Part 38 (1/2)
Ferron sent a text message. h.e.l.lo, Mother. You wanted to see me? The pause was long, but not as long as it could have been. You're late, Tamanna. I've been trying to reach you all day. I'm in the middle of a run right now.
I'm sorry, Ferron said. Someone was murdered.
Text, thank all the G.o.ds, sucked out the defensive sarcasm that would have filled up a spoken word. She fiddled the bangles she couldn't wear on duty, just to hear the gla.s.s chime.
She could feel her mother's attention elsewhere, her distaste at having the unpleasant realities of Ferron's job forced upon her. That attention would focus on anything but Ferron, for as long as Ferron waited for it. It was a contest of wills, and Ferron always lost. Mother- Her mother pushed up the faceplate on the VR helmet and sat up abruptly. ”b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l,” she said. ”Got killed. That'll teach me to do two things at once. Look, about the archives-”
”Mother,” Ferron said, ”I can't. I don't have any more savings to give you.”
Madhuvanthi said, ”They'll kill me.”
They'll de-archive your virtual history, Ferron thought, but she had the sense to hold her tongue.
After her silence dragged on for fifteen seconds or so, Madhuvanthi said, ”Sell the fox.”
”He's mine,” Ferron said. ”I'm not selling him. Mother, you really need to come out of your make-believe world once in a while-”
Her mother pulled the collar of the VR suit open so she could ruffle the fur of the violet-and-teal striped skinpet nestled up to the warmth of her throat. It humped in response, probably vibrating with a comforting purr. Ferron tried not to judge, but the idea of parasitic pets, no matter how fluffy and colorful, made her skin crawl.
Ferron's mother said, ”Make-believe. And your world isn't?”
”Mother-”
”Come in and see my world sometime before you judge it.”
”I've seen your world,” Ferron said. ”I used to live there, remember? All the time, with you. Now I live out here, and you can too.”
Madhuvanthi's glare would have seemed blistering even in the rainy season. ”I'm your mother. You will obey me.”
Everything inside Ferron demanded she answer yes. Hard-wired, that duty. Planned for. Programmed.
Ferron raised her right hand. ”Can't we get some dinner and-”
Madhuvanthi sniffed and closed the faceplate again. And that was the end of the interview.
Rightminding or not, the cool wings of hypomania or not, Ferron's heart was pounding and her fresh clothing felt sticky again already. She turned and left.
When she got back to her own flat, the first thing she noticed was her makes.h.i.+ft wall of furniture partially disa.s.sembled, a chair/shelf knocked sideways, the disconnected and overturned table top now fallen flat.
”Oh, no.” Her heart rose into her throat. She rushed inside, the door forgotten- Atop a heap of cus.h.i.+ons lay Smoke, proud and smug. And against his soft gray side, his fluffy tail flipped over her like a blanket, curled Chairman Miaow, her golden eyes squeezed closed in pleasure.
”Mine!” she said definitively, raising her head.
”I guess so,” Ferron answered. She shut the door and went to pour herself a drink while she started sorting through Indrapramit's latest crop of interviews.
According to everything Indrapramit had learned, Coffin was quiet. He kept to himself, but he was always willing and enthusiastic when it came to discussing his work. His closest companion was the cat-Ferron looked down at Chairman Miaow, who had rearranged herself to take advantage of the warm valley in the bed between Smoke and Ferron's thigh-and the cat was something of a neighborhood celebrity, riding on Coffin's shoulder when he took his exercise.
All in all, a typical portrait of a typical, lonely man who didn't let anyone get too close.
”Maybe there will be more in the archinformation,” she said, and went back to Doyle's pattern algorithm results one more d.a.m.n time.
After performing her evening practice of kalari payat-first time in three days-Ferron set her furniture for bed and retired to it with her files. She wasn't expecting Indrapramit to show up at her flat, but sometime around two in the morning, the lobby door discreetly let her know she had a visitor. Of course, he knew she'd upped, and since he had no family and lived in a thin-walled dormitory room, he'd need a quiet place to camp out and work at this hour of the night. There wasn't a lot of productive interviewing you could do when all the subjects were asleep-at least, not until they had somebody dead to rights enough to take them down to the jail for interrogation.
