Alan Foster: Cyber Way

“You’re telling me,” said Nickerson.

“Mrs. Kettrick have anything to say about sandpainting phobics?”

Nickerson shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense to her either.” He was staring at the body, watching forensics work.

Moody knew that the younger detective didn’t like psycho cases. Drug deals were more to his liking. They made sense. Buyers and sellers and users, everything fitted together nice and neat. Something like this, that made less sense the longer you looked at it, unsettled him. That meant he would leave all the legwork to Moody, which suited the senior detective just fine. Psycho cases didn’t bother him. Logic was always present. It was just twisted.

Nickerson was talking again. “The missus said she hardly ever came in here. She didn’t care much for this stuff. It was her husband’s passion. He’d show her a new piece when he had it delivered and she’d smile and forget about it. Not her style.”

“Something we can all agree on.” Moody gestured at the empty wall. “So she couldn’t tell us anything about this one?”

“Just that it was a big picture composed of lots of smaller pictures; very organized, very geometric.”

“Swell. Our motive, and we don’t even know what it looked like. All this stuff must be insured.”

“Already checked with the local rep for the company. Everything’s heavily insured, all right, but they couldn’t find Kettrick’s file when we asked about it. Seems it’s been wiped recently. Isn’t that interesting?”

Moody’s eyebrows lifted. “Definitely not a nut,” he asserted slowly. “Nuts don’t know how to penetrate insurance company security.”

“Yeah, but they don’t kill people who own art they don’t like, either.” Nickerson smiled. “Fortunately, we do know what the damn thing looked like.”

The detective regarded his colleague in surprise. “How?”

“Kettrick had an old-fashioned still camera. You remember those; the kind that printed two-D images on paper? He kept his own little file locked away, a snapshot of everything.” He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a small square of hard paper.

Moody examined the image. It showed a painting some six feet square composed of brightly colored, intricately rendered symbols and designs. Some resembled highly stylized human beings, others looked like plants; much of it was like nothing he’d ever seen before. It was tremendously complicated and as tightly organized as if it had been laid out with a cadcam program. Colored sand on wood. Aesthetically it meant nothing to Moody, whose idea of fine art was a well-crafted beer can, but he could appreciate the amount of time and effort that had gone into the composition.

It certainly didn’t look like anything worth killing two people over. But after twenty years as a cop Moody hadn’t found anything that was.

“Sandpainting, huh?”

“Yeah.” Nickerson nudged the photo. “There’s a little descriptive info on the back. Got it out of Kettrick’s catalog. It isn’t much.”

Moody turned the photo over. His eyes moved, not his lips. “Navaho, it says. Out West somewhere, aren’t they?”

Nickerson shrugged. “Thought you’d want to be the one to dig into it.” In other words, Moody mused, the younger man saw no vid opportunities here and was washing his hands of the whole business unless some arose.

“Phone?”

Nickerson jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Back up the hall.”

Moody nodded once and turned to leave, pausing only long enough to study the corpse of the unfortunate housekeeper. She lay face-down near the entrance, dropped by the killer as she’d tried to flee. The detective’s expression hardened. He had no sympathy or understanding for those responsible for the deaths of innocent people whose sole crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It took a real first-class cold-blooded bastard to shoot an old lady in the back. If she had been shot.

Lean close and the holes above her heart were clearly visible. Two of them, three inches apart. No sign of bleeding, just as Welles had said. Death by trauma induced by some kind of invasive presence. But what kind of presence if not metal slugs?

Coroner would let him know. He couldn’t do everybody’s job.

He found the phone, unclipped his spinner from his belt and jacked in. Department mollyserve found the Museum of the American Indian in New York, the Museum of the Southwest in Albuquerque, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Museum of, Museum of…

He settled on the Museum of Native American Art in Fort Worth, waited for clearance, then entered his queries. Two minutes later replies began a slow scroll on his screen. When he found what he was looking for, he thumbed Re

cord, waited another two minutes, then hung up.

The department was beginning to pull out. Forensic techs had scoured every room in the house for hair, dandruff, fingerprints, loose skin, blood, sweat, tears, and anything else that might help them eventually identify the murderer. Moody found Nickerson waiting to use the john.

“Arizona,” he told the younger man. “Also parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. That’s where you find sandpainting Navahos.”

Nickerson tried to sound interested. “So what does that give us, Vernon? A Navaho with a grudge?”

“We don’t know that it was a Navaho. We just know that this involves a piece of Navaho art.”

More often than most people think, the obvious pans out in police work. From starting with nothing, they went to having a prime suspect in no time at all, as soon as they began taking depositions from Kettrick’s office staff. Someone who consistently bypassed Security to telephone Kettrick and then broke into his office to confront him directly made a pretty good suspect in Moody’s eyes. The fact that several eyewitnesses described him as unmistakably Amerindian in appearance was conclusive as far as the department was concerned. It did not require a great leap of faith to assume for the purposes of additional investigation that he might well be Navaho.

They acquired a motive simultaneously with their suspect, because Kettrick’s secretary had heard the two men arguing about the sandpainting. What the detective still didn’t understand was what about it was worth killing for.

The first thing Moody did on returning to his desk was make several copies of the precious photograph. A couple went into the evidence vault beneath police headquarters, incongruous among tagged heavy weapons and ampules of self-injecting pharmacuties. A third he shoved under the mattress of his bed when he got home that night. Only then did he allow himself to relax.

As far as the murder suspect was concerned, no copies of the sandpainting existed. He’d wiped the insurance company’s file and destroyed the original. With luck it might make him overconfident.

What didn’t make any sense to Moody and what puzzled him all through the night was why a murderer would go to elaborate lengths to conceal a painting’s identity rather than his own.

By the following morning a preliminary determination had been rendered as to the cause of death in the Kettrick case. Nancy Welles told him about it before he had a chance to read it for himself.

They were in the commissary and she spotted him at one of the vending machines.

“Hi, Nance.”

“Vernon. They think they found out how Kettrick and his housekeeper died. But not what caused it.” Moody waited while she drew coffee from a nearby machine.

“Electrocution,” she said.

“Gimme a break, Nance. They know how but not what?”

She nodded as she stirred artificial creamer and artificial sweetener into the suspect coffee. “Remember the marks? Like bullet holes, only no bullets? Coroner’s report comes up and says they’ve both been corn-fried, but they don’t know how. You shoulda seen some of the faces in the room.”