“What did you say about prompting the witness?” the DA said.
Angel couldn’t find Chico on the wall. “Are there any more pictures?”
In response the entire wall changed, and she looked at another army of bald faces. Chico was almost dead-center, staring at her. “Fifteen, that’s the fucking bastard, fifteen.”
Fifteen froze. The other faces blanked and the other two came back, flanking Chico. “Now we want you to be sure—”
“Those are the bastards who attacked me.”
“You chose rather quickly—” the ferret started.
“That’s them.” She stared down Igalez. “The scum you’re defending’d kill you for not being human.”
White put his hand on her shoulder. “I think we’re done here.” White led her out of the room, and Angel was glad to get out of Igalez’s presence.
Anaka was waiting by the desk, looking impatient.
• • •
She’d been right. They needed her to identify the body. They took her to St. Luke’s Veterinary. She sat in the back of the car, numb, silent, while Anaka and White talked about what cops talk about.
They were going to stick her face-to-face with Byron cold on a slab and Angel wasn’t sure she wasn’t going to lose it. Hell, it felt like she’d lost it already. It was a damn close thing with Igalez.
She was stronger than that, though. She had more control.
Hoped she had more control, anyway.
Stop brooding on it, she told herself. Soon the whole thing will be over. Over already, really. Byron was a slab of meat and there was not thing one she could do about it.
Anaka and White argued around her, oblivious.
“I’m telling you,” Anaka was saying. “Ellis is hiding something.”
“I don’t want to deal with your conspiracies today.” White sounded more resigned than argumentative.
“Why’s she doing the Dorset case? She’s not a vulpine expert.”
“Who gives a shit, Kobe? Our job’s to bust the Knights, remember?”
“And if something’s funny about the autopsy—”
“Damn it, Kobe, if we do this right, the skinheads will plead, roll over on their masters, and we’ll never have to bring up the body . . .”
Angel was almost tempted to ask if that was so, why they needed to put her through this. She didn’t. Who cared what kind of internal politics these cops were going through, she just wanted to get the damn ordeal over with.
The pair argued with each other all the way to the hospital. After a while Angel stopped listening.
The detectives took her to Byron’s resting place, the morgue in the basement of St. Luke’s Veterinary. The morgue’s white tile walls echoed sounds to unnatural lengths. Cheap pine-scented disinfectant didn’t quite cover the smell of dead flesh that’d sunk into the walls.
Angel was cold down here.
Byron lay on a stainless-steel table. As soon as Angel saw the body, there wasn’t any doubt that it was him. Blood had caked on his fur, but it was the same face . . .
“I love you, Byron,” she whispered for the first and only time.
She said it so quietly that she was unsure if she had said it at all.
“Is it him?” Anaka asked for perhaps the third time.
Angel was still trying to find her voice.
She kept thinking how cruel it was. The slash on his neck had cut halfway through his throat and up the side of his face, pulling his cheek into a slack grimace. She was glad for whoever it was that had closed Byron’s eyes. If Byron’s eyes had been open, she was sure she’d go running off screaming—
After an eternity she managed to drag her gaze from the corpse. She nodded at the cops. She screwed her eyes shut, but it felt like the image of Byron on that table had glued itself to the inside of her eyelids. She felt White’s hand on her shoulder. “Let’s take you home.”
The cops took her back to the Mission District. White drove this time, Anaka next to him, leaving her alone in the back. For most of the ride they sat in silence, which was fine with Angel. She was still trying to deal with it, not just Byron, but her reaction to it—
She should be able to handle this, but she was on the verge of falling apart. Come on, she told herself, you only met him fourteen days ago.
They paralleled Market on Harrison, traveling toward the Mission District. As they made the turn south, Anaka finally asked a question.
“Miss Lopez, would you know why Bryan Dorset would want to meet with those two?”
“What two?” Angel whispered. She didn’t want to deal with more questions.
White sighed.
Victorian architecture began to slide by the car as Anaka tackled Angel’s hill. The cockeyed angles of the old homes made Angel’s head hurt. She put her face in her hands.
It was wrong.
Not just the offense of someone killing Byron. There was something else that was wrong—
White pulled the car up in front of her place, between the Antaeus and the Jerboa. Angel looked at Anaka before she left the car, “What are you talking about. Meet who?”
“He was killed in a hotel room rented by the Knights of Humanity—” Anaka began. “The information that led us to the body also said that there was a meeting scheduled within an hour of the time of death.”
A meeting? Why?
“No,” Angel said, backing away from the car. “I don’t have a damned idea why he’d want anything to do with those sleazeballs. What information—”
Anaka chuckled. “You don’t know? It’s—”
“Time you got some rest,” White said, and drove the car away.
Angel watched the car leave and smelled something worse than the morgue scent that clung to her fur . . .
Chapter 5
Angel didn’t bother going back to work, didn’t even call Sanchez. It seemed pointless—
Everything seemed kind of pointless.
