Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (6 page)

Lee flipped forward through the profile to the personal evaluation pages. There were a lot of them. There was no way to work for a big company these days without having their psych and sentient-dynamics people all over you, monitoring your personality and mental health and assessing how they stacked up in relation to the corporate persona. Lee had never particularly liked the idea of this, which was one reason why she had originally risked low pay and an uncertain lifestyle to go into business “on the small” with Gelert. However, at times like this, the psych profiles and all the rest of the bean-counting had their uses, if only to give you a place to start asking your own questions. 
Intelligence levels border-high/high
, Lee read in one of the summaries. 
Good cooperation coefficient. Good intuition/data ratio. Good
 
initiative/teamwork-integration compromises. Acceptable attendance and tardiness record. No
 
visible or expressed bigotries. Negative vice/antisocial coefficient. Coworker attitudes toward
 
subject generally good, with the usual offset.

“Now what does that mean?” she said softly.

“What?” Gelert looked over her shoulder.

Lee pointed to the phrase on the page. Gelert looked, then snorted down his nose. “It’s corporate code for the fact that he’s Alfen, and they know that most people hate Alfen.”

“Oh, come on. ‘Hate’ is kind of a strong word, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, maybe it is. After all, the Elves are all spiffy dressers, they all drive Porsches or better, their parties never run out of ice; when not merely rich, they’re fabulously wealthy, and they’re all stunningly beautiful, immortal, and eternally young: what’s 
not
 to like?”

Lee gave him an ironic look, dropping the report in her lap as they merged off the Wilshire onramp onto the Hollywood Slideway, and the Skoda locked itself into the traffic flow at 100 kph. “Seriously, Gel,” she said.  “Why would anybody come after this poor guy with a shotgun? He was just some kind of hardware maven. No family in this universe, as far as I can tell from this—there are holes in it.”

“I know. I’ll go digging and add in some background when we get back to the office.”

“No relationships—that, if anything, would have turned up in a corporate detailing.”

“Assuming it had been kept updated in a timely manner.”

“I bet this one is as updated as it can be. We’ll find out. But if it is, then that means there goes your 
crime
 
passionelle
. Your broker buddies are going to have to make do with something else: dil’Sorden wasn’t even dating.” Lee looked out the window for a moment, watching the green, dusty, upsloping ground cover beside the slideway rush by. “Unless this guy stole someone else’s project and made them mad enough to kill him because of it. Work is all he seems to have had time for, to judge by this.”

“Could have been. Don’t worry…motivation will out,” Gelert looked grim. “Just give it time. No murder is motiveless, any more than anything else in sentient behavior is.”

“Just sometimes the motive is buried deeper than usual,” Lee said. “Not too deep for us to dig up, I hope…”

The hov progressed as far as Fourth and took itself off the slideway: Gel took over the driving again and ran the hov down through the traffic toward Parker Center. The parking lots for the center were all underground, and access to them was backed up as always, so Lee had another fifteen minutes to pore over dil’Sorden’s personnel report between the time Gelert surrendered the hov to the local traffic management system and the time it deposited them in a slot at the back of beyond, six levels down and easily half a mile from the main complex.

They hiked through the catacombs to the nearest elevator/escalator stack and made their up through the levels to the sun and the air again. Ten minutes or so later they broke out into the windy central plaza. Lee glanced over at the main court building with a slight smile of triumph as she and Gelert made their way over to the LAPD’s HQ building, identical to the other porticoed white edifices around the plaza except for the department’s shield.

Inside the building was huge, open, and airy—a rebellion against the claustrophobic facilities of earlier years, which had been all too conducive to making the people inside think they were a fortress against a prying world that had no right to know what they were doing. In its latest incarnation, the LAPD headquarters looked more like a Silicon Lakeshore facility than anything else: the central atrium let the diffuse sunlight in everywhere, the colors were pale and cool, and voices murmured on all sides, individual words lost in the rush of the four slender waterfalls that poured down from the roof level into the central basin five floors up. Lee and Gelert took the escalators up around the sides of the basin to the fourth floor, where Forensics was located, and went hunting across the right side of the big open-plan space for the team of analysts working on the dil’Sorden case.

