CHAPTER 13

“Did you have to fucking hospitalize him?”

He shrugged. He’d dumped his prison jacket earlier—stripped off shoes and socks, too—and the beach sand under his feet was cool and firm. The night air brushed his neck and his bared arms like loose-drape silk.

“Couldn’t see a good reason not to.”

“No?” Ertekin had not taken off her shoes. “Well, it would have meant we got home tonight, instead of staying in this dump. Ever think of that?”

Her gesture took in the floodlit clutch of low-rise behind them, the coms tower, and behind it like some Godzilla parent the endless upward loom of the Perez nanorack. The rack’s structure stood mostly in darkness, but red navigation lights blinked in dizzying stacked synchrony, dragging vision upward until the lights disappeared into the cloud cover.

“It’s your dump,” he said.

“It’s leased.”

“That must be heartbreaking for you. COLIN dependent on local state power. I’m surprised you don’t just topple the government. You know, like you did in Bolivia back in the nineties.”

She shot him a look he was beginning to recognize. Halfway to anger, locked down by something else. In another thirteen, he’d have read it as social aptitude training. Here, he wasn’t sure what it might mean. Only one thing was clear. Something was scratching at the edges of Sevgi Ertekin, and had been since he met her.

“Marsalis, it’s late,” she told him. “I’m not going to get in a fight with you about something COLIN may or may not have done ten years before I joined them. The reason we’re in this dump is because you let your much-vaunted thirteen tendencies get out of hand, and it cost us another six fucking hours of phone calls and negotiation. So don’t push your luck. I’m close enough to sending you back as it is.”

He grinned. “Now you’re lying.”

“Think so? The warden wanted to refer it all the way back up to Tallahassee and a convened Violent Crimes Committee assessment. He’d just love to have you locked down while that grinds through the legislature.”

“I’d have thought he’d be glad to see the back of me.”

“Well, you’d be wrong. Warden Parris is an ex-marine.” Sevgi shot him another glance. “Just like Willbrink.”

“Will who?”

“Yeah, right. Forget it.”

He didn’t know how much truth she was telling. Certainly, things had been fraught once they saw what he’d done to Dudeck. The intervention squad didn’t quite stunwrap him on the spot, but it was a close thing. He spent three hours in the faintly ammoniac-perfumed gloom of the riot holding cells, was hauled out, marched summarily across to admin, and then marched just as rapidly back as, he supposed, competing authorizations whiplashed back and forth. It took another two hours to get him out of the hole permanently, by which time it was dark and the admin block was down to a skeleton crew of caretakers and security.

Norton and Ertekin came and went, in and out of doors to offices he never got to see inside. They barely glanced his way. Shift change came and went. At one point, a CO came and took his picture, took it away without comment. Carl let it all wash over him. When they were all done, he signed the documents they gave him, changed back into his own clothes, and, guessing it would be cold in New York, blagged an inmate jacket from the yawning night clerk. It was a use-faded gray-black, not a bad color in itself, but one sleeve was flashed with a line of orange chevrons and across the back was the customary sigma logo and name in the same glaring color. As with a lot of old stock, some tagging freak wit had taken a dye squirt to the lettering, dumping in a long jagged lowercase t after the S. He shrugged and took it anyway. Miami PD had impounded his gear from the hotel when they busted him, and he didn’t suppose he’d ever see it again. UNGLA were apparently still negotiating for the return of the Haag gun and its load. Point of principle, point of pride. No one really believed they’d win. He shouldered his way into the jacket, rolled up the short personal effects strip that went with the clothes he’d been arrested in, and walked out.

Fuck the accessories, Carl. You’re halfway home.

A grim-faced Norton stayed at his side all the way to the innocuous hired teardrop in the parking lot, opened the backseat for him, and closed it again as soon as he was in. Ertekin came out of the admin building a couple of minutes later, muttered something to her partner, and then got in behind the wheel. When Norton was in beside her, she fired up the engine and steered the car out of the prison gates on manual. Neither of the COLIN officers spoke to Carl at all.

Warden Parris, if he was still on site, never showed.

A couple of hundred meters down the exit highway, Norton was already on the phone, checking the Miami suborb terminal for departures north. Not surprisingly, there was nothing flying this late.

“Hotel?” he’d asked Ertekin.

She shook her head “Parris is way too pissed. I don’t want to wake up to a VCC warrant tomorrow morning because he called some friend in Tallahassee during the night. We need to get back on our own turf.”

