Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (17 page)

“There are two doormen, one for night, the other for day. I’ll give you their names and addresses, but Etienne is here already. You want to talk to him?”

“Of course. But first, I would like to see Mr. Ackerman’s room.”

“Oh, yes. This way.”

They went upstairs to room 12. De Cheney exhaled into the cheap chemical lock and the door sighed open. There wasn’t much to the place. A couch and two chairs that looked like they belonged there. Some clothes in the closet, a night guard’s uniform and one new suit, undoubtedly the one he had received on release from prison.

The forensic team would be here soon, and he was loath to spend much time inside, for fear of contaminating the place, of erasing the trace elements and bits of hair, the physical clues that sometimes led nowhere and sometimes everywhere.

He just wanted to see it, to picture where the man had spent his last days. If Justin Ackerman had been killed for being Justin Ackerman, then knowing the victim would help him know the killer. If he had been killed simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, well, it wouldn’t help much at all. But it couldn’t hurt.

“Was he noisy? Did anyone complain about him?”

“Not that I know of.”

“The rooms next to his-are they occupied?”

“That one is. A Mademoiselle Carter.”

She pointed to the door on the right. Girard knocked. After a few moments, a young woman answered. She was blond, perhaps twenty years old, a bit disheveled looking, pale but not unattractive.

“Oui? ” she said.

Her accent was terrible. An American.

“Mademoiselle Carter, my name is Raphael Girard,” he said in English.

“I’m a police inspector. I wonder if I can have a few words with you about your next-door neighbor?”

“Sure.”

She stood in the door frame and folded her arms, her eyes suddenly lively, interested.

“You’ve lived here for how long?”

“About a month, since the school year started. I’m studying antiquities at the Sorbonne.”

“A graduate student?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve always been fascinated by history. What period do you specialize in?”

“The early Roman period in Gaul, actually.”

“Oh. Asterix, eh?”

She smiled, openly and genuinely.

“Very good,” she said.

“I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of Asterix.”

“My father was a professor of twentieth-century literature. He was responsible for the reprinting in the sixties.” “Well, thank him for me,” she said.

“I collected those, as a child.” She smiled again.

“Now that you’ve put me at ease, Inspector, what did you want to know about my neighbor? I’m afraid I can’t tell you much.”

“Well, did he ever have visitors? A girlfriend, anything like that?”

“No, not usually. Though somebody came by a couple of nights ago. I remember noticing it just because he never had visitors. I was studying, and someone knocked on his door. I could hear them talking, but not what they said. I was sort of surprised, you know?”

She scrunched up her face.

“I think they left. I wasn’t really paying attention. Something happened to him, didn’t it?”

“We found him murdered.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“I am - that he was murdered. I think… I think I expected him to die, though. When you asked me about him just now, I thought you had found him dead-in there.”

She gestured toward the room next door.

“Suicide, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He just seemed… sad. Worn out, or something. He spoke to me once, in the hall. You know that way that people act, when you speak to them, and you can tell they don’t do it very often? The way they want to keep talking, even though all you meant to do was say hello? But I was pretty busy, and I was suddenly anxious. I need this place to study, and if I suddenly had this needy friend next door, always coming over…”

She broke off and frowned.

“So I sort of ignored him, after that, or just nodded at him and acted like I was in a hurry. I felt guilty about it, and I sort of worried - Well, but when he had a visitor, I remember thinking ‘Oh, good, he has a friend.”

“But you didn’t see this friend.”

“No. It was a man, though, I’m sure of that, from his voice. They spoke English, I’m pretty sure.”

“And this was about what time?”

“Oh, midnight, maybe.”

Another flash. The same two men talk, but Ackerman knows how it’s going to end. So there’s no surprise when the gun touches his head. He knows running is useless. Maybe he doesn’t care. Thump… Girard blinked rapidly. The girl was looking at him funny.

“Does that help?” she asked, her tone suggesting that she was repeating herself.

