by Jeff Edwards
“Am I getting warm?”
“Ice cold. Try Alexander.”
“Alexander? David Alexander Stalin. How do you get Joe out of that?”
I cocked my head just enough to relieve a crick in my neck. “John and I used to hang with this kid named Kevin Rojenco. His grandfather was always telling us horror stories about Joseph Stalin, this Soviet dictator who lived during the early twentieth century.”
“Soviet? You mean Russian? I thought they were a monarchy, with a King or a Czar or something.”
“They are,” I said. “But before that, they tried out just about every kind of government you can imagine. In the end, I guess they went back to what worked the best. Anyway, Kevin thought it would be funny to call me Joe. It just sort of caught on.”
“Sarge, and Joe. That’s two nicknames. Any others that I should know about?”
I shook my head. “Just the two.”
“Hmmm...” Sonja said. “Alexander... Alex. Can I call you that”
“No.”
“Okay. Alex.”
“What’s your middle name?”
“Oh no,” she said. “I’m not telling.”
“Hey,” I said. “Fair is fair. I showed you mine, now you show me yours.”
“I’ll be more than happy to show you mine any time you want, but I am NOT telling you my middle name.”
“Fine,” I said. “Be that way. You forget, Lady, I’m a professional snoop. Not only am I going to poke around in your personal affairs until I find out your middle name, but I’m going to bill you for it.”
“You’ll never find out,” Sonja whispered. “It’s the most carefully guarded secret of our time.”
“I’ll find out,” I said. “I’ll find out all of your dirty little secrets.”
“You’re not going to like some of them,” she said.
“Which ones?”
“Well, for one thing, I’m really eighty-five years old.”
“Oh, that. I already knew all about that. You carry it pretty well, but your age is starting to show.”
“Oh yeah? Well how about this? I was born a man. I’m really a transsexual,” she said in a teasing voice.
I made a show of yawning; she wasn’t the only one who could tease. “I knew about that too. You’ve got a huge Adam’s apple. That’s a dead give-away, every time.”
“Huge? Is that right?” She dug her fingers into my waist in search of my ticklish spots. It didn’t take her long to find them.
I retaliated, quickly finding a place right under her ribs that drove her crazy.
It was shaping up into a tickle-fight of epic proportions when the phone rang.
I called for a truce.
She lay back on the sofa in a state of mock exhaustion. “Okay. You’re safe for now, but I’m not done with you yet, Mister.”
My breath was still coming hard when I answered the phone. I took it on visual.
“David?”
It took me a couple of seconds to recognize the caller. Lisa Caldwell had been beaten. Badly.
Her right eye was swollen completely shut and the left was nearly as bad. From the swelling and trickle of blood, I guessed that her nose was broken. Her lips were puffy and the lower one was split near the left corner of her mouth.
“David,” she raised a plastic bag full of ice to the side of her face, “If you’re not too busy, I could use a little company.”
“Jesus, Lisa. Where are you?”
She touched her bruised cheek and winced. “I’m at home. Colosseum Apartments, unit thirty-four seventeen.”
“Have you called the police?”
“No, David. No police.”
“Lisa, you can’t just...”
“No! No police and no hospitals. Please.”
“You lie down,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
Lisa nodded feebly and terminated the connection.
I grabbed the Blackhart and my jacket out of the hall closet.
Sonja walked up behind me as I was strapping on the shoulder holster. “Can I come along? I know some first aid.”
“There’s a first aid kit under the sink in the hall bathroom.”
She went after it. Over her shoulder she asked, “Have you got a flashlight? A small one, if possible.”
“House, where’s the small flashlight?”
“In the center kitchen drawer.”
I went to the kitchen and grabbed it, flicked it on to test the batteries.
I met Sonja at the door. “Do we need anything else?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s go.”
Colosseum Apartments turned out to be one of those faceless apartment stacks in Park La Brea, just about in the center of Dome 6. Dreary slabs of featureless gray concrete, devoid of life or character.
