city blues 01 - dome city blues (28 page)

Maggie had grown up hating the Spartan lifestyle of the Luddites, trying to claw an existence out of the barren soil with only the kind of tools that they could make by hand.  By her tenth birthday, she’d watched a dozen relatives and friends rot from cancers brought on by solar radiation and the carcinogen-laced air, dying because their suspicion of technology left them without the vaccines and treatments that could have saved them.

At nineteen, she’d run away to Los Angeles, into the arms of everything that she had been raised to fear and hate.

By the time I met her, she had shaken off most of her father’s teachings, but she had somehow held on to his conviction that organ transplants—even blood transfusions—were the blackest of mortal sins.

Could Lisa have the same sort of hang up about DNA manipulation?  I didn’t know her well enough to even guess.

I filled the bag with ice and took it back to Sonja.  She laid it gently across Lisa’s eyes.

Lisa flinched when the cold plastic touched her face.  “Is my nose broken?”

“I don’t think so,” Sonja said.  “It’s pretty swollen, but it doesn’t seem to be displaced and the bleeding has stopped.”

She met my eyes for a second and then looked back down to Lisa.  “I think this is the work of a professional.”

“I’ll vouch for that,” Lisa said.  “They seemed pretty competent from where I was standing.”

Sonja said, “I’m trying to say this looks like very careful work.  A lot of bruising, some blood, but no real damage.”

“That’s not how it feels from in here,” Lisa said.

Sonja touched Lisa’s cheek.  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.  I know you’re hurting.  And I know you’re scared.  But I can’t find any sign of broken bones, and you don’t have any of the classic symptoms of concussion or internal bleeding.”

“So I’m going to be okay?”

“Well,” Sonja said.  “I’d really like to get you to a hospital, where they can run a full med-scan.  But, based on what I can see, I think you’re going to be fine.”

Lisa let out a breath that was heavy with relief.  “Thank you.”

I found myself breathing a little easier too.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Sonja said.  “I still need to do a bit of patchwork here and there.  You might decide I’m a pretty lousy doctor before I get done.”

Lisa raised her hand to steady the ice bag.  The hand trembled slightly.  “I did what you wanted, David.  I ran that search you asked about.”

I swallowed.  I found myself hoping that this wasn’t my fault, that Lisa had been the victim of a random mugging.  I prayed that she hadn’t been beaten like this because of some stupid little errand I’d sent her on.

I tried to keep the quaver out of my voice.  “What did you find?”

Lisa coughed.  “Pretty much what you expected.”

Another cough.  “A bunch of news articles: six girls over about eight months, the last one three years ago.  The methods were pretty much identical to Aztec.  Similar murder weapon.  The girls were cut up pretty badly.  The media nicknamed the killer Osiris.  Egyptian mythology, means the
Judge of the Dead
.  I looked it up.”

“What happened to the killer?”

“This forty year old construction worker named Russell Carlisle walked into a police station and confessed to all six Osiris killings.  Then he pulled a bomb out of his pocket and blew himself up.  Wasn’t a very big bomb, but he held it right up to his own head, so it did the trick.  Made a hell of a mess, but nobody else really got hurt.  His confession contained a lot of information that only the killer could have known.  The killings stopped after he died.  Case closed, just like you said.”

“What city was it in?” I asked.

“Right here,” Lisa said.

“What?”  From the tone of Sonja’s voice, she was as surprised as I was.  “Los Angeles?”

“The good-old City of Angels,” Lisa said.

“That’s unbelievable,” I said.  “I’m not surprised that your search turned up another string of murders, but I sure as hell didn’t expect it to be in my own back yard.”  I shook my head.  “Did you find any other cases that fit the profile?”

“Uh-uh.  Just the one.  How’d I do?”

“You did good, Lisa.  You did real good.”

She smiled wearily behind her ice blindfold.

I had to ask.  I didn’t really want to know the answer, but I had to ask.  “Who did this to you, Lisa?  Why did they do it?”

