Odd Girl Out

by Timothy Zahn

  “I assume so, yes,” she said. “There’s certainly never been a case I’ve heard of where the Modhri and any species had that kind of communication.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But what if the Human in question was herself telepathic?”

  Bayta’s eyes flicked back toward the room. “Rebekah?”

  “Why not?” I said. “You seem able to sense her, at least well enough to know when she’s four meters under your feet. And it’s starting to sound like she and the Modhri can sense each other, too.”

  “Except that Humans aren’t telepathic,” she said tartly. “I’m not aware of a single documented exception.”

  “Okay, so that’s a soft spot in the theory,” I conceded. “But there’s a first time for everything. Maybe there’s something in the air or water here that switched on a gene.”

  She shook her head. “There must be a more reasonable explanation.”

  “Like what?” I asked. “She’s afraid the Modhri will detect her if she moves. He’s not seeing, hearing, or smelling her.” I cocked an eyebrow. “For that matter, neither were you earlier today.”

  Her lip twitched. “Let’s assume you’re right,” she said. “What do we do about it?”

  “I’ll show you.” I pulled out my comm and punched in McMicking’s number. “It’s me,” I said when he answered. “How’s the analysis going?”

  “I’ve got a list of Veldrick’s alien contacts,” he said. “The hacker program’s still working on the city’s utilities records.”

  “Any of the alien data jumping out at you?”

  “One bit is, yes,” he said. “A group of six Filiaelians showed up on New Tigris about six weeks ago. Since then, they’ve done some very impressive business with Veldrick.”

  “How impressive?”

  “About ten times that of any other Crown Rosette customer,” McMicking said.

  I chewed my lip. And Veldrick had rather bragged about how gifts of his coral had helped with his business contacts. “Forget everyone else for the moment,” I told McMicking. “Concentrate on the Fillies.”

  There was a short pause. “You once told me the Modhri hadn’t penetrated the Filiaelian Assembly,” he reminded me.

  “That was the information I was given,” I confirmed. “It may turn out to have been incorrect. It could also turn out that the Fillies are innocent pawns in the Modhri’s scheme.”

  There was another pause, a longer one this time. “All right,” he said at last. “If you’re sure you want to start poking sticks that direction.”

  It was an oddly squeamish comment for a man of McMicking’s history and reputation. But I didn’t really blame him. The Filiaelian Assembly filled a significant fraction of the far end of the galaxy, with colonized worlds and systems reputed to number in the thousands.

  That all by itself put them at the top of the social and economic food chain. Add to that their utter alienness, plus their habit of casual genetic manipulation of their own kind, and you had a group of horse-faced, satin-skinned people you did not want to irritate or offend. “We go where the trail leads,” I said. “Right now, it’s leading to those six Fillies.”

  “All right,” he said again. “But unless there’s something solid—”

  “Hold it,” I interrupted. The curtain beside me had rippled slightly, as if catching a puff of air from the other side.

  “Mr. Compton?” Karim’s voice stage-whispered from the direction of the shaft. “Mr. Compton?”

  “I’ll call you back,” I murmured to McMicking, and broke the connection. “Stay here,” I added to Bayta, pulling the kwi out of my pocket and pressing it into her hand. Drawing my Beretta, I slipped past the curtain into the passageway.

  I reached the shaft just as Karim made it to the bottom. “There you are,” he said. Even in the dim light I could see that his face was pale. “Did you see any police officers on your way in here tonight?”

  “No,” I said. “Are there police officers out there now?”

  He swallowed visibly. “Come and see.”

  Oved was waiting on the walkway when Karim and I emerged from the tavern. His face was even paler than Karim’s. “Over there,” he said, pointing toward a service alley leading away into the shadows on the opposite side of the street.

  I frowned as I peered down it. The alley itself was unlit, but there was enough backwash from the streetlights and storefronts that I could just make out the outline of a car halfway back facing my direction. It was hard to tell, but it looked like two men were sitting in the front seat.