Norton went back to the phone. A couple of hours later, they were rolling through a security gate and into the nanorack facility environs. Powered fences glinted off across the Florida flatland, watchful men and women in coveralls prowling back and forth in the gloom. The low-light headgear they wore made them look like insect aliens from a low-budget stage show. Carl spotted the colin insignia on an upper arm, on the badge of a beret. Safe haven. He could see the tension drain almost visibly out of his two rescuers.

Now, out on the beach with sand between his toes and his own clothes on his back for the first time in four months, he could feel a similar easing in himself. A sudden self-knowledge slopped in him, the awareness of how clenched he’d become, and the faintly scary slide as he let it go increments at a time. He’d been here before a few times: the bridge of the Felipe Souza, crackling suddenly with transmission from the incoming rescue boat; stepping off the elevator platform at the bottom of the Hawking nanorack and onto ground that sucked at him with a full g; getting out of the teardrop taxi in Hampstead and looking up at Zooly’s new pad, checking the street corner sign, wondering if this could really be it, if maybe he’d gotten her instructions wrong—and then seeing her come to the huge picture window and grin down at him, dimly seen through the tree-shadowed glass. The slip in your guts that tells you it’s okay, you can let go now.

“Tell me something, Ertekin.” The words came out of his mouth like exhaled smoke, pure unguarded conversation. He didn’t much care what she thought or said in reply—just talking and knowing it wasn’t going to get him shanked was the point. “You’ve worked for COLIN a couple of years, right?”

“Two and a half.”

“So who’s senior? You or Norton?”

He got the look again, but muted. Maybe she could hear the lack of cabling in his voice. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“No? So how does it work?” He gestured. “Come on, Ertekin. We’re just talking here. It’s a beach, for fuck’s sake.”

The twitched corner of a smile, but he got the feeling it wasn’t for him. He gestured again.

“Come on.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you.” She shook her head. “One in the morning, the man wants to talk office politics. Works like this. Norton’s an accredited COLIN investigator, a troubleshooter. Got a dozen years in, he went straight to them after law enforcement training in some upstate college. It’s a good career move: COLIN pay way over average and most of the work isn’t what you’d call hazardous. You’re looking at anticorruption task forcing, chasing down local government scams on COLIN property, Marstech licensing breaches, that sort of thing.”

“Not much serial homicide then.”

“No. When things get heavy, they mostly hire muscle from private military contractors like ExOp or Lamberts. Where it’s legally messy, they pull local PD liaison. That was me. I came in on a couple of Marstech hijacks where COLIN staff got killed, seconded from NYPD Homicide. They liked the work I did for them, Norton was moving up to a senior post, he needed a permanent partner with bloodwork experience, so.” She shrugged. “Like that. They offered me the job. The money was a lot. I took it.”

“But Norton still ranks you?”

Ertekin sighed. Looked out to sea.

“What?’

“Thirteens. You’re all so fucking wired for hierarchy. Who’s in charge? Who’s at the top? Who do I have to dominate? Every detective I ever shared an office with, it—”

She stopped.

For a moment, he thought Norton was there, coming down the beach toward them from the bunkhouse. The mesh cranked, rustily. He flicker-checked the beach, saw nothing. Went back to her face and found her still staring out at the ocean.

“It what?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said evenly. “Yeah, Norton ranks me. Norton knows COLIN inside and out. But he’s not a cop and I am.”

“So he defers to you?”

“We cooperate.” She left the sea and met his eyes. “Strange concept for someone like you, I know. But Norton’s got nothing to prove.”

“And a thick head of hair, right?”

The lyric left her looking blank. He guessed she was too young to really remember Angry Young and the Men. Carl owned their last album because, hey, who over the age of forty didn’t, the download went triple platinum as soon as it hit the open stacks. But Ertekin would have been barely out of diapers at the time. He’d only just been old enough himself to take it on board when Angry Young blew his brains out all over the fittings of a Kilburn recording studio. Making a Mess. Right. Black-comic sly and London-gutter cool to the last. He sometimes wondered if Angry Young had known what would happen to sales of Making a Mess when he put the barrel of the frag carbine in his mouth that afternoon, grinned—apparently—at the sound man, and flipped the trigger. Whether he had in fact begun to guess when he’d scrawled out the title track and lyrics a year earlier.

“What’s his hair got to do with it?”

“Well, it’s hardly male-pattern baldness, is it?”

“Hardly….” She got it. “Oh you’re fucking kidding me. You cannot be serious. Marsalis, you don’t have male-pattern baldness.”

“No. But I’m not human.”

It stopped her like a shot from the Haag gun. Even in the last gasp glow from the arc lamps back up on the asphalt, he saw the way her stare tautened as she looked up at him. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as tight.

