Mountain of Black Glass (33 page)

Brother Epistulus Tertius was insistent, and after a few minutes they found themselves being led through the milling crowds toward the vault where the researching of antique correspondence was carried out. The monk talked in a nonstop rush of facts about the Library, most of them meaningless to Renie. She found herself instead watching the various denizens of the house as they went about their business, the black-smudged Coal Scuttle Boys larking on an afternoon's holiday, the various Kitchen guilds making arrangements with the itinerant sharpeners, the jugglers and musicians that gave the whole thing the air of a Renaissance carnival. It was only as they reached a doorway out of the Market Square and into the monastery halls—a section of the endless bookshelves that swung outward to reveal a tiled hallway into which Epistulus Tertius was beckoning them—that she realized why the dusting monk looked familiar.

If you saw a monk you assumed it was a man, but if someone shaved off black hair, and pulled a robe up until it mostly covered the face . . .

“It's him!” she said, almost shouting. “Oh, my God, it's him—I mean her! That monk up on the bookshelf—it was Quan Li's sim!”

Her companions turned from Brother Epistulus Tertius, startled into a flurry of questions, but !Xabbu's was by far the most chilling.

“Where is Martine?” he asked.

They quickly retraced their path across the Market, but the blind woman had vanished.

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial”

D
ETECTIVE Calliope Skouros tilted the viewing lens away from her face and sighed. The display pinched the bridge of her nose. Her head was beginning to hurt. It was time to contemplate having another drink and saying the hell with it for the night, or possibly for good.

For the third straight evening she had spent hours of her own time using the department account to comb the vast data resources of the IPN, trying to find something that would take her another step forward on the Polly Merapanui case. She had run victim Polly's own data every which way, all the mind-numbing trivia in the original case file and every useless bit she and Stan Chan had added to it with their own investigation. She had run the Woolagaroo angle through the informational meat grinder as well, hoping against hope it had come up in someone's M.O., been used as a nickname, anything, but with no luck.

Calliope's father had used to tell a joke, one she only dimly remembered. It had something to do with a wildly optimistic child who, when given a huge pile of horseshit as a cruel gift, had spent hours digging through it, reasoning, “There has to be a pony in here somewhere!”

Well, that's me,
she thought.
And up to this point, I'm seriously short of ponies.

 

Stan had a little pile of builder toys on his desk, cheap automata he had bought from a sidewalk vendor that would take any materials given them, like sand or sugar cubes or (in this instance) toothpicks, and turn them into odd little structures. His builders had gotten to a tricky point: he did not even say hello when Calliope swept into the room.

The door slamming shut behind her knocked the tiny structure apart. He looked up grumpily as the headless bug-things began the process all over. “Jeez, Skouros, what's your problem? You look happy—that can't be good.”

“We've got it!” She dropped into her chair and slid in behind the desk like a cargo plane coming in for a landing. “Come and look!”

Her partner made a face, but sauntered over to stand behind her shoulder. “Are we going to explain what it is we've got, or do we just wait until symptoms develop?”

“Struggle to not be an asshole for just ten seconds, Stan. Look at this. I've been trying to get some kind of hit on ‘Woolagaroo' for days, without luck. But it's the damn department search that's been locking me up!” She brushed her hand across the screen and a flurry of print danced behind, as though following her fingers.

“The search?”

“The gear, Stan, the gear! It doesn't do automatic phonetic matches—this stuff is from the Stone Age, I swear. I searched ‘Woolagaroo,' and all I got back was hundreds of last names and town names with similar spellings, none of them right, and none of them anything to do with our case as far as I could see. But then I started wondering whether the searcher they make us use was as old and useless as everything else around here, and I put in a few soundalike variants of my own, figuring it might be in there but spelled wrong—that it had gone in originally as hearsay, or been misspelled by the arresting officer. Hell,
I
didn't know how to spell it properly until I got those articles from Professor Jigalong.”

“You're taking an even longer time than usual to get to the point, Skouros.” But she had him, she knew; Stan was trying hard to sound casual.

“So I threw in a bunch of variants—‘Woolagaru,' ‘Wullagaroo,' see? Like that. And look what came back.”

“Wulgaru, John—aka ‘Johnny,' ‘Jonny Dark,' ‘John Dread,' ” he read aloud. “Okay, so you've found someone with an extensive juvenile record. Nasty little bastard, from the looks of him. But he's got no arrests in years—which, with his quick start in life, means he's probably dead. And that last known address is ridiculously old, too.”

“Yes! And he fell off the map less than a year before Polly Merapanui was killed. The same year!” She couldn't believe he was trying so hard not to see it. Calliope felt a moment of worry—had she been after this too long? But in her heart she knew better.

“So you've got a similarity between this guy's name and something that Reverend What's-his-name's wife said about an Aboriginal fairy tale, and the guy disappeared, or at least stopped getting arrested under that name, within a few months of our murder.” He pushed his glasses up his nose—like many other things about him, his look was decidedly old-fashioned. “Thin, Skouros. Real thin.”

