Harsh Lessons (15 page)

-

Frosty silence filled the car on the drive home as  James re-centered himself, let the light fill him; drew down calm.  He'd hoped Leeth would enjoy the lighter touch of Saint-Saën's "Samson et Dalila."

But her explosion during that unfortunate mangling of
Mon coeur s'ouvre á ta voix;
where she'd looked ready to storm the stage and kill the mezzo-soprano in front of the entire theater….

Just how unbalanced
was
she? 
Could
she have been Maria Lempriere's murderer?  She did seem to genuinely suffer during the performances.  He suspected she wouldn't last the distance.

Would be
retired
from the Department.

Thinking of the report he'd have to file for tonight felt like planning a betrayal.  Which was ridiculous: the
Department
had his first loyalty.  Had to. 
Why did she make everything so hard?

At least she had stopped muttering 'I killed her!' before they'd been drug tested, and ejected.

She'd been sitting staring fixedly ahead, silent so long that he twitched when she finally spoke.

'What happened?  Did somebody drug me?'

Sparing her a glance, she seemed back to normal.  'Drug you?'

'Yeah.  Was it a
test
?'  Venom underscored the word. 'Or did Nelson try to reprogram me out of existence?'

'What on earth are you talking about?'

In his peripheral vision, she turned fully toward him.  'Or did
you
do something to me, James?'

The hairs at the back of his neck prickled upright.  Activating his combat augmentation and the car's self-drive, he turned carefully toward her.  Saw that she'd gone dangerously still.

Shit
.  'I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.  But if this is your planned excuse for Mother and Father, rethink it.'

'Excuse for what?'

'Oh, I can't imagine.  Jumping up?  Screaming like a wildcat tearing the throat from a wildebeest?'

The look on her face started out pleased, before draining into open-mouthed shock.  'You're kidding.  I didn't do
that
.'  Her eyes lost their focus.  'But... people
were
talking to me. Who didn't like me….' Her voice trailed off.   'After I killed Jennifer, to escape.'

He shook his head, frowning.  'What are you talking about?'

Her eyes met his.  'James, what happened after we sat down to order dinner?  All I remember is killing Jennifer, then kind of waking up as we left the opera house.'

James stared at her.  She sounded honestly puzzled. The trouble was, she was getting to be such an accomplished actress.  'What do you mean, "killing Jennifer"?' he asked, cautiously.

She stared ahead into the night, hugging herself.  'I don't know.  It was kind of like climbing out of a dark hole, except there wasn't any
me
climbing out.  I think I killed Jennifer, and then I was back.'

'What are you talking about?  You are Jennifer.  Or, you were, for tonight.  And clearly, you're still alive.'

The look she turned on him was dark, and as close to scared as he'd ever seen from her.  She shivered and looked away.

James re-engaged manual drive, needing the distraction.  Trying to ignore the thought that she would not survive the night.

-

Nelson's analysis noted a violent erasure of his experimental neural programming.  The Doctor reported a similar destruction of his reinforcing magical Suggestions.

Despite this, Mother's opinion remained firm.  'The girl is unstable and unsuitable: a danger to everyone around her.  She should be Retired.'

Father called up a section of James's report, highlighting a sentence.  "
My impression is the Jennifer persona had taken a position of complete control
."

Mother scrolled back, stabbing at the section to highlight it.  '
After
returning from the Ladies.  Who knows what she was taking in there?'

'Our own tests and those of the opera's security personnel were negative.  And the Doctor says he raised her to consider any drug use as an admission of weakness.'

In the end, lacking sufficient evidence to convince Eagle, Mother accepted the Doctor's analysis.  Although she insisted on noting it was an unproven hypothesis, and that some unreported activity on Leeth's part remained an alternative explanation.

The remaining exercises, however, were restricted to simply dining out at the opera house restaurant.

The strange intruder was considered irrelevant.

