Nightmare (33 page)

  "Do you think Dorna’s dead somewhere?" Gray sealed the bag.

  "I don’t know," Ara said, worried. "I hope not. But it’s a definite possibility. And what if she was murdered to keep her quiet about something?"

  Tan put a gloved hand on Ara’s shoulder. "Look, I don’t want it to be Dorna either. But she’s the obvious suspect right now and we have to talk to her even if her disappearance and the blood are completely innocent. Come on—let’s see if we can find anything else the killer left behind."

  This time it was Gray who noticed it—a music disk titled
Thirteen Lucky Love Songs
. "The last song has been wiped," he reported.

  "All we’re doing is proving that the same killer got each one of them." Ara tried to pace the miniature living room, then gave it up. There wasn’t enough room. "This doesn’t give us any clues to who the killer
is
."

  "He—or she—will slip up eventually," Tan said grimly. "The nano-second that happens, we’ll nail the bastard."

  Ara’s gaze drifted about Giday’s living room. The denuded sofa seemed to mock her, a blot in the otherwise tidy house. It was the house of a woman bent on enjoying her vacation until at the last minute a lunatic had crushed her mind and destroyed her body. On the wall above the couch hung a lot of framed photographs and holograms interspersed with the occasional certificate of award.

  "Has someone told her family?" Ara asked. "I’m figuring she wasn’t married."

  "No, she wasn’t, and not yet," Tan responded.

  Ara got up and went over to investigate the certificates more closely. One of them was a commendation for outstanding work in multiple message transmission in the Dream. It was signed by one Tara Linnet, Manager for Dreamers, Inc. Ara blinked, her heart suddenly pounding.

  "We’ve been stupid!" she almost shouted. "God—completely stupid!"

  Tan, who had been talking to Gray, jumped in surprise, then recovered herself. "What are you talking about?"

  "There!" Ara pointed to the certificate. "Right there. We’ve been ignoring a potential lead."

  Gray stepped forward. "In recognition for outstanding contribution and work in multiple message transmission," he read. "So?"

  "Isn’t it obvious?" Ara said. "Giday worked for Dreamers, Inc., before she came to the Children of Irfan. They’re a corporation that offers Silent communication for a price."

  "I’ve heard of them," Tan said. "What’s the big deal?"

  "You said one of the problems with tracking down information about the killings on other planets is that there are so many law enforcement agencies that don’t talk to each other and compare notes," Ara said. "But what about the corporations?"

  "Go on," Tan rasped.

  "Dreamers, Inc., has more employees than some governments have subjects. They’re not just multi-national—they’re multi-planetary. But for all that, they’re is still a single organization. It doesn’t matter if one branch falls under one government and a different branch falls under another—it’s still a single unit. And you can bet that if someone’s been killing their employees and chopping off their fingers, they’ll know about it. Why don’t we ask them?"

  Tan looked excited for the first time since Ara had met her. "You’re right! The corps can cut straight across police boundaries."

  "There’s Dreamers, Inc., and the Silent Partners," Gray said, ticking off his fingers, "and Silent Acquisitions—"

  "Silent Acquisitions only deals in Silent slaves," Ara said. "They don’t hire out Silent."

  "Wonder if Dorna passed ever through them." Tan toyed with her braid. "The records that came with her were incomplete, and you can bet I checked."

  "That’s pretty common," Ara said. "I was the one who bought and freed her in the name of the Children, and the clearinghouse I found her in typically didn’t give anything but a short medical history. Previous owners were kept in strict confidence."

  "Why do they do that?" Gray wanted to know.

  "Because sometimes people own slaves in places where slavery is illegal," Ara replied. "They keep the slaves ignorant this fact. It’s easier than you might think, especially if the slave doesn’t speak the local language. And a lot of slaves are abused until they acquire a slave mentality. It wouldn’t even occur to them to try escaping or to demand their release. It sometimes takes years of counseling to bring them out of it."

  A breeze wandered through the windows, making the curtains flutter. Ara thought she caught a whiff of decaying flesh and wondered if the shot Gray had given her was beginning to wear off.

