Sins of the Father (18 page)

"Yeah, I'd say that about covers it," Anderson agreed. Inwardly, she found herself vaguely disturbed by the abrupt change in her partner's manner. In the hours they had spent in each other's company she had seen two faces to Lang. On one hand she wore the typical Judicial façade: stony, businesslike, and immune to emotion. But there was another face to the rookie Psi-Judge; one she tried hard to keep hidden.

Granted, Lang was hardly unique in that regard. Everyone wore two faces: the ordinary workaday face they wore to the world at large, and the private face of their inner thoughts and emotions. What concerned Anderson was not so much that Lang had two faces. It was that there seemed such a wide gulf between them. Lang worked hard to project an outward appearance of confidence and self-reliance, but Anderson could sense the emotional turmoil beneath it. She had the impression that Lang was nowhere as near as much in control of herself as she tried to appear. There was a brittleness to the woman's manner; a fragility that lurked just below the surface. Once again, she thought of the report she would be expected to give to Psi-Judge Vinley when this assignment was over. Vinley would ask her whether, in her opinion, Lang had what it took to make the grade in Psi Division.

Right now, Anderson was not entirely sure if she knew the answer.

"What do you think, Anderson?" she heard Lang ask her. Realising she had fallen so deep in thought she had lost track of the conversation around her, Anderson saw that Lang and Farnham had turned to look at her expectantly.

"Sorry, I was miles away there for a minute," she said. "What were you saying?"

"I was just wondering what our next step should be," Lang said. There was the merest suggestion of suspicion in her eyes. Thanks to her own psychic shields, Anderson would have known if Lang had tried to surreptitiously perform a telepathic scan to read her surface thoughts. Still, she had the uneasy feeling that Lang was well aware she had been thinking about her.

"Yeah, about that..." Pausing in mid-sentence, Anderson gazed at the boxes stacked in the living room all around them. An idea suddenly presented itself. "You realise, there's one big difference between Joseph Kapinski and Konrad Gruschenko?"

"You mean that one was a mob boss and the other was an innocent citizen," Lang asked, not without a trace of sarcasm.

"I was talking more about the fact that Gruschenko might as well have been a cipher," Anderson said. "Think about it. The guy lived like a ghost. He lived under a false identity, with false fingerprints, a false face, false papers - hell, even his age was false. And, because of that, there's no way we can hope to get any real handle on him. I know I keep saying this, but I'm sure the motive behind these killings is deeply personal. There's real hatred here: not just in the MO of the killings and the messages carved into the bodies, but even in that little boy's eyes. And yet, because of the way he lived his life, Gruschenko's past - his personal life, if he had one - is a mystery."

"But Kapinski's past isn't a mystery?" Lang said. "Is that what you're getting at?"

"Exactly," Anderson nodded. She waved a hand towards the stacks of boxes. "Kapinski's past is all here: hoarded, catalogued, even labelled. And, as strange as it may seem to us, all these things really meant something to Kapinski. You remember I said we'd be wasting our time trying to scan any of Gruschenko's hideouts. That he didn't stay in one place long enough to leave any kind of significant psychic impressions. But here, in this apartment, it's like the opposite is true. Did you notice anything unusual when you tried to scan Kapinski's body?"

"Now you mention it, I did." Lang's eyes clouded as she recalled the experience. "At first, when I was trying to connect to the psi-flux, it was like there was some kind of interference..."

"White noise," Anderson told her. "It's the boxes. Or rather, their contents. You've seen the junk inside them. Plasteen combs, old shoes, grocery bags. Kapinski was a shut-in. He spent his life surrounded by these things, night and day. They must have picked up stray psychic impressions like a sponge. Usually, when you perform a psychometric scan on an apartment, it can be difficult to pick up even a single impression. Here, there are thousands of them. Maybe even tens of thousands. All stacked on top of each other just like these boxes. When you think about it, we were lucky we could pick up anything at all from Kapinski's body. It's like this entire apartment is a radio receiver tuned to a thousand different channels at once."

