Spares

I sat in Howie’s office for a while, skimming Mal’s private files on the facial damage homicides. I tried to follow them from the beginning, starting with the scene reports, but soon lost the plot. Mal was in way over his head, the murder reports impenetrable crystals of obsessive detail. In the end I just pulled the victims’ addresses and got the computer to print them out.

I slipped Mal’s hard disk back into my pocket and went to the storeroom. Suej was sitting on the floor, her back resting against crates of raw materials for salsa. She was trying to read a women’s magazine.

“You haven’t found them,” she said.

“Not yet. I’m looking for them, but I have to work out who killed Mal first. I don’t think it’s the people who owned the Farm.” I paused. “And there are some other things I have to do.”

“Have to?”

For someone who’d spent most of her life in a tunnel, she was pretty hard to fool. “Need to.”

She looked at me. “Are we safe here?”

“As safe as we’re going to be anywhere,” I said, and left. I was remembering fast that the easiest way to behave badly is just to do it quickly. After the door shut behind me I turned and stared at it for a moment. I didn’t know what I was going to do with Suej. I didn’t know what I was going to do about anything, and I hated the fact that the only person looking into Mal’s death was me. It felt like I was living in a cliché, for a start, and I hate doing that. You always know what’s going to happen, and it never rains but it pours.

Howie was sitting over at a table in the corner of the bar, surrounded as usual by a pile of paperwork. I nodded at him and then had a brief contretemps with the bar droid, who insisted on serving me what it deemed to be my favorite drink. Every time I’d talked to it so far I’d had a whiskey, and so it had decided that’s what I wanted now. I didn’t. I wanted a beer, and said so. The droid reminded me that in its experience I’d always had Jack Daniels, and I’d probably prefer one now. I said I wanted a beer. The droid suggested that I was mistaken, and mused that my Preferences file might have become corrupted. In the end, I pulled my gun on him, and he served me a beer with relatively good grace.

“I’m considering getting rid of him,” Howie said as I joined him at his table. “What do you think?”

“Do it,” I said. It must have been great when computers could only fuck you up at work, by pretending they couldn’t find the printer. Now they’re so intelligent they can fuck you up all the time.

Howie shoved a lunchtime news sheet toward me. I scanned the two-line reports and saw that a Minimart in the Portal had been firebombed an hour ago. I pressed the MORE INFORMATION icon and the sheet shimmered blank for a moment before feeding up the rest of the details. There weren’t many: a grayscale photo and six lines of text. It was the same Minimart I’d been to, and the owner was missing presumed dead. No witnesses, naturally. It probably only made the paper because a piece of shrapnel smashed the car window of a passing high-lifer. Howie knew the guy had recognized me on my way back to Mal’s the night before. He hadn’t known what the report’s final line made clear: The Minimart owner had in the past been a known associate of Johnny Vinaldi.

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

“Didn’t think it was,” Howie said, though it had obviously crossed his mind. “Just shows Vinaldi’s problems aren’t getting any better,” he added, trying to look bland as he said it. He knew that I understood he was distantly connected to Vinaldi, and that I appeared not to hold it against him. Other people, notably those going round whacking small business owners, might take a different view.

“Yeah, Mal said something similar. He was equally vague.” I didn’t know whether I was trying to encourage the conversation or end it. Hearing the name from Mal had been one thing; from anyone else it was different. It sparked a mixture of hard-won calm and wordless rage that I didn’t know what to do with.

Howie seemed to want to talk about it. “In the last two weeks, five of Vinaldi’s closest associates have been clipped. I don’t mean losers like the Minimart stooge,” he said, “I’m talking guys who ran most of the thirties and forties. The latest was last night.” I nodded, remembering the report I’d seen on the morning news. “He gets new people in immediately, of course, but it’s rattling him. Also, the new guys are having to learning-curve it, and someone seems to be pushing him pretty hard on all fronts. Deals going sour, DEA agents turning him, the works.”

“So it’s some other lowlife trying to take over his rackets. Vinaldi can cope with that.” I knew from experience just how capable Vinaldi was of dealing with outside interference, and I didn’t want to discuss it.