“You quoting somebody there?”

“Well, yeah.” He chuckled, mostly because it was so good to be out there on the beach with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the sand. “Your guys, for a start.”

She raised an eyebrow. “My guys?”

“Yeah. You’re Turkish, right? Sevgi? Which pretty much makes you a Muslim, I’d guess. Don’t you listen to what your bearded betters tell you about my kind?”

“For your information,” she said thinly, “the last imam I listened to was a woman. She doesn’t have much of a beard.”

Carl shrugged. “Fair enough. I’m just drawing on global media here. Islam, the Vatican, those Jesusland Baptist guys. They’re all singing pretty much the same hymn.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh excuse fucking me.” He caught the flapping edge of his mood and dragged it back into place. You got out of jail today, pal. Tomorrow, you get out of the Republic. Day after that you’re on a suborb home. Just grin and bear it. He pushed out a laugh. “I pretty much do know what I’m talking about, Ertekin. See, I live inside this skin. I was there in ‘93 when Jacobsen came into force. And in case you think this is demob self-pity, it isn’t. We’re not just talking about the thirteens here. In Dubai I saw indentured Thai bonobos disemboweled and strung up outside the brothels they worked in when the shahuda hit town. The ordinary whores they just raped and branded.”

“The shahuda are not—”

“Yeah, yeah. The shahuda are not representative. Heard it. Just like the gladius dei don’t speak for all those peace-loving Catholics out there, and all those Jesusland TV freaks got nothing to do with Christianity, either. It’s all just a big misunderstanding, right. All this slaughter and blind prejudice, these guys just didn’t read promotional literature.”

“You’re talking about fanatical mino—”

“Look, Ertekin.” He found this time the laugh was genuine. “I really don’t care. I’m a free man tonight, got my feet in the sand and everything. You want to do the group-solidarity thing, run salvage on your broken-down patriarchal belief system, you go right ahead. I’ve believed some fucking stupid things in my time. Why should you be any different?”

“I’m not going to discuss my faith with you.”

“Good. Let’s not, then.”

They stood in the sand and listened to the quiet. Surf boomed on a reef somewhere offshore. Closer in, the smaller waves broke creamily in the gloom, made a white-noise hiss as they sucked back.

“How come you knew I was Turkish?” she asked him finally.

He shrugged. “Been there a lot. One time, I had an interpreter called Sevgi.”

“What were you doing in Turkey?”

“What do you think.”

“The tracts?”

He nodded somberly. “Yeah, standard European response. If it’s nasty or inconvenient, park it in eastern Turkey. Too far away to upset anyone who matters, and a long walk west if anybody gets out unauthorized. Which happens enough to keep me going back there a couple of times a year. You from the eastern end?”

“No, I’m from New York.”

“Right.” He nodded. “Sorry. I meant—”

He stopped as her gaze shuttled past him and up the beach. Turned to follow, though long-honed proximity sense already told him this time Norton was there for real. There on the low crest of the dunes, scuffing down through the sand toward them, and, by every physical sign Carl knew how to read, hauling bad news in bulk.

         

“Toni Montes. Age forty-four, mother of two.” The images flipped up in sequence on the conference room wall-screen as Norton talked. Vaguely handsome Hispanic woman, identity card shot, a strong-boned face fleshing out a little with age, henna-red hair cut short and stylish. flip. Body a graceless tangle in disarrayed skirt and blouse, limned in crime scene white on a polished wood floor. “Shot to death in her home in the Angeline Freeport this evening.” flip. Close-up morgue shot. Face bruised at the mouth, makeup smeared, eyes blown black by the pressure of the head shot that had killed her. The entry wound sat in her forehead like a crater. flip. “Children were out at a swimming class with the father. The house is smart, wired into a securisoft neighborhood net and upgrade-paid for the next three years. Either Merrin broke in with some very sophisticated intrusion gear, or Toni let him in.” flip. Body detail, one mottled flank and the sexless sag of a breast. “There was a fight, he knocked her around, put her on the floor more than once. A couple of her ribs were broken, there’s substantial bruising pretty much everywhere. You saw the face. Blood traces everywhere, too; CSI got it off the couch in the other room, the walls, too, in a couple of places.” flip. Red smears on stucco cream. “Most of it’s hers. Seems like he really went to town.”

“Did he rape her?” Carl asked.

flip.

“No. No detectable sexual assault.”

“Same as the others,” said Sevgi quietly. “Baltimore, Topeka, that shithole little town in Oklahoma. Loam Springs? Whenever he’s killed a woman, it’s been the same thing. Whatever this is about, it isn’t sex.”

flip.

