Black Man / Thirteen

“Look, Ertekin.” He found this time the laugh was genuine. “I really don’t care. I’m a free man tonight, got my feet in the sand and everything. You want to do the group-solidarity thing, run salvage on your broken-down patriarchal belief system, you go right ahead. I’ve believed some fucking stupid things in my time. Why should you be any different?”

“I’m not going to discuss my faith with you.”

“Good. Let’s not, then.”

They stood in the sand and listened to the quiet. Surf boomed on a reef somewhere offshore. Closer in, the smaller waves broke creamily in the gloom, made a white-noise hiss as they sucked back.

“How come you knew I was Turkish?” she asked him finally.

He shrugged. “Been there a lot. One time, I had an interpreter called Sevgi.”

“What were you doing in Turkey?”

“What do you think.”

“The tracts?”

He nodded somberly. “Yeah, standard European response. If it’s nasty or inconvenient, park it in eastern Turkey. Too far away to upset anyone who matters, and a long walk west if anybody gets out unauthorized. Which happens enough to keep me going back there a couple of times a year. You from the eastern end?”

“No, I’m from New York.”

“Right.” He nodded. “Sorry. I meant—”

He stopped as her gaze shuttled past him and up the beach. Turned to follow, though long-honed proximity sense already told him this time Norton was there for real. There on the low crest of the dunes, scuffing down through the sand toward them, and, by every physical sign Carl knew how to read, hauling bad news in bulk.

“Toni Montes. Age forty-four, mother of two.” The images flipped up in sequence on the conference room wall-screen as Norton talked. Vaguely handsome Hispanic woman, identity card shot, a strong-boned face fleshing out a little with age, he

“Did he rape her?” Carl asked.

flip.

“No. No detectable sexual assault.”

“Same as the others,” said Sevgi quietly. “Baltimore, Topeka, that shithole little town in Oklahoma. Loam Springs? Whenever he’s killed a woman, it’s been the same thing. Whatever this is about, it isn’t sex.”

flip.

“Siloam Springs,” Norton supplied. “Shithole little town in Arkansas in fact, Sev. Just over the state line, remember?”

“No, I don’t remember.” Ertekin seemed to regret the retort almost immediately. She gestured. The edge dropped out of her voice. “We wired in, Tom. It’s not like there was much chance to get to know the place.”

Norton shrugged. “Time enough to decide it was a shithole, though, right?”

“Oh shut up. It’s all Jesusland, isn’t it?” Ertekin rubbed at an eye and nodded at the projection wall. “Why’d they flag this one up?”

The sequence of images had frozen on another section of pale cream wall, Rorschach-blotched with blood and tissue. A tiny red triangle pulsed on and off in the corner of the screen.

“Yeah, Angeline PD couldn’t work this one out.” Norton prodded the dataslate on the table. On the screen, a block of forensic data floated down onto the picture. “When Merrin finally killed this woman, he shot her standing upright in the next room. High-velocity electromag round; it went right through her head and into the wall behind. The angle suggests he was standing right in front of her. That’s what doesn’t fit. Dying on her knees when she’s finally got no more fight in her, yeah, that I can see. But standing up and just taking it, after the struggle she put up. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Yeah, it does.” Carl paused for a moment, testing the intuition, the lines of force it flowed along. He knew the shape of it the way his hand knew the butt of the Haag gun. “She gave up before she was done, because he threatened her with something worse.”

“Worse than beating her to death?” There was an icy anger in the rims of Norton’s eyes as he spoke. Carl couldn’t tell if it extended to him as well as Merrin. “You want to tell me what that would be, exactly?”

“The children,” said Ertekin quietly.

He nodded. “Yeah. Probably the husband as well, but it’s the children that would have clinched it. Playing to her genetic wiring. He told her he’d wait until the children came home.”

“You can’t know that,” said Norton, still angry.

“No, of course not. But it’s the obvious explanation. He got in through the house defenses. Either Montes knew him and let him in, or he gutted the software, in which case he’d been scoping the house well enough to know the systems, so he certainly would have known that there were children, that they’d be back soon. That was his leverage, that was what he used.”

He saw the way a look went between them.

“It works, up to a point,” Ertekin said, more to herself than anyone else. “But all it does is turn the question around. If he was prepared to use a threat like that, why not use it from scratch? Why bother dancing around the furniture in the first place?”

Carl shook his head. “I don’t know. But to me, the shot looks like an execution. The fight must have been something else.”

“Interrogation? You think this was about extracting a confession?”

Carl thought about it for a moment, staring into the border of glare and gloom where the side of the screen edged out on the wall. Recollection coiled loose like snakes—this woman seemed to dislodge memory in him practically every time she opened her fucking mouth. Back in the jail—did you ever think that?—it was the passageways of the Felipe Souza and the cold inevitability of his thoughts as he waited out the rescue. Now she had him again. The hot, tiny room in a nameless Tehran backstreet. Blocks of sunlight etched into the floor, the shadow of a single barred window. Stale sweat and the faint aroma of scorched flesh. Discordant screaming from down the hall. Blood on his fist.

“I don’t think so. There are smarter ways of getting information.”

“Then what?” pushed Norton. “Just straight sadism? Or is this some kind of übermensch thing? Brutalism by genetic right.”

Carl met the other man’s eyes for a moment, just to let him know. Norton held his gaze.

Carl shrugged. “Maybe it was rage,” he said. “For whatever reasons, maybe this Merrin just lost control.”

Ertekin frowned. “All right. But then he just, what? Just calmed down and executed her?”

“Maybe.”

“That still doesn’t make much sense to me,” said Norton.

Carl shrugged again, this time dismissive. “Why should it?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, Norton, that at a basic biochemical level, you’re not like Merrin. None of you are. Down in the limbic system where it counts, across the amygdalae and up into the orbitofrontal cortex, Merrin has about a thousand biochemical processes going on that you don’t have.” Carl had meant to come across calm and detached—social aptitude routines had his body language and speech locked away from confrontational. But outside it all, the weariness in his own voice astounded him. He finished abruptly. “Of course it doesn’t make sense to you. You don’t have a map for where this guy is right now.”