Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (12 page)

McGinity didn’t say anything immediately. “I think I’d like to rule out insanity first,” he said, “especially considering some of the imagery I saw at the end, which makes no sense whatsoever. I’ll give you a call later.” He nodded to Lee and Gelert and headed out.

“I’ll have a chance to look at your sweeps after lunch,” Matt said to them, “as well as Paul’s. The boss has been looking at them this morning: I’ll have his notes later.” He rubbed his face with one hand, still looking thoroughly bemused, and pleased in a cautious way. “For once a case is going the way the boss wants it to…”

Lee said nothing, strongly suspecting that this assessment had a life expectancy of no more than half a sandwich or so. “Call us after lunch,” Gelert said. “We’ll drop by.”

*

It was actually around quarter to one when Mass relayed the first of Matt’s messages to reach the office, and Lee was glad she’d restricted herself to a few pieces of sushi and some green tea: her stomach had begun to roil. When they got up to Matt’s office, one of about ten glass cubicles grouped around the DA’s office on the northwest corner of Parker’s eighth floor, they found the glass frosted down around him. This was unusual for a man who, Lee knew, liked to watch everybody, trusting his evaluation of their expressions as completely as Lee trusted her own Seeing—and with some justification, for he was good at reading people as long as he didn’t get too close to them. Lee had often thought Matt had some of the Gift, but he’d never had the patience to take it through assessment and training. The more physical and concrete side of law enforcement was his chief love, and expressed itself also in a certain distrust of the less concrete types of detection.

Gelert scratched at the door, and Matt spoke it open for them: they went in. His desk was covered with imagery as usual, some of it flat under the surface, some of it still playing in the air in front of him as they walked in. He slapped one of the hot spots on the desk, freezing the playback, and waved them to chairs.

“You finished looking at the sweeps, I take it,” Lee said.

“Just about,” Matt said, collapsing the projection hanging in the air. “But the DA says that after that interview with Castelain, we’ve got more than enough to go to trial with a realistic chance of conviction. We have the murder weapon, and we have both physical and psychic forensics that link the suspect to the time and place of the murder.”

Lee really wished she didn’t have to say what she was going to: but she had no choice. “Motivation is too weak,” she said.

Matt gave her a look Lee had seen all too often and learned to dislike, though she had never really broached the issue. The expression suggested that Lee was out of her mind, but he would forgive her because he thought she was so cute. 
Problem was, I always thought it was funny…until I found out
 
that all of a sudden my “cute” had passed its sell-by date.
 “Lee, you heard him tell us about the gambling debt. It’s more than enough to put Castelain away while we work on whoever took out the contract on dil’Sorden, and why: because though he believed the story about the gambling debt, I’m not sure I do.”

“I’d feel happier about it if there was any evidence at all of gambling debts in dil’Sorden’s personal profiling,” Lee said. “Including his private mails, his banking and investment information, or anywhere else. And he’s in an Alfheim-based Fund, Matt, just like every other Elf alive! How likely is he to be unable to raise money to pay a debt that could get him killed if unpaid? The Funds routinely advance hundreds of thousands of talers to any given member for uses a lot less urgent, just based on their life expectancy data, without even referring to their credit line!”

Matt gave her an annoyed look. “So why 
didn’t
 he apply for a loan?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “How about because there wasn’t any gambling debt?”

“There may not have been,” Matt said. “But it’s going to be hard to prove that there wasn’t, so for the moment it’s the story we’re likely to run with. Assuming it 
is
 true, maybe there was something wrong with dil’Sorden’s rating with whichever Fund he’s in. The point is, dil’Sorden’s dead. End of story, at least insofar as we have a confession from the suspect to whom we were led by the forensics.”

“End of story?” Lee said softly.

Matt sat pushing a piece of paper back and forth on his desk for a few moments. “So now we come to the problematic part of this case. This mysterious Alfen of yours.”

“Not just mine,” Lee said. “Someone else 
was
 present at the murder scene, Matt. Both of us saw him. In my case, I saw him from two different angles. And more to the point, Castelain saw him—though not as clearly as we did. Don’t you think it might answer some unanswered questions about this investigation if we could find out who that was?” 
And where the heck he went
, Lee thought, but refused to say out loud: 
and where Castelain went later…and how.

