The Puppet Master

anyway, if you looked closely enough. And minor damage to the capillaries in the skin and intercostal muscle, and in the heart. If the needle didn't penetrate into one of the chambers, and the compressed air was released into the myocardium itself, there'd be conspicuous local tissue damage.'

'And that would be deadly?'

'Definitely. It would cause severe myocardial trauma.'

It helped to have had Introduction to Forensic Medicine back at Northern Michigan.

Luciano looked impressed and pleased. 'I'll write this up,' he said, 'and check those prints against the files.'

'Shave Vanderpol's head, too,' I told him. 'She wouldn't have held still for someone stabbing her with a needle like that one, unless she was unconscious. She may have been blackjacked. If she was, there ought to be discoloration. Maybe swelling; I'm not sure. And look under her left breast. That's a logical place to have injected her; it wouldn't show there. And if she was, check the breast for prints.'

9

I left Sacramento with something further to do. Prints in the FBI archives are from police files. Access to print files of the military, government employees, and so forth are only accessible with a subpoena. And you need substantive evidence to get one. But Donald Pasco would have left prints on the video cubes he'd brought with him. They'd have other prints on them too, but with today's technology you can get useful images of prints overlain by prints, along with how many layers down any given print is. If prints on, say the bill and the needle cap, matched any of those on the cube, that would be evidence enough for the subpoena.

And enough to get a hair sample for a DNA analysis, to compare with one of the semen. Assuming there was clear evidence she'd been killed by an injection.

There were prints on both the cubes. I eliminated some of them as Joe's and Dalili's, his secretary. The rest, with a note, I sent from our computer to the police computer in Sacramento, attention Sergeant Luciano. Then I went home, stopping for a six-pack on the way, stripped down to cutoffs, and spent the rest of the day on my recliner watching baseball play-offs. Getting up mainly to put a frozen Mexican pizza in the oven. I felt like I'd earned it, calories and all, even if I hadn't made much progress on the Ashkenazi job.

10

On Monday I told Carlos about the Sacramento connection, which might or might not have anything to do with Pasco. I also ran down for him what I'd learned and hadn't learned about Ashkenazi, and recommended we call it a done.

He thought about that a minute. 'No,' he said, 'stay with it for now. If we get lucky, and they arrest Pasco, then you can pull together what you've learned about Ashkenazi, and we'll go over it with whoever replaces Pasco as director there.'

That meant waiting, not my favorite inactivity. So I took some compensatory time off and went to the club, where I stretched and did Choi Li Fut forms till I'd worked up a good sweat, then put in an hour on the exercise machines, twenty minutes on the bike, and an hour dozing on the grass in Plummer Park. After that I ate lunch and went to a matinee of A Man for His Time at Mann's Chinese Theater, where I ate a tub of popcorn. Finally I went back to the office. Vanderpol had been sapped and murdered, just as I'd figured. The prints on the needle cap and the bill were Pasco's. So were prints on Vanderpol's left breast. Pasco was being held without bond, for Murder One, and DNA prints were being made from the semen and hair. I played it for Carlos, and he congratulated me.

'Write up your report on the Ashkenazi investigation tomorrow, and we'll see what Anti-Fraud says when they see the bill. They won't be happy, but we've got a signed contract.'

I went out to the parking lot, started my car, and turned on the radio to KFWB News Radio. I don't often listen to news while driving. It's a distraction. But this time I did, just in time to hear about the murder of Arthur Ashkenazi! The body had been discovered that morning and none of us had heard about it. He'd been shot in bed, through the head. I was back in the elevator in about fifteen seconds, up to the ninth floor, and caught Carlos just getting ready to leave. I told him what I'd heard.

'Ashkenazi's place is outside Montecito,' I said, 'so it'll be in the sheriff's jurisdiction. We ought to get the contract for it. We can tell them we've been investigating Ashkenazi for the state, which gives us a head start on the case.'

He got on it right away. Carlos has the authority when Joe is out. The sheriff went for it, and Carlos told him I'd fly up that evening. I caught supper at Morey's, then headed for the Larchmont Station, and a flight to Santa Barbara.

* * *

At the Santa Barbara sheriff's headquarters I learned something about the case that hadn't been released. Ashkenazi had been critically ill when shot. Possibly even dead, according to Sheriff Montoya. He'd been shot through the brain, a shot that wouldn't have caused much bleeding alive or dead. The reason for keeping this quiet was, the coroner said the disease symptoms were of viral meningitis. And he didn't want to start a panic. People would remember EVM, the epidemic viral meningitis that had killed more than a billion people, planetwide, in the winter of early 2000.

Tissue samples had been sent to the California Department of Health Services, attention the Chief of Vector Biology and Control. She and Sheriff Montoya were the only persons the coroner had informed. He hadn't told his secretary, hadn't entered it on his autopsy report, hadn't even informed the county health department. The sheriff didn't tell me until I'd signed an injunction in advance, forbidding me to tell anyone without his approval. Even his undersheriff didn't know.

Viral meningitis! I wasn't very enthusiastic about going out to Ashkenazi's place, but I didn't have much choice.

A deputy drove me. It was dark when we arrived. There was another deputy at the house, and Ashkenazi's servants were still there.

The bedding was just as it had been when the body had been taken away, but not as it had been when he was found. Ashkenazi had been somewhat wound up in the sheet, and they'd had to cut it to disentangle him. There was little blood. More sweat stain than anything else, from the meningitis. The pistol must have had a silencer; the shot hadn't wakened the servants. There'd been faint powder burns; the shot had been fired from about three feet, from the side toward the window. The gunman must have stood almost against the queen-size bed. The 9mm slug had been dug out of the floor for ballistic tests. There was no cartridge case. Probably the action had been hand