Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (31 page)

She leaned forward and clasped her hands.

“I was wondering - why didn’t you bring your bloodhound units?”

Bester gave her a wan smile.

“You’ll have to ask the central office. Personally, I think they believe I’ve become lazy - that I can’t work a case without my minions anymore. I’ll be happy to prove them wrong.”

He didn’t tell her his deeper suspicion-that there were probably those in the Corps who would be just as happy if he didn’t return from this assignment.

“Tell me about your cops - Ran and Farmer? Ms. Alexander said the MO was different.”

“A little. Sort of a quickie version. Their eyes were scooped out, but he just taped and glued their mouths shut.”

“I’ve looked at the reports on the other victims. At first I thought we had something fairly typical, here - the victim forced to look through the eyes of the killer as the deed is done. I worked a case in Buenos Aires like that. Every mundane psycho who comes up with it thinks he’s the Thomas Edison of serial killings, when in fact it’s so obvious…” He trailed off. “But I didn’t notice the rest of it right away. All of the other body orifices were sewn up, too - the cops?”

“Epoxied,” she corrected, with a slight quiver in her voice. “So it’s something more ritualistic. Something to do with the soul, the life force. Our killer has religious beliefs.”

“Are you familiar with the religion?” she asked.

“No. Nor do I intend to become familiar with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“One of my first lessons as an investigator was to learn to see things from my quarry’s point of view. If you can understand your enemy, you can defeat him. But Anne… I’m getting old. I don’t want to understand this sick son of a bitch. I just want to find him and punish him. Is that all right with you?”

She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded, grimly, a new determination settling upon her features.

“Good,” he said. “And now, I think I’ll go put my bags in my room and freshen up a bit. Then I’ll want to go over the evidence in more detail. Do you have a list of suspects, witnesses?”

“No.”

“No? That was a big house. Didn’t she have any servants?”

“She had a houseboy, a maid, and a cook. None of them remember anything useful.”

“Did you scan them?”

“No. None of them would agree to it. As you may have gathered, the locals are squeamish about telepathy.”

“I want to see them anyway. You can promise them they won’t be scanned, if you wish.”

“Will I be lying?”

“Anne. What you don’t know for sure, you can’t lie about.”

“Good enough.”

“I’m glad to see you coming around. I think I’ll go to my room now. See you later.”

Lyta was waiting for him outside the office.

“You’re ready to go to the hotel?”

“Hotel?”

“Unless you’d like to spend the night in a holding cell. The local office doesn’t have dorms-everyone lives in private homes.”

“And you, Ms. Alexander?”

“I’m still in the hotel. Since I’m an intern, I’m allowed to comp it”

“I see. Well, the hotel it is.”

Bester meant to drop his bags and get straight to work, but the room seduced him. The high gravity was already wearing out its welcome with his knees and lower back. The bed was huge - bigger, almost, than his entire bedroom on Mars. But it was the tub that brought him to at least a conditional surrender. It was enormous, with massage jets.

The guidebooks all said off wonders from lower-gravity worlds should bathe often, to give their skeletons and muscles a break. He started naming the water, then went to a terminal and used his access code to call up and execute a notepad copy of the report Alexander had given him.

He took his usual security precautions and then, with the pad in his good right hand, he sank thankfully into the buoyant waters. With the exception of the two cops, all of the victims had been business teeps.

Some good basic work had been done already, including a list of clients for each victim going back several months, cross-referenced in several ways-by company, association, type of transaction. Several firms showed up more than once, but that was to be expected in a freelancers, rather than being attached to a particular corporation.

He looked over the list carefully. The victims had been chosen because they were telepaths, and business teeps were the easiest to come by. They made their livings by being accessible. Most likely, the killer had called them, set up an appointment, met them, killed them. But in the lists of meetings, phone calls, and correspondence, no common denominator had turned up that checked out. So try it from another angle. The bodies of the business teeps were all found in their homes. A servant? Some sort of maintenance worker?

