by Diane Duane
“‘Mancers,” McGinity said. “Saw you on the news the other day.”
“Fame,” Gelert said. “It’s such a nuisance.”
“Not politically,” McGinity said, giving Lee a jocular look. “Thinking of a job in the DA’s Office?”
“Please,” Lee muttered. “That’s not at all high on my list.”
McGinity smiled, a look of disbelief. “Well, maybe not for you. But Gelert could probably manage something like that if he wanted. The DA’s never been happy with the percentage of nonhuman employees there.”
“He’ll just have to stay unhappy, I’m afraid,” Gelert said, as the door opened before them. “Anything like real work would interfere with my social schedule. And as for what I would have to do every day to keep that job, such as sticking my nose up Big Jim’s—” He paused, grinned a fangy grin, said no more.
Inside the interview room, Castelain was sitting at a small one-person table to one side of the room. On the far side of the room were two benches—one nearer the table where McGinity took his seat, one where Lee sat down, and Gelert sat beside her on the floor. A fourth table, opposite Castelain’s, was for Matt, the interviewer. There were a few minutes spent dealing with pads, briefcases, and so forth; then Matt closed the door and touched it locked.
“Interview with suspect LARC22799847, Jacques Xavier Castelain,” Matt said, sitting down at the separate table, “as per”—he glanced at his own pad—”case docket CARR8574.665. Suspect is charged with assault with first degree murder under statute number EllayLP2533.1 of the civil code of the city and county of Los Angeles. Present, the accused: Matthew Carathen, solicitor, District Attorney’s Office, LAPD; defense mantic, Paul McGinity, lanthanomancer, Holmes, McGinity and Oaxachitl, acting for the Ellay County Advocate’s Office; prosecution mantics, Liayna Enfield and Gelert reh’Mechren, reh’Mechren and Enfield, acting for the Ellay County District Attorney’s Office. Time is 1138.”
He paused for a moment to let everyone settle fully into judicial sensorium, glancing down at the pad again. “Mr. Castelain, state and national law require me to ask you at the beginning of this interview whether you have been informed of your legal rights by the advocate assigned to you.”
“Yes,” Castelain said.
“You are Jacques Xavier Castelain?”
“Yes,” Castelain said. “Look, I did it, all right? Let’s get this over with.”
No one moved or said anything for a moment. Paul McGinity’s expression was not one of surprise, but there was a thoughtful quality to it, as if something was occurring to him that had not occurred before.
“Advocate?” Matt said.
“Mr. Castelain,” McGinity said, “please don’t say anything for a moment. I have to remind you that your defense will be endangered if you become any more specific, about anything. Please just answer the questions.”
Castelain squirmed a little in his seat, said nothing.
Lee saw his anxiety, and Saw the reason behind it. He wants to be in jail, Lee thought. Desperately. She said as much to Gelert down their Palmerrand linkage.
It’s nearly rolling off him like panther sweat, Gelert answered, intrigued. He’s terrified of even being offered the possibility of being released on bail.
“All right,” Matt said. “Let me start with the evening of June 16. Where were you that night?”
“Ellay,” Castelain said.
“At around ten o’clock—”
“I was in a bar on Wilshire Boulevard,” Castelain said, looking from one of them to the next. As his eyes lit on Lee, she clearly heard him thinking, nice looking broad, shame about the eyes, they’d give you the creeps if she looked at you like that normally, guess she doesn’t, but how’d you tell until it was too late— Then he was looking at Gelert again, and the thought ebbed in intensity and felt much more clinical, one of them death-hounds, keep expecting him to howl and jump you any minute, those teeth are as bad as her eyes— But there was something else going on there: something he was much more afraid of. Lee held her curiosity in check with some difficulty: “digging” in a suspect’s sensorial display tended to produce false negatives. Just relax and See: the truth will reveal itself, it wants nothing more—
“I left around ten and caught the bus down Santa Monica to Eighteenth,” Castelain said. “I walked up Eighteenth and went around the corner to the club. I got into the doorway by there and waited—”
“Mr. Castelain—” McGinity said, sounding much more concerned.
