The Rent-A-Mech, Walter, had just put my breakfast on the table when D. Supt. Matheson rang me. “Forgive me for ringing you so early, Jaggers, but London ABC wants us to look into that fox hunting matter at Dartmoor. Apparently there’s an amdroid involved. It’s an outdoor scene and if you don’t move quickly the evidence may become contaminated. . . .”
Matheson hadn’t begun with a knock-knock joke, which meant he was troubled. The Miles Bowman death was the biggest story to hit Devon in decades. The wealthy and charismatic Master of Houndtor Down Hunts had died, I had gathered from yesterday’s news reports, when he had been thrown by his horse during a run. Apparently someone in the park police was exploring another theory.
Val momentarily looked up from the table where she had been lapping her single cream. Seeing nothing to distress her, she twitched her tail as if to launch an unwelcome insect and resumed emptying the saucer. A sepia and golden Tonkinese, her soft coat colored in a random watermarked silk pattern, she was much too elegant ever to be observed using the litter box, although I supposed she must be using it. It was, after all, being used. Perhaps she had friends in.
“Jaggers? Jaggers, there. Pay attention. Blast! When are you getting a modern screen phone? Bloody hell. Jaggers?”
With a parting glance at my rapidly cooling eggs and bacon, I responded into the handset, “Yes, Superintendent. You were saying?”
“Now, I’ve made a good number of allowances for you, Jaggers, because of your record. You were once an impressive detective. Do not take advantage. Am I understood?”
“Certainly, Superintendent.”
“You’re going to want to get to the scene before it rains.”
I shifted my gaze to the glass door that looked into the garden as Matheson continued. The mid-March sky over the city was gloomy grey with curtains of mist coming up from the river. “The park constabulary think they have their murderer, Jaggers. London wants us to go through everything. After all, artificial beings are our bailiwick. Ready to receive?”
I toggled the receive on my hand desk. “Go ahead, Superintendent.”
“Sending now.”
As the case file form and location instructions loaded, I mulled the late Miles Bowman’s place in the scheme of things. In certain upwardly crusted circles, Bowman’s death was immense. Houndtor Down had brought riding to the hounds and the good kill back to Albion after an eight-decade hiatus, dotted with less than satisfying drag hunts and those absurd experiments with AI-equipped robotic foxes. Houndtor’s answer was to introduce genuine bio fox amdroids for prey, but imprinted with human engrams. The fox, therefore, would be physically a fox, but no longer a fox according to the prohibition against fox hunting, in that the creature understood the consequences and could volunteer. In actuality, the vermin was a human in a fox’s “meat suit,” entitled under law to engage in whatever absurd, but legal, occupation he or she chose. Nevertheless, where one got volunteers was a puzzle.
I’d never been at the Houndtor Down Lodge, although I had witnessed a bit of one of the operation’s hunts on Cripdon Down the year before when I was on an easily resolved poodle abuse enquiry. The amdroid poodle had undeniably abused her owner, a Harley dealer from Torbay. However both poodle and woman confessed to being consensual S&M partners in the area for a hunt, hence no crime. Too bad really. The poodle matter promised to be the most interesting case I’d been on since being assigned to the Exeter office. Nevertheless, since I was on the moor then and a hunt was on, I watched. Except for the chase being followed above by a hoard of hovercraft, the hunt itself had been something caught in amber. Elegantly costumed riders mounted on magnificent steeds chasing a huge pack of handsome foxhounds, the peculiar warbling notes of the Master’s tiny horn signaling the sighting of the prey. As long as you weren’t particularly fond of foxes, it was rather uplifting.
The lodge was twenty-five kilometers southwest of the city, just beyond the village of Lustleigh on the east edge of the moor. The enormously lucrative concession had its own skydock, and the park detective in charge, one DCI Stokes, condescended to have a constable at Houndtor Down to bring us up to speed. “Superintendent, on the killing, did the park cops get a verbal?”
“No. This Stokes fellow is certain he has his killer, nevertheless: Lady Iva Bowman, Miles Bowman’s wife.”
Lady Iva Bowman. The image of that stunning beauty was fixed in the nation’s memory. Her marriage to Bowman had been little short of a media coronation.
“Their theory is Bowman and Lady Iva, along with the hunt staff and some eighty followers and club members, were in the middle of one of their smaller commercial runs when Miles was found dead along the route. Lady Iva inherits and I gather from DCI Stokes she had just learned that her husband was bonking the company’s lead second horseman, one Sabrina Depp.”
“Motive and opportunity,” I commented.
“They’re up the wrong branch, Jaggers.”
“You disagree, sir?”
“I knew Lady Iva years ago. For all her beauty, she is old school, very refined. I can’t see her getting down into the muck and beating a grown man to death with what appears to have been a horseshoe, regardless of the provocation. In fact, I rather suspect Miles Bowman’s horse.”
“An amdroid?”
“Yes. The horse isn’t running on a human imprint, though. It appears a year ago a favorite jumper of Bowman’s was near death from an injury and Bowman spent a not inconsiderable fortune to have the mount’s engrams copied and imprinted on an equestrian meat suit drawn from the mount’s own DNA.”
“That which Miles rides shall never die,” I dogmatized.
“Quite. I suspect Bowman’s nag determined one lifetime under Miles Bowman’s arse was sufficient.”
“In which case, Superintendent, it wouldn’t be a murder.”
“All of which I imagine Lady Iva would very much like to have established as quickly as is feasible—oh. Swing by Heavitree Tower before you leave for Dartmoor. You have a new partner: DS Guy Shad.”
“You’re having a laugh, right, Superintendent?
“Not really.”
“Guy Shad? Sounds like someone copied the name off an old action vid poster.”
“That is his name, Jaggers. Shad is an American.”
“Of course he is. Now, we agreed—”
“This isn’t a negotiation, DI Jaggers. Shad has been assigned to this enquiry because of his prior association with two of the principals, as well as his familiarity with the artificial being end of the law enforcement spectrum. He’ll be waiting at the skydock.” That warning edge crept back into the superintendent’s voice: “Grasp the nettle, Jaggers. It’s up to you to make this work.”
“Yes, Superintendent.”
A significant pause and then the superintendent decided to lighten the mood. “Jaggers: Knock, knock.”
“Ringing off, Superintendent. There appears to be someone at the door.”
I quickly hung up the handset as I muttered, “Brilliant,” to no one in particular. After the dreadful experience I had partnered up with the ever-effervescent Ralph Parker, I thought Matheson and I had agreed I always work solo.
Guy Shad. American. He’ll want to eat at Wendy McDonald’s Kentucky Burger Hut and call me Bud, I mused. I certainly hoped Parker’s meat suit was one of a kind. I’d go into retirement before I was made to work with another Parker.