“Yes. That’s very near the time of death.”

“Oh, my God. I heard the killer.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think I…”

“I don’t think you are in danger, but you should be careful. Take normal precautions. Don’t answer the door unless you know who it is - that sort of thing. Let me give you my card…”

He produced a slip that had his name and address written on it.

“It has my phone code in it, prepaid. All you have to do is swipe it through a payment slot. If you need anything, I’m at your service. And I’ll come by to check on you, if you want.”

She smiled, timidly.

“That would be nice. But that isn’t what I was going to say. I was wondering if there might have been anything I could have done, if I might have stopped him.”

Ah. Young Americans. They always imagined the world would be a better place if they, personally, took an interest in it. “Don’t worry about that,” he told her.

“There was no way for you to know. Besides, if you had tried, I would be asking these questions about you, I fear, and that would be a most unpleasant task. I much prefer having met you this way.”

He started to say more, but stopped. Was he flirting again? This was how he had met Marie.

“Once more, thank you, and good day,” he said, and backed out, quickly.

The doorman didn’t remember anyone, and looked uncomfortable about it.

“Well, someone came in,” Margarite said, a little shrilly.

“What do I pay you for?”

“Maybe it was another tenant,” Etienne mumbled.

“He might have just gone down the hall, for all we know.”

“That’s true. But let us suppose, for a moment, that you were distracted…” say, by the inside of your eyelids “…or were away from your post, maybe in the toilet. Couldn’t someone have come in and out without you knowing it?”

“No, Inspector. The door records everyone who goes in and out, anyway. You’re welcome to view the record, if you wish.”

“Let’s see it.”

They searched for three hours either side of midnight, but found no trace of anyone other than tenants coming in or out.

“Monsieur Ackerman went out,” Girard said.

“Of that, there is simply no question. And yet, I do not see him here. How can that be? Is there another way?”

“No.”

“A window?”

“The windows are sealed,” Margarite said.

“The building is environment-controlled, and open windows muck that up.”

“We should check them, anyway. What is sealed can be unsealed. What about the recording device? Could it have been tampered with?”

“I don’t see how. It’s AI-controlled. Nothing I could do to it, if you’re implying that,” Etienne said, defensively.

“I’m not,” Girard replied, suddenly recalling something.

Hadn’t there been something recently, in another part of town? Yes, an attempted robbery of a pharmacy, and even though one of the perpetrators had been found dead in the building, he hadn’t shown up on the surveillance. The security company in question had claimed that the clumsy recovery techniques used by the police had badly damaged the circuits, but the experts he knew in the department had flatly denied the possibility. Still, nobody could figure out how the device might have been fooled, either. And since a guard and three policemen had died in the incident, there had been considerable effort in that direction.

Wait a minute. Hadn’t the guard at the pharmacy been a telepath?

Could telepaths influence Als? He had never heard of such a thing, but then, if they could do it, it might be a pretty closely guarded secret. Hadn’t there been some rumor that telepaths had been able to do something to alien ships, back during the Shadow War? And a telepath could easily have erased the doorman’s memory, or fogged his mind, or whatever. Ackerman could have done it himself, for that matter.

This was getting interesting. Very interesting. Something was going on here, something to do with telepaths, he could feel it in his bones. Which meant he had better use the hours remaining to him very wisely, before Metasensory showed up. Otherwise, he might never know what had happened here. When any division of the EABI showed up, cases sometimes just vanished, as if they had never been.

His city. His murder.

Chapter 5

Girard sipped his vile coffee and glanced through the paper. He flipped to the arts section and read the book review. It was the new reviewer, and Girard enjoyed his acerbic sense of humor. The plot of the book seems to be revealed only on a need-to-know basis-and apparently the author feels the reader doesn’t need to know, he read and chuckled.

Behind him, Louis Timothee, his deputy assistant, gave a sudden soft exclamation.

“Look at this,” Timothee said.

