Paradigms Lost - eARC

by Ryk E. Spoor

  I hung up the phone and turned to Morgan, Baker, and Sylvie, all of whom were waiting. “We have our smoking gun.”

  “The damn thing came to the conference?”

  “Right here in this hotel,” I said, enjoying Baker’s expression. “And apparently wowed them with the presentation, too. It must’ve absconded with some of O’Connell’s notes and slides.”

  “Slides, yeah, but it wouldn’t need the notes,” Baker said, looking chagrined. “Assume it killed O’Connell, then it knew pretty much what O’Connell knew—about recent events, leastwise. Dunno just how extensive it is, but they sure steal enough to be able to get by. Probably just grabbed some rolls of film an’ chose some good shots.”

  “And then, finding that the conference just happened to be in Wolf City, it decided there was no reason at all for it to move on.”

  “Ayup,” Baker said dismally. “When’s that girl going to send her pic, so we can go around and trace her movements?”

  I grinned. “Receiving it now, but I’m willing to bet half of what I own that not one person will recognize her.”

  “What? Oh, damn. It booked it under her name because its default human form is female, but no way it looks like her, right?”

  “Maybe close in the written essentials, but not close enough to fool anyone, unless it’s so lucky that it oughtta be playing the lottery every day.” A photo-quality print came out of my little inkjet. “There you go.”

  Mandy wasn’t bad looking—cute, with a round face, dark hair in a sort of pixieish cut, and a reasonably trim body as you’d expect from someone fit enough to do diving archaeological work. “There you go, Baker.”

  “Nope, rather it was you. Remember, more contact I have with the outside, more likely I run into some paranoid who finds out what I am.”

  I sighed. “Fine, fine, look, you do the hotel staff anyway, will you? I’ll handle talking to the UAR people.”

  “No need to bother,” Syl’s voice broke in.

  Baker and I looked at her. “Why?”

  “Tsk, tsk, Mr. Information Man. While you were talking, I did a few searches under the members’ names, and looky what I found on Dr. Jesus Rodriguez’s web page.”

  On the screen was a photo of a tall, slender, dark-skinned girl of long hair and exotic beauty, pointing at a slide image showing a large stone object. The caption read, “Mandy Gennaro showing some of the spectacular finds from the University of Oxford’s Caribbean excavations.”

  Syl smiled at me smugly. “I think you get to keep everything, Jason.”

  Chapter 68: Hiding in Plain Sight?

  I looked at the stony face and sighed. “Another one, I see.”

  “Fourth, or if we’re right about the disappearances, seventh of us.” Baker grimaced. “I swear, the thing’s probably out there laughing.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. We certainly aren’t having luck catching it. The question is where the hell did it go after the convention? Plenty of people saw “Mandy Gennaro” there, but afterwards?”

  Baker shook his head. “Nothing. We’ve been around with photos, checkin’ the stores all through the area. Couple of people saw her during the convention, but not afterwards.”

  I turned away from the statue of the late Deputy Arnaud and headed up the stairs to Baker’s office. He shut the door behind us and followed. “So, she went into hiding. But that’s not a nondescript appearance; she’s going to be noticed if she was looking like that.”

  “Ayup. But…” Baker’s eyes narrowed; for a moment I almost thought I saw a yellow gleam. “Now there’s an interesting possibility. Look here; it’s hard to tell, but it looks to me, if we take best guesses, that we end up with a new statue around the time we get a new missing person’s report. There’s been a lot of events in the past couple weeks, so I dunno if we can say it’s a real pattern, but…what if she’s killin’ people, takin’ their place for a while, then shifting to someone else? The people who been disappearin’, she actually killed ’em days before. Then she hits someone else for a quick fix, uses them that day to scout out a new sucker, an’ takes them. An’ a few days later, it starts again.”

  I sucked in a breath. That theory made sense. “I see. Yeah, quite a bit. If that’s so, then she’s got to be either hiding the statues near the kill sites, or she’s got herself a good storage spot for a bunch of statues…” I smacked my forehead. “Duh! She’s not keeping the statues. She’s pulverizing them.” I gestured out the window, where you could occasionally get a glimpse of blue ocean. “Your habeas corpii are probably out there on the beach.”

