Drakon Page 6

  Gwen sighed and leaned back in the lounger. She remembered more than four centuries past . . .

  The fountain. It was old, Renaissance work. Much older than the plantation in the hills of Tuscany. It played in a little courtyard flagged with black and white stones, surrounded by arches borne on pillars. The central part of it was a statue of a maiden pouring the water from an amphora over one shoulder, all in age-green bronze. It fell into a round bowl of stone, the edge carved with a time-worn design of vines.

  I remember.

  The sun warm on her bare skin, and the slick surface of the marble under her left hand. Her right—a three-year-old's hand, still slightly chubby—dived into the cool water. The fingers flicked, a touch of scales, and a goldfish soared into the air. Gwen giggled and moved her hand. Flick, flick; more goldfish soared upwards. The fish tumbled back into the water with little plashing sounds, darting away to the other side of the pool.

  "Missy Gwen, stop that."

  That was her tantie-ma, Marya. Gwen turned toward her and ran, leaping up to wrap arms and legs around her. Marya braced herself against the solid impact and hugged her back. The child nestled against her, taking in the familiar comforting scent.

  "Here, punkin," her mother said.

  Marya handed her down, and she cuddled against the sleek warmth of her mother's side in the recliner, yawning and shifting until she was comfortable and drifted into sleep . . .

  Maybe that's why I remember, Gwen thought. The scents. Her mother Yolande had smelled human—had been human, the last generation of human Draka.

  That scent was heavy all about her, in Stephen Fischers little apartment. A flash of memory: Yolande older, in uniform, the high-collared black tunic of ceremony. Standing at the top of a stairway under a dome on Mars . . .

  She shook her head. Back to work. She frowned and made another note on the pad. It wasn't strictly necessary, of course; she had eidetic memory, and the transducer for backup. Just an old, old habit to help her see the shape of a sequential problem. Perhaps that was why she'd gone into reverie. Her mother had done that too, made notes.

  She wrote:

  1: Identity.

  She'd need, let's see, a birth certificate, and then documentation from there. False documents could probably be arranged with stolen money. She made a sub-heading: American or other?

  2: Base of operations.

  She looked around Stephen Fischer's cramped little apartment. It was much cleaner and better furnished than the one she'd used in her first flight from the warehouse, but not all that much bigger. Something better than this. Fischer had evidently made a fairly high salary, but equally evidently it didn't go far here. Like most Draka, she could put up with cramped quarters at need, but didn't like it.

  3: Legitimize the money.

  That ought to be reasonably easy. Even in her own history, the Americans had been sloppy-careless about security matters right up to the end—otherwise they might not have lost the Final War. These Americans hadn't had the long struggle with the Domination to keep them on their toes, and to judge from what she'd read, they had a crime problem like nothing her world had ever seen in any major country. With a huge criminal class, there had to be ways of transferring profits to noncriminal organizations.

  In a way, if this had to happen to someone, it was as well it was her. She could remember what a market economy with a non-notional currency was like; the Domination had had something like that back before the War, and she'd studied the American version in know-the-enemy lectures. Very long ago, but the data was still there. The freewheeling anarchy outside wasn't all that much like what she remembered from either case, but there were useful hints. The younger generation knew valuata as something exchanged over the Web, and rather theoretical in any case.

  Legate Tamirindus, for example, would have been completely lost for a good long while.

  4: Establish organization.

  She chewed meditatively on a carrot. Obviously, if she was ever going to contact home again she'd need huge resources; here, that meant money. She had a lot to sell, four and a half centuries' worth of technology, only the simplest of which would be applicable at all. The problem would be to do it without attracting too much attention. That meant disguising it as commercial activity.

  5: Do physics.

  That would be difficult. She'd never been a pure scientist. Few Draka were. Fighters, rulers, explorers, the arts, applied science—but basic research was servus work, mostly. It would be hands-on for her now. Nobody here would know much physics beyond the witch-doctor level.

  On the other hand she had the training, and her arrival here indicated several lines to look into. Moleholes obviously retained a quantum-indeterminate quality. With an anchor at both ends, though . . . She'd have to make the tools to make the tools, with several regressions before that, even for some sort of crude signaling device. Either it would be possible, or not; time to worry about that when it came to it.

