The Final Dream - Part Two of the Amazing Thriller

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B.R.K. Alder

27 Blencowe Street

West Leederville 6007

Western Australia

Ph. 08 9381-3978

newtopian@hotmail.com

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The

Final

Dream

Part Two

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Bart Alder

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Old English Pennies

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It was the second time Hudson smelled the body that he first stared at it.

He was standing in the coroner?s lab at the time. It seemed a strange contrast, the smell of disinfected floors and alcohol soaked dissection tools mixing with the noxious, bacterial nightmare of a half-frozen dead body.

And though he might have wanted to take in the details of the antique room with its tungsten light globes and brick walls, he could no more absorb details of the room he was standing in than he could sing in tune.

What dominated Hudson?s attention was the body and the smell.

It had been a violent smelling blue tarpaulin the first time he had seen it and on that occasion he had done his best to ignore the body itself, so this time as he stood inside the coroner?s lab behind Fisher?s right shoulder, Hudson looked with horror upon what could only be called a very pale, very dead woman.

She was laying flat on a shiny steel dissecting bench, naked from the chest up, her slender, lifeless arms resting by her sides. The doctor, for dignity?s sake had covered her lower three quarters with a sheet.

Hudson was again assaulted by the smell which had once before made him feel so ill. It was the smell coupled with the blonde hair and the whiteness of the chest, the yellowness of the extremities, the deathliness of her colour which made her so horrifying to behold. The dark rings around her eyes, the lack of expression on her face...

And Hudson, as he looked at her, found himself wondering a million things: Who was she, where did she come from, why was she wrapped up in a tarpaulin in the middle of nowhere, what did she die of? Why had he left her on the bus shelter - especially when there was the great risk of discovery?

Doctor Farris walked into the room, making eye contact with all the bench tops. Farris was a man of fifty years, with shortly cropped and neatly coiffed grey hair, brown, tired eyes and little in his life to smile about, except for going deaf in the same tone range in which his argumentative wife of thirty years spoke.

?She was only young.? said Farris. ?About twenty-five. She has no external signs of any organ or any other kind of physical decay - so that I can say that she probably didn?t die of any obvious illness. No skin tumours, there are quite a few needle marks on her right arm, left arm and right leg. I think most likely, she died from the drugs which it looks like she?d been using for some time. She had two coins on her eyes, held there with this waxy bandage. Actually, the whole of the face was bandaged up. You?ll see the photographs later.?

?Coins.? said Fisher. ?What kind of coins.?

?They?re over there on the table.? said Farris, pointing to a bench next to the body, a table on castors. On the table was a steel tray with bandages and two coins in it.

Fisher picked up both of the coins one by one with a pair of tweezers.

?Old English pennies.? Fisher remarked. ?About four hundred years old. Both of them quite rare actually. Worth a fortune I expect.?

?What can it mean?? asked Hudson.

?It means she was going to be buried.? said Dr. Farris.

Fisher nodded. ?I agree.? he said.

?How do you get that?? asked Hudson.

?The pennies covering the eyes is an old European burial tradition.? explained Fisher. ?The church would put coins over the closed eyes of the paupers who died in the town or whatever, who couldn?t afford to be buried with a cross or some other religious symbol. The pennies were a? symbolic way of giving the paupers something to go into the afterlife with. Think of it as a goodwill gesture. The practice stopped in Europe ages ago because graverobbers would dig up the dead bodies to steal the pennies. The killer probably puts the pennies on the eyes for the same reason the churches did it, to wish the spirit of the person well before they were buried. He?s a sentimentalist, Hudson.?

?And a rich one too.? Hudson added.

?Yes.? agreed Fisher. ?I?d say extremely rich. Rich to a point where money is a joke? But you say that the girl overdosed. That?s unexpected.?

?You understand that drug related death is only my preliminary analysis.? said the doctor forcibly as though if it were not clear that he would be rather upset in his own restrained fashion. He was also a highly pragmatic man who liked to have a spare theory up his sleeve in case anyone found his first theory was wrong. ?She is still partly frozen. I will have to wait for the body to thaw before I can continue with a deeper analysis. That could take a day or two.?

?Was she frozen by the cold or was she already frozen beforehand?? asked Hudson. Fisher waited to hear the answer.

? She?s so uniformly frozen it?s hard to know for sure, that?ll take more careful tissue analysis. Either way this body is the strangest darned thing I?ve seen in a long time.?

?What drugs are you thinking caused her death?? asked Fisher.

He lifted an arm and pointed to the needle marks. ?There are tracks everywhere. All over her body, between her toes, in her legs, the veins in her arms are almost dead. There are a lot of intravenous drugs but this is telltale heroin.? he mumbled. ?Probably. At least that?s what my preliminary report will say.?

?That is very unexpected.? said Fisher. Hudson looked at Fisher but could not imagine what Fisher had expected to hear.

Fisher was clearly agitated. ?Are you sure it was heroin?? he asked the doctor eventually.

?All the signs are there of a systematic use. Spot haemorrhaging in the eyes, massive clotting. Heroin is something of an emetic too, so not surprisingly there?s signs in the throat that she vomited prodigiously just before she died. It?s even possible she choked to death on her own ejecta. Not a pleasant way to die. You were right about those poles. They?re interesting.?

The doctor pointed to the two poles which he had left on the adjacent dissecting bench along with a neatly folded blue tarpaulin.

?Did you mark them left and right, as I asked?? said Fisher.

The doctor looked puzzled for a moment. ?Oh, I?m sorry, I didn?t get that message. I was asked to comment on the attachment of the poles. I thought that meant for me to suggest a function for the arrangement. I have the photos, you will see them after.?

Fisher drew a very long breath.

?Okay are we ready for the real weirdness??

The doctor said nothing as he lifted the sheet from her feet, moving it up her ankles. He lifted the right leg, tilted the foot. Fisher and Hudson clearly saw a large and deep incision.

?It looks as though her blood was drained through a cut here.? Farris pointed a waving finger along the incision. It was just above the right ankle.

?Why are her feet blue?? asked Hudson.

?Because that?s where the blood has collected. The blood below the cut didn?t get drained out. The vein was tapped, the blood which was no longer circulating just dripped straight out probably.? the doctor said. ?There?s a matching incision in the other ankle.?

?Somebody drained her blood.? Hudson said incredulously.

?Is there any medical reason for draining someone?s blood that you can think of?? asked Fisher.

The Doctor thought for a moment. ?Strange ritual. Satanic origin perhaps?? he offered eventually.

Satanic ritual or not, Hudson found himself thinking, ?Blood has been drained from the body. Was it the body that the killer wanted, or was it perhaps just the blood??

?The draining of the blood was the first part. The real ceremony began next.? said the Doctor. Hudson looked at Dr. Farris. Farris was clearly saying ?You may not want to look at this? with his eyes.

He pulled the sheet off the bottom half of the body. Hudson wished he?d listened to Farris?s eyes.

The whole torso had been cut open from under the armpits down the sides of her body and then across her abdomen in a giant U shape. There were also square patches of skin which had been peeled off her thighs. Incredible effort had gone into stitching the skin back into place but Dr. Farris had recut the tiny little black stitches. There were fibres of the stitches lying next to the leg. The skin, which should have been on her left leg was hanging off a little to one side. Hudson could see the frozen muscle tissue. Drained of blood it looked like a bunch of thin, spaghetti all glued together, grey and half-cooked. Seeing this made Hudson feel nauseous. The smell burned into him, the face, with its rings around the eyes. The mouth open.

The hair.

Oh god.

Hudson closed his eyes and saw the face again. The woman. Not the woman lying on the table in front of him. The woman.

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The long steel blade went into her dark skin, her blood pouring out of the giant wound as with a quick flash, the knife came down again and again and again...

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Oh god, no...

Slowly, Hudson let the thought go. He couldn?t place it yet. Was it from another dream? One which wasn?t a dream about the well, a dream about the woman.

And holding it all in, but allowing himself a moment or two to breathe through his mouth, Hudson again found himself asking questions.

?What does the dissection mean. What did it mean that the body was cut?? every time he talked the smell went through his head all the more. He looked at Fisher to notice Fisher?s face tilted towards him.

Fisher?s thoughts were of his own dilemma. Now it was certain. The killer was drawn to the dead. And if Hudson was smart, he?d figure the rest out. Can I trust him? I feel so damned trapped.

Hudson looked at the muscles, he looked at the skin. He noticed the stitching went up the body?s sides, to underneath the armpits. It was not like she had just been cut, it was as though she had been peeled. Hudson held his stomach when it threatened to throw up his meagre breakfast again.

?Why??

?She was long dead when this was done to her.? said the Doctor. ?She could have died days, weeks or even months before. She?s been treated ever so lightly with a preserving agent, from the spots of greatest discolouration, I?d say it?s formaldehyde. It?s commonly used in all kinds of industries. Her skin is preserved, her insides were even partly preserved by it too.?

Hudson realised that this was all being said for his benefit.

Fisher himself seemed disinterested in what the doctor was saying.

?What do you make of the skin cutting. How do you know it came after death?? Hudson asked while he had the doctor?s attention.

?For a start, from the lack of blood in the skin, and the holes in the ankles, it?s obvious that the cuts were made after the body was drained of the blood. So that?s the first thing. Otherwise, there are a million other things. These look nothing like the cuts you?d get if he was cutting her when she was alive... if she had been conscious when these cuts were done on her she would have fought back, there would have been bruising, bleeding, swelling...all kinds of signs. See how these cuts are all smooth, like they were done by a computer, the long cut from under the armpit to the hip... it all looks steady and perfect. If she had been wriggling, the cuts would be much, much messier.?

Hudson found that comment a little tasteless although he?d have been hard pressed to say what aspect of the comment offended him so much. It was just something awful about the way Dr. Farris talked. He talked as though the girl were not real. Her death had made her a nothing in the doctor?s eyes. The doctor could therefore talk about her with impunity.

?There aren?t any signs of struggling, she had not been sexually assaulted so far as I can tell although it is not possible to be sure. The person who cut up this body may well have had possession of it for some time. They could have done anything with it.?

?Anything?? thought Hudson. ?What did that word mean in this context??

?Did you find anything inside the body? Anything missing?? asked Fisher.

?No. At least not so far as I can tell. Although the corpse is quite soft on the outside now, the insides have not yet thawed, so I haven?t had a thorough look. But so far it looks clean. Nothing seems out of place. That is a very preliminary observation.? said the doctor who had studied medicine to heal but had found himself in the profession of being a pragmatic bastard and couching his words by default. He?d moved into working with corpses as a sideline because paradoxically, he found it less depressing than general practice.

?Hmmm.? said Fisher. ?Why don?t we just scan it? Isn?t there some way??

The doctor was shaking his head solemnly. ?Basically John it?s a question of should I make the call to the FBI for permission to use the hospital?s scanners or should you??

?Then thaw it. I hadn?t realised things were that bad.? said Fisher. Farris nodded.

?They?re worse.? said Farris. ?They see everything.?

Fisher was a little angry that Farris should be so blunt in front of Hudson. It was a basic thing, an obvious breach of proper procedure. A blundering mention of the status quo. Not scanning the body, avoiding the FBI. It looked treasonous. It would be reason enough for someone who didn?t understand to call in the FBI. Farris had said way too much.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

?It?s very strange.? said the doctor as he looked at the cuts. He?d turned red. Suddenly he?d realised what he?d done.

And Hudson said ?Strange is not the word. Sick is the word I would have chosen.? Sick is what he was feeling.

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A scream, a flash of blood-covered steel, the sound of gurgling death, she screams so loud, so loud. Hudson could hear her from miles away.

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?Excuse me.? Hudson said. He turned on his heels and left the room to get rid of the smell, to get rid of the sight. To get rid of the vision in his head. He needed to clear his mind. He needed a drink of water. He needed to smell onions or chilli powder? anything but the stench of death which clung to the inside of his nostrils.

Farris looked at Fisher.

?What should we do? He?s going to do it.?

?You should keep a cork in your mouth and I should be the one to stick it in.? griped Fisher. ?Anyway, we can?t stop him forever. I can?t continue to monitor him every fucking second, it?s slowing things down. If he calls them, he calls them. I don?t think he will. He seems to just live with his head in the fucking clouds all day. He?s not even noticing what?s going on here.?

?I hope you?re right.? said the doctor.

So do I, thought Fisher.

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Hudson ran out of the building and squatted outside the front door. He looked up to the sky and watched as a thick bank of grey cloud rolled over his head. He inhaled the damp air and held it in for a moment.

What was wrong with him? Hudson was racking his brains. He was standing in front of a dead body busy NOT LOOKING.

He could not figure out why.

A second later, Hudson felt the door to the coroner?s lab open behind him. He let his breath out.

?You get used to the smell if you hang around it for long enough.? Fisher said matter of factly as he squatted beside Hudson. ?I?m not saying you ever enjoy it exactly, I?m just saying that eventually, you don?t even notice you?re smelling it. It?s the same as with any strong smell. You ever work in a garage? After a week, even your pets smell like petrol and you don?t even notice.?

?Do you ever not notice that you?re seeing it too?? Hudson asked. ?Do you ever, one day see a dead body and just not realise that that?s what you?re looking at? Is there ever a time when it just becomes as normal as... buying the milk??

?Nope, not out here. This is still a rarity this far North thank god. The city?s the place you?re thinking of. It?s unusual to find dead bodies around here. I?ve been a cop for twenty years and this is the eighteenth body I?ve seen. It?s less than one a year. Do you ever get used to filling in a tax return?? Fisher asked caustically.

?Okay,? said Hudson, ?I see your point. But a tax return each year doesn?t make you feel like you want to throw up.?

