by Ilsa J. Bick
“Did he ride in your car?” If so, they could sweep for evidence. Probably do that anyway.
“No, that I do remember. I remember thinking that his car was a little strange.”
“Strange how?”
“Different. I . . .” She pressed her fingers to her eyebrows. “I just don’t remember. We had something to drink, and then we went into the . . . to the couch . . .” Her face worked as she remembered some detail.
“What?” Ramsey asked.
“Nothing. I keep thinking . . . white.”
Ramsey was confused. “White? White what?”
“Something about his face . . .” She gave it up. “I don’t know. But that’s the last thing I remember. White, and then drinking beer and then, you know, the couch.”
“Maybe he put something in your drink to knock you out. I’d like to get a sample of your blood and see if there’s anything there.”
“Sure,” Sandra said, and her lips trembled. “Take as much as what you want. Take it all.”
* * *
Ketchum returned, having made arrangements for Joey, and Amanda appeared a short time later. She looked beyond exhaustion, the purple of her bruise competing with the smudges under her eyes. “I won’t kid you, Ms. Underhill. Troy’s blood sugar is sky-high and he’s acidotic, like having battery acid in his blood. But neither Dr. Carruthers nor I understand how this happened. His insulin pump is working fine, and the insulin is fresh because you refilled his prescription Saturday.”
Sandra looked bewildered. “No, I didn’t.”
A frown lightly touched Amanda’s forehead. “The pharmacy records show you came around three o’clock. We have your signature.”
“Three? I was at Ida’s. There’s no way I could’ve come here.”
* * *
Ramsey said, “Maybe you don’t remember.”
But Sandra was adamant. “I remember that we were busy because Ida was serving ham and sweet potatoes and we’re always packed when there’s ham.”
They all thought about that a minute, and then Kodza said, “No drug can be that selective. If she remembers the menu but not coming here, that is likely accurate.”
Ramsey agreed. “Ms. Underhill, who orders Troy’s insulin?”
“Why,” Sandra said, “Doc Summers.”
* * *
Ramsey said, “Ms. Underhill, when I asked you about the guy’s car, you said it was strange. What did you mean?”
“I mean, strange.” Sandra made a helpless gesture. “At Charlie’s . . .”
“Charlie’s?” Amanda blurted, and they all looked at her. “I remember seeing a patrol car way down the road, and I thought that maybe there’d been trouble. But there was nothing.”
Sandra said, “That’s it! The patrol car, that’s what was so strange. He was driving one of your cars, Hank.”
“And something white on his face, like a bandage,” Amanda said. “John Boaz.”
50
2230 hours
John Boaz sprawled in his boxers on an overstuffed recliner. A can of beer balanced on his stomach and two slices of cold pizza and rinds lay in a cardboard box on a side table.
Damn Jack Ramsey. Boaz took a pull off his beer. And Amanda, she needed straightening out. He should’ve taken her around back of Charlie’s and done her until her eyes crossed. If Ramsey hadn’t shown up, he’d have done that, too. He should’ve done it before that Underhill bitch. Underhill had been like a giggly rag doll, just a quickie in the alley. But then after he’d hitched his pants and gone back in, Ramsey was there. So he left and went out to Underhill’s place. Underhill hadn’t cared about the bandage, either at the bar or later, at her house. Hell, at the house, she’d barely been conscious. Just kind of snorted and slept through the whole thing. He’d almost left. And that other patrol car . . .
“Bobby,” he said, out loud. He’d never have figured Bobby for a guy who’d pork anyone, let alone Sandra Underhill. Bobby was just . . . there. A gray guy with a hound-dog face and a couple belly rolls lipping his belt. But he’d recognized the number as the car rolled past. That was Bobby all right: had the hat squared on and everything and . . .
The angry hornet’s buzz at his door made him slop beer onto his belly. Cursing, he sat up, jiggled to shake off the beer and glanced at the time scrolling along the bottom of the holo. Almost a quarter to eleven. Who the . . . ?