I looked at Val and she was eyeing my bacon and eggs. “You may as well,” I said to her as I petted her head and went toward the hallway to get my raincoat and hat. “I have to get to work. I’m on the Miles Bowman matter.”
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“The superintendent’s assigned me a new partner. An American named Guy Shad.”
She looked at me with those stunning aqua eyes and said, “Give him a fair chance, Harry. I don’t want to worry. Is Walter coming in this evening?”
“Yes.”
Val looked at me for a moment then averted her gaze. “I’m sorry I can’t cook for you, Harry.”
“You catch mice. That’s quite as important.”
“You’re a dear, but you know Walter keeps this place so clean, there hasn’t been a mouse to catch in months.” She turned back to my plate and continued lapping at the yolk.
“Have a good day, dear,” I said and closed the door.
As the division sky cruiser assigned to me headed south into the muck above the city, I ran up the mechs in case we’d have to copy into them. There probably wasn’t going to be any need to get small; the animal android involved, after all, was a horse. Nevertheless, routine is its own reward, as the superintendent was wont to remark between knock-knock inanities. They were ugly little mechs, but useful for following assorted beings into places tight, high, or otherwise inaccessible to humans. While they went through their system scans, I checked InterNews on Miles Bowman’s death. Indeed, Lady Iva had been taken into custody, Detective Chief Inspector Raymond Stokes of the Devon-Exmoor National Park Constabulary stated in his news conference, blah, blah, blah. . . .
My mood was terrible, and it was time I faced up to it. I was having quite a bit of trouble letting go of having a new partner thrust upon me. I knew full well why ABC Division had human-imprinted animal androids as investigators. That’s the criminal dimension that necessitated the creation of our component of Interpol. Still, almost every amdroid I ever worked with had such bizarre excuses for having wound up in a critter meat suit, I was convinced it couldn’t help but have an effect on their work. It certainly had with Parker.
DC Parker had been the worst of a succession of amdroids assigned to work with me. It wasn’t just the thick Estuary accent Parker affected, his odor, the incessant grunting, or that he had difficulty in controlling his bowels. It was Parker’s effect on a subject during an interview. I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say undergoing interrogation by a thirty-five-stone mountain gorilla puts some people off. Banana peels and fruit flies all over the cruiser, fleas. I mean, really.
As the cruiser descended out of the overcast above the new Consolidated Police Administration Tower on Heavitree Road, I could see that the only living being waiting for me on the skydock was a mallard duck complete with green head, white neck ring, chestnut breast, grayish-white feathers, yellow bill, and orange feet. “Showing at a crime scene with Daffy in tow; that’ll put the yobs in a fright.”
As the cruiser’s computer control put the vehicle down in the center of the landing target, I declined a slot assignment, put the power on standby, and pressed the buttons to open both doors. I looked around briefly in waning hopes that this was some sort of practical joke, then resignedly got out of the driver’s side and trudged over to where the duck was standing. “DS Shad?” I inquired.
“I’m Shad,” said the duck in a voice that sounded very much like—a duck.
“Detective Inspector Jaggers,” I introduced myself.
“I know just what you’re thinking,” he said. “‘My God, a duck! I sure feel safe now that poultry has my back. Where ever does he keep his handcuffs? What was that idiot Matheson thinking to saddle me with this fugitive from a Chinese restaurant! I ought to go down to the superintendent’s office right this minute and put in for my walking papers! You’ve laid an egg this time, pigeon-brain. This is for the birds! Are you out of your bleeding mind? A duck!’ ”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers.”
He held out a wing. “Bird jokes? It’s going to be bird jokes?”
“Actually, I was going to ask if you wanted to drive.”
Shad lowered his wing, gave me a bit of a look, then flew into the open driver’s side of the cruiser. “That went rather well,” I muttered to myself.
I got into the passenger side, buckled in, and faced the duck. The power revved up, the doors closed, and the cruiser lifted off the landing target and headed southwest into the morning commuter traffic, the duck standing motionless on the seat. The GPS showed that our destination and control had somehow been given to the autopilot. “Wireless interface,” smugly explained Shad.
“Something you should know about me, as well, Shad.”
“What’s that?”
“I am a detective inspector, your senior as well as your superior, and if you should ever shoot off your bill to me like that again, me lad, I’ll stuff and roast your goose proper.”
“Ah, yes, sir. I apologize, despite the additional gratuitous fowl references.” After an awkward moment of silence, he glanced at me. “Admit it, though: I am an improvement on Parker.”
“You met him?” I asked.
“Back at the tower he mentioned something about having been your partner. Does Parker have a banana problem?”
“At least.” I glanced at Shad. “You do take up less space.”
“And I don’t crap in the cruiser.”
“That is an asset.” We both laughed at that.
Later, visibility almost down to zero as we approached the Alphington vector roundabout, Shad said, “Matheson told me to fill you in on my connection to Houndtor Down.”
“Please.”
“Back in New York about ten years ago, I knew Miles Bowman’s business partner, Archie Quartermain. I was a human, Archie was English, and we roomed together in a roach hotel in the Village. Back then we were both starving, taking acting lessons, and trying to get theater acting careers started. Archie waited tables and hustled vidgames, and I was a part-time police assistant at the local precinct, answering phones, filing, that sort of stuff. We were doing cattle calls and getting an occasional walk-on. Remember the Gladys Hudder case, when that DNA bio of Cary Grant sued his owner for emancipation?”
“The case that took the ‘slave’ out of ‘slavery’ for the human-imprinted and self-aware AI population.”
“Yeah, what would you rather be: an eighty-year-old woman’s boy toy or a filthy rich reincarnated Hollywood superstar covered with babes?”
“Decisions, decisions,” I added.
“Anyway, that case put Archie onto something,” Shad continued. “He wouldn’t talk to me about it. Kept saying, ‘I’m not finished yet.’ Still, he had some kind of scheme cooking. Every now and then when he was out I’d sneak a peek at what he was doing, but it was all technical stuff on staging, theatrics, English history, artificial-being law, air transport, artificial intelligence, business, computers, and android-amdroid bios and mechs. Then, one day when I was particularly hungry, the New York PD called for recruits—”
“You saw how much police recruits were being paid,” I interjected.
“Yeah, well, my stomach and I had a talk, and I entered the police academy. Training took up all my time, the work was interesting, and they kept me running as a probie. I lost track of what Archie was doing. My police probationary period eventually ended, I was assigned to a precinct patrol unit, and then I met a girl.”
My eyebrows went up.
“No. Her name wasn’t Daisy,” Shad responded with a modicum of heat. “Her name was Shondelle.” The duck glanced out the side window at a break in the clouds which revealed still more clouds.