?Mine does.? replied Fisher. ?I?m a businessman now and this station is my going concern. In the last three months alone my pubic hair?s gone grey trying to juggle money to keep the IRS away.?

Hudson laughed.

?That?s better.? Fisher said. ?You?ve seen the body now. You can think about what it means to do the job you trained so hard for. It?s a big responsibility. You gotta fucken hate criminals. And we?ve gotta catch this guy.?

Hudson thought about it all for a moment. No real conclusions.

?Have you seen anything like this before?? he ventured. The thought had been bobbing around in Hudson?s mind like a message in a bottle for some time. ?Have you ever seen anything so gruesome??

?Only once.? Fisher said. ?It was worse than this. There was this guy who cut up women. They were alive when he did this. When they died, he had sex with them and then he dumped them where they could be found. One of the bodies wound up in Paragon Falls.

?It was a local girl.? said Hudson, guessing from the look of pain on Fisher?s face.

?At the time, she was also my first wife.? said Fisher.

Hudson?s mouth hung open.

What could he possibly say? How do you say ?Sorry to hear that news, about your first wife being raped and murdered by a maniac?? What do you say to a story of tragedy like that? How do you say anything and not sound ridiculous?

?Did you catch him??

?Yeah, I did, actually.? said Fisher. ?The bastard shot me in the foot and tried to beat my head in with a brick.?

Hudson looked on amazed.

?You?re kidding? Did he get away??

?Not on your life.? said Fisher, quite appalled by the idea. ?I stabbed him through the chest with a kitchen knife.? Fisher then relaxed and continued... ?After that though, it was over for me, I collapsed and had to be taken to hospital by ambulance. Didn?t go to work for a month. Lived in a bottle. Even got stoned once and learnt guitar for an hour.?

They sat for another moment in silence.

He didn?t call them when he had the chance. Is he buying my trust with his patience, or is he the ignorant dope he appears? Would I be the fool, to trust him?

?So,? said Fisher eventually, ?what do you want to do??

Hudson stood up and dusted off his itchy uniform. He took a deep breath and nodded towards the coroner?s lab door.

And with that gesture, they both went back in to have a look at the body one more time.

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Lousy Golf

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The president played lousy golf against the Japanese these days.

World War Two had been a long time ago now, and since then, Japan had traded the United States into oblivion with what had ironically been largely American inventions. Every time the Japanese economy collapsed, American engineering would produce another technology boom which resurrected Japan?s industry. The U.S. had won the war, but lost the homeland factories. The jobs, the inventions, the rich investors... the position of power-broker.

The president was in fact throwing the late afternoon game because it was a Japanese custom for the more important man to win. The president hated the obvious ego greasing but it was critical to show proper respect at a sensitive time like this.

The president smiled at the distant cameras on the clubhouse. The cameras clicked, whirred and filmed away happily.

The press could only see him from the first, second and eighteenth holes. Which meant privacy in losing, which was... politically handy. To say the least. Netcolumnists, webreporters or webjournalists would love to find a new way to humiliate him. The president had taken to calling webjournos by their more vernacular collective name, spiders.

Japan was an interesting place for the president. It wasn?t like the States. In America, the ugly bastards would be hanging from the trees. Dangling by their long hairy legs, Banging him in the testicles with their huge furry microphones on six foot long poles, they?d stick a minicam up his fucking nostrils if they thought they?d get it sanctioned as constitutional in court. But here in Japan, it was discreet and private.

A chirping bird stirred his interest for a second. A puffy cloud stolled on by briskly. The sky was rich, blue. It was a fucking nice day, until you put the midget in the fucking picture.

Wash sighed as he held his club in his hand. He?d gone through this conversation a thousand times in his mind. It never seemed as humiliating and grindingly annoying as this in his rehearsals.

?We are sorry to hear about your wife?s illness.? Kawasaki Moribundi grunted.

The president nodded, swatting at the air, hoping he came off as being too upset for words for a moment. It sucked having to be in grief all day, but it bought a lot of political leverage at a handy time.

?Thankyou.? said the president sadly. ?I shall send her your concerns.?

Moribundi nodded slowly and pulled out his putter, letting enough time pass for the matter of the sick wife to be politely considered dropped. ?The problem in the suburbs grows worse.? he mumbled eventually.

The president nodded and putted. The president understood that the ?trouble in the suburbs? was a reference to what the Japanese naturally perceived as an irrational backlash to the new criminal code.

The president?s ball rolled several feet further than he had wanted to play it, but then, that was life. A bird chirped a happy little song and another replied calmly. The president liked birds. Especially seagulls. They made such wonderful, natural shooting targets, having the gift of flight.

Moribundi lined up his second putt. He took aim, and then, after having caught view of the president talking surreptitiously with his snickering caddy, Moribundi seemed to think better of his aim. He aimed five degrees more South West, towards the pond which was nicely adjacent to the putting green.

The president winced. With one stroke Moribundi?s ball was in the water.

?We are displeased with the lack of progress made.? came Moribundi?s rebuke as the president came over and to his horror realised that he would somehow now have to contrive to drop another four shots.

The ?displeasure with the lack of progress? was a reference to the promise the president had made less than four months ago, in writing, to the Moribundi office, explaining, in the manner of a chastened child, how eager he was to help turn this terrible situation around. How would draw on favours to have the news stop broadcasting these terribly damaging news items. How McGovern and his FBI were pushing so hard on the Japanese issue and how Japan was now seen as a pushy money lender who had turned into an invader.

Even Moribundi had been surprised by how quick the president was to point out in that letter that he too was suffering terribly from this unexpected turn of events, that his popularity had dropped below thirty-five percent (which was dangerously low, an almost certain no-confidence vote of impeachment by the congress was looming large at twenty-five percent.).

But Moribundi?s comment further refered to the fact that the pitch with which the nightly news was currently finding new stories of Japanese corruption, vice and stories about what racists the Japanese are, had not done anything like decrease in intensity. In fact to the contrary, they increased exponentially, multiplying faster and faster.

The president now implored Moribundi to understand that while McGovern of the FBI was ?running through Washington on Yellow Alert? it was going to be impossible for him to do much more than weather the storm, hoping that his popularity might pick up. Andrew Wash looked thoughtful.

Things were getting worse faster than ever and the Japanese man knew it.

There had been so many riots, there were peaceful demonstrations which the police had been turned away from preventing - and not so peacefully as you?d think for a peaceful demonstration. There was a picture on the front web page of the Enquirer of a peaceful protester socking a bald and lone policeman in the head with a piece of two by four which had previously been a part of a banner which read No More Police Violence.

Turbulent times for the police these days. Especially turbulent times for Japanese people living in America. Not many of them left now. And now by way of the anti U.S. reaction in Japan, internationally speaking, it was turbulent times for Americans too.

And it was free reign all over the internet, and the international press and the larger community generally praised the president for his stand alone common sense amongst a nation of paranoiacs. The British prime minister in a swell of admiration and a hopeful warm fuzzy cash in had called the president the ?Greatest statesman of our times.? And added with grandiose pomp ?He is all that stands between a world in turmoil and a world of peace. We cannot stand idle and watch him struggle to hold the American Empire together.?

The Japanese and American stand-off was gigantic international news. In fact it was an entire industry. People overseas, who were not as confident of the powers of reason over testosterone in the higher offices of international politics were pretty much standing hands-over-mouths and weak-kneed with fear that there would be a serious and power shifting war in which the whole planet stood to lose. That in fact a war of some kind was swiftly becoming the only vote winning option for the president to survive his second term. That surely he would take that option before too long.

It was this very perception which the president knew was being fired at him here and today, now, by the midget with the rotten golf game. Andrew Wash?s charisma, which everyone who met him acknowledged he had, was keeping him afloat. Well, that and the sympathy factor on the old ball and chain with the liver disease or whatever they were calling it now. But the midget was right, he had four stalled engines and was dangerously low on credibility. It was becoming clear to him that the Japanese were telling him that they expected him to fall on the sword, here he was, probably going down over this Japanese issue, doomed to be a mere footnote to McGovern?s New American History.

In a congress full of support to vote for huge trade cuts with Japan, the president had been seen by the United States press as hopelessly weak and delaying and even a little bit of pro Japanese bullshit had stuck a little too permanently, even though he had issued firm statements of dissatisfaction over Japan?s lack of proper diplomacy.

With McGovern now openly murdering him with the issue of the Japanese, a newly legalised third term was looking so very shaky at just over thirty-five percent popularity.

There were now stories on every net netpaper, on every television screen about the New Yellow Peril, Jap traitors were everywhere, on the Japanese payrolls, spying. America, for five hundred and forty years a nation full of gun enthusiasts, had now again become a nation of gun toters.

The president had made good, hell even great speeches about being a nation of peace not a nation of hate, about being a people of tolerance and a community of understanding. The words had dribbled from him quite spontaneously, those were often the best speeches of all. It had gone staggeringly well in fact. His popularity had zoomed up ten percent, but it had not lasted.

McGovern had come back twice as hard and had purged the military. ?Are you now or have you ever been involved in the Japanese conspiracy??? ?No sir.?? ?We find you guilty.?? Bang. Mass assassinations. All conducted privately in extermination camps which had been named ?Federal Emergency Correction Houses.?

The slender and elegant Japanese man watched unblinkingly as the president lined up his ball. He took careful aim and putted. The ball rolled just shy of the hole. The president?shoulders slumped in frustration.

?And we are a long way from where we started.? said the Japanese man slowly.

And by this he meant the fact that the whole idea of assisting with reforms in law administration and enforcement had been done as a means to conditioning America to become a not-so-debting nation. To increasing the rate of repayment on the massive loans the U.S. government had taken out over the last 100 years. Reduction of crime was to be the key, however. Crime and crime fighting was costing America billions and billions of dollars. It took years between arrest and trial and each trial cost thousands each day and with millions of trials... To dare to try to make the whole justice system self standing in costing was an audacious scheme. Slowly privatise it. The whole thing. Make money from the justice department, make it pay the government instead. They had asked Andrew Wash to take sole credit and he had done so gladly, being such a great reformer.

Yet aside from hinting at this, Moribundi?s comment went on to say more too.

It said that there had been a very solemn promise involved in the first place, a promise to keep the collaboration of the Japanese quorum out of the media.

The Japanese quorum were the men behind the money. Bankers mostly, they were formed, largely at the request of Moribundi, but without the knowledge of his popular emperor. The heads of nearly fifty different Japanese money lending institutions and corporations with a wide range of interests in America. The purpose of forming the quorum was solely to dispose of America as an increasingly bad debtor. Put America on the road to recovery. A military nation in total economic collapse is more dangerous than one nicely solvent and able to manage nicely, thankyou.

And after many long and arduous golf games the fate of the Americas had been decided in Japan, the idea had a lot of merit since Japanese companies would now be able to speed up American justice. America might be trained to become better at paying its debts.

Eventually, during a very interesting golf game, the president first heard the idea of letting Japanese troubleshooters loose through the wheels of justice. The president knew immediately that this matter would have to be kept private. Three times that first day they had talked, Moribundi had said how Japanese involvement must be kept quiet. Moribundi was a man who thought that saying things once was overstatement. Saying something three times was overt desperation.

It was to this need for silence over the matter to which Moribundi?s comment ?And we are a long way from where we started.? referred. It held within it the point that things had been kept so unquiet that it was a little hard for Moribundi, a man in his position to take this much betrayal from any single man, even if he was the chief executive of the United States of America.

The president nodded. It seemed it was his turn to speak.

?I know what I have to do. I believe in what we started, so I will stay to the end but I?ll still need a sanctuary. For my wife, you understand.? the president said. Moribundi faced the pond, a new golf ball in his hand and he dropped the ball behind himself, over his left shoulder. The ball plopped at his feet. He took his wedge and lined up his shot. He played it. The ball landed right next to the hole. It was a good sign.

?Eternal gratitude will be yours and a safe residence will be found? for your wife.? murmured Moribundi. ?Appease your people Mr. president. Use your gift. All is not lost. Not yet.?

And there it was. A two word death threat. Not yet.

But the president was not unduly concerned. He wasn?t the world?s best guarded man for no reason. Besides there were one or two big speeches still nestling up his bulging political sleeve.

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The Room and the Man

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He walked backwards and forwards for some time, his tall, thin shadow running its lean fingers through its hair.

He was anxious that things had not gone as planned. Sure, he had had his reasons for dumping Ivana?s empty old shell at the bus stop, but it had begun to feel to him like he had made a terrible mistake.

He had not counted on a flat tyre and then a seized car jack. That had prevented his return to the bus stop and the rightful passage of Ivana?s shell into the ground. He?d even partly drained oil from his sump on to the jack to try to loosen it, but it had done no good at all, he?d just gotten oil all over his hands and eventually his face.

And now this.

These fingerprints made it all suddenly quite complicated.

Like a fool, like a total incompetent braindead two-bit amateur. The most incredibly important rule in criminal activity. Don?t leave a fingerprint. Amputate your hand if you have to.

Oh god, how could he have been so terminally stupid! For all these years, a perfect record. Not one close call. Not even one! And now this colossal blunder which ruined it all.

He sat down in his padded leather rocking chair which was stationed next to his massive wall length bookshelf and he swivelled the photograph of his parents, which sat on an adjacent reading table, towards him.

?What should I do?? he asked them.

And the mouths of his parents, covered in a fine layer of dust, stayed pursed in their awkward smiles. Their academic gowns still blowing in the strong breeze.

What should I do?

Of course he had not intended to dump Ivana, but having dumped her, he had meant all along to come back for her. There had been a million of course?s and how stupid of me?s which he could have gone over in his mind, but in the end it all came down to the problem at hand. He had dumped her and left a fingerprint and he had realised that by now, she would certainly have been found.

