He had to bring up the final alteration from his hover vehicle. Thankfully, the building had a freight elevator, because Horn didn’t relish lugging the solid metal chair up the narrow stairway. Throwing a sheet over it to keep the built-in restraints from drawing attention, Horn hustled it up to his door before anyone became interested in what he was doing. Once he had it inside, Horn bolted the chair to the floor, then made sure the restraints were in working order.
The room was ready. Now all Horn needed was a roommate.
He visited half a dozen nightclubs and a dozen restaurants. At each place he had a different story and a different appearance. He had heard of people going to elaborate lengths to disguise themselves, wearing wigs and fake mustaches and rubber scars. Horn, though, always preferred to travel light, and his changes were simpler. His hair color didn’t change, but sometimes it was slicked back, sometimes tousled. At one restaurant he stiffened his posture to his full two-point-one meters, at another he slumped until he appeared to be no more than one-point-seven meters. At one location he was energetic, flailing his hands as he spoke, at another he was solemn and grave. In the end, none of the eighteen people he spoke to would have given the same description of him.
None of them had ever heard the name Henrik Morten. But at least two of them had seen the face. One was a restaurant that Morten had come to once, about three days ago, and not returned since. The other was a nightclub Morten had been to each of the past two nights.
He wouldn’t be there tonight, Horn knew. Morten was too smart to let himself fall into a pattern of visiting the same place too often. It was possible that Morten would never come back to that club at all. But it gave Horn enough to put a wedge in. Now all he had to do was shove.
It’s impossible to spend much time in a nightclub without gaining a radarlike sense for whom to avoid. Those who can’t develop that sense find themselves running through a series of bad encounters, which quickly disenchants them for the clubbing scene.
At Frou-Frou that night, everyone’s radar was telling them to avoid the man hunched over the end of the bar. He was drinking rapidly, not once leaving his stool to dance. His shoulders were hunched, burying his face in his suit jacket. His right foot twitched with nervous irritability. You could tell at first glance that he was a drunk waiting for an excuse to get into a fight.
No one sat within three stools of him, leaving the drunk to twitch over his drink, his eyes scanning restlessly back and forth, up and down the bar.
It was a good disguise, Horn knew, but it made it tough to watch the whole club. He mainly tried to watch the door, catching a quick glimpse while he pretended to only be looking down.
The other trick of this role was drinking enough to be convincing while staying sober enough to do the job. Luckily, Horn had been rehearsing for that part of the role his whole life.
The job of keeping an eye on the door, though, suddenly became unimportant when the trio of young women entered. A blind man could have seen them. They appeared to be dressed in neon, with the brightest parts of their dresses hugging what they believed were their most flattering contours.
Horn had a different sort of radar than the rest of the club-goers, and his went off as soon as the young women entered. He saw them scan the floor, frown a little, and confer with each other through a series of half-hearted shrugs. They strolled the floor for a few minutes, let everyone take a good look at them, danced with a few guys so they’d have the satisfaction of rejecting them when the music stopped, then left.
No one noticed the mean drunk at the end of the bar leave. The three young women didn’t see him carefully trailing behind them.
They visited a second club, with much the same result as the first. In their third club of the night, though, their eyes lit up when they saw someone they recognized on the dance floor. A handsome man with smooth hair, nearly black eyes, a cleft chin and an aristocratic air.
Henrik Morten.
They greeted him enthusiastically, calling him “Vic” (a small deception that made Horn inexplicably angry), and he danced with each of them in turn.
Burton Horn the mean drunk had been replaced by Burton Horn the amiable newcomer. Top shirt button open, jacket over his shoulder, he looked like a recent arrival to the neighborhood who’d just got off his government job and decided to see what the clubs near his new home were like. He made small, completely unmemorable chat with half a dozen people, who all branded him as decent enough but bland. Forgettable.
Morten and his trio played a subtle game of one-upmanship (or, Horn supposed, one-upwomanship) all night, each member of the trio vying to become his favorite for the night. They laughed loudly at his wit, they danced with other men to make him jealous, they whispered things into his ear that Horn was quite grateful he couldn’t hear. In the end, the tallest of the group, a woman with auburn hair, won, at least for this evening. She left with Morten.
Burton Horn followed, regretfully considering that her victory would be short-lived.
“So,” the detective sergeant said. “Want to go over this again?”
The young woman ran a hand through her hair, trying to scratch away the fog in her mind.
“Yeah,” she said. “Me and this guy, well, we were having some drinks, having some laughs, when he asked if I wanted to come back to his place. And I figured, why not?”
“What’s this guy’s name?”
“Victor.”
“Victor what?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know.”
“All right,” the sergeant said. “What happened then?”
“I already told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“We got a cab, and he gave an address up in Gratzstein, then we kinda got distracted in the back. After a while I looked up and it didn’t look like the way to Gratzstein at all, and I said ‘Hey!’ and just about then the driver turned around and I could see something in his hand, a little can. And I don’t know what happened after that.”
“He just reached back and sprayed you?”
“Right.”
“Wasn’t there a divider in the cab?”
This made the woman pause. “Hey… yeah! There was, there was when we got in! But, when he turned, it was gone.” She shrugged. “He must have done something to it.”
“And you didn’t see what?”
“No. We were, you know, distracted.”
“Okay,” the detective said, his voice weary. “He sprayed you. And?”
“I blacked out, I guess. The next thing I know I wake up in the cab, and the sky’s getting light, and there’s this thumping sound coming from the trunk, and my head hurts. I get up, get out of the cab, open the trunk…”
“Open the trunk?”
“Yeah. The keys… I had the keys in my hand when I woke up. The guy, the kidnapper, must have left them there.”
“He left you keys so you could free one of his victims?”
“I guess.”
“World’s nicest kidnapper. Okay, what was in the trunk?”
“This other guy wearing just his underwear, all tied up. I let him loose, we find a patrol, and then I’m here, telling you the same thing over and over.”
The door opened and another detective came in. He leaned over the table and whispered in the detective’s ear, “Got anything?”
“Nope,” he replied. “Your guy?”
“Picked up a fare in the afternoon; that’s the last he remembers before he wakes up in the trunk.”
“What do you think we ought to do?”
“There isn’t much that we can do,” the second detective said. “Get a description of this Victor fellow and put out a missing persons on him, and let these two go.”
44