Sonja rang the bell.
I stood with my back to the apartment door and scanned the area. I didn’t know who had roughed up Lisa, or even where it had happened, but if they were around somewhere, I wanted to know about it.
Lisa opened the door herself. It had three different types of alarms.
I wondered why she hadn’t let the apartment AI answer the door.
The swelling in her face was worse. She leaned heavily against the wall without speaking.
“I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “I brought a friend.”
“No, not at all. Come in.” Her voice was weak, muffled by her bruised lips. Even so, her tone made it apparent that she did mind.
I couldn’t help that. Ordinarily, I’d cut off my own arm before I’d spring an unexpected guest on someone. But Sonja claimed to have some medical training, and I figured that was a shade more important than social protocol.
Lisa stumbled as she backed away from the door to let us in. I grabbed her shoulders to keep her from falling and half-led/half-carried her to the couch. Not an easy task; she was a big woman.
She lay down very carefully, breathing in short cautious sips, testing for pain. There was no sign of the reactionary cringe that usually signals cracked ribs.
“Who did this to you?”
Sonja squeezed the top of my shoulder. “That can wait.”
She slid between me and the couch. “Lisa, my name is Sonja. We met once at my brother Mike’s apartment. Do you remember?”
Lisa’s eyes were closed. She nodded weakly.
“Good. Now, let’s have a look at you.”
Sonja’s voice was confident, her movements gentle but purposeful. “Can you open your eyes for me? Okay, that’s good. Pick a spot on the ceiling and stare at it. I’m going to shine a little light in your eyes, okay?”
I’d had doctors do that same test on me a hundred times and I’ve never understood it. “What are you checking for?” I asked.
“Several things. Uneven pupil dilation might mean a concussion. I’m also checking for hyphema.”
Lisa blinked. “Hi-what?”
“Hyphema. Blood trapped behind the cornea, the clear part of the eye that covers the iris. If blood collects there, it could mean a detached cornea.”
She snapped off the light and squeezed Lisa’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, I don’t see any serious signs. Now, follow my finger with your eyes. Good. Keep watching it.”
Lisa tracked Sonja’s finger. “How do you know so much about this stuff?”
“I was sort of a doctor, once.”
“Sort of a doctor?” I asked. “How is it possible to be sort of a doctor?”
Sonja glared at me for a second. “I don’t want to go into this right now.”
She turned back to Lisa. “I’m going to have to touch your face,” she said. “I need to check for fractures, especially around the cheekbones. It’s going to hurt a little.”
Lisa sucked in a deep breath and held it. “I’m ready.”
Sonja’s medical training was obviously a lot more extensive than my rusty first aid skills.
I didn’t want to stand over her shoulder, so I passed the time giving Lisa’s apartment
the once-over. What the exterior lacked in character, the interior more than made up for. About half of the available wall space was covered by fake walnut shelves. The shelves were packed with book chips and little ceramic figurines.
I looked around the room, skimming book chip titles. Maybe a third of them were work-related: information systems theory, programming tutorials, that sort of thing. The rest were erotic romance novels with titles like Love’s Forbidden Journey and Stronger Pounds Thy Heart.
The figurines turned out to be salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of animals, a lot of them extinct. Two horses, two dogs, two elephants, two monkeys, two tigers, two turtles, two kangaroos, two of just about everything. The pepper shaker giraffe had a cellophane tape bandage around his neck.
A corner of the front room was dominated by a work desk, complete with two computers and a massive stack of printer hardcopy.
Like the rest of the room, the desk was tidy. What little clutter there was looked too carefully arranged to be accidental. Something told me that it was pseudo-clutter, designed to relieve the impression of compulsive neatness.
“David.”
I turned around.
Sonja held out a clear plastic bag full of water. “The ice is melted. Find the refrigerator and get some more, please.”
