Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (16 page)

“To loosening up,” Bester said, raising his glass again.

“I’ll drink to that,” Louise said And they all did.

“She likes you,” Louise told him, that night in bed.

“She’s dubious of me,” Bester replied.

“She thinks I’m a cradle robber.”

“She’s cautious, that’s all. But she’s my sister, and she loves me. She wants what’s best for me, and anyone around you for half an hour can see that what’s best for me is you.”

He rolled over so he could see her face. Her eyes glistened faintly in the dim light that filtered in from the street outside.

“You make me humble,” he said.

“You give me memories I’ve never had and dreams I’ve never imagined.”

He paused.

“I started writing a book yesterday.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“When can I read it?”

He chuckled.

“When can I see the painting?”

“When it’s done.”

“Well, then you know my answer, too.”

He felt a prickle of fear. One day she would read the book, and then she would have to know, at the very least, that he was a telepath. She would know that he had been lying to her, in a sense - the lie of omission. But at the moment it was impossible for him to believe she wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t forgive. He had never in his life been this close to a human being, not even to Carolyn. It was the most frightening and the most wonderful feeling he had ever known.

“How long is she staying, your sister?”

“A few days, maybe a week. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No. You need this.”

That was a lie, too, but not a big one. His fear that the major would recognize him seemed to be groundless. There hadn’t even been a hint of it, the whole evening, not even a subconscious reflex. And he had been watching, carefully. This roll of the dice had come out in his favor.

“Thank you, Claude. It’s all because of you, you know. You made me understand that it was worth the risk, to love again, to repair fences. You gave me that.”

“I understand perfectly,” he breathed.

“Perfectly.”

She kissed him, and kissed him again, and the night dissolved into soft sighs and touches, nothing urgent about it, but sweet, comfortable, happy. Afterward, drifting to sleep, he thought of Justin, of his body sinking slowly into the river. He thought of what Louise would say, if she knew, and he felt an odd little catch, an explosion of grief so strong it nearly choked him. Faces passed across the darkness behind his eyelids. Byron, Handel, Ferrino, people whose names he couldn’t remember.

This was the end of it. This was the end of him. It occurred to him that when Louise had said his name earlier - Claude - he hadn’t flinched, as he once had. Hadn’t wished she could call him Alfred. Alfred Bester didn’t deserve Louise, wasn’t worthy of her. But Claude - well, perhaps Claude wasn’t either, but he could be. If he worked at it, if he always reminded himself he could be better.

I’m sorry, Justin, he thought. I had to do it, but I’m sorry. You are the last man Alfred Bester will ever kill. Because Alfred Bester is dead.

“Claude?”

“Yes?”

“Are you crying?”

“I…”

He was. He hadn’t recognized the sensation, but his face was wet.

“Why?”

“Because I’m happy,” he replied.

“Because I’m so very happy.”

Chapter 4

“He was dead before he hit the water,” the examiner said, adjusting his gloves.

“Not a drop of water in his lungs.”

He touched a contact on the edge of the examining table. A ribbon of blue light appeared on the toes of the naked corpse and moved slowly toward his head.

“Let’s see what the toxicology shows us,” the doctor murmured.

Inspector Girard nodded wearily. He had just pulled four shifts back-to-back, and was having a hard time concentrating on what the examiner was saying. That was bad, but it was better than going home, where his wife would either start screaming at him or just sulk, sullenly, burning him with her eyes. And going to Marie, now, was out of the question. He was a detective, yes? He should know better. The mistake every criminal made was in thinking that they were smarter than every other criminal, that they were the ones who wouldn’t be caught.

He, an inspector with almost twenty years behind him, and he had thought he could keep his affair with Marie a secret? He supposed he might have, if Marie hadn’t become pregnant, or if…

Bah. No ifs. He had been stupid. He shook his head, trying to clear the amorphous fish-things trying to obscure his vision.

“Another tourist?”

“I don’t think so,” the examiner said, prodding the head to one side as the blue strip of light finished its journey.

