“I know it’s quite an adjustment. One of the things Mr. Dorset hired me for was to get you over that hump, should it be necessary.”
Admirable prescience on Byron’s part.
What a fucking wonderful guy.
Angel started to realize exactly how pissed she was at Byron. He let her get blindsided by everything, without any warning, up to and including this damn will.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Pardon?”
“Damn it, if he made a will just a few days before—”
DeGarmo held up his hand. “Ahh, I see where you got the impression. No, Mr. Dorset was my client for ten years. His current will has been in force for most of that time.”
“But he just met me—”
“He had a habit of changing the name of the bequest every time he entered a relationship. He named you the primary heir a week before he died. He changed the will frequently. I doubt the proximity of the change to his death represented anything sinister.”
She was beginning to feel numb. “He changed it a lot?”
“Do you want to talk about this?”
“How many times?”
DeGarmo removed the palm computer from the breast pocket in his suit and referred to it. “Twenty-seven times in ten years. All female moreaus, California residents. All of them now receive a token bequest of forty thousand dollars.”
She tried to do the calculations in her head, and failed. As if losing Byron wasn’t enough, if the general chaos wasn’t enough, there was a sinking feeling that what she’d thought of as something special might have been something routine, pedestrian, casual.
“Did he mention anything about a possible engagement?”
DeGarmo arched an eyebrow.
Angel closed her eyes. All this fiancée bullshit was people making assumptions. Byron never was going to propose anything.
“Miss Lo—Angel?”
“I’m fine.” I’m not crying, she thought. She shook her head and tried to compose herself. “You looked at his estate. You were his lawyer for ten years. What did he do for a living?”
“He worked for VanDyne Industrial.”
Tell me what I don’t know. “What did he do for them?”
“The occupation he listed for the IRS was delivery. Other than that, I don’t know specifics. I only helped him manage his money. How he managed such large compensations from VanDyne, I don’t know.”
“And you don’t know jack about what he delivered.”
DeGarmo nodded and sipped his coffee. “I know enough not to want to know.”
Chapter 10
When Angel made it home, her head was still swimming. DeGarmo had managed to blow whatever certainty she had left in her life. She was so distracted that she was halfway in the door and shaking the rain out of her fur before she heard human breathing from the darkened living room.
Her head shot up. She could barely smell the man over her own wet fur, but she knew it was Detective White before her eyes adjusted. It took a conscious effort to keep her hand from drifting to the gun in her waistband.
White sat on the couch in the living room, lit by the flickering light from the comm and the occasional lightning flash. The vision of the balding lump of rumpled humanity on her own couch was surreal enough to trigger a frightening wave of vertigo. Lei was nowhere to be seen.
“What are you doing here?” Angel asked, one hand clutching the top button of her soaked blouse. The last time she had seen this man in the flesh had been when she ID’d Byron’s corpse. Then, he’d tried to be comforting. Even when she had called him at the station—making him hock his takeout Chinese breakfast—the iron that had crept into his voice held barely a hint of the tempered glare that locked on her now.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” White hit a button on the remote and the picture on the comm froze. The reflection in his gray eyes made them molten lead bearings. The heat of his anger had sunk into the walls. Angel could smell it.
She glanced at the frozen picture on the comm and saw Pasquez’s face.
Angel’s latent paranoia was returning in full force. Thank the lord that humans couldn’t pick up on the scent cues, otherwise the way she was tensed could probably be used as just cause to blow her away.
“Where’s Lei?”
“Frankly, I don’t give a shit.”
Christ, what was going on here? Well, you knew you were going to piss people off talking to Pasquez, she thought.
“How’d you get in here?”
White gave her a hard little smile. “I’m a cop, you little twitch. I can override any electronic lock in my jurisdiction—and I want to know what the hell you were thinking of when you talked to Pasquez.”
“I have a right—”
White stood up and threw the remote down on the coffee table. “I am sick of people’s fucking rights.” He walked up to Angel, who still stood in the open doorway, dripping. She noticed that White had been in the apartment long enough to dry off. “You think you have the right to make all sorts of half-assed accusations? Where do you get off?”
She backed up a step. “Do you have a warrant?”
“I’m not here to arrest you. Just want you to know how grateful I am.” He stood in front of her now, tensed to the breaking point. Angel was very careful not to move. “We had the Knights. Thought a morey shit like you’d appreciate that. But you had to shoot off your mouth, didn’t you? Not only screw the case, but you stir up shit in this town from Internal Affairs and the mayor’s publicist, to every shit-for-brains radical who’s got a gripe against the city.”
She was ripe with the scent of her own fear. “I’d like you to leave,” she said with as calm a voice as she could muster.
White nodded. “I’m going. But ask yourself if you want to see Chino Hernandez and Dwayne Washington out on the streets again. Because they’re all the Knights we got now, and you pull any more fancy bullshit, they’re going to walk.”
He stepped up to her and raised her face with one finger under her chin. The finger was warm, soft, and hairless. The contact made Angel nauseous.
