“But Norton still ranks you?”
Ertekin sighed. Looked out to sea.
“What?”
“Thirteens. You’re all so fucking wired for hierarchy. Who’s in charge? Who’s at the top? Who do I have to dominate? Every detective I ever shared an office with, it—”
She stopped.
For a moment, he thought Norton was there, coming down the beach toward them from the bunkhouse. The mesh cranked, rustily. He flicker-checked the beach, saw nothing. Went back to her face and found her still staring out at the ocean.
“It what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said evenly. “Yeah, Norton ranks me. Norton knows COLIN inside and out. But he’s not a cop and I am.”
“So he defers to you?”
“We cooperate.” She left the sea and met his eyes. “Strange concept for someone like you, I know. But Norton’s got nothing to prove.”
“And a thick head of hair, right?”
The lyric left her looking blank. He guessed she was too young to really remember Angry Young and the Men. Carl owned their last album because, hey, who over the age of forty didn’t, the download went triple platinum as soon as it hit the open stacks. But Ertekin would have been barely out of diapers at the time. He’d only just been old enough himself to take it on board when Angry Young blew his brains out all over the fittings of a Kilburn recording studio. Making a Mess. Right. Black-comic sly and London-gutter cool to the last. He sometimes wondered if Angry Young had known what would happen to sales of Making a Mess when he put the barrel of the frag carbine in his mouth that afternoon, grinned—apparently—at the sound man, and flipped the trigger. Whether he had in fact begun to guess when he’d scrawled out the title track and lyrics a year earlier.
“What’s his hair got to do with it?”
“Well, it’s hardly male-pattern baldness, is it?”
“Hardly….” She got it. “Oh you’re fucking kidding me. You cannot be serious. Marsalis, you don’t have male-pattern baldness.”
“No. But I’m not human.”
It stopped her like a shot from the Haag gun. Even in the last gasp glow from the arc lamps back up on the asphalt, he saw the way her stare tautened as she looked up at him. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as tight.
“You quoting somebody there?”
“Well, yeah.” He chuckled, mostly because it was so good to be out there on the beach with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the sand. “Your guys, for a start.”
She raised an eyebrow. “My guys?”
“Yeah. You’re Turkish, right? Sevgi? Which pretty much makes you a Muslim, I’d guess. Don’t you listen to what your bearded betters tell you about my kind?”
“For your information,” she said thinly, “the last imam I listened to was a woman. She doesn’t have much of a beard.”
Carl shrugged. “Fair enough. I’m just drawing on global media here. Islam, the Vatican, those Jesusland Baptist guys. They’re all singing pretty much the same hymn.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh excuse fucking me.” He caught the flapping edge of his mood and dragged it back into place. You got out of jail today, pal. Tomorrow, you get out of the Republic. Day after that you’re on a suborb home. Just grin and bear it. He pushed out a laugh. “I pretty much do know what I’m talking about, Ertekin. See, I live inside this skin. I was there in ‘93 when Jacobsen came into force. And in case you think this is demob self-pity, it isn’t. We’re not just talking about the thirteens here. In Dubai I saw indentured Thai bonobos disemboweled and strung up outside the brothels they worked in when the shahuda hit town. The ordinary whores they just raped and branded.”
“The shahuda are not—”
“Yeah, yeah. The shahuda are not representative. Heard it. Just like the gladius dei don’t speak for all those peace-loving Catholics out there, and all those Jesusland TV freaks got nothing to do with Christianity, either. It’s all just a big misunderstanding, right. All this slaughter and blind prejudice, these guys just didn’t read promotional literature.”
“You’re talking about fanatical mino—”
“Look, Ertekin.” He found this time the laugh was genuine. “I really don’t care. I’m a free man tonight, got my feet in the sand and everything. You want to do the group-solidarity thing, run salvage on your broken-down patriarchal belief system, you go right ahead. I’ve believed some fucking stupid things in my time. Why should you be any different?”
“I’m not going to discuss my faith with you.”
“Good. Let’s not, then.”
They stood in the sand and listened to the quiet. Surf boomed on a reef somewhere offshore. Closer in, the smaller waves broke creamily in the gloom, made a white-noise hiss as they sucked back.
“How come you knew I was Turkish?” she asked him finally.
He shrugged. “Been there a lot. One time, I had an interpreter called Sevgi.”
“What were you doing in Turkey?”
“What do you think.”
“The tracts?”
He nodded somberly. “Yeah, standard European response. If it’s nasty or inconvenient, park it in eastern Turkey. Too far away to upset anyone who matters, and a long walk west if anybody gets out unauthorized. Which happens enough to keep me going back there a couple of times a year. You from the eastern end?”
“No, I’m from New York.”
“Right.” He nodded. “Sorry. I meant—”
He stopped as her gaze shuttled past him and up the beach. Turned to follow, though long-honed proximity sense already told him this time Norton was there for real. There on the low crest of the dunes, scuffing down through the sand toward them, and, by every physical sign Carl knew how to read, hauling bad news in bulk.
“Toni Montes. Age forty-four, mother of two.” The images flipped up in sequence on the conference room wall-screen as Norton talked. Vaguely handsome Hispanic woman, identity card shot, a strong-boned face fleshing out a little with age, henna-red hair cut short and stylish. flip. Body a graceless tangle in disarrayed skirt and blouse, limned in crime scene white on a polished wood floor. “Shot to death in her home in the Angeline Freeport this evening.” flip. Close-up morgue shot. Face bruised at the mouth, makeup smeared, eyes blown black by the pressure of the head shot that had killed her. The entry wound sat in her forehead like a crater. flip. “Children were out at a swimming class with the father. The house is smart, wired into a securisoft neighborhood net and upgrade-paid for the next three years. Either Merrin broke in with some very sophisticated intrusion gear, or Toni let him in.” flip. Body detail, one mottled flank and the sexless sag of a breast. “There was a fight, he knocked her around, put her on the floor more than once. A couple of her ribs were broken, there’s substantial bruising pretty much everywhere. You saw the face. Blood traces everywhere, too; CSI got it off the couch in the other room, the walls, too, in a couple of places.” flip. Red smears on stucco cream. “Most of it’s hers. Seems like he really went to town.”
“Did he rape her?” Carl asked.
flip.
“No. No detectable sexual assault.”
“Same as the others,” said Sevgi quietly. “Baltimore, Topeka, that shithole little town in Oklahoma. Loam Springs? Whenever he’s killed a woman, it’s been the same thing. Whatever this is about, it isn’t sex.”
flip.
“Siloam Springs,” Norton supplied. “Shithole little town in Arkansas in fact, Sev. Just over the state line, remember?”
“No, I don’t remember.” Ertekin seemed to regret the retort almost immediately. She gestured. The edge dropped out of her voice. “We wired in, Tom. It’s not like there was much chance to get to know the place.”