Odd Girl Out

I reached the shaft just as Karim made it to the bottom. 'There you are,' he said. Even in the dim light I could see that his face was pale. 'Did you see any police officers on your way in here tonight?'

'No,' I said. 'Are there police officers out there now?'

He swallowed visibly. 'Come and see.'

Oved was waiting on the walkway when Karim and I emerged from the tavern. His face was even paler than Karim's. 'Over there,' he said, pointing toward a service alley leading away into the shadows on the opposite side of the street.

I frowned as I peered down it. The alley itself was unlit, but there was enough backwash from the streetlights and storefronts that I could just make out the outline of a car halfway back facing my direction. It was hard to tell, but it looked like two men were sitting in the front seat.

Sitting with unnatural stillness.

I looked back at Oved. The boy was trembling slightly, I noticed now. Probably the first time he'd ever seen death up close. 'Stay here,' I told him and Karim, and headed across the street.

No one attacked me as I approached the car. No one jumped from the shadows, either, yelling bloody murder and pointing accusing fingers in my direction. Whatever had happened here, the goal hadn't been to either lure me in or to frame me. I reached the car and looked in.

The two cops were sprawled slightly in their seats. Not like men who'd been killed where they sat, but rather who'd been killed outside the vehicle and then shoved back in.

There was a marked difference in their expressions, though. Sergeant Aksam looked almost serene, as if death had caught him completely unawares. Officer Lasari, in contrast, had a startled expression frozen on his face.

The cause of death in both cases was probably connected to the wide bloodstains in the centers of their chests.

I studied them from outside the car for a minute, taking in their expressions, positioning, and everything else I could see. Then, using a handkerchief to keep from smudging any fingerprints the killer might have left behind, I opened the driver's-side door.

From the lack of any mention of shots, I had already concluded the bloodstains were the result of stab wounds. Gingerly opening Aksam's shirt, I found my assumption was correct. But it was an odd wound, triangular with smaller tears coming off two of the three corners.

I frowned at the mark for a moment, my brain sifting through mental images as I tried to come up with something that could make a puncture like this.

And then, it clicked. Leaving Aksam's door open, I pulled out my comm and punched in McMicking's number.

The connection clicked. 'Is something wrong?' McMicking asked.

'Pretty much everything's wrong,' I said grimly. 'I'm standing beside a car with a couple of dead cops in it. The same two cops, interestingly enough, who tried to spoil our dinner earlier.'

'In front of a dozen witnesses,' McMicking said. 'I hope they weren't shot with your gun.'

'No, our murderer was a little more creative than that,' I said. 'It looks like Aksam and Lasari were stabbed with a Filly contract pen.'

I could hear his frown right over the comm. 'That makes no sense,' he said. 'Contract pen ink is genetically linked to its owner. He might as well have left family photos at the scene.'

'Which implies the murderer didn't care if he got caught,' I said. 'Which strongly implies in turn that our information about the Modhri and Fillies not working and playing well together is indeed out of date.'

'Indeed,' he agreed heavily. 'You have a read?'

I looked back down the alley. In general, hanging around a murder scene wasn't the brightest thing a person could do.

On the other hand, I had more privacy here than I was likely to get anywhere else in the neighborhood at the moment. 'The killer probably approached the car from the front, from near the tavern I told you about earlier,' I said. 'Both cops appear to have had time to get out to meet him. He approached them, probably asking for directions or some such, and when he was close enough he stabbed Sergeant Aksam. He then pulled the pen out of Aksam's chest and threw it across the hood into Officer Lasari's.'

'Either man draw his sidearm?'

'That's a little hard to tell,' I said. 'Both their sidearms are missing.'

He hissed into the comm. 'Wonderful,' he said. 'You're sure the contract pen was thrown into the second vic?'

'Reasonably sure,' I said. 'Lasari's wound has the slightly ragged edges of a thrown weapon.'

'Which may mean only one of the Fillies is a walker,' he suggested. 'It would have been safer to send in a pair of them, if he had a pair to work with.'

'Possibly,' I said. 'I wouldn't bet the mortgage on it, though. Anyway, our murderer then shoved the bodies back into the car, retrieved his pen and their guns, and left.'

'Any thoughts as to motive?'

'Oh, yes,' I said sourly. I leaned back into the car and used my handkerchief to pick up the document sitting on the center console's fax. 'They have a warrant here for the arrest of one Frank Abram Donaldson. A new one, with all the proper legal bells and whistles in place.'

'That's handy,' McMicking said heavily. 'I hope you haven't left any evidence behind.'

'It's pretty impossible not to leave something behind these days,' I said. 'But I haven't left anything they'll find without a detailed scan and sift. Besides, the pen residue should pretty well prove the killer was Filiaelian.'

'No, it only proves the killing weapon was Filiaelian,' he countered. 'You could easily have stolen it from one of these six upstanding citizens.'

'There's that,' I conceded. 'On the other hand, I could argue that neither of these cops would have just let me walk up to them this way.'

'Try persuading an arraignment judge of that,' McMicking said. 'This doesn't make any sense. First the Modhri gives you free rein to track down this Abomination, whatever it is. Then he tries to get you thrown in jail, and now he kills a pair of cops so that they can't throw you in jail? How schizoid is this Modhri, anyway?'

'As schizoid as only a million different mind segments can get,' I said. 'But in this case, that's not the problem. I think what we have here is two entirely different entities working at cross-purposes to each other.'

'The Modhri and who else?'

'Veldrick,' I said. 'His only concern is to keep Frank Donaldson and Hardin Industries from taking his precious coral away from him. He's almost certainly the one who tried to get me arrested earlier, and probably the one who then pushed for this new warrant. It's the Modhri, through his Filly walkers, who killed the cops.'

'But why?' McMicking persisted.

'Because he needs me free to persuade Rebekah to come out of hiding. Any progress on the water records yet?'

'Yes,' he said. 'There aren't any unexplained spikes.'

I frowned. 'None?'

'None,' he confirmed. 'Not with the six Fillies, not with anyone else.'

'That's impossible,' I insisted. 'We know Veldrick gave away chunks of his coral.'

'Maybe the Fillies just dumped the coral in their fish tanks,' McMicking suggested. 'The coral doesn't need the water to be flowing, does it?'

'Not over the short haul,' I said. 'But after a while it starts going dormant if it doesn't have flow or at least some tidal fluctuation. It's sure not going to be at its best and brightest sitting in a fish tank.'

'Maybe it didn't need its best and brightest to track down a ten-year-old girl.'

And then, suddenly, it hit me. 'Or else it needed to be mobile,' I said. 'Do you have access to car purchase or rental records?'

'I've got the city's licensing data,' he said. 'Looks like …huh. All six Fillies have rental cars.'

'Do you have the locations of their parking spot?'