  Baker looked like he wanted to kick himself as well. “Right, right, Wood. Shoulda thought of that. Ya must’ve hit it on the head. Damn.”

  “Around here, it’s easy to get rid of something like that. Getting rid of a body like Mansfield’s, that’s harder. Unless this thing eats flesh, too, and lots of it.”

  “Nope. They can eat—an’ some do, just like we do—but they ain’t like us in that area. Me, I could’ve polished off Mansfield in three or four bites, bones an’ all, but the Mirrorkillers don’t do that.”

  “But then why the hell is it leaving statues?”

  Baker pursed his lips, thinking. “Well, I’m thinkin’ it’s like running a business. Location, location, location. Even at night, if you’re out in the middle of town like she was with Weimar, it’s gonna draw attention if someone sees ya lugging a statue down to wherever it is ya plan to do the rock-crushing. Sure, by now she can probably do it with her bare hands, but it’s still gonna be noisy.”

  “Right,” I said. “So the ones we find are just stopgaps—she takes the form like you said, uses it to find someone she can nail in a more private location and then replace them for a while. You people all work together, and once she killed a couple of you she’d know everything about who she could and couldn’t talk to about what was going on—from your point of view, I mean. So I’d guess it wouldn’t be hard for her, as one of you, to talk to the right people and get them into a convenient locale.”

  “Nope,” Baker agreed. “We gotta be ready to cooperate with each other here, especially in shifting people around. The humans that work with us sometimes’ll have to be in two places at once, so to speak, and it’s our job to cooperate with ’em to that extent.”

  “Oh? Why do they have to do that?”

  “People in any business that’s got a lot o’ contact with outsiders. Either the ones doing the interaction have to be human, or we need humans who can do jobs that we can swap places with. You have no idea how complicated this can get. So any of us can call on the others to help out—moving bodies, switching places, whatever.”

  I nodded my understanding. “So it would be very easy for her, in the guise of her stopgap body, to get someone else to accompany her, or let her inside their house, or whatever.”

  “Ayup,” he agreed.

  “Then we’ve got her. Just make it so that people can’t do it that easily—they have to coordinate it with you, or some other central group. Next time she tries it, bang, she’s finished.”

  “Can’t be done,” he said heavily. “The masquerade can break with just one bad run o’ luck, and my people’ve gotta be able to respond to an emergency right away. Besides, ya don’t realize just how hard it is gettin’ wolves to work together this way if’n you ain’t the King. They hate bein’ shoved into coordinated slots, an’ it’s takin’ me just about everything I got to keep this thing workin’ as it is.”

  “Well, we’ve got a chance now, anyway. Look, she can’t be sure of exactly when the statues of her quick kills are going to be found, so she’s got to move fairly quickly. So somewhere around the area should be the place where she found her new longer-term host, so to speak.”

  “And how does that help us?”

  “I think there might be a way to test it. The Maelkodan isn’t vulnerable to silver. So if we can check all the wolves in the area, you just need to find one that doesn’t react. Wear a glove or something with a litt
le silver on it and shake hands; anyone who doesn’t get burned or whatever is your monster.”

  Baker gave me a respectful look. “Y’know, that might just work. I’ll get my people on it…right after I give ’em a handshake m’self.”

  Chapter 69: Lie Down and Reflect

  I put down the phone, sighed, and sank into a chair, toying with the just-finished duplicates of my CryWolf glasses. One advantage of working for the wolves was that I wasn’t restricted in movement if I stayed on the case, so I’d ordered the custom parts, then taken a day, flown up, and assembled the things. At least now I could be subtle. I put them on, adjusted the fit.

  “Bad news?” Syl asked sympathetically.

  “My bright idea was a bust. All we’ve got now is a bunch of werewolves with itchy palms, and I don’t mean that they’re looking for tips.” I chewed my lower lip idly. “Now, this could mean Baker’s idea still works, but she’s going farther afield than we thought looking for her replacement.”

