“You said Forensics have been over the apartment,” she said. “Any chance of seeing that?”
Coyle nodded. “Sure. We all done here?”
“I think so,” said Norton uncomfortably.
Marsalis nodded impassively.
“Full shift, datahome six,” Coyle told the ’face, and the drowned blue murk amped up to a blinding flash of white, then soaked back out into the somber colors of cheap rental accommodation. Driscoll’d either been saving for something better, or maybe didn’t rate home environment as much of a budget priority. The furniture was functional and worn; the walls carried generic corporate promo artwork from what looked like a string of different employers. A window gave them a view of what must be an identical apartment building twenty meters away across an alley.
Sevgi breathed in relief.
“You got matching genetic trace?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Rovayo pointed, and all around the room tiny scuffs of transparent red lit up on the furniture and fittings. “He was definitely here. Used the place for a couple of days at least.”
Marsalis went to the window and peered out. “Any sightings? Eyewitnesses?”
The female Rim detective frowned. “Not much from witnesses, no. These blocks are purpose-built for immigrant labor. Tenant turnover’s high, and people keep pretty much to themselves. There’s some security video from the corridors, but not much of that, either. It looks like he took out most of the surveillance equipment in the building right after he got here. They didn’t get around to fixing it for a couple of weeks.”
“Pretty standard,” Marsalis muttered.
“Yeah, right,” Coyle growled. “And I suppose you don’t got immigrant labor slums in the Euro-fucking-Union.”
The black man flickered a glance at him.
“I was talking about the surveillance takedown. Pretty standard urban penetration procedure.”
“Oh.”
“You want to see some of what we did get?” Rovayo asked. She was already gesturing a viewpatch screen into existence on the empty air. Marsalis shrugged and shifted from the window.
“Sure. Can’t hurt.”
So they all watched at a foreshortening camera angle as Merrin walked gaunt and hollow-eyed through the lobby, stared thoughtfully up at the lens for a moment, and then walked on again. Sevgi, watching Marsalis as well, thought she saw the black man stiffen slightly as Merrin seemed to look up at them all from the screen. She wasn’t sure what he saw there to tighten him like that; maybe just a worthy opponent. For her, the moment flip-flopped abruptly in her head, Merrin looking up, the corpse of Joey Driscoll looking down, corpse and killer, little windows opening out of time to let the dead and destructive peer in. Fucking virtual formats. Copied worlds, no place for anything but ghosts and the machine perfection of the ’faces drifting between, administering it all with the inhuman competence of angels.
She wondered suddenly if that was what the paradise the imams talked about would be like. Ghosts and angels, and no place for anything human or warm.
“We’ve got a problem here,” she said to dispel the sudden, creeping sense of doom. “If this is how Merrin got off Horkan’s Pride, then—”
“Yeah.” Coyle finished it for her. “How does he end up at Ward BioSupply the same afternoon, painting the dock with Ulysses Ward’s blood?”
“More important than how,” said Marsalis quietly. “You might want to wonder why?”
Coyle and Rovayo shared a look. Sevgi wrote the subtitles. Who knows why the fuck an unluck twist does anything? She wasn’t sure if Marsalis caught it, too.
Norton cleared his throat. “Ward was out there. The satellite footage and the filed sub plans prove it. We’ve assumed that was coincidence, his bad luck he happened to be in the region. He rescued Merrin from the wreck and got murdered for his kindness.”
“Big assumption,” said Marsalis, less quietly.
“We didn’t assume anything.” Irritable tiredness in Rovayo’s voice. Now that Sevgi thought about it, neither of the Rim cops looked as if they’d had a lot of sleep recently. “We ran background checks on Ward at the time. COLIN-approved security n-djinn. There’s no evidence of a link to Merrin, or Mars generally.”
“There is now. Maybe you just didn’t dig deep enough.”
Coyle bristled. “What the fuck do you know about it? You some kind of cop all of a sudden?”
“Some kind of, yeah.”
“Marsalis, you’re full of shit. You’re a licensed hit man at best, and from what I hear you weren’t even very good at that. They bailed your ass out of a Florida jail for this job, right?”
Marsalis smiled faintly.
“We’ll go back to Ward,” Rovayo said quickly. She’d stepped subtly into the space between the two men, body language a blend of backing Coyle up and defusing the situation. Sevgi made it as instinctive—you couldn’t brawl in a virtuality, but Rovayo seemed to have forgotten where they were. “We’ll change the protocols, maybe run it through a different n-djinn. We’ll go deeper until we find the link. Now, it’s a given that they knew each other. So it’s probably a safe bet that Ward went out there with the specific intention of bringing Merrin back.”
Coyle nodded. “Only Merrin won’t play ball. He doesn’t show, after what’s happened to him in transit from Mars, he doesn’t trust Ward or anybody else who’s in on this thing. And Ward has a limited window before Filigree Steel shows up; he doesn’t have time to search the hull for the guy he’s supposed to be collecting.”
“Or,” offered Rovayo, “Ward climbs down into the hull and when he sees the mess, he freaks and runs.”
“Yeah, could work that way, too.” Coyle grimaced. “Either way, Merrin finds his own way out, then goes looking for Ward anyway. You know what that sounds like to me? Revenge.”
Sevgi turned to look at Marsalis. “That make sense to you?”
“Well, you know us thirteens.” Marsalis glanced across at Coyle. He burlesqued a caricature Jesusland drawl. “We’re all real irrational when someone pisses us off.”
Coyle shrugged it off. “Yeah. What I heard.”
“Merrin’s just endured seven months in transit,” Norton pointed out. “He’s had to resort to cannibalism to survive. All because someone messed up his cryocap thaw. If he blamed Ward for that—”
“Or if Alicia here is right, and Ward did freak and run—” Coyle gestured. “Come on, however you look at it, this twi…this guy isn’t going to be in the most forgiving of moods. This is payback, pure and simple.”
“Marsalis.” Sevgi tried again. “I asked you what you think. You want to answer my question?”
He met her eyes. Face unreadable. “What do I think? I think we’re wasting our time here.”
Coyle snorted. Rovayo laid a hand on his arm. The black man barely looked in their direction. He took a step across the virtual apartment, faced the screen where Merrin was locked in freeze frame walking away, slipping out of the security camera’s angle of capture.
“He was clear,” he said slowly. “He’d beaten your half-arsed private sector security effort, he’d left them puking their guts up exactly as planned. He’d run rings around them, misdirected everyone’s attention, and then disappeared into local population, just the way he was trained. Going back for Ward meant exposing himself, coming out into the open again.” A long, speculative stare across at Coyle. “When you’re operational in enemy territory, you don’t take risks like that for some kind of revenge kick.”
“Sure,” said Coyle. “Your kind, you’d just let that be. Let the people who abandoned you out there in space get away with it.”
“Who said anything about getting away with it?” Marsalis grinned unpleasantly. “My kind know how to wait, cudlip. My kind would let the people who did this live with the knowledge that we’re coming, let them wake up every day knowing—”
“What did you call me?” It had taken Coyle a moment or two to grasp the unfamiliar insult he’d just been handed.