“This town’s ready to take a header. Don’t help push it—” White let go of her chin and moved past her out into the hall. As he started down the stairs, he added, “You might fall off the same cliff.”
Angel stood there, shivering.
After a while, she calmed down and closed the door behind her. White had reminded Angel of a seminal truth—she did not like cops. Angel walked to the comm and unpaused the program White had recorded. It was Pasquez all right, him and his BaySatt news exclusive. The basic theme of which was, “what was the city trying to hide?”
As Pasquez rambled on in the background, she turned on the light in the living room and saw that White had been a fairly busy boy. On the coffee table must have been every single ramcard that had been left in the house. The cards were scattered like some mad rainbow-sheened game of solitaire.
Predictably, behind her she heard Father Alvarez De Collor’s voice. Pasquez was asking Collor about the mess, in his capacity as the “voice of the nonhuman population.” Apparently, “the nonhuman population”—she wished the media sometime, somewhere, would use the word moreau—wanted the real murder suspects prosecuted. Collor made the assumption that the killers were human, and implied that they might be cops. Now there’s the voice of peace, Angel thought.
The nonhumans wanted empowerment. The nonhumans wanted to do to the Knights of Humanity what the Knights wanted to do to them. The nonhumans wanted better jobs, better housing, better medical care. The nonhumans wanted an end to discrimination.
If the nonhumans didn’t get all this now, with a cherry on top, then, Collor said, “Los Angeles is not that far away.”
Angel turned to look at the comm and got the closing shot of Collor in his full regalia. His priest’s col
lar, and the full combat getup of the Brazilian strike team he used to belong to, way back when. That wasn’t new, that was all Collor’s radical priest shtick. What was new was the fact that the holster had a sidearm in it this time.
It had been federal law for two decades that it was a felony for a moreau to possess a firearm. Collor was smiling at the camera with a perfectly vicious show of teeth on his feline face. The expression dared anyone to pick him up for the offense.
“Great,” Angel said.
Then the scene shifted and Pasquez was in an even more interesting interview.
The first thing she could see was the red flag with a white circle. In the circle was a stylized H that could have been a hacked representation of a double helix. It was the flag of the Knights of Humanity.
The camera faced a seated individual whose face was obscured by BaySatt’s computer. He was human, and in contrast to Collar’s field-grunt attire, this pink was wearing a stylized officer’s uniform done up in urban camouflage.
Pasquez introduced him as “Tony X,” prime mover and shaker of the Knights of Humanity.
“Oh, Christ,” Angel said, it was already being cast as a war. This exclusive by BaySatt news just seemed an exercise in picking out the leading players in the soon-to-be televised drama.
Angel walked around the coffee table, staring at the screen in fascination, as if it was an oncoming car, or a canister containing some deadly biological weapon.
“We had no part in the death of Byron Dorset,” said a computer-altered voice. “Individuals don’t matter. The Knights are interested in the destiny of the species.”
“You’ve been accused of promoting violence.”
“Any violence the Knights are involved in is defensive in nature.”
“Are you saying that the twelve alleged attacks on unarmed nonhumans in the past week were all cases of the Knights defending themselves?”
The computer-altered voice gained in intensity. “We are under assault, every human being in this country, by this plague of genetic waste. Anything the Knights can do to help this country wake up is an effort to save the race.”
“You’ve been accused of advocating genocide—”
“Do you know what these things are?” Tony X stood up and walked to a table. He pulled aside a sheet of canvas that was on top of it to reveal a terrarium. Inside it was a black object about the length of Tony X’s arm. “Look in here. This is an example of what we’re harboring in this country.”
Pasquez didn’t interrupt as the camera zoomed in on the flopping creature in the tank. The thing was black and chitinous. It had faceted eyes, and a meter-long ovipositor that oozed an emerald-green fluid the consistency of semen.
“The same labs that made our furry neighbors, produced this atrocity.” Tony X prodded the thing from off-screen with a metal rod. The bug creature erupted in a manic frenzy of thrashing that sprayed the sides of the terrarium with green, and it ended up wrapped around the rod and trying to stab it. “For the same purpose. To kill.”
The camera pulled back to reveal Tony X standing behind the terrarium. Angel was feeling queasy. Importing that kind of macro gene-engineered monstrosity was about as illegal as you could get.
Tony X went on. “It is only a matter of time before this country erupts in the same kind of conflagration that destroyed Asia, before we are cut down with the same plagues that depopulated Africa, before the nonhumans, the half-humans, the hairballs, take over.” He withdrew the slime-coated rod from the terrarium. “Genocide? We advocate survival. The survival of the human species.”
Angel closed her eyes and put her face in her hands, one displaced thought running through her head—the hope that Tony X’s bug never got loose.
The Tony X interview went on another minute and a half, but she didn’t really listen to it.
Instead, she sifted through all the ramcards on the coffee table. What did White think he was doing? Did he play all of these? What the hell was he looking for?
The door to the apartment opened and Angel jumped to her feet and turned around, scattering ramcards everywhere.
Lei was standing in the doorway.