“Archie was my best man when I married her. When I moved out, Archie moved in with another starving actor, Miles Bowman. I got to know Miles a little, but a year later both of them moved back to England. By the time I made detective, Archie and I had lost touch altogether. A couple years later, right before I was killed, Houndtor Down Hunts hit the media, fox hunting was back, and Miles Bowman was big news, filthy rich, and married to the daughter of an earl. But no mention of Archie Quartermain.”
I glanced at Shad. “You suspected something?”
“Sure. I sent a message to Archie and he eventually sent back his thanks but no thanks for the attempted rescue. According to him, everything was going according to plan. I did a little checking on my own and found out why Archie wasn’t getting any billing. He’s a really silent partner in Houndtor Down Hunts. Archie Quartermain is the fox.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. See, he copies his engrams before each hunt. If he wins he wins, but if he gets killed, he’s copied into a new bio cloned from his previous meat suit. It’s really not as grim as you might think.”
“Perhaps I’m making too much of being torn apart by a slavering pack of hounds.”
“He never remembers getting killed, see? When he does get killed, the set of engrams copied before the hunt are imprinted into the new fox suit and the new fox inherits but doesn’t remember.”
“But he knows he’s going to get killed.”
“Archie told me it’s like getting a knee operated on, except when he wakes up from his procedure it doesn’t hurt.”
“It still strikes me as rather a punishing way to make a living.”
“You’ve never been an actor, have you?”
“No.”
“Take my word for it, boss; there are roles to kill for and roles to die for.” He gave a duck shrug. “Besides, win or lose, Archie’s take per hunt is close to three million.”
“Per hunt?”
The duck nodded. “Each of the followers pays thirty thou or so to ride to the hounds, and there are eighty to a hundred or more per hunt, but that’s not where the real money is. The big cash cows in the fox hunting racket are the tally-hovers: air hover pods that follow along the route of the hunt, giving their passengers all the thrill and excitement of the hunt without the need of learning how to ride or risking any jumps. Tally-hover seats run three thousand per, which includes the virtual of the hunt complete with the purchaser’s face and body CGI substituted for the scarlet or black coat of his or her choice, and the entire ride experienced from the point of view of one of several riders.”
“How many of those tally-hover seats do they fill on an average hunt?”
“Thousands.”
“Astonishing. I find it difficult to believe that anyone would pay that much for a bit of a thrill ride that can be excelled by any number of virtual computer games.”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. See, inspector, it’s not just the thrill of a dangerous horse ride and the challenge of ganging up with hundreds of hounds, nags, and snobs to chase down and kill a small dog. What you also get for your money is to be seen at the opening tea ceremony and other refreshment stops along the route, dabbing lips and raising pinkies with such luminaries as Lady Iva Bowman and Lord Peter Talmadge. Talmadge is the hunt’s paid snob draw. There’s also an old rock star and an old movie star as draws for the upwardly mobile Lumpenproletariat who crave an association with fame. Archie Quartermain has fifty percent of the company. I’m betting he’s the richest fox in the world.”
“And the dottiest.” I frowned as I thought of something. “Does Lady Iva inherit Miles Bowman’s interest?”
“Unless she’s found guilty of murdering Miles.”
“If she doesn’t inherit, who does?”
“They don’t have any children, so Archie gets it all. Interesting, no?”
“To say the least.” I turned toward Shad. “None of which explains how a New York City cop wound up being a duck in Interpol’s Artificial Beings Crimes Division.”
“This is where I bare my soul, right?”
I held up a hand and dropped it to my lap. “Not a requirement. A desire to understand.”
“In that case, I’ll tell you. I think I said I was wounded in the line of duty.”
“Actually, you said you were killed.”
We began descending from the Bovey Tracy Roundabout. “I was backing up some guys taking down a perp. The next thing I knew all the bullets in the world were headed in my direction and I was fricassee. When I came to, my engrams were in memory, Shondelle was pounding on my keyboard demanding to know where the car keys were, and I get a call on my modem from my agent wanting to know if I’d be willing to have my engrams imprinted on a mechanical shark for a remake of Jaws that was going into production.”
“You agreed?”
He faced me with an expression of astonishment. “It was Hollywood. Jaws. With a role like that in my credits, who knows what other roles I might’ve been offered? That was when my agent changed my name. He figured a shark named Donald Lipper would be hard to take seriously.”
“Your given name is Donald?”
The duck leveled a rather menacing gaze at me. “Don’t go there, man.”
“What about your wife?” I asked, judiciously changing the subject.
“Shondelle,” muttered the duck. “Even though I explained what a huge break this would be for us, she took a walk. With the bread I could’ve made from a production like Jaws, I could’ve had my engrams imprinted on a six-figure bio of anything or anyone she wanted. No dice, though. The first person she called after she left my terminal was a divorce shark.”
“My sympathies. What happened regarding the remake?”
“What else? Jaws bit it. I was about ready for a karma transplant. A week later, though, my agent came through with a pretty good commercial gig. It was a role that before had been limited by computer-generated imaging and trained animals. They were finally ready to move up to a real actor.”
“What was it?” I inquired.
“Spokesentity for an insurance company.”
Shad saw my expression.
“Yeah. That’s the one. Really. That’s me.”
I frowned at him. “That duck was white.”
“Make-up,” Shad explained. He looked forward as our descent crossed the edge of Dartmoor, vast expanses of hilly bracken and grassland interrupted by rocky tors all beneath a gloomy sky. “Good years of really great physical comedy. I was on all the talk and game shows. I was the duck who turned the world on to disability insurance. But then the company was taken over by another insurance outfit. The new bunch wanted to use their own mascot: a creepy little computer-generated lizard, the same old animation they’d used for fifty years.”
“Unfortunate. I really enjoyed your commercials, Shad. Very amusing.”
Shad shook his head and angrily padded on the seat from one webbed foot to the other. “Treat me like some CGI that’d gone out of style. Me! I put life in that duck. I brought new dimensions to that role. I was the one who made that company a household name in every palace and hoodoo hutch on this planet. That’s what dedication, hard work, and loyalty get you: No severance, no residuals, out with the old letterheads.” He took a breath and let it out. “Anyway, alone, out of work, and no prospects, I went to the International Police Benevolent Association and invoked the ‘still living and able’ employment clause. They either had to put me on pension or find me a job in law enforcement.”
“So they sent you to ABCD.”
“First I was with Northern New England Wildlife Protection investigating duck hunting violations. Lucky I had this connection with Archie Quartermain.”
“Oh?”
“Whether it’s illegal to shoot a wildlife officer who’s a duck during duck hunting season really hasn’t been settled yet.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Besides, I had a supervisor who was an eared grebe. That’s a bird.”
