The Forever Drug (13 page)

I shook my head. The human and meta fondness for body ornamentation never fails to surprise me. When in human form I kept my hair clipped and combed, but that was about it. I didn't really care which clothes I wore; I was always losing them, anyway, when I shifted.

"What's up?" I settled into a chair. I decided to let Dass say whatever was on her mind before I asked for her help. She was obviously excited about something. I knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't hear a word I said until she'd unwound a little.

"Raymond assigned me the corpselight homicides," she said.

My ears perked up at that one.

"And guess what? Those things are being sold as a
drug
."

"I know."

"Oh."

Dass seemed disappointed by my lack of surprise. I could smell irritation on her.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked.

"I've been busy with other things," I said. "The Jane Doe case."

Dass didn't bother to correct me—Jane wasn't a
case
, exactly. Just someone I was trying to help out. She merely gave me a knowing look and picked up a datachip from her desk. She slotted it into her printer, then waited while the machine produced a brightly colored printout that looked like a topographical map of Nova Scotia. Except that the peaks and valleys were in all the wrong places.

"Halifax isn't the only city where corpselights are killing people," she told me. "Other Lone Star detachments have been reporting similar cases. There have been 'grinning corpse' deaths or sightings of glowing balls of light in Digby, Liverpool, Shellburne, Lunenberg, Yarmouth, and Parrsboro—all along the coast. But none in Sydney, despite the fact that it's the third-largest city in the area, after Halifax and Dartmouth. You'd expect a new drug to show up there, long before a little fishing town like Parrsboro.

"Corpselights are also being reported in major cities across the bay, like Saint John, Portland, and Boston. But not in any of the smaller American towns."

She pulled the printout from the printer and showed it to me. The yellow high points on the map were all along the coast, with orange peaks over the three cities she'd mentioned—the ones on what used to be the American coast. The high points rose to a bright red peak over Nova Scotia's south shore, at a point between Digby and Yarmouth. The lows were all inland and were colored a deep blue-purple— exactly the reverse of what you'd normally expected to see on a map.

I suddenly realized what we were looking at: a map generated by geographic profiling, a data-analysis system developed back in the 1990s by a Vancouver police detective. By mapping crimes that were "linked" by modus operandi or other important similarities, then crunching the distances between these sites, the geographic profiling program highlighted the areas the perpetrators were most likely to frequent. Nine times out of ten, this area of probability turned out to include places where the criminals lived, worked, or had family or friends. Despite the fact that computers were primitive in the extreme in the last century— those were the days before the Matrix—the program helped police of the day to catch a number of serious offenders: rapists, serial killers, armed robbers.

Dass had used a modern version of geographic profiling to track down the most probable source for the corpselights. And that source was—assuming the data were correct—somewhere on Nova Scotia's south shore, a part of the world where you only needed two digits to list the population of any given town.

"
That's
where the corpselights are being smuggled in from?" I asked, stabbing a finger at the red area on the map.

Dass nodded. "
Kitchaa
—crazy, eh?"

She keyed another command into the printer. After a second or two, another map began printing.

"And here's something even crazier," she said. "Just for fun, I had the computer crunch through reports of blackberry cats—that's how I knew there was a fresh sighting in Truro—and look what it came up with."

I looked at the geographic profile in her hand. The peaks and valleys were in slightly different places on this map, but the probable location of origin was the same: Nova Scotia's south shore.

I drew the obvious conclusion: "The same people
are smuggling blackberry cats
and
corpselights?"

"Among other things," Dass said. "I asked the Department of Records to run a scan of all reports of illegally-at-large paras on the northeast coast of North America, and eliminated any that were native to the areas where they were sighted. That didn't produce anywhere near the amount of data that there is on corpselights and blackberry cats—those two seem to be the favorites, hands down. But if you take the scattered reports of pegasus, Merlin hawks, aitvaras snakes, and cerberus hounds, you see the same pattern, all over again."

"Those paras are all native to Europe," I said.

"Right." Dass stared thoughtfully at the maps in her hand. "And that means someone is smuggling them in from Europe—by sea, obviously, since we're dealing with a distribution network based out of the south shore—and selling them as 'drugs' or as pets."

"Cerberus hounds?" I asked, incredulous. "Who the frig in their right mind would have one of those as a pet?"

"Get with the times, Rom," Dass said. "The European trids are calling the cerberus hound the 'pit bull of the'60s.'"

It took me a moment to realize she was being sarcastic.

"Spirits save us," I whispered. "I wouldn't want a cerberus hound to lick my hand. Not with a tongue that drips corrosive saliva." I couldn't think of a worse animal to choose as a house pet.

Except maybe a blackberry cat.

"So what do you need my help with?" I asked Dass. "You don't need a tracker to find this smuggling operation. You know where these creatures are coming from."

"I know
approximately
," Dass said. "The probable area covers more than fifty kilometers of coastline. I need your nose to narrow it down. I'm going to insist that Sergeant Raymond assign you to the MTF team that will be doing the investigation—a team I'm heading up, so I'll get to hand-pick its members. But I wanted to clear it with you, first. Especially since you're busy with... your case."

Drek. Dass had read me like a book. She'd spotted my attraction to Jane, and had realized that my protective instincts would automatically kick into overdrive.

I seized the opening Dass had given me. "That's what I need
your
help with, Dass. I've got a name for Jane Doe. I want you to run it through Lone Star's computers."

"
Vema
—I'll do it. Give me the name."

It took only a second or two to run down the name Mareth'riel Salvail. The results shouldn't have surprised me, but they did. Jane—Mareth'riel—was a citizen of Tír Taimgire. Her metatype was listed as human, not elven, and her age as forty-three. She lived in Portland, Oregon, was single and had no dependents, and was employed by a company called New Dawn Medical Research.

