Blood Sport

by Lisa Smedman

  “When I came back, Mama Grande was . . .” The cup of cocoa trembled more violently in his hands. I had to take it from him and put it on the coffee table. “I couldn’t even touch her, Leni. Not even to check for a pulse. She just looked so ... so helpless.” His voice rose to a howl of agony. “Oh, sweet Jesus, why did I leave her alone?”

  I grabbed Rafael and held on tight. My own cheeks were wet with tears. We clung together for a while, each lost in our own grief. Then Rafael angrily brushed away his tears.

  “It was those fraggers who messed with Mama Grande yesterday, wasn’t it?” he asked. “Those spineless, candy-assed little mocosos came back to take out their frustrations on an old woman, didn’t they?” He leapt to his feet and paced through my doss, big hands clenching and unclenching. Then he turned to me and said in a voice as cold as death: “They’re meat, Leni. Nothing but meat. I’ll kill them.”

  “You’re too late, Rafael,” I told him quietly. “Someone else already did.”

  I gave him the scan on what had gone down that evening. When I was done, he stood utterly still for a moment, then exploded into violence.

  “Frag!” he screamed. His booted foot lashed out, and my coffee table did a somersault and crashed against the wall. Coca went everywhere.

  I knew better than to try to stop Rafael—he’d make good the damage later. So I let him take out his anger on my furniture. Better that than on some poor slot who happened to get in his way. His foot lashed out a second time, knocking over an armchair. Again and again he kicked it, until the cushion tore and the stuffing exploded out. At last he subsided and stood, panting, fists clenched.

  “Here’s the way it had to be, Leni,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “I’ve thought it through, and nothing else makes sense. Mama Grande saw something while she was living in the Yucatán—something she wasn’t meant to see. And then, because she’s a bit ... loco, she blabbed it to someone. That's why the Aztlan Freedom League smuggled her up here—for her own protection.

  “The fake missionaries came to find out what she’d seen. They had to use magic to get it out of her head. When they did, somebody dusted them. And then, to make sure the secret stayed that way, they . . . killed Mama Grande, too.”

  I nodded. “I think you’re right, Raf. The question is who. Drug lords? The Aztlan government? The rebels? Who?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out. Right, Leni?” His eyes dared me to say no.

  “Right, Raf.”

  “And when we do . . .”

  If looks could kill, Rafael could have scragged an army. Little did we know we’d be taking on just that.

  5

  It was now Wednesday, four days since Mama G was killed, and I still hadn’t heard anything from Parminder. I’d phoned her several times to see how the investigation was going, and gotten the equivalent of “no comment.” She said only that they were “busy running down the data” on both homicides. Yeah, right, like there was any data to process. There had been no witnesses to either killing, and from what I had seen, squat in the way of evidence at either crime scene for forensics to work with. The only data they had was what I’d given them: the name and passport number of the female “missionary.”

  I’d tried running that data myself, and had come up with next to zilch on Dolores Clemente. She and her partner, who was listed in the Air Montezuma passenger list as Gabriel Montoya, had boarded a flight from Mérida to Tenochtitlán, and from there taken a midnight flight for Seattle just prior to renting the car. They had tickets for a return flight that left two weeks later, and thus had no reason for going to the train station—unless something had spooked them and they’d decided they needed to leave town in a hurry.

  It was a wonder the two had been granted permission to leave Aztlan. The Azzies were notoriously tight-hooped about letting their nationals go abroad, and it was an open secret that heavy bribes were needed to grease the wheels.

  I considered approaching the Aztlan consulate, but realized that the Azzie officials would never provide information on one of their nationals to an ordinary person like me—someone who was no longer affiliated with a police force or security firm. To crack that data, I’d need a wiz-hot decker to take on the black ice that was certain to surround anything Azzie. And I wasn’t sure that even my friend Angie was up to it.