  6: Call home.

  She finished the carrots and smiled. Establish a bridgehead. Bring through a couple of orbital battle stations and launchers, she thought, modified for planetary bombardment. The specs were still on file. It had been a while since the Race had an opportunity for conquest. Then the locals would be . . . what was that expression she'd read? Ah. Toast.

  ***

  Jennifer Feinberg cried into the pad of wadded Kleenex, threw it into the deskside wastebasket, and reached for more.

  Carmaggio helpfully pushed the box under her groping hand. He looked around; a tiny cubicle of an office on the 27th floor, computer, book racks with bound tables and trade periodicals, an African violet, and a cup of cold chamomile tea on the cluttered desk beside the picture of a man in a doctor's white coat. His professional eye classified Ms. Feinberg effortlessly: early thirties, Jewish, five-five, a hundred and thirty-five pounds—she probably dieted and exercised ferociously to keep it there—economics degree from NYU. Eight years with the same securities firm, fairly rapid promotion. Father a doctor . . . A pleasant face, black hair and big brown eyes, conservative business suit, pearl earrings. Attractive in a wholesome way, if you weren't put off by brains.

  Probably has a studio apartment on the Upper West Side, he thought, and checked his notebook. Yup. And a cat, and went to the opera fairly often, and read books Carmaggio'd never heard of. The only thing not on the to-be-expected list was the other picture on her desk; a young man in baggy olive-green BDU's, smiling, an Army-issue drab towel around his neck and a helmet under one arm. Brother, probably. Thin beaky face, and glasses. Not worth checking on.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I just—I saw him every day, and we did lunch, and then this happens to him . . ."

  APARTMENT HORROR, he read from the Post on her desk. WAREHOUSE VIGILANTES STRIKE AGAIN.

  Fucking media ghouls, he thought. The anger was so old it was reflexive. The national networks had picked it up for a couple of days, which meant still more pressure on him. A couple of local bottom-feeders had tried to make it a racial incident too, since the first twenty-one victims were all black or Hispanic. Stephen Fischer had quieted that, at least.

  Although he had to admit there was more to sensationalize than usual. It wasn't every day that a perp chopped up the body, stuffed it in the fridge, and then lived in the victim's apartment for a week, ordering in Chinese food on the victim's credit card.

  Plus fucking the victim before she killed him, he reminded himself—they'd found reddish pubic hairs mixed with Fischer's, traces of his semen.

  This is a bad one, he thought. Even without the space cadet parts, it was a very bad one. We definitely haven't heard the last of Ms. Machete. He ignored the impossible aspects. There were bodies, there was a suspect, time to wonder about that stuff when he made the collar.

  "How long did you know Mr. Fischer?" he asked, when the sobs subsided.

  "About two years. I didn't really know him. He . . . well, he was on the Equities desk, you know, and I'm in Analysis. I passed him
every day coming in, talked a little, we went to lunch with some mutual friends occasionally."

  "Did you know his ex-wife?"

  "We met at the office Hanukkah party once. She was a lawyer—that's why they split up."

  Carmaggio raised his eyebrows.

  "Well, they both had seventy-hour weeks or worse," Jennifer went on. "We all do, but she was with Mikaels, Sung, Lawson & Finkelstein. She got involved with someone at her firm. Said she'd at least see him sometimes."

  "Mr. Fischer wasn't, mmm, involved with anyone here? Anyone that you knew of?"

  "Steve?" She blew her nose. "No, he wasn't the type. I think."

  "No business problems that you knew of, enemies?"

  She looked at him, surprise in her red-rimmed eyes. "In Equities? God, no, they don't deal with the public."

  "Promotion?"

  "Nothing special. His people over in Equities—"

  "—would know more, yes."

  "It has to be some awful psychopath, like that Dahmer or whatever his name was." She burst into fresh tears. "In the fridge, God."

