by L. A. Graf
“Oh, hell.” Sikes must have smelled it, too, and realized what it meant. He stopped beside George when they reached Scott Free’s room, both of them listening to the ominous blank silence within. In the rooms to either side, the muffled sound of voices showed that this time the attack hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“I’ll get one of the policemen at the elevator,” said Sikes, and disappeared. He came back a moment later with a trim black woman, sharp-eyed and alert despite the hour.
“Did anyone come past you up the elevator or the stairs?” George asked her, although he was already sure what her answer would be.
“No one.” She reached for her passkey, frowning when she caught the smell seeping under the door. “And I didn’t doze off either—Bosserman and I played cards to stay awake.” The key turned in the lock, but the door only swung a few inches before it stopped, caught by the length of security chain. George exchanged glances with Sikes, then reached out and caught the chain in one list, ripping it out of the wall with one easy shove. He heard the policewoman’s breath suck in behind him, but he knew it wasn’t the display of strength that had startled her.
Like his wife before him, Scott Free had left most of his blood upon the carpet. Unlike his wife, the rest of his body wasn’t visible. But the shattered frame of the casement window and the clear pink stains dribbling down the glass showed where he had gone.
C H A P T E R 9
“OH, MAN, THIS is so bogus! I didn’t do nothing!”
Sikes sat on the tabletop, his tennis shoes wedged between the slats in the chair back in front of him, and the chair itself tipped until it balanced on two legs beneath the table. The police observation room was darkened and smelled acridly of smoke; more than a pack of cigarettes lay stubbed out around an overcrowded ashtray, the pitiful glow of the last four butts burning the stale ash orange-gray. Sikes had been watching the questioning long enough for the cop with him to puff through every one of those lousy cigarettes. It was enough to make Sikes wish he’d never quit smoking in the first place.
“What if I told you your buddy already admitted to getting you into the hotel?” the cop on the other side of the window snarled. “He’s gonna roll over and tell us everything about you.”
The Purist seated at the dirty, scarred-up table shook his head, but Sikes could see the beginning of desperate tears in his eyes despite the two-way glass between them. “Man, he’s lying. I wasn’t even with him when he delivered that message, you know? It ain’t fair.” The cops had given him a cigarette, too, and he lifted it now with shaking fingers and tried unsteadily to fit it between his lips. “We just go to his house every Friday and talk about hating slags, that’s all . . . that’s all . . .”
Sikes sensed more than saw someone move up beside him in the dark room. “And Hitler just wanted to improve the economy,” Protzberg commented dryly. A slim white hand slipped into Sikes’s line of sight, offering an unlit cigarette between two fingers.
He took it from her without looking away from the glass. “Thanks.” The chair seat beneath him was already littered with the guts of a half dozen other unsmoked cigarettes. He started in on this one by snapping it in half with one hand, prying out the filter and flicking it at the glass. “How much longer you gonna grill this guy?”
Protzberg’s face flashed into being in the glow of her lighter flame. “Until he tells us something useful.” She went dark again, and Sikes heard her breathe a stream of smoke past the cigarette’s crimson end.
“You’re gonna be here all week then,” he told her, crumbling up the last of his own unlit smoke. “This guy doesn’t know shit.” He turned away from the observation glass at last, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkened room behind him.
Protzberg snorted an unhappy laugh. “Working with Newcomers makes you psychic, too?” she asked. “Or have you just got a low opinion of Purist incentive?”
“A little of both.” He pulled closed the curtains between them and the questioning room, then groped his way toward the light switch by the door. “I don’t think that guy could find his ass with both hands. He’s scared shitless of your boy in there, he doesn’t have so much as his mother for an alibi, and he hasn’t contradicted his story even once in the four hours you’ve had him in there.” The lights bloomed before he reached the switch, and he blinked at Protzberg through stinging eyes while she toed open the door to let in air from the hallway. “This guy could have watched a TV show and had a better idea how to cover himself on a murder charge. I don’t think he did it.”
