Ex-Kop (29 page)

But Liz could help us. She knew things she hadn't told us. And she was Maggie's anonymous caller. If we asked, she might just tell us what she knew. Then again, I'd already turned down Liz/Michelle's little S&M fantasy once, and she wasn't the kind of woman who was used to rejection. She'd been after me to be her ultimate S. But if I approached her again, she might think I'd make a better M. I pictured myself going in there and trying to play her un-father, trying to get her to open up to me. I could see Liz turning the tables on me, trapping me with one of her bondage toys and then bringing her little brother in, the two of them using me as the Davies family's perv pet.

Maggie was still waiting.

“I don't want to see Liz,” I said. I scanned down to the bottom of Maggie's list of offworlders. Not a single name jumped out at me. “Do you recognize any of them?” I asked.

“No. But I starred the ones who are onplanet right now.”

I sorted so the starred names topped the list, nine of them. I looked at their dates of entry. Seven of the nine had just arrived
over the last couple days. It probably meant that they were all on the same tour. We'd have to check them out one by one, hoping that one of them was our serial. It was the only safe play. Half the damn city was on the lookout for us, but we knew for a fact that these offworlders would be in the dark. Can you imagine tour operator Horst Jeffers telling his customers to let him know if they saw a couple cops snooping around? Not the kind of thing customers on a sex-tour wanted to hear. These people were unsuspecting. These were people we could watch.

“Can I have that back?” Maggie asked. “I want to compare their entry and exit dates to the barge murder dates.”

I passed the sheet of digital paper back to her and lay back in my hammock, thinking it would be tough to get any kind of definitive date matches. Most of the barge murder scenes were found long after the actual murders occurred. Some of the time-of-death estimates had a margin of error of a month or more.

My head hurt. I closed my eyes and tried to close it all out, leaving myself alone with my hollowness.

Maggie whispered, “Are you asleep?”

“No,” I said without opening my eyes.

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No.”

“I'm sorry I got you into this.”

“I know.”

“We'll get him, Juno. It'll be over soon.”

I wasn't so confident, but I still said, “Yeah.”

“It'll be over soon,” she repeated.

She was right about that. It was only a matter of time before
Ian's crew started asking around Tenttown.
Seen an old dog with a shaking splint of a right hand walking around with a long-haired beauty wearing high-priced duds?
Shit, they could be surrounding this tent right now. Ian could come barging through those flaps any second with his biceps-by-'roid and his boy-o charm. The possibility that we might survive was growing more remote by the minute. And if we did manage to pull through? That almost scared me more than Ian. What the hell would I do then?

Maggie interrupted my self-administered career counseling. “Pick a name: Peter Wynn or Jacque Benoit.”

“Benoit. What do I win?”

“A stakeout with a lovely lady.”

I
TOOK
a seat next to Maggie at the bar. We were both tech-naked. No phones, no weapons, no digital notepads, nothing. You want to surveil an offworlder, you have to go low tech, and there was nothing more low tech than our eyeballs.

We'd been following Jacque Benoit all day. We watched him eat breakfast. We watched him drink coffee on the square. We watched him spend his afternoon meandering through the Phra Kaew market. We watched him hurry to the bank, just barely beating closing time.

He was a regular on Lagarto. He knew where he was going when he walked. The shop owners all knew him, nothing but hugs and smiles when he walked in. Maggie and I would hang across the street while the shop owners would serve him tea and snap their fingers at houseboys who would carry in one high-priced item after another. He made a fair number of purchases: handmade pottery, a set of monitor hide chairs, a wool rug.

We tailed him back to the hotel restaurant, where he was sitting in a group of four men, all offworlders. His hair was more white than blond, and his teeth were whiter still. I looked over the other three, sitting there with their unblemished skin and their whiskerless faces. When they smiled, their faces beamed cool attitudes, and when they talked, they were all debonair charm. They were drinking imported coffee. Just like offworlders to come all the way down to the surface only to drink their orbital-grown coffee.

Maggie and I sat at the bar and tried to blend in. Maggie was wearing a set of whites that we had picked up in Tenttown. Loose-fitting cotton pants, with a matching V-neck top that had embroidered flowers bordering the V. She'd donated her jewelry to a panhandler and dumped her shoes for a pair of jellies. Lastly, she'd pulled her salon 'do back into a pony, and her conversion from blue blood to blue collar was complete. Me, I was dressed like usual, in whites of my own, except I had purchased a cheap panama to cover up the bandaged bald patch on my head.

Maggie held up two fingers for the bartender then turned to me. “I think that's Peter Wynn sitting on his left.”

“Who?”

“The other guy from the list. The other one that matched six murder dates.”

“Was that the largest number of matches?”

“Of the group that's currently onplanet, yes. But of the entire three hundred and forty-two there were three who matched eight of the barge murder dates.”

“You realize how low the odds are that one of these guy's is our serial?”

“Yeah. Maybe we should give up on these guys and go see Liz. This time tomorrow, it'll be too late for Adela.”

“Let's give it another hour before we move on and see if he exhibits any serial killer behavior.”

“And what exactly is serial killer behavior?”

“You know, putting on a necklace made of human ears or masturbating over a dead animal.”

Maggie smiled. I didn't, didn't feel up to it. Making a joke was one thing, but laughing at it was another entirely.

“Ooh, that looks good.” The second Maggie said it, I realized how hungry I was. I looked across the room at the clay oven that served as the restaurant's centerpiece. The cook had
just pulled out an earthenware dish. Looked like fish in a brown sauce, spiced with cinnamon and cumin by the smell of it. The cook turned his attention back to the oven and rearranged a series of dishes to get at a round of bread.

