Shudder (12 page)

“Do you...erm...think sex cyber-toys can develop intelligence and ran rampant?”

A burst of sincere laughter erupted at the other side of the line. “What, you mean: ‘The Day of the Sex-Bot'? ‘The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Dildo'?”

Dave gave a laugh that was not entirely hollow. “Something like that. ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Murder.'”

“You are asking me this because of guilty paranoia concerning a thing in your closet, or because it has something to do with your work? I'm warning you, both possibilities would elicit a delighted guffaw from me.”

“I'm afraid it's to do with my work.”

Anton obliged with a delighted guffaw. “Well, it seems your work is like a Philip K. Dick novel.”

“So is yours, Tony, so is yours.”

“You don't have to remind me about that. Well, my answer to your question is: I think that anything is possible.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I think a sex toy developing intelligence is rather far-fetched. Did you ask the people who make them?”

“Yeah, I sent an email to their headquarters in Kuching.”

“That in China?”

“Malaysia.”

“I'm curious to their answer.”

“There isn't any. I tried to get someone in the police to send an official query, but...”

“They refused to involve the name of the city police in such disreputable madness.”

Dave sighed, “Something like that.”

“Well, good luck in hunting replicants, clones, and androids.”

“This isn't funny you know. So much creepy shit going on suddenly.”

“What creepy shit?”

“I'll tell you over coffee one of these days.”

“Okay, bye, Dave.”

“Bye, Tony.”

Dave breathed in deeply and felt something stir inside him. It was a vague affect, on the verge of turning into something more concrete: fear. Tingling tendrils of sticky anxiety in the face of the suddenly numerous unknowns tried to slither from his stomach up towards the solar plexus.

Must be going soft,
he thought.

He locked the door, took off his sweater, and began doing push-ups with deliberate slowness.

It was Tuesday afternoon. The rain had stopped during the night, but the roads and sidewalks still glistened in the dull autumn light. There was moisture on the small piles of leaves beneath the few trees in the city center. Five-minute waves of fine drizzle fell every half-hour.

The city air was cleansed of heavier particles. Dave had stopped on his way out of his home to just breathe for two whole minutes.

Now, four hours later, he was sitting in his private office, with five piles of paper, and a number of orphaned crisscrossed sheets covering his desk and parts of the floor. These were photocopies of the five maps of the city in different periods.

He was clutching a magic marker and squinting with angry intensity at the twenty-eleven map. A small crooked vein pulsated on the side of his forehead and an invisible pincer was already hovering near his skull.

He had just marked the places of the Season Girls' homes. There was no apparent pattern. A full third of the girls were not even from the city itself, but from nearby towns.

Only in the last twenty-five years had all the victims been from city. Perhaps because by this time it had grown large enough to reach a level of chaotic anonymity that allowed the killer to operate in safety without the need to go on victim tourism.

At least there was a pattern of sorts to the places of where the bodies were found. Each year they were placed on four sides of the city. On, or a little beyond its edges.

At first, it had even seemed like the body sites were marking the points of the compass. Unfortunately, the points changed every year. When Dave superimposed laboriously all the sites on one map, all he got was an irregular, fuzzy circle of dots.

When he connected the four dots signifying the four corpses in a given year with lines, a cross appeared. This had given Dave a pang of hope, but when he connected the dots of the next year, the center of the cross was in a different place of the city.

Of course, that would have been much too easy. Too Hollywood.

Pushing aside the marred map, eliciting an annoying rustle from all the other papers, Dave planted his elbows on the desk and planted his cheekbones on his fists. He tried to visualize the person responsible, the season killer.

If it was the same person all these years, he must about eighty by now. Unless he started killing as a toddler. Which was highly improbable to say the least.

So, point one is,
he thought,
there is more than one killer working
.

Accepting this assumption there could then be only two possible alternatives. Either the killer picked a successor, or more than one successors, or this was the work of an organized body of people. Some sort of evil Cabal or something.