She sat on the couch, turned on the comm, and tried to stay numb. By seven she was watching Sylvia Harper, the senior senator from California, from behind a forest of beer bulbs. It was the third time they’d put up bites from Harper’s speech in the Bronx. It was about Angel’s tenth beer.
Angel thought to herself, not for the first time, that the woman had guts to be human and anywhere near the Bronx.
“—the twenty-ninth amendment was not a mistake. Some people think that, because of the violence that is tearing at our cities, the United States should have never opened its arms to you, the nonhuman.
“These people forget what America represents. The ideals of liberty, equality, freedom—”
La-te-da, Angel thought. She might be some dumb uneducated bunny—but she knew some history. The grand ol’ United States always had that effing “liberty” at the expense of someone—morey, Amerind, or blacks like Sylvia up there.
Angel wondered if Sylvia was grateful that the moreys took the bottom rung for her.
The station jump-cut to another sound bite.
“When we tolerate slavery, we destroy ourselves. A lesson we must constantly relearn. Not just the slavery of physical bondage. It’s easy for us to say you cannot own another person, that you cannot make another person.
“But what will destroy us is mental slavery. The slavery of bigotry. The slavery of discrimination. The slavery of nonhuman ghettos that are allowed to spiral into poverty and despair. The slavery that allows a human being to say that because you are a different species, you have no human rights.”
“Human” rights, there’s a nice bit of ethnocentrism. Great, Sylvia, and you wanna be president?
Angel took another swig of beer. The room smelled like a yeast culture, but at least she was getting a buzz.
Angel heard Lei come in during the lead-in to the next story.
“Angel . . .?
?? From the sound of Lei’s voice, she knew about Byron.
“Shh,” Angel responded as she downed the last bulb, the bottle of Ki-Rin. Right after Harper, the news went local. Still leading the local news was the murder of a moreau. Only in San Francisco would Byron’s death be a lead story. Human suspects helped make it the lead.
“Angel, I’m so sorry.” Lei sat down and put her arm around Angel.
“I knew I was going to lose him.” Angel threw her empty beer bulb at the screen. It bounced off.
Lei squeezed her shoulder, and for once remained quiet.
“Laid his throat open. I had to ID his body.” The comm prattled on about martial law in LA. Angel closed her eyes on the aerial shots of the fires. “How could he be so careless?”
Lei stayed quiet.
“They’re psychos, and they’re pinks. How’d they get close enough to do that?”
Lei rubbed the back of Angel’s head between the ears. “You need some rest.”
Angel buried her face in her fur. “It’s so unfair.”
“I know.”
“I miss him.”
“I know.”
• • •
Angel had a restless sleep, and upon waking, sat herself in front of the comm again. She called in sick, almost cussing out Sanchez. Then she turned on the news and tried to think clearly.
Byron was still news. Now the vids had planted a camera in front of the seedy hotel on Eddy Street where he’d been killed. The voice-over said a pair of human members of the Knights of Humanity were being held for suspicion in the knifing.
They made her ID three suspects, and it hadn’t looked like a knife wound to Angel.
Then again, news was fucked more often than not.
Byron’s letter was still sitting on the table. Angel picked it up while, on the comm, Father Alvares de Collor, a moreau jaguar, was talking about making Byron’s funeral a show of moreau solidarity.
There is a very important question I have to ask you, Angel read, but I have to deal with some leftover responsibilities first, then I can think about the future.
“Leftover responsibilities,” Angel repeated, aloud. “Some future.”
Dawn light began to filter though the bay windows behind the comm. Angel could hear Lei wake up and start her shower.
“‘Unfinished business.’”
What the hell had Byron done for a living?
The news switched to an update on the fighting in Los Angeles. Like New York, other than a few fires here and there, things were static. The moreaus had carved themselves out the heart of the city, and local politicians were calling it a civil war. The National Guard had yet to go in, and Angel got the impression of a blast crater ringed by troops pointing their guns into the hole.
The Guard had good reason not to press the standoff. The Moreau Defense League had heavy armor on both coasts. On Manhattan, the blackened wreckage of the Nyogi tower testified to the last Federal push into the Bronx.
LA was supposed to be next on the Sylvia Harper urban violence tour. To Angel, it seemed a pointless gesture. Harper might chair a committee on interspecies violence, but no pink politico was going to calm things down there.
To a lesser extent, violence was occurring in every city with a large concentration of moreaus.
Not here, Angel thought. San Francisco is different.
At least it felt different before a bunch of bald pinks jumped her.
What the hell did those cops mean, he was going to meet with those punks? And Anaka acted like she should have known where they were getting their infor—
Angel slapped her forehead for a fool. Of course there were only two suspects in Byron’s death. Earl must still be in the hospital after what she’d done. In the hospital and being pumped for all he was worth. Earl was the cops’ source.
“Damn it, Angel, what are you doing up at this hour?”
“Trouble sleeping.”
