Soulminder

by Timothy Zahn

  A wistful, almost ghostly smile touched his face. “He was sitting in the far back seat of the station wagon,” he said. “The way-back-in-the-back, we called it. And he was calling, ‘Get off our road!’ at the cars behind us.”

  A quiet chuckle ran through the jury box. The woman stepped back, her eyes suddenly tear-bright, to be replaced at the microphone by the younger woman. “Mike, what pet did I have when I was in fourth grade?” she asked.

  His forehead creased. “You had a lot of dumb pets when you were little, Lise.”

  “This one died the day after it bit me.”

  The frown cleared. “Ah. Well, that would have been your hamster.”

  Another ripple ran through the jury, but to Blanchard’s ears this one sounded strained. As if the mention of death had reminded them that they were not, in fact, merely here to witness a genial family reunion.

  She looked over to where the defendant was sitting, his face carved from frozen stone as he watched the proceedings. He, certainly, hadn’t forgotten why they were there.

  The questioning lasted almost twenty minutes. When it was over, both women agreed that it was indeed their brother sitting in the witness chair.

  “Let the record show,” Dorfman said as the sisters returned to the spectators’ section, “that personal identification, plus signed affidavits from Soulminder authorities, have established that the soul of Michael Andrew Holloway currently resides in the body of Professional Witness Walker Lamar.” He let his eyes sweep the jury, then turned back to the witness box. “And now, Mr. Holloway, would you please relate to the court the events of the evening of January 27 of this year.”

  He seemed to brace himself. “I left my office about six-thirty,” he said, his voice almost too low for the microphone to pick up. “I was walking to the car when I heard footsteps coming up behind me. I turned around, and there was a kid behind me with a gun.”

  He paused, tongue flicking across upper and then lower lip. “He told me to give him all my money or he’d blow my head off.”

  “Did you comply?” Dorfman asked.

  “Yes, right away,” he nodded, a jerky movement of his head. “I tried to, anyway. I reached into my coat pocket for my wallet—” He took a deep, shuddering breath.

  “Did he say anything else, Mr. Holloway?” Dorfman asked into the momentary silence. “Warn you not to make any sudden moves, or anything like that?”

  He shook his head. “He didn’t say anything at all.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No. He was as cool as if he’d done this a hundred times.”

  “Objection,” Austin said, half rising from his seat beside the defendant. “The witness is speculating.”

  “Sustained,” Grange nodded. “Please confine your comments to answering the questions, Mr. Holloway.”

  The lips puckered slightly. “Yes, sir,” he muttered.

  “So,” Dorfman continued, “you reached for your wallet. Did you bring it out?”

  “I didn’t get a chance,” he said bitterly. “My hand was still inside my coat when he shot me.”

  Dorfman let the words hang in the air for a moment. “How many times did he shoot you?” he asked.

  “Objection.” Austin was on his feet again. “More speculation.”

  Grange nodded. “Sustained. Rephrase your question, counselor.”

  “How many bullets did you feel hit you, Mr. Holloway?”

  “I felt two,” he whispered. “Both in my chest. And I think I heard a third one after I fell on my back, but I don’t remember feeling it hit me.”

  “Two shots, both in your chest,” Dorfman repeated. “And yet, the coroner reported finding eight bullets—”

  “Objection,” Austin called indignantly.

  “Sustained,” Grange growled. “Save the summing-up for your closing, Mr. Dorfman.”

  “Yes, your honor. Tell me, Mr. Holloway: do you see the man who shot you anywhere in this courtroom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you point him out?”

  The witness took another deep breath, his eyes shifting from Dorfman to Battistello. “He’s right there.”

  Dorfman nodded, his expression theatrically grim. “Let the record show,” he intoned, “that Michael Holloway has identified the defendant, Mr. Battistello, as the man who assaulted him on the night of January 27.

  “The man who murdered him.”

  There was more, of course. Much more.

