Species (19 page)

Fitch pondered this for a moment. “I suppose you could be right,” he conceded. “But why kill that girl at the ID? What purpose did that serve?”

Stephen opened his mouth, but Laura beat him to it. “Sexual rivalry,” she said. “The girl must have gotten in her way, stolen the attention of someone Sil was interested in. She invoked a sense of jealousy in Sil, plus she was an obstacle. Therefore, she was eliminated.”

“Exactly,” Stephen agreed. “Again, she fits the classic definition of a psychopath—no inhibitions, moral sense or social structure. She’ll kill for any number of reasons. In response to feeling threatened, as a means to obtain something she desires, or just for convenience—if someone is in her way or is keeping her from accomplishing what she wants, she’ll cut them out of the picture. Simply touching her the wrong way could be enough to set her off.”

“She’s certainly hard on the competition,” Press said with a raised eyebrow.

“You’re saying that now she’s managed to mate?” Fitch asked. He looked repulsed and enthralled at the same time. And something else, too, that Laura found hard to define . . . proud, perhaps?

Laura saw Press glance at the corpse on the bedroom floor, then shake his head. “No. Doesn’t look like a successful mating to me.”

“How would you know that?” In spite of herself, Laura was fascinated by Press’s no-nonsense perceptions.

“He’s still got his pants on,” Press said wryly.

“The killing could have been afterward,” Laura suggested.

“I doubt it,” Press replied. “Bed’s still made and the only piece of clothing our creature left behind was a blood-soaked bra.” He wandered over to the bathroom door and looked in, checking for anything that might have been missed in the previous excitement and now dissipated steam.

“She must be very frustrated,” Dan said.

“Aren’t we all,” Stephen said sourly.

“Frustration can be the worst state of mind for anyone,” Dan continued, “especially someone socially unstable. Emotionally, it’s the root of all evil.”

“That’s right on the money, Dan.” Stephen tried to grin, but the dead body on the floor made the smile sag before it reached the professor’s eyes. “We’re all frustrated in one way or another.”

“Yeah, well, bully for us,” Fitch said uncharacteristically. “In the meantime let’s get back to Sil. If she didn’t mate with this guy, what was her problem? He was here, she was here, the moment was right. So what happened?”

Stephen was at a loss. “I have no idea. Everything I know says she should have gone for it. It looks like they were even starting.”

Laura chewed at her lower lip and studied Robbie’s body. “Maybe
she
rejected him. We can test him for hereditary diseases—bad heart, defective liver, something that would make him an unacceptable mate. She’s probably got sensory faculties far more advanced than ours—or far more basic, depending on how you look at it. Rats, for instance, can sense disease or genetic damage in potential mates.”

“I think I found the problem,” Press said. He held up a syringe and an empty vial bearing a white label with blue-and-black lettering on it.

Laura extended her hand and he dropped the vial onto her palm.
“Novolin 70/30,”
she read. “This is insulin.
70/30
is a combination of two human-derived types. Our man here was a diabetic; that would make him an unacceptable mate.” She handed the vial back to Press and he ducked into the bathroom; the resulting
clink
told her he’d tossed the glass vial and used syringe back into the wastebasket.

“So why didn’t she just walk out?” Fitch asked, exasperated. “Why did she have to kill him?” Laura held out her hands in the standard “I have no idea” gesture.

“Well,” Press mused, “it looks like he could have been between her and the door. Do you think he tried to stop her?”

“Some men don’t like to be rejected,” Dan put in. “They tend to get insistent. Maybe he was one of those.”

“Well, we’re not going to find her here,” Fitch said. He spoke rapidly to an aide waiting for instructions a few feet away, the second guy who’d joined them back at the freight train. “Dig into this guy’s history and find out what he drives, then put an APB on it, stat.”

“It’s already been done,” McRamsey said. “He drives a Brazilian kit car called a Puma. The DMV records indicate it’s bright orange.”

“I guess she’s not so docile and controllable, is she, Doc? What now?” Press had found another toothpick and shoved it between his lips. His hair had finally dried into an uneven bunch of dark, curly tufts, and he sounded absurdly like a cross between a thin-lipped Clint Eastwood and Bugs Bunny. “We could head back to the motel. I’ll bet you my next paycheck the clerk’s come up with the stuff Sil ‘didn’t’ leave behind.” He gave them all a dark, lazy grin.

“That’s as good a place as any,” Fitch said. He looked questioningly at Laura.

“I’m guessing as much as anyone else, Dr. Fitch,” she said. “We should examine the things she left behind anyway.” She shot a penetrating glance at Press.
“If
she did.”

Press gave her a smile that was just short of insolent. “You wait and see, Dr. Baker.” He flicked the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other without touching it. “I think you’ll all he quite surprised at what we find.”

21

S
unset Boulevard at night was a riot of color and sound and never-slowing movement. The Puma was a nice sports car, a little two-seater with a black interior and top that contrasted nicely with the bright orange paint job. The top had been down when Robbie had last driven it, and Sil liked it down, liked the way the warm California wind picked up her hair and made it drift on the air currents rolling over the car. She sure hadn’t gotten that kind of freedom looking out from the glass box back at the complex.