His coming to her home meant every other resident the block would know, and Ferron could look forward to a morning of being quizzed by aunties while she tried to cram her idlis down. It didn't matter that Indrapramit was a colleague, and she was his superior. At her age, any sign of male interest brought unEmployed relatives with too much time on their hands swarming.
Still, she admitted him. Then she extricated herself from between the fox and the cat, wrapped her bathrobe around herself, stomped into her slippers, and headed out to meet him in the hall. At least keeping their conference to the public areas would limit knowing glances later.
He'd upped too. She could tell by the bounce in his step and his slightly wild focus. And the fact that he was dropping by for a visit in the dark of the morning.
Lowering her voice so she wouldn't trouble her neighbors, Ferron said, ”Something too good to mail?”
”An interesting potential complication.”
She gestured to the gla.s.s doors leading out to the sunfarm. He followed her, his boots somehow still as bright as they'd been that morning. He must polish them in an anti-static gloss.
She kicked off her slippers and padded barefoot over the threshold, making sure to silence the alarm first. The suntrees were furled for the night, their leaves rolled into funnels that channeled condensation to the roots. There was even a bit of chill in the air.
Ferron breathed in gratefully, wiggling her toes in the cultivated earth. ”Let's go up to the roof.”
Without a word, Indrapramit followed her up the winding openwork stair hung with bougainvillea, barren and th.o.r.n.y now in the dry season but a riot of color and greenery once the rains returned. The interior walls of the aptblock were mossy and thickly planted with coriander and other Ayurvedic herbs. Ferron broke off a bitter leaf of fenugreek to nibble as they climbed.
At the landing, she stepped aside and tilted her head back, peering up through the potted neem and lemon and mango trees at the stars beyond. A dark hunched shape in the branches of a pomegranate startled her until she realized it was the outline of one of the house monkeys, huddled in sleep. She wondered if she could see the Andromeda Galaxy from here at this time of year. Checking a skymap, she learned that it would be visible-but probably low on the horizon, and not without a telescope in these light-polluted times. You'd have better odds of finding it than a hundred years ago, though, when you'd barely have been able to glimpse the brightest stars. The Heavenly Ganges spilled across the darkness like sequins sewn at random on an indigo veil, and a crooked fragment of moon rode high. She breathed in deep and stepped onto the gra.s.s and herbs of the roof garden. A creeping mint snagged at her toes, sending its pungency wide.
”So what's the big news?”
”We're not the only ones asking questions about Dexter Coffin.” Indrapramit flashed her a video clip of a pale-skinned woman with red hair bleached ginger by the sun and a crop of freckles not even the gloss of sunblock across her cheeks could keep down. She was broad-shouldered and looked capable, and the ID codes running across the feed under her image told Ferron she carried a warrant card and a stun pistol.
”Contract cop?” she said, sympathetically.
”I'm fine,” he said, before she could ask. He spread his first two fingers opposite his thumb and pressed each end of the V beneath his collarbones, a new nervous gesture. ”I got my Chicago block maintained last week, and the reprogramming is holding. I'd tell you if I was triggering. I know that not every contract cop is going to decompensate and start a ma.s.sacre.”
A ma.s.sacre Indrapramit had stopped the hard way, it happened. ”Let me know what you need,” she said, because everything else she could have said would sound like a vote of non-confidence.
”Thanks,” he said. ”How'd it go with your mother?”
”Gah,” she said. ”I think I need a needle. So what's the contractor asking? And who's employing her?”
”Here's the interesting thing, boss. She's an American too.”
”She couldn't have made it here this fast. Not unless she started before he died-”
”No,” he said. ”She's an expat, a former New York homicide detective. Her handle is Morganti. She lives in Hongasandra, and she does a lot of work for American and Canadian police departments. Licensed and bonded, and she seems to have a very good rep.”
”Who's she under contract to now?”
”Warrant card says Honolulu.”
”Huh.” Ferron kept her eyes on the stars, and the dark leaves blowing before them. ”Top-tier distributed policing, then. Is it a skip trace?”
”You think he was on the run, and whoever he was on the run from finally caught up with him?”