I tilted my chair back and stared up at the ceiling. A flight of grey birds angled overhead in a southward pointing chevron. Their voices were faintly audible, honking to each other. Prescott’s office was environment-formatted, all six internal surfaces projecting virtual images. Currently, her grey metal desk was incongruously positioned halfway down a sloping meadow on which the sun was beginning to decline, complete with a small herd of cattle in the distance and occasional birdsong. The image resolution was some of the best I’d seen.
“Prescott, what can you tell me about Leila Begin?”
The silence that ensued pulled my eyes back down to ground level. Oumou Prescott was staring off into a corner of the field.
“I suppose Kristin Ortega gave you that name,” she said slowly.
“Yeah.” I sat up. “She said it would give me some insight into Bancroft. In fact, she told me to run it by you to see if you rattled.”
Prescott swivelled to face me. “I don’t see how this can have any bearing on the case at hand.”
“Try me.”
“Very well.” There was a snap in her voice as she said it, and a defiant look on her face. “Leila Begin was a prostitute. Maybe still is. Fifty years ago, Bancroft was one of her clients. Through a number of indiscretions, this became known to Miriam Bancroft. The two women met at some function down in San Diego, apparently agreed to go to the bathroom together, and Miriam Bancroft beat the shit out of Leila Begin.”
I studied Prescott’s face across the table, puzzled. “And that’s it?”
“No, that’s not it, Kovacs,” she said tiredly. “Begin was six months pregnant at the time. She lost the child as a result of the beating. You physically can’t fit a spinal stack into a foetus, so that made it real death. Potential three- to five-decade sentence.”
“Was it Bancroft’s baby?”
Prescott shrugged. “Debatable. Begin refused to let them do a gene match on the foetus. Said it was irrelevant who the father was. She probably figured the uncertainty was more valuable from a press point of view than a definite no.”
“Or she was too distraught?”
“Come on, Kovacs.” Prescott jerked a hand irritably at me. “This is an Oakland whore we’re talking about.”
“Did Miriam Bancroft go into storage?”
“No, and that’s where Ortega gets to stick her knife in. Bancroft bought off everybody. The witnesses, the press, even Begin took a pay-off in the end. Settled out of court. Enough to get her a Lloyd’s cloning policy and take her out of the game. Last I heard, she was wearing out her second sleeve somewhere down in Brazil. But this is half a century ago, Kovacs.”
“Were you around?”
“No.” Prescott leaned across the desk. “And neither was Kristin Ortega, which makes it kind of sickening to hear her whining on about it. Oh, I had an earful of it too, when they pulled out of the investigation last month. She never even met Begin.”
“I think it might be a matter of principle,” I said gently. “Is Bancroft still going to prostitutes on a regular basis?”
“That is none of my concern.”
I stuck my finger through the holographic display and watched the coloured files distort around the intrusion. “You might have to make it your concern, counsellor. Sexual jealousy’s a pretty sturdy motive for murder, after all.”
“May I remind you that Miriam Bancroft tested negative on a polygraph when asked that question,” said Prescott sharply.
“I’m not talking about Mrs Bancroft.” I stopped playing with the display and stared across the desk at the lawyer before me. “I’m talking about the other million available orifices out there and the even larger number of partners or blood relatives who might not relish seeing some Meth fucking them. That’s going to have to include some experts on covert penetration, no pun intended, and maybe the odd psychopath or two. In short, someone capable of getting into Bancroft’s house and torching him.”
Off in the distance, one of the cows lowed mournfully.
“What about it, Prescott.” I waved my hand through the holograph. “Anything in here that begins FOR WHAT YOU DID TO MY GIRL, DAUGHTER, SISTER, MOTHER, DELETE AS APPLICABLE?”
I didn’t need her to answer me. I could see it in her face.
With the sun painting slanting stripes across the desk and birdsong in the trees across the meadow, Oumou Prescott bent to the database keyboard and called up a new purple oblong of holographic light on the display. I watched as it bloomed and opened like some Cubist rendition of an orchid. Behind me, another cow voiced its resigned disgruntlement.
I slipped the headset back on.
Chapter Eight
The town was called Ember. I found it on the map, about two hundred kilometres north of Bay City, on the coast road. There was an asymmetrical yellow symbol in the sea next to it.
“Free Trade Enforcer,” said Prescott, peering over my shoulder. “Aircraft carrier. It was the last really big warship anyone ever built. Some idiot ran it aground way back at the start of the Colony years, and the town grew up around the site to cater for the tourists.”
“Tourists?”
She looked at me. “It’s a big ship.”
I hired an ancient ground car from a seedy-looking dealership two blocks down from Prescott’s office and drove north over the rust-coloured suspension bridge. I needed time to think. The coastal highway was poorly maintained but almost deserted so I stuck to the yellow line in the centre of the road and barrelled along at a steady hundred and fifty. The radio yielded a medley of stations whose cultural assumptions were largely above my head, but I finally found a Neo-Maoist propaganda DJ memory-wired into some dissemination satellite that nobody had ever bothered to decommission. The mix of high political sentiment and saccharine karaoke numbers was irresistible. The smell of the passing sea blew in through the open window and the road unwound ahead of me, and for a while I forgot about the Corps and Innenin and everything that had happened since.
By the time I hit the long curve down into Ember, the sun was going down behind the canted angles of the Free Trade Enforcer’s launch deck, and the last of its rays were leaving almost imperceptible pink stains on the surf on either side of the wreck’s shadow. Prescott was right. It was a big ship.
I slowed my speed in deference to the rise of buildings around me, wondering idly how anyone could have been stupid enough to steer a vessel that large so close to shore. Maybe Bancroft knew. He’d probably been around then.
Ember’s main street ran along the seafront the entire length of the town and was separated from the beach by a line of majestic palm trees and a neo-Victorian railing in wrought iron. There were holograph ’casters fixed to the trunks of the palms, all projecting the same image of a woman’s face wreathed with the words SLIP-SLIDE — ANCHANA SALOMAO & THE RIO TOTAL BODY THEATRE. Small knots of people were out, rubbernecking at the images.
I rolled the ground car along the street in low gear, scanning the façades, and finally found what I was looking for about two thirds of the way along the front. I coasted past and parked the car quietly about fifty metres up, sat still for a few minutes to see if anything happened and then, when it didn’t, I got out of the car and walked back along the street.