started bleeding, and ran himself to death.'
Braxen nodded but made no notes. He and I both knew that if Stealth-one of the world's experts on innovative means of rival-retirement-pointed it out and it concerned death, he wouldn't be wrong. 'What kind of gun?'
Stealth's foot claws grated slightly on the cement as he straightened up again. 'Customized rifle. Long barrel to maximize accuracy and muzzle velocity. Good work.'
The cruiser's headlights made Braxen's tusks stand out against his swarthy flesh. 'You do the work?'
'I'm not a toymaker.'
'Wasn't a toy that killed this boy, Stealth.'
Stealth shrugged as if to say 'have it your own way.' He jammed his hands into the pockets of his trench coat and sat back on his haunches. The headlights left him a silhouette except for the reddish light burning in his Zeiss eyes.
I knew from the set of Stealth's shoulders that he wouldn't be saying anything more to Braxen. 'Harry, your forensics people will verify what Stealth is saying.''
The ork cop shook his head. 'No, they won't. No autopsy for this one.' 'What are you talking about? It's a suspicious death, isn't it?' I glanced down at Albion's body. 'You need an autopsy for your investigation.'
'Whatinvestigation, Kies? This kid's got no SIN. He doesn't exist as far as the system is concerned. He isn't even a statistic.'
I wanted to grab him, but two things stopped me. The first was the realization that Braxen was absolutely correct. Without a System Identification Number, neither Albion nor any of the other denizens who lurked in the shadows of the sprawl had any official existence. Schools wouldn't take them, hospitals wouldn't treat them, help centers ignored them.
Well I knew, for I myself had grown up without a SIN.
There was no way the system was going to investigate the death of someone like Albion. Had he been an elf or ork or Amerind, his own folk might have taken an interest in him. Lone Star, however, was a private corporation hired to keep the peace in Seattle, not to clean up after some murderer who got careless when dropping his trash.
The second thing that stopped me was Braxen's tone. For all of his being a cop, Harry Braxen wasn't like most of the blue crew. He'd grown up in Seattle and, as an ork, knew all about discrimination and the callousness of the system. He'd known who Albion was the instant he'd seen him, but he had probably called me down to identify the body to get me interested in the case.
'Spill it, Harry. I don't like standing in the rain.'
Braxen squatted next to the body and I dropped down beside him. Kid Stealth's shadow hid both of us and Harry kept his voice low enough that only Albion and the Murder Machine could hear us. 'Could be this is the fourth body I've seen dropped like this. Two gillettes down by the docks and one dreamchipper up in Bel-mont. She was the first and we got some datafiles on her before they lost her body. Files were dumped.' 'She have a name?'
'Athena Neon is what I filed her under. She had a neon rose tied with a yellow ribbon tattooed on her butt.'
I nodded slowly. 'It went down the same way?'
'Identical except for maybe one detail.' Braxen reached out and turned Albion's face to the left and then to the right. 'Can't tell with him, but the other three had all lost a lock of hair. One of the gillettes was a guy I'd popped the month before. That was how I first noticed it-his rat-tail was missing.'
In the back of my mind the Old One-what I call the slice of the Wolf spirit lairing in my psyche-started to growl. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prick up. 'No other links?'
Braxen shrugged. 'You know that sometimes us cops keep 'hobby cases.' '
'Ones you work on in your spare time, right?' I smiled. 'I have a list of women like that.'
Harry nodded. 'Well, these killings were a hobby case of mine, but my files are gone, just flat vanished. Someone with mondo-juice hit my corner of the Matrix and wiped them out.'
I straightened up. 'You're going to call a meat wagon for him?'
'Unless you think Salacia and her people want to make arrangements for him.' Braxen looked down at the kid as a wind-whipped plastic bag molded itself to Albion's face. 'The kid should have stayed where he was safe.'
'Amen,' I said to that, knowing that to find out what happened to Albion, I'd be going places that weren't even in hailing distance of safe.
II
Stealth and I retreated deeper into the alley as the morgue van arrived. The attendants zipped Albion into a body bag glistening with rain. Harry supervised and handed the driver a card. Then he got into his car and followed the van away, taking his headlights with him and leaving us in the dark.
I turned to Kid Stealth. 'He's gone. Give me what you've got because I know you're dying to have me show him up.'
Stealth answered me in a flat monotone. 'Doc Raven will be back from Tokyo tomorrow night. We can give him the scan, let him decide what to do about this.'
'Stealth, let me do some legwork first.' I pointed to the place where the rain had begun to darken the lighter outline of Albion's body. 'The trail will get cold.'
'The killer will be back.' The red lights in Stealth's eyes bloated and shrank. 'He's a thrill killer.'
'What?'
'This is his recreation.' Stealth looked at me for a moment, looked away, then nodded. 'The bullets you use in your Viper1…'
'Silver, drilled and patched with a silver-nitrate solution to make them explosive.'
'Why?'
I hesitated. Kid Stealth hadn't been around during the Full Moon Slashings so he didn't know what Raven and I had run into back then. I'd developed the bullets to deal with that mess and I'd kept using them since, just in case. I sensed in his question, however, not so much a desire to know the history of my bullets as to understand the thinking that went into producing them.
'I had them done that way so they would maximize shock and destruction. Bullets are meant to kill and I wanted mine to do the job well.'
Stealth studied me for a moment before answering. 'The bullet used on Albion was designed to make him
1The nice thing about carrying around and using a gun as old as the Beretta Viper 14 was that under most current laws, antiques weren't really considered 'weapons' for concealment purposes. Me, I never saw the allure of these newfangled guns full of computer components and all. Go ahead, rely on Windows Sniper 4.0 if you want to, but I prefer not to need software patches when I'm in a firefight. die.Back before the Awakening, before magic came back to the world, there were people who would test their hunting skills by using a bow and arrow to take wildlife.' Stealth held his hands before him as if visualizing what he was describing. 'Bows are uncertain. Because an arrow might not cause enough damage, innovative arrowhead designs were created. One type had three or four razored edges that spiraled around the arrowhead like the edges on a drill-bit. It was called a bleeder and was designed to chew up as much of the animal's insides as it could, while leaving a blood trail for the hunter to follow.'
The Old One howled angrily in the back of my mind. 'Stealth, you mentioned a stressed copper jacket with a light bullet and light charge. You're saying Albion was shot with the ballistic equivalent of a bleeder?'
'His wound was non-midline.'
1frowned. 'It still killed him.'
'No. The rifle used was more than capable of putting a shot through someone's eye at a range of at least two hundred-fifty meters. Albion was wounded by design.'
'What killed him, then?'
'He drowned in his own blood. He was coursed to death.'
'Coursed?'
