The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1

by S. Andrew Swann

  He did, however, have to hit the thing a few times to get it to work right.

  Manny’s nose twitched. “I don’t believe it. The file’s inactive. It’s barely a week old.”

  “The police are under pressure to drop the investigation.”

  Manny looked like he was about to say something, but apparently thought better of it. “Fine, well, we have the autopsy report, list of the forensic evidence, abstract of the scene of the crime, a few preliminary statements from the neighbors, as well as the witness who found the body, etcetera. Pretty complete record. Compared to most I’ve seen.”

  One of Manny’s lithe hands dove into a breast pocket and pulled out a ramcard and slid it into the side of the computer. Nohar briefly saw the rainbow sheen of the card reflected in a small puddle of beer on the table. “I’m running off a copy. Do me a favor and make a backup. Occasionally they do monitor access to the database.”

  Nohar nodded when Manny handed him the card. Nohar slipped it into his wallet, next to the as yet unexamined card from his camera, the pictures from Johnson’s funeral. “could you tell me how Johnson died?”

  “It’s all on the card I gave you. He was shot in the head. Through his picture window. Splattered his brains all over his comm—oh, that’s interesting . . .”

  “What?”

  There was the hint of what might have been admiration in Manny’s voice. “Are you familiar with Israeli weaponry? Thought not. The forensics team found the remains of two bullets, from a Levitt Mark II, fifty-caliber.” A slight whistle of air came from between Manny’s front teeth.

  “So?”

  “Came out of Mossad during the Third Gulf War. It was designed for a single sniper, and, like most designs they came up with, it’s made to keep the sniper alive. The bullets are propelled by compressed carbon dioxide. It can’t be heard firing by anyone farther away than fifteen meters or so. The ammunition is made from an impact-sensitive plastic explosive impregnated with shrapnel. It’s intended as an antipersonnel weapon. I haven’t seen an impact wound form one of these since the war. The Afghanis favored them for night raids—Nohar, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nohar knew Manny was tempted to try and talk him out of it. However, Manny wouldn’t try. Nohar hated when Manny got into surrogate-father mode, and Manny was too aware of that fact.

  Such meetings usually ended with them spending a few hours discussing innocent bullshit over too many beers. This time they finished the pitchers in relative silence. Nohar wanted to reassure Manny he wasn’t in over his head. But it would have been a lie. Nohar had trouble with lies, especially with Manny.

  So, at eleven-fifteen—an early night for them—they walked to the south end of the strip, and the lot where Manny had parked. The rain had intensified, finally chasing the moreys inside. The abandoned trash-strewn asphalt reminded Nohar of pictures of the Pan-Asian war. It was the view of a city waiting for a biological warhead.

  They rounded the pylons on Euclid Heights Boulevard and Nohar caught sight of the other cop on the riot-watch. Nohar wondered what it would be like, to come to work each day, to sit and wait for something to explode. The cops would have to be on rotation. Someone on permanent assignment would go nuts.

  The cop looked at them as they passed, two unequal-sized moreys huddling through the rain. There was a flash of lightning, and Nohar saw the cop’s face. The pink looked scared. In that instant he saw a man, a kid really, no more than twenty-two—young for a human that was, most moreys who made it into their twenties were well into middle age. The pink kid would have no idea what he would do if Nohar and Manny decided to do something illegal. He could imagine he sensed the smell of fear off of the kid, even with the car and the rain between them.

  They passed the police car and walked into the parking lot of the old school. Nohar couldn’t help but feel sorry for the cop. No one deserved to be placed in that kind of situation unprepared.

  They stopped at the van and Manny spoke for the first time since they’d left the bar. “I can’t talk you out of this, but my door’s open if you need it.”

  “I know.” Nohar was uncomfortably reminded of last night.

  Nohar told himself that there was no reason to accept things on this case to go bad like that. Hell, he’d been paid a hell of a lot up front, things couldn’t go that badly this time.