“I assumed it was either that or an illegal wrestling hold.”
Shad gave my joke a truncated pity laugh and continued, “Dudley Baumgartner. A small bird, he had a big black crest and these flaky little golden ear tufts he was really proud of. He could’ve been an American bald eagle, but BioDyne couldn’t legally recode the bald eagle DNA to give him black head feathers.”
“Why on earth would he want that?”
“Baumgartner was very sensitive about hair loss.”
“Eagles don’t have hair.”
“Tell it to Baumgartner. Red eyes, his voicebox implant programmed to talk like a frog—I’m telling you, boss, this case is saving more than my life.”
“Speaking of programmed voiceboxes, Shad, why do you use this duck voice? I mean, it’s still rather comical.”
“This was the voice that made me a star.”
The cruiser came in over the village of Leighon and up a gentle rise to a wood of oaks, maples, and conifers at the eastern foot of Hound Tor. In the center of the wood was a clearing, and in the center of the clearing, at the intersection of a maze of bricked paths and boxwoods, was the grand lodge of Houndtor Down Hunts, a city within a palace made familiar by countless posters, post cards, vid story settings, skyvault projections, and telly commercials.
A circular drive only slightly smaller than the M-5 ran from the front steps to an improved road that lead north toward Manaton. Most of Houndtor’s clientele came in by air. The huge skydock was south of the lodge. The dock appeared to have parking slips for only a few hundred vehicles, but as we came in over it, I could see the access lanes to additional parking slip floors below ground level. As we descended onto one of the multiple landing targets, I noticed with some alarm that Shad was shaking his tail feathers back and forth. “I say, Shad, do you need to go to the loo?”
“What?” He glanced back at his own shaking tail. “Oh.” He dismissed my concern with another wave of his wing. “Updating my anti-virus definitions.”
Despite the promised rain, the gardening staff was out in force, clipping, pruning, weeding, and such. No one else, staff or guests, seemed to be about. Of course, the promised park constabulary vehicle and driver were absent, which was a dual problem for us since the ABCD charter requires us to turn our case over to the local authorities in the event an arrest is to be made. The missing fellow, in addition, was supposed to bring us to the scene and copy us the park constabulary’s case file. “Typical,” I muttered as we exited the cruiser. “A thing you’ll notice during your time with ABCD, Shad, is that, as you Americans say, we can’t get no respect.”
“Let me see if I can scare up our ride,” said Shad, pointing his right wingtip up at the sky.
“You can fly?”
“But of course.” He took a running step, furiously flapped his wings, and took off low across the ground, gradually increasing his altitude in an ever-widening arc to the right. Quite beautiful, really. Almost completing a circuit of the clearing, south of the skydock he dropped from the sky like a hawk, disappearing into the trees below. This was shortly followed by rather loud duck calls, and the whine of an electric energizing. In moments a green and white park constabulary electric emerged from the trees, my partner perched triumphantly upon its light array.
Park Police Constable Lounds was a lethargic lad about fifteen stone, dark-complexioned, and keeping both head and face hairless. Clad against the anticipated precip in a constable’s yellow anorak, he appeared to be torn between his affected contempt for the “Interpollys,” as local police are wont to address ABCD investigators behind their backs, and his actual esteem-crushing shame for being so terribly low in DCI Stokes’s estimation as to be the one detailed to meet with us. His eyes were puffy and there was a bit of dried drool on the left side of his chin. Lounds had been napping. He pulled his desktop from his belt array and transferred the current Miles Bowman murder casebook to my portable. We boarded the vehicle, Lounds in the driver’s seat, I in the passenger seat, and Shad up on the light array. Lounds drove us to the scene following a route marked by numerous hoof impressions. I noticed carefully hidden motion cameras and sound pickups in several places along the way. It appeared as though the vid director and those manning the cameras and audio for the tally-ho virtuals knew exactly which course the wily old fox would take during the hunt. Probably all the details had been worked out with Archie Quartermain prior to the meet where the followers joined the hounds, tipped their hats to the Master—now deceased—and sucked down the first of several libations offered along the way. Call me old-fashioned, but the fox being in on the planning of the hunt seemed to take at least a bit of the sport out of the thing.
The route Constable Lounds took led around the ends of several hedges and fences, none of which enclosed anything. They were placed there, obviously, to provide the mounts and riders barriers over which to jump.
Eventually we crossed sheep-grazed grassland up a moderate grade to the left of Hound Tor, a magnificent citadel of weathered granite towers, a motorway-wide notch through the center of which became visible once we crossed the crumbling remains of an old asphalt road and reached midway between the lodge and a grove of conifers near the crest of the down. “Scene’s up there,” said Lounds.
I faced him and saw he was nodding toward the pines. I noticed my partner flying on ahead of us, soon disappearing behind some trees. I took a moment to look at the case file, but could find nothing in it referring to an interview with Archie Quartermain. “Are you familiar with this case file, Constable?” I asked Lounds.
“Read it twice waiting for you and your feathered friend there, guv. Fact is, I was first responder here.” He shrugged resignedly and stifled a yawn. “Been here since.”
“All night?”
“I was supposed to get relieved, but some bloody cock-up left me carrying the can.”
“I don’t see any interview with the deceased’s business partner, Archie Quartermain.”
“The fox, y’mean, guv? He’s in a hole somewheres.”
“No one’s seen him?”
Constable Lounds tapped his own portable desk in its holster. “Only address Quartermain’s got’s here at the lodge. He don’t have a room, though. No room and hundreds of millions in the bank.”
He parked the vehicle, we got out, and crossed the tape. There was a lane through the grove made by the trees being thinned to where no two of them in the path were any closer than six meters from each other. The trees themselves were Quik-gro pines, the vegetable kingdom’s twenty-meter-tall answer to Quik-gro human and amdroid meat suit bios. The tree branches throughout the entire wood had been trimmed to four meters plus from the ground. Within the confines of the path, then, there was an intermittently clear view from above, allowing the tally-hover spectators to follow the riders with their eyes and cameras, with no one actually riding to the hounds being more than a second or two out of view from someone above. Off the lane, however, the view from above was completely blocked due to the closeness of the trees. The yellow tape placed by the scenes of crime officers enclosed part of the lane but extended deeply into the off-lane trees.
“We got the vids, guv, both the lodge’s and from the folks up in the hovers.”
“Did anyone catch the actual killing on camera?”
“Not a one. Bowman got his in the thick of it.” Lounds pointed a finger toward our left. “Trail vids got Miles, his missus Lady Iva, Huntsman Diana Weatherly, Lead Second Horseman Sabrina Depp, the head whipper-in Thomas Flock, his nibs Lord Peter Talmadge, and that old West End actress Dotty T. off the main track here.”