But how could he have known about the jack and the tyre? He cursed the hand of fate which so often gave him the finger.

He touched the photo of his parents their smiles reaching him but so distanced that they had the luminosity of stars. A bright sun, but far, far away. It still made him so angry that they were not here, with him, in the present.

And the timetable had clearly said that the bus would be there at seven thirty in the morning. That had been hours ago.

That damned bus stop! He felt his self-loathing rage welling up within him. Slowly it subsided.

?Damned Ivana!? He heard his deep voice echo through out the large room, bouncing off the stone walls.

?Damn girl!? he allowed the reverberating atoms to wash over his ears. He tried to calm himself by closing his eyes and imagining the sounds as fading ripples in the air. Atoms in a gentle fluid, blobs, shaking, rattling as he spoke. Pushed together in clumps and pockets, waves of different pressures, like invisible pond ripples, wobbling through the air, smashing into, wobbling his ear drums. Sound.

Somewhere there was a solution to all of the problems.

All I have to do is find the answer with my mind. I am moving through universes towards the answer. I let the answer come upon me. Moving through universes. Moving through universes. Moving?

For some minutes he sat in quiet contemplation, following and controlling his breathing, allowing the silence to heighten the sensitivity of his hearing until his pulse thumped in his ears.

My blood. I can hear my own blood.

Ripples in the air, ripples in the body. Moving through universes towards a solution?

Calm now, he smiled, imagining his bent blue frisbees. Bent blue frisbees were what he called blood cells carrying carbon dioxide since that was a perfectly adequate description of their over all shape and colour. The bent blue frisbees were always moving, bumping into each other as they were sucked and pumped through his heart, out along miles of tubes which got thinner and thinner, bent frisbees which got pushed into his lungs where they released the gas and exchanged it for oxygen. Then the frisbees would change colour becoming bent red frisbees. Oxygen, shaped like two beach balls stuck together, were now pushed through his heart again and then some of them were sent up to his brain, feeding it. Beachballs and frisbees giving him the power to think. To move through universes and find a way.

He sat in the huge chamber, with his eyes, one grey, one blue, closing and opening, with his lips parted slightly, his nostrils flaring intermittently with his smile flickering like a dying light bulb. He was perched there for some time, thinking, dreaming. Going over his decisions.

It had been a tough decision to make, dumping poor old Ivana, but he had had his reasons. You can?t save lives with a smelly old corpse in the back of a van. It just isn?t right. And there could have been as many as eight people in those two cars. You can?t miss out on saving lives because you don?t have the room. So, of course, he?d decided to dump the body first.

He remembered the sounds of the bus shelter, the chatter of the insects and the peculiarly strangled hooting of a distant owl. A great grey owl if he was not mistaken, and in the background, the running of his engine. He saw the frost in the air from his forced breath?

Slowly the answer came to him. He had railed against the idea at first but now it was the only thing which made sense.

?Chemistry... Chemistry... near my physics notes.?

And walking along the length of the wall he stopped in front of some books with white labels affixed to the spines. Reaching up to the fifth shelf from the bottom, he pulled out a large black notebook from amongst a wall full of black notebooks. Chemistry Notes V.

?Ahhh, this one looks likely.? He sat down in his padded leather chair, opened the notebook and began to read.

And very faintly, as though in the distance, there was a high-pitched sound.

He looked up from his chemistry notes briefly.

?Not now. Later.? he said. But the noise didn?t stop.

He sat in his chair and he flipped the elegant dark hued fountain pen in his hand and made his list, directly from his old notes. He double checked the numbers and amounts, there could be no mistakes this time.

He wrote and re-wrote equations. Eventually he had an equals sign or two and after putting a big black ring around a very large number indeed, he was content. He thought about what had to happen next. He?d be going in to the real world where he?d have to blend, like a small brown beetle in a jar of coffee beans.

Going out in to the world and having to carry on like everything he wasn?t was just too tiring and exhausting for words. It was a grind to carry out that absurd double life but it was a neccesary evil which had its purposes. He found that the charade had worn thinner over the years. These days he couldn?t wait until he was home, in his lab, museum, or here at his desk so that he could just let the pressure of feeling so abnormal stop him from feeling dislocated. More and more his laboratory was his prefered locale. Where he did all his best thinking.

He was different. Always had been. Physically weaker than most other boys he?d felt alienated from them for his whole childhood. Boys as a rule are addicted to sport and physical prowess, he had become more interested in sedentary and philosophical things. Of course, it had been natural enough. He?d been from interesting stock, genetically speaking. Both parents had quickly made it to the top of their respective fields. She was the chief executive for the world?s largest space engineering firm and he was a gifted physicist, philosopher and mathematician. Both had IQ?s in the genius range.

Kids resented that inherited intelligence, they have physical methods for showing their envy. School had been a punishing time.

But he?d escaped all that. He?d changed his name about a thousand times since then. He had lost his old, real identity in Paris... years ago now.

And so now, here he was. With a hell of an unusual shopping list and the problem of having too many experiments going at one time to allow him to go to his day job any longer.

Putting on his brave face, to go out in to what everybody else liked to call the real world, ?This won?t take too long.? Tycho told himself reassuringly. ?And then everything will be fine.?

The high pitched noise beckoned his attention. It was getting louder.

?Coming.? he sang. ?But I can?t stay long.?

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Elijah McGovern

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?...is with us in the studio.? Elijah McGovern: FBI Director, flashed up on the uglier half of the screen. ?Mr. McGovern, may I ask how your day has been.? Julia Soma leaned her head to one side, letting her long blonde hair dangle over one blue eye coquettishly.

The image of her on the television was small, but Ewin Adams liked her smile. He sat on the stalled truck, briefly watching the men huddled in the distance, shaking their hands from the cold. He rubbed a contact lens and looked up at the sky and watched the TV image again.

He zoomed in and Julia?s smile got bigger.

McGovern then filled the screen with his earnest, grotesque face and he spoke straight to the camera.

?Urk! Zoom out!? said Adams horrified.

?Well Julia, I?m a man who likes to keep busy. And so I should be. There?s a lot of problems in this country right now, we have a pitiful and weak president, we have riots in almost all major cities. There are Japanese spies in American companies, universities, in the media and the police force of course and so naturally the whole nation is in a state of panic. It?s just terrible what?s happening and it?s all happening because of Japan and the arrogant blindness of the president. So today I?ve been in meeting after meeting, talking to my fearless men and women, telling them to work harder than ever at keeping some peace on our streets and to try their hardest to protect America from the great Japanese threat.? When McGovern spoke his mini-speech, it came out in one breath and took less than twenty seconds. An old FBI secretary had once said of Hoover, I can type a hundred words a minute, but he can speak two hundred. McGovern?s secretary once claimed that Elijah is like Hoover on speed.

Adams was bored. ?Off.? he whispered. ?Dixon.? he added.

An image of a fallen and cowering elderly Japanese woman filled his vision.

Adams liked using the cameras. A tiny fabric-gripping fibre optic camera with a long wave transmitter. Smaller than a Congressman?s brain, less conspicuous than a tiny piece of transparent lint. Adams had himself placed the camera on to Moses Dixon?s shoulder, the best observation point on the FBI Peace Keeper, by steering a remote control fly, landing it there and then letting the artificial fly stick the thin fibre sized camera on to the suit. It was a homing fly, so he didn?t even need to steer it back to his suitcase.

Dixon?s large hands cradled a gun the size of a Buick.

He shot the elderly weeping woman in the chest and then an old Chinese man in the head. Both died instantly. ?Okay? now for lunch? I was thinking? something Italian.? Dixon muttered with a laugh.

Adams shook his head in disgust. That sonofabitch Dixon isn?t human. He whispered ?Stone.? and the image of the interior of Dixon?s plush limousine faded away to be replaced by the image of the back of a door, a toilet door, on which was written Stone is a turdburger.

Still! thought Adams to himself. That man lives on the toilet.

?Fisher.?

He saw tiles, then a microwave. Fisher bent over and Adams saw Fisher?s hands reaching for two cups of coffee.

Adams sensed someone behind him. ?Off.? he sighed and the images disappeared.

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?We should be finished by now.? said the uniformed man with a face which was wrinkled into a petulant frown, ?I gave my word to the mayor.? It was the same thing he?d been reminding everybody all morning and nobody had listened before either.

Adams fixed his eyes on the man who was middle aged, still without a desk job and clearly very angry about it.

?Well we can?t leave until the mechanic comes and fixes the engine.? Adams was patient. ?Tell your mayor that.?

Ewin Adams glanced at the truck which had a new power pole loaded on to it.

?He said he?d be here by now.? the man clenched his fist irritably.

?You know mechanics? We?re stuck here for god knows how long, we?re on time and a half in a few minutes, just enjoy it.?

The man looked at the view around him, a forest of trees, laden with snow. Fuck it was cold.

?Enjoy this.? said the man as he gave Ewin Adams the finger and walked off.

Ewin turned and looked at the truck again, the side of which was white.

?Phone home.?

The phone was ringing.

?What?? said Penrose, his dark face twitching nervously.

?Are you sure this is necessary?? whispered Adams. ?I?ve started receiving personal abuse.?

?Yes. I?m sure it?s necessary. And the personal abuse will start coming from me if you ask if it?s necessary again.?

?You know I haven?t had any assignment this stupid for ten years. I?ve saved planeloads of children from terrorists, disabled seventeen nuclear weapons, commandeered submarines, aeroplanes, motorboats, helicopters, I?ve saved the free world more often than you?ve paid for sex. So please, remind me, why the hell am I doing this? this shit??

?This is kind of important shit. We have to go after the maniac just in case. You can do a lot of work from there anyway. Whatever you do, don?t let the power lines go back up. Those two stations just cannot get in touch.?

?Well I don?t think they really want to... both Stone and Fisher think the other is a moron, Fisher?s clearly afraid of bringing in the FBI as well because he actually wants the case solved. Stone is just a stupid coward who?s trying to work out how to dump the case. It hasn?t occurred to him yet that FISher might know anything. I really think I should be elsewhere, let the powerline go back up. There are other things I could be doing. More important.?

?No, you mean more adventurous, not more important. Stay where you are and that?s a fucking order. Anyone finds out too soon what?s going on, the FBI will walk right in and hold all the evidence. Geddin says that it?s all going to come out at the state of the union address. We need the disk before then, at least a day before... to prepare. Keep the FBI out. And do whatever you can to kill the press on the story. Get the disk. Don?t screw it up.?

?All right, all right... not so much helpful advice... I?m up against the whole FBI on this one. There really isn?t a lot I can do. Not about the press either.?

?Do what you can. No expense too great. Your card has no limit.?

Adams smiled as he spoke his words softly. ?The press there?s no real way to control. At least not from my end. They?re too unwieldy. You in fact have better resources to keep the press out of this than anyone else in the whole fucking country. Do a press dump.?

?Oh really? The whole country?s unstable and the president is the least stable member of it right now. If I authorise a press dump who knows how he?ll react and what will happen next.? said Penrose angrily.

?Then do it through Military Intelligence, or better yet, get one of those Whitehouse bigmouths to say too much, just get the spiders to crawl elsewhere for a couple of days. Bury the story.?

At the though of having to put his own arse on the line Penrose was back-peddling fast.

?But the press have enough fucking stories at the moment, there?s riots in all corners of the country...?

?That?s not news, that?s more like the weather. Riots are boring, people are sick of reading about them.? Adams said.

?There?s the sick first lady. The press are all over her.? Penrose pointed out.

?True.?

?And there?s the whole Japanese thing as well.? said Penrose.

?Look you wanted me to keep the press off the crash, remember? So stop trying to convince me that the press won?t be interested because as soon as they see Jessica Carey among the deceased we both know that they?ll flock to it buzzards to a corpse unless we give them something more... palatable. We need a press dump.?

?If I do a press dump there?ll be hell to pay. The President?s not a totally stupid man, you know.? said Penrose.

?There?ll be hell to pay if some fucking spider sticks their fangs in to Jess?s life and finds out that she was Military Intelligence. Can you imagine what?ll happen then? There?s always a hell to be paid. But if you want to stop a dog from eating a fillet steak you don?t try to wrench the steak from the dog because the dog will fight for it, you throw the dog a bone and the dog will drop the steak itself. Trust me, if you want the press off the story, take a running dump, take a big running dump. A seriously huge one might even keep the Feds running around in circles for days. Now tell me which hell do you least want to pay? The consequences of a press dump or the consequences of not doing a press dump??

?The FBI are in the president?s pocket ever since he cornered McGovern on being a homosexual. This whole Japanese thing is a great con.? said Penrose.

?I didn?t know about that.? said Adams doubtfully. ?About McGovern being a homosexual. I thought that was more speculation than fact.?

?I?m telling you it?s true.? said Penrose. It was what he always said when he lied.

?I have to go. Something?s happening.? Adams hung up without further comment.

Penrose put the scrambling phone down.

Ewin Adams had suggested a press dump. Ewin was probably right, he usually was. Penrose realised that he had to take the chance. He pressed a button on his phone.

It was ringing. Good.

?Bilgeby? It?s Clarence... No, not Laurence, Clarence... No, not that Clarence, the other one... Yes that?s right... Well, we?re doing a big dump and I need a few things... Well someone from the Whitehouse, preferably someone senior - oh and we?ll need a good reporter.? He listened for a minute. ?No! Are you kidding me, she?s not only won a Pulitzer but she?s on the Fairness in Media Council which means she?s owned and operated by the FBI... I know what I said but I meant a bad reporter, one who will print anything and doesn?t care about - yes that?s right, a good writer... Hack Vulcha you say? Excellent... No no no, he?s perfect... Now, who have we got in the Whitehouse? No not him, he?s been drugged by us so often he?s almost immune to Sodium Amythol. No! I said forget him, he?s fucking hopeless, he goes in to a hypnotic trance at the sound of a car backfiring. People are starting to talk. Who else??