Protzberg took another drag on her cigarette, then crushed it out amidst all the others despite having smoked less than an inch of it. “Then I guess it’s a good thing you don’t work for this department, isn’t it?”
Sikes resisted an urge to kick the closest chair across the room. “Hey, lady, I’m the one who has to deal with these jack-offs every day, remember? I’m trying to help you here.”
“You don’t deal with these jack-offs,” Protzberg said, leaning her shoulder against the doorjamb. “You deal with jack-offs from L.A. Don’t make the mistake of thinking those two populations have anything to do with each other.”
“They have to,” Sikes told her. “Whoever tore up Scott and Sandi Free knew enough about Newcomers to do them in without leaving so much as a drop of human blood on the scene. That means experience with the real thing, not just reading about them in books. Newcomers would have creamed any human who wasn’t completely prepared.” He shook his head, jamming both hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. “Somebody from the L.A. Purist crowd is using your locals for a front. They’re involved, sure, but they aren’t doing it.”
Protzberg toyed with the badge on the waistband of her jeans while she thought. Sikes waited for her, respecting the brainwork of another officer, “You know what I’m thinking?”
He made an interrogatory noise.
“I’m thinking maybe Ross Vegas’s kidnapping is just a setup for the rest of this.”
Sikes frowned. “Of course it is. You saw the ransom demand.”
“I don’t mean killing Newcomers in place of a ransom. I mean keeping us distracted about what’s really up, what we’re really after.” She pursed her lips in grim annoyance, focusing again on Sikes. “Five’ll get you ten Vegas is already dead. They’re just hoping we waste our time trying to figure out how to save him while they pick off your buddies, one by one.”
“Why bother kidnapping him, then?” Sikes wanted to know. “Why not just bump him off in his sleep to begin with?”
Protzberg shrugged. “Because then it’s just a murder. With him kidnapped, it’s a puzzle. Murders, you react to—puzzles, you solve.”
Sikes grumbled to himself and started pacing. “I dunno.” Good as it sounded, something about Protzberg’s theory didn’t sit quite right with him. “I think there’s some piece we’re missing, something that explains what Vegas has to do with all this. We just don’t know what it is yet.”
“More Newcomer ESP?” Protzberg asked, obviously skeptical.
Sikes grinned at her. “Twenty years of cop intuition.” He sidled past her and into the hall. “Which isn’t worth the doughnuts I spent on it if I don’t listen to it every once in a while.”
Protzberg let him get almost to the outside door before calling, “So where the hell are you going now?” Sikes zipped up his jacket as he backed out the door. “To see if I can’t dig up the missing Purist in our equation.”
The Purists had printed their flyers in bright Day-Glo magenta. Sikes wasn’t sure if they meant the color to entice people to puke, but it certainly had that effect on him. Maybe it was supposed to attach bad connotations to the words slag, spongehead, and ordained by God. All Sikes knew was that the verbiage, layout, and mental garbage were almost identical to the flyers fluttering around half of L.A.’s Slagtown. Maybe the Purist Party would be making more headway if they bothered to pay a real advertising agency to produce their racist PR.
Sikes folded the flyer in
half again to keep his eyes from continually glancing over the hateful words. He’d been handed the Purist tract by a mittened teenage girl when he left the police station three hours ago. She’d reminded him of his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in more than a year now, so he’d smiled warmly and thanked her for the paper before stopping to consider what it was. When it finally occurred to him, he’d smashed the flyer into a magenta wad between both hands. Then he stopped himself from throwing it away when he realized the opportunity it gave him.
There were more copy services in downtown Pittsburgh than Sikes would ever have guessed. He started from the cop shop and worked his way out and riverward, stopping only once to check a pay phone for a directory or yellow pages. No luck. Apparently social miscreants in Pittsburgh were as evil on phone books as they were in the West. After that, it turned into solid legwork, simply walking each street, then turning the corner and coming back from a block further down, reading the store signs and taking his bearings from the tall downtown Hilton by the rivers.
