The Murder Prophet Read online

he said. He spread his arms wide.

  I stared at him.

  He raised his eyebrows a little and grinned.

  I was in no mental state to imagine.

  he asked.

  I nodded. Maginox® exhaustion grabbed me and shook me like a dog with a chew toy. It seemed ages since I'd had supper with Nana Nina, and aeons since I'd sat in on Aleshu Coro's appointment and taken Idala to the Registry office.

  Lemur said.

  I said.

  He was still smiling, and I couldn't read those green avatar eyes.

  I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I smiled back, reached up, and gently peeled off the faceskin. I suppose to LemurCandy my avatar simply winked out of existence.

  I was back in my dark apartment, the only glow coming from the computer screen and a little from the streetlights leaking in around the window blind. I peeled off the synth gloves and left them on the desk. The Maginox® in my system had triggered a buzzing dizziness in my head now, and even that small amount of light made me want to clench my eyes against it. I managed to shut down my computer and unplugged it from the wall. What LemurCandy had told me about the magic on the Netz was just too creepy. Then I crawled into bed without getting undressed.

  "Goodnight, Kit," Phoebe said stiffly.

  I wished briefly that I could unplug her sometimes, too, and pretended to be already asleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I'll Shoot The Messenger If I Get The Chance

  In the morning, I managed to get my run in again (two days in a row!) despite how tired I'd been the night before. Phoebe seemed to be over last night's snit and was as cheerful as usual when she woke me. I have to admit, even before I hit the pavement, I felt...buoyant. The trip "outside the grid" with LemurCandy last night had been, for all its strangeness and physical drain, fun. I ran longer than usual, caught up in a generally good feeling about the world, and then had to rush to shower, dress, and make it to the office on time.

  Which was just as well, because I didn't have time to check my mail until I got to Darcko and Sadatake, and I was glad to have other people around me when I found what was waiting in my inbox.

  My very own message from the Murder Prophet.

  I don't know how long I stared at the stark black letters, not really comprehending what I was seeing. Or maybe not letting myself comprehend it. I swallowed hard a few times, my throat thick and constricted. It seemed to be full of my heart, pushing blood and adrenaline and denial through my veins. Even reading the message to Aleshu Coro had made my skin prickle, just because, although on its surface it was only a lovely bit of poetry sent as a warning, it didn't feel like that. It felt like a threat. Malevolent and menacing. And so did this one.

  I have a rendezvous with Death

  At some disputed barricade,

  When Spring comes back with rustling shade

  And apple-blossoms fill the air—

  I have a rendezvous with Death

  When Spring brings back blue days and fair.2

  My eyes were still locked on the screen when Kikufaax came to my doorway, pulling a red leather jacket on over her cream-coloured cashmere turtleneck. "I'm making a run to Grounds Zero for real coffee—Kit? What's wrong?"

  I swallowed hard once more so that my voice would have room to get through, and swivelled the screen so she could see it. "I got a message. Take a look."

  Her eyes narrowed as she read it. She raised her voice loud enough to be heard all over the office and called, "Kit's office, everyone!"

  It didn't take them long to congregate around the screen. My small office was packed, with five of us and the goose. Trip jumped up on my desk to see better. He shed some feathers, but I ignored them.

  "Anyone else get one of these?" Anna asked.

  Negatives all around.

  "So why Kit?" Glaive looked at me almost accusingly. He moved away from my desk to lean against the wall and folded his black-clad arms. "What did you do?"

  "What makes you think I did anything? I thought we were all working on this case as of yesterday afternoon."

  "Of course we were," Anna said soothingly. She patted my arm. "I think Glaive just meant, what did you in particular, do, that might have attracted attention?"

  "It could be a fluke," Trip suggested. Everyone looked at him. "Yeah, I guess not."

  "Hmmmm." Glaive stroked his stubbled chin with a forefinger. Glaive doesn't see any need to shave every day. I suppose there's a different standard for retired hit men than for other men. Or maybe it was trendy. "The police don't seem to have been treating these messages as threats, but it's hard to see this one as anything else."

  Kikufaax sat on the edge of my desk and shook her head. She'd shed her jacket again. Her right foot, clad in a low-heeled soft leather boot, drummed a little staccato of agitation against the wood. "It doesn't have to be a threat. The timing certainly seems to be related to the Coro case, but that doesn't necessarily speak to the intent as well. It might or might not mean someone's telling us to stay out of this."

  "Kiku's right," Anna said, frowning. She lowered herself gracefully into one of the "client" chairs in my office, smoothing the pleats of her mauve-patterned skirt with restless fingers that belied the calm in her voice. "There are two ways to think about these messages. They're either well-intentioned warnings to put the intended victim on guard, or they're threats designed to rattle the victim and make their last few days or weeks miserable."

  "Elegantly put, Anna," Saga said, taking the other chair. "The question is, which?"

  I waved a hand in the air. "Speaking as a recipient," I said, "it feels like a threat, and I'm feeling rattled and miserable. And in case anyone else hadn't noticed, look out the window—it's already spring."

  "Not yet," Trip said.