  At least it didn’t look like he was going to be stiffed again.

  Manny got into his van, another Electroline. In the dark of the storm, away from the streetlights, the van reminded Nohar of the frank in the graveyard. Both vans were the same industrial-green, the same boxy make, and had the same pneumatic doors on the back. The only difference—Manny’s van had a driver’s cab and “Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner” painted on all the doors.

  As Manny drove back toward downtown, Nohar supposed the van’s markings had a deterrent effect on car thieves.

  • • •

  “I said, a fifteen by fifteen grid with times three magnification!”

  “instructions unclear.”

  Nohar almost shouted something back at the comm. Instead, he took a deep breath and stroked Cat a few times. There are a few things, he thought, more fruitless than getting angry at a machine. Shouting at it was just going to overtax the translation software.

  “Display. Photo thirty-five. Grid. Fifteen by fifteen. Magnification. Times three.”

  This time the comm did what it was told.

  Photo number thirty-five was a good, panoramic shot of the seated parties at Johnson’s funeral. It was the one picture that had a full facial on everybody. The haze had helped by diffusing the July sun. The indirect lighting eliminated stark shadows, and would help in making the attendees, especially those to the rear, under the tent.

  He had enlarged it enough. Most of the faces were clear, which was good. Nohar did not want to wait half an hour while his cheap software enhanced the picture.

  Now for the grunt work. “Move. Grid. Left five percent.”

  One box on the grid now enclosed a face.

  He told the program to print it and a portrait of a funeral attendee started sliding out of the comm’s fax slot. One down, forty-nine to go.

  Nohar spent two hours getting identifiable portraits from the one picture. Most of them, he knew, would offer no useful information. However, the procedure calmed him. It was something he had done hundreds of times before.

  The routine was so automatic that his mind kept traveling back to Johnson’s murder.

  According to the autopsy, the time of death was somewhere between 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday the twenty-second, and 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday the twenty-third. The body was discovered by a jogger who noticed the broken window around noon on the twenty-fifth. There was a violent thunderstorm Thursday night, washing away a good deal of evidence. Presumably, this was why no evidence was found of the party or parties who allegedly stole the three million the campaign finance records said should have been there. Well, that wasn’t quite right. The police thought the finance records said the three million was there. However, before the cops folded, they only had a brief perusal of the campaign finances over the weekend. Apparently the records never left Binder’s headquarters.

  The autopsy also said Daryl had been having a good time before someone slammed a mini-grenade into the back of his head. Nohar read at the time of death Daryl had a good point-oh-two blood alcohol, traces of weasel-dust in his nose, as well as a few ’dorphs lying undigested in his stomach. To top it off, he’d shot his wad into somebody in the twelve hours previous.

  Seems he died happy.

  Nohar pictured him at the comm, riding his buzz, watching some party film or other, air-conditioning going full blast. Daryl might be giggling a bit. Then the sniper takes up his position. The sniper is hiding somewhere. The ballistic evidence gave an approximate traject
ory giving a field of fire at the back of Johnson’s head. Five houses across the street fit the bill, all occupied, no witnesses. Perhaps the sniper uses a driveway between those houses across the street.

  It’s night, to give the sniper cover. Night makes sense. Daryl’s been partying. The sniper knows the alarm is off because Daryl is home. He can see Daryl through the sight. The sniper aims at Daryl’s head, which might be bobbing to the beat from the comm. The sniper squeezes off a shot. The shot explodes, vaporizing the picture window.

  The sniper squeezes off shot number two.

  Daryl is sitting in the study, facing his comm, when his head gets blown away by the second exploding projectile belonging to the sniper’s Levitt Mark II. It hits six centimeters from the base of the skull—dead center, according to the autopsy.

  It hits from behind him, through the picture window in the living room, through the dining room, and through the open door to the study.

  The cops found remains of two Levitt bullets. One set in Daryl’s head. The other set by the picture window.

