High Bloods (21 page)

“I—”

“Good,” Paulo said. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind leaving us alone for a few minutes, Mr. DeMarco?”

“What?”

“We’ll get back to you shortly. By the way, you’ve been doing an outstanding job here in SoCal.”

“But—”

“Thank you, Mr. DeMarco.”

Cale’s mouth was open. He breathed through it. Paulo didn’t go to the trouble to look around at him. Cale coughed a few times, possibly reacting to the bile that had risen in his throat. When he had that under control he scraped his chair back. He stood and squared his shoulders and walked to the door where, his hand on the knob, he appealed with a glance to the gloves-wearing woman. She declined to save his manhood.

“I could use some coffee,” I said, as he was opening the door.

He stiffened as if I’d touched a cattle prod to his tailbone.

“And I,” Paulo said. “If you wouldn’t be going to any trouble.”

“Two coffees?” Cale said in a strangled voice, not looking around to confirm.

“Black,” I said.

“Any old way,” Paulo said indifferently.

The door closed. Paulo tweaked his earlobe thoughtfully, grinned to himself.

The ash on the woman’s cigarette was growing too long again. Paulo got up and disposed of the ash and put the cigarette back between her lips. Probably from long practice he knew just where she liked it. He spoke to her again in Greek.

They were an interesting team. Interesting in a purely clinical sense. I had the kid figured for a killer fruit. And speaking of medieval, if souls wore clothing, hers would’ve been chain mail.

When Paulo finished talking the gloves-wearing woman nodded, looking straight at me.

I said to her, “How are we going to have a beautiful relationship if you won’t tell me your name? Or am I just not your type?”

Lavishing the charm just as if I hadn’t been through a world of crap tonight, with bowling balls knocking around inside my head. I needed codeine like a baby needs its pacifier, or I was going to start vomiting.

Charm got me nowhere either.

Paulo also ignored my overture to the woman as he took a slightly larger than letter-sized envelope from an inside jacket pocket. The envelope contained a few small lumps of something and a color photo, which he placed on the desk in front of me. Then he adjusted the lamp so I could see more clearly.

The photo was a head-and-shoulders portrait of a Middle Eastern or Indian-Asian male, late middle age as far as I could tell. You could see thousands just like him on streets from Damascus to Mumbai to Jakarta every day. A somewhat frowsy, dark mustache plastered to his upper lip, dull half-lidded eyes. Flat lighting. Maybe the fact that he’d been dead for hours or as much as a full day when the picture was taken in a morgue had everything to do with his lack of manly distinction.

“I know it’s tough,” Paulo said. “But—”

I shook my head. “Uh-uh. Any identifying scars I could look up? A unicorn-shaped birthmark on his tummy?”

“No.”

“Murdered?”

“Yes. What is popularly known in SoCal as a spike job.”

“Where?”

“Rome. We think he came to see us.”

“‘Us’ being the Home Office. Spook Central.”

“Sure.”

“Did the vic contact you?”

“Presuming the corpse in the photo and the one who left his name and a message are the same man. Matter of great urgency, he said. Before we could establish direct contact, apparently some owlhoots on his trail caught up to him.”

“Owlhoots?”

“Bad guys. Dog heavies. I’m a Luke Bailiff junkie.” Paulo grinned and swished his feathery dark eyelashes at me.

“Okay, so you don’t have a positive ID?”

“They didn’t leave him with his fingers when they dumped him in the Tiber, only the ice pick in the back of his neck. But the name we have checks out. There is only one Barsi Chanthar Vajracharya, alive or dead. Known to colleagues as ‘Dr. Chant.’ A renowned nanobiotechnologist. Until about six months ago Dr. Chant was director of R and D for the Nanomimetics Corporation in San Jack Town.”

I nodded. “Was he fired?”

“As far as we’ve been able to learn, Dr. Chant took an abrupt and indefinite leave of absence and did his very best to disappear. Through airline sources we’ve placed him in recent weeks in five different cities around the world.”

“Fiddle-footed,” I suggested. “Or not very good at disappearing.”

“We’re just very good at tracking people who try. But so were the ones who wanted him dead. And they had a head start.”

I looked again at the photo. “I have a bitch of a headache right now, but I hear a bell faintly ringing. What did the autopsy report have to say? High Blood? Lycan?”

