Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yeah, right.” She switched on the power cell, and drove off. “Sorry to waste your time, Greg.”

  “I don’t think you did,” he said cautiously. “There’s something not quite right about the crime scene. Don’t ask what, it’s just a feeling. I just know something’s wrong there. It might come to me later; these things normally take time to recognize. Can I give you a call?”

  “Please!”

  “Thanks. So what’s your next step?”

  “Work through his friends and acquaintances, and the girls on the crystals. See if any of them recognizes the murderer. Just a hell of a lot of datawork correlation, basically.”

  Making sense out of Byrne Tyler’s twisted finances was one of Amanda’s biggest priorities. She had emphasized that often enough to Vernon and Mike Wilson, both of whom assured her of their total agreement. But there was no accountant waiting for her on Monday morning when she arrived at the station. Mike Wilson was in full apology mode, explaining that the person he had asked to be assigned to the Tyler case was finishing off another audit. “But he’ll have completed that by tomorrow at the latest.”

  “You mean he’ll be here tomorrow?”

  “I would assume so.” He handed her a memox crystal. “Peace offering. This came in from Tyler’s agency. It’s an index of all his professional contacts, people he’s worked with over the last eighteen months. They’ve also got records of his crankier fans.”

  Amanda gave the crystal a mistrustful glance; the number of people they were going to have to interview was expanding at an exponential rate. She went into the office to see what progress Alison had made identifying the girls on the memox crystals.

  It was considerable. Amanda’s eyebrows quirked several times as she ran down the list. For an ex-soap star he had an astonishing sex appeal. How he got to meet so many women in such a short time (during his engagement), and have such a success rate was beyond her. Sure he was boyishly handsome, and kept himself in top physical shape…They started to draw up an interview schedule. Most of it would have to be done over the phone; the preliminary inquiry, anyway.

  Vernon called her into his office at 8:40, requesting a full briefing. He was appearing on Radio Rutland soon to explain the case to the public. The police station had been receiving a steady stream of requests from the media, which had doubled since Starlight’s interview and pictures of a mourning Tamzin had appeared on the datatext channels last night.

  There wasn’t much she could give him. They certainly weren’t going to announce the failure of the characteristics assembly program to find the murderer. Vernon would just have to stick to confirming the investigation team was “progressing”; that anything else at this time could prejudice the case. He departed for the studio, fidgeting with his tie and collar.

  Greg Mandel called her mid-morning, and asked to have a look around the apartment again. She agreed to meet him up there, glad for the break. The women on Alison’s list that she’d called so far were uniformly apprehensive when they found out what the enquiry was about, brittle façades hiding real fear of discovery. It was a shabby process, leaving her feeling depressed and less than wholesome.

  Greg’s big EMC Ranger was waiting outside Church Vista’s courtyard gates when she arrived.

  “Any clue what you’re looking for yet?” she asked when they went inside.

  “Sorry, no. I guess I’m just here chasing phantoms.” He tapped a finger on the rim of the glass and wood door leading out to the courtyard. “Logically, we ought to start with the point of entry. Do you have an idea where the murderer came in?”

  Amanda flipped her cybofax open, and consulted the report from the scene-of-crime team. “No. According to the security ’ware logs, the main door here was opened at 21:12 hours with a duplicate card issued by Tyler, that’s two minutes after the ’ware recorded the Ingalo driving in through the gates—which matches up with Claire’s arrival. Then it was opened again at 23:09, from the inside, when she left.”

  “What’s the security system like?”

  “Good quality ’ware, standard application. All the doors and windows are wired up, and the log function records every time they open and close; motion and infrared sensors, voice codeword panic mode with a satellite link to a private watchdog company. I’d be happy here.”

  “Sounds foolproof.” Greg walked across the ground floor to the big window wall. Broad patio doors were set into it, to the left of the stairs. “What about this one?”

