their records on Jungle Expeditions. The woman had indeed gotten approval, but in typical government fashion, she hadn't bothered to pull the records yet. When Maggie complained, the woman got all pissy, and Maggie ripped into her with an uncharacteristic loss of temper. She kept poking the woman's holo with her finger while she made her demands clear. “You will get me my data, and you will do it now.” When the woman put Maggie on hold, her holo turned into a logo for the Office of Customs. I could see that Maggie was preparing for another fight as she waited for the woman to come back on the line. Luckily for the woman, she never did. She served up one of her underlings instead, who came on the line and streamed the names and numbers into Maggie's digital paper pad.
Maggie immediately dove into the data like she'd never lost her cool. Her eyes swiveled from side to side as she skimmed the records, making sure she'd gotten what she asked for.
Maggie handed me the pad. I strained to read the names in the tent's lamplight. “Can you make this thing brighter?”
“Sure.” Maggie took it back for a few seconds then handed the digital paper back to me.
I looked through the first few names, not recognizing any. These were the 342 Jungle Expeditions clients from the past year, or at least the 342 who had taken the time to list Jungle Expeditions on their customs forms. No telling how many just left it blank. I groaned, overwhelmed by the hopeless prospect of narrowing this list down to one serial killer. I didn't have the energy for it. “There's no way we can get through this list before it's too late.”
“Got any better ideas?”
I strained my Niki-hazed brain. There had to be a better way. Going though this list was solid police procedure, but it would take too damn long. And even if we managed to find our offworld serial, we'd still have to flip him to get to Horst, and then flip Horst to get to Ian, and then, as if that wasn't enough, we'd have to hope that somewhere along the way we got the evidence we needed to free Adela.
It was hopeless. I didn't want to upset Maggie by saying it, but Adela was as good as dead. There just wasn't enough time. I wished we could visit her at the Zoo, let her know that we believed her. It could make a big difference to her to know, before she died, that somebody believed her. If nothing else, I could at least apologize for making her cry. But Adela was off-limits. We couldn't get into the Zoo without one of Ian's old guard buddies calling him. We'd never get out alive.
“Well?” Maggie asked, waiting for my answer.
I didn't have any better ideas. Not as long as Yuri Kiper stayed underground.
Maggie said, “We either go through this list or we risk approaching Liz. You ready to charm her again?”
God, I didn't want to see her. Just the thought of her made my stomach tumble. I couldn't believe I'd flirted with her. How could I have done that to Niki? Betray her like that when she'd been in the state she was in. I doubted Niki would've cared. She wasn't a prude. But I cared. I cared plenty.
But Liz could help us. She knew things she hadn't told us. And she was Maggie's anonymous caller. If we asked, she might just tell us what she knew. Then again, I'd already turned down Liz/Michelle's little S amp;M fantasy once, and she wasn't the kind of woman who was used to rejection. She'd been after me to be her ultimate S. But if I approached her again, she might think I'd make a better M. I pictured myself going in there and trying to play her un-father, trying to get her to open up to me. I could see Liz turning the tables on me, trapping me with one of her bondage toys and then bringing her little brother in, the two of them using me as the Davies family's perv pet.
Maggie was still waiting.
“I don't want to see Liz,” I said. I scanned down to the bottom of Maggie's list of offworlders. Not a single name jumped out at me. “Do you recognize any of them?” I asked.
“No. But I starred the ones who are onplanet right now.”
I sorted so the starred names topped the list, nine of them. I looked at their dates of entry. Seven of the nine had just arrived over the last couple days. It probably meant that they were all on the same tour. We'd have to check them out one by one, hoping that one of them was our serial. It was the only safe play. Half the damn city was on the lookout for us, but we knew for a fact that these offworlders would be in the dark. Can you imagine tour operator Horst Jeffers telling his customers to let him know if they saw a couple cops snooping around? Not the kind of thing customers on a sex-tour wanted to hear. These people were unsuspecting. These were people we could watch.
“Can I have that back?” Maggie asked. “I want to compare their entry and exit dates to the barge murder dates.”
I passed the sheet of digital paper back to her and lay back in my hammock, thinking it would be tough to get any kind of definitive date matches. Most of the barge murder scenes were found long after the actual murders occurred. Some of the time-of-death estimates had a margin of error of a month or more.
My head hurt. I closed my eyes and tried to close it all out, leaving myself alone with my hollowness.
Maggie whispered, “Are you asleep?”
“No,” I said without opening my eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No.”
“I'm sorry I got you into this.”
“I know.”
“We'll get him, Juno. It'll be over soon.”
I wasn't so confident, but I still said, “Yeah.”
“It'll be over soon,” she repeated.
She was right about that. It was only a matter of time before Ian's crew started asking around Tenttown. Seen an old dog with a shaking splint of a right hand walking around with a long-haired beauty wearing high-priced duds? Shit, they could be surrounding this tent right now. Ian could come barging through those flaps any second with his biceps-by-'roid and his boy-o charm. The possibility that we might survive was growing more remote by the minute. And if we did manage to pull through? That almost scared me more than Ian. What the hell would I do then?
Maggie interrupted my self-administered career counseling. “Pick a name: Peter Wynn or Jacque Benoit.”
“Benoit. What do I win?”
“A stakeout with a lovely lady.”
TWENTY-FIVE
DECEMBER 4, 2788
I took a seat next to Maggie at the bar. We were both tech-naked. No phones, no weapons, no digital notepads, nothing. You want to surveil an offworlder, you have to go low tech, and there was nothing more low tech than our eyeballs.
We'd been following Jacque Benoit all day. We watched him eat breakfast. We watched him drink coffee on the square. We watched him spend his afternoon meandering through the Phra Kaew market. We watched him hurry to the bank, just barely beating closing time.
He was a regular on Lagarto. He knew where he was going when he walked. The shop owners all knew him, nothing but hugs and smiles when he walked in. Maggie and I would hang across the street while the shop owners would serve him tea and snap their fingers at houseboys who would carry in one high-priced item after another. He made a fair number of purchases: handmade pottery, a set of monitor hide chairs, a wool rug.
We tailed him back to the hotel restaurant, where he was sitting in a group of four men, all offworlders. His hair was more white than blond, and his teeth were whiter still. I looked over the other three, sitting there with their unblemished skin and their whiskerless faces. When they smiled, their faces beamed cool attitudes, and when they talked, they were all debonair charm. They were drinking imported coffee. Just like offworlders to come all the way down to the surface only to drink their orbital-grown coffee.
