Card Sharks

and biases as the rest of our tribe. And unfortunately, the list of healers who had turned to murder is a long and honored one. Faneuil had been a psychopathic bigot — end of story.

Still, it bothers me how he got out of Kenya. Out of Africa. He must have had help in high places. Which scares me, and sometimes keeps me awake at night. Memories of a young boy with a sweet voice also return to haunt me occasionally. In 1990 Jonathan wrote to tell me Daudi had died. And all I could think was that I'd killed him. It was Tachyon, or rather his example, who helped me get past it. I looked at him, and remembered how guilt had nearly destroyed his life.

I have a lot of people left to heal. I'm not going to blow it on guilt. Yes, I have been an unwitting accomplice to Faneuil's murders, but my conscience is clean. I just wonder if the same can be said for Faneuil — wherever he hides?

Yes, I'm afraid it can. The world has said it's okay to hate us. Maybe next they'll say it's okay to kill us. Faneuil is just waiting for vindication. He's sleeping the sleep of the righteous.

The Ashes of Memory 3

Hannah threw the transcripts down on Malcolm's desk. 'I want Harris fired, Malcolm. I want his ass out the door.'

Her fury had been building all day, though Hannah wondered if her ire was because Harris hadn't done his job or because his failure had dumped the task on her. But if Dr. Finn's tale had not been enough, listening to the depositions of the fire victims under his care had fueled the inward anger.

Jokers or not, no one deserved what they'd gone through.

Harris missed being on the receiving end of Hannah's wrath: he was out when she returned to the office not long after noon, and the fury had gone to glowing embers under the work awaiting her. The initial lab report had been on her desk, confirming that traces of jet fuel had been found in the remnants of the basement plants; the materials in the delayed fuse were still being checked. Dr. Sheets's autopsy reports came in the late afternoon: nothing unusual there other than the bizarre variety of forms among the dead: CO levels in the blood and tissue samples indicated that most had died from smoke inhalation long before the flames reached them.

Hannah had requested a database check on convicted and suspected pyros in the city; the list was depressingly long. Aces like Jumping Jack Flash she discarded — there'd been nothing to suggest a wild card power had been involved in the fire. Those who were still incarcerated or already in jail, those who never torched occupied buildings, and those who had never indicated any wild card antipathy she moved to the bottom of the list. There were still a dozen names left in the priority category. She'd decided to take Arnold Simpson, another of the agents, and interrogate the first one — a Kevin Ramblur, a street gang kid with the nickname of Flashfire who, it was suspected, had been responsible for snatching lone jokers from the street and setting them afire — when the floor clerk brought in Harris's transcripts.

'Pete said to give you these, and that he'd talk with you in the morning,' the clerk said. 'He had a doctor's appointment.'

Harris had given her a long litany of 'not available for deposition' and sketchy logs. They were garbage; utterly useless even if she hadn't already known that all of them were outright lies. That had fanned the dull anger back into rage, and Hannah stalked down to Malcolm's office rehearsing her first words.

'I'm not kidding, Malcolm. This is either incompetence, deliberate sabotaging of my case, or both.'

Malcolm Coan, District Director of the Arson Bureau, New York State Department of Justice, had the eyes of a Great White, dark and frighteningly expressionless. The rest of his demeanor did nothing to dispel the illusion of a predator, nor did the fact he insisted that all his subordinates address him by his first name lend him any friendliness. Everything about the man was sharp and edged — the lines of his face, the carefully manicured nails, the fresh starch on his white shirt, the careful crease of his pants. He picked up the reports Hannah had thrown down on the empty expanse of his desk, shuffled them carefully so that the edges aligned, and then leafed through them without a word as Hannah paced in front of him, too agitated to sit down. Finally he placed the reports precisely in front of him and looked at her with those dead, unreadable eyes. He waited.

'They're trash,' Hannah said finally. 'Harris went to the Jokertown Clinic and did nothing. 'Not available.' Well, that's a bald-faced lie. I talked to them. Dr. Finn was entirely cooperative.'

'Are you in the habit of checking up on the work of your agents?' Coan asked. His voice was no different than the rest of him: cutting and thin. Malcolm can make 'Good Morning' sound like an obituary — Hannah had heard that joke the first day on the job.

'No sir,' she answered. 'I much prefer to believe that they'll give me their best effort. The fact that I caught this was coincidental, but I did. Now I can't trust any of Harris's work, and I don't like his attitude, either. He obviously doesn't care.'

'And you want me to terminate Mr. Harris.'

'Malcolm, the regulations — '

'I know the regulations perfectly well, Ms. Davis.' Coan smiled, but there was no amusement in the expression. 'I also know Mr. Harris's work. In fact, I would have considered him for your position had I not been' — he paused — 'persuaded otherwise. He has done excellent investigation for me in the past.'

'With all due respect, not this time.'

'Nonetheless …' Coan swiveled in his chair. The Times lay at right angles to the corner of his credenza. Coan plucked the front section from the stack and placed it on the desk so that Hannah could see it. 'Today's edition,' Coan said. 'You will note that your fire has dropped entirely off the front page. You'll find no mention of it anywhere until page seven.'

The anger inside Hannah suddenly went cold. 'What are you telling me, Malcolm? That no one cares about jokers? I already figured that one out.'

'It means, Ms. Davis, that I have very little incentive to keep an already-overburdened staff working overtime on your case. It means that since you dislike Mr. Harris's efforts so much, I can oblige you by taking him off this assignment. I can use him elsewhere.'

'Take him off … ' Words dissolved in her shock. 'I'm already understaffed for something like this, Malcolm.'

'I can't afford to lose good agents, Ms. Davis. I also can't afford to waste this much manpower' — he actually smiled at her with the word — 'on this case. You don't want Mr. Harris, that's not a problem.'

'Malcolm — '

'And I want your preliminary report on my desk tomorrow morning at eight o'clock,' he continued. 'For the press, should they be interested.'

'You're going to ignore what I've told you about Harris?'

'Give me a signed IOC and I'll make sure it goes in his personal file along with my notes on this meeting and a formal reprimand. Will that be satisfactory, Ms. Davis?'

Hannah swallowed the remark she wanted to make. 'Do I have a choice, Malcolm?'

'Frankly, Ms. Davis, no. You don't. This decision, at least, is mine.'

Hannah nodded curtly. 'Then I'll get started on that IOC,' she said.

'Eight o'clock for your report,' Malcolm told Hannah's retreating back. 'No later.'

One of the lab techs was waiting for her in the corridor. She took a look at Hannah's expression, whistled softly, and handed Hannah a sheet of paper with exaggerated caution. 'It couldn't have been too bad,' she said. 'Your head's still attached.'

Hannah grimaced. 'This going to make me feel better, Jo Ann?'

'I doubt it. We tracked down the fuse components that were identifiable — a pretty standard hobby store chip used with nine-volt batteries: that was your timer. The piece of small canister that you found had a few flecks of green paint on it. Suggest anything to you?'

'Oxygen,' Hannah said, and Jo Ann nodded. 'Anybody who works around oxygen knows that you can't let