Howie shook his head. “It looks organized. Bottom line is he’s fine until confidence starts to go. Then the rats will start jumping to whatever new ship hoves in view.”

“Who the fuck could take him on?” I’d tried, with all the so-called resources of the NRPD behind me, and my life would never be the same again.

“That’s what I’d like to know. When I go to the John I have to give his guys twenty per cent of my turds, so I have a vested interest. Probably Vinaldi’d like to know too.”

“And Jack Randall makes three,” I said. “So he can buy them all a cigar.”

Howie smiled painfully. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I finished my beer in a swallow, stood up, and left the bar.

At four o’clock I was on 54, rapping impatiently on my third door of the afternoon. There was singing coming from behind the scarred panel in front of me, so I knew someone was in. A collection of corner boys had gathered fifty yards down the corridor, so I didn’t want to be hanging around outside any longer than I had to. I’d already been to 63 and 38, and both had been a waste of time. The lower of the two apartments had already been looted, and nobody within walking distance would admit to having heard of the victim. I’d walked back to the elevator, eye-fucked all the way, and counted myself lucky just to have gotten back out again in one piece. On 63, I’d talked to the second victim’s parents, both still blank-eyed with shock. They didn’t demand to see a badge, or ask if I thought their daughter’s murderer would be caught. They didn’t know anything about their daughter’s friends, or her job, or her life. She just came and went, sometimes early, sometimes late, until one night she hadn’t come back at all.

Standard responses, no better or worse than usual. I wasn’t expecting anything different on 54, but I kept banging on the door anyway. Eventually it opened, and a stringy black woman in her early twenties stood blinking vaguely at me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

The woman’s eyes were pinned and a muscle in her cheek pulsed gently. She stopped singing slowly, and internalized my question.

“Fuck that shit,” she said. “I live here. Who the hell are you?”

My real question was answered: She was fucked up, but not so much that any answers she gave me wouldn’t be worth listening to. Always assuming I could get her to tell me anything. She didn’t look too tough, but her heart-shaped face was already beginning to hollow out, and junkies don’t trust anyone at all.

“I need to talk to you about the death of Laverne Latoya,” I said. “Can I come inside?” I glanced up the corridor. The guys on the corner were still there. They weren’t coming any closer, but they were standing and watching carefully. Either they knew the woman I was talking to, or they were on a day-trip up from the 40s, and considering robbing both me and the woman’s apartment. Something told me it was the latter, and that they were only holding off because they thought I was a cop.

The woman’s shoulders slumped. “I already told about Verne,” she said, but she took a step back and let me inside. “I’m Shelley,” she added, vaguely. “Verne was my sister.”

The living room looked like shit. The back half was piled high with stuff, and covered with dirty sheets. I knew why; six days ago Laverne had been spread over it in a mess about one inch deep. Shelley was evidently camping in a small area of the remaining floor; witness a pile of clothes, a half-empty bottle of cheap wine, and some hastily hidden works.

“Did you live here with her?”

Shelley shook her head. “Only been here two days. I found her ’cos I came to borrow some money off her but I wasn’t living here then. Came here because I lost my apartment ’cos I’m not working at the moment. I’m a dancer,” she added, trying to be helpful, before tailing off sadly, “like Verne.”

I looked at her. She was dancing now, in a small and helpless way. She was trying to stand upright, but her legs were doing their best to undermine her. Each time one sagged she compensated with the other, in a tiny weaving side-step. Maybe she had been a dancer once, perhaps even a good one—in her state I’m not sure I could have stood up at all. I briefly considered shaking her down for whatever she was holding, but she didn’t look like someone who carried much spare, instead, I offered her a cigarette.

Easy question first: “Who did you talk to?”

“Two guys. Then one guy by himself.”

“The last guy, was he different from the others?”

Shelley nodded, smoke curling up out of her mouth. “Yeah. He was okay. He seemed…” She paused for a moment as if about to say something she barely credited. “He seemed like he wanted to know who did it.”

“He did,” I said. “He was a friend of mine. What about the others?”

“They was police.” She shrugged. I knew what she meant. They came down here because they had to, they called people to vacuum the body up and take it away and then left, never bothering to leave the impression that anything very much would be done about the fact that someone had dismantled her sister.

