Lee rubbed her head. “And you’d think that the news about the prospective change would have leaked out by now.”
“Of course it would have, if this bid had gone through any public brokerage. People would be screaming from the rooftops about it. I’m betting it went through a private one, though. There are lots of private brokers with links to Chicago Mercantile and Axquitl Modals who would accept a bid like this on the quiet. The understanding being that some of the profits would be spun off to them later, equally quietly, in some other form—stock options, what have you. The old ‘I dig a second hole, you drop your spare bone in it’ routine.” Gelert’s lip wrinkled back to show fangs.
Lee was beginning to shake a little, the nervous tremor she always got when feeling that she was close to something vital to a case’s solution. “Gel… could this be why Omren dil’Sorden died? Was no one supposed to find out about the size of the bid, or its price—but he did, maybe even accidentally for all we know, and then someone got wind of it and had him killed to make sure the information went no further?”
Gelert took a long breath, let it out. “It could be so,” he said. “And I’d take it a little further, and bet that it’s the price of the bid, not the size, that’s the issue. But proving it’s going to be exciting business.”
“Gel,” Lee said, “this is why Jok Castelain was pushed out into our laps, isn’t it. To keep the investigation from having to go any further…and uncovering this. The real reason why dil’Sorden was targeted.”
“I think you might be right,” Gelert said. “And if our investigation along these lines becomes anybody’s knowledge, we become targets, too.”
They looked at each other without saying anything for a good few moments. “You have a mate and pups to think about,” Lee said.
“It says ‘partnership’ on our office door,” Gelert said, “and I take that seriously, along with my oaths to the Lady with the Scales and Her Boss upstream. If you think I’m going to back away from this and let you take the heat just because—”
Lee waved him silent. For another few moments neither of them spoke.
“What do we do now?” she said at last.
“What we’ve been doing,” Gelert said. “If only to keep from attracting attention to ourselves.”
“That’s going to mean finishing the casework and sending it to the DA,” Lee said. “And meanwhile, making private copies of everything so we can keep working. Because if you’re right, we’re going to have to seem to be moving on to other things. Renselaar and Hagen are both determined to have a big announcement real soon now about how the murder’s been solved: Matt isn’t going to be able to buy us any more time. If he’s even willing.”
“There’s something else he might be able to affect,” Gelert said, “much as I dislike it. As soon as dil’Sorden’s murder case goes to trial, our psychoforensics records are unsealed and become public. At which point the figure at the murder which you didn’t mention to Hagen, the one he was scared you saw, becomes a matter of record… and he immediately realizes you lied to him, or withheld information, with an eye to getting hold of dil’Sorden’s computer data. That means trouble for both of us no matter how you look at it.”
Lee nodded. “If we can keep the case from going to trial for a while…” she said. “Gel, we’re prosecuting. There are some procedural moves we can use to slow things down.”
“But not for long,” Gelert said. “It may just have to go ahead, finally. The worst that can happen is that they’ll disbar us for use of confidential information outside of an official investigation, fine us everything we’ve got, and chuck us in the clink for forever and a day.”
He sounded cheerful. Lee wasn’t fooled, and could additionally think of many worse things that could happen. Yet none of them seemed as bad to her, somehow, as letting this case go to trial merely on its surface merits, stopping short of what her own oaths to Justice required—the whole truth, without which the people perish. Castelain might have Justice executed on him for his part in the murder, certainly: but Lee was sure there were other things yet to be unearthed about this case that Justice ought also to be allowed to deal with. That won’t happen if things stop here…
And away on the edge of her Sight, as if perceived just outside the ambit of more normal vision, Lee sensed something else wrong—something that would cause a whole lot of perishing if it was allowed to progress unchecked. She had no idea what it was, and even less of an idea what to do about it. But turning her back on it would be wrong.
“Meanwhile,” Gelert said, “I’m going to stay up tonight and have a look at that worldgating material…see if I can get a sense of just how you gate without a gate. If we can manage to convince Matt and the DA even partway that what we both perceived was something technologically based, then everything changes… at least insofar as it makes us, and incidentally them, look less like idiots.”
“And it gives us more time to dig,” Lee said. “Because there’s still the problem of Castelain passing out on the bus, and waking up wherever…not to mention the fading psychospoor. We may be able to get a postponement just on the grounds that we need information on that gating technology from the Alfen. And if they try to stonewall—”
“When did they ever not?” Gelert said, and grinned. “It’s in their blood. To be Alfen is to be secret. The more resistance they put up, the more time we have to dig even deeper.”
Lee stretched and leaned against the wall again, looking up the stairs, where one of the pups had flopped down on the topmost step and was hanging half over it, asleep. “And the more time the forces already interfering in this case have to find still other ways to interfere.”
She looked over at Gelert. His eyes were resting on her, calm, but concerned. “I’d take a little more time over my personal security than usual if I were you,” he said.
“If I were you,” Lee said, “I’d do the same.”