“Dotty—Dorothea Tay, do you mean?”
The constable grinned. “Grand old lady. She got ’er a meat suit’d break your heart, guv.” I couldn’t help but smile. Dorothea Tay, my childhood fantasy love from afar. I had seen all her early plays and I still had the vids of all her movies. PC Lounds’s face grew troubled. “DCI Stokes told me you’re Interpollys and you’re not to make arrests. That’s my job.”
“We are aware of the regulations.” I nodded toward the deep woods. “What do you think, Lounds?”
His bunchy little eyebrows arched. “Me?”
“You’ve read the file, you’re a trained police officer, I’d like your take on it.”
“Well, guv,” he began, slightly surprised at being asked, “only ones I know bring horseshoes to a fox hunt is horses.”
“Constable Lounds, you will be pleased to hear that my superintendent agrees with your assessment. Do you know why your DCI Stokes discarded that theory?”
Lounds looked very uncomfortable. He glanced up at the still darkening sky, then shifted his gaze to me. “Off record, inspector?”
“Of course.”
He pursed his lips and nodded once. “‘Titled Lady Croaks Multimillionaire Hubby In Grisly Slaying’ makes a juicer headline than ‘Horse Kicks Rider.’ ”
As we walked deep beneath the cover of the trees off the lane, I could see a laser marker perhaps ten meters ahead. DS Shad came flying the other way, his landing pattern weaving between a succession of tree trunks, the touchdown right before us—a competently executed maneuver. Shad waddled over and said, “Not much left. What hasn’t been taken away or trampled into the pine needles has been picked over by the wildlife.”
“Can you make out where Bowman’s body was found?”
“They have a Vader prang in place, but I didn’t run it up.” He nodded toward the cleared lane. “Notice once you get away from that open run, there aren’t any cameras or audio pickups?”
I nodded and followed as Shad lead the way, Constable Lounds bringing up the rear. Once we were next to the tree where the marker was attached, I asked Lounds to activate it. He took out a remote and did so, and a high-definition image of the deceased Miles Bowman appeared in its place on the forest floor two meters west from the base of the tree. He was on his left side, his head pointing southwest, body curled in a loose fetal position. The image was depicted wearing scarlet coat over cream-colored cravat, waistcoat, and trousers tucked into gleaming black riding boots, all of which had been marked with bloody hoof marks, the source of the blood being the deceased’s scalp, face, and hands. “Full scan, Lounds,” I requested.
Lounds touched the remote and the image expanded to include everything within the prang’s line of sight up to ten meters from the unit, which included several pairs of disembodied feet at the periphery: The scenes-of-crime officers awaiting clearance to approach the body. “I don’t see Bowman’s black velvet riding helmet,” I said to Lounds.
“Lady Iva had it in ’er hand, guv.”
“Be a good fellow and cycle the SOCS.”
The scenes of crime sequence images cycled: Footwear impressions included all of the suspects, including Bowman’s horse, as well as all of the other horses ridden by the suspects. A bloody horseshoe had been recovered from the ground near the body, and the shoe had come from Champion’s right front hoof. A note: Champion’s hooves had all been tested for blood and had come back negative, which would have been remarkable except when Champion had finally been recaptured, the nag was standing with all fours in a spring-fed brook.
I looked up at Lounds. “They didn’t test the rest of the horse for blood spatter?”
The constable shrugged helplessly. “DCI Stokes’s got ’is bird—” He glanced at Shad. “Beg pardon, Sergeant.”
“Forget about it,” answered the duck. Shad looked at me.
“Yes. It does appear to be left to us.” The beginning of raindrops hitting the needles above us announced itself. I pulled up my collar, took a holoanalyzer out of my breast pocket, and nodded at Lounds.
As he turned off the laser marker, we were momentarily plunged into relative darkness. I turned on the pen-sized analyzer, placed it in the receptacle on the laser marker to steady it, and controlled it with my portable. By default the analyzer first projected the aggregate images: All substances on the tree trunks not actually made of that type of wood. The tree trunks appeared mostly in shades of white and gray speckled with brown, red orange, lavender, and so on.
“A lot o’ stuff on them trees,” observed Lounds.
“Moss, lichen, animal waste, insects, and insect waste,” I said, filtering out the hundreds of thousands of colored speckles. I filtered out the bird droppings, rodent droppings, canine, and feline hair, urine, and excrement, as well.
“I hope that I shall never see a toilet filthy as a tree,” quipped Shad.
There was some equine as well as human blood on the tree nearest where the body had been. The tree was a twenty-centimeter-thick pine standing in front of a deadfall that was well into rotting its way back into the floor of the grove. The human blood was Bowman’s. The analyzer DNA-matched the horse blood through the world amdroid database to Champion, Mile’s Bowman’s horse. There was equine hair, also Champion’s. On three other tree trunks was human blood spatter in medium-velocity patterns. That blood, too, was Bowman’s.
I ran the spatter forms and sequence, derived the impact angles, and determined the points and order of origin. It then projected a reconstruction of the blunt force impacts, and it was looking more and more as though a horse was our suspect. The blows that were struck, at least six of them, occurred in pairs, in that two blows were struck at a time, and with horseshoes. D. Supt. Matheson couldn’t imagine Lady Iva getting into the muck to beat a man to death with a horseshoe. I was having difficulty, frankly, in imagining any human beating another to death, a horseshoe in each hand held such that the flat of the shoe struck the victim each time, rather than an edge, and that three times both hands were employed delivering blows at the same time.
“Guv,” said Lounds as he stifled a yawn, “need me?”
“I suppose you could stand a nap. Are all the vids in here?” I tapped my portable.
“They are.”
“We have all you can help us with, then, Constable Lounds. Drive us to the lodge, and then you can take the car and go home with our thanks for all your assistance.”
After an hour and a half in the lodge’s walnut-and-leather-festooned club lounge watching the professional and amateur vids of the interrupted hunt, Shad and I were swamped with useless information. Time and time again we saw the six riders following the hounds as they led away from the thinned lane beneath the solid canopy, then twenty seconds later, all but one returning to the lane and pausing as the foxhounds milled around searching for the scent. The prey, Archie Quartermain, appeared several times during the run. We saw him on stationary cameras coming into the lane through the grove, running along it, and exiting as he raced toward the rise beyond the grove, no one following.
No one caught Miles Bowman’s demise on camera. Lady Iva Bowman, indeed, had been the first to return to the spot off the lane, ostensibly looking for her husband, returning moments later with the Master’s black velvet cap in her hand to cry out to Lord Talmadge, who was the closest to her. He called to the others, all of whom followed Talmadge and Lady Iva back to where Bowman’s corpse was cooling.