There was a pause.

Penrose broke into a grin. ?Betsy Rappaport? She?ll do just fine. I?ll meet you at room two-fourteen in an hour.?

Penrose hung up and let out a sigh.

He needed that disk like he needed oxygen.

He lit a cigarette and looked nervously around the room.

It was the only proof of Plan B. The only chance for salvation. The only chance...

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Fisher?s Coffee

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While Hudson was thinking about nothing in particular, he played with his computer.

He zipped through a few photographs in the hope that he would never have to find out answers to the very many questions which came up in his mind about the killer and why the killer would want to peel the body of a young and obviously attractive woman. Hudson was hoping that somehow, miraculously, the case would solve itself.

Fisher walked back into the room carrying two cups of coffee.

Hudson took the smaller of the two cups and sipped at the steaming drink, screwing his face up as the bitter after taste kicked in.

?Oh Christ.? said Hudson, who preferred coffee to mud, but was apparently drinking the latter. ?Do you think that the fact that the girl was dead before she was cut is at all important?? he asked eventually.

?Oh yes. Absolutely. I would say it?s a critical observation.? said Fisher.

?Why??

?Look Hudson you?ve got to realise something very basic about detecting. The reason it matters is because these things called details always matter. All the facts matter.? Fisher replied. ?If he cuts her before death, like you suggested to Dr. Farris, he wants her to suffer. He knows she?ll suffer. He wouldn?t cut her open when she was already dead if he wanted her to suffer emotionally. There?d be no point. She?s dead. He likes his bodies already dead, we know that?s a part of his thinking because it?s just a consequence of the evidence. Every piece of evidence tells you something, some pieces might tell you several conflicting things, you just have to be good at reading details and making a lot of guesses. All we can now ask is did he find her dead or did he kill her?? Hudson nodded.

He found her dead. Thought Fisher. No doubt about it.

?Because if he does cut her up after death, he does it for other reasons. Reasons we don?t yet know. The state of the body is exactly as the guy wanted it to be. What we need to know, what we need to somehow figure out, is why the guy wanted the body in this state, because you see we are then closer to divining his motives.?

?Yeah, but he killed the girl, right??

?I thought so when I saw the bus shelter. It seemed the only way I could make sense of what I saw there. It was all so elaborate. The more I looked at the coccooned body, the more elaborate the crime appeared. It never occurred to me to question whether or not he had killed her. It seemed obvious to me that he had to have killed her, after all she was dead and... the smell... not to mention the tarpaulin and the poles. But when Dr. Farris told us that she had died from a reaction to heroin, I wondered.?

?Why should the overdose make a difference?? Asked Hudson.

?Because Hudson the point is it wasn?t an overdose. She threw up and choked to death. That?s accidental. He hasn?t killed her, she?s died accidentally and then he?s somehow come along, seen and stolen her body and cut it open.?

I can?t believe Hudson hasn?t seen it yet. He sees all around it, but misses the whole thing. Why doesn?t he ask about the crash?

?Could Dr. Farris be wrong about the cause of death? Could she have died from something other than the heroin thing??

?Oh sure. Like Farris said, the body is frozen. He can?t see inside the thing too much. She might have died from a ruptured spleen, a brain tumour... who knows. The heroin theory is only a first educated guess.? said Fisher, ?The question to my mind though, is not what did she die of, but what the hell did someone want her for, when she was already dead??

?Sex?? Asked Hudson, worried that the answer might be yes.

Fisher shook his head. ?That was the first thing I considered. There?s no way of being sure whether or not the guy had sex with the body or not but the attention paid to the cutting and stitching, the time involved in wrapping and transporting suggests to me that it probably isn?t a sex crime. It?s a part of some very intense spiritual ritual. The precision in the cuts suggests that the person has done it many, many times before.?

?A surgeon??

?No way. The dissection is so different to how bodies are usually dissected. This is unorthodox.?

Hudson looked at his watch. It was three-thirty.

?Until we get notice from the Ulsa police there is not much we can do. We are still waiting for a response on a finger print search. We started by sending the killer?s fingerprint to the police in the surrounding states, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, not forgetting Michigan - although as of yet we still can?t reach the Michigan police. The autodial on my computer is still trying to ring them.?

?So what do we do next?? Hudson asked.

?Well, we?re going to have a long night, tonight. If I were you, I?d get some rest. You?re no use to me if I have to worry about you dying on me tonight. There?s a bed in the station. Come.?

Fisher stood up.

?Thanks.? said Hudson wryly. ?But why should I rest now though? What are we going to do tonight??

?You need rest because right now you look like a shitstick in strong breeze. Tonight we?re going to the bus shelter to see if the darkness and the moonlight gives us any new ideas on how to track our killer.? said Fisher. Besides, there?s something I need you to witness.

?You?re kidding.? Hudson was incredulous.

?No, I?m not. I want to see how visible things are. I want to see what the killer saw. By day everything we saw was contaminated by daylight. The man we are tracking saw it very differently, we have it as our duty to see it the same way. It?s a long shot that we?ll discover anything new or interesting, but all we have at the moment is longshots.?

?So, when do we go out?? asked Hudson.

?Just after sunset.?

?That?s in under four hours.?

?Get some rest.? Fisher advised. ?Come with me, I?ll show you to your room.?

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The Second Dream

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?Now don?t you feel better about yourself.? whispered Caitlin. ?Look at him there. Sleeping. Doesn?t that make you feel good??

?Actually Caitlin it does.? replied Fisher. ?I?ve be able to do a lot of thinking without the stringbean there gawking over my shoulder.?

Hudson stirred. Fisher motioned her out of the room.

?He looks so peaceful.? she said.

?Which is why we should go now.? said Fisher. ?I?ve still got time left.?

They closed the wooden door with a barred window behind them.

?Fisher!? called a man?s voice frantically. ?Fisher you have to come here.?

?Damn... what now??

?Fisher, get your arse in here NOW!?

Hudson?s serene smile faded and he turned over, entangling himself in the blanket, he frowned, and he dreamed.

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He was in a desert. Falling down a piping hot sand dune.

There was a mass of clouds in the sky. They spelled out the word ?Exit.?

Hudson stood up quickly. His feet were in sandals. The sand felt hot between his toes, his ankles were boiling hot.

He was chasing a train and somehow he just knew that the girl?s naked dead body was on the train. The train which appeared out of the desert.

Every time he reached out to touch the train it would get that little bit faster and elude his desperate touch. He would then have to run all the harder to get near it only to have it escape him again. For some reason, which was unknown to him, he needed to be on the train, to be near the body. He knew it had something to tell him.

His heart was pounding, his legs powering along, he was sweating madly, straining, making every effort. The carriage always just that one stretch too far away, he stretched, feeling his muscles almost pull when -

Suddenly he tripped.

The train took off towards the horizon. After picking himself off the ground and dusting off his jeans and his T-shirt, he looked at the engine in the distance. And as though missing it had meant nothing to him, he was waving it goodbye, kissing his fingertips and wishing it bon voyage as it charged towards the line where the blue sky met the red desert.

Hudson turned around and went through to the railway station which had just appeared out of nowhere, through to the cab stand which was manned by four big yellow cabs, all with white-wall tyres. He jumped into one cab and the driver just took off.

?Fifty-second street.? he said, which was his old address. Milwaukee.

The cab driver turned around and it was her, with her face and her hair, with the glittery hairspray. She was dead, but you could not tell that from her face because it was untouched by the knife. It was uncut. But the face she pulled was the one Hudson had seen on the steel table. The eyes closed, the mouth relaxed. Sleeping almost, but for the pallor of the skin, but for the greyness. Under the shirt and pants were cuts so hard on the eyes that it hurt him, just seeing the face and knowing.

And then there was darkness as the lights in the cab went out and Hudson was transported instantaneously into the long and tall corridor of some multi-storey building. A Familiar building somehow.

Soon he was in an elevator.

He pressed the button to go to the 23rd floor.

And then from the darkness which followed came a laugh and again there was a man with a scar and a moustache. Surrounded by white walls, antique furniture - he saw a vision of his mother covered in her own blood, her body progressively more slashed and ripped as he looked at it. The sound of her terrified screaming stopped as his father, neck slashed open, a look of shock on his face came in with a tray of drinks. Hudson could hear the ice cubes clinking away, his father?s face now half missing from a shotgun blast... then the walls started to shake? there were no windows? his mother?s dead eyes turned towards him.

?You ran away.? she said.

Hudson woke up and just before he let out a scream, he stopped himself. He was still at the station, in the holding cell, on the bunk, holding a roar of pain inside his heart, cocooned in his blanket. Sweat already chilling on his arms and legs. He wriggled out of the blanket.

That was a totally unexpected dream.

He held his breathing down and tried to calm himself. Never had he had such a powerful dream, never. His mother and father... murdered, cut, like the girl. Covered in blood. The man with the scar had returned!

And then it hit Hudson like a thunderbolt.

The woman in the dream - his mother. She was not his mother.

Nor was the father in his dream his real father. Yet in his dream that is clearly who they had been. In his dream, they were his parents. But if she wasn?t his mother, and he wasn?t his father, then who the hell were they? Hudson tried to remember her face, but he could not. Nor his. Were they real people he?d seen in a crowd once or had he just made their faces up?

It left him feeling hollow and uncomfortable. Maybe the weird dream was his subconscious?s way of telling him to eat something more nutritional than bile. There was sweat all through his undershirt and he didn?t have a clean one. Shit. It was staring to get cold. He looked around himself at the holding cell and tried to remember the dream. ?How had it started??

He had just put his feet back into his shoes when Fisher lunged into the room, a wide-eyed, crazed face, ashen white and angry.

?We have to get out of here now.?

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Burying a Shell

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He?d been nine or ten when he?d seen his first shell.

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An old woman on a train, she was playing cards.

He hadn?t seen it happen, he?d been in the next carriage down so he?d had no chance to see it, but when he was there looking at it, he?d overheard people talking about it. The old woman had apparently grabbed at her chest and then let out this croaking sound, like food was caught in her throat and quite suddenly she went limp, and fell to the table. The whole time the glasses never fell off the end of her nose.

His interest had been first aroused when he?d seen people rushing towards the carriage joined to the one in which he?d been sitting. He was more fully informed when he?d heard a snippet of conversation between two young boys as they zipped past him.

?And she?s really dead?? one boy had said to the other.

The other had nodded. ?That?s what they?re sayin?.?

?Cool...? the first had replied.

And then, as the doors between the two carriages had opened their conversation had been lost to the roar of the train.

So he was drawn to the dead, he stood up from the seat which he and the boy next to him had struggled to keep from angry looking adults who?d been forced to hold on to hand rails as the train had filled station by station. He turned to that boy, ?Well, I?m going.? he?d said.

?I knew you would.? replied the boy, turning to look out the window. Ending the discussion there. Tycho looked at the boy with a critical eye. The boy turned to look at him angrily. ?Well go on then.? The boy crossed his arms.

?Chickenshit.? said Tycho.

He went to the next carriage to see it for himself.

He was confronted by a multicoloured wall of people with their backs to him, but being so short and slight, he had easily manoeuvred in such a way as to politely wheedle his way to the front of the crowd.

And he could see immediately that indeed, she was shelled.

She was still in the corner seat, her now emptied head flopped at the mercy of gravity and her eyes were still open. He could see her peering sightlessly down her glasses, her face still registering shock. There were two men who had apparently volunteered to pull her out of the seat. There was a old, grey-haired woman still seated next to the dead woman who was in hysterics. She kept saying ?Oh my god. Oh my god.? over and over. Someone tried to talk to her sensibly, but without success.

They pulled the body out and he watched it. It was as limp as a dead cat, or a dead rabbit, which he had already observed at close quarters. The body was clumsily handled out of the corner seat, over the table and into the aisle of the train, all the while the expression on the face, the look in the eyes, the body in general had seemed so... alien... as it went through the whole ordeal without once changing.

That poor woman - she certainly looked as though she had not at all expected death, as it was plain that once it started to happen to her, she had barely enough time to react, only time enough to find shock, not even time to find fear.

He had wondered, how can that be? How can death visit so quickly, that you yourself have no warning? One second you are you, the next? permanently unavailable for comment.

And he had been in the middle of this very interesting consideration when his thoughts had been interrupted by a very rude adult, who had insisted that he was too young to be looking.

?That?s preposterous.? he?d said, ?You can?t be too young to look at death, that?s like being too German to look at death.? And of course the adult?s mouth had hung open in an expression of dumbfoundedness.

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Only imbeciles think children are imbeciles. He smiled to himself as he drove, remembering.

?People are crazy.? He thought to himself as he watched the car in front of him turn left.

He had realised the importance of death and held a reverence for life since he was very young. Since both his parents had died in that plane crash he had realised that death was the only thing which made life worth noticing.

Death is the real human enemy. All humans acknowledge this to some degree.

He looked at his watch. It was almost six o?clock. There was time enough. No need for panic. Remember to breathe deeply. I control my breath, control my life.

?Not long to go now.? And my soul is safe, my shell safe.

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Turning Away

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?We got another call from another bus driver.? Fisher said. ?I should have known this was going to happen. We had a chance to catch our man and we?ve missed it. Probably the only damn chance we?ll get.?

Hudson looked at the shelter, almost expecting to see another blue tarpaulin.

But it was the timetable which he noticed first. Destroyed.

There were fragments of plastic all over the place. Whoever had destroyed it appeared to have shot it at almost point blank range several times with a shot gun.

