Dead Mann Walking

12

At this point, it was an equation. Two and two equals four. If Boyle’s attacker and Wilson’s attacker were the same, who were they, and why? For the first time I was thinking maybe Boyle’s siblings weren’t responsible. If that was the case, the victims had to have something in common, other than being headless. I had to find out what it was. Given that I didn’t know squat about Wilson, and Cara wasn’t about to give me an interview, I figured I’d try the Internet.

The library was a hike from police HQ, their Wi-Fi iffy to begin with. My best bet was the River Styx, a coffee/cybershop. It was on the way home, about six blocks west, right on the border of the Bones, where the Bohemian LBs were trying to gentrify. Cute name, Styx, the river separating the living and the dead. Here they pretty much meant it. Chakz were expected to stay on our side of the street, out of the Styx.

By the time I got there, it wasn’t getting any cooler, but night was showing up just the same. The dress code here was more my style than the center of town. In the dark, it’d be easier for me to pass, as long as I didn’t stay long enough for someone to strike up a conversation or get a good whiff of me. Not that I had any rot, but we do smell dead.

I got there just in time to see a familiar chak being shoved out the dark brown door. It was Jonesey, espresso in hand, heat sleeve and travel lid in place. They didn’t throw him out without serving him, which meant Jorelle was on duty as barista. Not Superman’s dad—Jorelle was an acne-faced Frenchman working his way through college. He didn’t mind where his tips came from as long as the little jar got filled.

There was a bit of a bounce to Jonesey’s shamble, so I figured he hadn’t heard about Boyle yet. Then I noticed his other hand was full of flyers. Was he advertising for a new strip joint? I thought about asking, but the living were around. If I was going to get a seat with a computer, I had to act like I didn’t know him.

He knew the score. As we passed, he whispered, “Keep to the back, near the AC vents.”

I slipped among the grain-stained browns that made up the furniture, posts, and walls, got myself a cup of joe from Jorelle, and made sure to tip too much. I almost forgot to take the coffee. I don’t drink it. It was a decent crowd, easy to hide in, so I made my way toward the dark corner where they kept the older rigs. Might as well have been state-of-the-art to me.

Right before I sat, I noticed that one of those flyers Jonesey was carrying had been pasted up on the wall, next to all the ads for local bands, massages, and house sitters. It stood out because of the sloppy handwriting. I stopped in my tracks as I read it.

Join the Dead Man Walk!

Rise and keep rising! Peaceful Chak Rally in

Town Square

Listen to the dead; we are your brothers, your sisters, your mothers, your fathers!

A rally. So the crazy bastard was running with it. I should find him, talk some sense into him. I looked toward the door, but he was gone. By the time I turned back, someone had already torn down the poster. Maybe that problem, at least, would take care of itself, and I had other worries.

The screen on the ancient computer flickered like the lights in a horror-film hallway. I was never much for bells and whistles, but a mouse would have been nice. A touch pad is tough if you don’t have proper hand-eye coordination. But the connection was clean. I logged in with my debit card fast as you please, and winced at the balance. I hadn’t deposited any of Turgeon’s cash yet, and only had enough in my account to pay for fifteen minutes.

I was about to do a search on Wilson when I got a twinge. Not the muscle kind, but the what-am-I-missing kind. Aside from the usual tingles and shakes, every now and then I get this particularly annoying sensation, like an itchy spot in the flow of consciousness that I can’t scratch because my hands are outside my skull.

I was forgetting something. I knew I was forgetting something, something I should check on besides Wilson and Boyle. It was something else. Someone from Bedtown, the hakker attack? No. I kept getting an image of a baby covered in scrambled eggs. Great.

I checked the news pages, hoping to jog my memory. Everyone had an article on the poor dead hakkers. An editorial suggested it should be legalized as a sport, so safety regulations could be standardized.

Nothing rang a bell, so I tried Frank Boyle. Other than today’s reports on the body, there wasn’t much about his afterlife. Never is. Even the Web, for all its porn and piano-playing cats, doesn’t care much about chakz. It wasn’t until I dug deeper, moved back a few years to when he was among the living, that I got some decent hits.

