Drakon (6 page)

"Which would put this about the same time as the warehouse," the detective said.
Nobody notices
when a janitor doesn't show up.
They'd assume he was on a bender, or something. Either the perp was very smart, or they'd lucked out in their choice of victim.

"More or less,
patron,
"

Carmaggio grunted.
Don't let what you want to be true cover your eyes.
Still, the MO was suspiciously alike—and the bizarre aspects were pushing his coincidence button.

"So," he said. "Twenty posse drug-dealers, and one anonymous janitor. Motive?"

"Dropped in for a wash and a snack," Rodriguez said, tapping the empty milk carton with his ballpoint.

"I think you may be right—a snack and somewhere to hide for a few hours. The distances are right."

Carmaggio turned slowly on his heel, looking over the little roach-trap.
Shitty place to die.

Probably an even shittier place to
live,
come to that, but that wasn't his department.

A slow burn of anger started at the back of his throat, unexpected and unfamiliar. Marley Man was no loss; and face it, Antonio Salazar was a complete loser who'd've ended up on a slab someday in the not-too-distant future. Probably put there himself with a needle; he was the old-fashioned kind and Dame Horse came with a dark rider these days. It wasn't even that the killings had been casual, probably motiveless. He saw plenty of those. It was . . .
like Uncle Luigi and the rabbits,
he realized.

He'd been seven when that happened. Going over to his uncle's, and the old guy had been killing rabbits. Big hutch full of rabbits, and Luigi standing by it in his undershirt, belly hanging over his pants, suspenders dangling, a burnt-out cigarette hanging off his lower lip. Luigi was a bricklayer, and he had hands like baseball mitts. Big beefy arms, fat but with lots of muscle underneath. The big hand went down into the cage and
wham
a rabbit came up in it, kicking and squealing and dropping black round pellets of rabbit shit. Eyes bugged out. Then Uncle Luigi sort of wrung it with fingers and thumb—a quick cracking sound, and it kicked and went limp. A toss, and it went onto the table with the others, next to the little curved knife.

Carmaggio had still been screaming when Uncle Luigi got him home. Dad gave him the belt and sent him to his room, but he wouldn't eat the stew anyway.

The perp here was killing the way Uncle Luigi did the rabbits.

The force of his own rage surprised him; and it was mixed with something else, something much more commonplace.

Fear.

"We're going to hear from this fucker again," he said quietly.

Jesus took the videocam rig off his head and looked down, snapping the cassette out of the machine. "
Si.
I've got that feeling too."

***

Stephen Fischer woke to the sound of a quiet, burring clicking sound. His bedroom was dark and the air still, smelling of incense and a sexual musk.

Jesus, what a lay!
he thought blurrily.
What an experience.

He felt too heavy to move anything more than his eyelids, to do anything but breathe.
I'd always
thought "drained" was a figure of speech,
he thought.

Eerie. He'd been sitting quietly with a beer, not even trying for a pickup. Better not to try right after a breakup; girls could sense it if you were too needy. It was late, nobody there, and he hadn't been in the place for two years, not since he married.

He'd noticed her the minute she came in. Black tracksuits weren't the usual dress for the after-work crowd on the Street, even at Fernways, which catered to the younger up-and-coming set—although the suit had a sort of shimmery quality to it up close. She'd come in with a draft of cold air . .

.

That's odd. She must have been freezing in that stuff out on the street in January.

. . .
come in with a nylon duffel bag in her hand, and given the place a once-over. God, those eyes.

Big and green, in the dark aquiline face. Model looks, model walk. And she'd come over to
his
booth, just slid right in.

***

"Order food," she said.

And slid a hundred-dollar bill onto the table. The accent had floored him as much as the money. A German trying to sound like Scarlett O'Hara might have sounded that way, but it was thick enough to be barely comprehensible. Voice soft and deep, like velvet.

Fischer blinked at her.
This doesn't happen to guys
on the Equities Desk,
he thought. In fact, he doubted it happened to anyone outside the movies.

