Robert Charrette - Arthur 03 - A Knight Among Knaves (15 page)

The music that had surrounded them cut off with almost electronic precision. Shahotain had come.

"Go. All of you," he said in a voice without patience.

The party was over. Sprites scattered and goblins ran for cover. There wasn't a bogie to be seen. Gentiano and Duwynt were already halfway to the door. Fraoch took John's hand and turned with him to follow their departing companions.

"Not you, Jack." Shahotain's face was stern.

Fraoch sighed, but dropped John's hand at once. Silently she mouthed,
Later.
John hoped so. First he'd have to survive whatever had put Shahotain in such a mood. He stood, waiting for the storm.

Shahotain's gaze swept John up and down. John felt hot, tried to find some place to put his hands. The package made it difficult. Hard to clasp your hands when you're holding something, hard not to look like you're fidgeting. John noticed the barest flicker in Shahotain's eyes as he took note of John's silk-wrapped memento, but Shahotain's expression never changed. John was reminded of how scary he had thought his tutor the first time he had seen him on that hill near the magic pool. At least then John hadn't had to endure Shahotain's attention for long. The silence grew, and John's trepidation with it, until Shahotain said, "I have something for you."

In Shahotain's hand appeared a transparent box containing a data disk. It might have been sleight-of-hand, or it might have been real magic; Shahotain was capable of either. He held out the disk to John. Taking the offering with his free

hand, John saw that there were no labels on either the box or the disk.

"What's this?"

"That's a question I'd look for from the others, not you," Shahotain said in his Disapproving Tutor voice.

John's tension eased. He was familiar with that voice; it was much better than Shahotain's Superior Elf voice. John had a good idea where he stood with his tutor. He tried again. "I meant, what's on it?"

"Information."

The bald, uninformative, elementary answer caught John off guard. Actually, it annoyed him. He expected better from Ms tutor. "That's the kind of answer I'd look for from Bennett, not you."

"Or one you might give yourself. Under the right circumstances."

Could be. "I haven't seen any computers around here. How am I supposed to read it?"

"You are not expected to read it here."

"Then what am I
expected
to do with it?"

"What you will."

John considered strangling Shahotain. "Why the games?"

Shahotain gave him the cold smile that said there would be no answer forthcoming to
that
question. Then Shahotain surprised him. "The disk contains information concerning a woman from the sunlit world."

John's first thought was that Shahotain meant his foster mother. No, it couldn't be! John just had mothers on his brain because of Bennett's gift. Still, if not her, whom? He had to ask. "What woman?"

"Marianne Reddy."

Hell!
He wanted that data, now he was being handed it. "Why give this to me now?"

"It is timely."

Shahotain left him with that remark.

Timely.

There were times when the ways of the people of his

blood infuriated him. Times when John felt more than a little out of place in Faery and weirded out by the strangeness of the otherworld. Faery just wasn't Rezcom 3.

Where Marianne Roddy had raised him as her son.

He had a Sot of questions, but he should have been used to that. Some questions seemed determined to remain unanswered. He'd had some answered here, but the answers often seemed to spawn more questions. Some of the questions he wanted to ask didn't seem appropriate to put to his new friends; he really didn't want to look stupid to them. His tutors might have the answers, but he wanted even less to appear stupid to them. Bennett held the answers to a lot of John's questions, but he was about as forthcoming as a stone.

Whom could he turn to?

These days, when the questions got too much, he usually sought privacy. Once he'd turned to Faye as a matter of course. She'd always been there whenever he had wanted another viewpoint. He wanted another viewpoint now, but Faye was not around. That was his fault. Fraoch. There were times when he wished his physical intimacy with her was matched by a spiritual one.

John felt very alone. He needed to do some thinking, get some kind of handle on what was going on. He was going to have to do it himself. Who else was going to help him?

CHAPTER
12

The guard at the apartment door didn't belong to the C-Kure™ rentacops who held the contract on the rezcom. She wore an Armianco uniform. Armianco was the corp that owned the place. Not a real cop in sight, but the monitor beacon proclaiming the apartment a crime scene was a New England Cooperative issue, which meant the locals had at least been here.
Ah, the joys of cooperation.
Charley hoped to God that the corp mooks had managed to preserve some of the evidence.

Charley breezed past the guard, a flick of his wrist displaying his badge. Manny stopped to do the check-in talk, which was fine by Charley.
Better him than me.
Manny would let him know later if he had done any more than waste time. Charley had more important things on his mind than corp etiquette.

Fifteen minutes before they'd gotten this assignment, Caspar had posted an addendum to his Modus 273 file. Caspar was one of Charley's cyberspace ears, a damned good one, and it had been months since Caspar had posted on anything but bad ones, the ones that didn't have the logical explanations that the department said they had. Caspar had posted this location, adding it to the Modus 273 file that hadn't previously shown anything in NEC police jurisdiction. Charley just knew he'd hate the reason, but he needed to find out what Caspar knew that he didn't about how this new incident was connected to the Modus 273 killings.

Armianco's Stamford rezcom, like the rest of the town, was more a part of New York City than the New England cooperative, but technically all of Connecticut still belonged to the NEC, at least until the amendment went through. Until then, this kind of shit was the NEC's problem, and NEC cops would be doing a job that was too big for them. Too bad New York didn't send any money for enforcement to go with the crime they let slop over the border.

It was a bit surprising that Armianco was being a good corporate citizen and cooperating. They had actually called in the NEC police, even though the deaths had happened on their ever-so-precious corporate turf. Which they only did when it was a mess that they didn't want to clean up themselves. The situation stank, even without the omen of Caspar's modus link.