“Mr. Castelain,” Matt said, “if you could just—”
“Mr. Carathen,” McGinity said. “May I ask—”
“Look, I told you, I shot him,” Castelain said, annoyed. “Don’t you people listen? Guys from one of the gambling clubs down here, they called me, said he had a big debt for a long time and he wouldn’t pay. Said they were done with him, he needed shooting or people would stop taking them seriously. So I did it. Price was right. Not a hard job, either. Guy walked out of the club like he was walking out of his living room, didn’t look right or left. Drunk, whacked out, who knows? He heard me then, saw me, started to run. I followed him around the corner, blam, that was it.” He paused. “Actually,” he said, “two blams.”
Matt and McGinity were looking at each other rather helplessly. Matt was bemused. McGinity passed a hand over his eyes. But Lee spared neither of them much attention, for right now her intent was mostly bent on Castelain. All over him, as Gelert had said, was the desire to be safely behind bars. It wasn’t just that jail was someplace Castelain was most familiar with after many years’ worth of ins and outs, a secure and structured environment where he knew how to behave. Much more to the forefront of his mind at the moment was the image of jail as somewhere where that one would not be able to get him. A tall, dark figure…
Lee bent her Sight against that shadowy background perception with all her force. It faded, as if it had stepped sideways into the air.
He thinks whoever tipped off the police will think he’s trying to get out of the deal if he’s released, Gelert said.
Yes. But there’s more. Lee looked at Matt and willed him fiercely to ask the question that most needed asking.
If he was aware of Lee’s gaze, he showed no sign of it. “Right,” Matt said. “If you insist on being so forthcoming despite your advocate’s advice, then tell me: was there anyone working with you?”
“No. I work alone.”
Lee Saw clearly that Castelain was telling the truth. Her mouth went dry. Could it be that he’d genuinely been unaware of the Alfen figure watching him?
“You didn’t see anybody else?” Gelert said.
“Nobody. You think I’m stupid?” Castelain gave Gelert one of the faintly irritated looks with which he’d favored Matt. “That’s why I shot him. If there’d been anybody else around, I would’ve waited, got him the next night or something.”
“Did you look behind you?” Gelert said.
“Huh? No. Why? Nobody coulda been there: I looked all around first. Then I went around the corner, I shot him, I made sure he was dead. Afterward I ran down the road and over a few blocks, and ditched the gun. Caught the bus afterward.”
Lee looked at Castelain and Saw nothing but a man telling almost all the truth with a kind of awful relief to be doing so, certain that this was the only way he was going to stay alive. But one thing he was lying about: the figure he’d seen watching him after he shot dil’Sorden… the figure that had stepped sideways and vanished. Once again Lee bent her Sight against that memory, and Saw a glimpse of something else: the interior of the bus, fading around Castelain’s point of view as the floor suddenly, bizarrely came close, bumped up against his face. Did he pass out? Or was he knocked out?— Then the point of view fading back in, a glimpse of dirt: Castelain pushing himself up to hands and knees, looking blurrily around him at waste ground somewhere. Up north, probably—
“Mr. Castelain,” Matt said after a moment, “under the circumstances the law requires me to offer you the ch
ance to make a fuller statement regarding this incident in writing. I am required to advise you that no clemency in your case is implied or in any way guaranteed by your agreeing to make such a written statement, and that you may ask the Advocate to assist you with the statement if you desire.”
Castelain waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “I can write just fine by myself,” he said. “Thanks.”
“All right. Interview closes at 1156,” Matt said.
He went to the door, touched it unlocked, opened it, and looked out. A few moments later a uniformed officer came to take Castelain away.