“Were you good friends with Laverne?” I asked. A calculated question. Over the course of the previous two addresses I seemed to have started remembering how things were done.

Shelley seemed to crumple. She gave up the attempt to stand, and wove toward the one chair which wasn’t covered in crap. The sleeve of her shirt rode up as she sat, revealing a long series of marks. Possibly the reason she lost her job—but if so she had to have been dancing somewhere at least moderately smart. Most places won’t care too much about needle tracks so long as you’ll take everything off and shake yourself in the right directions.

“Yes,” she said eventually, head down.

There followed the kind of story I could probably have filled in for myself. Two girls, growing up in the 40s. Only one of them sexually abused, but the other regularly beaten to shit. Laverne the former—sometimes volunteering to prevent Shelley from getting hit. Mother escaped the 40s through death, and her daughters followed as soon as they could by climbing a couple of floors as strippers. Laverne the better dancer, better hustler; Shelley traipsing behind, pulled in her sister’s tiny, doomed wake.

Then, a month ago, Laverne hooked up with someone. Shelley didn’t know the name, only that the guy had money and that her sister had met him dancing in the 130s. She didn’t see so much of Laverne after that, and started falling deeper into the habits her sister had always somehow kept her out of; doping, and turning tricks to pay for it. As I listened, I could tell that Shelley had known, while she was doing it, that she was starting herself rolling on a slope which got very steep very quickly indeed: and that there’d been nothing she could do about it. Seven days ago a missed shift had left her with no money, and she’d come to Laverne to see about a twenty-dollar loan. She’d found the mess at the far end of the room and nearly run straight back out.

Instead she stayed for a moment, torn between terror and knowing that no one else in the world would bother to report what she was seeing. Then she spotted Laverne’s purse lying down by the wall. Two hundred dollars inside.

“That wasn’t mentioned in the scene report,” I said. Shelley started crying, and I waited until she could hear me. “She would have wanted you to have it,” I added gently.

Shelley looked up, hoping for absolution. Her eyes were coping with her life much better than the rest of her, were still big and clear and brown. I wished for a moment that I could meet this girl’s father, lean in close and teach him a couple of home truths. “You think so?” Shelley asked.

“She was your big sister, wasn’t she?” I said. I watched her eyes as they flicked away, and saw that in time she’d feel okay about it. On the one hand I was glad; on the other I knew that part of what I was doing was getting myself into her confidence, the way you do when you want information out of someone. I didn’t feel great about it. I never had. But that was what the job was about.

In the end there wasn’t much more information to be had. Shelley had called the police, they turned up and went away again. Their questions were perfunctory, and they hadn’t been back. Then yesterday Mal showed up, and that had been different. He tried to find stuff out, got frustrated at Shelley’s answers. Problem was, Shelley really didn’t know much. All you had to do was look at her to see she barely knew anything at all. Like me, like everyone, half the code for her life had been written before she was old enough to know what was going on. All she could do now was watch the lines of instructions play themselves out.

I stood up. Shelley was still perched on the edge of the chair, staring into nothing. It didn’t look like she’d be singing again this afternoon.

“There much of the two hundred left?” tasked.

Shelley gave a small, tight smile without looking up and kept staring at the half-bottle of wine. I took my wallet out and found a hundred-dollar bill.

“Remember what Verne would have told you to do with this,” I said. “What were good things, and what were bad.” I put the money on a shelf in the hallway and left.

92 was another washout; the apartment empty, a “For Rent” sign outside. The neighbor on the right was a bad-tempered old tosser; he said the victim had been working for the Devil in some administrative capacity, possibly opening His mail for Him. On the other hand, he also claimed to be 180 years old, so it’s possible he was as mad as a snake. A battered and yellowing news sheet headline taped to his door said “Suffer the little children”; I couldn’t work out whether this was a plea for sympathy or a heartfelt request. The neighbor on the other side asked to see identification before answering any questions; but one look in his clear, bland eyes told me he had nothing to tell me that he wouldn’t already have spilled to Mal. Asking to see a badge was just another way of saying that he would tell anyone in authority everything he knew, at length and probably more than once.

