“Can I have that back?” Maggie asked. “I want to compare their entry and exit dates to the barge murder dates.”
I passed the sheet of digital paper back to her and lay back in my hammock, thinking it would be tough to get any kind of definitive date matches. Most of the barge murder scenes were found long after the actual murders occurred. Some of the time-of-death estimates had a margin of error of a month or more.
My head hurt. I closed my eyes and tried to close it all out, leaving myself alone with my hollowness.
Maggie whispered, “Are you asleep?”
“No,” I said without opening my eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No.”
“I'm sorry I got you into this.”
“I know.”
“We'll get him, Juno. It'll be over soon.”
I wasn't so confident, but I still said, “Yeah.”
“It'll be over soon,” she repeated.
She was right about that. It was only a matter of time before Ian's crew started asking around Tenttown. Seen an old dog with a shaking splint of a right hand walking around with a long-haired beauty wearing high-priced duds? Shit, they could be surrounding this tent right now. Ian could come barging through those flaps any second with his biceps-by-'roid and his boy-o charm. The possibility that we might survive was growing more remote by the minute. And if we did manage to pull through? That almost scared me more than Ian. What the hell would I do then?
Maggie interrupted my self-administered career counseling. “Pick a name: Peter Wynn or Jacque Benoit.”
“Benoit. What do I win?”
“A stakeout with a lovely lady.”
DECEMBER 4, 2788
I took a seat next to Maggie at the bar. We were both tech-naked. No phones, no weapons, no digital notepads, nothing. You want to surveil an offworlder, you have to go low tech, and there was nothing more low tech than our eyeballs.
We'd been following Jacque Benoit all day. We watched him eat breakfast. We watched him drink coffee on the square. We watched him spend his afternoon meandering through the Phra Kaew market. We watched him hurry to the bank, just barely beating closing time.
He was a regular on Lagarto. He knew where he was going when he walked. The shop owners all knew him, nothing but hugs and smiles when he walked in. Maggie and I would hang across the street while the shop owners would serve him tea and snap their fingers at houseboys who would carry in one high-priced item after another. He made a fair number of purchases: handmade pottery, a set of monitor hide chairs, a wool rug.
We tailed him back to the hotel restaurant, where he was sitting in a group of four men, all offworlders. His hair was more white than blond, and his teeth were whiter still. I looked over the other three, sitting there with their unblemished skin and their whiskerless faces. When they smiled, their faces beamed cool attitudes, and when they talked, they were all debonair charm. They were drinking imported coffee. Just like offworlders to come all the way down to the surface only to drink their orbital-grown coffee.
Maggie and I sat at the bar and tried to blend in. Maggie was wearing a set of whites that we had picked up in Tenttown. Loose-fitting cotton pants, with a matching V-neck top that had embroidered flowers bordering the V. She'd donated her jewelry to a panhandler and dumped her shoes for a pair of jellies. Lastly, she'd pulled her salon 'do back into a pony, and her conversion from blue blood to blue collar was complete. Me, I was dressed like usual, in whites of my own, except I had purchased a cheap panama to cover up the bandaged bald patch on my head.
Maggie held up two fingers for the bartender then turned to me. “I think that's Peter Wynn sitting on his left.”
“Who?”
“The other guy from the list. The other one that matched six murder dates.”
“Was that the largest number of matches?”
“Of the group that's currently onplanet, yes. But of the entire three hundred and forty-two there were three who matched eight of the barge murder dates.”
“You realize how low the odds are that one of these guy's is our serial?”
“Yeah. Maybe we should give up on these guys and go see Liz. This time tomorrow, it'll be too late for Adela.”
“Let's give it another hour before we move on and see if he exhibits any serial killer behavior.”
“And what exactly is serial killer behavior?”
“You know, putting on a necklace made of human ears or masturbating over a dead animal.”
Maggie smiled. I didn't, didn't feel up to it. Making a joke was one thing, but laughing at it was another entirely.
“Ooh, that looks good.” The second Maggie said it, I realized how hungry I was. I looked across the room at the clay oven that served as the restaurant's centerpiece. The cook had just pulled out an earthenware dish. Looked like fish in a brown sauce, spiced with cinnamon and cumin by the smell of it. The cook turned his attention back to the oven and rearranged a series of dishes to get at a round of bread.
Maggie sipped her drink. I saw her studying my untouched glass. “You know my offer's still open, Juno.”
“What offer?”
“You know what offer.”
I did know. She'd been after me almost since we first met. “They'll never take a woman,” I said.
“Why not? Women occupy all kinds of government posts.”
“Not on Lagarto, Maggie. You know how it is. Us Lagartans can't afford to raise our babies in tanks. It's women's bellies here. Women have a different role, a more traditional role. It's what people expect.”
“It doesn't matter what they expect. It's not like people vote for chief of police. It's an appointed post. And stop trying to talk me out of it.”
“Don't get me wrong, Maggie. I'm behind you. I know you'd make a great chief, better than Paul. I just don't see it happening.”
“That's why I need your help. You took over KOP once before.”
“That was Paul.”
“Bullshit. Chief Chang couldn't have done it without you.”
“Sure he could have. There's no shortage of muscle in the force.”
“Can't you see it, Juno? You weren't just muscle, you ran the whole operation. When Chief Chang was giving face time to the public, you were the one who was running the show. The sergeants, the lieutenants, they all reported to you.”
I started thinking that drink was looking pretty good. No. Leave it alone. Don't dull the hollowness. Don't dull her memory. I turned my focus back on the offworld quartet. They were all sitting on one side of the table while one of them held a digital pad out so they could all see.
Maggie kept at me. “Listen, Juno, I know you're resistant because you think things went badly the first time, but you did a lot of good, too. And it can be different this time. When I'm chief, we're going to clean up this city. Just imagine what a clean KOP can do for this place. It will change everything.”
I acted like I wasn't listening, but I was. What else would I do? “What makes you think we'll even survive the next few days?”
“I don't see much point in thinking any other way.”
Our golden boy offworlder took the pad from his Don Juan pal to get a closer look. He handed it back after taking a long look and put his hands up like they were the paws of a begging dog. He panted, his tongue flopping out like a dog's. In fact, it was a dog's tongue; long, wide, and flat. The others laughed lasciviously at his doggie imitation, one of them fake-licking the pad's display, bringing out more laughs.
“What the hell are they looking at?” I asked.
“And why are they using a digital pad?”
Maggie's question was rhetorical. The answer was obvious to both of us. They didn't want anybody to see what they were looking at, otherwise they would be popping up 3 -D holos over their table instead of sharing a single 2 -D pad.