He was surprised how happy the tedious activity made him. It certainly wasn’t the weather—the damp overcast and chill gusts cut through his leather jacket the way winter weather in L.A. never could. The temperature had soared to nearly forty today, which meant puddles instead of ice on the streets and lots of drizzling rooftops and signs to avoid. Still, something about canvassing an alien downtown armed with nothing but his intellect and a flyer appealed to the displaced cop in him. That’s been my problem, he thought. I’m the only Angeleno in Pittsburgh with nothing to do. God knew there were plenty of problems needing attention just now. It felt good to be useful again while the Newcomers promoted their race and the Pittsburgh PD kept an eye on Newcomer safety. If nothing else, it gave him something more constructive to do than lie awake in their hotel room worrying about how to protect Cathy from going the way of the Frees.
He stopped beneath a red-and-white copy shop sign, reading over the ads in their windows. All kinds of copy, faxing, and computer services available, and all of it twenty-four-hour. Shaking out the crumpled flyer, Sikes pushed open the door to a welcome rush of heat and dry air.
The copy places all smelled the same—crisp paper scent, overhot machine oil, and a bright, chemical smell that Sikes assumed must be copy-machine toner or some such. It wasn’t the greatest collection of smells ever invented to begin with; after being in six or seven stores of it in the same morning, it was all Sikes could do not to grimace upon setting foot in the shop.
The woman behind the counter glanced up when he came through the door. She was tall and attractive enough, although close inspection revealed her as older than her artfully placed makeup proclaimed. She frowned a little upon seeing him. Sikes stopped just short of the counter, all his instincts flaring to full alert. Her frown was one he associated with people who could somehow sense a cop in their presence, and it usually meant trouble if he slipped up in their talking. And him without even a badge or a gun. Sikes smiled at her, keeping a peripheral awareness of his distance from the door in case something went sour and he found he had to cut and run.
“Morning!” He displayed the wrinkled flyer with his most disarming smile. “I don’t suppose this is a print job your shop did in the last couple days?”
Her eyes stayed on him for a little longer than was comfortable before she flicked them away to look at the paper. “Yeah,” she said, relaxing a little. “We’ve done two runs for them now. Are you here to order another?”
“Not exactly.” He stuffed the flyer into one jacket pocket. “I’m looking for the guys who placed this order with you.”
“I don’t have to give out that kind of information,” she said before he’d even stopped to take a breath.
Sikes clenched his fists inside his pockets in an effort to keep his irritation out of his voice. “I just want to talk with them,” he said, exceedingly even.
She squinted again, and his nerves stung with renewed warning. “What for?”
“Personal reasons.” That wasn’t even a lie, really.
“Are you with Pittsburgh Public Safety?”
Amazing how far you could get without actually stretching the truth. “I don’t even live in Pittsburgh.”
She peered at him unhappily for a few more minutes, and Sikes ended up drumming his fingers inside his jacket pockets to keep from jittering with impatience. He tried hard to look honest and innocent (a bad combination for him), and was just about ready to launch into a whole new round of coercion when she asked suddenly, “You’re that guy those Newcomers were beating up on TV the other day, aren’t you?”
Sikes was beginning to wonder if there was a Pittsburgher anywhere who didn’t spend half their time watching news clips on television. “Yeah, I guess I am,” he sighed.
She nodded thoughtfully, holding out her hand, palm up. “Give me that flyer.”
Sikes fished it out of his pocket and let her take it. She smoothed it against the counter with the side of her hand, then scribbled across the back of it in neat, tiny script. “I didn’t know you wanted to talk to them for real,” she said as she wrote, “or I wouldn’t of held back on you. The cops are just being kind of pissy with us right now, you know? I didn’t want to get into anything.”
Sikes swallowed dryly against a sudden bad taste in his throat. “I can imagine,” he said, as coolly as he could manage. “Murder’s pretty serious to get caught up in.”
She pushed the flyer back at him with a neat, understanding little smile. “Depends on how you look at it. The only good slag’s a dead one, right?”
