city blues 01 - dome city blues (31 page)

The walls were covered with video panels tuned to one of those art channels.  The screens cycled slowly through an apparently endless gallery of abstract paintings.

The bed was round.  It hovered in the center of the room on an electromagnetic cushion, like a Lev.

Elaine Carerra’s body lay half on and half off the bed.  Her face was tilted upward, leaving her dead eyes to stare at the ceiling.  A spatter of blood had struck her left cheek and trailed off like a tear.  When she’d slid to the floor, most of the bed linens had gone with her.

The jumble of blood-slick sheets swaddled her body like a cocoon.  A wheeled cleaning drone sat frozen on its fat rubber wheels.  Its motionless manipulator arms were all bent toward the carpet near Elaine’s body.  The drone had obviously been feverishly trying to mop up the spreading stain of blood when the cops had arrived and shut it down.

My eyes found the raw hole that the killer had hacked in Elaine’s chest, and suddenly I
knew
.

Just to be certain, I backed out of the program, and loaded and watched the crime scene recordings for two of the other Osiris victims.  It wasn’t really necessary; I was already certain.  Delaney had called Aztec a copycat.  He was wrong.

I flipped the datashades up onto my forehead and shut the computer down.  I could feel my pulse pounding in my temples.

There were no more maybes.  As soon as I’d spotted the mutilated body of Elaine Carerra, I’d known with an absolute and sickening moral certainty that I had seen this killer’s work before.  Aztec and Osiris were the same person.  And he was still out there somewhere.

I peeled off the control gloves and datashades, and dropped them into one of the drawers of my desk.  I suddenly wanted a shot of scotch very badly.

I settled for a cigarette, inhaling the smoke deeply and waiting for the calming effect of the nicotine to steady the tremor in my hands.

I tried to focus, to force some semblance of objectivity back into my mind.  I needed to concentrate on the facts.

I had compared the victims from both cases.  There was a definite pattern to the killer’s selection.  The girls had a quality about them that I couldn’t quite describe, an essential sameness.  All of them had been between thirteen and fifteen—and had been similar in size, build, coloring—but it wasn’t that.  It wasn’t even that they looked alike, although they certainly had, to a degree.  It was more of a feeling.  The girls
felt
similar, as though they were somehow interchangeable.

That set me to wondering.  If the killer followed some sort of specific criteria for choosing his victims, what about his patsies?  Was there some essential similarity between Russell Carlisle and Michael Winter that had led to their selection?  And if there was such a connection, what would it be?  Probably not anything in their personal histories or lifestyles.  They had lived in different parts of the city, traveled in different circles, and practiced totally different professions.  Could the answer be in their deaths, rather than their lives?

I loaded the autopsy protocol on Russell Carlisle.  In less than five minutes, I knew I was on to something.  Carlisle’s hands had been heavily callused, the right more so than the left: the mark of a right-handed carpenter.  Like Michael, Carlisle had chosen to kill himself with his left hand, holding the homemade bomb against his left temple.

Two right-handed men who had chosen to kill themselves with their left hands.  In both suicides, the death blow had come from the left side of the head.  What could there be about the left side of the head, in particular, that could point to the killer?

I loaded the files from both autopsy protocols at the same time and instructed the computer to tag all similarities between Michael’s autopsy results and Russell Carlisle’s.

The comp bleeped and projected a short message: FILE SORT IN PROGRESS.  ESTIMATED COMPLETION = 00:01:30.  The seconds column started counting down immediately.  I’d forgotten how slow the desktop’s microprocessor was.

I lit a smoke and sat back to wait out the ninety seconds.

I was amassing a mountain of evidence, but I still didn’t know where it was pointing.  Kurt Rieger was my favorite suspect (in fact, the only one I had) but—when viewed objectively—the evidence against him wasn’t exactly airtight.  I knew that I should be considering other suspects, but I couldn’t seem to come up with any.

Had I grown too attached to my Kurt Rieger theory?  If Rieger was the killer, the woman was only an accomplice.  Why was I so wrapped up in that scenario?

Why did I want Rieger to be guilty?  Because he was a pedophile?  Because his Gestapo had beaten Lisa to a pulp?  Because he’d slept with Sonja?

The comp bleeped again and projected an enormous column of data.

I started reading.

Most of the flagged items were obviously garbage.  Both corpses were adult males.  Both had suffered fatal head wounds.  Both men had two arms, two legs and the normal compliment of toes.

I went through the list, dropping any flagged item that obviously wasn’t relevant.  The column got shorter fast.

When I had the list down to about fifty lines, I spotted a heading labeledCRANIAL CAVITY►FOREIGN MATTER►PRESENCE OF.  Under the label were ten entries:


Gallium Arsenide


Platinum


Carbonized Ceramic


Silicon Monoxide


Silicon Dioxide


Selenium


Nichrome


Titanium


Aluminum


Orthostatic Epoxy

I knew what orthostatic epoxy was.  It was used for gluing broken bones together.  I knew what platinum, titanium, and aluminum were, although I didn’t know why traces of them would be found in the head wounds of two different men.  Gallium arsenide?  Nichrome?  I had no idea what any of the rest of those things were, or what they were likely to be used for.

I drew a lung full of smoke and exhaled it slowly.  “House, run a short database search for me.  Where would you expect to find gallium arsenide, platinum, carbonized ceramic, silicon monoxide, silicon dioxide, selenium, nichrome, titanium, aluminum, and orthostatic epoxy used together?”