  Dorfman walked the witness through the murder in carefully precise detail, focusing a large percentage of his attention on Holloway’s recollection of the assailant’s clothing, expressions, and actions. The exercise was obviously a painful one, and more than once Blanchard felt herself wincing in sympathy with the terror and anger and helplessness boiling quietly out of the witness box. It was a straightforward enough strategy: Dorfman was bidding for jury outrage while simultaneously going for a preemptive blunting of any future attempts by the defense to cast doubt on the victim’s memory. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier to take.

  The direct testimony was hard enough to sit through. Austin’s cross-examination, urbanely hostile and subtly condescending, was even worse. By the time the defense attorney sat down Blanchard’s stomach was a mess of churning acid.

  “It is now five minutes until twelve,” Judge Grange announced as the witness left the stand and made his way back to the prosecutor’s table. “We’ll take a ninety-minute recess for lunch, and reconvene precisely at one-thirty.”

  He banged his gavel and headed for chambers, and the courtroom participants and spectators began to break up into movement and the buzz of conversation.

  “So what happens now?” the witness asked as he and Dorfman stood up. “Will I need to come back for more testimony?”

  “Unlikely,” Dorfman said, the bulk of his attention on the papers he was shoveling into his briefcase. “Unless Austin decides to recall you, your part in this is pretty well over.”

  The other licked his lips, his gaze fluttering around the courtroom. “Any chance I can come back this afternoon and listen to Austin’s case?”

  Dorfman looked at Blanchard. “Doctor?”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mr. Holloway,” Blanchard told him. “You’ve been using Walker Lamar’s body for just under two and a half hours, and the legally allowed maximum is three hours per day.”

  “The closing arguments, then?” he persisted, a strangely yearning expression in his eyes. “Can I at least come back for the closing arguments?”

  “I can ask,” Dorfman shrugged, snapping the locks on his briefcase with a sharp double click. “But Austin’s bound to object, and since the judge will be denying his motion to dismiss he’ll likely let him have that one.” He glanced at the other; took a second, closer look. “You’ll be coming back for the verdict, though,” he added. “That one’s guaranteed by law.”

  “I know,” he sighed. He looked around the courtroom again—almost, Blanchard thought, as if committing it to memory. “I just wish … ”

  “I wish, too,” Dorfman grunted. “Having the victim in the courtroom usually helps the prosecution, which is why Austin will fight it. Not that we’re going to need any help in this particular case,” he added reassuringly. “Look, I’ve got to get going—Austin’ll be filing motions with the judge, and I need to be there to argue against them. See you later.” With a nod to each of them, he strode off toward the judge’s chambers.

  Blanchard looked at the witness. “You okay, Mr. Holloway?”

  He swallowed. “Yeah,” he said, his voice soft.

  “You did well, if that helps. I know it was hard for you.”

  “I did what I had to do.” He took a deep breath. “I guess we’d better go.”

  He walked around the bar and into the aisle, Blanchard sidling down her row to meet
him. At the rear of the courtroom the last of the other spectators were just leaving; lengthening his stride suddenly, the witness caught up with them, leaving Blanchard behind. She broke into a jog, caught up as the group pushed open the heavy door.

  Without looking back, he let the door swing back on her. She caught it, shoved it open again—

  And stepped out into a blaze of light.

  “Mr. Holloway?” someone called through the locust clicking of multiple camera lenses. “What can you tell us about the trial?”

  Blanchard reached out blindly and grabbed his arm. “Give it a rest, people,” she snapped toward the reporters before he could answer. “You want a mistrial or something? You know there’s a gag order on Mr. Holloway. Come back after the verdict.”

  “How about you, then, Dr. Blanchard?” someone else suggested. “What do you think of the trial so far?”

  “No comment from me, either,” Blanchard growled, gripping the arm a little tighter and giving him a push toward the elevator. “Go light up some other corner of the world, huh?”

