Chapter 8
The girl had been bound and gagged, trussed up like a turkey, no signs of a struggle—she’d probably thought it was part of the game. They’d slit her throat and then let the blood run into a trench about four inches deep, two feet wide, and four feet long. Now the trench was a rectangle of black, crusty, mud, like a giant chocolate bar. They’d scooped out the girl’s eyes, cleanly, and then laid her down, spread her legs and arms, and unraveled her veins to make a blood angel in the dirt. It was the sixth girl in two weeks, and all Saru could feel—aside from an urge to fill the trench with vomit—was relief. This wasn’t the girl; this wasn’t her girl. She knew because of the flower in her hair. This was just a poor, sad, desperate woman who happened to have unusually bright blue eyes—she assumed.
Hemu had given her the flower—and a promise that the hips, or the worshippers of the Slow God would comb the Fish in search of the girl—plucked it seemingly at random from the chapel wall and placed it in her hair. She’d tossed it, of course, and ground it into the pavement with her boot. The memory of the night made her angry, each step away from the place had made her angrier and angrier. What were they playing at? What was this? More smoke and mirrors, more scams, more drugs and ploys to drill inside her brain and manipulate her. At the time it had felt real, believable, nice even. But back on the streets, away from the flowers and silent vagabonds and the city sky all lit up like stars, it seemed like she had just been played again, given just enough information to make her look like a sap, hooked, landed, and flayed.
And the damn flower wouldn’t go away! A tiny white bell on a thin green stem and every morning it appeared in her hair again, exactly where Hemu had placed it, lovingly, reverently almost—had she really considered sleeping with a homeless man? The thought filled her with disgust and a self-loathing that was warm and comfortable like an old sweater. She’d crushed and burned the flower, flushed it down the toilet and tossed it off a rooftop—scene of a disemboweled schoolgirl—but always it came back. It was a glitch in her memory—her whole brain, her whole setup was glitched. There was no flower but for whatever reason her brain had fixated on it, forgotten to delete the memory when the flower itself was gone, and so she was haunted by it. That and other things. Her vision still flickered from time to time, she’d lose minutes and forget where she was, and sometimes she heard the laugh, the hyena laugh of Friar’s death. She needed to find a saw jockey she could trust, someone to go into her brain and reset everything to factory settings. But she couldn’t afford it now, couldn’t afford the downtime of having her mind rebooted, the drooling, the potty training, the learning to walk all over again.
“The odd thing is,” someone was talking. She’d zoned out, let her thoughts take her away. She brought herself back to the moment, back to the mutilated girl in front of her, the mounds of reeking garbage—a desperate woman turning tricks in a junkyard—the obnoxious cackling of crows, and the spindly man in a saggy gray uniform trying to make sense of it all. McCully, a vulture, private forensics and body auctioneer. Made a living as sell-serve to PIs and then selling the corpses back to the family, if they gave a shit.
“…is that this girl didn’t suffer. They cut her throat, and with something sharp, before they took her apart. The other girls, well, it took them a long time to die.”
“What are you thinking?” she said, mechanically. She didn’t really care; the girl was dead, it wasn’t her mark, time to move on. There were no clues here, hadn’t been any clues before, not so much as a hair or a drop of blood or even a sign of a struggle. The girls had no traces of identifying drugs, no bullet holes or darts, not even particularly high levels of stress chemicals considering how they’d died. She’d pulled all their histories and given them to Jojran to investigate, but she didn’t have any hope. The only thing that seemed to tie the murders together was they’d all had their eyes scooped out. One of the girls had a friend—yes, her eyes had been blue, but that was still hardly evidence. It was entirely possible these murders were just a lark for some psychopath—she’d even called Lou and told him to cancel the chase, just in case—but she didn’t believe it. Too much coincidence. And there was that damn flower.
Deep in her gut, the part of her really steering the ship, she could feel it, feel the flower. It was like a wind chime in a warm breeze. Now it was tinkling, metal pipes gently knocking against each other as she looked down at the eyeless corpse with her veins spread out like angel wings. It touched her just enough to tell her this was important, but it wasn’t the clanging she’d feel if this were her girl. A dumb game of Marco Polo. Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!
“…I’d say she died late last night, early morning. Lucky that none of the elzi got at her, strange even, because this place is crawling with ‘em.” McCully gestured grandly at the panorama of garbage. “They love this place, there’re piles of ‘em here—are you listening to me?”
“Yeah,” she said.
He squinted at her. His face was wrinkly, like a walnut. “I don’t like this,” he said. “A few more of these and the cops’ll have to get involved.”