Chapter 16 

Newly-minted Special Agent Adam Garland of the Bureau for Internal Development dismissed his notes on the megacorp, Tik Tek.  Still uneasy.  With their new creepily-lifelike Mark VII androids and gynoids, it made a kind of sense for the Corp to be acquiring bio-med companies.  Even moribund ones like CyclonalMT, ruined by the '38 Moratorium.  Probably just wanted to clone skin cells for the Mark VIIIs they must be developing….

With an effort, he put the technology giant out of mind and moved to the next item on his "bud list."  Spending an hour a week on niggling concerns before they could flower into disasters was a large part of the secret behind his "remarkable intuitions."

Yeah, and how it got me noticed by Eagle and "promoted" to the BID.
  He grimaced.  That girl, and her guardian, Harmon, were still there on his list, too.  They'd pop back onto his radar, he knew, sooner or later.

He shook his head.

Okay: next was "The Breaker."  He pulled up the map of possible incidents, color-coded by the degree of the match with the perp's pattern.

On a hunch, he switched to a 3D visualization, showing the date of each murder-assault.

Ah, shit. 
He reviewed a sample of the cases.

Yeah, the torture motif had evolved, crystallizing into its current fixity only in recent months.  And the assaults now occurred only in New Francisco, though shifting into the poorer areas.   And growing less frequent.

Or less reported, more likely.

Ah, no!
  He zoomed in, expanding his map.  There, tracking the Lincoln Highway across the country: a series of unsolved, pointless murders, a day or two apart, buried in the larger set of homicides.  But following that trail backwards became harder and harder, as the earlier pattern of the killer's murders became less unique; less identifiable.  Making it impossible to say where the first death had occurred.  Especially if it was New York, with
its
homicide rate.

He made a note in the file, but set aside the question of the origin point for now.  It'd probably be better to follow up on the disturbing magical angle.  Like that first weird experience in the Golden Gate Park – after questioning Sara and her "uncle" Harmon, come to think of it….

But, yeah,
that
summoning had been just bizarre.  His then-partner, Berlusconi, had been as freaked-out as the shaman, Lucas.  And Lucas had grown more and more reluctant to assist each time.

He'd worried, in fact, that Lucas was losing it.  Going off the rails, as so many shamans did, down their traditional
drug
route to altered states of consciousness.  Especially when they struck difficulties.

Lucas, last time they'd met, had been distracted and jumpy; paranoid that "something was after him."  It made him wonder whether there even
was
a weird magical effect, or just Lucas, burning out.  But the… dead magic zones, or whatever the fuck they were, and the,
shit
, vaguely
robotic
spirits?  They'd freaked out the other shamans he'd called in at
least
as badly as they'd freaked out Lucas and Berlusconi.

Yeah, "the shaman test" looked like an excellent litmus test for a Breaker murder or torture.  Survivors always described the same large man with dead eyes.  Half of them thought he was a robot, not human at all: a failed AI experiment running in a military
combot
unit.  But that wouldn't explain the magic angle: how it seemed to screw up the shamans.  Shit, he hadn't even been able to
find
Lucas, last time he'd needed him.  Not even his squat-mates seemed to know where he was.

Yeah, his instincts were screaming at him over this Breaker guy.  As if a major calamity was brewing.
 

Chapter 17 

Leeth danced into the rec room where some guy on the trid was droning on about something.  Her eyes lit up when she saw James, and scampered over.  Before she could speak, though, he held up a hand to silence her.

She flounced heavily into the seat by his side and pouted up at him, but he paid no attention.  Gradually she noticed the strange expression on his face: blank but tight.  He seemed really absorbed by the boring guy, so she reluctantly spun around in her seat to see what was so interesting about whatever he was lecturing on about.

'Then he said if I didn't cut off her finger he'd blind her.'  The man didn't shrug, but it would have matched his toneless voice.

Leeth frowned, and sat up. 
Cut off her finger?

'I tried to cut him again with the knife but the chain didn't reach that far.  Then he pulled her head back and pulled out one eye.  My daughter started screaming and so did my wife.'