  "At any rate," Tan said, "we need to start checking with the corporations. The killer’s MO is unique, so they’ll probably have no trouble remembering it if they’ve seen it. Then we just find out if they ever owned someone named Dorna Saline, and—"

"That might not work," Ara pointed out. "It’s common for buyers to change the names of their new slaves. It reinforces the slave mentality—you don’t even own your name—and it muddies the trail if the purchase was illegal. Half the time the slaves themselves don’t know their owner’s real name or the name of the planet they lived on. Dorna,
if
she’s the killer, may have had a different name with every owner. For all I know, Dorna made up her current name. She was only listed as a lot number on the auction catalog."

  "You didn’t bother trying to check?" Gray asked.

  Ara shrugged. "Why should we? Like I said, the previous owner is kept anonymous, and we give our new people as much privacy as we can, since slaves have had so little of it. It means a lot to most of them, being able to choose their own name. Some keep their slave names as is or they change the spelling or pronunciation. Some use a name from their childhood. Others make up brand new ones. Kendi did that, I’m pretty sure. I have no idea what name he was born with, and I’ve never asked."

  Gray deflated a bit. "How will checking with these corporations help us find Dorna’s hiding place?"

  "It won’t," Ara said. "But right now we don’t have definitive proof that Dorna’s involved in the murders at all. If we find another place that had these finger-chopping murders, we can cross-check names of Silent employees and slaves with the monastery records of Silent who arrived here before the murders began. We might get lucky."

  "More sifting," Tan sighed.

  "I believe a wise woman once told me—how did the saying go?" Ara said. " ‘Welcome to the tedious side of Guardian work’? "

  "Very funny."

  The rotten smell grew stronger. Tan sniffed the air, apparently noticing it herself.

  "We should get out of here before our suppressants wear off," she said. "I’ll let the techs know we’re finished so they can do the fine-tooth comb thing. Ara, we need to contact some of these corps. Can you do it this evening, meet on your turf at, say, seven?"

  "You want me to come with you?" Ara said.

  "You know slavers. I don’t," Tan said. "And thank god for that. I’d much rather deal with killers."

  At seven o’clock Ara was in her pleasure garden. The fountain made pleasant noises and the pear and orange blossoms smelled exquisite. Usually the place felt quiet and relaxing, but now there was an undercurrent of tension and she felt an urge to keep looking over her shoulder. Twice she spun around expecting to see a looming dark man with a hat that hid a leering face and both times she saw nothing. When Ara felt a presence at the edge of her turf, she had to muffle a scream before she realized it was only Tan.

  "Please come," Ara called.

  Tan appeared, and the Dream rippled briefly around her. "You look nervous."

  "Let’s just get started," Ara said. "I have a contact at Dreamers, Inc. Take my arm and I’ll move us."

  Tan obeyed. Ara closed her eyes and cast out her senses. Dreamers, Inc., kept a permanent presence in the Dream, and the pattern of thought was familiar to Ara. She located it and focused on it. They were
here
but she wanted them to be
there
and they would be there
now
. The familiar
wrench
cut through her and she opened her eyes.

The brown desk and the red Oriental carpet stood in the middle of a stark, white space. There were no walls, no ceiling, no doors or windows. Just empty whiteness with a room-sized square of colored silk in the middle of it. A human man, thin and spare, sat behind the desk with his hands primly folded on the blotter. An inkwell and quill pen sat to one side of a small sign that read Welcome to Dreamers, Inc.. Everything about the space and the man said
receptionist.
  Ara knew that there were actually close to a hundred receptionists on duty at any given moment to field and direct the countless mundane inquiries the company received every day, but the human mind was not geared to register hundreds of receptionists and thousands of questioners occupying the same space, and Ara’s subconscious automatically filtered out what her conscious couldn’t deal with. Everything she didn’t need was relegated to background whispers.

  "May I help you?" asked the man in a reedy voice.

  "My name is Araceil Rymar," Ara said. "This is Inspector Lewa Tan. I need to talk to Marco Clark. Is he in the Dream?"

  "No," the man replied promptly. "His shift begins in twenty minutes. Would you care to wait or leave a message?"

  "Tell him that I need to speak with him immediately."

  "To Dream Engineer Marco Clark," the man said. "Message begins: Araceil Rymar needs to speak with you immediately. Message ends. Is that correct?"

