Stealing the Elf-King's Roses Read online

  Lee nodded, followed Blessington’s glance. Gelert was about halfway down the block, walking very slowly, stiff-legged, bristling, while the uniformed cops watched him with idle curiosity. Lee smiled very slightly as she watched him stalk along. Her paraperceptual cues came in visual form when she was working, but Gel’s, predictably, came as scent. Gelert’s people were the greatest trackers in the worlds; at the core of their nature as a species was the understanding that what they hunted, eventually they found. The hunting could take all kinds of forms, quarry variously concrete or abstract; all over the Worlds, madrín were researchers and scientists, consultants and advisers. But finally it all came down to noses, one way or another, a situation Gelert often complained about as seeming awfully undignified in someone with a doctorate. Yet nothing could have moved him to give up this particular form of the talent, and the hot fierce look in Gel’s eyes after he had been working on a crime scene always made it plain to Lee that this particular style of discovery was what he lived for.

  “What’s he after now? Did he say?”

  Blessington shrugged. “He growled. I couldn’t understand him.”

  Lee raised her eyebrows. “He tends to drop into dialect when he’s distracted.” Gelert had put his nose down to the sidewalk, and his pace was speeding up: he was nearly to the end of the block.

  “Lee, you want us to keep this end of the scene locked down for a while?” Blessington said.

  “It’s a good idea. I need to talk to the people at Parker and have a look at the victim’s profile and recent history before I come back for another look.”

  “Okay. Bensen, Echevarria,” Blessington called over to two of his people as Gelert turned left around the house on the corner lot and vanished from sight, “better go with the gentleman and keep people out of his way while he’s working.” The two uniforms nodded to their boss and headed off after Gelert at a dogtrot.

  “You know this neighborhood at all?” Lee said to Blessington.

  He gave her an amused look. “I lived here before I was married.”

  “What’s around the corner?”

  “A nightclub: a couple of restaurants. It was the nightclub dil’Sorden came out of. He’d come in earlier, alone. Had a snack and a few drinks, listened to the jazz combo that was playing there last night, paid his bill, and left.”

  “He didn’t meet anybody?”

  “Not according to the club owner.”

  “Did he go there often?”

  “The owner said he saw him occasionally. Not a regular, but he would drop in for something to eat after working late. The place has a rep for its ribs.”

  Lee nodded. “Jim, he was already running as he came around the corner. Whoever shot him came around after him, fast. He had to have been waiting for dil’Sorden in one of the doorways that face onto Wilshire: I’m going to have another look at that later. Here’s how it went—”

  She and Blessington went up to the corner, and Lee reenacted for Blessington what she had seen. At the end of it all they stood there again over the tarp, looking down at the spot where dil’Sorden had fallen.

  “Contract job?” Blessington said at last.

  “I can’t see why, but then I only had time to skim his profile on the way over,” Lee said. “There seemed to be some urgency ‘Upstairs.’ ”

  Blessington made that sour face again. “Which smells weird to me to start with,” he said, “but then I’m just a detective.” The delivery was ironic but not hostile: Lee smiled slightly. “Speaking of smells,”

  Blessington said, and grimaced. “Bensen, what the hell are you guys up to?”

  He listened for a moment, face immobile. “How about that,” he said. “Yeah, bring it back. Be careful about how you wrap it; it might have been handled two or three times before it got there, and maybe after.”

  Blessington looked over at Lee. “He’s good,” he said. “He found the murder weapon three blocks over and two blocks up, in somebody’s front yard, two feet deep in pachysandra.”

  “You owe him one, then,” Lee said. “Think how many manpower-hours he saved you.”

  “He’ll remind me of it, I’m sure,” Blessington said.

  Down the street, Gelert and the two uniforms were coming around the corner again: one of them, Echevarria, was carrying an antistatic evidence bag, glancing back smoky silver reflections in the hot sun as they approached. Gelert was trotting along with his tongue hanging out, looking to Lee’s eyes unusually pleased with himself. As the officers stowed the shotgun in the car, Gelert sat down beside Lee and Blessington.

  “The murderer caught a bus,” Gelert said. “About twenty minutes after the killing: one of the night buses down Melrose.”

  “Stupid,” Blessington said. “Too many witnesses.”

  “He seemed willing to take the risk,” Gelert said. “Forensically it was smart: his lifetrace got tangled up with a lot of others, fresh and stale. And by the time we pull that bus out of service so that I can go over it, there’ll be more overlay still. But it won’t help him, because I should still be able to tell when he got off, and once we plot the times against the bus schedule, that’ll tell us where.”

  “Assuming it ran on time,” Lee said, with understandable skepticism. No Ellay native ever really believed public transit would do anything so unusual.

  “Night buses usually do,” Gelert said. “Especially the automated ones, and I think this route went auto some time back.” He looked up at Lee. “Did you see the other Alfen?”

  “I did,” she said.

  “Where’d he come from?”

  “Around the corner. He went back that way. I’m going to work on him on the second pass. But I think we need to go up to Parker first to talk to physical forensics and take a little more time to go over the victim’s profile. Oh, and Jim? I’m going to ask the club to stay closed until this evening, so Gelert and I can go over the ground.”

  “Right,” Blessington said. “Tell them to call me if they need authorization. Meanwhile, we need to get this weapon to Parker. Bensen will stay with the site here. Meet you afterward?”

  “Sure, Jim.”

  Blessington and Echevarria got into one of the black-and-whites and drove off: Gelert sat panting for a moment, watching them go. “That didn’t take you long,” Lee said.

  “The trace was pretty strong,” Gelert said. “What I found odd was the way it dropped off as the guy who’d used the gun got to the bus stop. Normally it gets stronger when you stand in one place for a few minutes.” He was starting to frown.