  There was a problem with this sequence of events.

  It was those two words. “dead center.”

  Daryl Johnson should have turned to see what the noise was.

  For Nohar, that was a big problem. Daryl was shot in the back of the head. Nohar couldn’t see someone so jazzed-up he’d be oblivious to twenty square meters of glass exploding directly behind him—now that he thought about it, the whole damn neighborhood was oblivious. What the autopsy listed shouldn’t have zoned Daryl out that bad. Even a reflexive jerk toward the noise, no matter how fast the sniper got the second round off, would have put the shell toward one side of the head or the other.

  Also, what was a nine-to-five working stiff doing that jazzed in the middle of the week? Given the time of death, Daryl was doing some heavy partying for a Tuesday.

  Finally, even in Shaker Heights, a house standing open like that, two or three days without the alarm or a window, and nothing else ripped off? That didn’t ring true.

  The final portrait ejected from the printer.

  Nohar stretched and got to his feet. His throat hurt from all the commands. Someday he was going to have to fix the keyboard. Despite the overstuffed cushions on the couch, his tail had fallen asleep again.

  Nohar rubbed his throat and decided he needed a beer. He ducked into the kitchen. As he ripped the last bulb of beer from its envelope, he realized how hungry he was. The only food in the fridge was a plate of bones, and the last kilo of hamburger. Nohar only briefly considered the beef bones, even though a few looked fairly meaty. He grabbed the lump of hamburger and tossed it into the micro as he snapped the top off his bulb.

  The cold brew soothed the raw feeling at the back of his throat, leaving a yeasty taste in his mouth. One of the few decent things pinks did with grain was turn it into booze.

  Outside the dirty little kitchen window, the storm was worsening. The thunder rattled the glass in its loose molding.

  Nohar drank as he watched the lightning through haze glass and rippling sheets of water. If Smith was right, and there never was any three million, why was Johnson killed? What was Johnson doing Tuesday night? Why didn’t Johnson, or anyone else, respond to the shattering picture window—

  Ding, the burger was warm. Nohar dropped the empty bulb into the disposal and washed his hands in the sink. He pulled the meat out of the micro, and spent a few seconds finding a clean plate. The hamburger leaked all over the plate as soon as he began unwrapping it. The blood-smell of the warm meat wafted to Nohar and really reminded him of how hungry he was. He ripped out a red, golfball-sized chunk from the heart of the burger and popped it into his mouth, licking the ferric taste from his claws.

  Another thing the pinks did well, picking their domestic prey animals.

  Cat was suddenly wide awake, mewing and rubbing against Nohar’s leg. Nohar flicked a small gobbet of hamburger toward the other end of the kitchen. Cat went after it.

  Nohar ate, standing at the counter by the sink, looking out the window, thinking about Daryl Johnson. Occasionally he flung another chunk of meat away, to keep Cat form distracting him.

  Chapter 6

  The rain broke Thursday morning and the sun came out.

  Nohar barely noticed. He spent a few hours attaching names to the faces he had excised from the funeral picture. The only real interesting aspect of that drudgery was the fact that Philip Young, the finance chairman, had not attended the funeral.

  He spent wasted effort trying to get a hold of Young. He tracked down an address and a comm number, but Young wasn’t answering his comm. Neither was his computer, which was irritating. He called Harrison, but the legal counsel’s comm was actually locking out Nohar’s calls.

  Nohar had never talked to the lawyer before.

  Thomson’s comm was also locking out Nohar’s calls.

  That left Binder. Nohar knew that would be hopeless. He tried anyway, going as far as calling Washington long-distance. The guy manning the phones was polite, condescending, and totally useless. Binder was somewhere in Columbus, raising money and campaigning, and the only way to talk to him would be to have a press pass or a large check.

  Nohar didn’t know if it was because he was a morey, a PI, or because they were hiding something. Nohar would lay odds on all three.

