Black Man / Thirteen

Quiet in the softly lit conference room. He could feel Ertekin’s gaze on him like a touch. He looked at his hands.

“You said he’s killed twenty others apart from this one.”

Norton fielded it. “Seventeen confirmed, genetic trace material recovered at the scene. There are another four we’re not so sure about. That’s not including the people he murdered and ate aboard Horkan’s Pride.”

“Yeah. You got this stuff mapped out? Where he’s been?”

He didn’t look up, but he felt the glance run between them again.

“Sure,” said Norton.

He worked the dataslate deck and the image of Toni Montes’s blood went away. In its place, continental North America glowed to life, stitched with highways and slashed red along the excision lines of the Rim States and the Union. The map was punched through with seventeen black squares and four gray, each checked against a thumbnail victim photo. Carl got up and went to the wall for a closer look. The Angeline Freeport marker showed a laughing Toni Montes, hair styled up for some party and an off-the-shoulder gown. He touched it gently, and detailed data scrolled down beneath. Mother, wife, real estate feed host. Corpse.

He looked at the other images pockmarking the map. They were mostly similar, careless snapshots, lives caught in the living. In a couple of cases, the image was an ID holoprint, but mostly it was smiles and squints for the camera, close-cropped to cut family members or friends from the frame. The faces looking down were a mix of races and a range of ages, midthirties all the way up to one old man in his late sixties. Married, single, with children, without. Work ranging from datasystems specialties to manual labor.

They had nothing in common but the continent they lived on and the fact they were dead.

He moved back to the West Coast. Norton did something to the dataslate, and a Bay Area blowup slid out on top of the main map. The Horkan’s Pride splashdown was marked in a not-to-scale box just off the coast, eleven faces and names stacked on top of one another beside it. Then three more red squares, all clustered around San Francisco and Oakland. Carl stared at the grouping for a moment, aware, at some level, that something didn’t gel. He frowned, touched and read the scroll-down data.

Saw the dates.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Ertekin moved up behind him. Abruptly, he could smell her. “He came back. Two kills, same day Horkan’s Pride hits the water. Then he’s gone, across the frontier into the Republic. Next stop Van Horn, Texas, June 19. Eddie Tanaka, shot to death outside a cathouse on Interstate 10. And then he’s back in the Bay Area again, nearly four months later, October 2, killing this Jasper Whitlock. What does that suggest to you?”

“He forgot his wallet?”

“There you go. I knew there was some reason we hired you.”

Carl twisted and gave her a reproachful look. Something happened in the line of her mouth. He breathed in lightly, trying for her scent again. “He’s working off partial data. However he came up with this hit list, he didn’t have all the names at the start. Why cross into Jesusland in June when he’s got to come all the way back and do this guy, uh, Whitlock, later. And now we’ve got Montes, she’s down in the Angeline Freeport. That’s a short run down from the bay, and no frontier checks. He’s making this up as he goes along.”

“Right. What we figured, too.” Ertekin backed off a little, ended up close to where Norton was sitting. “If Jasper Whitlock had been another Eddie Tanaka type, you could maybe have sold me on Merrin not finding him first time around, needing to go back. But Whitlock was a medical services broker. All aboveboard, upright citizen, pillar of the community, ran his own business. Not the sort of guy that’s too hard to find. Merrin shot him sitting behind the desk in his own office. So it’s got to be, Merrin didn’t know he had to kill this guy back in June. He found out later.”

“Question is where from?” Carl stared at the continental map, the scattered black flags. “He crosses the border to ice Tanaka, goes all the way to Texas. Any sign that he was after information there?”

“No. Tanaka was strictly a small-time scumbag. Drugs, illicit abortions. The odd smuggled-organ deal.”

Norton looked up from the dataslate, face deadpan. “In fact, the Jesusland version of a medical services broker.”

“Well…”

Ertekin scowled. “We already chased that co

“Rat catcher,” supplied Norton.

“Unemployed anyway for the last two years, living mostly off a string of women out of El Paso and points east. Before that, Houston, similar profile. Best guess is that’s how he got into the abortion provision in the first place. There’s a lot more money in it than—”

“Catching rats.” Carl nodded slowly. “Right. So I’m looking at this map, we’ve got southeastern Texas, northern Texas, western Oklahoma, then two in Colorado, one suspected in Iowa, Kansas one suspected one dead cert, Ohio, Michigan, two in Illinois, South Carolina suspected, Maryland suspected, Louisiana, Georgia, and northern Florida. Have you got any ties between any of these victims? Anything that gels at all?”

The look on Ertekin’s face was answer enough. She was staring at the map, too, and the scattered faces of the dead.

“He could be getting them out of the phone book for all we know,” said Norton soberly.

CHAPTER 14

The sounds of shouting dragged her awake.

For a confused moment, she thought it was a theft or some excessive haggling down in the market. Then the rhythmic element in the voices made it through the wrap of sleep and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply in the narrow barrack room bed. The inside of her head felt grimy with the lack of syn. On the other side of the room, dawn was seeping through at the edges of the moth-eaten varipolara curtain; pearl-gray light lay across the ceiling and down the far wall in blurred stripes. She looked at her watch and groaned. The chanting outside was too muffled to make sense of, but she didn’t need to hear the words.

On the table beside the bed, her phone rang.

“Yeah?”

Norton’s voice filtered into her ear. “Hear the fans?”

“I’m awake, aren’t I?”

“Good call, Sev. If we’d stayed in town, we’d be fucked. That nasty cop mind of yours saves the day again.”

“So.” She flapped back the sheet, swung her legs out of bed to the floor. The skin on her thighs goosefleshed in the cool air. “Parris has friends in Tallahassee after all.”

“Better than that.” There was a sour grin in Norton’s voice. “He went to the media feeds. We’re all over Good Morning South.”

“Ah, fuck.” Groping around on the floor with her free hand for clothes. “You think we can still get out of here okay?”

“Well, not by suborb, that’s for sure. Whatever was keeping the lid on Marsalis’s genetic secrets at South Florida State is long gone now. He’s blown. Either Parris talked, or somebody leaked higher up.”

“Got to be Parris.”

“Yeah, well, in any case, now you got Jesuslanders fifty-deep outside both gates and backing up down the access road for a couple of klicks at least. Real Diefor-the-Lord types by the look of it. I just got off the phone to our press liaison in Miami and she tells me there are bible thumpers lining up for airtime from here to Alaska.” She could hear him gri

“Great. So what do we do?” Sevgi stuck an arm into a shirtsleeve. “Fly home the old-fashioned way? COLIN’s got to have a couple of flatline Lears down here, right? For short-hop VIPs.”