“Father Collor?” It was an easy guess to make. There were only three ordained nonhuman Catholic priests in the States at the moment. Alvarez de Collor was the only feline. Angel felt stupid for missing who it was. She’d seen him on the news just this morning.
“Angelica Lopez?”
Oh, great. “This is about Byron, has to be—”
“You’re Miss Lopez?”
“Yes, yes.” Angel rested her head against the top of the comm. Let the priest get a great shot of her robe, she didn’t care. “What?”
“Miss Lopez, I apologize for breaking in on your grief—”
“Cut to the point, padre.”
There was a long pause. “I need your permission to make funeral arrangements for Mr. Dorset.”
Silence hung in the air for a long time. Angel pushed herself away from the comm and looked at the feline priest. “What the fuck?”
The priest made a visible effort to ignore the vulgarity. “We need to show a united front to the kind of people who did this—”
“What the fuck?”
“As his fiancée, you’re his heir and only next of kin.”
“Is this some kind of sick joke?”
“Please, can we discuss this calmly—”
Angel’s head was whirring as she began to figure out how the pieces of the priest’s little world slid together. “You made a statement to the press.”
“Miss Lopez—” He was starting to show signs of distress. His eyes were darting past the comm’s screen, as if there were spectators out of Angel’s view. This was obviously not going as he’d planned.
“Before you had any—before you even talked to—” Angel realized she was pacing around the coffee table, trailing the robe behind her. She stopped and faced Father Collor. “You want to turn this into a circus!”
“That isn’t it at all.” He was looking to the left and right. Angel was positive now that there were people offscreen, and he was looking at them as if to say, “This isn’t my fault.”
Angel wanted to kick something. She brought her fist down on an empty beer bulb, and traces of froth splattered over the table, the wall, and the comm. “How’d you get a hold of my comm?” The bill was in Lei’s name, Angel wasn’t listed in any directories.
“I assure you—”
“Father, go chase another ambulance.” Angel cut the connection.
The world seemed to be conspiring to piss her off. Who the hell did that self-righteous feline think he was? Byron wasn’t even Catholic—
One of the jaguar’s statements began to sink in.
“Fiancée? Next of kin?” Angel felt a little dizzy.
She sat down on the couch. How the hell did she suddenly become Byron’s fiancée?
The comm rang and Angel answered it, somewhat afraid of what it might be.
The call announced itself as being from Krane, DeGarmo and Associates. Sounded like a bunch of pink lawyers.
That’s what it was.
The lean black-haired human who’d called her was Paul DeGarmo, Byron’s lawyer and the executor of his will. What the jag priest had said was half-right anyway. She was Byron’s single largest bequest.
DeGarmo didn’t seem to find this odd at all, even though Angel had only known the fox for thirteen days.
What the hell was going on here?
She silently took the security codes for Byron’s car and his condo. She nodded politely when DeGarmo told her that the body was going to be released on Monday and some sort of burial arranged. He told her a lot of financial details that slipped right by her—estate taxes and such.
All she kept thinking was that she had taken one step into Byron’s life and suddenly she was in charge of all that was left of it.
Chapter 6
Angel reread Byron’s note for the tenth time since she’d parked the car. The words had begun to blur and lose their meaning—and she was no closer to understanding why Byron might want to meet with those bald psychopaths. It still made no sense.
Angel shoved the letter into her jeans with the Earthquakes tickets. It was no help, and she knew it by heart already.
“What the hell am I doing here?” she asked no one in particular.
She was sitting behind the wheel of Byron’s BMW in the parking lot of St. Luke’s Veterinary. The engineered-leather bucket seat was jacked up as far as it could go, giving her a view down the sloping blue hood at the moreys coming and going.
It was Saturday afternoon—no work, nothing for her to do but brood on Byron’s death. Brooding had brought her here. She was still unsure why. She was unsure of a lot since talking to DeGarmo yesterday.
Everything she was doing felt odd, disjointed—as if someone else was making the decisions and she was just along for the ride. She only felt in touch with her surroundings when a knife edge of emotion slid briefly through the haze. More often than not it was a spasm of grief or self-pity.
But with increasing frequency it was anger. Irrational anger at silly things, like the ease with which she’d retrieved Byron’s car from the impound lot. For the first time in her life, cops were being reasonably nice to her, and it felt like she was being bribed—all the cops in San Francisco wanted her to be a nice little rabbit and go along with the program. Most of all, anger at the increasing fraction of her life that was getting public airtime. Father Collor was only the first person to try to make political hay out of Byron’s death.
Angel hated politics.
She kept an eye on the Ford Merovia sedan parked across from her BMW. It was the reserved spot for Dr. Pat Ellis, the doctor who’d signed Byron’s death certificate. The doctor who Detective Anaka, White’s Asian partner, seemed so suspicious of.
Why didn’t she just call the doctor?
“What the hell am I doing?” she asked herself again.
The Merovia started, and Angel watched the feed cable automatically withdraw from the curb outlet. Angel saw a woman approaching with a little black remote control in her hand. Must be the doctor.
