by Colin Harvey
"Thanks. Appreciate it."
Itandje grinned. "Let me borrow your Rangers season ticket a few times next year, and we'll call it quits." He added, "Where are you now?"
"Getting breakfast." Shah ended the call.
As he walked to the nearest diner, Shah wondered whether he was wise to use his regular eyepiece. It had all his personalized features and short-cuts, but unlike the Department, Kotian had seemingly unlimited time, manpower and money to track him via the signal. He might just be bloody-minded enough to do it.
Shah stopped at the next shop, and bought a dozen prepaids. All had only minimal features, but the cost still nearly drained his account, leaving him barely enough for breakfast for two. Maybe I can get the calories back from van Doorn. He wasn't hopeful. But being broke and alive's better than the alternative. Shah switched off his regular piece, and replaced it with one of the prepaids. It was a typical cheap set; rough against his temple where a tiny lump of plastic hadn't been filed down to complete smoothness, while the bridge pinched his nose. And he would have to download numbers from his own piece, which would mean activating it for a few minutes later on. Better that than it being on all the time.
He bought breakfast for two and telling himself he was being paranoid, returned to the hotel by a different route. Must remember to bill the hotel to the Department, he thought. They can slug it out with the Crime Victims Board over who finally pays the invoice.
Upstairs, Aurora was still asleep, but stirred again as he pushed the door closed. It was still not five o'clock yet. "Hmm?" Aurora murmured, then grabbed at the cheap bedside clock. "What?" Releasing it, she fell back. "It's the middle of the night! What is wrong with you?"
"Couldn't sleep."
Turning over she draped an arm across his lap. "Got a cure for that," she murmured.
"I need breakfast first. Didn't get to eat last night."
He unpacked coffee and waffles. Aurora heaved herself upright, and switched on the feeble bedside light. Leaning on his shoulder, she unpacked her half.
"This is two days' food for me," she grumbled as she wolfed it down. Shah liked that she ate with gusto.
"You still ate it." Shah gazed at her. "You serious?"
"Half-serious. I take stimulants and appetite suppressants and exercise hard." She laughed at his expression. "You think staying this thin is easy?"
"I thought… oh, I dunno," Shah said. "I just bought what I wanted, and doubled it."
Aurora cut the conversation short by forcing the rest of her waffle into his mouth. Her laughter at his attempts to chew it died, and her face grew serious. "You realize that when we check out, that's it? We should stay as late as possible. I assume Grunwald will be looking to slot me into the program at any time, and once that happens…" she cupped his cheek in her hand. "Mr Stubble."
"I have to be in work by eight," Shah said, trying not to let his feelings show. We wasted so much time. No, I wasted so much time. "So I should shave now," he said, "So that when Mr Stubble comes back to bed, he doesn't burn your lovely face."
When he returned to bed they made love again, then fell asleep.
He awoke at nine-fifteen, and scrambled out of bed, cursing.
Itandje had already handed over to Bailey, who said, "I tried calling you, but you switched your 'piece off."
"Yeah." Shah ignored her accusatory tone. "I'm using this prepaid one." He called her 'piece, and hung up when she answered. "I'll use it until the prepay runs out. Then switch to another one."
Bailey raised her eyebrows. "Bit, uh, spy-tech, isn't it?"
"We didn't have a leak in the Department, then?" Shah said. "And Kotian hasn't got country-fulls of money, and a grudge against me?"
"OK." Bailey nodded slowly, mulling it over. "You'll let the cap know?"
"OK," Shah said. "But only him. I'd appreciate it if you handle any other calls for me. Can we do that?"
"We can."
Shah switched on his regular eyepiece, and put a divert instruction on it to Bailey's number, then switched it off again. "Done."
He spent much of the next hour waiting anxiously, first for a chance to brief van Doorn, who nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense. We still got nothing formally tying Kotian to the threats and attempts on your partners, we can't assume he's unconnected, and – on a personal level – I'd be mightily pissed if anything happened to Marietetski and you." Van Doorn looked up. "You know they turned him off."
Shah nodded. "That's where I was when the ten-eighteen came through."
"Funeral's next week, day to be confirmed. We're all attending it. And don't worry about the hotel and phones. I'll sort them out."
"Thanks," Shah said, keeping an eye on the nearest interview room in which two familiar figures sat with Stickel.
"You got somewhere to be?"
"I wanted to speak to Leslyn and Doug, Cap. I've had no chance to check they're all right, let alone…" He sighed, wishing he knew what to say to them when the time came.
Van Doorn said gently, "They'll get counseling Pete. They should recover." He added, "Without wanting to downplay what happened, they were pretty lucky. Doug took a beating, and Leslyn got scratched up and cuts. But no bones were broken, and no one was killed."
"Not for want of trying." Shah shook his head. "Maybe we have been lucky. In forty-plus years, my job has never brought grief like this down on them – until now. Maybe they're right to want to get out."
"And ever since I can remember, people have said it never used to be this bad."