“Siloam Springs,” Norton supplied. “Shithole little town in Arkansas in fact, Sev. Just over the state line, remember?”

“No, I don’t remember.” Ertekin seemed to regret the retort almost immediately. She gestured. The edge dropped out of her voice. “We wired in, Tom. It’s not like there was much chance to get to know the place.”

Norton shrugged. “Time enough to decide it was a shithole, though, right?”

“Oh shut up. It’s all Jesusland, isn’t it?” Ertekin rubbed at an eye and nodded at the projection wall. “Why’d they flag this one up?”

The sequence of images had frozen on another section of pale cream wall, Rorschach-blotched with blood and tissue. A tiny red triangle pulsed on and off in the corner of the screen.

“Yeah, Angeline PD couldn’t work this one out.” Norton prodded the dataslate on the table. On the screen, a block of forensic data floated down onto the picture. “When Merrin finally killed this woman, he shot her standing upright in the next room. High-velocity electromag round; it went right through her head and into the wall behind. The angle suggests he was standing right in front of her. That’s what doesn’t fit. Dying on her knees when she’s finally got no more fight in her, yeah, that I can see. But standing up and just taking it, after the struggle she put up. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Yeah, it does.” Carl paused for a moment, testing the intuition, the lines of force it flowed along. He knew the shape of it the way his hand knew the butt of the Haag gun. “She gave up before she was done, because he threatened her with something worse.”

“Worse than beating her to death?” There was an icy anger in the rims of Norton’s eyes as he spoke. Carl couldn’t tell if it extended to him as well as Merrin. “You want to tell me what that would be, exactly?”

“The children,” said Ertekin quietly.

He nodded. “Yeah. Probably the husband as well, but it’s the children that would have clinched it. Playing to her genetic wiring. He told her he’d wait until the children came home.”

“You can’t know that,” said Norton, still angry.

“No, of course not. But it’s the obvious explanation. He got in through the house defenses. Either Montes knew him and let him in, or he gutted the software, in which case he’d been scoping the house well enough to know the systems, so he certainly would have known that there were children, that they’d be back soon. That was his leverage, that was what he used.”

He saw the way a look went between them.

“It works, up to a point,” Ertekin said, more to herself than anyone else. “But all it does is turn the question around. If he was prepared to use a threat like that, why not use it from scratch? Why bother dancing around the furniture in the first place?”

Carl shook his head. “I don’t know. But to me, the shot looks like an execution. The fight must have been something else.”

“Interrogation? You think this was about extracting a confession?”

Carl thought about it for a moment, staring into the border of glare and gloom where the side of the screen edged out on the wall. Recollection coiled loose like snakes—this woman seemed to dislodge memory in him practically every time she opened her fucking mouth. Back in the jail—did you ever think that?—it was the passageways of the Felipe Souza and the cold inevitability of his thoughts as he waited out the rescue. Now she had him again. The hot, tiny room in a nameless Tehran backstreet. Blocks of sunlight etched into the floor, the shadow of a single barred window. Stale sweat and the faint aroma of scorched flesh. Discordant screaming from down the hall. Blood on his fist.

“I don’t think so. There are smarter ways of getting information.”

“Then what?” pushed Norton. “Just straight sadism? Or is this some kind of übermensch thing? Brutalism by genetic right.”

Carl met the other man’s eyes for a moment, just to let him know. Norton held his gaze.

Carl shrugged. “Maybe it was rage,” he said. “For whatever reasons, maybe this Merrin just lost control.”

Ertekin frowned. “All right. But then he just, what? Just calmed down and executed her?”

“Maybe.”

“That still doesn’t make much sense to me,” said Norton.

Carl shrugged again, this time dismissive. “Why should it?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, Norton, that at a basic biochemical level, you’re not like Merrin. None of you are. Down in the limbic system where it counts, across the amygdalae and up into the orbitofrontal cortex, Merrin has about a thousand biochemical processes going on that you don’t have.” Carl had meant to come across calm and detached—social aptitude routines had his body language and speech locked away from confrontational. But outside it all, the weariness in his own voice astounded him. He finished abruptly. “Of course it doesn’t make sense to you. You don’t have a map for where this guy is right now.”

Quiet in the softly lit conference room. He could feel Ertekin’s gaze on him like a touch. He looked at his hands.

“You said he’s killed twenty others apart from this one.”

Norton fielded it. “Seventeen confirmed, genetic trace material recovered at the scene. There are another four we’re not so sure about. That’s not including the people he murdered and ate aboard Horkan’s Pride.”

