A Werewolf Among Us

capacity.'

'Bullshit,' she said, handing him the shell as he sat up in bed again. 'Do you need help?'

'No.'

'Then I'll leave. I don't want to see those damned holes in your chest again.'

When she was at the open door between his bedroom and the sitting room, he called to her. 'Tell Rainy to come and see me, will you?'

'He already asked me to tell him when you came around.'

'Thank you.'

But she was gone.

St. Cyr turned the shell on its back, pulled out the two cords that terminated in male jacks, plugged them into the female receptacles in his chest. For a moment he almost stopped at that point, almost unplugged the shell and put it away. Why couldn't it wait until morning? It couldn't wait until morning simply because of the nightmares… But the bio-computer was always bothering him when it attempted to analyze his dreams, wasn't it? Wouldn't it be pleasant to have a reprieve from the inevitable psychoanalysis? He reminded himself that the computer itself did not comment on the dreams. The computer was only a compact data bank and logic circuitry. He used it, and he produced results. When it talked to him, he was actually talking to himself, no matter how much like a dialogue the unspoken conversation seemed. Therefore, it was not as great a weakness to rely on the shell as Tina thought it was; in a way, he was only relying on himself. And without the logic circuits, the nightmares would be far worse, terrifying… He lifted the shell against his chest, flicked the switch. In a minute it had thoroughly tapped his body.

'Hello?' Inspector Rainy called from the other room.

'In here,' St. Cyr replied.

The policeman walked into the room, wiping at his thick hair with one pink hand. He seemed to be dressed exactly as he was the first time St. Cyr had seen him, his clothes still rumpled and frayed at the cuffs. 'Feeling well enough to talk?'

'I asked for you.'

Rainy nodded, dragged a chair close to the bed, sat down. Though he was plump, he looked positively diminutive in the chair, like a troll or an over-fed elf. He gripped the arms of the chair until his knuckles were white, though he gave no other indication that he was ill-at-ease. He was probably trying not to brush his hair back, St. Cyr decided.

'Find anything?' St. Cyr asked.

'The empty darts that got you.'

'What was in them?'

'TDX-4, a perfectly legal hallucinogen.'

'Why not a narcotic that would have completely disabled me?'

'Perhaps the killer didn't have access to it.'

'I'm assuming,' St. Cyr said, 'that the person who attacked me is a member of the family. There are three narcotic-dart pistols floating around to protect them from the killer.'

Rainy leaned forward in his chair, wiped his hair; he looked much less like a troll when he sensed something that applied to the chase. 'Who has these pistols?'

'Jubal and Alicia share one. Dane has another, and Tina.'

'Not Hirschel? He's the gun man, after all.'

'They're his pistols, but he gave them to the others when it was clear that Jubal frowned on deadly weapons. He prefers a projectile weapon anyway, I suppose.'

'He only had the three?'

'So he said.'

'But he might have concealed a fourth? Then, when he used it, he would be directing the suspicion elsewhere.'

'Perhaps. But Tina tells me that it was Hirschel who saved me. I have distorted recollections of the same thing.'

Rainy frowned and started back into his troll pose, than sat up again and said, 'Suppose Hirschel has a good reason for killing the family but doesn't really want to kill you, just disable you for a while, put you out of action? He could have staged the events this morning — thereby putting you in bed, and also making himself look the hero. It would be a good deed to point to later, if he should end up being the last surviving member of the family, with all that money waiting in the bank.'

Good point.

'Good point,' St. Cyr said.

'And too, the killer might be an outsider with a gun of his own.'

St. Cyr nodded. 'Can you trace this TDX-4, find where it's been purchased lately in the area?'

'Impossible. As I said, it's a legal hallucinogen on Darma. It's sold everywhere that chewing gum is sold.' Still on the edge of the chair, he combed his hair with his fingers and said, 'What exactly did you see in the garden? What got after you?'

'The trees, the brambles, the grass.'

'But those were illusions.'

'Yes.'

'What ripped your shoulder?'

St. Cyr unconsciously reached for the bandaged arm. 'A wolf.'

'You saw it?'

'Sort of.' St. Cyr tried to explain the chaos in the garden, the way things had looked to him when he was under the influence of the hallucinogen.

Rainy interrupted him. 'You don't have to go into much detail. I've used TDX-4 many times, though never with a paranoid reaction.'

'I've been feeling paranoid lately.' St. Cyr shifted, sat up higher in bed. 'Anyway, I saw a wolf, a silver wolf.'

'Gray,' Rainy said.

'No, silver. Bright shiny silver, in parts.'

'That could be part of the illusions.'

'Perhaps. But I remember that I also seem to remember that it was always snarling, its mouth opened wide, lots of teeth showing… Funny that it never attempted to bite. It just swatted at me with those godawful claws…'

'A trained animal?' Rainy asked.

'I thought of that. In fact, I thought it might belong to Hirschel. If a trained animal is involved, its master has to be a member of the household — to let it in when it killed Leon and Betty.'

Rainy sank back in the chair. 'We keep getting more and more file pages on this affair, but nothing makes sense when you try to put it together.'

St. Cyr squirmed uneasily and turned sideways on the bed, more directly facing the policeman. 'I have this bothersome notion that everything I need to know is right before me. I've been hunting the needle in a mound of hay, have gotten down to the last piece of straw, have picked that up and found nothing. All the while, the needle is lying flat on the ground under my knee. If I could just move, see it at a different angle than I've been viewing it from so far, it would all be very obvious.'

Rainy pointed at the cyberdetective's chest. 'Isn't your machine helping any?'

St. Cyr frowned. 'Not much yet. That also bothers me. If it feels this close, the bio-computer ought to have more of it worked out than it does.'

To feel is an emotional response. I operate logically.

Rainy said, 'Well, everyone in the family was by himself at that hour. No one has an alibi. For all we know, it could have been all of them working in harmony against you.'

'Been taking TDX lately?'