Soulminder (29 page)

Katovsky snorted. “Oh, for—”

He stopped at a gesture from Sommer. “I understand what you’re saying,” Sommer said. “But the Pro-Witness program is hardly in the same class as those others. We’re not talking convenience or vanity here, but justice.”

“Justice?” Blanchard shook her head. “I’m sorry, Dr. Sommer, but I can’t call anything justice that only works for a small knot of rich people who had the buckets of spare cash necessary to buy into a Soulminder computer before they were killed.”

“Justice has always been skewed toward the powerful,” Porath pointed out. “So is most everything else in life. Besides which, if you want to be strictly technical about it, isn’t anyone who works for someone else renting out his or her body?”

“It’s not the same,” she insisted. “It’s a matter of dignity. Of—” She shook her head, suddenly tired. “The hell with it. If you can’t see the difference, I can’t explain it.” She looked at Sommer. “You didn’t bring this up just to have a theoretical debate.”

“No, I didn’t.” Sommer hesitated. “It’s occurred to us, Dr. Blanchard, that assuming either Lamar or Holloway killed Griffin on his own requires us to stretch things a little too far. Lamar, for example, had access to that article on Griffin. But he wouldn’t have known that Holloway had been out of touch for half an hour, thereby giving him an alibi. Holloway, on the other hand, apparently knew that Lamar always took a solitary walk after his Pro-Witness stints—”

“He knew that?” Katovsky cut in, frowning. “How?”

Blanchard clenched her teeth. “I probably mentioned it to him at one time or another. He asked a lot of questions about Walker.”

“And he made an off-hand reference to it just before going back into Soulminder yesterday afternoon,” Sommer added. “So he knew that Lamar would be out for a while, giving him an alibi. But he
didn’t
know about Griffin’s shady dealings.” He looked hard at Blanchard. “Do you see where we’re going with this, Doctor?”

“It would be hard to miss it,” she said bitterly. “You think I set the whole thing up. Talked either Walker or Holloway—or both of them—into murdering a total stranger for me. I presume my motive was to somehow discredit the Pro-Witness program?”

“It’s the most plausible motive we’ve come up with yet,” Everly said coolly. “Why else would you stay with a program you hate?”

“It may come as a shock to you,” she growled, “but there are people in this world who stay where they’re needed for the simple reason that they
are
needed. Who’s going to look out for Walker and the others if I go? Certainly not any of you—you’re all so madly in love with either the money or the gosh-wow technology that you can hardly see straight.”

“That’s enough, Doctor,” Katovsky snapped.

“Why?” she retorted. “What’re you going to do, fire me on the way to the D.A.’s office?” She looked back at Sommer. “Did it happen to occur to you that a person who’s concerned with the quality of other people’s lives is hardly the type to commit cold-blooded murder?”

“It did,” Sommer conceded. “But as Frank said, it’s the most plausible motive we have. The only other option at this point is that either Lamar or Holloway went homicidally insane.”

Blanchard took a deep breath. “I didn’t kill Eliot Griffin,” she said. “Nor did I aid or abet whoever did. If that’s all, I’d like to see Walker before they take him back to jail.”

Sommer gazed at her for a moment, then shrugged fractionally. “All right. Frank will take you down. Although”—he added as she pushed back her chair and stood up—“there’s really no rush. Murray’s arranged to have Lamar released into our custody. He’ll be remaining here, at least for now.”

“Good,” she said shortly. “He’ll probably need some counseling after what’s happened. This way he can get it from his cellmate.”

It was as good an exit line as any. Turning, she left the room.

And tried to ignore the aching in her stomach.

Lamar was lying curled up on the cot when they let Blanchard into his room. Curled up, watching her with dull eyes. “Walker,” she nodded in greeting as the door closed behind her. “How are you doing?”

For a moment he didn’t respond. Then his shoulders hunched a little. “Okay. I guess.”

“That’s the spirit,” she said. “I don’t believe you, of course, but that’s the spirit.”

He shrugged again. Crossing the room, Blanchard snagged the single chair and pulled it next to the cot. “I understand Katovsky’s made arrangements to keep you here instead of sending you back to jail,” she commented.

