“I don’t care,” Eveth growled, holding an icepack to her face and forehead. “He’s mocking us.”
“And he could have killed you, Baker,” Grodray replied mildly.
It didn’t help that her partner was probably right. She had come to, handcuffed to the dumpster with her own manacles. Badge and gun were tucked into their spots. Unconscious thug with a rap sheet a mile long stunned and laid out at her feet.
She had just managed to free herself when Grodray arrived with half a dozen uniforms holding weapons out.
Now, they were all back up on the forty-seventh floor, taking Talyarkinash Liamssen’s life apart. No reason to waste a perfectly good warrant. And she had found an icepack in a personal refrigerator, down a set of steps concealed by a bookcase and hiding a medium-sized apartment.
Grodray had taken charge of things at that point, setting her down in that sterile conference room upstairs with instructions not to move while forensics teams went to work.
“What do we know?” Eveth asked, raging inside but controlling it.
She couldn’t believe she had fallen for something so obvious. The human was dangerous, that much she knew. Half a foot shorter, but roughly the same mass, and extremely strong. And he had a punch like a wallop. Her head was still ringing.
“The two Yuudixtl were probably here with them,” Grodray said, reading off his notes. “We’ve found indications four people were staying downstairs, and at least one was the right size. They had been here three days, from the trash in the can and the food missing.”
“Missing?” Eveth asked, still a little fuzzy.
“Count slices of bread missing from a loaf, divide by two, and you have meals served,” Grodray smiled. “Things like that. Crude but effective.”
“Right.”
“The Yuudixtl obviously disappeared when you went after the others, and we have no witnesses,” Grodray continued. “Cameras probably caught something, but it will take time to track that down. I’m sure they made it outside the lock-down zone and called a cab with a new credit account they had stolen.”
“Sirs, you might want to see this,” one of the cops, a young Grace officer with good instincts, had appeared in the door and motioned them to join in.
“What have you got?” Grodray was first, only because Eveth had to stand up, wobble the tiniest amount, and then follow.
“Not sure,” the male cop said. “We think she was in a hurry to destroy things, but missed this.”
They followed him out into the main room, down the stairs, and into a small work area off the main control room with the worthless music studio deck. Liamssen had done something to the computer controlling it all, and none of the knobs or sliders did anything now, as far as anybody could tell.
Another officer was standing there, holding a piece of paper that had been crumpled up at some point, now flattened out on the desktop.
Eveth leaned over the Grace cop’s shoulder to look. The tentacles were almost painful on her head and neck, but she could deal with that. Except that everywhere those tentacles touched, the pain receded.
She glanced down at the officer in surprise. He smiled sheepishly and blushed.
“Thought it might help,” he offered.
“It does,” Eveth replied. “Thank you.”
He leaned closer. She leaned closer. It was almost like they were kissing, except both were faced to the side. It was still a bizarre experience, one that should have been erotic, under almost any other circumstances.
The paper was a sketch, drawn freehand but by an extremely skilled hand. It showed a wing, such as an Elohynn might have, coming out from the back and down to a central elbow joint, before running up to a rough point overhead.
But the scale was all wrong, if the lengths on the side were any indication.
An Elohynn male, roughly six feet tall on average, had wings that were roughly nine feet long, with a twenty-foot wingspan on a mature adult.
This wing would be almost three times that.
“Any ideas?” Grodray asked.
Eveth pulled clear of the forest of helpful kelp and stood fully upright with a nod of thanks to the cop.
Grodray was deduction writ large. Eveth had always suspected the reason she was paired with him, once the bosses realized that they wouldn’t hate each other, was that she brought induction to the equation.
Leaps of intuition that the evidence just wouldn’t cover.
“Ornithopter?” she tossed out.
It was utterly inefficient, since something like an auto-car rode powered lifters and could also maneuver in low planetary orbit once a transport tube had lifted you. But the Elohynn preferred personal flying to anything else, including walking.
But why would a human want to build an Ornithopter?
She shrugged after a moment.
“Where did you find this?” Grodray pointed at the page.
“Crumpled up and behind the waste drop, sir,” the Grace cop said. “Looks like someone didn’t like the design, but missed the incinerator bucket, and were either too lazy to get up, or didn’t see it fall long.”
“Tag it and scan it into the files,” Grodray instructed the man.
Eveth followed her partner into the main common room where obviously the criminals had been waiting. There were remains of a sandwich on a low table, a pocketcomm that one of the Yuudixtl had been using to access a stole credit account on the bar, and a reading tablet on the end table next to the sofa.
“Three of them in here, watching us upstairs?” Eveth asked, taking it all in at a glance.
“That’s my theory, Eve,” Grodray said. “Given the timelines, Liamssen came down stairs as soon as we left, everyone panics. They run, taking the time to grab go-bags from that cabinet over there, and to tell the computers to kill themselves.”
“So we’ve found them, and lost them,” Eveth said. “Now what?”
“Now we turn up the heat,” Grodray smiled with a cruel mouth and lips pressed thin. “Assault on a Constable. Flight From Justice. And we have Dr. Liamssen’s full bio signature, plus a good description of the other three.”
“Do we lock the city down?” Eveth asked.
“Had you been hurt, or killed, I would have gotten nasty, Eve,” Grodray said in a voice that managed to make even a hardened cop like Eveth shiver. “The perp did the absolute minimum necessary to escape you, plus he left us a prize, like a cat bringing home a mouse. I want to sweat that Warreth hard and open up a second avenue of the investigation, but we’re going to hand the punk off to another team so we can focus on the perp.”
“Can you do that?” she asked, suddenly breathless with anticipation. This was up there with Level-7 Security.
“I talked to the Planetary Inspector while the medics were checking you out,” Grodray stated. “She’s cleared us to act like free agents here.”
Free agents. Just a tiny step short of Prime Inspector, the dream of every cop, to be able to pursue any crime they thought warranted their attention, on any planet of the Accord of Souls, and demand the full cooperation of the local authorities.
Not request. Demand.
Jackeith Grodray had said he never wanted to get to that level. Hell, he had never gone farther than Senior Constable, but that was a personal choice that Eveth would never settle for.
But Grodray had a Level-7 Security Authorization. Had they offered him Prime Inspector at some point and he refused?
Eveth made a note to learn as much as she possibly could from the man while they were partnered. Jackeith Grodray had always been exceptional, spoken of in the department in reverential tones. Was he even better than that?
“Step one?” Eveth asked after she got her thoughts under control.
“Dinner,” Grodray said. “I know a good take-out joint not far from here, so we can move quickly if we get a hit on an All-Points Bulletin in the next hour. Then I’m going to turn up the heat and see what boils.”
Again, Eveth felt a shiver at the tone. She wasn’t sure she had ever seen Grodray lose his temper, but that was what this felt like.
Which was good, because she was well past that point with the damnable human running loose in her city.