Forests of the Night

by S. Andrew Swann

  "Don't know about other folks, but my clutch was into protection— When you do, you have to protect people you charge. Both Zips and flush were pretty dangerous." She sighed. Her ears drooped. "Too dangerous for us."

  She turned to face him. Her scar was fighting the frown she wore. "Could've used someone like you back then, Kit."

  Nohar didn't have a response for that. So he went back to his fruitless search.

  By nine they had combed every inch of the property at least twice. The only result was part of a letter-fax Angel had found halfway across the street. It had been written by a gentleman named Wilson Scott, presumably to Binder or someone in the campaign. They only had the bottom half, so Nohar didn't know. It could be totally unrelated.

  The letter went into detail on "the late morey violence.'' It got pretty down on the moreys, talking about moreys offing pinks, moreys taking hostages, morey air terrorism, and other generally alarmist topics.

  Sounded like something somebody wrote during the riots. It was dated the tenth of August. Nohar wished he had a year to go with it. He also wished Scott didn't have a habit of writing in sweeping generalities.

  With just half a hysterical polemic, the morning seemed to have been a waste of time. They didn't even have an address for Scott.

  Nohar took Angel to his office with him. He wanted to make a few phone calls, now that people in the Binder campaign weren't on vacation. He would have liked the less-cramped atmosphere of his apartment. However, he figured the more he kept Angel away from Moreytown, the better off they both would be.

  Even with Angel, the office wasn't any more cramped. He lifted her up, and she fit on top of the filing cabinet, out of the way—and out of view of the comm. . . .

  Not that he intended to use the video pickup. He was going to try and bull through to the one living member of the Bowling Green gang of four he had yet to talk to. Edwin Harrison, the legal counsel.

  Nohar's funeral picture had him sitting right next to Binder, front row, center. With Daryl Johnson's death, Harrison would be the most powerful man in the Binder organization, after Binder himself. In fact, Nohar remembered news off the comm had him as the current acting campaign manager.

  The top, or close to it.

  He killed the video pickup and hoped he could reach Harnson before anyone realized who was calling. Nohar also engaged in a slight electronic legerdemain. The outgoing calls he had been placing from his apartment had all been piped through his comm in his office. This was the listed one, his professional voice, so to speak. This was the comm everyone was locking out.

  However, the process worked in reverse. He could pipe calls from the office through the unlisted comm at his home. They wouldn't be locking that out—yet.

  It turned out to be easier than Nohar had expected. The strained voice and the strained expression on the secretary—from the obvious makeup, and the hair perfect as injection-molded plastic, she would fall into Stephie's category of window dressing—made it obvious she'd been operating the phones too long. Nohar could see lights blinking on the periphery of the screen. She had at least a dozen calls coming in. The way her eyes darted, she had at least four on the screen.

  Nohar asked for Harrison. Her only response was, "Hold on, I'll transfer you."

  The screen fed him the Binder campaign logo and dry synth music as he waited for Harrison's secretary to pick up the phone. It was a long wait and Nohar had to restrain the urge to claw something.

  The call was finally answered, not by a secretary, but by Harrison himself.

  Edwin Harrison had to be the same age as Young and Johnson. They had all been contemporaries out of college about the same time. But Nohar knew pink markings well enough to see the graying at the temples and the receding hair as some indication of premature aging. Harrison bore the slight scars of corrective optical surgery—Nohar had a brief wish his rotten day-vision could be corrected as easily—distorting his eyes. Under a nose that had been broken at least once, he had a salt-and-pepper brush of a mustache. There was no real way to estimate height over the comm, but Harrison looked small.

  Harrison's shirt was unbuttoned and his face looked damp. The man was rubbing his cheek with one hand. Nohar figured he'd been shaving, a pink concept the moreau didn't understand.