  "Yes, thank you." Ara took Tan’s arm and with a
wrench
they were back in Ara’s pleasure garden. Birds twittered and bees buzzed among the blossoms.

  "Couldn’t you tell yourself if this Marco guy was in the Dream?" Tan asked. Her voice once again was full of rich, low tones.

  Ara shook her head. "I’ve only met him in the Dream, never in person. We’ve never touched, and I’m not good at finding people I haven’t had physical contact with. Marco can find me, though."

  "So where now?"

  "Let’s try Silent Acquisitions. They deal exclusively in slaves, so there’s a good chance Dorna passed through them at one time or another."

  Another
wrench
and they were standing in another receptionist foyer. This time the rug was blue and the desk was a chrome and steel fortress and the person behind it was a red cone with four flexible arms and three eyes, but it was still clearly a receptionist foyer. A hovering sign behind the creature read Silent Acquisitions, Ltd.: Where Your Tastes Are Met.

  Ara again introduced herself and Tan. The cone narrowed its eyes. "Are either or both connected with Children of Irfan?" Its voice was like a spoon plopping in cold pudding.

Uh oh
, Ara thought. "Why do you ask?" she said aloud.

  "Please answer the question," the creature plopped. "Are one or both you connected with the Children of Irfan? Please answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ There are no lies in the Dream."

  "Yes," Ara was forced to say. "We both are."

  "I am sorry, but I am not allowed to speak with you."

  "But—"

  "If you wish to leave a message for a particular party," the creature went on, "you may hire a courier ship with a hardcopy missive. Good day."

  The reception room vanished, leaving behind the featureless plain that was the default condition of the Dream.

  "Rude," Tan observed. "What brought that on?"

  "Probably me," Ara said grimly. "The Children—including me—have bought, stolen, swindled, and tricked a hell of a lot slaves out of that company over the decades. We’ve probably cost them billions in revenue by now. Silent Acquisitions seem to have adopted a new policy of identifying Children and then refusing to communicate with us so we can’t trick any information out of them. Bastards! Filth doesn’t even begin to describe what they do."

  "I agree," Tan said, "but we need to stay focused on the other job."

Ara let out a long breath. "Right. Sorry. I just hate slavers. Buying and selling sentient creatures is about the lowest anyone can—"

  "You church, me choir," Tan said. "Can we go?"

  "Right, right. Let’s try the Silent Partners and see what they have to say."

  The Silent Partners, it turned out, didn’t know of any strange murders. Neither did DreamShapers. They were about to visit Quietude, Ltd., when Ara felt a presence brush her mind.

  "Marco!" she said with delight. "He’s in the Dream. Hey, Marco! My turf, all right?"

  The pleasure garden appeared around them. Ara was dressed in her green robe with the close-fitting hood. She put Tan in a similar one, but blue. They both sat on the lip of the fountain, waiting. After a brief interval, a yellow sphere of light the size of a basketball whizzed over the garden wall and hovered in front of Ara. Her face showed her pleasure.

  "Marco," she said. "I’m glad you could talk to me. This is Inspector Lewa Tan."

  "Good morning," the sphere said in a voice reminiscent of ringing bells. "Or is it not morning on Bellerophon?"

  "It’s evening for us," Ara told him. "Listen, I know you’re probably busy, so I’ll be fast." She gave a quick explanation of the Dream murders. "Can you find out if there were any similar happenings among Dreamers, Inc.?"

  "I know there were," Marco said in his bell-like voice. "It was nine or ten years ago."

  Tan stood up, excited. "Can you put me in contact with the investigator in charge of the case?"

  "Perhaps. I will have to go through appropriate channels. Please wait."

  The ball vanished with a
pop
of inrushing Dream energy. Tan waited with ill-disguised impatience.

  "Marco’s good," Ara said. "He knows a lot of people."

  "My drugs are going to wear off soon," Tan grumbled. "What species is Marco, anyway?"

  "Human." Ara scratched her nose. "He’s a practicing Zen Buddhist. When I first met him twenty-some years ago, he looked as human as you or me but now ..." Ara shrugged. "I sometimes wonder what’ll happen when he reaches Nirvana."

  The ball popped back into being. Standing beneath it was a small, dark-complected man in a linen suit. He had a thin mustache, small black eyes, and equally black hair scattered with silver.