Ellis was approaching human middle age. Her sun-bleached hair was shot with gray. Her blue eyes were clouded by corrective surgery. She wore a suit whose sharp lines seemed to be working at cross purposes to the plump roundness they contained.
Angel got out of the BMW and moved to intercept Ellis.
Ellis didn’t seem to notice her at first. The doctor kept walking to the quietly idling Merovia. Angel had gotten within a few meters before Ellis looked up at her. The doctor’s expression showed surprise, and for a second she wielded the remote control at Angel, as if it was a weapon.
Angel stopped, “Dr. Ellis?”
“Y-yes,” Ellis responded, looking around the parking lot, as if she expected to be ambushed or something. Angel could smell fear.
“I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”
Ellis kept looking around the parking lot. “Who are you?”
“Angelica—”
Ellis wasn’t looking in her direction. “Yes, I remember, you identified the body.”
Angel nodded. “I want to talk about Byron.”
“Not here.” The doctor opened the door to the Merovia and retreated inside.
“Where, then?”
“Get in,” Ellis left the door open for her.
For Angel, things had gone from disorienting to just plain weird. The doctor’s paranoia was beginning to rub off on her. Angel slipped into the car, casting a glance over the parking lot at St. Luke’s to see if she could find what Dr. Ellis was looking for. Angel didn’t find it.
Ellis zigzagged through half of the new city south of Market. Angel didn’t see any sign of the people Ellis must have thought were following her. Every time Angel started to talk, Ellis told her to wait.
Eventually, Ellis parked the car a block east of Franklin Square. “Let’s go for a walk
around the park,” Ellis said, and Angel could tell she was making an effort to sound calm.
“Okay.” Angel stepped out of the car and on to the sidewalk. They were surrounded by construction now. The skeletons of new buildings covered the area between Twentieth and the Central Freeway like an iron forest. A combination of earthquake and economic recession made this area one of the last to be rebuilt. It was getting close to seven, and the silence was ominous. Construction had ceased for the day, and the street was empty of cars and people.
Franklin Square itself was getting a facelift—which meant that sidewalks were torn up, piles of dirt covered by black tarpaulins were scattered at random, the park was clogged by construction equipment, and pipes from the old sewer system lay in choked stacks by the entrance.
They began to circle the park, and Angel asked, “What are you afraid of?”
“You wanted to talk about Byron Dorset, so talk about him.”
They were walking down a deserted stretch of Sixteenth Street, and Ellis was still looking around as if she was being followed.
“I want to know how he died.”
“You saw the corpse. Massive trauma to the neck—”
Angel grabbed the doctor’s arm. “You know what I mean. I want to know what sliced him.”
Ellis stopped and shook her head.
“News called it a knifing,” Angel continued. “What kind of knife tears out that much of someone’s neck?”
“It wasn’t a knife.”
“What, then?”
Ellis looked around again. “I can’t be talking to you.”
“What was it?” The fear-scent was floating off of Ellis and embracing Angel. It was hard to be that close to someone so wound up and not see eyes peering out of the darkness. What was Ellis afraid of?
The doctor looked torn, and very upset. It was getting hard for Angel to take. She grabbed the doctor by the elbows and shook her. “What killed him?” she shouted.
The fear-smell became sharper, less generalized. Angel could hear the doctor’s pulse and breathing accelerate. For a moment, she seemed more afraid of Angel than she was of anything else. “I retrieved feline fur and nail samples from the wound.”
Angel let go of Ellis. Suddenly she felt that it wasn’t a hill she was standing on, but the crest of a rolling breaker that was dropping out from under her.
“Don’t talk to me again.” Ellis turned and ran back to her car. So much for a ride back to St. Luke’s.
“A morey?” Angel asked herself.
• • •
“You’re where?” The perennial look of concern crossed Lei’s muzzle.
“Frisco General, you know, Potrero—”
“I know where the hospital is. What are you doing there?”
“I’m not there, really. I’m in a car across the street.” A foghorn sounded from the bay.
“If you’re calling to reassure me, you aren’t doing it by evading the question. What possessed you to walk down there?”
“I said, I have a car.”
“What . . .”
“Look, Lei, I’m fine. I just didn’t want you to worry about me not being home.”
“Well, I’m worried—”
“I’ll explain when I get back.” Angel cut the connection before Lei could object.
What was possessing her to come here? Did she think the cops would allow her to talk to Earl? Did she think that he’d actually talk to her?
But, damn it, she wanted to know what Earl had given up to the cops. What he’d said that had put two pink Knights away rather than the morey that’d slashed Byron.
And Earl was in stable condition at San Francisco General Hospital, according to the incessant news reports. Of course, the news didn’t call him Earl. They called him “a third alleged assailant.” Alleged was right, considering that Earl, pink number three, was in the hospital when Byron got sliced open.
Everything about Byron’s death was beginning to smell.