  Nohar found his polite voice. "Mr. Harrison—"

  Harrison sat down in front of his comm. "Whoever you are, if you want to talk to me, you better turn on your video pickup. I can tell the difference between a voice-only phone and someone with a full comm who just doesn't want to be seen. I have no desire to spend a conversation with a test pattern when you can see me perfectly well."

  So much for polite. Nohar just hoped the guy was too long-winded to hang up immediately. He did as requested.

  Harrison's reaction was immediate. In the same, level, conversational tone of voice, he said, "Holy mother of God, it's a hair-job."

  Hair-job?

  Nohar hadn't heard moreys referred to as hair-jobs in nearly a decade. "Can we talk?"

  "Mr. Raghastan, correct?"

  Nohar hated it when people mispronounced his name, even if it was only a generic label for that particular generation of tigers. Nohar nodded.

  "I am sorry, but I have a very busy schedule. If you could make an appointment—"

  So you can ignore me at your leisure, Nohar thought. Not without a fight. "I only have a few questions about Johnson and the campaign's financial records."

  Harrison seemed to be indecisive about whether he wanted to be evasive or simply hang up. "I am sure you know any financial information that isn't a matter of public record is confidential. I can refer you to our press secretary. I am sure he can—"

  —Brush me off as well as anyone in the campaign, Nohar thought. "No, you don't understand. I don't want specifics.'' A lie, Nohar thought, but there's little chance of getting specifics out of you, right? Right. "I was just wondering how thorough Young was in torching the records."

  Harrison looked pained. "I am afraid I can't discuss Young. We are still dealing with the police on-that matter."

  Probably true. Trying to cover things up, no doubt. "Your headquarters was closed down last week. I suppose Young just waltzed in and took what he wanted?"

  From Harrison's expression, Young just walked in. It also looked like Young had done a lot of damage. "How many years back, five? Ten? Fifteen?"

  From Harrison's face, fifteen.

  "How much were you able to salvage?"

  Harrison looked puzzled. "Salvage?"

  Binder wasn't the one with the trucks. Nohar supposed there was little harm in telling the lawyer, and it might jar something loose. "I was under the impression you were in charge of the trucks that carted away the remains of the fire."

  That got Harrison. "I am sorry. I really must go—"

  I bet you must, Nohar thought to himself. He wondered exactly what kind of illegal crap was in those records that could turn Harrison that white.

  Harrison regained his composure. “I should tell you. Stay out of this—it doesn't involve you, or your kind.”

  As the connection broke, Nohar said, "But it does. More than you know, you little pink bottom feeder."

  If he could pick up that much from Harrison's face, Nohar decided the lawyer would never win a jury trial.

  There was a snore, and Nohar saw that Angel had fallen asleep on top of the filing cabinet. Instead of waking her up and leaving, he leaned against the wall and thought.

  All that talk—well, all his talk—about Young had shaken loose a doubt. He was missing something, a big something.

  Young's motivation.

  It just wasn't your standard grief reaction to torch the finance records of your employer. Nohar could, even with Stephie's doubts, believe Young blew himself up over lost love. But why the records?

  Slowly, it began to dawn on Nohar that he was missing the obvious.

  True, Johnson and Young had been lovers, fifteen years, above average for any relationship, pink or
otherwise. Young saw Johnson's killer—the morey canine Nugoya called Hassan—he probably saw Johnson get shot. But Young never called the cops.

  Not only didn't he call the cops, but Young actually covered for the missing Johnson. Stephie said Young had mentioned Johnson was out with "some bigwig contributor.''

  Then, after a few weeks, he blows himself up.

  Someone very purposefully removed almost every trace of the records Young had torched. If the motive for Johnson's assassination was in those records, the odds were they had been carted away by the people responsible for Johnson's death. There were four ways they could have known what Young had been trying to destroy. Binder's people, Young himself, or the cops could have told them. All unlikely.

  Or, they told Young to destroy the records.

  "You're not going to do me like you did Derry."

  Fear. Young was scared when he said that. He was talking paranoid. "You're all with them." Moreys, he was talking moreys and—something else. Franks? MLI? Whoever they were, they were in charge of Johnson's death—and Young.

