[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

"What was what?" Ukiah checked his .45 and slipped it into his kidney holster.
The day was hot and the flak jacket uncomfortable, but he knew Max was too
edgy to let him go without.
"The looking." Max snapped shut the chamber of his gun and put it into his
shoulder holster.
Ukiah shrugged and slipped on his headcam. "I don't know. I was just looking
at her and she looked back."
"You I understand." Max shook his head. He flicked on his handheld tracking
system and checked the signal. "I've got you." He slipped the tracking system
into his pocket. "I'll leave the deck on the
Hummer. I mean, you look at people. That's what I remember most about the
first time I met you the look."
"What do you mean?"
"Kid, you've got a look that like I said one stays looked at. That first day,
I came up the tree-house ladder and was eye to eye with your look. Pow,
straight to the core. I almost climbed back down and dropped the case."
Ukiah shook his head, giving Max a grin. "Max, I have no idea what you're
talking about."
"Of course not. People don't do it back to you. Check it out sometime,
though you make a lot of people damn nervous by it, especially the guilty
ones."
"She wasn't nervous. She just looked back."
"Which has me damn nervous."
Max slotted a new disk into the Hummer's deck. "Max VOX test. Testing.
Testing." He tapped the colored signal strength bar on the monitor. "I'm
coming through loud and clear. Give me a test."
"Ukiah VOX test. Test 1-2-3-4."
"That's lousy you're barely in the yellow." Max reached up and tugged on
Ukiah's headset. "Try it again."
"Ukiah VOX test." Ukiah grinned. "Hey diddle diddle, Max jumped over the
moon."
Max shook his head, laughing slightly. "You're in the green. Let's go."
Max slammed the Hummer's door and locked it by his remote. Together they went
up the steps to join Agent Zheng by the door. She had unsecured the police
barrier tape and pushed open the broken door.
As she stepped cautiously inside, Max caught Ukiah by the shoulder. "Just
because Agent Zheng is with us, that doesn't make her an automatic good guy,
kid. Remember that. Don't rely on her, don't expect her to cover your back."
Ukiah nodded. "Okay, Max." A thought occurred to him and he smiled. "Not one
of the good guys?
Max, haven't you noticed? Agent Zheng is a girl."
Max cuffed him on the shoulder and went on into the house.
The bodies had been removed. The bloodstains remained. Ukiah crouched in the
threshold as he remembered doing the day before. Slowly he scanned the entry.
His memory skipped back and forth between his normally laser-etched recall and
his slightly fuzzy regained memory. "Lots of people been in here since the day
before yesterday, things are shifted around, not by much, but enough."
"Like what?" Agent Zheng asked, pulling out a PDA to take notes.
"That piece of carpet." It was a two- by three-foot carpet sample used to
catch dirt at the front entrance. It was stained a rust color by blood. "It
had been under the one girl when I first arrived. It's over there beside the
stairs now."
He tilted his head sniffing, suddenly aware of a draft and a familiar smell.
"What is it?" Max asked.
He stepped inside and swung the door shut. Behind it was an obvious basement
door. He cracked it slightly and the strong odor of animal musk swept up from
the basement.
"You weren't in the basement," Agent Zheng commented behind him.
Page 37
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Ukiah glanced back at her. "They kept mink in the basement?"
"Ferrets." Agent Zheng scrolled her PDA file backward and read. "There were
three ferrets found in cages in the basement, one male and two females.
According to friends, they belong to Janet Haze, and normally she kept them in
the attic with her. A day prior to the murders, she asked her roommates if she
could move them to the basement, complaining that they made too much noise.
The ferrets were removed the evening of the murders by the Allegheny Animal
Control Department and taken to the humane shelter on the North Side."
"And they're still there?" Max tried to sound casual while he gave Ukiah "the
look."
"I checked on them yesterday afternoon," Agent Zheng admitted.
Ukiah shut the door uneasily. "Too much noise? She seemed really bothered by
noise."
Agent Zheng nodded. "It's been found that in psychotic individuals there is an
inability to filter out background noise. It's theorized that it's a chemical
imbalance that literally drives the person insane by overloading their senses.
In your recording, Janet Haze repeatedly asked you how one stopped listening."
Max caught his eyes and shook his head, as if warning Ukiah not to say
anything.
Haze had been asking the wrong person, Ukiah thought instead of saying. When
they had first started working together, Max asked him often if he was
listening. It had puzzled Ukiah since he didn't go
around with his fingers jammed into his ears. Slowly he had learned that other
people couldn't recall things they hadn't paid attention to, while Max had
learned that Ukiah always listened.
Ukiah glanced about the entry hall. Other than the basement, there was the
living room and the stairs leading out of the hall. "Where first?"
Agent Zheng indicated upstairs. "Since the bodies were on the first floor,
it's the most disturbed. It probably would be best if you start with her
room."
Ukiah started up the steps and had almost reached the top when a thought hit
him.
Why did Agent
Zheng check on the ferrets yesterday afternoon?
He paused at the top of the steps and watched Agent Zheng follow him up.
Should he ask her?
What would he say if she asked why he was so interested in the ferrets? If
Janet Haze's ferrets were still at the humane society, then they weren't the
ferrets at the morgue. Assuming, of course, they hadn't broken out, had a
midnight feeding frenzy, and returned to their cages to look innocent.
Unlikely, but so far everything about the morgue was unlikely.
***
The window to Janet's room was shut, and otherwise at first the room seemed
unchanged. He stood at the center of the room and did a slow scan. To her
credit, Agent Zheng stood patiently at the steps, without a hint of growing
impatient. Max pulled out a cigar and chewed on its unlit end.
When Ukiah found the first missing item, Max caught the change in Ukiah's
expression. "Found something?"
Ukiah stepped forward to tap a crowded bookshelf. "There was a bottle between [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]