“Lei, damn, you scared the crap outa me.”
“Hello to you, too.”
Lei walked in and started gathering up ramcards.
“Where were you?” Angel asked.
“Friend of mine’s in the hospital. Some damn pinkboy Knight jumped her in Chinatown last night. The comm’s been so tied up that I only found out when I got home from work.”
Angel took a handful of ramcards from Lei. “Is she all right?”
Lei nodded. “Yes, only a bump on the head from a tossed brick. They’re just keeping her for observation. By the way, I wanted to ask you about these ramcards. What were you doing with them all day?”
“It wasn’t me, it was—” Angel came up short. Paranoia parade or no, something was very wrong with what Lei just said. “What do you mean ‘all day’?”
“I come home from work and all these cards—” Lei wrinkled her nose and swatted her tail in agitation. The look of agitation made her canine features almost feral. “Who’d been here?”
“One of the Detectives, White. You came back from work and—”
“Ramcards all over the table, the place smelling of disinfectant, the comm on. What the hell are you doing, Angel? I’ve been giving you slack because of the shit you’ve been through. But some of these cards are personal. What were you doing in my room?”
“No one was here?”
“I walked in, saw the mess, got my call, walked out. Now tell me, what right did you have to— Are you okay?”
Angel shook her head and sank into the couch. It wasn’t effing paranoia any more. She was in something, deep. She only wished she knew exactly what it was.
“What’s wrong?” Lei asked.
“I haven’t been here since noon. I didn’t take out those ramcards. I left the comm blocking out all incoming calls. I didn’t reset it.”
“You said Detective White—”
“He left and came back? And, what you say you smelled, disinfectant?”
“Yes—”
“Someone covering their scent? That sound like a cop?”
Angel remembered the fake pine she smelled when they had come back from Byron’s condo. Someone had been here, twice. She shivered.
• • •
They called the police. It was well after lunch on Tuesday when the cop came. Cop, singular. It was quite a different story from the break-in at the condo. The uncharacteristic deference the cops had been showing seemed to have evaporated. It took Angel an hour to get the complaint in, and it took the cop—one lone uniform with a vid unit—twelve hours to get there.
Apparently, she was no longer high on the priority list.
Not that the cop who showed was bad. He took footage, cracked his gum, and talked incessantly about the cops holding Chinatown and the Tenderloin together, about the Knights of Humanity—whom he called neo-skinheads—about Father Alvarez De Collor—about whom he expressed some ambivalence, being Catholic himself—and even the presidential bid of Sylvia Harper.
Not once did the uniformed cop mention Byron Dorset and his untimely death.
The cop took an hour to record the apartment, and another fifteen minutes to take her statement. When he left, he slipped around Detective Anaka, who was standing in the doorway.
“Can I come in?”
Angel shrugged. “Your partner didn’t bother with invitations.”
Anaka walked in. He smelled of dirt and sweat, and his suit was even more rumpled than usual. “Sorry about White.” He sighed and collapsed into the couch.
“Please, sit down.” Angel told him as she cleared the table of ramcards.
Anaka leaned forward and rubbed his temples. Angel walked around, putting things away.
She activated the drapes on the windows, letting in some sunlight that had taken over in the abdication of the storm. Throughout, Anaka remained silent.
After nearly ten minutes of waiting, she couldn’t take it anymore. “What? You said you were going to talk to me, so talk.”
“There’s not much to say—” Anaka sighed and stared at the ceiling. “They suspended me.”
Angel opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. Angel didn’t want to hit him with her primary question, Why come here, then? Instead, she asked him, “What happened?”
“Over four months of stacked-up sick leave and vacation time. They said I was overworked.” Anaka ran a shaky hand through his black hair. Even his razor mustache looked frazzled. “I guess I do put a little too much of myself in my work. Haven’t missed a day in years . . .”
“I’m sorry—” Angel was increasingly uncomfortable. She wasn’t used to total strangers coming to her for comfort. Much less cops. What the hell was she supposed to do?
“Only a matter of time, really. I’m too much a pain in the ass. I keep digging where people don’t want me to dig.” Anaka kept shaking his head. “People in the department have been waiting for an excuse to get me off the streets. Folks in the council have been plotting against me for years, waiting for an opportunity.”
“Yeah. Right.” Angel never liked anyone who said that people were plotting against them. It always sounded like the guy speaking was one step ahead of the white coats and trank guns.
Come on, Angel berated herself, give the guy a break. He’s a drum major and you’re a cheerleader, but you’re both in the same parade—about to be run over by the same float.
After a long period of silence, he looked up. “Do you have anything to drink?”
She wanted to get Anaka out of her house, this seemed the perfect excuse. “Sorry, we haven’t had a chance to go shopping.”
“Oh.” Anaka didn’t look like he was moving.
Angel walked up to him and grabbed his elbow. “Why don’t we go somewhere and get something?”
DeGarmo had given her a coded ramcard with a withdrawal limit of fifty thousand dollars. She figured she could spare a little of that to get Anaka out of her fur.