage in the Republic. You can see how that’d play diplomatically.”

“What price technology without God on your side?”

“Right. Plus, if word got out that said psychotic killer is a, uh…”

“A genetic monster?” he asked gently. “A twist?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. I guess you didn’t.”

“The Republic are already handing their people a line of shit about how the Rim is just a craven appeasement system for the Chinese. And with the stories coming out of China, the black lab escapees—”

She shrugged again. “Well, you can see how that one’d play as well, right?”

“Pretty much. Nothing like a good monster scare.”

They cleared the shadow of the freight loader. Sevgi turned her head to beat the sudden glare of the sun and thought she caught a smile slipping across the black man’s lips. His gaze had rolled out to somewhere well beyond the gathering of buildings around the nanorack.

“Something funny?”

His attention reeled back in, but he didn’t look at her. “Not really.”

She stopped.

After a couple of paces, so did he, and turned to face her. “Something the matter?”

“If you’ve got something to contribute,” she said evenly, “then I would like to hear it. This isn’t going to work unless you talk to me.”

He looked at her for a long couple of moments. “It’s really not very important,” he said easily. “I guess you’d call it a resonance.”

She stood where she was. “Resonance with what.”

He sighed. “A resonance with monsters. Do you know what a
pistaco
is?”

She dredged memory, pulled up something from a long-ago briefing on altiplano training camp crimes.

“Yeah, it’s some sort of demon, right? Something the Indians believe in. Some sort of vampire?”

“Close.
Pistaco
’s a white man with a long knife who comes at night and chops up Indians to get at their body fat. Most likely, it’s a cultural memory from the conquistadores and the Inquisition, because they certainly weren’t averse to a bit of dismemberment in the name of Gold and Jesus Christ. But these days, up on the altiplano they’ve got a new angle on the story.”

“Which is what?”

Marsalis grinned. She was appalled at how much it reminded her of Ethan, at how it reached inside and touched her in the place he used to.

“These days,” he said, “the Andeans don’t believe the
pistaco
is the white man as such anymore. That’s gone. Still the same monster, still looks the same, but now the story they tell is, the
pistaco
’s something evil that the white man’s
brought back
.”

He nodded toward the dark towering webbed architecture of the nanorack.

“Brought back from Mars.”

The sweep and swoop of the codes took hold.

Sevgi felt herself dislodged from current reality, turned away from it like a small child guided away from a TV screen by warm parental hands. The couches at COLIN Florida were clunky, thirty-year-old military surplus stock, fully enclosed and soundproofed, and now, in the deadened stillness they created, there was a low chiming that seemed to resonate deep in her guts. From long habit, she let herself home in on it. Gentle steerage to the new focus.
Look at this, look at this
. The colors above her seemed to mesh into significance just out of reach. The chiming was the beat of her heart, the shiver of blood along veins and arteries, a cellular awareness. The swirling ebbed and inked back, glaring out like antique celluloid film melting through. The standard desert format inked in.

She looked around. Marsalis was not with her.

“Good afternoon, ma’am.”

The Freeport PD ’face was a handsome black patrolman in his early twenties, insignia winking in the jarringly heatless Arizona sun. The fabric of his short-sleeved uniform had a perfect, factory-fresh texture to it, and so did his flawless, airbrushed skin. Muscle roped his forearms and bulked out his shoulders.

He might have stepped, Sevgi thought sourly, out of the early stages of a porn experia, the storyline section before the clothes came off. She guessed the intention was to inspire confidence and respect for the symbols of Angeline law enforcement, but all it did was put her on the edge of a giggle and make her slightly warm.

Oh well, at least it isn’t another fucking body-perfect überbitch.

More than slightly warm, in fact.

“Uh, I’m waiting—”

“For a colleague.” The ’face nodded. “He’s incoming, but it’s taking some time. May I see your authorization?”

Sevgi lifted an open palm and watched as the skeins of bluish machine code fell out of it. They splashed on the ground with a faint crackling and disappeared into the dirt as if soaked up. Despite the color, it felt uncomfortably like watching herself bleed through a slashed wrist. At least, what she’d
imagined
it would when—Stop that.

“Thank you, ma’am. You are cleared to proceed.” Ahead of her, the familiar adobe datahomes swam rapidly into existence. The ’face stepped aside to indicate Sevgi’s new status. “Your colleague also.”