House’s answer came almost instantly.  “Neurosurgery.”

I sat up straight.  “Neurosurgery?  You mean brain surgery?”

“Yes, David.  The first nine substances you mentioned are routinely used in the manufacture of microchips.  The most obvious application of microchip technology, in combination with Orthostatic epoxy, is neurosurgery.”

“Holy shit.”

“I’m sorry David, what did you say?”

“Never mind.”

“Shall I start lunch, David?”

“No.  But you can start me a pot of coffee.”

“Of course.”

I backed out of the autopsy reports and called up the LAPD Bomb Detail’s file on Carlisle’s bomb.  I didn’t get a lot out of the report, but I did get a name and contact information.

I punched up the phone number.

A cadaverously thin man in black coveralls answered on the first ring.  “Scientific Investigations Division, Bomb Detail, do you want to declare an emergency?”

“No.  I don’t have an emergency.”

His posture relaxed visibly.  “How can I help you?”

“Can I speak to a Sergeant Victor Bradshaw?”

“It’s Lieutenant Bradshaw now.  Hold please.”

His face was replaced by a hold video.  Young bronzed gods and goddesses windsurfed on an idyllic beach.  The sand was the color of raw sugar, and the water a beautiful shade of unpolluted blue.  It must have been one of those virtual beaches; I couldn’t imagine where they’d have found a stretch of real sand and water clean enough to shoot that scene.

I put out my cigarette and was in the process of lighting another when the hold video vanished.

A short, muscular African man in police blues appeared in its place.  “Lieutenant Bradshaw.  What can I do for you?”

I introduced myself and told him what I wanted.

“Three years, Mr. Stalin?  You expect me to remember a case from three years ago?”

“A man blew his own head off in the middle of your police station,” I said.  “That strikes me as sort of memorable.”

“Yeah well, be that as it may, we get some pretty crazy assholes here.  Just this morning we had some idiot try to blow up one of those big robotic clowns out in front of a fast food restaurant.  God only knows why.  Dropped the bomb and blew one of his own feet off instead.  Assholes, I’m telling you.”

He rubbed his jaw slowly.  “But I think I remember the guy you’re talking about.  I’m going to put you back on hold while I go pull the file.  My memory might need a little boost.”

I nodded, and Lieutenant Bradshaw switched places with the windsurfers.

He reappeared a lot sooner than I expected.  “Okay, I’ve got you,” he said.  “Russell Carlisle, September of Sixty.  Blew his brains all over the wallpaper down in the day room.  What do you need?”

“What can you tell me about the bomb itself?”

Lieutenant Bradshaw flipped through a couple of pages of hardcopy.  “IED.  Improvised Explosive Device.  Your basic kitchen-sink bomb.”

“You mean homemade explosives?  Like bathtub-nitro or kitchen-plastique?”

“Not at all,” Bradshaw said.  “The explosive used was HPX-16.  Military-grade explosive.  Stable as applesauce, but it packs one mother of a punch.”

“So what makes it a kitchen-sink bomb?”

“Too many brother-in-law circuits.”

“Huh?”

“Circuits that don’t serve any real purpose,” he said.  “What my old man used to call
bells and whistles
.  For instance, Carlisle used two different kinds of batteries.  One of those compact high-density lithium jobs and a flat-pack of alkalines.  You ask me, the alkalines would have worked just fine by themselves.  A lot cheaper too.”

“Anything else?”

Bradshaw flipped through the printouts again.  “Remember, we pieced this together from fragments.  It looked like there were a lot of microchips and circuitry that didn’t have anything to do with the bomb at all.  Brother-in-law circuits.”

He looked up.  “The weird thing is, whoever built that bomb knew exactly what they were doing.”

“You lost me,” I said.

“Most of the IED’s we see are pure shit.  Pipe bombs, stuff like that.  Don’t get me wrong, a lot of them work, even some of the bad ones.  People watch too much vid and start to thinking that building a bomb doesn’t look so hard.  Carlisle’s bomb wasn’t like that.  Like I said, we were working from reconstruction, but that bomb looked clean.  Good detonator.  Initiator wired up right.  Good choice of explosives.  Adequate power.  As good an IED as you’re likely to find.  We went over the pieces pretty carefully, but we never did figure out what all that extra stuff was for.”

He folded his printout in half.  “That’s about it.  Help any?”

“I think so,” I said.  “Maybe a lot.  I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

“Any time.”  He reached out to hang up.

“Oh, one more question,” I said.  “Those brother-in-law circuits: the battery, the chips and the extra circuitry.  If you packaged it all up together, without the rest of the bomb, how big a package would it make?”

Bradshaw pursed his lips.  “You want a guess?  Hmmm…  I’d say just about the same size as a pack of cigarettes.”

CHAPTER 20

It was darker than I expected when I stepped out the front door of my house.  I looked up and saw that the normally transparent panels of the dome facing had taken on a strange glazed appearance.  It was starting to rain.

Far above my head, the pelting of raindrops against the polycarbon panels reduced the sky to a soft blur that glimmered and rippled as the water ran down the arc of the dome.  The effect was that of a soft-focus lens, absorbing and diffusing a lot of the afternoon sunlight.  The light that did get through dappled the streets and buildings with shifting patterns of shadow.

I looked at my watch.  If I hurried, I could make the barricade in time to catch the two o’clock Lev.

I lit a cigarette and increased my stride.