The black figure stalked after her.
“At this point,” said the ’face, “the model estimates the killer force-marched Montes into the other room, threw her back against the wall, and shot her through the head. Reasons for the change of tactic are still under consideration. It may be that he was concerned the killing would be seen through the window to the street.”
The black figure bent over Montes and hauled her to her feet by the hair. It pinioned her arm into the small of her back and shoved her, struggling, toward the connecting door to the dining room. At the threshold, the two figures froze in tableau.
“Would you like to relocate to view the final sequence?”
Sevgi glanced at Marsalis. He shook his head. “No. Turn it off.”
Montes and her black cutout killer blurred and vanished. Marsalis walked through the space where they’d been, leaving Sevgi in the front room. When she followed, she found him knelt once more by the corpse, apparently reading the scroll-ups.
“See something you like?” It was an old homicide joke, crime scene black humor. It was out of her mouth before she realized she’d said it.
He looked up and seemed to be scanning the room. “I’m going to need to see prior record.”
She blinked at him. “Prior record of what?”
“Her prior record.” He indicated the sprawled corpse. “Montes.”
“Marsalis, she was a fucking housewife.” Angry, she realized, with herself and the ease with which she’d slid back into crime scene macabre. She brought her voice down. “This is a suburban mother of two who sold real estate part-time. What record are you talking about?”
He hesitated. Got up and stared around the room again, as if he couldn’t work out how Montes had come to be living with this décor.
“Marsalis?”
He faced her. “If this woman was a real estate saleswoman, I’m a fucking bonobo. You want to get some air?”
She cranked an eyebrow. “In a virtuality?”
“Figure of speech. There’s got to be a briefing level somewhere in this format. How about we go there?”
The briefing level was cut-rate, a mesa top that you got to from anywhere in the construct by reciting a key code Cranston provided them with. The system switched without any transition you could feel to a viewpoint high up over the desert and the spread of datahomes on the plain below. Over time, it appeared various AFPD detectives had imported their own custom touches, and now the mesa top was littered with favorite armchairs in clashing upholstery, a couple of tatami mats, a hammock strung on two thick steel hooks embedded, startlingly, in floating patches of brickwork, another slung more conventionally between two full-size palm trees, a pool table, and, for some inexplicable reason, a tipped-over antique motorcycle with an ax buried in its fuel tank.
It was very quiet up there, just the wind catching on edges of rock in the cliff face below. Quiet enough that you thought if you listened carefully, you might be able to hear the faint static hiss of the base datasystems turning over. Carl stared down at the adobe structures for a while, not listening for anything, thinking it over. The datahomes seemed very distant, and he supposed that was appropriate. There was nothing here he needed to interest himself in more than superficially. He wondered how much to bother telling Ertekin, how much cooperation he needed to fake to keep her cop instincts cooled.
“Look,” he said finally. “That fight they’ve modeled down there is bullshit. Montes wasn’t a victim, she fought this guy all the way. She knew how to fight. That’s why the slippers came off. She didn’t lose them in the battering, she kicked them off so she could fight better.”
“And you’re basing this on what?”
“Initially, instinct.” He held up a hand to forestall her protest. “Ertekin, this isn’t some fucked-in-the-head serial killer we’re talking about. Merrin came all the way to the Freeport just to kill this woman. That has to make her something special.”
“Maybe so. But it doesn’t make her a combat specialist.”
“No. But her hands do.” He raised both his own hands now, palms toward his face, fingers loosely curled, halfway to a double fist guard. “There’s bone alloy marbling across the knuckles, you can feel it under the skin. Probably calcicrete. That’s combat tech.”
“Or part of a menopausal support regime.”
“At forty-four?”
Ertekin shook her head stubbornly. “I looked through the file last night. There’s nothing about combat training there. And anyway, it doesn’t gel with the genetic trace material under her fingernails. You really think a combat pro would bother scratching her attacker?”
“No. I think she did that when she’d already given up. When she’d already made the decision to let him kill her.”
“Why would…”
He saw the way it dawned on her, the way her brow smoothed out and the heavy-lidded eyes widened slightly. In the Arizona construct sunlight, he realized suddenly that they were irised in flecked amber.
“She knew we’d find it,” she said.
“Yeah.” He looked somberly down at the datahomes again. “Toni here was gathering evidence for us. Just think about that for a moment. This is a woman who knows she’s about to die. A minute or less off her own death, she’s calculating how to take this guy down posthumously. Now, that is either psychotic force of will, or training. Or a bit of both.”
They both stood in silence for a while. He glanced at her again and saw how the wind twitched her hair around the lines of her jaw. Tiny motion, barely there at all, but something about it set off an itching in the pit of his stomach. She must have felt some of it, too, because she turned and caught him looking. He got the full sunlit force of the tiger eyes for a moment, then she looked hurriedly away.
“Gene analysis says no enhancement,” she said. “Standard chromosome set, twenty-three pairs, no anomalies.”
“I didn’t say there would be.” He sighed. “That’s the fucking problem these days. Anything extraordinary shows up in anyone, we all go running to the augment catalog looking for correlation. Got to be something crammed into an Xtrasome, something fucking engineered. No one ever wonders if it might just be good old-fashioned heredity and formative conditioning.”
“That’s because these days it mostly isn’t.”
“Yeah, don’t fucking remind me. Anyone wins anything these days, they’re up there plugging some gene frame consortium as soon as the cameras roll.” Carl lifted his arms in acceptance-speech burlesque. “I’d just like to say I couldn’t have done it without the good people at Amino Solutions. They truly made me what I am today. Yeah, fuck off.”
She was giving him an odd look, he knew.
“What?”
“Nothing. Seems like an odd stance for you to be taking, that’s all.”
“Oh, because I’m a thirteen I’ve got to like this pay-and-load excellence we’re all living with. Listen, Ertekin, they rolled the dice with me just like with you. No one dumped an artificial chromosome into me in vitro. I got twenty-three pairs, just like you, and what I am is written all over them. There’s no optional discard for shit like mine. No knockout sequencer in a hypo they can shoot me up with and make me safe to breed.”