The booth was dim, only a single candle burning on it. The underlight brought out the sculpted angles of her face; model looks, but not the neowaif type. She was dark enough to be a Latina, but the eyes were bright green and the mahogany red of her hair looked genuine.

"Ah, I'm Stephen Fischer," he said.

There seemed to be a lump in his throat, making it a little difficult to talk. That wasn't the only lump, either. He wavered between annoyance—he'd been out of his teens for a decade and a half—and delight.

There'd been nothing since the divorce and not much for the year before it.

"Gwendolyn Ingolfsson," she said. For a moment she stared at his extended hand and then took it.

That was another surprise; her hand was hard, like smooth articulated wood. A jock's hand. The nails were trimmed very close.

"Would you like to join me for dinner?" he said.

"Yes."

Silence fell for a moment. A waiter came over with another place-setting and a menu; her head tracked him smoothly, then turned back to Fischer.

"What would you like?" he went on, trying not to burble and feeling sweat break out under his collar.
And I'm goddamned nervous too.
Events were out of control, and normally he didn't like that.
To
hell with control.

"I'm hungry. Several dishes."

The green eyes bored into his. He called the waiter over, ran down the menu; Fernways had a small selection, but it was all good. Food arrived; the woman—Gwendolyn, odd name—began to eat, neatly but enormously. His eyes widened. She was not gaunt, but the figure under the loose fabric was obviously the product of heavy exercise club investment, real sweat equity. How could she eat like this?

She looked up from finishing off her twelve-ounce porterhouse. "Tell me about
yourself,
" she said; the accent seemed a little less notable.

Fischer loosened his tie and talked; through the dinner, through dessert—she had two—through coffee and brandy. Somehow he never got around to asking the questions, beyond "New in town?" and

"Where are you from?" Clipped answers: "Yes" and "Born in Italy."

"So," he said at last, trying desperately not to squeak. "Would you like a nightcap? At, ah, at my place?"

She smiled, showing very white teeth. "Yes."

***

Christ, I may never move again.
She'd taken his hand the minute they walked into the little studio apartment and led him straight to the bed. Naked she didn't look like a model; more like an Olympic pent-athlete, if they'd come in a non-flat-chested variety. His memory blurred into impossibilities.

I
couldn't
have done all that.

She wasn't in the bed. He could tell it by the feel, even before he saw the light of his computer monitor on. That was the clicking sound, the keyboard.

It was a moment before what he was watching made any sense. Gwen was sitting, eyes glued to the screen; it was logged on to the Internet. Text was scrolling by at far above reading speed through his 28.8 modem. Her hands poised over the keys; every few seconds they would strike in a blur of speed, too fast for him to see individual keystrokes at all. And not loudly, a precise controlled tapping giving exactly as much force as needed. There was an encyclopedia open on the desk beside the machine. When the high-speed modem was exchanging data, she flipped through the pages. No, stared at each page for about three seconds, then flipped it over.

She's reading.
The conviction hit him like cold water, and he gasped. Her head turned slightly. He gasped again when she rose and turned to face him.

"You've been watching me, Stephen," she said . . . sadly?

The accent was much less noticeable now. She walked over to the bed, barely visible in the faint blue glow of the monitor.

"I'm sorry you did that."

"What . . . look, what the
hell
were you doing with my computer?"

"Stephen, when do you expect someone to call?"

He bunked in bewilderment. His stomach lurched.

"Call?"

"Call you here."

"Maybe nobody this weekend. Come off it, I want some answers."

She put out a hand—

***

Gwen finished flushing the soiled sheet down the toilet in pieces of suitable size, then looked thoughtfully at the body hanging by its heels from the shower head, draining.

No, it wouldn't fit—even butchered. And the spirit of chaos alone knew what would happen if she blocked the drains. She walked out into the kitchenette and took a quick look inside the refrigerator.

Yes. If she put all the food on the counter, then disarticulated the limbs, the whole body should fit nicely, with the head in the freezer. At maximum refrigeration, it would be some time before the smell became obvious to humans.
Let's see, skull, torso, each limb in two sections,
she decided, and went to work with a regretful sigh.