It was pushing six by the time I made it up to 104 and I was getting thirsty. I told myself that once I’d cased the last address I could go downstairs somewhere and have a drink. Maybe Howie’s, or maybe somewhere I could be alone and think. I crossed the 100 divide via an unorthodox route that cost me a hundred dollars. Normally, you have to apply for a pass, and I wasn’t in the mood for that; not least because I didn’t want the NRPD knowing that I was here.

I was fighting to remain calm, because I. knew that the one thing that scares the shit out of witnesses is the sight of someone who looks like he’s ready to hit them. Being scared just makes them shut up or tell lies—neither any use to me. But in between every intentional thought I had was a reminder that Jenny and David and the others were lost somewhere in New Richmond, and that every minute which ticked by helped count them into some unmarked grave. A call from a phone post to Howie told me what he’d already predicted—none of his contacts had heard anything at all. Also that Suej was wondering where I was, and when I was coming back.

The higher you get in New Richmond the fewer people live on each floor: the ultimate being the 200-plus levels, now the province of just one family. 104 is the lowest of the park floors—forty per cent of the area laid out in nearGrass and sculpted trees. You can’t throw a brick without hitting someone rendering something in watercolors. It’s sometimes fun just to throw the brick anyway. Round the edge of the floor are a string of midrange bistros and clothes stores, all selling the same things at prices that make you want to bark with laughter; the buildings in the center are full of Identi-Kit studio apartments for aspiring young professionals.

Louella Richardson’s apartment was in a small block near the xPress elevator. She’d been found only that morning, and she lived the right side of the line, so I hung outside for a while. It was possible that some cops might still be around, working the scene hard enough to make it look like they tried. When I saw nobody worth noticing after fifteen minutes, I went inside and tramped up the glowing white stairs until I found Louella’s door. No tape across it, as there hadn’t been at any of the others. I waited dutifully for a few minutes after knocking, but nobody answered. A couple of yards away was the door to the next apartment. The name tag under the buzzer told me a Nicholas Golson lived there. I leaned on the bell for a while, and was about to leave when the door opened.

“Jeez, man—there’s no one dead in here, if that’s who you’re trying to wake.”

I turned to see a kid in his early twenties with a foppish wave of brown hair and clothes carefully chosen to look about twice as expensive as they actually were. Behind him stood a woman in front of the bedroom mirror, fixing her lipstick. The sheets on the bed had seen recent action. Young Nicholas was obviously a bit of a lad.

“Not bad,” I said, “but you want to work on making it sound less rehearsed.”

The kid stared at me for a moment, then grinned. The woman walked into the hallway and Golson moved aside to let her pass. “See you later, Jackie.” He winked.

With a roll of her eyes she corrected him. “It’s Sandy.” Fuming quietly, she swayed and tottered off toward the stairs.

“Whatever,” he said, with a vague flap of his hand, and then turned his attention back to me. “What do you want, tall dude?”

The inside of Golson’s apartment was tidier than I expected, presumably because Mom paid for a maid to come in. Maybe also because someone who evidently dedicated so much of his life to encouraging members of the opposite sex to take their clothes off had probably figured out the fact that they liked to be able to find them again afterward. The furniture was white and the carpet red—it looked like the inside of someone’s mouth. Three of the living room’s walls were studded with artificial view panels, each showing a stretch of beach. The sound of waves piped round the room, the ebb and flow exactly matching the movement through the windows. The view looked kind of like one I knew as a child. Except that it had been idealized, which meant it said nothing at all.

On the remaining wall was hung a piece of strange-looking sporting equipment, like a large fiberglass dowsing tool. To loosen him up I asked Golson what it was.

“Wall-diving rod,” he said, enthusiastically. “Bought it yesterday.”

I connected vaguely with a newspost report. “I gather it’s all the rage.”

“Yeah, it’s cool this week. You just grab your rod and leap out the window. Freedom, man—you know what I’m saying?”

“Probably not. How well did you know Louella?”

Golson kicked the end of his bed, activating some inbuilt droid. Thin telescopic hands reached out of either side of the headboard, grabbed the sheets and started making the bed.

Golson winked. “Never know who I might run into later.” I smiled politely, but let him know that I was waiting for an answer. He sighed. “Not that well. Okay, a little bit. We hung occasionally, you know? I already told the cops this.”