  Normally, a name and passport number would have been the magic key to a treasure trove of data, all of it available through perfectly legitimate means. But I kept turning up blanks. In the short time that Dolores Clemente had been in Seattle, she hadn’t made any purchases, hadn’t booked a hotel—hadn’t even used a public telecom. She and Montoya had flown in, rented a car, and driven straight to our neighborhood the next day. Which told me that they knew exactly where they were going. Rafael had already confirmed that the pair hadn’t called on any of the neighbors. They’d gone directly to our house.

  And that was odd. Why so elaborate a ruse—just to get in the door? Why not just muscle your way inside? If the pair were going to pose as missionaries, why not choose a simpler scam? It would have been easy enough to boost a bible from a hotel and pose as garden-variety Christians. Why use simsense chips from some weird, apocalyptic fringe group? I doubted that they’d had time to boost the chips locally, which meant they had brought them all the way from Aztlan.

  And that was the other part that didn’t scan. The Catholic faith was banned in Aztlan. Carrying religious recordings out of that country was on a par with taking a loaded weapon or pound of heroin through customs. Unless the recordings weren’t Catholic, of course . .. But then why was there a cross on the cover?

  I fished out of my pocket the chip case that Rafael had found on the floor of the kitchen. I’d uploaded its apocalyptic message to a number of religious bulletin boards, asking if anyone had ever encountered a similar product. Nada. Or at least, nothing conclusive There were lots of guesses, but none of the suggestions panned out. None of the religious recording studios I was directed to had produced the chip. But they were all keen to sell me other recordings that they promised would be both uplifting and inspirational. . .

  This time, I scanned in the cover of the chip, isolated the multi-colored cross itself, and posted just that to the religious bulletin boards with a query as to what faith it came from. I flagged the file as urgent. While I was waiting for a reply, I brewed myself a soykaf and stared out at the rain. It was pounding down on Mama G’s garden, bending and muddying the plants. I could imagine the state they’d be in after a few months without her to tend them, and I blinked back tears. We’d had her body cremated and then scattered her ashes in her garden. I’d made a silent promise then and there to my adopted grandmother that I would tend the plants as best I could. But I didn’t have her green thumb. A part of me knew that the garden would soon return to the weed-choked state it had been in when Mama G arrived. It would be as if she had never lived here. Her efforts would be gone, erased. Just as she had been.

  I turned back to the telecom. It was chiming softly, indicating that I already had a response. I scanned the reply, and wasn’t surprised by what I found. According to the professor of Native American Studies in the Sioux Nation who had answered my query, the graphic on the cover of the chip case wasn’t a cross at all—it was the ancient Mesoamerican “tree of life,” with the four colors representing the four directions. So the religious chip wasn’t Christian at all, but Aztlaner.

  That made me sit back and think. Maybe I was coming at the rest of the puzzle from the wrong direction, as well. Maybe the chips weren’t just a cover, but the real thing. Honest to gods religious propaganda. Suppose Clemente and Montoya really were missionaries—they’d certainly had a genuine-looking gleam in their eyes when they talked about the coming apocalypse . . .

  On a hunch, I turned back to my telecom and called up the Seattle religious directory for the two-week period bracketed by the two Air Montezuma flights. I used the keyword “apocalypse” and immediately found what I was after—a d
ay-long conference at Seattle University, sponsored by the Unitarian Church, entitled “Religious Interpretations of the Apocalypse: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.” And there, on the list of attendees, were the names Dolores Clemente and Gabriel Montoya.

  The conference had been held on Monday and Dolores and Gabriel were no-shows, both at the conference itself and at the home of the people who were going to billet them. No surprise—the pair had been in the police morgue for more than twenty-four hours by the time of the convention. Unless resurrection really was possible, they weren’t going to be around for any apocalypse, either.

  The conference must have been the official reason the two had used to get permission to leave Aztlan. Probably the country was glad to get rid of its religious lunatic fringe, if only for a little while.