?But why?? Hudson asked.

?The fingerprint.? Fisher said. ?The killer wasn?t sure if we?d find it, but he damn well knew he?d left it there.?

?How could you know he was coming back?? Hudson asked. He couldn?t understand why Fisher was so intent on blaming himself for this unforseen occurrence.

?Because.? Fisher replied. ?Of course he intended to come back! For the body! It?s the only way this whole body dumping makes any sense. When I realised that he intended to come back for the body I should have also realised that he intended not to leave us a crime scene. He left a fingerprint, not intending to leave the body there for discovery. When he couldn?t come back for the body, he had to come back for the fingerprint. So, some time today he came out here and he tried to destroy the fingerprint evidence.?

?I?d say he succeeded.? remarked Hudson while looking at the debris.

?Like hell he did.? Fisher countered. ?My photograph may not be admissible evidence in a court of law, but the plastic screen we removed from here this morning sure will be.?

?I didn?t see that happen.? Hudson said.

?Do you honestly think that I?m going to leave a pyschopath?s fingerprint where I found it? The thought is terribly insulting to me.?

Hudson felt very stupid. In fact he hadn?t thought for a second about collecting evidence - he was still trying like hell to find it.

?This plastic,? he indicated the million or so shards on the ground, ?is the plastic from the other side of the timetable. When the killer shot it he may have thought he was shooting both plastic sheets... Look at this.? said Fisher.

Fisher had found a lump of metal which had once been a bullet.

There were holes in the shelter. There were more bullets. After looking the shelter over thoroughly Fisher determined that the bullets had probably all come from one point.

?See how the trajectories all line up, to a single point on the other side of the road?? Hudson had nodded. He looked at the holes and after a few moments, he actually saw what he had already nodded his agreement to. Because of the design of the shelter, all the bullet holes were in a pattern. There were parts of the shelter where there were no holes.

?But why would he do this? Is it like a fantasy of his to shoot or something? Why wouldn?t the guy just smash it with a brick? No matter how he modelled it in his head he came back with the same objections. It was a stupid and pointless act. There were easier ways of getting rid of the fingerprint.

?The first thing which obviously occurs to me is that he is angry.?

Hudson looked again at the bullets and the mess the shooter had made of the bus shelter.

?The second thing that occurs to me is that he shot up the shelter to create attention.? said Fisher. ?Bait.? he said. ?Or a lure.? Fisher?s surprise was geniune. He felt his jaw drop as he heard Hudson say?

?I think we should call for back up.?

?Things are going to be just fine, son. Just get everyone out of that station.?

?Caitlin... Caitlin are you there??

There was a long silence.

?Caitlin, Tom anybody...? Is anybody in the station receiving me??

?Loud and clear Hudson,? said Tom, ?Heading home for roast potatoes right now, make it good.?

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Tycho

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It had taken only a few minutes. He had looked the place over and had found out everything which he needed to know in order to do his job and now the most of it was ready.

He was out of the overalls too. He felt better in jeans. He always had. Jeans are the ultimate everyman?s clothing. Nobody notices an extra pair of jeans in a crowd.

He picked up the phone and dialled the number which he had memorised. He had wondered which of his voices he should use. He put a blob of chewing gum on to the lens on the front of the miniature camera at the front of the phone.

Voices were easy. To be good at doing voices you had to be good at listening to people?s voices. Accents were easy. Accents were about hearing right, not just pronouncing right. It?s an act of paying attention.

The phone started ringing. He looked at his watch. One minute twenty to go. It rang again. He wondered if there was anyone there.

He?d given much thought to which voice was the proper voice to use.

After all, it was a part of the plan to have this blamed on Anti-Japanese activists. Maybe that wasn?t morally right but this was also self preservation. And self preservation was about waiving moral rights sometimes.

And at the moment cops are the meat in the social sandwich. The Japanese government on one side, the U.S. government on the other side. Not much had happened in Wisconsin by way of civic disharmony. Certainly not Paragon Falls. Nothing had happened around here for a long time.

Until now.

Again the phone rang. He looked at his watch. One minute ten seconds.

The man?s voice sounded like a chainsaw trying to cut through granite. It hurt to do that voice, but he wouldn?t be doing it for long.

It was the right voice. It spoke for a generation of people pissed off at the system, it was manly, courageous, it was angry and it resented authority when authority misbehaved.

The phone stopped ringing. He had to do this right.

The word connect flashed up as the screen filled with an image of a rotating police badge. There was a woman?s voice. A young woman from the sounds of it, but you could never be absolutely certain. Some women sound twenty on the phone, but in reality they?re fifty. His trained ear told him it was a digital recording. It was hard to detect, unless you knew what to listen for. Background noise. Hiss. ?You have reached the Paragon Falls police station.?

Yes, he knew that. He was the one who had dialled the number.

?And nobody is here to take your call at the moment. If there is an emergency then feel free to call 5576-2124 which is the 24 hour emergency number, that?s 5576-2124 otherwise feel free to leave -? there was a long beep.

?Hello? said the same woman?s voice and a beautiful young woman?s image filled the screen. ?Sorry, about that, I just got to the phone.?

?I?m sorry too, ma?am.? said the man, in that gravelly voice he had practiced so much since he had seen the film, ?You see you?d better get your sweet ass out of there. You now have only... twenty-five more seconds until the bomb in your building goes off.? and he hung up the phone.

Jack Nicholson. The right mixture of brain and cool for the job. They?d probably call him Jack.

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One Fierce Tug

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?Bomb!? she screamed.

Which struck her as an unusual thing to scream at the time but when it came to one word warnings, there was little else to be said. She wasn?t sure of who else might be in the building, but if they hadn?t heard her screaming then they would certainly hear the fire alarm.

?Bomb in the building!? she screamed again, her voice spraying against the walls like a fingernail scraping deeply across a blackboard, an emotional and terrified voice cutting through the bricks and echoing throughout the old house with its need for attention.

She was still running around her desk when she spied the familiar little red box mounted on the wall at the back of the room.

?What kind of a fucking place is that to put the fire alarm?? she wondered to herself. She would have to run away from the front door to reach it. Away from safety to raise the alarm.

She slid across the smooth floor in her socks, sliding up to the wall with the little red box on it, screaming ?Everybody out!? as she went. Her scream this time even more fully fledged, a scream which ripped her throat to pieces.

The box itself was at chest height. As she slid across the floor in her socks towards the ever growing red box, she took aim at the box with her fist and threw the punch to smash the glass.

Caitlin punched the wall instead, however, her feet slipping from beneath her. Her arm did not yet hurt, the adrenaline pumped and charged through her body. She threw a second punch, a more timid one this time, using the flat of her palm instead of the knuckles, but the punch was also better directed. The safety plastic on the face of the little red box shattered and the button underneath was smashed in. The loud fire klaxon came on immediately. The flashing red light on the ceiling in the centre of the room came on too, just in case you couldn?t hear the alarm, or feel the furniture shake or see the walls move.

Caitlin tried to run but found that it was difficult getting enough friction between her socks and the smooth floor, putting so much effort in to her running, she nearly lost balance. She stood with her arm leaning against the wall, her head throbbing with the great pulsing sound, breathing hard and fast as she grabbed her right sock by the toes and pulled, yanking her sock off in one fierce tug. That would do. One foot free would be plenty. Her hand started to hurt.

She puffed her cheeks and then sucked them in and momentarily held her breath as she prepared to accelerate.

Putting her right foot on the floor, her left against the wall she pushed herself forwards. She ran around the supporting pillars towards the front door.

?Bomb!? she screamed hoarsely and silently as she went. One pink sock in her hand, the other on her left foot.

The bombs started going off around her in a crash of falling brick and spray of exploding glass with a shower of chips of mortar and the buckling and splintering of wood, blood in her eyes, she ran towards the tunnel of light which was the front doorway, praying that she would make it out before the whole roof came down on top of her.

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Tycho

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Tycho walked slowly towards his car from the phone booth, he looked about himself at the people milling around, innocently unaware. He giggled to himself thinking how he could now watch how these everyday people would react when it happened.

In the near distance he saw his white van, with the plastic tubes on the roof and the dark tinted windows, he admired it sitting there, in a parking bay in front of the park. The park, adjacent to the station.

He had been counting to himself. He was good at counting seconds without looking at his watch. ?Six.? he whispered to himself.

Five... four... three... two... one...

And the whole town shook in a sudden bright light, and with a ground shaking tremble as the bombs went off. He watched it in the reflection from the darkly tinted van?s rear window.

Shop windows shattered, people screamed. The sound from the following chain of explosions drowned out the screams as one by one, in a little sequence of fireworks the police station had its supporting walls knocked out by nitro glycerine mixed with diatomaceous earth as a stabiliser. Dynamite. Mixed the old fashioned way, just as old Alfie Nobel would probably have done it.

Tycho had planned to leave town as quickly as possible. He had planned that the bombs would be ready to go off and he would be on the road making the warning phone call from his mobile phone. But that hadn?t happened. Mobile phones could be triangulated and pinpointed to the last square metre by satellite. He?d read in an old Scientific American that mobile phones were the least private, the least safe means of communication and so thinking more about it he?d decided to make the call from the public phone, using a pair of winter gloves. And so having to make the call from town, he then decided that it would be wiser to leave town directly after the call.

But seeing the reactions of the people around him had made him change his mind. It was safer to blend in. It was safer to just become one of the crowd. That was where he was safest. He knew how to mingle and merge into society. He drifted equally well in low and high circles. Knew his way around a Mathematical symposium, a Hobo?s campfire or a Royal Gala Ball with equal nonchalance and social agility.

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Being in a crowd is easy, everything the crowd does is based around the reason for gathering and changes in mood. Once you know what that is, once you know the mood of the crowd, blending in and being lost among its members is one of the things the human being is best at.

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Tycho stopped heading casually towards his van and he turned to join the crowd of distressed people who were instinctively running towards the station which had by now become a shroud of smoke and a pile of rubble.

He hoped to himself that the young sounding girl had managed to get out before the bombs went off. It would be nice if he had managed to make all of his problems go away, without having to do any extra harm. No sense in waste, death is the enemy, after all, not the living.

As he got nearer and nearer to the station he felt a deep peacefulness come over himself. He felt his shoulders unknot and his back stopped aching. He was now safe and had let his breathing slowly unwind the tension from within him. He shook it from his fingertips, felt it draining from his feet. That felt nice. He?d been very tense the last few hours.

Tycho looked critically at the debris, scattered across the road, he watched as people ran frantically back and forth, consumed by panic, so suddenly afraid of the big, wide world. Having the sense not to laugh, he stood watching for some minutes, until the fire trucks arrived. He tried not to laugh as he mocked them.

?What kind of a cowardly shitwipe would do this to John?s station?? one man near him had said.

?Fucken Patriots? Army.? said another man loudly.

Tycho was gratified to note that people could be relied upon to think in glorious stereotypes. It was all going to plan.

?Did anyone see anything?? asked Tycho from a shadow where he was well hidden from the dying sun. But there was a total silence from the two dozen or so people who had gathered. Tycho saw the hand of the dead man sticking through the rubble at the rear of the station, the crowd pulled his body from the rubble. Tycho looked at the body with an appraising eye. There was one interesting thing about the shell. It had a wedding ring on it.

That was... regrettable. One to the enemy. He felt a tragic sadness come upon him. He was momentarily riddled with guilt. The phone call had been a calculated gamble. Nobody was supposed to die.

The fire engines came. Darkness would soon follow. The police would be racing back from the bus shelter. It was wise to go now.

With that thought he turned away from the busy scene of frantic people as they pulled bits of rock and wood from the mound which had once been the police station which had so threatened his livelihood.

Now I can go home and rest.

He opened up the back door of his van and climbed in.

It had been tough work climbing those trees and setting up the cameras but it was worth it. That was the great thing about a trade van. It had all the requisite tools for any number of nefarious acts. Smoothing away the dents from the ladder in the soil by the bus shelter had taken time. But it had been worth it.

He flicked on a TV screen and the interior light dimmed.

The hardest work had been laying the booster box. It was underground. Digging holes had been hard work for some years, and he?d developed methods for digging them using machinery, robots, as a matter of fact.

The robot in the back of his other van could dig a hole and lower the body. He?d not been able to get a robot to be able to cover the hole back up yet, but that was the easy part of the job anyway and he didn?t mind the slight inconvenience of burying the bodies himself.

But there was no robot in the back of his trade van, so burying the booster box had been an effort. But if he was ever going to reflect on it, he?d want a permanent record.

The image which came on the screen was very dim.

But there was something moving. The camera was placed high up in the trees branches. He enhanced the image using his own company?s software. It was a view of the road, the bus shelter. On the road was Hudson.

?Excellent.? said Tycho. ?Excellent.?

Now there was a booster in the area, he could retrieve images from all of the other cameras he?d put around the place.

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Don?t Fuck Up

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Just as Tom arrived with a screech of brakes the plume of smoke which they could now see on their horizon clearly emanated from Paragon Falls. The sight of the smoke rising slowly in the higher altitude winds made them think seriously about their priorities.

?It?s probably the Chemistry department at the school.? said Tom not even believing it himself. ?Or else it could even be the anti-Japanese.? he added.

Fisher gave Tom a look which would have withered a less ignorant man.

Hudson ran to the Fisher?s car and grabbed the handset.

?Caitlin?? he said and he waited. ?Caitlin, are you there??

But the second he took his finger away from the transmitter there was just the hiss of static.

?Caitlin?? he screamed.

Fisher had noticed that Hudson was not getting answered, and as he looked South towards the curling dark ribbon of smoke, it had become clear to Fisher that it was not the school, it had been the station.

?Maybe she heard the explosion and she?s gone to have a look at it.? said Tom.