When Doug and Leslyn finally emerged from the interview room, Doug moved more like a man of ninety than sixty, while Leslyn stared round with darting eyes, jumping when someone dropped a box of files.
"Hey," Shah said. "Come and sit for a few minutes."
Leslyn looked at the legal counsel who'd accompanied them. Shah recognized her as one of the regular pool used by the city. The counselor said, "I assume you're asking as a spouse, not a policeman?"
Shah nodded, and the woman waved them to seats that she gathered from other desks.
"I'm sorry that this happened." Shah reached out for Leslyn, but she shied away.
"I've had enough, Pete." Leslyn blinked, her voice unsteady. She grabbed Doug, who drew a sharp intake of breath. Shah felt a pang. Once she would have reached for him, "Doug and I are leaving New York. Immediately. We – we're going upstate. I can't bear to be here any longer than we have to be."
Shah glanced at Doug, who sat stiffly in his chair. His face was already a patchwork of livid red welts, and even a purple one. "You know that you'll lose touch with her when she becomes post-human, don't you?"
Doug nodded, even though it was clearly an effort. His jaw was wired up, so that it was hard for him to speak. "I know," he still managed to say. "But we have until then."
They made to leave. "Doug," Shah said. The other man turned back to face him. "Just wanted to say thanks… for protecting her. For everything."
Doug blinked, his eyes misting up. "Thanks," he ground out. "Good luck."
LXIV
The call came through as Shah was wolfing a Danish down at his desk for lunch. "Help me," a woman said. For a heart-lurching moment, Shah thought it was Aurora. Then he glimpsed lowlights in the blonde hair. Before he could answer, his own voice came down the line: "You won't stop me." It went dead. Before they could lock onto the eyepiece's signal, that too died.
Bailey said, "He or she's switched it off."
"He," Shah said. Bailey said nothing.
They spent an anguished forty minutes rousing every available unit on the Upper East Side – which was as much as they could narrow the signal – to look for the woman.
"He knows what he's doing," Valentine said. An earnest man who wore old-fashioned spectacles into which his eyepiece had been set, he was the head of the NYPD's under-funded, understrength, undermanned Surveillance Department. "That area has fewer cameras than any other part of New York."
Shah snorted. "Cameras wouldn't stop him, any
way. All they'd do is finger the perp when we had time to go through the footage properly."
Valentine stared at Shah. "You're right," he said at last. "But if the facial recognition software throws up a match, we could get officers to the spot. Maybe even in time."
When the call came through, it took Shah a second to react. "Her ID's back online!"
Valentine was already on the line to Comms. "We're still triangulating. Keep her talking as long as you can, Pete."
Shah swallowed, licked his parched lips, and connected.
"Shah," the woman mumbled, as if she had something in her mouth, but her avatar gave no clues as to whether she was hurt.
"Yes? Who–"
"Your bitch is next. Aurora." Her voice broke; "Please–" the line went dead again.
"Damn, damn, damn!" Valentine yelled, then said, "How near did you get the trace? Not the Upper East Side? Then where, dammit?" Shah couldn't ever remember hearing the little man swear before. "OK, OK," Valentine fumed. "Move everyone toward the lower end."
They spent the next forty minutes swinging all units southward, even managing to borrow a Federal helicopter, something that normally took days to arrange.
The phone rang again.
It was a voice-only line. Shah shivered as he heard himself say, "You got the wrong man. Did you think when you killed him, that you ended it?"
Shah said. "Don't hang up–" He grimaced. "Hello? Hello? Dammit!"
"He's left it on!" Valentine said.
A few minutes later a passing patrol found the eyepiece, dumped in a trashcan back near where the original call had come from. "The fucker doubled back," Shah said. "You sure that that second call came from the lower end?"
"Positive as we can be. We didn't have enough time to zero in on it completely, but we narrowed it down to a ten-block radius around Battery Park."
Shah called up the map on his eyepiece. "So if he doubled back, he probably went along Roosevelt Drive?"
"That, or he took a short-cut. Should we assume he's in a private vehicle?"
"Have to. No cabbie would haul a kidnap victim round Lower Manhattan."
"Unless he is a cabbie," Bailey said.
"Nope, it's Kotian." Shah ticked off fingers; "Aurora; Leslyn; someone who looks like Aurora; what do they have in common? Me."
Van Doorn called Grunwald on a group line. "Do we have enough to take Kotian in?"
Grunwald pulled a face. "No. It's a house of cards. Kotian's lawyer will shred us in seconds. Get me something solid, and I'll get you a warrant faster than you can say killer."
"What about Aurora?" Shah said.
"She's under observation," van Doorn interrupted.
Grunwald said, "She came to my office this morning. She'll be OK as long as she does nothing stupid."
Thirty minutes later, another call came in, this time from the river police. "We got a body in the water. Looks like your missing woman, though it's hard to tell, she's been beaten up so bad." The officer cut in the feed of the missing woman being pulled from the water, and turned over so that she was face up.