Her restraint did her no good: Matt’s thoughts were already there. He glared at her. “The DA,” he said, “is having a lot of trouble with your sweeps.”

“I just bet he is,” Gelert said, looking down along his nose at Matt. “How do you think 
we
 feel? But they’re what we Saw, Matt. You can’t cherrypick a psychoforensics sweep for what you like and what you don’t. The trial judge won’t stand for it, and neither will She; it’s either all admissible as evidence, or none of it. And when the trial starts, if you’re going to use the sweeps as the evidential link to the murder weapon, and also use the observation of the murder itself, then the defense team is going to use the ‘vanishing’ evidence as an excuse to discredit everything else. So maybe if everyone just gets to work on understanding the ‘impossible’ right now, and finding an answer that’ll hold water, rather than trying to pretend it just didn’t happen, the case won’t go down the drain.”

Matt said nothing. “Renselaar can’t afford to be seen ducking a possible conviction right now just because some of the evidence is peculiar,” Lee said. “He should just take the case forward and stonewall when the press starts making its usual noises. Then, when we chase down a logical explanation and he breaks the news and takes credit for it, he gets to look like the stalwart defender of Justice refusing to be distracted from Her service by the muckraking journalists intent on a quick fix. Or on making the future Mayor look stupid for the sake of a juicy headline.”

Lee tried her best not to sound too snide while saying this, but had no sense of whether she was being successful; she was too busy holding Matt’s eyes with hers, uncomfortable though it made her, and trying to make him see the rightness of what she was saying. She could get no sense, though, that he was seeing any such thing.

Which left her with one remaining piece of business. “I want to suggest one other thing to you,” Lee said. “Magda tells me there was a tipoff that led the San Fran police to Castelain.”

“Yeah, saw that.”

“So where did that come from, Matt?” Lee said, possibly more sharply than she meant to. “Who knew we were looking for him?”

“Everybody knew. There was an all-points out for him.”

“The timing raises questions, Matt,” Gelert said. “The team here at Parker ID’d Castelain yesterday afternoon. The tipoff came through just barely after they got in touch with San Francisco. Somebody pushed him over the edge so that he would roll right down into our laps, just when we need him.”

“So he had some enemies,” Matt said. But he sounded uneasy now.

“You know it’s not that simple. There’s a leak here,” Lee said. “And outside is somebody who wants us to take the suspect we have and be content with him. And the poor guy himself is desperate to be in jail. Even 
you
 saw it: I saw the look on your face. Why are so many people so eager to see this case wound up in a hurry, Matt? And are you going to let them get away with it?”

“No one’s going to get away with anything,” Matt said.

“Unless you talk yourself into a mistrial by purposely ignoring the implications of evidence,” Gelert said. “Justice will be served, Matt. And I’d sooner be on the right side of Her when it happens. The other side’s no fun.”

Matt said nothing for several moments. Finally, he got up and looked at them both, expressionless. “You have two days to finish your casework,” he said. “The DA wants the completed case on his desk first thing Friday morning, so he can find a place to slot it into the calendar. Don’t miss the deadline.”

“When have we ever?” Lee said, but he didn’t even look at her: he was already halfway out the door.

It closed slowly behind him, leaving Lee and Gelert sitting there for a few moments in rather shocked silence. “Yes,” Gelert said, “he’s feeling the heat, I’d say. Come on…”

They went out and made their way down past the waterfalls and out into the central plaza. The sky had started to cloud over, just mackerel sky against pale blue at the moment, but thickening: the Santa Ana wind had broken, a cooler wind from the west beginning to take its place. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so abrupt in the line of work,” Lee said. “No matter how bad things got…”

“He’s having trouble understanding what he saw,” Gelert said. “He doesn’t like it any better than you or I do. If he supports us with the DA, then his credibility as well as ours is on the line. And if the DA can’t be convinced…”

“We all go down together,” Lee said.