Traffic was heavy and the car was forced to slow until Sil had to work the clutch constantly—stop and go, stop and go. Prostitutes and cops were everywhere, everyone trying to look like they were someone, some
thing
else; johns toured the area, trying to invent new ways to elude the no-cruising ordinance that went into effect at ten
P.M.
Men looking for women, women looking for women—with all those people milling around, it was a wonder that Sil spotted the first plainclothes security man on the corner a block away from the motel. Dressed in slacks and a sport coat and sitting on a street bench eating popcorn while he browsed through a magazine, she couldn’t believe he didn’t realize he was ridiculously conspicuous amid the scantily clad women and leering men in muscleman T-shirts and shorts. More security guys dotted the sidewalk, but none of them noticed the Puma and Sil squeezed the car into the left lane of traffic and accelerated. When she saw a break in the oncoming cars, she jumped the red light with a left turn.

She wound her way southwest through a number of smaller streets until she came to La Brea and followed it south, just because she liked the name. She recognized the expressway emblems from the television and decided she would keep going until she found the Santa Monica Freeway that the signs advertised, but when she reached the entrance ramp she was forced to detour around it. Wide-eyed when she saw the huge, twisted metal supports and cracked concrete, Sil cruised through the underpass of the massive structure and painstakingly mouthed the words on the signs:
DETOUR—EARTHQUAKE DAMAGE—USE ADAMS BOULEVARD TO EXPOSITION—FOLLOW THE SIGNS.
She still didn’t know what an earthquake was, but she’d just gotten a lesson in what it
did.

At last Sil was on the freeway, the night wind blowing in her hair as the automobile sped easily along. More signs flashed by, and one in particular intrigued her:
PACIFIC OCEAN
/
SANTA MONICA PIER, 6 MILES,
followed by an arrow in the direction in which she was driving. Robbie had mentioned this, and Sil still wondered about it. This ocean, did it have anything to do with an earthquake?

She would drive there tonight, she decided. There was so much to see and learn, so much to do.

Top on the list and much harder than she’d anticipated, was to find a mate.

22

T
he greasy clerk at the motel was gone, replaced by the night staffer, who was a no-nonsense middle-aged man who looked like he was an ex-marine and introduced himself as Raymond. He gave Press’s hand two hard pumps and ignored Fitch altogether as he produced a room key from the cash drawer and tossed it to Press. “Seven-B,” he said flatly. His face was bland but his eyes were small, dark pebbles, intelligent and sunk deep in his skull. “Henry—that’s the guy who was on shift when you folks were here—and me had a little talk about the stuff that was in there and how it oughta be back in the room when you folks returned.”

Press nodded his thanks and didn’t insult the man by asking if that meant Sil’s belongings were there now. The motel was crawling with Special Operations men trying to look like nonchalant businessmen. Press thought they fit in about as well as a Scandinavian blonde at a seminar on African-American genealogy.

Sil’s motel room was right on line with the rest of the place—small and slightly seedy, clean on a surface that masked years of poor-quality care and cheap cleaning materials. The curtains were drawn and the room’s only lamp wasn’t much help in the lighting department; it made the frayed, dark-colored bedspread look mostly black and didn’t even have enough output to fully illuminate the tiny closet. All of the things that Sil had apparently purchased with the cash from Angela Cardoza’s paycheck had been dumped in a pile on the double bed. Press and Stephen went through it, with Stephen marveling over the speed at which Sil seemed to be learning the technique of sexual attraction.

Press lifted a piece of lingerie with one finger and raised his eyebrows. “Bet you can’t guess where this came from,” he challenged.

“Frederick’s, I’d bet,” Stephen answered.

“Oh,
please,”
Laura said in a disgusted voice from the bathroom doorway. “This isn’t a game, you idiots. That alien—or she-thing or whatever you want to call her—could be killing someone right now. Or even worse, reproducing.”

“What do you think, Dan?” Fitch surveyed the drab room. “Any guesses on where she’ll go?”

“What do
I
think?” Dan looked carefully at each of his team members. “I think she’s probably tired and wants to find someplace safe to rest. Didn’t your tapes from the complex show her sleeping a lot?”

Fitch rubbed his jaw. “Yes, but she’s older now, already through her growth stage. She won’t need to sleep as much.”

Laura’s voice drifted out from the bathroom. “But Dan’s right; the human part of her will still require a certain amount.”

Dan went to the window and parted the drapes so he could peer outside. “I think she won’t come back here while all our cars and people are lined up out front.”

“You’re assuming she can find her way back.”

“Why wouldn’t she?” Stephen asked. “She can understand and speak English, shop and use a credit card. She rented this room on her own and also took her last victim’s car, remember? If she can learn to drive that quickly, there’s no telling what else she’s capable of. Besides, most intelligent life-forms find their way to and from their lairs unconsciously. It’s only humans that place so much value on actual locations and addresses.” He sounded disdainful.

Dan wandered over to the open bathroom door. “What are you doing in here, Dr. Baker? Did you find something?”

“Yes.” Laura had pulled on rubber gloves and was using a cotton swab to dab at a small spot of red on the toilet seat.

“What is it?”

Laura dropped the soiled swab into a plastic bag and carefully closed it. She held it up to the dim fluorescent bulb that buzzed over the sink. “It could be blood,” she said thoughtfully. “This would seem to indicate that Sil’s body follows an animal’s reproductive cycle.”

“Who said anything about an animal?” Dan looked confused. “I thought she was part human and part alien.”

“She is.” Laura peeled off the gloves and dropped them in the wastebasket next to the toilet. “But we know nothing about the alien part, remember? Perhaps the alien part of her reproductive makeup resembles the estrous cycle of some of the animals on this planet. If that’s true, we’ve got to find her before she completes it, before she breeds.”