“Yeah. But you haven’t told me.”

“Louella was a babe—obviously I’m going to sniff around. But she held it pretty tight, you know—God knows I tried, and I usually get there. So after a while I figure okay, so I’m not going to fuck her. We ended up kind of friends instead.”

“Any idea who might want to kill her?”

“God no, man. I mean, have you seen what she looked like?” He reached across to a bookcase and pulled down a file box. Placing it on the table he started rifling through a collection of maybe a hundred LED-wafer photographs of women. After a moment he tutted, and pulled out a photo of the girl who’d just left. He showed me the back of the picture: The name “Sandy” was clearly written there. “Got to get better at remembering that shit,” he said, obviously pained at his incompetence.

“Louella,” I reminded him.

“Oh, yeah. Here.” I took the picture he handed to me. It showed Louella Richardson looking rich and beautiful and intelligent. There was an extraordinary gloss to her bearing, as if her ancestors hadn’t so much crawled out of the primeval swamp as taken a cab. Golson shrugged. “Who’d be selfish enough to scrub something like that off the planet? I mean, if you can’t score yourself, you at least got to have the grace to leave it around for the other guys to have a try—am I right?”

Somewhere during the last sentence or so I’d remembered that I wasn’t a cop anymore, and that I didn’t have to be polite to everyone above the 100 line. Nevertheless, I smiled thinly, and didn’t hit him or anything.

“So tell me something,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like what Louella was doing in the last week, who she might have seen.”

“Hell, Louella saw everyone, man—you know how it is.”

“No, I don’t,” I said firmly, wishing that Mal, with his infinite patience, had been here first and written a report for me to read. “What did she do for a living?”

“She was a Shopping Explainer,” he said, and I nodded. Rich people who sometimes couldn’t come up with an excuse for buying something they wanted often hired people to come up with an excuse for them. Often the Explainers worked on staff, helping them with every little purchase; sometimes they were freelance, and only called in for unusual extravagances. Louella was the latter, and had a number of clients in the 160s and above. So, yes, in the world view of an airhead like Golson, she saw everyone. Everyone who counted.

“Socializing,” I said. “Who did she hang out with?”

“Her friends, of course,” Golson said, clearly baffled. I checked my mental question gun, and found I only had about two patience bullets left. After that, it was going to be live ammunition.

“Okay. You, who the fuck else?” I asked.

“Well, Mandy and Val and Zaz and Ness and Del and Jo and Kate.”

My last patience bullet. “Remember any guys’ names?”

“Well, no—I mean, who cares, right?” Suddenly sensing that I was reaching critical mass, Golson apparently decided to throw me something real. “Look. The last couple of weeks she’d been going to this new club. That’s all I know. I only went there once—it was kind of ganchy.”

I decided against asking what “ganchy” meant. I found I didn’t care. “What was it called?”

“Club Bastard, and I can’t remember where it was because I was totally loaded.”

Golson saw me to the door, prattling about wall-diving. I tried not to hold the fact that he was a waste of DNA against him, and gave him Howie’s number—in case anything unusual happened, or in the unlikely event he remembered something more significant than Sandy’s bra size.

As he shut the door behind me I noticed he wore thick silver rings on each finger of his left hand, and wondered how long Shelley Latoya could live on what they’d cost. Then I walked straight to the elevator and Beaded down to a world I understood.

About nine o’clock, something tickled at the back of my rusty brain. At first it was slow and indistinct, and I dismissed it as oncoming drunkenness. All the other evidence certainly pointed that way. But it was insistent, and I started to listen, still running my eyes over Mal’s reports but in reality waiting for some inner voice to speak. I hoped it would be loud enough for me to hear. All I could sense with any certainty was that it was something very, very straightforward I had missed.

I was slumped by then in The Ideal Mausoleum, and had been for several hours. The IM was perfect for my needs. It was dark, played old music very loudly, and had a row of Matrix terminals for hire in the back. When I arrived I asked the barman to give me all the Jack Daniels they had and took it with me into the gloom. Two of the terminals were broken, and some kid was checking out alt seal-culling on the other, but I encouraged him to leave.