  Carmaggio sighed; for once he more or less agreed with the amateur's take on it. This was going nowhere, although you had to cover all the bases. It was a good thing that the office here didn't have all the details, or they'd be even more hysterical.

  "Thank you again, Ms. Feinberg," he said. "Here's my number. If anything occurs to you, anything at all . . ."

  She nodded, wiping her nose and taking the card. Carmaggio shrugged into his overcoat and left.

  "De nada" Jesus said in the corridor, holding up his notebook. Carmaggio nodded. They were working their way steadily through everyone who'd known the victim, and accomplishing squat.

  "This isn't an ex-girlfriend or the guy he beat out for the promotion," he said quietly. "Stephen Fischer just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  "At least we've got a make."

  Tall redhead in a black pantsuit, carrying a duffel bag, no positive ID on race—hell, it could be a fucking transie."

  Not according to the DNA, but that had gone crazy anyhow, and he found it even more difficult to believe in a woman doing what this perp had done. And he didn't believe a man could have done it, in the first place.

  He looked out the window at the driving snow, falling gray-white into the canyons of New York. Out there in his city was someone who pulled machinery apart to see how it worked, and sat at a computer running up Panix.com bills and eating egg foo yung while a body slowly rotted in the refrigerator.

  Someone who killed human beings with the casual precision of a leopard in a flock of sheep.

  She'd kill again, and again, until she was stopped. Henry Carmaggio hunched his shoulders and thrust his hands into the pockets of his overcoat.

  "Let's get going."

  Chapter Four

  "No, don't turn around," Gwen said quietly.

  The man hissed in pain as her fingers clenched on his upper arm. She walked behind him and to the right, down the crowded street. Neon blinked on the wet sidewalks, on the pedestrians in bulky clothing and on the umbrellas many of them carried. She was wearing . . . what was the word? A tracksuit. What the advertisement called the World's Finest Cold-Weather Athletic Clothing, with high-laced sports shoes. The clothes were far warmer than she needed, but the jacket had a hood that concealed most of her face, and they were baggy enough to let her body vanish inside.

  Few of the crowd looked at her, or at each other. They walked with a hurried, nervous determination that seemed characteristic here; heads slightly bowed, refusing to meet each other's eyes. Wafts of warmer air gusted up out of the subway stations, with a gagging reek of wastes and ozone. Cars splashed rooster-tail fans of dirty water onto the edges of the sidewalks, and sometimes beyond onto the legs of the passersby. Most of the stores sold weirdly primitive electronics, or various sorts of erotic entertainment almost as crude.

  At least the rain did a little something in the way of clearing the air.

  "Hey, what you want, man?"

  He tugged against her grip, and she tightened it in warning. "I want you to do me a favor," she said, keeping her voice pitched several octaves deeper than the natural setting.

  To a human's dull ears it would pass well enough for a man's voice, and it was no particular strain for her vocal cords; she could imitate most animals' cries well enough to fool the creatures into killing range.

  "This is a C-note," she said, pushing a hundred-dollar bill into his pocket. "I need some papers. A passport."

  The man's free hand brought out the folded bill; he peeked down at the edge to verify the amount and then tucked it securely away. She could hear his sub-vocalization, a confused murmur with cop? cop? interspersed through it.

  "Get me someone who can do the passport, and you get three more like that. Fuck me around and I pull your arm out of your shoulder."

  She gave a single heavy tug, not quite enough to dislocate the joint, proud of her quick mastery of the local dialect. The man's scent turned heavier with fear, a salty odor, faintly appealing.

  Why me? the human was thinking to himself. And: Easy money.

  "Easy money," she said soothingly. She wanted him to be afraid, but not so panic-stricken he forgot greed.

  It wasn't hard to identify petty criminals; not when you could pick up their speech from many times the distance a human could, and automatically sort multiple conversations for keywords. Scenting the drugs and weapons helped, as well.

  "Sure, I take you to Jojo," he said.

  He was half lying. Ah. He probably knows of such an individual, but doesn't plan to deliver.

  "Of course you will," she said. "Right now, and if you try to run away, the arm goes."

  ***

  "Bingo," Carmaggio said softly, and spat the gum in his mouth toward a manhole cover.