"I'm sure this is all very interesting if you're a Psi-Judge." Farnham had been silent, but now he joined the conversation. "But I don't see how it's relevant to your investigation."

"It's relevant because every part of Kapinski's past is recorded in these boxes," Anderson said. "And I don't mean psychically. I mean physically. There's so many stray psychic impressions in here, if we started trying to scan the boxes I think we'd get nothing but gobbledegook. But, physically, the entire place is a treasure trove. If the contents of the boxes are sorted and catalogued, there's every chance we'll find something that links back to the motive for these killings. And if we find the motive, we'll find our perps. I'm sure of it."

"Wait a minute." There was an edge of disbelief in Farnham's tone. "Are you suggesting we go through all these boxes? It could take weeks."

"I'm not just suggesting it, I'm ordering it," Anderson replied. "I don't want to pull rank, but I've been appointed the primary on this investigation."

"You're not serious?" Farnham's voice had risen; disbelief giving way to a note of belligerence. "What about how long it's going to take us? We're talking about the murder of a shut-in, for Grud's sake. It's not like this is a priority case. Get a grip, Anderson. This is the Big Meg. Murders happen all the time."

"You're right, they do," Anderson said. "But, in this case, we can stop more murders from happening. We're dealing with what looks like the beginning of a series of killings. That means more people are going to die unless we can find out what's driving this murder spree. Then, there's the fact that the killing here links back to the death of Konrad Gruschenko, and may or may not be connected with Gruschenko's criminal empire. You heard about the raids on suspected Organizatsiya operations earlier this morning?"

"Sure, I did. But I don't see-"

"Gruschenko had been running criminal enterprises under a variety of aliases throughout this city for nearly thirty years. Right now the Sector House authorities are concentrating on shutting down his operations, but when the dust settles there's going to be a lot of questions asked about how Gruschenko managed it. I don't mean the face changes and rejuve jobs, or even the false documents - with enough money and the right connections you can get hold of those things easily enough - the real question is how did Gruschenko stay ahead of the Justice Department for so long? Did he have contacts and informants inside the Department? Auxiliaries, filing clerks, maybe even Judges? I suspect that SJS are going to be all over the Gruschenko investigation by the time the day is out. And Kapinski was killed by the same perps who murdered Gruschenko. You said before that this wasn't a priority case? Me, I see things differently. So far, we've got serial killings, superhuman perps, a major organised crime conspiracy, possibly even Judicial corruption - all stuck together in one big ugly ball of wax. I don't want to overstate things. But, you ask me, unless Judge Death suddenly walks through that door looking to dance the fandango, this case is about as high priority as it gets."

Realising the tone of her own voice had risen to match Farnham's, Anderson paused momentarily to regain her composure and allow her words to sink in to the minds of her listeners.

"Grud, it's going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack," Farnham said glumly. He looked at the boxes around them and shook his head in defeat. "All right. I'm going to have to call this in to Control first and update them about what we're doing here. But, after that, where do you want to begin?"

"I suppose we should each just pick a box at random and start work," Anderson said. She looked at the faces of the other Judges. Appalled at the scale of the task ahead of them, Lang and the two Tek-Judges wore identical grimaces. "When you contact Control though, you'd better ask them to send more manpower."

She glanced briefly once more at the interior of the apartment and its thousands of crates and boxes.

"I get the feeling we're going to need a lot more Judges."

TWELVE

KEEPING PROMISES

For Leonard, the killings he had committed that day did not end with the box man. It had been a strange experience, crawling from the air-conditioning vent to find he was in a room crammed with dusty boxes piled on top of each other like stacks of firewood. The first of the bad men he had killed for Daniel had been dangerous. The old man who looked young had been armed with a gun and carried himself with the walk of man who had killed before. The second man though, the box man as Leonard thought of him, had seemed helpless, almost pathetic. He had hardly even struggled as Leonard's hands closed around his throat; he had simply stared with eyes full of sadness and loss as his life faded away to darkness. Once more, Leonard was reminded of the fact that he had become a murderer. By taking cause with Daniel and following his friend's instructions, he had killed men he had no quarrel with nor any reason to hate. He had killed them simply because the boy had asked him to: an act of friendship that seemed destined to see more blood spilled before the day was through.

