Part 7 (1/2)
She glared at him, then took a deep breath. ”I'm giving you my superficial understanding of all of this.
I'm new to the Disty, unfortunately. If I weren't, I wouldn't be in this mess. All I can tell you is what I learned from some Sahara Dome official who spoke to the Disty and then talked to me. Right now, I'm so contaminated that I can't talk to any Disty.”
Flint frowned. She had said something about contamination, but that had been when he wasn't paying a lot of attention.
”Anyway, the Disty have a way of cleansing areas where corpses are found. Family members of the deceased do some kind of thing with fire and sixteen days of silence, and sprinkling a special kind of liquid on the spot. Then no one goes near the site for a month or more, depending on the length of time the corpse spent there. Finally, some other Disty is sent in to make sure the decontamination happened. If he clears it, then the area's safe again.”
”And the people who are contaminated?” Flint asked.
”They have to go through some other kind of ritual, also with the family of the deceased. No one would explain that to me, except to say it's harmless.”
Flint had heard of stranger rituals, so he didn't doubt that this one could exist. But he would look up the Disty death contamination rites when Costard left, whether he took the case or not. His curiosity again. It always got the best of him.
”What happens if the family members can't be found?” Flint asked.
She blinked rapidly, as if her eyes were filling with tears. She bent her head, wiped at the corner of one eye, and then took a deep breath.
”Ms. Costard?” Flint made certain his voice was harsh. He couldn't give her sympathy at this moment. He had a hunch she would respond to it badly.
She nodded once, acknowledging him but not looking up. Then she held up a hand, took another deep breath, and raised her head.
Her eyes were red and so was the tip of her nose. She looked helpless and frightened. He had a hunch he was finally seeing her core personality. She was overwhelmed and out of her league, and from what he had listened to in her story, no one had tried to make things easier for her.
He wouldn't either, just by the nature of his job. Yet for the first time since she had come in the door, he felt compa.s.sion for her.
”What do they do?” he asked again.
She swallowed hard, squared her shoulders, and straightened her spine. She raised her chin slightly. ”They use the people involved with the body-and I use 'people' loosely. It could mean Disty, it could mean humans, it could mean Revs-anyone who was near the body when it was found- and these people have to do the decontamination work.”
Her voice hitched and she stopped. When it became clear that she wasn't going to say anything else, he spoke.
”Is this decontamination work a ritual as well?”
She nodded. ”I wasn't told the details, so I looked them up. Torture-that's what we'd call it. The use of bodily fluids-not necessarily blood, although that's the preferred fluid from humans-combined with an exchange of body parts, detached, and some other really grotesque things that I don't want to describe. I don't even want to think about them.”
Her voice sped up as she recounted this. She had threaded her fingers together and she was twisting them, twisting, twisting, twisting, as if the very act could make her words disappear.
”I'm told that not many humans survive this decontamination process.”
”What about Disty?” he asked. ”Do they survive?”
She shrugged. ”I didn't ask.”
He leaned back in his chair and templed his fingers, tapping them against his chin. He had seen the results of Disty vengeance killings-corpses splayed, their intestines removed and used to decorate a room. The blood spatter around the human victims of vengeance killings always indicated the victims were alive while they were being disemboweled.
If the Disty could do that, they could come up with equally vicious things for a ”decontamination ritual.”
”How long do you have before the Disty conclude that the children no longer exist?” he asked.
”Initially, only a month,” she said. ”But I was able to show the Disty that Jrgen's body had been under a building for thirty years and that she hadn't been killed on site.”
”Show them?” Flint asked. ”I thought you couldn't interact with them because of your contamination.”
”Apparently, contamination doesn't spread to equipment,” she said. ”Or at least to vids. I made a recording of my evidence, explaining everything clearly, and the SDHPD showed that recording to a Disty Death Squad. The Death Squad determined that the contamination wasn't quite as bad if the body had been killed off-site, so they gave us an extension.”
”An extension?” he asked. ”As if you hadn't paid your rent on time?”