As if cued by her thought, she began to smell something odd for Frisco General—moreys. Lots of moreys. She closed on the front of the hospital, and she could see cop cars scattered everywhere, flashers cutting through the humid darkness. An aircar from BaySatt News was hovering over Potrero Avenue, pointing at some disturbance.
Angel slowed her walking and began to listen.
“Chanting?”
A group of a few dozen moreaus, mostly canines and foxes, were holding a sit-down protest in the lobby of the damn hospital. It sounded like they were chanting hymns to the cops.
Angel stopped her approach as police vans started driving up.
Like hell they’re going to let a morey in the building now.
Angel had an inspiration.
She avoided the lobby and walked around to the Emergency entrance and the ambulance bays. No moreys here, as Angel had hoped. The protest was aiming for media attention, not at really disrupting the hospital’s operation.
What it did do was disrupt security.
With all attention on the fracas out front, Angel managed to walk in to the Emergency Room, slip past the nurse’s station, and make it to the elevators without being challenged. That was the easy part. Now she had to find Earl and get into his room.
In all the movies she’d seen where this was a problem, the hero always slipped into a lab coat and walked around the hospital unchallenged. Unfortunately, the hero was never a morey.
Before the elevator came, she heard a familiar voice coming up behind her. The voice of detective Kobe Anaka, the Asian cop.
Oh, shit.
She only had a second to think before Anaka and whoever he was talking to—the other voice was much too even and mannered for his partner, White—turned the corner and saw her. She backed away from the elevator, felt a door behind her along the opposite wall, and darted through it just as Anaka and a tall gray-haired human in a white coat came around the corner.
Damn it. She had backed into a closet with no extra room, even for her. She was wedged up against a hard plastic cleaning robot, and she couldn’t close the door enough. The door was ajar, with the ten-centimeter gap facing out into the hall, toward Anaka and the doctor. She didn’t want to climb up on the robot because the only place to stand seemed to be a touch-sensitive control panel and she’d probably turn the damn thing on by accident.
She was saved from discovery by the elevator. The elevator she’d been waiting for arrived just as Anaka walked into the line of sight with the closet. As if in response to Angel’s frantic wish—he and the doctor walked into the elevator with apparently no thought as to why an empty elevator had stopped on this floor.
As soon as the doors of the elevator closed, Angel allowed herself to breathe again. In response, the closet door swung open. She left the closet with the cynical thought that at St. Luke’s they had morey janitors rather than these robot things, and the moreys were probably cheaper—
Then it hit her. She needed to find Earl. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Anaka was here. The cop had to be here to see Earl.
Angel felt like a fool as she looked at the indicator for the elevator. It was going down—down?—and stopped at S-3. They were keeping Earl in the basement?
She wished she had paid attention to what these two had been saying; then she might know whether or not this was a wild goose chase.
Instead of waiting for the elevator, she bolted for the stairs. Inside the echoing concrete stairway, she took the steps half a flight at a time. If she was lucky, she’d reach the subbasement while Anaka and the pink doctor were still in earshot.
The last two flights were blocked by a chain and a sign reading, “authorized personnel only.” She only noticed because she almost ran into it.
The door to the third sublevel opened on an empty corridor. Angel didn’t see any of the directory holos saying “you are here
.” Angel guessed the assumption was that, if you were down here, you were supposed to know where you were going. A map wouldn’t have been much help anyway, since she didn’t know where they were keeping Earl.
Angel listened. The tile on the floor and the walls gave a distorted audio picture, but she was pretty sure she couldn’t hear more than half a dozen people roaming the halls. Most of those seemed stationary. After some thought, she could pick out footsteps way down the hall on her right. The subdued voices were difficult to make out, but Angel bet that they were Anaka’s and the Doc’s.
She followed them.
If she didn’t blatantly walk in front of a nurse’s station or a security booth, she might be all right. There wasn’t much she could do about the cameras that panned the corridor—except hope that the protest out front had captured everybody’s attention.
She was following the two away from the biggest concentration of human noise. “Too much like the morgue,” she whispered to herself. She was reminded of Byron in the basement of St. Luke’s. The too-cold walls, the disinfectant that didn’t hide the smell of blood and decomposition.
Eventually, her cautious pace lost her the audio clues to where Anaka and the Doc had gone—and with the disinfectant everywhere, tracking by scent was useless.
She slowed even further, but kept going.
What now?
She turned a corner and bumped into a gurney.
The top edge hit her at about neck level, and under a sheet, she felt a cold foot hit her face. She fell backward, and the gurney rocked forward slightly on locked wheels.
Angel rubbed her face and slowly got to her feet.
“Fuck. It is the morgue.” She slapped herself on the forehead for saying that out loud.
She could smell the body on the gurney now—blood, shit, and death. The corridor beyond ended in a massive pair of double doors. That was where most of the odor of decomposition was hanging.
“Wrong number,” she said, slightly disgusted with herself. Now she could either continue this fruitless search for the third punk, or she could slip out and pretend this never happened.