  She stumbled out of the glare, cursing to herself at the spots dancing in front of her eyes. Modern video cameras could record perfectly well in normal background light; the only possible reason for the media to still use those half-sized searchlights was in the hopes of dazzling their victims into saying something they shouldn’t. Blinking away the tears, she turned—

  And froze. The man whose arm she still held, the man frowning bemusedly down at her, was not Walker Lamar.

  Letting go as if scalded, she looked around her. But it was no use. With a dozen courtrooms and offices simultaneously breaking for lunch, the corridor was filled with hurrying people blocking her view. Holloway was gone.

  And he’d taken Lamar’s body with him.

  “The first thing you need to do,” Soulminder Security Duty Officer Larry Carstairs said soothingly into her ear, “is to take a deep breath and not panic. Breathe; don’t panic. Think you can handle that?”

  Blanchard gripped the pay phone a little harder. She would far rather have called in the alarm from the privacy of a stairwell, but she’d forgotten to charge her cell last night and this was all she had. At least there were still pay phones here in the annex, where enough poor people and other non-cell users congregated to make them both useful and necessary. “There are situations in life, Carstairs,” she bit out, “where a certain level of flippancy is welcome. This isn’t one of them.”

  “You’re taking this way too seriously, Dr. Blanchard,” the other said with that same maddening calm. “This is no big deal—we’ve had witnesses getting away from their handlers ever since these Pro-Witness programs got going. Chances are he just wanted to wander around in the sunlight for a while without someone hanging around reminding him that he’s legally dead. He’ll be back—he knows he needs to be transferred out by twelve-thirty, after all.”

  Blanchard gritted her teeth, last night’s nightmare flashing through her mind. The walking dead … “And what if he doesn’t come back?” she countered. “You’re not going to find him while you sit there making hopeful noises.”

  Carstairs sighed audibly. “Even as we speak, Doctor, there are ten people at both ground level and at upper windows in the process of looking for him.”

  “Oh, right,” Blanchard snorted. “Noontime at Ridley Square is a great time to go looking for somebody.”

  “It’ll be easier than you might think,” Carstairs countered, his calm tone fraying a little at the edges. “Or did you assume that those god-awful powder-blue blazers the Pro-Witnesses wear are somebody’s idea of good taste? You wouldn’t believe how easily those things stick out of a crowd. I don’t tell you how to do your job. Kindly don’t tell me how to do mine.”

  Blanchard took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to sound like she meant it. “I just—God, he’s stolen someone else’s body.”

  “Only borrowed it,” Carstairs said, all soothing again. “Don’t worry, we’ll get him back. Even if the quick and dirty approach doesn’t work, there are other tricks we can try. You might as well come on in—we’ll bring him directly to the transfer room when we catch him.”

  Blanchard glanced around the courthouse corridor, already considerably less crowded than it had been five minutes earlier, hoping against hope she’d see her quarry waiting there for her. She needn’t have bothered. “Yeah,” she told Carstairs. “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

  “I’ll talk to you then. And really, Dr. Blanchard, try not to worry. I’d be willing to bet you a week’s pay we’ll have him spotted before you even get here.”

  It was a bet she should have taken. Leaving the courthouse annex, she hurried across the sun-drenched walkways bordering Ridley Square to the Soulminder building.

  To find that the witness was still missing.

  “He’s apparently taken off his blazer,” Carstairs grunted, his attention off on something out of range of Blanchard’s intercom camera. “Probably folded it inside-out over his arm—otherwise, we’d have seen something through the filters.”

  “So what now?” Blanchard asked, fighting hard against the urge to let off something blisteringly sarcastic. Recriminations and blame placing could wait until after they’d found him. Assuming they ever did. “The three-hour limit expires in”—she glanced at her watch—“just under twenty minutes.”

  “Thank you; I can tell time,” Carstairs growled. “I still think he’s probably somewhere in the general Ridley Square area, but we’ve got someone checking out cab and limo companies anyway.”

