Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

The morning squad room buzzed with movement, talk, caffeine energy. Homicide detectives always run because it’s a timed event. You close in on the perp inside two weeks or it’s over.

And here was the ME folder on Ethan Anselmo. Once you’ve studied a few hundred autopsy reports you know you can skip the endless pages of organs, glands, general chemistry, and just go to the conclusions. Forensic analysis had a subreport labeled GSR, which meant gunshot residue, that was blank.

The ME was confused. Heart stopped, lungs full, much like a drowning victim who had fought the ocean to his last. But the strange ridges on his skin looked like nerve damage, seared as if in an electrocution. The punctures McKenna had seen just obscured the case further.

McKenna hated muddy cases. Now he had to assign cause, focusing the ME report and the background he had gotten last night. He didn’t hesitate. Probable homicide, he wrote.

The usual notices had gone through, assigning case and ME numbers, letting the Squad and Precinct Captains know, asking if there seemed any link to other cases—all routine. Section Command and District Office heard, all by standard e-mail heads-up forms, as did Photo and Latent and Lab.

He took out a brown loose-leaf binder and made up a murder book. First came the Homicide Occurrence Report with Mobile Main as the address in the right upper corner. Then the basics. A door that opened wide with no sure destination beyond.

McKenna sat back and let his mind rove. Nothing. Sometimes an idea lurked there after he had reviewed the case; not now.

He knew he had to finish up a report on a domestic slaying from two days back, so he set to it. Most murders were by guys driven crazy by screeching kids and long-term debt and bipolar wives. Alcohol helped. They had figured out their method about ten seconds before doing it and had no alibi, no plausible response to physical evidence, and no story that didn’t come apart under a two-minute grilling. When you took them out to the car in cuffs the neighbors just nodded at each other and said they’d always figured on this, hadn’t they said so?

This was a no-brainer case. He finished the paperwork, longing for that paperless office, and dispatched it to the prosecutor’s office. They would cut the deal and McKenna would never hear of it again. Unless the perp showed up in fifteen years on his front porch, demanding vengeance. That had happened, too. Now McKenna went armed, even on Sundays to church.

Then he sat and figured.

The ME thought the odd marks on Ethan Anselmo might be electrocution. Torture? Yet the guy was no lowlife. He had no history of drug-running using shrimp boats, the default easy way for a fisherman to bring in extra income all along the Gulf. For a moment McKenna idly wondered when the War on Drugs would end, as so many failed American adventures had, with admission that the war was clearly lost. It would certainly be easier to legalize, tax, and control most drugs than it was to chase after them. He had at first figured Anselmo for a drug gang killing. There were plenty of them along the Gulf shore. But now that felt wrong.

His desktop computer told him that the Anselmo case was now online in the can’t-crack site Mobile used to coordinate police work now. There were some additions from the autopsy and a background report on Anselmo, but nothing that led anywhere.

He sighed. Time to do some shoe-leather work.

The Busted Flush was back at its dock. McKenna had changed into a beat-up work shirt and oil-stained jeans. Sporting a baseball cap, he found the crew hosing off a net rig inside the big aluminum boathouse nearby. “Pitscomb around?” he asked them, rounding the vowels to fit the local accent.

A thirty-something man walked over to McKenna. One cheek had a long, ugly scar now gone to dirty pink. His hair was blond and ratty, straight and cut mercifully short. But the body was taut and muscular and ready; the scrollwork tattoos of jailhouse vintage showed he had needed for much of his life. He wore a snap-button blue work shirt with a stuck-on nameplate that said Buddy Johnson. Completing the outfit was a hand-tooled belt with carry hooks hanging and half-topped boots that needed a polish pretty bad.

“Who wants to know?”

The stern, gravel voice closed a switch in McKenna’s head. He had seen this guy a decade before when he helped make an arrest. Two men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they yanked the bumper off the truck. They panicked and fled, leaving the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper.

“Lookin’ for work,” McKenna said. This guy couldn’t be heading up the operation, so he needed to go higher.

“We got none.” The eyes crinkled as if Buddy was trying to dredge up a memory.

McKenna shifted his own tone from soft to medium. “I need to see your boss.”

Still puzzling over the memory, Johnson waved toward the boathouse. McKenna walked away, feeling Johnson’s eyes on his back.

Pitscomb was at the back of the building, eating hog cracklings from a greasy bag, brushing the crumbs into the lagoon. Carrion birds eyed him as they drifted by on the soft slurring wind, keeping just above the gnarled tops of the dead cypress, just in case they saw some business below that needed doing.

Pitscomb was another matter. Lean, angular, intelligent blue eyes. McKenna judged that he might as well come clean. He showed his badge and said with a drawl, “Need to talk about Ethan Anselmo.”

Pitscomb said, “Already heard. He didn’t come to work that night.”

“Your crew, they’ll verify that?”

He grinned. “They’d better.”

“Why you have an ex-con working your boat?”

“I don’t judge people, I just hire ’em. Buddy’s worked out fine.”

“What do you do for the Centauris?”

“That’s a Federal matter, I was told to say.”

McKenna leaned against a pier stay. “Why do they use you, then? Why not take the Centauri out on their own boat?”

Pitscomb brushed his hands together, sending the last of the cracklings into the water. “You’d have to ask them. Way I see it, the Feds want to give the Centauris a feel for our culture. And spread the money around good an’ local, too.”

“What’s the Centauri do out there?”

“Just looks, swims. A kind of night off, I guess.”

“They live right next to the water.”

“Swimming out so far must be a lot of work, even for an amphibian.” By now Pitscomb had dropped the slow-South accent and was eyeing McKenna.

“How far out?”

“A few hours.”

“Just to swim?”

“The Feds don’t want me to spread gossip.”

“This is a murder investigation.”

“Just gossip, far as I’m concerned.”

“I can take this to the Feds.”

Again the sunny smile, as sincere as a postage stamp. “You do that. They’re not backwoods coon-asses, those guys.”

Meaning, pretty clearly, that McKenna was. He turned and walked out through the machine oil smells of the boathouse. Buddy Johnson was waiting in the moist heat. He glowered but didn’t say anything.

As he walked past McKenna said, using hard vowels, “Don’t worry, now. I haven’t chewed off anybody’s arm in nearly a week.”

Buddy still didn’t say anything, just smiled slyly. When McKenna got to his car he saw the reason.

A tire was flat, seeming to ooze into the blacktop. McKenna glanced back at Buddy, who waved and went back inside. McKenna thought about following him but it was getting warm and he was sticking to his shirt. Buddy would wait until he knew more, he figured.