He closed his eyes. He was tired, more tired than he had any right to be. The water felt very, very good. No. He couldn’t rest yet. Miles to go and all of that. He opened his eyes and focused on the report again. The letters seemed to swim. Too tired. He closed them again, and let his mind flow out.

It had been a long time, he realized, since he had listened to a new city. He had never listened to one in another star system. For a moment, he felt an almost youthful excitement at the idea. And yet there was nothing. He concentrated, and more nothing. Something in the stone the building was made of? In the atmosphere? In the solar wind?

And yet he had had no trouble earlier, when he scanned Stesco. Indeed, he had been in fine form. His head bumped back into the edge of the tub, and he suddenly realized how slow and stupid he felt. Too slow, too stupid to be explained by fatigue.

With a snarl that came out only as a snort, he started trying to lever himself out of the tub. He was only halfway out when the man in the black hood stepped into the bathroom.

Chapter 4

Bester sat back down in the tub.

“I don’t suppose you came to scrub my back?” he asked.

The black-hooded figure didn’t answer, but he did raise a wicked-looking weapon, rather unhurriedly. Bester thought it might be a Nam hunting pistol.

Bester raised his own PPG out of the tub in something more of a hurry. His first shot missed, as the water dripping from the muzzle of the weapon vaporized and distorted the path of the phased plasma. His second shot was dead on target and caught the black-clad man in the right shoulder.

Something spattered against the tile behind him-presumably something fired from the pistol - and he quickly scrambled out of the tub, for fear that the ampoule had contained enough nerve toxin to affect him even though it had diffused in the water. He kept his own weapon level.

The hooded man moaned, leaning against the door frame and obviously in pain. There was a good bit of blood.

“Yes, I know I’m a bit old to keep toys in the tub.” Bester held up the PPG. “My version of a rubber ducky, I suppose. Push that weapon toward me, will you?”

The fellow managed to, though it wasn’t easy for him. He sank to the floor.

“Don’t kill me,” he said. “Hurt a poor, disturbed serial killer like you?” Bester said, taking a robe down from its hook on the wall and slipping into it. “Now why should I do that? You want to pull that mask off, or shall I shoot it off?”

Struggling into a sitting position against the commode, the would-be assassin managed to pull the hood off with his left hand. The face beneath was unfamiliar, the green eyes startling jewels in a nearly ebony setting.

“You got something into my bathwater? Something like sleepers? I’m guessing that because I’m feeling better already.”

It was a lie, but at least he wasn’t feeling any woozier.

When he tried to scan the fellow, though, all he got was a frustrating sensation of needing to sneeze, almost being able to sneeze - but not quite sneezing.

“Yes. In your water. May I tie a tourniquet?”

“Not just yet. You aren’t the serial killer, are you? I’m guessing your bag has all of the right tools-needle and thread, epoxy, rope - but you aren’t him. You came here to kill me, and with equipment I seriously doubt anyone outside of Psi Corps could get their hands on.”

The man just looked at him sullenly.

“Okay. Get up. We’re going in the next room, where we can have a civilized conversation.”

He motioned with the weapon.

“I’ve lost too much blood. I can’t stand up.”

“Shall I cauterize that wound for you? Sometimes, at the medium setting, if you hit just right…”

The fellow shook his head and climbed reluctantly to his feet. At Bester’s direction he stumbled out onto the balcony and into a chair.

“There,” Bester said. “This is tiled, too, so the maid won’t have a lot of trouble cleaning it up. Now, why did you try to kill me? No, let me make it simpler for you. Who sent you to kill me?”

“Scan me and find out.”

“I will, in due time. What did you hit me with? Sleepers don’t work that quickly, certainly not absorbed through the skin. Something new Department Sigma is developing?”

“You’re letting me bleed to death. Let me tie this off and I’ll tell you everything.”

“Very well. I’ll call for some help.”

He backed into the room and picked up the telephone that lay on the counter. The assassin bolted out of his chain: Bester dropped the muzzle of the PPG, to aim at his knees…

Too late. He had misjudged the man. Helped him, even. Disgusted, he walked back to the balcony. Here, six stories was more like eight or nine on Earth. The broken body was already starting to draw a crowd. He sighed, punched a code into the phone. After an instant, a female voice answered from the other end.

