blood surrounding the body.
The breastbone had been split in two, and the ribs spread apart left and right, sticking up like the maw of a bear trap from—
—from the
The other lumps, all crusted over now, were doubtless spleen and liver and kidneys and more, but which was which, Elliot couldn’t say.
At the bottom of the open chest cavity, there was all sorts of bluish-white connective tissue, and in places the vertebral column itself was exposed.
The last thing Sergeant Eliot looked at in any detail was the jawless face, now absolutely white, right down to the waxlike upper lip. This was only Elliot’s second shift with the Tosok entourage; he didn’t yet know most of the humans, but this one was familiar enough.
It was that guy from TV.
Cletus Calhoun.
Frank Nobilio was having the dream again. He was at university, in the sixties, wearing bell-bottoms and a flowered shirt. He was walking down a corridor when another student passing by wished him luck.
'What for?' asked Frank.
'For the exam, of course,' said the student.
'Exam?'
'In biochemistry.'
Biochemistry. Oh, Christ. Frank remembered signing up for that course at the beginning of the academic year, but somehow he’d forgotten to go to every single one of the classes. And today was the final exam — an exam he’d not studied for at all. How in the hell did they expect him—?
Frank found himself stirring into consciousness. Decades since he’d left university, but he still had that same damned dream. Oh, the details changed — sometimes it was American history he’d forgotten to take, sometimes statistics — but the basic story kept coming up over and over again, and—
Insistent knocking at the door. An earlier barrage of it must have woken him.
'What is it?' Frank called out. His voice was raw; he’d been sleeping with his mouth open.
'Dr. Nobilio? It’s the police.'
Frank disentangled himself from the sheet, got shakily to his feet, and made it over to the dorm room’s door. He opened it, and his eyes squinted against the corridor light beyond. 'Yes?'
Two men stood in the hallway. One was Sergeant Ellis, Elliot, something like that, wearing a police uniform. The other Frank didn’t recognize: a compact man with an olive complexion, perhaps forty-five years old. He had wavy black hair, brown eyes, and a neat mustache. The small man flashed his ID. 'Dr. Nobilio, I’m Detective Lieutenant Jesus Perez, LAPD. I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but there’s been a murder.'
Frank felt his jaw dropping. 'Which one was it?'
'I beg your pardon, sir?'
'Which Tosok was killed?'
Perez shook his head. 'It’s not a Tosok, sir. It’s a human.'
Frank let out a sigh of relief. Perez looked at him in shock. 'Sorry,' said Frank. 'I— I’m sorry. It’s just that, well, Christ, I hate to think what would happen if one of the Tosoks were murdered.'
'We want you to identify the body, sir.'
Frank’s heart skipped a beat. He was still waking up. 'You mean it’s someone I know?'
'Possibly, sir.'
'Who?'
'We believe it’s Cletus Calhoun, sir.'
Frank felt like someone had driven a fist into his stomach.
The general commotion had awoken some of the other humans, too. By the time Perez got Frank over to Clete’s room, Packwood Smathers and Tamara Slynova were already there, standing on the threshold just beyond the pool of blood. Smathers’s white hair was wild, and Frank had never seen Slynova without makeup. Frank was in his pajamas; Smathers had a robe on over his; Slynova seemed to be wearing nothing but a robe.
Frank approached the doorway and looked in. Two LAPD criminalists were already working inside the room. Clete’s body had been covered by a white sheet, which was now stained with blood. The sheet tented up over the spread rib cage. Frank looked down on his friend’s face, missing its bottom part, the skin white as a marble statue’s. He fought the urge to vomit.
'Well?' said Perez.
'That’s him.'
Perez nodded. 'We thought so. Found his wallet on him. Do you know who his next of kin is?'
'He’s not married. But he has a sister — Daisy, I think — in Tennessee.'
'Any idea who would want to see him dead?'
Frank looked at Packwood Smathers, then back at the body. 'No.'