She hadn’t noticed. Beside her, Marsalis was shading in. Looking at him as he solidified, she suddenly lost all interest in the patrolman. The attraction was in the flaws, the lines in the face, the faint and flattened scar across his left hand that looked like a burn, the barely perceptible tangles of gray in the hair. The way his mouth crimped slightly to the right when he looked at the patrolman. The way he took up space as if blocking a doorway to somewhere. The way—She still wasn’t sure why he’d suddenly opted to join her in the virtuality.

“You took your time,” she said, a little more harshly than she’d intended.

He shrugged. “Blame the genes. Thirteens run high resistance to hypnotic technique. I knew some guys back in Osprey who had to be sedated before they could use a v-format at all. Shall we go have a look at Toni?”

The ’face led them across the sand to the closest of the datahomes. primary crime scene hung in the air beside it in holographic blue. Unusually, the adobe structure had a door. The patrolman worked the black iron latch and pushed the raw wood surface inward. It opened incongruously onto a prissily decorated suburban front hall.

“My name is Cranston,” said the ’face as it stood back to let them pass. “If you need departmental assistance, please call me. The victim is in the dining room. Second door on the left. Feel free to touch or move anything, but if you wish the changes to be saved, you’ll need to advise me.”

They found Toni Montes sprawled on the dining room floor not far from the section of wall where her blood and brains were splashed. She’d rolled when she fell and landed on her side, head turned, displaying the soggy mess of the exit wound. Her limbs were a seemingly boneless tangle, her feet bare.

The faintly shimmering white corpse outline seemed to isolate her from the surroundings of her home, as if preparatory to snipping her out of the picture. As they approached, supplementary data scrolled up over the body in neat holographic boxes. Tissue trauma, time of death. Probable causes of secondary injuries.

Age, sex, race. Genetic salients.

“I hate that shit,” said Sevgi, for something to say. “Fucking convenience culture, it just gets in the way of what you’re trying to see.”

“You can probably disable it.”

“Yeah.” She made no move to summon Cranston. “Back when I started on the force, NYPD ran trials on this option where you could get the corpse to talk to you.”

“Jesus, whose fucked-up idea was that?” But it was said absently. Marsalis knelt by the body, brow creased.

“I don’t know. Some datageek with too much time on his hands, looking for a creative edge. Rationale was, it was to prevent desensitizing. Supposed to bring back to you the fact that this was once a living, breathing human being.”

“Right.” He took one of the dead woman’s hands, which had fallen cupped loosely upward, and lifted it gently. He seemed to be stroking her fingers.

Sevgi crouched beside him. “Well, they already had the models where you could get the victim to reverse from moment of death, back up, and then walk through the probable sequence of events. Guess it wasn’t that much of a stretch.”

He turned to look at her, face suddenly close. “Can we do that here?”

“You want to?”

Another shrug. “We’ve got time to kill, haven’t we?”

“All right. Cranston?”

The ’face shaded undramatically into being across the room from them, like a pre-millennial photo Sevgi had once seen developed chemically at a seminar.

“What can I do for you?”

Sevgi got up and gestured. “Can you run the crime event model for us? Last few minutes only.”

“No problem. You’ll need to come through to the front room; that’s where it seems to have started. I’ll engage the system now. Do you want sound?”

Sevgi, who’d watched a lot of this sort of thing, shook her head.

“No, just the motions.”

“Then if you’ll follow me.”

Unnervingly, the patrolman stepped directly through the wall. They left the body and took the more conventional route through the connecting door to the front room, where Cranston was waiting. As they came in, the sky outside the room’s window darkened abruptly to night and the drapes drew themselves partway closed like some cheap horror-flick effect. An unharmed edition of Toni Montes stood in for the ghost—she shaded back to life in the center of the room, feet still shod in mint-and-cream espadrilles that picked up the colors in her skirt and blouse. Her makeup was intact, and she looked impossibly composed.

A pace away from her, the system penciled in the perpetrator.

It was a black outline of a man, a figure with the smooth, characterless features and standardized body mass of an anatomical sketch, all done in shiny jet. But it breathed, and it swayed slightly, and it sprang at Toni Montes and hit her with a savage, looping backfist. The image of the woman flew silently backward, tripped, and fell on the couch. One espadrille came off, flipped ludicrously high, and landed on the other side of the room. The black figure went after Montes, seized her by the throat, and punched her in the face. She flopped and slumped. The other espadrille came off. She pushed herself away along the couch, stumbled toward upright while the black figure stood and watched with robot calm. When Montes got to her feet, it stepped in again and punched her high in the chest. She flew back into the drapes, rolled, staggered upright. She flailed with nails, got a backhand for her trouble that knocked her fully across the room. The edge of the opened door to the hall
caught her in the back. This time she went down and stayed down.