  Everyone looked at him again. He shrugged his wings. "The first day of spring isn't officially until March twentieth, and this is only the tenth."

  "When is Coro's fortnight up, if that's accurate?" Glaive asked.

  Kiku shot him a withering glance. "The twentieth. Didn't you figure that out already?"

  Glaive shrugged. "No. I figured two weeks gave us more than enough time, once we put our minds to it. So I didn't bother with dates."

  Anna fixed me with a serious look. "Don't worry, Kit. We're not going to let anything happen to you."

  "Yeah," I said, "I wonder if anyone said that very same thing to any of the other victims?"

  Trip waddled across the desk and patted me awkwardly on the shoulder with one of those weird hands. At least he'd had the good sense to get the Mancer to make them white, so they just looked like an extension of his white-feathered wings. Sort of. I couldn't imagine how creepy they would be if he'd had them flesh-colored. "I'm going to start practicing my moves even harder," he assured me. "And I'll be around, whenever you need me. I mean it. We're all in this together."

  Well, I didn't burst out laughing, but it was close. No matter what I say about him, there's no way I'd intentionally hurt Trip's feelings, so I managed to clamp my lips together in some semblance of a smile and bite my tongue at the same time. The pain kept the laughter at bay long enough for me to get control, and then I just said, "Thanks, Trip. I appreciate it."

  Glaive said, "Okay, so let's call it a threat. That means that the Murder Prophet, whoever he or she is, has some interest in th
e murders, other than just being able to predict them."

  "Or if not in the murders, then in the murderer," Kiku said.

  Saga shook his head and narrowed his eyes. Although his demeanor stayed as outwardly calm as ever, the hard note of anger in his voice came through loud and clear. "There are multiple murderers involved, remember. It would be too much to believe that they are connected in any way other than through the person sending these messages. If that person is not the murderer in all cases, that theory fails. I cannot accept that these murderers are related by anything other than chance."

  "Then we're back to the Murder Prophet," I said. "Personally, I don't care what his motivations are right now. I just want him stopped." I shivered. I didn't want anyone else receiving one of these messages.

  "Glaive was correct to ask his earlier question, however," Saga said, turning to me. "What did you do yesterday, Kit? You seem to have attracted unwanted attention. That in itself could be a clue."

  "Lucky me," I said. I leaned back in my chair and counted items off on my fingers. "I picked up Miss Kineall. We chatted a bit, not about the Coro case or the Murder Prophet. I delivered her to the Registry office as you requested. I had supper with my grandmother. I went directly home from there and went Netz-surfing with LemurCandy, looking for information relevant to the Coro case. I had a tiff with my apartment AI. I went to bed." I shrugged. "That's it."

  Glaive snickered. "I've always said, Kit can piss off anyone. Obviously, even a computer."

  "Where did you go with Lemur?" Kikufaax asked, ignoring him.

  "I met up with him in a mind virtual, then we went outside the grid—"

  "Really?" Trip interjected. "I've read about that! It's supposed to be really cool! Do you think he'd take me sometime?" The goose was practically jumping up and down on my desk. Fluffy bits of white down fluttered over some of my papers.

  "I'm sure he would, if you asked him," I said reassuringly. "It was definitely interesting. We went to place Lemur called the Library and sorted through data; Lemur was looking for references to the Murder Prophet and I did a search on Coro. Then he took me to a...a friend's house, I guess. Still virtual. The guy was trying to do a traceback on one of the messages from the Murder Prophet."

  "Any luck?" Glaive asked.

  I shrugged. "They didn't seem to have any real answers before we left. Then we went really deep inside the Netz and they got me to tag some of the data streams as true or false—I didn't even know my magic could do that—"

  I stopped because I caught sight of Saga's face. Now he also looked angry. You have to understand, Saga is the epitome of imperturbable. Here's how I knew he was angry: a straight little vertical line bisected the space between his brows, and the corners of his mouth turned down about two degrees.

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  "LemurCandy may have exposed you to a malicious Harmonized Divination Nexus," Saga said. "Do you know if he source-response vetted the data streams before he exposed you to them?"

  I raised an eyebrow. "Once more, this time in some language I might understand?"

  "Never mind. I will contact LemurCandy myself," he said, and stood. "Did anyone check with him to see if he received any messages from the Murder Prophet himself?"

  "Not yet," Anna said calmly. "You go ahead and ask him." Those two had been partners for so long, they had learned some cosmic secret about balancing each others' moods. If one was angry, the other got preternaturally calm. And vice versa. More marriages would last if couples could learn that secret.

  "I'm going to go get Kit a coffee," Kikufaax said.

  "And a lemon doughnut?" I asked hopefully.

  She laughed. "And a lemon doughnut. Anyone else?"

  The others chimed in with their orders, following Kiku out of my office, and I had a few moments alone to collect my thoughts. I wanted to contact LemurCandy, but Saga was already doing that. I supposed I could try and get in touch with FallenElfGeek, but I wasn't confident I could find my way back to his apartment by myself and I didn't like to try without talking to Lemur first anyway. For all I knew, that was FEG's secret virtual hideaway, and they wouldn't appreciate my mucking it up for him.