Lei was half dressed for work, swishing her tail, and tapping a digitigrade foot. She stepped over and picked up the remote for the comm and switched off the news. “Are you going to keep torturing yourself?”
“That’s not it. It—”
Lei shook her head and pulled on a blouse.
“Something’s wrong about Byron’s death.”
“Tell the cops. It’s their job. Then stop worrying about it.” Lei leaned over and turned Angel’s head to face her. “Dear, you don’t need any more reasons to feel bad.” Lei rubbed noses and stepped back. “I’ll be back right after work to see how you’re doing, okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.” Angel nodded.
She waited until Lei left, then she put her face in her hands and shook. Did it really matter? Byron was gone, and that was that. Even if there was something strange about what was going on, it wouldn’t bring him back. Those two pinks were scum anyway. Who cared?
Angel could smell her own blood and realized she was biting her lip.
She cared.
And she was going to drive herself crazy thinking about it. Lei was right, it was the cops’ job. She should take her problems up with White or Anaka—If she could figure out what was wrong.
She called the Frisco PD and the reaction of the uniform answering the comm made her grab a robe. It had slipped her mind that she was calling humans and they considered it polite to wear some sort of clothing on a comm call.
Little details like that were slipping by her.
They transferred her call through three or four departments before someone realized that someone might actually want to talk to her—in that respect, Frisco wasn’t any different from Cleveland, New York, LA, or anywhere else . . .
Sun was beginning to leak in through the bay windows and the omnipresent-fog by the time she got through to Detective White. The pink didn’t seem any less obese. If anything, he seemed even bigger cramped into the screen on the comm.
He was in the middle of eating breakfast out of a mass of Chinese fast-food containers littering the desk between him and his comm. White had just speared a chunk of beef with a chopstick. The sight made Angel feel a little ill.
“Miss Lopez,” White said between bites. “What can I do for you?”
Angel sucked in a breath. “You people sure those guys I fingered were the ones who did Byron?”
White was in the middle of swallowing and started coughing. He ended by hacking up a chunk of meat and spitting it into the container he was eating from. “Jesus Christ.” He dropped the container and pulled a dirty-looking handkerchief to wipe his face. “You’re not going back on your testimony—”
“No, but I—”
White was shaking his head. Angel saw something hard begin to surface in his expression. “You will press assault on these guys—”
“I will, but—”
White leaned back, and Angel could hear the stressed office chair creak over the comm. “Whew, you scared me, lady.”
Angel pulled the green robe around her and sat on the coffee table, scattering empty beer bulbs. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“Miss Lopez, we want these guys—all of them. Your testimony on the assault is what we got. Without that—” White clasped his forehead and shook his head.
“Damn it, what have you got about the murder?”
White leaned forward. “What are you asking, Miss Lopez?”
“How do you know they killed him?”
White was silent for a long time. Eventually he said, “They killed him.”
“How do you know?”
He rubbed his forehead. “I know that because half a million moreaus in this city believe it’s true.”
“What?”
White looked really angry. “We have them dead on the assault charges. They’re guilty as sin.”
“The murder?”
“We have enough to get things past the grand jury.”
For the first time, Angel began to realize just how little the cops must have. “The bastards who did this might still be out there, and you—”
“We have the bastards who did this.” White stared at her. “And if you want to see the guys who were going to ‘beat you up, rape you, kill you, and bugger you up the ass’ put away, don’t do anything to jeopardize our case.”
“What case?” Angel asked, and cut the connection.
“Great!” she yelled at the ceiling. Not only did White do nothing to settle her fears, but he as much as said that it didn’t matter. The SFPD had their men, job done, let’s break out the wine and fucking cheese. If we can’t pin murder one on the geeks, we can put them away for a year or two for talking mean to this here rabbit.
Angel walked to the bay window and looked northeast, toward downtown. “The system sucks!” She slammed her fist into the window frame. “It ain’t just when it’s against us! It always sucks!”
Angel turned her back on the city and slid to the ground. She sat there for a long time, thinking that she might as well’ve stayed in Cleveland.
Angel didn’t realize she had fallen asleep until the comm woke her up by buzzing for her attention.
“Who the hell?” she mumbled, debating about letting the computer answer it. She decided against it. “Got it!” she yelled. The comm heard her and obliged by putting the call through.
“Hello, is there anyone there?” said a slightly familiar voice. She wondered where she’d heard it before.
“I’m coming,” Angel said, pulling herself up from in front of the window. While she had slept, full daylight had come to burn off the fog for a while.
She had to limp around the comm because her foot had fallen asleep. For the first time in what seemed like two days—or was it only one—she realized the mess she must have looked. She hadn’t cleaned her fur since—
Who the hell was this guy?
Large spotted feline, a Brazilian jaguar. The jaguar’s eyes followed her to the front of the comm, golden eyes with tiny pupils. The large cat wore a grave expression, carefully avoiding either a show of teeth or creasing his muzzle. It wasn’t until she saw the priest’s collar that she realized who it was.