I took Mal’s disk out of my pocket and jacked it in. While it negotiated with the host frame I took a long sip of Jack’s and peered around me into the gloom. I’d remembered the place as a dive, and a dive it surely was. I wouldn’t have trusted anyone I could see here to be able to spell their name right at the first attempt, and a bored cop could have busted over half of them for dealing and everyone else for possession. Luckily, nobody was interested in that kind of law enforcement anymore, which made it a perfect place to hang out; the patrons were all far too wasted to be into anything which would attract unwelcome attention.

“Jesus—this place is filthy.”

“How can you tell?” Tasked, turning my attention to my screen, which now showed Mal’s desktop environment. The Ideal Mausoleum is so dark I’d never been able to tell what color the floor was.

“This terminal’s swarming with viruses,” Mal’s versonality said. “Nice place you’ve brought me to.”

“You can handle it. Any news?”

“Still no match on the dead guy, they still don’t know Mal’s dead, and the murder reports are still locked. I’d advise against trying anything fancy on this terminal, because half these viruses are probably reflecting the datastream to hackers. Ow—piss off.”

I watched as the computer stomped on a little bitey virus that was trying to chew its way into his RAM.

“All I want is the stuff on Mal’s hard disk,” I said, when the dogfight appeared to be over. “Can you keep the Mongol hordes out for an hour or so?”

The computer’s voice changed momentarily to a high-pitched warble. “You’re a big hairy knobface,” it sang.

Mal’s versonality came back a second later, sounding more than a little pissed. “Another poxing virus. It’s dead now, little fucker. Yeah, I can—but don’t take too long.”

As the computer settled down to swatting the products of juvenile minds, I watched Mal’s files scroll onto the screen.

Mal’s reports documented, in page after page of detail, one of the essential truths of homicide investigation.

Real murders don’t get solved.

Let me explain. There are two types of murder. There are those where you catch someone red-handed, on video, with fifteen on-site witnesses and a murder weapon in the killer’s hand. These will go down.

They don’t happen very often.

Then there are all the others. Out of those, one in ten may lumber toward resolution; with a lucky print-hit, a long-shot DNA match, or a last-minute witness falling out of the woodwork. This one in ten may also go down. Sometimes.

The others will not.

The whodunits will stay out there, inviolate and perfect; part of the tapestry of life’s events and only wrong because we say so. People always say that the perfect crime is next to impossible, but that’s a crock of shit. The perfect—in the sense of insoluble—crime happens hundreds of times a day. Mal’s files were like an abstract of his mind; his personality stamped into words. Patient, thorough, comprehensive. His files also documented three such perfect crimes. No witnesses. No prints. No murder weapon. No forensic evidence of any kind. Mal could have worked those cases until the end of time and the murderer would have remained out there, capering and laughing just out of reach behind the curtain of shadow which would always surround him. There was nothing physical to tie the three murders together except the manner in which they were carried out: the frenzied desecration of a female body, and the stealing of their eyes. The eyes might—or might not—be relevant, and could possibly help narrow the field down to a few hundred subjects. Maybe it was a Bright Eyes who had committed the crimes. Mal had obviously thought so, which would have been one of the reasons he’d been following them up. On the other hand this didn’t tally with the NRPD’s apparent attempts to stall the already perfunctory investigations. The police department had no special love of Bright Eyes, and certainly wouldn’t have gone out of their way to prevent one from being caught for red ball crimes. Added to which, eye desecration was a standard MO for the kind of psychotic meltdowns who managed to remain undetected for years. Frankly, it could have been anyone.

I spent two hours, aided by regular slugs of whiskey and distracted by the computer’s swearing as it fended off further viral attacks, trying to find something between the lines of Mal’s reports. There was nothing, no theory that I could get to even beta stage. None of the dead women appeared to share a single friend, ex-boyfriend, job, drug habit or even star-sign. They lived on five different floors, from 38 up to 104. The nearest I came to an insight was the possibility that the victims had been chosen for their complete lack of relation to each other, which pointed to a distressingly organized murderer.

It was nearly ten o’clock before two half sentences finally wandered into each other in my brain like ships colliding in the night. By then the shipping lanes were somewhat fogged by alcohol, and it’s fortunate the sentences found each other at all.