“Well, my doubting friend, how thin is this?” She waved her fingers and another window full of text drifted up like a carp rising to the surface of a pond. “Our young friend Wulgaru did time in the Feverbrook Hospital juvenile facility when he was seventeen, on the violent ward—‘threat to himself and others' is the official catchall.”

“So?”

“So did you actually read our case file? Polly Merapanui was there at the same time, a brief stay after a half-hearted suicide attempt.”

Stan was silent for a long moment. “Damn,” he said at last.

 

Her partner was unusually reserved on the drive out to Windsor, but he did point out that it would have been faster just getting the records sent to the office. “It's not like either of them are still living there, Skouros.”

“I know. But I'm different than you, Stan. I need to
go
there, have a look at the place. Get a feeling for it. And if you give me any ‘women's intuition' bullshit, you can walk back. This is my car.”

“Touchy.” His eyebrows rose briefly. Stan Chan was so deadpan that he made Calliope feel like some kind of circus freak—The Incredible Sweating, Shouting Woman. But he was a solid bloke, and his strengths meshed well with hers. Good Cop/Bad Cop was less important in most investigations than Excited Cop/Cautious Cop, and even though she occasionally got tired of playing her role—it would be nice to be the cool and collected one, just for once—she couldn't imagine working better with anyone else.

From the name, she had half-expected Feverbrook Hospital to be some castle monstrosity of turrets and cupolas, the kind of building best viewed under the lowering clouds of an electrical storm; instead, while it was indeed a remnant of an earlier architectural style, that style was from the earlier part of Calliope's own century, a look she tended to think of as “Strip-Mall Whimsical.” The buildings were scattered about the grounds like a child's collection of blocks, except where they were piled high and awkwardly at the center of the complex to form what must be the administration buildings; most were painted in cheerful pastels, with ornamentation in bold primary colors—railings and awnings and annoying little decorations that served no obvious purpose. The effect was of something designed first to lure, then soothe and delight, the slow-witted. Calliope wondered how intentional that had been.

The hospital director, Dr. Theodosia Hazen, was a slim, tall, middle-aged woman whose graciousness seemed as practiced as yoga. She glided out of her office as soon as the detectives were announced, a smile of
noblesse oblige
tilting the corners of her mouth.

“Of course, we are happy to help,” she said, as though Calliope or Stan had just asked. “I've had my assistant pull the records for you—we could have sent them!” She laughed at the silliness of it, as though the detectives had told a slightly naughty joke.

“Actually, we'd like to look around a bit.” Calliope lit up a smile of her own and was pleased to see the other woman caught off-balance. “Has the hospital changed much in the last ten years?”

Dr. Hazen recovered quickly. “Do you mean structurally or operationally? I've only been the director for two years, and I like to think we've improved our management processes in that time.”

“I don't know what I mean, exactly.” Calliope turned to look at Stan Chan, who had clearly already decided that there were no bonus points for him in getting between his partner and the director. “Let's walk and talk, shall we?”

“Oh.” Dr. Hazen smiled again, but it was reflex. “I hadn't . . . You see, I've got such a lot to do today. . . .”

“Of course. We understand. We'll just wander around on our own, then.”

“No, I couldn't let you . . . that would be terribly rude of me.” The director smoothed her gray silk pants. “Let me just have ever such a quick word with my assistant, then I'll be right with you.”

The grounds were certainly nothing to complain about; even the most stiff-legged and disoriented of the patients did not, in the airy Sydney noontime, seem anything to be frightened of, but Calliope was still having trouble shaking her Gothic mood. As Dr. Hazen pointed out this or that fixture, her tone as bright as the day, they might have been touring the grounds of some particularly Bohemian private school. Still, Calliope reminded herself, most of these young people belonged in the category of dangerous-to-
somebody,
even if that somebody was only their own sad selves; it was a bit difficult to fall in with the director's breeziness.

As they passed through a long lavender courtyard surrounded by roofed walkways, Calliope found herself studying the inmates with a little more attention. After all, the murder victim Polly Merapanui had definitely been here, and every investigative cell in Detective Skouros' body suggested that the girl had met her murderer here as well.

The hospital population, at least in this semirandom sample, seemed to contain only a few Aboriginal patients, but as she looked at the disaffected faces of all colors, at eyes tracking on any movement for lack of something better to do, Calliope could not help remembering pictures she had seen of cattle stations in the outback, portraits of the local Aboriginals who had lost their land and their culture—people with nothing left to do but stand in the dusty streets and wait for something that was never going to happen, without even an inkling of what that something might be.

The hospital also had rather a lot of armed guards, muscular young men talking to each other more often than to the inmates. Each wore a shirt with the Feverbrook corporate logo, as though they were roadies for a touring band; each had a stun-baton holstered on his hip.

Dr. Hazen noticed her staring. “They're hand-coded, of course.”

“Sorry . . . ?”

“The batons. They're hand-coded, so that only the guards can use them.” She smiled, but it was the tight sort that weather announcers wore when assuring viewers the hurricane wouldn't be as bad as expected, but that they should lock themselves in their cellars anyway. “We are a secure facility, Detective. We do need guards.”