?If she heard an explosion, she would be on the radio. After an explosion like that the only reason she would not be calling us is because she can?t. It?s the station.?

?Does anybody read me?? Hudson pleaded one last time in to the mouth piece.

?Aw come on Fisher, you don?t even know that Caitlin was there.?

?Yes I do.? said Fisher. ?I was paying her overtime.?

Tom went silent but looked very angry.

There was silence on the radio too.

?Nobody else gets overtime!? Tom muttered.

Hudson got out of the driver?s seat when Fisher came over to him.

?Nobody else works as hard as she does. You work least of all, inject something lethal tonight would you?? grunted Fisher. He then pulled the disk out of his camera and inserted a new one. ?Find me the site he shot the shelter from.? he griped, giving Hudson his camera. ?I?m leaving you and Tom here. You know what?s going on, Tom doesn?t so I?m leaving you in charge, Hudson.?

Hudson was sure that Tom wouldn?t like it, that he was now being used to punish Tom didn?t escape his notice either. He leaned close in the window and said softly ?I?ve never been in charge before, what should I do? Any advice??

?Yeah,? said Fisher with equal softness, ?Don?t fuck up.?

And with that parting thought, after Hudson had removed his head from inside the car?s window, Fisher drove off.

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Hack Vulcha

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Clarence Penrose had well and truly left room two fourteen by the time freelance spider, Hack Vulcha arrived. Betsy Rappaport, presidential press liason officer, was already nicely sedated, scanned for wires and hypnotised. She lay on the luxury double bed, a serene smile on her usually worried looking, middle-aging face. She wouldn?t remember a thing. In fact if she was asked what she did on this evening she?d swear that she sat at home all night cuddling her cat, listening to Pink Floyd.

Bilgeby Grimes was sitting in the corner of the CIA run hotel room, reading a newspaper article about the sex life of the average teenager.

Hack had started setting up a microphone and recorder.

?It says here that the average girl loses her virginity at thirteen.? said Grimes.

?I know.? said Vulcha. ?I wrote that article.?

?So you did.? said Grimes honestly surprised as he scanned the by-line. ?You write well sometimes.?

?So why am I here?? said Vulcha.

?Try asking Betsy about Whitehouse security.? advised Grimes.

Vulcha looked interested.

?Go on.? he said.

?Betsy will tell you more than I could.? lied Grimes expertly.

Vulcha turned towards her. ?Beeeeetsy?? he called.

?Here.? said Betsy, raising her palm to the air.

?Betsy. Mr. Grimes says I should ask you about Whitehouse security. Why would he do that??

?Because Whitehouse security is going nuts.? sang Betsy girlishly. ?We?re expecting an assassination attempt on the President. Several actually. They want us to remember a hundred different passwords and carry like these really ugly ID badges on us at all times. There are guards posted every two inches. The place is insane. Insaner than normal, that is.?

Vulcha?s mouth hung open. It had been days since his last front page article. Finally the article to end them all had arrived.

?You know it says in here that lesbianism is becoming more common in under sixteens.? mumbled Grimes, who encouraged all lesbianism for his own private reasons.

Vulcha was too happy to hear Bilgeby Grimes. He looked back at Betsy.

?Betsy...?

?Here.?

Hack Vulcha put his unshaven, warty head close to her face, full and bloated like a fat rotting melon, he oggled her with eyes like hard-boiled eggs, his lips, framed by a sweaty three day growth of ginger hair, he slobbered as he spoke with a Pulitzer winning smile, his breath hard, cold and with a stench like a dead rat.

?About these assassinations, I want you to tell me everything.?

Bilgeby Grimes chuckled to himself. Clarence Penrose was going to be very happy.

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The Eye of Morality

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Fisher?s voice came through the two-way radio. It sounded tired and defeated ?He?s bombed the station all right. There?s nothing left of it.?

?Was anyone in there at the time?? Hudson asked.

?Yes,? Fisher said. ?Caitlin and Mark. Mark was on the toilet.?

It took a second of silence for Hudson to realise that Fisher?s remark meant that Mark was dead.

?Oh?? was all he could manage.

?He never had a chance. But our man called the station. He spoke to Caitlin. He told her that she had twenty seconds to clear the building before a bomb went off. She only just got out herself.?

Hudson couldn?t believe what he was hearing. He mouthed the words ?My god.?

?Caitlin said that the guy sounded just like Christian Slater.?

?The actor?? asked Hudson.

?Yes, the actor. He was about to leave an answer on the answering machine when she picked it up.?

This was insane. Hudson couldn?t believe it. ?He got the machine? Where was Caitlin??

?She was the same place she was when we tried to radio her for backup a minute earlier. She was out of the main reception, she was in the kitchen, nuking a plate of spaghetti and boiling a kettle. The message on the machine ran for about thirty to forty seconds, so I think he tried to give her at least a minute. Enough time for her to raise an alarm and evacuate the building, but not enough to diffuse the bombs.?

A plate of spaghetti had cost forty, maybe fifty seconds, and that in turn had cost a life.

?Oh god.? Hudson said.

?But Caitlin got out, mostly okay, a bit shocked and stunned. She can?t speak yet and she has a fractured wrist and bruises on the back of her head. I had to tell her to get some sleep. She was pretty upset about Mark. Lillian is talking to her now, she?ll sort her out.? Fisher said.

?Christian Slater bombed our station?? mumbled Tom. Hudson ignored him.

?Do you know where the bomb was planted?? Hudson asked.

?Well, I guess we have a name for the guy now, they always end up with a name somehow.? said Tom to himself in the background. ?We can call him Christian, or maybe even Slater. Whaddya think? Which is better??

?Looks like several bombs, designed to just destroy the building and everything inside of it, nothing more, nothing less. All the bombs went off more or less simultaneously. Nothing too hard to come by, probably just plain old dynamite.? Fisher?s voice was low and trembling, angry.

?You found the site he shot the shelter from.

?We certainly did.? said Hudson. Tom was nodding.

?And??

?There?s a shitload of bullets in the trees as well.?

?He made it look like a frenzy. That?s what made us so wary, so aware all of a sudden that he was aggressive when aroused.?

?Why go to all this trouble?? Hudson asked. ?Why plan something like this? Why lure us out, why not kill us with the bomb??

?He doesn?t want us dead, that?s the whole point. How are we going to know he?s smarter than us if we all die? We were not his target. His target was-?

?The evidence.? Hudson said.

?Well yes, all the physical evidence, but just as importantly, all the tools and equipment we use to try to find him and catch him and incriminate him as well.?

?Well,? Hudson pointed out, ?His plan worked.?

?Quite.? Fisher said softly. ?I?m coming to meet you out there. Stay where you are. Save any further questions till then. I need time to think now.? And with that the radio went dead.

Hudson looked at Tom. Tom had his finger stuck in his ear and was waggling it about furiously. Hudson looked at Tom and realised ?He doesn?t even care. A friend of his just got blown to pieces by a bomb and he doesn?t even care.?

Tom noticed Hudson looking at him. ?What?? he asked.

Hudson looked at the ground. ?Nothing.? he said in disgust. ?Nothing? at? all.?

?You gotta a problem??

Hudson laughed. ?Somebody actually married you??

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Munchies

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?Go home, Tom. Your wife will be worried.?

?Thanks, Fish.? Tom said, without the trace of the sarcasm Hudson had expected.

And quickly, Tom got into his car and drove off leaving Fisher and Hudson to the greyness and the silence of the shelter at night. There was the diminishing sound of Tom?s car stereo as it blared off into the night.

Fisher?s car engine purring its warmth and its noisy life away into the surrounding nothingness, Hudson watched the tail lights of Tom?s car getting dimmer and dimmer until around the now familiar bend, they disappeared.

The passenger door of the car swung open.

?Get in.? Fisher said.

And as Hudson got in and closed the door, he looked at Fisher and noticed how much older Fisher appeared now than when he had last seen him. He looked tired, but more than that he looked hollow.

He gave Fisher a nervous attempt at a smile.

?Where are we going?? Hudson asked.

?We?re staying right here.? Fisher replied. ?At least for the time being. It?s not like there?s any where else to go, anyway.?

Hudson spent a while wondering what to say to Fisher, and it took him about five minutes to notice that Fisher seemed to be quite enjoying the silence, and that saying anything would probably have been the wrong thing to do under the circumstances anyway.

It was after ten minutes Fisher finally spoke.

?It?s been a hard day.?

?Well it can?t get too much worse.?

Fisher finally managed a geniune laugh.

?Why are you laughing?? asked Hudson grinning.

?I love your naivety. You honestly have no idea of hiw much worse it gets.?

?Why. What now?? Hudson asked, the grin now a frown.

?Well basically we?re screwed. All our good evidence is gone.?

?How much do we have on the girl?? Hudson asked.

?Nothing, so far as I know. Tom won?t have anything, probably. A list of possible professions, her thumbprint to send to some state police around the place just in case she?s got a record, a tattoo on her butt to keep him busy checking out tattoo joints if he gets too much time on his hands, but seeing as we don?t know where she was originally from, seeing as we don?t know anything about her, there are going to be a lot of dead ends. And that?s about it. The tattoo?s the best lead Tom?s got, and a tattoo, most of the time, is a lousy lead.?

?So, we?re not likely to get much from an investigation of who the girl is?? Hudson asked.

?Probably not, although you never can tell.? Fisher said. ?Tom?s an arsehole? and a jerk? but when he can be bothered he?s pretty capable.?

?Is there anything else which I?ve missed or nobody?s told me about?? Hudson managed a grim smile. He was afraid of the answer.

?Bound to be.? Fisher looked out the car window for a moment and heaved a deep sigh. More than you?ll ever guess. The thought made fisher feel strangely guilty. He spent a moment tapping a finger and then flicked on the dash computer. It was time to tell Hudson the rest.

?Oh yeah, another great perk of the job, I get to do this each day. Lie to the FBI.?

He tapped on the computer a few times.

It came to life.

?Memo mode on:? He said.

Memo mode came on and the dashboard started taking dictation.

?Daily Sheet: for the 5th December, 2041,? he said: ?Nothing worth reporting.?

?Memo end.?

?Send it to central.? said Fisher and the computer did as it was bid. Thumbs up.

?Politics!? said Fisher.

?What do you mean... politics?? asked Hudson who could not understand. ?Surely the FBI would be better at this than we are, they?ve got a division set up specifically to catch psychos like this. Psychos ?R? Us... something like that??

I think I can trust him. Hakamaji was probably right. Besides, by now Hudson was as criminally guilty of treason as any of them.

?Hudson, the FBI are running this country. They own it. The FBI will bury the case and if we object and try to raise hell, they?ll bury us. Our only chance is to hang on like crazy. This is why I?ve held back from contacting Ulsa, as soon as we do, Stone can turn this case in to a federal issue and everything we are fighting for here has gone. Things are so haywire with the police, the Japanese and the FBI it?s hard to know who to trust. I sure as hell don?t trust Stone. Not when the FBI are so powerful and especially not now we?re at the brink of war. The investigation of the fingerprint is in all honesty less than vigorous. We send it to state police knowing that as soon as they turn anything up they?ll hand it over to the FBI. So far we?ve sent it to none.?

?And you?ve been frightened of me??

?Oh sure. Watching you closely. I can?t just tell you I?m committing treason when you got here you hated me so much I had to keep pulling your daggers out of my back. We?re keeping this away from the FBI for all kinds or reasons. They?ll destroy us with it. If the war doesn?t destroy us first.?

?Wouldn?t we win a war against Japan??

?No,? said Fisher, ?the Japanese will have noticed the impending war too and I?m sure that they will take the appropriate action.?

?What action will they take?? asked Hudson.

?One which makes it impossible for them to lose, a position in which the United States will not be able to unleash its arms against the monetary force of Japan. Remember, money is all numbers in a computer now, not a dead president on a piece of green paper. Of the richest banks in the world the top six are Japanese. There are eleven Japanese banks in the top twenty. None are American. The U.S. army can?t steal numbers, because those numbers can be in any bank in any part of the world. They can be moved at the speed of light, to somewhere else, which would be very glad indeed to have the new numbers.

?No matter what the United States does to Japan militarily, as in the islands and the cities, the Japanese companies, as in money, will survive, and they will destroy America financially. They can corrupt it, subvert it and make America even more of a hive of social degradation than it already is. Sure America will hurt Japanese money but not enough to stop Japanese money finding retribution.?

?Do you think that for sure?? said Hudson.

?Not one single doubt in the world. Here, do you want a sandwich?? Fisher asked. ?My wife packed you some ham and salad sandwiches, I hope you eat that stuff.?

The lettuce was still crisp and there was even mayonnaise. It was heaven.

?It?s good to have munchies when you?re out for a long night,? Fisher said. Although Hudson noticed that the munchies Fisher consumed were largely golden in colour and flowed from a cold can.

?Could you please remind me why we are here.? Hudson said.

?We?re here to observe.?

?Observe what exactly?? he asked.

?Whatever there is to be observed,? Fisher said cryptically. ?To see what the night suggests to us. To see if there is anything which we overlooked as a result of the daylight.? he said. He lifted his drink. ?And to get shitfaced after a fucking horrible day. To the night.? Fisher said. Tonight Hudson, I grab your life and place it into a hole that?s slightly deeper.

?To the night,? Hudson responded, holding up his ham and salad sandwich in response to Fisher?s unusual toast.

The radio screamed in to life.

?Fisher are you there, you god-damned pain in the arse??

It?s happening already.

?We?re about to play Meet the Coward.? said Fisher. ?And here?s our first contestant for this evening. Fulcrum Burke.?

Fisher looked playful.

?Mayor. It?s lovely to hear from you.? he smirked into the handset.