There was nothing more they could do that evening. Lee got up and helped Gelert tidy the living room, then softly went up the stairs to avoid waking up any of the small white bodies littering the floors; made her goodbyes to Nuala, and headed back out to the hov. Lee walked around it once in the parking area, a well-lit place that suddenly seemed more threatening than usual. She let the Sight take her, and looked the hov over carefully for anything that seemed wrong: but the vehicle sat there, untampered-with, innocuous. Lee got in, started it up, and drove home.
*
The memory of the constant state of nerves that had followed the Eligieni multiple murder case was now imposing itself on her again; she started to see something she hadn’t thought of for a couple of years now—images of that other parking lot where one of the two brothers involved had tried to shoot her.
Lee was nervous all the way back, looking suspiciously at the roadsides, at any driver who passed her too fast; at everything. She hated this reaction—the upset caused by the first few moments in a given case when she realized that she was in danger, that someone might very well be willing to kill her to keep her from proceeding. Certainly nothing overt had happened yet. But Lee couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there was going to be something overt: that Gelert was right. Better to be prepared for it, she thought as she pulled up in front of her house, calming down already.
She went up the front path, gazing into every shadow: in fact, doing everything she should have done except watch where she was going, so that she tripped on the cracked slab and nearly fell. “Damn, damn, damn,” Lee said as she recovered herself. What use is paranoia if it makes you break your own neck? Stop trying to look judicially at everything, and just watch where you’re going! She stomped up the front steps and spoke the front door open. As it closed behind her she actually leaned back against it to feel it there, reassuring, a barrier against what presently felt like a very naughty world.
“System,” she said, “secure everything.”
“Secured,” the house system said to her implant. The blinds rotated themselves
into closed mode; all the windows and doors doublebolted themselves.
“At least there’s something I can depend on,” Lee muttered, and went into the kitchen. Coffee was out of the question at the moment; her nerves were jangled enough. Xocolatl was more what she needed.
She went to the sink to fill the electric kettle, set it in its stand and started it, then got down on her knees to open the bottom cupboard next to the sink and try to figure out where she’d hidden the xoco this time.
And all the lights went out.
The terror went right through Lee in a flash that seemed to start just above her kidneys and blast outward all through her. Oh, wonderful! Someone’s defeated your security system, and now you’ve locked them in here with you!
The lights had been too bright when she came in; her vision would take too long to cope with this darkness. My normal vision, Lee thought, and closed her eyes.
She heard the snick, snick of someone’s gun being cocked. She was not a great expert on firearms, but this one had a very big-gun sound to it; at the very least it was meant to sound big, and to scare her.
“Okay,” said the voice. Male, and processed: he was wearing a neolarynx of one kind or another. “Get up nice and slow, lady.”
“Uh, yeah, right, look, just don’t do anything, okay,” Lee said, doing her best to sound scared out of her wits, and not having to work too hard at it. “If you want money, there’s a safe in the back bedroom—”
“Never mind that. Get up slow.”
I gave you a chance to pretend to be a burglar, Lee thought. Too bad you wouldn’t take it. She kept her eyes closed, silently feeling her way along sideways via the cupboard under the sink, concentrating on Seeing. Without clear line of Sight, she had to depend on the directional sense, always a somewhat dicey business. But the gunman’s sense of amusement and enjoyment of all this was palpable, easy enough to feel; it was coming from over by the patio doors, where he stood, confident, sure that she couldn’t see him. Probably wearing nightsighters, too. Well, it’s not going to be enough. She would know this man’s psychospoor again anywhere, but the way things were going, she might not have to. “All right,” she said, “I’m getting up. Don’t do anything, okay?” Her voice broke most realistically. “I’m getting up—”
And perhaps the gunman then had reason to be surprised when Lee popped up from behind the breakfast bar and shot him in the chest, because not that many householders have their gun safe in the cupboard under the sink.
The gunman spun around sideways, staggered by the slug from the big caliber Sig. Body armor. Dammit! Lee dropped partway behind the breakfast bar again, braced, waiting. The man struggled to bring himself around to face her again, and the second he was face-on to her, Lee shot him again in the chest, twice, full on this time. The impact of the first bullet smashed him back into the glass of the patio door; the second one knocked him straight through it.
All the house alarms chose this moment to go off, screaming and hooting bloody murder, though the lights for some reason stayed off. Lee dropped down behind the breakfast bar again and put her head around the side of it, where as she braced the gun again she had a clear view of the patio doors, and could See the figure staggering to its feet, cursing at the broken glass—getting up, hesitating a moment, then turning, running, heading for the back wall. Five foot nine, Caucasian, light build, dark hair, plaid shirt, dark jacket, dark pants, black sneakers—she got a glimpse of the white soles as the gunman went over the back wall into the alley, and kept on running—and his psychospoor nicely recorded in her implant for the black-and-white to relay when the alarm system finished calling for armed response and went on to call the police.
Slowly and carefully Lee stood up. Behind her, the kettle boiled, and its switch popped up, snick! —and Lee whirled and very nearly shot it. Then she stood still and, after a few long moments, found it possible to laugh at herself. The black-and-white seemed to take forever to arrive, though in reality it took no more than five minutes.