“Yo,” I said, to the screen. “Can you spare a minute?”

The versonality was amusing itself by generating an animated history of its victories against the viruses. Though attractively rendered, it was perhaps rather epic in tone. “Yes,” it said sheepishly. “What do you need?”

“Club Bastard,” I said. “Tell me about it.” An onscreen agent sprinted off to check some database or other, and I took another quick slug of Jack’s. I suddenly knew this was what I had been listening for, was so confident I was already reaching for my cigarettes when the information I’d been looking for came back.

It still came like a bolt from the blue. I stared at the screen, reading the name at the bottom; then I yanked the disk and ran.

54 was dark and intense, most of the ceiling lights broken and every corner a gaggle of dealers. I jumped out of the elevator and ran down the second corridor, hoping the fuck that Shelley was still in. All I needed was a confirmation. I caught a little grief from the homeboys up from the 40s, and flicked my jacket open to reveal what was hanging close to my chest. No big threat in this neighborhood, because most of them were probably even more heavily armed than I was; but no one wants to die unless they absolutely have to, not even now.

I nearly tripped turning into the final corridor, some animal getting under my feet. I turned, trying to see what it was, but it disappeared round a corner. It looked a little pale and strange to me, but presumably that was an effect of the half-light Probably it was just some stray cat, though it seemed to scuttle rather than run. There was no singing behind Shelley’s door now, and no answer when I banged on it. I called her name and pressed my ear close to the wood, but couldn’t hear anything inside. I gave her a minute, then I pulled my gun and kicked it in.

The hallway was dark but a flicker of orange light came from the room down the end. I ran in to find a candle burning in the middle of silence, and a slim brown body lying curled round it. A needle still hung out of the artery in her thigh, and the candle had an inch to go. When I rolled her onto her back I saw that her eyes were tilted completely up under the lids, and a trickle of drying vomit ran out of her mouth and slid off her face.

Shelley Latoya was about as dead as you can get, outlasted by a cheap candle that was dripping milky wax onto the carpet. Head thumping, my vision blurred orange by Jack’s and the guttering flame, I searched the area around her until I found the foil packet. It was empty, but one taste told me what I already suspected. Rapt, hardly stepped on at all. A tiny spark of darkness flared on my tongue and then disappeared, leaving me next to a cooling corpse and without the confirmation I needed.

I held the foil next to the candle and found the name of a club embossed in the back: “Weasel Enemas.” Maybe if I’d just thought about the information I’d gathered I could have worked it out more quickly. Perhaps if I’d been thinking less about having a drink I might have paid better attention to Golson. Maybe not. My whole day had been predicated on just seeing the murder sites, and then relying upon Mal’s reports. How was I to know that two half sentences would have been enough, and that burying myself in real information would just blind me?

Laverne Latoya had been seeing a man she met in a club in the 130s. Okay, there were probably a hundred clubs in that area, but Club Bastard, where Louella Richardson had been spending her time in the weeks before she died, was on 135. It catered to aspiring young things from the low hundreds and high-lifers slumming it down from the 140s. It also—the database had said-featured dancers, with strippers after midnight.

Not many people deal Rapt. It isn’t very popular. It’s kind of a heavy experience. Weasel Enemas was owned by a different guy than Club Bastard was, but that was exactly the point: If you were dealing drugs out of your club you didn’t pack them in something with your own logo on it. You stole stuff from a competing joint, and sold them in that for the cops to find.

I’d come to see if Club Bastard rang any bells with Shelley. What lay in front of me wouldn’t stand up in court as the answer, but was answer enough for me. There had never been any question that this was going anywhere near a court anyway. Two women had died through their contact with just one club. The computer had supplied me with the name of the man who owned it, and I felt my head glow like a bulb as I knew what I was going to do.

First I pulled a sheet from the pile at the back and laid it over the body, then I snuffed out the candle and stood for a moment in darkness. I was drunk, and angry, but not stupid enough to be able to ignore a simple fact. I couldn’t blame Shelley’s death on anyone else. I couldn’t blame it on anything except a hundred-dollar bill left by someone who thought he was doing her a favor.

But I didn’t know how to punish myself for that, and so someone else was going to have to do.