do. Her thighs could wait. “Thanks,” she said.
“It’s, ah, a bit gruesome,” said Kinoshita.
Sandra opened the file, scanned the description — a computer-generated transcript of the radio message from the officer who first arrived on the scene. “Oh.”
“A couple of uniforms are there now. They’re expecting you.”
She nodded, got to her feet, adjusted her holster so that it sat comfortably, then slipped on a pale green blazer over her dark green blouse. Metro’s two hundred and twelfth homicide of the year now belonged to her.
The drive didn’t take long. Sandra worked out of 32 Division on Ellerslie just west of Yonge, and the crime scene was at 137 Tuck Friarway — Sandra hated the stupid street names in these new subdivisions. As always, she took stock of the neighborhood before going in. Typical middle-class — modern middle-class that is. Tiny cookie- cutter red-brick houses in rows, with gaps between them so narrow that you’d have to squeeze sideways to get through. Front yards that were mostly driveway, leading up to two-car garages. Communal mailboxes at the intersections. Trees that were little better than saplings growing in tiny plots of grass.
Location, location, location, thought Sandra. Yeah.
A white Metro Police car sat in the driveway of 137, and the station wagon used by the medical examiner was parked illegally on the street. Sandra walked up to the front door. It was wide open. She stopped on the threshold and looked in. The body was right there, stretched out. Dead for about twelve hours, it looked like. Dried blood on the floor. And there it was, just as the transcript had said. A mutilation case.
A uniformed officer appeared, a black man who towered head and shoulders above Sandra — no mean feat; they’d called her “Stretch” in high school.
Sandra flashed her badge. “Detective Inspector Philo,” she said.
The uniform nodded. “Step to right as you come through, Inspector,” he said in a rich Jamaican accent. “Lab not been yet.”
Sandra did so. “You are?”
“King, ma’am. Darryl King.”
“And the deceased is?”
“Hans Larsen. Worked in advertising.”
“Who found the body, Darryl?”
“The wife,” he said, tilting his head toward the back of the house. Sandra could see a pretty woman in a red blouse and black leather skirt. “She with my partner.”
“Does she have an alibi?”
“Kinda,” said Darryl. “She an assistant manager at the Scotiabank at Finch and Yonge, but one of the tellers called in sick, so she worked the counter all day. Hundreds of people saw her.”
“What’s ‘kinda’ about that?”
“I think it a professional hit,” Darryl said. “No hesitation marks. Scancam show no prints. Security camera disk gone, too.”
Sandra nodded, then glanced back at the woman in red and black. “Could be a jealous wife who arranged it, though,” she said.
“Maybe,” said Darryl, looking sidelong at the corpse. “I just glad my wife like me.”
Control, the unmodified simulacrum, dreamed.
Nighttime. A blanket of clouds overhead, but with the stars somehow shining through. A giant tree, gnarled and old — maybe an oak, maybe a maple; it seemed to have both kinds of leaves. Its roots had been exposed on one side by erosion — as if it had weathered a massive storm or flash flood. A ball of woody tendrils was visible, soil clinging to them. The whole tree seemed precarious, in danger of tipping over.
Peter climbed the tree, hands grabbing branches, hoisting himself higher and higher. Beneath him, Cathy climbed as well, wind blowing her skirt up around her.
And below, far below, a … beast of some sort. A lion, perhaps. It reared up on its hind legs, rampant, the forelegs leaning against the tree. Even though it was night, Peter could see the color of the lion’s coat. It wasn’t quite the tawny shade he’d expected. Instead, it was more of a blond.
Suddenly, the tree was shaking. The lion was humping it.
The branches shook wildly. Peter climbed higher. Below, Cathy was stretching toward another branch, but it was too far. Much too far. The tree shook again and she tumbled downward .
In the wake of a spate of disappearances of young women in southeastern Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star today revealed that it had received an E-mail message purportedly from the killer, claiming that all the victims had been buried alive in special lead-lined coffins that were completely opaque to electromagnetic radiation in order to prevent soulwaves from escaping.
Researchers in The Hague, Netherlands, announced today the first successful tracking of a soulwave moving across a room after leaving a deceased person’s body. “The phenomenon, though very difficult to detect, seems to retain its cohesion and strength over a distance of at least three meters from the body,” said Maarten Lely, professor of Bioethics at the European Community University campus there.
The Pandora’s Box Society, headquartered in Spokane, Washington, today called for a worldwide moratorium on soulwave research. “Once again,” said spokesperson Leona Wright, “science is rushing madly into areas best approached cautiously, if at all.”
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Lawyer Katarina Koenig of Flushing, New York, today announced a class-action suit on behalf of the estates of terminal patients who had died at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, claiming that in light of the soulwave discovery the hospital’s procedures for determining when to cease heroic intervention were inadequate. Koenig previously won a class-action suit against Consolidated Edison on behalf of cancer patients who had lived near high-tension electrical lines.
CHAPTER 26
In theory, nine o’clock was official starting time at Doowap Advertising. In practice, that meant that a little after nine people began thinking about actually getting down to work.
As usual, Cathy Hobson arrived around 8:50. But instead of the standard joking around as people sipped their coffee, today everything seemed somber. She moved through the open-plan office to her cubicle and saw that Shannon, the woman who worked next to her, had been crying. “What’s wrong?” said Cathy.
Shannon looked up, her eyes red. She sniffled. “Did you hear about Hans?”
Cathy shook her head.
“He’s dead,” said Shannon, and began crying again.
Jonas, the one Cathy’s husband called the pseu-dointellectual, was passing by. “What happened?” asked Cathy.
Jonas ran a hand through his greasy hair. “Hans was murdered.”
“Murdered!”
“Uh-huh. An intruder, it seems.”
Toby Bailey moved closer, apparently sensing that this cluster of workers was the interesting one to be with — someone hadn’t yet heard the story. “That’s right,” he said. “You know he didn’t show up for work yesterday? Well, Nancy Caulfield got a call late last night from his — I was going to say wife, but I guess the word is ‘widow,’ now. Anyway, it was in this morning’s
“Was it robbery?” asked Cathy.
Jonas shook his head. “The newspaper said the cops had ruled out robbery as a motive. Nothing taken, apparently. And” — Jonas’s face showed an uncharacteristic degree of animation — “according to unnamed