I took the bag and went in search of the kitchen. The apartment wasn’t big enough to hide it from me for long.
I opened the seal at the top of the plastic bag and poured the cold water down the sink.
My foot bumped against something on the floor, a blue plastic bowl. There were two of them, both tucked halfway under the little eave where the bottom of the kitchen cabinets overhung the floor. One of the bowls was empty, the other half full of water.
On the counter top by the sink was a strange looking plastic rack like the one my grandmother used to stack her dishes in to dry.
The refrigerator had one of those novelty voice boxes. When I opened the door to the freezer, the box oinked like a pig and asked if I was eating again.
The ice maker was hidden behind four cardboard tubs of gourmet ice cream and a stack of dieter’s frozen dinners.
Why did Lisa bother with dieting at all? If she got her DNA tweaked a little, she could eat anything she wanted and be skinny as a rail. Was she allergic to viral DNA manipulation, like John? Or was it something else? A religious conviction, maybe?
Maggie had been that way about organ transplants. She’d been born in New Canaan, a Luddite colony down around Oceanside. One of those reclaim-the-Earth-smash-the-machines religious cults that lived like pioneers from the 1800’s, and tried to breed pollution resistant crops.
Her father was a lay-preacher, a real hellfire-and-brimstone type who firmly believed that he was destined to sit at the right hand of God.
Maggie had grown up hating the Spartan lifestyle of the Luddites, trying to claw an existence out of the barren soil with only the kind of tools that they could make by hand. By her tenth birthday, she’d watched a dozen relatives and friends rot from cancers brought on by solar radiation and the carcinogen-laced air, dying because their suspicion of technology left them without the vaccines and treatments that could have saved them.
At nineteen, she’d run away to Los Angeles, into the arms of everything that she had been raised to fear and hate.
By the time I met her, she had shaken off most of her father’s teachings, but she had somehow held on to his conviction that organ transplants—even blood transfusions—were the blackest of mortal sins.
Could Lisa have the same sort of hang up about DNA manipulation? I didn’t know her well enough to even guess.
I filled the bag with ice and took it back to Sonja. She laid it gently across Lisa’s eyes.
Lisa flinched when the cold plastic touched her face. “Is my nose broken?”
“I don’t think so,” Sonja said. “It’s pretty swollen, but it doesn’t seem to be displaced and the bleeding has stopped.”
She met my eyes for a second and then looked back down to Lisa. “I think this is the work of a professional.”
“I’ll vouch for that,” Lisa said. “They seemed pretty competent from where I was standing.”
Sonja said, “I’m trying to say this looks like very careful work. A lot of bruising, some blood, but no real damage.”
“That’s not how it feels from in here,” Lisa said.
Sonja touched Lisa’s cheek. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I know you’re hurting. And I know you’re scared. But I can’t find any sign of broken bones, and you don’t have any of the classic symptoms of concussion or internal bleeding.”
“So I’m going to be okay?”
“Well,” Sonja said. “I’d really like to get you to a hospital, where they can run a full med-scan. But, based on what I can see, I think you’re going to be fine.”
Lisa let out a breath that was heavy with relief. “Thank you.”
I found myself breathing a little easier too.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Sonja said. “I still need to do a bit of patchwork here and there. You might decide I’m a pretty lousy doctor before I get done.”
Lisa raised her hand to steady the ice bag. The hand trembled slightly. “I did what you wanted, David. I ran that search you asked about.”
I swallowed. I found myself hoping that this wasn’t my fault, that Lisa had been the victim of a random mugging. I prayed that she hadn’t been beaten like this because of some stupid little errand I’d sent her on.
I tried to keep the quaver out of my voice. “What did you find?”
Lisa coughed. “Pretty much what you expected.”
Another cough. “A bunch of news articles: six girls over about eight months, the last one three years ago. The methods were pretty much identical to Aztec. Similar murder weapon. The girls were cut up pretty badly. The media nicknamed the killer Osiris. Egyptian mythology, means the Judge of the Dead. I looked it up.”