Four or five rows of cubicles in they found the team assigned to the case, or at least three of its members. One set of four cubicles, arranged in a square, was notable amongst its neighbors for having a truly disreputable-looking ficus in the middle of it, its every skinny, straggly branch decorated with paper ornaments and less identifiable objects hung by strings: crayoned Christmas balls, foil dreidels, cellophane Jul fires, crumbling Day-of-the-Dead bone cookies, and here and there the occasional stranded paper plane. Under the spreading Whatsit Tree, in one of the cubicles, a young, short, round, dark-haired, dark-skinned man sat staring at the high-res vision plate set into the cubicle wall, with his hands in midair before him, seemingly twiddling with nothing. On the plate was an image of what seemed like a piece of thick rope.

Lee came up softly behind him and stood still, looking at the “rope,” as the seated man worked with the virtual glove box program. “Silk,” the man said, without turning to look at them. “Hi, Lee. Hi, Gelert.”

“Hi, Telly,” Gelert said. Lee said nothing as she watched Telinu Umivera manipulate the fiber under the scanner—definitely something worth watching, as he was possibly one of the best materials people in the department.

“Alfen silk?” Lee said.

“Yup,” Telinu said. “Look at the bump ratio.” The definition on the scanner’s enlargement changed, so that the “rope” filled the view. A pattern of shallow semi-hemispherical bumps became visible all across the view area. “It’s a dead giveaway: Earth-sourced silk fibers don’t bump that way. I teased this out of a thread someone left on the back of dil’Sorden’s jacket. Fifty-fifty blend: Alfen silk, Earth-New Zealand merino wool. Spun in Auckland, woven in Singapore.”

“But not from dil’Sorden’s suit?” Gelert said.

Telinu shook his head. “Wrong color, wrong age, wrong everything else. Someone he’d seen within the last…”

“Could have been a week,” said a voice from the other side of the cubicle. A head looked over the cubicle wall—blond, green downturned eyes, fluffy short hair: Stella de la Roux. “This guy wasn’t real good at taking care of his clothes,” she said in her soft breathy little voice. “I don’t think he even brushed the suit down when it got stuff on it—just shook it off.”

“Sounds like a gold mine for you, Stella,” Gelert said.

“More like a mudhole,” she said, and vanished behind the partition again. “It’s going to take hours to classify it all.”

Telinu pushed his chair back a little from his desk, stretched his arms above his head. “You have a chance to look at our raw findings yet?” Lee said.

Telinu shook his head. “I had a look ten, fifteen minutes ago, but the system hadn’t processed them through. Things are running slow today.”

“Well, there was definitely another Alfen at the murder scene,” Lee said. “I saw him, and Gel smelled him…at least a witness, if not otherwise involved. This might possibly have come from his suit.”

“Let me know if the interviewing makes it sound that way,” Telinu said. “I’d be glad of whatever psych corroboration we can get, because there is simply too much physical evidence on this body. Stelladella wasn’t kidding about his coat: half the county’s plastered over it. Mikki is having to macro some of my custom search routines so that the system can start sorting and flagging some of the eight million samples the guys in the clean room have pulled off it already…”

“Alfen fiber, Tierran fiber, Earth fiber, Alfen hair, Alfen fur…” came a voice from the third cubicle.

Lee and Gelert walked around that way. “Fur?” Gelert said to the long lean silver-haired man who was sprawled in that cubicle’s seat, watching line after line after line of code scroll up the display plate in front of him.

“Somebody’s cat,” Mikki Uiviinen said, looking over his shoulder at Gelert. “God only knows where he picked it up, and the problem is that 
we’re
 going to have to figure it out.”

“Did you know we found the murder weapon?” Gelert said.

“Yes indeed,” Mikki said idly. “Good boy.”

Gelert stepped forward, leaned his head over sideways, and took Mikki’s upper arm gently between his jaws. “I invite you to restate that,” he said, grinning around the arm.

“You bite me, I’ll bleed on you, I swear,” Mikki said, not moving. “Okay. Good 
‘mancer
.”

“Woof woof,” Gelert said dryly, and let him go.

“How come 
his
 report gets up here before mine does?” Lee said, slightly aggrieved.