  I contacted the seminar organizers, but they weren’t able to give me much on the pair—just a Matrix address in Mérida. Clemente and Montoya had signed up for the conference just three weeks ago, and had somehow managed to make all of their travel plans and visa arrangements in that short period of time. They were attendees, rather than speakers, and so hadn’t been asked to send any biographical data. They’d made only one inquiry: whether it was possible to distribute religious educational material at the conference. The sim-sense chips, obviously. Which explained why they had so many of them, all the same.

  Okay, so religious fanatics were interested in Mama G. They’d used the conference as an excuse to come all the way from Aztlan to Seattle. They’d really come here to quiz Mama G about something, and then used magic to pull that something out of her head. They’d used the simsense chips to . . . to . . .

  I thought I had the answer, but needed confirmation. So I called Parminder for the third time that day. As soon as she recognized my voice, she began to protest that she didn’t have anything new for me, and to reassure me that the Star was still working diligently on the case. I apologized for bugging her again and quickly came to the point.

  “I need your expert opinion, Parminder. I have a question regarding a case I’m working on.” I deliberately didn’t say which case it was, but she’d probably guess.

  “Suppose you were using one of your mind-reading spells to question a witness who wasn’t able to remember an event—maybe who didn’t want to remember it,” I began.

  “The spell probes the mind—it doesn’t read it,” she corrected me. “And I wouldn’t do that. Use of a mind probe without the prior consent of a witness is subject to—”

  “Yeah, I know it’s illegal,” I said, cutting her off. “But suppose you were using the spell on someone whose memory was fragged. How would you get the witness to think about what you wanted to know?”

  “It’s possible to go deep enough to sift through the conscious and unconscious,” Parminder said. “But that can sometimes damage the mind. It also takes a lot out of the mage working the spell. The end result might be paranoid delusions or permanent memory loss. And that would destroy a witness’ credibility later, when he or she was called to testify in court. It isn’t worth the risk.”

  “Suppose the witness was already . . . crazy?” I hated to apply that term to the woman I thought of as my grandmother. I’d always preferred to think of her as amusingly eccentric. “Suppose their long-term memory was already damaged?”

  “Maybe hypnosis would work,” Parminder ventured. “If the witness were capable of being hypnotized, he or she could be regressed back to the event that they had witnessed. The memories might be recovered that way.”

  “Is it possible to hypnotize somebody who doesn’t want to be?”

  “An unwilling witness, you mean? Impossible.”

  “What if you could force them to think back to the event by some other means?” I asked. “Say, by hooking them up with a trode rig so they receive a simsense recording that mimicked it. Would they think about what they had witnessed, then?”

  “I don’t see how they could help it,” Parminder answered. “They’d be forced to relive the event. But the person’s mental images would be contaminated by the simsense, and again he’d be useless—legally—as a witness.” She paused, then lowered her voice. “You realize that what you’re suggesting is completely illegal. That any mage who helped you to do this would be breaking the law and risking imprisonment of not less than—”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything of the sort, Parminder,” I reassured her. “I think this technique may have been used on a client of mine.”

  It only took her a moment to guess what I meant. “On Rosalita Ramirez, you mean. By the missionaries.”

  I paused for a moment. Parminder hadn’t put the word “alleged” in front of missionaries. So she knew they were legit, too. Interesting.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “That’s why the kitchen was trashed. They probably had to ...” I took a deep breath, imagining the fear Mama G must have felt as the pair held her down and forced her to experience gods only knew what via the simsense. “They probably had to restrain her while they slipped the trode rig over her head. The only thing I can’t figure out is why they wanted to show her a simsense of a religious tract. What memories did they hope it would trigger?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Parminder? I know that sound. You’re onto something. Tell me what it is.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? I gave you the tie-in with the double homicide at Charles Royer Station. That ought to be worth something.”

  “I just can’t.”