“Lamp, high,” he said.

Harsh white light suddenly filled the room. The corpse was an old fellow. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and his blue-tinted face was composed, almost serene. What did you try to get away with, my friend? What business has this ended for you? Was death a relief, in the end? A well-deserved peace?

He shook his head again when he realized he had missed what the doctor had just said.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“I said it looks pretty professional. Small - caliber slugs, so there are no exit wounds. I think the killer put a bag over his head, too - there is a faint ring of capillary damage around the throat, here.”

He pointed to what, for Girard, was an invisible line, but if the examiner said it was there, it was. The man was a necromancer, a wizard of the dead, and Girard had come to respect him deeply.

“The muzzle was placed right against the skull, too, so the killer was close.”

“Was he bound?”

“No sign of it. No abrasions of any sort on the hands or feet, no odd muscle positions.”

Girard had a sudden flash. Two men talk to one another, like old friends. One casually pulls a pistol, as though he’s taking out a cigarette lighter. The other doesn’t notice, until the steel touches his head, and now he’s puzzled. His puzzlement deepens as he feels a thump, and everything goes strange, as if he is very drunk, and he forgets where he is, what he s doing, and there is another thump, and another…

Girard had these flashes. He had wondered, often, if he might not be some sort of telepath, but all the tests came back negative. No, he was merely damned to have that sort of imagination that put things together without consulting his intellect, a brain that dreamed while it was awake. It made him a good detective, but he didn’t like it. Sometimes, when he was wrong, when his flashes proved incorrect, he was actually more relieved than when he was right.

It didn’t happen often that he was wrong.

“Have you identified him yet?”

“That’s the puzzling part. Considering how professional the execution was, you would think the killer would have tried harder to get rid of the body. Dissolve it in acid, or some - such. Cut off the fingertips, knock out the teeth.”

“The killer was working alone,” Girard said.

“If this were a syndicate hit of some sort, there would have been no body, as you say. And I’m guessing that not only is this poor fellow’s DNA registered someplace, but the killer knew it. So. Since he didn’t have the means, or the time, to entirely destroy the body, he did the next best thing. He disposed of it in an entirely conventional way, hoping we wouldn’t notice him in the piles of bodies we fish from the river every day.”

“Or perhaps it really was just a robbery-murder, by someone with a professional technique.”

“Perhaps.”

He paced around the corpse. His personal troubles began to fade, overwhelmed by the puzzle.

“His DNA was on file, yes?”

The examiner tapped a small display.

“Let’s see. Yes, you’re right. He…”

“No, don’t tell me who he was, yet.”

“As you wish, Inspector.”

“The killer killed him near the water, so he wouldn’t have to carry the body.”

“That could be. He soiled himself when he died, but the pattern of absorption by his clothes suggests he was immersed almost immediately.”

He tried to picture it another way. A tourist out for a stroll, an out-of-luck, unemployed hit man looking for his next meal. He walks up, asks for a match or something, and when his victim looks down, kisses his head with the end of his pistol.

No. Why the bag? The killer had wanted his victim dead, fast and certainly. And the way the victim was dressed in no way suggested a rich man. This was never a robbery. He couldn’t make that scene come alive in his head.

“If his DNA was on file, he was probably either a convicted felon, in the military, or a telepath. Which one?”

“A telepath.”

Well, that opened up a lot of possibilities. A hate crime? A lot of people hated telepaths for a lot of reasons. That might explain the execution-style slaying. The killer saw himself as a cleansing force, out to make the world safe for those without unholy powers.

Or it might have been an old grudge, yes? There must be plenty of grudges after the telepath war.

Two telepaths, once friends, on opposite sides of the conflict. A pretense of reconciliation - that would explain why the victim wouldn’t notice murder coming up to him, didn’t even flinch as his bloody-minded companion drew his weapon with cold, certain intent. Except it couldn’t have been that cold. There were mistakes here, and a lack of planning that suggested panic…

No, wait-where had he gotten panic? A panicked man didn’t calmly place a gun against someone’s head and pull the trigger, then produce a plastic bag. Ah, but people didn’t always know they were panicking, did they? When Marie told him of her pregnancy, he had believed himself to still be in control. He had fooled himself, suppressed the fear, told himself that all he needed to do was act calmly and everything would be all right.

