sorry for the cop. No one deserved to be placed in that kind of situation unprepared.
They stopped at the van and Manny spoke for the first time since they'd left the bar. 'I can't talk you out of this, but my door's open if you need it.'
'I know.' Nohar was uncomfortably reminded of last night.
Nohar told himself that there was no reason to except things on this case to go bad like that. Hell, he'd been paid a hell of a lot up front, things couldn't go that badly this time.
At least it didn't look like he was going to be stiffed again.
Manny got into his van, another Electroline. In the dark of the storm, away from the streetlights, the van reminded Nohar of the frank in the graveyard. Both vans were the same industrial-green, the same boxy make, and had the same pneumatic doors on the back.
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The only difference—Manny's van had a driver's cab and 'Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner' painted on all the doors.
As Manny drove back toward downtown, Nohar supposed the van's markings had a deterrent effect on car thieves.
'I said, a fifteen by fifteen grid with times three magnification!' 'instructions unclear.'
Nohar almost shouted something back at the comm. Instead, he took a deep breath and stroked Cat a few times. There are few things, he thought, more fruitless than getting angry at a machine. Shouting at it was just going to overtax the translation software.
'Display. Photo thirty-five. Grid. Fifteen by fifteen. Magnification. Times three.'
This time the comm did as it was told.
Photo number thirty-five was a good, panoramic shot of the seated parties at Johnson's funeral. It was the one picture that had a full facial on everybody. The haze had helped by diffusing the July sun. The indirect lighting eliminated stark shadows, and would help in making the attendees, especially those to the rear, under the tent.
He had enlarged it enough. Most of the faces were clear, which was good. Nohar did not want to wait half an hour while his cheap software enhanced the picture.
Now for the grunt work. 'Move. Grid. Left five percent.'
One box on the grid now enclosed a face.
He told the program to print it and a portrait of a funeral attendee started sliding out of the comm's fax slot. One down, forty-nine to go.
Nohar spent two hours getting identifiable portraits from the one picture.
Most of them, he knew, would offer no useful information. However, the procedure
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calmed him. It was something he had done hundreds of times before.
The routine was so automatic that his mind kept traveling back to Johnson's murder.
According to the autopsy, the time of death was somewhere between 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday the twenty- second, and 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday the twenty-third. The body was discovered by a jogger who noticed the broken window around noon on the twenty-fifth. There was a violent thunderstorm Thursday night, washing away a good deal of evidence. Presumably, this was why no evidence was found of the party or parties who allegedly stole the three million the campaign finance records said should have been there. Well, that wasn't quite right.
The police thought the finance records said the three million was there. However, before the cops folded, they only had a brief perusal of the campaign finances over the weekend. Apparently the records never left Binder's headquarters.
The autopsy also said Daryl had been having a good time before someone slammed a mini-grenade into the back of his head. Nohar read at the time of death
Daryl had a good point-oh-two blood alcohol, traces of weasel-dust in his nose, as well as a few 'dorphs lying undigested in his stomach. To top it off, he'd shot his wad into somebody in the twelve hours previous.
Seems he died happy.
Nohar pictured him at the comm, riding his buzz, watching some party film or other, air-conditioning going full blast. Daryl might be giggling a bit. Then the sniper takes up his position. The sniper is hiding somewhere. The ballistic evidence gave an approximate trajectory giving a field of fire at the back of Johnson's head. Five houses across the street fit the bill, all occupied, no witnesses. Perhaps the sniper uses a driveway between those houses across the street.
It's night, to give the sniper cover. Night makes sense. Daryl's been partying. The sniper knows the alarm is off because Daryl is home. He can see Daryl
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through the sight. The sniper aims at Daryl's head, which might be bobbing to the beat from the comm. The sniper squeezes off a shot. The shot explodes, vaporizing the picture window.
The sniper squeezes off shot number two.
Daryl is sitting in the study, facing his comm, when his head gets blown away by the second exploding projectile belonging to the sniper's Levitt Mark II.
It hits six centimeters from the base of the skull—dead center, according to the autopsy.
It hits from behind him, through the picture window in the living room, through the dining room, and through the open door to the study.
The cops found remains of two Levitt bullets. One set in Daryl's head. The other set by the picture window.
There was a problem with this sequence of events.
It was those two words, 'dead center.'
Daryl Johnson should have turned to see what the noise was.
For Nohar, that was a big problem. Daryl was shot hi the back of the head. Nohar couldn't see someone so jazzed-up he'd be oblivious to twenty square meters of glass exploding directly behind him—now that he thought about it, the whole damn neighborhood was oblivious. What the autopsy listed shouldn't have zoned Daryl out that bad. Even a reflexive jerk toward the noise, no matter how fast the sniper got the second round off, would have put the shell toward one side of the head or the other.
Also, what was a nine-to-five working stiff doing that jazzed in the middle of the week? Given the time of death, Daryl was doing some heavy partying for a Tuesday.
Finally, even in Shaker Heights, a house standing open like that, two or three days without the alarm or a window, and nothing else was ripped off? That didn't ring true.
The final portrait ejected from the printer.
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Nohar stretched and got to his feet. His throat hurt from all the commands. Someday he was going to have to fix the keyboard. Despite the overstaffed cushions on the couch, his tail had fallen asleep again.
Nohar rubbed his throat and decided he needed a beer. He ducked into the kitchen. As he ripped the last bulb of beer from its envelope, he realized how hungry he was. The only food in the fridge was a plate of bones, and the last kilo of hamburger. Nohar only briefly considered the beef bones, even though a few looked fairly meaty. He grabbed the lump of hamburger and tossed it into the micro as he snapped the top off his bulb.
The cold brew soothed the raw feeling at the back of his throat, leaving a yeasty taste in his mouth. One of the few decent things the pinks did with grain was turn it into booze.
Outside the dirty little kitchen window, the storm was worsening. The thunder rattled the glass in its loose molding.
Nohar drank as he watched the lightning through hazy glass and rippling sheets of water. If Smith was right, and there never was any three million, why was Johnson killed? What was Johnson doing Tuesday night? Why didn't Johnson, or anyone else, respond to the shattering picture window-Ding, the burger was warm. Nohar dropped the empty bulb into the disposal and washed his hands in the sink. He pulled the meat out of the micro, and spent a few seconds rinding a clean plate. The hamburger leaked all over the plate as soon as he began unwrapping it. The