Perhaps a family of crazies.

Okay, three possible alternatives. A master—apprentice business; an evil sect-like organization; or an inbred mad clan.

Dave got up and closed his window. He had suddenly felt a chill. Outside the appropriately and inappropriately dressed inch high pedestrians were going about their inch high lives. Not one of them was looking up at him through a sniper rifle.

Of course, that didn't prove anything.

He sat down again.

If it were an organization, or a mad clan, this would also explain why the detectives who worked on the case all met with unfortunate accidents. For a master-apprentice thing, it bordered on the impossible, unless the killer was a policeman himself.

Unless he was a policeman himself...heavy shit.

Dave did not believe for one minute that the list of car crashes and heart attacks was a wave of coincidental deaths. So, why had no one probed deeper into this? If the police can't handle it, why not pass it over to some secret service or other? That's what he would have done.

Prompted perhaps by the uncomfortable doubts surrounding the Season Girls from all angles, Dave slipped into some quick daydreaming. If he were head of police, there certainly would be some changes made. Resources would pour into the force, they'll have their own experts and detectives again, and criminals would always get their due...

A year ago, he had cracked a case of gang-rapists who stalked and attacked lesbians. The culprits had turned out to be immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, and they had only been practicing ‘correctional rape' as they'd called it.

When caught and charged, they were not remorseful, but rather taken aback. Baffled. As if at the back of their minds they had really believed that the rape laws were just nonsense for the sake of appearance and that no one was
really
that much opposed to it.

These were nobody's women really, no man's honor had suffered. Anyway, what more logical answer can there be to the existence of lesbians, than to gang rape them, to make them see the error of their ways?

Dave was so proud to find the clues and testimonies enabling the force to finally catch these animals and then was devastated, when the whole lot were deported back to Africa. He knew that they would get some ridiculous slap on the wrist back home.

For all he knew, they all probably got medals for the struggle against Western satanic decadence.

Now if
he
were chief of police, he would bug Parliament, or the Senate, or whoever did these things, until they passed a law that sex crimes committed here would be served here. To hell with not enough space in jails. Surely, it was just a question of will and management to build a few jails more.

Lots of jails in fact.

He looked again at the city map with the fuzzy circle of spots and decided to let the matter stew below the threshold of his consciousness. His thoughts were going everywhere. He really should learn some sort of concentration mantra or something.

He opened a newssheet at random.

A new film about a love affair between a Victorian werewolf and a time traveling zombie had taken the box office by storm.
Spiderman 15
was a distant second.

Rumors that Madonna was about to embark on another farewell tour. Dave looked at her photo. She looked surprisingly fantastic.

The little-known party of the National Patriots had issued a statement concerning the new raising of the retirement age. Dave clicked to see the whole statement.

“For too long we the people have allowed our political class to fleece us like sheep. We are not a conquered country and they are not conquerors. Yet we have forgotten that it is we the people who tell them what they should do and not the other way round.

For decades, honest people have toiled and planned for a retirement that never comes. Joe the plumber and Maria the hairdresser have worked and worked and looked forward to when they are sixty-five, until it turned out that they must work until seventy.

Then we all work until seventy and then it turns out that we must work until seventy-four. This is ridiculous. This is being done to us because we do not draw a line. We do not say, ‘no'. It's time to say, ‘no' to these robber-barons.

They say there is no money for pensions. There would have been more than enough money in the retirement funds if the government had not allowed their pals in the banking sector to squander it time after time.

They say there is no money for a dignified retirement of the hardworking, honest citizen, and yet there are always billions of dollars to give as bailouts for big corporations. There are always billions of dollars spent to wage useless wars on the other side of the globe and to finance regimes in the third world that hate us.

We, the National Patriots, say that enough is enough. The politicians have become a closed elite that looks down at us with contempt. We the people must take the power back. We must take back our dignity and resurrect our belief that democracy really works.”