But there was nothing logical about adultery, about ruining a marriage of thirty years, the humiliation of his own children realizing what he had done to their mother. No, he hadn’t acknowledged his panic. He had swallowed it, and it had poisoned him. It had made him stupid even as he convinced himself he was clever. The mind worked like that. This wasn’t the first time he had seen it.

So what did he have? Someone who wanted to kill a telepath, probably a telepath himself. Someone who thought he was doing the murder for all the right reasons and with all the proper precautions, while at the same time he was frightened at the most fundamental level possible. Maybe the victim had learned something he shouldn’t have, yes? Telepaths had a way of doing that. Maybe the meeting was at the victim’s behest, an overture to blackmail. And the killer saw, with terrible lucidity, that the way out of the trap was to destroy the trap itself. Enough.

“Who was he?”

The examiner, who had become busy examining the man’s stomach contents, didn’t bother looking at the video display. The faint gleam on the narrow goggles he wore suggested the information was scrolling there.

“Justin Ackerman. Born in North America, in Toronto. Sixty-three years of age. He was a telepath, a P7. A war criminal, as a matter of fact. He had just finished serving his sentence and was out on parole. Applied for a work visa two months ago, rented an apartment near the Rue de Paris. He worked part time as a night guard at the club Pugeot.”

“Have you informed Psi Corps yet?”

“No, Inspector. But we’re supposed to inform them within twenty-four hours.”

“We still have ten, then, yes?”

He walked toward the door, snagged his jacket from the skeleton - coat-rack that held it on an outstretched arm.

“Hold off as long as you can. I want to talk to his landlord and his employer, before the EABI shows up and takes this one away from me.”

Though why he should care, he couldn’t say. Wouldn’t he be better off without one more case? But he had a longstanding dislike for the Metasensory Division of the EABI. In the old days when they had been MetaPol, they had swept in like birds of prey, arrogant, dismissive, heavy-handed. He didn’t like having them in his city. Oh, they were better on the surface now, but the arrogance remained. And perhaps he was envious of their abilities-sure, they claimed not to use them, but he knew better. Who wouldn’t? He had never been able to escape the feeling that it was unfair, cops who could read minds, as often as he wondered if he himself didn’t have a touch of their power.

No, this was his city, not theirs. His murder, his murderer.

And, he thought cynically, another thing to keep his mind off how his life was slowly disintegrating around him.

“He didn’t have any friends. At least none that I saw.”

Margarite de Cheney might have been attractive once, before life had scrubbed her face red and bruised her eyes with disappointments. Girard wondered looking at her, if she ever felt joy in anything anymore. He wondered if she could kill. If one’s own life was gone, it was easier to take another’s, yes?

He wondered wryly if that meant murder was next on his agenda. Would his life be easier if he had killed Marie? No, because he would have been caught. Everyone got caught, sooner or later.

Besides, he did love her, in his way. And the thought of another child, while immensely complicating, was not without appeal.

“No one came or went?”

“You’d have to ask the doorman. I never saw anyone, but then I don’t spy on my guests. Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“He’s dead.”

He watched her reaction-this was the moment when a lot of them blew it. They always imagined they should act surprised, shocked. Real reactions were slower than that. Death was something people spent their whole lives pretending couldn’t be real. When confronted with it, there was usually a comprehension gap, a moment searching through the words they had just heard, trying to see if there was some other way to interpret them.

“Dead? You mean…”

“Dead,” he repeated, disappointed.

But then, he hadn’t really thought she was guilty.

“Murdered.”

“Here?”

That scared her.

“Maybe,” he lied.

“We found his body in the river, but he could have been killed anywhere. Which is why it’s so important that you recall everything you can.”