Lisa sighed heavily.  “If I’d just done my homework assignment, like you told me, I’d have been okay.  But I had to go for the extra credit.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I started thinking,” she said, “about the questions you’d asked me, and things began to line up in my head.  Kurt Rieger’s thing for little girls.  Aztec’s thing for little girls.  I thought I could see what you were leaning towards.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.  “I ran another search.  I scanned company records for Rieger’s itinerary on the dates of all the Aztec and Osiris murders.  I looked for patterns.  I figured he could have faked a few alibis, but not twenty.”

“And?”

“He came up clean,” Lisa said.  “Rieger was in Europe at a trade conference for two of the Aztec killings.  He was the keynote speaker at a fund raiser during one of the murders; about four hundred people can vouch for that one.  He was on vacation in Jamaica for another one.  I can account for his whereabouts during nine of the Aztec killings and three of the Osiris murders.”

Sonja dabbed the bloody corner of Lisa’s mouth with a sterile swab.  “Couldn’t company records be altered?” she asked.

Lisa jerked when the disinfectant stung her ravaged lip.  “I thought of that.  I scanned his travel visas through North American and European Immigration. He’s also featured in a few page-six articles in various trade journals.  Some of them detail his location on certain dates.  You might not be convinced, David, but I am.  Rieger may be a pervert, but he’s definitely not Aztec or Osiris.”

“Okay,” I said.  “You still haven’t told me who did this to you.”

“Rieger’s goons,” she whispered.  “Two of them.  I must have tripped a few warning flags when I pulled his files.  Just because he’s not your killer doesn’t mean there aren’t any skeletons in his closet.”

“Did you recognize the goons?”  I wanted names.  Somebody had to pay for this.

“They were your typical wall-to-wall-muscle, blonde haired, blue-eyed Aryan Supermen.  You know, Hitler Youths.  I didn’t recognize either of them, but I’m certain they were from Gebhardt-Wulkan Internal Security.  They caught up with me on the Lev and beat the hell out of me.  They took my purse and the data chips I was carrying to make it look like robbery, but they made their real motives pretty clear.  They said I was screwing with things that could get me hurt, bad.”

Jesus, this really
was
my fault.

Lisa didn’t seem to think so.  “David, I’m sorry.  If I’d listened to you, none of this would have happened.”

I sighed.  “No, Lisa.  This is my doing.  I knew what the stakes were, and you didn’t.  I never should have involved you.”

Sonja stood up and stretched her back.  “I’ve done all the damage I can do.  Are you sure I can’t talk you into going to a hospital?”

“No,” Lisa whispered.  “No hospitals.”

“Why the hell not?”

I hadn’t meant for it to come out like that.  I was getting angry.  Not at Lisa.  At myself.  At two faceless thugs who had beaten up a defenseless woman on a train.

“Because they’ll kill me if I go to the police.  They told me that.  They said I can take two weeks sick leave to heal up, but if I go to the cops, they’ll...”

“They’ll
what
?”

Her words came out in a whispered croak.  “They said they’ll drown me in my own bathtub.”

Sonja started repacking the first aid kit.  “If you show up in the Emergency Room looking like this, the ER staff will call the police.  I’ve worked ER; it’s standard operating procedure, no way to stop it.”

“With pay,” Lisa said.  Her voice was weak, tired.

“What?”

“The two weeks sick leave,” Lisa said, “it’s time off with pay.”

Sonja made a face.  “Sounds like they’re just a regular pair of saints.  Maybe if they break your arm, you can get in on the employee profit sharing plan.”

Lisa mumbled wearily.  “It’s the only job I’ve... got.  I can retire in another five... years.  I’m too old to start from... scratch somewhere... somewhere... else...”  Her voice trailed off into silence.

She wasn’t moving.

Despite Sonja’s diagnosis, my heart stopped.

The look of concern that crossed Sonja’s face must have mirrored my own.  She knelt by the couch and examined Lisa’s still form carefully.

Finally, she exhaled.  “She’s sleeping.”

My heart started beating again.

Sonja stood up.  “We can’t leave her alone.”

