Red Shadows (16 page)

"Sounds like that's our Lenny, then," Anderson said. "Take me to him. I get the feeling I might have more luck scanning him than I will scanning faucet handles." She looked at the other Judges in the apartment. "Noland and Yoakim, I suggest you run the victim's body and the crime scene up here to see what you can find. Weller, it's up to you, but I suggest you come with me. For all we know, our jumper may have seen the killer. "Let's see what Lenny Kaspasian can tell us."

Falling, he was falling, not flying. His earlier elation had given way to terror. He was screaming. The ground was coming closer. Falling, he was falling to his death. His last thought was a final desperate and despairing question.

Where were his wings?

"The killer's psychic," Anderson said. She was kneeling beside the broken body of Lenny Kaspasian on a pedway just behind Elizabeth Short Block. The impact from the two-hundred storey fall had flattened his body, crushing his bones and liquifying his insides, leaving a elongated crater beneath him in the plascrete surface where he had landed. "Grud, I should have seen it before. The killer is a teledominant."

"A tele-what?" Weller asked. He and Costigan were nearby, though she noticed both Street Judges had decided to stand far enough away from the impact site to prevent their boots from being soiled by any of the blood that had splattered from Lenny's body.

"A teledominant," Anderson said. "His psychic power allows him to mentally dominate other people and make them believe anything he wants them to." She straightened her legs and stood up, and then turned to face Weller. "In this case, when the killer arrived at Melanie Arnwold's apartment he found Lenny Kaspasian there as well. He decided to get rid of him. He told Lenny - and I quote - 'Bat-gliding is a fun and rewarding hobby'. Next, he told Lenny he was wearing wings and a lo-grav unit, which, as you can see, he wasn't. Then, he told him he should climb up to the roof and take his maiden flight immediately. And Lenny believed it all, every word of it, which is how come he ended up looking like synthi-pancake spread all over the pedway."

"Hmm, from the sounds of it he was as dumb as drokk, then." Weller looked down at the dead man in derision.

"No," Anderson shook her head. "Admittedly, I don't get the feeling Lenny was the sharpest tool in the box, but all the brains in the world won't help you resist a teledominant's powers of suggestion. You know how they say a hypnotist can't make you do anything you wouldn't be willing to do normally? A teledominant doesn't have to put up with those kinds of restrictions. He can make you jump off a building, run naked across the megway at rush hour, gouge out your own eyeballs with a spoon, or push your grandmother down the stairs. The only limits are the teledominant's imagination and the victim's will power. And, no offence, but most non-psychics don't have what it takes in that department to resist a teledominant's orders."

She paused for a short while to think, turning to stare down at Lenny Kaspasian's body, before raising her eyes to the windows of the block next to them. The killer is psychic. She suddenly realised it was what her intuition had been trying to tell her at the Sharn crime scene at Mary Kelly Block. The killer is psychic. With that thought, she felt the pieces of her investigation start to fall into place.

"You realise this explains everything?" she said to Weller as she turned to him once more. "The different faces I saw on the killer in each psi-scan, the flowers and candy, or the lack of them. And you were right when you said the killer couldn't have been wearing a delivery uniform. Every discrepancy between the physical evidence and what I saw in the scans is explained by the fact that the killer is a teledominant. He shows up at each apartment, tells his victims he's a delivery man, and they believe him because his power compels them to. He doesn't need to be wearing a uniform or carrying anything. If he tells them he's from Synthi-Flora, then that's what they see. The victims' own minds fill in all the blanks for him. That's why one victim sees him as a short man, and another one sees him as being tall. When the killer told them he was a delivery man, each victim's mind automatically called up memories of delivery men they had seen in the past and superimposed those images over their killer's features."

"So that's why there's no sign of a delivery man in the exterior surveillance footage?" Weller said. "That's what helps make this drokker such a ghost?"

