Alien Heat (8 page)

“When I held her sweater, that day in your office.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw a dog. A black dog, a cocker spaniel. The dog was barking, it was snarling, it was going to bite. The baby was crying.”

“What baby?”

“I don't know. He killed the dog with his fist.”

“Who?”

“The clown. I can't see it all. There was smoke, and an alarm.” Her eyes were wide and faraway. David wanted to touch her shoulder, but was afraid to.

“What about the clown? What did he do?”

“He put his hands on her throat and he choked her. Her eyes got big and her tongue stuck out. He kept on choking her, even when she was dead.”

“What does he look like?”

“I told you, he was a clown.”

“How can you be sure it was a man? Was he—”

The knock at the door was loud. They both froze.

“Yo, David? You in there?”

Mel.

“Yeah, I'm here. Come on in.”

The expression on Mel's face told him how odd they looked—pizza carton open on the bed, the two of them close together, the air thick with tension.

Mel gave David a sharp look, and David took the cue to back away.

“Sorry, David, they insisted.”

David saw the shadowy figure of String, a white-haired man, Jenks, then the boy, running across the room to Teddy Blake. She opened her arms and he ran to her, hiding his head and holding her tight. She held him without hesitation, and David thought sadly that she had an admirable grace with children.

Arthur would not take it well when she went to jail.

Because good as she was, she had not been able to resist playing him along—the con woman had been unable to give up the show. The hand to the throat had given her away, she
knew
what had happened to Theresa Jenks. It was all a nice little scam. The woman, wealthy and vulnerable. Books from the Mind Institute, priming the pump.

Find the link between Blake and the Mind Institute, and the whole nasty thing would unravel.

Teddy's eyes were closed, and she stroked the boy's head. His sobs were loud and painful in the cluttered dingy room.

ELEVEN

Outside the captain's office, the noise level was rising. Someone—David wasn't sure who—pressed next to the glass, scratching the small of his back with short stubby fingernails.

The man wore suspenders, suit coat draped over one arm. He was talking to Clements—probably another arson cop. David did not like this man, standing in the homicide bull pen, talking too loud and scratching himself.

“David? Are you listening to me?”

David was not listening. He was too angry to listen. Why should he listen to a long-winded no?

“I'm listening.”

Captain Halliday snugged his tie up close to his thin, reddish-brown neck. He checked his watch.

“Come on, we're late.”

David looked at his feet, saw his shoes were dusty.

Halliday paused by the door. “Silver, you coming?”

“How about as a material witness?”

Halliday sighed, opened the office door. “If you folks will head on out to conference room B, I'll be with you in just a few minutes.”

The knot of cops began to shuffle. One of the Elaki skittered backward into a desk. David heard Mel shout, “Hey, Yo!” and wondered if a fight would erupt.

Halliday closed the door and sat on the edge of his desk. “I'm not getting through to you, am I, Detective?”

“I think the mistake is mine, sir. I'm not getting through to you.”

“You're getting through to me all right, David, loud and clear. You've got a thing about this woman, this psychic, and it's affecting your judgment.”

“She knows too much, Captain, she's got to be involved. Or do you believe in all that stuff?”

“David, let's think about this, okay? Let's say you're absolutely right. Let's say for some bizarre reason she's involved in the fire and the murder—”

“What's bizarre? She's milking Jenks.”

“Say you're right—”

“I'm right and I want a warrant.”

“No, you don't. Not if you're right, you don't.”

David frowned.

“You're a long way from knowing what the hell's going on, David. The Blake woman is one little thread. Watch her, talk to her, follow other lines of investigation and see where she fits.”

David looked back at his feet. Still dusty. He glanced up at Halliday. “You're right, of course.”

The captain sighed. “David, you're one of the best homicide investigators I've ever had the pleasure of working with. So what's up here? Because this just isn't like you.”

