She took the blunt from him, brusquely. He watched her smoke for a couple of moments in silence. She pretended not to notice.
‘Sevgi,’ he said finally. ‘You can’t tell me you’re happy to walk away, knowing we’ve been played.’
‘Can’t I?’ She met his eyes. Exploded a lungful of smoke at him. ‘You’re wrong, Marsalis. I can walk away from this happy, because the fucked-up psycho who cut Helena Larsen into pieces and ate her is dead. I guess for that, at least, I should thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Yeah. And maybe we don’t know why Merrin came back, and maybe we’ll never know. But I can live with that, just like I lived with more unsolved cases than you’ll ever know when I worked homicide. You don’t always get a clean wrap. Life is messy, and so is crime. Sometimes, you just got to be happy you got the bad guy, and call time on the rest.’
He turned away to look at the sea. ‘Well, that must be a human thing.’
‘Yeah. Must be.’
‘Norton’ll be pleased.’
She rolled her head sideways, blew smoke and nailed him through it with another look. ‘We’re not going to talk about Tom Norton.’
‘Fine. We’re not going to talk about Norton, we’re not going to talk about Ren. We’re not going to talk about anything inconvenient, because you’ve got your monster and that’s all that matters. Christ, no wonder you people are in such a mess.’
Anger ignited behind her eyes.
‘Us people? Fuck you, Marsalis. You know what? Us people are running a more peaceful planet now than the human race has ever fucking seen. There’s prosperity, tolerance, justice—’
‘Not in Florida, that I noticed.’
‘Oh, what do you want? That’s Jesusland. Globally, things are getting better. There’s no fighting in the Middle East—’
‘For the time being.’
‘—no starving in Africa, no war with China—’
‘Only because no one has the guts to take them on.’
‘No. Because we have learnt that taking them on is a losing game. No one wins a war any more. Change is slow, it has to come from within.’
‘Tell that to the black-lab refugees.’
‘Oh, spare me the fucking pseudo-empathy. You could give a shit about some Chinese escapee you never met. I know you, Marsalis. Injustice is personal for guys like you – if it didn’t happen to you or someone you think belongs to you, then it doesn’t touch you at all. You don’t—’
‘It did fucking happen to me!’
The shout ripped loose, floated away in the immensity of the vaulted space. She wondered if the RimSec CSI crew heard it. His hands were on her shoulders, fingers hooked into her flesh, head jutting close, eyes locked into hers. They hadn’t been this close since they fucked, and something deeply buried, some ancestor subroutine in her genes picked up on the proximity and sent the old, confused signals pulsing out.
It was the part of herself she most hated.
She kept the locked stare. Reached up and jabbed the lit ember of the blunt into the back of his hand.
Something detonated in his eyes, inked out just as fast. He unhinged his fingers with a snap. Backed off a fraction at a time. She drove him back with her eyes.
‘Keep your fucking hands off me,’ she hissed.
‘You think—’
His voice was hoarse. He stopped, swallowed and started again.
‘You think I can’t empathise with someone out of the black labs, some gene experiment made flesh? I am them, Sevgi. I mean, what do you think Osprey was? I am a fucking experiment. I grew up in a controlled environment, managed and box-checked by men in fucking suits. I lost—’
He stopped again. This time, his eyes slid away from hers. A faint frown furrowed his brow. For a split second she thought he was going to weep, and something prickled at the base of her own throat in sympathy.
‘Motherfucker,’ he said softly.
She waited, finally had to prompt him. ‘What?’
Marsalis looked at her and his eyes were washed clean of the rage. His voice stayed low.
‘Bambaren,’ he said. ‘Manco fucking Bambaren.’
‘What about him?’
‘He was fucking with me, back at Sacsayhuaman. He thought they took Marisol – my surrogate – away from me when I was fourteen. But that’s Lawman, in Osprey they did it at eleven. Different psych theory.’
‘So?’
‘So he was too close to the detail. It wasn’t just the age, it was the other stuff. He was talking about men in uniforms, debriefing in a steel trailerfab. Osprey’s handlers all wore suits. And we never had any trailers, the whole place was purpose-built and permanent.’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s read about it. Seen footage.’
‘That’s not how it sounded, Sevgi. It sounded personal. As if he’d been involved.’ He sighed. ‘I know. Thirteen paranoia, right?’
She hesitated. ‘It’s pretty thin.’
‘Yeah.’ He looked away from her. Seemed to make an effort, she saw his mouth clamp. He met her eyes again. ‘I’m sorry I grabbed you like that. Thought I had that shit locked down.’
‘’Sokay. Just don’t do it again. Ever.’
He took the blunt from her, very gently. It was down to the stub and smouldering unequally from where she’d stabbed his hand with it. He coaxed a little more from it, drew deep.
‘So what’s going to happen now?’ he asked, voice tight with holding down the smoke.
She grimaced. ‘Aftermath, like I said. We’re going to be chasing the detail for months, but they’ll start to fold the case priority away. Someone somewhere’s going to figure out how to knock off some major unlicensed Marstech again, and we’ll get switched to that. File Merrin for a rainy day.’
‘Yeah. What I thought.’
‘Look, let it go, Carl.’ Impulsively, she reached out and took his hand, the same hand she’d scorched. ‘Just let go and walk away. You’re home free. We’ll look at the familia thing, who knows, maybe we’ll get somewhere with it.’
‘You go down there without me, all you’ll get is killed.’ But he was smiling as he said it. ‘You saw what happened last time.’
She flickered the smile back at him. ‘Well, maybe we’ll be a bit less full frontal in our approach.’
He grunted. Held up the dying blunt, querying. She shook her head, and he just held it there between them for a moment or two. Then he shrugged, took one last toke and pitched it out through the cradle forks, down the long slope to the water.
‘You chase that aftermath,’ he said.
‘We will.’
But out beyond the vault of starboard loading, the waves were starting to pale, black to gunmetal, as the early light of a whole new day crept in.
CHAPTER FORTY
Back at the hotel, he opaqued the windows against the unwelcome dawn. Jet-lag and fight ache stalked him through the darkened suite to the bed. He shed his clothes on the floor and stood staring down at them. S(t)igma, the back of the inmate jacket reminded him in cheery orange. Sevgi Ertekin stood in his thoughts and waved – she’d walked him up to the helipad on Bulgakov’s Cat and seen him off. Was still standing there with one arm raised as the Cat dropped away below and behind the autocopter, visible detail blurring out.
He grimaced, tried to shake the memory off.
He ripped the bed open irritably, crawled in and tugged a sheet across his shoulder.
Sleep came and buried him.