Frank made his way through the second, fourth, and sixth floors — each of which housed Tosoks — accompanied by the German scientist, Kohl. They went down the corridors, pausing at each occupied room to ask the Tosok within to join them. The aliens filed out, and they all made their way to the lounge in the middle of the sixth floor. It was now 4:30 A.M.
The Tosoks stood patiently. Frank did a quick head count — only six of them were present. Let’s see: there’s Captain Kelkad, and Rendo. Torbat. And—
'Sorry to keep you waiting,' said a voice. 'What’s happening?'
Frank turned around and had a shock almost as great as the one that had overtaken him when he saw Clete’s ruined body. Coming down the corridor with two-meter strides was a Tosok Frank had never seen before, with silvery skin.
'Who — who are you?' said Frank.
'Hask.'
'But— but Hask has bluish skin.'
'
Frank looked at the being. He did indeed have an orange left-front eye and a green right-front eye. 'Oh,' said Frank. 'Forgive me.'
Hask moved in to take a seat. Frank looked at the seven aliens. They’d seen a lot of Earth. Although an effort had been made to present the best side of humanity, there had been no doubt that some of the worst had been displayed, too. The Tosoks had encountered poverty and pollution, and they knew that the security people were there to protect them from the possibility that a human being might want to do them harm.
Still, the violence humanity was capable of had all been abstract to this point. But now — now they had to be told.
'My friends,' said Frank, into the sea of round, disk-like eyes, 'I have bad news.' He paused. Damn, he wished Tosoks made facial expressions; he still wasn’t good at deciphering the waving of their cranial tufts. 'Clete is dead.'
There was silence for several moments.
'Do humans normally die without warning?' asked Kelkad. 'He seemed healthy.'
'He didn’t die of natural causes,' said Frank. 'He was murdered.'
Seven pocket computers beeped, slightly out of sync with each other.
'Murdered,' repeated Frank. 'It means killed by another human being.'
Kelkad made a small sound. His computer translated it as 'Oh.'
*7*
'Sir,' said Lieutenant Perez, stepping into the opulent office on the eighteenth floor of the Los Angeles County Criminal Courts Building, 'we, ah, have a bit of a situation here.'
District Attorney Montgomery Ajax looked up from his immaculate glass-topped desk. 'What is it?'
'I’d like to go over the criminalist’s report on the Calhoun murder with you.'
Ajax was silver-haired with pale blue eyes and a long, deeply tanned face — a Bahamas tan, not a California one. 'Something out of the ordinary?'
'You could say that, sir.' He placed a photograph on the DA’s desk. It showed a bloody U-shaped mark on a gray carpet.
'What’s that? A horseshoe?'
'We didn’t know what to make of it, sir. I thought maybe it was a heel mark, but the criminalist says no. But, well, have a look at this, sir.' He placed a newspaper clipping next to the photograph. It contained a black-and-white photograph of Kelkad making his foot impressions at Mann’s Chinese Theatre. The imprint was almost identical in shape to the bloody mark.
'Christ almighty,' said Ajax.
'My thoughts exactly, sir.'
'Is there any way to tell which Tosok made the bloody footprint?'
'Possibly, although the print is not detailed.'
'Is there any other evidence to implicate a Tosok?'
'Well, Calhoun’s leg was severed with some sort of extremely sharp instrument. It went through the leg without compressing the muscle at all, and seemed to hardly catch on the bone. It cut through the femoral artery, and because it was a clean cut, Calhoun simply gushed blood out of it.'
'And?'
'And the guys in the lab can’t think of any human tool that could have done the trick. The slicing open of the abdomen seemed to be done mechanically as well. But the rib spreading — well, that seemed to be done manually. The cut edges of the ribs were razor sharp, and Feinstein found some chemicals on one of the rib tips that he couldn’t identify. It might be Tosok blood.'
The DA had already seen the crime-scene photographs. 'Okay,' said Ajax.
'But whichever Tosok did it must have gotten soaked with human blood. Surely if it was one of the Tosoks, it would have had to have cleaned itself up somehow.'
Perez nodded. 'I thought of that, too.'