“Because the weapon did,” Telinu said. “The eternal victory of the material over the immaterial, Lee. Sorry. Three sets of prints so far, they say in the clean room. One is Alfen: the characteristic double whorls and ‘barred spirals’ are clearly present. Ballistics is standing in line behind the dusters to get its hands on the weapon for barrel and muzzle work. Metallurgy has already pulled a sample for the registration.”

“Okay,” Lee said, breathing out. “Good.”

“So this isn’t just some mugging, you think,” Mikki said.

“No,” Lee and Gelert said in unison.

“Robbery?”

“No one touched the body after it fell,” Gelert said. “The assailant took off down the street, ran a few blocks down, a few blocks over, ditched the gun, ran some more, then caught a bus.”

“He wait long?”

“Not too long,” Gelert said. “It suggests that the murderer may have known the timing of the bus…”

“It also suggests that someone else might have been operating to make sure that dil’Sorden was in the right place at around the right time,” Lee said.

The others looked at her. She shook her head. “Conjecture,” she said. “I have interviewing to do yet. We’ll see if the facts support the theory.”

“Revenge? Retaliation for something going wrong?” said Mikki.

“Nonpayment for drugs?” Stella said. “Or a gambling debt?”

“Not enough data,” Gelert said. “We’re a ways off motivation yet. But I’m glad there’s at least some physical evidence supporting the idea that this was a joint Alfen-human job. Perceptual evidence may stand on its own in court these days, but it stands a whole lot taller with physical evidence to support it.”

“Well, we’ll stay on it,” Telinu said, turning his attention back to the strand of silk. “This one’s gonna take a lot of figuring out.”

“Not that we mind,” Stella said. “It’s certainly interesting enough. Been a while since I’ve dealt with an Alfen murder.”

Lee nodded…and then stopped. “Really?” she said. “A long while?”

Stella nodded. Telinu stopped a moment, thinking. “Yeah,” he said. “There was that case, what, three years ago? That rape and murder. But nothing since.”

Mikki looked over at him. “Not that you see them as perps all that often either,” he said. “But they usually seem to be on the other side of the gun, or knife, or whatever.”

Lee stood still and frowned at that for a moment. “Mikki,” Lee said, “seemings aside…exactly how often 
are
 Elves murdered? It’s statistics I’d be interested in. Worldswide, if possible.”

Mikki looked at her with a somewhat bemused expression. “Lee,” he said, “is it possible that you notice any news story in which you’re 
not
 mentioned?”

“Self promotion is nine-tenths of a career,” Gelert said. “You heard it here first.”

Lee gave Mikki a look, though she knew he was teasing. “This is a poor moment to descend into personalities,” she said.

“I’m not kidding,” Mikki said. “All right, maybe I am, you’ve been busy. But the FiveInterpol interspecies crime study is finally, finally about to be made public. After five, maybe six postponements. It was beginning to stink to high heaven; I think they just couldn’t find any way to postpone it anymore after the UN&ME started breathing down their necks. I would have thought you’d heard. It’s been all over the news.”

“The case we just finished really has been taking a lot of my time,” Lee said, “and I’ve had less time for the news than usual. 
Mea culpa.
 So can you get me a copy?”

“Not the slightest chance,” Mikki said. And winked.

Lee had little time for the winking. “Mikki, are you trying to suggest that the report suggests the distribution of such crimes is 
not
 standard statistical distribution for a population in a given universe? Maybe not even Monte Carlo! Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“I couldn’t say,” Mikki said, acquiring an expression of unusual innocence, even for him.

“That look of naked greed suggests that he could if the price was right,” Gelert said. “But he’s trying to maintain some poor semblance of innocence. He’s going to take it out of you in cookies, Lee.”

Mikki gave Gelert an annoyed look. “If word gets out,” he said, “nobody will feed me this stuff anymore, Lee. That would be unfortunate. It’s occasionally useful to be able to pick up bits and pieces of information this way…”

“It’s the gingerbread you’re after, isn’t it,” Lee said, resigned. “All right. Two dozen.”

“Three. With the gilding.”

“Don’t ask me for cute shapes.”

“I wasn’t going to. But service has to be paid for in kind, Lee, you know that. Especially when you think it’s going to make a difference to your case.”