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Political Winds

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?I thought I might get you on this damn thing.? said the voice in a tone which was both disrespectful and aggressive. ?After you called my secretary this afternoon, I?ve been expecting you to call me all evening.?

?I?ve been pretty busy, and anyway, this is exactly why I gave the damn radio to you.? said Fisher, ?You asked for a unit for yourself so that you could -?

?Yes, yes, I know all of that.? said the voice caustically. ?And I?m only using it because you assured me about a million times that the thing is safe, so it had better be safe or it?s your arse.?

Fisher digested that comment without once showing how he took it.

?It?s safe.? Fisher said reassuringly, ?Go ahead, say whatever you want.?

?When this thing gets out, about your station being blown up by the Anti-Japanese mob, there?s going to be a lot of pressure on me to get the bomber.? said the voice. ?The popular opinion in Wisconsin is still against the APA. Two and a half states South and the pressure would be on me to get you, right John??

?I see.? said Fisher with a sigh. There was a look on his face which said ?Oh no, not this again.?

?But mayor, this was almost certainly not the Patriots? Army. They haven?t bombed anything anywhere in Wisconsin yet, and besides, the APA destroy police stations with rocket launchers, hand grenades and car bombs. This bombing here was done cleanly, just enough to bring the supporting walls down. The work of a single experienced man. The APA work during the night. This bomb went off at dusk. It is only similar to the others. It?s pretty clear that the bombing is a part of another case of mine.?

?Well I?d keep quiet about that if I were you.? said the mayor.

?I will not.? said Fisher quite indignantly. ?I?ll scream it from the god-damned rooftops, because it?s the truth.?

?Screw with the FBI, they?ll screw with you, and John, the FBI have some guys with pretty big dicks and evil minds, and they don?t stop screwing until they draw blood.?

Hudson winced. That was a mental image he could have done without. Fisher nodded his head. He struggled hard to control a smile.

?That mutherfucker Dixon from the FBI has already spoken to me once about my loyalty to the government and if they can put pressure on me, it means that they can put pressure on you and all your boys, John. They can put pressure on anybody... that?s the whole point.?

Hudson noticed Fisher now shaking his head, covering his mouth like a kid, trying not to laugh.

?FBI Investigations these days aren?t nice, John, they?re not based on facts. Your station blows up, your son-in-law is inside it at the time and both you and your daughter collect on his insurance. A slightly different emphasis of the same facts tells a totally different story. Maybe it?s you who bombed the station, because you?re a Japanese sympathist and you discovered that your son-in-law was going to expose you. So you bomb the station yourself and then blame it on some other guy whose case just popped up in front of you. The FBI kill you and play pin the medal on the dead guy. Either story sells netpapers, bucko. Either story promotes careers in the FBI, with half the judges on the payroll and the other half dead, the computer judges are all programmed by the FBI anyway so they only return guilty verdicts...?

?Bucko?? thought Hudson.

The voice continued.

?I vouched for you at an important time once, remember? You don?t play the McGovern?s way and it?ll make me look bad too. I?m being honest here.?

?Don?t take it too personally, mayor.? said Fisher. ?I?m sure when the FBI are telling you to bark like a dog and take it up the arse, you?ll bend and yap waiting for the right time to make your stand.?

?No more bullshit John, things are that bad. If the FBI turn up asking you to kiss arse then you?d better pucker on up and prepare to savour the flavour.?

?Like Fuck.? Fisher exploded, his face purple, saliva landing twenty feet from him. ?I just swore to my daughter that I?d catch the guy who bombed my station and murdered her husband, I can?t just nail the town drunk to a tree and feel good about it.?

The fact that Fisher had a daugher who was engaged to Mark was news to Hudson who greeted the information with solemn silence. It explained a great deal of Fisher?s unrest.

?Look John,? the mayor murmered eventually, his silken voice mollifying, calming, soothing. ?I can see what you?re saying, and of course you?re right, but the stupid die and the smart survive. If it really means that much to you then catch the real guy later, just have a convenient scapegoat ready for the FBI. I?m warning you. You don?t and you?re being stupid.?

How could threats sound so much like sincere warnings and vice versa? Hudson wondered. Fisher shook his head from side to side.

?Catch us a bad guy fast.?

?I can?t catch what I can?t find.? said Fisher. ?But as always, I?ll do my best. Anyway, come to think of it, what is happening about my police station, when do I get a new one?? asked Fisher.

?Why are you asking me?? asked Burke. ?That?s not my problem, surely, you?re a businessman and that?s a matter between you and your insurance company.?

?I don?t have a station and I know you have the resources to provide me with a temporary one.? Fisher was blunt. ?That is my concern, what are you going to do to help me??

?But I don?t have to Fisher. In fact I?d be crazy if I did.?

?I?m out of options here. Please, give me something, a room in a council building somewhere, anything.? pleaded Fisher.

?Are you determined to be an idiot about this?? asked the mayor.

?Sounds like me.?

?Then no way.? said Burke. ?I?m not giving the FBI free target practice on my head because of you. I?ve given you ten times more warning than what I owe you.?

?In that case,? said Fisher, ?I have to go now. There?s things I?ve got to do and I can?t be bothered with cowards.? He dropped the handset on the seat of the car.

?Our local mayor,? said Fisher angrily, ?more of a wind sock than a person.? Fisher walked off towards the side of the road. Hudson watched him go.

Hudson wondered if he should follow Fisher as he heard the voice on the radio screaming. ?Why you son of a turd-puking, cat straddling??

Hudson switched the radio off and it was then he noticed that the miniature microphone, a piece of thin wire with a connector, in total a device less than an inch long, was plugged into the external microphone socket. Fisher had recorded the conversation. The car computer was still recording sound even now. It would keep recording until it had finished filling a whole disk. A Floptical disk held two hours. He wondered if he should re-turn the volume on the two way back up. He decided against it. Whatever Fisher wanted was on the tape already.

It was ten minutes before Fisher came back. Hudson watched the computer clock tick away. Fisher eventually had enough to drink and started the car.

?Where to now?? Hudson asked.

?Home.? said Fisher. ?You?re paid up at the B and B until tomorrow. After that, you?ll have to live with me, you know, until you find a place. I?m trusting you Hudson.? And I?ll kill you if you screw me over.

Hudson only wondered if Caitlin was still living there.

?Sounds great!? he said.

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The Third Dream

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He had stopped falling, he could feel the action of landing, which is to say, splatting on the ground feet first and hoping to hell bones don?t break.

The jarring he felt through his whole body was as though he were still landing, trapped eternally at the point of feet crashing on to the ground. After some time feeling stabs of pain through his feet and legs, he could stand again.

He was at the bottom of the well. It was dark. Sound echoed. The room he was in was like an old dungeon, made of stones and mortar. There was a dripping of water. Drip... drip... drip. The rattling of heavy chains.

A pink neon sign flickered on and off. ?Goodbye.?

Above him, a long, long way away, was a spot of daylight.

The top of the well.

Drip... drip... drip...

He heard a voice. He knew immediately whose voice it was.

?Mommy!? said Hudson, ?You?re hurt.?

His dream mother walked towards him. She was dressed as though she were just about to go out on the town.

Drip... drip... drip...

A drop of deep red blood dripped from her fingers.

DRIP.

It was hard for Hudson to see in to the darkness, there was a vision of her dark hair.

It had glittery hairspray.

Oh god.

Hudson screamed as a man stepped out from the shadows. Hudson stared, still screaming as his mother fell to the floor. He tried to run to help her but his legs refused to move. He could hear the sound of bones being broken as he looked to see his feet embedded in cement.

The sound of hacking stopped, the body lay on the floor before him, half lit by the full moon. She had been sliced to pieces, there were slashes across her stomach and ribs and around her back, there were gashes on her arms and across her throat. With a spasm she twitched, stretching out an arm towards him. Blood gushed from her throat. She was dying in front of him and he just watched on.

And the people were so big. They were so tall. His mother seemed like a giant!

There was a laughing sound, scraping of metal against metal. His heartbeat was pounding his ear drums and then there was the sound of footsteps getting fainter. A door slamming. He felt his feet moving again.

His mother went to say something but she coughed up blood.

Hudson blinked. Turned away.

They were now in a house.

The carpet was familiar, it was beige.

Covered in a thick pool of blood. Hudson crawled on his hands and knees into an adjacent room.

It was a bedroom. Hudson?s father was on the bed. He was tied to the bed posts and gagged.

Hudson sat on the floor, and he looked at his hands.

They were all tiny, but his hands nonetheless, hairy, callouses on the fingertips of his left hand from years of fretting guitar strings, all shrunken. little fingers, with their thin, flexible nails.

And a man with a scar and a thin, straight moustache walked into the room.

He pulled out a shot gun from his coat and shot Hudson?s father in the face.

Hudson looked up at the man with the scar to see him laughing and laughing, choking on laughter. Hudson turned and ran all the way out of the bedroom, down a flight of stairs and out the back door. He looked again at his hands as he ran. THEY Were still little, but smooth, hairless, pudgy, stubby little fingers, with their thin, flexible nails. They were the hands of a child.

His alarm went off. His night was over.

His eyes were open, which meant that he was awake for the day.

Hudson, still shaking, felt the bed around him.

It was as though a bucket of water had been thrown over it. It was drenched. He looked at his watch. It was almost seven o?clock. Before he ate anything he needed a drink of water and a shower.

He made himself go through the motions of getting up although in truth, he felt like never getting out of bed again.

He had showered, shaved and dressed by seven twenty-nine.

At seven thirty on the dot, as he was about to open it to leave, there was a knock at the door.

Hudson opened it. It was Fisher. ?Quick, no time.? he grunted. Fisher turned and fled downstairs and then outside to his 4WD. After locking his door behind him, Hudson ran downstairs to do the next day?s work.

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Hudson?s Third Day

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Little hands. The hands of a child. thought Hudson.

?The Michigan police sent me a lot of stuff last night.? Fisher said.

It took Hudson a minute to work through the sentence. Hudson, like so many of the creatures who roam the earth, sometimes needed a few minutes to warm up after a sleep before they?re ready to take in anything substantial through their senses. And of all his senses which didn?t work too well during these times of surfacing, it was Hudson?s ears which took the longest time to warm up.

?They sent it to you at home?? Hudson asked.

?Yes.?

?What?s going on??

?Wait for the briefing,? said Fisher, ?and then you?ll know when everybody else knows.?

Hudson hadn?t expected the sudden formality and he took it a little personally that Fisher would not tell him of this urgent news now that it was just the two of them sitting in the car. Fisher, normally so sensitive to the world around him was preoccupied with troubles as he started the car and with obvious urgency pulled out of the driveway.

For the time being, Hudson too sat in silence, there was just the screaming brightness of daylight, the brilliance of morning which pummelled him in the eyes and the sound of Fisher?s 4WD to console any scars he bore Fisher for Fisher?s lack of faith in him and his discretion.

After a few minutes of cutting corners, Fisher stopped suddenly and pulled into the driveway of a house, the design of which had clearly been a matter of pride to the architect. A house of such elegance that it seemed incongruous with the deepness and gruffness of the voice and the image of Fisher.

So glaring was the contrast that for a moment Hudson assumed that there was another stop before they reached Fisher?s home, that there was someone else to be picked up. But when Hudson saw all the other Datsubishi squad cars parked half up the kerb, like a still-life of a four car pile up, Hudson realised that this was their destination, which meant that it was Fisher?s house.

?Your place?? he asked Fisher as they pulled in.

?Uh, yeah.? Fisher replied, obviously not expecting the question.

?It?s nice.? Hudson said, and it was.

The building itself had a presence, it too had something of a unique character, the ivy which crept all over it in an attempt to devour it, the wrought iron balconies not juttingly ugly, but not shy either. A house, Hudson thought, with the shapeliness which spoke of life inside, not the flatness of a slab for an exterior, it was a house whose inhabitants did not wish to keep you away with fences or to hide their lives among trees which look to the eye more like camouflage than a natural sculpture. It was a house which looked as open as a grass plain.

?Really nice.? said Hudson for emphasis.

?Thankyou.? Fisher said. ?My wife?s greatest love. Lil restores the thing all the time, and I get to live in it without lifting a finger. I?m happy with the arrangement and so is she.? Fisher smiled and it was clear to Hudson from his circumspect smile that Fisher clearly had feelings for his wife he would not degrade by putting them into words.

They walked towards the staircase, which apparently led to the main entrance.

?Watch your step.? He said. He pointed to the third step from the bottom. ?That one wobbles. Some people step on it, others prefer to miss it altogether.?

Hudson gave the step a miss, which he noticed Fisher observed. Hudson wondered where such an observation might be stored in Fisher?s mind, what Fisher might deduce from the observation of whether Hudson missed a step or tested it. What inner scars might that show Fisher within Hudson?

Up the steps went Hudson, with Fisher in a rush beside him, and strangely a man whose eyes Hudson still had not seen, was now opening the front door to his beautiful house for him, opening the door and then sweeping into one of the most exotic corridors Hudson had ever seen.

It was twenty feet long. The ceiling, being the top storey, was over eight feet high from the floor.

On the walls, wherever there was not a door to some adjacent room, there was a photograph. Thousands of them. It took Hudson?s breath away. A lifetime of photography, just on these walls.

Hudson stood there stunned and Fisher, who of course encountered the hallway at least twice each day, thought nothing of walking past thousands of the most amazing photographs, full of people and places full of such expression. There were mostly black and white photos, although colour photos had made an interesting looking mural down the length of the corridor. The effect held Hudson transfixed for some time. It was only after Fisher had walked the length of about half the length of the corridor that he noticed that Hudson had not yet made it through the front door.