  The back courtyard was cold and slick with the last rain; which kept the smell down, at least. He walked over to the body. Damn, that's unusual. You got used to corpses in all sorts of positions; upside down, hanging from things, in beds, in cars. Once he'd had a killing where the girlfriend's body got stuffed into a large sealed crate and mailed by the ex-wife to the husband. Who'd fainted, fallen over backward, and killed himself when he opened the crate—and that presented some interesting evidentiary problems.

  This one was lying on his stomach, with the forward third of his body propped up against the brick wall of the building. As if he'd run right into it and poured down, like Wile E. Coyote in one of the old Road Runner cartoons.

  Carmaggio took his hands out of his pockets and pulled on a pair of gloves. "Another fun night in the Busiest Precinct in the World," he said. A couple of the uniforms and technical people laughed as they went about their business.

  They were about a block from Times Square; he could see the reflected lights of the Embassy in a puddle out on the street, beyond the cars and the cordon. At least now the press had had a month to forget the warehouse killings, so he didn't have a flock of black-winged cameramen following him around, flapping and squawking and waiting for something to die. There was a Sbarro's next to the Embassy, which reminded him he hadn't eaten. I'll get a meatball sandwich afterward, he decided.

  "Ai, me muero," Jesus Rodriguez said, gloving up as well. "You know, there was a time when I thought I'd be catching murderers, not spending my days with the bodies."

  "Hmmm."

  Carmaggio crouched behind the body for a second. Hands were down, resting on the ground palms up. There was a smear of blood on the wet brick, starting about face height for someone the victim's height. He touched a gloved finger to it and rubbed the result with the ball of his thumb; unscientific, he supposed, but it often worked as a rough-and-ready timecheck. Hard to tell, though, with this temperature and all the water oozing out of the brick—God damn all midwinter thaws, anyway, they screwed things up worse than snow. Maybe there was something to this global warming thing; winters had frozen harder when he was a kid.

&nbs
p; The initial blood spatter was huge, like an inkblot in one of those old psychologist's tests. More blood in a pool around the base of the wall. Head injuries bled out fast, as bad as a major wound to the chest cavity.

  "What do I see in this?" he wondered, stepping back and looking at the blot. "I see someone who had their head shot out of a cannon at a wall, is what I see."

  There was nothing around the body but garbage. He crouched again and used a pencil in his left hand to move the ponytail of greasy black hair that covered the victim's neck. Aha.

  Livid bruises on either side of the spinal column, right above the shoulders. "Look at this," he said.

  Jesus joined him. Henry spread his hand as if he were about to take the back of the dead man's neck in it, a straightforward grab with the thumb on the left side. It fit exactly, thumb-mark and four fingers, although from the spacing the hand had been slightly smaller than Carmaggio's.

  "What does that say to you?" he asked his partner.

  "Perp is right-handed," Jesus said helpfully.

  "Oh, funny man."

  "Geraldo has nothing to me, patrón. I'd say someone put his face to that brick with an extreme quickness."

  Henry grunted. "How long?"

  Jesus picked up one of the hands by a thumb. There was a purplish sheen to the waxy skin, and a whitish spot appeared when the younger policeman stuck a finger in the livid patch that had lain nearest the ground. The joints of the hand moved freely.

  "Hour, maybe two, no more than three."

  "Right."

  There was a bulletin out with the extremely incomplete description they'd gotten from the restaurant where Fischer had been seen last, but the chances of it doing any good were . . . Somewhere between nada, zip, and fucking zero, he thought resignedly. You couldn't pull in every tall redheaded woman within a mile of Times Square.

  "All right, let's move him."

  Two of the uniforms came forward, and Jesus got out his minicam, speaking softly into the throat mike. Henry whistled.

  Teeth dropped out of the shattered mouth as the slack body was lifted free of the bricks. One of the patrol officers swallowed and wobbled a bit, until her partner hissed sharply at her. Broken jaw, mandible pushed right back. All the upper teeth snapped off. Frontal bones pushed in until there was nothing but a glistening mass of pulp, and the forehead had a dished look.