The black figure stalked after her.

“At this point,” said the ’face, “the model estimates the killer force-marched Montes into the other room, threw her back against the wall, and shot her through the head. Reasons for the change of tactic are still under consideration. It may be that he was concerned the killing would be seen through the window to the street.”

The black figure bent over Montes and hauled her to her feet by the hair. It pinioned her arm into the small of her back and shoved her, struggling, toward the connecting door to the dining room. At the threshold, the two figures froze in tableau.

“Would you like to relocate to view the final sequence?”

Sevgi glanced at Marsalis. He shook his head. “No. Turn it off.”

Montes and her black cutout killer blurred and vanished. Marsalis walked through the space where they’d been, leaving Sevgi in the front room. When she followed, she found him knelt once more by the corpse, apparently reading the scroll-ups.

“See something you like?” It was an old homicide joke, crime scene black humor. It was out of her mouth before she realized she’d said it.

He looked up and seemed to be scanning the room. “I’m going to need to see prior record.”

She blinked at him. “Prior record of what?”

“Her prior record.” He indicated the sprawled corpse. “Montes.”

“Marsalis, she was a fucking housewife.” Angry, she realized, with herself and the ease with which she’d slid back into crime scene macabre. She brought her voice down. “This is a suburban mother of two who sold real estate part-time. What record are you talking about?”

He hesitated. Got up and stared around the room again, as if he couldn’t work out how Montes had come to be living with this décor.

“Marsalis?”

He faced her. “If this woman was a real estate saleswoman, I’m a fucking bonobo. You want to get some air?”

She cranked an eyebrow. “In a virtuality?”

“Figure of speech. There’s got to be a briefing level somewhere in this format. How about we go there?”

The briefing level was cut-rate, a mesa top that you got to from anywhere in the construct by reciting a key code Cranston provided them with. The system switched without any transition you could feel to a viewpoint high up over the desert and the spread of datahomes on the plain below. Over time, it appeared various AFPD detectives had imported their own custom touches, and now the mesa top was littered with favorite armchairs in clashing upholstery, a couple of tatami mats, a hammock strung on two thick steel hooks embedded, startlingly, in floating patches of brickwork, another slung more conventionally between two full-size palm trees, a pool table, and, for some inexplicable reason, a tipped-over antique motorcycle with an ax buried in its fuel tank.

It was very quiet up there, just the wind catching on edges of rock in the cliff face below. Quiet enough that you thought if you listened carefully, you might be able to hear the faint static hiss of the base datasystems turning over. Carl stared down at the adobe structures for a while, not listening for anything, thinking it over. The datahomes seemed very distant, and he supposed that was appropriate. There was nothing here he needed to interest himself in more than superficially. He wondered how much to bother telling Ertekin, how much cooperation he needed to fake to keep her cop instincts cooled.

“Look,” he said finally. “That fight they’ve modeled down there is bullshit. Montes wasn’t a victim, she fought this guy all the way. She knew
how
to fight. That’s why the slippers came off. She didn’t lose them in the battering, she kicked them off so she could fight better.”

“And you’re basing this on what?”

“Initially, instinct.” He held up a hand to forestall her protest. “Ertekin, this isn’t some fucked-in-the-head serial killer we’re talking about. Merrin came all the way to the Freeport just to kill this woman. That has to make her something special.”

“Maybe so. But it doesn’t make her a combat specialist.”

“No. But her hands do.” He raised both his own hands now, palms toward his face, fingers loosely curled, halfway to a double fist guard. “There’s bone alloy marbling across the knuckles, you can feel it under the skin. Probably calcicrete. That’s combat tech.”

“Or part of a menopausal support regime.”

“At forty-four?”

Ertekin shook her head stubbornly. “I looked through the file last night. There’s nothing about combat training there. And anyway, it doesn’t gel with the genetic trace material under her fingernails. You really think a combat pro would bother
scratching
her attacker?”

“No. I think she did that when she’d already given up. When she’d already made the decision to let him kill her.”

