1
Giles Gratton, sick as a dog from nineteen years spent sleeping in the off hours between bloody murder rooms and the aldermen’s bullshit, doesn’t knock.
“Get your coat,” he says.
“Hi, Captain.”
“Yeah, all that.”
I get my coat and hold the door for him.
“Hi, Cal,” Gratton says.
We go down the stairs together. No need to waste a perfectly good bit of bad news with conversation.
—
We’re in the wrong part of town for something in my line. Not that it’s nasty, it’s just not perfect. The people I deal with are up there, not down here. Gratton drops me at the building but doesn’t come in.
“I’ve already seen it.”
“You got any idea?”
He shakes his head. “Just that it’s your thing.”
“Confirmed?”
“No, but if you get in there and you think I’m wrong, you can keep the money and go back to bed.”
I walk through the lobby and take the stairs up to the third floor. Every single step is shiny clean and smells of off-brand Limonene.
Inside the apartment, the dead nerd lies on the floor. There’s a hole in his head, small and smudged with grey ash and a light burn. A close-range shooting: an execution or a suicide. There’s some blood, blowback from the moment of impact, but the round must still be inside him. Small calibre, low power. Just enough to do the job.
Down by his feet, Musgrave the city doctor is fussing with a tablet: the police network is achingly slow. Other than that there’s not a lot going on. Murder rooms are like train stations at midnight, not much left to do before the last departure.
The nerd looks about forty-five with no habits. He’s got dark hair cut nerd style, he’s wearing a nerd shirt, button-down, with little hooks for a clip-tie stitched under the collar. Nerd slacks too high at the waist and too short at the ankle, and nerd shoes from an artisan place in the market, with orthotic inserts. The thick soles complete the anti-chic vibe. This was how he lived, wardrobe like an old guy and no mind to be anything else.
There’s a lounge chair in front of the big window. I figure he sat there and looked out, so I go and do that too. I can feel the ghost of him in the cushions, pressed down and permanently shaped by his weight. Forensics have come and gone ages ago, but still the other three twitch slightly as I sit because they’re not allowed to, not allowed so deep they can’t imagine that anyone would.
“You want to get a snack while you’re at it?” Detective Felton, standing by the door, doesn’t love my way of being in the world. We got nothing to discuss, so I don’t.
Outside, the city spreads east and west along the lake. The Chersenesos district juts out into the deep water from midtown, a dog’s muzzle lapping from a massive bowl. Behind the skyscrapers the mountains rise up from the farthest shore. Othrys is topographically an alpine lake: the line from the peak to the trench is smooth, and the water is as deep as the mountains are high. Anything you throw in falls for a clear four thousand metres to a cold darkness that keeps its secrets well and never lets them go. Anything, or anyone.
“Oh bloody fucking fuck,” Musgrave growls at her tablet. It’s not true what they say: good workmen do indeed blame their tools, at least when they have to use what the department can afford. Felton and his uniform buddy can’t even be bothered to laugh. Just two of them: there’s a serious incident in the Heights. There always is when you need one. Gratton giving me space—or maybe rope.
I go back to the desk and run my hand along the flat surface. It’s clean and cold. There’s a university terminal, a block of cartridge paper by the printer. The drawers have bamboo dividers to keep everything in its proper place: one cubby for staples, one for rubber bands, one for pens. There is nothing, but nothing, out of place in this room, in this entire apartment, except for the nerd who owns it, dead between the display case and the fish tank.
Koi carp, two, one orange, and one orange and white.
I shuffle all the way back on the dead man’s office chair until my feet come off the floor and then I push off with my right hand so that I’m spinning slowly around. The chair is a science chair, translucent and nasty. They take a seed from your ear cartilage and grow it and then you sit in it because something something immune response something biota. Supposedly it’s good for you, but who knows? High-ticket item. Round and round I go in the dead nerd’s chair, which I guess is technically part of the corpse.
“Hey, Musgrave, you gonna autopsy this chair?”
“Nope.”
“Because you know—”
“Yes I do. Technically it’s still alive so it would be a vivisection, but let me say again: no, I do not at this time propose to vivisect the chair, because I have an annual budget and it’s fucking ridiculous.”
“Just figure it’s made of his body. If he was maybe poisoned—”
“He was shot in the head,” Musgrave says, like she doesn’t really want to talk about it any more.