The face that stared out at me from the crystal-ball monitor—the holo from Mareth'riel Salvail's passport—was Jane all right. She had the same gold-flecked eyes, brown hair, and full lips. Just at the bottom of the image, down near her throat, was the silver locket she'd showed to me in the graveyard. Everything fit. Except that the woman in the holo was somehow
not
Jane. She had a higher tilt to her chin, a more confident look in her eye. She looked ... older, somehow.

There wasn't much more than general information—the only reason we'd been able to access that much data was because Mareth'riel had been a regular visitor to the UCAS. The purpose of her trips was listed as business—New Dawn, it seemed, was putting out feelers, looking to set up subsidiaries in the UCAS.

Mareth'riel's earliest visit to our country was in 2045 and her most recent was a trip made in July of 2057. According to the Customs and Immigration records, she left the UCAS on August 10, the day after President Dunkelzahn was assassinated. Or rather, she
tried
to leave. She passed through UCAS customs at the Halifax airport, and boarded a flight for Calgary—a flight that crashed during takeoff, killing everyone on board, after rioters storming the Halifax airport abandoned a truck on the runway in the path of the speeding 707.

It sounded plausible enough. In the turmoil that followed the president's assassination, all kinds of drek had hit the fan. The "death" of one Tír Taimgire national would have gone almost unnoticed. Except that Mareth'riel Salvail was still alive. Had she somehow not boarded that plane after passing through customs? If so, where had she been for the past four years?

There was something else I didn't understand. "How come this information didn't come up when I ran Jane's retinal scans yesterday?" I asked.

"I don't know," Dass said. "It should have—Lone Star's databases are linked with Customs and Immigration's." She scrolled through the file for a moment in silence, then stabbed a finger at the monitor. "
Kumbe!
" she said. "Here's the reason. There
are
no retinal scans of Mareth'riel Salvail in this file. The field for them is blank."

"Huh?" I said. "How can that be? They're a required part of every passport."

Dass shrugged. "They must have been deleted."

"Could we try something?" I asked. "Blow up that image of Mareth'riel Salvail so that her eye fills the monitor, and call up a visual of the retinal scans I did on Jane yesterday. Maybe we can do a manual check on whether the two match."

"
Labda
," Dass said. "It might work." She entered the request. Then she gave a low whistle as the data materialized inside the crystal-ball monitor of her computer.

"
A
kigeni
—that's strange," she said.

"What?"

I leaned closer and scanned the data myself. Suddenly, Jane had a criminal record. And another name.

The retinal scans that I'd subjected Jane to yesterday now were linked to the file of a woman named Margaret Hersey, a thirty-eight-year-old resident of Sydney, Nova Scotia. According to the report, Hersey was a busker who earned a living by performing illusionary magic on street corners, trying to cajole a few nuyen out of the tourist trade. Because she was SIN-less and because this was the first time she'd run afoul of the law, there was no other personal information available. The arresting officers had to go with the information she gave them.

Hersey had been arrested in Charlottetown earlier this year—on March 16, 2061 to be precise—and charged with unlicensed use of a manipulation spell. She'd cooled her heels in that city's jail until her trial, then been sentenced to three months detention, to be served in Lone Star's maximum-security penal institution in the Halifax Citadel. It was a heavy sentence for a first offense, but perfectly in line with President Haeffner's new "zero tolerance" policy on unlicensed spellcasting. All mages are sent to the Citadel now, no matter how minor their crimes.

Hersey had served out her sentence and been released from prison on July 23—just two days before I found her on Georges Island, all memory of her past erased. Or so someone wanted me to believe.

"This is crazy," I said. The office door was closed, but even so I was whispering. "When I had Records run Jane's retinal scans yesterday, this file didn't exist. But according to what we see on the monitor, the first of the data in this file was entered at the time of Hersey's arrest, nearly six months ago."

Dass nodded absently, still staring at the monitor.

"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble to link your Jane Doe with this other identity," Dass whispered back. "And they've managed to deck into the Lone Star databases to do it."

We both knew how improbable that was. Lone Star's databases are protected by some of the toughest intrusion countermeasures in the Matrix. The console cowboys of the Division of Matrix Security are authorized to use deadly force: the black IC they've created can fry a decker's brains in a nanosecond flat.

Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. But those countermeasures are frigging
lethal
, just the same. You have to want something awfully bad to try to crack Lone Star's system. Decking your way in to plant a false arrest record for someone was something you only did if covering up that someone's identity was very,
very
important.

And they'd done more than just one run against government databanks. They hadn't just planted the false arrest record—which had to have been done yesterday,
after
I ran Jane's scans and came up with null data. They also deleted Mareth'riel Salvail's retinal scans in the Customs and Immigration databases some time before yesterday.

Which meant that someone had anticipated Jane being picked up by Lone Star, and scans being done. That someone had at first figured that it was best if Jane remained anonymous—then had changed their mind and given her a false arrest record instead.

They were obviously counting on Jane not being able to remember what her real name was. But they decided—belatedly—to cover their hoops.

I thought back to the expression on Jane's face when she'd looked up at the Halifax Citadel, the huge, star-shaped 19th-century fortress that had been turned into a maximum-security prison. If she'd been incarcerated there, that would explain her traumatic memories of being forced to wear a mage mask. And that wouldn't have been the worst of it. From what I'd heard from members of Lone Star's Division of Penology, the mage mask was only the beginning. Mages incarcerated in the Citadel were subject to a number of measures designed to keep them from using their spells to make an escape. Drugs, simsense feeds, doses of stims that overload the nervous system, electroshock, and—although this was entering the realm of rumor—experimental neurosurgery.