Two more days passed in which he did not achieve anything — except a better understanding of Tina Alderban, whom he found himself spending too much time with. She seemed, with every moment that he was around her, increasingly beautiful, stirring needs in him that he had ignored for quite a long while. At night, when nightmares came, she was not in them — but when he woke, it somehow seemed to him that she was nevertheless connected to them in some fashion. He knew that the stalker in his dream was not Tina, but some connection…
On the evening of the second day after he and Dane had returned from the gypsy camp, he was in Tina's studio looking over a new piece of work that she had almost finished. As they stood side-by-side before the canvas, he thought that he detected an attitude of longing in her that mirrored or at least resembled his own. He turned away from the painting — which she had evidenced disgust with — and took her in his arms, pulled her against him, kissed her. When she responded, her tongue moving between his lips, he let his hands slip slowly down her back until they cupped the full roundness of her buttocks. They stood that way for a long while, going no further, requiring nothing more than that. For St. Cyr it was a revelation, for he reacted to the girl in far more than a physcial way. He wanted to protect her, to hold her against him and share everything that was to come in the future. He was startled by the ferocity of his commitment (Avoid emotional ties.) and then, subsequently, hurt when she stepped away from him and adjusted her blouse, which had slipped out of her shorts.
She said, "You still think I can care for someone, form a normal human relationship?"
"More than ever."
She looked weary. "Then it isn't you. I thought it might be you, but we can't ever be that close."
His mouth was dry when he said, "What? Why not?"
"You're — cold," she said. "Like all the rest of us in this house. You hold back; you don't give yourself. To care, I've got to have someone who can go more than halfway, who can teach me."
"I can," he insisted.
"No. You're too logical, too reserved. It's that bio-computer, I suppose, that makes you that way."
"I can take it off."
"Are you any different when you do?"
"Of course."
"Perhaps you are, subtly," she said, "But I think that the basic coldness remains."
"I'm as emotional as any other man, outside of my cyberdetective role." It had been a long time since anyone had made him feel defensive.
"When you aren't wearing that shell?"
"Yes," he said.
"How often do you wear it?"
"Only when I'm working."
"How often are you on a case?"
"Oh — on the average, three weeks a month or so."
"And you never wear it between assignments?"
"Hardly ever."
"Hardly ever? What does that mean? Sometimes you wear it when you aren't working?"
He remembered the way the customs men had looked at him, their certainty that he depended on the bio-computer shell for his very existence. He did not want to see the same expression on her face. Yet he could not tell her anything but the truth. "Sometimes — I leave it on a day or two past the conclusion of a case."
She turned away from him and looked back at her new painting. "That shell you wear makes you as hollow as the rest of us, as flat and selfish as someone who has been hypno-keyed."
After that, there had been no opportunity to get her in his arms again. He had left her studio shaken, and had experienced the worst nightmare in many years toward the dawn of the next morning.
Rising early because of the nightmare, he bathed and dressed and went into the gardens to inspect the site of Dorothea's murder. He had been there before, as had the police, but he planned this time to make concentric circles around the spot, constantly widening his search pattern until he either found something they had overlooked before or had been from one end of the gardens to the other without luck. Besides, it was something to do while he waited for the killer to make his next move.
The place where the girl's body had been found was still marked by the chemicals the police had used to force the earth to give up secrets — before they discovered it had none to give up. The grass was dead, though tiny green shoots from new seeds had begun to peek out of the ugly stain. St. Cyr moved quickly around the site, covering the ground that he had been over once before, then slowed his pace as he came upon untrodden flowerbeds and walkways where neither he nor the police had done much work.
It was tedious work, but at least it kept his mind occupied while the sun climbed into the sky and began to eat away the empty hours.
Just when he was beginning to miss the breakfast he had not taken time to eat, his legs weary from more than two hours of continuous pacing, the killer made his next move. Something stung St. Cyr in the center of his back, sent warmth through the upper half of his body.
He fell forward to avoid a second shot, if there happened to be one; he hit the earth hard, the shock against the bio-computer shell carried swiftly against his ribs. Unfortunately, the shell was far tougher than he was and did not cushion any of the blow. He scrambled forward toward a line of hedges behind which he could have a little bit of shelter. As he was scrambling through the hedgerow, scratching his face and hands on the brambles, a second dart pricked his right buttock.
On the other side of the hedge, he plucked the long, slim needles from his back and looked at them closely. They were thicker in the middle than on either end and had only a single point, with an almost microscopic hole in the very tip. The charge was held in the middle, in the rounded bulge no wider than a quarter of an inch and about one inch long.
Charge of what, though? Narcotics? If that were the case, then he was in a damn bad way. Strangely, he had not passed out immediately, as he should have. But if he had just been narco-darted, he only had a few precious seconds to do something to save himself.
Had Leon, Dorothea and Betty been snapped full of narcotics before the killer made his move against them? No, that would have showed up in an autopsy.
Perhaps he had not just been sedated, but poisoned. Perhaps in a moment he would go into violent convulsions.
He rolled onto his stomach and wriggled a dozen feet along the hedgerow, spread some of the tightly-packed branches and surveyed the trees and flowers and shrubs across the way. He could not see anyone lurking there. He thought he would have heard them if they had tried to circle him, but he looked behind anyway. The gardens there were also serene.
St. Cyr was still not sleepy.
That worried him.
What the hell was going on?
Your perceptions seem to be deteriorating, the bio-computer said.
"I feel all right."
He should not have spoken so loudly. He did not even need to vocalize communications with the bio-computer pack. Besides, his voice carried remarkably well in the heavily-grown gardens, echoing down the sheltered flagstone walkways.
It is currently only a subtle deterioration.
Poison, he thought.
He got to his knees and stood without much trouble, though for a second or two it seemed to him that the ground had rippled, risen towards him in an effort to keep him from getting away. That was imagination, of course. Looking quickly around, he tried to gauge the nearest exit from the artificial jungle. If he could make the open lawn around the mansion, someone might see him and come to him before it was too late.