“Why would…”

He saw the way it dawned on her, the way her brow smoothed out and the heavy-lidded eyes widened slightly. In the Arizona construct sunlight, he realized suddenly that they were irised in flecked amber.

“She knew we’d find it,” she said.

“Yeah.” He looked somberly down at the datahomes again. “Toni here was gathering evidence for us.

Just think about that for a moment. This is a woman who knows she’s about to die. A minute or less off her own death, she’s calculating how to take this guy down posthumously. Now,
that
is either psychotic force of will, or training. Or a bit of both.”

They both stood in silence for a while. He glanced at her again and saw how the wind twitched her hair around the lines of her jaw. Tiny motion, barely there at all, but something about it set off an itching in the pit of his stomach. She must have felt some of it, too, because she turned and caught him looking. He got the full sunlit force of the tiger eyes for a moment, then she looked hurriedly away.

“Gene analysis says no enhancement,” she said. “Standard chromosome set, twenty-three pairs, no anomalies.”

“I didn’t say there would be.” He sighed. “That’s the fucking problem these days. Anything extraordinary shows up in anyone, we all go running to the augment catalog looking for correlation. Got to be something crammed into an Xtrasome, something fucking
engineered
. No one ever wonders if it might just be good old-fashioned heredity and formative conditioning.”

“That’s because these days it mostly isn’t.”

“Yeah, don’t fucking remind me. Anyone wins anything these days, they’re up there plugging some gene frame consortium as soon as the cameras roll.” Carl lifted his arms in acceptance-speech burlesque. “
I’d just like to say I couldn’t have done it without the good people at Amino Solutions. They truly made me what I am today
. Yeah,
fuck
off.”

She was giving him an odd look, he knew.

“What?”

“Nothing. Seems like an odd stance for you to be taking, that’s all.”

“Oh, because I’m a thirteen I’ve got to like this pay-and-load excellence we’re all living with. Listen, Ertekin, they rolled the dice with me just like with you. No one dumped an artificial chromosome into me in vitro. I got twenty-three pairs, just like you, and what I am is written all over them. There’s no optional discard for shit like mine. No knockout sequencer in a hypo they can shoot me up with and make me safe to breed.”

“In which case,” she said quietly, “I’d have thought you’d see the Xtrasomes as a step forward. For the next generation at least.”

For a moment, he could feel the rolling weight of his own pointless anger, back and forth through his chest cavity like a punching bag left swinging. Images from the past four
wasted
months flickered jaggedly through his head.

He put a clamp on it.

“I’m a little short on that kind of outlook right now. But let’s stick with Montes, shall we? I’ll bet you this much: she’s got a combat history, at a minimum a combat training history. If it doesn’t show up in the prior record, then she hid it for some reason. She wouldn’t be the first person to wind up in the Angeline Freeport wearing a brand-new identity. Wouldn’t be the first person to marry someone who knows nothing about who she used to be, either, so you’re probably wasting your time talking to the husband.”

“Yeah. Usually the way.”

“How old were the kids?”

“Four and seven.”

“His?”

“I don’t know.” Ertekin reached up and made a gesture that split the virtuality open. She tugged down a data scroll, gently glowing text written on the air like some angelic missive. She paged down with delicate middle-and ring-finger motions while the index finger kept the scroll open. “Yeah. First birth’s Republic-registered, looks like they moved to the Freeport shortly after. Second child was born there.”

“So she’s from the Republic, too.”

“Looks like it, yeah. You think that’s relevant?”

“Might be.” Carl hesitated, trying to put the rest of it into words, the vague intimations he’d had while he watched the replay death of Toni Montes. “There’s something else. The children were the obvious leverage, the reason she let him kill her.”

Ertekin made a gesture of distaste. “Yeah, so you said.”

“Yeah, so the question has to be why did she believe him. He could have killed her and then still waited around and murdered the rest of her family. Why trust him to keep his word?”

“You think a mother put in that situation has a choice? You think—”

“Ertekin, she was making choices all the time. Remember the genetic trace under the nails? This isn’t a civilian we’re talking about, this is a competent woman making a series of very cold, very hard calculations. And one of those calculations was to trust the man who put a bullet through her head. Now, what does that say to you?”

She grimaced. The words came reluctantly.

“That she knew him.”

He nodded. “Yeah. She knew him
well.
Well enough to know she could trust his word. Now, where does your suburban housewife mother of two part-time real estate saleslady make friends like that?”

He went and sat in one of the hammocks while she thought about it.