We went outside, and I waited while Kmuzu brought the car around. When Kmuzu let me out at the station house, I told him to go back home and keep Angel Monroe out of trouble. “And pay attention around Umm Saad and the boy too,” I said. “Friedlander Bey is sure she’s somehow connected to Reda Abu Adil, but she’s playing it very cagey. Maybe you can learn something.”
“I will be your eyes and ears, yaa Sidi,” he said.
As usual, the crowd of hungry young boys was loitering outside the copshop. They’d all begun waving and screaming when they saw my Westphalian sedan pull up to the curb. “O Master!” they cried. “O Compassionate!”
I reached for a handful of coins as I usually did, but then I remembered the Lamb Lady I’d helped the week before. I took out my wallet and dropped a five-kiam bill on each of the kids. “God open upon you,” I said. I was a little embarrassed to see that Kmuzu was watching me closely.
The boys were astonished. One of the older kids took my arm and steered me away from the rest. He was about fifteen years old, and already there was a dark shadow of beard on his narrow face. “My sister would be interested to meet such a generous man,” he said.
“I’m just not interested in meeting your sister.”
He grinned at me. Three of his yellow teeth had been broken off in some fight or accident. “I have a brother as well,” he said. I winced and went past him into the building. Behind me, the boys were yelling my praises. I was real popular with them, at least until tomorrow, when I’d have to buy their respect all over again.
Shaknahyi was waiting for me by the elevator. “Where you at?” he said. It seemed that no matter how early I got to work, Shaknahyi got there earlier.
“Aw right,” I said. Actually, I was still tired and I felt mildly nauseated. I could chip in a couple of daddies that would take care of all that, but Shaknahyi had me intimidated. Around him I functioned with just my natural talents and hoped they were still enough.
It wasn’t that long ago that I prided myself on having an unwired brain as smart and quick as any moddy in the city. Now I was putting all my confidence in the electronics. I’d become afraid of what might happen if I had to face a crisis without them.
“One of these days, we’re gonna have to catch Abu Adil when he’s not chipped in,” said Shaknahyi. “We don’t want to make him suspicious, but he’s got some tough questions to answer.”
“What questions?”
Shaknahyi shrugged. “You’ll hear ’em next time we pass by there.” For some reason, he wasn’t confiding in me any more than Papa had.
Sergeant Catavina found us in the corridor. I didn’t know much about him except he was Hajjar’s right-hand man, and that meant he had to be bent one way or another. He was a short man who lugged around too much weight by about seventy pounds. He had wavy black hair parted by a moddy plug, always with at least one daddy chipped in because he didn’t understand five words in Arabic. It was a total mystery to me why Catavina had come to the city. “Been lookin’ for you two,” he said. His voice was shrill, even filtered through the Arabic-language daddy.
“What is it?” I asked.
Catavina’s predatory brown eyes flicked between me and Shaknahyi. “Just got a tip on a possible homicide.” He handed Shaknahyi a slip of paper with an address on it. “Go take a look.”
“In the Budayeen,” said Shaknahyi.
“Yeah,” said the sergeant.
“Whoever called this in, anybody recognize the voice?”
“Why should anybody recognize the voice?” asked Catavina.
Shaknahyi shrugged. “We got two or three leads like this in the last couple of months, that’s all.”
Catavina looked at me. “He’s one of these conspiracy guys. Sees ’em everywhere.” The sergeant walked away, shaking his head.
Shaknahyi glanced at the address again and jammed the slip of paper into a shirt pocket. “Back of the Budayeen, spitting distance from the graveyard,” he said.
“If it isn’t just a crank call,” I said. “If there is a body in the first place.”
“There will be.”
I followed him down to the garage. We got into our patrol car and cut across the Boulevard il-Jameel and under the big gate. There was a lot of pedestrian traffic on the Street that morning, so Shaknahyi angled south on First Street and then west along one of the narrow, garbage-strewn alleys that wind between the flat-roofed, stucco-fronted houses and the ancient brick tenements. Shaknahyi drove the car up onto the sidewalk. We got out and took a good look at the building. It was a pale green two-story house in terrible disrepair. The entryway and front parlor stank of urine and vomit. The wooden lattices covering the windows had all been smashed some time ago, from the look of things. Everywhere we walked, we crunched broken brick and shards of glass. The place had probably been abandoned for many months, maybe years.
It was very still, the dead hush of a house where the power is off and even the faint whir of motors is missing. As we made our way up from the ground floor to the family’s rooms above, I thought I heard something small and quick scurrying through the trash ahead of us. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, and I missed the sense of calm competence I’d gotten from Complete Guardian.
Shaknahyi and I checked a large bedroom that had once belonged to the owner and his wife, and another room that had been a child’s. We found nothing except more sad destruction. A corner of the house had entirely collapsed, leaving it open to the outside; weather, vermin, and vagrants had completed the ruin of the child’s bedroom. At least here the fresh air had scoured out the sour, musty smell that choked the rest of the house.
We found the corpse in the next room down the hall. It was a young woman’s body, a sexchange named Blanca who used to dance in Frenchy Benoit’s club. I’d known her well enough to say hello, but not much better. She lay on her back, her legs bent and turned to one side, her arms thrown up above her head. Her deep blue eyes were open, staring obliquely at the water-stained ceiling above my shoulder. She was grimacing, as if there’d been something horrible with her in the room that had first terrified her and then killed her.
“This ain’t bothering you, is it?” asked Shaknahyi.
“What you talking about?”
He tapped Blanca’s hand with the toe of his boot. “You’re not gonna throw up or nothing, are you?”
“I seen worse,” I said.
“Just didn’t want you throwing up or nothing.” He bent down beside Blanca. “Blood from her nose and ears. Lips drawn back, fingers clutching like claws. She was
juiced at close range by a good-sized static gun, I’ll bet. Look at her. She hasn’t been dead half an hour.”
“Yeah?”
He lifted her left arm and let it fall. “No stiffness yet. And her flesh is still pink. After you’re dead, gravity makes the blood settle. The medical examiner will be able to tell better.”
Something struck me as kind of odd. “So the call that came into the station—”
“Bet you kiams to kitty cats the killer made the call himself.” He took out his radio and his electronic log.
“Why would a murderer do that?” I asked.
Shaknahyi gazed at me, lost in thought. “The hell should I know?” he said at last. He made a call to Hajjar, asking for a team of detectives. Then he entered a brief report in his log. “Don’t touch nothing,” he said to me without looking up.
He didn’t have to tell me that. “We done here?” I asked.
“Soon as the gold badges show up. In a hurry to travel?”
I didn’t answer. I watched him pocket his electronic log. Then he took out a brown vinyl-covered notebook and a pen and made some more notations. “What’s that for?” I asked.