Only three of the riders in the party had been carrying point-of-view vid cameras: Bowman, Talmadge, and Dorothea Tay. Miles’s POV camera went dark as soon as his horse ran beneath the thick cover. No audio.
Talmadge’s camera showed he was ahead of the Master when his own horse turned off the lane to follow the hounds, his camera going dark until he came out from beneath the thick cover and came up behind the staff riders back in the lane, where it appeared the hounds had lost the scent. Talmadge pulled his mount up behind Tay. Weatherly, Depp, and Flock then turned, supposedly in reaction to Lady Iva’s call for help. He and the others followed Lady Iva back beneath the solid cover, where the images from his camera were so dark they were almost useless. Talmadge dismounted, then we could just make out the image of Lady Iva standing next to her husband’s corpse.
After that, we watched Dorothea Tay’s POV vid from the beginning, starting with the opening ceremonies, the fields of riders moving off, the casting of the hounds, and then, as Shad put it, “Yoicks away.”
It was rather exciting watching the unedited recording. Miss Tay was quite a rider, as were the five persons with whom she was riding, the hounds almost always in view. Glimpses of Miles, Lady Iva, Lord Talmadge, even an occasional glimpse of Archie Quartermain, his white-tipped tail vanishing and reappearing as he led the chase. Midway through the lane of thinned trees, the hounds veered left and ran beneath the solid cover. Miss Tay led the other riders, her camera going dark beneath the dense cover, the images clearing as she returned to the lane.
“If we’re to believe these vids,” said Shad, “the only ones who could’ve done in Miles were his spouse and his horse.”
“It’s easy enough these days to doctor vids, Shad, inserting or removing anything one wants. It still takes time, though, and all those tally-hover amateur tapes seem to back up everything shown by the stationary and POV cameras.” I glanced at Shad. “As subtly as you can, see if the park cop SOCOs examined any of the vids for editing.”
“Check.”
As I returned to Dorothea Tay’s POV vid, Shad did his wireless thing. From my end, the call was silent. Shad noted me watching him, and I pointed at my ear. Shad pointed at my portable. “Six-sixty-one,” he quacked.
As soon as I opened that particular channel, I was treated to an authoritative and distinguished investigator questioning DCI Stokes of the park cops on the case evidence, and about any testing that might have been done regarding any editing. The voice Shad was using was very commanding, very British, and seemed very familiar. Every syllable simply oozed gobs of absolute authority and withering contempt. No testing had been done, as it turned out, and Shad’s voice intimated that having the vids examined for editing would reflect kindly upon DCI Stokes’s future, whereas continuing to fail to examine them would likely earn him a posting as toilet attendant to the northernmost of the Shetland Islands.
“Very effective, Shad,” I said. “The voice you were using—I know it from somewhere.”
The duck nodded. “Laurence Olivier as Marcus Licinius Crassus in the old motion picture Spartacus. I find it works very well on most Britaucrats.”
While I digested this particular facet of my new partner’s sound equipment, I studied a frame of one of the stationary vids I had up on my screen. It showed a red fox: short legs, a long bushy tail, and a narrow muzzle. The creature’s ears and feet were black, its tail had a white tip, and the coat was glossy and rust red. I turned and glanced through one of the many tall windows in the club lounge facing Hound Tor. The promise of rain had been fulfilled. “Shad, run the cruiser around to the front of the lodge beneath the portico. I think it’s time someone interviewed the fox.”
An hour later the rain was falling steadily on the cruiser’s canopy a half kilometer south of the lodge grove, giving us a distorted view of the protected site of a nameless medieval village and the large rock formation just beyond it. In the distance, occasionally obscured by patches of ground fog, rose the imposing heights of Haytor Rocks. Had the village been located in the American southwest, it would have been called a ghost town. It was little more than lanes, foundations, and the occasional restored wall, with a small imitation stone, prefab National Park Information Center sporting a pseudo thatched roof and pseudo brick chimney at the site’s northwest corner, with a rather real-looking sparrow perched on its top. Shad had posted a wireless text message for Quartermain and when the fox answered, this was where he said we were to wait. Putting the waiting time to use, Shad checked with the District AB Registry for the particulars on both Archie Quartermain and Miles Bowman’s horse.
“Both amdroids were gestated, grown, and activated through Fantronics, Ltd. out of London,” said Shad. “The bio amdroid assignment supervisor there, Dr. Shirley Wurple, dodged my call. Her chief assistant to the assistant chief, one Martin Corbola, says he would be happy to answer all of our questions—once we present at the Fantronics legal offices, during normal business hours, a duly sworn and signed warrant for the information on Quartermain.” He faced me. “The information on the horse, however, he gave up willingly.”
“Horse engrams can’t quite grasp the concept of litigation, I suppose. Have London ABCD apply for a warrant for Quartermain’s records and post us with the names of any Fantronics employees connected with Quartermain’s transformation into a Vulpes vulpes.”
After sending in the warrant request, Shad said, “Where were you before you wound up in ABCD?”
“Metro. London Metropolitan Police.”
“You mean, Scotland Yard?”
“Just ‘the Yard.’”
The duck studied me. “So, you were a big-time murder cop in the Yard and you wound up out here in West Mudflap doing grunt work for Artificial Beings Crimes . . . how?”
“What about you? How come you’re still a duck? The International PBA pays for human meat suits for fallen officers.”
“Have you ever seen those generic bios they use in the States? One size fits all. They don’t come with wireless modems either.”
“Also they don’t fly,” I added.
“There is that.” He nodded. “The flying is one reason I’m a duck.”
“I hear for many ams it’s the sex.”
Shad faced me as his eyes widened. “Are you kidding?”
“Not at all. Many species of animals have better sex than humans, I understand.”
“What—did Parker tell you that?” The duck laughed with a repeated wak, wak, wak sound. “Better sex? Ignoring the really severe seasonal limitations for most waterfowl, have you ever seen ducks copulate?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“No matter how you slice it, man, it’s criminal sexual assault.”
“You mean rape?”
“I’m not exaggerating.” He shivered all over. “In Duckville, man, if you don’t do it like that, you don’t do it at all. I can’t do it that way. It is one big stone cold turn-off.”
“Then why don’t you opt for a human meat suit?” I insisted.
“Look, when I was working for that insurance company, part of the deal my agent put together was quite a sophisticated package for their spokescritter. This duck is loaded: ENN-band wireless interface, portable engram reader, all-weather thermal imaging, state-of-the-art sound, a memory bigger than the Library of Congress, disease-proof, and mildew-resistant. As long as I don’t get shot by a hunter, sucked into a jet intake, or caught by a chef, I’m practically indestructible. But it’s not just that I’d have to give up all those features to put on one of those Mediocre Myron meat suits to become a mere mortal human back in New York’s finest. What would happen to me—I mean, what would happen to the duck?”