  Sitting with unnatural stillness.

  I looked back at Oved. The boy was trembling slightly, I noticed now. Probably the first time he’d ever seen death up close. “Stay here,” I told him and Karim, and headed across the street.

  No one attacked me as I approached the car. No one jumped from the shadows, either, yelling bloody murder and pointing accusing fingers in my direction. Whatever had happened here, the goal hadn’t been to either lure me in or to frame me. I reached the car and looked in.

  The two cops were sprawled slightly in their seats. Not like men who’d been killed where they sat, but rather who’d been killed outside the vehicle and then shoved back in.

  There was a marked difference in their expressions, though. Sergeant Aksam looked almost serene, as if death had caught him completely unawares. Officer Lasari, in contrast, had a startled expression frozen on his face.

  The cause of death in both cases was probably connected to the wide bloodstains in the centers of their chests.

  I studied them from outside the car for a minute, taking in their expressions, positioning, and everything else I could see. Then, using a handkerchief to keep from smudging any fingerprints the killer might have left behind, I opened the driver’s-side door.

  From the lack of any mention of shots, I had already concluded the bloodstains were the result of stab wounds. Gingerly opening Aksam’s shirt, I found my assumption was correct. But it was an odd wound, triangular with smaller tears coming off two of the three corners.

  I frowned at the mark for a moment, my brain sifting through mental images as I tried to come up with something that could make a puncture like this.

  And then, it clicked. Leaving Aksam’s door open, I pulled out my comm and punched in McMicking’s number.

  The connection clicked. “Is something wrong?” McMicking asked.

  “Pretty much everything’s wrong,” I said grimly. “I’m standing beside a car with a couple of dead cops in it. The same two cops, interestingly enough, who tried to spoil our dinner earlier.”

  “In front of a dozen witnesses,” McMicking said. “I hope they weren’t shot with your gun.”

  “No, our murderer was a little more creative than that,” I said. “It looks like Aksam and Lasari were stabbed with a Filly contract pen.”

  I could hear his frown right over the comm. “That makes no sense,” he said. “Contract pen ink is genetically linked to its owner. He might as well have left family photos at the scene.”

  “Which implies the murderer didn’t care if he got caught,” I said. “Which strongly implies in turn that our information about the Modhri and Fillies not working and playing well together is indeed out of date.”

  “Indeed,” he agreed heavily. “You have a read?”

  I looked back down the alley. In general, hanging around a murder scene wasn’t the brightest thing a person could do.

  On the other hand, I had more privacy here than I was likely to get anywhere else in the neighborhood at the moment. “The killer probably approached the car from the front, from near the tavern I told you about earlier,” I said. “Both cops appear to have had time to get out to meet him. He approached them, probably asking for directions or some such, and when he was close enough he stabbed Sergeant Aksam. He then pulled the pen out of Aksam’s chest and threw it across the hood into Officer Lasari’s.”

  “Either man draw his sidearm?”

  “That’s a little
hard to tell,” I said. “Both their sidearms are missing.”

  He hissed into the comm. “Wonderful,” he said. “You’re sure the contract pen was thrown into the second vic?”

  “Reasonably sure,” I said. “Lasari’s wound has the slightly ragged edges of a thrown weapon.”

  “Which may mean only one of the Fillies is a walker,” he suggested. “It would have been safer to send in a pair of them, if he had a pair to work with.”

  “Possibly,” I said. “I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on it, though. Anyway, our murderer then shoved the bodies back into the car, retrieved his pen and their guns, and left.”

  “Any thoughts as to motive?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said sourly. I leaned back into the car and used my handkerchief to pick up the document sitting on the center console’s fax. “They have a warrant here for the arrest of one Frank Abram Donaldson. A new one, with all the proper legal bells and whistles in place.”

  “That’s handy,” McMicking said heavily. “I hope you haven’t left any evidence behind.”