Lee had had plenty of time to make that cup of xocolatl, which had possibly saved her life, and to call Gelert and tell him to have a look at his own security, before the armed response team rolled up at almost the same moment the cops did. She stood there on the doorstep with the cup, getting past the shock, heading along toward anger now as the security-system people came up to the front door. “Break-in?” one of them said to her.
Lee shook her head. “Hacked. I haven’t touched the system box…go see what it has to tell you.”
She left them to it and went down to the end of the walk to talk to the officers in the black-and-white. There were two of them, a dark woman with neatly cornrowed hair, a Hispanic man: the woman looked down at the datapad built into the dashboard, and said, “Ms. Enfield, is it? The system’s got your load. You’re going to press charges?”
“If you can catch him. He came pretty well prepared; armored, anyway. My money says he’s been picked up, and he’s halfway to San Diego by now. Over the back wall, into the alley—it runs into San Dimas at the north end and Willow at the south.”
“We’ll go around and look.”
“Take me around with you?”
“Sure.”
The officers in the black-and-white drove back down the street and around the corner, left and left again, into the alley, a long blind street lined only by garage doors and wheelie bins: today had been garbage day. Lee tsked. “Forgot to put my garbage out,” she said.
“Did it a little late, maybe,” said the female officer. Lee grinned. They got out of the hov just before Lee’s property line, and Lee got out with the two officers, woke up her implant again, and looked at the wall and the road. “He went down that way,” she said, pointing south toward Willow. “Turned west. That’s all I can tell you from here.”
“Okay,” the male officer said. “We’ll see if we can find anything, Ms. Enfield. But HQ notified the DA’s Office about this…and they want you to have a security detail. We’ll wait till the alarm people have restored your system and secured the back doors. There’ll be plainclothes hovs in front and in back until Parker can assign you someone more permanent in the morning.”
“Thanks, Officer. Want some xoco?”
They both grinned at her.
*
It took nearly another hour to get rid of everyone—though perhaps Lee was glad enough, for the moment, to see the dark car pull up out front as the uniformed officers left, and to know there was another one out in the alley. Gelert was on the comm again: it took longer to calm him down than it had taken Lee to calm herself. Finally she told him to go to bed, because she was going to do that whether he did or not; and at last Lee sat down on the living room sofa with one more cup of xoco, staring at the soft shine of the dimmed lights on her hardwood floor, starting to feel both very angry, and also strangely satisfied. We’re on the right track, Lee thought. No question about it now. No one bothers to try killing you because you’re getting it wrong.
The comm went again. She sighed and spoke the living room entertainment screen on, switched it to comms and said, “Hello?”
The screen stayed black except for the area which would have shown the ID of the calling number or station, and which now simply said SUPPRESSED.
Uh oh, Lee thought. Our little friend, calling back to threaten me? “Hello?” she said again.
“Ms. Enfield,” said a voice, another male voice, also certainly processed; but not the same as the last one.
“Who’s calling?”
There was a pause, as much uncertainty on the other party’s part, Lee thought, as anything to do with the processing software. “There are some parties who’re interested in keeping you from progressing much further with your present investigations,” the voice said.
A number of them, I’d say; which one do you represent?, Lee was tempted to say, and didn’t. “Like your little friend just now,” she said, “was he one of yours?”
The voiced paused. “What?”
&nbs
p; “The man who suborned the alarm system in my house, closed it up after him, and waited for me in the dark, almost certainly with the intent to either put me in the hospital or kill me.”
Genuine surprise. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Then you may be good at getting comm numbers, but you’re not real well informed otherwise.” Lee was fuming, and also bemused. Possibly this person was not attached to the attempt on her life just now. So this was some different loony. And why is he calling me here rather than at the office? The answer suggested itself instantly: Because there’s no recording software on this line…and someone knows it. Boy, is that going to change in the next day or so! Yet she still found herself getting a haunted feeling, with nothing to base it on, nothing that would ever stand up in court, something purely subjective.
A tall, dark shape…
Ridiculous. That silhouette’s been on your mind for days…that’s all it is. But still she could hear Gelert saying, Follow your hunches…
“I’m sorry you’ve had trouble.”
“I’m sure you are, but you still haven’t identified yourself…so you have ten seconds to explain what you want.”
“There are people who want to give you a hand.”
Lee laughed. “Where were they this evening? I could have used them in the kitchen.” Okay, that sounded slightly hysterical. Fine. I have some hysterical coming.
“Hagen isn’t one of them.”
Lee went quiet for the moment. “And? Five seconds.”
“He knows what you know.”
She had to laugh again. “Who was it,” she said, “who suggested that the perfect way to get someone to leave town was to send them a message that said, ‘Flee, all is discovered’? What makes you think you know what I know? Any more than Hagen does?”
“There are more people than just ExTel,” said the voice, “who know what was in Omren dil’Sorden’s personnel records.”