Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [21]
Her nav comp found an insertion point in one of the traffic streams, and she took the vehicle up at the steepest angle allowed. They reentered the flow at Level 75, just below the cloud layer. Fifteen minutes later the skimmer was nestling neatly into a parking pod near the upper floors of an expensive resiplex.
“Does he know we’re coming?” I-Five’s sensors were alert as they entered the building. The gleaming metallic walls of the lobby were lit with subtle chromatics, providing an ambience of understated elegance. Jax was abruptly very much aware of the shabbiness of his apparel. The boots, trousers, bloused shirt, and sleeveless fleekskin vest, which had been exactly right to blend in with the riffraff downlevel, here looked distinctly out of place. He shrugged. So much for keeping a low profile.
He felt nervous, on edge. The Force was trying to tell him that something wasn’t right. Something bad had happened in this building, not long ago. But just as the Force could be incredibly explicit with the visions and portents it sometimes granted, so, too, could it be maddeningly vague and inchoate, and this was one of the latter times.
“No,” Dejah said, answering the droid’s question. “I tried to comm him but there was no answer.”
Jax looked at her. “You don’t sound very worried about your partner.”
She smiled thinly back at him as they walked. “That’s because Ves is frequently incommunicado. When he doesn’t reply I assume he’s working. He always works obsessively when he’s upset. It’s his way of dealing with it. And,” she finished, “sometimes the result is his best art.”
They traversed a length of corridor, at the end of which was a portal to a resicube. As she put her palm on the identifier plate, Dejah continued, “He’ll be in his studio. It’s in the rear of the—”
She didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, as the door slid open and she looked inside, she screamed.
The cube’s interior was cream, pearl, and ivory, the furniture and finishings all in shades of white. Which made the bloodstains on the carpet next to Ves Volette’s body stand out in stark and brilliant scarlet.
Prefect Pol Haus of the sector police was a Zabrak: a short and somewhat stocky humanoid whose stubby horns rose from his skull in an untidy arrangement with no discernible growth pattern. This undisciplined look was not confined to his head. Haus was a disreputable-looking specimen from head to toe. His rank was high enough that he no longer needed to wear a uniform, and his attire looked like it had been custom-tailored by a palsy-stricken Dug. Over his clothes he wore a duster afflicted with a profusion of pockets. These seemed able to produce just about anything necessary for investigating a crime scene. He sported no ritual tattoos—another rarity for a Zabrak—and his skin was an unhealthy hue that bespoke a persistent lack of exposure to natural light.
Watching the prefect as he went about his business, Jax didn’t buy into the veneer of disorganization. One did not get to be an official in the planetary police by being lazy, slovenly, or both. The fact that Haus paid so little attention to his appearance suggested that he didn’t have to. That was significant. The fact that Sector Command had sent somebody of his rank to investigate wasn’t a good sign, either. Prefects didn’t leave the station to personally check out routine homicides. Such unpleasantness was normally left to underlings.
Jax and his companions were in the hall outside the cube. The murder scene itself was swarming with forensics droids large and small, which were recording and cataloging everything in sight. Jax had some knowledge of the procedure. Everything that a killer might have come into contact with would be scanned