“The meat suit would be put in the queue for whoever wanted to become a duck.”
“That line doesn’t exactly wrap around the block. I’ll tell you what would happen: This little duck would be allowed to die, its mind emptier than my pension plan. This duck made me a star, put my name in Variety, and got me my own booth at Billy Bob’s Buffalo Burger. I owe it more than letting it wind up in a recipe or a landfill somewhere.”
“The lovemaking, though, Shad. Do you miss it?” I almost regretted asking. Each question is, in its own way, a confession.
Shad stared at me for a second. “Sure, I miss it. About a year ago there was this hooded merganser I met on a landfill in Skowhegan, Maine. Cutest little tail you ever saw.”
“How is a mallard attracted to a hooded merganser? Doesn’t that violate some sort of law of nature?”
Shad waved a wing, dismissing the question. “Every year in New England some moose comes out of the bogs and falls in love with a dairy cow, and I’m talking real moose and real cows. You do realize I’m not a real duck, don’t you?”
“Pardon me if I seem a bit dense, Shad, but it seems even more perverse for a human to be sexually attracted to a hooded merganser.”
“You need to walk a mile in my webbed feet. Besides, you never saw her fluffy pink and white pinfeathers. Your theory works the other way, though. She wouldn’t give a mallard a second look.” He faced me. “I still haven’t forgotten my question.”
I stared at the rivulets of rainwater streaming down the canopy. “About three years ago my wife died. It was in some sort of building explosion. Killed seven others as well, including the bomber.”
“Religious nut?”
“Insurance scam gone awry, as it turned out. The fire brigade’s paramedics managed to harvest my wife’s engrams before she went neutral.” I smiled sadly, recalling her reaction when she regained consciousness in the generic female bio the National Health and the IPBA had provided. I glanced at Shad. “She called her bio Averill Average.”
Shad only nodded, his gaze fixed on some inward quandary of his own.
“My wife had many health problems: chronic headaches, arthritis, difficulties with her heart—”
“None of which Averill Average had,” completed Shad.
“Quite.” I let out an involuntary sigh. “She was so healthy I imagined it would be for her like being born again. To be honest with you, Shad, generic that female bio may have been, but I found her rather attractive.”
“Built, huh?”
I felt myself blush. “Well . . . in a word.” I glanced at him. “That notwithstanding, my wife couldn’t stand her new body. She saw a therapist and all the rest, but I’m afraid she had some rather severe issues that were brought to full flower by inhabiting what she considered someone else’s body, although hers was the suit’s first imprint. We explored the possibility of doing a Quik-gro bio from her own DNA, but the NH and the PBA wouldn’t cooperate because of her DNA’s built-in health problems.”
“Policy,” remarked Shad.
“Indeed. The short of it was that she wanted out.”
“Suicide?” asked Shad.
“No. She wanted out of Averill Average. She wanted a new meat suit.”
“How? The union wouldn’t spring for a second body—particularly not a designer suit. Those can cost millions.”
“As it turned out, she didn’t want a human bio no matter who it looked like. Valerie traded her human meat suit on eSwap for an automatic dishwasher, ten years housekeeping service from Rent-A-Mech, and an amdroid meat suit. She had her engrams imprinted on a female cat bio.”
“You’re married to a cat?”
“A Tonkinese. We’re still together, of course. I love her very much.”
The duck let out a snort of frustration. “Great. Neither of us are getting any.”
I burst out with a laugh at that. “Quite.” I looked over at him. “Regarding your question, I’m on my second bio myself. Between that and my experience with Val, I qualified for ABCD.” And now came the difficult part. “Perhaps my work at the Yard was slipping. Set in my ways. I’d been a detective for almost sixty years. Perhaps Metro just needed to clear the upper ranks in order to bring up deserving youth. Whatever. Since I refused to retire, I was forced to take a position with ABCD.”
“Yeah,” said Shad as he nodded. “Now I know who you remind me of. You sort of look like Basil Rathbone.”
“I noticed the same resemblance in this bio. I rather like it. How does one so young remember Rathbone?”
Shad placed the back of one wingtip against his forehead. “Surely you jest. Basil Rathbone, big star in the nineteen forties and fifties, his Sherlock Holmes films still on the B&W vids all the time.”
“Ah, yes,” I said as I recalled. “‘Guard this with your life, Watson.’ He was an early Sheriff of Nottingham, as well.”
“The Sheriff of Nottingham was a brother officer who got a bum rap from a biased media,” Shad observed, then held out his wing. “So, what happened? Did you get killed?”
“The first time. The second time there was a genetic glitch in the bio that resulted in rather debilitating health problems. The IPBA insurance covered bio replacements both times, and Valerie insisted I take this one.”
“What happened to the old you?”
“The first was ransacked for body parts with the remainder cremated and scattered in Val’s garden—back when she used to garden. The second one, believe it or not, is still alive and in the nick up in North Yorkshire awaiting trial for multiple murders.”
“G’wan. North Yorkshire? The old you is the Harrogate Slasher? Chucky Bulvine? The guy who used a portable engram assignment unit to steal an identity to disguise himself for his nighttime murder sprees?”
“That’s the one. Some terminal pensioner from Otley took on my old body thinking he might get an additional four or five severely limited years out of it for next to nothing. Then one night Chucky Bulvine caught him, wiped him, did a swap, killed his first victim, then reassigned back to his old body. He kept that up, using my old body, then reverting to his usual self between killings. He might never have been caught except Bulvine’s ex-wife found his body in stasis when he was out in mine and put a plastic bag over his head. By the time he returned, his old self was covered with flies.”
“So Bulvine’s stuck in the old you.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “The old me simply wasn’t up to running from the police.”
“Too much cop in your DNA.”
“Mostly a weak heart and a pair of bad knees.” I grinned as I added, “Quite a dilemma for Bulvine, though.”
“How so?”
“Bulvine’s best legal strategy is to drag things out until the crown’s aged chief witness either dies or can be frightened off. The doctors, however, don’t think the old me can possibly live another six months. Quite a predicament.”
“That’s the future,” Shad remarked laconically. “What a fascinating modern age we live in.”
I grinned as I pointed at the duck. “Lucky Jack Aubrey in the vid remake of Master and Commander. Right?”
“You know your flicks. In the Master and Commander remake, do you remember the flightless cormorant the doctor saw when the Surprise made the Galapagos Islands?”
“Of course.”
The duck crossed his right wing across his breast, held out his left wing and did a courtly bow.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe it—”
A tapping sound came from Shad’s side of the cruiser. He straightened from his bow and looked down through his side of the canopy. “We better copy into the mechs, boss. It’s Archie Quartermain, and right now he’s going into a muddy hole in the ground.”