"Exactly." Excited at having finally reached a breakthrough in the investigation, the words now flowed out of Anderson but breathless bursts. "And, you know what else? This could even have a bearing on the lack of internal surveillance footage inside the blocks. It had occurred to me: how did the killer know the surveillance cameras were offline in some of the blocks? Did he have access to the maintenance logs? Was he casing each block in advance? But if he's a teledominant, for all we know when he finds a place with cameras, he just has a quiet word in the block super's ear and suggests they should be taken offline. If the perp is smart enough, he could even fix it so the super wouldn't remember the conversation afterwards, and we already know that this guy is plenty smart."

She paused again, casting her mind back to her memories of the psychometric scans she had performed on each victim: Margaret Penrith, Vincent Henk, Eunice Bibbs, Brenda Maddens, Velma Sharn and Melanie Arnwold. There was a common thread running through all their experiences of the killer. A thread that ran true even in the collateral damage death of Lenny Kaspasian, killed as an afterthought - an addendum to the murder of his girlfriend.

"His voice," Anderson said. "That's how the killer works his mojo. Some teledominants are able to control their victims through telepathic commandment. With our perp, I think his power is tied directly to his voice. I mean, it's a psychic power, so obviously the real source of his ability is his brain, but I think the killer is accustomed to using his voice as the conduit. When he activates his powers, people treat everything he says like it was the word of Grud. He tells his victims to stay still, to lift their chins, and they do exactly what he tells them, even when they see him pull out a knife. That's how he managed to kill three victims with a single slash wound when they were standing facing him. With his powers, he knew they wouldn't struggle."

"What about the Sharn woman?" Weller asked her. "She fought back. She even bit him."

"It could be she was an exception," Anderson said. "Maybe she had the will power to resist him. That's what got him so steamed that he pulled out all her organs and put them in jars. After that, he realised that mutilating his victims, so completely, gave him vastly more satisfaction. So, when he killed Melanie Arnwold, he wanted to mutilate her the same way, but the presence of her boyfriend complicated things. He told Lenny to throw himself off the roof, but all the same he knew that was likely to bring the Judges to Melanie's apartment sooner rather than later. He didn't have time to sever the organs from the blood vessels and arrange them in containers like he did with Velma Sharn. So he did the next best thing, doing the best job he could in the time at his disposal."

"Hmm. Looks like you've got it all figured out," Weller said grudgingly.

"I wouldn't go that far, but it's a start." Noticing a sour expression come over Weller's face, Anderson realised the Street Judge did not share her excitement. "What is it, Weller? You look like I just offered you a cup of rat piss and told you it was soy-cola. Can't you see this is a real breakthrough?"

"A breakthrough?" Weller pursed his lips in disapproval. "That's what you'd call it, huh? If this is what passes your standard for a breakthrough, Anderson, I'd say you are pretty easily pleased. Bad enough we're already working a serial case with no real leads to work on. We don't know who the killer is, what he looks like, or even how he goes about choosing his victims. And now, now you say the perp is a dangerous psychic, able to control people's minds and compel them to do whatever he tells them? I hate to have to bring you back to Earth with a bang, but if what you say about him is true, then I'd say it just got about a million times more difficult for us to catch him."

NINE

THE BIRTH OF MONSTERS

It had been a long night, and the monster William Ganz was tired.

Yawning, he lay down to sleep curled under a blanket on a thin mattress on the floor of his lair. His lair; that was his name for the space he inhabited inside the derelict and fire-ravaged basement of a long deserted con-apt building. He could have called it his home, his room, or even his dwelling. Somehow though, he preferred the word lair. It seemed more fitting. Deep inside himself he recognised something that to the rest of the world was only conjecture. Deep inside, he realised he was a monster. Granted, he was neither clawed nor fanged, nor were his features in any way particularly revolting. But for all that, he knew he was a monster, just as he knew that the status of a monster demanded certain standards of him. A monster could not have an apartment. A monster must have its lair.