That would be the end of her case, ruined. They’d storm the slums, kick down doors, round people up, chase every lead—not that too many were presenting themselves as it was—into a rat hole and then find some poor foreign schlep to take the fall and execute him on the evening news.
“What do I owe you?” she asked, wearily. At the time a half a million dollars had seemed pretty close to infinite money, but now having to pay out half the fucking city for tips and leads, Net tracks, thugs, pimps, vultures, dudaws, and mercs, she was pissing cash.
“Two thousand.”
She counted it out. “You gonna take the body?”
“Family’s got nothing. I’ll leave it for the elzi.”
“Okay. You know, the second you get word I want you to call me.”
“You expecting more like this?”
“Yeah.”
He glanced around nervously at the piles of trash. A vulture didn’t spook easy, didn’t go well with poking at corpses and lugging them around, but McCully seemed downright nervous, like whoever did the girl was going to pop out and lop off his dick. Fat chance; he had about the grayest, blandest eyes you could imagine, grayer than his drab vulture onesie.
“Walk away,” he said. “Whatever you’re doing, whatever they’re paying you, walk away.”
“Can’t.”
“You’re in over your head.”
“Boy don’t I know it.”
He glanced around again, conspiratorially, and then leaned in close. “Saru, whoever killed these girls knew what they were doing. I’ve never seen a throat cut like that before. It’s like they used a machine, straight, measured, even. And the way they moved her…” He kept glancing around. Who did he think was listening? But he’d gotten her attention at least. “It, it’s hard to say just from what we have…but it looks like she moved herself.”
“What do you mean?” What did he mean?
“I mean, after they cut her throat and bled her out into the trench, it looks like she stood up and lay down on her own.”
“Is that possible?”
“For an elzi maybe, who knows what keeps them moving, but they’re clumsy…I don’t know who or what could do this, but it stinks of Wekba…this isn’t a normal crime.”
“Well I know that already,” she said crossly, and started walking away. “Keep this quiet,” she yelled over her shoulder. “And let me know when you get the next one.”
An elzi was lying on the hood of her Cadillac, basking in the midday haze like a lizard. She pulled a rusty pipe from a trash pile and used it to pry him off her hood. He fell to the ground and then crawled away on hands and knees, stopping to lick a gum wrapper he’d found. The Caddy was a piece of shit and she hated driving it—stuck in traffic, vulnerable—and paying $400 to fill it up, but cabs wouldn’t run out to the city skirts. Too many cabbies had been called out to nowhere land only to be tapped in the back of the head and have their cars chopped up.
She grumbled the car to life and careened down the dirt path to the exit and onto something resembling a street—more potholes than anything. Halfway to the city center she got a call from Jojran. She switched the Caddy to auto and put Jojran up on the windshield. He used an avatar, an electric blue tiger-man in some sort of Gyptian-looking space suit. His avatar sat in a chair like he was commanding a starship and there were stars flying by in the background. What a fucking joker, but he was good at what he did.
“I’ve found something,” he said. He used his own voice, squeaky, like a ball forgot to drop. It was ridiculous coming from the ultra-masculine tiger body he’d chosen for himself.
“What is it?”
“Come over and I’ll show you.” Always trying to get her to come over. Always trying to get in her pants. Maybe if he came out and said it she’d let him cop a feel but she couldn’t stand his simpering innuendo, his false-confidence suave.
“Just patch me in.”
“Bad idea, this is heavy shit. Might hurt.”
“I can take it.”
“Come on over, it’ll be fun.”
She sighed inwardly. If it was anything interesting it was probably a bad idea to just feed it to her over the Net. Glitched out as she was it could cause her to blow a neuron or if she really was being hacked then they could just lift it off of her. Besides, Jojran always had good booze. She’d raid his bar and skedaddle.
“Alright. Be there in a half hour.”
She kicked it back into manual and revved up to ninety, flying onto the highway and zipping in between the SUVs and trucks, Hathaway chem tankers, minivans, motorcycles, and techie sports cars. Mentally she accessed her account and dropped a few thousand bucks into her exemption fund, just in case a copper was lurking somewhere. Half the fucking cars were ASA vehicles in disguise, and she’d already gone through the hassle once of being caught and having her Caddy seized. She’d had to drop almost ten grand in bribes to get it back—she would’ve let it rust if there hadn’t been about forty grand worth of contraband implants hidden in the snicker case in the fuel tank. A woman in a beat-up go-fuck-yourself-mobile flipped her off as she passed, and the Betty slipped a few centimeters out of its holster. Damn that thing was twitchy.