  Lee looked down toward Melrose. “You thinking that someone was helping him hide his trace somehow?”

  “I’m thinking about that second Alfen,” Gelert said.

  “So am I. Bensen?” Lee called. “Have you got any more site tape in the car?”

  “Miles of it. Want some?”

  “Please.” Lee went over to the black-and-white, and Bensen handed her out roll after roll. “Three be enough, ma’am?”

  “Should be. I’m going to block off the sidewalk from the corner to the club dil’Sorden was in: it looks as if our perp came out that way.”

  “Right. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

  Lee headed for the corner, and Gelert got up and came with her. “So what are you thinking of?” she said softly, as they came up to the corner of the side street with Melrose, and Lee fastened the tape to the street sign there. “How do you fade out a lifetrace?”

  “No way that I know,” Gelert said, “unless the person himself is dying. Not having seen the news today, maybe our murderer did die on a bus last night, but frankly, I doubt it. Something else happened. I want to know what. At the very least, I’m going to get a paper out of it.”

  Lee smiled slightly. “I thought you were through with your post-doctorate publication cycle.”

  “One more never hurts.”

  “Yeah, right. Research junkie.” Lee stopped opposite the door of the club. LA VIDA LOCA, said the cold dark neon sign attached to the blin
d white stucco of the building’s frontage. No window: solid brown wood door. It was one of those “we keep it dark in here for a reason” places: intimate, or secretive, depending on the crowd that used it. “You want to go on with this?” she said to Gelert, holding out the roll of tape she’d just finished looping around the parking meter opposite the club’s door. “Take it on down another couple of shops, say to the dry cleaner’s there.”

  “Right,” Gelert said, taking the tape in his teeth and backing down the street with it. Lee went to the club door, pushed it open.

  After the brightness of the street it took a moment or so for her eyes to get used to the dimness, even though the lights inside the place were on full. The decor was modern enough, but very dark, all reds and hardwoods: if the furnishings had been less well kept, it would have struck Lee as the kind of place where married men went to have dinner with the women they weren’t married to. “Can I help you?” a male voice said.

  Lee turned. A man stood there in white T-shirt and jeans; the first glance gave her an impression of longish, unruly gray hair, wide-set dark eyes, big shoulders, big hands, polishing a glass with a glass cloth. “Yes,” Lee said, bringing out her professional ID and showing it to him. “My name is Lee Enfield: I’m a ‘mancer working with the LAPD, investigating the murder that happened around the corner last night.”

  “Mike Ibanez,” the man said.

  “What time would you normally be opening tonight, Mr. Ibanez?’

  “Six,” Ibanez said.

  “All right Mr. Ibanez, my partner Madra Gelert and I are going to need to do a psychoforensic sweep through here later today: probably early this afternoon, though we’ll come sooner if we can. Until the first sweep is done, we’ll need you to keep the premises locked, and not open them again until we clear them. You can stay inside, that’s all right, but no one else should come in: no deliveries, that kind of thing. The County will compensate you for your downtime and any employee overtime or reimbursement that the closure entails. I’ll bring the paperwork for you when we come back. Is that all right?”

  “Sure,” Ibanez said.

  “Thank you,” Lee said. “My partner and I may have some questions for you afterward.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  Lee wondered whether he was always going to be this voluble. Of course, he may just be freaked out. It’s hard to remember that other people don’t see murders every other day… “Thank you,” Lee said. “Will you lock the front door behind me? We’re taping off the front sidewalk, but all the same we don’t want anyone slipping in and contaminating the scene before we’ve had a chance to examine it.”

  He nodded and accompanied Lee to the door: as she stepped out, she heard it lock behind her. Lee made her way down the sidewalk toward the middle of the block, staying close to the wall, and out past the dry cleaner’s where Gelert had fastened the tape.

  “Talkative guy,” she said to him, as he held the tape up to her and they started to walk back. “We’ll see what we find out later on. You want to drive? I wouldn’t mind a few minutes to look over the profile Hagen sent us.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Their company hov was a Skoda Palacia with the flex-species package. Gelert nosed the driver’s side door open, and the hov recognized his touch on the lock and reconfigured the driver’s seat as the forward-facing flat contour pallet that Gelert preferred. He jumped in, lay down, and let the guidance sleeves and safety webbing connect up around his limbs and hook into his implant, while Lee got in on the passenger side and kept the hov from belting her up until she could reach into the backseat for the printed report that Mass had handed them as they left the office.

  She started paging through it as Gelert pulled out into traffic. Omren dil’Sorden had just turned thirty-two years old. He had been working in ExTel’s network development department for eight years: his official title there was “senior research assistant.” The personnel-department files appended to his CV explained that his work mostly had to do with building and enhancing telecommunications network structures at the point where they interfaced with intraworld gating facilities—both commercial gates like those at Kennedy and LAX, and “electrons-only” minicollider exchanges such as were maintained by many public and private companies. It was specialized work—Lee understood the general concept, but she had the sinking feeling that she was going to get to know it a lot better in the coming days. For the moment, she gathered that dil’Sorden had been mostly busy with improving present solid and wireless telecom networks in the LA area, and designing the new ones that would replace them—nets specifically structured to integrate with the new intercontinual comms gateways being installed at LAX over the next couple of years. Not exactly a job that makes people want to kill you, most of the time, Lee thought. At least you wouldn’t think so.

  She read down the list of projects dil’Sorden was involved in, one after another, and found herself shaking her head. When did he sleep? Lee thought. The terminology was bewildering: when she ran into a description of a “packet shunt-squirt pipeline array,” she stopped, able to get no impression of anything but some kind of giant lawn sprinkler. Whatever the technical details of the systems he was designing, Omren dil’Sorden was plainly a busy guy.

  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.