Lee and Gelert and Paul McGinity sat there for a moment closing their various visions down and sealing off their recordings of what they had just perceived. When Matt came back in, Paul had stood up and was recovering his briefcase. “Sorry, Paul,” he said. “Looks like a wasted trip.”
“Looks like?” Paul said, dry. “Matt, I think that boy needs a psych evaluation: I’m going to order one.”
“You’re not implying duress, though.”
McGinity didn’t say anything immediately. “I think I’d like to rule out insanity first,” he said, “especially considering some of the imagery I saw at the end, which makes no sense whatsoever. I’ll give you a call later.” He nodded to Lee and Gelert and headed out.
“I’ll have a chance to look at your sweeps after lunch,” Matt said to them, “as well as Paul’s. The boss has been looking at them this morning: I’ll have his notes later.” He rubbed his face with one hand, still looking thoroughly bemused, and pleased in a cautious way. “For once a case is going the way the boss wants it to…”
Lee said nothing, strongly suspecting that this assessment had a life expectancy of no more than half a sandwich or so. “Call us after lunch,” Gelert said. “We’ll drop by.”
*
It was actually around quarter to one when Mass relayed the first of Matt’s messages to reach the office, and Lee was glad she’d restricted herself to a few pieces of sushi and some green tea: her stomach had begun to roil. When they got up to Matt’s office, one of about ten glass cubicles grouped around the DA’s office on the northwest corner of Parker’s eighth floor, they found the glass frosted down around him. This was unusual for a man who, Lee knew, liked to watch everybody, trusting his evaluation of their expressions as completely as Lee trusted her own Seeing—and with some justification, for he was good at reading people as long as he didn’t get too close to them. Lee had often thought Matt had some of the Gift, but he’d never had the patience to take it through assessment and training. The more physical and concrete side of law enforcement was his chief love, and expressed itself also in a certain distrust of the less concrete types of detection.
Gelert scratched at the door, and Matt spoke it open for them: they went in. His desk was covered with imagery as usual, some of it flat under the surface, some of it still playing in the air in front of him as they walked in. He slapped one of the hot spots on the desk, freezing the playback, and waved them to chairs.
“You finished looking at the sweeps, I take it,” Lee said.
“Just about,” Matt said, collapsing the projection hanging in the air. “But the DA says that after that interview with Castelain, we’ve got more than enough to go to trial with a realistic chance of conviction. We have the murder weapon, and we have both physical and psychic forensics that link the suspect to the time and place of the murder.”
Lee really wished she didn’t have to say what she was going to: but she had no choice. “Motivation is too weak,” she said.
Matt gave her a look Lee had seen all too often and learned to dislike, though she had never really broached the issue. The expression suggested that Lee was out of her mind, but he would forgive her because he thought she was so cute. Problem was, I always thought it was funny…until I found out that all of a sudden my “cute” had passed its sell-by date. “Lee, you heard him tell us about the gambling debt. It’s more than enough to put Castelain away while we work on whoever took out the contract on dil’Sorden, and why: because though he believed the story about the gambling debt, I’m not sure I do.”
“I’d feel happier about it if there was any evidence at all of gambling debts in dil’Sorden’s personal profiling,” Lee said. “Including his private mails, his banking and investment information, or anywhere else. And he’s in an Alfheim-based Fund, Matt, just like every other Elf alive! How likely is he to be unable to raise money to pay a debt that could get him killed if unpaid? The Funds routinely advance hundreds of thousands of talers to any given member for uses a lot less urgent, just based on their life expectancy data, without even referring to their credit line!”
Matt gave her an annoyed look. “So why didn’t he apply for a loan?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “How about because there wasn’t any gambling debt?”
“There may not have been,” Matt said. “But it’s going to be hard to prove that there wasn’t, so for the moment it’s the story we’re likely to run with. Assuming it is true, maybe there was something wrong with dil’Sorden’s rating with whichever Fund he’s in. The point is, dil’Sorden’s dead. End of story, at least insofar as we have a confession from the suspect to whom we were led by the forensics.”
