Byron was dead.
She had known it from the way the cops acted, even before they told her that he’d been killed in some hotel in the Tenderloin. When she went with the two detectives, she said nothing, even as Sanchez asked her what the hell was going on. She was in the cops’ unmarked green Plymouth before she could begin to think.
Byron was dead.
She couldn’t shake the phrase. It kept running through her mind over and over.
Get a grip, she thought. A cynical part of her brain was telling her how insane this all was.
Why?
Angel’s mind locked on that word like a mantra as the cops shot down Market toward the police station. The fat pink, White, tried to be comforting, but his words didn’t jell into anything coherent—just another noise, like the engine and the abused suspension. Anaka said nothing.
Why?
Why him? Why now? Why did this have to happen before she knew what she felt?
Maybe the cops were wrong and it wasn’t him. To most humans, moreaus all look alike, right? Even cops. Even to some cops who worked the moreau districts—
Angel shivered when she realized that they were going to ask her to identify the body.
Could she handle that?
Damn it, of course, she could handle it. She’d seen corpses before, some of them her friends. She’d led a fucking street gang. She’d seen more death up close than some morey veterans. She was tough, a survivor . . .
She never should have let someone get that close to her.
The new, supposedly earthquake-proof, police headquarters squatted on the foundation of the old post office. It tried, too hard, to look contemporary with the surviving structures in the cluster of civic buildings across Market. The Plymouth slid into a tunnel that fed into the parking garage. Even in the car Angel could feel the temperature drop and smell the ozone of a few hundred confined vehicles. The lights buzzed, and the echo from that made the scene feel unearthly.
Anaka parked the car near the bottom of the hole. The garage was a concrete tomb. It was dark, hard, and cold. White led her out. Anaka had stepped out of the car to follow them, but White stopped him. “Go check with the coroner—”
“But—” Anaka began to say.
“Meet us back up on three.”
Anaka stepped back into the car, slammed the door shut behind him, and pulled away.
White put a hand on Angel’s shoulder and maneuvered her toward the elevators. Angel stayed pliant, saying nothing.
They entered the elevator and White flashed his badge at a sensor. “Detective Morris White, third floor.”
“Confirmed,” the elevator responded.
Angel took a few breaths and tried to find her voice. “Where are we going?”
The doors slid open, and White led her to a desk, behind which sat a bored looking uniform.
White acted a little uncomfortable. He addressed the uniform first. “I have an appointment for a vid room.”
“Detective White, right?” The uniform held out his hand. White handed over his badge and the cop ran it through a scanner. “The lawyers are waiting for you, 5-A.”
“Lawyers?” Angel asked, forcing herself to regain a little touch with reality.
“We want you to ID our suspects.” They walked past the desk, and down a long corridor. They passed doors every ten meters or so. One door near the end of the hall hung open. White paused in his walk down the corridor. “Are you up to this?”
“Me? ID the suspects?” Angel spoke slowly. She’d agreed to go with the cops, mostly out of shock. She still didn’t trust police, and she was beginning to wonder exactly what was going on here. Who the hell could she identify? She barely knew Byron.
Yeah, said the cynical part of her mind so why are you so torn up over this?
I might have married him, she answered herself.
Out of love, replied the cynic, or because he was the only person to ever show any interest in a well-used lepus that barely scraped herself off of the pavement back home?
“Let’s talk inside,” White said, taking her nonanswer as a yes.
White led Angel the rest of the way to room 5-A, and shut the door behind him. The room was a stark white rectangle. The far wall was covered by ranks of vid screens. A long table squatted in front of the screens. Two empty chairs faced the table and the screens beyond. Two chairs at either end of the table were filled.
Both occupants wore conservative dark blue suits. The one on the far right was a redheaded human woman who was idly tapping at a wallet computer. The other one was a moreau ferret. The ferret turned a sinuous gaze on the two of them and shot White a chuckle. “You finished prompting the witness?”
White sighed. “Miss Lopez, let me introduce Mr. Igalez from the public defender’s office.”
The ferret whipped a nod.
“And Mrs. Gardner, Assistant District Attorney.”
Gardener glanced up, and her head moved in a nearly imperceptible acknowledgment.
There was a third person in the room. A uniformed cop sat at a control console next to the door. White didn’t introduce him. From the way the seats were arranged, Angel couldn’t see him when she sat down.
White sat down next to her. They faced a wall full of test patterns. He pulled a microphone over to her face. “I want you to understand, you’re here as a witness, not a suspect. But you do have the right to have your own lawyer present.”
Yeah, right, a morey with a lawyer. A morey waitress ex-gang member with a lawyer. She wondered where Igalez came from, and who he was defending.
Angel sighed and asked, “What do you want from me?”
Gardener, the DA, started. “We want to know about the events of October 23.”
After a long pause, Angel finally asked, “Friday?”