“Lyta, could you come up to my room? I need you.”

From the tone of her affirmative answer, he could guess at least one thing she might be imagining. He didn’t have the energy to care.

They had coffee the next morning in the hotel restaurant, and a local breakfast specialty called poksh, a sort of heavy, steamed, sweet bread.

“But how can you be sure, sir. That this Koste wasn’t the killer we’re after?”

“First off because that’s not his real name,” Bester said.

The coffee was heavy and pungent, and left a complex aftertaste. Not exactly like any he’d had on Earth or Mars. He wondered if it was one of Beta Colony’s exports - if it wasn’t, it ought to be.

“I tracked him through two aliases before I lost him. No, he was a professional assassin, and other than wishing to make it look as if I was killed by our local hero, I’m afraid he brings us no closer to resolving the case.”

“I see. But who would want to kill you, sir?” Bester laughed, his first genuine laugh in a long time. “You don’t know me very well, Lyta.”

He took another sip of the coffee and a bite of the poksh. He found the bread less inspiring than the coffee.

“What did you find out about Jack Finn?”

“Well, only that he disappeared a week ago, about the same time the Psi Cops were killed. They found his body two days ago, in a field about twenty klicks from town. I don’t see a connection. He wasn’t a teep, and he wasn’t killed like the others. He was stabbed in the heart, very simple.”

“Huh. Yet there was a clear connection in Stesco’s mind.” “Maybe it was simple association.”

“Maybe. What did Finn do?”

“He was the chief information ecologist for the city. That is, he monitored the way flows of information-in computer networks, telephone and link calls, and so on-related to power flow in the city.”

“That’s interesting. What else do we know about him?”

“He was an Adamist.”

That got Bester’s attention.

“In other words, he was a Teep-hater.”

“Yes, sir. But about half the population of Beta has Adamist leanings.”

“Yes, what a surprise. But still-think about it. Were he still alive, Finn would be a prime suspect.”

“How do you figure that?”

“All of the security systems in the victims’ houses were linked to a citywide system. Finn was in a position to put kinks in that, if he wanted to. To block calls at the metropolitan level long enough to gain entry”

“Maybe. I think it would be more complicated than that, if you don’t mind my saying so. He would still need the particular code, retina and fingerprint information, and so on for each house in question.”

“It’s worth checking into.”

“You think he might have been working with the killer?” “That would be highly unusual - if our killer is really a serial killer. They usually work alone.”

He ticked his finger against the table.

“Our good friend Captain Stesco thinks Finn’s murder is connected, doesn’t he? But he doesn’t know why he thinks that, or I would know. It’s a gut instinct, on his part.”

“Anyway,” Lyta said, “even if Finn was working with our killer, he couldn’t have been in on the last murder. He was already dead.”

“True. Ah, well. Today I want to do a series of interviews. Domestics, servicemen-anyone recorded as going near the houses in question. Also - I’m assuming the reports regarding the two cops are in a separate file?”

“Oh - yes, sir. I was going to give them to you when you finished the first. It’s procedure here, I guess…”

“Right now what I want to know is this-where were the cops found?”

“In their homes, like the others.”

“And yet, they were `quickie’ versions. Serial killers like to be in control, and their rituals put them in control. They tend to follow scripts to the letter. The cops must have been getting close to him-but if he went so far as to kill them in their homes, why not go all the way and do it right?”

“Maybe he felt pressed for time, having to do two in one night. Maybe he has some arbitrary deadline he wants to be done by.”

“Good thinking. But the time of death of the other victims doesn’t seem to confirm that at least, I don’t see any obvious pattern. Would you run an analysis? Just search for any patterning in the time of death. Meanwhile, I have some interviews to conduct.”

Bester glanced at Lyta every now and then during the “questioning.” For the most part she kept her eyes fixed firmly on her notepad, undoubtedly working on the time-of-death problems, but just as certainly trying to pretend she wasn’t aware of what was happening.