Beer can still in hand, he padded to the door. He lived in an end unit townhouse with a tiny patch of front lawn he didn’t give two fracs about and no neighbors in the next unit over. As he neared the front door, he noticed something a little off. The porch light was out. Odd. The light was on a timer, and he thought he remembered the light clicking on because he remembered the pizza delivery boy digging in his back pocket, counting out change. Now he’d have to change a stupid bulb.
“Well, fuck me,” he said, and then as the buzzer buzzed again: “Yeah, yeah.” There were decorative waterglass sidelights mulled to either side of his front door, and a corner street lamp threw just enough light for him to make out the blurry silhouette of an officer’s hat. Ketchum? “Yeah?”
A voice, muffled by the door: “It’s Bobby. Want to talk ’bout last night.”
“Yeah?” Grinning now, Boaz tapped numbers on a pad next to his door, keying out his lock. The lock snicked back, and he pulled open the door. Said: “I’ll bet you want to talk about last night, you son—”
And froze when he saw the broad round O of a gun muzzle pointing at a spot between his eyes.
“Well, maybe not,” Gabriel said, and pulled the trigger.
51
Tuesday, 17 April 3136
0130 hours
“I feel like my head’s gonna explode.” Ramsey was pacing, cranked on caffeine, just about zero sleep, and sugar. They’d appropriated a conference room on the hospital’s second floor. Amanda got coffee and everyone—excluding Brett who’d volunteered to escort Joey and his mother to an aunt’s home out of town—doped up on caffeine. A few minutes later, one of the ER techs showed with a tray of yesterday’s muffins and pastries filched from the cafeteria. “Too much going on at once and it’s got to be connected, but I don’t see Boaz being this organized, or this sneaky. Just because he was at Charlie’s doesn’t prove anything other than he was in the same place at the same time as Sandra Underhill, and her memory’s not that reliable.”
“There are two things that bother me,” Kodza said. Pensive, she fingered the rim of her coffee cup. “Noah and Troy seem to have happened in very short order, yes? But why has nothing happened to Joey?”
Ketchum said, slowly, “Well, Joey took us out this afternoon . . . I mean, yesterday. Monday. That’s when we found the blood and broken step at the tree house, and that blood where Limyanovich was killed. But Troy’s bike was already gone. Joey wasn’t involved with that because he was grounded Saturday and Sunday.”
“So the killer may not know about Joey. If he was in the tree house as Detective Ramsey suspects, he was too focused on Troy’s bicycle. But a deputy would think about leaving behind evidence, especially DNA, and yet there is blood on a nail, on the ground where Limyanovich was killed, on the grass up the hill.” Kodza shook her head. “I cannot see a policeman making that mistake.”
“So that means the killer has limited knowledge and expertise,” Amanda said. “Troy was planned, but Noah was a lucky break.”
“And now we’re back to whodunit.” Ramsey picked up his cup, swirled dregs, put it down without tasting. “Joey says Doc Summers, but there’s that hill. So we’re back to a younger guy, in a wig and makeup. Or two killers. Or a woman.”
“Well, someone knows medicine,” Amanda said. She gestured to a computer pop-up screen where a ream of laboratory data still shimmered in emerald green. “The lab says the stuff in Troy’s pump is sterile saline. Whoever switched out the vials had access to the pharmacy, knew how to manipulate records, steal the right vials, forge Sandra’s signature. . . . Can you see Boaz doing that? Because I sur
e can’t—not all that and filling vials with sterile saline.
“What’s so important about the saline?” Ketchum asked. “That it’s sterile?”
“If you’re going to inject something, it better be sterile. But only a medically trained person would care. It’s like a reflex. But I can’t wrap my head around Doc, and Doc and Boaz together? There’s just no way. They’d kill each other. Boaz is mean, and he’s stupid. Does that strike you as the kind of person Doc would hang his life on?”
“No.” Ketchum screwed up his nose. “He sure doesn’t. But we can’t just toss the idea.”
“Which still brings us back to motive because if we knew that,” Ramsey said, and now he locked eyes with Kodza, “we’d know how to look at it. All this pop-pop-pop is tied to Limyanovich, and you’ve been much more”—he considered the word—“tractable since speaking with your superiors. Whether that’s because you’re on our side, or you’re just angling for information, I don’t know if I care. But I’m asking you again. Help us.”