Bailey said, "Is it my imagination? Or is she beaten the same way that the other girl –that was meant to be Aurora – was?"
They gathered in the squad room: Shah, Bailey, van Doorn, Grunwald, Valentine and Lee the profiler. "The victim is Lindsay Wayne," van Doorn said, sending them her details.
Any age's too young, Shah thought, but thirty-five? He was glad that he didn't have to tell her partner and children that she wouldn't be coming home from lunch with a group of ex-colleagues. Someone else had that unenviable task.
"No record, no questionable activities," van Doorn continued. "She seems to have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Grunwald asked Valentine, "What do we have on the kidnap trail?"
"Far as we can tell she was abducted in Yorkville. Traffic analyzed the footage. See the kidnapper's car appear here, and here. The perp's wearing a hood, so plenty of people noticed, simply because it was incongruous enough to draw attention."
"He wanted to be noticed," Shah said. "In his mind if he can convince enough people the Ripper's still out there, then he's exonerated Sunny."
"Conjecture," Grunwald said.
"But logical," Lee said. "His interviews have indicated that he sees his son as an extension of himself. So in exonerating Sunny, he exonerates himself."
Grunwald shrugged, told Valentine, "Go on."
"He drove down the old Long Island Expressway at eleven oh six to dump the body in Battery Park. We got people coming forward to provide info, but it's lacking in quality."
Van Doorn interrupted the lament. "We found her car?"
Valentine said, "Dumped by the Queensboro Bridge. CSU are going through it, but the perp knew what he was doing. Unless we get luckier than we have so far we'll find nothing."
"But surely…" Bailey began. She stopped, lapsing into thought.
"Finish it any time you like," van Doorn said.
Bailey sighed and looked at Shah. "You said she looked enough like Aurora that you thought it was her."
"Only for a moment."
"But you thought it was her," Bailey insisted.
"Sure."
"So she wasn't picked at random."
The others nodded. Grunwald said, "So?"
"So she's going to be on all the surveillance cameras – and so will the person who was following her? We work backwards, rather than forwards."
Grunwald gazed at van Doorn, who sat with eyes narrowed. "You know what you're asking?" He said. "CSU alone take nine or ten days for inquiries, so everyone makes all requests urgent, to speed things up – now even genuinely urgent ones take five or six days."
"Uh-huh."
"Even with a population way down on the city's peak of eight and a half to only three million, we still had over two hundred murders last year."
"Stop it or I'm going to cry," Grunwald said. "You know what'll happen if the newsfeeds get hold of the fact that a woman was snatched and killed because she looked like someone else? They'll slaughter us. You have to get people in numbers onto this."
"I didn't say we wouldn't do it, but we can't leave the rest of the city uncovered. I've been talking to the precinct heads to get them to put what people they can onto cam-analysis as back up to the facial recognition programs."
"OK," Grunwald said. "If you get any problems let me know, and I'll put my biggest boots on and kick the crap out of any precinct head who's less than completely co-operative."
Shah tried to put the thought of Grunwald in boots out of his head. "What do you want me to do?"
"We'll set the facial recognition programs to Lindsay Wayne," van Doorn said. "Go through the shit-loads of footage that they'll throw up. Bailey, you manage the current cases."
"How sure are we that this isn't the real Ripper?" Grunwald said. "Could we be wrong in assuming that it was Sunny Kotian, or Sunny Kotian ripping alone, as we have done?"
Lee coughed. "I'd agree with Shah's assessment; this is a different operation from the Ripper," he said. "He worked anonymously. The assaults escalated, but there was no contact with the police." He added, "I know this assault mirrors a woman being beaten to death, but those were specific circumstances."
"So how is this different from that one?" Grunwald said, looking skeptical.
"As far as we can tell, the earlier victim's trigger was as much proximity as resemblance. She looked like Aurora Debonis, but more importantly, she was where she was. This one looks much more like her, and has clearly been stalked. The original killing was done with minimum fuss. This is loud, selfpublicizing. The killer is incredibly conflicted. He's superficially confident, even taunting us, but I suspect that in some ways he wants to be caught – or at least identified. He's saying 'come and catch me if you can.' "
"So what does all that mean?" Grunwald said.
Lee said slowly, weighing every word, "I get the impression… that if you confront him and put him in a situation where
… the evidence is overwhelming, he'll admit to it. Almost welcome admitting to it." He added quickly, "But you need the physical evidence – as long as he has wiggle room, he'll deny it."
"Are we done?" Grunwald said.
Van Doorn said, "I think so. Let's get to it, everyone. Let's nail this bastard."
Shah sent messages off to the other precincts, requesting every feed they had, giving Lindsay Wayne's details for them to marry up in the vain hope that it would reduce the tidal wave of dross coming his way. He had no illusions of the likelihood of that. He knew that he would just send everything, unfiltered. At the end of the regulation forty-five minutes the timer interrupted him. For once he was glad to come up for a breather from the cumulative erosion to his self of other people's thoughts and cares.