The apartment stank too, of cold, old death. Charley had scanned the prelim file on the way over, curious as to how bodies could go undiscovered in such a state-of-the-art place as the Armianco rezcom. According to maintenance, the tenant, one Anthony Marino, had called in to say he was going on vacation, and the apartment's systems had been set low, even the Tidibot™ drones were shut down. Nobody from maintenance would have checked the place for another week if the rezcom's electronics hadn't been fritzed in the blackout when Eden Again bombed the Agassi power station. When things came back on-line, a nasty-minded busybody of a supervisor, one Yvonne Browne, had discovered a chance To score points when she noticed the vacation request. Execs like Mr. Marino didn't take off on whimsical vacations; they had to log downtime requests weeks in advance, and Browne knew it. When Browne couldn't find such a request in the log, she had squawked upstairs and found out she wasn't quick enough; there already was an investigation in progress. Execs like Mr. Marino didn't miss work without people noticing. Her yelp put them on the apartment, something that the corp cops hadn't yet gotten around to. Mr. Marino might be a godlike being to Supervisor Browne, but he was still fry to the people who ran Armianco, and by extension their pet cops. At least Marino had been until he'd gone and gotten himself dead. Now he was somebody important and Armianco wanted to know just what the police department was going to do about this tragedy.

The department sent Charley and Manny, though why was unclear. The prelim report had contained lots of details, sordid ones. Mr. Marino had died in the arms of prostitutes, who were also dead. There were drugs involved. Nothing in the report pointed to a case for Special Investigations. Of course, the cause of death remained undetermined, but that was not in itself suspicious; examinations took time these days, especially for corporate citizens. No CoD just meant that the crime wasn't an obvious murder. Charley just hoped that when the coroner's report was filed, it would end their assignment to this case, but his sour stomach kept telling him he was being foolish. Caspar wasn't interested in ordinary deaths, even homicides.

The apartment was huge, wandering off into nooks, crannies, and other rooms. Charley knew from the report where to go. The bodies were in the main bedroom, off to the left. The door was open and the light on. When he laid eyes on the bodies, he popped an antacid tab even though he'd already had the bottle-prescribed limit for the day. He needed it.

What he saw was a trio of stiffs. Mr. Marino's bio listed him as thirty-two. The prostitutes' registrations showed them in their twenties and the DNA scans supported it, give or take a few years. But the bodies looked like old people. White hair. Shrunken muscles. Papery skin. The corpses looked ancient, almost like mummies. The withered husks looked dry enough to blow away if a wind ever penetrated the sacred air-conditioned confines of the rezcom.

He understood now why the report didn't have anything that looked like an SIU crime. This was one of the bad ones. The less data about it loose in the system, the better.

The brief sound of a rush of water from the bathroom caught his attention. There shouldn't be anyone here but

cops. Cops didn't wash their hands at a crime scene. So

who?

The bathroom looked bigger than his own apartment. I'rom the doorway, the mirror showed him a woman seated on the chair by the vanity. An Armianco ID tag lay atop the shoulder-strapped briefcase near her elbow. She was brushing with a cloth at dark flecks staining the front of her business suit. Charley caught a faint whiff of something that was not perfume, the same odor coming from the john. Bad enough that she was here, but if she had compromised evidence—

He entered the bathroom, warming up to slag her down for interfering in a police investigation, then he realized that he had seen her before. Association chains fired in his brain and his anger cooled. A little. Well, maybe not much, but curiosity overrode it.

"Dr. Spae, isn't it?"

She started at his voice, first looking into the mirror, then turning to look directly at him. When her mismatched eyes focused on him, there was no hint of recognition. Her voice was shaky when she spoke. "Do I know you?"

Charley hadn't needed to hear her voice to cinch his ID; her eyes had done that. "We met a bit over a year ago, Doctor. Norwood Hilton, during their poltergeist problem. Since then our only contact has been on the net." He could see that she was still having trouble placing him. "I'm Charley Gordon. NEC Special Investigations Unit."

"Gordon? Detective Gordon?" Charley nodded politely. She nodded back, forced a smile. "I suppose it makes sense that they assigned you."

Makes sense to whom? "Just doing my job, Doctor. I have to say that I'm surprised to see
you
here. I don't remember seeing your name on the list of witnesses." Not that there were any witnesses, and even if there had been, they wouldn't have been detained here at the crime scene. Still, he thought he ought to at least start the conversation politely.

"I'm not a witness. At least not to the
event
of this abomination."

That was an odd phrasing. "You know something about this?"

"Know?" Her gaze strayed to the door into the bedroom. Her eyes were bleak. "God, I hope I don't
know."

"You're not making sense, Doctor."
And you're not making me happy.
Spae's postings had always been rational, at least once he allowed for her assumptions, and she'd always been as fast to debunk the garbage as the department PR flacks, sometimes faster. That, plus the fact that she'd put him on the right trail on one of the bad ones when nobody else had been holding a clue, had led Charley to put more faith in her responses than those from the usual run of "investigators." "Why don't we start over. Suppose you tell me what you're doing here."

"Armianco hired my firm to investigate."

"That firm being?"

"Lowenstein Ryder Priestly & Associates."

Charley recognized the name, but wondered why Spae was associated with them; he hadn't heard of LRP taking an interest in his sort of business. They specialized in keeping things quiet and, failing that, putting the best face on whatever dirt their corporate clients had gotten into. That must be why they were involved. He didn't like it. Sure, Armianco had the right to have a private investigation, this was corporate turf; but they shouldn't have had their people on site until SIU cleared access. He wasn't going to push the point. Not yet anyway.