It all slipped into place. The Rabbit Hole. That’s who White’s suspects were—
The three punks who’d jumped her!
She’d been feeling numb, in shock, ever since White and Anaka had picked her up. However, she had no idea how truly pissed she’d been until she had something to focus her anger on. Angel bit her lower lip until she tasted blood. She wanted to kick something.
She’d see those skinheads fry.
The questions went on about The Rabbit Hole, and the punks who’d attacked her. The DA asked calm, sometimes leading questions, while the Public Defender was hard, angry, trying to rip any hole in her story, and, failing that, trying to cast her in the worst light possible.
The questioning was accompanied by a rapid drumbeat that Angel only realized belatedly was her own foot pounding the ground, hard.
Igalez got to her. Not that he made her admit anything, but having a fellow moreau try to make that fight look like she’d provoked something . . .
“Are you saying that crushing that man’s testicles was not excessive force?” asked the ferret.
“Three bald punks were about to spike me like a football.” Her pounding foot doubled its speed against her volition. The table vibrated in time to it and Angel realized that White was staring at her.
“You could see no other way to remove yourself—”
Angel jumped on to the chair, tensed like a spring. She leaned toward him. “You ever been raped, Igalez?” She was amazed how calm her voice sounded.
“Miss Lopez—” White said. He put a restraining arm on her shoulder.
“Have you, Mr. Public Defender?” The pounding was now her own heart, and the smell of the blood from her lip seemed to fog the room. She was riding a razor-thin edge here, and be damned if she wasn’t pushing the envelope.
Gene-techs all over the world had designed moreaus for battle, and most designs had some combat mode written into their genes. All Angel really needed was to get pissed enough and she’d go crazy on her own adrenaline.
“No—” From the way the ferret looked, he could smell how far he’d pushed her. The fear he broadcast, and the sound of his own heartbeat fed into Angel’s state.
It was like a wind at her back, pushing her to move. She’d reached a point where she’d fired every cell of her body to scream threat. “A ferret—kinda like you—tried to rape me once. If I’d kicked him in the balls, he might still be alive.” She jumped. White didn’t expect the move, and she was so hyped that she was across the table and on Igalez before anyone else could act. By a supreme act of will, all she grabbed was his tie. “I let him get too close.” Her nose was only a few centimeters from the ferret’s. She could hear other people in the room scrambling around the table. Every sense was sharpened on a metabolism her anger had driven to just this side of panic.
She gave Igalez her best smile. “I had to chew through his throat.”
Some sense started leaking in, and she began to force it all back. Her body wanted to rebel, but it recognized that she was still in charge, barely. She let go of his tie and he dropped back into the seat. “The scar on my cheek’s from a chunk of his cartilage.”
She backed off, barely able to admit to herself that what she’d just done had scared her as much as it had Igalez.
White was about to grab her, but she hopped back into her seat without assistance. “Excessive force, my ass.”
Had she really been about to do to Igalez . . .
It took a few seconds for everyone to return to their seats. Even the uniform by the door had vacated his post. The color had drained from the Assistant DA’s face, and her hand shook her wallet computer slightly. White glared at her, wiping sweat from his balding skull. The uniform’s hand hung a little too close to his weapon.
Angel shook. Losing control like that wasn’t good. The only person who knew how close things had come was Igalez, the only other morey in the room.
And Igalez looked truly spooked.
“Are you contending,” Igalez asked, regaining his composure and spending a few seconds loosening his tie, “your belief at the time was that these humans were going to—”
“Beat me up, rape me, kill me, and bugger me up the ass? In that order? Damn straight,” Angel said quietly, trying to hide her own discomfort.
The questioning was subdued from that point on. Dates, facts, names. Igalez didn’t go into motivation or justification again. They covered the fight at The Rabbit Hole two or three times, and only briefly did they go over the time between then and now. The fact that they didn’t ask her much about relatively recent history struck her as odd, but she didn’t dwell on it. She was too shaken.
When the questions ended, White said, “Now, what we’d like you to do is identify the three men who attacked you.”
White waved back at the uniform and the test patterns dropped from the screens; Angel faced a wall of faces. Over twenty of them slowly rotated in front of her—
“First of all, I told you, they were all bald.”
In response, the pictures with hair froze as the computer erased the hair, pixel by pixel. After a half second, she was facing a wall of bald humans. Angel stared, looking for Earl, Chico, and the black dude. Earl was the first one she recognized; he wore a face she’d never forget.
“Freeze number twelve. That’s the guy I kicked.”
Twelve froze and the Assistant DA said, “We’re more interested in the other two—”
“Can we avoid prompting the witness?” The ferret stepped on the DA’s speech.
Angel ignored them and studied the black faces on the wall. She didn’t know his name, but he had been standing closer than White was now.
“Six, number six.” Six froze, facing them expressionlessly. “That’s number two—”
“Are you sure?” asked the ferret.
