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Detective Sergeant Calliope Skouros could only nod. The towel-clad apparition vanished back into the steamy bedroom. God, the girl was beautiful. Maybe not in the runway-model sense, but strong and just vibrating with youth and life.
Did I look like that once? Did I have that glow, just because of how old I was? Or rather, how old I wasn't?
Stop it, Calliope. You're not that bloody old, you just work too hard. And you eat too much crap. Find a life, like Stan always says. Go to the gym. You've got good bones.
As she mulled over the dubious value of good bones, something her mother had always assured her she had when a younger Calliope was feeling particularly unpretty, Elisabetta appeared again from the bedroom, a towel around her head, the rest of her now dressed in a black knit top and a pair of black 'chutes slashed with insets of glowing white.
"These are so. . . ." She waved at the silky trousers. "I mean, I know they're utterly cutting, but they're so much more comfortable than that latex shit."
"Cutting. . . ?" asked Calliope, knowing even as she did so that she was just confirming her own official middle-agedness.
Elisabetta gri
"It was really nice of you to let me use your shower. It's so far back to my place, and the traffic. . . ." She bent for her bag, then straightened up. "Oh, and thanks for the drink, too."
"No problem. I enjoyed it." Calliope considered some further affirmation but could not come up with anything that didn't sound utterly stupid in mental rehearsal. I love your company and I have weird fantasies about you all the time? I'd like to be genetically reengineered to have your babies? I drink three gallons of coffee a day just to watch you walk around dropping salads on peoples' tables, so it was quite nice to have you naked at my place, even in the next room?
"I really want to go to this party. My friend's house-sitting, and the people told her it was okay to have it—they've got this amazing place, with walls, like a castle. And you can have fireworks every night. They're not real, they're just holograms or something, but my friend says it's wonderful." She pushed damp hair out of her eyes and looked at Calliope. "Hey, maybe you'd like to go. You want to?"
Something squeezed at her heart a little bit. "I'd love to." Something else squeezed—her conscience? "But I can't. Not tonight. I have to meet someone." Am I closing a door? she wondered nervously. "My partner. My work partner. About work."
Elisabetta regarded her solemnly for a moment, then returned to the task of rummaging around in her bag. But when she looked up, she wore a smile that was both amused and ever, ever so slightly shy. "Hey, do you like me?"
Calliope carefully leaned back on her chair, just to stop herself drumming her fingers nervously on the tabletop. "Yes, Elisabetta. I do. Of course I do."
"No, I mean do you like me?" The smile was still shy, but challenging, too. Calliope was not entirely sure she wasn't being teased or mocked in some way. "Are you . . . are you interested in me?"
Further obfuscation was not going to work, although it was tempting. Calliope realized that after almost a decade and a half of police work, after sitting in interrogation rooms facing rapists and robbers and murderous psychopaths, she couldn't think of a thing to say. After what seemed like half an hour, but was probably three seconds, she cleared her throat.
"Yes." That was as much as she could manage.
"Hmmm." Elisabetta nodded, then slung her bag over her shoulder. She still seemed to be enjoying some secret joke. "I'll have to think about that." As she reached the door, she turned, her smile wide now. "Got to fly—see you later!"
Calliope sat in her chair for a long minute after the door whooshed closed, unmoving, as stu
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
"Technically," Stan Chan said after a short silence, "this should be the portion of the conversation where you ask me, 'and how was the big meeting, Stan?' I mean, now that we've spent twenty minutes or so talking about some waitress I don't remember."
"Oh, Jesus, Stan, I'm sorry." She stared at the bowl of cocktail crispies, then defiantly took another handful. "I really am. I haven't forgotten about it. It's just . . . I've been out of circulation a long time, what with one thing and another. I forgot how much like shooting some weird drug it is. Does she like me, should I care, what does that little thing mean. . . ? Damn, see, I'm doing it again. Tell me about what happened, please. I'm getting sick of listening to myself, anyway."
"That's why you and I make such good partners. We agree on so many things."
"Die, China-boy."
"You'll never take me down, you goat-chasing lemon."
"I'm glad we've got that straightened out."
Stan nodded happily, then sobered. "I'm afraid that's going to be the highlight of the evening."
"So they didn't go for it," One of the reasons she had been wasting time with waitress-trivia had been a bad feeling about Stan's meeting with the department brass.
"Not only didn't they go for it, they pretty much made it clear that they thought a couple of garden-variety homicide dicks should keep their noses out of things they couldn't understand."
"Meaning the Real Killer case."
"Yep."
"Did you ask them about the Sang-Real thing I was thinking about? The whole King Arthur and the Grail idea?"
"Yes, and they informed me that they'd thought of it themselves a long time ago, and had beaten it into the dust. Looked up Arthurian scholars, checked the seating lists for Parzival in case the guy's a closet Wagner nut, every angle they could think of. I have to admit, it sounds like they were pretty thorough."
"So basically, then, the answer was 'piss off.' "
"That sums it up pretty well, Skouros. They already decided once that Merapanui wasn't anything to do with their serial killer. And the captain was there, too—did I mention that? She thinks it's a lot more likely that minor villain Buncie got his dates wrong than he saw Joh
"The captain. . . ." Calliope leaned forward, thoughts of Elisabetta's shoulders shining with water drops vanishing quickly as she realized what Stan was trying to tell her. "Oh, God. Does that mean. . . ?"
Stan nodded. " 'Fraid so. She basically said we should wrap it up and put it away. She asked me if we'd found any actual evidence that our Joh
"But . . . damn." Calliope slumped. There wasn't any, of course, not hard evidence, not the kind you could even take to a prosecutor. She felt like she had been hit in the stomach with a club. The whole thing was a structure built on guesswork—the kind of paranoid fantasy that kept thousands of net nodes busy. But she knew it wasn't pure fantasy—that the hunches were built on something. And Stan knew it, too. "Didn't you argue?"
"Of course I did." For a moment he showed a flash of genuine hurt. "What do you take me for, Skouros? But she pointed out that while we were devoting so much time to this five-year-old case, people were getting murdered in new and original ways all the time, and the department is understaffed as it is. It was hard to argue with her."