  “Why does she have to switch so often, though?”

  “Remember her basic limitation, Syl. Every time she whacks a wolf, she gets a brand-new face. She doesn’t keep a record of the old ones in her matrix, so she can’t just go back to where she was…”

  I saw it then; it was, in its way, sheer genius. It wouldn’t work forever, but certainly for longer than it had already. And I could confirm it so easily…

  Picking up the phone, I called Baker and asked him a few questions, as though I was clarifying something. Then I hung up. Sylvie watched as I checked my gun once more. “What are you going to do?”

  “The rest of my job. But I’ll do it my way, not Carruthers’ or Baker’s way.”

  She nodded, serious. I started to say something else as she began to put on her own gun, but I stopped. She knew what I was going to do before I did it, and there was no arguing with her when she decided what part she was going to play.

  Besides, I needed her to play that part.

  I went down to the lobby, where Vic glanced up. “Hey, Mr. Wood! Need anything?”

  “Actually, yes, Vic. But it’s kinda private…?”

  He nodded his understanding—certain business, after all, not being something to discuss in non-secured public areas. Even though it was late, there was always the possibility of someone dropping by at the wrong moment. He hung a “back in 15 minutes” sign up and we went into a back room. “Okay, how can I help?”

  I studied him. “First, let me congratulate you,” I said, to his image sparkling in the glasses. “I almost didn’t figure out how you were doing it, and without that, we’d never have caught you.”

  He froze for a moment, just as he had the night we checked in, then sighed. “Goddamn. If you don’t mind my asking, how’d you figure it?”

  “Partly the timing of the killings, partly luck, and just a few little things that nagged at me,” I said, making sure I was not blocked in and had at least two ways to run. “Baker’s theory on what you were doing wasn’t bad—and it was actually close, in some ways—but when we came up with nothing on that, I started thinking it was a complete bust. But then there had to be some explanation for the pattern. So I was thinking…why? If you’re not moving from life to life, what’s the point of the pattern of one person disappearing, one person being found?”

  He nodded, sitting down on a crate some distance away. Apparently, he really did want to hear the explanation. “Go on.”

  I was careful to avoid staring directly into his eyes; despite assurances that an alert human could probably break contact fast enough, I wasn’t taking any risks. “Then there was the whole Jerry Mansfield episode. It didn’t quite fit with the others. Especially the silver dust bit.

  “But it did make sense if I assumed someone got a little panicky. The wolves certainly did. Mansfield was a quick and dirty attempt to get rid of me. His death made it look like someone was out hunting wolves the conventional way. Once I’d weathered that threat—when Karl Weimar left me alive—it was clear that the quick impulse had failed. You knew who I was when I registered, and it flustered you. Here you were, still adjusting to the way this world works—and even with your ability to grab people’s knowledge, I’ll bet that still takes some getting used to, the changes in the world since you were last out and about—and along comes this guy with a reputation for dealing with Weird Crap. No warning. You knew you’d killed a fairly important guy already, the cops were looking for him, and if they’d gotten a whiff of the weird, well, who would they call? Jason Wood, of course.

  “Naturally, you knew who and what everyone in the town was, and Mansfield made a perfect target—vital to the town’s functioning, but wouldn’t die in that all-too-telltale stony way. By the time the wolves stopped panicking at my presence and the silver evidence, I’d be dead. Maybe. You didn’t have that much to lose, since you planned on settling down here to eat anyway.”

  He hung his head. “I’m sorry about that. Really. But you’re right, I just…what’s your idiom? Freaked, that’s it. After uncounted thousands of years, I was finally, finally free, and suddenly there you were.”

  “The first ‘disappearance’ was about due to be reported, anyway; Karl Weimar gave you the perfect chance to start confusing the trail,” I continued. “Your first victim was expected to be away for some time, so you had latitude. And you’d already figured it out. Everyone knew you couldn’t go back to a form you had already had. And you couldn’t take the form of human beings, only wolves. So Victor Spangler, long-time resident, and well-known human collaborator, was a doubly safe identity.