“Probably so it’ll be easier to do all their mental testing on me,” he muttered, his eyes on her.

Pointedly
on her. “I’m not here as a psychologist, Walker,” she told him gently. “I’m here as a friend.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” His eyes drifted away, to stare at the wall. “You know what really scares me about this? That maybe I really
did
do it. That I just sort of blanked out and killed the guy.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, Walker. I really don’t. Under normal circumstances, I’d say you weren’t the type to crack like that. But in this case … ”

“You think maybe Soulminder did something to me?”

“It’s possible,” she said. “In this kind of transference, the resident soul and the body
do
affect each other. We’ve known that for a long time. That’s why there’s a three-hour limit on it, in fact—supposedly, no significant alterations can happen in that time. But whether that’s really true … ” She waved her hands helplessly. “I just don’t know. And I don’t know how we’d prove it even if I did.”

Lamar’s forehead was furrowed in deep thought. “You’re saying that, like, if Mr. Holloway wanted to kill someone that
I
might go ahead and do it later on?”

Blanchard shook her head. “Again, I don’t know. I talked to Holloway about that a few minutes ago, asked him if he’d been angry or frustrated just before he transferred out yesterday. But he said that all he’d been was sad.”

“Doesn’t sound like something that would’ve made me go out and kill someone, does it?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “Don’t worry, though. We’ll keep hammering at it.”

“Yeah.” For a long minute he was silent. “You want to know the really funny part of it?” he said at last. “One of the reasons they hired me to be a Pro-Witness in the first place was that I knew a little about what was going on in the world. They said it showed I wasn’t just some loser off the street trying to make crack money.”

Blanchard stared at him. “They said
that
?”

“Oh, not to my face. I got someone to let me see the file they did on me a couple months later.” He shook his head. “And you know the first thing I did when I got my first paycheck? I went ahead and sent off to get
Time
coming to my apartment. If I hadn’t … ”

“It probably wouldn’t have helped,” Blanchard told him. “What mattered was that Holloway didn’t have access to the magazine at all. If you hadn’t had a subscription, you still could’ve read it at the library.”

“I never read magazines at the library,” Lamar said. “But I used to read ’em at the dentist.”

Blanchard raised her eyebrows. “At the
dentist
?”

“Yeah. You know—in the waiting room. They always had piles of magazines there.”

“Old ones, probably, if I know dentist waiting rooms.”

Lamar shrugged. “A little. Didn’t matter much when I was a kid. I guess probably that’s why I sent away for the subscription. So I could get ’em all new.”

He launched into a story about how once he’d snuck back into the dentist’s office the next day to return a magazine he’d borrowed overnight. But Blanchard wasn’t really listening. In her mind’s eye, she caught a memory of Lamar, hunched over a fancy glass table, his dark hair blocking his face as he leafed studiously through a magazine …

“Dr. Blanchard?”

She blinked. Lamar was frowning up at her from his cot. “You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, standing up and knocking on the door. If she was right … “I’ll be back soon. Hang in there, and try not to worry.”

“This is ridiculous,” Assistant D.A. Dorfman griped as his secretary pored through the box of old magazines in the bottom of his coat closet. “Completely ridiculous. You and Holloway were in here exactly five times, and in each instance you came directly into my office or the deposition room and then went straight out.”

“No,” Blanchard said, her eyes on the secretary. “On one of those occasions you shagged us out of the room for a few minutes so that you and Austin could confer in private.”

“And you don’t remember when that was?” Everly asked, shifting the bulk of his Smythson 88 fingerprint scanner to his other hand.

Blanchard shook her head. “I’ve been to too many depositions and meetings here over the months. But I have a clear mental picture of Holloway sitting by the glass table in the waiting room reading a magazine.”

“Holloway, or Lamar.” Everly grunted. “Remember that Lamar has been here before, too.”

“Yes, but not for months,” the secretary said over her shoulder. “I checked my appointment book, and I would have remembered if a Pro-Witness came in unexpectedly—here it is.”

She half turned, the copy of
Time
in her hand. “Who gets it?”