First exit to downtown she screeched to a stop and got out. She told the Caddy to go back to the garage and prayed it found its way this time. Last week she’d sent it home and it went exploring instead—a typical GPS fuckup—and wedged itself in an alley ten blocks away with blood all over the grill. The dash cam showed an elzi skipping into the highway. Three grand to clean the damn thing and hammer out the dents. She thought again of plans to round up all the elzi and put them on a barge on the river and ship ‘em to Jersey. Or just sink the barge.
Jojran lived in a fancy apartment building off Washington Park. The security guard wouldn’t open the door for her.
“Listen,” she said, pressing the com button and gritting her teeth. “I have an appointment with Alex Ramirez.” She wasn’t sure if that was Jojran’s real name or just an identity he’d stolen for the real world, but it was the name he was using to live in this nice place and she did have every right to be there, and this guy was pissing her off. She could see him through the glass, talking to his sneering compatriot, shaking his head. He wasn’t even responding to her. She knew there was an auto-rifle pointed at her somewhere, loaded with tranqs or rubber bullets or hell it could even be lead. It wouldn’t do her any good to throw a tantrum outside but it might give her some emotional satisfaction. How strong was that glass? Mentally she rifled through the ammo in her holster—she had a few Bob’s Big Boys that were closer to cruise missiles than bullets. Would that do it? She started calculating what her sentence would be. That was the problem with crimes against the rich—they could always outbid you. Not if she solved this case. She could shoot anyone she wanted then. But first she had to get into this fucking building. She called Jojran.
“These fucking pig men won’t let me in,” she said, wishing she could blame them.
“I’ll talk to them,” he said, self-important. She got the strange sense that he had arranged this in some ill-conceived plot to impress her. She saw the one guard’s eyes go unfocused for a second, taking a call, and then he reached down to his console and she heard a buzz as the door unlocked. She strolled in and flashed them a smile.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Sorry for the misunderstanding,” he said. It was clear he still thought she belonged on the other side of the glass. The lobby was so clean and bright, and had abstract paintings on the wall. All the copper was polished and shiny, the uniforms crisp and clean. The guards themselves looked like competent men—tall, fit, poised, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and hard eyed—not the pudgy houseplants you normally saw parked behind a reception desk. The guard’s eyes watched her sign in; she saw the twitch in his jaw as her thumbprint came up as Susan Greere, CPA, CFO, Meadow Media. He knew it was fake as a stripper tit but she was a guest. He walked her to the elevator and stood glaring at her. She glared right back and resisted the urge to flip him off just as the doors sucked closed.
Jojran lived in one of the top quarter suites, an open two-floor affair of dark wood, brushed steel, and wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of the city below—away from the filth of humanity it almost looked nice. The view was a waste as Jojran spent 99 percent of his waking life on the Net—a self-titled super-user, uber, viking, elite, professional masturbator, whatever you called it. He greeted her in a leopard-print silk bathrobe that did little to distract from his height deficit and surplus fat. She hoped to God there were silk boxers on underneath—and why was he wearing just socks?
“Welcome,” he said, dramatically, squeakily. “To my humble abode.”
“Lovely,” she said. She pushed past him and went to the bar, an actual bar in the corner, and began rummaging for the most expensive thing she could find. Dimly it occurred to her that if she solved this case then she could afford to live in a place like this, to stare out the windows at the little people below and drink vodka swirling with pulverized diamonds. She poured herself a glass and drank.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked, as she finished the first glass and started on a second. He was following a script, some rehearsed plan of seduction. There was a twinge of pity for him somewhere in her, but that was about it. If he wanted sex he could buy a girl or a guy or a mountain goat if that tickled his fancy. Whatever need made him act this way toward her was something she couldn’t understand—or entirely afford to neglect. Certainly he didn’t help her for the money; he made enough of that stealing IDs and scraping corporate accounts. Nor did she bring him particularly interesting cases, present case excepted.
“I’ll have this,” she said, now studying a bottle of what looked like potent grain alcohol that had been drunk by beautiful women and then urinated out and distilled again. Would there even be any alcohol left? Worth a shot. She took one. Not bad.
“Ah, yes. I have the full range of Virile Vodkas—I’m something of a connoisseur. Might I tempt you with this?”
He sallied over and found a small bottle of clear glass in the shape of a penis. He poured out a generous glass and handed it to her. She took it and sniffed. Her poison detectors found traces of an aphrodisiac cocktail, a mix of designer chems meant to make her horny, but nothing malicious. They’d been tailored to her to increase potency, which she found oddly touching, and she wondered where he’d gotten a sample of untainted DNA. She had a viral shedder that sprinkled taints of gobbledygook throughout her body so genetics were usually useless against her. Had they failed? Or had he spent the time to go through and extract what he could to match her somatic profile? That was a little creepy. The poison sniffer gave her the green; she could disassemble and neutralize the cocktail. It was simple enough that she copied it to study later, maybe she could reverse engineer it, have it secreted from her lips or pheromones and take a stab at Eugene one day. She sipped.
