by Ryk E. Spoor
I nodded, then remembered she couldn't see it. "I get you. No one who knew him actually saw him from any point after . . . when?"
"Dinnertime. He went off to the lab to finish some notework on our finds, and since we were already getting ready to pull out, the rest of us were more into relaxing a bit."
"So if someone got to him on board your ship, they could've just left the notes and then used his card to buy the tickets."
"Right."
"Were the notes in his handwriting?"
I could almost hear a shrug in her tone. "Could've been. I wasn't studying them hard then. Since, well, they don't look quite right, but then if he was in a hurry and upset . . . anyway, the police will probably be able to say for sure."
"Anything else odd?"
Again, she hesitated. "Not at the time. But . . . well, we brought our finds to RLAHA when we arrived—"
" 'RLAHA'?"
"Sorry, the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art." Mandy clarified. "And just the other day they found something very odd. We'd uncovered this thing—some of us think it was a sarcophagus, others that it was a vault box, others some kind of storage chest for holy relics—but whatever it was, it was big, had a lid, and seemed hollow. Anyway, RLAHA and our team start going over it so we can date it, open it properly and all, and what do we find? It's apparently already been opened—in the air."
"Dr. O'Connell wouldn't have done that on his own, maybe out of curiosity?"
Her voice was somewhat offended, somewhat tolerant of my ignorance (partial ignorance, actually—I thought I knew the answer, but it didn't hurt to ask). "Mr. Wood, no archaeologist worth his or her degree would even think of it. We're not playing Indiana Jones up here. Such an object is like a time capsule, but a very, very delicate one. Open it under the wrong conditions and you destroy more than half of what it can tell you."
"I understand. Was this sarcophagus, or whatever, one of the things you discussed at the UAR conference in Florida?"
There was a long pause. "I'm a bit confused, Mr. Wood. I wasn't at the UAR conference—Dr. O'Connell intended to go himself. He was going to confirm his travel plans with them either the night he disappeared or the next night, in fact. Naturally, that never happened . . ." Her voice trailed off, then came back, " . . . but it is a bit odd . . . I did get a letter a few days ago from Dr. Rodriguez of the UAR which was discussing some of our finds. I thought it a bit odd, but I hadn't really read it carefully yet."
"You didn't attend the UAR conference in Venice, Florida?" I repeated.
"No, I did not, Mr. Wood. Why?"
I looked down at the flyer in my hand, printed up from the UAR site. "Because, according to the UAR, not only were you there, you, not Dr. O'Connell, presented a quick but fascinating overview of what you had found," I answered. "Ms. Gennaro, would you do me a favor? Fax me a picture of yourself, so I can show it to some of the attendees?"
She was silent a moment, apparently still trying to absorb what I'd said. Then, "What . . . ? Yes, yes, of course. If someone's running around pretending to be me . . . well, I don't know what to think. Your number?"
I gave her my fax number—actually an e-fax number, one that would send the fax as an e-mail so I could retrieve it anywhere.
"Will there be anything else?"
"No, not at the moment. You've been immensely helpful, Ms. Gennaro."
"You're welcome. Could I trouble you to at least let me know what you find out?"
I hesitated. What the hell, I could certainly figure out a bowdlerized version which would be close enough for her to hear. "I certainly will."
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 his 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, mainly, with a fairly 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' web page."
On the screen was a large 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."
62
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 yet. The question is where the hell did it go after the convention? Plenty of people saw her there, but afterwards?"
Baker shook his head. "Nothing. We've been around with photos, checkin' the stores all through the area. Couple 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, overall, just like we do—but they ain't like us in that area. Me, I could've polished off Mansfield in eight or nine bites, bones an' all, but the Mirrorkillers don't do that."
"But then why the hell is it leaving any of the 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 people doing the interaction have to be human, or we at least have to have humans who can do their 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 in fact 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 little 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 now . . . after I give 'em a handshake m'self."
63
I put down the phone, sighed, and sank into one of the chairs, toying with my just-finished duplicates of my CryWolf glasses. One advantage of working for the Wolves was that I wasn't actually restricted in movements 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 said, 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 gone. 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 stopped. She knew what I was going to do before I did it, 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 you wanted to discuss in non-secured public areas. Even though it was late at night, there was always the possibility of an uninvolved traveller dropping by at the wrong moment. He hung a "back in 15 minutes" sign up and we went into one of the back rooms. "Okay, how can I help?"
I studied him. "First, let me congratulate you," I said, to his sparkling image 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. "God-damn. 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 more 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; it made it look like someone was out hunting Wolves, in the conventional way. Once I'd clearly weathered that threat—when Karl Weimar left my room with me still alive, in short—it was clear 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 Shit. 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—almost 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 had been expected to be away for some time, so you'd had latitude. And you'd already gotten it figured out. Everyone knew you couldn't go back to the same 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 keys to unravelling this puzzle until recently, or I might have caught on sooner. Certainly if I'd just been going by your movements en route here, Vic would have been high on the suspect list; you're in 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 that sometimes have to be quickly moved around so as to be the interfaces with humans that 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—that is, the day before I arrived—Vic had to go out and be counterman at one of the other hotels. Someone, of course, had to take his place here—a Wolf who had changed himself to look just like Vic! You, of course, noticed the substitution, and that was when the whole idea hit you. You immediately killed him and took his place, now having the guise of Vic the Human to work from. Now that 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. That's why you had to destroy the other bodies, to hide the fact that otherwise there'd be quite a collection of Vic Spangler statues around. Once I had the idea, all I had to do was ask Baker if you were a collaborator—I said it as though I assumed you were a Wolf, he corrected me—and check a couple timing issues with your assumed ID."