“What is it?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t feel so sorry for Ackerman after all. Did you realize that he worked in the Psi Corps reeducation camp at Amiento?”

“Yes.”

“Really? I just found that. It was past one of the security curtains…”

“Yes, he was acquitted of most charges and served his time, so of course they make it difficult to access that part of his past. It’s in keeping with the forgiveness statutes passed after the Civil War. We can get to them, we just have to work bloody hard.”

“Acquitted?” Timothee said, incredulously.

Girard turned, and found his assistant staring at an image. It showed a heap of dead bodies. He clicked, and another scene came up-a group of men, women, and children, emaciated but alive, stared blank-eyed at the picture taker.

“He rolled over on some of his superiors, of course. The age-old cry of the footman butcher, you know? ”I was only following orders.””

“Well, what do we care this son of a bitch is dead, then?”

“We care because it’s our job,” Girard replied.

“Furthermore - listen, give me your best guess. Who killed Ackerman?”

Timothee gestured at the screen.

“One of them. Or the brother or sister or son of one of the dead ones. He oversaw the systematic torture, mutilation, and murder of thousands. Just because he was acquitted doesn’t mean he’s forgiven. I would have tracked him down, if one of mine had been in that camp.”

“That’s a good guess. Statistically, it makes the most sense. And you’re right, in a way. I don’t condone vigilantes. We can’t. But maybe I wouldn’t look far beyond the obvious, if I jumped to the conclusion you have. Maybe I would figure the killer was justified, and let it go at that.”

“Damn straight.”

“But that’s why I keep my conclusions tentative. That’s why I formulate alternate hypotheses. And if the one I’ve come up with is correct, I think you’ll agree we should keep this investigation open.”

“I don’t see any alternative hypothesis.”

“Well, you’ve blinded yourself then-not a good way to start an investigation. It’s just like science, you know. You form various hypotheses and then you start testing them, or at least seeing which one best fits the facts you know.”

“If you have a better fit for the data, what is it?”

“Maybe not a better fit, but I have another fit. There is another sort of man who might want to kill Ackerman, a sort with a motive other than revenge.”

Timothee paused for a moment.

“Turn off the screen. It’s distracting you. All you can think of is what you would do to a man involved in that.”

Reluctantly, Timothee did so. He continued staring at the blank space where the picture had been.

“Well?” Girard asked, after a few moments.

“Holy shit.”

“See?”

“You think it was someone else who worked at the camp? One of the war criminals who got away. Fernandez, or Hilo, or…” he paused “…Bester.”

“Eh. La.”

“Holy shit,” he repeated.

“One of the real mindfraggers, here in Paris? I thought they all were supposed to be off world.”

“Where would you hide? On a space station with a few hundred thousand, a colony world with a few million at best, or on Earth, hidden in a crowd of more than ten billion souls?”

Timothee sat open - mouthed for a few heartbeats, then lunged for his computer.

“We can cross - reference,” he said, “find out who worked there, who was caught, who is dead, who…”

“…got away,” Girard finished for him.

“Only one, and you’ve already said his name.”

But Timothee had it, now.

“Bester,” he murmured.

He might as well have been speaking the name of the Devil.

“Alfred Bester. My God, if he’s here in Paris-hey!”

His screen went blank. He started working furiously to try to get it back. Alarmed, Girard turned back to his own AI unit and found it similarly blank. It was still working, but when he tried to return to the screen with Bester on it, he got an icon that read “information not found.”

“Ub-oh,” he murmured.

“What happened?”

“I have no idea,” Girard responded.

“But I want to find out. We’re supposed to have clear access to that database, and no one has the authority to cut us out of it. Not the EABI, nobody. When…”

At that moment, the com on his desk burred for attention. Girard stopped in mid sentence, frowning.

“Answer,” he said.

“Picture?” the wall asked.

“Sure.”

The screen came on, revealing a balding man of middle years. There was something very familiar about him, and when he spoke, recognition came. Girard had seen his face half a hundred times on ISN broadcasts.