Dave smirked. He hadn't voted since he was twenty, but what he read just now did strike a chord. It struck the chord clumsily, but even that was more than could be said for the established parties.

He opened the National Patriots website, but there was nothing there except a banner saying Down for Maintenance.

Typical.

He looked at the other news. In the criminal section, he saw a headline—
Albino Killed for Medicine
.

Anton. With ominous foreboding, he clicked to see the full text.

He let out a puff of relief. It wasn't Anton. It was some other unfortunate albino.

The remains of his body were found dumped in a park. Experts said this could be the results of an Eastern African superstition, that medicine made from the body of an albino can cure almost any disease.

Dave ground his teeth and felt the pincer finally beginning to squeeze his skull, and together with it, a wave of racism threatened to blot out his normally relaxed view of the world.

Then he suddenly realized that perhaps this was why Anton was a racist. He probably knew of this African superstition and his racism was a form of self-defense. After all, he could never know in the eyes of which Afro he was an animal with medical properties, to be chopped up, and sold off.

Following up on his emotional momentum, he read an article calling for the deportation of all African immigrants back to where they came from.

The author reminded the readers, that “Our basic freedoms were paid for by centuries of blood, sweat, and tears”, and that “people who are not willing to live by our democratic rules must not be given the chance to disrupt our lives.”

Exactly
, Dave thought. Then, to feel fair to himself, he read an article condemning fascist reactions to such incidents.

The author reminded the readers that at the time of their grandparent there was the fear of the Asian peril, and at the times of their parents—the fear of the Muslim peril. Integration was the answer.

This is different
, thought Dave and rubbed his face. He should have shaved today.

He looked again at the map with the body sites of the Season Girls and remembered his plan for the toy-basher. He dialed Fortham's number.

“Hi, Dave, what's cooking?”

“A toy basher...”

“Ah, you've got him in your sight?”

“I think so. I was wondering if you would like to cover my back when I try to use myself as bait.”

“What? How?”

“I sent you the preliminary report about the similarities concerning the three victims of break-ins.”

“I haven't read it yet.” Andy. Honest and blunt as usual. Where other people would evade and fib, he simply said how things stood.

“Well, in short, they all bought the same toys from the same shop at the same time.”

“You want to do this as well? When?”

“Thursday night. After midnight. Around one.”

“Wait, let me think.”

Dave tapped his teeth with his pen and waited.

Andy's voice returned, “Okay, I'll tell the wife that I'm on stakeout that day.”

“Just don't mention it's in a sex shop. Ha, ha. Thanks, Andy.”

“No problem. How's the season girl curse, not caught up with you yet?”

“Good of you to bring this up. Do you think there might be some sort of massive conspiracy behind all this?”

Andy answered after a short silence. “I hope not. I certainly hope not.”

“I mean, so many girls. Not two, not twenty, over two hundred.”

“I know, I know, I counted them also. It could be just general inefficiency.”

“To this extent? Are things that bad?”

“Well, you know. Up to two thousand people disappear every year without trace from our cities. Traffic accidents kill and maim around five thousand. Hundreds are murdered and while the dead Season Girls were relatively few, they didn't stand out so much. By the time the numbers accumulated, it became background noise.”

“Some background noise,” Dave said with feeling.

“Yeah. With the media not knowing, no pressure comes from the public to solve it.”

“What about all these people who tried to solve it and got heart attacks or into various accidents?”

Another silence from Andy. Then, “What can I say? I just hope we don't get it the same way.”

Some relief. Might as well have stayed silent.
“Well, so do I. Okay, see you Thursday.”

“See you Thursday. Take care.”

“Yeah, you too.”

The detective extricated himself from his desk without upsetting the paper piles too much and massaged his temples.

Focus, focus
, he repeated to himself,
think about the toy-basher, about nothing else, nothing else. Things will wait their turn.