  I was getting angry. “This isn’t just some joygirl street trash who was murdered, Parminder. This was someone I cared about. Someone I loved. I deserve to know whether or not you’re putting any effort into this—to know what’s going on. I won’t compromise your investigation by blabbing what you tell me around. I’m not some civilian who’s going to blow the conviction for you. Not that you need .. .” I paused to regain my composure. I’d almost lost it—had almost been about to tell Parminder that she was perfectly capable of deliberately fragging up a case on her own. I swallowed my hostility and tried a different tack. “The way I see it, you failed to provide backup when I most needed it, and now you owe me one, partner.” I placed heavy sarcasm on the last word.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then the words I’d been hoping for. “Meet me tonight at seven p.m. at Icarus Descending. You know where it is?”

  “I know it. I’ll see you there.” I stabbed the Off icon on the telecom. Icarus Descending was downtown and very trendy.

  It was still only the middle of the afternoon. I’d put my other cases on hold for the week—I couldn’t concentrate on anything but Mama G’s death right now. So I didn’t have much to occupy me until seven o’clock. I got up and puttered aimlessly around my flat, stopped to pat Pinkerton, who was lazing in front of the heat vent, the stared out the window at the rain.

  I took a sip of the soykaf I’d left on the table and realized it had gone cold while I’d been talking to Parminder. I added the cup to the dishes in the sink and made myself a fresh one, taking time to pour some cream into Pinkerton’s bowl before adding the last of the cream to my soykaf. Then I sat down at the telecom.

  I'd already run through it several times, but I decided to give the copy of the recording I’d obtained from the security camera at the car rental agency one last scan. So I slotted and ran it, watching on my monitor for anything I’d missed.

  The pair had said very little—Dolores had simply answered the clerk’s questions and handed over her passport and credstick when asked to do so. As she drew them from her purse, I could just see a hint of yellow inside that must have been the simsense chips. Gabriel Montoya stood behind her, jacket slung over his shoulder, staring warily around at the people passing through the terminal behind them.

  Something was tugging at my subconscious, and so I ran the recording through a second time. Then it hit me. There—when Montoya turned to stare at a pretty blond elf in a tight red dress. When she glanced at him, he raised one hand to run the fingers
through his hair in an instinctive preening motion. As he did, the sleeve of his short-sleeved shirt lifted just enough to show a round, whitish mark on his right bicep. The first few times through, I’d taken it to be a scar, but now I realized that it was too symmetrical, too perfectly circular. If anything, it reminded me of an embossed design on leather. The mark showed only for a second, and then Montoya dropped his arm and the sleeve hid it again.

  I skipped back a few seconds on the recording, then ran it forward again in slo-mo. When the mark was fully exposed, I hit the Pause icon and zoomed in tight on the mark. At the center was a stylized, glaring face—almost skeletal—surrounded by a sun-shaped circle. Additional circles inside the first held a design of some sort, but there wasn’t enough detail to make it out.

  I knew I’d seen the face-and-sun pattern somewhere before, but couldn’t place it. I made a printout of the zoom and sat there, staring at it until my eyes ached. No joy. I knew the information was on file somewhere within my wetware, but frag if I could access it just then.

  I was still puzzling over it when I heard Rafael’s motorcycle pull into the back yard. I opened the back door and waved him inside.

  He’d been out for another long ride and his boots and bike were covered in mud. That’s all he’d done the past few days: ride. He had to keep moving, he said, to keep from going crazy. I knew how he felt. But it was my mind that had to be kept busy, rather than my body. I kept my grief at bay by working on the puzzle that surrounded Mama G’s death. By doing that I could distance myself, treat it as just another homicide. Except that it wasn’t.

  Rafael wiped his feet and came inside. His breath smelled like he’d been drinking, but he seemed sober enough. I offered him a soykaf, but he shook his head. Instead he flopped onto the couch. “Cops find anything yet?” he asked. He played with his hands, cracking his knobby knuckles. I noticed that his fingers were scraped and wondered if he’d been punching furniture again—or if he’d picked a fight with someone.