Flatlander - Larry Niven [75]
The grid-equipped laser would be less efficient, as a rifle with a silencer is less efficient But the grid would make the murder weapon impossible to identify.
I thought about it and got cold chills. Assassination is already a recognized branch of politics. If this got out— But that was the trouble; someone seemed to have thought of it already. If not, someone would. Someone always did.
I wrote up a memo for Lucas Garner. I couldn’t think of anyone better qualified to deal with this kind of sociological problem.
Nothing else in the stack of printout caught my eye. Later I’d have to go through it in detail. For now I pushed it aside and punched for messages.
Bates, the coroner, had finished the autopsies on the two charred corpses. Nothing new. But records had identified the fingerprints. Two missing persons, disappeared six and eight months ago. Ah ha!
I knew that pattern. I didn’t even look at the names; I just skipped on to the gene coding.
Right. The fingerprints did not match the genes. All twenty fingertips must be transplants. And the man’s scalp was a transplant; his own hair had been blond.
I leaned back in my chair, gazing fondly down at holograms of charred skulls.
You evil sons of bitches. Organleggers, both of you. With all that raw material available, most organleggers change their fingerprints constantly—and their retina prints—but we’d never get prints from those charred eyeballs. So, weird weapon or no, they were ARM business. My business.
And we still didn’t know what had killed them, or who.
It could hardly have been a rival gang. For one thing, there was no competition. There must be plenty of business for every organlegger left alive after the ARM swept through them last year. For another, why had they been dumped on a city slidewalk? Rival organleggers would have taken them apart for their own organ banks. Waste not, want not.
On that same philosophy, I had something to be deeply involved in when the mother hunt broke. Sinclair’s death wasn’t ARM business, and his time compression field wasn’t in my field. This was both.
I wondered what end of the business the dead ones had been in. The file gave their estimated ages: forty for the man, forty-three for the woman, give or take three years each. Too old to be raiding the city street for donors. That takes youth and muscle. I billed them as doctors, culturing the transplants and doing the operations, or salespersons, charged with quietly letting prospective clients know where they could get an operation without waiting two years for the public organ banks to come up with material.
So they’d tried to sell someone a new kidney and had been killed for their impudence. That would make the killer a hero.
So why hide them for three days, then drag them out onto a city slidewalk in the dead of night?
Because they’d been killed with a fearsome new weapon?
I looked at the burned faces and thought: fearsome, right. Whatever did that had to be strictly a murder weapon. As the optical grid over a laser lens would be strictly a murder technique.
So a secretive scientist and his deformed assistant, fearful of rousing the wrath of the villagers, had dithered over the bodies for three days, then disposed of them in that clumsy fashion because they panicked when the bodies started to smell. Maybe.
But a prospective client needn’t have used his shiny new terror weapon. He had only to call the cops after they were gone. It read better if the killer was a prospective donor, he’d fight with anything he could get his hands on.
I flipped back to full shots of the bodies. They looked to be in good condition. Not much flab. You don’t collect a donor by putting an armlock on him; you use a needle gun. But you still need muscle to pick up the body