James's face looked pale. And as the monotone description of torture continued, Leeth hunched in on herself.  It was far worse than anything Uncle had done to her, she realized, as the recitation went on.  Despite herself, she tried to imagine her uncle hurting her without even caring about what he was doing.  Just bored.  Even at his worst, when he was so mad his face sort of clamped solid and his speech got really precise and cold, he was
there
, thinking about her.  But doing it the way this guy had….  She shuddered violently.  It'd be so much worse.  Like a nightmare.

She came to herself to see Nina Summers now interviewing some expert explaining how sometimes the brutality of the lives of non-CID'd people sank them into the worst kind of primitive savagery.  That the "demon" the murderer had described, who had made him torture his own family to death, was a classic schizophrenic projection.

'But professor, there have been examples of real demons returning-'

'No, Nina, there have been powerful magicians, somehow preserving themselves to reawaken when the magic once more Unfolded.  People so corrupted by their own power they thought they were demons-'

The man continued, but Leeth had stopped listening.  'I think it
was
a demon!'

James shook his head.

'Why not?  It's possible!'

'No, Leeth. 
That
kind of horror is something all too human, even if from the very darkest part of ourselves.'

'So you're saying this guy was evil and stuff, and did all that to his wife and daughter for no reason?'

James looked tired.  'No.  And I'm not the only one to think there
was
someone there, just as he said.  Some of the media are calling the thing behind these incidents "The Breaker."  About a week ago someone found a couple in their apartment not too far from here.  The ’sheets said they'd tortured each other to death.'

Tortured?
Leeth's eyes fell to her own arms.  But there weren't even any scars: he was always very careful in his healing afterwards.  '
I'd
never torture someone to death.  I'd just kill him.'

James searched her face.  'You have someone specific in mind?'

Her mouth opened, and James waited for her to speak, but no words came.  'Leeth, are you all right?'

It
had happened again.  She knew.  She recognized the empty confusion.  James was looking at her like he thought she was something fragile, or stupid.  She shook her head.  'What were we talking about?'

He frowned.  'The couple who tortured each other to death.  Under some sort of twisted duress.  Tortured, I suspect, just like this guy tonight.  I think someone out there is subjecting people to the most disgusting mental and physical cruelty I've ever heard of.'

'We should stop it!  I could Hunt him!  It'd be awesome: me against The Breaker!'

He shook his head, tiredly.  'It's not something for us.  It's too small.  Not important enough.  But we have contacts.  I've passed on my thoughts, and some people will look into it.'
 

Chapter 18 

The interior of the squad car was dark and warm, the smell of Henderson's cinnamon donuts and espresso making Detective Marta Sanchez's stomach rumble.

'Go on, Marta, your body just outvoted you. I heard it.  There's still one left.'  He held it out.  'No?'

With difficulty, Sanchez ignored him.

'Best damn money I ever spent, that FatBurner genemorph,' he rumbled, as half the remaining donut disappeared into his large mouth.  Henderson was large all over – and thanks to the genetic modification and bacterial tuning, very little of it was fat.

'Yeah, dumbass, and escaping all the possible side-effects from your illegal gene work has probably used up your entire life's luck quota.'

Henderson just grinned at the dark-haired woman beside him.  Draining the last of his coffee, he crushed the rubbish into a ball and tossed it without looking into the cardboard box on the floor behind.

Sanchez raised one heavy eyebrow.

He nodded, and the playfulness fell away.  He was ready, now.

The two were pretty much everything cops were always supposed to have been – tough, smart and dedicated.  If they'd also cared less about the street people and more about those who "mattered," they’d have been stationed somewhere other than the massively sprawling "Dumpyard Precinct."  The Dumps covered pretty much everything south of Sixteenth Street and east of the inverted wreckage that formed the now-appropriately named heights of the Noe Valley.  No valley any more.

The entire precinct consisted of just Sanchez, Henderson, sixteen security bots on automated patrol routes, and two ancient Tik Tek arthrobot cleaners.  Plus the all-terrain Asgard CrawlTank – surplus from the Brazilian Eco-wars and lovingly maintained by their permanently-stoned mechanic, Josh Taverner.  In Sanchez's opinion the tank was too dangerous to ever deploy.  God help the mostly CID-less residents of this human wilderness.