She gave him a distracted smile. ”Not quite like that. Their laws determine the level of contamination and the time it takes to recover. The longer the corpse remains at its place of death, the more the contamination grows, but apparently, the corpse takes less contamination with it when it moves to a new location. The thirty-year time span was shorter than the Disty had expected, and the fact that Jrgen was killed off-site took some pressure down too. So we have six months to find family members.”
”Six months,” Flint repeated, thinking about the magnitude of the case. He hadn't had a case this involved, but during his training, Paloma had told him of cases she had worked on that had taken years to resolve. She had given him a rule of thumb: The more alien groups involved, the more off-Moon locations involved, the longer the investigation would take.
”It's not really six months anymore,” Costard said. ”I used up a week making my determinations, and the Disty used another week before they decided to believe me. Then I've spent another week searching for a Retrieval Artist to take my case.”
”There aren't any Trackers on staff at the Sahara Dome Human Police Department?” Flint asked. A lot of departments all over the galaxy had Trackers, many of whom were cops as well.
She shook her head. ”The SDHPD is a for-show police force. They keep the humans in line for the Disty and take care of human-on-human crime, which the Disty don't want to deal with. But anything that happens outside the Dome isn't the Disty's concern-unless it had some kind of impact on them, and then they handle it, in ways that I don't entirely understand.”
Flint flashed on the last vengeance killing he had seen. Three humans, murdered in a s.p.a.ce yacht, their bodies splayed in typical Disty style. The mess had been awful. The stench had been worse.
”You could hire a private detective,” Flint said. ”It would be cheaper.”
”Jrgen disappeared,” Costard said.
”Jrgen tried tried to disappear,” Flint said. ”From what you tell me, she failed. Chances are the children failed as well. For all you know, they could be buried under nearby buildings.” to disappear,” Flint said. ”From what you tell me, she failed. Chances are the children failed as well. For all you know, they could be buried under nearby buildings.”
Costard shuddered. ”I like to think they disappeared.”
Flint stood. The walls of the office felt closer than they had, probably because of all the talk of the Disty and their nasty ways.
”I used to be a police officer, Ms. Costard,” he said. ”You learn pretty quickly that the most obvious solution is usually what happened. The obvious thing here is that Jrgen and her children were caught before they could finalize their disappearance, they got killed, and their bodies were scattered on building sites. A good private detective can find this out for you, and charge you so much less than I can.”
”But what happens if you're wrong, Mr. Flint?” she asked. ”What happens if the children did disappear? Aren't I better off hiring you, a man who is trained as a detective and who knows how to find the Disappeared, than hiring someone who could screw up a disappearance investigation?”
He said nothing. She had finally caught his attention. All of it.
”To me,” she said, ”the worst-case scenario is that Jrgen managed to get her children away from the M'Kri Tribesmen but wasn't able to save herself from . . . whatever killed her. The children are safe. They grow up, they're functional adult humans, and then my hired detective blunders his investigation. The M'Kri Tribesmen find the children, take them away, and will not let them come to Sahara Dome to help us decontaminate their mother's final resting site. Whereas if I hire you, the children would be safe and they could come to Sahara Dome and-”
”There's no guarantee that they'd be safe just because you hired me,” Flint said. ”I'd be more cautious than your fict.i.tious detective, that's for sure, but I could still trigger an investigation that would end up in their getting captured by the M'Kri. That's one of the risks you take any time you hire a Retrieval Artist.”
”But theoretically, you do your best to minimize that risk,” she said. ”That's why I would hire you. To protect all sides-the children, me, the others from the SDHPD-and to give us a chance. Please, Mr. Flint. We don't have a lot of time.”
He wasn't going to let that pressure make him decide to take a case. ”Why did the other Retrieval Artists turn you down?”
She flashed him that glare again. ”Let's see. The first three-all of whom worked in Sahara Dome-didn't want to cross the Disty. You see, if you get near this corpse, you could be contaminated.”
”I wouldn't get near it,” Flint said.