  “Buses?”

  “None of them hit the area since the window opened.”

  “How about restaurants?” Blanchard persisted. “I had a witness once who said he’d kill for the chance to taste prime rib again.”

  “Already checking them,” Carstairs said. “You got anything on Holloway himself that might be useful? Anything he said or did that might point to where he’s gone?”

  “I’ve been trying to think,” Blanchard said, shaking her head. “But so far I’ve come up dry.”

  “Yeah. Well, don’t worry about it. Like I said earlier, we’ve got a few other strings to our bow here. They’ll just take a little more time, that’s all.”

  Blanchard nodded, fighting against the flood of utter helplessness rising to choke her. “Yes, I understand. What can I do to help?”

  “Not much, really.” Carstairs studied her. “On second thought,” he amended, “they could probably use another spotter up on five. Outer corridor—they’ll have some spare binoculars up there you can use.”

  Blanchard nodded. It was, she realized, little more than make-work—Carstairs’s people would be far better at this sort of thing than she would. But it would at least give her the illusion that she was doing something to help clean up the mess she’d made. “I’ll be right up.”

  In the nine months since she’d arrived at Soulminder Los Angeles, Blanchard had become more or less acclimated to the incredible masses of people that descended upon the Ridley Square park every day at lunchtime from the office buildings surrounding the patch of green. Now, looking down at it from the fifth floor, that original bit of culture shock came back with a vengeance.

  “You take that section of the park,” the surveillance chief instructed her, pointing out a rough wedge of Ridley Square bordered by two winding wood-chip paths and the outer sidewalk of the park itself. “Look at everyone already there, and check anyone who comes in.”

  “Got it.” Lifting the binoculars to her eyes, trying to calm her pounding heart, she got to work.

  The minutes ticked by. There were, probably not by accident, relatively few people in her sector, and all too soon she’d confirmed that Walker Lamar’s face wasn’t among them. “All negative,” she reported to the surveillance chief. “What should I do now?”

  “Start on the next sector to
the east,” he told her. “We’ve already covered the park,” he added, as if sensing her next question, “but it’s always possible he slipped back in while we concentrated on other areas.”

  “Right.”

  She’d covered that section, and was just starting on the next, when she heard a sudden quiet intake of breath from the woman next to her. “Got something,” the other announced. “Grid Double-A forty-seven; two-twenty vector.”

  “Got it,” the chief said. “Blanchard—that switch on the right side of your binoculars? Push it forward.”

  She did so, and to her surprise a faint heads-up grid abruptly appeared, superimposed on the view. “Where was he again?” she asked, searching the grid edges for the identifying letters and numbers.

  “Double-B forty-three, now,” the woman beside her said. “Angling toward the Soulminder building, more or less from the direction of the courthouse.”

  One look was all it took. “That’s him,” Blanchard nodded, a wave of relief washing over her.

  “All right, the ground people are on him,” the chief said. He sounded relieved, too. “They’ll have him in the transfer room in two minutes.” He glanced at his watch. “Nice timing on his part—you won’t even get the satisfaction of chewing him out.”

  Blanchard looked at her own watch. Twelve twenty-eight; just those same two minutes until the legal time limit ran out. “Don’t bet on it,” she said grimly, handing him the binoculars and heading for the elevator.

  She made it to the transfer room maybe twenty seconds before the witness and his security escort got there. “Holloway, what the hell was that all about?” she snarled as they came through the door. “You have any idea how much trouble you’ve just caused?”

  She’d been prepared for him to argue back at her. Instead, he avoided her eyes as the security guards hustled him to the table. “I’m sorry, Dr. Blanchard,” he said, his voice as meekly and humbly apologetic as if he were an eight-year-old caught stealing from the cookie jar. “I didn’t plan to run away from you like that—really I didn’t. But when those newsmen grabbed you—well, I just thought it would be nice to walk around in the sun for a while. It’s … you know. My last chance to do something like that.”