I nodded.  “I’ll go look for some blankets and pillows.  We can sleep in here on the floor.  That way, you can keep an eye on Lisa, and I can shoot the first Aryan Superman who knocks on the door.”

She shot me a sour glance.  “Go find the blankets.”

If I’d known what to call it, I’d have asked the apartment AI for the blankets.  Its name might be something simple.  Then again, it might be something impossible to guess, like
Zarathustra
or
Lady Macbeth
.

I couldn’t remember hearing Lisa address it, or talk about it a single time, so I didn’t have a clue.

I looked up at the ceiling.  “Apartment?”

No answer.

“AI?”

Nothing.

Screw it.  I didn’t feel like playing guessing games, and I could probably find the blankets quicker than I could find the AI’s maintenance board.

I found the linen closet at the far end of the hall.  Before I could open the door, something brushed against the back of my legs and shot down the hall toward the living room.  It startled the hell out of me, and I barely caught a glimpse of it before it jetted around the corner at the other end of the hall.  Some kind of animal.  Something gray, and sleek, and fast.  A cat?

It couldn’t be a cat. Lisa couldn’t possibly afford one.  Probably, Lisa and Sonja and I together couldn’t have afforded one.

I thought about the plastic bowls tucked under the kitchen cabinets; food and water bowls.  It
was
a cat.

After I dug up the blankets, I made a quick tour of the apartment, making sure that all the windows were locked.  Every one of them was alarmed.

I found and opened a steel door.  It led to a fire escape.  I closed it again, dead-bolted it and turned on the alarms.  There were three of them, just like at the front door.

Sonja checked on Lisa again, while I threw together a makeshift bed of blankets and pillows on the floor.

The carpet wasn’t expensive, but it was soft, and Lisa had kept it clean.

When her doctoring duties were complete, Sonja dimmed the lights and snuggled up with me under a synlon quilt patterned with colorful tropical fish.

I lay there staring up into the darkness and listening to the gentle rhythm of Sonja’s breathing.

I wanted that chip, the one that the GWI security Nazis had stolen from Lisa’s purse.

I knew that Lisa was probably right, in all likelihood, Kurt Rieger wasn’t my man.  But, somehow, I didn’t want to let go of him.  It was a decent theory and I liked it.  It made a lot of pieces of the puzzle fit together in patterns that made sense to me.

I knew that it was selfish of me; Lisa had nearly died trying to get me that information.  But I couldn’t help it.  I wanted that chip.  I wanted to read the news articles about Osiris myself, and compare the times and dates of Rieger’s itinerary.

Tomorrow.  Worry about the chip tomorrow.

I was two-thirds asleep when I felt Sonja’s whispered voice warm in my ear.  “Corinne.”

I scrunched into a more comfortable position.  “Hmmm?”

She kissed me on the cheek and whispered.  “That’s my middle name, Corinne.”

CHAPTER 17

Sonja woke me with a kiss.  “Morning, Sleepyhead.”

Her breath was fresh and minty.  I was certain that mine was not.

She held out a mug of coffee.  The cup was pink and covered in tiny writing that claimed to be 100 reasons why chocolate is better than men.  The aroma of the coffee was rich enough to offset any misgivings I had about the Men/Chocolate equation.

I sat up far enough to accept the steaming cup and took a sip.  “Good coffee.”

Sonja showed me her dimples.  “Thanks, but I didn’t make it.  Lisa did.  It
is
good though, isn’t it?”

I craned my neck.  Lisa wasn’t on the couch.  “Where is Lisa?”

A voice floated down the hall.  “In the kitchen, trying not to eavesdrop.  About time you were up.”

“Good morning to you too,” I said.

I lowered my voice.  “How’s she doing?”

Sonja stole a sip from the other side of my cup.  “A lot better than I expected.  She’s a pretty tough lady.”

I sat the rest of the way up and stretched.  My back made those muffled crackling sounds it uses to remind me that I’m not a kid anymore.  I yawned.  “Can I ask you a question?”

Sonja looked away from me.  “Drugs.”