Killing the box man was not enough for Daniel. Nothing, it seemed, was enough to quell the hatred the boy felt deep in his soul.

Afterwards, when he had killed the box man and carved the message into his flesh, Leonard had been annoyed when Daniel began to talk about killing someone else.

"We should do one more today," Daniel had said, speaking aloud with no fear that anyone would hear them now the apartment's owner lay dead at their feet among a mound of fallen boxes. "There's another bad man who doesn't live too far away from here. We could go and kill him, and be back home within the hour."

"That's what you said last time, Daniel," Leonard had said. Hearing an element of harshness in his own voice, he regretted it at once. He was tired, and his temper was short. Daniel was his friend, but sometimes the demands the boy placed upon him made life hard. "I'm sorry, Daniel," he apologised. "I didn't mean to sound angry. It's just, I'm tired. It's been a long day, and I need to sleep. I've got to work again tonight."

"Just one more," Daniel had stared at him with wide round eyes. "He's not far away. And if we leave him 'til tonight, we'll have to come all this way again. It's easier now, while he's close."

"But I'm tired, Daniel. I need my..."

"Please, Leonard," Daniel had pleaded. The boy's eyes had seemed on the verge of tears. "You promised."

It was there again. The agreement between them. Leonard would kill the bad man on Daniel's behalf, and Daniel in turn would help Leonard find his mother. It was a promise set in stone, and Leonard could no more walk away from it than he could bear the thought of never seeing his mother again. He remembered her so clearly, but only Daniel held it in his power to create a reunion.

"All right, Daniel," Leonard said tiredly. We will kill another bad man."

He hated crawling through vents. The sewers and the maintenance tunnels were not so bad, but they only extended from building to building. Once they came to the block where the bad man lived, Leonard was forced to leave the tunnels behind and enter the building's air-conditioning system. It was not the fact that the vents were dark: even if he had not had Daniel to guide him, he could have easily navigated his way through them. No, it was the lack of breathing room that Leonard disliked. He was accustomed to the wide open spaces of the Cursed Earth; breathing in fresh clean air and feeling the warmth of the sun on his face. To Leonard, being inside an air-conditioning vent felt like being buried alive.

Admittedly, to the people of Mega-City One the air in the Cursed Earth would have seemed neither too fresh nor altogether clean. There was something called fallout that Leonard had heard the guards at the coffee warehouse talk about amongst themselves. They had not liked working with mutants. The guards were afraid that Leonard and the others might have brought fallout with them on their clothes somehow; that it would infect the guards and give them cancer. At least, that was how it seemed to Leonard from the things he had heard them say. Like so much else about life in the city, he found he did not really understand it at all.

There was so little space inside the vents. His body was so big, and the walls of the vent were so tight around it, the only way that Leonard could move was to push with his feet and wriggle his body forward like a snake. It was hot and tiring work, and the stale air that blew through the system from time to time whenever someone turned on the air conditioner in their apartment only made it worse. The moment Leonard entered the vents he quickly lost all track of time. He could not be sure whether he had been inside them for minutes or for hours. There was only the sense of constant movement as he wriggled forward, half a metre at a time, while Daniel whispered encouragement in his mind.

Keep going, Leonard
, Daniel said.
You're nearly there now
.

Nearly there
. Daniel had been saying those words for what seemed like hours. The same words, over and over, while Leonard huffed and grunted his way through the vents. His shirt was wet with sweat. His legs ached. His throat was dry. He felt a pounding pain at the back of his head, keeping time with Daniel's words.

Nearly there
, Daniel said.
You're nearly there
.

Stop
.

At last, the journey ended. After twisting and turning through endless branching vents, they came to a grille cover that looked out across the floor of one of the housing block's apartments. They had reached their destination: from the excitement he could hear in Daniel's voice, Leonard was sure of it.