He took the hideously colored sheet without answering her, couldn’t even bring himself to plaster on a sick smile for her benefit. When he got outside, the frigid wind blasted away what little heat he retained. It felt good and clean and right to be shivering and unprotected in this uncaring weather.
Wanting only to put distance between himself and her racist sympathy, Sikes walked nearly four blocks in the bitter cold before he even thought to read the address she’d written on the flyer and figure out where he needed to go next.
C H A P T E R 1 0
THE MIXED SOUNDS of human and Tenctonese applause jerked George awake from a dream of being chased. He blinked and looked fuzzily at Susan, seeing her warm smile emerge from the darkness when the ballroom lights came up. “Was that the last talk?”
“For the morning session.” She touched her forehead affectionately to his cheek. “You slept for an hour. Do you feel any better?”
“Not much.” From the ceiling, he could hear the elegant echoes of Nancy Thompson’s amplified voice, thanking the final speaker for his presentation and summarizing the afternoon schedule for the benefit of the television viewers. Partway through the list of talks, George woke up enough to count spotted heads in the audience before him.
“Thirty-four.” He cursed and surged to his feet, feeling a wave of what humans called déjà vu. “There are two of us missing.”
“Maybe they’re in the restroom.” Susan followed him when he pushed out from the row of chairs and headed toward the empty balcony. A sprinkling of hotel guards walled off the stairs, but otherwise the long sunlit stretch was empty. “Do you want me to check the ladies’ room for you?”
George frowned at the public restrooms, not sure he wanted to send Susan into possible danger. While he watched, however, a pair of TV camera operators emerged from the ladies’ room and headed for the water fountain. He pointed them out to Susan. “Just ask them if they saw a Tenctonese inside. I’ll check the men’s room.”
“All right.” Never shy about talking to strangers, his wife approached the two humans without hesitation. George allowed himself one reassuring look to be sure they didn’t pull out any weapons they might have cleverly hidden in their camera bags, then headed for the men’s room.
A darkly bearded human in a trim suit looked up from the sink when he entered, his knife-sharp gaze familiar from many hours of cable news. “Detective Francisco, isn’t it? Can I
just ask you a few questions—?”
“Sorry, I’m looking for someone.” George scanned the rest of the room and found it empty, then ducked out again to see Susan shaking her head at him from across the lobby. His stomach muscles winched themselves a little tighter with apprehension.
“They didn’t see anyone at all in there,” Susan reported when he came to join her at the balcony’s edge. The rumpled quilt of snow outside glittered fiercely, melting in the midday heat. Even stripped of its ultraviolet by the window glass, the reflected sunlight felt good on George’s face. “But they thought they heard someone talking in the dining room.”
“Let’s go look.” George strode past the main ballroom, hearing the scraping of chairs and rising hum of conversation that meant the symposium had just broken for lunch. He quickened his step, not wanting to be distracted by Newcomers he had already counted. Even before he stepped into the dining room, however, the rising and falling cadence of a familiar voice told him he’d found one of his missing Tenctonese.
“Emma Bovary.” Susan made an exasperated noise when she saw the beautifully spotted linnaum seated at a table directly in front of the camera stand. A gaggle of starstruck human girls clustered around her, breathlessly hanging on her endless stream of anecdotes. “I bet she left the symposium early just to get that seat.”
“It doesn’t matter, as long as we have her accounted for.” The grinding in George’s stomach didn’t stop, however. He knew enough by now to know that the Purists were taking them one at a time. “Let’s go up and check the hotel rooms.”
“All of them?” Susan turned to look up at him, dismayed. “George, we’re going to miss lunch, and you don’t even know if anything is wrong!”
Common sense warred with his overwhelming need to be sure that all the Tenctonese were safe—and lost. The concern in Susan’s face, however, prompted him to find a compromise. “I won’t miss lunch if you stay down here and save it for me.” He saw her eyes darken with incipient protest and added, “That way, if you count thirty-five of us in the room, you can have the hotel page me, and I’ll know to come back down.”