“The man from the river was an Off-Blood. NANOMIM HR records confirm that Dr. Chant was Off-Blood. Best we can do without fingerprint confirmation, but it’s a near-certainty they’re the same man.”

“Off-Bloods are a select group,” I said. “Fewer than one thousand of them in SoCal. Most are men. It’s almost a fraternity. No secret handshake, but they try to help one another. It’s
a difficult way to live. They share info on the availability of reliable blood cows. Off-Bloods like doing business with Off-Bloods. Nobody else seems to have much affection for them.”

Cale DeMarco knocked, then backed into the room with two Styrofoam cups of black coffee. I felt in my pockets for my pill dispenser. A cody for my head, meth for stamina. I took both with the coffee, burning my tongue.

DeMarco looked curiously at the photo of the murdered man. And at me.

“Two murders that may tie in,” I said. “I’m pretty good with murders. Would you mind asking Beatrice to come in? We need her.”

Paulo didn’t object. The gloves-wearing woman glanced at DeMarco when he was slow to react. He nodded tightly and left.

“Two murders?” Paulo said.

“Artie Excalibur’s is the one I’ve been working on. He was done in by an OOPs named Chickie Hickey early Monday morning. In his office above de Sade’s. Bea and I happened to be there. Chickie has yet to turn up. Probably dead herself. She was an actress and protégée, in the bird-in-nest sense, of Miles Brenta, who dabbles in movie production. Bucky Spartacus, the kid who went OOPs tonight at the concert, was more than a protégé of Brenta’s; from what I’ve heard he was like a son to him. The two kids have been an item for publicity purposes, but I think it went deeper than that for Bucky: he was in love with Chickie, even though he might have known or guessed that Chickie was doing both him and Brenta, a double-dip career move. Chickie might have infected Bucky with LC disease, but that’s guesswork. If Bucky, why not Brenta? It
is
plain fact that Bucky was toting an unregistered Snitcher, the remains of which we found in the little pile of burnt offering he turned into.”

Paulo opened his envelope again and shook out three two-inch-square transparent evidence bags on the desk next to the
photograph. I recognized the Snitcher recovered at the amphitheater.

“That’s supposed to be in the ILC lab right now,” I said.

“It will be,” Paulo said. “But I doubt they’ll learn anything from what’s left.”

“What are the other two for?”

“Number two is a standard-issue Snitch, the most recent upgrade, in use for nearly six years. There are tens of millions of them, reliable, maintaining what we hope is a balance of nature.” He smiled a little sadly. “Number three, as you can probably tell without a magnifying glass, is smaller, injectable, state-of-the-art: a LUMO, probably a prototype.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From the body of the late Dr. Chant. Slightly modified so that wolf-scanners like yours wouldn’t detect it. But our chief pathologist in Rome is very thorough.”

“Off-Bloods have no use for Snitchers. So he was on the run with a LUMO he helped design.”

There was a polite tap at the door. Paulo got up from his perch on the desk and opened it.

Beatrice came in supressing a yawn, looked first at me, seemed relieved that I hadn’t been given the third degree with a meat-axe. Although I could be sure it was part of their repertoire when needed. Then she looked at the gloves-wearing woman and smiled.

“We’re keeping you up very late,” the gloves-wearing woman observed with a hint of apology. She spoke out of the side of her mouth. The cigarette didn’t move. Her voice had a lot of hard bark on it, probably due to a lifetime’s affection for gaspers.

“Oh, that’s okay, Arl. I know it’s important.”

“When did you two get chummy?” I said.

“Oh,” Bea said, “we had a chance to chat before the Stork brought you.”

Bea and the gloves-wearing woman seemed to find the allusion
amusing, which made my mood and temper worse than they already were.

“Your name’s Arles?” I said. “Like the French city?”

“For Arlequin,” she croaked.

“I always thought ‘Arlequin’ was INTEL/INT code for something. But you spook types always play it so tight and cozy. Working with any of you is like bedding down with a python.”

“Let’s not be quarrelsome. Too much is at stake for discord. Why is Beatrice here?”

“Yes, why?” Beatrice said brightly.

“Have a look at the photo,” I said to her.

Bea put a hand on my shoulder and leaned toward the desk.

“Ohh. Ugh. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Know him?”

Bea made herself take a longer look.