"I'll have to be more subtle," she reproached herself, as she finished packing the refrigerator. "I can't go on leaving a trail like this."

Besides, Stephen had been . . . yes, sweet. Killing him had been almost as unpleasant as putting down a
servus.
She hadn't taken pleasure from a human since her youth, back when they'd been common, before the modified type completely superseded them. Interesting. Stephen might have been very useful, too, if she hadn't been careless. Too risky once he'd become suspicious, though. Wild humans were very difficult to condition properly; it would take weeks of work before she could be sure of one. A
servus's
emotions could be played like a violin, and of course they were raised to accept the Draka. Humans varied wildly, and at best their susceptibility to pheromonal controls was spotty.

The problem was that she was simply not used to pretense. Unlearning habits as ingrained as hers wasn't going to be easy, even with survival at stake. She'd have to
understand
the humans here, not just their nature but their culture.

Gwen fixed herself a snack of raw vegetables and cold cuts and took the plate back into the bedroom. She would eat the perishables first, then the canned goods; that ought to last her for a few days.

Throttling back on her metabolism was possible, but it made her sluggish and couldn't be reversed immediately in an emergency when she needed burst speed and strength. Nothing came free; her system was packed with extra capacities and they all required fuel. There was always the dead human, of course .

. .
But no.
Granted that it wasn't exactly cannibalism, she'd still have to be considerably more rushed before thinking seriously about that. There were plenty of food vendors about, if she was cautious.

Stephen Fischer had kept very complete records of his life on the little perscomp. Between that and the print books and the CD-ROMs, and what she could access from this
net,
the weekend should be far from wasted. By its end she should know better how to judge when someone would show up to investigate, in plenty of time to move along. With luck, she might be able to stay here a week or so.

A permanent nest would be more difficult.
I'm going to need a front,
she knew.
Subtle. Be more
subtle next time.

***

Dr. Mary Chen clipped the X rays to the lighted background glass. For comparison, she had a normal arm's prints next to them, and a shot of a gorilla's she'd gotten from the primatology people over at the University.

The woman beside her bent close to the film, whistling silently. "Oh, now this is really, really interesting," she said, adjusting her glasses.

The professor used a pen from her blouse pocket—she wore a plastic protector—to trace the lines of the bones.

"Look at the ratio of the radius and ulna to the upper arm," she said. "Definitely nonhuman, far too long, but it's not exactly like any of the other higher primates. And this gap here, not pongoid at all. Hmmm."

She pushed up the glasses again and peered at the film with her nose almost touching it. "From the wrist and hand, this isn't a knuckle-walker. Palm, more probably. The hand is extremely human in structure, except that the bones are more robust, but the wrist isn't like anything I've ever seen. It's almost as if it's been structurally reenforced."

"There's heavy callus on the palm," the doctor confirmed.

Pure technical interest,
Chen thought. She didn't seem to see the
implications,
which had been keeping the Medical Examiner awake every night for the past three. She sipped at the cold tea in its paper cup and grimaced. Caffeine wasn't working anymore. She yawned.

"I'd say it was probably some sort of baboon," the primatologist said. "Though the thumb structure is wrong, more like a hominid. And it's far too large; the size is more gorilloid. But it's more like a baboon than anything else I can think of."

She beamed at Chen. "Dr. Chen, do you realize what this
means?
"

She nodded jerkily.

"An entirely new species! Fascinating. And"—her voice dropped conspiratorially—"first publication."

"
No
publication until I give explicit, written authorization," she said sharply.
This woman is a
complete space cadet.
"And I'll want a written release to that effect."

The academic's face dropped a little. "It'll take months even for a preliminary report anyway," she said. "Oh, all right. And you'll get full credit."

Chen nodded and turned to the cooler. The room was dark except for the lights behind the display panel; it was well after normal hours. She turned on the overheads and pulled out the long tray, unsealing the plastic wrap around the arm.