“Oh that’s very nice,” she said, and commanded her face to blush a little. Might as well play along. She tossed her coat on one of the white leather couches and adjusted her shirt and bra to maximize her cleavage. He noticed. Her scanners swept him, saw the quickening pulse, the anticipation, and the anxiety. For all his skill on the Net he lacked the sophistication of a person-to-person bout and he was naked before her. Another twinge of pity. Oh, well, time to get to the point.
“So what do you have for me?” she asked.
“Huh?” Staring at her tits. “Oh, right. Yeah. It’s interesting.” She could tell it was. He was torn between sharing his news and delaying to try…something with her.
“Oh?” She flattened her tone. “Show me.”
“Okay.”
He sat down on the small couch facing the floor-to-ceiling windows and patted the seat next to him. She poured herself a mix of everything at the bar and sat. He clapped his hands and the room went dark. There was the ozone feel of a Net wave and she found herself standing in Jojran’s vik, his virtual kingdom, which appeared to be some sort of spaceship. He sat in the command chair as the electric blue man-leopard, and she sat at his side. In front of them was a screen that showed stars flying by. She’d been in viks before—most people had some form of escape—but they were usually patchy affairs, phoned-in, cardboard-fake theatre sets that did little more than disguise the ugliness of a sad-sack studio apartment. She’d considered building one herself, putting up some virtual wallpaper or a window or two but she didn’t like the viks; they made it too hard to snatch truth from fiction.
Jojran’s vik was especially unsettling. She knew she was sitting in the dark of his apartment on a too-cozy couch listening to him wheeze. But it took concentration to keep herself there. If she relaxed, let herself drift, she was back on the starship—she could feel the hum of the futuristic engines, the gentle murmur of the virtual crew and the faint blips and beeping. She could see the addictive factor, the power of controlling your reality that made so many poor saps into Net heads, working dead-end jobs, slogging through life just to get enough to pay the connection fee and stay logged in. Here, in this fantasy starship, she could even glimpse the motives that would lead a mind to explore, to push deeper and deeper into the fantasy, into the dark place of the Net that promised to make all dreams come true. What else was an elzi, really, other than a Net head with conviction?
“Do you like this setting?” Jojran asked, anxiously. “If you don’t we can change it. I have a whole bunch. We could go to a forest or I’ve got some abstracts, and one where we fly around in a big feather bed.” He seemed to be hoping for the last one.
“This is fine,” she said tersely. Just being here was making her uneasy. She was pretty sure her hardware was glitched but if it was a hack then sitting in an open connection like this was dangerous. Of course Jojran had security measures and he could protect her, but she didn’t know what she was up against. Even Jojran had never gone farther than peeking through another person’s implants. He’d never tried seeding thoughts or mind control.
“Okay, so I looked up all the girls you gave me.” Their faces appeared in the view screen—their real faces, thank God, from varying IDs, not the mutilated ones. They all had blue eyes. “And it was pretty much a no-go in terms of connection. Different ages, different backgrounds, though nobody especially important. The only connector seemed to be the fact that they had blue eyes.”
“I know all that.”
“Right, but then I found this.”
A sphere appeared on the virtual screen, like a knot of hundreds of pieces of yarn all tangled together. It was absolutely meaningless to her.
“What am I looking at here?”
“A program rendered visually, an AI or bot. People use them to scrub the Net, do searches, machine tasks, but this, this is wild. Usually these’ll have one or two strands but this has hundreds, this is a piece of work, like artistry right here. I’ve been trying to unravel it for days and it’s had some pretty nasty surprises. It tried to send electrical feedback at me once and stop my heart, managed to dodge that one. And half of these are to hide it, to mask its presence. But everything leaves a trace.”
“So, what does this have to do with the girls?”
“This is the connection,” he said excitedly. This is the link between them. I found this strange, let’s call it a presence, whenever I did a search on one of them. Like I found almost exactly what you would expect to find in a textbook search—the birth records, school records if they went to school, taxes, driver’s license registration, job IDs, advertisements for sexual services, in one case. It was about as ordinary as you could get. Except I saw that someone else had been searching for these women, and after some digging I found this bot, tons of these bots going through, running these searches. And so I followed…that was a trip. And I found where they were taking this info. An uber, like me, someone else searching for these girls.”
He couldn’t contain himself any more. With an almost audible whoosh the virtual world vanished and they were sitting back in the living room, squinting in the light. Jojran was practically bouncing up and down with excitement.
“He made a list Saru! A list of these girls. And I found it. I found it!”