  “It’s a manual lock, you can only open it from the inside. There isn’t even a catch outside.” Amanda glanced at the log again. “That was closed from 1900 hours onward.” She followed after him as he went into the kitchen, which overlooked the courtyard. All the marble worktops were clean, there was nothing out of place, no food stains, tall glass storage pots of dried pasta unopened, spice jars full; even the line of potted ferns on the windowsill were aesthetic, healthy and well-watered. It was as though the whole place had been transplanted direct from a showroom. The band of windows above the sink had two sections which could open. Both had solid manual-key security bolts. Greg didn’t even have to ask. “They haven’t been opened for ages,” she told him. “Not since June, actually.”

  There was a cloakroom next door; emerald-green ceramic tiles halfway up the walls, cool whitewashed plaster carrying on up to the ceiling. A hand basin at one end, toilet at the other with a small window just above it, four panes of fogged glass. Greg went over and looked at it. The top half of the frame was open a crack, its iron latch on the first notch. When he lifted the catch and pushed it open further the hinges creaked, protesting the movement.

  “My cat couldn’t get through that,” Amanda said.

  “Fat cat,” Greg replied. “What about upstairs?”

  Main bedroom, the bathroom, and both guest bedrooms all had wide windows equipped with security bolts. Out of the ten which opened, the security bolts were unfastened or loose on three, leaving just the standard latch to deter burglars.

  “How would they get up to them?” Amanda asked skeptically when they finished checking the last guest bedroom.

  “I’ve used wallwalker pads in my army days,” Greg said. “And I’m not sure how strong those trellises outside are, maybe they’d act like a ladder.”

  “Security log says they stayed closed. You want me to run forensic checks on the external wall?”

  “Not particularly. If you have the technical expertise to circumvent window sensors, then you can walk straight in through the main door.”

  Amanda’s cybofax bleeped. She accepted a call from Mike Wilson. The accountant definitely wouldn’t be available before Wednesday—did she want to wait, or get someone else in? One was available for Tuesday, but Wilson hadn’t worked with him before. Amanda scratched irritably at her forehead; as Crescent was paying, she wanted results quickly, and, to her, one accountant was no different from any other. She said to get one in for Tuesday morning, first thing. It didn’t matter who.

  “No progress on finding a match for the murderer’s face,” Mike Wilson said. “And you won’t believe how many of Tyler’s showbiz pals have had discreet trips to the surgeon. It doesn’t help our visual comparison programs.”

  She finished the call and went off to find Greg. He was downstairs again, crouching over the red body outline. “I’ve been thinking about motive,” he said. “All we’ve come up with so far is jealously.”

  “The accountant’s in tomorrow—maybe we’ll find a big debtor.”

  “Could be, except the kind of debt that drives someone to kill isn’t normally one you’ll find on the books. And killing someone means you never get paid.”

  She glanced around at the paintings. Tyler had spent a lot of money on them, no matter how questionable his taste. “You think they stole something?”

  “We know it had to be a professional who broke in here. It could have been someone trying to reclaim a debt the hard way. Maybe the death was an accident after all. What we have is a burglar
who hadn’t done enough research on his target to know Claire was making nighttime visits. I mean, they certainly kept it quiet enough. Tyler was awake when he wasn’t supposed to be.”

  “Could be,” she said.

  “Crescent Insurance must have a list of his paintings; it’s simple enough to check they’re all here.”

  “Okay. We’ll try that.”

  “Sorry I can’t come up with anything more concrete.” He made his way out, stopping to take one last look at the small odd painting. Frowning. Then left with a rueful wave.

  Amanda used her cybofax to connect directly into Crescent’s memory core, and requested Tyler’s home contents file. Greg was wrong. All the insured paintings were there. Amazingly the most expensive one was View of a Hill and Clouds. She paused in front of it, not quite believing what she was seeing was worth 20,000 New Sterling. Art, she thought, just wasn’t for people like her.

  The accountant did arrive on Tuesday morning. He had brought three customized cybofaxes and a leather wallet full of memox crystals loaded with specialist financial analysis programs. His assiduous preparation, eagerness, and self-confidence did a lot to offset the fact that he looked about eighteen. Amanda assigned Alison to assist him.