Frank Fulton-Boyle had been an architect, and pretty involved in the community. No shocker, given what I saw at Bedland. Even zombies are creatures of habit. The tall guy I’d seen next to him in the photo was Kendrick Boyle-Fulton. I guess they did the name-swap thing, like John Lennon Ono and Yoko Ono Lennon. I didn’t find anything about the marital disputes Boyle mentioned, but I’d need a police database for that. Not likely, given my loving relationship with Booth.

Kendrick’s murder made a big splash, though. There was even some national coverage. Domestic abuse among gay couples was a curiosity at the time, so the mass media, like a god with ADD, trained its eye on it until the next bleeding lead came along.

I also found a memorial Facebook page. Judging from the date, it was set up shortly after Boyle’s conviction. Funny thing: It was dedicated to Kendrick and Frank. An awful lot of their close friends would not accept that Frank could beat anyone to death.

One of the FB albums had a shot of their adopted son, Duncan, at the funeral, in black suit and tie. Gray faced with mourning, he looked even more like Ashby. A comment from a neighbor said he was to return to Russia, to live with an aunt in Kaliningrad. I thought about shooting him an e-mail, but I could always do that later, if I had a good reason. Until then, why ruin his day?

Couldn’t find a thing about Boyle’s postmortem exoneration, but that wasn’t unusual. No surprise his loving pals didn’t get back in touch, either. Chakz don’t fit back into their former neighborhoods.

I don’t know what I was looking for, but reading about the murder made me antsy. Different sexual preference, different job, and Lenore and I hadn’t had any children, but the beating death, the wrongful conviction cut close to home. Electric-syrup time. Nice and sticky.

I slapped my brain around until it worked its way back to Colin Wilson. A few nanoseconds after I typed his name, I had what we called back in homicide a son-of-a-bitch moment. The first record that popped up was an article from the Fort Hammer Ledger, December 13, 2008, detailing Colin Wilson’s conviction for the “bludgeoning death” of his wife, Cathy.

Golf club. History of domestic violence.

Like I said, son of a bitch.

I could hear Misty saying that the fact that I’d gotten all freaked out about Wilson in the first place could be part of the universe’s plan. Me, I knew my brain just gets stuck on things. I still wasn’t convinced the fact that the same choppers were used meant anything more than a freelance cleanup service. I had to back up a little before I laid one coincidence on top of another.

Could there be more?

Despite the ferals and the hakkers, there are lots of chakz. No one’s counted, probably out of embarrassment, but a big chunk are from the early days, when everyone and his uncle was giddily yanking some favorite relative back from beyond the veil, like Tommy at the morgue. So we weren’t all criminals.

Even so, take any two chakz and the odds aren’t crazy that they were both exonerated for some kind of murder, since murder is usually what gets you executed in the first place. Figuring that eighty percent of victims know their killer, pick any two murder convictions at random, and how hard would it be to draw two who’d offed their significant others?

It’s not fifty-fifty, more like getting a full house—unlikely, but not impossible.

I typed in a search string for “murder AND beating AND spouse AND executed” and got 4.8 million hits. Figured.

But that’s convictions. I had a combo here—two people exonerated for killing their spouses. Adding “exonerated” brought it down to under a million. I tried adding “brought back from dead” and “ripped” and “RAR” but got zilch. Again, for that kind of info, I’d need a police database.

Still, it had to be rare. Hiring an attorney, getting a retrial, finding someone to pay for additional DNA testing cost time and money. If the person closest to you in the world is dead, and everyone else is convinced you did it, who exactly is going to spend that time and money?

Oh, it happens. I don’t know how it worked for Wilson, but Boyle said his father paid for retesting the DNA. For me it was dumb luck, some police brutality, and a DA just starting out. I hear he was fired right after they brought me back.

Wait a minute. There weren’t two; there were three, and only one of us still had his head bone connected to his neck bone: me. What were the odds of that? Could it mean I was next on the hit parade?

Son of a bitch.

I sat there cursing like a bagman until the clock wound down and the computer disconnected. Just as well—people were starting to stare. I shoved my hat on and made for the door, rubbing my neck and wincing the whole way.