“I do,” Everly said before Dorfman could answer. Plucking the magazine deftly from her hand, he carried it to Dorfman’s desk, opening it up to the page with Griffin’s sidebar interview. Blanchard moved to the opposite side of the desk, craning her head sideways to reread the article as Everly unpacked the scanner part of the Smythson. There was still something about the write-up that bothered her. Something not quite right …

“Here goes,” Everly muttered under his breath. He held the scanner over the left-hand page, and abruptly the office was bathed in an eerie ultraviolet-tinged light. The light cut off, and Everly repeated the procedure with the right-hand page. “Okay,” he said, tapping keys on the computer part of the unit. “Let’s see what the print files come up with. You looking for something?”

Blanchard shook her head, starting the article again from the top. “Yes, but I don’t know what. There’s something important here—I know it. But I can’t figure out what it is.”

“It’s just a normal article,” Everly said, leaning over to look at it. “Pretty much like every other newsmagazine interview.”

“I know.” Squeezing her hand into a frustrated fist, Blanchard shifted her gaze up to the photo. To Griffin, smiling professionally at the camera; to the expensive desk and curtains, framing that smile as if they’d been arranged in their positions for exactly that purpose; to the cloud-mottled blue sky outside the window, with the top of the Soulminder building just visible.

And suddenly, she caught her breath. “Everly—”

The last syllable was drowned out by an electronic beep. “Hang on,” Everly grunted, flipping up the Smythson’s small display screen. The first image that came up was that of the two magazine pages, dotted and smeared with the delicate patterns of dozens of fingerprints. Everly tapped the switch again, and the image was replaced by a list of those prints’ owners. Blanchard craned her neck—

“Bingo,” Everly said, swiveling the screen briefly toward her and then keying back to the image of the pages themselves. “You were right on the money, Doctor. Here, here, and
here
. Walker Lamar’s thumbprints, right where someone reading the magazine would hold it.”

“Doesn’t prove he read the sidebar, though,” Dorfman said.

“Oh, it proves it, all right,” Everly countered. “You can see—right here—where he moved his hand so that he could read what his thumb had been covering up. No, he read the sidebar, all right.” He looked at Blanchard. “But all that does is bring us back to square one.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Blanchard said, shaking her head. “Because Griffin wasn’t just a random killing. There’s no reason why the murderer would have gone to a sixth-floor office if he’d just wanted any old victim.”

“So he wanted someone who deserved to die,” Everly said, nodding. “Or at least someone who came close to it. So?”

Blanchard gestured to the article. “So look at the interview again. Look at it closely.”

“I’ve read it so many times that I’ve just about got it memorized,” he growled.

Blanchard took a careful breath. “Then tell me what the article
doesn’t
tell you.”

For a long moment Everly frowned at her, and she found herself holding her breath, willing with all her might for him to see it. If he didn’t—if it didn’t therefore strike him as at all significant—then it was probably nothing more than a figment of her own wishful thinking—

“I’ll be damned,” he said, very softly. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”

“Right about
what
?” Dorfman said suspiciously.

Everly cocked an eyebrow at him, then turned back and began to reassemble his fingerprint scanner. “You’ve seen this picture, Dorfman. You can see the Soulminder building in the background, which says that Griffin’s office building bordered Ridley Square. But
how did the killer know which building it was
?”

“Well, obviously—” Dorfman broke off, an odd expression flooding across his face.

“Exactly.” Everly straightened up, hauling the repacked Smythson off the desk. “You know what we’re looking for, Doctor. Let’s get to it.”

He looked down at the article, tongue playing nervously across his lips. “No, I don’t remember reading this,” he said, looking up.

Looking up … but with his eyes never quite meeting Blanchard’s. Or anyone else’s in the deposition room, for that matter. “I’m sorry, Mr. Holloway,” Dorfman shook his head, “but I’m afraid that won’t wash. We found your fingerprints all over a copy of the article from my waiting room. A copy, I may add, that Walker Lamar never had access to.”

“I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it,” the other said, trying his best to sound huffy. It didn’t really come off. “So okay, let’s assume I did read it. What then?”

Dorfman looked at Blanchard, then at Sommer, Everly, and Porath. “What then, Mr. Holloway,” he said quietly, “is that, for whatever reason, you decided to kill Eliot Griffin. You want to tell us what that reason was?”