  Greg turned up at the station just before lunch. “I got your message about the paintings,” he said. His manner was reticent, not like him at all.

  “It was worth following up,” she assured him. “I would have got around to doing it anyway.”

  “That feeling I had that something was out of kilter. I know what it is now. It’s that small oil painting, the funny one with the flying saucer or whatever. I’m sure of it.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know, but something is.”

  “I know it stands out from the others. But it turns out Tyler knew the artist: they went out partying together when McCarthy visited England a few years back. And believe it or not, it’s the most expensive piece there.”

  “Ah.” Greg began to look a lot more contented. “It’s wrong, Amanda.”

  “How? It’s still there, it wasn’t stolen.”

  “You asked me in on this, remember?” he said gently. “I didn’t think I’d have to convince you of all people about my gland all over again.”

  She stared at him for a minute while instinct, common sense, and fear of failure went thrashing about together in her head. In the end she decided he was worth the gamble; she had asked him in because she wanted that unique angle he could provide. Once, she’d heard Eleanor, his wife, call his talent a foresight equal to everyone else’s hindsight.

  “How do you want to handle it?” she asked in a martyred tone.

  He grinned his thanks. “Somebody who knows what they’re about needs to take a look at that painting. We should concentrate on the artist, too…get Alison to mine some background on him.”

  “Okay.” She called Mike Wilson over.

  “An art expert?” he asked cynically.

  “Crescent must have a ton of them,” Greg said. “Art fraud is pretty common. Insurance companies face it every day.”

  “We have them, yes, but…”

  “An expert has told us something is wrong with the painting, and this is my investigation,” she said, not too belligerently, but firmly enough to show him she wasn’t going to compromise on this.

  He held his hands up. “All right. But you only get three lives, not nine.”

  Hugh Snell wasn’t exactly the scholarly old man with fraying tweed jacket and half-moon glasses that Amanda was expecting. When he turned up at Church Vista Apartments he was wearing a leather Harley Davidson jacket, a diamond stud through his nose, and five rings in his left ear. His elbow-length Mohican plume was dyed bright violet.

  He took one look at Tyler’s collection and laughed out loud. “Shit. He spent money on these? What a prat.”

  “Aren’t they any good?” Amanda asked.

  “My talent detector needle is simply quivering…on zero. One hates to speak ill of the dead, my dear, but if all he wanted was erotica, he should have torn the center pages out of a porno mag and framed them instead. This simply reeks of lower middle-class pretension. I know about him, I know nothing of the artists—they say nothing, they do nothing.”

  Mike Wilson indicated the McCarthy. “What about this one?”

  Hugh Snell made a show of pulling a gold-rimmed monocle from his pocket. He held it daintily to his eye and examined the painting. “Yeah, good forgery.”

  Amanda smiled greedily. “Thanks, Greg.”

  “No problem.”

  “It’s insured for twenty thousand,” Wilson said.

  “Alas my dear chap, you’ve been royally shafted.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Hugh Snell gave him a pitying look. “Please don’t flaunt your ignorance in public view, it’s frightfully impolite. This isn’t even a quality copy. Any halfway decent texture printer can churn out twenty of these per minute for you. Admittedly, it will fool the less well versed, but anyone in the trade would see it immediately.”

  “Makes sense,” Amanda said. “The smallest and most valuable item, you could roll it up and carry it out in your pocket.”

  “Certainly could,” Greg murmured.

  “I owe you an apology, Mr. Mandel,” Mike Wilson said.

  “Not a problem,” Greg assured him.

  “Congratulations,” Wilson said to Amanda. “So it was a burglary which went wrong, then. Which means it was a professional who broke in. That explains why we’ve been banging our heads against the wall.”

  “A pre-planned burglary, too, if he’d brought a forgery with him,” she said. “I bet Tyler would never have noticed it had gone.”