  Young was afraid of them. Young was also pathological about Daryl Johnson taking the fall for something.

  "Derry didn't know he was helping them—what they were. When he found out he was going to stop. . . . People will say he was working for them.''

  Why that fear for Johnson's rep? If Young cared that much, why wasn't he at the funeral?

  Guilt.

  Nohar triggered Young's suicide: "You're the finance chairman. Why didn't you figure it out first?"

  Then, blam.

  Of course Young knew what was in the finance records. Nohar felt like an idiot for not realizing sooner. Young was the one to let in the canine assassin with the Levitt Mark II. Young was in a conspiracy with them. Somewhere there was a trail in the records. Johnson had found it and had confronted Young with it.

  The two of them were close, but Johnson was going to put a stop to it, whatever it was. Young couldn't let that happen—no, not quite right, they couldn't let that happen. They hired the morey. They killed Johnson. They probably just told Young to turn off the security and leave the door open so they could explain things to Johnson. When Young blew up, they made sure the records vanished.

  No way Young could call the cops. Whoever was handling Young must have forced him to go on, business as usual. Go into work, go back to his shadow house. All the while, guilt ate Young up. He felt responsible for Johnson's death.

  The whole charade of blowing out the picture window was to cover Young's tracks. To give Young an alibi.

  It was working so well—up to the point Young torched the records.

  That seemed an act of desperation, and not just Young's desperation—

  Nohar had a bad thought.

  Thomson had mentioned Johnson's executive assistant, Stephie, as having the same access to the financial records as the gang of four. That was obviously just the "official" slant on things. After all, Stephie described herself as window dressing. What if they didn't know that?

  That worried Nohar.

  What if they thought Johnson's executive assistant knew something, and just weren't sure enough to go to the lengths they went with Johnson? What if she was being watched? Could it be a coincidence Young went ballistic the day after Nohar talked to her?

  Could it be a coincidence that the white rat's—Term's— "Finger of God" seemed to have lifted?

  He called Stephie. No answer.

  It was ten-thirty, an hour and a half before he was to meet her. Damn. Nohar clutched the filing cabinet and started deep breathing exercises. His concern had triggered the fight-or-flight reflex, the adrenaline was pumping. He wanted to fight something. It was still too soon after those Ziphead rodents behind the bus. Something inside him was responding to the pulse, the adrenaline, the stress-He fought it off.

  Nohar couldn't let his control slip like that.

  He had barely brought himself back under control, when the comm buzzed.

  Nohar told the comm. "Got it."

  The comm responded.

  Smith had the video on. He was as eldritch as ever. The glassy eyes still stared out of a flat, expressionless face in the center of a pear-shaped head. Moisture glistened on the rubbery-white skin. On the monitor, Nohar got a chance to examine Smith from a closer perspective than he really wanted to. The pear shape of the frank's head, Nohar now saw, was caused by a massive roll of flesh that drooped over the frank's collar. The roll of fat obscured any neck or chin the frank might have had. The frank was totally hairless, too, no hair at all, anywhere. No pores Nohar could see.

  The frank could have been a white polyethylene bag filled with silicone lubricant.

  The reason the frank didn't blink was because he didn't have any eyelids.

  Smith also didn't have any nostrils.

  No ears either.

  The frank was calling from an unlisted location, and the lighting only picked up the frank's white bulk, nothing of the background. "I am glad I see you mostly unhurt from when you go to Philip Young,"

  "Thanks." Nohar immediately noticed Smith's weird accent again. It was not Afrikaans. "Your message said you paid the hospital."

  "It is a legitimate expense of the investigation."

  "You want a progress report."

  The frank attempted a nod, sending the flesh of his upper body into unnatural vibrations.