“No. Impossible. I cannot believe Ida killed Miles,” said the fox.
Archie Quartermain paced back and forth, looking about warily in what passed for his office. The site of the medieval village below ground level was a warren of tunnels and chambers, many of the chambers being old hidey-holes formed from the village’s remaining root cellars, wells, and cisterns. The stone slab chamber in which our meeting took place was a little over three meters by two and contained an occupant other than Shad, Quartermain, and myself: a human skeleton.
While our meat suits reclined in the cruiser, hovering prudently out of reach of local malefactors, Shad and I were in the mechs. Mine resembled a tread-mounted aluminum grapefruit topped with miniaturized vid, lighting, audio, and analysis equipment. Shad was in the fist-sized hover mech, which resembled an art deco Saturn with a badly straightened set of rings. The only illumination in the chamber was provided by our mech lights. While Quartermain paced, I did a quick carbon on the skeleton to see if it was something I needed to ring in. It wasn’t. The bones dated back to the thirteenth century. Judging from the earthenware jug next to the bones, the likely cause of death was slow suicide. From his own mech, Shad tuned into my test data and responded with a signal inaudible to the fox, “Talk about your cold cases.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Quartermain said. “Miles and Ida Bowman are—were the love story of the century. Besides, Miles was a bear of a man. Strong, muscular, good in a scrap. Ida was half his size. Beat him to death with a horseshoe? Rubbish.” He stopped suddenly and looked at Shad. “The run was all wrong. Have you looked into that?”
“What about the run?” asked Shad.
The fox glanced warily at the hover egg. “It didn’t follow the planned route, did it, Don? The hounds and horses were supposed to follow the glade lane through Quik Grove. Have you seen where Miles was found?”
“Yes,” responded Shad, “but the horses follow the hounds, and the hounds follow you, right?”
“Not that time. I zigzagged down that lane and never got off it. Suddenly all the hounds were gone.” He looked at Shad. “You have GPS and wireless in that mech?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll see. The run was all planned out in advance, down to the last turn.” The fox sat, his tail around his legs, hunched his head forward, and bared his teeth. “I’m sending you the plan, as well as the performance record. I hit every mark exactly, in sequence, and on time.” The fox glanced at me. “We use the records to debrief the staff after each hunt.”
“Why?”
“Constant improvement at Houndtor Down, inspector. Identifying weak areas and mistakes, sharpening up the challenge, polishing the act.”
My partner nodded. “Got it, Archie.”
“My run was cut short at the first turn, after leaving the grove. That’s when I noticed none of those hounds were dripping hot slobber in my dust.” The fox froze for an instant, then fixed me with a beady-eyed stare. “I have a built-in image reader in my package. Once I realized something had gone wrong with the hunt, I tuned in and peeked through Champion’s eyes. He was the only amdroid in the leaders. Miles’s horse was already out of the grove, running down toward Becka Brook. Champion’s emotional feed spilled into his vid. I was sure something terrible had happened. I didn’t find out what until I was back in my den and tuned in the message Sabrina Depp posted for me.”
“About Miles’s death?” I asked.
“That, Lady Iva’s arrest, and that the police wanted to talk to me. It’s simply all so preposterous. Iva couldn’t have killed Miles. You’ve got to get to Champion and download his recall bank.”
“When you tuned in Bowman’s horse, what did you see?” asked Shad.
“A scramble of terrible images.” He thought a second. “A horse hit by a lorry hauling toilets, horses horribly wounded and killed in a desert, horses falling and being blown apart by cannons—all of it at once, filled with deafening pain and panic.” The fox looked at me. “It was like looking at a horse’s nightmare.”
There was a scuffling sound, movement beyond the old bones. Quartermain jumped over the skeleton and vanished from view. Shad and I aimed sensors at each other. He dipped his front ring and whispered, “Recognize it? The horse hit by a truck hauling toilets?”
“Yes,” I answered. “Lonely Are The Brave, Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau, nineteen sixties.”
“Nineteen sixty-two. The desert thing might be from an old vid called Hidalgo,” he suggested.
“Horses dropping and being blown up could be from any of the old movies centered on the Crimea or the Napoleonic Wars.”
“Charge of the Light Brigade, Errol Flynn,” said Shad. “I’ll see if I can tune in Champion.”
I tracked over next to the old bones and saw that beyond them was an opening between two of the foundation rocks that led to a burrow. I swiveled my sensor array in Shad’s direction. “Any luck with the horse?”
“I can’t get through.”
“Put it off for now. I want to know the layout of all these burrows, Shad, and I want the mapping to be unobserved. Go on up to the cruiser and transfer over to a micro.”
“Man,” he muttered. “The last time I went out in a micro I was swallowed by a grouper. You have any idea of the disgusting things fish eat?”
“Soon.”
“Yes sir,” he answered with a sigh as he turned and flew out of the chamber the way we had entered.
I looked back at the skeleton. Archie Quartermain was skulking behind the ribcage. “My mate,” he said furtively. “Brought me mouse.” He licked his chops, panted for a brief moment, then said, “Still warm.”
“Steady,” I cautioned.
“She’s pregnant.”
I was left speechless for a moment. At least foxes were getting it on. “Well, congratulations, you sly old . . . Congratulations.” Time to return to the investigation. “Tell me, Mr. Quartermain. Where do you keep your body in stasis?”
“Body?” The fox paused long enough to glance at the floor and shake his head. “This is my body now. Don’t keep anything in stasis.”
“Well, what about your human body? Where is that?”
“Sold it. Seed money for the operation. Brought a good price. Ask Don. Archie was a young handsome fellow in good health. Brought almost two million.”
“Mr. Quartermain, I have to ask about your own possible interest in your partner’s death.”
“Mine?”
“If Lady Ida is found guilty of Miles Bowman’s murder, you stand to inherit quite a respectable sum, not to mention a very lucrative operation.”
“Money. That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? Money?”
“Of course.”
The fox began pacing again, his nose sniffing at the chamber floor. “Mice,” he said as though to himself alone. “Mice are important. Mating, grubs, grass, eggs, gates, cubs, fast-fast legs, and chickens are important. Money: that’s paper.” He abruptly turned and fled through that opening at the rear of the chamber. “The game,” he growled huskily as his voice faded. “The game is all!”
Archie’s soliloquy on priorities concluded, I tracked out of the muddy burrow and called down the cruiser. Shad was in it just completing his transfer to the micro, a flat-black colored hover vehicle resembling a stealth lipstick, one end encrusted with instruments. After hosing out the mech, I went back to my meat suit and Shad darted off to map the burrow system. While Shad was occupied doing that, I went to the lodge.