There are no family pictures around the terminal, or on the mantel, or in the display case. There are none in the living room with its view of the harbour, thirty-six storeys down. There are none in the bathrooms. There is a box in the lumber room full of bric-a-brac, and no doubt he intended, one day, to go through it and set some of those things out. Or perhaps he just didn’t give a damn. Sometimes you keep things because you don’t have time to throw them away.
Alastair Rodney Tebbit, went by Roddy. This address plus a teaching room on campus. Not married, at least for the present. Manicure his only obvious vanity, and a bullet somewhere in his skull: one shot between the ear and the temple, right through the stem and bounced off the concave bone on the far side. The gun is the one he bought yesterday morning, smaller than my palm. The credit card slip is still on the side table where he dropped his keys. Swiss made, with no digital parts. It comes with a spring holster: you twitch your wrist in a particular way and the gun pops into your hand. Another high-ticket item, and fine, he had the cash and not a lot to spend it on, but most of the stuff here is ordinary. Only the chair, the shoes, and the gun are expensive. Roddy Tebbit did not impulse buy, and he did not bother with needless things. He spent money on stuff that mattered, and the gun mattered.
Still spinning in the chair. Look up, look down, look around. There is no part of the crime scene that is not interesting. Cobwebs on the ceiling, but they’re new. I can see the spider working. No dirt anywhere else except the tiny blush of ejecta on the carpet where he died, and the diffuse grime that settles wherever humans live, the little tracks of a thousand daily journeys from kitchen to lounge chair to bathroom to bedroom that Roddy Tebbit will not be making ever again.
—
I roll the chair back and open the drawers. There are two on top of each other, one shallow and one deep. The first one is full of things to write with. Pencils, hard. Pencils, soft. One box of a half dozen in solid graphite. Then pens. Pens, blue. Pens, black. Pens, red. Trifecta. Sharpies, indigo, and only indigo. Personal quirk. The notes on the cartridge paper are in indigo. Nice colour.
Paperclips, one size only. Staples, for stapler, adjoining cubby.
Next drawer. Tape, various colours and sizes. Solder kit. Protective goggles, protective gloves. Lightweight gear for making new charging cables. Solder, different metals. Cable offcuts, cable clips. Latex glue, in date. One empty cubby, no indication of what it held. Maybe it was open: a place for the unexpected. I close the drawer.
And there, on the floor at the spot where the rug folds by the foot of the desk: a tiny piece of shaped metal, yellow and warm. Two loops like a roller coaster track, not more than a couple of millimetres across, a hole through the middle. The butterfly piece from an earring.
“Hey, Musgrave.”
“Yes?”
“Got a bag?”
She doesn’t say “of course.” Musgrave’s self-image is anchored deep in the flesh of forensic pathology, and she doesn’t need to remind anyone how good she is. You don’t work with her even once and not notice. She comes over, curious. There shouldn’t be anything. Scene of crime should have seen this, but they missed it, probably because they were eyeballing the corpse. Even here, that’s not something you see every day. “Where?” she asks.
I point and she takes a picture almost reflexively. Then I go into my pocket, where I keep a folding corkscrew someone gave me a long time ago. It’s a little silver item with a slide-out pin that you’re supposed to use to pierce the wax seals you get on some bottles. Great for picnics, and for evidence. I reach down and lift up the butterfly, let it rest on the tip of the pin. Musgrave makes a noise like “hht” then leans over and drops it into an evidence bag, passes it off to the uniform.
“His ears aren’t pierced.”
You wouldn’t expect them to be, or any other part of him, but she’ll check, anyway.
I straighten up and look around.
Roddy was a quiet, boring guy who lived for his work. He fed his fish regularly, he shopped local, and he rode a bicycle to campus. He did not, at least in so far as anyone knows at this early stage, run off with other people’s wives, gamble in dens of vice or haul drugs over the border in the secret compartment of a Maserati. He had no debts, no known enemies and no obvious worries. Yesterday morning he bought a gun and yesterday night that gun was fired into his head. An accident, a suicide or a murder. And none of these things would be my problem, except for the other bit.
Roddy Tebbit, if he was standing straight without a .22 derringer shell spiralled through what I have to assume was top grade brain matter, would have been seven feet, eight and some inches tall. Two hundred and thirty-six centimetres.
And according to his driving license, he was ninety-one years old.
Roddy Tebbit was a Titan.
Gratton was right. This is my thing.