Halliday swung his left leg, sneaked another look at his watch. As always, David knew the proper attitude to take with management.

“Nothing's up.”

“Okay then, let's go. Lights out.”

The office went grey, dimly illuminated by the light from the bull pen. The computer terminal glowed white on black.

“David? You coming?”

TWELVE

There was a stir of excitement in the conference room. Detective Clements accepted congratulations and admiration on behalf of the arson lab techs, who had taken burnt fragments of several discs stored in sensor units interspersed around the supper club and restored them well enough that they could be shown.

Clements should have been excited, but she was solemn. There was a hitch, as usual, and someone went out for the inevitable coffee and doughnuts.

David wondered what Teddy Blake was doing today. Presenting Jenks with a final bill, now that his wife's death was confirmed?

A lot of cops went to psychics. Everybody in the department knew it; nobody talked about it. Police work was dangerous. A man could walk into a precinct, ask directions, and open fire with a weapon that should not work, except for some reason no one could fathom (or own up to) the field was not on. An oversight that cost three detectives, and one uniform. An oversight that meant the walls had to be repaired, the floors recarpeted.

Police work meant that a woman, newly promoted to sergeant, could get caught in a grid glitch in a neighborhood that had just been taken apart by holographic troops. That this sergeant could literally be torn to death by a crowd that ripped her arms and legs from her body, right outside the tunnels of Little Saigo where David had roamed as a boy.

Police work meant that a team of detectives could go up against a psychopath who had killed over twenty children, and stockpiled every imaginable weapon, and come away without a drop of blood being shed and the perpetrator weeping on the way to jail.

All of this could happen and did happen, the point being you could never predict. Some cops had a hard time with that—getting up every day and going to work at a job where you couldn't predict. So some of them went to psychics, trying to exercise a measure of control over something that could not be controlled.

Even him. For different reasons, that were really the same reasons. The inability to live with uncertainty.

It started several months after he'd joined the force. Rose had been expecting their first child, a dark-haired baby with brown eyes, a perfect, pink and white little girl, Kendra. And while Rose stalked the house, heavy-bellied and depressed, David had been ravished by the work. He welcomed it, absorbed it, wondering if his new and formidable skills as an investigator could be used to find out just what had happened that night when he was a boy, when his father had gone out for doughnuts and never returned.

But every tiny thread, any hint of a lead, went nowhere.

He did not think he would ever get over that sense of shame, the humiliation of money spent while bills went unpaid and he and Rose scrimped for baby things. The memory of secrets shared that should not be shared, spilled in his eager need to be fed hope. The shame of having the psychic set limits on how often he could come, when he had grown desperate for news and encouragement.

“Lights down,” someone said.

Detective Clements sat on the edge of the table and began the disc. People shifted their weight and moved their chairs so they could see. Someone reached for a doughnut and a napkin. Light flickered on the television and the static cleared.

The images were cloudy, details difficult to make out. There were dark spots like shadows. David leaned forward, wondering if he was mistaken. No. He saw the girl he'd found in the middle of the tracks, her white dress tight, shiny and clean, her hair soft, face young enough to leave no doubt that she was underage. She stood by the bar, talking to a woman in a blue dress, both of them animated and happy, dark hulking shadows of men close beside them. A balloon drifted by, large and purple, a happy note.

The balloon sank behind the bar by the kitchen. Detective Clements froze the image.

“That, right there, is our incendiary device. Our murder weapon, if you will.”

David looked up, met her eyes. “The balloon?”

“I think so. We found potassium chlorate and sugar down there, behind the bar.”

“Potassium chlorate and sugar, huh?” Mel closed one eye. “I know that's significant, Yo, I just don't know why.”

Detective Clements tossed her head sideways, the thick wedge of hair flipping over her shoulder. “Put sulfuric acid in a balloon. Then put that balloon inside another one that's coated with fire fudge—”

String waved a fin. “Fudge chocolate?”