  “Which means it was someone who knew Tyler had the McCarthy on his wall, and how much it was worth.”

  Amanda went up to the McCarthy; and gave it a happy smile. “I’ll get forensics back to take a closer look at it,” she said.

  Three - Degrees of Guilt

  Greg managed three hours of sleep before Christine decided it was time to begin another bright new day. His eyes blinked open as her cries began. Nothing in focus, mouth tasted foul, limbs too heavy to move. Classic symptoms—if only it were a hangover, that would mean he’d enjoyed some of last night.

  “I’ll get her,” Eleanor grumbled.

  The duvet was tugged across him as she clambered out of bed and went over to the cot. “Isn’t it my turn?” he asked as the timber of the crying changed.

  “Oh, who cares?” Eleanor snapped back. “I just want her to shut up.”

  He did the brave thing, and kept quiet. In his army days he’d gone without sleep for days at a time during some of the covert missions deep into enemy territory. Oh, to be back in those halcyon times. Christine could teach the Jihad Legion a thing or two about tenacity.

  Eleanor started to change their daughter’s nappy.

  The doorbell rang. Greg knew he’d misheard that. When he squinted, the digital clock just made it into focus: 6:23. The bell went again. He and Eleanor stared at each other.

  “Who the hell…?”

  Whoever they were, they started knocking.

  The hall tiles were cold against his feet as he hopped over them to the front door. He managed to pull his dressing gown shut just before he flicked the lock over and pulled the door open. A young man with broad bull shoulders had his arm raised to knock again.

  “What the bloody hell do you want?” Greg yelled. “Do you know what time it is?” Christine was wailing plaintively behind him.

  The young man’s defiance melted away into mild confusion. “Eleanor lives here doesn’t she?”

  “Yes.” Greg noticed what the man was wearing, a pair of dark dungarees with a cross stitched on the front, blue wool shirt, sturdy black leather boots. It was his turn for a recoil; he hadn’t seen a kibbutznik since the night he faced down Eleanor’s father. “Who are you?” He ordered a tiny secretion from his gland, imagining a tiny mushroom squirt of whi
te liquid scudding around his brain, neurohormones soaking into synaptic clefts. Actually, the physiological function was nothing like that; picturing it at all was a psychological quirk that most Mindstar Brigade veterans employed. There’s no natural internal part of the human body which can be consciously activated; only muscles, and you can see that happen. So the mind copes by giving itself a picture of animation to explain the onrush of ethereal sensation. The result left him sensing an agitated haze of thoughts, entwined by grief. The man had forced himself to the Mandel farm against all kinds of deep-rooted doubts.

  “I’m Andy,” he said it as though puzzled that Greg didn’t already know…as though his name explained away everything. “Andy Broady. Eleanor’s brother.”

  Andy sat in a chair at the kitchen table, uncomfortable despite the cushion. He’d glanced around with a type of jealous surprise at the oak cupboards and tiled work surfaces. Greg followed his gaze with a mild embarrassment. The fittings were only a few years old, and Mrs. Owen came in to clean and help with Christine three times a week; but the room was still a mess. Baby bottles, washed and unwashed were all over the worktops, two linen baskets overflowing with clothes, packets of rusks, jars of puréed apple and other mushy, disgusting-tasting food were stacked in shop bags ready to be put away. Last night’s plates and dishes were waiting on top of the dishwasher. Big, rainbow-colored fabric toys underfoot. Half the broad ash table was littered with the financial printouts which Eleanor had generated as she worked through summaries of the citrus grove crop and market sales.

  Christine gurgled quietly in Andy’s lap, and he looked down at his new niece with guilty surprise. His lips twitched with a tentative smile. He held her with the stiff terror of every bachelor, frightened that he’d drop her, or she’d start crying, or burp, or choke or…

  “How old is she?”

  “Coming up six months.” Eleanor opened the dishwasher and retrieved three cups.

  “She’s lovely.”

  “Make me an offer, you can take her home with you today.”