The Puppet Master

to the Star Wars festival. It struck me as uniquely twenty-first-century American: Carlos, grandson of Japanese peasant immigrants, who grew up on a hardscrabble farm in Colorado, and Penny, who'd been a child on a paddy farm in wartime Viet Nam, driving downtown in a car powered basically by gravity, to sit in the New Palladium watching a laserized renovation of a space opera classic about a war 'a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.'

14

So what happened when I got to work in the morning? I had two messages waiting. One was from Carlos, telling me to see him first thing. He wasn't in yet. Then I played the other message, from Sacramento, and shared it with him when he did get in.

The evening before, a patrol car had been chasing a guy for driving erratically. Finally he stopped on a bridge and threw something in the Sacramento River before they grabbed him. In his luggage they found a silencer for a 9mm pistol, and a box of 9mm cartridges. A magnetic sounder team then recovered a 9mm pistol from the river, and his prints were on it. Ballistics test-fired it, and computer checked the slug against the national files. It matched the slug dug out of the floor of Ashkenazi's bedroom.

The guy's driver's license address was obsolete, but his auto registration address had been current. A search of his apartment turned up several Franklins—hundred-dollar bills. They'd checked for prints and found Pasco's.

Pasco's! It's one thing to be uptight, maybe even a little crazy, about someone 'promoting' astrology. But to have him assassinated?

What struck Carlos most about it was that the Sacramento police had accomplished it all in one night. The result of technology, including computerization of damn near everything. And budgets that allowed a full night shift. Twenty years earlier, he pointed out, it would have taken days, a week, and they might not have found the pistol at all.

Not only was Pasco discredited and in jail, but the shooting of Arthur Ashkenazi was solved. Which should close the contracts with the Anti-Fraud Divison and Santa Barbara County, and the company could collect its fee. My problem was, I felt uncomfortable with it, and said so to Carlos.

'Tell me about it,' he said.

'Well, Montoya said Ashkenazi might have been dead when he was shot. And if that's true, then Ashkenazi died of natural causes. And Pasco's hit man was guilty of illegal entry, illegal discharge of a firearm, mutilation of a corpse, and attempted murder, but not murder.'

Carlos frowned. 'So I'll phone Sacramento and let them know what Montoya told you. Is that all?'

'No. I'm hung up on what the 'natural cause' was, of Ashkenazi's death. I was told what it was, but I'm under an injunction not to tell anyone. It's really bad. Dangerous. But keep the Santa Barbara contract open till noon. To authorize some calls, and maybe some data access.'

Carlos gave me a long look. Then he nodded and left without asking anything more. I got on the line with Sacramento again, this time to the Chief of Vector Biology and Control. No, she said, there hadn't been another reported case of viral meningitis except for Ashkenazi's. Not anywhere in the world, so far as she knew, for ten years. And 'remarkably,' as she put it, they hadn't succeeded in establishing a colony of Ashkenazi's virus on human tissue cultures. Considering its swift development in Ashkenazi, and its apparent identity with the EVM virus, that was hard to accept. Especially after they repeated their attempts, this time being extraordinarily careful to do everything just right.

'How do you explain something like that?'

Her image shrugged on the screen. 'I don't. I'm calling it a noninfectious virus, and describing its infection of Mr. Ashkenazi as an unexplained anomaly. But we're taking no chances with it.'

I thanked her and hung up, then told Carlos about it. Talking around it, never saying the words viral meningitis. 'I think,' I told him, 'that I just may find the explanation. Can you come up with a contract that'll pay for it?'

He leaned back in his tilt-seat swivel chair. 'Martti,' he said, 'I've got a lot of confidence in you. I did before, and I've got a lot more since you nailed Pasco. That was brilliant. And I'd really like to accommodate you. And if I did, Joe would probably go along with it. But with no more to go on than you just gave me, there's no way.'

He sat back up. 'However, if you want to do it on your own time, I'll give you unpaid adminstrative leave. Keep track of your time and expenses, and if you come up with something that will justify pitching a contract to—who? Vector Biology?'

I nodded.

'If you can do that, we'll pitch it to them. And if we get a contract, we'll charge them retroactively for your time and expenses. There's plenty of legal precedent, and right now your stock is high.'

15

I called Vector Biology, and asked the director if they planned to keep the virus. She said absolutely. They had it on file in a freezer. Something as weird as it was, they'd definitely not discard. I told her I was involved with the Ashkenazi case, and had a data trail that might lead to an explanation. Admittedly I exaggerated, but it would set her up in case we hit her later with a contract request.

Then I called Santa Barbara and asked Montoya for his approval to mention the case of viral meningitis. Recording the call, of course. I said it was vital to following up a lead on the case. He told me the injunction was still legally binding, but considering the time elapsed, Vector Biology's inability to culture it . . . If it was really necessary, and if nothing bad came of it, he wouldn't pursue the matter.

I didn't tell him I'd have done it anyway. We were both on record on the matter, our asses half covered.

Next I phoned the Westwood Station of the LAPD and got the name of a restaurant—Peri's Cafe—favored by their people for private one-on-one meetings. According to Lieutenant McNab, the food wasn't great, but the booths gave maximum privacy.

Finally, I called the genetics lab at UCLA and asked to talk to the director. The receptionist asked what I wanted to talk to him about, and when I said it was confidential, she told me Dr. Chatterjee didn't accept calls on that basis. But when I told her it was a legal matter, she put me through. Suspecting she might listen in, I told Chatterjee I was an investigator for the state, and we needed his expertise.

I'd appealed to his sense of professional pride, so he gave me a one o'clock lunch appointment, suggesting a