Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [38]
They don’t happen very often.
Then there are all the others. Out of those, one in ten may lumber toward resolution; with a lucky print-hit, a long-shot DNA match, or a last-minute witness falling out of the woodwork. This one in ten may also go down. Sometimes.
The others will not.
The whodunits will stay out there, inviolate and perfect; part of the tapestry of life’s events and only wrong because we say so. People always say that the perfect crime is next to impossible, but that’s a crock of shit. The perfect—in the sense of insoluble—crime happens hundreds of times a day. Mal’s files were like an abstract of his mind; his personality stamped into words. Patient, thorough, comprehensive. His files also documented three such perfect crimes. No witnesses. No prints. No murder weapon. No forensic evidence of any kind. Mal could have worked those cases until the end of time and the murderer would have remained out there, capering and laughing just out of reach behind the curtain of shadow which would always surround him. There was nothing physical to tie the three murders together except the manner in which they were carried out: the frenzied desecration of a female body, and the stealing of their eyes. The eyes might—or might not—be relevant, and could possibly help narrow the field down to a few hundred subjects. Maybe it was a Bright Eyes who had committed the crimes. Mal had obviously thought so, which would have been one of the reasons he’d been following them up. On the other hand this didn’t tally with the NRPD’s apparent attempts to stall the already perfunctory investigations. The police department had no special love of Bright Eyes, and certainly wouldn’t have gone out of their way to prevent one from being caught for red ball crimes. Added to which, eye desecration was a standard MO for the kind of psychotic meltdowns who managed to remain undetected for years. Frankly, it could have been anyone.
I spent two hours, aided by regular slugs of whiskey and distracted by the computer’s swearing as it fended off further viral attacks, trying to find something between the lines of Mal’s reports. There was nothing, no theory that I could get to even beta stage. None of the dead women appeared to share a single friend, ex-boyfriend, job, drug habit or even star-sign. They lived on five different floors, from 38 up to 104. The nearest I came to an insight was the possibility that the victims had been chosen for their complete lack of relation to each other, which pointed to a distressingly organized murderer.
It was nearly ten o’clock before two half sentences finally wandered into each other in my brain like ships colliding in the night. By then the shipping lanes were somewhat fogged by alcohol, and it’s fortunate the sentences found each other at all.
“Yo,” I said, to the screen. “Can you spare a minute?”
The versonality was amusing itself by generating an animated history of its victories against the viruses. Though attractively rendered, it was perhaps rather epic in tone. “Yes,” it said sheepishly. “What do you need?”
“Club Bastard,” I said. “Tell me about it.” An onscreen agent sprinted off to check some database or other, and I took another quick slug of Jack’s. I suddenly knew this was what I had been listening for, was so confident I was already reaching for my cigarettes when the information I’d been looking for came back.
It still came like a bolt from the blue. I stared at the screen, reading the name at the bottom; then I yanked the disk and ran.
54 was dark and intense, most of the ceiling lights broken and every corner a gaggle of dealers. I jumped out of the elevator and ran down the second corridor, hoping the fuck that Shelley was still in. All I needed was a confirmation. I caught a little grief from the homeboys up from the 40s, and flicked my jacket open to reveal what was hanging close to my chest. No big threat in this neighborhood,