‘No. But I’m not human.’
It stopped her like a shot from the Haag gun. Even in the last gasp glow from the arc lamps back up on the asphalt, he saw the way her stare tautened as she looked up at him. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as tight.
‘You quoting somebody there?’
‘Well, yeah.’ He chuckled, mostly because it was so good to be out there on the beach with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the sand. ‘Your guys, for a start.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘My guys?’
‘Yeah. You’re Turkish, right? Sevgi? Which pretty much makes you a Muslim, I’d guess. Don’t you listen to what your bearded betters tell you about my kind?’
‘For your information,’ she said thinly, ‘the last imam I listened to was a woman. She doesn’t have much of a beard.’
Carl shrugged. ‘Fair enough. I’m just drawing on global media here. Islam, the Vatican, those Jesusland baptist guys. They’re all singing pretty much the same hymn.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, excuse fucking me.’ He caught the flapping edge of his mood and dragged it back into place. You got out of jail today, pal. Tomorrow, you get out of the Republic. Day after that you’re on a suborb home. Just grin and bear it. He pushed out a laugh. ‘I pretty much do know what I’m talking about, Ertekin. See, I live inside this skin. I was there in ’93 when Jacobsen came into force. And in case you think this is demob self-pity, it isn’t. We’re not just talking about the thirteens here. In Dubai I saw indentured Thai bonobos disembowelled and strung up outside the brothels they worked in when the shahuda hit town. The ordinary whores they just raped and branded.’
‘The shahuda are not—’
‘Yeah, yeah. The shahuda are not representative. Heard it. Just like the gladius dei don’t speak for all those peace-loving Catholics out there, and all those Jesusland TV freaks got nothing to do with Christianity either. It’s all just a big misunderstanding, right. All this slaughter and blind prejudice, these guys just didn’t read promotional literature.’
‘You’re talking about fanatical mino—’
‘Look, Ertekin.’ He found this time the laugh was genuine. ‘I really don’t care. I’m a free man tonight, got my feet in the sand and everything. You want to do the group solidarity thing, run salvage on your broken-down patriarchal belief system, you go right ahead. I’ve believed some fucking stupid things in my time. Why should you be any different?’
‘I’m not going to discuss my faith with you.’
‘Good. Let’s not, then.’
They stood in the sand and listened to the quiet. Surf boomed on a reef somewhere offshore. Closer in, the smaller waves broke creamily in the gloom, made a white noise hiss as they sucked back.
‘How come you knew I was Turkish?’ she asked him finally.
He shrugged. ‘Been there a lot. One time, I had an interpreter called Sevgi.’
‘What were you doing in Turkey?’
‘What do you think?’
‘The tracts?’
He nodded sombrely. ‘Yeah, standard European response. If it’s nasty or inconvenient, park it in eastern Turkey. Too far away to upset anyone who matters, and a long walk west if anybody gets out unauthorised. Which happens enough to keep me going back there a couple of times a year. You from the eastern end?’
‘No, I’m from New York.’
‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘Sorry. I meant—’
He stopped as her gaze shuttled past him and up the beach. Turned to follow, though long-honed proximity sense already told him this time Norton was there for real. There on the low crest of the dunes, scuffing down through the sand towards them and, by every physical sign Carl knew how to read, hauling bad news in bulk.
‘Toni Montes. Age forty-four, mother of two.’ The images flipped up in sequence on the conference room wall-screen as Norton talked. Vaguely handsome Hispanic woman, identity card shot, a strong-boned face fleshing out a little with age, henna-red hair cut short and stylish. flip. Body a graceless tangle in disarrayed skirt and blouse, limned in crime-scene white on a polished wood floor. ‘Shot to death in her home in the Angeline Freeport this evening.’ flip. Close-up morgue shot. Face bruised at the mouth, make-up smeared, eyes blown black by the pressure of the headshot that had killed her. The entry wound sat in her forehead like a crater. flip. ‘Children were out at a swimming class with the father. The house is smart, wired into a securisoft neighbourhood net and upgrade-paid for the next three years. Merrin either broke in with some very sophisticated intrusion gear, or Toni let him in.’ flip. Body detail, one mottled flank and the sexless sag of a breast. ‘There was a fight, he knocked her around, put her on the floor more than once. A couple of her ribs were broken, there’s substantial bruising pretty much everywhere. You saw the face. Blood traces everywhere too, CSI got it off the couch in the other room, the walls too in a couple of places.’ flip. Red smears on stucco cream. ‘Most of it’s hers. Seems like he really went to town.’
‘Did he rape her?’ Carl asked.
flip.
‘No. No detectable sexual assault.’
‘Same as the others,’ said Sevgi quietly. ‘Baltimore, Topeka, that shithole little town in Oklahoma. Loam Springs? Whenever he’s killed a woman, it’s been the same thing. Whatever this is about, it isn’t sex.’
flip.
‘Siloam Springs,’ Norton supplied. ‘Shithole little town in Arkansas in fact, Sev. Just over the state line, remember?’
‘No, I don’t remember.’ Ertekin seemed to regret the retort almost immediately. She gestured. The edge dropped out of her voice. ‘We wired in, Tom. It’s not like there was much chance to get to know the place.’
Norton shrugged. ‘Time enough to decide it was a shithole though, right?’
‘Oh, shut up. It’s all Jesusland, isn’t it?’ Ertekin rubbed at an eye and nodded at the projection wall. ‘Why’d they flag this one up?’
The sequence of images had frozen on another section of pale cream wall, Rorschach-blotched with blood and tissue. A tiny red triangle pulsed on and off in the corner of the screen.
‘Yeah, Angeline PD couldn’t work this one out.’ Norton prodded the dataslate on the table. On the screen, a block of forensic data floated down onto the picture. ‘When Merrin finally killed this woman, he shot her standing upright in the next room. High velocity electromag round, it went right through her head and into the wall behind. The angle suggests he was standing right in front of her. That’s what doesn’t fit. Dying on her knees when she’s finally got no more fight in her, yeah, that I can see. But standing up and just taking it, after the struggle she put up. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.’
‘Yeah, it does.’ Carl paused for a moment, testing the intuition, the lines of force it flowed along. He knew the shape of it, the way his hand knew the butt of the Haag gun. ‘She gave up before she was done, because he threatened her with something worse.’
‘Worse than beating her to death?’ There was an icy anger in the rims of Norton’s eyes as he spoke. Carl couldn’t tell if it extended to him as well as Merrin. ‘You want to tell me what that would be, exactly?’
‘The children,’ said Ertekin quietly.
He nodded. ‘Yeah. Probably the husband as well, but it’s the children that would have clinched it. Playing to her genetic wiring. He told her he’d wait until the children came home.’