“No, baby, the fudge isn't something you eat. You mix it up with sugar, but instead of chocolate, you add potassium chlorate.”

David rubbed his temples, thinking the headache was going to be a bad one. “The acid eats through the balloon?”

Clements nodded. “Yeah, that's the whole point, see. Eats through the first balloon, ignites the fudge in the second one. And you got yourself an A-number-one incendiary device.”

David pulled his bottom lip. “How long?”

“How long what, baby?”

“How long does it take the acid to eat through the balloon?”

“Depends on the balloon, and you can layer it. My guess is anywhere between fifteen and forty-five minutes.”

“We're still testing it out in the lab.”

David looked around to see who'd spoken, saw the man who was scratching himself earlier in the bull pen. David frowned at him, trying to remember his name. Rufus Cobb. Detective Cobb. He had reddish-brown hair and a coarse-looking mustache that needed attention.

Cobb was frowning at Clements, his arms tightly folded next to his chest. “We're still just speculating, Yolanda, you might make that clear.”

“I figured you'd do it for me.”

He shrugged. “We haven't been able to duplicate this in the lab. We can't make the balloon float like that, the way it did on the disc there, with the fire fudge. Plus, let's face it, folks, this is an exotic.”

“Exotic?” David asked. The problem with being a homicide cop in an arson investigation was how often one found oneself playing straight man.

Warden skittered forward, his eye prong twitching. “Is unusual this. Connotes professional behavior.”

“Hired torch?” Mel asked.

Clements nodded. “Could be. We're going through our arson signatures, see what we come up with. Get this, Silver.” She took a cigarette from her purse and put it in her mouth. The room became silent. Clements rolled her eyes, took the cigarette out of her mouth, and waved it in the air. “I'm not
lighting
, okay, sweethearts? Just tasting the tobacco a little.”

David decided that he liked her. She reminded him of Mel.

“We found trace elements of potassium chlorate in that house where you fell through the floor.”

David shifted in his seat. He had not been planning on sharing that particular episode.

“Now wait a minute.” Mel scratched his chin. “I thought that fire, the one in the house, caught from the supper club. Like an accident.”

“It wasn't an accident that we found Theresa Jenks there,” David said.

Clements shook her head. “We're still sifting, but there was enough heat and flame to insure hostile fire.”

String arched backward on his fringe. “How is this fire hostile? This is emotion?”

“Is human expression,” Warden said. “The constant anthropomorphism. Her meaning is the fire seems to be set for the purpose carefully. So it is insured that building will go down to the cinders.”

“Ah.”

Yolanda Clements sniffed the cigarette. “Listen, while you two translate, I'm a run the rest of the show. It's going to jump around; we've spliced the whole. Got bits from those nasty rooms upstairs.”

“Where's vice when we need 'em,” someone said.

“Hey, Yo, we get copies of this?”

The image wavered, and bars of grey static fuzzed the clarity. David squinted.

“That an
Elaki
?” someone asked.

“I had no idea they were so … agile. What's he doing to that woman?”

“Use your imagination.”

“Oh, God. If it wasn't so neat, I'd throw up.”

“Beats sheep, I guess.”

David heard a chair scrape the floor, looked over his shoulder, saw Della slip away.

The scene switched to the kitchen where an Elaki and a boy, both in soiled undershirts and ball caps, peered into a fryer. The Elaki waved a fin over the grease, and the boy laughed and turned the Elaki's ball cap backward.

David wondered if either of them had survived.

The image blurred, another shift in location. David saw the bar again, people laughing, talking, drinking. Something odd about the scene. He realized that the people and Elaki were mixing freely here, sitting together at tables, moving in and out of mixed groups. The numbers were pretty evenly distributed—human and Elaki one-to-one.

A hallmark of the supper clubs. The only other place David had seen such easy mixing was a restaurant called Pierre's, and even there, Elaki stuck with Elaki, and people stuck with people.