Kodza’s face was an absolute blank. “I believe that is what I have been doing.”
“The hell you have!” Ramsey grabbed hold of an armrest on Kodza’s swivel chair and swung the woman around until their faces were no more than twelve centimeters apart. “These are kids we’re talking about. This maniac shot Noah, and if we hadn’t gone to the Underhill’s house, Troy’d be dead right now. So don’t give me this crap. You keep messing around, I’m going to blow this up. I’ll contact every news organization on the planet and tell them how the legate’s not interested in a guy who goes around killing kids, and I’m sure I’ll let slip something about Blakists.”
Two high spots of color blossomed on Kodza’s cheeks. “What is this Blakist nonsense? The Blakists were wiped out.”
Ramsey barked a laugh. “That’s crap. The Kittery Resistance is all over the news. Maybe that’s why you wanted the body so quickly, to get rid of all that inconvenient evidence. But now we know, and I’ll bury the legate before I’m through.”
“You?” Kodza’s eyes were as dead and flat as the eyes as a Hel cobra. “You do not have the power.”
“Try me. I think you’ll be surprised. I’m not like Hank. I don’t have to worry about getting elected. Personally, I don’t care if people like me. I’m in enough trouble now where going public would end my career. But I’ll do it.”
There was a short silence and then Ketchum cleared his throat. “Ramsey talks to the news people, I’m right there at his side, star or no star. Because, lady, you don’t give a damn about my people—and I sure as hell don’t give a damn about you.”
* * *
Finally, Kodza said, “First, you must tell me this. You say that Limyanovich is a Blakist or—at the very least—part of the Kittery Resistance. So I ask you, Detective. How do you know?”
“His DNA,” Ramsey said. “Amanda found DNA evidence that his mother or his relatives came from Kittery. Limyanovich was murdered in a cemetery where the townspeople butchered a lot of people they believed were Blakist sympathizers. Add to that local legend that Farway—and especially, the islands—were Blakist hideouts back in the Jihad. Noah Schroeder’s dad was the sheriff before Hank, and he was murdered on Cameron Island and we know that Limyanovich went to Cameron Island two days before he died, and I think our killer went out there to test his explosive. So they’re all connected somehow. It’s too much coincidence.”
Kodza nodded, silent, her face pensive now. “I see.” Then a hint of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Well, are you going to tower over me like a Kyotan bear, or will you sit? Frankly, you are making me nervous.”
Without a word, Ramsey backed up but stayed on his feet. “Talk.”
“The stakes are much higher than you realize. Yes, we had suspicions that Limyanovich was a Blakist. But rumors are not proof. For that matter, we are concerned about the Clans,” Kodza said.
“How?” Ramsey asked. Thinking: That odd DNA Amanda found. Hmmm.
“We are not sure. To say that Clanners have infiltrated the Inner Sphere is patently obvious. Clanners have associated with certain houses, etcetera, etcetera. But Clanners actually interfering is more disturbing. I have been investigating rumors that several Clans have banded together to make a push for Prefecture X.”
“You mean, like the Jade Falcon invasion?”
She waved that idea away. “No, no, nothing so obvious as an all-out assault. This is something quite different, very novel for the Clans. We do not even know if the rumors are true, or part of a disinformation campaign to make us look away from what is actually happening. We have managed to intercept a few messages, some a year or so before the HPGs collapsed, and many more within the last few years as things have become so much more unstable: about a shadowy cabal, a triumvirate. But we don’t know what that is. For that matter, it might be nothing more than a new term coined to describe a clan leader.”
Amanda said, “Triumvirate implies three. But three what?”
“We do not know. We have no direct proof that the Blakists have regrouped, or that they are related in any way to one clan, or three, or none at all.”
“So how is Poly Tech involved?” Ramsey asked.
“Because of their genetics work,” Kodza said. “Who else would be so interested in genetic advances except Clanners? Again, we have no proof.”