“Yeah. You got this stuff mapped out? Where he’s been?”

He didn’t look up, but he felt the glance run between them again.

“Sure,” said Norton.

He worked the dataslate deck and the image of Toni Montes’s blood went away. In its place, continental North America glowed to life, stitched with highways and slashed red along the excision lines of the Rim States and the Union. The map was punched through with seventeen black squares and four gray, each checked against a thumbnail victim photo. Carl got up and went to the wall for a closer look. The Angeline Freeport marker showed a laughing Toni Montes, hair styled up for some party and an off-the-shoulder gown. He touched it gently, and detailed data scrolled down beneath. Mother, wife, real estate feed host. Corpse.

He looked at the other images pockmarking the map. They were mostly similar, careless snapshots, lives caught in the living. In a couple of cases, the image was an ID holoprint, but mostly it was smiles and squints for the camera, close-cropped to cut family members or friends from the frame. The faces looking down were a mix of races and a range of ages, midthirties all the way up to one old man in his late sixties. Married, single, with children, without. Work ranging from datasystems specialties to manual labor.

They had nothing in common but the continent they lived on and the fact they were dead.

He moved back to the West Coast. Norton did something to the dataslate, and a Bay Area blowup slid out on top of the main map. The Horkan’s Pride splashdown was marked in a not-to-scale box just off the coast, eleven faces and names stacked on top of one another beside it. Then three more red squares, all clustered around San Francisco and Oakland. Carl stared at the grouping for a moment, aware, at some level, that something didn’t gel. He frowned, touched and read the scroll-down data.

Saw the dates.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Ertekin moved up behind him. Abruptly, he could smell her. “He came back. Two kills, same day Horkan’s Pride hits the water. Then he’s gone, across the frontier into the Republic. Next stop Van Horn, Texas, June 19. Eddie Tanaka, shot to death outside a cathouse on Interstate 10. And then he’s back in the Bay Area again, nearly four months later, October 2, killing this Jasper Whitlock. What does that suggest to you?”

“He forgot his wallet?”

“There you go. I knew there was some reason we hired you.”

Carl twisted and gave her a reproachful look. Something happened in the line of her mouth. He breathed in lightly, trying for her scent again. “He’s working off partial data. However he came up with this hit list, he didn’t have all the names at the start. Why cross into Jesusland in June when he’s got to come all the way back and do this guy, uh, Whitlock, later. And now we’ve got Montes, she’s down in the Angeline Freeport. That’s a short run down from the bay, and no frontier checks. He’s making this up as he goes along.”

“Right. What we figured, too.” Ertekin backed off a little, ended up close to where Norton was sitting. “If Jasper Whitlock had been another Eddie Tanaka type, you could maybe have sold me on Merrin not finding him first time around, needing to go back. But Whitlock was a medical services broker. All aboveboard, upright citizen, pillar of the community, ran his own business. Not the sort of guy that’s too hard to find. Merrin shot him sitting behind the desk in his own office. So it’s got to be, Merrin didn’t know he had to kill this guy back in June. He found out later.”

“Question is where from?” Carl stared at the continental map, the scattered black flags. “He crosses the border to ice Tanaka, goes all the way to Texas. Any sign that he was after information there?”

“No. Tanaka was strictly a small-time scumbag. Drugs, illicit abortions. The odd smuggled-organ deal.”

Norton looked up from the dataslate, face deadpan. “In fact, the Jesusland version of a medical services broker.”

“Well…”

Ertekin scowled. “We already chased that connection,” she told Carl. “Tanaka’s got no official medical standing, in the Republic or anywhere else. He was a biohazard engineer by trade—”

“Rat catcher,” supplied Norton.

“Unemployed anyway for the last two years, living mostly off a string of women out of El Paso and points east. Before that, Houston, similar profile. Best guess is that’s how he got into the abortion provision in the first place. There’s a lot more money in it than—”

“Catching rats.” Carl nodded slowly. “Right. So I’m looking at this map, we’ve got southeastern Texas, northern Texas, western Oklahoma, then two in Colorado, one suspected in Iowa, Kansas one suspected one dead cert, Ohio, Michigan, two in Illinois, South Carolina suspected, Maryland suspected, Louisiana, Georgia, and northern Florida. Have you got any ties between any of these victims? Anything that gels at all?”

The look on Ertekin’s face was answer enough. She was staring at the map, too, and the scattered faces of the dead.

“He could be getting them out of the phone book for all we know,” said Norton soberly.