Gelert shrugged his backpack forward a little as they came out on the flat after coming up the flight of steps to the plaza. “Elections are coming,” he said. “The DA moves up, all the people under him move up too…if they’re doing their best work and keeping him happy. If he gets unhappy, they get demoted. And we lose our freelance work for the DA’s Office, and look stupid, or ineffective, or negligent. Which affects all our other work.”

“So we have two days to figure out exactly what we saw, and then convince Matt, but more importantly, his boss, to believe it.”

“Sounds about right.”

Lee sighed. “Let’s get back to the office.”

“Only long enough to tidy up loose ends. Lee, you promised to come home for dinner with us.”

The last thing she felt like right now was being social. 
But I promised…
 “Nuala isn’t making anything special, is she?”

“Oh, no. She suggested we might bring something home.”

“I could bring some pasta dough, make something…”

“No, you’ll get all caught up in rolling those little ear things again all night, and we won’t get anything done. How about Xainese? The kids like Xainese.”

“…Okay. Let’s go.”

*

“So how 
do
 Elves disappear?” Lee said softly.

They were sitting in Gelert’s living room some hours later. It was the largest of several adjoining domes that butted against one another on several different levels, a rosette of hex windows at the top of each for letting in daylight. The condo was a sleek compromise between the den-structures that 
madrín
 built for themselves, and an apartment more suited to a bipedal species, with a sort of Southwestern tribal-NorthAm look about it—the interior all smooth plaster, graceful curves and (Gelert’s tastes being involved) much holoprojected art. The stairs between levels would relapse into ramps when human guests were gone, but right now most of Gelert’s and Nuala’s pups were racing around and practicing falling up and down the stairs in a mood of general rejoicing.

The floor was comfortably cushioned to a meter or so up the walls, and Lee in her jeans and T-shirt was leaning against one wall, surrounded by writing pads, printouts, and transpads hooked into her office commwall, and by a welter of mostly empty Xainese food containers. In Lee’s lap was a six month old 
madra
 pup about a meter long—Fhionn, she thought: even now she had trouble telling them apart, since they were all still identically covered with undifferentiated pinky-white, wiry fluff—lying on his back, legs pointing into the air in various directions, and snoring a tiny snore. A couple of meters from her, Gelert lounged amid similar clutter, and behind him lay his mate Nuala, a little bigger and a little slenderer than Gelert, lying listening quietly to them, only her eyes shifting occasionally as she watched the children run around.

“The answer, as you well know, is that they don’t disappear,” Gelert said. “They’re hominid bipeds, just like you and the Xainese and the Huictli and the Tierrans and the Midgarthr. They have a small range of psychic and psi abilities, just as other hominids native to the various other Earths do, but teleportation is not one of them.”

“But they’re not 
just
 like the rest of us,” Lee said. “Even in terms of what they’re made of. Matter sourced from Alfheim sometimes has properties not common to artifacts from other universes. Specially some of the pure chemical elements, which behave differently from elements native to other universes. The most obvious example being allotropic gold.” She glanced down at her pad, which was once again showing the 
Britannica
 precis on Au100+.

“That’s not the 
only
 way the Alfen are different from other humans, of course,” Nuala said in her soft little voice.

“No,” Lee said. She stretched, leaned back among the cushions. “Nuala, tell me something. How do they look to you?”

“Really?” Nuala said.

“Really.”

Nuala gave Lee a look out of her big soulful eyes. “I don’t want to offend…”

“You won’t.”

“They look to me the way humans should,” Nuala said, sadly, as if in apology, “and don’t.”

Lee folded her arms and leaned back for a moment, considering. It struck her as a good explanation: for when she, at least, saw an Alfen, there was always a kind of backtaste on the experience: a sense of sadness that everyone couldn’t look like that.

“But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” Nuala said after a moment. “One does want to keep looking at them, for some reason. I always feel a little foolish about it.”

“You wouldn’t be alone,” Gelert said. “Everybody does it. Anyway, the differences between Alfen matter and matter in the rest of the Earths aren’t going to be enough to let them do the Tooth Fairy number under their own power. What we perceived has to have been something technological.”