  Nohar told the frank what he knew and what he thought he knew. How Johnson was killed, who was involved, and, of course, the as yet nebulous why. Nohar had convinced himself, despite Young's unreliability, that the reason lay in the now-destroyed and or missing financial records of the Binder campaign.

  "Excellent progress in such a short time."

  "Now let me ask you a few things." Nohar knew he had jumped into the case prematurely, and what bothered him most wasn't his involvement in a pink murder, or even his involvement with a murder, period. What bothered him was the absence of information on his client and his client's company.

  "I render what aid I can."

  "First, you're worried about MLI being involved in the killing, and you told me you're an accountant— What's in the campaign records that could have connected back to MLI?"

  "Only our heavy financing of the Binder campaign. A connection our board informs me will be severed as of our last payment—the three million Binder is missing and we are not. Our only contact with the Binder campaign is our money and suggestions on appropriate votes to take on the issues before him."

  Nohar snorted. Having a bunch of franks telling Binder what to do bordered on the absurd. "You dictated the way he voted in the House?"

  "He never votes against us. Our support is based on his closeness to our views."

  That did not ring true. A frank's views being close to Binder's? Binder was a little to the right of Attila, was for the sterilization of moreys and probably the outright extermination of franks.

  However, the finance records were the only connection between MLI and Binder. That gave credence to Smith's suspicion someone in MLI was behind the killing. Since the money trail had been sitting tight that long—fifteen years back, the way Harrison acted— if the motive was in the records it was in some incredibly obscure financial tidbit where Johnson never would have seen it in the first place, or it was in those "suggestions on appropriate votes."

  "Second, I want to know where you and the other franks at MLI really come from."

  For the first time Nohar saw what could be the remotest trace of expression on the frank's face. Close to a nerve. The bubbling voice seemed just a little strained when Smith responded. "I told you. We come from South Africa—"

  "South Africa never signed the U.N.'s human genome experiment ban—but it's just one non-signer of at least two dozen that have the technology. One of a half-dozen that uses it. That isn't an Afrikaans accent."

  Smith let out a sound that could have been a sigh. "I do not know if I am glad or not I hire such a perceptive investigator."

  "
Don't compliment me on noticing the obvious."

  "I am afraid this information I cannot give you."

  "Oh, great-"

  The sigh, it was a sigh, came again. "Please, I explain. Our origin must remain private. Just as we must remain unseen ourselves. It is for the company's survival. If MLI has a murderer, or murderers, in its midst, such secrets are public. But my loyalty will not permit such knowledge until I know if the guilt is there. If you can't pursue this without that information, I will let you go with the money you have earned.''

  Good, you have an out. Nohar stood there, staring. He told himself he was going to say to hell with it. Drop the whole mess then and there. . . .

  He thought of Stephie. He couldn't. He had never ditched anything in the middle.

  "You know you're hobbling me when you withhold information."

  "I am sorry."

  "I need copies of those 'suggestions.' "

  "They're on file. I get them. At ten-thirty Wednesday night we meet in the cemetery."

  "Comm off."

  What in the hell did he think he was doing?

  He should have dumped the case when he had the chance.

  Chapter 12

  The walk past the city end of Mayfietd was nerve-racking for Nohar. His sudden concern for Stephie had hit a few buttons. He was passing Ziphead territory with Angel. He felt the gun was all too obvious under his green windbreaker, even though when he chose the jacket it had seemed up to the job of concealing the Vind.

  It felt like there was a target strapped to his back and the weight under his arm didn't really help.

  There were no rats around, hadn't been since yesterday. That was becoming suspicious. There were always rodents around in Moreytown, even in daylight.

  The streets were bare of them.

  There was new graffiti under the bridge that separated Moreytown from the Circle. It was under the sarcastic, "Welcome to Moreytown." It read, "The Zipperhead rules here." The Zip graffiti was becoming too ubiquitous.

  Nohar remembered the too-common slogan, "Off the pink," from the riots. A decade later, that slogan—Datia's slogan—had passed into general usage as a stock anti-authoritarian comment.