  “I didn’t get all the clues to this puzzle until recently, or I might have caught on sooner. If I’d just been going by your movements en route here, Vic would have been high on the suspect list; this is a fairly central location, you have contact with everyone, and so on.

  “The key, of course, is the masquerade. The wolves have to cooperate in order to keep the secret from being blown, and they especially have to do so with their human collaborators—the ones who sometimes have to be moved around quickly so as to be the interfaces with human outsiders who might possibly be carting around CryWolf gadgets. These collaborators are of prime importance in all areas that have high contact with outsiders: convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants…and hotels.”

  He chuckled and nodded. “Right, right.”

  “I found out that the day the conference ended—the day before I arrived—Vic had to go work at one of the other hotels. Someone had to take his place here—a wolf who had changed himself to look just like Vic! You noticed the substitution and that was when the idea hit you. You killed that wolf and took his place, and assumed the guise of Vic the Human. Once you were ‘in,’ you could use that cooperative requirement to get other wolves to take on Vic’s form—on the excuse that you were needed elsewhere. You had to destroy the other bodies to hide the fact that, otherwise, there’d be quite a collection of Vic Spangler statues around. All I had to do was find out if you were a collaborator—I asked Baker as though I assumed you were a wolf, he corrected me—and check a couple of timing issues with your assumed ID.”

  He spread his hands. “You got me, all right. Had to kill the real Vic, too. So now what?”

  I frowned. “Aye, ‘there’s the rub,’ as Hamlet put it. On paper, you’re a murderer, or a dangerous animal, depending on who you ask. And I can’t say I’m comfortable with the whole idea of what you are, or of letting you go after you killed a harmless archaeologist. On the other hand, I also really hate being strung over a barrel by the wolves. Their King’s put me on reserve as a personal chew-toy for later, but they’ve bargained with me to solve this mystery in exchange for my friends’ safety. I want to see if we can find a resolution that doesn’t include my using this,” I pushed my jacket aside and eased the gun out, “to turn you into a colander. And I’m also a bit of a conservationist, I suppose; killing off the entirety of a species doesn’t sit well with me.”

  Vic sparkled; the shimmer intensi
fied. It was like watching clouds of sunshine-touched mist dissolve and then reform. The Maelkodan appeared in its natural, default-human form. I admired its tactical sense; if it wanted to play any sympathy cards, it knew perfectly well that a beautiful woman would have a better chance with me than even a nice, cheerful hotel proprietor. “As I see it, the problem is that I need to eat.”

  “Not nearly as much as you have been,” I pointed out. “They already told me just how much power you gain; by now you’re getting quite a ways up there.”

  “And you believe everything they say?” she challenged.

  It was my turn to chuckle. “Not at all. Unfortunately for you, Morgan was the source of confirmation on that information.”

  Her lips moved in a pout or a tightening; I couldn’t be quite sure which without looking her in the eyes. “Ah, the one who feels like something from home. But really, Mr. Wood, does it matter? Aside from Dr. O’Connell, who just happened to be the one present when I finally broke free and acted on my instincts, the only ones I’ve killed have been wolves or their friends. Do you really care what I do to them?”

  I acknowledged the point. “In truth, not really. I think the world’s better off without them. But there’s the issue of my own word versus theirs. I did promise to investigate this fully and track down the killer. Now, I could weasel some technicalities around, but I do have to solve the problem for which I’m hired, and saying ‘Well, I did find the killer, but too bad, I’m not doing anything about it’ really violates the spirit of the contract. The very last thing I want to do is encourage them to start playing technicality games with me.”

  She nodded. “I could just move on.”

  “Will you really be able to stop killing? Be honest, because if you lie about it and it comes out later, I will, beyond any shadow of a doubt, come after your ass.”

  She paused for a long, long moment.

  Finally, “No. No, I could not. It is what I was created to do. I am a hunter. I hunt anything, mostly wolves, but even your people. The hunt is part of my life. They made me that way. You would eventually hear of more deaths. And they would continue, so long as I live.”