“What did you say about prompting the witness?” the DA said.
Angel couldn’t find Chico on the wall. “Are there any more pictures?”
In response the entire wall changed, and she looked at another army of bald faces. Chico was almost dead-center, staring at her. “Fifteen, that’s the fucking bastard, fifteen.”
Fifteen froze. The other faces blanked and the other two came back, flanking Chico. “Now we want you to be sure—”
“Those are the bastards who attacked me.”
“You chose rather quickly—” the ferret started.
“That’s them.” She stared down Igalez. “The scum you’re defending’d kill you for not being human.”
White put his hand on her shoulder. “I think we’re done here.” White led her out of the room, and Angel was glad to get out of Igalez’s presence.
Anaka was waiting by the desk, looking impatient.
• • •
She’d been right. They needed her to identify the body. They took her to St. Luke’s Veterinary. She sat in the back of the car, numb, silent, while Anaka and White talked about what cops talk about.
They were going to stick her face-to-face with Byron cold on a slab and Angel wasn’t sure she wasn’t going to lose it. Hell, it felt like she’d lost it already. It was a damn close thing with Igalez.
She was stronger than that, though. She had more control.
Hoped she had more control, anyway.
Stop brooding on it, she told herself. Soon the whole thing will be over. Over already, really. Byron was a slab of meat and there was not thing one she could do about it.
Anaka and White argued around her, oblivious.
“I’m telling you,” Anaka was saying. “Ellis is hiding something.”
“I don’t want to deal with your conspiracies today.” White sounded more resigned than argumentative.
“Why’s she doing the Dorset case? She’s not a vulpine expert.”
“Who gives a shit, Kobe? Our job’s to bust the Knights, remember?”
“And if something’s funny about the autopsy—”
“Damn it, Kobe, if we do this right, the skinheads will plead, roll over on their masters, and we’ll never have to bring up the body . . .”
Angel was almost tempted to ask if that was so, why they needed to put her through this. She didn’t. Who cared what kind of internal politics these cops were going through, she just wanted to get the damn ordeal over with.
The pair argued with each other all the way to the hospital. After a while Angel stopped listening.
The detectives took her to Byron’s resting place, the morgue in the basement of St. Luke’s Veterinary. The morgue’s white tile walls echoed sounds to unnatural lengths. Cheap pine-scented disinfectant didn’t quite cover the smell of dead flesh that’d sunk into the walls.
Angel was cold down here.
Byron lay on a stainless-steel table. As soon as Angel saw the body, there wasn’t any doubt that it was him. Blood had caked on his fur, but it was the same face . . .
“I love you, Byron,” she whispered for the first and only time.
She said it so quietly that she was unsure if she had said it at all.
“Is it him?” Anaka asked for perhaps the third time.
Angel was still trying to find her voice.
She kept thinking how cruel it was. The slash on his neck had cut halfway through his throat and up the side of his face, pulling his cheek into a slack grimace. She was glad for whoever it was that had closed Byron’s eyes. If Byron’s eyes had been open, she was sure she’d go running off screaming—
After an eternity she managed to drag her gaze from the corpse. She nodded at the cops. She screwed her eyes shut, but it felt like the image of Byron on that table had glued itself to the inside of her eyelids. She felt White’s hand on her shoulder. “Let’s take you home.”
The cops took her back to the Mission District. White drove this time, Anaka next to him, leaving her alone in the back. For most of the ride they sat in silence, which was fine with Angel. She was still trying to deal with it, not just Byron, but her reaction to it—
She should be able to handle this, but she was on the verge of falling apart. Come on, she told herself, you only met him fourteen days ago.
They paralleled Market on Harrison, traveling toward the Mission District. As they made the turn south, Anaka finally asked a question.
“Miss Lopez, would you know why Bryan Dorset would want to meet with those two?”
“What two?” Angel whispered. She didn’t want to deal with more questions.
White sighed.
Victorian architecture began to slide by the car as Anaka tackled Angel’s hill. The cockeyed angles of the old homes made Angel’s head hurt. She put her face in her hands.
It was wrong.
Not just the offense of someone killing Byron. There was something else that was wrong—
White pulled the car up in front of her place, between the Antaeus and the Jerboa. Angel looked at Anaka before she left the car, “What are you talking about. Meet who?”
“He was killed in a hotel room rented by the Knights of Humanity—” Anaka began. “The information that led us to the body also said that there was a meeting scheduled within an hour of the time of death.”
A meeting? Why?
“No,” Angel said, backing away from the car. “I don’t have a damned idea why he’d want anything to do with those sleazeballs. What information—”
Anaka chuckled. “You don’t know? It’s—”
“Time you got some rest,” White said, and drove the car away.
Angel watched the car leave and smelled something worse than the morgue scent that clung to her fur . . .