‘You can’t know that,’ said Norton, still angry.
‘No, of course not. But it’s the obvious explanation. He got in through the house defences. Either Montes knew him and let him in, or he gutted the software, in which case he’d been scoping the house well enough to know the systems, so he certainly would have known that there were children, that they’d be back soon. That was his leverage, that was what he used.’
He saw the way a look went between them.
‘It works, up to a point,’ Ertekin said, more to herself than anyone else. ‘But all it does is turn the question around. If he was prepared to use a threat like that, why not use it from scratch? Why bother dancing round the furniture in the first place?’
Carl shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But to me, the shot looks like an execution. The fight must have been something else.’
‘Interrogation? You think this was about extracting a confession?’
Carl thought about it for a moment, staring into the border of glare and gloom where the side of the screen edged out on the wall. Recollection coiled loose like snakes – this woman seemed to dislodge memory in him practically every time she opened her fucking mouth. Back in the jail – did you ever think that? – it was the passageways of the Felipe Souza and the cold inevitability of his thoughts as he waited out the rescue. Now, she had him again. The hot, tiny room in a nameless Tehran backstreet. Blocks of sunlight etched into the floor, the shadow of a single barred window. Stale sweat and the faint aroma of scorched flesh. Discordant screaming from down the hall. Blood on his fist.
‘I don’t think so. There are smarter ways of getting information.’
‘Then what?’ pushed Norton. ‘Just straight sadism? Or is this some kind of ubermensch thing? Brutalism by genetic right.’
Carl met the other man’s eyes for a moment, just to let him know. Norton held his gaze. Carl shrugged.
‘Maybe it was rage,’ he said. ‘For whatever reasons, maybe this Merrin just lost control.’
Ertekin frowned. ‘All right. But then he just, what? Just calmed down and executed her.’
‘Maybe.’
‘That still doesn’t make much sense to me,’ said Norton.
Carl shrugged again, this time dismissive. ‘Why should it?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means, Norton, that at a basic biochemical level, you’re not like Merrin. None of you are. Down in the limbic system where it counts, across the amygdalae and up into the orbitofrontal cortex, Merrin has about a thousand biochemical processes going on that you don’t have.’ Carl had meant to come across calm and detached – social aptitude routines had his body language and speech locked away from confrontational. But outside it all, the weariness in his own voice astounded him. He finished abruptly. ‘Of course it doesn’t make sense to you. You don’t have a map for where this guy is right now.’
Quiet in the softly lit conference room. He could feel Ertekin’s gaze on him like a touch. He looked at his hands.
‘You said he’s killed twenty others apart from this one.’
Norton fielded it. ‘Seventeen confirmed, genetic trace material recovered at the scene. There are another four we’re not so sure about. That’s not including the people he murdered and ate aboard Horkan’s Pride.’
‘Yeah. You got this stuff mapped out? Where he’s been?’
He didn’t look up, but he felt the glance run between them again.
‘Sure,’ said Norton.
He worked the dataslate deck and the image of Toni Montes’ blood went away. In its place, continental North America glowed to life, stitched with highways and slashed red along the excision lines of the Rim States and the Union. The map was punched through with seventeen black squares and four grey, each checked against a thumb-nail victim photo. Carl got up and went to the wall for a closer look. The Angeline Freeport marker showed a laughing Toni Montes, hair styled up for some party and an off-the-shoulder gown. He touched it gently and detailed data scrolled down beneath. Mother, wife, real estate feed host. Corpse.
He looked at the other images pock-marking the map. They were mostly similar, careless snapshots, lives caught in the living. In a couple of cases, the image was an ID holoprint, but mostly it was smiles and squints for the camera, close-cropped to cut family members or friends from the frame. The faces looking down were a mix of races and a range of ages, mid-thirties all the way up to one old man in his late sixties. Married, single, with children, without. Work ranging from datasystems specialties to manual labour.
They had nothing in common but the continent they lived on and the fact they were dead.
He moved back to the West Coast. Norton did something to the dataslate and a Bay Area blow-up slid out on top of the main map. The Horkan’s Pride splashdown was marked in a not-to-scale box just off the coast, eleven faces and names stacked on top of each other beside it. Then three more red squares, all clustered around San Francisco and Oakland. Carl stared at the grouping for a moment, aware at some level, that something didn’t gel. He frowned, touched and read the scroll-down data.
Saw the dates.
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Ertekin moved up behind him. Abruptly, he could smell her. ‘He came back. Two kills, same day Horkan’s Pride hits the water. Then he’s gone, across the frontier into the Republic. Next stop Van Horn, Texas, June 19th. Eddie Tanaka, shot to death outside a cathouse on Interstate 10. And then he’s back in the Bay area again, nearly four months later, October 2nd. What does that suggest to you?’
‘He forgot his wallet?’
‘There you go. I knew there was some reason we hired you.’
Carl twisted and gave her a reproachful look. Something happened in the line of her mouth. He breathed in lightly, trying for her scent again. ‘He’s working off partial data. However he came up with this hit-list, he didn’t have all the names at the start. Why cross into Jesusland in June, when he’s got to come all the way back and do this guy, uh, Whitlock, later. And now we’ve got Montes, she’s down in the Angeline Freeport. That’s a short run down from the Bay, and no frontier checks. He’s making this up as he goes along.’
‘Right. What we figured too.’ Ertekin backed off a little, ended up close to where Norton was sitting. ‘If Jasper Whitlock had been another Eddie Tanaka type, you could maybe have sold me on Merrin not finding him first time around, needing to go back. But Whitlock was a medical services broker. All above board, upright citizen, pillar of the community, ran his own business. Not the sort of guy that’s too hard to find. Merrin shot him sitting behind the desk in his own office. So it’s got to be, Merrin didn’t know he had to kill this guy back in June. He found out later.’
‘Question is where from?’ Carl stared at the continental map, the scattered black flags. ‘He crosses the border to ice Tanaka, goes all the way to Texas. Any sign that he was after information there?’
‘No. Tanaka was strictly a small-time scumbag. Drugs, illicit abortions. The odd smuggled organ deal.’
Norton looked up from the dataslate, face deadpan. ‘In fact, the Jesusland version of a medical services broker.’
‘Well…’
Ertekin scowled. ‘We already chased that connection,’ she told Carl. ‘Tanaka’s got no official medical standing, in the Republic or anywhere else. He was a biohazard engineer by trade—’
‘Rat-catcher,’ supplied Norton.
‘Unemployed anyway for the last two years, living mostly off a string of women out of El Paso and points east. Before that, Houston, similar profile. Best guess is that’s how he got into the abortion provision in the first place. There’s a lot more money in it than—’