Maggie sipped her drink. I saw her studying my untouched glass. “You know my offer's still open, Juno.”

“What offer?”

“You know what offer.”

I did know. She'd been after me almost since we first met. “They'll never take a woman,” I said.

“Why not? Women occupy all kinds of government posts.”

“Not on Lagarto, Maggie. You know how it is. Us Lagartans can't afford to raise our babies in tanks. It's women's bellies here. Women have a different role, a more traditional role. It's what people expect.”

“It doesn't matter what they expect. It's not like people vote for chief of police. It's an appointed post. And stop trying to talk me out of it.”

“Don't get me wrong, Maggie. I'm behind you. I know you'd make a great chief, better than Paul. I just don't see it happening.”

“That's why I need your help. You took over KOP once before.”

“That was Paul.”

“Bullshit. Chief Chang couldn't have done it without you.”

“Sure he could have. There's no shortage of muscle in the force.”

“Can't you see it, Juno? You weren't just muscle, you ran the whole operation. When Chief Chang was giving face time to the public, you were the one who was running the show. The sergeants, the lieutenants, they all reported to you.”

I started thinking that drink was looking pretty good. No. Leave it alone. Don't dull the hollowness. Don't dull her
memory. I turned my focus back on the offworld quartet. They were all sitting on one side of the table while one of them held a digital pad out so they could all see.

Maggie kept at me. “Listen, Juno, I know you're resistant because you think things went badly the first time, but you did a lot of good, too. And it can be different this time. When I'm chief, we're going to clean up this city. Just imagine what a clean KOP can do for this place. It will change everything.”

I acted like I wasn't listening, but I was. What else would I do? “What makes you think we'll even survive the next few days?”

“I don't see much point in thinking any other way.”

Our golden boy offworlder took the pad from his Don Juan pal to get a closer look. He handed it back after taking a long look and put his hands up like they were the paws of a begging dog. He panted, his tongue flopping out like a dog's. In fact, it
was
a dog's tongue; long, wide, and flat. The others laughed lasciviously at his doggie imitation, one of them fake-licking the pad's display, bringing out more laughs.

“What the hell are they looking at?” I asked.

“And why are they using a digital pad?”

Maggie's question was rhetorical. The answer was obvious to both of us. They didn't want anybody to see what they were looking at, otherwise they would be popping up
3
-D holos over their table instead of sharing a single
2
-D pad.

Maggie said, “I'm going to find out.” And before I could stop her, she was up and heading for their table. My heart rate sped up like a revving outboard. Maggie walked by the oven and then around to the back side of the table. She slowed down to an agonizing pace as she approached the group from behind. She came right up to their backs and took a long look at their pad. They stayed oblivious, the whole group enraptured by
their digital display. The maître d' didn't stay so unaware. He was already crossing the floor, approaching Maggie and giving her the evil eye. Maggie saw him coming and set a brisk pace in the opposite direction. She joined me at the bar just in time to see the bartender take away our drinks with a scolding look. We skulked our way to the exit while the maître d' dirty-looked us all the way out.

We went through the revolving doors and stepped into the rain, the maître d' following us a half block to emphasize his point. He probably thought we were a couple thieves looking to make away with some high-tech swag, and he wanted to make it clear that we weren't welcome within half a block of his restaurant.

Maggie and I stepped under the awning of a café. Rain sheeted off the canvas, closing us in behind a curtain of water. Maggie's face was screwed up in thought.

“Well?” I asked.

“They were looking at stills. Nude photos.”

“And?”

“It was Adela Juarez. They were looking at nude shots of Adela Juarez.”

“It was that punk Raj. He probably talked her into letting him take some keepsakes then turned around and sold—”

“No,” she said. “There were bars.”

“Bars?”

“She was behind bars. Those pics were taken at the Zoo.”

My face must've screwed up just like hers as I tried to reason it out. How did these offworld tourists wind up with nude photos of Adela Juarez? Something was tickling the back of my brain. There was a memory back there if I could only pull it out of my head. “Pictures,” I finally said. “When I visited Adela, she asked me if I was there to take pictures.”

“Did you ask her why?”

“Yeah, but she didn't answer. I didn't think it was important, so I didn't push it.”

“We have to go to the Zoo.”

“Yeah.”

Maggie and I glided into the dock. I climbed out of the rented skiff and walked the short distance to land, the Zoo lights barely visible through the downpour. I looked back at Maggie, who was staying nice and dry under the skiff's tin roof, and then approached the newsstand, the same one I'd visited both just before and just after my finger-breaking episode with Ian. I took up a stool under the overhang and ordered up a cup of stale coffee.

I watched as boats pulled into the dock and discharged night shift zookeepers who filed up the riverbank steps to report to work. Soon thereafter, other guards started coming down the steps as the shift change progressed. I kept my panama angled over my face and kept my eyes zeroed on the wide-waisted.

I thought I saw him struggling his mass down the stairs, walking like a two-year-old, dropping one foot down to the next stair and bringing his other foot down to that same step before trying the next one. Coworkers passed him by as he kept up his slow descent. It was him. I could see his crumbcatcher beard. He was the supervisor, the one who had called Ian. I sipped my coffee, my broken fingers tingling with the memory of Ian and Hoshi holding me down snap after snap.

The plan was a quick snatch and grab, but watching this guy labor down the stairs, I thought it might be more of a hook and tow. I downed the last sip of overcooked coffee and fell in step behind him as he passed. I followed him onto the dock. I had my piece out, letting it hang in my left hand as I walked. I kept cool, letting him make his way down the creaking dock.
I looked at Maggie. She was already pulling the tether from the cleat.