—
You maybe could get a seventy-year-old former Olympic basketball player who looks like forty-five. I mean theoretically. In reality your serious sports people pick up injuries, and the longer they stay in, the worse those tend to be. They get cardio problems, craquelure fractures, crumbling joints, hamstring, anterior cruciate ligament, rotator cuff. They might end up with a foot problem, wear orthotic shoes.
What you do not get is a man in his tenth decade looking like his fifth. That is not within the bounds of the normal human healthspan. The only way you get from there to here is T7 therapy, so even if Roddy is in the wrong part of town, in the wrong kind of apartment and wearing the wrong clothes—even if he’s so very much not gossip magazines and sturgeon sushi and private planes—he is what he is. Going by age and size it’s just one dose, but in policing terms it doesn’t make much difference. This is an entire rain of shit for the department. Titan cases by definition involve frightened rich people calling the politicians they socialise with, who call the police chief, who then wants to know everything before the cops themselves do until it’s like two guys running in clown shoes, except that when they fall over one of them gets to fire the other.
Meanwhile the Titans think the cops don’t really give a shit if they die, which is somewhat true. They think every tabloid hack in the world wants a photograph of a naked Titan with a knife between her ribs, which is entirely true.
I don’t hate Titans, cops or journalists. I also don’t love Titans, cops or journalists.
I do what I do and I try to do it right.
—
I poke around some more, open the box of bric-a-brac and find…stuff. Old train tickets; a branded baseball cap from a diner somewhere in flyover country; work gloves and a tool belt, but no tools. Receipts from everywhere, a pair of hiking boots and a bag of moss. I give the moss to Musgrave, who says thank you, she has always wanted some. I tell her I thought maybe it was important.
But I didn’t, really. Roddy didn’t think any of this was important enough to do anything with, and for that matter nor did his killer, assuming there was one, who had plenty of time if they wanted his box of things he couldn’t bring himself to throw away.
Figure maybe that was all it was: stuff in a holding pattern between being useless and being refuse. Old people get like that, and Titans are old even if they look young. They also get fragmentary amnesia sometimes, if the dosing process was particularly traumatic, if there was a lot of pain. The brain puts itself back together, but not always completely, and it’s not unknown for Titans to have little files of the details they can’t quite remember, or a desk drawer filled with things that ought to matter, but they don’t know why. The cost of immortality is losing part of who you were, and perhaps that’s not a bad bargain anyway.
After twenty minutes it’s clear the gold butterfly fixture is all I’m getting from the apartment unless I want to question the fish. I do not, so I tell Musgrave I’ll see her later at the morgue, and she looks like that is an offer she can take or leave.
I go out between Felton and the uniform into the hall. There’s a bag of takeout from last night dumped by the apartment door. The label says it was ordered at seven fifty, but Roddy Tebbit never took it inside. Receipt printout is eight fifteen.
When you stand in the hallway and smell the cold food, you realise you’ve been breathing death in the apartment. It’s not a stink of blood or bowel, but any dying leaves a trace in the air. I feel it as a kind of thinness, like the flavour of a bone broth taken off the cooker before it’s time, or the empty pages of a new colouring book.
Apartment 363 where Roddy Tebbit lived is the corner, with big picture windows. 362 is a mid-floor and 364 is pretty much the whole of the other side of the hall, although the building on that side is stepped like a pyramid, so in terms of your square meters it isn’t any bigger than the other two, but it probably has a hell of a terrace. I go along to 362. There’s a bucket outside. I knock. When no one answers, I ring the bell, and then knock again. Finally the door opens and a guy in a janitor coat looks out. He has greasy hair and muttonchop sideburns and no beard, and he wears a badge which says his name is Rufus. I say hi to Rufus.
“Hi,” Rufus says. “You part of—” He waves at the cops.
“External contractor.” Meaning I don’t care about whatever his hustle is. You got to know a guy like Rufus has a hustle. “These nice people?” Gesturing to the apartment behind him.
He shrugs. “Moved out last week. Going to the west coast.”
“I hear it’s cold as hell.”
“Well, they sure didn’t leave anything behind.” He sighs. Figure some people leave stuff he can sell on.
“You ever see the nerd next door?”
“The doctor guy?” He raises his hand up way over his head. Not everyone that big is a Titan. In fact right around one in every one million people is naturally over seven feet tall, for a global total of maybe eight thousand; the number of Titans in the world is a quarter of that, even if a lot of them are here, in Chersenesos. But it’s not really about the numbers: Titans are red carpet, VIP lounge and champagne. They wear perfect clothes and shoes without orthotics. They’re hard money walking. So, sure, maybe Roddy Tebbit was not “that Titan guy” to Rufus. He was tall, and he was a doctor.