He was tired, so tired. He had needed to work swiftly, cutting her open and pulling the organs from her body with no time to arrange them. Then, he had fled the scene, careful to keep his face lowered, staring down at the ground to make it harder for the cameras outside the block to catch his likeness. The Grey Man had taught him that. The Grey Man had told him to buy clothes made of Stay Kleen. He had promised him the internal surveillance cameras in the blocks where he killed would not be working. He had even given him pointers on killing. "Use a knife," the Grey Man had told him. "Guns are always more trouble than they're worth. They jam. They misfire. With slugthrowers you have to worry about ballistics and shell casings, with lasers it's flash patterns and energy cell failure. Admittedly, guns can have their uses, but for quick and quiet work, the professional knows there is no better tool than a knife." As with everything else since his release from the institution, William had listened to the Grey Man's good advice. Not that he had needed much prompting in that regard. Guns were so impersonal. When it came to the work of killing reds, the knife was better.

Tired, so tired. As sleep approached him and his consciousness slowly receded, William felt the throbbing of the wound in his hand as a dull and distant ache. He had stopped at a pharmacy on his way home to his lair to fill the prescription the doctor in the clinic had given him. The instructions were printed on the bottle: two tablets, to be taken twice a day with a glass of water. For a moment, when it came time to take the first tablets, William had wavered uncertainly. The years he had spent in the institution had left him with an instinctive mistrust of doctors and their pills. Finally, he had realised these pills were there to help him; not to help him in the way his doctors in the institution had talked about, with all their stupid and well-meaning lies. No. These pills would not make his brain sluggish and compliant. They would not stop him from seeing auras. They would simply prevent his hand from becoming infected, and he needed his hand to be in good working order. It would be hard to be a monster if he only had one hand to kill with.

Tired, tired. His breathing becoming slow and regular, he drifted off to sleep. As so often when the cares of the world left him, William's dreams turned to memories of his past. He dreamed of his father, his childhood, the years in the institution. He dreamed of the days and nights before he had become a monster. He dreamed of all of these things, safe and secure in the knowledge that in his dreams they could no longer harm him. He dreamed.

William dreamed, and he remembered...

Memories...

Daytime, the apartment in Ciudad Barranquilla, the hot summer sun streaming in through the apartment windows, William is two years old. He is sitting on the rug in the middle of the living room floor, playing with his toys: Plasteen building blocks. He arranges them methodically by size and colour. Nearby, his father sits in an armchair, watching and waiting.

"William." His father calls out to him. "William, look over there." He croons softly as he speaks. "There, over by the wall. You can see it, can't you?"

Spying movement in the corner, William looks up, his eyes following his father's pointing finger. A spider, there is a spider in the apartment. To William's eyes it seems huge, menacing. The spider's body is as big as one of his father's hands. Its legs are black and swift. The spider glares at him, its eyes glittering like malevolent jewels as they catch the light. Staring back at it, William feels terror growing inside him. With an unexpected motion, the spider darts towards him. William screams.

As he screams, the spider disappears, fading away like a shadow before the sun. Soon, it is as though it was never there.

Sitting back in his chair, his father smiles.

Night. The years have passed. He is five years old. The spiders come to him every night. Lying in his bed, curled under the covers, William hears them scuttling across the floor. Pulling the covers tighter around his head, he tries to block out the sound. Scuttling, so loud there must be dozens of them, hundreds, thousands. In his mind he imagines the spiders as a writhing black tide spreading out to engulf every inch of the floor. Terrified, he puts his head under the pillow. He tries not to make any noise. Perhaps if the spiders do not hear him they will simply leave him alone. Suddenly aware of the sound of his own breathing, he fears it will give him away. He holds his breath. In the darkness, he hears the spiders creeping closer...

Closer.

His terror growing, William feels a tiny vibration across the surface of his bed clothes. One of the spiders is climbing the bed. Feeling the vibration move nearer, he realises it is under the covers with him. The spider's body brushes against his leg. It is too much. He can keep silent no longer. The terror inside him must have release. William screams.

Abruptly, the scuttling noises cease. His senses tell him the spiders are gone. It is as though they were never there.