  No need to be frustrated yet, Nohar told himself. There were a lot more people employed by Binder than the executive officers. Someone out there knew Johnson, and would hand him a lead.

  He scanned through the items he had downloaded from the library yesterday. He was looking for a likely subject to hit. Predictably, the picture that caught his eye was a photo-op at a fund-raiser.

  Behind Binder, with the upper crust of his campaign machine, there was an extra player.

  Nohar leaned forward on the couch. “Magnification. Times five.”

  The picture zoomed at him. The resolution was excessively grainy, but he could see the extra person in the gang of four. To Binder’s right were Thomson and Harrison, to his left were Young and Johnson—and Johnson’s executive assistant. Johnson’s assistant happened to be a woman. The picture implied a lot about them.

  Nohar ran a search through his Binder database with her name, Stephanie Weir. Every time the software found something with Weir in it, there was Johnson. They seemed inseparable.

  Now, here was someone who’d know about Johnson.

  But would she talk to him?

  He almost called her. However, when he thought it through, he realized this wasn’t going to be one of those cases he could run from the comm. He had already seen how easy it was for the pinks to shut him out over the phone. He was at enough of a disadvantage as it was. He’d do this in person.

  He should wear his suit for this. He hated it with a passion, but he was going out to the pinks’ own territory. They had their own rules. He opened the one closet and took out the huge black jacket and the matching pants. He hesitated for a moment.

  Maria wasn’t here, but he could smell her tangy musk.

  Nohar snatched shirt, tie, and shoes, and slammed the door shut. The memories didn’t stay in the closet. He did his best to ignore them as he dressed. The relationship was over. It was only going to be a matter of time before he found one of her tops. She always left them here in hot weather.

  He was still thinking about her by the time he got to the tie. The difficult ritual of getting the black strip of cloth properly wrapped around his neck was a welcome distraction. While he did so, he tried to force his mind off of Maria and on to Weir.

  Nohar left the apartment comparing Maria’s black jaguar fur to the long raven hair Stephanie Weir had in her pictures.

  He had to walk three blocks to his car, because of the traffic restrictions. It was parked outside his office—actually a glorified mail drop—on the city end of Mayfield Road. It was a dusty-yel
low Ford Jerboa convertible. Nohar wished someone would steal it. It was too old, too cheap, and for Nohar, too small. He could fit in the little thing, but the ’28 Jerboa had a power plant that could barely push around its own two tons with Nohar on board.

  He unplugged the car from the curb feed and tapped the combination on the passenger-side door, the one that worked. With the door open and the top down, he stepped over the passenger seat. Nohar eased himself behind the wheel, slipped some morey reggae into the cardplayer, and pulled away from the curb.

  • • •

  Shaker Heights was a different world. It was only separated from Moreytown by a sparse strip of middle-class pink suburbia. It could have been on the other side of the city. Driving into Shaker required some effort, since most of the direct routes were blocked off by familiar concrete pylons. In keeping with the neighborhood, these barriers were faced with brick and sat amidst vines, bushes, and tiny well-kept lawns. Nohar actually had to drive into Cleveland proper before he could weave his way into Shaker.

  He expected to be stopped by the cops at least once, but he wasn’t. Could be the suit. It didn’t lessen the tension he felt. The roads were smooth and lined with trees. Not a morey in sight. The cozy one-family dwellings stared at him from behind manicured lawns.

  Stephanie Weir lived in one of those intimidating brick houses.

  Nohar pulled the Jerboa up to the curb in front of her house. Brick, one family, seven rooms, a century old or so. It was the kind of building that reminded Nohar how young his species was.

  Come on, he told himself, a few questions, nothing major.

  After saying that to himself a few times, he climbed out of the car and stretched. Before he realized what he was doing, he had reached up and started clawing the bark from the tree next to his car. No matter how good it felt, when he noticed himself doing it, he stopped. He hoped the Weir woman hadn’t seen. It was embarrassing.