?Come on, you fool.? Fisher said gruffly. Hudson gave him a look of some astonishment and indicated with a gesture the array of photographs which had so caught his attention. Fisher looked a little agitated but took a second to comment.

?Yeah, they?re my wife?s photos. Kinda catch your eye, don?t they. She?s a wonderful artist. She?s the kind of person who sees how something can be improved and improves it to perfection.? Fisher shook his head. ?Drives me crazy.? he added for free.

Hudson came in and closed the front door behind himself. He was marvelling at the walls. All the frames matched the light of the room. They were all of the same type, but different colours, subtly so. The attention to detail was interesting. The arrangement of the photos themselves was a like a kind of abstract mural.

Hudson walked slowly past a length of photographs, hypnotised by them. He saw one of Fisher with a fishing rod in his hand, Fisher looked taller and skinnier and he was falling out of a boat. His fishing pole was still in his hand, his right leg was up in the air. You could see that he was making circles with his right hand, his back was arched. He was a second away from falling out of the little wooden boat and into the dark water. Hudson looked away from the photograph with a smile on his face. He went to look back. Something about the photograph beckoned him.

?Down here.? hissed Fisher.

Hudson looked away from the photograph back towards Fisher and went down the hall way. He could look at the photo again later on.

And looking at Fisher?s stooped frame, Hudson noticed that Fisher had already walked to the end of the corridor and was about to open an oak door. A plain door with an old iron door knob. A high doorknob, the kind designed to be used only by adults. The study, Hudson presumed.

Hudson hurried along the corridor as Fisher stepped aside and opened the door for Hudson to walk through. He heard a heated conversation grind to a halt with Tom yelling: ?They are the god-damned FBI...?

And all the eyes looked towards the doorway, they saw Hudson come in and a nervous moment later he was followed by Fisher. As Fisher swept into the room Hudson saw a roomful of faces lapse in to relief.

Tom was still waving his arms. ?That?s all I?m saying.? he said turning a little red to see Fisher staring at him.

Hudson waited until Fisher had closed the door before coughing politely to ask for a place to sit. Fisher pointed to a chair which looked too padded to be a chair in which to consider matters of current investigation. The chair Hudson had used at the office had a hard seat, a broken reclining lever and no arm rests. This broken, hard, non-reclining and only partly swivelling chair in the now demolished office was the kind of chair you sat on.

The chair in Fisher?s den was the kind of chair you have to get into and somehow extracate yourself from. In fact it was the kind of chair for which you needed to have a huge swirling glass of expensive Cognac in your hand, before you could even think of getting into it.

Noisily, and self-consciously, Hudson sat in it and when he noticed that everyone looked so tense it reminded him of the seriousness of their problems at that point. Talk of communication with the Michigan police had had the effect of making everyone in the room wary. Tom?s voice seemed to ring through the room.

FBI.

Hudson looked around at the assembly. There was Caitlin who had a black eye the size of a coffee mug, cuts on her forehead and a thickly bandaged hand. Hudson tried to smile at Caitlin when he caught her attention. A quiet smile which said that he was glad to see that she was still alive and well.

?We?re all here.? said Fisher. Hudson was painfully aware of the absence of Mark Sexton and he was sure that everybody thought of Sexton at that moment. ?So we can start.?

Fisher took a deep breath.

?Much has happened and the information we now have on our man Christian has made for some strange reading. Hudson and I were on surveillance until fairly late last night and I got home to find Lillian frantic.? Fisher looked at Hudson. ?She said that Stone had been trying to get a hold of me since seven-thirty. So I looked on my computer and sure enough there was a whole heap of mail, there were fingerprints, there were schematics galore... total confusion. But we can now be absolutely sure that this crash had a tremendous affect on the Christian?s conduct.?

?How are we sure?? Asked Tom.

Fisher looked at him with some reproach as he continued his story.

?I asked the computer to sort the mail by the time it was received so that I might begin with the first piece of mail received and there at the top of the list was this.?

He pointed to it on his computer screen.

An icon of a person?s head with a single word underneath it: HELP.

Fisher touched the icon and a man?s face filled the screen.

At the bottom left of the screen were the words Stone@Zeno.nsps.com

Everybody in the room let out a hiss.

?Shut up.? Fisher held up his hand.

?Hi John.? said the head, tired. ?I know that you?re a busy man, but we?ve got a real problem. A car crash in the South... only a few dozen feet from the state line, in fact. You see, it?s like... huge smash up... power pole ripped almost straight out of the ground... two cars - both written off... but when we arrive to label the dead and cart them off... there?s no bodies. Like the fucking things have just disappeared.? Stone was emotional, he was very upset. His eyes were glazed over and his hair stuck to his forehead. He looked wretched.

?So obviously somebody took the bodies. What I can?t figure out is why.? The head on the computer shook from side to side as it spoke.

Hudson was getting angry as he remembered Fisher?s words. ?The killer likes his bodies already dead...? Hudson cursed his blinded stupidity for not having seen immediately that the very same bodies he was so loathed to think of at the site of the crash had actually been attractive to the killer, because, as Hudson now realised, in quadraphonic sound surround, the killer preferred his bodies already dead... think like the killer... think like the killer when you look at the evidence... Fisher had been hinting all along.

?I?m sending you pictures of the cars...? said Stone?s head.

Fisher flicked up a picture of each car on the screen, covering the Stone?s face as he talked. Two pictures, one of each car. Both pictures were medium distance views - the blood was visible regardless.

Hudson shrank away from the blood. He made himself look with both eyes, but inside he closed up and saw only the colour red and the idea of fluid.

?And if you look at the pictures you will know that with all the blood on the insides of the cars, and just the extent of the damage, there was no way in which anybody was left alive after the impact. Our estimates are that both cars were travelling in the neighbourhood of 80 mph when they hit. When car one hit the pole, the driver would certainly have died instantly, just from the forces at work.? Stone?s tone was now flat. Emotionless.

?But all the same, No bodies in either of the cars. No bodies for the surrounding 500 metres. I sure as shit can?t piece it together, locals are beginning to suspect that the accident was deliberately caused and that the guy who caused it stole the bodies, but I don?t get it, why would someone want to steal bodies?? It was clear even to Hudson that what upset Stone was not the tragedy, but how seriously the puzzle of the missing bodies caused him aggravation in the office.

?I?ve thought to get ahold of you for a few days now, but we?ve been without power at the station until the electrical company fixed the problem for us, it took them more than eighteen hours because there was some crazy screw up with the pole type. Three times the fucking idiots went and put up the wrong type of pole. It took them one whole day to do a four hour job.

?I?ve been so damned desperate to get through to you and thanks to all the award winning fuck-ups which sent us back to the stone age for the better part of a day, this is the first chance I?ve had.

?I?m sending you all our stuff over, photos and stuff and for god?s sake, if you have any ideas, or any information at all which you think might help, then please get back to me as soon as possible.?

And the last look on the face of the man on the screen, from what Hudson could see of him from behind the pictures of the two crushed car wrecks, looked to be the expression of a man whose brain was sore.

The recording stopped playing. The face disappeared from view and the two photos remained.

?So what does this mean?? asked Annie.

?I suspect that he?s hoping that on a longshot I?ll contact him with some news, so that he can turn it in to a federal case and unload it fast.? said Fisher. ?All we have to do next is stop Stone from bringing in the FBI and then catch the killer.?

?Have you got a plan?? asked Tom.

?No.? said Fisher. ?Not yet... first we need to analyse what this piece of information means. It had only yesterday occurred to me that the bodies from the car crash would most likely be missing, and to settle that thought in my mind I had intended to speak to Stone for some time, I?d put it off for fear of losing the case to the FBI. Now that he?s given us this, we have no choice.

?I sent a message in return to him, for him to come to join us here at eight O?clock this morning because-?

The groan which erupted in the room was shared by all except Fisher who perhaps felt more focused than everyone else, and Hudson, who didn?t know Stone well enough yet to groan on instinct.

Fisher was chastising with his look. ?Oh look, come on guys, this isn?t about old wounds, lets be practical. Yesterday a bomb killed one of our officers. Stone has information we need. And we need information. Stone is really the key, If we get him on our side, we?re fine and we?ll keep the FBI out. Otherwise, we?re screwed.

?Besides,? muttered Fisher hopefully, ?It might even be Stone?s boys who make the arrest. He?s not the worst investigator in the world.?

?Yeah, right.? snorted Tom rather loudly. ?Stone couldn?t detect his own dick with a room full of mirrors and a high power magnifying glass.? There were titters. ?Mind you, his dick is pretty small.? he conceded.

?But all the same,? said Fisher, ?he?s on his way. The only real alternative was that we all went to Michigan and that would have looked really aggressive. Better to get him here. I think in this room, with all of us here, united, we really stand a fair chance of convincing him to do this investigation without the FBI.?

?You?re appealing to his humanity.? observed Annie. ?You?ll fail.?

?We,? Fisher replied, ?have no real choice but to try.?

The thought of that stifled all further opposition.

All the while Hudson thought to himself Why would he drop one body and pick up two? What, was there just no room in his car?

?You?ve all had time to think a little, now I want your ideas.? said Fisher.

He looked at Tom. Tom nodded.

?I think that this has little to do with the job I?ve been given. It seems totally impossible to me that our girl is going to turn out to be either of the two missing bodies.?

Fisher nodded.

?Thankyou for that reminder of your list of duties, Tom. I was after more constructive thinking about the broader matter of Christian. Oh, yes, and since nobody asks, a licence plate check on the wrecked cars led Stone to the families of the drivers. His investigation has revealed that there are a total of three bodies missing. Two drivers, both female and one child, an infant boy. There are at this point in time only the three lost bodies.?

Tom looked at Fisher. ?Seeing as our girl has nothing to do with the new bodies, then there is nothing for me in this new information, either.?

?Give us your impressions, anyway.? said Fisher.

Tom ran his tongue across the front of his teeth.

?Okay but you?re not paying me to say this. I think from the looks of things that your guy collects bodies and cuts them up. I think it looks like he was going along, he saw the crash, and then he turned back to go to the shelter, he dumped the body probably to make as much room as he could, and then turned back to pick up the three new bodies.?

It was as Hudson had seen it in his own head.

?Discussion.? said Fisher.

?Why would he dump the body?? Asked Caitlin it had caused her pain to speak and her voice was a tiny rasp. Hudson?s heart began to melt. His brain soon followed.

Fisher interjected ?A better question is, why would he turn around and dump the body??

Tom said ?He figures, I?ll go back, I?ll dump the body and then go get the new ones. He doesn?t know how many bodies he?ll find in the two cars, there maybe like eight bodies, so he?s making room in his van.?

?He chose a bus shelter as his site. Why?? asked Fisher.

?Lack of options?? suggested Tom.

?And also it?s predictable. You know when the last moment will be before the body is definitely discovered. You can get that from the timetable.? said Annie.

?It?s over the state line from the accident too.? said Hudson.

?Excellent point Hudson.? said Fisher. ?Less likely to be discovered immediately, bought himself time, the accident and the body were investigated by two police forces, and moreover, that very fact...?

?Assures that the the FBI will have jurisdiction.? said Hudson, ?He thought out the whole thing...?

?Christian is no risk taker.? said Annie nodding agreement.

?Oh, but he was the other night.? argued Fisher. ?I inspected that car crash site and there is no way I can see how somebody caused a crash there. There?s no evidence for it, the idea of orchestrating a car crash is bullshit. The fact that he dumped a body and clearly intended to come back for it, all points to improvisation. There was no planning in this. When Christian plans, he plans carefully, with attention to details.

?So if Christian was planning to cause an accident, why would he be carrying this other body? This annoying body which he would have to temporarily discard while he took those three new bodies back home? The only reason that the theory about causing an accident ever held water is because it came from people who did not know about the body found here in Wisconsin.?

?Christian intends to take no chances, yet here he has surpassed himself, risking total exposure to get three new bodies. The question is... Why? Why take the risk of exposure?? he looked around the room. He looked at Hudson.

There was one answer which made sense when he thought of it.

?Because new bodies are hard for him to get.? Hudson said.

Eyes turned to him.

Hudson looked at Fisher and his finger was pointing at him. Hudson felt self-conscious.

?Probably not.? Fisher said after a moment, ?Maybe it?s not easy to get dead bodies, it?s always risky, but he?ll have a method. A way of doing it, being close to them, probably surrounded by them in his work place, but you?re right in essence, stealing bodies - there?s always a risk of discovery. He takes these three because they are offered to him easily, and he is a collector, so he collects.

?I suspect the element of danger of taking them from the site of an accident and spontaneity just overtook him, perhaps reliving another occasion of excitement or near discovery, or opportunity. Maybe dulled by the simple routine of taking bodies at will made this fortuitous moment appear like a special treat. A chance to make it fun again. You know, take the routine out of it, just for the fun?s sake.

?When he was presented with a chance smorgasbord of bodies, just by fate, he could not help himself, he had to take the risk. Probably saw it as a flexing of his virility. If he?d not done it, he?d have felt weak and sorry. Doing it made him feel important and special, and hungry to start cutting.?

?All of this raises the questions how many bodies he has used, where he normally gets them from and where he buries them.?

It was as Caitlin said this that Fisher?s grandfather clock gently struck eight o?clock. A moment later they were all treated to the sound of a car pulling up on to Fisher?s drive way. The room remained silent.

A moment later Hudson heard a car door slam, and the sound of someone treading on the grass, quickly. He heard footsteps on the steps leading to the front door and it was on the third step he heard the man let out an involuntary noise as the step cracked and broke underneath his weight. He heard it all as the silence dripped from the people locked in that room of Fisher?s angrily awaiting for Stone to knock on the door.

The whole time, nobody spoke a word.

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