Ian said, “What are you talking about?”
“You're in a restaurant with jungle paintings, and you were just sitting across from a guy with a bruised face. I can see everything.”
“Where are you?” The camera view wheeled dizzyingly around the restaurant floor. The offworlder was approaching.
“Are you listening? You've been bugged. You remember Maggie shooing a fly away? She dropped a bug in your hair. I'm looking through the cam right now.”
“You're shitting me.”
“Ask the offworlder. He might be able to detect it.” I clicked off. My guess was the offworlder had already picked it up. Those people seemed to have more circuitry under their skullcaps than they did brains. Maggie's cam was surely lost, and this whole stakeout setup was already shot-might as well take the opportunity to prove my snitch skills.
Ian led Horst into the men's. We caught a super-close-up of the offworlder a second before he picked the cam out of Ian's hair and the projector went blank.
Within seconds, my phone was ringing. Holo-Ian asked, “Where the fuck did she get this thing?”
“She's rich, remember? She said she picked it up from an offworld shop.”
“Are you saying she's been watching me?”
“We've been watching you together, ever since you left KOP station. She just ran out to get some food when I called you. It was the first chance I got. Listen, Ian, I gotta go. I need to finish erasing our conversation from the recording before she gets back. She's going to be suspicious as hell. I don't know how long I'll be able to keep her trusting me.”
“I'm not done with you, boy-o. Come to Roby's tonight,” he ordered before hanging up.
Maggie was staring at me.
“Sorry about the cam,” I said. “The offworlder would've found it anyway.”
“You don't know that for sure. That unit was pretty high-end.”
“Never underestimate an offworlder,” I said with the authority of somebody who had been burned before.
Maggie sighed. “We got nothing.”
“We got plenty, Maggie.” I paused, prolonging the moment long enough to give proper emphasis to what I was about to say. “That guy with the bruised face, he was at the barge the other night. The unis caught him trying to sneak onboard to steal some footage. Josephs told me he was a cameraman for the Libre. I watched him get his ass kicked by Ian and company right there on the pier, and now we just heard Ian say something about how he'd been sloppy-”
“What are you saying?” she asked with a shocked face. “Are you saying Ian's involved in the barge murders?”
I nodded, my mind crackling with the possibilities. The plot was already forming in my mind. Horst: the offworld serial killer. Yuri: the documentarian. And Ian: the cover-up man. The three of them having dinner together: maybe a celebration dinner, or maybe they were getting together so Horst could pay them their fees.
Maggie's face knotted into a tight mask of concentration as she worked through the same possibilities. “That would explain why Ian's so determined to work the barge case.”
“That it would,” I said, stone sober. I was amazed at how quickly Maggie recovered from the bombshell. Here she just found out that her partner was likely involved in thirteen more murders than she'd thought, and already her mind was back in high gear. My worldview must have rubbed off on her more than I thought. She was finding it all too easy to believe the worst in people. That, or her opinion of Ian was so low that even thirteen murders weren't far beyond the reach of what she thought he was capable of.
“And you think Yuri is our filmmaking accomplice?” she asked.
I was already nodding before she finished the question.
“He must have vids of all the murders,” she said.
I suddenly remembered to ask, “Hey, did you ever watch that vid, the one the rook found on the pier?”
“It was blank.”
“Erased?”
“No. It was blank, never been used. Ian thought some tourist probably went down to take some shots of the old barges and then lost it in the weeds trying to change discs.”
It sounded plausible, but I didn't believe it, and I could see in Maggie's eyes that she didn't believe it either. A tourist visiting the pier? The barges were hardly a top tourist attraction. And at this time of year? Way too rainy. I was shaking my head.
“He's full of shit,” Maggie said hotly.
“Was the vid molded over?”
“No. Just wet.” Which meant the vid hadn't been exposed to the rain for long, a couple days at most.
“So unless an offworld tourist went down there recently to film those rusted-out hulks in the rain, it was the cameraman who dropped the vid.”
“And if that's the case, Ian was dead on about him being sloppy. The cameraman must've realized he'd muffed it so he came back and tried to sneak onto the pier to retrieve it.” Maggie's cheeks were flushed, and the smile on her face made her look like an animal baring its teeth. She had a lead, her first in a case she'd worked for months, and it led straight to her partner.
I took a hit off my flask and held it out for Maggie. I wondered how long I'd had the flask out.
She put up a no-thanks palm. “But why bother coming back if the vid was blank?”
My mind tangled up into a tight little knot. I thought about it for a minute and said, “I don't know.”
“Maybe he was afraid we'd find prints.”
“Did you?”
“No. It was clean. I don't get it. He had to know it was impossible to sneak around that pier without getting caught. There was a dead cop on that barge. A whole squad was crawling around down there. Why take the risk?”
“Like you said. Maybe he was afraid he'd left his prints on it. Maybe he didn't know it was clean.”
Maggie gnawed on her lower lip, totally unsatisfied by the explanation. “It still doesn't make sense. Say we did find his prints on the vid. He could've beaten any wrap we tried to pin on him. There's probably a thousand ways he could explain it away. Especially if he really works for the Libre. He could say he lost it some other time. Who knows how many stories he's covered down on that pier? It's not like we found the vid in the cabin, or even on the barge.”
Maggie's words barely echoed in my head. I felt like there was a doubled-up rubber band squeezing down on my brain. Why did Ian make such a show of knocking the guy around? Why not just have the unis escort him off the pier? But instead, he made a big production out of it, all under the guise that he was trying to keep the case from going public. Why? The answer was close, so close… But I couldn't pin it down. I felt like I was trying to grab hold of smoke.
Maggie kept the theories coming. “What if he didn't know it was blank? Maybe the camera broke down on him without him realizing it, and he thought he had filmed the murder, but he really missed the whole thing. Or maybe he just got the blank vid mixed up with the real vid of the beheading. If he thought he'd dropped the beheading vid, he'd have plenty of reason to come back for it, even if it was the wrong one.”
I took another swig of brandy and tried to tune her out. Her words were clogging up my thoughts. I closed my eyes and tried to relax away the clutter in my head. Fragmented ideas rattled around my skull. Maggie was still talking, her voice seeping into my consciousness. She was saying something about how it was just our luck that he dropped the blank vid instead of the real one.
It clicked. Instant understanding surged through my head like a drug. “Are we dumb? That son of a bitch,” I mumbled.
“Who?”
“Ian.”