  “It’s pretty impossible not to leave something behind these days,” I said. “But I haven’t left anything they’ll find without a detailed scan and sift. Besides, the pen residue should pretty well prove the killer was Filiaelian.”

  “No, it only proves the killing weapon was Filiaelian,” he countered. “You could easily have stolen it from one of these six upstanding citizens.”

  “There’s that,” I conceded. “On the other hand, I could argue that neither of these cops would have just let me walk up to them this way.”

  “Try persuading an arraignment judge of that,” McMicking said. “This doesn’t make any sense. First the Modhri gives you free rein to track down this Abomination, whatever it is. Then he tries to get you thrown in jail, and now he kills a pair of cops so that they can’t throw you in jail? How schizoid is this Modhri, anyway?”

  “As schizoid as only a million different mind segments can get,” I said. “But in this case, that’s not the problem. I think what we have here is two entirely different entities working at cross-purposes to each other.”

  “The Modhri and who else?”

  “Veldrick,” I said. “His only concern is to keep Frank Donaldson and Hardin Industries from taking his precious coral away from him. He’s almost certainly the one who tried to get me arrested earlier, and probably the one who then pushed for this new warrant. It’s the Modhri, through his Filly walkers, who killed the cops.”

  “But why?” McMicking persisted.

  “Because he needs me free to persuade Rebekah to come out of hiding. Any progress on the water records yet?”

  “Yes,” he said. “There aren’t any unexplained spikes.”

  I frowned. “None?”

  “None,” he confirmed. “Not with the six Fillies, not with anyone else.”

  “That’s impossible,” I insisted. “We know Veldrick gave away chunks of his coral.”

  “Maybe the Fillies just dumped the coral in their fish tanks,” McMicking suggested. “The coral doesn’t need the water to be flowing, does it?”

  “Not over the short haul,” I said. “But after a while it starts going dormant if it doesn’t have flow or at least some tidal fluctuation. It’s sure not going to be at its best and brightest sitting in a fish tank.”

  “Maybe it didn’t need its best and brightest to track down a ten-year-old girl.”

  And then, suddenly, it hit me. “Or else it needed to be mobile,” I said. “Do you have access to car purchase or rental records?”

  “I’ve got the city’s licensing data,” he said. “Looks like . . . huh. All six Fillies have rental cars.”

  “Do you have the locations of their parking spot?”

  “They don’t have parking permits here,” McMicking said. “But the cars do all have locators. Let me pull up a map for you.”

  I pulled out my reader and keyed for a download. “Ready when you are.”

  “Here it comes,” he said. “You haven’t explained yet why the Modhri wants Veldrick to pass around pieces of his coral. Assuming the Modhri has a reason.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, looking at the city map he’d just sent. One glance at the current positions of the Fillies’ cars was all I needed. “Take a look at the placement of the Fillies’ cars. Remind you of anything?”

  “You mean like your basic more-or-less circle?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Now think back to the search and surveillance classes you took back in your Marine days.”

  There was another pause. “I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “A detector array?”

  “Sure looks like one to me,” I said. “And, you’ll note, currently centered squarely on Karim’s tavern.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning—I think—that our young friend Rebekah is a telepath,” I said. “And that she’s broadcasting on a frequency the Modhri can pick up.”

  “Wonderful,” he growled. “And the Fillies? Just along to add cultural weight to the whole thing?”

  “Or else it only works with a coral-plus-Filly combination,” I said. “Probably Fillies genetically engineered nine ways from Sunday, come to think of it. There certainly would be no reason to drag in aliens from the other end of the galaxy if Halkan or Jurian walkers would work as well. Regardless, bottom line is that we need to eliminate or move either the coral or the Fillies before we can move Rebekah.”

  McMicking grunted. “The whole thing’s crazy,” he declared. “But that seems to be about par for this course. What’s the plan?”

  “Like I said, we have to take out the coral or the Fillies or both,” I said. “And we might as well start with Veldrick’s stash. Get yourself over to his house and figure out the best way in. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can. Don’t start the party without me.”