  But I didn't want to just sit there thinking about the message. I closed it with a vehement click, determined to put it out of my mind. I still had the data I'd filtered about Aleshu Coro to go through, sent to my own inbox in a secure packet from the Library last night. I set about opening it up and trying to arrange the data into something that made sense.

  Coro's biography read like something out of a boring movie about a guy with an almost-perfect life. He'd developed his meagre magic talent early, but not at such a young age that his parents had to deal with the medication issue. Top student, sociable, enhanced no doubt by the fact that his father was a well-to-do businessman and his mother a prominent environmentalist, although not the fanatical kind.

  He started MageData, Inc. straight out of college, utilizing an innovative type of database he'd developed in a university computer course. Married his college sweetheart, an artist named Evangeline Harrington. The sweetness apparently didn't last, and they'd divorced about six years later. The ex-wife had dropped off the radar, gone off to Europe to pursue her art.

  Second wife, Clarice Valencia, was a technician at MageData, and they married shortly after Coro's divorce, just when the company started to really become a leader in the field. A MageData subsidiary came up with a reliable genetic test to determine if a person had an active magical ability or not, and it was hailed by some as the first step toward a real magic-ability identification test. Not everyone thinks having such a thing is a good idea, but the governments want it so badly they pour a lot of money every year into funding the research. Me, I think if it ever comes it'll be such a massive invasion of privacy that they won't be able to implement it, since they still can't even force anyone to take the initial genetic test.

  Anyway. Second marriage lasted ten years. MageData got to be the biggest in the field, and I guess Coro thought he deserved a new trophy wife. At least that had been the rumor at the time. Wife #2 got a lot of property, including a magically-created island near Fiji, so I don't imagine she spent a lot of time licking her wounds. Wife #3, Sandrine (née Allaire), had been in the picture for five years now.

  At this point Kiku came back with my coffee and doughnut. I barely looked up to thank her, I was so deep in reading the data, but she didn't leave right away.

  "You all right, Kit?" she asked, hovering in front of my desk. She twisted the plain silver ring she always wore on her right hand, a sure sign of her agitation.

  I looked up then. "What? Oh, yeah, sure." I drew a deep breath and blew it out. "I was spooked at first, but the best thing for me to do is just keep working, keep my mind off it."

  She nodded. "I'd be the same way. Anyway, don't worry. We've got your back."

  "I know it."

  She smiled then and left, but I'd heard the undercurrent of concern in her voice. Kiku was almost as unflappable as Saga, so it didn't exactly make me feel as much better as she'd probably hoped. I took a sip of coffee and then a big bite of doughnut. Powdered sugar and tart lemon filling...now that was comforting. I turned my attention back to the screen.

  Numerous tidbits of information had made it through my filters but I didn't see how most of them could be useful to the case. Coro's favorite drink (something called a Bodyguard's Scabbard, which I'd never tried but sounded interesting), preferred avatars (one that looked just like him, and a blond male bimbo who seemed to get a lot of use), known usernames (apart from his corporate "Acoro" the only other he ever seemed to use was "PsychoticMuslinCrayon," apparently a holdover from his college days and linked to the blond avatar), and favorite color (blue).

  There was also data on Coro's charitable donations (on which, I admit, he didn't stint) and "good works," which included youth facilities, university endowments, magic research grants, and the like. I only skimmed over those, because philanthropy is not generall
y the kind of thing that gets a person killed.

  In fact, there was very little in the file to peg Coro as the kind of person who gets murdered with malice aforethought. Sure, he might have trampled on a few little people on his march to the top of the database ladder, but on the whole my impression was that he was a pretty nice guy. He had ethics. He had a conscience. He gave back.

  I sighed and cleared the data off my screen. That had gotten me exactly nowhere, except for the two ex-wives, whom I didn't think were going to figure in this. One had likely been gone too long to be still holding a grudge, and the other had made out well enough on the deal to let bygones be bygones. We'd check them out, but it seemed like a dead end.

  I shivered. What's with these expressions that we use all the time and then suddenly they take on a whole new meaning?

  I shook it off and buzzed Kiku. "Anyone else tasked with talking to Coro yet?"

  "I don't think so."

  "I'm going to call him up, ask him about the company and stuff."

  "Sure thing," she said. "Logical for you to do it, since you'll know if he's telling the truth."

  I slipped into the kitchen and washed down a couple of Maginox®, then went back to my office, closed the door, and phoned Coro. He'd obviously left instructions for his staff because with an absolute minimum of runaround, for a company the size of MageData, I was talking to the man himself. He still sounded tired, but glad to hear from me.

  The conversation followed pretty standard lines. I asked him again if he had any enemies, he said no, and then I asked him again in various ways, this time pinpointing specific possibilities like employees, members of MageData's Board of Directors, other business contacts, ex-wives and their families, personal acquaintances, etc.

  He said no to all of them, and he was telling the truth. The guy really couldn't imagine anyone wanting to kill him, for any reason.

  I got him to verify some of the information I'd found online, just to double-check and so that he'd know we were doing our job. I didn't bring up his favorite drink or the blond male avatar. He didn't have to know everything we knew.