Ketchum frowned. “But you’ve got ideas about Clanners on one hand and ideas about Blakists on the other, and nothing to tie them. I know everyone in Farway and you’re saying some people might be Clanners? Descendants of Clanners? I can’t see it. My God,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t want to think about word getting out about this. Talk about a witch hunt.”
“Yes, so you can see, precisely, why we . . . I have not been at liberty to share so many things. You must understand the need for absolute secrecy.” Kodza paused, put a finger to her lips in thought then said, “Of the available theories, we do not believe that there is a clan group on Denebola per se, or a Blakist cell in the sense of Jihad. But Kittery Resistance on Denebola, in Neurasia? Perhaps. Our best guess is that Limyanovich was lured here, and that is what we are even more interested in.” She eyed Ketchum. “Part of your town’s mythology revolves around homegrown vigilante cells that were actively tracking down Blakists during the Jihad, yes? Well, I tell you now: this is no myth. There were such cells. After the Jihad was over, Devlin Stone allowed these cells to continue—to track down Blakists and turn them over to a war crimes tribunal.”
The other three stared at each other. Amanda said. “Devlin Stone?”
Kodza showed a thin smile. “There is much one does not know about Devlin Stone. To the best of our knowledge, these cells ceased operations when they ran out of Blakists to hunt. To the best of our knowledge.”
Ramsey got there a split second before everyone else. “Rogue cells. Sleeper cells. You’re saying that there’re still some out there. So, now with the HPGs down, the land grabs going on between people like Katana Tormark and Bannson, the Capellans pushing in, and add to that the fact that Prefecture X gets sealed off, these people must be going nuts. They’ve got to be seeing enemies everywhere.”
“Exactly.” Kodza paused. “This cell, they are good. They see themselves as The Republic’s guardian angels, I believe. That they stumbled on Limyanovich was accidental. We had our eye on Limyanovich for some time because of his extensive travels, Poly Tech, and his background. But we could not prove anything.”
“But why lure in Limyanovich? What did they think he had?”
“That is the mystery,” Kodza said, without irony. “Perhaps they felt Limyanovich had additional information about a secret conclave of Blakists. This cell, their core belief revolves around Blakists, hop-skipping from world to world. There have been other incidents on other planets: suspicious murders without resolution. The only clues we have are rumors of a confiscated data crystal.”
“What’s on it?” Ramsey asked.
Kodza shrugged. �
�Intelligence indicates that these people have a map of some kind, but that it is incomplete. Our best guess is that the information is an itinerary: worlds where this triumvirate is active, recorded as jump points.”
“But you don’t know, really, if any of this is true,” Ramsey said, his voice clogged with sudden fury. “In the meantime, kids are getting shot. They’re getting killed. This,” he jabbed the table with an index finger, “is reality. This is all I care about: this planet, these kids, my home. Go look at Troy, and tell me this other stuff matters. Take a hard look at evil, and then try to wash the blood from your hands, or the stink of death out of your clothes. Live my life for a change, and then tell me how any of this crap means a good goddamn—because it doesn’t. It never can, and it never will.”
Kodza didn’t reply at first. Then she said, very quietly, “You are right to be angry, Detective, and though you may not believe, I have known death, very well.” She pulled in a deep breath, released it. “I do indeed have a ghost agent I have not wished to compromise. I assure you, this agent has had absolutely nothing to do with Limyanovich’s death, or what has been happening to your people, Sheriff Ketchum. In fact, this agent has been working very hard to find out just exactly who did.” Another pause. “I have two ghosts, actually.”
“Kinda overkill,” Ketchum drawled.
“An interesting turn of a phrase, Sheriff, because one agent you knew very well. He was Isaiah Schroeder.”
Ketchum’s face crumpled. Not into tears but as a slow draining of animation into a look of utter shock. “Isaiah? He worked for you? He was—?”
“Was murdered, yes. So there is every reason to suspect your Doctor Summers.”
“What about Boaz?” Ketchum asked. He was getting angry; Ramsey heard the energy crackle under Ketchum’s words, like lightening in an advancing storm.
“Not out of the question.”