  “What about the bodies?”

  I looked into the car. Ideally, I would have preferred to move the whole mess a few kilometers away from Rebekah’s hiding place. But I didn’t have the time or equipment to pull that off without leaving bits of my DNA everywhere. Not to mention the instant trouble I’d be in if someone caught me driving a car with two dead cops in it. “We leave them here,” I told McMicking. “There’s no time for anything else.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll see you soon. Watch yourself.”

  “You too.”

  I broke the connection and put my comm away. I started to close the door, then had a sudden thought. Reaching past Aksam, I forced my hand gingerly behind Officer Lasari’s back.

  The Glock they’d taken from me earlier was gone.

  Gently closing the car door, I headed back down the alley. It was, I reflected, just as well that Bayta and I had had a good dinner. It looked like it was going to be a very long night.

  NINE

  Bayta wasn’t at all happy with the plan. Neither was Karim. But they weren’t in charge here. I gave them their orders, borrowed the keys to Karim’s car, and headed out.

  The garage behind the building where the car was parked was double-locked. Inside, the car itself was literally chained to the concrete floor. Apparently, auto theft was a major problem in Zumurrud District. Even with all the keys it took me a good ten minutes to get the car ready to go.

  Maneuvering my way through streets filled with drunks and loiterers was the next challenge, and it cost me another ten minutes. But there was nothing I could do except ease my way forward through the wandering pedestrians and keep an eye out for drunk drivers. Finally, I was out of Zumurrud and back into the relative calm of Makarr. I picked up speed and headed for Veldrick’s upscale neighborhood.

  All seemed quiet as I pulled into Veldrick’s street. I parked a block from his house and went the rest of the way on foot. Things here were even quieter than they had been in Makarr pistrict. Imani City’s rich and powerful were apparently finding their evening’s entertainment in the comfort of their own homes.

  Veldrick’s house was well lit, with l
ights showing through the curtains in both the great room and one of the back rooms. I eyed the shrubbery and nearby buildings as I approached, but McMicking was nowhere in sight. Strolling past the house like an innocent pedestrian, I keyed my comm.

  “Yes?” McMicking answered.

  “I’m here,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “Inside,” he said. “Hang on—I’ll unlock the front door for you.”

  He keyed off. Muttering a curse, I reversed direction and went back to the house.

  The front door opened as I approached. “About time,” McMicking commented in greeting. The middle-aged jogger Bayta and I had had dinner with had been replaced by an elderly Oriental man with a small goatee and hair gathered high on the back of his head. “What did you do, walk the whole way?”

  “I had to run the Zumurrud obstacle course,” I growled as I brushed past him. “I thought I told you to wait for me.”

  “I’m on Mr. Hardin’s clock here, not yours,” he pointed out reasonably as he locked the door behind me. “Come on in and give me a hand.”

  I walked into the meditation room to find a half-dozen small Quadrail-style cargo crates lined up near Veldrick’s artificial stream. On top of one of them were a pair of thick, elbow-length leather gloves. “Where did you get the crates?” I asked.

  “Veldrick’s storage room,” McMicking told me, crossing to the boxes and pulling on the gloves. “I figured that however he moved the stuff in he would probably have kept the transport boxes. Turns out I was right.”

  “It’ll certainly make it easier to move it back out again,” I agreed, frowning. Something was nagging urgently at the back of my mind. “You have a story ready in case Veldrick walks in on us?”

  “Veldrick won’t be walking in on anyone for a while,” McMicking said. “He’s sleeping off a snoozer in the master bedroom.”

  “You have any trouble getting in past the alarms?”

  “Not a bit,” he said. “I shot him as he opened the door for me.”

  I stared at him. “You knocked on the door?”

  “Actually, I rang the bell.” He gave me an innocent look. “You worried he’s going to describe his assailant to the police when he wakes up?”