Flatlander - Larry Niven [25]
I called down. He was.
I persuaded the computer to compare them with the holos from Monica Apartments.
Nothing. Nobody matched anybody.
I spent the next two hours writing up the Owen Jennison case. A programmer would have to translate it for the machine. I wasn’t that good yet.
We were back with Ordaz’s inconsistent killer.
That and a tangle of dead ends. Owen’s death had bought us a handful of new pictures, pictures which might even be obsolete by now. Organleggers changed their faces at the drop of a hat. I finished the case outline, sent it down to a programmer, and called Julie. I wouldn’t need her protection now.
Julie had left for home.
I started to call Taffy, stopped with her number half-dialed. There are times not to make a phone call. I needed to sulk; I needed a cave to be alone in. My expression would probably have broken a phone screen. Why inflict it on an innocent girl?
I left for home.
It was dark when I reached the street. I rode the pedestrian bridge across the slidewalks, waited for a taxi at the intersection disk. Presently one dropped, the white FREE sign blinking on its belly. I stepped in and deposited my credit card.
Owen had collected his holos from all over the Eurasian continent. Most of them, if not all, had been Loren’s foreign agents. Why had I expected to find them in Los Angeles?
The taxi rose into the white night sky. City lights turned the cloud cover into a flat white dome. We penetrated the clouds and stayed there. The taxi autopilot didn’t care if I had a view or not.
… So what did I have now? Someone among dozens of tenants was a Loren man. That, or Ordaz’s inconsistent killer, the careful one, had left Owen to die for five weeks, alone and unsupervised.
… Was the inconsistent killer so unbelievable?
He was, after all, my own hypothetical Loren. And Loren had committed murder, the ultimate crime. He’d murdered routinely, over and over, with fabulous profits. The ARMs hadn’t been able to touch him. Wasn’t it about time he started getting careless?
Like Graham. How long had Graham been selecting donors among his customers, choosing a few nonentities a year? And then, twice within a few months, he took clients who were missed. Careless.
Most criminals are not too bright. Loren had brains enough, but the men on his payroll would be about average. Loren would deal with the stupid ones, the ones who turned to crime because they didn’t have enough sense to make it in real life.
If a man like Loren got careless, this was how it would happen. Unconsciously he would judge ARM intelligence by his own men. Seduced by an ingenious plan for murder, he might ignore the single loophole and go through with it. With Graham to advise him, he knew more about current addiction than we did, perhaps enough to trust the effects of current addiction on Owen.
Then Owen’s killers had delivered him to his apartment and never seen him again. It was a small gamble Loren had taken, and it had paid off this time.
Next time he’d grow more careless. One day we’d get him.
The taxi settled out of the traffic pattern, touched down on the roof of my apartment building in the Hollywood Hills. I got out and moved toward the elevators.
An elevator opened. Someone stepped out.
Something warned me, something about the way he moved. I turned, quick drawing from the shoulder. The taxi might have made good cover—if it hadn’t been already rising. Other figures had stepped from the shadows.
I think I got a couple before something stung my cheek. Mercy bullets, slivers of crystalline anesthetics melting in my bloodstream. My head spun, and the roof spun, and the centrifugal force dropped me limply to the roof. Shadows loomed above me, then receded to infinity.
Fingers on my scalp shocked me awake.
I woke standing upright, bound like a mummy in soft, swaddling bandages. I couldn’t so much as twitch a muscle below my neck. By the time I knew that much, it was too late. The man