Now instead, if you were marketing a juicy sin of, say, Adolf Hitler, one with a good provenance? That could bring a tidy sum-on up into six figures. Sins of notorious historical characters were always in big demand. I'd recently seen an old Pol Pot mass murder sell at auction for close to a quarter million dollars. But it would be hard to conceive how anything gathered from a local thug would be worth much to anyone.
I poured myself another glass of scotch and shook my head. No, the more likely explanation was the one Henderson was already running with. Still . . .
When all else fails, I thought, read the manual. I walked to my bookshelves and fingered the thick edges of the ten-volume compendium published by the Hamartiaphily Collector's Guild. It held the definitive description of every known type of human sin that had been isolated and identified to date, close to fourteen thousand of them, catalogued in the Linnaean taxonomic scheme that governed the system: family, genus, species, subspecies. The volumes were printed on quality stock, with four-color glossy illustrations of the obverse and reverse sides of the best known collected examples. My eyes drifted to the even larger array of HCG supplements and updates that sat on the shelf below, many of the more recent ones as thick as the main volumes themselves.
The study of human sin was complicated and ever evolving. Where to begin?
I picked a volume off the shelf at random and flipped it open to a page showing HCG 14-54-13-230: family 'murder,' genus 'familial,' species 'premeditated,' subspecies 'sanctioned.' The illustrated example was a sin extracted from a Pakistani father who, with community approbation, had killed his unmarried daughter because of her promiscuous sexual behavior. It displayed as a brownish-mauve color, and because the collected example was quite 'pure'-that is, the man had felt no sense of remorse after committing the sin-its shape was symmetrical and regular. Specifically, in this case it took the form of a stellated hexecontahedron.
A very attractive specimen, to be sure. It would certainly complement any serious hamartiaphile's collection. But this was not going to get me anywhere. I closed the volume, re-shelved it and went online to check the hamartiaphily forum sites. Maybe something new had shown up there, something that might relate to last night's crime.
It didn't take me long to turn up an interesting post.
****
Every apprentice has a master, and mine was a rich old Dutch sin-seer and collector named Gerd Vanderhout. He'd taught me everything I knew about hamartiaphily, and had developed my youthful incipient talent for seeing what few others could see. I owed him everything.
In truth, he was more a father figure to me than anything else-which was easy to understand, since I didn't even know who my real father was.
I drove to Gerd's manor house, which was ensconced within a guarded residential enclave on the wealthy side of town. He appeared at his front door in response to my knock, a little bit stooped but still taller than me.
'Peter! How nice to see you! But . . . it is not our normal chess day-is it? Or perhaps this old man's brain is getting addled. No matter:
I entered the foyer, sat my soggy umbrella in the stand by the door and removed my raincoat. 'Please excuse my unannounced visit, Gerd. No, it's not Tuesday. But I have a problem, one that I hope you can help me with.'
'Ah!' Vanderhout raised one bushy, gray eyebrow. 'Another titillating crime mystery, yes? Here, come into the library and let us have a glass of schnapps to take the night's chill away. And you can also be the first to see my latest acquisition!'
Gerd had one of the finest hamartiaphily collections in the country, comprised of a huge number of unique, one-of-a-kind items. Many of them had been selected for display in the HCG catalogs, being as they were the best prototypical examples. Some were the only known specimens of a sin subspecies. Gerd himself had been a founding member and had served as president of the Hamartiaphily Collector's Guild for a number of years, back in its early days. No one had better craft credentials than him.
And no one knew more of what went on in the trade at any given time. I'd often consulted with Gerd on police cases. The man was a fount of knowledge, full of insider information.
He poured a splash of liquor into two snifters at his bar. I took the one he offered and sat down in a comfortable wingback chair in front of the low wood fire burning in his fireplace. Gerd moved to one of his many mahogany display cabinets and retracted a vial, then handed it to me.
'Is it not exquisite? I obtained it from a collector in Cairo, just the other day. There was quite the competition for it, but I prevailed.'
The sin took my breath away. I could sense the energy of its spectral radiation leaking through the leaded glass of the container.
''Exquisite' is an understatement. I've never seen its match for color-and such perfect symmetry! Family 'avarice,' if my eyes don't deceive me. Although the shape of the crenellations seems atypical for that class.'
Gerd beamed. 'That's because it is a previously undiscovered species, Peter. The provenance is somewhat shaky, but the specimen's conformation speaks for itself. I think it will justify a brand new HCG category entry-if my instincts are correct.'
I handed the vial back to him and took a sip of liquor. After Gerd replaced the precious item on his shelf and sat down in the chair next to me, I briefed him about the case. Then I handed him a printout I'd made of a recent hamartiaphily forum post.
'This looks like a new person on the scene. Have you any idea who he is? He's trying to hawk some low-level sins that you might get from a petty criminal like our victim.'
Gerd glanced at the sheet. 'No, I do not recognize the user name. I presume he uses an overseas anonymizer service, like many in our trade do?'
I nodded. 'Yes, I tried to trace him, only to run into a dead-end IP routing address in Romania. It's going to be difficult to officially track him down and follow up. Particularly since I have to abide by Guild rules. Naturally, I'd never reveal the identity of a fellow sin-seer to others outside the craft. That's a given. Still, we
'Which makes this a difficult situation for you. If, however, we are truly dealing with a renegade seer, we may be obliged to take matters into our own hands. What is the expression . . . 'clean up our own house'?'
'But how do you propose to do that? I question the wisdom of going in that direction. If it's our man, he's clearly very dangerous.'
Gerd reached over and patted my arm. 'Let me make some discreet inquiries, Peter. In the meantime, try not to fret. Everything will seem better in the morning, when the rain stops and the sun comes out.' He smiled and stood up. 'Would you fancy a game of chess? That will help take your mind off these . . .
****
I left Vanderhout's residence late. The rain had stopped and a thick fog had drifted in to blanket the wet streets. As I drove home, I noticed that I was being tailed. Probably Detective Henderson or one of his lackeys.
This business was getting complicated.
What was worse, I discovered that someone had entered my apartment and gone through my things while I was gone. It had been a subtle job, and I might not have even noticed it-except that I'm scrupulous about filing my data CDs. I noticed that a pair of them were out of order in my desk file drawer. Looking further, I found other small hints of intrusion.
Henderson again, no doubt. I felt the heat rise behind my collar. The bastard! Who did he think he was dealing with?
Fortunately, there was no way he could've found any sensitive information on other sin-seers, even if he had scraped my computer's hard drive clean. Those data were safely stored where no one could find them without tearing the place down to its foundation. Still, I felt irate. I'd confront the son of a bitch in the morning and demand that he back off on me.
Or maybe not. It wouldn't be wise for me to cut off my nose to spite my face. The fact was, I benefited greatly from my relationship with the police. By my consulting agreement, ownership of any sins I extracted from murder victims for identification transferred to me. And Lord knows I enjoyed a small but very tasty supplement to my regular consulting income when I sold the best of the little buggers on the open hamartiaphily auction markets.