“What happened to the killer?”
“This forty year old construction worker named Russell Carlisle walked into a police station and confessed to all six Osiris killings. Then he pulled a bomb out of his pocket and blew himself up. Wasn’t a very big bomb, but he held it right up to his own head, so it did the trick. Made a hell of a mess, but nobody else really got hurt. His confession contained a lot of information that only the killer could have known. The killings stopped after he died. Case closed, just like you said.”
“What city was it in?” I asked.
“Right here,” Lisa said.
“What?” From the tone of Sonja’s voice, she was as surprised as I was. “Los Angeles?”
“The good-old City of Angels,” Lisa said.
“That’s unbelievable,” I said. “I’m not surprised that your search turned up another string of murders, but I sure as hell didn’t expect it to be in my own back yard.” I shook my head. “Did you find any other cases that fit the profile?”
“Uh-uh. Just the one. How’d I do?”
“You did good, Lisa. You did real good.”
She smiled wearily behind her ice blindfold.
I had to ask. I didn’t really want to know the answer, but I had to ask. “Who did this to you, Lisa? Why did they do it?”
Lisa sighed heavily. “If I’d just done my homework assignment, like you told me, I’d have been okay. But I had to go for the extra credit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I started thinking,” she said, “about the questions you’d asked me, and things began to line up in my head. Kurt Rieger’s thing for little girls. Aztec’s thing for little girls. I thought I could see what you were leaning towards.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I ran another search. I scanned company records for Rieger’s itinerary on the dates of all the Aztec and Osiris murders. I looked for patterns. I figured he could have faked a few alibis, but not twenty.”
“And?”
“He came up clean,” Lisa sa
id. “Rieger was in Europe at a trade conference for two of the Aztec killings. He was the keynote speaker at a fund raiser during one of the murders; about four hundred people can vouch for that one. He was on vacation in Jamaica for another one. I can account for his whereabouts during nine of the Aztec killings and three of the Osiris murders.”
Sonja dabbed the bloody corner of Lisa’s mouth with a sterile swab. “Couldn’t company records be altered?” she asked.
Lisa jerked when the disinfectant stung her ravaged lip. “I thought of that. I scanned his travel visas through North American and European Immigration. He’s also featured in a few page-six articles in various trade journals. Some of them detail his location on certain dates. You might not be convinced, David, but I am. Rieger may be a pervert, but he’s definitely not Aztec or Osiris.”
“Okay,” I said. “You still haven’t told me who did this to you.”
“Rieger’s goons,” she whispered. “Two of them. I must have tripped a few warning flags when I pulled his files. Just because he’s not your killer doesn’t mean there aren’t any skeletons in his closet.”
“Did you recognize the goons?” I wanted names. Somebody had to pay for this.
“They were your typical wall-to-wall-muscle, blonde haired, blue-eyed Aryan Supermen. You know, Hitler Youths. I didn’t recognize either of them, but I’m certain they were from Gebhardt-Wulkan Internal Security. They caught up with me on the Lev and beat the hell out of me. They took my purse and the data chips I was carrying to make it look like robbery, but they made their real motives pretty clear. They said I was screwing with things that could get me hurt, bad.”
Jesus, this really was my fault.
Lisa didn’t seem to think so. “David, I’m sorry. If I’d listened to you, none of this would have happened.”
I sighed. “No, Lisa. This is my doing. I knew what the stakes were, and you didn’t. I never should have involved you.”
Sonja stood up and stretched her back. “I’ve done all the damage I can do. Are you sure I can’t talk you into going to a hospital?”
“No,” Lisa whispered. “No hospitals.”
“Why the hell not?”
I hadn’t meant for it to come out like that. I was getting angry. Not at Lisa. At myself. At two faceless thugs who had beaten up a defenseless woman on a train.