“I may have seen him. A few months ago, at Artie’s digs. Late at night. Artie had asked me to bring him a spare computer from the safe at the office, the one he used at home had conked. Artie had me lock up all of his computers. I told you he was kind of paranoid about business matters.”

Paulo said, “We think the man in the photo is Barsi Chanthar Vajracharya, a.k.a. Dr. Chant. Formerly employed by NANOMIM.”

Bea’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Well—a lot of men look like this, dead or not. But remember I told you, R, about the e-mails Artie was getting from this Dr. Chant?”

“E-mails from where?” Paulo asked.

“South America. India. As if the two of them, Artie and Chant, had some big deal about to happen.”

“It happened,” I said. “They’re both dead because of it.”

“What sort of deal?” Bea said.

“Trafficking in stolen Snitchers. Maybe.”

“Not Artie,” Bea insisted. “He got a little shady sometimes, but he wasn’t a criminal.”

I looked at the gloves-wearing woman.

“Is that what you’ve had DeMarco working on? Yeah, it would be a step up for an old bloodlegger like Ortega. If there was enough money in it.”

“There is not,” she said hoarsely.

“I didn’t think a deal like that would bring you here from Rome. Too much at stake, as you said.” I gave it a few seconds, then shrugged and got up from my chair. “Okay, go on playing python, but I won’t be your main squeeze. You’ve got DeMarco for that. I have two murders and a potential third to solve before the next full moon. That would be Mallory Scarlett, still missing and a potential trophy for werewolf hunters. Lycans are human too. In a manner of speaking. Besides, I sort of liked the little snot when she was living next door. Come on, Bea. Let’s vamoose.”

Paulo stood too, turning to me and smiling. I looked him in the eye.

“If you have no objections that I can’t deal with,” I said.

The gloves-wearing woman said in her half-ruined voice, “Perhaps we can help you with the Scarlett girl.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Yes. She was taken from the Angeltowne Livery at 1230 hours yesterday in one of the armored trucks they keep over there.”

“Taken where?”

Paulo said, “The helicopter DeMarco assigned for surveillance tracked the armored truck to the Crestline Highway a few miles north of San Bernadino. That’s when the chopper had to turn back; apparently the EGT was running red-line.”

“Swell,” I groused. “Crestline? There’s only about a hundred twenty square miles of forest and mountains we’ll have to search in the next forty hours.”

He shrugged. “The girl wasn’t a priority with us. But if she’s going to remain a prisoner until she hairs-up, probably there are
only so many areas suitable to conduct a
mal de lune
up that way. One or two may be hunting lodges owned by prominent sportsmen. And all hunters like to brag, some of them in advance, about their prowess. You know. It’s the Luke Bailiff, only-law-west-of-Dodge syndrome.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “You’ve given me a worthwhile lead. I apologize for being edgy with you. This OOPs business has me—”

It wasn’t the tingle of a distant bell competing with the headache bongos that stopped me: it was a full-throated cannonade of Notre Dame–sized bells as the tumbrels rolled through Paris streets. I turned and stared down at the Snitchers neatly labeled in evidence bags—two that looked unused, one nearly destroyed.

“R?” Beatrice said tentatively. “What’s wrong?”

An image of Chickie Hickey at de Sade’s whipped through my mind like a ghost released from an attic.

“Jesus,” I said. “Anything but that.”

Paulo clicked his lighter to fire up another cigarette for the gloves-wearing woman. She was looking at me when I turned to them.

“Unfortunately, yes,” she said with a nod.

Bea grabbed me pleadingly.

“Don’t
look
like that,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

I picked up the evidence bag with the Snitcher leftovers from the amphitheater.

“Chickie had one of the new, injectable LUMOs,” I said. “Different location in the body, no surgical scar to cover up. After she went OOPS I thought it was probably because her Snitcher had been cut out of her. Which couldn’t have accounted for her actions after she haired-up. So it had to be the LUMO. And this one was Bucky’s. Another LUMO? That leaves two possibilities.” I went after those with the dedication of a soused rat in a maze. I’m always full of ideas. Sometimes they turn out to be good for
something. I made my choice. “The LUMOs are defective. A design flaw. They can’t stop a Lycan from hairing-up.”

“Three years of testing,” Paulo countered. “All the tests done to WEIR’s specifications and under their supervision. A printout of all relevant data runs to about four thousand pages. Conclusion: no design flaws. All the prototypes, thousands of them, worked perfectly. And you’re missing something.”