“End of story?” Lee said softly.
Matt sat pushing a piece of paper back and forth on his desk for a few moments. “So now we come to the problematic part of this case. This mysterious Alfen of yours.”
“Not just mine,” Lee said. “Someone else was present at the murder scene, Matt. Both of us saw him. In my case, I saw him from two different angles. And more to the point, Castelain saw him—though not as clearly as we did. Don’t you think it might answer some unanswered questions about this investigation if we could find out who that was?” And where the heck he went, Lee thought, but refused to say out loud: and where Castelain went later…and how.
Her restraint did her no good: Matt’s thoughts were already there. He glared at her. “The DA,” he said, “is having a lot of trouble with your sweeps.”
“I just bet he is,” Gelert said, looking down along his nose at Matt. “How do you think we feel? But they’re what we Saw, Matt. You can’t cherrypick a psychoforensics sweep for what you like and what you don’t. The trial judge won’t stand for it, and neither will She; it’s either all admissible as evidence, or none of it. And when the trial starts, if you’re going to use the sweeps as the evidential link to the murder weapon, and also use the observation of the murder itself, then the defense team is going to use the ‘vanishing’ evidence as an excuse to discredit everything else. So maybe if everyone just gets to work on understanding the ‘impossible’ right now, and finding an answer that’ll hold water, rather than trying to pretend it just didn’t happen, the case won’t go down the drain.”
Matt said nothing. “Renselaar can’t afford to be seen ducking a possible conviction right now just because some of the evidence is peculiar,” Lee said. “He should just take the case forward and stonewall when the press starts making its usual noises. Then, when we chase down a logical explanation and he breaks the news and takes credit for it, he gets to look like the stalwart defender of Justice refusing to be distracted from Her service by the muckraking journalists intent on a quick fix. Or on making the future Mayor look stupid for the sake of a juicy headline.”
Lee tried her best not to sound too snide while saying this, but had no sense of whether she was being successful; she was too busy holding Matt’s eyes with hers, uncomfortable though it made her, and trying to make him see the rightness of what she was saying. She could get no sense, though, that he was seeing any such thing.
Which left her with one remaining piece of business. “I want to suggest one other thing to you,” Lee said. “Magda tells me there was a tipoff that led the San Fran police to Castelain.”
“Yeah, saw that.”
“So where did that come from, Matt?” Lee said, possibly more sharply than she meant to. “Who
knew we were looking for him?”
“Everybody knew. There was an all-points out for him.”
“The timing raises questions, Matt,” Gelert said. “The team here at Parker ID’d Castelain yesterday afternoon. The tipoff came through just barely after they got in touch with San Francisco. Somebody pushed him over the edge so that he would roll right down into our laps, just when we need him.”
“So he had some enemies,” Matt said. But he sounded uneasy now.
“You know it’s not that simple. There’s a leak here,” Lee said. “And outside is somebody who wants us to take the suspect we have and be content with him. And the poor guy himself is desperate to be in jail. Even you saw it: I saw the look on your face. Why are so many people so eager to see this case wound up in a hurry, Matt? And are you going to let them get away with it?”
“No one’s going to get away with anything,” Matt said.
“Unless you talk yourself into a mistrial by purposely ignoring the implications of evidence,” Gelert said. “Justice will be served, Matt. And I’d sooner be on the right side of Her when it happens. The other side’s no fun.”
Matt said nothing for several moments. Finally, he got up and looked at them both, expressionless. “You have two days to finish your casework,” he said. “The DA wants the completed case on his desk first thing Friday morning, so he can find a place to slot it into the calendar. Don’t miss the deadline.”
“When have we ever?” Lee said, but he didn’t even look at her: he was already halfway out the door.
It closed slowly behind him, leaving Lee and Gelert sitting there for a few moments in rather shocked silence. “Yes,” Gelert said, “he’s feeling the heat, I’d say. Come on…”