“Yeah,” I say.
Rufus shrugs. “Sure. You can’t miss him.”
To be honest I have been wondering if anyone will.
“He okay?” I ask. “Decent fella?”
Rufus nods. “Sure. Just some guy. Shy maybe.”
“He date?”
Rufus shrugs. “There was a girl sometimes. A lady, I guess.”
“He social with anyone?”
“No.” His eyes flick across and down at the floor, but his body twitches a little towards 364. “I mean just neighbourly. Maybe chips and dips. He’s a quiet guy.”
“Any visitors? Loud music? Like that?”
Rufus laughs. “I think one time some of his students came round and they played him something modern. Three of them. Said they were going to teach him to live a little. It didn’t take.”
“You recognise them if I showed you a picture?”
“It was a while ago. One of the girls had long brown hair, down to her legs.”
“Like brown brown or—” I don’t know what the fuck else brown. I was going to use the hair to make him describe the girl, but Rufus gets a look. It’s the look people get when they want to ask me how much I’m not a cop. Like am I not a cop so I don’t care about jaywalking? Or am I not a cop so yeah, you know, this one time in Vegas—?
I look Rufus in the eye and I offer him cash. Rufus says it happens he is having a particularly bad month owing to some poor financial investments in the field of canine athletics. I help out with this shortfall.
Rufus ambles away to a closet and I watch him go. He has a weird gait, like Chaplin playing a sailor. I ask myself if he has smashed-up hips. I had a cousin who moved that way after a horse walked over him. I wonder whether he might have hated Roddy Tebbit for being a Titan, because Titans don’t have injuries like that any more, not after they get dosed, but no one was going to give Rufus a shot at that.
Rufus comes back and he’s holding a piece of brown string. When he gives it to me and I realise what it is.
“You took some of her hair?”
“Humans shed hair all the time,” Rufus says. “You got long hair like that, more of it. It catches on doors, plants, on a sweater. Then it goes on the floor. This girl, she brushed her hair outside the apartment. To look smart for class, I guess.”
“And you just pick it up because it’s neater that way.”
“I gather it,” Rufus says, pious and clean. “I keep it all and I colour-grade it, and at the end of the year I sell it on.”
Always something new. I think about how that works and make a mental note not to search Rufus’s place unless I absolutely, positively, have no other fucking leads in the world.
“To who?”
“Embalmers. Mostly for touch-up. Sometimes a corpse will lose hair. If they can’t use it outside, sometimes stuffing.”
“Well,” I say, “life is the process of learning shit that you never ever wanted to hear.”
Rufus does not like my tone. “Well, that’s her hair, anyway,” he says, and he’s thinking about going.
“He seem different recently? Roddy Tebbit?”
Shaking his head. “Not that I saw.”
“And not yesterday, specifically? This week in general?”
“No. Hey—” People always start to get it when you ask that. “Hey, what happened?”
“Fire drill,” I tell him. “Excuse me.”
—
Whoever lives in 364 was waiting for the knock but doesn’t want me to know it. I hear footsteps, rapid and nervous, and then there’s a pause while they stand on the other side of the door and count silently. I count too. People count to ten because that’s what they think you do. I get to nine and fix my expression, respectful neutral, and the door opens.
She’s long and narrow. She has her hair shaved to the notch at the back of the skull and cut to the line of her mouth at the front, and the jacket dress she wears has a deep collar designed to drag your eye downwards from her face. I fix my eyes on a patch of air a few inches in front of her nose and look as official as I can.
“Good afternoon,” I say. “My name’s Cal Sounder. I’m working with the police on a serious crime. You mind if I come in?” I badge her, properly, so she has time to read the fine print. She doesn’t.
“Of course,” she says, “come in.”
She sounds sad, but there’s something in her eyes like gunpowder and white alcohol.
—
The apartment is all-over rugs and brass jugs: Mesopotamia chic was in last year. It smells of coffee and vetiver, and in between peacock feathers there’s some hardwood modern furniture, as if the Sultan always had a thing for Charlie Eames. The woman’s name is Layla Catchpole. She’s divorced. It wasn’t a good divorce, but it’s over now. Her ex-husband lives in Maui with his new wife.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Sounder?”
I play dull on instinct.
“There’s been a problem in the building, ...
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